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Sunday, July 16, 2006 |
Feature Idea for computer software: Print Lock. There are a few documents I have that I never want to print. The most common reason is that the doc contains confidential information, and I don't want it going to a shared printer. The other reason is that the doc is WAY too long, and what I really mean to do is print a Selection (using the MS-Office Print Dialog term) from it.
This need suggests a feature idea to me, albeit one of tertiary importance, but then, all the MS-Office enhancements since Office 97 have been in that category. Here's how it could work.
To implement the Print Lock:
1. Select the Print Lock checkbox.
2. Optionally enter text that will be displayed when a user tries to print the document.
Behavior when a user tries to print the document:
1. System displays a dialog that says "Print Lock has been set on this document. [Optional text added, if any]."
2. Dialog includes buttons: OK, Print Anyway.
3. OK cancels the attempt to print.
4. Print Anyway proceeds to print.
2:00:05 PM 
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Monday, March 13, 2006 |
On our prior cordless phone, you toggled off of speakerphone mode by pressing the Talk key. That phone had a separate off key, I think.
Our cordless phone has a nice useability glitch. There is a big key on the left that says "TALK (end)"--in other words, and on/off toggle. Next to it is a key that says SPKR--to switch to speakerphone mode. So the question is--what do you do to turn off speakerphone mode? My intuition says: toggle the SPKR button. WRONG! That ends the conversation.
Like many useability glitches, the way you stumble into it involves a Murphy's law corrolary: the worse possible time. Just imagine--you make the dreaded call to customer service, and since "wait times are averaging 13 minutes", you turn on the speakerphone and lay the phone next to the keyboard. 13 minutes later, when the CSR starts to answer, you pick up the phone. Intending to put it in handset-mode, you press the SPKR key again, AND HANG UP!
As a tangent, this makes me realize that the IRV platform in general lacks any feature along the lines of "Warning--you are about to terminate your connection! Is this what you want to do?"
8:48:33 AM
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Monday, March 06, 2006 |
I've been using first NetFlix, then Blockbuster, for almost 3 years, to have DVDs delivered straight to my mailbox. For a fixed price, I get to have 3 movies out at a time. I typically try to balance this: 1 kids movie, 1 family movie, 1 grown-up movie. So as any remotely geeky reader will undoubtedly have already inferred, I am thinking that the "queue" functionality they provide could be improved to support this kind of requirement.
As things stand now, you get only 1 queue. You can re-arrange the priority of items within it, which directly translates to the order you receive them. So, if you are returning your family movie, but the next item in the queue is a grown-up movie, you can set a new order that makes a family movie the new #1, so that that will be the replacement you receive, thus keeping your "inventory" balanced.
I know they want/need to keep things simple, but wouldn't it be nice if they offered an advanced option for multiple queues, a number corresponding to the number of movies your plan lets you have out at one time (3 in my case)? That would automatically keep your inventory in balance.
UPDATE: My friend Gim says that NetFlix does have this feature.
10:24:05 AM
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Saturday, December 10, 2005 |
There are several apps (email, X1 text indexing, browsers) that I pretty much want loaded every time I start my PC. However, this can get very annoying when you are doing some kind of troubleshooting, or just in a great hurry. I think a cool--admittedly in the merely nice-to-have category--feature would be to be able to configure an app to load 10 minutes after startup.
7:31:57 PM
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Monday, May 02, 2005 |
I'm occasionally seeing sites restrict the "printer friendly" versions of their pages to subscribers. Another idea--which came to me because I thought a site was doing it, though they turned out not to be--would be to stream the printer-friendly version directly to the printer. I.e., when you click the "CLICK HERE TO PRINT" button, instead of rendering the printer-friendly version in a browser window, with the simple, graphic-free printable layout, it would just be materialized and sent straight to the printer.
The point in doing so would be to deny you the benefit of a clean version to link to, or for cut-and-paste emailing.
6:46:02 AM
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Tuesday, January 18, 2005 |
Windows doesn't put network file in the Recycle bin (i.e., you can't un-delete them if you delete them by accident). I guess I understand that--the logic would be that you can always have the admins retrieve it from backup if you need it.
But it really makes it a pain if you THINK a file, of indeterminate name, MAY have been deleted from your network drive. Because there is no way to browse the Recycled bin for it. It would be nice if a shortcut to it, or something like that, were deposited in the Recycled bin for deleted network files.
2:55:18 PM
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Wednesday, December 01, 2004 |
WAAAY back, before Outlook killed it, I used to a really cool PIM called Ecco. It was very innovative, if quirky. It was a pioneer in the PIM category (now hardly even considered a category, it so dominated by Outlook).
This was before the advent of the PC-oriented PDA (not counting the abortive Newton), but it still had the concept of synchronization, because they recognized you might have data on multiple computers (work and home, for instance--laptops were less common back then, too). Anyway, it also had a really nice feature, which allowed you to configure whether alarms were to be active on a given computer. I would really like that for my PDA, so I could turn off the utterly superfluous alarms that I have to work through while my PDA is sitting in its cradle on my desk at work.
4:41:15 PM
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Saturday, October 30, 2004 |
I have another idea for a VSS feature: a document library utility. At initial check-in, I would like every document to get a unique number, and be able to categorize it, upon check in. Also need document owner, and a brief description of document purpose. And probably status. For example:
# Type Owner Status Purpose
100 UseCase Smith Active blah, blah...
101 UseCase Jones Active blah2, blah2...
104 UI Mockup Simon Active blah3, blah3...
9:11:32 PM
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Sunday, April 25, 2004 |
Since getting my FZ10, I have become addicted to burst mode. The problem is, now I have SO many more photos to wade through (4-7 for every click of the shutter). In theory, I would
quickly eyeball the set, select the one I like, and discard the rest.
There are two problems. One, the software I have is somewhat slow to switch between pictures. The bigger problem, though, is that I would like to be able to look at the set side-by-side on my big monitor. So I would like software that lets me specify a number of pictures to show tiled (4, 6, etc), and then renders them very quickly, and also lets me flag the ones I like very quickly, and efficiently delete the rest.
The key here is FAST. Of course, thumbnails won't do, I am trying to make subtle distinctions beween shots, I need the full resolution. I have plenty of RAM to dedicate to the process. I would even be okay if I had to pre-select the photos, then wait a few minutes for a caching process to run.
I use PhotoTools iMatch for image categorization, and love it, but it is on the slow side. I am also a Photoshop newbie, but I don't think it has exactly this kind of feature.
Fotana almost seems to fit the bill. It is VERY fast. But it doesn't AUTOMATICALLY create the 4x, 6x, etc side-by-side views I crave.
11:25:01 AM
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Friday, April 09, 2004 |
I am one for having LOTS of browser instances open at once. I might be in the midst of some kind of research that I have to set aside while moving to some other task, but that I want to come back to later in the day. I would like to be able to mark a browser session as protected, which would prevent the browser screen from being closed or re-used (yes, I already have the "re-use browser sessions for shortcuts" advanced option turned off).
My analogy is like protecting selected pictures on a digital camera (any protected images can not be deleted until protection is turned off). I haven't thought deeply about some of the details...besides preventing re-use by shortcuts (for those who have that feature enabled), and preventing "x-ing out", would protection do more? Would it prevent script elements on the page from changing the screen (i.e., what happens if I click a link?)? Maybe it could cause those to spawn a new browser session.
A really nice refinement of this feature would be to remember the URL even upon a re-boot, and resume the browser session (where possible, it will obviously fail when the session is stateful).
11:13:04 AM
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Saturday, January 24, 2004 |
When I do a route plan with MS Streets & Trips, 98% of the time, I print it and have no need to save it. But of course, every time I plot a route then quit the program, it has to ask me if I want to save. It would be neat if it could have a configuration setting not to prompt the user to save, but to auto-save the last three maps. So if you do quit and did want to save, you could recover. Hmmm, seems like this functionality might be generally useful, sort of like the autosaved recover versions of files you get in the MS Office products.
11:21:39 PM
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Wednesday, January 07, 2004 |
I was looking for a particular Dilbert I remembered, but couldn't find it, not on the www.Dilbert.com site, nor elsewhere on the web, although I remembered enough words from it that I could pretty reliably have searched out the right one, had the strips all been text-indexed. The best I could do was to find a random website that recounted, textually, the Dilbert I had in mind. This experience made me think of an idea for the Dilbert website. The text of each strip should be indexed and searchable. So, to the extent you accurately remembered the text of a Dilbert, you could be fairly confident you had found the right one, based on the text-only search results. Then, just like the archives for the New York Times and other on-line publications, you would have to pay to get the full content--in this case, the illustrated comic strip. Of course it would have to be cheap, $1 per strip at the most. (Ideally, the text might be augmented with keywords to aid in searching. For instance, perhaps there is a strip where Wally gets fired, but it doesn't actually contain the text "fired". If "fired" were added as a keyword, then a search for "Wally" + "fired" would stand a decent change of returning the strip in question.)
1:33:14 PM
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Tuesday, December 30, 2003 |
All-too-frequently, I will enter an Outlook appointment for the wrong date. Most often, it will be the right date for the wrong month. This usually happens because I left my calendar "open" to some future month. I think there is an easy useability improvement that would help save me from this careless error: color-coding each month. So, if I were used to looking at December's dark blue background, and went to enter in January an appointment meant for December, I would immediately notice January's bright green background, before I could follow-through on my error. My second most common form of this error is to enter an appointment for the right day of the wrong week. A similar solution here would be to have a background pattern of some sort (think cross-hatching schemes, though I'm sure the graphic artists at MS could do much better than that) to denote the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th weeks of each month.
10:12:01 AM
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Saturday, November 22, 2003 |
I have an idea for a weblogging-tool feature that could help mitigate the problem of linkrot, both the intentional kind and the unintentional kind. When I post to my weblog, for each link in my post, my weblogging tool should do the following: 1) Traverse the link. 2) Copy all text on the resulting page. 3) Store said copied text “under the covers” somewhere (call this “SourceNotes”). That way, when linkrot sets in (and is discovered), I have some options. First of all, I can consult the SourceNotes, and maybe that will give me a strategy for searching, finding and re-linking the item of interest. Second, copyright be damned, I can choose to post the full-text of the linkrotted source, myself. Of course there are all sorts of considerations for fine-tuning: configurability, limiting the length of copied text, perhaps having an interactive mode (specify what you want copied). But this gives the basic idea.
5:34:46 PM
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© Copyright 2006 Erik Neu.
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