When you have no say in what happens,
You become a spectator, a cold spectator;
Enduring the pain you are suffering,
You enjoy the plot as it unveils…
And finally you realize,
What is broken is not the mirror…
It is you.
Archive for: July, 2008
Inevitability
Learning from the real time technocrat
Flooding your advertisements with keywords and buzzwords usually means that you have nothing much interesting to offer. From an advertisement I recently came across:
Some things I could make out from it:
- The master is a “real time Technocrat”
- He previously worked in “complex US projects”
- He can train me in “Rich Internet Applications”
- The syllabus includes “Web 2.0″ too.
If I were you, I would certainly give this course a miss.
Message boxes are dead
Every one of us have experienced the bitter taste of a message box staring us at when we try to accomplish some task with our software. Message boxes are used to convey some information, usually thought as important information, to the user and ask him to act upon the information. For example, look at the screenshot:
What is the need of such a dialog box? The user wanted to add the information to the registry. That is exactly why he initiated the process, and now the application shocks the user with a message box accompanied by “ding” sound and blocks all other activities until he clicks OK button.
There are many versions of this UI irritants:
(Update: My mistake. Getting a message box from registry editing was a wrong choice. I should have taken the screenshots from a simpler application. Many people in reddit are already bashing my idea. Registry editing is indeed very important process and alerting the user is necessary in very critical applications.)
Here are some reasons why I hate message boxes:
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They makes the user think and take a decision (users hate this).
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They block all other activities in the application or even the operating system until an action is taken.
- They are accompanied by weird sounds.
- They steal focus from what user is doing and this may lead to data loss in some situations.
So what are the alternatives?
First, Don’t make me think. Don’t ask questions. Just do whatever is appropriate at the moment. Don’t ask me if I want to save a file or not. Just save a version in my drafts folder. The next time I open the application, allow me to navigate and edit my drafts.
Second, don’t throw unwanted information at me in the form of message boxes. See how Gmail tells “Your message has been sent”:
It gives the information without annoying me. Very good.
WordPress does this too.
Many great applications are adopting this strategy.
The time is ripe for you to do away with those nasty message boxes in your application.
Start today. Refine tomorrow.
If you are waiting for the perfect moment to start or the perfect product to start with, my bets are that you will keep on waiting for ever.
Quality is important when there is enough of quantity.
If you have not yet started doing something, start doing it and then think about making it better.
Think about the quality of your articles only after you start writing. Before that your concern should be about starting. Think about scaling your web application after you get enough traffic. Before that think of ways to get good traffic.
With this I announce the opening of Kerala, a website/blog which I will be co-authoring. We intend to open it to all bloggers soon. We are working on the details.
So I started something; what have you done today?
How to design software registration keys
Design keys which satisfy two conditions. You will be selling these keys with your software. In the software test for only one condition. Users will anyway reverse-engineer your code and generate fake keys for your software, but these keys will satisfy only one condition that you checked for.
In your web application test for the second condition too. This way you can find illegitimate keys and block illegal copies of your software from auto-updating. You can also try to disable those copies.
You will have to blacklist even original keys which are being used by many users at a time (this happens when someone shares/publishes his key).
Two Questions
If you do know the answers, please let me know. Thanks in advance.
(1) There are many people (typical persons) around us who do not read books, blogs or anything else. They don’t want to learn anything new and they are happy as they are. They actively refuse reading or learning anything new and doing anything great. Is it possible to educate them better? How do you tell those people about the best practices in their respective fields? What do you do to make them learn new stuff?
(2) Telecom companies, large retail store networks or other very big corporations are enjoying huge monopolies in their respective markets so that they no more care about customer satisfaction. Greed is what they are driven by. Many times I have seen telecom companies over-billing customers. I am yet to see an incident where a lower than actual bill was given. I am yet to see a bug in their systems by which I am charged less amount.
Seth Godin once described the story of a New York restaurant. Even if the restaurant pisses of every single customer who comes there, they will get enough new customers every day. My question is: how do we deal with these big guys? How do we make them serve the customers better?
I had my food in your privacy
All of us know the importance of privacy. Privacy is one of the corner stones of trust and security in any business, online or not. We all try to ask for privacy in the services we use in day to day life and every company worth their salt try to impress customers with their privacy statements. However it looks like neither the the authorities of a state nor a very prominent bank in India does know even the basics of privacy and security.
What you are looking at is the complete details of the voters list in the state of Andhra Pradesh. Complete details means every single thing the state knows about you.
Anyway I will tell where I got this data from. I did not hack into the secure servers of AP. I did not crack the pass-phrase of the DBA. Apparently the authorities sold their waste papers to a vendor. Incidentally this vendor made paper plates using these and sold it a local cafe. I got the paper plates whenever I ordered something from there.
I took some more samples from there. Then came another shocking truth. Among the data there was data corresponding to the details of the customers of a famous bank. Looking at the samples it was obvious that the papers contained data of all the customers of the bank from all parts of India.
I don’t know how to react to this. Just wanted to let you know that the next time you are doing business with anyone, ask them what they do with their waste papers.
