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.

It was quite some time ago that, as part of an inebriated challenge, I made it my goal to significantly improve the plain cheeseburger. I have relatively simple tastes. If I’m eating a burger, I have the burger, some cheese and the bun. That’s it. Mayo or other sauces are out, leafy green crap (I believe we’re calling it lettuce these days) is in the bin, and gherkins… well, no sane person likes gherkins anyway. Nice and simple.

Some people don’t like that though. It’s boring, they say. Those people are wrong and missing out on the beautiful simplicity that is the plain cheeseburger. However, I did take them up on a challenge: to find an ingredient, a single addition, to make the plain cheeseburger rival a burger with the works in their eyes. It would be hard work, a lot of burgers would need eaten but, damn, someone had to do it.

I started where any sensible person with a knowledge of junk food would begin: the humble pizza. Yes, pizza. Master of toppings, mixer of random flavours. Ham would be cheating as it’s too close to a bacon cheeseburger. Pineapple was a bad idea on pizza, it wasn’t going to be better on a burger. Smaller. Sweetcorn!

Sweetcorn is an interesting vegetable. A lot of people really like the taste and the texture, the slight squirting sensation as your bite into the main section and the watery goodness inside. It is, however, a terrible idea for burgers. It just makes the taste seem an out-of-date lumpy. Bad.

Another choice: beans. Everyone likes beans. Juicy, tomato tinged and just the right side of “I’ve got some in the cupboard”. The beans were interesting. Although it did work to an extent, some couldn’t understand the bean/burger combo. The beans were dripping out of the side in ways they couldn’t stop, and more ended up on the floor than anywhere.

Damn.

Another look in the fridge revealed something so simple, so lowgrade, so brilliant that it would have to work. And it did. The secret ingredient was barely noticeable but it tasted fantastic, the perfect counterpoint to cheese and the minced flavourings. What was it? Another kind of beef: corned beef. A slice of that in your burger and you’re set.

Challenge accepted and won.