In January, Rogers introduced a new feature to its cable TV subscribers: a Quick Start Menu. What’s on this menu? How can it help me? It doesn’t matter. The brain trust at Rogers decided to put the menu behind the “Guide” button, which normally brings up the Integrated Program Guide (IPG). If you actually want to see the IPG, you simply press the Guide button a second time. Convenient, no?

Immediately, a Facebook group was put up to entreat (read “browbeat”) Rogers into removing this intrusion into their customers’ workflow.

Rogers’ response? They gave us a way to switch the menu and guide around. So when you press the Guide button, you actually get the guide. But if you press it again, you get the menu. Marginally less annoying. Good job, whoever’s doing UX at Rogers.

You know, there are buttons on that remote which never get pressed. The B and C buttons for instance. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to put the menu behind those? (more…)

I’ve been kept very busy over the past couple of months setting up butterscotch.com: Tucows’ new video network, brimming with terrific videos, short and long, providing tips, tricks and insights into technology for pros and tyros.  Our new team includes tech media veterans Andy Walker, as General Manager and Executive Producer; Amber MacArthur, Director of Content; Sean Carruthers and Matt Harris, Senior Producers; and Andrew Moore-Crispin, Web Editor.  In addition to our existing Tucows team, that’s a lot of talent coming together.

Our current line-up consists of regular shows, such as Andy and Sean’s Lab Rats, and Cheryl Poirier’s spin-off, Miss Download; as well as standard and special tutorials.  Tutorials are screen captured how-to’s with a voice over.  Special tutorials are a series of ten or so episodes on a particular topic.  For example, the two special tutes we have on offer right now are Facebook for Grownups and Gmail for Beginners.

We do have other shows already on the site, and many more are coming, so check back often at butterscotch.com, or better yet, subscribe to the RSS feed.

The challenges, for me, in putting the site together, were:

• slicing up the composite and creating the base page (HTML and CSS) (got a lot of Photoshop help from Joan, our graphic artist at Tucows)
• establishing single signon between butterscotch and Tucows.com
• creating the backend CMS (content management system), where Andrew maintains the content which appears on the site

Of course, we’re not done yet.  We’re still developing new and terrific functionality, and figuring ways to integrate the butterscotch and Tucows content.  It’s all about bringing more value to our visitors and authors.

Sure developing the site was a marathon of long days and late nights, and it kept me from family and blogging, but this is the sort of challenge which stretches your abilities and forces you to find new insights into your work.  I loved it.  I wouldn’t want to do it again real soon; but I loved it.

In spite of Apple’s many transgressions, I finally caved, and bought a Touch.  What transgressions?

• They’re suing a small Victoria, BC business school over the apple logo.
• The iPhone/Touch doesn’t have cut and paste.
• The iPhone/Touch doesn’t have an SD card slot for extra memory.
• The iPhone/Touch SDK comes with a punishingly harsh NDA.

Ok, they’ve actually retired that NDA, but there are other offences.  The highly vaunted Apple user experience has been a bust for me.  I tried and tried, but couldn’t get into the App Store, which is the ONLY WAY to download programs onto the platform. (more…)

Google is today releasing a new browser called Chrome. It’s supposed to be much faster and more robust than existing alternatives. (Yes, even better than FF. Can you believe it?) Google describes the philosophy and advantages in a 38 page comic book:

http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/

The big question is what this will mean for the current players?  I figure it’s too soon to tell.  But I’m hoping Mozilla will use the opportunity to pick up whatever they can from the GPLed Chrome, for inclusion in Firefox.

Also, I’m not sure how much I can trust Google since they’ve pulled the rug out from under my feet with their now defunct Browser Synch extension.

I’ve been using Paint Shop Pro for years.  I got pretty good at making greeting cards, but there was a limit to what I could do in terms of photo-realistic compositions.

My friend, Kristan Uccello, posted a link on Facebook to a set of tilt-shift miniatures, which I think I can pull off.  I’m also interested in learning how to do High Definition Range photos.  I’ll keep you posted.

What really got my juices flowing, though, was a link to one of the artists in that list: Glenn Karlsen from Norway has some terrific and amazing images.

I’m not sure you can do this stuff with The GIMP, which is the open source, cross-platform image manipulation program I’m currently using, but I’m going to give it a shot.  Watch this space for developments.

There is a tremendously well-researched, well-reasoned history of the OLPC, and it’s subsequent effects on the computer industry, at “Why Microsoft and Intel tried to kill the XO $100 laptop”.  A minor quibble about the article: the author didn’t mention the ASUS Eee PC, which clearly owes it’s existence to the OLPC, and then went on to spark other ultraportables such as the HP 2133 Mini-Note.

I’ve been using, playing and struggling with Windows since version 3.0.  Before that, I used pretty much every version of MS-DOS.  I’ve poured a lot of my money into Microsoft.  I’ve watched them go from enthusiastic techno geeks, to arrogant robber barons.

When Vista was announced, I vowed not to donate another dime to the mighty Microsoft marketing machine.  I was planning on going to Linux.  But when push came to shove, I didn’t want to spend days struggling with obscure arcana.  So I decided to go with an OS hailed as a paragon of ease of use: OS X. (more…)

A few weeks ago I picked up a Lexmark X9575 Wireless 4-in-1 printer, scanner, dicer, chopper, at Costco.  It’s sat in the box, unopened, since then; not because I’m a lazy sloth (I am, but that’s another post, probably written by my wife), but rather because I looked up whether it was supported in Ubuntu.  The forums say, it isn’t.  So we wouldn’t be able to print from our Ubuntu-based Toshiba laptop in the living room. (more…)

The spectrum auction is over, and from all accounts, the big winner of the new entrants is Globalive, which runs the “I can’t believe it’s a phone company!” Yak Communications.

Myself, I can’t believe they’ve survived this long!  These buffoons are so massively incompetent it staggers the imagination. (more…)

I’ve been frustrated after the conversion to FF 3.0, looking for the Dictionary.com search engine.  The Mozilla addons site only has the Merriam-Webster engine.  I went hunting for it on the Dictionary.com site, and finally found the link: http://dictionary.reference.com/tools/firefox.html gives you access to the dictionary, thesaurus and reference engines. (more…)