Author Archives: Ryan Markel

Gmail’s Permanent Failure: Only Humans Can Build Software For Humans

It’s telling that even within the Gmail team, there is a basic, fundamental, deep-seeded inability to put things together in a contextually graceful way that makes sense to actual (non-Googler) users—in other words, to deliver a great user experience.

[…]

Understanding how users want to navigate around the application, which tasks to show as buttons versus which to hide in menus, which features should be left out completely, and so on . . . those seemingly minor decisions are often the difference between good software and great software, and the reason great product managers and interaction designers are always in demand.

This is very true. I didn’t understand how true until I began working with these things a few years ago. It’s fascinating to watch how hard my colleagues work every day to provide and continually improve excellent user experiences.

You should read the whole thing. (via TechCrunch.)

Mac Twitter Client Recommendations, Attempt #2

I Tweeted about this previously, but as Twitter sucks for having actual conversations (especially when you don’t have a desktop client running), I thought I’d re-do this as a blog post and encourage you to comment.

Here’s what I’m looking for:

  • Has to be for Mac OS.
  • Can’t use AIR.
  • Can’t use Java.
  • Can’t be ugly.

If you have or know a Twitter client that falls under these restrictions, please suggest it below. What I’ll do is find a night where I try all of them and I’ll post my reactions to them in a fuller blog post.

More Progress

Today Moose’s speech therapist stopped me in the hall–apparently she had been waiting to talk to me, and had even considered calling me over the weekend, because she had some news she really wanted to share. She told me that she couldn’t believe the progress Moose has made in speech, even since the end of May!

She’s impressed with how much more he’s talking, which was no surprise to me. He has been talking more (sometimes non-stop), and while I like being reassured that he is improving, I was fairly certain that I couldn’t have imagined how much more he has to say now.

My third-oldest has autism and it’s been very hard for him to learn to communicate. This is among the best news we could have received since his return to school, and I’m very proud of him.

(via More Progress | Amanda.)

Adding Specific Sharing Services to Sharedaddy or Jetpack

UPDATED 3/26/11: Sharedaddy is now distributed as part of Jetpack, so I’m taking the opportunity to add some additional services to this list. Please continue to contribute if you have any other services that you’d like to see on this post.

In my previous post, I described in detail the process necessary to add a sharing service to the WordPress.com Sharing tools (also known to self-hosted WordPress users as the Sharedaddy plugin). Even if your favorite social network or sharing site isn’t available, odds are likely that you can find a method to add that service as a custom sharing button.

For the tutorial, I used Delicious as an example service because it’s a service I’ve used in the past, had a good URL structure that’s easy to demonstrate, and had nice screens that helped my instructions to be easier to follow. (It also had a nice site-provided 16×16 icon that we could use to mark the sharing service.)

This is a collection of various common sharing services that aren’t included in the Sharing tools defaults. It provides the necessary information so you can plug them in to your Sharing options. Remember, the three things you need to define a sharing service are:

  • A name for the sharing service (used for the text label)
  • The URL needed to send a link to the sharing service, which can use up to five variables, which are:
    • %post_tags%
    • %post_title%
    • %post_full_url%
    • %post_url%
    • %post_excerpt%
  • And the URL of a 16×16 icon that can be used for the service.

(If you need a refresher on how to add custom sharing services, please see the previous article.)

I’ll provide the Sharing URL format—including the variable placement—and a 16×16 button icon you can use for the service. Whenever possible, I’ve tried to pull the icon from the sharing service itself to avoid any licensing issues. This means some of the icons are ugly. If you would rather, are there a few very nice sharing service icon collections available, but you’ll have to credit the author if you use them.

Since a good number of WordPress.com blogs have used GetSocialLive in the past, I think that’s as good a place to start as any. I’m only going to include those for version one of this post; if you would like another service or you have one that should be added to this list, please leave a comment and I’ll be happy to include it in a revision. I’d like this post be be a kind of “encyclopedia” of these services for people who are using ShareDaddy.

Filling Out the GetSocialLive Services

Of the services included in the GetSocialLive tool, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Twitter are already provided for use in Sharing Settings—so you won’t have to worry about those. As for the rest:

Delicious

http://delicious.com/save?url=%post_url%&title=%post_title%

Blinklist

http://blinklist.com/blink?u=%post_url%&t=%post_title%

Technorati

http://technorati.com/faves?add=%post_url%

Yahoo! Buzz

http://buzz.yahoo.com/buzz?targetUrl=%post_url%&headline=%post_title%

Newsvine

http://newsvine.com/_wine/save?u=%post_url%&h=%post_title%

Services I Use, So They Get Preferential Treatment and Are Higher on the List

Evernote

http://www.evernote.com/clip.action?url=%post_url%&title=%post_title%

Hacker News

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=%post_url%&t=%post_title%

Instapaper

http://www.instapaper.com/hello2?url=%post_full_url%&title=%post_title%

Other Services

Do melhor

http://domelhor.net/submit.php?url=%post_url%&title=%post_title%

FARK.com

http://www.fark.com/cgi/farkit.pl?u=%post_url%&h=%post_title%

Google Buzz

http://www.google.com/buzz/post?message=%post_title%&url=%post_url%

Menéame

http://meneame.net/submit.php?url=%post_url%&title=%post_title%

MySpace

http://www.myspace.com/Modules/PostTo/Pages/?u=%post_url%

Orkut

http://promote.orkut.com/preview?nt=orkut.com&du=%post_url%&tt=%post_title%

Pinboard

http://pinboard.in/add?showtags=yes&url=%post_url%&title=%post_title%

Posterous

http://posterous.com/share?linkto=%post_url%

Tumblr

http://www.tumblr.com/share?v=3&u=%post_url%&t=%post_title%

But Wait; There’s More

If you have a sharing service you either want to add to Sharedaddy’s custom option, or have added and already know how it works, please feel free to leave a comment on this post and I can get it added to this list.

Bing for Mobile Comes to Your Verizon Android

The Bing Community Search blog:

Today we are happy to announce the first official Bing for Mobile Android App available to Verizon customers.  You can now download the free Bing App from your Verizon Wireless Android phones’ Marketplace.

This is precisely why I (unfortunately) hope that Android doesn’t gain the upper hand in the mobile market. Apple did a great job freeing handsets from a lot of carrier interference with the platform and user experience—though AT&T fought back by using network restrictions—and Android is handing that control right back to the carriers, where it shouldn’t be.

This app should be available for all Android phones.

(via Bing Community.)