Apathetic Thursday

For the past month I have been working on thee next version of DeChaos. I have re-engineered the interface to what I hope is a better method of selecting the folders. I hope it is more intuitive now. I am also looking into some other neat options and possibly ways to integrate it with iPhoto.

I have been using DeChaos 5 to sort my photos all day today and I think it’s working well. For those interested in testing it out, go here: http://apatheticthursday.net/dechaos/

Technology has reached a point where consumers are literally afraid of their electronics. They are not afraid that the electronics will attack or hurt them, but rather afraid that if they touch something, they will break it. This has several implications, which are rather discouraging for the more tech minded individuals.

To begin, allow me to illustrate the problem.

Let’s say that you develop the concept of a car. You design a car, you engineer a car and you are finally able to build a car. After finishing this tremendous project, you take it out and show it to people. You say, “Look at this! It’s a car! Isn’t it neat? You can have it! Go ahead and use it!”

After leaving the car in their hands, you leave, only to return several hours later to find twenty or thirty people pushing the car to the top of a hill, climbing onto the roof, and riding the car down the hill. You look on in horror as the car smashes into a tree, at which point everyone picks themselves up off the ground, brushes themselves off, and begins to push the car up the hill again.

This is not at all what you expected, so you try to explain: “Wait! Look, see? You can open the door and go inside! There’s a steering wheel! You can make it turn! There is a radio, you can listen to music! There are breaks, so you don’t hit trees! Why are you pushing it up the hill?! You could drive it up the hill, in fact, you could drive it down the hill, or anywhere you want! You can use it for so much more? Don’t you see!?!?”

The problem that we face is the result of many issues. The first being:

Features are not immediately obvious.

The people building the technology take their work for granted. They added or designed features that made sense and they understand it perfectly. It’s completely obvious to the builder that a car should have a steering wheel. Isn’t that common sense? You should be able to set the home page on your web browser, right? Doesn’t everyone know that? In short, no. It’s an additional feature, not a requirement, and as such many people will not even think about it.

Users don’t always understand the language used.

???????? ????? ????????Why do you go to “Preferences” to change the settings? How is someone suppose to know that? Take a look at the screenshot to the right. Check out the keyboard shortcut for “Paste and Match Style.” What on earth is that symbol? I don’t know about you, but I don’t have any keys on my keyboard which even remotely match that first symbol. What’s with the up arrow? Is that the up arrow key? (No, it’s the shift key.) How do we expect people to know this? Now take a look at “Complete.” First off, even I don’t even know what “Complete” does and secondly, what on earth is that circle with that arrow? How is this not confusing?

If users don’t understand what a feature does, it doesn’t matter if they can find it or not. Granted, helping them to find the feature is the first step, but they are not going to go out looking for the feature unless they either know that it should be somewhere or they just want to dabble around. The users are more than happy to ride the car down the hill. It’s fun and exciting, it does what they want. Why do they need more?

Users are afraid of breaking things.

If a user has something that works for their needs, they have no reason to go and change anything. It might break something, and if it does break something, they may not be able to put it back to how it is now.

This ties in greatly with the last issue. If users don’t understand what is being said, they won’t use the feature because they don’t know what it does. But they are afraid to try new things because they fear that doing something they don’t understand will completely break what they have.

In some respects, this is a good fear to have. Users shouldn’t go around deleting random files from their system folder. (Or for that matter, any files from their system folder.) When it comes to learning more about their computer and features that they have, it is counter productive.

I don’t really know why I should put this smelly liquid in my car. What if that means I can’t ride it down the hill? What if that breaks it? What if that’s not suppose to go in there? I’m fine how I am, I won’t touch anything.

What can we do about it?

The solution is not a simple project. The good news is that the younger children today are becoming much more adept at working with the newer technology. The learn quickly and are more willing to try new things. It’s the older generation of users that will need more help in learning their way around things.

For the consumers we need to find a way of explaining the features, the language and how to explore the program. Once the users begin to understand, they will be much more capable of handling issues on their own.

While educating people about technology, though, it is important to also educate the technology creators and designers so that they understand how to view their design as if they are a first time user.

Before I end, let me give one example of a cool new feature which I think is really a great step in the right direction.

Apple has done a really neat thing with the Help menu in Leopard. The Help menu contains a search box which not only searches thee help documents, but also searches the menus for options. This is a great feature to help explore the program and to find features. We need more things like this.

On my Mac I have a set of tools I use in conjunction for all my website design. For most of my graphic design I use Photoshop, I’m very fortunate to have such a powerful tool at my disposal. For coding and file transfer, I have a small little set of tools which has become indispensable.

Transmit: Transmit is my favorite FTP client. I have used it for a few years now. It’s reliable and robust. One of my favorite features is that it allows me to edit files on the server using the program of my choice. Which are usually:

TextMate: I got TextMate from the original MacHeist bundle. If it wouldn’t have been included, I probably wouldn’t have ever justified TextMate’s steep price tag. After using it for a year and a half, I don’t think I could live without it. It’s definitely worth every penny.

CSSEdit: I love CSSEdit. It’s an amazingly powerful tool for working with CSS. It allows me to type in my CSS when I know what I want, but also choose options from menus if I don’t remember the syntax. I can’t imaging designing without it.

All of these tools work wonderfully, but also they are very pretty applications. They are designed well. I don’t think I would call them perfect, but are usually very intuitive.

What’s in your toolkit?

John Gruber posted a review of several different Twitter Web Apps for the iPhone. I’m glad I’m not the only one who is not satisfied with many of the web apps out there.

I early wrote about my experiences with several todo web apps that may be used with a mobile device, such as, say, an iPod Touch. Here is my full review on the subject. (By “full review” I mean 4000+ words on the subject.)

Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATE: I changed the title of this post to something more appropriate. A future post will talk more about my general complaints with web apps.

The last week in February I went out and finally bought myself an iPod Touch. I had been wishing I had one since January 1st when a good friend showed me his. The original idea I had, although now seen as rather naive, was that I would get an iPod Touch, Apple would shortly after announce the SDK and within a week or so I could have some sweet calendar and to-do apps running on my iPod.

For over a year I have been working with a Palm Zire 31, and have been very pleased with it, but when I got my iPod, the Zire went to ebay. I was really hoping that the iPod could fully replace my Palm Pilot. Well, Apple made their announcement and it wasn’t what I expected. They told me I had to wait until June, or more likely, early to mid July, before I could use my iPod like I wanted too.

I figured I could live with this and that I would simply have to run off Web Apps until June, which wouldn’t be entirely hard because most of my time is spent on a well wireless campus. I already had a preconceived idea of how a to-do list should work and I was hoping someone had made a really wicked awesome web app that would fulfill all my needs, hopefully making things easier and more user friendly than my Palm.

I was first recommended towards Ta-da Lists, which I was really hopefully about, coming from 37 Signals. It was a neat app, but it wasn’t what I was looking for. I really wanted something with due dates, so I can put every assignment for the rest of the semester into it, as well as a long list of things I want to try to accomplish in my free time. I quickly decided that Ta-da Lists was not what I was looking for and moved. (I really like the idea behind it and I love the simple to use interface, but it’s just not what I needed.)

I did some searching via Google and came across a site called, Just Another Mobile Monday, which had a list of several good applications for online to-do lists. A site called Toodledo caught my attention and seemed to have everything I needed. I like Toodledo, it did pretty much everything I wanted to do. It has priorities and allows for grouping in folders, and maintained a “Hotlist” of all tasks that were overdue or coming up soon. For anyone looking for a good to-do web app, I would put Toodledo on my list of “web apps you should try.” For some reason though, I wasn’t satisfied. I had used Toodledo for a few weeks and I really liked it, but I decided I needed to try something else, to see if it fit things better.

The next web app I decided to try out was Listingly. The interface looked neat and method of breaking things down into lists looked promising. After trying it out for a bit though, I was not very impressed with the site. The images wouldn’t always load and the text never sat right in the buttons. I played around with it for a day, but by then I knew I needed something else.

I heard Leo Laporte mention that Remember the Milk was a really good to-do list for the iPhone. I had seen it before when searching for a to-do list, so I thought I should try it out. Remember the Milk looks really promising, but unfortunately, it’s not as nice as I would like yet. After playing around on my Laptop I decided to give it a try on my iPod. I finally found the iPod optimized version of the site and discovered that it was for “pro” users. This means that there is a $25 yearly fee to use the service. Fortunately, they have a 15 day trial period for the software, and I was quickly up and running.

Remember the Milk has a very nice interface, although there are some things that take some getting use too. I have used it for 15 days now and don’t fully understand how location and tags fully work, but I really liked the rest of their set up. The little side graphics looked wonderful and they color scheme was nice too. There were a few more options in adding a task than I really needed, but it worked how I expected for the most part and worked well.

Today, however, my trial is up. Ideally, I want to use a iPod based app, rather than a web based app to store my to-do lists. Over the summer I won’t always be in a location that has wireless connection, in fact, after another year of college I can’t guarantee I’ll have wireless connection anywhere. I’m really hoping to find a great to-do list app for the iPod in June or July. One that will sync with iCalendar and everything. As much as I like Remember the Milk, I don’t feel that $25 is worth 3 months of usage, especially if $25 is suppose to give me $12. Personally, I can’t justify the spending of that money. I can work with the “non-optimized” mobile version of the site, but it really isn’t the same if you know how it could be.

Surfing the Apple website, after my trial had ended, I stumbled across Noter, a simple little to-do list on the web. It took me about 2 minutes to decide that it had no chance of serving my needs and again I needed to move on.

Which actually brings me up until now. I decided to write up my experience, and actually in the process have discovered two things. The first is that there is a site called Vitalist, which like Toodledo and Remember the Milk, look promising. The iPhone interface is free, and it appears to have a good feature set. I have signed up for an account and will probably spend the next day or two playing around with it and seeing how well it works.

The other thing I realized while writing this up was that I really did like Toodledo, and if Vitalist doesn’t live up to my expectations I can always fall back onto it for a few months until I am finally able to run apps on my iPod.

In Conclusion

There are a lot of web apps out there for staying on top of your to-do lists. I think my favorite has to be Remember the Milk, but I don’t agree with their policy of charging for an iPod interface. I understand it makes sense financially for them, but I just wish it was free.

Toodledo is probably my overall favorite because I have used it the longest, but I’m curious to see how well Vitalist works in comparison. After I spend more time with it I’ll have to post up my experience, but I’m hoping it’s going to be a good one.

Just finished some coding work, which at long last has brought some wonderful functionality to my pride and joy, DeChaos.

DeChaos 4.0 has improved functionality, allowing for 1 level of subfolders and also moving forward and backward freely, skipping some photos and going back to rename others. I have also added support for other file types. At first I limited the program to jpegs, but now it accepts jpegs, pngs, gifs and tiffs.

From what I can tell it seems to be working wonderfully. But I am still looking to find any tiny bugs, which is why I’m posting it as a beta. So if anyone happens to stumble upon a bug, let me know and I’ll try to fix it.

You can find the download link here: http://apatheticthursday.net/dechaos/

I’ve been waiting for WordPress 2.5 for a while now, but I’m glad they are taking the time to make sure everything is working well before the official release.

Well I finally have my photo sorting program to a state where I am happy enough with it that I am willing to let other people completely ruin it for me. It’s been a long process getting everything to work but I think it is all entirely worth it.

This program was written entirely for myself, but if someone else happens to find a use for it, that’s wonderful. That’s the reason I wanted to polish everything, so that I could have a really nice program that other people could use if they wanted too.

This program stemmed from a realization that I had to organize my photos. My picture collection had grown to 18,000 photos, most of which were in iPhoto and most of which were neither organized or named or rated or tagged. In fact, there were several batches of photos that had been dumped into iPhoto and never looked at again.

My task of sorting the photos was daunting to say the least, and iPhoto wasn’t much help. If I would often find myself deleting a photo from an album only to later remember that the photo was still in my library and I had not truly deleted it. Trying name or sort the photos in iPhoto caused an additional challenge because I had already set up several half completed sorting schemes and dragging photos to albums is rather clunky.

So I went in search of other photo organization tools. Nothing seemed to have the feature set I needed. I was looking for something that was

• easy to use and able to sort thousands of photos quickly
• something that was not proprietary
• something that would allow me to sort the photos into groups
• something that would let me name the photo.

But I couldn’t find anything that did this to my satisfaction. So I began to think about creating my own photo sorting program.

I had been wanting to try my hand at a full fledge Applescript Studio Application with a nice GUI for some time now, but I had never really had an opportunity. I figured this would also be a great learning experience for me as well, so I began with my design.

My initial program didn’t take long to write up, but I relied only on Applescript for this version and as a result the move commands to the Finder were far too slow. I rewrote the program using shell scripts to move the image files around, which sped things up tremendously. I used this version for awhile until I got fed up with the lack of a few of what I deemed “necessary features.”

Finally, I reworked the interface and added the needed features to the program, spending many more hours debugging and tweaking. While there are still a few little annoyances within the program, I can live with them until I can get them out. (Sometimes things just don’t do what they are suppose too.)

The program is very simplistic in nature. I exported all my photos from iPhoto into 3 different folders (based off of year taken) which culminated in a folder of several hundred photos, a folder of 4,000+ photos and a folder of 12,000+ photos. The program would then run through a list of the images I gave it and move the files to a new folder of my choosing and rename the file as I commanded.

I started off by creating a folder called “Philip’s Photo Library” wherein all my photos would eventually be sorted. Upon starting up my program I would choose a folder of photos to be sorted and my “Philip’s Photo Library” folder and off I would go to sort the photos.

DeChaos loads up the first photo in the list and displays it in the image box. I can then type a folder name into the drop down list menu. If, say, the photo was a , I might want to put this photo into the “Flowers” folder, so I would type in “Flowers” into the combo box. If I already had a folder called “Flowers” created, the combo box would automatically fill in as I typed, making it easy to have very specific or long folder names (”My Great Aunt Mable’s Wedding”). If I wanted to name the photo that was being sorted, I could then type in a second name in another text box. This would be the name of the image file after it had been moved.

The one issue I ran into at this point was the issue of duplicate names. I solved this issue very easily by attaching an ‘arbitrary’ number to the end of each photo that was sorted. This makes duplicate entries extremely unlikely, if not impossible, the only cost is that the image file names look a bit messy. This doesn’t bother me, yet, and I have been thinking over a few different options for getting rid of them, but it doesn’t seem worth the effort.

So as of right now, I am considering myself to be done with the overall development of DeChaos. I have noticed a few inconsistencies and problems for different people on different computers and my goal is to fix those as they come up, but for I’m not entirely sure what’s causing the problem yet and it’s only causing the problem in some instances so it’s not something that is readily reproduced.

If anyone is interested in DeChaos, proceed to download and try it out yourself. I am currently working on some documentation for the program, but I don’t know how much I really want to do with it, so stay tuned. In any event, if you have questions or problems drop me a line or leave me a comment and I’ll see what I can do to help.

UPDATE: New Version is out

DeChaos 4.0 (Build 1101)
Requirements:

• Mac OS 10.4.x or 10.5.x
• Photos that need to be sorted

Download Page

I had a great problem solving experience last night which not only solved the problem I was facing but also did a great job of helping me to realize a real world example of some of the things I am learning in my “Theatrical Design” class.

I was working on my photo sorting program, known as DeChaos, and I was struggling with the issue of allowing users to move forward and backward along the list of sorted photos. I wanted it to work so that if someone knew they had multiple shots of the same photo they could jump ahead or skip over a photo if they wanted to see what was next. The issue that faced me was that if the user decided to sort that photo the program would then move onto the next photo and, should they attempt to go back to the last photo, the program would try to load the photo that had already been sorted (meaning it moved location) and would error out because the photo file wouldn’t exist.

I had in my head, multiple elaborate schemes of how to keep track of the photos that the user skipped and how to jump back to them, keeping them from going back too far, and the whole thing was a complete mess.

I was thinking this over while sitting on the steps outside the SuperBowl party that was going on in the other room when Anna came over to talk to me. I started to explain the problem to her so she had an idea of what I was working on, when mid-sentence the answer struck me like a lightning bolt of energy.

The problem I was working on in my mind was “How do I keep track of the pictures that a user skips,the pictures that the user sorts, without slowing up my program, making a lot of unnecessary lists and variables and keep it simple and reliable.”

But as I explained my problem I realized that the issue was really “How do I keep the user from sorting photos after they have skipped over the photos.” The answer was immediately obvious to me: Don’t give them the option.

If I don’t allow users to sort photos after they have skipped some, they are forced then to go back to the photo they were at when they first skipped ahead and resume sorting from there. It was an amazing solution, easy to implement, and it makes perfect sense.

What this really did for me though, was open my eyes and look at the big picture, which was really “what do I need to prevent?” rather than “how can I make this work?”

This is something that people often overlook, sometimes we are just so focused on the gears that we don’t see that they aren’t doing anything. Thats when we need to take a step back and look at the whole clock.