AboutUI

Desktop? Why?

So, the Hard-disk on my SAP laptop died. For the third time in 6 months. I have a small suspicion that the Good Ole’ T42 is about to reach the big scrapyard in the sky, but with the current offerings from our IT department, I’ll stick to my IBM workhorse as long as I can. The one on my personal desktop died a week ago, so I’m finding myself re-installing two machines at the same time.

Re-installing all the different software which I need for my daily work (full list below), I found myself asking – Why do I bother? Why don’t I have everything browser based, or VM based. My laptop dies? Who care. Its just hardware. I hear this sentiment more and more reflected when speaking to customers. One of them just told me this week: “Product xxx should go to the browser. Why do we need a desktop? why should we incur the cost of supporting a desktop (following the Vista fiasco)?. Our roadmap is inclined towards browser only, looking into virtualization (esp. with HTML 5 coming out). We don’t believe in RIA – the plug-in concept vs. the HTML5 vision”.

I do believe in RIA, but I see the point. As HTML gets better and better (See how Firefox 3.5 handles Video) and the desktop OS’s not becoming any more stable (yeah, yeah, Apple and Linux fan boys), I am trying more and more to keep my information at the cloud. Instead of backing up to an external hard-drive, I’m using Mozy. Instead of jotting things to little notebooks, I’m using Evernote. Remember The Milk. Slowly but surely – I’m going to the cloud. And if this is happening for my personal productivity, what will this mean to Enterprise software? Can we break down the monolith Enterprise apps to small pieces/services which run somewhere else? More to come.

So what did I install?

SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio (Eclipse) – see above

Posted in Cloud, General, Tools | No Comments »

The LinkedIn Cycle

Having my LinkedIn network updates fed as an RSS to Google Reader, I couldn’t help but noticing the following trend:

Posted in Fun | 2 Comments »

Manual SEO

While I already twitted this picture, I think it deserves a more permanent mention:

For the non-hebrew speakers among you (you really should learn it, you know) – the sign says: “Type in Google 50 years reunion for Ort Kfar Saba and Register” (Ort is national school network). The concept is simply brilliant – why invest in AdWords when you can just print some signs and place them in the local neighbourhood. As @Shari noted (she actually went and tried it), they even have a nice domain name – http://www.ortks50.com/ and a nice site (too much flash for my liking). Is this a growing trend? Google as the ultimate Yellow Pages? no need to write a domain name on your poster which people need to copy while driving or taking the dog for a walk.

Posted in Blogosphere | 1 Comment »

Introduction to Twitter

I was asked by my colleague Dafna to give the team a brief introduction what is Twitter and how it may become relevant to our Enterprise customers. With Salesforce.com , SAP and every joe-enterprise-vendor announcing ‘support for Twitter’ in their upcoming release, we wanted to take a step back and try to understand some of the nuances.

The slide deck itself is pretty rudimentary, as most of the discussion was verbal, but you can see it below. Followed by some insights which I gained from the meeting.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Blogosphere | 3 Comments »

MP3 TCO

For the first time in my life, I’ve bought an MP3 player. I’ve had some before which were crappy giveaways which I’ve gotten as some promotional thingies, but my (slowly) growing hobby on two wheels demanded that I get me a new thing. The requirements were simple:

1. Small
2. Have a clip
3. Nice design.

Naturally, I started with the iPods. They have superb design, small, clip, whatnot. Sure, they are expensive in Israel (as are all Apple products) but hey – I deserve it. However – here came the iTunes thingie. Installing an 80Mb bloatware on each computer I have/manage (4, the last time I counted) was unacceptable to me. So i decided to go with the really cool looking Sansa Clip:

Its small, I can just open it as a shared drive and drag and drop stuff to it, it looks cool and with 4Gb It can make both the Lufthansa flights more bearable and riding the bike real fun.

However, there is this tiny tiny problem. A lot of my MP3z have hebrew titles to them. My Brand new Sansa clip displays them from left to right, instead of right to left.

I know, This is a little thing, but it annoyed me. So I started searching for a solution to the problem. I quickly learned from Google that I need to install a firmware updater. No problem. Download, Install and then:

Which is of course completely not true. Sitting inside the sunny Walldorf offices of SAP, I’m naturally behind a firewall + proxy. The Updater is not smart enough to re-use the internet connection settings of one of my browsers (I have IE8, FF3 and Chrome all running) to connect and assumes a supr dumb connection setting.

In enterprise software terms, Sansa failed on providing BIDI support (Bi-Directional) and their software developers should really be sent to one of these 10 jobs.

However – they have such a cool looking MP3, so who cares? Which is actually the realization I have from this – Yes, TCO/TCA is important. But Bling Sells…

Posted in Design, Enterprise | No Comments »

Do one thing and do it well

Back when I was young and still harboring some dreams and friends (real ones, not those you follow), we used to hang out almost on a daily basis at Hummus Ashkara. The thing about Hummus Ashkara is that they only do one thing (surprisngly – Hummus) and they do it exceedingly well. Unlike a lot of the other places operating at the same time they didnt have a wide variety of things on the menu. Just this one thing. Hummus. And for that – they did it amazingly.

I have the same feeling (sans the calories) everytime I take a look at Balsamiq’s Mockup tool. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Balsamiq is an extremely simple, extremely intuitive application for creating fast mockups. By drag-and-dropping variuos UI elements (starting from big ones to the little ones) you can create amazing screens in no time.

Balsamiq know to do one thing and that is to create UI mockups. Nothing more and nothing less. There are so many software products who do UI mockups “as well”. And hence – are lacking.

Dont get me wrong – there is a value to integration into a suite of products (e.g. Microsoft Office) but this integration should be in addition to the ‘standalone’  or ‘local’ capabilities of the targeted product.

Until recently, I treated Balsamiq as a nice tool, but lacking. Yes, I was impressed by their sales numbers, And then they introduced the ability to add extensions / plugins, through this site – Mockups to Go. People using Balsamiq are contributing UI patterns. Now – the festivities can begin. I can imagine us putting some time in creating the SAP Signature Design as a Balsamiq pattern and personally – my life would become so much better. No more powerpoint / visio to try and convey my thoughts and vision for some products to all the relevant people. That is probably the hardest part of being a product manager / product definition / program manager – whatever the title is – the problem remains. Balsamiq (with the aide of some patterns) can come to the rescue.

Posted in Tools | 5 Comments »

Police 2.0

Last week a person with (undoubtedly) very bad karma entered my front yard and took my Red and Black Mongoose Rockadile LE bike. Yes, Yes, I know. It’s not such an expensive bike. I have yet to meet my 40K weekly milestone before I really make it spiffy, but it already had the baby chair adapter and the water bottle holder (sans the bottle itself). This really pissed me off. I really liked my bike and the financial burden of getting a new one is also considerable.

2006 Mongoose Rockadile AL; Complete specs

Luckily enough, the bike was insured. However, in order to get the money from the insurance company, one has to show a police report that the bike was actually stolen. Maybe this is different in other countries, but in Israel, filing a complaint for a stolen bike is a mere formality. The police force is so overloaded, undermanned and under budgeted that the chance to get a police officer investigate a 2000 NIS (500$, at current rates) bike theft is less than zero. However, one must file a complaint.

So I went to the police station. One overwrought officer (a very nice one) was in charge of all ‘community service’ which basically means – all the complaints which we are not going to do anything about. Petty thefts, neighbor disputes etc. It took me 4 hours to get to my turn. It took the guy 30 minutes to register my complaint (including typing my verbal testimony – “I came back home and found that my bike is gone”) and then 3 phone calls to the insurance company to fax them the printed complaint form. Such a waste of time. I started thinking about “Police 2.0”. Imagine an external facing portal for these petty issues. You log in, go to the online forms page (already existing!) and fill out such a complaint. Someone then goes over all the filed complaints and handles the ones which are suspicious or problematic. For the rest – you should just be able to forward the filled form to your insurance company. That should take you all in all about 5 minutes.

Of course, there is no such form. But wouldn’t it be cool?

And no, this has no relation to SAP announcing its new Law enforcement solution…

Posted in Enterprise | 12 Comments »

OMG. Upgrading to WP 2.7.1

I’ve just upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.7.1. It took me three clicks and five minutes. And this includes backing up everything. This is how Lifecycle management should be.

Posted in Wordpress | No Comments »

The Danger of Platforms

I’ve been trying to get myself into a bike riding regimen for a while. Being a naturally lazy person (its the ADD!), I set myself with milestones to encourage me with my day to day operations. Otherwise, I don’t get anything done. The milestone I set a week ago was this – Until I reach 40Km of bike riding in a week, I wont buy any new bike gadgets. For there are so many wonderful bike gadgets out there…

In order for me to meet my 40Km milestone, I need to ride my bike to work. The showers at SAP close at 09:00, meaning that between dispersing the kids to their respective educational establishments to all the rest, I need to be out of bed by 06:30. Like most grown men, I use my cell-phone as my alarm clock. During all my cell-phone usage years, I have made a point to stick with Nokia only. They have the usability thing going. Alas, a year ago I was handed a Sony-Ericsson K350i. After a week in which I deleted 3 contacts, I pretty much got used to it. However, this morning, instead of being woken up at 06:30, I naturally woke up at 07:45. No biking, no coffee, quick quick quick to work. An investigative comittee was formed (my wife) and revealed the following. The phone was stuck (all night!) on the following screen:

Save before Exit?

What happend is this. I edited the time of the alarm and exited the “organizer” app. A normal assumption would have been that I wanted the alarm time changed –> save the new time and exit. What happened is that some development platform / OS (The K530i is running a Sony-Ericsson proprietary OS) had the following logic: “Object Changed, User Wanted to exist –> Ask user if he is sure”, with no regard to what the object really was. It makes perfect sense to have the “Are you sure” question on Contacts – You don’t want to accidentaly delete them, but for times on you alarm clock?

Another example for this is when you start up your K530i. Instead of just starting up, it has a question for you – “Do you want Flight Mode or Normal Mode?”. Here’s a safe bet – 99.99% of times such a phone is started you want the normal mode. For those 10 jet-setters who open up their phone during flight – they’ll manage. The number of times, on the other hand, in which I’ve opened up the phone, forgot about this question and found that I’ve been ‘off’ for several hours – that’s a class action waiting to happen.

Bottom line – Forget the platform and showing off you capabilities – Know your use-case. What do people want when they set up their alarm clocks? What do they want when they turn on their phones?

As for the bike gadgets – they’ll have to wait until next week.

Posted in Enterprise | 11 Comments »

In 30 years

Amazing photo gallery by Patrick Borland, of decayed machines in the Cokatoo Islands shipyard(?) should give you a perspective of how whatever you are doing now will look in 30 years. Will it even have an aesthetic value by then?

Posted in General | No Comments »