First, they don’t allow passwords longer than 8 characters. A financial site limiting password length? Smart. Not to worry, there’s sound reasoning for that:

The length of the password is limited to 8 characters to reduce keyboard contact. Some softwares can decipher a password based on the information of “most common keys pressed”.

Therefore, lesser keys punched in a given frame of time lessen the possibility of the password being cracked.

Phew! I was worried for a minute, there. Sounds like they’ve got some smart folks coding this stuff up.

The worst part, though, is how they enforce that unnecessary length-limit. While they could have set the maxlength property on the password field to 8 characters and called it a day, they instead left it set at an appropriate 32 characters and implemented the following obnoxious javascript check:

1. On key press, check password length
   
2. If password length > 8, show a panel scolding the user for typing more than 8 characters.
   
3. Clear password box.

   

Seriously, Amex?

Alas, they did not.. But Shipley isn’t terribly upset about it.

As a creator, part of what I seek is recognition, immortality. I don’t work for Apple, or Google (I’ve been offered jobs & buyouts) because I want the fame myself. It’s my shot at immortality. My designs are my children. So it stinks when I feel like Steve might get the fame for my innovation. I lose my children, as it were.

But your children aren’t really yours. They have lives of their own. So when your designs do change the world, you have to accept it. You have to say, ‘Ok, this was such a good idea, other people took it and ran with it. I win.’”

Now that’s an attitude worthy of admiration.

• Millennium
  • Century
    • Decade
      • Year
        • Month
          • Day
            • Hour
              • Minute
                • Second

As time goes forward, changes in periods of time cause changes down the hierarchical chain; an hour doesn’t change without a minute and second changing too, just as a year doesn’t change without a month, day, hour, minute, and second changing along with it.

When we talk about hours, we know that each hour is made up of 60 minutes— minute zero to minute 59. When the clock ticks and that 59 turns to 00, we’ve entered a new hour. Similarly, when 23:59 turns into 0:00, we’ve entered a new day. This works the same way all the way up the chain.

We’ve got no problem agreeing that one second after December 31st at 23:59:59 is January 1st of the following year—a new year. But somehow when we continue up the chain to decades and millennia people freak out and bring Jesus into the equation. Leave that guy out of this discussion.

Look at it this way. Each number in the year corresponds to a period of time. A change in each of the columns indicates a new period of time.

• Change in the ones column, i.e. 2008 -> 2009, indicates a new year.
• Change in the tens column. i.e. 2009 -> 2010, indicates a new decade, along with a new year.
• Change in the hundreds column. i.e. 1899 -> 1900, indicates a new century, along with a new decade, and year.
• Change in the thousands column. i.e. 1999 -> 2000, indicates a new millennium, along with a new century, decade, and year.

It’s a beautiful system. Trying to claim that the Aughts don’t end today, and the Tens don’t start tomorrow is preposterous, as is claiming the decade hasn’t ended yet. The numbers simply don’t back the claim. Today is the end of a decade, and tomorrow is the start of a new decade. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Looks normal and ok, right? Auto detect those settings. Why not?

Yesterday, I was shocked to find out that if you actually specify your broadband type and line settings—mine were DSL and RJ-11, respectively—the difference you will notice in your U-verse DSL speed will make your jaw drop. I discovered this little tidbit while on the line to AT&T’s surprisingly awesome technical support, and it makes me wonder how many people out there are silently dissatisfied with their AT&T U-verse performance, when a solution is so close to home. Honestly, with this much of a performance boost, why didn’t the AT&T installer set up the router this way to begin with?

I had no idea that having the hardware auto-detect the line connections would impact performance so negatively. Consider me informed.

⇧⎇ + T gets me this:

I select the project I want to launch, and I’m on my way.

First create a saved spotlight search. Open up a finder window, and type a search into the search box to get additional search criteria, and save the search after you’ve filled in the criteria you want. My search looked like this:

You might have to restart QuickSilver in order to get that saved search to show up, but after you do you should be able to type in the name of that saved search in QuickSilver to retrieve it. Now you just need to create a trigger to pull that up, and you’ll be all set.

Select Triggers under the QuickSilver menu, and add a new HotKey command. Mine looks like this:

Save it, assign the shortcut you want to it, and you’ll be launching documents in fewer clicks than before.

1. Should not take up the entire nightstand; small is good.
2. Alarm clock should be visible in the dark, without lighting up the entire room.
3. Must have radio function.

Seems simple, but finding an alarm clock that meets these three requirements are surprisingly difficult.

I think that manufacturers of electrical devices feel that producing an alarm clock is such an easy task, they might as well; they’ve got the parts, they’ve got the people, why not throw something out there? I also imagine they give the least experienced engineer to design this thing, as it’s a relatively straightforward task, and consequences of failure are minimal. I really doubt that they put much thought into the process, because if someone really thought about designing a great alarm clock, wouldn’t we have seen one with a keypad long ago?

Problem encountered on the majority of alarm clocks: Setting the time is difficult for the average human, and in some cases difficult for the advanced human. (See explicit hotel printout on how to set the alarm.)

Logically, you’d think a problem that inhibits a customer from successfully using your product would be on the top of the list of things-to-fix-right-now. Unfortunately, this problem has been largely ignored in the alarm clock world, and instead alarm clock manufacturers have seemingly focused on the following non-problems:

1. The numbers aren’t big enough.
2. The numbers aren’t bright enough.
3. The numbers aren’t being projected onto my ceiling.

The alarm clock I currently have, which is bigger and brighter than it needs to be actually has a “dim” toggle switch which I always have in the “on” position. I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t have that enabled because without it the blue display is blinding. Alarm Clock/Radio/Nightlight?

It also seems like more and more manufacturers are going away from the classic red letters, which were bright enough to see easily in a dark room while not being confused for a night light, and instead opting for super-bright blue, or green displays. Was there anything wrong with red?

If that wasn’t enough, some manufacturers started adding projectors to their feature list. Oh god, why? How on earth did “Add useless projector to alarm clock” rise above “Make alarm clock useable” on the priority list?

Getting back to my search, after looking through hundreds of alarm clocks online, I found one that was actually pretty impressive, in terms of design: The RCA RPC100.

It’s surprisingly well laid-out, having clearly marked “AM/PM” instead of cryptic dots¹, nice looking buttons, pretty sleek looking design over all, and a killer feature (in the alarm clock world, anyway) of having the set alarm time display in the upper right corner of the display². The green display might be a little brighter than necessary, but I was willing to overlook that because of the strength in the other areas. It actually looks like someone actually designed this thing, rather than just perpetuating the mistakes other manufacturers have made over the years.

There’s a catch, though. This thing is nine inches wide. Nine inches!? That is a monstrous alarm clock.

I still really haven’t found the perfect alarm clock, devoid of all design flaws, but I did find one that seemed to come from a simpler time, where red displays and a small footprint were still the norm. The Insignia NSC211, sold by Best Buy for a mere $10.

It’s not an example of a great alarm clock, but it’s not bad, and it meets Maggie’s requirements.

What’s your favorite alarm clock?

Alignment on the Mac: WTF? The checkbox and star line up, but past that, things are off kilter.

This is annoying, to me.

The new version is completely rewritten using Google’s new Gmail API, but still contains the old [very ugly, in retrospect] code to support any users who haven’t been so fortunate to get the new version rolled out to them (many Google Apps For My Domain users, namely).

The features are about the same, with one addition. Option/Alt-clicking the one-click icon performs a domain search.

Even with Gmail’s unlimited storage, I have emails I never want to revisit again (like myspace’s some-shitty-band-wants-to-be-your-friend requests). These usually pile up for a while, and then one day when I feel ambitious I go through and clear them out. This new feature makes this process dead easy; option/alt click the icon next to a guilty message, and delete all the returned results.

One Click Conversations is available for Gmail on Firefox through the use of Greasemonkey. This script should be included in the Better Gmail 2 plugin sometime soon.

But what I do miss, in some ways, is how I used to enjoy my music. I used to like browsing used music stores, and if I happened to stumble upon something I’d been looking for, I’d buy it, take it home, put it in the CD player, and enjoy it while admiring the cover of the album, and reading the liner notes.

When just casually wanting to put on some music, I used to open up my CD cabinet, and scan my collection until something caught my eye. If I filled my 5 disc CD player, I’d get around 5 or 6 hours of music, without any repeated songs.

On one hand, I don’t miss driving around town trying to find obscure albums, and love the fact that now I can go from thinking about how I want to hear a song to owning that song in less than 30 seconds, without ever leaving my chair.

On the other hand, I sorely miss the once-clear definition between an album and a mix tape. Listening to albums used to the norm for me, while listening to a mix tape was more of an unusual occurrence. When I thought about listening to music, I didn’t think “I want to hear this song“, I thought “I want to hear this album“. iTunes Party Shuffle completely reversed my thinking, and I guess I just sat back and let it.

And I’m a little bitter about it.

Party Shuffle is easy. It seems like a great idea to just select my top rated songs smart playlist, and shuffle away. There are problems with this, though. First, shuffle is surprisingly poor at really shuffling songs, and as a result is very good at making you sick to death of a few songs, or artists. Tragically, I had to unrate the Who because of this. As much as I love them, I need to take a long break before I can really enjoy them again.

This burn-out shuffle problem can be alieviated somewhat by creating a smart playlist with the much needed “has not been played in the last week”, I found out, but really, this shouldn’t be a problem in the first place.

I really wanted to start listening to Albums again, but when browsing through a Library of 706 artists, and “1129 Albums”, it was hard to scan through my choices, as I used to with my CD collection. Maybe it’s just me, but if I don’t see the cover of Tonight’s The Night, I sometimes forget it exists and will go months without ever considering it as a listening choice.

What would be great is if iTunes would actually comphrend the fact that music is not just a library of singles, but rather a library of complete and incomplete albums, with some singles thrown in. Albums should be considered their own entity, if specified, meaning Albums could have ratings, play counts, and all the rest of the data songs have.

On that same path of thought, ratings need to be much much smarter. I want the ability to find all the albums that contain at least 4 songs I’ve rated higher than 3 stars, that I haven’t listened to in the last 2 months. I want to be able to find the songs whose ratings have increased in the last week, which would be extremely useful for figuring out what my current favorites are. Give me something I can work with, Apple. I’ve been wanting to write a better ratings plugin for a long time now, but the hurdle of figuring out how to do that is a little daunting. It’s on the list, though.

I made a small step in returning to my previous listening style last week, when I spent some time going through my library and adding “[Album]” to the “Grouping” field of all songs that were part of a full album. I then made a smart playlist showing only those songs, and also made sure that every album in that list had Album art (which is much easier than making sure my entire library, with lots of singles and incomplete albums has album art). Now, using CoverFlow, or List view, I can browse my albums with an ease I never experienced before in iTunes.

It’s a long way from ideal, but it’s a start.

The short demos Steve gave at WWDC and at MacWorld were impressive, but what really won me over was the guided tour of the phone I watched yesterday. Since when has a cell phone been really intuitive to use?

Horrible cell phone user interfaces have become so common it’s always a surprise to discover a phone that’s “not as horrible”, and downright shocking when I see one that really is easy to use. I’ve berated Motorola’s awful interfaces to Motorola employees (well, my brother), and I still marvel at some companies’ blatant disregard for anyone who actually wants to use their products. Can you honestly imagine a similar “guided tour” of Motorola’s RAZR?

“It’s thin.”

Do you think they’d point out the fact that some menu options on the home screen are in all caps, and some aren’t? Or that the font-size is too large, so that “ADDRESS BOOK” is truncated? How about the seemingly random shortening of menu options, like “SpkrPhone”, when screen space is clearly available? And that’s just aesthetics.

As I recall from a harrowing experience of trying to set up my wife’s old Motorola phone, the process of adding contacts seemed to be designed using some sort of reverse polish logic, because I had to lower my intelligence level to that of an advanced cave-man in order to successfully complete this simple task. It made me wonder if anyone actually tried using the phone before launching it out into the world? Or perhaps, did they know full well that the UI was horrible, but also knew that the general public’s expectations of cell phones were so low, that they would still wait in line for it, simply because it was thin?

Well, for once someone is changing the game. With the iPhone, Apple’s engineers appear to have actually thought about how people will use the phone, and designed their interface around that. And now other companies are going to have to follow suit.

Some companies have been better than others — Sony Ericsson, and LG, for instance — but I don’t think they’ve done it well enough and aren’t main stream enough for consumers to really take notice. Apple has, and Apple is, though.

For instance, I’ve been wishing for a way to separate my phone book into the people I call often and the people I don’t ever since I got a cell phone. I have numbers of people who I haven’t talked to in years, and although I don’t want to delete them, I also don’t want to scroll by them to get to the number I really want to call. “Favorite contacts” on the iPhone allows you to do just that. And it’s about time.

This Friday’s launch of the iPhone will usher in a new era of cell phone standards. I hope that it straightens out what type of experience phone manufacturers put into their products, and more importantly, what consumers demand of their phones. Because honestly, how many clicks should it take to add your friend to your address book? Don’t you have better ways to waste your time?