Applications or Actions 2: Duplicate my functionality?

It's very hard to create an application that has all of the features that all of us want, without anything we don't want. In fact, you'd have to make it so simple that it could only support one feature.

So instead what we have are many applications all doing the same thing, but differently. Why? Why do we need 20 different media players on our systems? Because each one has functionality that we need, we like, or that does something peculiar we might need every so often.

Currently on the Mac I have a few media applications - system ones such as iTunes, DVD Player and Quicktime, then ones I installed like VLC, and Windows Media Player. What bugs me about this is that I effectively have 4 video players - when all I want to do is just play video.

VLC is great and is a much better replacement for me than Quicktime - it handles QT movies efficiently and is supposed to handle WMV effectively too, but it doesn't. That's where WMP comes in, but that's useless for me as it can only play 1 video at a time (no playlist queue), and it breaks one of the best parts of OS X as well - closing the video window quits the program. Which is silly - if I want a browser running but I have nothing to look up yet, I should be able to hide it until I do need it.

I'm going off topic here. OK, then next there is DVD Player which I can only use for DVDs. I think I prefer it's interface to the rest, but again, DVDs only.

4 applications, each doing different tasks, but each doing the same task overall. VLC is the only one that does playlist management, WMP the only one doing WMV files, DVD player playing only DVDs, and poor QT, shunned but I still need it on my system!

What I need is one interface that can manage playlists of video, can play DVDs and WMVs too, and has a nice UI that's clean and easy to use. I'm sure this is what other people would want too - although perhaps with a different featureset. This is where application fragments come in.

Having 4 applications to achieve the same end result doesn't seem to be the best way any more.

Solve for the moment.

A good user experience is all about good … moments.

The Art Of Hyperlinking

A guide on how to hyperlink properly. I'd also add to the list:

Use the title attribute of an anchor so that it is clear to what you are linking to. Usually the site title and article title are enough, but if you haven't stated the article content in your document, then provide a sentence or two as well.

What Gordon Ramsay can teach software developers

An interesting article - software and restaurants aren't so different after all.

Let them eat cake.

It amazes me somewhat that when a good solution does crop up, it's not implemented across websites that should be using it.

One of my pet peeves about some websites is that their articles spread over a number of pages - I know why this is, it's to break up the content into easily manageable chunks - like what is done with printed media. But folks, this is the web. I don't want to have to click 10 times just to read an article - that's 10 times I have to download the associated banners. Straightforward printing is also near impossible on these multipage articles - and 'print-friendly' pages are worthless when we have CSS to provide that functionality.

So why aren't these sites providing the content in one page and breaking it up using javascript? It's perfectly accessible, it's quick and printer-friendly pages are a thing of the past. It still amazes me that 3 years after the article was written, we have webmasters keen to spread content out over multiple pages - especially as broadband connections have become more ubiquitous.

Why Does Software Spoil?

Nice article by Jeff Atwood.

Radio Syndication Simplistic?

Interesting post on how RSS readers don't pick up the formatting of beautifully crafted web pages.

Ten Ways to Make More Humane Open Source Software

Hell, it doesn't have to be open source. This document sets down guidelines for any software project. Very good read. (via)

Wasteland Vista

Some really interesting points in this article. Read the whole thing, there's some really good advice on how not to design an application. And I completely agree with the following:

Vista doesn’t seem concerned about balance, at least to someone acting as a
user. From what I can see, the specific visual form was designed to provide
appeal in showrooms and demos not in regular use. It’s a form for selling a
product, not for using it. This is design driven by marketing, about making the
sale, not the experience.

Not unpleasant...

There's an interesting discussion in the comments at Christopher Fahey's blog, on the NYT article regarding the percentage of time that men/women find unpleasant whilst doing an activity.

Is it really so easy to generalise the issue? When you consider that such a figure is hard to quantify, given the heterogeneous nature of how we use computers, it's difficult to believe that 13% of the time, unpleasant situations occur.

I find Windows to be ugly 10% of the time. But 90% of the time I'm not using Windows. How about you?