Perhaps the best example of converting an irritating popup into an “unobtrusive”, conveniently placed message is the “Remember Password” dialog of FireFox:
Upto Version 2.x
Version 3.x
It was indeed very irritating to decide whether I want to remember the password or not for some xyz website where I had just one minute of quick work to be done. Good UI always deserves applause. After all, for most users, the UI is the Application. Thanks FF!
The focus on usability has increased considerably in the past decade. Firefox, Ubuntu, Wordpress are all great examples of powerful software or systems which strive for ease of use. There is little surprise that they emerge as clear winners or strong contenders for pole position in their respective domains.
Some of the lesser known apps which provide awesome features are the Portable Apps Suite and my favourite virtualizer, Sun VirtualBox. I’ll yak a bit on the benefits of Portable Apps in this post, and cover VirtualBox later.
In one way, Portable Apps is a platform that should never have been required, let alone developed. But here we stand, with all our major desktop software for Windows machines – depending somehow, somewhere, on the Windows registry.
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Dependency on the registry isn’t required for all apps. Most should be able to manage configurations using a simple flat file akin to what *nix apps use. Efficient read of config property is not an issue at all; one can just load the config file and store the contents in a map. But some developers anyway proceed to use the registry in order to hide the configuration from the user. Included in these are all those great apps which require a registration key or something of that nature to function. This key or identification, unique to the user, is stored in some obscure corner of the registry, so that the (regular) user cannot tamper with those.
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So back on line. To many of the users who were content with the Windows-IE-Office-Y!Messenger installations and need no more than that, the scenario above made little difference. But as increasing number of people found themselves using more than one (sometimes-malfunctioning, virus-infected) Windows PC, it became necessary to install and maintain all required software on multiple machines.
Enter Portable Apps. While this suite doesn’t provide any sort of portability between OSes (Windows, *nix, mac), it does give a very neat and clean platform for those who would like to develop applications running directly from a flash drive or external disk. Basically this means that the apps ought not to refer to Windows registry for state information or configuration. Many subsequently altered their code and came up with portable versions of their apps. The Open Source Software devs were some of the first to cover this ground, since none had any intention of locking the user with registration keys or the sort. Thanks to them, we have a humongous list of free portable software (some free as in freedom 
). Better still, we have the most-used software already included with the portable apps suite. All this, with a very neat menu providing a list of all apps “installed” (basically just copied to a proper directory) in the external drive, and all documents stored.
For anyone with a flash drive of more than 256MB, this is a must-have. Not just for people regularly working on multiple machines, but also for those who visit relatives and would like to show them the new video on their flash drive, but can’t, because the Windows Media Player on their PC simply doesn’t work
My list of awesome portable apps:
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After much comic book reading and a geeky satisfaction that not many around me will understand that comic, I downloaded the much hyped browser and played with it for a few minutes.
So this post is certainly not another review or “five things you didn’t know” or “seventeen things you should know” about Chrome. In fact, all this while, I’ve been reading about it more than I’ve been using it. And all around I see people looking at the browser with a raised eyebrow. Well, that’s expected, of course. We are not Apple fans to run amok crying “oooh I love iPhone”. But still, the general tone does seem a bit negative.
First there was the License clause. Stupid, but not really evil. God, how many people were scared to death by that. As if Google wanted to take everyone’s blogs and use them in some great-evil-conspiracy. Lame.
Then there’s this security flaw which allows the carpet bomb attack. With that we have the already cliched “Google’s Tarnished Chrome” headlines. We all saw this coming.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all in for open information and the likes. I thank all the folks out there who are going through every possible option of Chrome to make my life a lot easier when I use it. But it just seems as if everyone was expecting a rock sturdy browser with amazing out-of-the-world features and a memory consumption of 100kbs. Its just a beta guys!!!
More importantly, I do not find anyone sparing a few good words for the bold steps taken by Google towards ensuring a great user experience, even with long usage of the browser. An all new Javascript engine! Separate sandboxed process for each tab! An actual useful homepage!
I understand that the comic (press release) already explains that quite a bit, but still. Few are writing about what separates Chrome from Firefox or IE. Most articles are rather finding content in speculating which way the market will move and which browser will claim most developer attention.
One wonders what FireFox was doing all along. I suddenly felt as if I was just using an open source IE replacement all this while, and not any awesome piece of software. After reading about Chrome, it took me a few moments to remember what FireFox was good for. Yet, since FF remains the ultimate in terms of being a simple, extensible, cross platform, open source browser, I still stick by it (more so because I use Firebug and FlashBlock extensions very heavily)
All in all, I have a feeling that Google Chrome brings in a lot of goodies (and promises of a good deal more). I don’t care if the developer community “splits” between FF and Google. I don’t care if there is one more browser I need to take care of for my apps (as long as it works well with most scripts, as it does now). I believe Chrome brings a good piece of code to the community along with some important questions which maybe FireFox and IE teams need to chew upon.