Linked List: November 6, 2009

Friday, 6 November 2009

I’d like to thank Savoy Software for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote Spots, their Wi-Fi hotspot directory app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Spots is a wonderful app, with a gorgeous visual style and thoughtful UI. It works offline (essential for use on an iPod Touch), with a built-in database of over half a million hotspots worldwide, and its use of location awareness and built-in map views feels super smart. If you want an app for finding nearby Wi-Fi hotspots, this is it. Spots is available for just $1.99 on the App Store.

Google Dashboard ★

Single-page overview of everything tied to your Google account. Now that I’ve seen it, it’s hard to believe they didn’t offer this until now. Smart.

People in Blinking, Animated Glass Houses ★

David Pogue, writing for The New York Times, which puts at least two blinking, animated ads on every page of its site, including this one:

Second, and more important, I don’t think advertisers should be blinking, animating and distracting in the first place. If I’m interested in the product, I’ll read the ad. But trying to pull my focus as I’m trying to read crosses some kind of line.

You know what? I would never click any ad that blinks or animates in the first place. It’s obnoxious and juvenile, and I’m not about to reward them.

(Via Merlin Mann.)

Google Promoting the Droid on Google.com Homepage ★

Because the google.com homepage is almost always ad-free, and space there is not for sale, I would call it the most valuable ad space on the entire Internet.

Update: They did the same thing last year for the T-Mobile G1.

OpenOfficeMouse ★

The OpenOffice.org open source community has designed their own mouse. It has 18 buttons. This is apparently not a joke.

Update 1: The same designers made an automobile, too.

Dan Frommer on the Lack of Consistency Between Android Phones ★

The Droid has multi-touch support in the OS, but doesn’t use it in the UI. The cheaper HTC Eris runs an older version of Android OS and offers multi-touch, but only in HTC’s own custom apps.

Photoshop.com Mobile Android App ★

Looks like a feature-for-feature peer of their iPhone app. If anything, the Android version has more features — the screen shots show a straightening tool the iPhone app currently lacks.

Update: Several kind DF readers have emailed or tweeted to point out that the Photoshop iPhone app does have a straightening tool — it just isn’t a named tool. You can straighten with a two-finger rotate in the crop mode. Perhaps the Android version made this a separate mode because the app doesn’t support multi-touch? (And perhaps it can’t because it supports pre-2.0 versions of Android OS?)

Joshua Blankenship on the American Airlines/Dustin Curtis Thing ★

Interesting retort from Joshua Blankenship. I agree with him that Dustin Curtis’s original post regarding the AA.com website was flippant, to say the least. But Curtis isn’t the point. “Mr. X”, the UX designer whom American Airlines fired, isn’t the point.

The point is that American Airlines is clearly a failing company. They’re losing hundreds of millions of dollars every quarter. The experience of traveling on one of their flights is terrible. Their website is terrible. These facts are not unrelated.

How does this happen? It happens when a company is run by executives who don’t have taste and aren’t concerned about customer experience.

Update: Seriously, I don’t get this. Any airline should have two goals: make it easy and pleasant to book travel, and make it pleasant to be on their flights. AA sucks at both. Compare and contrast with JetBlue and Southwest.

Live Video From the Yankees Victory Parade and Celebration ★

Hard to believe it’s been nine years since the last one. Thoughts already turning to next year, as the crowd chants “28!”

The Incompetence of American Airlines ★

Dustin Curtis:

A few months ago, I wrote an article expressing my displeasure with American Airlines’ hideous online presence. I also spent some time mocking up a redesigned version of their website. To my surprise, a user experience designer at AA.com emailed me an amazing response describing some of the design problems faced in large corporations. You should read my original article here and the response from Mr. X here.

An hour after I posted the response, American Airlines fired Mr. X.

Worth reading in its entirety. What’s interesting isn’t that the guy got fired, but his insight into the culture of a failing company.

The bottom line is that American Airlines has talented designers on their UX team, but they’re unable to build a decent web site because the decisions are all made by executives with no taste for design, and no concern for customer experience. The experience of using the aa.com website matches the experience of taking an American Airlines flight: a mess.

Jason Snell on the Process of Getting Macworld’s ‘iPhone Superguide’ E-Book Into the App Store ★

Jason Snell:

He also said something that really irked me. He suggested — again, perfectly politely — that if we had a problem with our app rejection, we should just reply to the rejection, because app reviewers pay attention and respond to complaints. I had to explain to him that we had entered into a back-and-forth with our reviewer. It just hadn’t helped — it was like talking to a brick wall.

Nilay Patel on the Droid’s Software Keyboard ★

The iPhone’s use of multi-touch for its software keyboard is a key factor in its success. That the Droid doesn’t use it for its keyboard is a perfect example of how important it is for Google to add multi-touch to the standard Android system UI. It’s nice that the APIs are there for third-party developers to support multi-touch gestures in their apps, but the keyboard is a standard component used by every app on the system.

Update: Now I’m hearing that the Droid’s keyboard does support multi-touch in some fashion, but just not in the “press another key while still holding down the previous one” fashion that Patel demos.