India Post

India is still new to the Internet. A lot of established trading houses, merchants and even the Indian Embassy don't have good, usable websites. But I was pleasantly surprised by the India Post website. The website is usable, information is easy to find and most important actions are up-front in the home page. Way to go! :) The postal service has had the sense to hire a good developer who knows his bread and butter to do their website.

If you want an example of a badly done website, you should look at the Indian Embassy (Washington D.C) website. S had to fill an online application form to renew his passport and they had a big disclaimer saying they would ONLY accept online apps. So we dutifully tried it and ended up being their QE team. The 'Submit" button on the application threw a JavaScript error. We couldn't print or save the application because of some other exceptions. Some developer had forgotten the basic rule of coding -- HANDLE EXCEPTIONS!

I can't tell you how annoyed I was -- both as an end user as well as a software professional. As an end user, when I am sending confidential information, it is scary to see some strange exception. Do you take it that your operation failed? Succeeded? As a software professional, I intensely dislike people who can't do their basic homework and follow good practices. Is the Indian Embassy so poor that it can't hire a decent company to do their website? Or is it yet another example of the "chalta hai" attitude we see so much?

iCon

Recently, I've been working with a lot of Mac lovers at my workplace. They're passionately loyal to Apple products. It tickles me to find anyone so passionate about certain things. In this world of a million options and cheaper alternatives, I believe it takes something special to inspire brand loyalty. And looking at an iMac, I can easily see how it captures the imagination!

I like to look behind a success story and figure out how/why it happened. This is true of both people and products. Lots of times, people only see the finished end product and go, "Oh, they had it easy" or "Oh, that's intuitive enough. Nothing new". I think the real interesting success story lies in the making of a product/person. And if you look closely enough, you'll find a piece of the person in the products that they create.
I was curious about Steve Jobs. So I picked up "iCon: The Second Greatest Act in The History of Business", a biography of Steve Jobs and started reading it.

First off, this was a good read unlike some other biographies. It doesn't bore you with unrelated stories and vague statements. It is simple, straightforward and dishes out criticism as well as credit. It amazed me that for someone who talks a lot about karma & philosophy, Jobs sometimes can be ridiculously silly! :) Goes to show that genius in one field doesn't mean any kind of maturity in general. Sure enough, when you read through Jobs' life story, you see some elements of his character in Apple products -- for instance, the austere simplicity of Apple applications or the easy aesthetics of the UI.

Whether you love Apple or not, it is definitely an inspiring read about a man who changed three industries -- computers, music and movies. In the book, Jobs makes it clear that his final ambition would be to overtake and defeat his main competitor -- Bill Gates. Almost all his moves in the computer market have been toward making Apple a viable alternative to Windows boxes. And I have to say that he's getting closer.

I am a hardcore Windows user and I don't have many complaints against it. But I was simply blown away by the Mac recently. I got a HD camcorder recently. It came with Sony's crappy bundled software, Picture Motion Browser. Windows MP doesn't support the AVCHD format for HD movies and I had to use PMB. And by golly, was it crappy! Frames were dropped, the picture was grainy and Windows kept crashing with some strange error. On the other hand, I plugged in the Camcorder on a Mac and the experience was a lot different. Mac automatically opened up iMovie, imported the movies and played it back impeccably! The quality and user experience were simply too smooth. I loved it and am seriously considering buying a Mac for various other reasons.

Anyways, I just had to rant about this on a Friday..:) And this is my response to RS' book tag a while back. Go read iCon.

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Browser wars....

All these years, I never understood when some nerds complained about how buggy browsers were. I just thought they were the mutterings of those perpetually afflicted by the victimitis virus..I was the user and IE and Netscape seemed perfectly fine to me. Well, after all these years, now that I am designing websites, i myself am going stark raving mad trying to get browsers to display my website properly!!!! How well I understand what those poor nerds were talking about...!

Anyways, as testimony to me going mad, i just received an e-mail from the University that declared me delinquent! apparently, i haven't given them some transcript (the nth one). I have this great love affair going on with U Ky's graduate school. It's like this: if they don't see me for 30 days together, they go utterly crazy and start firing off all sorts of e-mails (ranging from being declared delinquent to informing me that I never was admitted to UK to god-knows-what-else) designed to bring me to their office. The latest missive is just the last in a string of such communications.

So goes another boring day in my life....