Don Melton, an ex-Apple engineering director, has given a little bit of insight into the secretiveness of his former employer. He’s written a great blog post about how he was tasked with building Safari and keeping it a secret.
I think that the most interesting thing about this is that he hired David Hyatt, who had worked on Mozilla and Netscape, and that little tidbit made it to Macrumors at the time. He even blogged about it, although didn’t say what he was working on.
Oh, the herp derp of this story, courtesy of a “staff writer” at 9-5 Mac: No Microsoft products were reported stolen. Yeah, yeah, tee-hee, someone broke into a Microsoft office and stole some iPads. Tee-hee, Microsoft has iPads, tee-hee they didn’t steal any MS products.
Except, of course, you could bother to take advantage of the knowledge that SVC Building 5 is where the Apple Productivity Experiences team (that is, the team formerly known as the Macintosh Business Unit, my former team) lives. And presuming that this was just a theft of opportunity, Building 5 is a good one for opportunity. Its main entrance faces US-101, and doesn’t have a single external door that’s visible from La Avenida (which is its street address). It’s immediately next to the VTA bus depot. According to the article, the theft occurred during the holiday week, and that campus was probably all but deserted that week. There’s no signs of a break-in, which means that it was probably either someone who has physical access to the building (anyone with a current MS badge, which includes employees, contractors, security guards, the catering staff, etc), or someone who tailgated someone with a badge. So someone got into the building, saw small items that are very easy to walk off with, and did so.
In other words: if you’re gonna make Microsoft jokes, at least make sure that they’re not lame ones. Breaking into a Microsoft building and having Apple products stolen is an easy joke to make, which means that it’s just lame. Stop being lame, people. Herp derp.
Author John Scalzi has decided that he is killing his voice mail. I’m completely on his side in this, and I think that perhaps it’s time to make it official.
I have three voice mailboxes: my personal cell phone, my office line, and my home line. On my personal cell, if the voicemail is left by someone I know, I almost never listen to it. I look at the number and decide when I’m going to call them back (or communicate in some other way, usually text or email). If it’s not left by someone I know, there’s maybe a 50/50 chance of me listening to it. Maybe.
On my home line, voicemail is this vast wasteland of nothingness. I can’t tell you the last time that I listened to it. I check its caller list to see who’s called lately, but that’s it.
My office voicemail is one that I actively hate. It’s a hassle to use. I have to remember my PIN, and then navigate an idiotic menu system (“press 1 to listen to your voicemail”, “press 1 to listen to your messages” why?!), and then listen to the message. If I miss the important information in the message (like a telephone number), I have to listen to the whole bloody message again. And, possibly, again. And then I can delete it. Once I’ve listened to and deleted all of my messages, my voicemail starts playing me my deleted messages automatically. I have utterly no idea why.
I think it’s time to officially put this policy into play. This means figuring out how to record a message on my work voicemail.
Dear Notifications Center,
I hate you.
I hate you because you’re that obnoxious person at the party who has to be the center of attention, even though you’re ostensibly on the sidelines.
Whenever there’s an update, not only do I have the badge on the App Store telling me that you would like attention, but I’ve also got you sitting there in my upper left corner of my desktop telling me that no, really, you’d like some attention now. And my options are either “upgrade” or “details”. There’s no “dismiss”, there’s no little green X. There’s just those two options. I can’t get rid of you without opening up the App Store, even though I’ve already decided that updating you isn’t in my top priorities right now. In fact, on my home server, you’re always going to have a little red badge on the App Store because that server is still running iTunes 10, and if there’s anything that I hate more than you, it’s iTunes 11. You’re a close second, though, and if I consider your iOS brother, I might actually hate you more because you’re even more obnoxious in the smaller form factor.
Oh, and I hate you because I can’t tell you that there are notifications that I never want. I never want to be notified with sound, and you don’t even give me the option to not have sound on some notifications (I’m looking at you, Facebook notifications). I don’t want banners, and I don’t want alerts. There’s a reason that I never install Growl on my own, and that I uninstall it if some other bloody application decides to install it without asking me. The only notification that I ever want is a little badge, preferably with a number in it, and maybe a bounce on the dock icon if something is truly desperate for attention. Other than that: GTFO.
I hate you because your sort order is impossible to scan if there’s a lot of items in there. My options are to sort manually (because I totally want to have to manage a list of apps manually) or to sort by time (because I totally care about whether I last managed an app 3 months ago or 3 months and 1 day ago). Why can’t sorting alphabetically even be an option?
I hate you because you take up a precious spot on my menu bar, and you’ve also broken all of my muscle memory that told me that Spotlight was always the rightmost item in my menu bar. Now Spotlight, that’s something that I use all the bloody time. I don’t have a single application or anything else in Notification Center (go on, go look at my settings for you: everything’s listed under “not in Notification Center”), but there you are, not just sitting in my menu bar all the time, but sitting somewhere where I’d love to have something that was actually useful to me.
I want to be able to make sure that any new app never gives me a sound or thinks that it is somehow worthy of alerts or (grrr) banners. But no, I can’t do that. I have to manage every single individual app by itself, and I either have to remember to do that when I install the app, or wait until the app fires an unwanted notification, get annoyed by the unwanted and unnecessary notification, and then go through and do the same damn thing again where I remove all badges, alerts, sounds, and everything else.
In short, feel free to FOAD.
No love,
Nadyne.
In January, I started something new at VMware: a monthly series of UX tech talks. This was a direct outcome of VMware User Experience 2011 (vUE 2011), which I created and led last year. Its goal was to get our internal VMware user experience community together for the very first time. It was a rousing success, with nearly 60 people from all corners of VMware attending. One of the things that we learned as a result of vUE 2011 was that we wanted more opportunities for us to come together and learn from each other.
I just sent out the series of invites for the 2013 UX tech talk series, which made me think about all of the tech talks that we’ve seen in 2012. It’s been quite an awesome mix of topics. Take a look at this:
This tells me a lot about my fellow user experience colleagues across VMware. We’ve talked about some very hands-on topics, like how to use tools and how to conduct research, as well as some topics intended to make us think about what it means to be a user experience professional and how we can learn from other areas.
I also went back and looked at the conference reports that I get from our meeting conferencing tools, and the UX tech talk series had awesome turnout throughout the year. Even better, the invitation list has only expanded as more and more people have become aware of this and wanted to have the opportunity to learn more. We started out with about 30 people at our first tech talk, and have only grown from there.
The 2012 tech talk series has been an amazing success, and its success is attributable to so many people. There’s Lisa, who stepped in to help me run this series when it turned out to be a lot more work than I had anticipated! She’s done an awesome job of helping to line up speakers, giving feedback to speakers when they practice their talks, and keeping everything moving. There’s also my team’s assistant Joan, who works behind the scenes to manage the logistics of all of this (which is a surprisingly involved and time-consuming task). And, of course, there’s all of the tech talk speakers who have offered their experience and expertise to the VMware user experience community.
I can’t wait to see what UX tech talks we do in 2013. And there’s vUE 2013 in the works too …
There’s a lot of awesomeness to be had in working at VMware. One of my favorite perks is the VMware Foundation, which this year matches $3141.59 of charitable giving to approved organizations. We also get 5 paid days of service learning, which we can use to volunteer time at approved charities. (“Approved charities” essentially means “any 501(c) organization”, so pretty much every charity is an approved charity.)
This year, here’s how I’ve taken advantage of this perk. I’ve volunteered for two different organizations: Breakthrough San Francisco, and IDEO.org. I’ve also donated to KQED-FM, the San Francisco Symphony, RAINN, and Planned Parenthood Mar Monte.
I didn’t take full advantage of my service learning hours for this year, so one of my goals for next year is to fully take advantage of that.
It’s official! I’m on the MacIT conference advisory board. They get a girl and someone who knows enterprises, all wrapped up in one sarcastic package. I’m not sure they realize what they’ve signed up for.
(Actually, I’ve been participating in this for months, but I’ve been excessively bad about getting a bio and headshot to IDG for inclusion on the website.)
The next time you need to fill in some space in a report or presentation, consider Bullshit Ipsum. You can also use its output as a checklist for your next report to ensure that it’s buzzword-compliant.
I was introduced to Glitch, a beautiful MMO, a few weeks before it was announced that it would close. Glitch was a lovely game with a fantastic user experience. Tiny Speck, the company behind Glitch, got all of the details right. The in-world experience was truly unique, imaginative, and beautiful. And they did a great job with its interactivity, and even got keyboard interaction right. Their visual language was gorgeous. They did the best job that I’ve ever seen of integrating music into the experience. But the game was also unsustainable: built on Flash, which brought even my brand-new MacBook Pro to a standstill sometimes, it just couldn’t deal with the number of players that it needed to be sustainable.
And when they announced that they were closing, they again got all of the details right. They offered options to those who subscribed: refund, let the company keep it, or donate to charity. They continued to introduce new elements of gameplay, including new areas of the world. They introduced what was possibly my favorite type of animal, the helikitty. There were quests that led up to the end of the world. And in the last few hours of the game, they wrapped up everything very nicely, giving the staff and the players a nice way to say goodbye.
Also importantly, they allowed the artists who contributed to the game to continue to grow on their art and let it out in the world. Art director Brent Kobayashi sells handmade Glitch pouches and art prints on Etsy. Two Indiegogo projects appeared quickly: one for the music of Glitch, another for the art of Glitch. Both hit their goals in under two hours.
As PCWorld says, it was a graceful exit. I’m sad to see it go, but glad that I got to experience it. Goodbye, Glitch.
Oh, I almost forgot! There’s a video of the presentations from the Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner that we hosted a couple of weeks ago.
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