Back as far as Raskin’s The Humane Interface, and quite possibly before, modes in user interfaces have been frowned upon. Despite that, huge amounts of software ships with a simple mode and an advanced mode. The theory being that when users get started they use the simple mode which makes the simple tasks they want to do really straight forward. Later when they want to do more than the basics, they’ll be more familiar with the software and thus be able to handle the advanced mode.

David Welton described a frustration he had with FireFox’s spell checker which piqued my interest:

I write most of my email (in gmail) and submit most web site content in English, however, a significant portion is also done in Italian. I leave the spell checker in English, because Italian is, in general, quite easy to spell, so that even as a native speaker, a helping hand is occasionally welcome. However, it isn’t as if I write Italian perfectly either, so the help there would be nice as well. I find it quite annoying to go change the language in the spell checker option each time, especially when, as an example, I’m responding to email and do 2 in English, one in Italian, another in English, and so on. On the face of it, identifying what language an author is using looks a lot like a natural language processing problem and thus requires a PhD and many years of research to tackle. Looking a little closer though, you begin to realize that the problem domain is dramatically reduced in this case:

Kevin Gamble pointed me towards the Sun Wiki Publisher for publishing documents to MediaWiki servers straight from OpenOffice/StarOffice. The key problem with these types of integrations is that wiki markup simply can’t handle anywhere near the same level of expressiveness as even HTML, let alone a word processor document. Hence the description mentions:

All important text attributes such as headings, hyperlinks, lists and simple tables are supported. Even images are supported as long as they have already been uploaded to the wiki site. An automatic upload of images is currently not supported.

Jeff Atwood:

Some of the largest sites on the internet — sites you probably interact with on a daily basis — are written in PHP. If PHP sucks so profoundly, why is it powering so much of the internet?

The only conclusion I can draw is that building a compelling application is far more important than choice of language. While PHP wouldn’t be my choice, and if pressed, I might argue that it should never be the choice for any rational human being sitting in front of a computer, I can’t argue with the results.

Nick Bradbury:

Those of us who believe that desktop software is still relevant in a browser-based world should be up in arms about how hard it is to install software (on Windows, at least – it’s easier on the Mac). Multiple security warnings, required OS updates, and tech-heavy language make downloading and installing software too scary a prospect for non-technical users.

Desktop software on all platforms can and should be really easy to install. All it requires is for the user to click a link, click “Run” and the application should be up and running. In future they should be able to access it directly from their hard drive (start menu, Applications folder, command line, whatever is appropriate for the platform). Anything more complex is purely because the developer chose to make it more complex.

Jeff Atwood chimes in on the age old question of HTML vs Markdown/Textile/Custom Markup/etc. Unfortunately he rules out using a WYSIWYG editor with the one line statement:

Nothing’s decided at this point, but we definitely won’t be giving users one of those friendly-but-irritating HTML GUI browser layout controls. Well sure, you wouldn’t give them a friendly-but-irritating HTML GUI browser control, but why not give them a good one? These days it takes a fair bit of effort to find a HTML editor that doesn’t handle the very basics fairly well and Jeff doesn’t seem to be looking at anything more complex than bold, italic and some hyperlinks. I think a lot of people get stuck in a real geek ego thing or remember the really early days of HTML editors and don’t actually evaluate modern editors properly and it’s a real shame.

CMSWire: Vendor Criticism of CMS Watch

In an industry whereby most of the “independent analysts” are heavily dependent on revenues from the very firms they claim to be “independent” of, it’s unusual to see truly critical research get published. So it becomes a surprise to both buyers and sellers when they read such criticism. In our reports we widely distribute the compliments and brickbats — if something is truly terrible we will tell you.

I’ve said this internally to Ephox already but I want to give a big congratulations to the team on getting EditLive! 6.4 out the door. We have a lot of customers who have been waiting quite a long time for the features in that release and only a year or two ago they were thought to be effectively impossible given the Swing Text APIs that EditLive! is built on. It’s a testament to the team that this can be done at all, let alone with such high quality.

Since Ephox is an IBM business partner and we pulled the right strings and made friends with the right people, I get access to IBM’s offices (apparently world wide but Bedfont Lakes is closest and best set up). They’ve got quite a nice business partner suite on the first floor looking up at all the real IBM employee’s offices but before today it’s always been a major pain.

Firstly, without a car it takes about 2 hours to get here which is never fun, but today I have a car so that was ok.

Ephox’s fearless leader, Andrew Roberts turned up in an interview with Randal Leeb-du Toit. Some good stuff in there, definitely worth a listen.

Reuters:

“Later this year, Vodafone customers in Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey will be able to purchase the iPhone for use on the Vodafone network,” Britain-based Vodafone said in a statement.

The plans for the iPhone in Australia will be very interesting – mobile internet is ridiculously expensive there at the moment and the iPhone is basically dependant on an unlimited data plan. While I was over in Australia recently with data roaming turned off my iPhone was pretty much reduced to a big, somewhat ineffective phone rather than a mobile internet sensation…

Business Week on the increasing number of companies that have at least some Macs:

In a survey of 250 diverse companies that has yet to be released, the market research firm Yankee Group found that 87% now have at least some Apple computers in their offices, up from 48% two years ago.

What’s interesting about this is that it’s one of the few surveys I’ve seen that doesn’t focus on raw market share. While hardware manufacturers might be interested to know that Apple has X% of the total market, software developers shouldn’t care.