The connection of soothe to yes is strange but true; it takes a bit of relaxing to get it straight in the mind. I suppose that if something is, and is true, and leads to nodding of the head, and brings the archaic response sooth, or the modern answer yes, it is a soothing experience. The truth is not always soothing, but in a better world it ought to be.
New Work: LadyBugz, a FogBugz Client for Mac
I’m happy that my company just released the version 1.0 of LadyBugz, a FogBugz client for Mac.
If you just heard FogBugz for the first time, it is a “bug and issue tracking, project management, help desk software” service. FogBugz is a product of FogCreek, one of whose founders is Joel Spolsky, the software luminary behind Joel on Software and Stack Overflow.
What Zonble and I like about FogBugz is that it fits the needs of a software company well. The nature of our work requires a good issue tracking tool, but we also need to communicate with clients and customers. Many issue tracking tools are not designed with support department in mind, and this is where FogBugz does it just right.
As we used FogBugz more and more, it became natural that we wanted to create a native Mac client for it. It’s interesting that many good Mac and iPhone applications these days are client software to well established services. Tweetie is a good example. We also happened to know one thing or two about working with successful web services. So we decided to create a Mac client to FogBugz that we want to have the best of the two worlds: good web service delivered with a fast native interface.
The version 1.0 of LadyBugz gives users an integrated case and event browser, a case editor, and a mail composer. Those three components correspond to the three areas in which FogBugz excels: project management, bug and issue tracking, and help desk / customer service integration. It also comes with snippet support, an important feature for people who do frontline support services. Good help desk features are what make FogBugz stand out among similar services, and we would also like to design LadyBugz with both engineering and support departments in mind.
We had the first beta version up and running in mid-November last year, and since then we used it every day for our project management and product support. Like many applications with ambitious feature sets, LadyBugz also underwent architectural changes and total rewrites. We’ve also decided to target solely on the latest Mac OS X (10.6) so that we can leverage great tools like Grand Central Dispatch-backed NSOperationQueue, blocks, and many user interface improvements. The aim is to create smooth user experience with good technical performances.
Since this is our first full-featured Mac application, and also our first commercial product developed as an independent software vendor, we really hope LadyBugz brings good value to FogBugz users. And just like any version 1.0 software, this is really just the beginning of many great plans ahead. We want to spread the words, and will continue bringing out great things to our users.
Finally, I’d like to thank Mike Ash, Jeff Johnson and Lee Falin of Rogue Amoeba, Joe Goh of Phone Journal, Pierre Bernard of Houdah Software, Justin Williams of Second Gear, and Evadne Wu of Iridia Productions for having given us many suggestions that shaped the application. I’d also like to express my gratitude to the authors of the open source libraries that we use, including Sparkle and many others—they are a major force that makes the Mac developer community strong and vibrant.
LadyBugz is commercial software, with an individual license for US$55. You can download and try it with full features for free for 21 days. It also has a presence on Twitter, so follow us and let us know how we do.
Thanks!
LLVM Wallpaper and OS X’s xattr
For the past few months I’ve been using this as my wallpaper/desktop background. I’m seldom a fan of any personality or any project, but hey it’s LLVM.
I finally found out the source of the picture. It’s made by putting the LLVM logo over one of Cocoia’s wallpapers.
How did I find out the source? I must have seen the link from some friend’s twitter long time ago, but the friend’s tweets are locked, and Twitter’s search is not really helpful.
So how did I finally find out? Surprisingly, via Get Info in Finder! Essentially, it’s the xattr (extended attributes) in the file. Since 10.5, all files downloaded by Safari carry an xattr called com.apple.metadata:kMDItemWhereFroms:. You can use the command line tool xattr to inspect those attributes. The attribute values are in the form of property lists.
I find this a good point to show the importance of file system advance and why metadata matters.
The Afterbuzz
Jacqui Cheng of ars technica, my emphasis:
These swift and widespread changes to Buzz’s automatic-everything behaviors are certainly commendable, and it’s clear that Google does listen to user feedback in ways that other companies don’t. However, the sheer extent to which the company had to back off from its initial launch functionality goes to show how delusional Google was when it came to its assumptions about user privacy.
Just because I share something somewhere else on the Internet doesn’t mean I want it auto-linked to something else I use, and just because I choose to use Gmail doesn’t mean I even necessarily want to be involved in Buzz at all. Those should be choices that are left up to the user, not Google on behalf of the user. End result: Google is left cleaning up its messes when it could be moving forward.
Reblog: A conversation Dan Wineman has every month or so
mrgan:
Even if Flash were the world’s best-engineered animation and interaction technology (which, lol, it’s not) scorn would be heaped on it for what it has allowed people to do to restaurant websites.
That said, I recommend that you write a nice email to your local Flash-webbed business and suggest to them, as nicely as you can, that they offer a one-page summary of what you need to know: hours, location, menu if possible. My favorite restaurant in the world has an eye-gouging website which nevertheless tells you all you need to know in the first three seconds of browsing.
I can’t agree more. So many times I had to pick a random place to eat because the one I wanted to go had, darn, a Flash-only website. Flash is even more entrenched in Taiwan because business owners find it flashy, and flashy things mean they’re getting the money’s worth.
What restaurant owners don’t realize is Flash-only websites actually hurt their business. Responsible designers should remind their clients that. Although I’d say the exact opposite is at work here. It’s the incentive thing.
Imagine If Your Bank Did That to You…
This is from the leader article, “Who’s Afarid of Google?”, of The Economist, August 30, 2007, my emphasis:
Google is often compared to Microsoft (another enemy, incidentally); but its evolution is actually closer to that of the banking industry. Just as financial institutions grew to become repositories of people’s money, and thus guardians of private information about their finances, Google is now turning into a custodian of a far wider and more intimate range of information about individuals. […]
[…] That said, conflicts of interest will become inevitable—especially with privacy.
[…] The answer, as with banks in the past, must lie somewhere in the middle; and the right point for the dial is likely to change, as circumstances change. That will be the main public interest in Google. […]
One obvious strategy is to allay concerns over Google’s trustworthiness by becoming more transparent and opening up more of its processes and plans to scrutiny. But it also needs a deeper change of heart. Pretending that, just because your founders are nice young men and you give away lots of services, society has no right to question your motives no longer seems sensible. Google is a capitalist tool—and a useful one. Better, surely, to face the coming storm on that foundation, than on a trite slogan that could be your undoing.
I think many of us in the tech industry, who are supposed to know better, are actually confused about the multiple definitions of the term “openness”. Promoting open source technology and openness in tech standards is usually a good thing. Crossing the border to make your life open, without qualification, prior notice or warning, is not. Imagine if your bank did what Google Buzz did to you, making your account history open and trackable by others (say, those you recently wired money to, or received wires from), what your reaction would be? I’d say the bank would be in big trouble.
Google has improved Buzz’s privacy settings for the past few days. Still, there are questions on how the whole thing happened at all. I’m also troubled by the fact that Google’s PR machine doesn’t sound a bit apologetic—so the inconveniences and confusions (to say the least) that many users had endured for the past few days were whitewashed.
Counternotions, a blog that often raises sharp questions on big players’ strategies, comments:
Yes, someone at Google […] thought it was alright AND excellent business practice to graft Buzz over Gmail simply for expediency. Now, we hear they may separate the two. But not only the damage is done, but we also know that there’s not enough deep thinking about and appreciation of the customer experience at all at Google. It’s naive beyond belief, for a $150B company.
If a company starts to think it’s beyond reproach and its customers accept whatever new thing it gives them, it’s a bad sign indeed.
Thank You, Google, for Wasting One Hour of My Precious Working Time Rescuing My Friends’ and My Privacy, for Making Me Unable to Sleep Well from Now On.
As I said in a previous post, I turned off Google Buzz immediately when it was enabled onto my gmail account. I was annoyed by the fact that I was not asked to opt in, shocked by the fact that many of my email contacts were automatically added in, and deeply troubled by the fact that, from a quick glance, I have absolutely no control over the whole thing: access control and privacy level settings.
I turned off Buzz by clicking on the very small text link at the very bottom of my gmail page. Who would have thought that it is put in the very sheepish place where privacy policy and other legal prints are? And that’s not even the end of the story.
A few friends have reported that many of your online traces are still there even if you turned off Buzz. I had a hunch that it was going to be bad. So I re-enabled Buzz and did some experiments with other friends. It was worse.
A quick summary of a few very troubling facts.
People can see who you are inadvertently following. That mostly includes contacts you’ve recently writing to. Good luck if you were writing to an old flame, to a competitor, to a potential client that asks to remain confidential, or to a potential new employer.
You’re inadvertently added to people’s follow list. And you have absolutely no control over who can see you and who can add you.
People can see who you’re inadvertently following and who are inadvertently following you.
Blocking people takes you away from people’s follow list. If I block Alice, I’m now gone from Alice’s follower list. So when Bob looks at Alice’s follower list, he won’t see me. But,
You have to re-enable Buzz to block people. If you don’t block people, they’ll stay on your follower list forever.
Even if you have turned off Buzz, people are still able to find you—and as a result are able to comb through your “social network”—through other people’s follower/following lists. I’ve heard that if you have ever created a Google Profile, or is sharing your Google Reader feeds to Buzz, the situation is worse.
If someone disabled Buzz, you can’t block them. Because there is no longer a profile link for you to click into, and that’s the only place to unfollow people. And they’ll stay in your “following you” list forever.
Confusing? I’m as confused as you are.
The damage is already done. Evgeny Morozov of Foreign Policy has written on the political ramification of Google’s careless rollout of Buzz, especially in oppressive countries.
What deeply troubled me is that I had to learn about how Buzz worked in order to thwart potential invasions to my privacy, over which I used to think I’ve had good control with Google’s trusted mail service. And now I start to worry, even start to fret if I have missed anything to plug the holes.
I had spent an hour unfollowing everyone that I was “following” and blocking everyone that Buzz said was followed me. I assume this is for now the only way to keep my friends and I from the mess.
But now I know I won’t sleep well and have to come back to check (by re-enabling Buzz then turning it off again) to see if I’ve missing anything, or if another place catches on fire, another item of my private information was inadvertently leaked. And the entire world might still think if such information is revealed with my consent and authorization.
“Because in the business also known as social network, he who asketh not users’ consent, careth not if they resent.”
My reply to a friend’s comment on my tweet that I turned off Google Buzz. She asked, “Why can’t the world be simpler?” Above was my thought.
Social Network and Email Don’t Go Together
I turned off Google Buzz the moment I saw its advertisement blocking my gmail page. And I had to google it to learn how to turn it off. And I thought only Yahoo! and Microsoft did stupid things when it comes to email.
People, your email is not your social network. Just because you own a phone number, that doesn’t mean you have to invite everyone you ever called to call you to say hello, nor does it mean you are interested in hearing other people’s calls. The worst thing is, what Google Buzz is doing is to equivalent to publishing the names of a few dozens of people you’ve recently called to the entire world.
A few weeks ago, I logged into my long deserted Yahoo! email account to see if there was still anyone I knew emailing to that abandoned address. I used to do that every few months. To my horror, I discovered I was enrolled in many social networks I didn’t care about without my prior consent. I could even saw updates (equally inadvertent) from some contacts that I really only contacted once in like… what, 10 years ago? I immediately cancelled my already disused Yahoo! email for good. Microsoft does similiar things if you happen to use both its whatsitsname Messenger and its Live Mail.
Google’s email used to work for me very well because that was the only service that didn’t try to be a sucker. For all its good reputation on thwarting email spam, this is the biggest surprise I’ve had from them yet.
Update: What annoyed me was how Buzz was deployed. It was opt-out by default, not opt-in. I can understand the rationale Google wants to do this. Books like Nudge show opt-in and opt-out can make huge differences. Also, the nature of web app means new features are enabled automatically to everyone. The problem lies in the fact inadvertently joined social network can disrupt your ongoing design to compartmentalize your communication channels.
