Erik Neu: Software Features

Print-Lock for Software

Sun, 16 Jul 2006 19:00:05 GMT

Feature Idea for computer software: Print Lock. There are a few documents I have that I never want to print. The most common reason is that the doc contains confidential information, and I don't want it going to a shared printer. The other reason is that the doc is WAY too long, and what I really mean to do is print a Selection (using the MS-Office Print Dialog term) from it.

This need suggests a feature idea to me, albeit one of tertiary importance, but then, all the MS-Office enhancements since Office 97 have been in that category. Here's how it could work.

To implement the Print Lock:

1. Select the Print Lock checkbox.

2. Optionally enter text that will be displayed when a user tries to print the document.

Behavior when a user tries to print the document:

1. System displays a dialog that says "Print Lock has been set on this document. [Optional text added, if any]."

2. Dialog includes buttons: OK, Print Anyway.

3. OK cancels the attempt to print.

4. Print Anyway proceeds to print.

Mon, 13 Mar 2006 13:48:33 GMT

On our prior cordless phone, you toggled off of speakerphone mode by pressing the Talk key. That phone had a separate off key, I think.

Our cordless phone has a nice useability glitch. There is a big key on the left that says "TALK (end)"--in other words, and on/off toggle. Next to it is a key that says SPKR--to switch to speakerphone mode. So the question is--what do you do to turn off speakerphone mode? My intuition says: toggle the SPKR button. WRONG! That ends the conversation.

Like many useability glitches, the way you stumble into it involves a Murphy's law corrolary: the worse possible time. Just imagine--you make the dreaded call to customer service, and since "wait times are averaging 13 minutes", you turn on the speakerphone and lay the phone next to the keyboard. 13 minutes later, when the CSR starts to answer, you pick up the phone. Intending to put it in handset-mode, you press the SPKR key again, AND HANG UP!

As a tangent, this makes me realize that the IRV platform in general lacks any feature along the lines of "Warning--you are about to terminate your connection! Is this what you want to do?"

Mon, 06 Mar 2006 15:24:05 GMT

I've been using first NetFlix, then Blockbuster, for almost 3 years, to have DVDs delivered straight to my mailbox. For a fixed price, I get to have 3 movies out at a time. I typically try to balance this: 1 kids movie, 1 family movie, 1 grown-up movie. So as any remotely geeky reader will undoubtedly have already inferred, I am thinking that the "queue" functionality they provide could be improved to support this kind of requirement.

As things stand now, you get only 1 queue. You can re-arrange the priority of items within it, which directly translates to the order you receive them. So, if you are returning your family movie, but the next item in the queue is a grown-up movie, you can set a new order that makes a family movie the new #1, so that that will be the replacement you receive, thus keeping your "inventory" balanced.

I know they want/need to keep things simple, but wouldn't it be nice if they offered an advanced option for multiple queues, a number corresponding to the number of movies your plan lets you have out at one time (3 in my case)? That would automatically keep your inventory in balance.

UPDATE: My friend Gim says that NetFlix does have this feature.

Windows Feature: Load 10 Minutes After Startup

Sun, 11 Dec 2005 00:31:57 GMT

There are several apps (email, X1 text indexing, browsers) that I pretty much want loaded every time I start my PC. However, this can get very annoying when you are doing some kind of troubleshooting, or just in a great hurry. I think a cool--admittedly in the merely nice-to-have category--feature would be to be able to configure an app to load 10 minutes after startup.

Idea for a Variation on Controlling Access to Printer-Friendly Page Versions

Mon, 02 May 2005 11:46:02 GMT

I'm occasionally seeing sites restrict the "printer friendly" versions of their pages to subscribers. Another idea--which came to me because I thought a site was doing it, though they turned out not to be--would be to stream the printer-friendly version directly to the printer. I.e., when you click the "CLICK HERE TO PRINT" button, instead of rendering the printer-friendly version in a browser window, with the simple, graphic-free printable layout, it would just be materialized and sent straight to the printer.

The point in doing so would be to deny you the benefit of a clean version to link to, or for cut-and-paste emailing.

Need Recycle Bin for Network Files, Too

Tue, 18 Jan 2005 19:55:18 GMT

Windows doesn't put network file in the Recycle bin (i.e., you can't un-delete them if you delete them by accident). I guess I understand that--the logic would be that you can always have the admins retrieve it from backup if you need it.

But it really makes it a pain if you THINK a file, of indeterminate name, MAY have been deleted from your network drive. Because there is no way to browse the Recycled bin for it. It would be nice if a shortcut to it, or something like that, were deposited in the Recycled bin for deleted network files.

Inactivating Alarms on PDA

Wed, 01 Dec 2004 21:41:15 GMT

WAAAY back, before Outlook killed it, I used to a really cool PIM called Ecco. It was very innovative, if quirky. It was a pioneer in the PIM category (now hardly even considered a category, it so dominated by Outlook).

This was before the advent of the PC-oriented PDA (not counting the abortive Newton), but it still had the concept of synchronization, because they recognized you might have data on multiple computers (work and home, for instance--laptops were less common back then, too). Anyway, it also had a really nice feature, which allowed you to configure whether alarms were to be active on a given computer. I would really like that for my PDA, so I could turn off the utterly superfluous alarms that I have to work through while my PDA is sitting in its cradle on my desk at work.

VSS Document Librarian

Sun, 31 Oct 2004 02:11:32 GMT

I have another idea for a VSS feature: a document library utility. At initial check-in, I would like every document to get a unique number, and be able to categorize it, upon check in. Also need document owner, and a brief description of document purpose. And probably status. For example:

#    Type        Owner    Status    Purpose
100 UseCase   Smith     Active    blah, blah...
101 UseCase   Jones     Active    blah2, blah2...
104 UI Mockup Simon    Active    blah3, blah3...

Needed: software for fast review of multiple shots, using tiling (burst)

Sun, 25 Apr 2004 16:25:01 GMT

Since getting my FZ10, I have become addicted to burst mode. The problem is, now I have SO many more photos to wade through (4-7 for every click of the shutter). In theory, I would
quickly eyeball the set, select the one I like, and discard the rest.

There are two problems. One, the software I have is somewhat slow to switch between pictures. The bigger problem, though, is that I would like to be able to look at the set side-by-side on my big monitor. So I would like software that lets me specify a number of pictures to show tiled (4, 6, etc), and then renders them very quickly, and also lets me flag the ones I like very quickly, and efficiently delete the rest.

The key here is FAST. Of course, thumbnails won't do, I am trying to make subtle distinctions beween shots, I need the full resolution. I have plenty of RAM to dedicate to the process. I would even be okay if I had to pre-select the photos, then wait a few minutes for a caching process to run.

I use PhotoTools iMatch for image categorization, and love it, but it is on the slow side. I am also a Photoshop newbie, but I don't think it has exactly this kind of feature.

Fotana almost seems to fit the bill. It is VERY fast. But it doesn't AUTOMATICALLY create the 4x, 6x, etc side-by-side views I crave.

Browser Feature: Protected Instances

Fri, 09 Apr 2004 16:13:04 GMT

I am one for having LOTS of browser instances open at once. I might be in the midst of some kind of research that I have to set aside while moving to some other task, but that I want to come back to later in the day. I would like to be able to mark a browser session as protected, which would prevent the browser screen from being closed or re-used (yes, I already have the "re-use browser sessions for shortcuts" advanced option turned off).

My analogy is like protecting selected pictures on a digital camera (any protected images can not be deleted until protection is turned off). I haven't thought deeply about some of the details...besides preventing re-use by shortcuts (for those who have that feature enabled), and preventing "x-ing out", would protection do more? Would it prevent script elements on the page from changing the screen (i.e., what happens if I click a link?)? Maybe it could cause those to spawn a new browser session.

A really nice refinement of this feature would be to remember the URL even upon a re-boot, and resume the browser session (where possible, it will obviously fail when the session is stateful).

Prompts for Saving Streets & Trips

Sun, 25 Jan 2004 04:21:39 GMT

When I do a route plan with MS Streets & Trips, 98% of the time, I print it and have no need to save it. But of course, every time I plot a route then quit the program, it has to ask me if I want to save. It would be neat if it could have a configuration setting not to prompt the user to save, but to auto-save the last three maps. So if you do quit and did want to save, you could recover. Hmmm, seems like this functionality might be generally useful, sort of like the autosaved recover versions of files you get in the MS Office products.

How Scott Adams Could Make (A Little) Money with A Search Feature on the Dilbert Website

Wed, 07 Jan 2004 18:33:14 GMT

I was looking for a particular Dilbert I remembered, but couldn't find it, not on the www.Dilbert.com site, nor elsewhere on the web, although I remembered enough words from it that I could pretty reliably have searched out the right one, had the strips all been text-indexed. The best I could do was to find a random website that recounted, textually, the Dilbert I had in mind. This experience made me think of an idea for the Dilbert website. The text of each strip should be indexed and searchable. So, to the extent you accurately remembered the text of a Dilbert, you could be fairly confident you had found the right one, based on the text-only search results. Then, just like the archives for the New York Times and other on-line publications, you would have to pay to get the full content--in this case, the illustrated comic strip. Of course it would have to be cheap, $1 per strip at the most. (Ideally, the text might be augmented with keywords to aid in searching. For instance, perhaps there is a strip where Wally gets fired, but it doesn't actually contain the text "fired". If "fired" were added as a keyword, then a search for "Wally" + "fired" would stand a decent change of returning the strip in question.)

Color Coding Months in Outlook

Tue, 30 Dec 2003 15:12:01 GMT

All-too-frequently, I will enter an Outlook appointment for the wrong date. Most often, it will be the right date for the wrong month. This usually happens because I left my calendar "open" to some future month. I think there is an easy useability improvement that would help save me from this careless error: color-coding each month. So, if I were used to looking at December's dark blue background, and went to enter in January an appointment meant for December, I would immediately notice January's bright green background, before I could follow-through on my error. My second most common form of this error is to enter an appointment for the right day of the wrong week. A similar solution here would be to have a background pattern of some sort (think cross-hatching schemes, though I'm sure the graphic artists at MS could do much better than that) to denote the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th weeks of each month.

Sat, 22 Nov 2003 22:34:46 GMT

I have an idea for a weblogging-tool feature that could help mitigate the problem of linkrot, both the intentional kind and the unintentional kind. When I post to my weblog, for each link in my post, my weblogging tool should do the following: 1) Traverse the link. 2) Copy all text on the resulting page. 3) Store said copied text “under the covers” somewhere (call this “SourceNotes”). That way, when linkrot sets in (and is discovered), I have some options. First of all, I can consult the SourceNotes, and maybe that will give me a strategy for searching, finding and re-linking the item of interest. Second, copyright be damned, I can choose to post the full-text of the linkrotted source, myself. Of course there are all sorts of considerations for fine-tuning: configurability, limiting the length of copied text, perhaps having an interactive mode (specify what you want copied). But this gives the basic idea.

Feature: Eliminate Annoyance of Answering Cell Phones in Crowded Rooms

Sat, 25 Oct 2003 18:17:28 GMT

Most people find it distracting, if not even outright rude, when people answer their cell phone in crowded rooms (meeting rooms, restaurants, etc.). Nonetheless, there seem to be quite a few people who, at least on certain occasions, simply cannot resist answering. Maybe a few of them even have a justifiable need (expectant fathers, for instance).

So, a technological solution is in order. Cell phones need a button the user can press in response to an incoming call. If they press the button, a message would be played to the caller that says "the party you are calling has acknowledged your call, and will answer momentarily." If they hold the button down, the message would continue to be replayed every 10-15 seconds. Similarly, if the user presses the button and lets up, each time they subsequently press the button, the message would be re-played.

X1 for Text-Indexing

Fri, 10 Oct 2003 16:20:24 GMT

If the words "text indexing" mean anything to you, go download X1 now! It indexes email messages and files, and purports to also support web searching. That last feature is superfluous to me, but the first two are killer. The integration with Outlook is nearly seamless. The interface is very clean, the options well thought-out. The response, even to searches for message contents, not just data fields, is truly instantaneous (multiple orders of magnitude faster than native Outlook).

What is also very impressive is the way they have partitioned the freeware vs. payware functionality, to provide non-crippled freeware. (It's impressive from this user's perspective, anyway; maybe their investors wouldn't be as impressed, since I find the freeware enough, at least for now!). The email and file search functionality comes in the freeware version. The payware version adds the ability to index file attachments in emails, and to index folders located on a network. Now, if they would just add integration with VSS! All-in-all, this is a very well-done, must-have utility.

Okay, I like it so much, I probably will pay for it (or get my employer to do so). And it would be nice to have the Pro features. But the point is, the free version is extremely useful, totally non-crippled!

Auto-Numbering Shapes in Visio

Sat, 28 Jun 2003 13:26:31 GMT

You know how you have this big flowchart, and you are trying to walk people through it, and you keep having to say things like “okay, now we are at the second diamond in the top left corner”; or, you just hold up the piece of paper and point at the node you are on? Wouldn’t it be AWESOME if Visio would just number the dang things for you? Of course, you would want the option for those numbers to be static, even if you move shapes around and otherwise futz with your diagram, wouldn’t you? Well, guess what, Visio does this! Just go: Tools-Marcos-Visio Extras-Number Shapes. Hopefully this is available in your version of Visio (I have Visio Pro 2002). I have no idea why this is buried so deeply. I’m sure that if there were a numbering option off of Tools it would see a lot more use.

Needed: ERwin Lite

Wed, 18 Jun 2003 16:09:25 GMT

What ERwin needs is some kind of lite, end-user version, preferably free. Sort of like Adobe Reader vs. Adobe Distiller. What I am thinking of is a tool that would let me propose changes to a Data Model, then pass those recommendations/requests on to a real DBA, who can use a full version of ERwin to actually implement them and generate the database. It would be SO much better than marking up a printout.

Feature complexity and mental models required of users

Sat, 17 May 2003 04:23:38 GMT

Like many email readers, MS Outlook has always had the option of using a Preview Pane, so that you don't even have to explicitly open a message (which generally involves a double-click and a new MDI window on-screen) in order to read it. Works great for short messages.

Outlook also has a host of nifty miscellaneous features--not closely related to the core mission of creating, sending, receiving and reading email--such as sending a message with Voting Buttons (e.g, "I will attend the summer picnic" YES/NO). It turns out that the interaction of this last feature with the Preview Pane two has a problem, as a colleague and I discovered the other day.

I heard said colleague muttering "I never get the voting buttons". I had just gotten the same company-wide invite, so I knew the buttons were there. I turned and offered to help. Sure enough, the problem was that she was reading the message through the preview pane, which does not display the voting buttons. And her mental model of the software was not sophisticated enough to prompt her to think "Okay, there are supposed to be voting buttons, but I don't see them. Maybe that means I need to fully open up the message to see them."

The foregoing is meant mostly as an observation on the implications of complexity (feature-richness), not really a critique. I don't have an obvious solution. Perhaps you could do something like this...When the user clicks reply to a message which has features that don't work without a full open, and they have not performed a full open, at least once, warn them to that effect. But of course that solution involves yet more complexity under the covers. Plus possibly irritating those advanced users who know what they are doing in replying w/o doing a full open...

MSLifeBits

Fri, 18 Apr 2003 22:26:53 GMT

This would fall along the lines of lightweight Knowledge Management: I would like to be able to perform rapid text search on every document I have ever accessed. A very limited-breadth version of this is one of the benefits I get long-term from maintaining a weblog: an index not of every article I accessed, but at least every one worthy of mentioning in the blog (though the index isn't full-text, of course).

In the work environment, extend this idea to searching any non-restricted project document ever created. In practice, I do this all the time with my email archive. In fact, in previous jobs, I have asked for a copy of my predecessor’s Outlook .PST.

Also, I see an opportunity here for Google (or others) to find a lucrative consumer and business market. They could sell me a $20/year subscription to maintain a full-text index of every document I access on-line. Of course they should give me the option to explicitly remove a document from the index. They could even have clever PageRank-type features to weight the importance of an article by the number of times I have accessed it, and perhaps the length of time I spent reading it (as measured by page scrolls, which implies a thick-client download).

It would be a requirement (of mine), that I own (including physical custody) my personal index. The $20/year would pay for another year's access to the service, not for the rights to access my own historical archive.

Fighting Browser Pop-Ups

Mon, 03 Mar 2003 03:29:49 GMT

Pop-up windows, in various guises, are becoming increasingly annoying features, borne out of desperation by web site operators to obtain some kind of income one a web where users expect everything to be free. Even one pop-under window per session (like the New York Times), is bad enough, but many sites hit you every time you go back to the home page, in the same session. The truly evil ones spawn a host of windows the moment you hit the site.

There are various programs, such as SurfPal, which will help combat the problem by suppressing all popped child windows, but they are not perfect. One problem is that there may be legitimate uses of pop-ups, especially in web-based applications. The time-reporting program at my previous employer made extensive use of pop-ups. It took me a bit of puzzling to realize what had changed, the first time I tried to use time-reporting, days after I had installed SurfPal.

In fairness to SurfPal, it was configurable, so I could create a "whitelist" of approved sites, which would be allowed to create pop-ups. But there is still the challenge of having a sufficient mental model of what should happen for the user to make the connection between a website or web app not performing, and the effects of pop-up suppression. I suppose a good enhancement would be to create a SysTray icon that lights up when a pop-up is being blocked. Furthermore, it could be configured not to light up in the future for that site.

Sun, 23 Feb 2003 03:03:44 GMT

One of my favorite, and one of the most under-appreciated, features in Microsoft Access is the ability to invoke a large, pop-up scrolling window to make it easier to read a lot of text that is contained in a small, scrolling text box. (You do this by Shift-F2, or selecting Zoom from the right-click menu.) You can make an HTML interface do this, but it's not as good (it never is). I think this would be a really cool feature for the browser developers to build right into the browser...I believe it is technically feasible.

Sat, 15 Feb 2003 17:13:29 GMT

I can't count how many times I have popped open my CD-ROM drive to put in a CD, and been briefly surprised to find a CD already in there. Of course the explanation is that it is whatever CD I had in there last time I installed software. Why don't installer programs end with a firm reminder to remove the installation CD?

Sun, 02 Feb 2003 19:36:24 GMT

I'm going to get a 5-button mouse. I am looking forward to having the browser BACK button mapped to a single mouse button. Not so sure how important it is to have that for the FORWARD button. I think I use Forward maybe 20% as often as back. I am thinking I would rather devote that button to "Open link in new browser window".