If you spend any time on people’s blog sites, you have no doubt encountered the “Snap Preview” dialogs that appear when you hover over a link. If you have not, then visit the Snap site and check it out.

Since these preview dialogs started showing up on blogs, they have generated quite a bit of noise. Many people love them, and many people hate them. Fred Wilson put them on his blog and got a lot of feedback, mostly negative.

Snap seems oblivious to the criticisms. As evident from the blurb on Snap’s site, they are milking the numbers as much as possible. Who wouldn’t want to highlight “65 million+ previews viewed” (which, incidentally, does not take into account that a “preview” happens when your mouse happens to hover or cross over a hyperlink, whether you wanted to see the preview or not)?

My personal opinion of the Snap Preview concept is that it is quite easily one of the stupidest things I have seen on the web. Seriously, what possible benefit could one derive from an annoying popup DIV with thumbnail images and greeked text. What meaningful thing can the Snap Preview do for me that a simple right-click, Open in New Tab or Window can’t do? Oh right, annoy me incessantly and ruin my browsing experience.

Now, the point of this blog post is not to gripe about Snap. I view it as an interesting opportunity to analyze usability gone wrong and provide some suggestions on fixing it. Possibly, quite possibly, with some usability improvements, the Snap Preview might be tolerable and maybe even useful. Here are three tips for improvement:

1) Turn off the display when casually hovering over links. This behavior is totally unacceptable and is no less annoying than ad popups. Instead, modify the script so the preview is displayed only on deliberate hover actions. I consider a deliberate hover one that lasts more than a couple of seconds minimum.

2) Visual Distinction. Although the Snap-enabled links are visually distinctive, it’s too much to expect a visitor coming to your site for the first time to be able to differentiate whether you just happen to style links a certain way or if they are Snap-enabled. I would prefer to see some combination of #1 and #2…perhaps a distinct, branded icon with a reasonable hover delay. (The little word balloon does not qualify as distinct or branded.) 

3) Provide useful information. The preview is cute, but useless. I would much rather get some useful information about the page. What is its Page Rank? What are the key concepts expressed in the page content — show me a quick synopsis or even just display the metadata for the page? Finally — a good use for a tag cloud — analyze the page words on-the-fly and create a tag cloud in the preview. Show me the Digg, Reddit etc. numbers for the page so I can determine if it’s important to other people.

What do you think of Snap? Of these suggestions for usability improvements?

I have been using Windows Media Center Edition for over a year now. When Vista Ultimate became available, I immediately upgraded because I was drawn to the improvements in the UI. Now, several months later, I am not so sure. Although it’s unlikely that I will revert to XP Media Center, I will have to live with the following things that I don’t like about Vista Media Center. To be honest, not all of these problems are new…some of them plagued XP Media Center too. However, since this is a “Why I Don’t Like…” list, I’ll lump them all together.

1) Frequent lock-ups

My hardware hasn’t changed. It was stable with XP Media Center and my reboots were limited to manual ones when updating software etc. These were few and far-between. Now, with Vista Media Center, it seems like I have to reboot daily, sometimes multiple times. The 10–ft experience has become a 1–ft experience and is trying my patience. This is with a clean install of Vista. I tried the 64–bit version and am now on the 32–bit version and have not seen any improvement. Most lock-ups occur while viewing recorded TV. Although there is no good time for the computer to lock-up, this has to be the worst time. Vista was supposed to be more stable…what happened?

2) Media Folders

I am extremely picky about how I organize my data, especially media. I have photos organized by year, with event sub-folders and the same with videos. I recently consolidated the two to accommodate Media Center.

Unfortunately though, Media Center inherits some settings and the “media discovery” approach from Windows Media Player. Now, Windows Media Player continues to be the suckiest media player ever. I have successfully avoided using it for many years, but with Media Center I have no choice. When I tell Media Center where to look for media, it does it in the stupidest way possible. It displays folders in the UI even if they have the Hidden attribute set and even if they are EMPTY. What idiot developer wrote this portion of Media Center? If I navigate to “Picture Library” I will see many folders which happen to only contain videos and therefore show up empty. If I navigate to “Video Library” the opposite happens. A simple test to see if any media of the type being displayed exists before displaying a folder choice seems like the logical thing here. But that is not the case. This is the developer mind-set prevailing over the usability mind-set. It’s more efficient to not enumerate the contents of the folder, so let’s just display the folder even if it’s empty.

Wait, there’s more. When I add additional storage folders for Recorded TV, Media Center decides to use these folders for my Photos/Videos section too. Why? It makes no sense? There is a dedicated selection called Recorded TV. This is the only place I expect to find Recorded TV.

3) Music

Media Center’s ability to select music is nice. There are options to view by album, artist, genre etc. But it’s no good for me as I don’t want Media Center to decide how my music is organized…I want to decide how my music is organized. I have over 50 Gb of ripped music in English, Hindi and Gujarati. Since AMG is unable to help Media Center (or WMP) identify most of my music, the net result is that I have a selection called “Various” that has some 8,000 tracks. What a mess!

My music is already neatly organized by language, then genre and then album. All I want is to be able to navigate this hierarchy. This is virtually impossible to do with Media Center.

4) Movies

This is where Media Center almost got it right. The default “Play DVD” option is lame. But once you make the well-documented registry hack and enable “DVD Library” you unlock a much nicer movie-watching experience. I have two Terastations with a combined 3TB of ripped DVD movies. Again, same deal…organized by language (Hollywood, Bollywood etc.), genre and movie. This is based on my family’s movie watching preference. Shall we watch an English or Hindi movie? Action, Comedy or Romance? Easy.

Since DVD library relies on the incomplete AMG meta data, this too is not possible and the end-result is that I have to page through hundreds of movies to find one I want to watch. It’s all hit and miss.

I tried “My Movies” and found that to be even worse. It insists on putting a large disc icon overlay on all the movie covers which is entirely stupid since it conveys no useful information.

All told, I am fed-up with Media Center shortcomings. There are several other annoyances, but the above four are the main reasons I don’t like Media Center. I am not sure what I can do about the lock-ups other than try different hardware, which I will in a month or so. But I am frustrated enough with the remaining three issues, that I am going to do something about it.

My Solution

The sample “Z” application that comes with the Media Center SDK has a really nice UI. My idea is to hack it and create a “folder-based” media experience so that Media Center will respect how I have organized my media versus forcing its own convoluted approach on me.

My other idea is to remove the management aspects of the media from the Media Center computer. Whether you manage the media, cover art, meta data etc. using the remote or at the Media Center PC itself, both approaches are terrible from a usability and convenience standpoint. What I would like to do is create an embedded web server for Media Center and add-on DotNetNuke. Add a few modules and Voila! I have the perfect system. Not only will I be able to manage my media from any web browser, but I will also be able to selectively share photos and videos with others without having to replicate them from my home storage to some other photo/video sharing site such as Pickle.

These solutions require a fair amount of work and I am not sure how much time I will have in coming months, but I love working with media and I love creating usable apps, so this will be a good break from more serious work-related development.

One of my dedicated servers at PowerDNN is running 64–bit Windows 2003 Server. Recently I had to get an app that was ASP.Net 1.1–dependent to run on this box. No problem, right? Wrong…big problem. Turns out that in order to run ASP.Net 1.1 and 2.0 concurrently on 64–bit Windows Server, you have to run IIS in 32–bit mode. Here’s the reason according to Microsoft KB894435:

IIS 6.0 supports both the 32-bit mode and the 64-bit mode. However IIS 6.0 does not support running both modes at the same time on a 64-bit version of Windows. ASP.NET 1.1 runs only in 32-bit mode. ASP.NET 2.0 runs in 32-bit mode or in 64-bit mode. Therefore, if you want to run ASP.NET 1.1 and ASP.NET 2.0 at the same time, you must run IIS in 32-bit mode.

Unfortunate, but understandable. I followed the instructions in the article and everything worked fine until I needed to switch the ASP.Net version for the app that I mentioned earlier. Despite having both versions of ASP.Net installed, the ASP.Net tab was not displayed.

Googling a bit, I discovered that this problem often appeared when upgrading from an ASP.Net 2 beta to the production version. The fix was to delete some obsolete registry keys and register the framework again using aspnet_regiis. I did this, rebooted and saw no difference.

After spending almost two hours looking for a solution, I decided that there was no easy fix (of course, I was completely wrong). It then occurred to me that since the properties dialog is just a UI for WMI, it should be possible to accomplish the ASP.Net version switching using script. Googled some more and discovered that this was a solution, but not the simplest one. If you know the website ID, then aspnet_regiis can set the ASP.Net version for an IIS site. And Denis Bauer (of Reflector File Disassembler fame) had already solved the problem with a neat utility called ASP.Net Version Switcher.

This utility solved the problem and had me up and running in seconds. I selected the site, clicked the ASP.Net version I wanted and hit the Switch button. Done.

Thanks, Denis.

Unbelievable. Apple has done it again with the most amazing iPhone. This phone is a minimalist person’s dream. Looks like I am going to be switching from T-Mobile to Cingular this summer so I can get my hands on this beauty.

The features I find most compelling are:

• Only one button and no keypad
• Full fidelity web browsing
• Intelligent, non-sequential voice mail
• Portrait or landscape mode

My current phone is a Sony-Ericsson W800i. It has a number of the iPhone features, packaged in a very usable Sony aesthetic package. However, Apple’s minimalist approach to the hardware and the tightly integrated software puts it in a whole different league. 

I was having trouble installing Windows Vista on an HP Pavilion zd8000. Repeated attempts yielded the same result — during the “copying files” phase, the machine would blue screen with a PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA STOP error. STOP errors are typically hardware-related, so I went through the drill and disabled anything out of the ordinary in the BIOS setup, re-seated the memory etc. No joy.

I then tried the Vista recovery option, and found an option to run memory diagnostics. Since my drive is a new partition and has no OS, this would not run (of course, the error message was not helpful at all…it just said “there’s a problem”). After Googling a bit, I found this cool site — Microsoft Online Crash Analysis. The site has a detailed guide to using the Windows Memory Diagnostic and an ISO image containing the memory diagnostic software. I downloaded the ISO, burned a CD and booted up the machine with it. The machine booted up and instantly ran a series of memory tests from which I determined that one of the 1GB memory chips is bad. Removed the memory and the blue screen problem went away.

I have added the memory diagnostic CD to my collection of Windows disaster recovery tools. If you are getting intermittent blue screens, try this software…it will help identify or eliminate bad memory as the cause of the problem.