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A Metro user-interface wish list
One side effect of being a user-interface critic is never being able to step away from the work–the world is full of bad UIs. And sadly enough, public transportation has been a tremendous contributor....
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Conference badge design best practices
I spend an unhealthy amount of my time walking around strange places with a piece of paper suspended from my neck by a lanyard, courtesy of all of the conferences on my schedule. A partial selection...
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Weekly output: tech exceptionalism, mobile UX, smarter wireless,...
This was an unusual week: For a change, it was my wife out of town on business and me doing the solo-parent thing at home. If you were wondering why I seemed absent from Twitter in the evenings,...
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Setting the time on a Timex 1440 sports watch: the worst UX ever?
tl:dr: Press and hold the “set” button until you see the seconds count blinking at the top right of the face, then press the “mode” button to switch to hours and then minutes, press the “start/stop”...
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The fable of the one-handed phablet
For most of the last three years, I have been fighting a battle against “phablets” and losing it badly. Not only have people flocked to buy supersized phones after each negative review I hand down, the...
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Mac settings changes you might miss going from Snow Leopard to Yosemite
One of the major Christmas presents at my in-laws was a shiny new 13-inch MacBook Air that replaced a 2010-vintage MacBook–which meant that one of my major presents was getting apps, data and settings...
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What posting a Facebook Offer taught me about Facebook’s privacy rules
Some months ago, a PR person for Gogo handed me a few freebies I probably couldn’t use: three free passes for that company’s inflight WiFi service. (Ethics aside, almost all of my transcon flights are...
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Samsung’s Android versus stock Android: how six common tasks compare
I didn’t get around to reviewing Samsung’s Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge after their introductions at Mobile World Congress this February, but a couple of months ago Verizon Wireless PR offered to loan...
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This is the worst interface I’ve ever seen
Our water heater broke sometime Monday, and we found out the analog way: Only cold water came out of the tap. A visit to the basement revealed that the heater had already been reporting a problem in...
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Ugh, Washington Gas is the worst at customer experience
We got a message on our home phone yesterday from Washington Gas, and even by voicemail standards of annoyingness it was unhelpful: “We value you as a customer. Please contact us for an important...
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AirDrop apologists have some opinions
Who knew suggesting that an Apple interface enabled undesirable outcomes and ought to be changed would be so controversial? Me–I’ve been critiquing Apple’s products since before the company was...
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News sites, can you at least stop nagging distant readers to get your...
With my industry becalmed in its current horrid economic state, you’d expect news sites to strive to make new readers welcome. Instead, they keep resorting to clingy, creepy behavior that must send a...
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Six updates in, iPadOS still needs work
It hasn’t even been two months since Apple shipped iPadOS, but in that time the tablet offshoot of iOS 13 has seen six maintenance updates–from iPadOS 13.1.1 to 13.2.3. That plethora of patches has...
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Streaming-TV sites still need some design work
This year’s version of the “what regional sports networks will shut up and take a cord-cutting baseball fan’s money” story was not like the last three. I wrote it much later in the year, it’s at Forbes...
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My recipe management remains surprisingly analog
All the kitchen time I’ve had over the last year of not going out to eat in restaurants has seriously advanced my cooking, but it has not advanced my recipe management nearly as much. Yes, I still...
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Three credit-card apps actually worth putting on your phone
For years, I resisted the requests of various credit-card issuers to add their apps to my smartphone. Why bother when I can log into their sites in my phone’s browser? But three of them finally won me...
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Weekly output: Boost Mobile bundles telemedicine, Tegna’s local-ads sales...
This week’s biggest accomplishment doesn’t appear on the list below: getting my second dose of the Moderna novel-coronavirus vaccine Thursday morning. 5/4/2021: Dish’s Boost Mobile to add telemedicine...
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Suggested Windows 11 laptop taskbar-settings edits
My overdue introduction to Windows 11 hasn’t allowed me enough time to develop too many informed judgments about this operating system as a whole. But three weeks have left me pretty confident that I...
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Some Time Machine backup-volume trial and error
The Mac-maintenance task that has taken care of itself for most of the last four years brought itself to my attention Wednesday, and I wish it had not. Two days of troubleshooting later, I think I...
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