Good suggestions from Marco Arment, founder of Instapaper.

This morning I just made the observation that, as far as I can tell, every coffee station here at the office seems to have a pair of scissors — since the coffee packets are so difficult to open!

Somebody better tell Peet’s that coffee packets have users too! I’m sure if it was a financially viable option, and if they made a commercial-grade machine, companies might just switch to Keurig over it.

Mockapp.com has created both Keynote and PowerPoint templates of iPhone UI elements, and has made them available as free downloads. Say you had a dream in the middle of the night about the most awesome iPhone app that, to your surprise, no one has thought of yet. Instead of waking up in a deep sweat and scribbling said ideas on paper, you could dream them up on Keynote.

After mapping out your concept on Keynote, you could then pitch it to others in a Keynote presentation. The Keynote and PowerPoint templates include alerts, the iPhone keyboard, arrow icons, buttons, as well as a host of other UI elements.

Run a javascript function after UpdatePanel.Update() – ASP.NET Forums:

…

You should call the method in this way:

ScriptManager.RegisterStartupScript(this.Page, this.GetType(), “MyScriptName”, “<script type=’text/javascript’>functionToCall(‘hello world’);</script>”, false);

The problem could be the fact that you are using this instead of this.Page. Also instead language=’javascript’ you can use type=’text/javascript’.

All I know is that when I launched the script properly passing this.Page it worked properly. I had derived from Page to a custom base page, so maybe that had something to do with it.

Additionally, I refined it just a bit by building the script dynamically in a string and then passing that instead of just a literal in the static method call.

One more improvement I was considering is to embed this as a method on my aforementioned customized base page. Then i can just pass a name and the script to the method, and I won’t have to worry about the messy details every time.

Every time I log into one of my online banking systems, I get a message like the following:

This is just intrusive and rude behavior (as Alan Cooper might say). First of all, the message first off tells me when the last unsuccessful attempt was made to access the account… HUH??? Then it tries to be helpful and tell me when the last successful attempt was made.

It just makes no sense at all to me why this message exists at all. Why would I ever care about these particular statistics, and even if I did care about them, is it really necessary to pop up a message box every time I log in???

I vote no.

Fine. If you want to have that information accessible, provide a log of all accesses tucked away in my account settings or somewhere I can get to if I think I have a security concern. Don’t show this message to me, please. What this message boils down to is a debug-ish message in the clothing of security (I could be wrong, but that’s what it smells like to me).

Interestingly, as a side note, I happen to know that this system is from a company that is now owned by Intuit (my former stomping ground), and in the two or more years since that acquisition, this message box has surprisingly still not disappeared.

Is it just me or is that a ludicrous choice? Why not a space (my preference – a la delicious) or a comma?

In addition, there is no example visible to show you what the legal delimiter is! You have to miraculously divine what it wants, or let it show you what it wants, as I chose to do.

To find out what the delimiter is, I had to do the following:

1. Open the “Select Tags…” dialog.
2. Select two (short) tags. (I notice lots of other folks thought that a space would be a logical delimiter too…!)
3. Close the dialog.
4. Oops. Closing the dialog didn’t populate the text box with my selections. Awesome.
5. Trying again… Open the “Select Tags…” dialog.
6. Select two (short) tags, this time at the end of the list where I notice OK and Cancel buttons (yes – you heard that right. The buttons are embedded in the list itself… and at the bottom of the list, no less! They’re not on the dialog “window.”)
7. Click OK.
8. Observe that text box has the new selections delimited by semicolons.

The auto-populating text box is another usability nightmare deserving of its own article, but I’ll let someone else write that one up. ;)

However that has now changed. I went in this morning and lo and behold… the “Would you like to connect to ‘Nissan Customer’” message appears when I opened up my laptop (expecting dead air)!

So this is great news, and they have yet again proved their superiority in my opinion – from the usability in their cars to the usability now in their lobby!