Thank you for all your comments
thank you for all those suggestions
May 2009 be a year full of
love, laughter and happiness!

This is where www.delorie.com comes in to the rescue. This website provides a handful of tools for SEO related work. You can use its online lynx viewer to view a web page in text-only format. Use the Search Engine Simulator to view a web page in different summarized forms based on the content and structure. There is also a purifier, header viewer, request viewer and backward compatibility viewer. All these tools provide you easy SEO while keeping it all in the cloud; and keeping off you hand from sweating too.

OneNote strengths

Although EverNote has managed to surpass Microsoft OneNote in some areas, OneNote is still strong in formatting text, etc. OneNote’s ability to automatically tabulate content as soon as it detects a table like structure is severely missed in EverNote. The default colors and fonts on OneNote goes nicely with the rest of the Microsoft Office suite to the extent where a note entered in OneNote is no different to a document typed in Microsoft Word.

EverNote strengths

The latest version of EverNote is as mighty as you want it to be. Write once, access from anywhere in the world (which requires a registration on the EverNote server) is the best feature you can cheer upon. The new user interface is very simple and user-friendly. Unlike the OneNote UI which is a candy jar in its appearance, the new EverNote UI has a unique touch and a soothing green shade to it. Once you start working on it, you wouldn’t want to go back to another note taking tool ever.

The bottom line

Many note taking tools roamed but none prevailed to be the best among the rest until the days of OneNote. The introduction of OneNote damaged every other note taking tool’s reputation and took note taking to another level with sophistication and novelty. The lessons learnt from OneNote’s arrival have been put in to practice nicely with the introduction of EverNote 3. The next big thing will be to see how Microsoft strikes back with their next version of OneNote. Or will it be just Microsoft Notes?

On the other hand, today’s date (2008-08-08) has a nice vibe to it too. You can’t simply ignore the reiterating arrangement in numbers. I guess this happened last year too; but a month and a day earlier (2007.07.07). If you go to the Wikipedia article on number eight, you’ll see there are many facts on this number. I was awestruck to see how many interesting and equally important things have associations to this symmetrical numeral. Just for the sake of completing this post I thought I’ll post the most interesting 8 things on 8 according to the same Wikipedia article mentioned above.

• Eight is the atomic number of Oxygen.
• The maximum number of electrons that can occupy a valence shell is eight.
• In the human adult dentition there are 8 teeth in each quadrant. The 8th tooth is the so called the wisdom tooth.
• There are eight notes in an octatonic scale.
• A byte is eight bits.
• An Eighth is a common measurement of Marijuana, meaning an eighth of an ounce.
• Eight is symbolic for lesbian sexual relations.
• In Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths ramifies as the Noble Eightfold Path; In Islam, eight Angels carry The Holy Throne of Allah in heavens; In Hinduism, eight is the number of wealth and abundance; In Christianity, eight is the number of Beatitudes.

Image courtesy: Duncan. See 8 on Flickr.

When I say regular people, I meant to classify those who do not belong to the school of designers and related disciplines. The five top reasons why Paint is the choice of graphics editing program amongst the common can be stated as follows.

• Paint has an extremely simple user interface and strictly follows the desktop metaphor. Because of this, there is no way a user can go wrong with Paint. There is one window, one canvas and one toolbar to deal with. There is the pallet area too; but most users aren’t afraid of it as they are with other parts of a window.
• Paint starts fast: you don’t have to wait until the next epoch to use Paint. It has such a small footprint and will start before you are done doing a double-click. Another benefit of the small memory footprint is that you don’t need a fancy computer to run Paint on.
• You can only use the most common file types with Paint. Here again, you do something, and save the file in your format of choice without being presented a handful of post-save options. The file is just saved and ready to be used in a few milliseconds.
• You will never rip apart Paint by accident. Most modern software are designed with ‘total UI flexibility’ in mind so that there are 101 toolbars and menus to a density where people are scared to move the mouse pointer across the screen with the fear of moving one part of the UI and sticking it in another area rendering a total mess in the GUI. Paint doesn’t have this prevailing silliness and hence you are a happy user.
• You can buy a new computer and Paint will be there; you can go to a friend’s PC and still Paint will be there. Paint is ubiquitous; it’s installed by default on every computer since Windows 95. It’s totally available to you during the lifetime of your computer and will never expire asking you for a new serial number.

It seems like the main reason for regular people to like Paint is its simplicity. A normal user doesn’t fancy sophistication in software. They want their job done, in the easiest way and in the shortest timeframe.

Note: This was done on off hours. Therefore a week’s work is about ten to fifteen hours.

This theme is more modern looking than the previous two. There is adequate white space surrounding objects and consistency has been preserved across pages. I have also made every attempt to make it look good on all browsers. Different sections of the theme (header, main menu, content area, etc.) have different appeals to it so that they do not conflict with each other in appearance.

The most notable element on this design is the large desktop area on the top of the page. On my previous two themes I used an area similar to this to designate specialty. For example, for Halloween, I had jack-o-lanterns on this space. But the header blended with the rest of the design too well to the point where it was not noticeable. There was also a lot of work involved as a change in the header was in fact a change in the entire design. Now on this design, the header has been made an integral part of the design while without making it a part of the content.

With the introduction of this theme, I’m going to release the previous theme to the WordPress community. It will take some time though as it needs some modifications and patching before making it more public aware.

Thank you for visiting nStation.

Ergonomics of the right-handed design: The practice of creating right hand oriented icons has come in to play from industrial design as almost all devices are right-hand oriented. If you haven’t noticed this before, the right-handed design is the same reason why your TV remote is well operated from your right hand compared to the left hand. The power button (or any other crucial controller) is conveniently placed where your thumb finger would rest when you are holding the remote. This is the same reason why controls are placed on the right-hand side of the elevator; and the list can go on and on.

To illustrate this, I’ve shown the left hand orientation in the Google Android UI icons here. See how the Android design is completely opposite to the common design in certain cases.

Primary and secondary objects are used in these icons to suggest the left hand orientation. For example the Alarm Clock, Browser, Calculator and Calendar icons are oriented towards the left hand side. The Dialer and Messaging icons clearly show the left hand orientation as the handset and the pencil is held left-handedly.

Android screenshot courtesy androidcommunity.com.

Certainly the current Android prototype is too early to sustain till the final release. Probably the entire set of UI icons will be changed in the final release. Maybe this is done purposely to be different from the rest of the world. The guys at Google are famous for doing things differently. I’m not complaining here — just enjoying the fact that someone has made a design that suite my style as I’m a left-hander!

Apparently everyone is in a hurry to give their site a new look and Mozilla falls no short. Check out the new Firefox Add-ons site with the hip search bar and pretty inner pages. Although the previous website didn’t have any serious usability pitfalls in its design, the new look-and-feel is very compelling to use. I love the fact that they’ve decided to show a couple of thumbnails on the main page and provide a clear rating and reviewing panel on the convenient right-hand side of the page. Furthermore that green color search box somehow invites me to explorer more. Another good example for effective use of color to uplift the usability of a design.

It is also worth mentioning the drop-down categories list on the left hand side of inner pages that is so well designed that it is not one of those “hover me and I’ll show you myself” kind-a-design. A note to all you AJAX loving, “I’d do whatever the dudes do” web designers, learn from the pioneer.

I experienced this as I was installing the Windows Live Mail program on my laptop. After I started the setup program I notices two very interesting messages appear on the setup dialog box that actually made me smile.

The first one showed up as the setup was taking longer than expected to download the packages from the Internet:
“Sorry, this is taking a little longer than expected. Please bear with us just a few more minutes”

And the second one showed up when it was installing the downloaded packages:
“Installation may take a few minutes. Feel free to do other things while you wait.”

This way of acknowledging the user is very important for a better human-computer interaction. I think the traditional 3 limits for response times have to be altered to facilitate the sophistication available on modern hardware. Nowadays, the time limit for keeping the users attention on a given context is way below 10 seconds. This value continues to shrink down if feedback is further delayed from the machine. You may have heard people say ‘my computer is so slow’ if the software has lack of appropriate feedback. Software installation packages that download certain parts of the package from the Internet are notorious in breaking users’ patience. This eventually leads the user disliking and discontinuing the software. The move towards providing friendly messages certainly help people to bond with their software better than they are now.