Sat 1 Sep 2007
In honor of America’s Independence Day, movie fan site Ain’t it Cool News hosted a “Top 10 Films about America” get-together for all their writers. Here are my picks (in no particular order):
Sat 1 Sep 2007
Ryan Stewart (great blogger and Adobe evangelist) recently blogged about his trouble with Google Reader:
I just screwed up. I accidentally marked all of my Google reader items as read when what I intended to do was mark a specific folder as read. If this was a desktop application I could hit undo and I’d back up, have all of my data the way I want it, and be ready to read all of the delicious feeds I’ve been missing this week. But Google Reader is a web application, so I can’t do that, I’m just SOL.
This is actually just a problem with Google Reader, and not with web apps in general. In fact, many of Google’s applications make wonderful use of Undo. I was alerted to this fact by a talk that Aza Raskin (the late Jeff Raskin’s son) gave at Google, called the Death of the Desktop. He talks about “Are you sure” messages and why they were so problematic. Raskin explains what we all know instinctively, that when you have initiated a task any message that is trying to warn you away is going to be ignored as you are trying to complete your task. Over time we begin to develop muscle memory to just click OK. What works much better is realize that it is only after you have completed your task that you then may want to not have done it in the first place. This is why Gmail’s status messages that double as Undo controls work so well. Just selected 20 messages and marked them as junk? Gmail gives you the option to Undo. Just changed the labels on your work messages from “work” to “from mom?” Gmail lets you undo. As Raskin points out, though, some other Google apps need to get on board this train as well (he uses Calendar, Stewart is frustrated with Reader). For my money, this is how web apps should work, at least whenever they can. Anyone know what technical limitations on this feature might be?