Nice Carnival 2008 - A Usability disaster

Whenever you drive in Nice, you need to know what events are on, as the Promenades des Anglais often is closed for traffic to make room for them.

At this time of the year, the big event is the carnival. The web site of Nice Carnival 2008 is one of those flash sites. You are looking for information, and you are greeted with some irrelevant pictures of something you are not interested in - if you have Adobe Flash Player installed at all. You also get annoying music, which interferes with the sound of the DVD you try to watch waiting for the slow site to load. After some time you get a "skip intro" link, which sends you to a second flash page, where you have to move your mouse around over different parts of the screen to see which one will display information about the program.

Note this: you cannot look at the page and see where the information is. You have to move your mouse around to see where it is likely to be. Someone has had real fun designing that. That same person would have had the same kind of fun working for the Spanish inquisition in the 16th century.

You move your mouse around and you find the place where it says "Programme et réservation", which opens a menu on the opposite side of the screen, where you can click on "Programme et tarifs".

You decide that it may be safer to read the program in English instead of French, and you click on the British flag, which prompts the entire flash to reload. It takes around 20 seconds on my computer. There is then some error, so I cannot get to the program at all. I click on French again. Wait for another 20 seconds. Click on "Programme et tarifs".

Wait for another 15 seconds. This new page does not navigate using flash, but the annoying music still takes time to load.

In the middle of the screen is a frame with the program. As the program does not actually fit in the frame, I cannot print it out using command-P, as I can with most other pages. Neither is there any button for a printer friendly version.

I instead right click on the frame and choose "Open in another window". I now have a perfectly good ordinary html page, which contains all the information I need, and which prints just like that. It is about 6 kb big. The rest of the navigation that brought me to the page is easily 6 Mb, that is 1000 times bigger. It took about 0.2 seconds to load the programme page. That is all I wanted. Instead the website ruined 5 minutes of my life. For those who do not want to spent those five minutes: here the program is.

A fringe buyer

I currently live in France. We have excellent olives in the shops, and I would guess that the first Beaujolais nouveau comes here much earlier than it does to Muskegon. However, there are other products that come later here than they do in for example the US - like new high-tech products.

Recently a new version of Microsoft Office 2008 made it to the shops in the US and the rest of the world, including France. The version you buy in the US is in English. The version you buy in France is in French. That is fine and excellent for the vast majority of the customers.

But we are some people who prefer all our software to be in one and the same language. As most software is available in English, that is the language of choice for us. Working in the same language in all programs makes it slightly quicker to browse through the menus. Even if you know that Copy and Paste are Copier and Coller, it is quicker to always browse for Copy, than to sometimes browse for Copy and sometimes for Copier.

Besides there is one feature, support for Japanese vertical script and furigana, which is not included in the French version. It is included in the Japanese version, of course. And the English version. But not in the French one.

So the task is to get Microsoft Office 2008 in English, even though I live in France.

That is hard. The knights of the round table had it easier when they were stumbling around looking for the holy grail.

None of the shops here has the English version. Applestore.fr does not have the English version. Applestore.com does not ship the English version abroad. It is like a giant conspiracy to block anyone in France from using an English version of Office 2008. I wonder if they have road blocks on the borders and and strip searches making sure no one brings in an English copy.

My latest attempt was to go to amazon.co.jp and try to order a Japanese copy shipped to France. However, they also had restrictions. Apparently, software produced for the Japanese market cannot be shipped abroad. No MS Office. No Egword. Probably not the Japanese version of InDesign.

People talk about the dangers of globalisation. Is this what they mean?

Anyhow, most people are probably happy with the versions available. Most French prefer the French version to the English one. Most French do not speak Japanese. Everyone is happy. Except the consumers on the fringe.

D40X

I just got a new camera. My old SLR was a D50, which did the job well, but after holding a D40 in my hands on Friday evening, I realised I could not resist such a cute little SLR. I went for the D40X though, to get some additional pixels.

My trusty old AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm lens still works, and so far I think the combination is excellent: a really flexible lens with vibration reduction and the smallest SLR I have so far held in my hand with 80% more pixels than my old D50. Perfect for travel and even to carry around, as one takes a quick walk around town.

I had considered a D300, which I also got the opportunity to hold in my hand recently. I admit that the D300 is a marvellous machine - superior in almost all ways to the D40X, but it is heavy. It is nothing you grab along when you go for a quick walk to the nearest bakery. The D40X is such a camera.

There are people who claim that the additional pixels in a D40X compared to a D40 are a waste. The additional pixels are "only significant if you're printing larger than 13 x 19" (30 x 50 cm) and larger" they say. However, I never print anything. I use the additional pixels to better be able to zoom in and crop small details of photos. In no way am I a fan of huge amounts of pixels for standard photos. I use the lowest possible resolution, unless I know I need more, and when I need more, I usually want as much as possible for the flexibility and joy of zooming around and cropping heavily.

However, it is undeniable that the larger number of pixels sometimes causes problems. I took some pictures of the carnival in Nice today. As I never knew what details I would want to zoom in on, I started off taking NEF (RAW) pictures. Soon a realised that my 8G SD card would not be big enough for all the pictures of the day. I took 800 pictures - roughly as many as I had planned to take. Each NEF is around 7M, and I already had some pictures in the camera to start with. Changing to JPEG with the same resolution, I got the file size down to about a tenth, and that is much more reasonable - even if you loose some flexibility.

The software that came with the camera is rubbish, by the way. It is Nikon's standard "PictureProject". I never used it with the D50, but I wanted to give it a second try. The installation failed over and over again. The error message was something with the shared library "zelkova3". There is a "fix" at Nikon's support site which does not work. My crime was to use the "Installer" instead of the idiotic helper application which launched the installer. Apparently the helper application did some other necessary things as well, which the "Installer" did not do. Besides, Nikon's support site sucks. I had to send a mail to myself to get the right URL to the article. Anyhow, PictureProject is a waste of time, so do not bother trying to make their error prone installers work. That way you will be much happier.

My copy of Photoshop is CS2, and that version cannot read NEF files from D40X. Luckily Preview can do it. So can Aperture and of course CS3, if one has them. I have not yet managed to write any AppleScript to convert from NEF to JPEG.

Why TextEdit is better than Pages

Apple currently delivers two word processors. One comes free with the operating system - TextEdit. The other is paying software included in the suit iWork - Pages.

The strange thing is that the free software is better than the paying one in several respects.

• Only TextEdit opens MS Word 6.0 or MS Word 95 and earlier Word formats.
• Only TextEdit can specify the encoding for exported text documents.
• Only TextEdit saves odt and docx formats.
• Only TextEdit can open text files in other unicode encodings than UTF16.
• Only TextEdit can edit HTML files.
  
• Only TextEdit has a "Save" function to foreign file formats. Pages forces the user to go through an export process.
• Only TextEdit has autosave.
• TextEdit handles some OpenType glyphs that Pages does not handle.
• Only TextEdit handles right-to-left script like Arabic and Hebrew.
  
• Only TextEdit displays the name of substituted fonts.
• TextEdit has kerning while Pages has tracking.
• Only TextEdit can correctly create spaces around French « chevrons ».
• Only TextEdit handles Japanese and Greek wordbreak rules.
  
• Only TextEdit supports Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) grammar checker. It contains some checks for pure grammatical errors like:
• Verb conjugation ("I is". "I have did".)
• The difference between "their" and "there" (as in "there house").
• Sentence fragments (sentences without a verb - like this one).

And then some firsts:

• TextEdit could handle tables in RTF files before Pages could.
• TextEdit could handle subpixel font rendering before Pages could.

If you wonder why this comparison list is not posted at the excellent PagesFaq blog, it is because it is of little use to anyone. Pages has plenty of advantages over TextEdit as well. The list is just compiled as a curiosity.

Yahoo, what is it good for?

I never understood the rational for Microsoft to buy Yahoo, and neither do Microsoft's shareholders or even the occasionally enlightened International Herald Tribune.

My own doubts come from the fact that I think Yahoo is rubbish. Not only that, but they fail to adapt.

Google builds its fortune around its search engine. It has some other good products, but without the search engine, they would hardly have got the momentum to build any other applications at all.

Google search is slick and to the point. It has been so for years. Why has Yahoo not been able to learn from it? Is "slick and to the point" a patented concept? Does Yahoo have to design an ugly confusing interface due to intellectual property laws?

And why would Microsoft want to learn anything from Yahoo? To be certain that they never get better than number two on the internet?

Yahoo's Ajax based mail is useless. It crashes, it blocks one's browser and it keeps excusing itself for not being able to log in to some chat that one does not want to log in to.

Luckily for everyone, the deal does not seem to take place.

If you have comments to this story, feel free to send me a mail at mlewanfr@yahoo.fr.

More features - less information

The evolution of the internet frightens me.

One sees more and more videos and animations - both in pop-up windows and embedded deep in the html code. They interact with flash and javascript and css and downloadable fonts, and the designers will have as many tools they can ever imagine to make the pages look just like they want them.

And what is disappearing?

Text.

There is less and less text on the average page. There is admittedly a saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. However, only good pictures are worth a thousand words. Many pictures contain absolutely no interesting information at all. The net result of a video interview of twenty minutes is often less than the same interview written down. In the video interview, you are not able to copy and paste text to your note book for further thoughts. You are not able to quickly browse back to what was said five minutes ago to compare to what is being said now. You are not able to search for keywords. You are not able to browse through irrelevant parts and speed up the information uptake so you can absorb two interviews in the same time as one. In the video interview, you can spend hours trying to hear what that foreign name was, so you finally can look it up.

Animations, sounds, video - it is prettier than text, but it contains less information and it takes more time, and if there is anything that is limited in man's life, it is the available time.

Avoiding Microsoft

For some good and some less good reasons, there are people who have set as personal quest to avoid all things Microsoft. Messages sometimes come across as if Microsoft was inherently evil, and as if any morally decent person had to shun all their products.

Each person has the right to his or her opinions, of course, and making a metaphysical generic moral judgement on a company with about twice as many employees as the population of the entire country Monaco, is not worse than a lot of other things man does.

However, I do get miffed when Microsoft hunters go after people using any MS software. Inevitably, there are situations in which Microsoft provides the best solution - or even the only one.

If you want to bring down Microsoft, you should not struggle to avoid those of their products that are better than others'. It is much more efficient to avoid those of their products that are worse than others'. That is, after all, a bigger segment of their sales.

Do not develop what is fun

In many industries the main problem is that the employees get bored and loose motivation. In IT the problem is sometimes the opposite. Developers get overly enthusiastic about their job and try to use as much interesting and fun technology as possible. Unfortunately, what is fun is not always most efficient or most maintainable.

Consumers have to fight with bad design

I just bought a book. It is a nice book. It has an inside and an outside and plenty of paper pages. And a CD.

CDs frighten me.

Especially when they come with books or magazines.

In at least 90% of all cases the CD is designed by someone who is paid to make something that looks good and is impossible to penetrate.

In this case, the main value of the CD is a 400 Megabyte video. You might guess that the video would by lying on the CD in some standard video format so I could play it.

No.

It is in flv format and it can visibly only be launched from the CD's dedicated Flash player, which is given the same name as the book, to confuse things. Yes, the Flash player is not called Flash player. (Why?!) The dedicated Flash player then launches some sort of web page view, where the video is embedded (!) among text in thumbnail size.

Clearly I cannot watch a one hour long video like that, so I google around and discover that VLC is supposed to play flv files. I download VLC, and launch the file.

And all this, because some incompetent designer has been paid a fortune to make it impossible to view what I have paid for.

What the book is about? Well, this and that. Usability among other things. Let me quote one of the phrases from the CD:

"You must test your website to understand customer behavior and incorporate those findings into it. Even experienced usability experts test their assumptions."

Clearly, the designer did not read the file s/he put on the CD.