Early criticisms point out the store’s paltry selection, slow performance and sign-in errors, disappearing apps and a less-than-intuitive UI. Nokia blamed the store’s unresponsiveness on unusually high traffic and did its best to address the problem, but even those efforts by its own admission resulted in only “intermittent performance improvements.”

[Ovi, Nokias New App Store, Off to Rocky Start | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD]

That reminded me of a nice post from 37signals. Nokia, like Blackberry and Microsoft obviously copied Apple’s App. Store and that’s a problem. When copying you skip understanding, and understanding is how you make progress. When you copy, you don’t understand how or why something is how it is. Instead, you simply “repurpose the last layer instead of understanding all the layers underneath.”

My other big gripe is content, the lack of quality content deters me from ever entering Ovi. Who was given the SDK to develop new apps for Ovi? Here’s a list of the top most downloaded Apps in the App Store from July 10th, 2008 (when the store just opened) compared to the Ovi store.

Honestly, if a Star Trek ringtone is the best thing your store has to offer, I won’t be coming in any time soon. On top of all that, the store is hard to navigate, difficult to log into, and slow. Nokia, do you actually expect anyone to go there? Give me Pandora, a good Twitter app, and make it easy to work with, then I’ll swing by.

An innocent man died after being pushed to the pavement by a police officer and it was caught on civilian camera , a perfect example of crowdsourcing (CCTV, the “Big Brother” surveillance system was experiencing “technical issues” at the time). This horrific sequence of events strangely reminds me of Rodney King.

“Surveillance is still talked of as something done to us by them, but increasingly it’s something done to everyone by everyone else. What that means for the authorities is that they can no longer control the flow of information about their actions.” -Holden Frith, Wired.co.uk Editor

Cory Doctrow’s wrote a book called Little Brother, it’s about a modern-day technologist who proves that individuals can level the playing field against agents of the state by using their own understanding of digital tools to subvert and confront them. It’s available for free, published through a creative commons license, and available here. I can’t wait to pick it up on Amazon.

[Wired Blog: Little Brother Is Watching You]

This routine provides a password to unprotect your worksheet. However, it may not give you the original password that was used.

• Open the workbook that has the protected sheet in it. Hit Alt+F11 to view the Visual Basic Editor. Hit Insert-Module and paste this code into the right-hand code window:

Sub PasswordBreaker()
 'Author unknown but submitted by brettdj of www.experts-exchange.com

 Dim i As Integer, j As Integer, k As Integer
 Dim l As Integer, m As Integer, n As Integer
 Dim i1 As Integer, i2 As Integer, i3 As Integer
 Dim i4 As Integer, i5 As Integer, i6 As Integer
 On Error Resume Next
 For i = 65 To 66: For j = 65 To 66: For k = 65 To 66
 For l = 65 To 66: For m = 65 To 66: For i1 = 65 To 66
 For i2 = 65 To 66: For i3 = 65 To 66: For i4 = 65 To 66
 For i5 = 65 To 66: For i6 = 65 To 66: For n = 32 To 126

 ActiveSheet.Unprotect Chr(i) & Chr(j) & Chr(k) & _
 Chr(l) & Chr(m) & Chr(i1) & Chr(i2) & Chr(i3) & _
 Chr(i4) & Chr(i5) & Chr(i6) & Chr(n)
 If ActiveSheet.ProtectContents = False Then
 MsgBox "One usable password is " & Chr(i) & Chr(j) & _
 Chr(k) & Chr(l) & Chr(m) & Chr(i1) & Chr(i2) & _
 Chr(i3) & Chr(i4) & Chr(i5) & Chr(i6) & Chr(n)
 ActiveWorkbook.Sheets(1).Select
 Range("a1").FormulaR1C1 = Chr(i) & Chr(j) & _
 Chr(k) & Chr(l) & Chr(m) & Chr(i1) & Chr(i2) & _
 Chr(i3) & Chr(i4) & Chr(i5) & Chr(i6) & Chr(n)
 Exit Sub
 End If
 Next: Next: Next: Next: Next: Next
 Next: Next: Next: Next: Next: Next

End Sub

• Close the VB Editor window. Navigate to the worksheet you want to unprotect. Hit Tools-Macro-Macros and double-click PasswordBreaker in the list.

Original tutorial can found at The Office Experts Sample VBA.

Now before I open up this can of worms, people each have their preference, and we can argue for days about which one is better. Personally, I like the way the OS X looks. GDI++, a Japanese application, does just that. It takes just about 5mb of memory and sits in your task tray, rendering everything on your system in GDI++ instead of ClearType (the typical windows font rendering tool). And when you disable it, it just puts everything back to the way it was. It’s really easy to activate, and gets rid of jaggy fonts. Below is a before and after screenshot taken of craigslist with and without GDI++ enabled:

Before

After

Here are some instructions on how to get this working on your computer:

1. Download GDI++.
2. Extract this ZIP file in any directory, for example:
   C:\gdi
3. Double-click the file:
   gditray.exe
4. Now, your task bar you can note a “G”, like the image:
   
5. Double-click it, it should start glowing green:
   
6. Enjoy this beautiful font-smoothing.

Originally found at Estevao Mascarenhas.

Instead, we should be talking to the creator of the page directly and having them remove or modify the content of the page all-together, it will remove the results from not only Google and Yahoo, but everywhere else you haven’t thought of.

We’re signing legislation like the Internet Safety Act that prevents people from accessing the internet anonymously. Supposedly this is going to stop sex offenders and help the police catch them. Instead, it’s going to do more harm than good, completely eradicating available and open WiFi in places like Starbucks and your favorite sports bar.

We also take them off Facebook and Myspace. Instead, we should be figuring out a way to stop them from making sexual advances towards kids all together. Facebook has removed 5,585 sex offenders from their site since May of last year. Great, the only reason we’re doing this is because it’s measurable and easy to enact. This quote made me really think about us concentrating on the things we fear, instead of real problems:

“Why are we so obsessed with the registered sex offender side of the puzzle when the troubled kids are right in front of us? Why are we so obsessed with the Internet side of the puzzle when so many more kids are abused in their own homes? I feel like this whole conversation has turned into a distraction. Money and time is being spent focusing on the things that people fear rather than the very real and known risks that kids face. This breaks my heart.”
[Boing Boing: Internet not full of pedos, the statistical edition]

Last week, I wrote about doctors making patients sign EULAs that disallow them to give feedback on the services they received on review sites like RateMDs.com. Another instance of not concentrating on the real problem, but simply being afraid of losing clients due to poor service. Why doesn’t Apple make people sign EULAs to not review their products? That’s because they try to make great products which customers will review positively. We need to figure out how to make these tools work for us, instead of trying to fight them.

“They’re basically forcing the patients to choose between health care and their First Amendment rights, and I really find that repulsive,” Swapceinski said.
[Docs seek gag orders to stop patients' reviews (AP)]

Luckily they will never be able to stop posting on the Internet and put “out of court settlement” into extinction. This is simply silly legislature, and the doctors that are complaining are clearly the bad ones. How about this suggestion: improve your practice so the reviews you get on the sites and blogs are good, then use that to sell yourself.

There are a lot of reasons why WebKit is used in so many applications. From Apple’s Safari—the default browser on the Mac and iPhone), Google’s Chrome—their flagship browser on both Windows and Android mobile platform, and Palm Pre’s Web OS operating system, WebKit has proven to be widely accepted amongst the giants of the industry. Even KDE and Nokia’s S60 use WebKit and this is one of the biggest reasons why:

Performance is a top priority for WebKit. We adhere to a simple directive for all work we do on WebKit.

The way to make a program faster is to never let it get slower.

We have a zero-tolerance policy for performance regressions. If a patch lands that regresses performance according to our benchmarks, then the person responsible must either back the patch out of the tree or drop everything immediately and fix the regression.

Common excuses people give when they regress performance are, “But the new way is cleaner!” or “The new way is more correct.” We don’t care. No performance regressions are allowed, regardless of the reason. There is no justification for regressing performance. None.

[The WebKit Open Source Project - Performance]

Think about that quote when designing anything. Performance is the most important thing you can get out of your application, so make it a priority. If your code looks cleaner or better but is slower, you’re just fooling yourself. Never accept a decrease in performance and you’ll be as successful as WebKit.

To do that, I have to first turn on the TV using one remote, then the cable box with another, then the sound system with the third. Eventually when all my devices come on and I can hear that screachy kid on American Idol loud and clear, I’ve forgotten how to switch the channel. I look down only to see about 50 tiny buttons, none of which point me in the right direction.

That reminded me of a post I saw on Gizmodo today. I think that manufacturers need to pay a bit more attention to simplicity. If I only use 10 buttons on a remote frequently, make them large and easy to use, the rest you can hide behind a bezel or put them in a less-convenient place.

Value the importance of using less to accomplish more. If you can combine the play, pause, and select buttons into just one, do so. Why do we still have seperate buttons for fast forwarding and skipping to the next chapter? Press the button to go to the next chapter, and hold it to fast forward. For example, here’s the remote for an Apple TV:

But here’s the catch: Most of the time, we do almost nothing. Our most common tasks—email, Web surfing, watching streamed videos—require very little processing power. Only a few people, like graphic designers and hardcore gamers, actually need heavy-duty hardware. For years now, without anyone really noticing, the PC industry has functioned like a car company selling SUVs: It pushed absurdly powerful machines because the profit margins were high, while customers lapped up the fantasy that they could go off-roading, even though they never did. So coders took advantage of that surplus power to write ever-bulkier applications and operating systems.

[The Netbook Effect: How Cheap Little Laptops Hit the Big Time]

Over is the time of “bigger is better”, welcome to the era of efficiency. I love how the author relates fast laptops to SUVs, and I think it makes sense. When fuel prices in the United States were on the rise, people started buying more efficient vehicles that better suited their real-world uses. With the recession in full swing, we’re seeing the same idea trickle down to consumer goods. This is a large leap in understanding the beauty of small and simple.

I just discovered a nifty application in Google Labs, it’s called Google Sets. It basically finds anything synonymous to the things you enter. I never though about it before, but if you enter three or four artists you like, it’ll recommend some similar ones. I found some great music this way, you should try it! Google Sets.