All posts by nadyne

Apple

ten reasons why I hate iTunes 11

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I hate the new iTunes.  Hatehatehatehatehate it.

  1. My favorite view is gone.  I loved the old music view, which I had set up to show me both the album cover as well as the songs.  Now, I have to choose between views, each of which have their own issues:
    1. Songs – Impossible to scan, because there’s no differentiation between albums.  It’s just a laundry list of my music, which on my small iTunes library at work is 23,212 items as of this writing.
    2. Albums – This clearly wasn’t designed for someone who has a large library.  It’s also difficult to scan for something.  And yes, I do like scanning my library.  Searching is fine, but sometimes i just want to scan.
    3. Artists and Genres – These are the closest to the old view that I loved, but there’s so much wasted space here that it drives me mad.  I like whitespace, but they’ve crossed over from whitespace into wasted space.  Also, of course, this is per-artist (or per-genre), which isn’t a complete view of my music collection.
  2. I clicked on “auto-size all columns” in the main songs view, which gave me columns that are all massive, and there’s no undo.  Now I have to manually resize them.  This is okay since I’ve got my laptop connected to a 24″ external monitor, and I put iTunes into fullscreen mode on it so that I could see more than one column (because apparently I’ve got some songs and albums with long titles), but is nearly impossible otherwise.
  3. The fonts are all wrong.  I don’t know how the fonts got to be all wrong, but they are.  The kerning is wrong, the weighting is wrong.  I have no idea how you can make Helvetica look so horrible, and I assume that you have to work hard on doing so.  This contributes to being difficult to read and difficult to scan.  It’s especially noticeable when bold is used, which is in a surprisingly high number of places.  I don’t hate Helvetica as much as some folks do, but something’s wrong with its use in iTunes.
  4. Tooltips are gone.  Apparently they’ve forgotten one of Neilsen’s heuristics, recognition over recall. I have to recall what these buttons mean.  I used to be able to recognize them and have the tooltip there at the ready to help me when I couldn’t recognize them.  Looking at podcasts, for example, there’s four buttons immediately after the name of the podcast, and I had to click on two of them to see what they were.  Or, let’s consider the gear icon, which is mostly used for settings, except in the sidebar, where it’s “export”.  How can I recall what an icon means when it has multiple meanings?
  5. Buttons have lost their button-y look.  In most places, this isn’t an issue.  I don’t mind that the previous/play/next buttons in the main toolbar of the app are just icons and don’t have any kind of visual indication that they’re buttons.  Those three buttons together have a lot of meaning on their own, I recognize them immediately, and I’m okay.  However, in other places, it’s often difficult to tell what’s a button and what’s not.  For example, those four buttons after the name of the podcast have insufficient whitespace to immediately identify that they’re buttons.  Also, the play button out of context from its previous/next siblings just looks like an arrow (and that’s a glyph that I’ve seen in the names of songs and podcasts).
  6. … Except when they haven’t.  There’s still a few buttons hanging around.  There’s a nice bug “unsubscribe” button for podcasts, except it’s all in caps, just in case you weren’t aware that This Is A Button.
  7. The removal of the sidebar makes creating playlists a lot more difficult.  If you don’t re-enable the sidebar, the only way to add a song to a playlist is via command-click.  With the sidebar, you can just drag a song (or a group of songs) to the playlist on the left.
  8. In books, I’m now forced to care about the difference between “books” and “PDFs”.  They’re both stuff that I want to read, and a lot of those PDFs are books.  They might not be in a book-related file format like epub, but they’re still books in any way that I care about.
  9. Movies, TV shows, and podcasts have all added an “unwatched” (or “unplayed”, for podcasts) type.  This is inconsistent with all other views, because it’s the only view where I’m now viewing a subset of the available content.  Unwatched is now the default view, which makes this doubly annoying.
  10. Search is  s l o w.  I know I’ve got a big library and that I type fast, but I can click to the search box and type a whole song or artist name before a single character appears there.  Since I can’t scan my library anymore, search is important, and it’s all but unresponsive.

UGH.

VMware, women

Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners

I’ve been aware of the Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners for quite awhile, and I’ve always had the best of intentions for actually attending one.  But I’d never quite managed to actually make it to one, which is embarrassing to admit, given how many opportunities there have been.  I finally attended one when VMware hosted dinner #30 last week.  I knew all of the speakers, and it was on campus so I couldn’t make any excuses about it being too far away or me not leaving early enough.

I’m so upset with myself that I waited this long.  It was an amazing networking opportunity, to chat with women of all ages, working in all aspects of computing.  I got to meet other women in user experience, I got to meet other women interested in programming languages, I got to meet other women at other major companies.  It was awesome.  I had so many great conversations, and met so many people who I’ve been in email and twitter contact with since.  It was great.

Sadly, I can’t go to dinner #31 tonight (I’ve already got plans), but I’ve got my fingers crossed for the next one.

user experience

user experience and The Oatmeal

The Oatmeal has a great comic about being making things for the web.  It resonated with me, a lot of it applies to user experience too.

Inspiration isn’t something you can schedule, harness, or control.  It arrives when it arrives.  For designers, this means that you have to be prepared for inspiration to strike at any time; for researchers, this means that inspiration from design analysis arrives when it arrives.

The seeds of inspiration arrive from unexpected sources, and these seeds might not come to fruition for quite some time.  You have to experience things, and this experience informs what you do in the future.

Ideas from others can spark new ideas in you.  Others will tell you what you should design or research.  Their ideas are worth listening to.  You might not follow through with their suggestion, but their idea can lead to you seeing something else more clearly, and thus doing an awesome design or completing some awesome research.

Idea generation is like a river.  New stuff comes in, old stuff flows out.  You’ve got to keep up-to-date on new user experiences and new research to keep your river flowing.

There is such a thing as destructive feedback.  Not all feedback about user experience is created equal.  If you take it at face value, it can just be destructive.  In user experience, it’s your job to tease out useful feedback from destructive feedback.

Nadyne

I hate it when this happens

I just found out, via an article in The Atlantic, that there was a whole conference dedicated to notetaking, called Take Note, and it happened on November 1-2.  I would have loved to have gone — I did a whole bunch of research about notetaking when I was working at Microsoft.  Some of the results of that research went into OneNote for iPad and OneNote for iPhone (both of which were released after I left the company).

It’s interesting to note1 that all of the speakers are academic, not from industry.  I would have loved to have heard what the academics had to say about it, as well as been able to hear from others in industry about their experience in creating technology to support notetaking.

  1. Pun unintended, but I’ll let it stand. ↩
Nadyne

a tactical error

In my post about equality in blog comment spam, I made a tactical error.  I mentioned certain well-known brand names.  That post has gotten an immense amount of spam, more than 30 keyword comments in under a day.

Which is sad, because they’re not actually brands that I care about.  I think Uggs are ugly, and the idea that there are actually wedding Uggs makes me question humanity’s role on this planet.  So if you actually want to spam me and have a chance of me clicking on it, it needs to be about Fab1 or Eileen Fisher.  Or it needs to be for a most awesome sofa that is not a sectional and is not brown or grey2, since that’s something that I want and haven’t been successful in finding.

  1.  oh, how I <3 them, we will not discuss how much I’ve spent there this year ↩
  2. Hint: my current sofa is red and camelbacked and awesome, but is also more than 10 years old and been moved a few too many times.  When I first bought it, a good friend started calling it as my bordello sofa. ↩
vCloud, vCloud Director, VMware, vSphere

free VMware videos

We’ve just released a website that has more than 50 videos about vSphere, vCloud Director, vFabric, Site Recovery Manager, and more.  It’s a great introduction to VMware solutions to help you learn more about what we’ve got to offer.

I’ve been watching a few of them in my spare time to learn more about some of our products that I haven’t yet had a chance to touch, as well as to see how we’re talking about our products to our users.  They’ve been pretty useful to me, I hope they are to you too.

women

equality in blog comment spam

Once upon a time, it used to be that my blog comment spam was all about (ahem) enlargement.  Today, when I cleaned out my blog comment spam, I realized that it was all about products for women: Ugg boots, Hermes handbags, and perfume.

I’m not interested in either enlargement or Uggs, but I wonder if I’m slightly happy that the comment spam isn’t just for men any longer.  Yay, equality?

Nadyne, women

experiences at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing

This year, I got to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing for the first time.  I was excited at finally being able to go: I’d been aware of it for awhile, but it kept on conflicting with other things.  Besides being able to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Systers mailing list, I was part of a panel presentation about influencing without authority.

I got my first undergrad, in CS, in 1998.  There weren’t a lot of other women in my program.  I have a second undergrad in math, and a MS in technical communication — which, as a program, had more women, but I was in the human-computer interaction track, which had fewer women.  I also used to be an Emergency Medical Technician.  All of this is to say that I’m used to being the only woman, or maybe one of two or three women, in the room.  I’m used to having to hold my own with a bunch of guys, and I’ve long since come to terms with that.

Being at Grace Hopper was weird for me.  It sold out this year, so there were ~3600 other technical women there.  I’ve never been in a room with that many technical women before.  In one meeting with my previous employer, I actually had a meeting where it was all technical woman, and we took a picture to commemorate it because none of us had had such a thing naturally happen  before.  Being surrounded by so many technical women was just fantastic, even if it did feel very odd to me at first.

Grace Hopper also skewed pretty young.  Of those 3600 attendees, ~1500 were students.  The content of the conference reflects this: there were plenty of sessions aimed at students (both graduate and undergraduate), as well as sessions for people who were just starting out in their career.  I wish that I had known about this when I was an undergrad, because I would have loved to have had access to resources like this instead of looking around the handful (or less) of other women in my CS and math courses and wondering where the rest of the women were.  There was also some great material for people who were senior leaders, which I appreciated because I’d very much like to be in a position to take advantage of that material someday.  I kind of felt like I fell into a donut hole: there were a lot of women who were 25 or younger, and there were a good number of women 45 or older, but I didn’t feel like there were a lot of women in my particular tribe there: mid-career professionals who were looking to figure out how to continue growing their careers.  There was some material there.  Of the sessions that I felt were appropriate for me in my mid-career, my favorite session was “Women, Thought Leadership, Mentorship, and Sponsorship”.

One of the things about presenting at a conference, and also being there representing your company, you’re not really an attendee of the conference.  I mean, I got to go to sessions and all of that, but people were always coming up to me to introduce themselves either because they were interested in something about my company (say, the awesome swag that we included in the bag, or a job there) or because they were interested in or had a follow-up question about my session.

Another thing about being a presenter, especially when it’s your first time, is that you’re nervous before the session, so you don’t get to immerse yourself in the conference.  At least, I didn’t, maybe others are better able to do that.  And then there was the session itself.  My session was right after the keynote.  My fellow panelists and I arrived early, skipping the morning’s keynote so that we could chat and make sure that we were all prepared.  This meant that we didn’t know that the keynote ran over, so we went from an empty room with a handful of people there for our session at the time when we were supposed to start, and then suddenly the room was so full that our room monitor had to turn people away about 10 minutes after the start of the session.  We had a good discussion, not to mention some awesome questions (and I’ve got a bunch of blog posts to write as a result of those questions).

Overall, Grace Hopper was an awesome event, and I’m really glad that I attended.  I need to put some more thought into what I’m looking for as a mid-career technical woman, where to find it, and how I can help create that.

women

five awesome women in science and technology

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In honor of Ada Lovelace Day, and inspired by a challenge to name five awesome women in science and technology in five different countries, I’ll give my answer.

  1. Margaret Livingstone, Harvard Medical School (US).  She gave the keynote talk at UIST 2012 (which I just attended, and it was awesome, and I need to write it up) about art and vision, and gave me quite a lot to think about in terms of how we process visual information.  She is in the process of expanding her book Vision and Art, to be republished next year.
  2. Ada Yonath, Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel).  She won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2009 for her work about ribosomes.  (The previous female Nobel laureate in chemistry was 1964, so she ended quite the dry spell.)
  3. Cheryl Praeger, University of Western Australia.  She’s done some amazing work on group theory and algorithm complexity.
  4. Tebello Nyokong, Rhodes University (South Africa).  She is the first woman from South Africa to have won the L’Oréal-UNESCO award for women in science, for her work on cancer treatments.
  5. Sophia Drossopoulou, Imperial College London (UK).  She might just be my favorite woman doing work in programming languages.
I’m overdue for a write-up of my experience at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, too.  For now, suffice it to say that it was a freakin’ awesome experience to be in a room with 3600 other technical women, and I nearly fell out of my chair when my panel session about influencing without authority filled the room and had to turn people away.