And I again, kudos to the KDE crowd that made even the scrollbar super slick here (do this with a folder that has enough files that you have to scroll).

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One of the design goals was when you saw it you wanted to lick it.

When Mac OS X first came out, Steve Jobs bragged that they were making an interface so beautiful you just wanted to lick it. Now, I don’t know about that, but having a beautiful interface is definitely not going to hurt you. Take a look at this MacHeist ad I just got yesterday. MacHeist repackages third-party Mac apps and sells them in bargain bundles- often including a puzzle to be able to buy it. Notice anything interesting about it?

There are only 2 things being sold here. That’s right. Yes I can count the 7 apps in the bundle. But really they’re selling on two points. The app icons and the bundle price.

These aren’t apps that make sense to be sold together. They’re a pretty good hodgepodge of functionality. They’re also not ‘essential’. But they normally cost a lot more. And the icons look nice and are presented beautifully in the email. Yes, there’s a description of each app, but it’s so short as to be simply a note about what you’re buying- they’re not a full description of each app.

Take a moment and look at your app icon. Is it lickable?

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One thing I’ve started doing is rating my music within Amarok so that I can build a dynamic playlist that plays all my favorites. This presents a problem since like everyone it seems, I have a lot of music and no time to rate it. This is what I’ve done and maybe it will work for you.

Ratings

The most important thing when setting the ratings for your music is what you want it to mean. I think when it started I was hung up on putting how good I thought the music was. But really, I don’t care about that. My rating criteria was simple: how often do I want to hear it?

It makes it a lot easier to ‘decide’ what rating to give it. You can also rate in half stars but I don’t want that much granularity.

New Sounds

Next set up a dynamic playlist. Go to Playlists > Dynamic Playlists and add a Proportional Bias. I will say that the ‘Bias’ label is confusing but just don’t think about it. Set the Proportion to 100%, and Match ‘Rating’ With ‘equal to’ 0 stars. Now add more Proportional Biases for any genres you want to exclude- I excluded Audiobooks and a couple others. When you’re finished, save the new dynamic playlist. If you make changes, save them as a new playlist- saving over the old one didn’t actually save on my system.

Now while your music plays, use the global hotkeys to save the new rating as you listen. Like what you hear? Set the rating with Super (which is usually the Windows key) and 1/2/3/4/5 depending on the rating you want to give it. And don’t stress about it. If you miss rating because you were busy and didn’t think about it- don’t panic! It’ll come up again.

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The document was created with an unsupported version of excel.

Now it may seem at a glance to be unfair. OpenOffice support for MS Office formats is pretty reliable. No desktop OS has trouble with it.

The trick to solving this is in the error message itself. The file was created with an unsupported version of Excel. You’re thinking “nah…”. Yes. Create a blank file in Excel. Open it in OpenOffice. Paste all you want. Save. Ta-da. You now have an iPhone and Blackberry compatible file.

Here’s one in case you need it:
Blank Excel File

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Alone among desktop developers, KDE seems to have grasped that the free desktop is no longer trying to equal the proprietary ones and that the task now is to imagine what the computer desktop could become.

Bruce Byfield

Watch some videos!

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Target the application for one specific user and make it perfect for him/her. Then hope that it’s good enough for other users as well.

Honestly, I don’t know how well it will work. There’s the potential to cause problems by being so targeted that it’s unusable by anyone else. But I have to say that this makes a lot of sense. Most open source projects, if they were just stable enough for any user to use, they’d come a long way. They may even come up with a couple features no one has thought of yet, but I doubt it. I suspect that they’ll mostly be checking off features they’re used to using elsewhere. As I’ve mentioned before, you don’t get many switchers by just matching features. But, if they can check off some important features and add a game-changing feature that could work.

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One caveat- no SSL currently.

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But the better way is to adjust the paths the system looks for. You can find them under System Settings > About Me > Paths. That cleared up some of my problems. Say what you want about having too many options- it’s nice that there’s a nice UI to change those options.

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The chances that you can top a trusted provider on the very thing the provider is trusted for are slim indeed.

Instead, you gain converts by winning at something the existing provider didn’t think was so important.

This is why if you show someone a checklist of features their proprietary software has and show that the open source alternative has all of them, they probably will not be swayed. There is a cost to switching, and if they already have the proprietary one that does all those things, why switch. In fact, you have to show them the features they don’t have.

Wow Factor

It might not be something important. I’ve mentioned Disco before, a disc burning app for Mac OS X. Killer feature? Smoke blows around on your screen as it burns the disc.

With Disco we tried pushing the boundaries of interface, usability, and utter functional simplicity. Well, once you realize that Disco is emitting real time smoke as you burn, we start redefining the boundaries of progress indication. You can even blow into your microphone and the smoke will react accordingly.

Useful? Hardly. But I bought it. And I couldn’t wait to tell others about it. I didn’t lead off with things it actually did- I led off with the smoke. Don’t get me wrong- the minimalist UI was fun and easy to use. But the smoke- man that’s cool.

Don’t provide an alternative- provide a better product. What has your app got that they don’t?

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