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On Friday Morning, Splashtop introduced a new application, the Win8 Metro Testbed – powered by Splashtop. With both of the releases of Windows 8 so far, a key criticism of mine has been how hard it is to fairly evaluate the OS without a device that supports touch properly. Where Windows 7 is a desktop OS that offers little value when used with touch, Windows 8 is so touch-centric that evaluating it with only a keyboard and mouse is, I believe,…

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I don’t have a Ph.D. in ergonomics. I didn’t even stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. But still, I have to say, I have to disagree with Jakob Nielsen in his blog post. Jakob states that if you build a mobile site (and he recommends that you do), that you redirect users to it automatically. This is not that different from the incredibly annoying tendency of sites to offer you their mobile app with the persistence that the talking toaster from…

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For most of my career at Microsoft, I worked as a Program Manager on Windows Setup. No, not the Windows installer. Windows Setup – the tools and technologies that took a computer either from an earlier version of Windows or a bare PC, to an installation of Windows. But in this role, I still had to deal with the ramifications of how Windows applications were installed, and often would see the work of other teams incorporated into Windows setup –…

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This is my office phone. See the red light? Most people who know me know that the best way to reach me is always my cell phone or email (or Twitter). But that red light marks purgatory for those who didn’t know. You see, office phones and I just don’t get along. I’ve tried, really I have. But these “designed by an electrical engineer” phones have always driven me nuts. Right up there with fax machines and printers, the needlessly…

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If you’ve read my blog or followed me on Twitter for long, you know that I love to analyze patterns in spam and scams. Over most of 2010 and 2011, spammers (in particular the porn spammers in late 2012) were very prolific. I believe recent controls put in place are helping to regulate the amount of spam on Twitter to a better degree than before. However, last week, something happened that exposed a weak point in whatever algorithm Twitter is…

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In my last blog post, I discussed the different user interface approaches that Apple is currently taking across all of its platforms. Four platforms, four slightly different answers. There is, I believe, a rational explanation for each of them – and most importantly, a rational reason for all four to at this point at least, not have a completely identical experience. In a recent meeting at work, we discussed Metro and WinRT as they related to an article that a…

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This is the first in what I hope to be a series of blog posts about user interfaces; where we are, where we’re going, and where we’re likely not going. Yesterday, as I was pondering this blog post, I thought about where we’ve come with user interfaces. Today, PC users often point to the iPad as not being “ready for business”, yet the same thing happened when the PC poked its way into the world of typewriters and mainframes/minicomputers, and…

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When the Nest Learning Thermostat first came out, I went through a couple of different modes of thought. Let me walk you through them. Bewilderment – I read the initial news about the thermostat and thought, “Tony left Apple and made… a thermostat?” Excitement – I realized that the design team had followed what appeared to be an Apple-like philosophy of simplicity and task-based design. Disappointment – I realized that it was $249, which was a little more than I wanted…

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The other day, I was on a panel of 4 pundits where an audience member asked whether we felt Microsoft would approve a Metro app that was data heavy. The visual I got was a data grid application, something perhaps written in Access, VB, FoxPro, or some other visual designer at a time when raw data access was thought to be a good thing. I spoke pretty candidly about the fact that if you’re making the effort to port to Windows…

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Natural. A harmless word. As someone who grew up in Montana, if you used “natural” in a word-association test, the response I’d give you is probably Glacier National Park. But natural isn’t a harmless word anymore. Unlike the word organic, which (though overloaded in meaning) has a very explicit definition when it comes to food, the word natural means everything, yet means nothing at the same time. At a simplistic level, the word natural means “from nature”. However, unless it’s something…

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