Ryan Boswell [dot] com
Improved Google Docs Upload Process
A few days ago, Google Docs revamped their upload process. The biggest addition was the ability to select a folder to upload. When you upload a folder, a new collection is created with all of the files the original folder contained. It’s not going to change the world, but it does make uploading large groups of files much easier to do.
But the other big change was that they removed the need to go to a dedicated upload page. Now, you just click upload, choose whether you’re uploading files or a folder and your browser prompts you to select the items. Once you do that, a small display dialog appears in the bottom right corner of the window (see picture at right) with the status of the uploads. The files will be uploaded into whatever collection you are currently viewing, a feature that I’ve been wanting for quite a while. I love that the new process is incredibly streamlined now and it makes uploading much more simple and intuitive than before.
But wait, this process is still too complicated, because you are still forced to go through the process of selecting the files through a browser upload dialog. So how about just dragging and dropping files from your desktop onto your file list? Oh, you can do that too now. This is probably the coolest part, since it makes uploading documents as easy as moving it from one folder to another on your computer. The one drawback is that so far in my testing is that it doesn’t work with iWork files, which is what I use when I do things outside of Google Docs, but it seems to work for any other file type Google Docs supports.
For those of you that actually liked the old method of going to the dedicated upload page, you are still able to do so by selecting ”Basic” under the normal upload menu.
The Unification of Our Online Lives
An interesting post over at GigaOm’s WebWorkerDaily today lists the 4 needs we have for the “perfect web working tool”. I couldn’t agree more. In recent months, I’ve been making efforts to consolidate the various applications and services that I use on a regular basis, focusing on tools that allow me to be more mobile.
One of the reasons was my desire to be part of the Chrome OS Pilot Program, I applied back when it first started and unfortunately haven’t been selected (yet, at least), although one of my close friends was (I’ve since gotten to play around with it a little, but no regular use). The biggest trial of switching to Chrome OS is that there are no desktop applications, everything has to be “in the cloud” per-say. So far I’ve gotten quite a lot of my daily routine moved to the cloud, or at the very least, mirrored there so that it’s accessible if necessary. The biggest holdouts are my music and photo libraries and my development environment/workflow for client work. So far my media libraries are too large for any online service (without paying through the teeth), and I can’t really find any decent web-based development environments (I’m taking suggestions for any of these).
Of course, one of the challenges of moving to a cloud-based workflow is the numerous tools and services that I would have to use and switch between. This is one of the four needs that GigaOm’s post mentions, the need for a centralized dashboard. I’m hesitant to rely on one service to host and fulfill all of my needs for my workflow, since if that one service goes down I am left unable to do anything. Therefore, I do believe in using multiple different services for different needs, but having some kind of “web desktop” that allows me to access all of these disparate services from one place is invaluable. Even a self-hosted option would be good, although for it to reach the masses, it would need to be hosted for people.
The second big need that I can connect with is that of aggregated contacts and information. Currently, my desktop address book and Google Contacts are synced, which takes care of one part of that need (at least for me). But there is no easy way to maintain a constant syncing link between those contacts and my Facebook friends or Twitter followers (this could also be expanded for others that use services having similar connection features). There only exist one-time, one-way syncing available for this, and it is manual. As for communications, I can’t reiterate enough the need for a truly universal inbox that can combine email, Facebook messages, Twitter @replies and DMs, instant message conversations (AIM, Google Talk, MSN, Yahoo, etc.), Google Voice texts and voicemails, and any other direct communication methods commonly in use (no need to include regular Facebook news feed or Twitter feed posts in this). The internal conversation that is given on the GigaOm post is something that goes on all-too-often in my own head, and sometimes I will spend over an hour looking in over a dozen different places to find something that either I or someone else said. It should be easy to see my entire digital conversation history with any one person, no matter what service we used to communicate.
Hopefully, someone will step up to fill this void before too long, or I may have to start getting my hands dirty with writing my own.
Beautifying Sign-Ups and Logins
After the very insightful post about proper techniques to consider when creating e-commerce websites, here is a great tidbit about what to think about to make sign-up and login forms better. Great read, and definitely going to keep that in mind in the future.
Sparrow, Finally a Viable Mail.app Replacement
Two months ago I purchased an application called Sparrow, at the time it was relatively new and was a Gmail-only mail app. I’ve been looking for a solid replacement to Apple’s Mail.app for a while now, so I was intrigued. With the promise of full IMAP account support in the works, and with so much praise already, I decided I woud fork over the $10 and buy it and see how I liked it. If I wasn’t impressed, I would only be out $10, so I wasn’t too worried.
The Inbox
For a month or so I used it with my two Google Apps accounts, since they were the only ones that were supported at the time. The interface is very simple, and very reminiscent of the Tweetie for Mac interface. Each account has it’s own inbox, there is no universal inbox, so if that is really important, this probably isn’t the app for you.
First, Sparrow automatically groups messages by thread, and it will show all messages in the thread, even if some of them are not in the Inbox, just like in the web version of Gmail. As you can see to the right, you can easily tell at a glance a lot of the important information about a message thread: attachments, who the senders of the thread are (a comma separated list of everyone that has sent a message in the thread), how many messages are in the thread, and if you have replied to the most recent message in the thread. Also, if you have any labels applied to messages, it will denote that by coloring the top right corner of the message with the color you have set for the label in the preferences.
In one of the updates since I purchased the app, multi-touch gestures were added. My two favorites are pinching open/closed a message into a new window, and three finger swiping a message open into a drawer.
Message Views
There are two ways of viewing messages, either in the drawer or a new window.
Drawers
One of the biggest complaints visually about Apple’s Mail.app is that there is no option for a three-pane message view. Several 3rd party plugins aim to fix this, but as yet there is no official way to accomplish this. That’s one thing that makes Sparrow nice, you can now choose to view your messages like this. Of course, on the other hand there is no option to view your messages in the split-pane view that Mail.app and most other email applications provide. So take that how you will.
The appealing part of using the drawer is that all of your main interactions occur within one unified window, save for replies and forwards which will always open into a new window. Also, you can make use of the three-finger-swipe to open and close the drawer.
The one drawback as I see it of using the drawer is that it takes up a lot more screen real estate, since even if you have no message selected, it’s still there; just a big empty blank window. Also, when you reply or forward a message, the original still appears in the drawer. This may not be a big issue for some, but personally when I’ve taken action on an email, I want it out of my sight.
New Window
Messages that you open in a new window are similar to those opened in the drawer, except they have their own window (obviously). The one advantage to new windows is that once you take an action (reply, archive, forward) on the message, Sparrow automatically closes it out, since logically you won’t need to view that message anymore.
The drawbacks here are that your screen can quickly become cluttered with multiple windows if you forget to close one out after reading it. On the upside, you have the option to pinch open and closed messages in a new window, which can be fun.
Proper Gmail IMAP Support
This isn’t really one of the major things about Sparrow, but I’m so excited and happy about it I had to make it it’s own section. I’ve been using Mail.app and my Gmail accounts through IMAP for years now. Because of the way that Gmail organizes it’s IMAP folders, Mail.app has a hard time mapping certain folders to their function (mainly Trash, Drafts, and Spam), and so I’ve had to fore-go the traditional keyboard shortcuts for deleting and junking emails in favor of Mail Act-On shortcuts that do these actions properly. But because Sparrow was Gmail-only, it handles these things natively, which is awesome. Also because of this native Gmail-specific support, it works nicely with any labels you may have. Unfortunately because of how poorly Mail.app works with Gmail via IMAP, I have long since abandoned my use of labels because it was just too difficult to manage. But maybe with the ability to work with them properly now I may start using them once again.
The Little Things
One of the aspects of an applications design and functionality that matters the most are the little things that make life easy.
- If you use Gmail in your browser at all and know the keyboard shortcuts already, you can easily make Sparrow use those shortcuts rather than the default ones (which parallel Apple’s Mail.app).
- When you reply to or forward a message, and the original is in a new window, the original message is automatically closed out so you don’t have to worry about it.
Quick replies are very useful for firing off short replies or confirmations to emails you get. A small text box drops down below the subject line and above the message body and lets you type in a few short lines and hit send.- Minimalism to the Max. One of the biggest take-aways I’ve gotten from Sparrow is functional minimalism. Everything is tailored to unobtrusive emailing. One example of this is that you don’t need to have the app in the dock, you can relegate it to just the menu bar (which will kindly turn blue and display an unread message count when there are any). You can also choose to have it show up in both places if that’s your fancy.
- Growl notifications are my lifeline to what’s going on in the background. Sparrow uses them natively, which makes me happy. Also, you can turn off notifications by account, which can be useful if you get a large amount of daily email in one account.
Why I Switched
Apart from the fact that I’ve already paid for the app, I really love Sparrow. I mean really, really love it. I’ve been using Mail.app ever since I switched to Mac 8 years ago, and I’ve tried over a dozen other email applications and nothing has gotten me to switch, not even the Gmail web interface (although that is 90% because I have multiple accounts and not all of them are Gmail, and I don’t like having to go multiple places to do email). Everything is intuitive and simple, and it has a very Mac feel to it, even more-so than Mail.app. So, if you have an extra $10 to spare (and have a Mac of course), you should at least try out Sparrow, I promise you won’t be disappointed.
Apple Surpasses Microsoft In Almost Everything
It’s now official, Apple has surpassed Microsoft in profit. Over the past year Apple has slowly been making it’s way to shooting past Microsoft in pretty much every aspect, financially. First came the market cap a year ago, then revenue 6 months ago, and now profit. At this point, Apple is far ahead of Microsoft in each of these three areas. It’s about time, although it does mean that Apple isn’t really the underdog anymore, they are now bigger than Microsoft financially. In fact the only Microsoft has on Apple is OS market share, and that’s still going down, albeit slowly, but dropping all the same, and it’s only a matter of time before this changes as well.
Always-On Location Data: The New World Order
Once again, the fear of privacy invasion through location tracking skyrockets as stories about Apple’s iOS devices “secretly” tracking and storing your location data on your device hit the internet. I’ve written up my thoughts a little bit about the whole issue a few times before, but I’ll address it in more detail this time.
I’ve said that I use Google Latitude to track my location and share it with a few select friends. One of the main reasons I used Latitude, however, is for my own personal interest. I like having a log of my location history spanning back months (and eventually years, once I’ve been using it long enough). It’s interesting to see my traveling habits and where I go at certain times of the day, week, or month. So I don’t generally have a problem with using a service like Latitude to track my location wherever I go, in fact I love it. I have GPS turned on at all times on my iPhone so that I get the most accurate location possible (which sometimes is still a ways off, but generally is pretty accurate), and I only ever turn it off if my battery is dangerously low and there’s no hope of getting to a charger anytime soon.
Now that it is extremely public knowledge that Apple’s iOS devices maintain a own location history log of their own, the debate has sparked up again surrounding always-on location services and how they can be a breach of privacy if not implemented correctly. I do agree that Apple should make information on how they use and collect location data a little more accessible and offer the option to not store the location if the end user doesn’t want to. But I do like the idea of having that data available if someone wanted it for their own use.
One useful tool that arose from the media storm around the iOS location storing is iPhoneTracker. It’s an OS X application that you can download and run to show you a time-lapse view of the location data that your iPhone saves. You’ll need to run it on a computer that has an iPhone backup stored on it for it to work, and it will auto-detect the most recent backup and find the location file if it exists. I’ve put in a screenshot of all of the location data that my iPhone has stored since I got a warranty replacement iPhone back in late February. As you can see I’ve travelled up and down the state of California in the past two months. I don’t know exactly what the different color dots mean, but I’ll take a wild guess and say that the large blue ones are 3G, smaller red is Edge, and the small orange ones are no data service. I may be wrong, but that seems to make sense.
It’ll be interesting to see what other applications may start popping up that make use of this particular set of location data in a more creative and useful way (Google Latitude/iOS Location Data mashup of some kind maybe?). I guess only time will tell.
Overall, I do welcome the new world order of having always-on location tracking. But only as long as the right precautions were taken to ensure that this data doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.
Apple ID Account Headaches
Everyone and their mother probably has an Apple ID by now. If you’ve ever bought anything in iTues, you have one. In fact, judging from the user forums and blogs I’ve perused in the past, there are quite a few people that have 2 or 3. This last bit leads to a bit of a problem with managing your purchases. It’s hard to tell which account you purchased something from, and it’s a hassle to have to manage so many different accounts.
I myself have two accounts, one of them I’ve had for 6 years and is just a normal Apple ID account I setup when I got my first iPod back in 2005. The other is my MobileMe account I opened two and a half years ago. Up until the beginning of this year I didn’t have many problems with using the two accounts, I decided that I would keep my iTunes purchases all with my original account because I had been using it for just that for so long already. However, the headaches started when I made the decision earlier this year to only use my MobileMe account with the Mac App Store, while still making all of my normal iTunes (music and iOS app) purchases with my original account. Now I have quite a number of purchases (hundreds in the case of my original account) split between two different accounts, and it is rather annoying.
While very few websites or services have the functionality to “merge” accounts, I don’t think I’ve ever heard more calls for it than with Apple IDs. As I mentioned previously, it seems that there are quite a few people who have multiple Apple IDs and have the desire to merge them into one account.
Technical Limitations
Unfortunately because of the way that Apple’s DRM works in iTunes and Mac App Store purchases, merging accounts is not a feasible process. Basically, everything you purchase from the iTunes or Mac App stores is tagged with your username. This is how Apple’s DRM verifies that you own the content and are able to use it. Now, what happens to all of those files if your username changes or is merged with another one? Well, technically your old username is no longer yours and therefore, there is no way to verify that you are that same person and the files become useless because the DRM engine won’t allow you access to them. But there are two ways that I could see Apple handling this problem.
Solution 1: Apple introduces the ability to “transfer” your purchases from one account to another (and subsequently deleting the “empty” account). Just as with iTunes Plus, if you want to merge your account, you’ll need to re-download all of your purchases, tagged with your new username (or rather the username that you have chosen to continue with). This solves the issue of authenticating users to their purchases. Additionally, any files previously tagged with your old username become de-authorized, requiring you to replace them with the updated copies, ensuring that there is no cheating the system by maintaining multiple copies of your purchases. However, this solution can be bandwidth intensive if, like me, you’ve had an account for a while and have made more than just a few purchases. This increases costs for Apple and it increases convenience for the end user because they have to take the time to re-download all of their purchases and make sure that there aren’t any old ones left lying around.
Solution 2: Apple introduces the ability to tie two (or more) accounts together. You would be required to select one primary account to proceed with, all future purchases are made using that account. All of your other accounts are then tied to this primary account and act as aliases. This way, all of your previous purchases will continue to function properly. You would only need to authenticate yourself with your primary account and Apple’s DRM servers would acknowledge that that account is verified for all of your “alias” accounts.
Of the two solutions I came up with, the second is probably the simplest and most seamless, not to mention cost-effective, but the first would be the most streamline and would eliminate the overhead of retaining the “duplicate” alias accounts and their information. Of course, I don’t know exactly how Apple structures their user databases and which way would in reality be easier or the best solution. Both methods would require a lot of changes and additions to the way their systems work, but primarily in different areas.
Ultimately, it’s up to Apple to determine how this situation will be resolved, if it will ever be addressed. At this point, I’m not sure if Apple will ever deal with this issue, but it would be nice if they did.
OCR Powered Mobile Credit Card Payments
The use of OCR technology to facilitate financial transactions is gaining a lot of traction lately. Banks have started using the technology to glean information from checks in ATMs so that customers only have to insert a stack of checks and verify that the auto-detected amounts are correct rather than manually enter the amounts. Some banks are also expanding this technology to mobile ATMs, such as Chase allowing customers to take pictures of checks using their smart phones and use that image to deposit checks. I’ve used the Chase mobile app on my iPhone before, and it works pretty well, using a cloud-based version of the same process that ATMs use.
The next step of using OCR for payments is apparently in the Credit Card payments sector. Mobile Credit Card payments are becoming quite popular in recent months with hardware scanners/swipe accessories. AisleBuyer is now using the same methodology as mobile banking apps do with depositing checks. By taking a picture of the customer’s credit card, the app uses OCR to extract the credit card number and use that to process the transaction. With no need for potentially expensive hardware accessories, the barrier for entry to mobile credit card payments is drastically lowered.
As a tech enthusiast, I think this is an awesome idea and will make life so much easier for people that want to take mobile credit card payments.
But on a more personal level, I am wary about using this just because I still am uncomfortable with the possibility of someone having a picture of my credit card. I feel like this is going to be a major hurdle for adoption and use of this method of mobile payments. I’m sure that AisleBuyer actually does discard the image once the credit card number is extracted, but the thought of someone hacking the application and using some kind of cache does make me a little uneasy about the idea. I guess only time will tell how society as a whole feels about this particular technology.
Good E-Commerce Checkout Design
Great timing for this article providing some great tips on good e-commerce checkout design. Right now, one of my major projects is an e-commerce driven website, and thankfully I haven’t really done much work on the checkout process at this point, so I’ll definitely be sure to take all of that into consideration. It might be worth a read if you’re interested in usability stuff or you yourself are working (or may in the future) on an e-commerce website.
Mac App Store Woes
After using the Mac App Store for 3 months, I’ve got some additions to my original thoughts on the matter.
App Updates
One of my biggest complaints thus far is in updating applications. I don’t understand why I have such trouble in doing this. Ideally, when you need to update an Application, you open the App Store, go to the Updates tab, and click “Update” next to the application. Secondarily you should be able to click “Update” next to the Application in Purchases tab. But I have yet to have the ability to update an application this simply. For the purposes of an example, I will use Sparrow, a wonderful mail Application that I purchased a few months ago.
Twice have updates been released since I purchased it. The first time, two days after the update was released, it still hadn’t shown up in my account (even though the version numbers in the store and the app were different). So I decided I would try deleting and reinstalling the app. That almost resulted in having to re-purchase the app all-together since it still didn’t show up as available for Update or even Install. As it turns out, I didn’t delete the library files so that the Mac Store didn’t recognize the Application as installed. Once that was done I was able to reinstall the application (with the updated version), but it also meant I had to re-set all of my preferences and re-add all of my mail accounts (4 in total, I wear many hats).
Fast forward a few weeks to the most recent update. I got a notification from Sparrow that an update was available in the App Store so I popped over to update the application. This time around, the application does show up as needing an update in the Purchases tab (yet the Updates tab still claims that all my apps are up to date), so I click Update, and get an odd message: “You have updates available for other accounts. To update this application, sign in to the account you used to purchase it.” Great, the only problem is that I’ve only ever used one account with the App Store, and I am signed in with it. So I decided to sign out and then back in, hoping there was maybe some glitch with my current session that was causing a problem. Nope. I got the same error again.
Then, hoping maybe it was just a problem with updating that one application, I tried updating another app that needed it. Again, it seemed to think I was signed into the wrong account.
At this point, I have yet to update the application because of these weird issues, and I am in no hurry to uninstall the application and reinstall it just to upgrade to a new version again. I’m starting to regret my choice to start using the Mac App Store so quickly, it seems there are still many problems that Apple needs to work out for this to become a viable option for app distribution.
If anyone else has had these issues and has found a way to fix them, please do let me know in the comments below.
Update 4/13/11: After contacting Apple support about my problem and going in circles with the support staff assigned to my ticket, it seems that this is an issue APple is aware of and is working to resolve quickly. I was told that uninstalling and re-installing the application should fix the problem (even though that’s exactly what I did previously). If I find any more details about the situation I will update this post.