I’m pretty happen with my switch from Quicken to Microsoft Money. I’m not sure it’s any better, but the switch enabled me to clean up lots of crud that had accreted over the past 15-20 yrs of Quickening. And Money’s phone support has been tremendous.

But…

Money’s UI designers should invest in a dictionary. When the menu choice says “Change account details > Close or reopen accounts,” what it actually means is “Show or hide accounts.” Closing an account is a big deal. Hiding the display of an account is not.

And when it forces you to say that the amount of a bill you’re paying is either a “fixed” amount or an “estimate,” what it really means by “estimate” is that you’ve entered in precisely the amount you want to pay as stated on your paper bill.

Jeez. Don’t they do usability testing? [Tags: quicken microsoft_money usability]

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Yahoo has done a good job emulating the Mac’s Dashboard widgets with its own Yahoo Widgets. (Yahoo bought Konfabulator to get its Widget engine.) They even look cool like the Mac ones do. But, Yahoo is not doing a good job helping us to find them. For example, there are 186 widgets in the System Utilities folder on the Web site, and 276 in the Fun and Games category. Then there are nine more categories. That’s too much to browse, even if you set it to show 25 at a time.

How about taking a page from Firefox Extensions and offer listings by most popular and highest rated? Or, heaven forbid, do we need a meta-Widget? [Tags: yahoo widgets macintosh firefox]

8 Comments »

After twenty years — twenty years! — Microsoft Word still can’t do the most basic of its selling points: Placing graphics into text. (Note: I am using Office XP, which puts me a rev behind.) For almost twenty years, I’ve been trying to tell Word where I want graphics laid out. Word still won’t listen to me.

I want my page to look like this:

But, after twenty minutes of trying, this is the way Word keeps insisting I want my page to look:

That happens to be with the layout set to top-and-bottom, but it’s what I get for various other layouts. If I drag the image where I want it, it bounces back to the top of the page where the top portion would be cut off if I tried to place it. Sometimes it bounces onto a new page entirely and I have to go hunting for it.

If I set the layout so that it’s inline, I get this:

Here’s a closeup:

No, it doesn’t help to create a drawing canvas first. All that does is limit the number of layout options Word can get wrong. Aaarrrggghhh!

I used to work for Interleaf. We were getting this right in 1986.

[Tags: MicrosoftWord annoyances microsoft]

Gaspar Torriero has discovered at least part of the problem. He writes in an email:

As I suspected in the comments, your document “Normal” style has the
line height set to “exactly” 18 points.

So when you insert an inline image which is taller than that, Word is
by design (and stupidly) sticking to that value and will not adjust
line height to suit the image. That is your problem. And in fact Word
is showing you the bottom 18pts of it…

To solve the problem, provided you do non want to revert to standard
line height, you should:

– insert new line
– modify Format -> Paragraph -> line spacing to “single” for that line
– insert inline image: line height will adjust accordingly
– everybody is happy

Well, we’re all happy except those of us who are chagrined because it turns out to have been our fault.

Nevertheless, based on 20 years of frustration and the weird transparency issue in the screen captures, I maintain that Word’s graphic placement is hinkey.

Thank you, Gaspar!

36 Comments »

An hour before I was supposed to keynote the Online Information conference in London, I found out that the copy of my presentation I’d FTP’ed to my site wasn’t working. So I gave the helpful media guy a thumbdrive with the latest version from my Mac. Same problem. When loaded on a Windows PC, the Mac version of my Powerpoints opens in an extreme read-only mode that does not allow it to be modified, saved, or saved-as because I embedded the fonts precisely in order to decrease the risk of incompatibility between Windows and Mac.

After some quick checking on the Web, we discovered that Mac doesn’t support embedded fonts in PowerPoint. So, I think what happened was: I developed the deck on Windows and embedded the fonts. I moved it to the Mac and did some more work on it. I saved it on the Mac. And this screwed it up for the PC.

Tag this: Aaaaarrrrggggghhhh!

(Having a read-only version made life harder for the media guy at the conference, but it all went well ultimately.)

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My Thinkpad is scheduled to go back to the shop on Thursday. A 5-hour chkdsk session seems to have cleared up some of the disk issues. The remaining problems are:

1. USB ports don’t work. They don’t even work on boot up, so it is not a Windows driver issue.

2. The IBM rescue partition doesn’t load.

3. Performance is worse than sluggish because a process called System (not System Idle) takes up 99% of my CPU. (The System process apparently is a catchall for kernel threads.)

Sigh.

PS: Unless you will personally warrantee the Mac you want me to buy — including you paying roundtrip Fedex if it needs repairs — do not leave a comment that I should be an aforementioned Mac. Thank you. [Tags: thinkpad]

Scott Kirsner argues that Apple is favoring Goliath over David (to use his trope), in an op-ed in the SF Chronicle today.

A PowerBook (12″, 60mb, 528mb ram that I’ll up to a gig) is on its way, thanks to the Harvard discount. And my Thinkpad is on its way to being repaired; I’m not ready to give up on it yet. I’ll blog later about why, as someone who has used Macs on and off since the mid-80s, I am not the fan that the rest of you all seem to be. I’m not saying I’m right. I’m just saying I enter this new phase of my life with trepidation.

19 Comments »

Logan Airport has forced the American Airlines lounge to turn off its over-priced T-Mobile wirelessness so the Airport can sell its own overpriced wirelessness without competition.

Sucks big time.

And while I’m on the topic of Logan sucking: The re-done Terminal A opened a few months ago. It cost tons of money and it shows. Yet travelers still have to hunt out the rare power outlets. Didn’t Logan ask a single traveler what we want in a terminal? We would not have said overpriced, single-sourced wifi and no power outlets. Jeez!

And while I’m on the topic of T-Mobile sucking: AA has a nice promotion to give one day of free ethernet-cabled connectivity from T-M. Thank you. But to take advantage of this, you have to proceed through screen after screen, filling in your personal details, creating an account, creating both a password and an access code, specifying a security question… Note to T-Mobile: If Logan would get out of the way, then we could maybe get some competitive wifi in here that understands that we just want to turn on our computeres and connect, not fill out mortgage applications. Jeez!

Aaarrrrggghhh.

2 Comments »

Quicken has been around since 1775. It is in version #2,356. How can it still have stupid, irritating, data-swallowing bugs in it?

Using the latest version, I have in the past ten minutes hit three bugs.

1. Write a check to an online payee for whom you use the curly braces to embed a hint that’s invisible to the recipient. E.g., You might have an account such as “Cingular {The mother-effing home account}.” Press “Record Check” because you’re done. Quicken pops up a reminder that the stuff in curly braces won’t appear on the check. I’ve been getting that message for 176 years, which is fine. The problem is that after you click on the message’s OK button, every time it gives you the same message again. Now that‘s annoying.

2. Start to fill in a check. Choose one of the memorized transactions. It fills in the name. Have a moment of doubt about the name. So, go to the list of online accounts and check out the name. It’s fine. Go back to the check-writing window. You get a dialog box that says “You have changed the last transaction you were viewing. Save it now?” Yes, no, or cancel. Since you want to fill it in, you don’t want to save it yet. You also don’t want to not save it. You want to cancel the dialogue box. Press Cancel. You get the same dialog again. The Cancel button is a no-op.

3. This is the REALLY annoying one, but I’m not sure I remember the exact sequence. It goes something like this: Fill in a check’s name and click on Split so you can enter multiple entries because you’re trying to pay off a credit card. (Oops, make sure you fill in an amount first or else it won’t let you get to the Split window, even though you may want to fill in the entries and have Quicken figure out the amount. Oh well.) Spend ten minutes filling in the entries. (Be sure to consolidate some of the entries because after 4,000 years of existence, Quicken still arbitrarily limits splits to 30 entries.) It’s a pain in the neck but the tax folks need to know the breakdown. Press the “Adjust” button so that the amount of the check equals the sum of the entries. Perfect! Now you’re back at the check writing window. Type your account info into the memo area of the check. Click “Record Check.” You get a dialog box telling you that the check’s total does not match the sum of the entries even though you are 100% certain that you pressed the “Adjust” button. Click on “Split” so you can re-press the Adjust button. Quicken has now replaced all the entries with the entries from the previous check you wrote to that account.

4. Say aaaaaarrrrrrgggggghhhhhh!

[Tags: quicken bugs whines]

34 Comments »

I read an article at Salon about the New Age branding of airlines I thought RageBoy might enjoy, so I used the page’s handy “email this article to a pal” form.

The next day, I hear from RB that I’ve sent him a link to “The Hot Sex Handbook.”

Wow. That’s really not the sort of mistake you want a site to make with any of your friends, except maybe RB.

And while I’m being uncharitable about site mistakes made by my betters, what’s up with page 10 of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince?

The site, therefore, of Fudge stepping out of the fire once more, looking disheveled and fretful and sternly surprised that the Prime Minister did not know exactly why he was there, was about the worst thing that had happened in the course of this extremely gloomy week.

Site??? That’s the type of mistake I make all the time — I could sightsitecite lots of examples — but I’m not writing the most anticipated book of the year on which my publisher has bet the farm. They printed up almost 11 million copies in this country. One of the chains reported they were selling 200 copies a second (or so the rumor has it). You’d think they could put it through an extra round of proofreading…

Note: I can predict with 100% confidence that my next book will contain more and dumber errors than that. [Technorati tags: RageBoy Salon HarryPotter]

4 Comments »

Clicking above or below the slider thingie advances or retreats your window by approximately one window’s worth of display. That’s useful, but I’d also like to be able to right-click in a scroll bar and get taken to that proportional spot in the document: Right click three-quarters of the way down and it shows you the document three-quarters of the way in. Sure, I could slide the slider thingie, but that requires more eye-hand coordination than my eyes and hands have put together.

Maybe LonghornVista – Could it be a more boring name? Why not something with some guts, like Winux or HAL? – will institute this, if it has time after implementing tag-based scroll bars.

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John Davison, at the gamer’s site 1up.com, explains why he walked off of Donny Deutsch’s “The Big Idea” show on CNBC after it was apparent that he’d been lied to and set up. Go, John! (Link from Jeff Jarvis.)

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