delackner

Phonebook > Search > List of ways to search, NONE of which is just "show me my phonebook".

Let's try name lookup > Enter a string to search for > Search results > Choose a result > Dial.

Let's try Group > List of Groups > First Group > Choose name > Dial

That's insane. It is like no one ever tried to make a phone call with their phone when designing it.

Don't get me started on the text editing screen. It is a modal text area that flips between movement within the whole text and movement within the single word you are editing. I love Vim, and I still hate this text entry method.

This whole topic has been covered many times before, but its roots are various and you could write a book on the subject of why most firms (both japanese and non) are just so horrible at consumer software interface design.

Some people suggest that it is just that the Japanese firms were only really good at hardware, but that rings false. I've seen a lot of really horribly designed Japanese computers and mobile phones before the iPhone came out, even just judging the hardware by itself on simplicity and reliability.

But this leaves the question: Do you expose yourself to the advertising? Which advertising? If you don't expose yourself to ANY advertising, how are you supposed to choose things when you are standing in the store with no phone reception and no 5 year failure data? You take a deep breath, relax, and just buy whichever one you respond most to.

How is a small upstart company supposed to establish a reputation for quality in such an environment? Does a reputation for quality actually indicate true quality?

If a luxury brand item fails every few months and you have to take it in for complementary repair/replacement, how do you end up feeling? I used to laugh at people who bought super high-end luxury goods that I know from data are made from cheap materials.

But the reality is that the high-end company stands behind their product and they replace it when it falls apart since with their fat margins they can easily replace the products that have problems. The customer ends up happy. If you buy a "best of breed" product from a tiny company with razor-thin margins, chances are they will be gone by the time you are struck by a need to seek their help.

This is really hard for me to internalize, given that for many classes of mechanical products the benefit of super-over-optimizing is that you end up with a purchase that lasts for maybe 10x as long, which helps us try to ignore the reality that for most purchases we over-optimize, all we end up with is having wasted hours of time and decision-making energy for little noticeable benefit.

[1]http://biopsychiatry.com/happiness/choice.html

""" Troubled by drugs discovered in European waters, poisons expert and biologist Francesco Pomati set up an experiment: He exposed developing human kidney cells to a mixture of 13 drugs at levels mimicking those found in Italian rivers.

There were drugs to fight high cholesterol and blood pressure, seizures and depression, pain and infection, and cancer, all in tiny amounts.

The result: The pharmaceutical blend slowed cell growth by up to a third suggesting that scant amounts may exert powerful effects, said Pomati, who works at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. """

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/there-are-drugs-...

Ever since Facetime came to the iPod Touch, I have used it routinely with my parents on the other side of an ocean, and it remains the only video solution I've seen that actually WORKS. Skype video and Fring video on the iphone are just horrifyingly bad in comparison, occasionally comically bad, with seconds per frame blobs of color that vaguely resemble heads). Facetime just works, with quality that matches the output when you record an HD video on the device.

Can't see more than the summary of the study you pasted, but it seems to suggest one single dose was tested per person. Wouldn't this maximise the sedative penalty?

Fun oddity after switching to SSD: If the laptop gets REALLY hot from long term summer usage, in the past I would just slap a cooling pad under it to get the fans to stay quiet. Now, the cooling pad somehow causes the SSD to freeze, so I have the cooling pad sitting only under the left half of the machine, and all is well.

Currently, even in a group of friends where we basically always split everything down the middle to keep it simple, not even having to do a split at all until a later, convenient time would be fantastic.

My current app hit #1 in a fairly major category (music) quite easily when we switched to free, but in the rest of the world it barely cracked into the top 50 before immediately sinking again, mostly because no one knows it exists. Still trying.

What you eat is inextricably linked to your body's proper functioning and, yes, risk for a variety of diseases.

Thinking just about calories is meaningless. A single calorie of glucose / fructose / fat / alcohol / gasoline are simply not at all the same. Even the same ingredients (those useless nutritional composition labels) affect the body totally differently depending on how they are structured.

1 gram of pureed corn for instance will burn very differently from 1 gram of steamed corn kernels, versus that same 1 gram, popped.

It is a massive failure of education that people are surprised to hear that eating poorly leads to increased risk of disease.

Arguing that diet has no effect on disease is like suggesting that you could just live on glucose, a multivitamin, and water. Try that for a week and your body will be in full-on war against you. Actually, please don't.

The only way the next really amazing app comes along that EVERYONE wants is for a seething ocean of developers churn through ideas fighting for users.