I’m going to extend my online presence on Technorati. As a procedural measure I’m supposed to have this short code (2CS29C43BNQS) on a blog post so that they can verify authenticity. I also made the decision to make the ‘blog’ part of the site strictly journalistic. So here we go with the very first blog post under the new web address, nstation.org on this Programmers’ Day.

OneNote strengths

Although EverNote has managed to surpass Microsoft OneNote in some areas, OneNote is still strong in formatting text, etc. OneNote’s ability to automatically tabulate content as soon as it detects a table like structure is severely missed in EverNote. The default colors and fonts on OneNote goes nicely with the rest of the Microsoft Office suite to the extent where a note entered in OneNote is no different to a document typed in Microsoft Word.

EverNote strengths

The latest version of EverNote is as mighty as you want it to be. Write once, access from anywhere in the world (which requires a registration on the EverNote server) is the best feature you can cheer upon. The new user interface is very simple and user-friendly. Unlike the OneNote UI which is a candy jar in its appearance, the new EverNote UI has a unique touch and a soothing green shade to it. Once you start working on it, you wouldn’t want to go back to another note taking tool ever.

The bottom line

Many note taking tools roamed but none prevailed to be the best among the rest until the days of OneNote. The introduction of OneNote damaged every other note taking tool’s reputation and took note taking to another level with sophistication and novelty. The lessons learnt from OneNote’s arrival have been put in to practice nicely with the introduction of EverNote 3. The next big thing will be to see how Microsoft strikes back with their next version of OneNote. Or will it be just Microsoft Notes?

Seven used to be the luckiest number. At least that’s the impression I had until recent developments. On numerous occasions I have heard people say ‘lucky seven’ when making references to favorable outcomes. But this year things have become a little different. The Chinese consider eight to be a lucky number and have gone great lengths to prove it. According to this Wikipedia article, Chinese believe that eight is lucky as it sounds like ‘prosper’ or ‘wealth’ (in their language of course). I guess you know why Beijing officials want to start Olympics on this date at 8.08pm specifically; neat.

On the other hand, today’s date (2008-08-08) has a nice vibe to it too. You can’t simply ignore the reiterating arrangement in numbers. I guess this happened last year too; but a month and a day earlier (2007.07.07). If you go to the Wikipedia article on number eight, you’ll see there are many facts on this number. I was awestruck to see how many interesting and equally important things have associations to this symmetrical numeral. Just for the sake of completing this post I thought I’ll post the most interesting 8 things on 8 according to the same Wikipedia article mentioned above.

• Eight is the atomic number of Oxygen.
• The maximum number of electrons that can occupy a valence shell is eight.
• In the human adult dentition there are 8 teeth in each quadrant. The 8th tooth is the so called the wisdom tooth.
• There are eight notes in an octatonic scale.
• A byte is eight bits.
• An Eighth is a common measurement of Marijuana, meaning an eighth of an ounce.
• Eight is symbolic for lesbian sexual relations.
• In Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths ramifies as the Noble Eightfold Path; In Islam, eight Angels carry The Holy Throne of Allah in heavens; In Hinduism, eight is the number of wealth and abundance; In Christianity, eight is the number of Beatitudes.

Image courtesy: Duncan. See 8 on Flickr.

nStation has a new theme from today onwards (July 16, 2008). This theme is a fresh design I came up with a couple of days back. It took me about a week to complete the design and another week to develop it to a WordPress Theme.

This theme is more modern looking than the previous two. There is adequate white space surrounding objects and consistency has been preserved across pages. I have also made every attempt to make it look good on all browsers. Different sections of the theme (header, main menu, content area, etc.) have different appeals to it so that they do not conflict with each other in appearance.

The most notable element on this design is the large desktop area on the top of the page. On my previous two themes I used an area similar to this to designate specialty. For example, for Halloween, I had jack-o-lanterns on this space. But the header blended with the rest of the design too well to the point where it was not noticeable. There was also a lot of work involved as a change in the header was in fact a change in the entire design. Now on this design, the header has been made an integral part of the design while without making it a part of the content.

With the introduction of this theme, I’m going to release the previous theme to the WordPress community. It will take some time though as it needs some modifications and patching before making it more public aware.

Note: This was done on off hours. Therefore a week’s work is about ten to fifteen hours.

I experienced this as I was installing the Windows Live Mail program on my laptop. After I started the setup program I notices two very interesting messages appear on the setup dialog box that actually made me smile.

The first one showed up as the setup was taking longer than expected to download the packages from the Internet:
“Sorry, this is taking a little longer than expected. Please bear with us just a few more minutes”

And the second one showed up when it was installing the downloaded packages:
“Installation may take a few minutes. Feel free to do other things while you wait.”

This way of acknowledging the user is very important for a better human-computer interaction. I think the traditional 3 limits for response times have to be altered to facilitate the sophistication available on modern hardware. Nowadays, the time limit for keeping the users attention on a given context is way below 10 seconds. This value continues to shrink down if feedback is further delayed from the machine. You may have heard people say ‘my computer is so slow’ if the software has lack of appropriate feedback. Software installation packages that download certain parts of the package from the Internet are notorious in breaking users’ patience. This eventually leads the user disliking and discontinuing the software. The move towards providing friendly messages certainly help people to bond with their software better than they are now.

Imagine a situation where you have to edit a page and preview it in rapid successions, using the edit post link is the shortest path to take. The conventional way of login in to the WordPress dashboard and clicking ‘Manage’ and then clicking ‘Pages’ effectively involves 3 clicks; as oppose to using the edit post link involves only 1 click. So whenever you need to edit a post or a page, just login to WordPress and go the relevant page and click the edit post link.

Note that not all theme developers use this tag – therefore downloaded and third-party themes may not have this link present.

As I’ve mentioned in an earlier note, the traditional paradigm of blogging is non-intuitive. There are many elements in this metaphor that doesn’t improve usability of a blog-site. So I thought of changing all that and creating a new user experience based on a different paradigm. With this there isn’t just a blog, but many other elements that can show off personality very effectively. Although I don’t have enough analytics evidence to cover my argument (yet), the improvement in readability and structure looks very promising. If you are wondering what I’m talking here, or interested in knowing how I did it, an article explaining the revamping process will be posted after the weekend.

Blogger’s Dilemma courtesy Cox & Forkum

We love long weekends. I thought as my new year note this time I’ll post all the long weekends (imposed to Sri Lanka of course). Some of them are convertibles by adding a leave to the list yourself. Hence the list goes:

Long weekends in 2008 for Sri Lanka

January
12 – 15 (14 Mon Leave): 4 days*
19 – 22 (21 Mon Leave): 4 days*

February
2 – 4: 3 day

March
20 – 23: 4 days

May
17 – 20: 4 days

October
11 – 14 (13 Mon Leave): 4 days*

December
12 – 14: 3 days

* – take leave yourself on the day mentioned within brackets to convert to a long weekend

Logo designing or branding is an art needs to be dealt with utter caution. Often design houses that make super brands fail to take their own brand to the next level. This short post is not to criticize a brand that in my opinion done without considering all ‘sides’; but to make aware the fact that, branding isn’t just painting a portrait.