I sent a friend an email with an attached Zip file. It bounced, with a message from “System Administrator” that read Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients. Subject: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx The following recipient(s) could not be reached: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx … 552 5.7.0 review our attachment guidelines. u14sm9443132gvf.20 I figured maybe the … Read more
Back to my Sygnet Bluetooth Handsfree Carkit model BTS600. We saw its problem with cloaking the controls and indicator lamps… but on top of that, the people at Sygnet played a trick that is becoming very common in this digital era: they overloaded the controls and the lamps. I use Overloaded in the Object Oriented … Read more
When I got my Nokia E71 smartphone, I also bought a hands-free device for it: the Sygnet Bluetooth Handsfree Carkit model BTS600. This actually works quite well – it wirelessly identifies the phone on my belt when I get in the car, and until I leave the car all calls are routed to this device. … Read more
It’s hard to speak ill of Adobe Photoshop. Even its painful price tag is well justified by this application’s incredible power, which I’ve been barely scratching in my many years as a faithful user. Still, there is one inexplicable sin its designers have committed. Tastes vary, which is why Microsoft have included in their Windows … Read more
The key idea of Human Engineering is to design the product to fit the humans using it. Makes sense? Sure does, but there are also cases of the opposite approach; Select the human to fit the task or the product! Obvious examples abound in sports, as with the physical attributes of the horse racing jockey … Read more
Two of the least pleasant-to-use GUI controls are the scrollable list box and its cousin the drop-down list, especially when they have many items listed. Of course, that’s exactly when they are indispensable… you can’t use radio buttons for 50 choices, so if you need to let the user choose a state of the union, … Read more
Everyone knows that the QWERTY keyboard layout sucks, because it carries a legacy from the early typewriter days; still, we’re all locked into its use and live in oblivion of what we’re missing. But we have another legacy from mechanical typewriters that is hard to forget because it bites us daily. i REFER TO THE … Read more
Here is an absolutely trivial product feature that turns out to be very nice. This is the latch release for the more recent IBM (now Lenovo) Thinkpad notebook computers. I’ve been through more models of Thinkpad than I remember, and until the T4x series they all had two latch releases on the front edge of … Read more
Here is a box containing some medicine. As the law requires, it has the lot number and expiration date clearly marked. Well, OK, not clearly… in fact, the information is barely visible at all. The law, one can guess, says nothing about the information having to be Legible. It’s not like making the text visible … Read more
Have you had the experience, as a child, of discovering the optical properties of oiled paper? I remember it well… I was an avid reader as a kid, and when a smudge of oil from some snack would get onto my books I’d notice that the translucent oily spot that looked darker than the paper … Read more
