You think my last post on the design of Lotus Notes was all there was wrong with it? You’ve never even seen it have you? Remember we’re looking at v5 so these bugs gaping holes in design may have been fixed later. Four more:

• Back and Forward – I have no idea what kind of rationale is behind the back and forward navigational buttons in Notes, but it does not conform to our Earth logic. Instead of having a back button that sensibly means go back within the current context (i.e. the current tab), it goes back through different tabs. This is particularly infuriating in browser mode, where there is not necessarily any other easy way of going back a page. It’s also easy for it to just get stuck and throw away the history, stranding you where you are. Good move. The forward button? Well, it doesn’t work so much. It goes forwards when it wants to, but not always.
• Attach – The Attach icon only works if a new email message body is in focus. If you’re in any of the header fields, you can’t attach things. This might be remotely excusable if being out of the correct context disabled the attach icon but it doesn’t. Instead, clicking it produces an error. Oh yes, and a minor point: it uses the wrong verb for attachments. You do not “create” an attachment, you “add” it or “attach” it.
• Scroll Bar Sizing – Notes gets it’s scroll bar usage hugely wrong. Think of the scroll bar, from top to bottom, as representing the length of the associated document. The scroll block (the bit you can grab to drag up and down) should be proportional on the bar to the size of a single page of the document in the view port. So, if a document takes up 2 pages (i.e. it’s twice the size of the view port) then the scroll block should be half the size of the scroll bar. This sets up all sorts of great visual cues and feedback. Notes ignores that. It sets it to the minimum size allowed. As a side effect of this, it also doesn’t implement smooth scrolling; it’s perfectly possible to drag the scroll block down a bit and have it snap straight back to where it was previously. Oh yeah, and scroll wheels don’t work either. Kudos to the Lotus team for ignoring a really simple and highly effective bit of standard design.
• Crash – If the program crashes (which it will), you must do an OS restart if you want to open Notes again. So, it messes up and you have to restart everything. That’s failing gracefully for you. This will happen when you’re running several server processes and waiting for an email to help sort an important issue.

That’ll do for now.

Anyone ever used Lotus Notes? No need for hands in the air, I’ll pick you out from the gentle sobbing. I feel your pain. Notes has got to be one of the worst pieces of crap software I’ve ever seen in terms of design. It is woefully poor. Here are 4 of my favourite headscratchers:

• Alerts that aren’t – Sometimes you’ll set a reminder in notes, say for an important meeting at 4pm. A sensible program would tell you 5-10 minutes in advance, thus providing a “reminder” that you have something to do fairly soon. Not so with Notes. Instead it tells you half an hour after the event begins, by default. Genius; you’re so late that there is no longer any point in going. Thanks for streamlining my life like that, Notes.
• Save – The Save button often, but not always, means “Save and Exit”, kicking you out of the document after every save. This is despite the frequent inclusion of a separate Save and Exit button.
• Standardised Exiting – Instead of doing the same thing that every other Windows App has done since 95, the Lotus team seem to have thought they know better. If you’re writing something and try to exit without having saved it, a normal app will ask you if you want to save before exiting and provide 3 buttons: Yes, No and Cancel. Everyone who has used Windows knows what these do. Notes provides a slightly different solution: 4 radio buttons labelled “Save and Send”, “Send only”, “Save only” and “Discard Changes”, combined with “Ok”, “Cancel” and “Help” buttons. With this bizarre bit of UI, I can see why they included that last button.
• Mixed Metaphor – What UI form component am I describing: rectangular, white background and black text, a grey button-like square flush righ with a symbol in it that looks like it provides the main action? If you said a dropdown, you’d be absolutely right. Except in Notes. Here it describes a focussed tab. You will click that symbol at least a half dozen times without thinking about it, finding it exits that tab.

I should say that these all come from version 5. I have no idea if they’ve been fixed in newer versions, but that they happened at all is fairly shameful. There are another few obvious ones to come. Note that these are just the things that really bug me, not the day to day annoyances.

For more, see Design: Lotus Notes, Part 2.

Away from the fairly unhealthy food of last week, there are some meals that I know how to make that won’t absolutely kill you from either sugar or fat content. They are, however, few and far between. The Beef And Cheese Tortilla is the best of them:

• Get some Tortillas, preferrably with a light sprinkling of flour.
• Buy some fresh beef ham. By that I mean, go to a real butchers. I know, fresh ingredients; crazy. You may need to specify that you don’t want any spices added, depending on how your butcher sells the stuff.
• Get some peppers.
• Get a block of strong cheddar. Or, if you don’t like the finest cheese known to man, pick something else. Your choice.
• Dice the beef ham and peppers.
• Grate the cheese.
• Prepare a thick gravy. It should not be watery at all. That would cause a mess later.
• Fry the beef ham until nearly done (frying pan or wok), then add the gravy to coat it a bit. When it’s all bubbling and nearly done, add the peppers for the last minute or so.
• Lay out the tortillas flat and add a few drops of the grated cheese.
• Fill with the contents of the pan, add more cheese and wrap.
• Enjoy.

And some people think I can’t cook anything without a hundred calories. Bah! Next time, how to make a pot noodle.

Google, in all their wisdom, have created a web-based feed reader, imaginatively titled Google Reader, and, as I mentioned in my del.icio.us links, it is rubbish.

In the past, the big G have been the Technic of the Lego family. Robust, complicated and well-designed toys reduced to the simplest UI that could possibly work. Every cog and brick has been perfectly placed to add the right functionality to the right audience, and these systems have been slowly built up into a collection that has become the cornerstone of most people’s web toybox.

Google Reader is Duplo: big, chunky and useless. The UI is far from intuitive. All the best features are hidden behind tabs and button pushes. Why should I have to go through several (confusing) steps to find the add feed button? It’s one of the primary use cass, it should be a permanent fixture! Who thought that item-level menus was a good idea? It just greatly slows down the time it takes to get through hundreds of feeds. I want to click on a feed (or group of feeds) and see everything all at once. I do not want to navigate to the item level for each feed and then have to navigate back to the main menu, then to the next item level, then to the main menu. No feed reader has ever done that, and for good reason: it’s slow. Every feature is accessed through ugly blocks of design and disparate widgets. They should have made up their mind.

Bloglines is your bog standard Lego. It’s functional, but not brilliant. There’s so much more that it could be done with it if it was just a little nicer (for example, I hate the page load of the menu frame when saving or unsaving items. Very unnecessary.) It’s still a lot better than this latest Google effort. I’d have expected more.

Someone, yesterday, asked me what “ennui” means. While it has a dictionary definition (listlessness), it is hard to convey the precise meaning of the word, for me.

• Lethargic dissatisfaction,
• Life dragging pointlessly into a grey stupor,
• A melancholy drudge of indefinite length,
• Apathy in the extreme.

Not that I’m currently feeling any of the above, but I think we’ve all experienced that level of nothingness before. In fact, it’s a good way to be to truly appreciate the better parts of life.