Mac

iTunes and half-star ratings

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Some time ago, I discovered that you could enable half-star ratings in iTunes with a simple Terminal command1:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes allow-half-stars -bool TRUE

Ever since I enabled that, I’ve been happily half-starring items.  When your music library runs to well over 40k songs, there is a difference between a five-star song, a four-and-a-half-star song, and a four-star song.

But then, sometime after I upgraded to Mountain Lion on my work computer, I noticed that all of my half-stars were gone.  My heart skipped a beat: I’d put a fair amount of work into rating those songs, and the idea of having to go back through and re-doing it made me quite cranky.  But I love my half-stars, so I quit iTunes, ran that Terminal command again, and re-launched it.

And then, I discovered that all of my half-star ratings were back.  Apparently those half-stars weren’t lost, they were just truncated when the correct bit wasn’t flipped.  Which means I can stop flipping out.

So, if you ever find yourself in my boat, try re-enabling half-stars with the Terminal command above, and see if iTunes does the right thing.  I hope it does.

  1. A tip of the hat to The Unofficial Apple Weblog for the original tip. ↩
Nadyne, women

a-conferencing we will go – Grace Hopper and UIST

I got lucky, and get to attend back-to-back conferences this year.  I’m pretty excited about both.

The first is the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, which I just heard has sold out.  3600 of my fellow women in technology will be there.  I’ll be speaking on a panel about how to influence without authority.  I’ll also be working in the VMware booth for recruitment purposes, so if you’re interested in jobs at VMware, come by our booth and I’ll be happy to tell you more about what it’s like to work here.

Then I leave Baltimore and head to Cambridge for UIST 2012.  I’ve been wanting to go for years and years, but it always either conflicted with or was too close to OOPSLA for me to be able to attend.  So I’m totally geeked to be able to attend this year.  I’m just attending UIST, which is a nice change.

If you’re going to be at either of those, feel free to ping me via twitter so that we can meet up for coffee or cocktails.

user experience, VMware

storage admins needed for usability study

My team is conducting a usability study, and we’re in need of virtual storage admins to take part in it.  We expect it to take no more than 90 minutes of your time, and we will provide compensation for your time.  If you’re local to Palo Alto, we invite you to come to our Palo Alto campus for the session; otherwise the session can also be conducted remotely through WebEx. We plan to run the sessions from September 27th until October 5th.

If you’re interested, please fill out this very short survey to tell us a bit about yourself and your virtual environment.

VMware, women

women connecting women at VMware

This summer, VMware piloted a mentoring program for our female interns: each of our incoming women were offered the opportunity to be paired with a senior woman at the company.

I had my own (female) intern reporting to me, doing awesome research over the course of the 12-week internship.  I also participated in this program, and mentored a design intern.  For me as a mentor, it was a great way to get to meet with someone who I wouldn’t’ve gotten to spend a lot of time with otherwise, and hear about what life is like for woman who is currently working on her CS undergraduate degree.

Over the course of the 12 weeks, we talked about a lot of things, including (but definitely not limited to:

  • what it’s like to do user experience at VMware
  • her work with the women in CS program at her university
  • the different career paths available, and how career paths often take unexpected and awesome twists and turns
  • what it’s like to juggle two professional careers, and the tradeoffs that you have to make along the way
  • opportunities to help out other women understand the value of a CS degree

… and so much more.  I’ve only barely scratched the surface.

It was a really good experience for me.  Answering questions makes you think about things, and hearing the perspective of someone who is new to the field is always a good reminder about what we can do to help new people get established.

The best part about this is, I get to see both of these interns again soon.  They’re both going to be attending the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference this year.  I’ll be part of one of the panel sessions, how to influence without authority and why it is important.  I just noticed that Nikki, my research intern, was featured in the GHC news, writing about her first Grace Hopper Celebration (and wearing a VMware t-shirt, too!).  It’s my first GHC, so I’m excited to be able to participate too.

Apple, Mac

local and iCloud notes in Notes.app?

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Does anyone know if it’s possible to have both local and cloud notes when using Notes.app in Mountain Lion?  I’ve been using Notes.app on my work Mac, and I have some notes in iCloud that I’d like to have access to when I’m at work, but I don’t want my local notes to get merged into iCloud.  I’ve tried a few different configurations, and I don’t seem to be able to keep both.

Has anyone else found a solution to this?  Other than “don’t use iCloud” or “don’t use Notes.app”, that is.

iPhone

switching to Verizon for the iPhone 5 is a lot harder than it should be

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I’ve been on AT&T for quite some time.  I was an AT&T subscriber back in the dark pre-iPhone ages.  And back then, AT&T was good enough for my needs, which consisted of their most basic plan.  And then the iPhone came out, and AT&T was the only provider, and I bought it on launch day.  I kept that original launch-day iPhone even though I ran into issue after issue with AT&T’s service.  AT&T is notorious for having bad coverage in the Bay Area, and that’s certainly been true for me.  The iPhone 4 came out with its retina display, and I bought it on its launch day too, when AT&T was still the only provider.

Then Verizon and Sprint began offering the iPhone.  And then my contract with AT&T expired.  And then the iPhone 5 was announced.  Sprint’s coverage isn’t sufficient for my needs, but Verizon … oh, I dreamed of being satisfied with my carrier.  So my husband and I discussed it, and decided to preorder the new iPhone and jump to Verizon in the process.

We stayed up Thursday night to preorder.  The next day, I got an email saying that my credit application was on hold.  This surprised me, because my credit rating is stellar.  I called on Saturday, and was requested to fax in more information.  I asked if they could accept it via email, because that way I could send it in instantly, as opposed to having to find someone from 1984 who still had a fax machine.  They gave me an email address, I sent it in, and didn’t get a response.

So on Monday, I called again, and was told that they needed more information.  I got the needed information, emailed it in again, waited for a couple of hours, and called again when I didn’t get a response.  This time, I was told that I had only faxed blank pages.  I obviously hadn’t, since I had emailed PDFs.  The guy said that he didn’t know anything about emailing, only faxing, and his system was telling him that I had only faxed blank pages.  I wasn’t sure what to believe, since the earlier call had told me that they had received the previously-requested information but that they needed more, and thus his response directly contradicted my previous calls.  He said he couldn’t tell me anything more, and that I needed to fax in the requested information, and that I should have an email within 10 minutes of doing so.  I pointed out that I’d never gotten an email response to my previous “faxes”, and asked when these email responses arrive.  He said that it’s 10 minutes, and I pointed out that I hadn’t received anything yet, and he didn’t have any control over it — which, on one hand, I get it, but it’s frustrating to be given an answer that has no resemblance to reality.

So I emailed all of the requested information again.  And this time, while waiting the 10 minutes that I was told that it would take for my application to be processed once they received the information yet again, I tweeted about it:

Dear @VZWSupport: You’re making it Very Difficult for me to switch to you.I’ve been trying since Saturday. Do you want me to stay with AT&T?

And they responded!

@nadyne We certainly want you to join the VZW family! Please follow us and DM me your credit reference number & or application number. ^TB

So I did.  Concurrently, I tweeted to a friend (whose tweets are protected, so I won’t quote them, but I think that the tweet is clear enough without the context of their tweet):

well, I think I’m switching, that is. I might end up staying with AT&T if Verizon can’t get their act together.

So a different Verizon agent responded:

@nadyne Our act is all together! What is going on? I want to ensure you have a positive experience! ^AE

This tweet doesn’t actually make me feel like their act is all together, given that my DM with my application number had been sent ~5m earlier, and someone else has already responded.  But yet another agent responded via DM to say that the application had been approved (finally!), and that I should call sales to complete the order.  They gave me a toll-free number, which is a different toll-free number than the one that had been in the email that started this whole mess.  I called, and waited on hold for nearly 30m.  When an agent finally picked up, they told me that they couldn’t help me, because I was calling about an internet order instead of a phone order.  But he offered to transfer me to the right department.  I pointed out that I’d been on hold forever, and he apologized and said that he couldn’t help, but he could transfer me.  So he did.  And the department that he transferred me to is closed for the evening, since apparently West Coast customers don’t need to talk to this department.

Now I’m really feeling like Verizon’s act isn’t all together.  Their online support agents gave me the wrong number to call, and their system is so siloed that I have to know what department to call based on how I placed the original order.

I called the original number that I had, from the email.  This agent is able to confirm that yes, my credit application has been accepted.  So I asked whether this delay in approving my order is going to result in a delay in actually getting the phone.  After all, I stayed up until midnight on Thursday so that I could pre-order a spiffy new Verizon iPhone.  And he said that he didn’t have access to that information, and that I would have to call the internet order department to ask that question.  I asked if he knew the hours of that department, and he said that he didn’t.  So I got the phone number, and discovered that this department is the same one that I had gotten forwarded to earlier in this odyssey, so they’re still closed.

None of this makes me feel confident that Verizon has its act together.  As I tweeted,

This really isn’t a very good start to a relationship.

I especially like that I’m going to have to pay a $35 activation fee per line for the privilege of burning 4 hours tonight, and who knows how long tomorrow, in trying to figure out how to resolve the issue that Verizon created for me.  I have to admit that, even though AT&T’s coverage sucks and I get dropped calls and no service all the time, I’m now contemplating canceling my Verizon order.  I can just go queue up on Friday morning for a new AT&T iPhone.

Zimbra

Zimbra v8 has GAed

I can’t believe I forgot to mention this.  Zimbra v8 is now available!  It’s got a whole lot of new awesomeness, but most near and dear to my heart is that the front-end has gotten a complete makeover.

The Zimbra team approached me soon after I joined and asked if I could give them a hand.  They had a new user experience design team.  They actually didn’t know about my expertise with email clients and servers when they reached out to me, so I don’t think that they were quite prepared for how enthusiastically I agreed to help them out.  So we sat down and talked.

That team had a lot of input streams, like their Bugzilla and internal feedback that they got from us at VMware, not to mention their own opinions.  But, essentially, they had a lot of anecdotes.  They didn’t have a lot of data to help them prioritize the changes that they should make to the user experience.  Ultimately, we decided to do a baseline usability study: take the most current version of Zimbra, look at the most common workflows, and see how we fare.

When we’re talking about Zimbra, my research questions were … well, obvious.  Can users find their inbox, sent mail, and trash?  Can they create a new meeting, add people to that meeting, and schedule a conference room for it?  Can people set up their out-of-office message?  When I presented this as the questions that we were going to answer, some people asked why I was looking for such basic information.  The answer is that we needed that basic information before we could move on to more in-depth questions.  We have to understand how well we’re doing on the most basic tasks first.  If we’re getting something truly basic wrong, then it doesn’t matter how awesome we are on the subsequent stuff, because no-one will ever get to it.

So I did the study: I spent a week in the usability lab with users, the Zimbra design team, and other members of the Zimbra development team.  I learned a lot.  I learned way more than I anticipated that I would learn.

I have to admit, I was cocky when I went into that study — I thought that all of my experience with email clients and servers meant that I knew all of the answers to the questions that I had.  I was wrong.  I was so totally wrong.  I did correctly identify some of the places where people would stumble.  But there was one task that I threw in  to make the study flow better.  It was only there to make the end-to-end story behind the usability study more complete, and to make a transition from one set of tasks to another less obvious.  And nearly every user stumbled on it, revealing a problem that we didn’t know about (I didn’t anticipate it, there were no bugs filed on it, we’d never heard a complaint about it) and never would have found otherwise.

I presented my results to the team.  As with any usability study, there was good news, and there was bad news.  We went through it all, to make sure that we  understood where we were getting things right, and where we needed to make improvements.  I was cocky when I went into the study, and I was nervous when I went into this team presentation.  After all, user experience design and research were new to them, and so I wasn’t sure whether the message that I had to deliver was one that they were ready to hear.

And just like I shouldn’t’ve been so cocky when I went into the study, I shouldn’t’ve been so nervous when we were talking about the results of the study.  The team had been there throughout the whole thing, so they had seen people struggle firsthand.  We spent most of the time focusing not on the research, but rather on how we would go about addressing the issues that were surfaced in the research in time for Zimbra v8.

And so I see that Josh Johnson, one of the members of the Zimbra design team, has just posted about all of the changes that were made to the user experience.  I’ve been following their progress for awhile, and the changes that they’ve made between v7 and v8 are awesome.  Overall, the UI so much cleaner, and (near and dear to my heart) the calendar is a lot easier to use.  Go read Josh’s posts, it’s got screenshots of the awesome new v8 and even kindly gives a shoutout to my research.  The team has done some amazing work, and I’m proud to have helped them along their way.

a Macintosh girl in a Microsoft world

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