How not to title your web pages

I wonder how many people pay attention to providing a good title for a web page. When I find a site I like or need, I often bookmark it, but also often find that I have to rename it so that when I'm glancing through my bookmarks, it's easy to find.

Starting the title of a site with the name of a company or the division, or the website itself is no good (unless it's the main page). Take this example from Qualcomm:


After saving it as a link, I end up with this in my bookmarks:


It's the highlighted one, if it wasn't obvious. And that's my point. Notice the other two Qualcomm links near the bottom. The only difference between them is capitalization. I can't tell what they actually link to. The bookmark titled "Customer ..." is actually the renamed version of the highlighted one above. Just by the fav icon (denoted Brew) and the word "Customer" I know that it's the customer support portal website for Brew. But I had to take action to get that to happen; it wasn't as simple as if Qualcomm had simply rearranged the title to be "Customer Support Portal | Qualcomm Brew" instead.

Droid recommendation

A friend of mine asked me if I'd recommend the Droid, as he needs a new phone. Here's what I said:

I'm torn. It's a decent, solid enough mini-computing device. But it's almost as if they forgot it's a phone first. I love the ability to sync my Gmail contacts and FB info and all that other social stuff but I hate guessing at what the back/clear key might do, or wondering which application is going to launch when I press the Messaging icon (because sometimes it launches the phone or the FB app, funnily enough). Multi-tasking is cool... but only when it doesn't slow the system down where mis-taps start to happen. Still, I like it better than every other phone I've used short of the iPhone (which has its own host of issues, but at least they were consistent with the UI).

The Messaging app mis-launching is a frustrating one indeed. Once, I had to power cycle the phone because I couldn't get to the messaging app, even indirectly. Who knows what registry-type settings got messed up.

To re-iterate. Decent computing device, poor telephony device, better than most of your other options.

Blank screen on the Droid

Do I really need a blank home screen on the Droid? From my home screen, I can swipe left and get my calendar and a couple of other widgets I put there and if I swipe right, I get a blank screen. Why? Sure, make it available when I'm trying to re-arrange icons, but don't have it there if there is nothing to view.

I'm not sure how long it's been there... the reason I noticed it was that my Google search bar disappeared from the home screen, only to be found by itself on the (now) blank screen. It was an obnoxious pain to drag it back over to it's original starting place.

The UI of the Droid just feels too rushed. Not enough thought when into basic best practices. Sadly, it's still better than a lot of other phones out there.

Droid Keyboard Alt/Shift issues.

For me, the keyboard on the Droid is terrible. Most people complain about the lack of tactile feel, and I agree that it sucks, but that's hardly the sticking point for me.

Instead, the position of the Alt and Shift keys seemed flip. I find I use the keys about equally between capitalization and punctuation. However, it feels unnatural to me to have to stretch my thumbs out the the side to hit the shift key. Instead, I often hit the alt key instead when I need to capitalize a letter. And then I get frustrated and hit it again because I've inadvertantly put a symbol in its place and then hit Del... erasing my entire line because I hit the Alt twice followed by the Del key. Not what I wanted.

I think the problem relates to the normal keyboard on a desktop. To hit the shift key, a person uses their pinkies, not their thumbs. However, on the Droid (or other mobile), you use your thumbs for all tapping; the other fingers are stabilizing the device, or as is the case of the pinkies, not being used at all. So if the usage model changes, so should the layout. Obviously, Motorola/Google didn't think this was a major problem and that people would probably get used to it. But what it really shows in a lack of thoughtfulness on their part. They have an extra blank space on each side of the keypad; they could have extended the either the alt or shift keys to be larger and more accessible, for example, but only after having evaluated which set characters get used most often.

When messaging, I use a lot of contractions... it keeps the sentence structure proper (not using "u" and "ur" and things like that that) while keeping the character count down. So I need the apostrophe a lot. What a pain to type "I'll" Shift-I-Alt-M-L-L." The need to make a shift between the Shift and Alt keys makes the process very cumbersome. A larger keyboard with it's own number row (or pad; does the directional pad ever get used??) would have made life easier; put the key punctuation characters as shifted versions of the number keys instead. That way "I'll" becomes Shift-I-Shift-M-L-L. On top of that, you get the bonus of more easily being able to type numbers into a text field... you know, something that happens a lot on a TELEPHONE.

And don't get me into that overburdened space bar. The space bar simply should not have a double function. It should do one thing and one thing only, no matter what mode the rest of the keyboard is in.

Droid Messaging/Contacts Problems

Been having trouble with the Droid. Everyone asks "Do you like it?" My response is almost always "Meh," mostly because while it does everything I want, it doesn't necessarily do it well. Messaging is a case in point.

If I add a person to my contact list, then later enter the messaging app to send them an SMS, I often cannot find them. I have to instead exit the app, go back to contacts, find them and then tap on the smiley face to send a message.

I know at some point, that new contact will eventually show up in the messaging drop down when I type their name in, but I haven't figured out the connection yet.