Some Bad UI
So, I busted my Blackberry holster today. Damn.
Not a problem; I’ve bought some great stuff in the past from the Blackberry store. Except, they have now changed it. Looks kinda pretty, I guess.
I get on there, select my device (8703e) and proceed. I find the holster I want - nothing stylish or pink. Just a plain, old, default black swivel holster. Like the one that comes with the device.
I put it into the cart and proceed to checkout. I enter in all my data, but whoops. Someone forgot something:
Notice how I indicate that I’m in Canada. The from actually knows that I’m in Canada - the error message says so. However, I can’t select any province from the drop-down form like it’s telling me to. I can only select US states.
Like I said: oops. Looks like there was some test case along the way that didn’t get QA’d properly before release. Will I buy from the Blackberry store again? I guess. If I can’t get my holster down at my local Verizon store…
Watching TV on Your Lap
There’s just something so cool about watching TV on your lap. In addition to getting my new Macbook Pro this week, I also found out that SlingMedia (the makers of SlingBox) release the beta client for OS X. Sweet!
There’s nothing better than watching David Letterman guess what kind of pies his mother made for Thanksgiving. I wish that everyone could have as great of a first American Thanksgiving experience as I did.
To all those wondering what the different is between Canadian and American thanksgiving, I don’t think there’s much. I’d say sports, but The Leafs weren’t even playing tonight, and there’s a whole slew of NFL football thats available.
And for all those thinking about how cold it is — trust me, it could be much colder. You could be in Antarctica.
Backpack
I want to point out how important Backpack has become for my day-to-day management of an array of products.
I’ve got a paid account, and create pages here for all of the products I currently manage. I’m sharing pages with the people in the company that need to see them, and I’m adding task lists, important documents, and making full use of writeboards to create roadmaps, feature & benefit sets, and so on.
No, it’s not a true Project Management tool like Basecamp. But, I’ve used Basecamp, and tried to get people to use Basecamp properly, but not with much success. I’ve already had plenty of success with Backpack, and thus far, everyone seems to be really into it.
One other great thing that I have taken advantage of is the unique e-mail address assigned to each page you create. I’ve got these added into my Outlook contacts list, and whenever I get my hands on a feature idea, or something that’s related to any of the products, I just forward it over to the page, and it automatically appears. How cool is that? It’s coming in really handy when I have to review market data and research points brought up by others in the company.
It’s a fantastic tool, and while 37Signals doesn’t mention Product Management as one of it’s intended purposes, I think they should add it to the list.
Congrats to Happy Cog!
Just wanted to give a nod to Jeffrey Zeldman and the expansion of Happy Cog.
I do admit that I kinda feel like a fan-boy. Back in the days of starting to get into Web Development (and design, to some extent), I started reading The Daily Report on, well, a daily basis. After realizing that the Web was where I wanted to spend all of my professional / career time, I really turned to all of the great things and content Jeffrey had created for guidance - as I’m sure a lot of those in Web design / development have and continue to do.
In fact, I remember the day the Happy Cog site was launched.
Kudos, guys. You have done, and will continue to do, stellar work, and help lead us to outstanding online destinations that actually worry about the user - not convoluted interfaces that make me queasy.
Slow Internet Sucks
I am so used to having faster Internet access wherever I am - office, home, a friend’s house - it doesn’t seem to matter. BUT, when that access becomes slow (like, 28 baud slow), I’m forced to hate the Internet.
My mind seems trained to operate as fast as a broadband Internet connection. I want to do 5-10 things at once, have multiple tabs going in FireFox, yet can’t seem to get anything moving along quickly. I’ve checked and re-checked each Airport Express in the house, and the only thing that I can think of is our crappy Internet provider.
However, tomorrow, that will stop. I’m currently, albeit slowly, looking for another provider. Hopefully either cable to DSL and no more of this “T1 shared throughout the entire building” crap, by some company that has headquarters in Arizona. No, no. I want to be able to get a tech support person on the phone during Pacific time.
Blech. Broadband speeds have tainted me. On another note, I’m still loving Windows Live Writer.
