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It seems there’s finally a way to integrate Thunderbird/Sunbird/Lightning (the Mozilla Calendar project) with Google Calendar in both directions, using the Provider plugin. There’s a great tutorial on it here that worked perfectly for me.

The Calendar project (Lightning) still has a ways to go before it can compete with Google Calendar in usability and user interface quality—a canonical example might be the “Add task” pane, which scared me to death when I opened it…

It’s a generic form interface of course, but man is it cluttered and complex. Adding a task is usually needs only one line of text—“File my taxes by April 16th” (a reminder for all you Americans ;-), or “Go to the store and get milk.”

Less often you add a deadline or date, and even that could be extracted from one line of text, making the interface both simple and powerful. Google does this for adding calendar events and it works marvelously.

Rarely do I complexify my tasks beyond that, so I don’t want to always be forced to look through all these options! Even clicking the “<< Less” button (you might have noticed) leaves all the fields above the description box, and the dual date fields are enough opportunity for confusion.

Obviously there’s a lot of power once an interface like this is learned, but I believe it’s possible to keep all the power of a complex interface while simplifying it following principles of good interface design. On this screen, if the title field was larger than the rest and bolded to signify it’s the most important bit of information, I would be much happier, as my eye would be led to where it needs to go most often and for the best reason. Suddenly the purpose of the interface becomes obvious, all the secondary options get a secondary appearance and thought, and it becomes much less confusing. Simple. And there are dozens more simplifications and improvements that could be made to every interface that looks like this.

I only care now because the Google Calendar link means I’ll be trying to use Thunderbird/Lightning for my main calendar now, so the interface better be on the same level or I’m going back to the web!

Any thoughts? What would you do to this screen?

This should get an award for the best user interface ever devised for a microwave. I mean, look at it: it’s a dial. It’s accurate, obvious, intuitive, usable in a single motion, looks like a clock (our standard mental model of time), and it’s really friggin’ simple.

Why in God’s name did they ever switch to numbers? Someone in the home appliance industry please read this and bring the dial back to the microwaves of the world. People will think it’s genius and they’ll buy your microwaves, I promise.

It really is better, in case you’re skeptical. It is so easy just to turn the dial, there’s nothing to think about. Want to add more time? Just turn the dial more. It makes so much sense it scares me sometimes.

Okay, everyone’s going to be talking about flock, but I’m jotting my thoughts down from my initial ten minutes of playing around with it.

First, love the blog integration, but how useful is it going to be to anyone except us early adopters and bloggers? Oh, wait, everyone blogs these days.

Second, pretty rough around the edges (some interface quirks here and there). It’s a beta, I’ll let it slide.

Third, I’m stuck with flickr?? Sorry, I want zenphoto integration. As a side note, how much did flickr pay flock? And del.icio.us?

Fourth, the favorites look good, but I haven’t used them enough to be useful.

Fifth, it seems too fake, and what I mean by that is Web 2.0 is arrogant, why can’t you realize that? It’s a “we’re better than everyone else and we know it” feel. It’s like
saying you’re cool because you hang out with the cool people. Let’s get real, folks. The web is not high school.

So screw the hyped apps, let’s have some real integration. I really want to see a browser so flexible that it exposes this kind of functionality with almost any web app, not just the cool kids—flickr, technorati and del.icio.us. Which leaves me wondering, should all this be in a browser anyway? Aren’t I limiting myself an awful lot here?

So I’m wondering if they got the whole idea wrong from the beginning. I’d feel awfully sorry for them if they did, so I’ll give it a chance and see if it does anything for me. After all, I do like this blog manager.

Update: Joel gets it too. I couldn’t agree more. Also, I’m updating this in Wordpress, and I can’t read the code the stupid Flock blog editor made. So much for that…

I updated the header images (and the background) for the new season. Have to admit, it is one of my favorites. The other three of my favorite seasons are pretty good too though…

I tried to make a major visual adjustment, but realized I didn’t have enough time to play with the CSS tonight, so it’ll have to wait for another time. Or maybe I’ll just do the cool thing and redesign. I was thinking something simpler, cleaner, and with no shadows. Shadows are so last year. I’ll see what I come up with in my (ha) free time.

Edit: Hm. I think the background’s too bright this time around. Maybe I’ll darken it up a bit later.

Dear Ed Zander,

The ROKR will fail because it is not designed well, and people know it. It is iTunes bootstrapped onto an antiquated piece of hardware without a matching interface. For future success, hire Apple’s designers to make a phone, and give them lots of money.

Good luck with that.

I’m going to try to explain this in a succint and clear manner, without writing an essay.

Good designers use web standards because it’s stupid not to. Literally. HTML without CSS layout and design is like C without functions. It’s a perfect analogy—without functions, programmers would have to repeat code that does the same thing over and over again, and get it the same each time it was repeated to remain consistent and avoid errors. Without CSS, designers would have to repeat code for everything, and they’d have to make sure everything remains consistent manually. It’s a horrible thought not to have functions in any programming language—it’s the same with HTML.

CSS is just the natural evolution of web coding. Before, the web didn’t have abstraction. Now it does, and smart people use it. It’s stupid not to. So why all the hype? Because people who understand it really get how important it is. It finally made the web codable. It dissolved the need for middleman design tools. It made web code comprehensible. It’s just the right way to do it.

This is why we need standards support from all major browsers; because once you give people a taste of what’s right, they can’t go back to doing things the wrong way.

Why am I writing this? Because I’m sick of working on this damn project that has 18 nested tables for every piece of text. I’m sure glad we’re moving away from that…

I changed the colors back to bluish, and curved the sharp corners on the top. I think it fits the style better; makes it just a little smoother.

I know I’m being pretty incremental and open with the design here, but I don’t have time to make any big changes. Maybe during the summer I’ll work on something new, but until then, this is what you’ll see. I will of course continue to change the photos at the top with the seasons, and I will also try to get some content on the other pages. That’s been bugging me forever.