Dave Smith's Blog

A co-worker got this error message today, and I thought it was quite humorous:

I just watched a Microsoft video preview of Office 2007. I was impressed with the new “Ribbon” concept to replace all the old toolbars and menus. When I say all, I mean all! Finally, the “File” menu is gone! I think it looks quite nice, and it shouold save us from being drowned in an ocean of dialogs. I’ve written a few GUIs in my day, and it’s challenging to write a complex GUI that doesn’t overwhelm the user with dialogs and windows. Kudos to Microsoft on this one.

I do, however, have two gripes that go to the very heart of what I consider a quality user interface, from which Microsoft software has suffered for years. Read on for some good old fashioned gripes…

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Last Saturday I turned on my iPod nano to discover that about a third of the horizontal lines were solid white, obscurring the volume bar. I was momentarily devestated that my black beauty had broken. In desparation I googled “apple ipod support” and came to the iPod support page. I didn’t have a lot of hope for the outcome, but I filled out a couple forms anyway. Saturday night (yes, the same day, on a weekend no less), I got an email from Apple saying that they would replace my iPod for free. I was happy, but skeptical. Could it be that easy? And free? That never happens with online returns.

On Monday, a box arrived with prepaid DHL shipping label. The included instructions told me to stick my iPod in the box and send it back to Apple. This is the kicker: Apple even included strips of packing tape for me to seal up the box. Amazing! Not only did Apple spring for the shipping costs, but I didn’t even have to come up with my own tape. Total cost to me: $0.00.

On Friday, my replacement iPod arrived, and I’m listening to it now with all my old tunes loaded. Painless, free, fast. Apple got it right.

Apple: This is my first positive support experience from an online purchase. I never had to wait on hold, never had to even dial my phone, and you covered shipping. That’s the way it should be. You’ve won a customer for life.

I just installed WordPress 2.0. It went without a hitch. All I had to do was download the tar.gz, copy all the stuff in my old WordPress ./wp-content/plugins directory to WordPress 2.0′s plugins directory (same location), and copy my old wp-config.php file. Then I just visited ./wp-admin/upgrade.php and it was done. That’s it. It appears to be working.

I don’t know if it did anything to my database. I haven’t checked it yet (nor do I plan to).

The new rich text editor is a bit akward but it works. It seems to insert extra spaces if I type too fast, but we’ll see how well it goes in the coming days.