Checking for solutions

I'm not a big fan of computers attempting to solve an interal problem for me. Like this:

In all the years I've worked on Microsoft's OS, it has yet to ever successfuly find a solution. So what is it really doing? I suspect it's just waiting for the program to respond to something. What, I don't know.

It's a useless dialog in this sense as well: it has only a single button, "Cancel." So now I have to take action which still won't do anything.

Here's my proposal, part of which is stolen from Apple. Actually, let me first suggest that computers should never have these types problems. It's a flaw in the OS to have applications lock up as often as they do on a brand new (as of August 2011) computer (yet they do. Get with it, computer maufacturers!). In lieu of that pipe-dream ever getting solved, I would like to propose that if an app is non-responsive, the OS takes it and hides it away, clearing up the desktop for us and not tempting us with thinking we can click on it. Then, a la Apple, have its task bar icon bounce up a couple of times, or glow red when I move my cursor near it. Then, if I actually click on the icon, have a message drawer extend out and tell me, "Sorry, this app is behaving badly. What would you like to do?" then have some options: "Force Close", "Ignore, for now", "Give it 10 secs, then force close" or similar.

Force close is the most common thing I'd imagine would happen. On my Mac, if an app freezes up (i.e. Firefox. What happened to you guys?), I have to force close it about 20% of the time. On my PC, if it freezes longer than 20 seconds, I have to end the process on it 100% of the time. If I have to do it that often, make it easy for me.

Funny how it takes a human to fix a computer's problem.

Field Formatting Forgiveness

Here, while I was filling out a form a for a local college, I encountered this little problem. After having typed in my phone number (which is in a valid format for a US phone number), I got the error show above. "Please enter a valid US phone number XXX-XXX-XXXX".

This is an example of a failure to be forgiving to your users; asking them to guess (because there was no indication of the format before I entered the numbers) what the proper format is annoying. Other valid formats include: (XXX) XXX-XXX or XXX.XXX.XXX or even XXX/XXX-XXX.

Instead of making the user fill in a field to fit your expectations, allow them instead to put in any format they desire; check for the 10 digits needed to be a valid phone number and then have the system reformat. That way, you're not annoying your user and you can still get consistency in your data (and it's under your control).

The original Motorola Droid is not my favorite phone. I own it because I needed it for work and it was the first serious competition for the iPhone when it came out. Since then, many new phones have come out with wonderful features that I suspect could have been integrated into this particular generation of smartphone.

For me, the keyboard on the Droid is terrible. Most people complain about the lack of tactile feel, and I agree that it sucks, but that's hardly the sticking point for me.

Instead, the position of the Alt and Shift keys seemed flip. I find I use the keys about equally between capitalization and punctuation. However, it feels unnatural to me to have to stretch my thumbs out the the side to hit the shift key. Instead, I often hit the alt key instead when I need to capitalize a letter. And then I get frustrated and hit it again because I've inadvertently put a symbol in its place and then hit Del... erasing my entire line because I hit the Alt twice followed by the Del key. Not what I wanted.

I think the problem relates to the normal keyboard on a desktop. To hit the shift key, a person uses their pinkies, not their thumbs. However, on the Droid (or other mobile), you use your thumbs for all tapping; the other fingers are stabilizing the device, or as is the case of the pinkies, not being used at all. So if the usage model changes, so should the layout. Obviously, Motorola/Google didn't think this was a major problem and that people would probably get used to it. But what it really shows in a lack of thoughtfulness on their part. They have an extra blank space on each side of the keypad (where the red arrows are pointing); they could have extended the either the alt or shift keys to be larger and more accessible, for example, but only after having evaluated which set characters get used most often.

When messaging, I use a lot of contractions... it keeps the sentence structure proper (not using "u" and "ur" and things like that that) while keeping the character count down. So I need the apostrophe a lot. What a pain to type "I'll" as: Shift-I-Alt-M-L-L." The need to make a shift between the Shift and Alt keys makes the process very cumbersome. A larger keyboard with its own number row (or pad; does the ugly looking directional pad [green circle] ever get used? -- okay, sometimes, I guess) would have made life easier; put the key punctuation characters as shifted versions of the number keys instead. On top of that, you get the bonus of more easily being able to type numbers into a text field... you know, something that happens a lot on a TELEPHONE.

And don't get me into that overburdened space bar. The space bar simply should not have a double function. It should do one thing and one thing only, no matter what mode the rest of the keyboard is in. It drives me crazy to have shifted into alt mode while typing number and then have an odd dialog, unrelated to my need to have a space between numbers, popup when I hit the space bar.

There are some redundancies in the interface that I think could have been left out and made for better space. The Menu and Search keys are both duplicated on the 'hardwired' part of the touch screen (see in blue). In the case of the menu button in particular, if you select it, you get a task bar popup at the bottom of the screen. Meaning you have to move your finger to right around where the 'hardwired' touch button is anyway. So what's the point of a physical key? The search key makes a little more sense... but not in light of the fact that Moto could have used that space to make bigger Alt/Shift keys, or a better keyboard, or an "Fn" key for a third level of functions (if they really wanted to overload the modes on the keyboard!)

The take away here is actually deeper than my minor complaints about the keyboard. The fact is that Motorola is a very large company that, given the opportunity they had, blew it when it came to creating a useful and elegant design to compete with Apple's iPhone. The keyboard is simply under-designed. It's awkward and overloaded and uncomfortable to use. And there is little excuse for such a design failure when there were already tons of examples of keyboards out in the market (Blackberries galore!) to sample from, years of research to help, and tons of money invested into the project. This was simply a sloppy decision on Motorola's part.

Password Requirement Clarifications

This is from QUALCOMM's BREW MP website, after having attempted to input a new password. It says: "Please enter a password with at least 6 character, including three distinct characters and at least one number."

What is a distinct character? 'a', 'b', and 'c' are all distinct characters. Perhaps they meant at least one alphabetic, one numeric, and one non-alphanumeric character. Or does capitalization also make a character distinct?

What led up to this is even more interesting. When I registered for the site, it didn't ask me for a password, just an e-mail address (and lamely, an alias for the forums, which I obviously hadn't gotten to seeing yet, since I had to register first; don't make me determine a unique alias until I actually need it and understand the context). I couldn't log in (because of the lack of password) until I clicked on the "Forgot password?" link, which then brought me to the issue I started this article with.

QC seems to have issues with password and account registration... not the first time I've had to run through hoops to get a registration working, especially with the original BREW website.

[Re-posted from Code Fog.]