1. Describe what happens, not what doesn’t happen. The vast majority of problem reports I receive begin with “I can’t ______,” as in, “I can’t log in” or “I can’t send an email.” Unfortunately, this says very little about the problem you’re experiencing. You wouldn’t tell your auto mechanic, “I can’t start my car,” or tell your doctor, “I don’t feel well” and expect them to diagnose your problem. Instead, you would say something like, “When I turn the ignition, I hear a rrr-rrr sound and the check engine light comes on,” or, “When I stand up quickly after a meal, I feel dizzy.” You can do the same thing with computers: “When I enter my username and password and click Submit, the login page reloads,” or “When I click the Send button on an email message, the window closes and a moment later I see the following error message: [copy and paste].”
2. Provide specific details. When you’re describing what happened, go ahead and be as specific as you can. If you’re having a problem logging into an account, be sure to mention the username you’re using. If you can’t send an email, what email address are you sending to? If you have trouble viewing a web page, what is its complete URL? (Just copy and paste it!) If you can’t add a product to your shopping cart, what product did you try? Any of these details could be the essential clue that helps find the problem.
3. Don’t assume everyone else can see the problem. If the problem you’ve encountered were obvious or consistent, it probably wouldn’t exist because the software developers themselves would have seen it and fixed it. That’s why the details in step 2 are so important. Logins probably work with most usernames, and most products can probably be added to shopping carts … it may be the particular data you’re working with that triggers the problem. The goal is to put someone else in your shoes so he or she can see the problem, too.

These guidelines are valid whether you’re asking a friend for help, calling tech support or hiring a programmer to build custom software for you. If you’re that programmer, you know what I’m talking about, and I have a tool that can help your clients: check out Betaboard, which asks all the right questions to gather this key information for you.

But even if you’re just making a phone call or sending an email message, keeping these guidelines in mind will help get the job done faster.

The problem with this approach is that users don’t always size their web browser windows to fill their screens. Actually, many users do, but they shouldn’t — especially with ever-increasing screen sizes. After all, the purpose of a large screen is not to let you view one thing at a time, with more empty space around it — it’s to let you view more things at one time. It’s just like a large desk or workbench that lets you spread out several documents or tools for easy access. Most people don’t buy large desks so they can read large pieces of paper, but so they can lay out several pieces of paper side by side.

To accommodate this, web designers should not view their job as “how to fill up those big screens.” Instead, they should design a site at the smallest reasonable size and then let users arrange that how they wish within their workspace.

An even better approach is to design a site that can automatically expand and contract to correspond to the user’s window (not screen) size. If a user wants to view a number of smaller windows, the site will look good; if a user wants to view just one large window, the site will also look good. This is called “liquid design,” and although most designers don’t approach their work in this way, I always advocate for it. “Fixed” designs are still more popular, but with computing devices ranging from 40″ flat-panel displays to 2.4″ phones, I’m hoping more designers come to realize that the best person to decide what size to make the site is the end user.

Today I was thinking about one inherent problem, which is the level of specificity that programming requires. I don’t think most people understand this, so I wanted to take a shot at explaining it. To make this a little more concrete, let’s imagine that you’re designing software for a robot, which will help with your cooking.

You don’t like chopping vegetables, so you decide to program your robot to carry out that task. First, you program it to distinguish a vegetable from other objects in the kitchen. In this process, you realize how many different shapes vegetables come in, and how difficult it is to tell a vegetable apart from other objects. But eventually you limit yourself to 10 different vegetables and teach your robot to recognize them.

Next comes chopping. The basic up-and-down motion of the knife is easy enough to program, but there are a lot of decisions to be made during the chopping process. How large should the pieces be? What shape? This varies by the recipe and maybe by the vegetable, so you end up creating a chart that your robot can refer to when beginning a new chopping task.

You’ve spent more time on this than you expected, but now your robot is working pretty well. You set it to work on a bag of potatoes and turn your attention to other things. OOPS — when you look again, the robot has chopped a few rotten sections of potatoes along with the good sections. Your robot doesn’t know how to recognize bruises or spoiling, so you have to teach it that, too. Unfortunately, a rotten potato looks different than a rotten tomato, so you need more charts explaining all the possibilities. Eventually, by trying some different vegetables and watching the robot carefully, you get it to correctly identify and reject rotten vegetables every time, without throwing away too many good vegetables in the process.

Satisfied, you leave the room to work on something else, and come back in a few hours. OOPS — the bowl that the robot was using is full, and the chopped vegetables are overflowing onto the countertop and the floor. Now you need to teach the robot how to tell if the bowl is full, and what to do when that happens.

I think you see the problem now: software (whether in a website or a robot) only does what we tell it to do, and no more. The key is thinking, in advance, of every specific instruction we will need to provide, for every possible scenario. But this is difficult because our own minds are very adaptable and don’t require so much planning.

This is where my job as a programmer comes in. If a client asks me to build a robot that “chops vegetables,” I need to translate that to a robot that “identifies particular vegetables, divides them into particular sizes and shapes, rejects pieces that don’t meet particular standards, and stores them appropriately.” To the extent that I can think of these requirements in advance, I can offer an accurate time and budget estimate, and build a product that the client is happy with.

By the way, I have a narrower definition of “bug” than most people, and that’s easy to discuss using this analogy. When you found that your robot was not discarding the rotten vegetables, was that a bug? I would say no, because nobody had bothered to tell the robot about rottenness. That’s a problem, but it’s not the robot’s fault! If, on the other hand, you had programmed the robot to recognize a particular kind of rottenness in a particular vegetable, and it still failed to do so, then you’d have a bug — a piece of software that’s not doing a task it was specifically designed to do.

The good news is that once we get that robot working, it will chop a heck of a lot of vegetables without further intervention. The bad news is that it falls upon us to define in advance every detail of that task.

+ Viewing my photo library is marvelous. I expected this … I’d love to take this to a family reunion and pass it around when talking about my last vacation, house projects, etc.

+ Browsing the web is better than I expected. The iPhone version of Safari really works well here, scaling websites to fit the window in either orientation, and scrolling and zooming with the touch interface.

+ And reading e-books … I had never considered doing this, but the book reader is really cool and Project Gutenberg (30,000 classic books for free) is amazing. I immediately downloaded two books I’ve been meaning to read and I can’t wait to try this.

- No Flash for video. I don’t visit many sites that use Flash intros or animated menus, but I do watch a lot of streaming video and virtually all of that is in Flash. When I got up early Sunday to stream a European bike race, I grabbed my laptop because I knew I wouldn’t be able to use the iPad. HTML 5 is the next standard for web video, but I expect it will take 1-2 years to become prevalent enough to avoid this problem. (Regarding major motion pictures, I did stream a 90-minute movie through the Netflix app without a single hiccup.)

- Doesn’t replace an iPod. The iPad is much nicer than my iPod touch for viewing pictures and video, but I can’t put it in my back pocket to listen to music while I’m working outside, or slip it onto a dashboard mount to connect to the car stereo.

- Doesn’t work as a standalone computer. I would strongly recommend this to friends and relatives who need a zero-maintenance web and email computer — it’s the closest thing to a functional “web appliance” that I’ve used. But you still need a main computer to operate it. It wouldn’t even show the home screen without syncing to iTunes first.

One thing I haven’t tested much is the keyboard. My accuracy has been excellent for entering web URLs, but I haven’t tried writing email with it yet. I usually don’t even bother writing on my iPod touch, so I’m wondering how much more usable the iPad will be. If it doesn’t hamper writing messages, this could replace a laptop for many trips.

My personal bottom line is that the iPad is too expensive to add as a third device between my laptop and iPod, since it doesn’t do anything those devices can’t do. But for people who don’t already have those devices — or don’t need the production capabilities of a laptop or the ultra-portability of an iPod — this is a brilliant device for reading email and websites and viewing photos and movies.

Update, 5/12/10: I’ve spent more time with the iPad now. Typing is, well, easier than on an iPhone and harder than on a laptop. Apps take on a whole new potential in this larger format, and reading e-books is quite nice. One surprise is that holding the device or laying it on a table to read or watch videos gets uncomfortable, so Apple’s easel/case is an important accessory. But my bottom line is the same: it’s not distinct enough to fit between an iPhone/iPod and a laptop. I’ve given mine away as I had planned to do, and I’m enjoying getting re-acquainted with my iPod touch, which is almost as good for most of the things and better at a few of the things that I do with these devices.

Low cost, easy to use: DomainSite
I started using DomainSite (also known as Name.com) because of their $8.88 registration cost, but stayed because of their no-fuss administration tools. In just a few minutes, I can log in and redirect my domains or email from one server to another, and I like being able to renew my domains without clicking through pages of “special offers” for other services I don’t need. DomainSite is a small company based in Denver and I’ve since gotten to know some of the employees by name, which is nice.

Big name, easy to use: Register.com
If you’re more comfortable with an older, bigger, higher-profile company, I suggest Register.com. I used them for years and some of my clients still do. Their control panel isn’t as straightforward as DomainSite’s, but it gets the job done and I’ve learned some of the tricks of using it. Register.com still uses the base $35/year price for domains, which was standard before smaller companies came in offering lower prices. That’s fine if you have one domain, but if you end up registering lots of them, you’ll start to feel the price difference.

Low cost, hard to use: GoDaddy
Among the aforementioned smaller companies with lower prices, GoDaddy is the most popular. However, they’ve come to offer so many different add-on services that it can be difficult to find domain registration info on their site. Whenever I need to change your domain settings, I have to click through pages after page, and popup window after popup window, to find them — and then I get logged out and have to start over after a few minutes of inactivity. I charge by the hour, so this is not in your best interest. Besides, Mr. Daddy — do you really need race cars and cleavage to sell domain names?

Big name, hard to use: Network Solutions
Rounding out my list is the original, big name registrar, which we used to affectionately call NetSol. Now they’ve taken on the worst of both worlds — the cost of Register.com plus the complexity of GoDaddy. Actually, Network Solutions isn’t much harder to deal with than Register.com, but last time I used them, it took 24 hours for domain changes to take effect — during which time the affected sites were completely unavailable. I don’t know if that was just a fluke, but I’d rather not try it again.

There are many registrars out there, but of those I’ve used, I would recommend DomainSite or Register.com and stay away from GoDaddy and Network Solutions. As for the next step of purchasing web hosting — that’s even more important, so let’s wait until we start our project!

When my favorite hosting company had an incident recently, losing data for two of my clients’ sites, I realized that this model is quite outdated. Modern websites consist of much more than the developer’s files. With a content management system, my clients are adding content and files from different locations that are only collected in one place on the server. And with a social networking site, users are adding content constantly, without which the site would be worthless. Without an automated backup of the site’s database and root directory, replacing content added by the clients is time-consuming, and replacing content added by users is impossible.

My solution is a new system I’ve created for my clients. It allows me to configure automated backups of the database and the root directory, at different intervals if needed, as frequently as once per hour. I and/or my clients can receive email notifications of every backup, and every backup failure. The backup files are saved at a different datacenter than any of the sites, and are available to clients any time at a password-protected web page. Clients can even log in and run a manual backup at any time.

This should bring my backup strategy up to the level of my current website development. I can’t say I’m looking forward to using it, but I do like knowing it’s there!

My app is designed for aficionados of jug band music, a form of traditional blues and jazz played on homemade instruments. The app includes a washboard, spoons, kazoo and jug. The trick is that they each play like the real instrument: you rub the washboard, tap the spoons against your knee, hum into the kazoo and buzz your lips into the jug. I made a demo video to show how it works.

Programming for this device was pretty brutal, because most of my experience is with the loosely-typed PHP, and the iPhone runs on the strongly-typed Objective C. Simple commands that would have taken me less than a minute in PHP took me hours in Objective C, until I started thinking in terms of data types. The syntax was killing me for a while — figuring out where to place an asterisk, an at-sign or a square bracket — but I’ve experienced that in moving from JavaScript to Perl to PHP over the years. I’m working on a second app now, and the new challenge is memory management, but I’m getting the hang of that, too.

I was especially curious about the infamous App Store approval process, which Apple uses to ensure quality apps and, some suspect, protect its business interests. But I didn’t have any problems here. The code-signing process was cumbersome, but I followed all the tutorials and my app was approved on the first try. If you have an iPhone or iPod touch and can spare $.99, you can buy a copy now. Who knows, you might even get hooked on jug band music!

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

The premise is that because we now have instant access to a wealth of reference information online, we’re losing our ability to read long passages, concentrate and think. I disagree; here’s why.

Regarding access to reference information, I think that’s a quantitative rather than qualitative difference from the pre-Internet days. When I was reading books in school, I was always encouraged to look up a word in the dictionary if I didn’t know it. I never did it much, but I do it a lot more now that I can access a dictionary online with a few clicks. If that was good advice with a book, how could it be bad advice with a computer? Now I can not only look up vocabulary words, but local wildlife, art history and world politics as I run across them in my daily life. I would conclude that this makes me more intellectually curious — because it rewards my curiosity with new knowledge — not less intelligent.

As for reading long passages, I use the web as much as anyone, and (compared to other people I’ve browsed with) I’m quite good at seeing how the information is organized on a web page and jumping from one link to another. I also do a lot of skimming, as the author describes. But this is when I’m looking for something in particular, like a street address or a bit of programming code or a song lyric. I did the same thing in college when I was researching a paper at the library. Reading for enjoyment is a different skill, and I haven’t lost it. When J.D. Salinger died last week and I decided to revisit The Catcher in the Rye, I read it in two, three-hour sittings.

Perhaps a lack of concentration is the author’s real problem, but I don’t think that comes from using the web. Like a book, that goes at our pace and doesn’t interrupt our train of thought. That’s not the case with other technologies like television, telephones and instant messaging. I tend to use those as little as possible when I’m working, but if they were talking, beeping and flashing at me all day, I’d probably feel like the author does.

I guess my motto would be, tune out, turn off, log on!

Before I had time to do that, I switched from Entourage to Thunderbird, and was delighted to find that such a plug-in already exists. I tried it and it worked exactly as I had imagined:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/attachreminder

Then I switched from Thunderbird to Apple Mail, and found a plug-in for that, too:

http://eaganj.free.fr/code/mail-plugin

I haven’t used them, but it looks like similar plug-ins are available for Gmail and Outlook:

http://www.techsuperb.com/email/forgotten-attachment-detectors-for-gmail-and-outlook/1536.html

I’m afraid that still leaves Entourage without a similar feature, but it won’t be me who builds it — I’m happy with my new mail setup.

• When you perform a Google search, and the answer is visible on the search results page, so you don’t even have to click one of the results.
• Variation: When you perform a Google search using your browser toolbar, and the answer is visible in the search shortcuts that appear while you type.
• Blogs that consist solely of funny pictures related to a theme (e.g., icanhascheezburger.com, cuteoverload.com and failblog.org). As my wife can tell you, there are hundreds of these!

Can you suggest a catchy name? And what other new Internet terms should I add to this list?