Category: Technology

User Experience – Complete My Album

“Appleยฎ today announced Complete My Albumยฎ, a groundbreaking new iTunes service that allows customers to turn their individual tracks into a complete album at a reduced price by giving them a full 99 cent credit for every track they have previously purchased from that album.”

Interesting. It’s interesting that it:

  • Turn individual tracks into a complete album,
  • At a reduced price

But let’s see it from user experience angle … if you want to do it before the launch of this service … you need to do searches about the album, buy the rest of the songs in the album (as you don’t want to buy the songs you already bought), and all with multiple clicks and screens.

Now … you can finish the whole task with only one click. I love Apple.

Wiideo – Wii Videos

Since the design of Wii is so innovative (e.g. the remote), one obvious challenge is to educate the consumers about all the new stuffs … even before they buy the game console. What approach is better than video clips ? And of course with the help of Internet, the cost of distributing these video clips to potential consumers is practically zero.

You can find dozens of Wiideos in Internet, some by Nintendo, some by other professional animators / graphic designers (e.g. www.super78.com). Here are some clips I really really like:

How To – Upgrade LifeType 1.2

LifeType just released the version 1.2 couple of days ago, and here are some details of the upgrade process from an user’s point of view.

  • As mentioned in my previous post on upgrading LifeType, one must check out the official upgrade procedure first.
  • Then follow the steps in my post, you basically can complete the upgrade without any problems. Kudos to the LifeType team !!
  • However, this new version requires V1.2 compatible templates and plugins. It’s therefore suggested to download version 1.2 plugins / templates you installed before and install again.

Now for the extra tips … there are many things improved in this new version, and requires some works after the upgrade:

  • This new version split the locale files to two tiers – one for general texts and one for administration texts (in locale/admin/ directory). Therefore, if you have set up your own locale, make sure you modify it to handle this.
  • Permission system is also introduced in this version. If your blog allows other users to edit the posts other than the blog owner, make sure you turned on User can administrate other blogs (admin mode) option in the user’s permission setting.
  • If you want to move your existing template to V1.2, please read this wiki article to see anything you wanna change first.

Have fun !!

Getting Real

Once in a while, there is a new technology, new program language, new company or new development methodology that rocks the computer / Internet industry. 37signals.com is one of them. They are a company, a technology and a belief.

They develop ground-breaking websites, using new techniques / technologies, from a new point of view. And they wrote a book to evangelise their ideas … it’s called Getting Real. The best part of it is you can read the book online for free as well. Of course, I got the physical book (bought in lulu.com, which worth another blogpost) as I like to read a book, from a book …

There are many good ideas in the book and I think all developers in the world shall read this chapter. Some excerpts here:

If you can’t fit everything in within the time and budget allotted then don’t expand the time and budget. Instead, pull back the scope. … Launching something great that’s a little smaller in scope than planned is better than launching something mediocre and full of holes because you had to hit some magical time, budget, and scope window.

Don’t miss it !!

Goodbye, Father of Fortran

Other than my mother tongue and English, Fortran (Formula Translation) was the third “language” I learnt; and it’s a computer language. A language that changed the world of computing.

It was released back in 1957 by the IBM team led by the Father of Fortran, John W. Backus. He died on Saturday at his home.

Good God it was long time ago … I will miss all the punch card days. Thank you John Backus, may you rest in peace.