Address Migration
Posted: Thu 21 June, 2007 Filed under: Customer Services, Geeky, Getting Organised, Technology, Thoughts 1 Comment »One of the things that always infuriates me when I get a new phone is the sheer hassle that’s always present when it comes to moving the address book (and/or contacts) from one to the other. For some reason it’s just never as simple as it could/should be.
Of course, there’s the ‘classic’ option, of saving all the contacts onto the SIM card instead of on the phone. But if you actually use the contacts and address book, then you need them to be on the phone – the SIM just holds ‘name &number’ data. So if you have a contact called (for example) Tom, and he has a home phone, work phone, mobile, and email, that’s four records on the SIM. On the phone, it’s one record – which is, of course, how it should be.
But I’m yet to find a phone that has a simple “Send all the contacts from this phone to another one” – whether that’s by Messaging, Bluetooth, IR, or anything else. Even (or, perhaps, particularly) Windows Mobile can’t manage this task – it can send your contacts one at a time, so why can’t it do all of them in one big bundle of data?
In fairness to Windows Mobile®, it does synchronise with MS Office on a PC. Fortunately, so does my new phone. So I could connect the XDA to the PC, synch all the contacts off the phone into MS Outlook , disconnect the XDA, connect the K800i (which, of course, also has a completely different cable) and synch the contacts out of Outlook onto the K800i. But all the same, what a faff.
Is it really that difficult to handle phone contact transfers?
I know (before Gordon says it) that this is one of those events where user-centred design would work really nicely. I don’t care how the phone transfers the address book – I want it to Just Work™, without being a nightmare faff of cables, or one-by-one data transfers. Just one simple ‘Move my address book to another phone’ option – or perhaps even a first-use option (i.e. one where the process is part of the initial phone set-up) that simply says “Copy the address book from your old phone?” – and if you choose it, you get to choose whether the data transfer is done by IR, Bluetooth, WiFi, or something else. (Bluetooth is the ideal candidate, of course, with WiFi a close second).
Is that too much to ask?
Nagging
Posted: Thu 29 March, 2007 Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Technology 3 Comments »While I have to admit that in general we’re both pretty pleased with the TomTom satnav unit I bought earlier in the year, there is one thing that I wish I could change.
TomTom operates in what I refer to as “Goldfish Mode”. Much the same as the voiceovers in Masterchef (Sorry, Masterchef goes Large, god help us all) and Dragon’s Den, TomTom assumes you have- at best- a memory span of thirty seconds. Which means you get instructions like
“In 500 yards, turn right at the roundabout, first exit.“
You get to about 100 yards from the roundabout.
“Turn right at the roundabout, first exit“
You get to the roundabout, and start to go round it
“Take the exit“
It drives me insane, and a lot of the time I find that it’s actually distracting, because you start to wonder if you’ve missed something relevant.
All I want is an option on the menu that says “Just notify me of the directions ONCE” that I can tick, and not be treated like I’m a bloody idiot. I know, lowest common denominator and all that bollocks, but jesus, just once, can’t something also have options that aren’t for that low-end user?
Notification
Posted: Mon 12 March, 2007 Filed under: Charm School, Technology, Weirdness 4 Comments »In the course of my current work, I use laptops a lot. I suppose desktop machines may do this too, but I don’t know – the one I use at home doesn’t really have that problem.
Anyway – whenever I turn on the laptop (whether my own, or the one at work) in the office, it’ll flag up a little notifier in the bottom-right hand corner of the screen saying something about “Unable to detect any wireless networks”.
Now, fair enough, I don’t mind it telling me that it can’t find the network. What really annoys me though, is that – particularly in the case of the work laptop – I have wireless networking switched off at the hardware switch. It’s not operating. Full stop. There’s no wireless network in the office, so it’s pointless having the damn thing turned on.
But Windows is unable to detect that actually, there’s no active hardware for finding a wireless network – so there’s no flaming chance at all of discovering that network. But it still flags up the message, every bloody day. I know there’s no wireless networks found, because the bloody sodding wireless network card is turned off, you stupid, stupid machine.
Grrrrr.
Handwritten – an Update
Posted: Thu 1 February, 2007 Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Security, Technology 1 Comment »About a week ago, I wrote about the cashpoint (ATM) machine with the handwritten notice on it – which (to my surprise) garnered no comments at all.
Anyway, walking past the same pair of machines today, I noticed that this time the same one was out of order, but had up the machine’s default “Out of service – please use another machine” message on the display. No handwritten sign was in evidence at all.
I wonder if anyone’s noticed yet that they lost money last week?
Workflow
Posted: Thu 10 August, 2006 Filed under: Geeky, Getting Organised, Photography, Technology, Thinking About... 7 Comments »Yes, I’m afraid I’m going to be banging on about iTunes, Picasa, JPEG vs Raw, and so on again. Because it’s all come up in the last week, Workflow has been on my mind a bit (and there’s some work-related stuff behind the scenes as well) so it’s all ending up as a bit of a brain dump.
Personally, I can be bloody disorganised. Well, that’s not strictly true. I usually know where things are, what needs to be done, when it needs to be done by, and how I’m going to do it. It’s just that I can be very “last minute” about things – particularly when it’s all to a deadline. It’s something I know – and acknowledge – about myself, and that I know I need to fix, or at least learn to handle better.
So anyway, I working on organising myself a bit better. But that’s not what this post is about. Oh no. Instead it’s about file structure, and file organisation instead. You lucky people.
You see, Gordon has said a couple of times that certain bits of software (iTunes, Picasa etc.) mean he no longer needs to know where files are – the software keeps track of it for him, and – for him – that’s fine. Unfortunately, doing that kind of thing drives me utterly fucking crackers.
Because I know where I put stuff, and I know (pretty much) what is where. I know that all my music sits in c:/music, but then I know that under that it’s kept in a file structure, so it goes c:/music/[band]/[album name]/[tracks] , and I never, ever have a problem finding where the stuff is that I want. To me, that’s organised, because I don’t need to fuck about thinking “is it in that folder? Or is it (iTunes, I’m talking about you here) in ‘compilations’? Or in some utterly random other place?”. I don’t need to use Google Desktop Search, I don’t need to Search for files. I think I use the “Search for files” function in Windows maybe once a year. If that. I know where my stuff is.
With photos it’s similar. Everything sits in c:/photos. I know, it’s unimaginative. But it’s easy to find. Then I name folders with where I was, or the subject of the photo series, and all the photos from that session/day/trip go in. If it’s been a holiday, you’d find it in c:/photos/[trip name]/Day [number] . I’m bad in that I don’t rename the files individually to say what’s in them – I should, but I don’t. But I know what’s where, and I can usually find the images I want when I want them. And again, to me that’s what being organised is about.
Yesterday, Gordon wrote
WHERE the files are doesn’t matter. HOW iTunes structures the folders doesn’t matter. As long as you can find the MP3s in iTunes (which is where the ID3 tags come in) then why do you care that an album is stored in ‘compilation’?
To me, it does matter where the files are. I want to be able to find them, to use them outside of that one specific application. For my music stuff, I can play it on the PC using RealPlayer, but I also use another program to write the music files to my MP3 player, or yet another one to write them to the phone so I can use that. For my photos I can use one program to view the thumbnails so I can select what I want, I can use Photoshop – or Paintshop Pro, or ImageMagick, or Corel, or whatever – to edit those photos, I can write them to a CD/DVD as backup, or I can transfer them using FTP to another site. Because of the way I work, I do need to know where the files are. I don’t want to be wasting time figuring out where Application A has stored them so that I can find them with Application B, C or D and use them in that.
So yes, it’s my workflow. Maybe I should be more flexible, or something. But because I do use different programs for different things, I want the files that I use to be in the same place, in my own organisation. Not in some arbitrary thing that one program uses, and then insists I have to use because it uses it. It’s a personal perspective, but I don’t like having workflows and decisions forced on me, whether it’s by Arsehole Bosses, or programs.
Maybe I’m a dinosaur. Maybe I’m a control freak. I don’t know. What I do know, though, is that at no time soon am I going to be letting a fucking program tell me it’s storing stuff according to its own structures where I can’t find the bloody stuff easily without using a search to do so.