Design Gripe

Every now and then I come across something that was designed with a flaw. In my hotel room this weekend it was the Heater / AC unit. The unit was extremely difficult to get set to the right temperature, and we had to fiddle with it all the time. 

AC Unit

This looks fairly typical right? Alas, it is flawed:

  • “Cool” shows up twice in two different selects
  • “Warm and Cool” temp setting is actually the room temperature at which the cool or warm air cuts off and reverts back to fan, not the temp of the air coming out.

A better design would have been to eschew the bottom right control all together. Add an “Off” Option to the fan speed switch (because “off” is in fact a speed), and let the cool warm dial speak for its self. By adding temperature increments around the dial, the user can simply set the temperature they want and leave it.

This would require a more advanced circuit board, but not drastically – and the user would not have the momentary frustration that comes with using a confusing set up. (Not to mention waking up freezing cold, or sweating!)

 

-Ben

Turn off PayPal Information sharing

PayPal is a great service, leading the charge towards a digital currency that skips over borders. Unfortunately, they too have fallen towards the sentiment that your private information shoudl be public by default to further “advertising and marketing.”

This is enabled by default. I had to read halfway down through a muti-page email they sent me today before I found out about it. (Only because the email mentioned the word “Errors” which when associated with PayPal, perks my ears up!)

Anytime my information is being used by other companies, I want to know about it – Up front, right away. Unfortunately, I have come to expect that I won’t. 

You can disable the PayPal sharing under My Account > More Options > Notifications

Saddleback caterpillar

Saddleback Caterpillar

I got stung by one of this little guys brothers while hiking on the AT this weekend. Hurt like helland I still have a raised red area where he hit me.

The caterpillar will eventually turn into a moth and be non-poisonous, but in its caterpillar stage, it has the worst of the sitnging slug caterpillar venom. 

Jailbroken App marketplace and Customer Service

I jailbreak my iPhone religiously. I love what it allows me to do, and now that there is a legitimate marketplace for jailbroken apps (yes, these do now cost money) there are services that manage them – and they have CUSTOMER SERVICE!

One of these is Rock Your Phone (www.rockyourphone.com). Several months ago i purchased an app that lets me tether my phone, recently i upgraded to the new iOS4 for my phone, and had to upgrade the apps i had purchased. Unfortunately this meant that I lost the old jailbroken apps I had paid for, but Rock Your Phone remembers these apps.  When i tried to reinstall these, i no longer saw the list of my old apps.

I contacted Rock Your Phone’s customer service with an email, and hours later they replied, letting me know I had logged in with the wrong account (my gmail vs my benhanna.com address) and that they had combined the accounts for me so I could get al my apps back!

I wouldn’t expect that from apple, much less a jailbroken app store!

Kudos Rock Your Phone, you just became a legitimate company in my eyes.

-Ben

Google Buzz – The Basics

Google just released a new feature for Social Media, called Buzz. You don’t need to hear about it from me. If you use Gmail, you will get it in your inbox shortly.

Buzz - benhanna1@gmail.com - Gmail_1265824210550

Buzz aggregates content from several sites, including Twitter, FLickr, Picassa, and Google Reader. Google already has a base of 35 million Gmail users to roll this out to, which means that they can jump Twitter (18 million users) overnight.

Buzz also allows you to update your own statuses, comment on friends status, and “like” their updates. The key move here is that when you agree to start using Buzz, it automatically follows the people you email the most. New Buzz’s find their way to the Buzz tab (below your inbox) and to your inbox. The fact that buzzes were cluttering up my inbox was annoying, so I created a new filter to make them skip this to eradicate the double notification.

To do so, go to Settings> Filters > Create a new filter > and put Buzz: in the Subject field.

Inbox (20) - benhanna1@gmail.com - Gmail_1265824791898

Click Next Step and check: Skip the Inbox. Then click Create Filter. Your done!