License Plate Sanity Restored

Stupid Design

About 3 years ago, Texas changed their license plate design to something that made them unreadable from more than 10 feet away.  I am sure they looked beautiful in a high-resolution, brightly lit setting to a committee of clueless overseers, but they failed to deliver on what should have been the number one requirement: readable at a distance in a variety of lighting conditions.

How does a group of people get put in charge of redesigning license plates and fail to deliver on the readability requirement?  How is is that at every step of the design and approval process no one ever raised this question? Did they ever even think to consult the number one user of the plates: law enforcement?  Would any police officer fail to spot this fatal design issue immediately?  This was an epic failure of government, committees and common sense.

It may not sound like it, but this is meant to be a positive, uplifting story. We come to that end by noting that Texas has corrected the problem and is (yet again) going to put out a new design, precisely to address the current problem of readability. And it took the Texas government only 3 years to recognize and fix the problem: maybe a new record.

This new design harken back to much older designs, and I like them a lot.  Simple, effective and functional.  Now I have to figure out how to trade in my plate for a new style one.

Sensible Design

Elevator Insanity

Having been in NYC the last 10 months, I have encountered more elevators than I previously have in the past.  I have grown to have some contempt for elevator manufacturers. I just do not understand why the very small number of manufacturers could not agree on some standards.  You have your "G", which could mean "ground floor" or it could mean "garage". You have the "L" which could mean "Lobby" or "Lower". Then there's the "M", which could mean "mezzanine" or it could mean "main floor".  I have even seen custom letters in some hotels that stand for some special feature on that floor, which of course has no meaning unless you know the secret code. Is "R" a "roof" or a "restaurant"? Do they dare use "G" for "gym"? I do not care what letter they use for what, just the consistency would stop me from pressing the wrong button as I go from one building to the other.

Then there is the inconsistency about where floor numbering starts. Sometimes the first floor it is the same as "main", "lobby" or "ground" floor, but not always.  So if you see a "G" and a "1", you really have no idea what is what.  The one thing that does add a little bit of sanity is the "star" on the button to indicate the "main" floor to get off (which could be "M", "G" , "L"or "1").  For simple buildings with one exit, this is usually satisfactory, but there are a lot of places with multiple levels of exits and one usually does not know exactly what level they entered on.  You can enter from the street and not be on the "ground" floor, or you can enter in way where you have no idea what level you are on. In those circumstances, how I am supposed to know what they consider the "star" level or exactly what button I need to exit the way I came in?

And my biggest gripe comes from the elevator in my apartment building.  The buttons go from "1" to "16", with a"star" on the "1". All this is perfectly good and unambiguous. And what would you expect the LED readout to show when you reach floor "1"?  You would expect to see "G" naturally.  They could not even stay consistent within a single elevator design.

Shopping Helper Updated

My Firefox add-on, Shopping Helper, has been updated and improved. It's a great tool for helping people shop on-line. You can keep shopping lists and favorite stores and it automatically keeps track of the prices, allowing you to view products in a comparison grid, and alerting you when there is a significant price change. You can get it here:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7942

And visit the home page for overview webcasts, screenshots and help:

http://labs.pronto.com/public/shopping-helper/index.html

Google Wave Thoughts

I've read a bunch of hype about the Google Wave presentation and then actually watched the hour+ long presentation that the Google Wave team gave. Here's some thoughts on the matter.

Is this truly the revolutionary architecture they are hyping? It could be, but only if people buy into it and it does not wind up being too complicated to understand. Thus, its success depends on how well it is hyped, how well they can manage the early-adopted/tech crowd and if they can have enough stuff built on top of it for the average person to get some uptake. Given that, the early developer preview demo and release makes a lot of sense.

The basic fact is that they have the right idea: email is archaic, IM is archaic, and there are all these emerging new interaction patterns: Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc. Can't we put all these things under one roof? My answer is: maybe. If you design something too general, it fails for being too complex/abstract to comprehend. I wonder if the generality of Google Wave may suffer from trying to be too general.

In some sense, you could give a demo of the TCP/IP stack today and woo the crowd with all the things you could do with it: email, IM, blogs, facebook, twitter, etc. Wow, this thing is amazing!

So is it something the user cares about or something only developers care about? I think it is too complex/abstract for the end-user to consider or care about. But maybe we sit in a time where something as general as TCP/IP is needed, only one level up, and maybe this fits the bill. There's no question that building apps today is a royal pain in the butt, especially handling concurrent events and all that makes up implementing the more collaborative things. If Google Wave winds up being the API that makes all this easier for the developer, maybe it will get uptake and be the "next big thing".

Followup 2: Shopping Helper

There's now an on-line video demonstration/tutorial for the Shopping Helper Firefox add-on:

Watch on YouTube

Followup: Shopping Helper

The Firefox Add-on to help you shop on-line that I mentioned in a previous blog entry has now started to go through the process of being hosted on Mozilla's addons site:

Shopping Helper Page on Mozilla's Add-ons Site

It is still in their sandbox as an experimental add-on at the time of this writing, but if you don't want to have to log in to download it, you can still get it here:

Shopping Helper Page on Pronto.com Labs Site

Shopping Helper Firefox Add-on

If you shop a lot on-line, there's a neat Firefox add-on that is coming out that offers a lot of useful features. It's Pronto's Shopping Helper, which allows you to create shopping lists, get price alerts, and view current prices. It has a ton of other minor features, but is overall a useful tool for organizing and tracking products you hope or plan to buy some day. You can see the preview here, which will also eventually point you to an actual download (should be within the next few weeks).

Pronto's Shopping Helper Firefox Add-on