Google Reader Redesign Misses Something

Google is asking for feedback on the redesign of its "Reader" RSS aggregator.

Here's some: It's still too hard to assign feeds to folders -- the names of the folders get truncated in the Feed Settings menu. See image at left.

The menu should expand to accommodate the names, with a much larger maximum width.

This is still my single biggest design issue with Reader.

I'm also curious to see if they fix the technical issues, like misreporting old feed items as new, and very slow updates for some feeds (i.e. Google's servers don't fetch the feed often enough).

UPDATE: Same thing with the folder list in the left sidebar, see below. And there's no way to make this wider:

Macs suck at fonts now?

Just spent an hour trying get my damned Mac to install a font. The system is smart enough to identify both the PostScript and TrueType files as fonts in the Finder -- and it even loads a preview! But try to "Add Font" in the system's Font Book application and you get a SILENT failure.

No dialog. No diagnostic message. And no font added.

UPDATE: I'm not the only one with this problem. A known bug. No response from Apple. 

UPDATE2: Just add the files to ~/Library/Fonts. Works fine that way.

Mac OS X Fails Me Every Damned Night

Right now I'm watching Bill Clinton's DNC speech for about the fifth time, because OS X has yet again crashed. This time, in the midst of a video capture.

You think you know your operating system? Trying using it for 12 blog posts a night. With video capture and editing and encoding and uploading. Heavy picture downloading, cropping and scaling. Heavy RSS skimming across hundreds of feeds. Heavy Web surfing. Streaming in lots of video. Heavy email use. Constant IM. Ten different things going on at once in the name of speed on a busy news night.

You'll discover how weak your tools really are, even when they're the best the world has to offer. Not just the OS but your Web services (Google), third-party software (ecto, Photoshop, Visual Hub, SnapzPro) and Apple sofware (iMovie, Preview, Safari, iChat).

  They will break your heart and, worse, waste your time night after night. It doesn't matter if it's a brand new multicore machine with the RAM maxed out. It doesn't matter if it's built on a Unix core that's supposed to have protected memory and preemptive multitasking. OS X WILL have a hard crash on you sooner or later. In my case, it happens once or twice every night. 

Every crash sets me back a half hour or so. That's time out of my life and it adds up.

Hard things are hard to do. Fair enough. I didn't build a better system. But I hope Apple realizes how fragile its system is at publishing, 21st century style.

Del.icio.us ruined as professional tool

A note on the new version 2 of del.icio.us: We actually use it extensively at work as a professional tool, to share links with one another (and thus to suggest or assign posts and various other things). However v2 dropped timestamps on all bookmarks -- only dates are provided. This has made it about half as useful. And there's not even an option to turn timestamps back on!

Lesson: If your design assumes people will use your app as a kind of casual toy, you will probably foreclose serious, hard-core use.

Drawing A Circle In Photoshop Elements: PhD Required

Even with these directions, I couldn't make it work. And Barbara Brundage/Dave Pogue/Tim O'Reilly's "Missing Manual" isn't helping either. What a waste of money this program has been.

Previously.

iPod weak for podcast listening

Hey iTunes: If I'm halfway through an hourlong podcast, please don't delete it off my iPod because you think I'm done with it. If you're going to monitor what I listen to, at least do it right. Right click/mark as new + resync is getting really old.

One day, Apple will learn to make a reliable MP3 player

My iPod freezes multiple times per week. (Most recently, five minutes ago, as I tried to rest after a night of paperwork.)

I use it strictly to play music.

Some day, Apple will learn to make one of these portable music thingamajigs that doesn't crash. They just need some more time to iron out the kinks. They've only had seven years so far.

The attached image is a Google search showing how common this problem is. The second hit is from 2004, The third hit is an Apple doc on the topic, linked to a movie they made on the topic.

iTunes sucks at importing burned CDs

I've been cleaning out my physical home office inbox, and importing to my Mac a bunch of mix CDs given to me by other people. Every time, iTunes asks if I'm sure I want to import a CD that's not in CDDB or whatever it's called these days (Gracenote?). Uh, yes.

When I click "Yes," that would be a good time for iTunes to ask me to name the album. Instead, it doesn't, it just starts importing the CD, so I end up with a bunch of tracks named "Track 01" "Track 02" etc. and with blank album names. So I can't tell apart one imported CD from another and the tracks become lost, one mix CD indistinguishable from another.

The workaround, by the way, is to select all the tracks on the CD (don't wait for them to be imported, this works with an import in progress), select File/Get Info, say "Yes" to the scary confirmation dialog, then enter the name of the mix into the album field and hit "OK." Now you'll be able to pull up the mix CD just by typing the name into the iTunes search field while browsing your music library. If you feel like naming the tracks, you can do that later, whenever.

Amazon's feedback loop sucks

Speaking of the ways in which Amazon sucks, I have probably spent upwards of $2,000 on that site so far this year. I wanted to send them feedback (a few months ago) about the ridiculous amount of packaging they use, which not only fells trees but takes up wayyy too much space on trucks and planes thus contributing to global warming.

Same thing tonight, I wanted to bitch about the product "In Stock" lie.

They really don't want to hear feedback from customers. Nothing you can find on the site, no form, no email address, nothing.

Amazon's crappy checkout design

No, the checkout would be the wrong place to tell me your partner store is entirely out of stock of what I ordered, Amazon. Thanks for wasting my time.

Your grocery-store data, shared

Get-rich tip: Be the first grocery store to provide a digital purchase history to customers, for use in household planning.

This would actually convince me to use a frequent-shopper card and provide accurate information for it. Every time I made a purchase, a record (in some open standard format) would be emailed to an address of my choosing. In this fashion, I could build a household food database.

A sufficiently sophisticated grocery chain could even make the purchase history available via Web app, though the email option should still be there so other tools could be used.

An ambitious customer could even use a handheld scanner at home on items as they are thrown away. This would allow you to have an accurate, available-from-anywhere database of what is in your fridge and/or pantry. A scanner would also allow you to scan in purchases from other retailers (i.e. wine from your local wine shop, cheese from the cheese shop, etc).

And of course you could enter data in manually. With the right interface, this wouldn't be such a pain. With one click, for example, you could record the repurchasing of anything you've ever bought before.

If a bar-code scanner were built into an iPhone or Blackberry, one could quickly check whether a particular item is already in the cupboard at home, or even find out if one is being charged a reasonable price.

Photoshop Elements: Truly Awful

Oh God, I finally got Photoshop Elements installed and now (right this second, actually, I'm in the middle of a shift) I'm trying to use it. Oh please kill me. 

Thank god I spent $1000 on this 30-inch monitor so Adobe could fill the screen with its atrocious interface. That's right: There's no way to keep Photoshop from hogging the entire screen! Even if you have a big monitor. 

Of course Adobe doesn't tell you this when you buy the product. One of the Amazon reviews mentioned it, but I read another review elsewhere that implied this setting could be changed. Ars Technica: "the default behavior of the editing workspace is a 'maximized' view..." Uh, no, not the DEFAULT behavior. The only behavior! And the only way I know is this more honest online review.

There's also nothing in the sparse Photoshop documentation, and Barbara Brundage's "Missing Manuals" book is useless on this topic, I guess she couldn't fit in a discussion of the 2560-pixel-wide elephant in the room while gushing about how "cool" this program is.

Not that I'm bitter!

(Disclaimer: I'm bitter.)

Photoshop Elements 6 Support Sucks

I need an image editor for work to do basic things like selectively blurring text in documents and putting a couple of images side-by-side. Not rocket science, but every week it seems like there's more I need to do.

Many people encouraged me to simply pirate Adobe Photoshop. I don't believe in doing that sort of thing, and I've heard good things about Adobe Photoshop Elements, which costs about $80, so I bought it. Out of my own pocket, since I'm a contractor.

Today I went to install it. Here, in full, are the directions, provided by Adobe:

"Close any Adobe applications open on your computer. Insert the installation disc into your DVD drive and follow the on-screen instructions."

Well, guess what? When you insert the DVD, NOTHING HAPPENS.

OK, so I open the Readme file. This contains NO INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO INSTALL THE SOFTWARE. There is a section called "INSTALLING" but -- whoops! -- it never actually explains how to, uh, do the install. It just lists system requirements, some things you're not allowed to do and some things that might go wrong.

Normally, I would just drag the App on the DVD to the Applications folder on my hard drive. But 1. there's a bunch of different folders and icons and 2. Adobe Elements is known to not use this Mac convention.

I go looking through the manual for a phone number to call. There is none. IM? None. Email address? None. AT LEAST A WEB URL?? NO!!

OK Adobe, you don't think it's worth it to support me at $80. Why would I ever spend $800 with you? Oh right, because you're the only game in town. 

Want to buy single magazines through iTunes or Amazon

I stopped my Fortune subscription several weeks ago due to time constraints, but I'd love to buy just the issue with Steve Jobs on the cover (see Gruber and FSJ for details). Fortune's publisher Time Inc. should make buying a magazine as easy as buying a song on iTunes. Better yet, actually sell magazines through iTunes since I already have an account there. Or Amazon.

And yes I'm talking about a physical paper magazine, not a stupid PDF or whatever. Mail it to my house, bill my credit card. This would be much preferable to trying to hunt the specific issue down in stores or signing up for an unneeded subscription that clutters my house, adds a little stress to my life and hurts the environment.

Over the course of a year I may very well end up spending as much as or more than I would have on a subscription. I'm fine with that.

As I've said before, the print media business will recover only once publications start paying attention the basics, like how they are sold and distributed.

Improved ecto support for Blogger

Though all indications are that Blogger's API still sucks because it does not allow image uploading, the blogging application I use, ecto, has worked around this by uploading my images to Flickr automatically when I drag them into my posts. This is not ideal, since it pollutes my Flickr feed with random images for my blog, but it's better than no images.

I'm going to stick with Blogger for this blog because I don't have the energy to move it and ecto in version 3 is now much more smooth about working around Blogger's image limitations. It also now supports tagging in Blogger.

If/when Tumblr supports apps like ecto, I will move the blog off Blogger.

(UPDATE: Another way Blogger sucks with ecto and other third-party tools: If you have Blogger set to "convert linebreaks" in the standard online Blogger posting form, that setting will *also* apply to posts from ecto, even though they are sent in HTML via the API. When you change this setting to work properly with ecto, it makes all your prior posts screwy. Dumb dumb dumb. If your blog is short, just republish all your old posts via ecto and you are golden.)