My recent free time has found me cleaning, organizing, and tackling projects that have been on the back burner for far too long. Top on that last list: Cataloging and posting my pictures from my trip to Spain with Shipra last September.

Even though it’s old news by now, some of the pictures are pretty cool. Even if you saw them on my iPod, I’ve added commentary and interesting facts, so you should take another look. You can browse my entire Flickr stream if you want; after the jump, I go through some of the highlights.

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It’s been a while since my last update, but some pretty substantial stuff has been going on in the interim. First and foremost, I’m changing things up professionally (again): Starting the day after Memorial Day, I’ll be returning to Microsoft’s Developer Division to continue my usability research work.

It was a tough, but exciting, decision to make. Following along with this year’s MIX Conference clinched it for me; I realized how much fun DevDiv was having without me! Plus, you really can’t beat Ux team at DevDiv, and while being the lone soldier had a lot of benefits, it will be nice to be back with that team, doing what I love to do.

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This will likely be fixed in no time, but the irony was too much to ignore.

Jakob Nielsen released his Alertbox just a few moments ago, implying in the summary that, of all the bad design decisions a company can make, those around content are the most costly:

Bad content, bad links, bad navigation, bad category pages… which is worst for business? In these examples, bad content takes the prize for costing the company the most money.

Intrigued, I followed the link, only to find this:

So not being able to even see the content… does that fall anywhere near the “bad content” end of the spectrum?

A bit of investigation reveals that the entire Alertbox subdomain is somehow restricted in its access. Hopefully this issue isn’t too costly for him.

I so called this one.

So I’m walking out the door today, and as I go to turn off the TV, I see the e*Trade talking baby commercial. Just before I turn it off, I heard something that didn’t jive with what I had heard the 10 times I added the video to my last blog post (yes, I obsess at times).

I step back and play the commercial again, and sure enough: eTrade is now advertising savings accounts that earn six times the national average – down from their initial claim 8x. It turns out that the national average isn’t actually falling; eTrade just couldn’t sustain their initial promise. There aren’t any online videos with this updated version yet, but I’ll be keeping an eye out.

This makes me even less likely to sign up for an account with them. In two more months, will it be four times the national average? Or perhaps they’ll aim for the top of the bell curve. Either way, it won’t be with my money.

Yes, I know it’s been a couple weeks. It’s actually been a big couple of weeks, but more on recent developments coming soon. In the meantime, my 12 half-written blog posts were giving me the evil eye, so yet again, I’ve returned to my neglected blog.

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In general, I’m not a fan of wikis. I appreciate them as a collaboration tool, but I think their usability leaves something to be desired. However, six months ago, I decided that I needed a place online to keep notes, elaborate on ideas, and keep track of to do lists on my various side projects. A wiki was an obvious choice, so I set out on trying to find a choice that was at least semi-usable.

I stumbled upon Stikipad, and I was impressed. The design was simple, the markup commands easily accessible, and it didn’t require any complicated setup. From that day six months ago, if anyone asked me about setting up a wiki, I recommended Stikipad as the most usable alternative.

Yesterday, I was distraught to find that I couldn’t access my wiki. Every time I tried to sign in, I was redirected back to the sign in page. No errors – my password was correct – it just wouldn’t pull up my account!

Once I learned it was happening to a friend also, I decided to check out their help page to see if there was anything about this issue. The page is, itself, a wiki, and it turns out it was edited 15 days ago; likely, with that bold message at the top (posted here in case Stikipad comes to their senses):

Conclusion? Stikipad must be dead. I can’t imagine a legitimate business functioning for two weeks with such an inflammatory message on the landing page of its help site.

Really, it’s a shame. I thought Stikipad had a lot of potential. I guess it goes to show the extreme importance on having bulletproof customer service when you’re in the web industry (especially if you’re asking people to pay you): It seems like customers will put up with occasional bugs, as long as the company is responsive. But dropping off the radar entirely is simply unforgivable.

At the end of my review of Spaces yesterday, I mentioned an article over at 37signals. Like me, David identified the need to open separate application windows on different spaces, without being torn from one space to another.

I followed his link to Mac OS X hints, and adjusted the Dock accordingly. But even with that fix, I ended up being so frustrated that I turned off Spaces all together last night. Why? Because the “fix” ended up breaking Alt+Tab.

I still maintain that the best way for Spaces to be effective is to maintain truly separate Desktops; including, separate files on each Desktop, separate Docks for each Desktop, etc. However, that isn’t how Spaces operates today. Accepting this fact, I still find myself determined to reap the potential productivity benefits.

After the jump, I discuss why I’m obsessed with Alt+Tab, how Spaces is breaking Alt+Tab, and how I’m using Mozilla Prism to make Spaces meet my needs a little bit better.

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I’ve been excited about the prospect of Spaces for quite some time. Perfect for someone who wants to multi-task: I can have one space for email and chatting, another for blogging and photos, and still another (or two or three) for side projects. Brilliant!

In some cases, applications will be nicely confined to one space. IM clients, for example: I will only chat in one space to prevent from being distracted in others.

Web browsers are another story. I need them everywhere. For email. For blogging. For arranging photos on Flickr. For researching that tricky programming issue that has me pulling my hair out. But I don’t want email on my programming space. That’s the point of separating it out – I don’t want to be distracted by something that isn’t contributing to the task on that space.

So let’s take a simple scenario, and explore how Spaces supports it.

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OK this incident was just freaky. Whilst I’m freaking out and asking Julian to help me recover my iTunes library, I was noticing that none of my IM emoticons were showing up. Instead, I just got the standard Apple “I don’t know what this image is” question mark:

Perplexed, I decided to go into the Preferences menu and see if I could sort something out. And then I was really perplexed. My Preferences menu looked like it had died during the upgrade:

If you run into this, simply trash the current version of Adium and reinstall it. In my case, the preferences remained intact, so reinstalling fixed all my problems without any additional setup work required.

Anyway, this will be the last Leopard Chronicle about an application hiccup. I just couldn’t resist showing off that Preferences window, since it freaked me right out.

Shame on me for believing Apple when they say that their new Leopard OS “works with the software and accessories you already have.” I’ve already mentioned that Leopard didn’t play so nicely with Safari. It turns out that it doesn’t play well with iTunes either.

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