Tuesday, June 21, 2005
Basic usableness
This is not a discussion about usability per sey, more a comment on modern systems and their complexities. My work computer is becoming impossible to use - maybe it's because my Mac is so nice and simple and easy at home, but the Windows machine in the office is a pain.
Email: Outlook corrupts my mail file about once a month if I use it as a POP client. As an IMAP client, it can't properly connect, and then doesn't download messages at any reasonable speed so that it takes minutes per message. So I've switched to Thunderbird. Better, but I have to exit the client and restart it to get it to check for new mail. So it could be my mail setup - but whilst I have a lot of messages in my inbox, they are cut off at 3 months old and moved to a 'Received' mail folder - not that strange a situation.
Files: networked storage here seems so slow - so it takes ages to browse the filesystem to find my stuff.
Profile: damn thing. Not too much on my desktop, but I am 'Over profile space and need to delete things before I can log off'. It's all ****** config files and data files for photoshop and other apps - and thunderbird is now the main culprit - so I can sort of check my email, but not then log off.
All these are sortable. All these are not major issues with the applications themselves. It's even possible that all this is actually sensible, in some way. But as a whole, it makes the whole system less usable, in a day-to-day, want-to-get-some-work-done kind of way.
Perhaps the solution is to go home and use my Mac.
This is not a discussion about usability per sey, more a comment on modern systems and their complexities. My work computer is becoming impossible to use - maybe it's because my Mac is so nice and simple and easy at home, but the Windows machine in the office is a pain.
Email: Outlook corrupts my mail file about once a month if I use it as a POP client. As an IMAP client, it can't properly connect, and then doesn't download messages at any reasonable speed so that it takes minutes per message. So I've switched to Thunderbird. Better, but I have to exit the client and restart it to get it to check for new mail. So it could be my mail setup - but whilst I have a lot of messages in my inbox, they are cut off at 3 months old and moved to a 'Received' mail folder - not that strange a situation.
Files: networked storage here seems so slow - so it takes ages to browse the filesystem to find my stuff.
Profile: damn thing. Not too much on my desktop, but I am 'Over profile space and need to delete things before I can log off'. It's all ****** config files and data files for photoshop and other apps - and thunderbird is now the main culprit - so I can sort of check my email, but not then log off.
All these are sortable. All these are not major issues with the applications themselves. It's even possible that all this is actually sensible, in some way. But as a whole, it makes the whole system less usable, in a day-to-day, want-to-get-some-work-done kind of way.
Perhaps the solution is to go home and use my Mac.
Comments:
All that profile garbage is because of the dreadful way the SoCS network is set up... As you only use the one machine in your office there is no reason to have a roaming profile at all.
Would a mac work any better on the SoCS network!?
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Would a mac work any better on the SoCS network!?
(c) 2003-2005 Russell Beale
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