TechBubble - September, 2004

Monday, September 06, 2004

by Nik Kalyani

Sunday, September 05, 2004 11:36:00 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

The only good things I can say about Gmail are that (a) the search is excellent, and (b) it prompted other mail providers to up their disk space.

I have been using it off and on for a few months now and find the interface is counter-intuitive. Initially, I chalked that up to lack of familiarity with the U.I., but after playing with it for a while, I have concluded that not only is the interface counter-intuitive, it is just awful. Perhaps all the usability folks at Google are too busy with other things, because it does not seem like anyone has given much thought to it. Yes, I am exaggerating, but it's not too far from the truth.

Minimalism is good...I like minimalism...but when you are providing a webmail client, there are some expectations and Gmail falls short. Some of the issues I have with it:
- Variable location of primary action links such as Reply, Forward etc. These are at the bottom of the email message. On long messages you have to scroll to find them. You can click on More Options at the top, but this is a silly place for some obvious functions.
- Two clicks to delete -- Actions, Move to Trash. Dumb!
- Message thread in chronological order (i.e. conversations( -- I hate this. I do not need to see older messages first. I rarely need anything but the most recent message to have thread-sync in my mind. Who cares about what was said three weeks ago. And if I do, isn't that what search is for.
- No personalities -- I have grown to love Yahoo!'s personality feature so I can use the same mail client for managing multiple email accounts.
- Text overload -- This is a contradiction. With all the DHTML in use, Gmail assumes a newer browser (although I am sure it degrades well). Why then the emphasis on text? Some interface actions deserve buttons. Make them clear to the user that they are actions.
- New metaphor -- Everybody is familiar with a folder metaphor. Why come up with a new and unnecessary metaphor for organizing messages called Labels. This is another dumb feature.
- No WYSIWYG editor.

I could go on and on. I believe good U.I.'s should not make you think. They should be easy to work with and key functions should be easy to find and perform. Google search is fantastic...simple and intuitive. I wish I could say the same for Gmail. My opinion -- Gmail sucks!

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Friday, September 03, 2004

Upload/download large files with ASP.Net

by Nik Kalyani

Friday, September 03, 2004 5:06:03 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

One of the most frequent support questions I encounter pertains to problems uploading or downloading large files using ASP.net. Assuming that these aren't super-huge files so we do not have to go into details of ASP.net's inherent inefficiencies in this area, there is usually one reason for the problem -- incorrect configuration in the web.config file.

In order to support large file uploads, ASP.net needs to be told to increase the "maxRequestLength" attribute of the "httpRuntime" element to a number larger than 4096 (Kb) which is the default.

Both uploads and downloads will fail if the "executionTimeout" attribute (also of the "httpRuntime" element) is at the default of 90 seconds. What number you set this to depends entirely on the size of the uploads/downloads the application must support and the expected bandwidth of the user.

Here's the MSDN reference for httpRuntime.

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ASP.Net

Wednesday, September 01, 2004

MSDN Columns on "The Business of Software"

by Nik Kalyani

Wednesday, September 01, 2004 7:26:37 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Eric Sink has an excellent series of articles on MSDN called The Business of Software.

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