5 Common Pitfalls of Bad Design

One must wonder, 'How do you become a hit with the masses?' or hell, maybe even, 'If Steve Jobs was still around, what would make him want to check out my product?' It's a good question, and a legitimate one. But quite frankly, I don't see what's so hard to understand.

For one, good design intended for mass consumption at an epic scale should to avoid these 5 common pitfalls:

1. Trying to Boil the Ocean: Many companies feel that over-saturating an experience with a wealth of features for sharing, information, and branding will sell the product. It won't.
2. Failing to Understand Context: People understand the world through a lens of 'what they know.' If you think everyone thinks the same way as you do, you couldn't be further from the truth.
3. Oversimplifying: Many may argue that lazy design is always good design. This is untrue. There are times when making archaic things 'pretty and simple' may actually strip the value of it altogether.
4. Marketing is Not UX: Mistaking branding and user experience as the same exact thing. The idea of marketing focuses on 'telling.' User experience, however, focuses on 'understanding.' 
5. Process Over Innovation: The best design ideas are often innovations pushed to the limit within a constrained environment. Companies often glorify the process of implementing these constraints and fail to understand what truly makes ideas shine; the simple feeling of accomplishment.

How To Clean Up Scanned Sketches

Some people have been asking me for a quick and easy way to clean up smudges when scanning stuff off their MoleSkine's and sketch books.

Now, in Photoshop, all you need to do is pull up Levels from Image -> Adjustment. For the white arrow, pull it a bit left until it hits near the beginning bump of the rightmost curve. For the black arrow, go right slightly until the darks appear uniform.

Alternatively, you could always spike up the Brightness and Contrast, but that often results in much of the detail blowing up and getting a crappy look overall. Use this method and you'll be immediately more pro.

How To Import Jing SWF Files into iMovie '09

More things to learn this weekend. Woop, woop! If you've been trying to get your Jing recordings into iMovie '09 for editing, you'll quickly realize there's a problemo to be had. Because SWF format and vector based, the only way to get iMovie to read it would be to convert the file to an accepted imovie format.

My suggestion: Try http://media-convert.com and do it online free. There's plenty of options to choose from, but all you need to do is make sure you select the proper dropdown menus and export it into .mp4 format. You also have the option of linking multiple recordings if you were to attempt a timelapse video of sorts. Makes it a whole lot easier to manage just one file.

Update: Nevermind, this does not work.

Mac Hack Attack: Multiple Identities on Apple Mail Edition

If you've ever tried setting up multiple alias with a single e-mail using Apple Mail, you'll notice it isn't nearly as easy as setting it up in Thunderbird on a PC. You either had to manually add a Reply-To address or throw a pissy fit.

The main reason for this is because there is no box or anything remotely logical to get the alias to add. Luckily, there's an easy solution, thanks to yours truly. Here it is:

1. Open Mail App.
2. Go to Preferences
3. Click on Accounts
4. Choose your account
5. In the "Email Addresses" data entry field, add your aliases (identities), separated by a comma.
6. Save your account.

Now, when you compose a new email, your aliases (identities) will be in the "Account:" drop-down menu.

Planning It All Out

My next biggest tech project involves setting up a file server. Not sure if I should invest in WHS just yet, despite Jess' very convincing walkthrough featured a few days earlier. The main reason for hesitation - I still want to game it up! Steam don't run on WHS, yo.

Jessica Cambensy Sexily Compares RAID 5 and Windows Home Server

Hey, Jessica here. Blogging in for Anthony for this week's daily dose of technical heaven. Today, I'm going to run across WHS (Windows Home Server) and its perks against the ever elusive topic of going RAID5 in a consumer's home tech environment. First off, let's talk about the Drive Extender feature used on WHS.

Windows Home Server Driver Extender basically gives you 3 big perks. First, it functions with multi-disk redundancy so that if any given disk fails, data is not lost - it's already be duplicated somewhere else. Secondly, it has arbitrary storage expansion by supporting any type of hard disk drive (Serial ATA, USB, FireWire etc.) in any mixture and capacity. Finally, you get a single folder namespace (no drive letters). This is big on minimalist technophiles, I've heard.

So, lets compare the two a little more thoroughly, shall we? I'm going to run through a couple of questions I've heard through my hundreds of hours scavenging the internet. Here's a few sample ones I'll be answering in due time: Isn't RAID better than Drive Extender? Why should I use Drive Extender instead of RAID? Which RAID card should I buy? How good is software RAID5?

First off, I would strongly suggest against going for any software-based RAID 5 solution. There's a gap as wide as the Grand Canyon between software RAID5 and hardware RAID5. Software RAID5 is slow. Damn Slow. Meanwhile, hardware RAID 5 runs fast. Zippity fast. So fast, that if two drives fail, you'll be losing your data faster than you can say, "Hey baby, I like that dress on you."

My selfish arrogance aside, it's clear that RAID5 is geared towards performance and availability. It's not about data integrity. If you want your data to be safe, replicate it. Back it up. Put it in a jar. A jar far away from your main personal computer. Keep in mind this - even if you use RAID5, you're still going to need to back it up. RAID5 is designed so that an event of a single drive failing, it will preserve your data and make it available (but slower) until you get another drive in place, when it will rebuild the missing volume.

So what happens exactly when one drive fails in RAID5? If you're not there, the system will try to rebuild itself. This causes all of the drives to get real busy and when it does this, the chances chances of losing a second drive go through the roof. When that happens in RAID5, you're completely screwed. I'd also like to add that a contributing factor is the fact that people tend to use the same brand of drives when setting up the initial array. This means a higher possibility of a faulty batch, since they were purchased at the same time.

My personal experience with RAID5 goes a little something like this. I had a server running RAID5 at home, it ran perfect for over a year (actually, close to two). One night after I went to bed, a drive failed. 3 minutes later another failed. This was a 2 terabyte RAID array.

I came down in the morning to my worst nightmare. Every bit of "valuable data" I had in the world was now gone. In desperation I scoured the internet, and finally found a piece of software that (for $40!) could recreate every file that I still had data for, if not a little slowly. I rushed out and bought 3 750gb drives, and started to restore everything I had lost. The restore process took a ridiculously long 3 1/2 months, running full time, around the clock. The good news is that I was able to get one of the failed drives spinning again, and I lost a total of one file.

What did I learn? I learned RAID5 doesn't back up my data. Sadly, I thought it was safer. Worse than that, it was actually less safe. A single drive failure would have meant nothing. Add another drive, and keep chugging. Potentially, it may have taken a few hours to rebuild the lost volume, but I could have been using it while it did.

A second drive failure would have meant I was offline for a little while for it took to restore - if I actually had a backup. Still, not bad, considering that would have been less than the 3.5 months. But a two drive failure (which is fairly likely given all the variables) - without a backup - is a nightmare.

If you value your data, replicate it. I'm now using WHS with 6 250gb drives and 3 750gb drives, and the data that I value (pictures of myself, etc) is replicated as per specific settings set in the OS. The really important stuff (photos of Anthony, etc) is foldershare'd to a friend’s house and vice versa, giving us both off-site backups. While not very 'space efficient,' I can at least deal with a drive failure.

Now let's go over the other two popular options: RAID1 (mirroring) is the only RAID where a failure doesn't increase drive activity drastically since reads just going to one drive now, instead of one. For RAID0, the focus is purely speed. For example, if I were to walk down an alley by myself at night in one of my low-cut miniskirts in order to get to my flat faster, I'll be sacrificing safety in order to reach my destination at twice the speed. I would only use this for my PC desktop at home, where I want it fast and with nothing except my OS is running on it. All of my important data, of course, goes to my WHS.

My final bit of advice is to know this: If you're using hard drives, you will eventually experience a drive failure. Not 'might,' but will. How badly you are affected depends on your choices. So, determine how valuable your data is. At the price you pay per GB these days, it's stupid (and a turn-off for me) to try and and play it cheap when it comes to hard drives. Disk space is cheap. The stuff you store is not.

I think the victor is clear in this little essay of mine, but feel free to add your own two cents in the comments. I'd love to hear from you. And maybe, if you're tech-savvy enough (like me), you'll get a little invite from me to take a trip to my local Fry's Electronics.

So I've Gone To Vista x64 SP1 Ultimate

It was a hard decision, but I went ahead with it since I had 4GB of RAM and Windows XP kept giving me obnoxious random BSOD's every so often. My initial impressions? It works, surprisingly much smoother than I had initially expected. Sure, emulating more than half of my applications in 32-bit mode is a bit of a downer and searching for drivers is like a treasure hunt and I had to buy a new wireless PCI card, but overall? I think it's a keeper - sorry to disappoint all you Vista haters out there.

My favorite is (another big surprise) the sidebar. I found it especially useful - though most of the downloadable applications are on Live.com are outright trash - the standouts seems to be a few hidden gems in that heaping pile of poop. My personal pick is the WP-Corp E-Mail checker. It runs through IMAP and opens up to Windows Mail, where you can also sync via IMAP and voila! You're up and running better than you could ever imagine. More impressions after a month or so of usage.

Legality? Pish Posh, TinyXP Rules

Microsoft's fairly old, but outright despicable plans to discontinue the support for Windows XP has not been taken lightly by Internets. Hacking gurus eXPerience have given fans of XP a new reason to cheer, their TinyXP Rev09.

TinyXP contains all the updated drivers to the day and there are several custom installation options. It’s based on XP SP3. The best thing about this is that allows you to install Windows XP without the much hated Internet Explorer, Outlook express and WMP. These are the available install options.

1. TinyXP With IE/OE/WMP (With Added Driverpacks)
2. TinyXP With IE/OE/WMP (Without Added Driverpacks)
3. TinyXP Without IE/OE/WMP (With Added Driverpacks)
4. TinyXP Without IE/OE/WMP (Without Added Driverpacks)
5. TinyXP BARE With IE/OE/WMP (With Added Driverpacks)
6. TinyXP BARE With IE/OE/WMP (Without Added Driverpacks)
7. TinyXP BARE Without IE/OE/WMP (With Added Driverpacks)
8. TinyXP BARE Without IE/OE/WMP (Without Added Driverpacks)
9. TinyXP With Repair Option (Product Key Already Filled In)

TinyXP also installs thousands of registry hacks that improve the system so much you’ll never want to go back to the standard version. For the record, the installation will automatically install following components:

• Service Pack 3 Final (Build 5512)
• All Hotfixes Up To May 2008
• DirectX DLL Libraries (24 to 36)
• Flash Player v9.0.124.0 (IE) - / - Plugin DLL v9.0.124.0 (Firefox/Opera)
• Royale Theme (Options 1 to 4) - / - Classic Theme

The following applications are also included in CD: Acronis Backup & Restore, Hirens Boot CD 9.5 (over 200 diagnostic tools), and SpinRite 6.0 (which hunts for bad sectors and squashes them).

To top it all off; the entire cd fits on a regular 700MB CDR. Talk about totally awesome!

How To Snag Any Streaming Media Source

Ever find that one video that you really, really want to keep off YouTube, an unreleased song on Myspace, or music off Mog that isn't available anywhere to buy?

Well, this nifty little program covers you in all bases. Basically, here's all there is to it:

1. Download Orbit Downloader.
2. Run Orbit Downloader.
3. Click Tools → Grab++.
4. Go to a music streaming page. For example: Pandora and Mog.
5. Press OK to the Hint disclaimer.
   
6. Refresh the page.
   
7. You'll notice that it will catch anything that comes through. Look for the 3-5MB files for music, 7-12MB files for videos, etc.
8. Check off the files you want, and there you go!
   

How To Make A Next-Gen Console Sell

To accompany my dying need for an AIO solution, here's just a few things developers can do to improve the current state of console depression:

1. Make a console that's easy for developers to port.
2. Limit new redesigns and upgrades to 1 every 3 years.
3. Integrate open-source media file support.
4. Make internal hard drives SATA swappable.
   
5. Make it as power efficient as hell.
6. Give us more than 2 color choices.
7. Do NOT charge for online connectivity.
8. Have HDMI out. The more ports the better.
   
9. Stop the format war and make a standard HD media.
10. Give the console PC and Mac support.
11. Make games downloadable for cheap (~$20). Then, allow gamers to return finished games for rebates for other games (~$10). This encourages a constant turnover in purchases and gamers don't feel like they are wasting time or money.
12. Make VoiP/voice messaging support standard.
13. Include TiVo abilities.
    
14. Make rumble, wireless controllers standard.
15. Beta test it and don't release it until it's ready.

Miranda IM Chat Client

Okay, so the learning curve was not as easy as I thought it'd be. Three and 1/2 hours later though, I am liking this proggie much more than that ghetto DeadAIM I've been using for years now. It's less intrusive, uses less memory, and completely customizable in every aspect. One gripe, AIM avatar support is kaput right now - which is very limited since I don't know a single soul who uses any other chat client. Download it here!

Windows Vista Home Premium: OS of Choice

After sifting through the confusing number of versions of Vista and doing some extra research here and there, I've found the best version of Vista would be the Home Premium edition.

Although I'm a bit reluctant to throw money down for the very first time in the direction of the Microsoft empire (I'm actually hoping Google takes over), I think it's better than the hours I spend trying to find cracks and downloading possible viruses onto my system.

That won't keep me from pirating everything else though *cough*... hehe.