TAP Portugal - pay good money for low budget service

This is my first flight with TAP and if you can judge the people based on their airline they are probably a dwarflike people with a deep love of tea-like coffee.

Combined with that the link to online check-in didn't work, understaffing at the checkin desk and a one and a half hour delay without any information; you got a really horrible experience. The woman talking down to me when asking about the delay is just an added bonus.

If you are going to Lisbon from Amsterdam don't choose TAP.

Just look at all that crazy leg room!

Waiting at Schiphol (note to self: don't fly TAP)

I arrived at Schiphol in good time but then stood in line for almost an hour waiting for check-in. I know it shouldn't surprise me but it is incredibly frustrating to wait for people trying to check in seven bags, going economy with multiple pieces of hand baggage or traveling with fluids. Have the not stepped on a plane in the last four years? None of which was helped by desks closing and the only person left was a poor girl who acted as if it was her first day.

Side note: TAP didn't even post anything about the ash cloud on their web page until yesterday only to have it removed later the same day. Talk about poor customer experience!

But at least I made it to the gate on time. Ux Lx here I come!

Laziness is the mother of all inventions (VNC Windows to Mac OS X)

Today has been an eventful day in front of the computer. I need to finish up a lot of stuff before going UX-LX since I'll be gone for a week (if the Icelanders permit).

However at home I use my girlfriends iMac as a stereo. Back when I had a MacBook as a work laptop I would just have a Apple Remote Desktop session running and change the music remotely. Now I have a standard issue Dell Latitude and Apple Remote Desktop is a thing of the past.

I started out using TightVNC but it was not a pleasant experience since the connection kept dropping and there was no support for scaling which is a necessity when you are trying to view the contents of a 24-inch monitor on a 15-incher. So I moved to RealVNC and now I had scaling but the connection kept dropping just the same. After some googling I found out that a lot of people have problems with the built in VNC server that comes with Apple Remote Desktop.

So my new solution is to use Putty to restart the damn thing whenever it goes down with:

sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -activate -agent -restart -console

It's a workaround but at least it works and I don't have to move.

Me vs. Windows XP: Clearing out the temp files

It's very nice to be working at a big mature organisation however there are also drawbacks. One such drawback is the rigorous security of which one part is having to work against a server all the time and the other is having to use Windows XP. When I work from home all my files need to be synced to the server. Since this includes all files it also includes all the temp files (temp files are temporary backup files that applications write and then usually forget to clean up afterwards).

To minimize the wait I have written a small script that removes all the temp files in the Windows\Temp directory as well as my own Temp catalogue.

So if you are in a similar position or just don't like having your computer cluttered with thousands of small abandoned files, fire up Notepad and enter:

del /f /s /q C:\windows\temp\

del /f /s /q "C:\Documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\Local Settings\Temp\"

Save the file with the ending .bat (you need to select all files in the Save As dialogue) and drop it into your Start up items directory. You'll find it by accessing the start menu and right click explore on it.

Now every time you log in all those files will be a thing of the past. But don't try this if you don't know what you are doing.

User Experience Specialist at Reed Business

I have been very very very busy over the last few months. I got a new job at Reed Business and subsequently quit my job at Knowledge Values. My new life as User Experience Specialist at Reed Business started in January and I have been almost living in the office since then.

The new role at Reed has brought with it a lot of changes apart from being able to solely focus on usability I now work 100 % in Dutch. At my old company business was done in English and conversations with colleagues were done in Dutch. So "going completely native" was quite a challenge in the beginning, albeit a very fun one.

The idea is to resume blogging now that I am more comfortable in my new role.

My Axure grievances

Hi, I have now used Axure RP for some months now (I used to use Keynote) and before you read this post I want to assure the reader that I still think it is an awesome tool and essential for my work. However, there are a lot of things rotten in the state of Axure and these are the things that get on my nerves on a daily basis:

Interaction

1, What's up with the Windows 95 interaction style? Dialogs upon dialogs and then there are more dialogs. You would think that a product for people in the field wouldmake use of a more modern design pattern like the inspector pattern. This becomes blatantly obvious when you move from Keynote to Axure RP. Why are so many modal dialogues (case editor being the most obvious example)!

2. There's no drag 'n drop for lists, just a bunch of up and down buttons. Once again this make me feel all 1995 inside.

Weird stuff/annoyances

1, Double clicking on a big chunk of text doesn't take you to where you clicked butrather to the middle of the text field. How does that match anyone’s mental model?

2, Weird auto-scrolling in lists. Using the dynamic panels panel to edit stuff and then when closing the dialogue the list scroll to another position. Once again I fail to see how that matches anyone’s expectations?

3, Why doesn’t hidden stuff stay hidden? If I have master with a bunch of dynamic panels and I set them to hidden they show up in on the page where I use that master anyway, usually blocking important stuff. It's frustrating when making mockups of dynamic panels or popup menus.

Features

1, No compound-elements. I cannot say that all these elements belong to an other element without resorting to dynamic panels and adding state.

2, No assigning events to multiple elements. This gets especially tedious when you have a button with an image and a text. My solution is to add a transparent rectangle on top of it all and adding the case to it, but then you miss all the niceties such as roll-overs en onclick behaviour.

3, No ruler guides. This is a major omission. Since there is an automatic snap to grid it becomes a massive annoyance when you want to align with something that is off the grid.

4, Text layout is sorely lacking with line height being the most obvious omission.

5, No ability to mark something as "fixed" (like the CSS property).

6, Some frequently used event types are missing such as onscroll and onkeydown.

CUA of the Month

Guess who is Certified Usability Analyst of the Month?