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myMacBUZZ

Please excuse the silence as I geek out over my new blog myMacBUZZ.

Mac and iPod fans rejoice! myMacBUZZ brings you weekly, made-in-Malaysia Apple news to satisfy your Mac news buzz.

Check it out: http://mymacbuzz.com

Hi, my name is David and I can’t pay attention

I’ve been noticing that my ability to pay attention has been deteriorating since university. This blog entry is a perfect example. I was reading this article half way before I started to blog. I’ve got ADT.

What is ADT?

It’s sort of like the normal version of attention deficit disorder. But it’s a condition induced by modern life, in which you’ve become so busy attending to so many inputs and outputs that you become increasingly distracted, irritable, impulsive, restless and, over the long term, underachieving. In other words, it costs you efficiency because you’re doing so much or trying to do so much, it’s as if you’re juggling one more ball than you possibly can.

Source: Why can’t you pay attention anymore | CNET News.com

Email, SMS, RSS, IM - the list of distractions is endless. In the office, you have bosses that want to see you at any minute, phone calls, and all that stupid silly tasks that get in the way of doing your job. And when you are able to sit down for 15 minutes to work, your mind just isn’t there.

That’s why I started practicing GTD, or Getting Things Done, a productivity practice by David Allen. It’s not been that great. I think I’ve since realised that it’s not about being more productive or being more organised. What’s more imporant is being mindful, being here in front the task that you have to do, and do it in 10 minute spurts.

If you’re like me (and I’m sure many of you are), read Merlin Mann’s 43folders. He’s got a great way of getting to the root of why this is distracting or why that is unproductive and putting everything into words.

Now excuse me, I’ve got a report to do. But before that I need to go back to finish reading my article.

How to run Windows XP on an Intel Mac

The hard way

Download the OnMac bootloader. Pore through step-by-step but long instructions. Partition your drive, creat a slipstream CD, look around for drivers. Scratch your head a few times if it doesn’t work. Waste another hour repeating the process. And tada! You can boot Windows on your Intel Mac.

The easy Apple way

Download Bootcamp from Apple.

Sure there are a few more steps, but now Apple has given everyone who wants to run Windows on their Macs a leg up with this cool little app.

It’s a public beta preview of a feature that will be available in the next version of Apple’s operating system, OS X 10.5 Leopard.

As elegant as it gets

Boot Camp lets you install Windows XP without moving your Mac data, though you will need to bring your own copy to the table, as Apple Computer does not sell or support Microsoft Windows. Boot Camp will burn a CD of all the required drivers for Windows so you don’t have to scrounge around the Internet looking for them.

Coolies! I can’t wait to get my Mac Mini… but I think I’ll wait for OS X 10.5 Leopard.

Email hoaxes

I’ve been getting a lot of ‘Please forward this email to as many people as you know’ type of messages lately. I just want to set it straight that these email are a bunch of baloney. No one is getting any money no matter how many times you forward them. And if you DO forward them, you are contributing to the spam problem.

Let’s have a look at some of the many email hoaxes that we commonly find in our inboxes.

The hoaxes

You will receive money/reward

Claim:
You will receive a reward from Microsoft/Bill Gates/Dell/Nokia/My
grandmother if you forward this email to as many people as you know.

_It’s a fake!_

Rachel Arlington

Claim:
AOL and ZDNet are donating 32¢ to the care of Rachel Arlington, a child with brain cancer in need of an operation her parents can’t afford, for every e-mail forwarded (and all similar emails). They even include a cute little picture.

_It’s a fake!_

Why these claims are fake

There is simply no way to trace and track emails that are sent. You can tell who’s read an email before, but other than who was the sender and who was the recipient, there’s no way to track that. And for the supposed 15 cents whoever is supposed to donate wherever, it’s just not worth the effort to track all those emails manually.

Why do these people do it then? I don’t know. Maybe the first person starts it as a joke. Then the rest who don’t know better continue to forward it to all their friends and the cycle continues. I have a feeling it’s those email addicts are the ones who forward these crap the most, just because they need to compulsively fiddle with their email every 2 minutes. Yep, you know who you are. I’m talking about you.

Many of these email messages will have a message that goes, “if you delete this, you don’t have a heart”. Some even quote Scripture. Bah. Please, please don’t be taken for a ride. If you’re in doubt, you can always look up Snopes.com, the Urban Legends Reference Page to check it out.

Tangent

Oh by the way, did you notice my new design? The minimalist look is so ‘in’ at the moment, don’t you think?

Err.. ok, it’s not a redesign. I’m taking part in the Annual CSS Naked Day, brainchild of Dustin Diaz. If you’re a web designer who’s confident enough to show off your website in the buff, go on and take part.

See ya.

Hey, I got linked from Lifehacker

My “Fix Firefox’s unresponsive script”:http://www.itchyhands.com/2006/01/07/fix-firefox-unresponsive-script-warnings article has been pretty popular. Last Friday it got linked from “Lifehacker”:http://www.lifehacker.com. Thank goodness the traffic wasn’t too heavy to kill my server. Here’s a shout out to all Lifehacker readers who have been visiting.

My online ambitions:
* -Get linked by “Lifehacker”:http://www.lifehacker.com-
* Get linked by “Boing Boing”:http://www.boingboing.net
* Get “Slashdotted”:http://slashdot.org
* Get “digged”:http://www.digg.com

The Star Online site critique

When The Star launched the redesign of their website last year, I drafted a blog entry about what I thought of the website, but never posted it. Recently, I decided to go dig up that old post and polished it up, and so now I present to you my vicious, spiteful critique of “The Star Online”:http://www.thestar.com.my website.

For this critique, I will assume that the website’s main objective is to communicate news because, well, it’s an online newspaper. I am also aware of the fact that newspapers earn their income mainly from advertising and I will be touching on adverts quite a bit. Last of all, I will be comparing The Star Online to some other online newspaper type sites, just because I can. Oh, and I was just kidding about being vicious and spiteful.

h3. Layout

Layout-wise, The Star Online is pretty conventional. It sports the tried and tested fixed-width, 2-column layout for most of its pages, and a little variation on section frontpages. While it is a layout that users can get used to easily, it doesn’t do a very good job of displaying news.

When the site first loads, the only news that users see are the cover story of the day and a column of World Updates. Err… why World Updates? I would think users are more interested in other local headlines or top stories. Surrounding these two columns of news are no less than four advertisements of various sizes.

You know, it’s funny because I don’t think The Star puts advertisements on the front page of its print version, but has loads of blinking ads and other banners on the online version’s homepage. Compare that to the homepages of some other online news sites that I think have great layouts.

Most of these sites are much more subtle with their advertisement placements, choosing to limit them or to place them away from the main content. BBC News doesn’t even have any adverts at all.

The Star Online has a width of 770 pixels. I think that they would be able to display more columns of news if they increased the width to something wider than 900 pixels. I don’t have any hard numbers for Malaysia, but I think that it’s safe to say that the majority of us have a 1024 by 768 pixel monitor resolution, so a wider layout should be no problem to at least 80% of The Star Online’s users.

h3. Design

Design-wise, The Star Online has got to be one of the blandest online newspapers that I’ve ever seen. I wonder if they really have a _designer_, because the site looks like something that someone from the IT department threw together overnight. Compare the design to the simple and subtle design of “The Times Online”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk, or the stylish “nymag.com”:http://www.nymag.com (I like the choice of fonts) or the bold, stand out colours of “News.com”:http://news.com.com. Heck, even the “New Straits Times”:http://www.nst.com.my site looks better. Another thing about the first three outstanding examples are how they present the top stories of the day at a glance to the user above the fold. Observe also that distraction from advertisements are minimised by thoughtful placement.

Now we come to the thing that I hate the most about The Star Online – the navigation. The navigation is quite confusing because it is split into the six tabs on top and another bar below the banner advertisement. Clicking the navigation tabs opens the page in a new window _which is a really bad usability mistake_. Just look at usability guru Jakob Nielsen’s list of “Top Ten _New_ Mistakes of Web Design”:http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990530.html, points #1 and #2.

p(caption). The Star Online: navigation is split by advertisement banner

Opening pages in new windows catches users off guard and breaks the Back button, meaning that users can’t click the Back button to get them back to where they came from. My mom gets totally confused when new windows pops up, and the majority of users online are like my mom.

However, implementation of opening new windows is also inconsistent. For example, if you click the Property tab at the top of the page, a new window opens, but if you click the Property link at the bottom, the page loads in the same browser window. The site is peppered with these surprise links and you’ll never know which link will open in a new window.

Now, the navigation bar. It’s got the cool dropdown and flyout menus, but unfortunately the whole navigation bar disappears if Javascript is off. Another inconsistency I don’t like is how clicking on Archives and More doesn’t work, unlike the other links. For the two links, you need to click the sub-item on the dropdown menu for it to work.

h3. Branding

Another big issue with The Star Online for me is regarding their (lack of consistent) branding. First, they must have one of the smallest website logos that I’ve ever seen on any website. It’s not really attractive and fails to draw the eye to itself. Here are some actual size comparison between The Star Online and some other popular websites.

The Star Online logo is the worse of the lot above, and even the logo for mStar, The Star Online’s Malay language companion, looks much better. The Star Online logo has too many colours and frilly bits, and it’s not consistent with The Star’s corporate colours. As much as possible, the logo should look like The Star’s own logo for consistency. Logos should be clear, simple and recognisable. Here’s a “tutorial on creating a good logo”:http://www.fizbang.com/1-3-06.php that all designers should bookmark.

It’s bad enough that they’ve got that tiny logo, but immediately below it is a big flashing banner advert that totally distracts attention away from the logo. If I was scanning through a dozen web pages quickly and I see this screen (below), chances are, I would think that was a restaurant or recipe site.

p(caption). Is this a business site or cooking site?

h3. Beyond skin deep

A good, well-thought site design will make the user experience a much more pleasant one, and help in the goal of communicating news. To do this, the webmasters need to redesign the layout to present more news, more efficiently. They also need to address the inconsistencies in navigation across the site and employ a decent designer to make the site more readable and visually appealing.

Also, all modern websites should employ table-less, semantic, XHTML and CSS based designs. The benefits of employing XHTML and CSS are beyond the scope of this article, but if you are curious, Doug Bowman of “Stopdesign”:http://www.stopdesign.com has an excellent article on how “throwing tables out the window”:http://www.stopdesign.com/articles/throwing_tables/ can have a substantial benefit for large, high traffic sites, a category that “The Star Online”:http://www.thestar.com.my falls in.

Running a big website like The Star Online is no mean feat. By my count the site has around 10 major sections. It takes lots and lots of hard work to make sure that articles are published on time and I take my hat off to the webmasters who do that day in and out. However, that’s no excuse to do a shitty job on the site design. The Star is the leader for English newspapers in Malaysia, but it’s website still has some ways to go.

Updated 20 Feb to include recommendations on XHTML and CSS

CSS Basics

“‘CSS Basics – Making Cascading Style Sheets Easy To Understand’”:http://www.cssbasics.com/ is a really great website for people new to CSS.

CSS Basics starts of with what CSS is all about, the syntax format and goes through all the major CSS properties you need to know. While it’s written for beginners, even I learnt something new.

It’s a real easy-to-understand introduction to CSS that breaks everything down into 18 short chapters. I first balked when I saw there were 18 chapters, but really, they’re short and sweet. The website is written very well and makes CSS approachable for the total newbie.

I take my hats off to “Ben Partch”:http://blog.cssbasics.com/ the writer, who is also a ‘mentor’ at the excellent “Sitepoint forums”:http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/. I think he’s done a great job with the site, and I highly recommend it for anyone who’s interested to learn about CSS.

30 Boxes – super online calendar

I’ve been playing with “30 Boxes”:http://www.30boxes.com lately. It’s an online calendar application that is really, really slick. I’ve used Yahoo Calendar and a few other online calendars before, but 30 Boxes completely blows them away. Here’s a quick review.

My biggest problem with other online calendars was that they were slow. Even if you had a fast internet connection, you had to fill in your event details into a form, set the date, repeat, look through your address book if you want to invite someone blah blah blah.. and it becomes such a chore.

30 Boxes gets around most of that because it’s super fast once everything is loaded, thanks to some AJAX magic. Best of all, entering event details is a breeze. It has a ‘one box’ at the top of the page that you use to add events in a human understandable syntax.

Here are some examples:

*Justin’s birthday feb 21 6pm (Bring pot luck)*
Easy right? The part in the brackets will turn into a note

*WIP meeting monday 11am repeat weekly tag work*
Set repeats easily and even tag your events

*Valentine’s Day hot date 2/14 6pm +yourdate@gmail.com*
Sends an invite to yourdate@gmail.com for a hot date next Tuesday.

The other cool thing about 30 Boxes is it’s social networking functionality. Friends, or ‘buddies’, you’ve invited can view your calendar or vice versa based on your privacy settings. You can even allow certain buddies to add events to your calendar. You can even integrate your Flickr photos and blog posts into the calendar. Check out “my buddy page”:http://30boxes.com/buddy.php?id=11656!

I’ve really got to get back to work (I’m paid to work after all hehe) but here’s a link to “a more detailed review by Thomas Hawk”:http://thomashawk.com/2006/02/30-boxes-best-calender-ever.html. Also, the whole blogosphere is abuzz with 30 Boxes, so just check out the “30 Boxes tag”:http://http://technorati.com/tag/30+Boxes on Technorati.

Tag your Outlook tasks

Michael Sippey has wrote a customised form for Microsoft Outlook to enable tagging in Tasks. (People are tagging _everything_ now aren’t they?)

Looks like a great hack for Outlook junkies who are trying to implement GTD. That’s Getting Things Done, for you GTD noobs.

You can find the Outlook .oft file and related blog entry at “Michael’s blog”:http://sippey.typepad.com/filtered/2005/12/simple_task_ent.html.

Play Windows Media in Quicktime in Mac OS X

If you’re a Mac OS X user, no doubt you’ve been frustrated with Microsoft’s Windows Media Player for OS X. Now you can play Windows Media files (.wma and .wmv) right in Quicktime with “Windows Media Components for Quicktime”:http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=915D874D-D747-4180-A400-5F06B1B5E559&displaylang=en. It’s even optimised for high-definition playback.

I would never have expected Microsoft to be so nice to offer this cool plugin for Mac users. So here’s to you Microsoft. It’s a free download download, “so go get it”:http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=915D874D-D747-4180-A400-5F06B1B5E559&displaylang=en!