Gary's Bloggage » design

Sometimes the Hardware is Willing but the Software is Weak

Gary — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:40:32 +0000

I’ve had an HP DeskJet F-something-or-other for a couple of years now. It’s a small grey thing, around the size of a shoe box that prints, scans and photocopies. At least that’s what it said in the brochure and on HP’s web site. It used to sit plugged into the USB port on my AirPort Express for easy wireless printing. Not that it actually printed mind you.

I viewed this piece of hardware’s role in life as rendering documents from one of the Macs we have in the house, in full colour or black and while, onto sheets of A4 paper.

The DeskJet had other ideas.

It viewed its role in life as a source of revenue for HP to get me to keep buying ever more expensive replacement inkjet refills, by the cunning ruse of reporting the cartridge was empty when it was brand new, by refusing to print colour or black and white consistently and in the end, by just refusing to print, unless it was using invisible ink that it secreted somewhere in that grey shoe box.

The scanner was OK though but the photocopier functionality was somewhat hampered by the lack of being actually able to print what had just been scanned. The printer continued to not endear itself by refusing to be installed on my faithful and ageing PowerPC based iBook G4 running Leopard. Intel MacBook Pros running Leopard and Snow Leopard seemed to be fine but the iBook insisted the printer was actually another model entirely and just sulked.

So based on the premise that we wanted to print far more often than we wanted to scan, the HP DeskJet F-whatever-the-model-number-is has been retired and replaced with a gleaming, black, colour laser printer from Samsung. It’s a CLP-315W for those of you who like model numbers.

The hardware is very capable. It works and prints in black and white and in colour which is more than the HP DeskJet ever seemed to do. You can connect it via a USB cable, set it up as its own ad-hoc wifi network or add it to your own network where, for Macs at least, it broadcasts itself as a Bonjour printer and is perfectly happy to accept print jobs from my iBook and from my MacBook Pros. It’s now sitting on a shelf in the cupboard under the stairs minding it’s own business and in a state of slumber until one of my Macs sends it the right network incantation, it wakes up, prints and then goes back to sleep again. It just works.

Now granted, the supplied user guide said it supports Mac OS X 10.3 through 10.5, but a quick check on Samsung’s UK support site (before purchasing I might add), yielded a native set of 10.6 Snow Leopard drivers. And they work. But as I’ve mentioned before, applications which think they have a right to take over one of my machines and do things the way they want to do them without asking permission are one of the things that … irk me.

No drag and drop installation here. Not even a native Mac format mpkg installer. No, after some waiting and authentication I see the words “Installation powered by VISE X”; I’ve found in the past that VISE X installers, or rather the authors of VISE X installers, tend to see my machine as their property, to install and configure stuff with impunity. But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt here.

Wait. What? You want me to shut down every single app just to install a printer driver? Oh, no, actually you want me to shut down every single app to install the printer driver, which then starts up Safari, gets me to configure the printer via a Java application which needs my firewall turned off in order to work and then you refuse to install the Smart Panel app because Safari, the one the installer started up in the first, is running.

So eventually we get there. The printer is installed, it’s printing over the network and all is well with the world. I can see the Smart Panel app is running in the menu bar and it’s only a glorified status monitor, which I can get through the printer driver anyway so I close it down. Meanwhile, Software Update is telling me there’s a security update waiting for me, so I install it, reboot and login again.

Smart Panel is back with me.

Sure enough, a quick glance through my Login Items shows me that the installer has, without my permission, made a decision on my behalf that I’ll always want to run this app and has inserted itself into my list of Login Items. This is not a well behaved app. Well behaved apps, ask permission before doing stuff like this.

At least it’s not as bad as iPass Connect though, which reinserts itself into the Login Items every single time you run it regardless.

So, the Samsung CLP-315W; a great printer with weak software that just can’t be bothered to be good and takes the easy way out. Very poor as Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer used to say. But at least it prints.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

iPass Connect on the Mac; great service, appallingly designed app

Gary — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 13:44:06 +0000

I find myself travelling a lot for work these days and that means a roaming service for wifi hotspots and hotel internet connections really makes life simpler. I could maintain subscriptions to The Cloud, T-Mobile Hotspots, BT OpenZone and so on and so on, but fortunately Yahoo! provides me with an iPass subscription.

iPass is great; it allows me to connect to pretty much every hotspot and hotel internet service there is. I’ve been using it for over 4 years now and can only think of a single time when I haven’t been able to get a connection. I’m using it right now, sitting in the departures lounge at Berlin’s Tegel airport waiting for my flight back to London.

So far, so great, but the current, Snow Leopard supporting, version of the iPassConnect app, v3.1, seems to have been designed by someone with scant regard for anything approaching consistency and usability. Let me count the ways in which this app frustrates.

1. Quit iPassConnect? I see no Quit menu option.

From the Mac OS X GUI you can’t stop iPass running. The app lives in your menu bar and scans and rescans for wireless networks (which I’m sure reduces battery life) even when it’s connected to a wireless network. If I’m connected to a wireless network why would I want to look for another network, all the time, constantly? There’s a red and white animation going on in the menu bar which I’m sure someone thought was cute but which is incredibly distracting. But let’s overlook that for a moment. To quit an app, you simply select the menu bar and select Quit or press Cmd-Q.

Not that I’ve ever been able to find the mythical Quit command for iPassConnect. The only way to kill the damn thing is from within Activity Monitor or by the killall command from the shell within Terminal.

Simple resolution: Let the user choose when they want to run your app and when they don’t. Add a Quit command.

2. Install as a Login Item? Every single time?

It’s a simple, plain fact that the more apps you have in your account’s Login Items, the slower your login time will be. Like most people, I keep the number of Login Items down to a bare minimum and then start apps up as I need them. If I don’t use something all day, every day, it’s very unlikely that I want to make it a Login Item. Most apps are well behaved and ask your permission before inserting themselves as a Login Item but not iPassConnect. Run the app and hey presto you get a Login Item. Mildly annoying but at least you can remove it from your list of Login Items. Run the app again though and hey presto you get a Login Item. Each and every single time. It’s frustrating the first time it happens and induces psychosis after the hundredth such occurrence.

This is uncontrollable, un-configurable, totally unacceptable and verging on downright insulting. It’s an app designer’s way of saying to the user “I don’t care what your preferences are, I know better than you”.

Simple resolution: Act in a well behaved manner, ask the user for their preference, act on it and remember it.

3. Update? What update?

Most apps these days have a way of calling home and checking for an update. For those apps that run within a window there’s usually an Updates option in the application’s menu. For those apps that don’t run in a window there’s usually an option in their preferences pane. Note the word usually and let’s have a look at the iPassConnect preference pane.

There’s an Updates tab which is a good start. There’s an Enable automatic updates option which is also a good thing. But it only controls the hotspot dictionary that the app maintains. Want to update the app or know whether there’s an update available? Not with this app (and the iPass website is remarkably update free as well).

Simple resolution: Add an update option and ask the user if they want to check for updates.

4. Snow Leopard support. In 32-bits.

Snow Leopard continues Apple’s march towards a pure 64-bit operating system. A cursory glance at Activity Monitor shows that most apps running are Intel (64-bit) and this includes the System Preferences app. So let’s try to set some preferences for iPassConnect.

Ah yes, the iPassConnect preferences pane is 32-bit which means that you have to restart System Preferences in 32-bit mode and there it stays, running in 32-bit mode, until you manually restart System Preferences in the default 64-bit mode.

Simple resolution: If you say your app has Snow Leopard support then fully support Snow Leopard. That means 64-bitness across the board.

iPass is a great service, it deserves a great app; version 3.1 is not that app.

Written and posted from Berlin Tegel Airport (52.5545447, 13.2899969)

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous