It’s somehow really motivating, bring on next season!!!

I just hope it’s the first year in Miami version, motivated, lean and hungry. I don’t want the last few years in the Lakers where he was overweight, contract concerned and lazy.

Follow him on Twitter http://twitter.com/THE_REAL_SHAQ

When is LBJ going to hit up Twitter, come on bron?

How To Force Blizzard To Add LAN Support To Starcraft II (PIC)

Looking at the image, you see that a customer is canceling his World of Warcraft account in order to protest the dubiously misused term DRM that’s being used to prove customers are trusted to play the game. The exact phrasing is:

I am cancelling my account because you chose DRM as an acceptable means of deployment in StarCraft II, and refused to allow me to play the game as I wish, where I wish without connecting to your system to authenticate my purchase. You have lost me as a customer because I cannot play your game without proving to you every time I play it that I am a legitimate customer.

Since you have decided your game is too good to trust me with, I have decided my money is too good to leave in your hands.

I have seen this tactic before. My 11 year old uses it from time to time. He doesn’t want to have to wear a coat, so he decides he doesn’t want to go outside anymore. Childish much? The reality is this user really has very little idea what the motivating factor behind this decision was. It’s quite possible that it uses network resources to stay up to date, allow social features, etc. Blizzard is making gobs of money with World of Warcraft so it’s feasible that they are mashing it up with an MMORPG. But that’s not the point.

The point is that Blizzard has and will have millions of customers, and quite probably this guy too. Once all his friends are playing and talking about how good it is, or his WoW Crack addiction grips him, he’ll be back. Blizzard, just like most software companies, write software for the greater group, not the super hardcore contingent (which this guy obviously is) and will include a feature set that appeals to the broader base. I can guarantee that adding a LAN support mode is no trivial feat, and Blizzard isn’t going to be blackmailed into redeveloping the entire game this close to release by $15 per month.

Get a grip, sure, vote with your wallet, but drop the “screw you guys, I am going home” Cartman routine, it’s a game.

The interesting part is that we have all grown since high school, but not always in the ways we might expect. Many people I expected to stay close with for life, I was still close with without Facebook. Some people who I thought I would be friends with forever, I lost touch with way before Facebook, and instead of rekindling those friendships with this new connection, I only confirmed how trivial they were to start with.

The real interesting ones are some of the people I had little to no contact with. After high school, life swallowed us up, chewed on us awhile, spit us out, and we landed with common ground that connected personalities that we would have otherwise never found.

So what’s the moral here? I would say there isn’t much of one you can do anything with now. Take the chance to add those people you never thought you clicked with. Get involved and take an interest to see where everyone landed. Once you survey the landscape and figure out who is meaningful to you, drop the outliers. Build a clan, share your life and have fun.

The real value of Facebook to me is those interactions. I would wake up tomorrow a happy man if a virus ripped through Facebook over night and shredded all of the fan pages, the Mob Wars, faux-causes and quizzes. Those things are on a one way trip to ignore-ville for me anyway. But I still thank Facebook for helping me put some perspective on relationships that I have questioned for years, and helping me find new ones.

At first I thought it was possibly doing some color grouping like IE8 does with tabs. Then I noticed the colors matched! I am not sure what the algorithm is, but it looks like it takes the dominant color, and the glow is that color, slick.

That leads me to the topic of this article, attention to detail.

Windows 7 is Polished

Of course these little glows do little to add functional usability to the operating system, but the pop-up windows previews and aero-peek functionality they enable sure do.

Beyond the coolness of them, they are fast and unobtrusive as well. I find myself using them as a faster way to navigate tabs in Internet Explorer as well as to figure out where I am when using several spreadsheets at the same time in Excel.

What’s with all this Transparency?

I kind of thought the same thing too, that was until it came in really handy the other day. My friend Matt was messaging me with Google Chat via the GMail page, and I had no notification of new messages. At least I thought I didn’t. Then I saw the Page Title flashing through the transparent border of the application I was currently working in.

That adds another level of interest for me with transparencies, they allow me to keep a little more of a grasp of what is going on beneath them.

Of course a lot of this is just glitz and splash, but if you give Windows 7 a chance you will find there is a lot of really useful technology hiding all over the place, it may not be a single feature to knock your socks off, but the sum of the parts is one beautiful operating system.

If you aren’t running Windows 7 yet, I have two suggestions:

1. Download Windows 7 RC and upgrade today, it’s baked, it’s solid and it’s totally worth the upgrade.

2. Hit up Amazon or Best Buy and pre-order the upgrade. It’s cheap, $50 cheap for home premium, that’s over half off. Get it before July 11th or it’s going to cost you double.

I know I work for Microsoft, and that makes me seem biased, but try this on for size. I have a Macbook Pro, and I love it, but I recently bought a new PC laptop, installed Windows 7 before I ever booted the OS that came on it, and I use it probably 60% of the time at home.

What else is dead?

It seems to me that home stereos should be dead also. I am sure portable music systems (iPods) outsell component stereos by a much wider margin. I guess we should stop making those too. While we are at it, let’s cancel any remaining orders for landline telephone systems and stop making books too. I am guessing that you are probably already getting my point. There are always going to be portable versions of pretty much anything that we use. There will even be cases (like with laptops) that they are more practical, just as economical and outsell the non-portable variety by large margins. But dead?

What is a Niche anyway?

I am willing to bet that if I did a quick survey down the office here at Microsoft, I would come out in an overwhelming majority of people that would freak out if you took their desktops and made them work exclusively on laptops. Here multiple monitors, multiple hard drives, unusual rats nests of connected hard drives, web cameras, speakers, headsets, telephone systems (and that’s just my desk!) are the norm. The point is we USE our desktops. At home I have an audio recording rig that I would never want exclusively on a laptop. My wife is buying a monster desktop to edit video, put her back on a single cpu and she would smack your face off.

The same would go for most people who really productively use a computer. I don’t mean to belittle checking email, chatting and surfing (in private mode I hope) all the porn you can handle. But for graphic designers, analysts, developers, media producers and other hard core users who need fast processors, multiple monitors, and might actually want to be able to upgrade components from time to time, the desktop is still king.

Who said you had to be king of the largest kingdom?

If you are carrying a portable surveillance and tracking device, please turn it off. They have already tracked you here. They already know that you are listening to me, so there is no need for you to keep telling them that you are still here. And if they want to listen to what I am saying, we’re going to publish the video recording anyway. They don’t need to turn on your portable surveillance device to do it.

Wow! I always thought he was a bit self righteous and narcicistic, but he really things “they” (I am not sure who they are, this speech was being given in Europe so I doubt he is thinking CIA, FBI, etc.) are, but apparently he is important enough that he thinks some nefarious organization is keeping tabs on him, as well as everyone in attendance to try and get to him. Yikes.

With almost any software, there are multiple ways it can be used. To help us decide how well a feature fits in a particular product, many times we will develop a persona of who our target user is and how we think they might use our product.

What Exactly Is a Persona?

The almighty Wikipedia says:

Personas are fictitious characters created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic that might use a site or product. Personas are useful in considering the goals, desires and limitations of the users in order to help to guide decisions about a product, such as features, interactions, and visual design.

We deal with personas in my work life all the time, but as I deal with many amateur developers and web designers, I thought it might be valuable to share this technique and maybe get some feedback from readers that have their own unique perspective.

How Do You Build One

The obvious answer is first get to know your customers or users. Who are these people and what do they want and need to do? Watch people use your product. Learn the tendencies and habits of these people. A good place to start would be by reading The Inmates are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper. This book will explain the great detail of some of the ideas I will share next.

The basic concept is this, you imagine. Of course you can back your imagination up with statistics, usability studies and all manner of scientific data, but they key to creating them and using them is imagination. You have to be able to imagine using your product through they eyes of someone else. Someone that might have more limited knowledge or capabilities. Sometimes you might have to imagine someone with much more capability. (for example designing an SDK) The key is being able to suspend what you know, or what you think you know, and imagine your products and ideas through the eyes of who will potentially buy, use and hopefully love your software.

The Benefit

In our work place, the obvious benefit is it allows everyone on the team to know who we are talking about as a user when we say “Bob would definitely want to do this.” We speak of personas as people all of the time where I work. We have all studied and understood who the character is, so we are able to communicate with each other as if the person was a real user. The benefit is that the fake person IS a real person, or better yet in our case, millions of real persons.

Personas are particularly useful at diffusing disagreements about product designs. When you have a group of intelligent, strong willed people, who all believe passionately about what they are working on, sometimes passion overrides logic. Even when someone is very loyal to their particular design idea, it’s easy to explain the negatives through the use of a persona, hopefully without offending the person in the process.

More Practice (Scenarios)

Once you have established strong personas, the next step is to write compelling user scenarios through the eyes of your personas, but that’s a blog for another day.

More Reading:

Persona Development

Scenario Development

So I am just wondering, why is there no quality, safe place to get lyrics for the albums we are buying?

I want my stinking lyrics back. Why don’t we insist that the lyrics are packaged in the MP3 meta data, and that the players provide the UI to view them on the device. Seems pretty simple and obvious to me, duh.

Petition anyone?

My thumb is 20mm wide at the point it contacts the iPhone. The iPhone’s home button is roughly 11mm wide. That means my thumb is already twice the size of the button.The problem is that the trash icon in the email client on the iPhone is only 6mm from the home button.

To exacerbate the problem, the trash icon is directly in your thumb’s path to the home button. That means that unless you have very small and agile thumbs, there is a good chance that your thumb will lightly pass over the trash icon on the way to the home button if you immediately close the client while a mail is open, something I seem to do often.

If you find messages missing, check your trash, you probably did it yourself.

I guess money talks… BING!

The background, the top banner and the top right ad, woof