When we have clients who are thinking about Flash splash pages, we tell them to go to their local supermarket and bring a mime with them. Have the mime stand in front of the supermarket, and, as each customer tries to enter, do a little show that lasts two minutes, welcoming them to the supermarket and trying to explain the bread is on aisle six and milk is on sale today.

– Jared Spool, Macromedia User Interface Engineering.  This was given as guidance in 2003.  2011 and we’re still stuck with loads of Flash Trash.

MarketingSherpa: Uproar over Anti-Flash Intro Survey Results.

Jack Welch ready to fight

“I wouldn’t admit it if I did.”

– Jack Welch, on whether he knows any of the board members of HP. (via WSJ.)

– Eric Schmidt at The Hills Hillicon Valley.

CHART OF THE DAY: In Case You Had Any Doubts About Where Microsofts Profit Comes From.

I didn’t try any of those: I tried the single most important thing a mobile search must provide: directions.

Home Page

The styling is a bit meh, but the brunt of the criticism is on the actual “touch” usability.

There are three things they really got wrong:

• Can’t get location from iPhone GPS.  Google’s mobile search, which is also a website running within Safari, can query my iPhone for it’s current location.
• Bing logo doesn’t link to home page.  Instead, you have text links at the bottom which are a bit too small to touch effectively.  One starts to think this was really built for a stylus.  The comical thing is that the logo is on every screen, is a nice, fat link target, and they never thought of using it.
• Delete key. After filling in a search query, an X gets placed to the left of the search icon.  Better tap carefully, otherwise all the text you just typed will be wiped out.

Directions

Since bing didn’t know my location, it prompted for a start.  I applaud Microsoft for fighting the urge to put a Windows logo next to “start”, but at least they finally realize they need to build a fresh brand for Search.

I wanted to go from Faniuel Hall to Redbones in Somerville; two well known local locations.  Notice the “X” adjacent to the Search.  I can’t possibly figure out why someone didn’t insist on putting the search button beneath the text area.

After carefully pressing the search button, I was brought to the “end” screen to type in my ending location.  Note that I misspelled Somerville.  I didn’t bother to correct it, since search engines know I’m a bad typer.

And, here we see the results.  404.

Google Check

Here’s the same misspelled query in the iPhone’s Map client, which sends its queries straight to the Googleplex:

Instant results.  In addition to the directions, I get realtime traffic.

Back to bing, and we type in the correct spelling.  Still, no dice.

So, I went back to bing’s web search, and typed the same misspelled destination, and I get results:

What’s this mean?

Looks like their directions aren’t plugged into their search engine.

We’re programmers. Programmers are, in their hearts, architects, and the first thing they want to do when they get to a site is to bulldoze the place flat and build something grand. We’re not excited by incremental renovation: tinkering, improving, planting flower beds.

It will be interesting to see what Canon comes up with in response. 10.2MP in a $500 body is quite an accomplishment.

Down The Line

Originally uploaded by rckrawczykjr.
This is a test of blogging from flickr. To set it up, all I needed was my WordPress username and password, and the address of my blog. I got to choose from several nice layout styles, and picked one which wraps text nicely around a right justified photo.

I wonder how it will work with my existing style sheet? How will it get catergorized? I suppose they (Flickr) focused on the most important thing — getting a picture in your blog as simply as possible. And for that, it’s easy to leave out the other stuff.

The more I think about this, the more it reinforces my passionate belief: that everyone in the world should have their own website. Not just to publish photos, write prose, or share mp3′s: but as a central, anywhere-accessible repository for your entire digital life.

Seeing services such as Flickr’s blog post, which lets you get to your website from another one, is just mind blowing!