Netflix, why

By Jacob Cohen | November 17, 2008

Netflix, why do you make things harder than they need to be?

Here are the steps I took to try to watch instant content on my computer through Netflix:

  1. Switch from Firefox to IE, as they only support IE 6+
  2. Install an ActiveX control
  3. Get a new DRM file with a unique ID
  4. Upgrade Windows Media Player to version 11
  5. Upgrade a component of Windows Media Player
  6. Get a DRM license to watch the show or movie

By contrast, here are the steps required to view something on a site like Amazon Video on Demand:

  1. Open it in your browser

Or Hulu:

  1. Open it in your browser

I’ve been a long-time customer of Netflix, but recently they seem intent on snubbing customers any way they can, whether it is this video playback runaround, or their announcement not too long ago that they would be removing the ability to have multiple queues per account (a decision that, thankfully, they decided not to follow through with after the backlash from their customers).

If Netflix is truly a believer in video on demand as the next big thing, shouldn’t they get it right? Netflix is not exactly putting their best foot forward here.

Topics: General | 6 Comments »

Obligatory Political Post

By Jacob Cohen | November 4, 2008

But it’s a blog widget, so it still has to do with technology. Sorta.

Topics: General | No Comments »

Don’t use Brick and Mortar Metaphors for Online Business

By Jacob Cohen | October 30, 2008

Lately I’ve been becoming more and more tired of the way many online businesses are operating as if they were a brick and mortar business. Specifically, the concept of processing fees and business hours.

Alaska Airlines, for example, charges a $25 “processing fee” to transfer frequent flier miles from one account to another. I don’t think that amount of computing cost has been worth $25 since about 1955. It doesn’t require any human processing at all. They should just call a spade a spade and admit they’re charging a bogus fee just because they can.

Washington Mutual, as another example, lets you access your accounts 24/7, but transactions only take effect during “business hours.” For example, if you transfer money between accounts in the middle of the night, it won’t take effect until the following day. What are they waiting for? It’s not like someone comes in in the morning and processes the pending transactions, it’s all done by the computer. There’s no legitimate reason for the delay.

I guess it comes down to the fact that you’re essentially a captive customer. If an online store had a message at 11pm saying “Hi, please come back during business hours to place your order”, customers would just shop elsewhere. But in the case of airline frequent flier miles or bank accounts, you’re pretty much stuck. You’re not going to abandon those frequent flier miles, or leave the money untransferred.

Ultimately you may decide to look for another airline or another bank that doesn’t have these restrictions and fees, but the problem is, they all do this. There really isn’t anything you can do.

Topics: General | 2 Comments »

CD/DVD Drives and Windows

By Jacob Cohen | September 22, 2008

Why is it, after all this time, that we still have to press “OK” when we insert a disc that some program is waiting for? Can’t it just figure it out? CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives have provided notifications when a disc is inserted for at least 10 years now.

Maybe Windows isn’t the problem, and every application needs to write their own code to detect that the disc has been inserted, which is also stupid, but for slightly different reasons, and also indicates that the code should just be part of Windows to begin with.

Topics: General | 2 Comments »

Don’t Allow Your Application to Hang

By Jacob Cohen | September 15, 2008

One of the more frustrating things a GUI application can do is to become unresponsive while it is doing something or waiting for something to happen.

For example, to pick on Microsoft products, both Excel and Outlook have a problem where, if they are waiting for some operation to complete (such as fetching data from a remote file, or opening a .pst file locally), the application will not respond to anything, not even the message from the operating system telling the app to paint itself. From the user’s perspective, the app is frozen, and only experience tells them to just wait a few moments and the app will “recover”.

Applications often use a progress bar to indicate that stuff is happening, seemingly to show about how much relative time is left to complete the operation. But a new fad has been sweeping GUI application design in recent years: the “circular progress bar”, as I call it, which will reset to the beginning when it reaches the end. These progress bars are meaningless for determining if anything is actually happening, or how much is left. They are seemingly only there so that the user can see that the app has not frozen. The problem is, when the application reaches some particularly intensive calculation, or waiting on some data, the progress bar freezes! It can’t even keep a simple animation running.

Are GUI programmers so afraid of multiple threads or processes that they allow their applications’ very responsiveness to wait synchronously on something else their application is doing?

Sometimes it doesn’t make sense for the user to be able to perform any new actions before whatever else they did has completed, but they should at least be able to raise/lower the window’s focus, move the window, see the data that was in the window before, and especially cancel whatever operation they had kicked off.

And please, if you include a progress bar, make it meaningful. Circular progress bars are about as useful as the rotating hourglass mouse cursor.

Topics: General | 2 Comments »

Google Chrome Start Page Thumbnails

By Jacob Cohen | September 4, 2008

I’ve recently been trying out Google Chrome, and so far I’m pretty impressed. The browser is fast, and loaded with conveniences.

One of these is when you create a new tab, instead of loading a web site homepage or a blank tab, it creates a page that contains a grid of thumbnails of your 9 most frequently visited sites, and some other links like recently closed tabs, recent bookmarks, etc. Pretty useful stuff.

However, I think it could be better. Here’s a copy of the suggestion I posted to their Feature Requests and Suggestions discussion board:

The start page’s thumbnails of 9 frequently viewed web pages is
useful, but I find it hard to tell at a glance what page is what.

I suppose I would immediately recognize the site thumbnails if I were
accustomed to viewing web pages from ten feet away, but as it is,
seeing the overall page structure with logos that are too small to see
doesn’t spark the immediate recognition I need for the start page to
really be useful.

I think if the thumbnails were able to zoom in on the portion of the
page that contains the site logo (if one exists and is reasonably easy
to find) or at least the upper left corner, it might make things more
quickly recognizable.

Here’s an example comparison I threw together.

Existing experience:
http://cohenpix.smugmug.com/photos/365901399_jvgYx-X3.png

Suggested improvement:
http://cohenpix.smugmug.com/photos/365901407_tXMVH-X3.png

I find that, with the possible exception of Break.com (due to their
placement of large advertising logos) it is easier to identify these
sites at a quick glance.

(as a side note, what’s up with GMail not showing up as a thumbnail?)

For convenience, here are the images I referenced. Click to view full size:

Topics: General | 3 Comments »

Wikipedia

By Jacob Cohen | August 22, 2008

This xkcd comic says it all: http://xkcd.com/214/.

I originally went to Wikipedia to look up barrow, because I had read something about someone being buried in a barrow, and I thought, you know, it’s time to find out exactly what that is. I then found out what I was really looking for was tumulus, so I took a look at that page. This page mentioned Pahoehoe, a type of lava I remembered from a show I watched on volcanoes. From there, my browser tab list grew almost exponentially.

Topics: General | 1 Comment »

Source Control and Private Branches

By Jacob Cohen | August 21, 2008

Jeff Atwood wrote a blog entry today extolling the virtues of early and often checkins to source control. I agree with this, though I think there are a variety of ways to accomplish it.

Recently I have become fond of using a combination of Git and Perforce. The Perforce depot provides the centralized, managed source control system that lets me coordinate my code with other developers. Git provides the quick personal versioning and branching convenience that I use every day to manipulate my code base on my own machine.

Why do I need both of these? Perforce supports branching too. But then I have to set up the branch, and switching between branches is not an especially quick task. If I want to quickly work on something off a different branch, I have to painstakingly store everything I’m currently working on into the branch I’m on, then switch, open files, check those back in, then switch back.

With Git, I do all of my branching and switching locally. Everything starts from the p4/master branch which is the version Perforce is tracking. I can then easily create several parallel branches on top of this that let me modify different things without stomping all over my own changes.

Since the Git repository is local, more akin to rcs than to centralized SCM products, I can check in as often as I want without having to worry about integration with other code. I typically check in to my Git repository about as often as I save the file in my editor.

Since multiple people on my team use this approach, we can actually pull changes across from each others’ Git repositories without having to go through Perforce. This behavior of Git is similar to SCM products like arch, where changes are defined by the checksum of their contents. Thus, if I pull a change from a co-worker, and apply it to my local copy, and later pull down that same change from Perforce, everything is happy and there are no conflicts because it is the same change.

So I typically work within my own codebase for about a day or two at a time, using Git furiously to keep track of all my fine-grained changes to the code. Then I use Git to compare my repository to what is in the Perforce depot, and create a Perforce change specification representing all of the changes I have made (typically at the user story or feature level).

Topics: General | 1 Comment »

SmugMug Customer Service is Great

By Jacob Cohen | August 19, 2008

I haven’t actually had to use it yet, but the more I use customer service features of other web sites, the more I appreciate the promise and guarantee of “an e-mail response within an hour” from SmugMug.

How many times have you sent in feedback, or a request, or a complaint, to a web site, and get some sort of response like “Thank you. Due to the high volume of requests we receive, we can’t respond to each request personally.”

Really? Are they really receiving that many requests? If so, they’re either doing very poorly, or very well. In either case, they should probably dedicate some more of their attention to their customers.

Topics: General | 1 Comment »

Laugh Tracks Suck

By Jacob Cohen | August 19, 2008

Why do television producers feel the need to add a laugh track to some sitcoms these days?

Take the show Two and a Half Men for example. This show’s format seems to be nothing but one-liners separated by pauses for laughter from the laugh track. You know, you don’t have to try to make every single line of a character’s dialog funny, or to make every conversation between two characters some sort of forced lunge/riposte/counterriposte exchange, with pauses inserted for the laugh track between each line.

Even worse, a show like The Big Bang Theory would be really funny in its own right, but they have for some reason included an obnoxious laugh track. The show’s premise is solid, and the characters are well-acted (well, Sheldon is at least), but once you notice that laugh track, it’s almost impossible to un-notice it, and it really detracts from the enjoyment of the show.

Perhaps sitcom writers should take a cue from the longest running sitcom of all time, The Simpsons. A laugh track is not needed or wanted to help viewers enjoy the program. Worse, it often actively detracts from enjoyment once the viewer notices it (which is hard to avoid - laugh tracks have a very different sound from normal audience laughter).

Topics: General | No Comments »

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