Electronic Mail
Writing an email has certain disadvantages as compared to speaking directly to the other person. For one thing, given the various interpretations possible for every written statement, it is necessary to always sound polite and positive, avoiding many of the terms and phrases used in common speech.
Secondly, it’s slow. Once an informal email is sent, a reply after a few days is common and accepted. I often reply immediately to emails during an electronic conversation, but this kind of prompt reply actually irritates many people because, having replied to an email and completing a chore, it is once again their turn to reply!
April 20th, 2006 at 07:56
Aah! You are back on your blog…i thought even you had got bored with the blogging!
April 20th, 2006 at 08:36
No, I haven’t gotten bored with blogging. It’s just that I’m finally done with a humongous Software Engineering project — a product that we named Olive. You can find screenshots of the pre-release alpha version at http://junkland.n3rds.net/pages/olive.html
April 21st, 2006 at 01:21
“focusing on the need to provide an enhanced user-experience”
In what way does Olive enhance UX?
April 21st, 2006 at 04:29
I like Olive’s look.
What does it do? What are its features?
April 21st, 2006 at 05:26
Looks like you’re going to make me go through SEN talk all over again.
The idea was to let the user do a whole bunch of activities quickly and easily. These activities include things like blogging, image-posting, maintaining social calendars, checking email and so on, mostly services that are provided by online service-providers. If the user participates in such activities, then this application should be able to provide quick access to them by residing in the system-tray.
When you talk about user-experience, it involves a number of factors, some that are obvious and some that are subtle yet important. There has to be a balance between customizability and standardization, because customizability means the application is more difficult to use, whereas standardization means that the application is uninteresting. From the user’s perspective, the factors that actually qualify Olive as an application that “enhances user experience” are:
(1) Ease of use — The interface is standardized where standards are expected. Examples of this are the button layout (‘Publish’, ‘Save’, ‘Cut’ , ‘Copy’ etc.) Where non-standard items are introduced (the fancy buttons on top), there are only a few, in order to reduce clutter and confusion.
(2) Flexibility — The software is not rigid in the way it functions. Sidebar items can be added and removed as required. The tabs that are visible (the blogging tab, photoblogging tab and the browser) can be undocked and resized if desired and used independently.
(3) Minimize user-interaction — The philosophy of design here is that the user should not be asked unnecessary questions. Most of the time, the application resides in the system tray silently.
(4) Connect related activities — Certain features in the software are geared towards connecting or linking up different tasks. For instance, the browser has buttons to add the current page to the favourites list (del.icio.us) and to “blog” the current page. In the image-editor I can load an existing picture, modify it and publish it, without having to open up a different application.
(5) Extending the current setup — The architecture of the software is plugin-based. For instance, blogging using the Blogger and MetaWeblog APIs is possible because there are plugins for each type of implementation. More APIs can be supported directly, by writing a plugin that implements a specific interface. This architecture applies to blogging (Blogger, MetaWeblog etc.), photoblogging (Flickr etc.), calendar (upcoming.org), email (POP3 etc.), bookmarks (del.icio.us) and newsfeeds (RSS 0.9, RSS 2.0, Atom etc.). From the user’s point of view, this means that tomorrow someone could write a plugin for a new service, and all he has to do is download the DLL and drop it into the plugins folder, and the software will do the rest.
This is pretty much what I was referring to when I said “enhanced user-experience”.
April 21st, 2006 at 05:32
Check out -
http://junkland.n3rds.net/uploads/Software_Requirement_Specification.pdf
April 21st, 2006 at 08:32
looks great! no wonder you’ve been busy