If you were following the #gamifyOracle hashtag, you might have seen some of what went on, but for completeness sake, here’s my recap.

This was an internal-only meeting held by the Applications UX team, bringing together the entire organization of about 130 people from around the World. In case you didn’t know, Apps UX supports all Applications product families, i.e. Fusion, PeopleSoft, EBS, Siebel, JD Edwards, etc. It’s quite possible that you’ve attended one of their usability labs at Oracle OpenWorld or another conference.

In addition to the entire Apps UX organization, about ten “honored guests” were also invited, including two ACE Directors, Basheer Khan (@bkhan) and Edward Roske (@eroske), and several Oracle people from outside Apps UX.

Unfortunately, Friends of the ‘Lab Bex Huff (@bex) and Floyd Teter (@fteter), weren’t able to make it. They were both missed.

The purpose of the event was to expose the UX team to gamification and get them thinking about design paradigms to support adding game mechanics into enterprise applications. After a brief introduction of concepts, the day was spent working in teams. Each team was assigned an application flow and had to build a game and experience around that flow; the goal was to create an engaging experience around a business task.

Each team presented its work in a three-minute pitch at the end of the day, and attendees voted for a winner by investing virual currency.

I was on the Chun-Li team. Yes, that Chun-Li, the one from Street Fighter II and considered by some to be “the first lady of fighting games.” And yes, all the teams were named after characters of major games. Our task was to integrate various game mechanics into the traditionally dull task of creating objectives for an annual performance appraisal.

We spent morning brainstorming ideas and the afternoon honing the pitch and building high fidelity mockups. The team of UX people did all the heavy-lifting, while I contributed ideas and chatted, adding very little value beyond banter.

I expect that Ultan (@ultan) will blog a more thorough retrospective on the day, so I’ll skip a lot of the details and move on to my own antics.

At checkpoints during the day, we reported our progress to the game admins, who awarded points and badges. A few members of the UX team in Guadalajara built a sweet app that we used to check-in to our teams at the start of the day and that tracked our team’s progress throughout the competition, detailing badges we earned, mechanics we had unlocked with our design, and showing our overall ranking with the other teams.

There was also a leaderboard ranking all the teams projected on the big screens in the conference center, which showed real-time movement as the teams gained points.

At the beginning of the day, Erika Webb (@erikanollwebb), the moderator and one of the brains behind the jam, conceded that like all games, this one could gamed. Personally, I’ve always seen this as success, not failure, given that it means the game has succeeded by engaging users.

That admission felt like a challenge, so in the afternoon, I decided to start poking around for entry points. First, I earned our team an expertise badge by selecting all the attributes available on my personal profile. Easy stuff. Then, I tackled the points problem.

Team points were not completely transparent, and teams rose on the leaderboard, without any real explanation of why.

Being toward the bottom, I decided to see if I could hack in to get Team Chun-Li some respect.

My first approach was a brute force attack on the Admin page, which I easily found. After trying some easy passwords in combination with the emails of the admins I knew and failing, I decided to sniff the JS files included on the page.

Among several files, I found an admin.js file, which looked promising. Using the JSView Firefox add-on, I scanned the file for information. The app used JSON in the open, which was promising, since I could test using the browser with no authentication. After a couple tests and some digging, I found the ID for our team and began constructing URLs.

I started out by granting us all the badges available, just to test. Everything went well, and no one complained. So, I found a function that granted points and started adding to our total, a little at first.

The game page showed a maximum of 200 points, so after a few more increments, I decided to push past that number.

No one outside our team had noticed that Chun-Li had shot to the top of the leaderboard and exceeded the 200 point maximum. So, I upped the ante to 1,000 for giggles.

That got us noticed. To their credit, Laurie Pattison (@lsptahoe), Erika and the whole team seemed to find this funny and were good sports about it.

In my defense, Laurie had essentially dared me to hack their app earlier in the day, right after I had given up on breaking into their admin app, and for the record, I never intended to cheat and win. It was fun for me, and I hope no one got too annoyed. I think I accidentally took down the app by passing it a negative value, but luckily, all this required was an easy restart.

Thinking back on the day, a ton of work went into producing this event, which had fun challenges, cool apps, videos and a whole host of production behind it.

So, shouts go to Laurie, Erika, Ultan, the team of developers from Guadalajara and everyone involved. A good time was had by all and thanks for inviting and subsequently tolerating me.

Final notes, Ultan attended and showed something at the Maker Faire over the weekend, and I’m really hoping he plans to blog about that. I’m very interested to read about it. Also, Erika will be showing something cool at the GSummit in June. Looking forward to that.

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Depending on your bank, you may have used a modernized ATM, e.g. one that has no envelopes for deposits, but instead, scans your checks and cash to determine the amount you’re depositing.

Pretty good idea, right? Cuts back on the manual process of opening all those deposit envelops, removes the overhead cost to print and stock those envelopes, removes the need for deposit slips, etc.

The problem is how much time it wastes for the end user and creates frustration. Based on my very unscientific research, a deposit now takes 5-10 times longer than it did with the old, dumb ATMs. The low end is for single check deposit that the machine successfully scans on the first try.

The high end is for the intensely frustrating process of trying over and over to get the machine to read all the bills in your deposit.

I’ve had both experiences over the past few months. One time it took me nearly 10 minutes to get the ATM to read all the bills I had in a deposit. If you’ve ever fought a vending machine over a crinkled bill, you’ll know the feeling.

Compare this to the relatively low tech, but predictable experience with a deposit envelope.

Another observation about these new machines: they’re slow and require relearning. With an old ATM, you can predict which buttons to press because the flow is pretty much the same. Plus, the UI is entirely text-based and very responsive.

Not so with the new machines, which introduce new flows, more buttons, and GUI elements. All this makes for a slower experience, even for fast operations like quick withdrawals.

Longer session times means queues build up behind you at the ATM, which is never a good time.

This is yet another example of the sacrifice of efficiency for features. I saw this many years ago when I worked on implementations that replaced old mainframe-based CLI tools, designed for fast data entry, with new sexy GUIs.

An old friend of mine continues to use Pico (a Pine-based mail client) to read his email. Why? He long ago mastered all the keystrokes and can fly through mail, without any of the trappings of a GUI. Plus, CLI is just faster and will always be.

The recent upgrade of my Nexus S to Android 4.0.4 (ICS) is yet another example, at least for me. The phone app is constantly misbehaving, making the device a substandard phone. A bit odd for a smartphone.

The common thread here is devices trying to do too much. I understand why. The ATM offers to save the effort of filling out a deposit slip. The invoicing system offers more information on a single screen in a more readable format. The smartphone offers a rainbow of other functions.

They’ve all expanded to do more for the user, but in doing so, they’ve lost sight of the primary functions the user came to expect, the most critical of which is speed.

Performance is a feature, probably the most undervalued one of all.

Anyway, have you encountered one of these new ATMs? Thoughts?

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I’ve been meaning to share this thoughtful piece from Scott Porad, CTO of Cheezburger (squee!), that does an excellent job encapsulating some reasons why software is so difficult.

His main points, or rather, those made by his friend are:

1. Software is entirely hand-made, and compounding this, software is distributed at very large scale. Looking back through history, machine-made goods have always replaced hand-made goods to account for large scale distribution. Software isn’t there, yet.

2. Software production lacks standards. Think about software projects, and you’ll find a variety of methods, e.g. waterfall, agile. However, even within an established method for running a software project, there is variance from team to team, even within the same company.

3. Everyone has an opinion on how long a project should take, an anomaly for producing goods that require high levels of experience and skill from the people doing the work. Project estimation is hard.

Scott’s second point about standards is similar to one that nags me, titles. Software uses titles like engineer and architect, but these jobs don’t require the same levels of certification and training that their namesakes do.

So, while it makes sense to use titles that mirror physical construction, this isn’t really a fair comparison.

I’ve noodled the reasons behind why software is both difficult and misunderstood for years, and this is the best encapsulation I’ve read to date. Even so, I’d add a few other points.

4. Everyone uses software, at home, at work, on the go, and software usually requires substantial learning investment. This tends to make everyone feel like an expert, and it tends to trivialize the effort required to produce this or that small tweak.

This is a scaling problem for  producers of software, e.g. every time Facebook makes a chance, revolt ensues. It’s exceptionally difficult to make changes to software because of the investment in relearning. Plus, software is highly emotional to the end user, making the effect of changes impossible to estimate.

5. Software relies on hardware, which is an older, more mature production model. Therefore, hardware tends to advance more quickly than software can keep up, and replacements cannot be assumed. So, when software is produced, it must account for old hardware and new hardware, which compounds the all other problems.

I’m sure there are other points too. This is a good starting point, and I’m interested to know your thoughts, given that most of you are close to the problem.

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The topic is gamification.

Insert cringe here. While I loathe the term, the results that game mechanics can produce when applied to non-games are undeniable. Take reputation for example. Everyone craves status, in life, at work, at the airport, at the coffee shop, everywhere.

Good reputation systems provide just that by adding tangible value to people’s community contributions and surfacing the results. The very existence of a reputation system can help draw previously resistant contributors into the system, if only to attain status.

Sure, it’s difficult, but there are tons of good examples out there. Stack Overflow comes immediately to mind.

I suppose the main problem today is the term “gamification” which hilariously is autoreplaced by “ramification” in OS X Mail. Maybe that’s not an accident.

People associate gamification with manipulation, or being gamed. However, there are long-standing examples of game mechanics that most people don’t immediately identify as games, e.g. frequent flyer programs, which are more powerful for status than for explicit rewards.

Back to the design jam. The Apps UX team understands the power of game mechanics. Check out Friend of the ‘Lab and sometime contributor, Ultan Ó Broin’s (@ultan), post for a sample of their approach to this puzzle.

Anyway, I’m excited and honored to attend this session and soak in the ideas from a room full of smart people. Apparently, longtime Friends of the ‘Lab Bex Huff (@bex) and Floyd Teter (@fteter) will also be in attendance. Bonus points achieved.

Ultan and company tell me that they’re watching the hashtag #gamifyOracle if you have thoughts and ideas you’d like to share. I suppose you could rant too, but that’s not very productive. No one ever rants on Twitter anyway.

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For the uninitiated, like me, ICMI stands for International Customer Management Institute, and ACCE, their annual show, stands for Annual Call Center Exhibition. I’ll be showing Oracle Social Network (OSN), the web and iPad versions, and talking generally about Oracle Public Cloud (OPC), on the demo floor both days of the show.

ACCE is a pretty small show, at least compared to the big events I usually attend for Oracle, so it’ll be an interesting chance to interact in a more cozy environment. This conference targets an attendee group that I don’t usually talk to, i.e. contact center and customer service professionals, another plus.

I’ll also get to show OSN for the first time (for me, not the product), and this has been great practice. Although we’ve been using OSN internally for quite a while, I haven’t got a chance to touch and feel the Fusion CRM and HCM integrations, and preparing for the show has brought me up to speed with OPC and its various offerings.

So, lots of pluses for me, and I suppose, for you too, if you’re going to be at the conference.

On the off-chance that you’ll be in Seattle for the show, or otherwise, hit me up in comments, always great to meet readers IRL.Possibly Related Posts:

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Those familiar with Sites (and FatWire) are probably familiar with the Jump Start Kit (JSK) concept, which is a preconfigured installation of the Content Server, bundled with Apace and Tomcat running on an in-memory db called HyperSQL or HSQLDB, including a demo site. It’s a push-button installation that allows for portability that runs nicely on a laptop and can be carried on a thumb drive.

If you download Sites from OTN, you won’t find a JSK, but never fear, you can get one from Support.

That’s all well and good, but if you work with Sites for a bit, you’ll probably need some help. There is very good documentation online, also available as a standalone download, but if you’re not an RTFM kinda person, I have a resource for you.

Fatcoders

Fatcoders, love the name, is a blog run by Michele Sciabarra and Mirella Di Girolamo that discussed detailed information about Sites (and FatWire) development topics. Based on the content and looking at their LinkedIn profiles, these are two very seasoned veterans, who’ve been using Sites, ahem FatWire, for many years.

I found this resource thanks to Bex Huff (@bex) and his session “A Crash Course In WebCenter Sites (FatWire) for Site Studio Customers” at Collaborate. During the session, he mentioned a hack that will allow Sites development within JDeveloper, the Oracle development IDE.

I haven’t tried yet, but apparently, the techniques Michele describes in this post, The Simplest Way to Use Eclipse for FatWire Development, should work for JDev as well, at least that’s how I understand it.

Bex listed a number of other resources for Sites/FatWire information in his talk, which ideally, he’ll find some time to share in a post.

Anyway, if you’re interested in working with Sites, download it and then bookmark Fatcoders and put it in your reader.  Great resource.

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A few of us were chatting over dinner about how much we loved TripIt (@tripit), and I remembered a story from the AppsLab vaults.

I remain a true believer that we need more dead-simple email (and IM) interfaces into web services, which is why I’m a longtime fan of TripIt. People just can’t be bothered to try out this or that new service, and email isn’t going anywhere.

I’ll confess I haven’t used TripIt in years, but that’s really on me, not on them. TripIt really showcases simplicity as a feature; all you need to do is email your travel itinerary to their bot, which it parses and then uses to create a trip for you, complete with nice-to-haves like checkin, stuff to do at your destination, calendar files for import, etc.

Plus, there’s the social element, which alerts you when friends are nearby.

Anyway, way back when, I attended a session called “Making Email a Useful Web App” at Web 2.0 Expo, presented by TripIt co-founder, Andy Denmark (@adenmark), a great session that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Not long after, I blithely complained that TripIt didn’t fully support our corporate travel agent’s itineraries on a blog post of Andy’s. He politely offered to take a look.

I didn’t expect him to do anything, what with a fledgling company to run and all, but I emailed him copies of the itineraries, just for kicks. Not too long later, he replied and said they’d take a look and get it sorted later that week.

Sure enough, they did, and from then on, itineraries sent by our corporate travel agent worked perfectly, no fuss, no mess.

How awesome is that?

Great company, with great service at all levels.

So, if you work for Oracle and enjoy using TripIt to process and manage your itineraries, you owe Andy a big hug, virtually of course, for taking the time to listen to a whiney user.Possibly Related Posts:

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Now, thanks to the power of OTN (@oracletechnet), you can kick the tires yourself.

Let’s back up and talk about what Sites is first. Sites is all about web experience management, specifically through your consumer-facing, dot-com web presence, which can be a tricky business, given that you could have tens of thousands of assets to surface online and hundreds of contributors, most of whom aren’t technical users. Or at least, they’re not paid to be technical.

Sites provides a simple interface that makes it easy for contributors to create, find, organize and deploy these assets without calling IT for help. Contributors can see the effect their changes will have on the overall site and edit and tweak them as necessary, all without actually changing the live site.

Sites also provides an architecture that makes deployment a snap, protecting the production environment from fat-finger mistakes and allowing for useful features like date-based publishing and look-ahead views of what your site will look like in the future, based on content you’ve scheduled for publishing.

Performance is a main feature of Sites, which includes caching in many different layers to ensure that visitors don’t experience any latency as they browse around your web presence.

Sites is also developer-friendly, supporting what you already know, like JSP tags and Java. If you’re like me and prefer easy stuff, JSP tags are a powerful way to extend content using a simple kinda-sorta like HTML way, or if you’re more like Noel (@noelportugal) and prefer the power of Java, you can embed it directly into your pages.

There are a ton of features, which you can read about here and of course, here, and yeah, there’s a mobility server to create mobile web-friendly versions of your content.

Noel and I have worked a lot with Sites team over the past few months; of course, we have a Sites maven on our team, Noël Jaffré (@noeljaffre), and we’ve also had the pleasure of working directly with the Sites PM and development teams. I want to congratulate them on the release, which represents a full overhaul of the previous version and has been in the works for quite some time.

If you attended Collaborate 12 last week and came by the WebCenter booth, you got a sneak peak at the new contributor interface as well as the new sports-themed demo site.

Since Sites is a relatively small install and can be carried on a 1 GB thumb drive, we’re planning to bring some along with us to future events. Although I’m not seeing it immediately in the OTN download, Sites does frequently include a Jump Start Kit (JSK), which includes Apache and Tomcat, preconfigured to run in a quick and dirty way, allowing for portability and providing a quick way for people to get hands on with the product as fast as possible.

If you find us at an event this year, we’ll probably have some drives with us for you to try. I know Friend of the ‘Lab Bex Huff (@bex) was hoping to do this for Collaborate, and I’m sure he’ll have some at future events too.

So, head over to OTN and get started learning WebCenter Sites.

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I’ll lead off with a big thanks to all the organizers from OAUG (@oaug1), IOUG (@ioug) and Quest (@questusergroup), with a special mention for the IOUG WebCenter Special Interest Group (SIG) who made sure we found the right sessions and networked with the right folks. This is a definitely a special group, e.g. they rocked togas at the 80s Party on Wednesday night. Legit.

Also, big thanks to our WebCenter Marketing maven, Kellsey Ruppel, who worked so hard to make the conference run smoothly for us.

I got a lot more out of Collaborate 12 than I did Collaborate 08 in Denver, which is entirely my own fault, largely thanks to help of these people, and I’m already planning for a Denver do-over at Collaborate 13.

Day 0

The show got started early for me with the WebCenter Customer Advisory Board (CAB) meeting on Sunday.  This wasn’t technically a Collaborate event, but since many of the CAB members were in Las Vegas for the big show, it made sense to have it before the events really got going.

The CAB is enormously valuable to our PM organization, since these customers provide real use cases and feedback, and I spent the day meeting meeting, greeting and listening to real users of the product.

One of the highlights for all the customers attending the CAB was a chance to touch and feel Oracle Social Network for the first time. The OSN PM team provided an overview of the product, and then collected feedback through the tool. The commentary I heard was overwhelmingly positive, and after spending a week with the product, everyone is excited for release.

Another highlight was Christian (@cfinn) and his flying monkeys. I won’t give away the specifics, but if you find him speaking at an event you’re attending, make an effort to go.

Last but definitely not least, thanks to TekStream for sponsoring the cocktail reception.

I had planned to attend the WebCenter Deep Dive, but unfortunately, the two events conflicted. I did manage to sneak away briefly to catch up with longtime Friend of the ‘Lab, Bex Huff (@bex), whose company Bezzotech sponsored that event.

Day 1

Monday kicked off the event in earnest. I spent most of the day preparing the WebCenter Sites demo booth, but I did manage to sneak away for a meeting with the IOUG Board of Directors and the IOUG WebCenter SIG.

This was a treat for our entire team. As a team of WebCenter evangelists (or advocates, take your pick), we rely on communication and collaboration with organizations like the IOUG. They tell us what their members want, and ideally, we deliver.

So, this type of interaction is invaluable to what we do. Thanks to the Board and SIG for taking time out of their hectic schedules to chat with us.

I ended the day of events with the opening of the Exhibit Hall, and got a chance to watch the WebCenter Sites experts we have from the FatWire acquisition in action showing their product. I’ve spent a lot of time recently working with Sites, the Web Experience Management pillar of the WebCenter Suite of products, and it was great to see the real experts in action.

Although I didn’t get to any sessions on Monday, the day was very productive.

Day 2

Tuesday began for me with Bex’s session, “A Crash Course In WebCenter Sites (FatWire) for Site Studio Customers.” As a longtime Stellent guru, Bex knows a thing or two about Site Studio. His session mapped functions from Site Studio to Sites, and it introduced me to several customers who are interested in learning more about Sites. So, Tuesday began with a win.

I then spent several hours working the Sites demo booth. Booth duty always seems like a chore until I get into it. I enjoy talking to people and listening to what they have to say, and once the traffic starts to flow, the time flies.

We got a nice flow of people to our booth. Most of them had questions about the Content and Portal pillars of WebCenter, but they were impressed when they saw what Sites has to offer.

After a long day of booth duty, I mixed and mingled at the evening reception on the exhibit hall floor, then gave my feet a rest.

This was the day I started to lose my voice though, which always happens to me at conferences, since I talk so much. Note to self, listen more.

Day 3

On Wednesday, I stopped by “Build an iPhone app using WebCenter Portal REST APIs” presented by  Chris Bales (@cbales) and Rodrigo Lima (@rodrigo_lima) before heading back to the demo booth. The session attracted a nice crowd, especially for a morning session. I didn’t get to stay, but I heard good things.

After my final demo booth stint, I caught a couple afternoon sessions, “Surfacing Oracle Social Network into Your Business Applications” given by Andy Kershaw, OSN PM lead and  ”WebCenter User Experience and Interaction – From iPads to Xbox” by Friend of the ‘Lab, John Sim (@jrsim_uix) of Fishbowl Solutions.

Andy’s session was unfortunately timed to overlap with lunch. Had it been a smidge later, I suspect he would have drawn ten times more people, given the content. Andy showed several key features of OSN, including how to connect it to other business applications.

John’s session showcased the exciting possibilities for enhancing enterprise data surfaced through REST APIs with new interface paradigms like touch and natural motion capture, specifically Xbox Kinect. It was great to meet John IRL for the first time after stalking him virtually for a couple years.

By the end of Wednesday, I was sounding like a lifetime smoker.

Day 4

Although Thursday was only yesterday, Vegas seems like a nostalgic memory now. There wasn’t much on the agenda, as the conference wrapped at noon, so Noel (@noelportugal) and I spent some quite time debriefing and comparing notes from the week.

By the end of the conference, I left Vegas feeling like I had put in a good week. I had the pleasure of meeting dozens of new people and reconnecting with people I’ve know for years.

It was a great week, and thanks to everyone for making Collaborate 12 a personal success for me.

Now, to rest my voice.

Thoughts on the conference? Find the comments.

Update: Kellsey added pics to the repost she did over on the WebCenter blog. So, it did, in fact, happen.

Update 2: Among the many “finally met IRL” moments that I had at Collaborate 12, I forgot to mention newish Twitter Friend of the ‘Lab, Chad Thompson (@zirous_chad) of Zirous. He was the first of many fine folks who stopped by the demo booth. Sorry Chad.

Update 3: Forgot another old pal, David Haimes (@dhaimes), whom I caught up with a couple times during the week. He was presenting some cool Fusion Applications stuff. Not entirely sure why my memory is so bad.Possibly Related Posts:

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History of the browser user-agent string

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One of the reasons I switched to a Nexus phone last year was to get to new versions of Android quickly. Google first showed ICS in October, and they released the upgrade in conjunction with the Galaxy Nexus release in November in Europe and December here in the US.

Six months seems like a long time to me, but that feeling is probably influenced by a touch of envy watching other phones get the upgrade first. The fact that carriers were rolling out upgrades to their high-end phones more quickly than Google could roll out vanilla Android to its Nexus line was the kicker.

Anyway, after several days using the new OS, I have a few observations that might interest you.

Upgrade process

The upgrade itself was very smooth. The download was a scant 400-ish MB, which came down very quickly over wifi, and installed itself quickly. Within 10 minutes, I was live again.

If you’ve used Honeycomb (Android 3.0) on a tablet, there’s very little that will surprise you; the ICS UI is virtually identical. If you haven’t used Honeycomb and are coming from Gingerbread (Android 2.3.x), then you’re in for a whole new world of surprise and delight, or frustration and annoyance, depending on your perspective.

New stuff I like

I like Android’s widgets, something you won’t get in iOS. For you iOS people, a widget can surface pieces of an app’s functionality on the phone’s desktop, e.g. your email, a music player, a tweet box, etc. Honeycomb added the ability to resize widgets, which was a very helpful, especially for the calendar widget. In Gingerbread, the calendar widget was a tiny 2×3, not big enough to be useful. Now, I can enlarge the calendar widget to see several events, rather than just the next one.

I haven’t tested extensively, but it seems like the GPS issues that plagued the Nexus S may have been fixed. Even with wifi assisting, apps like Maps were unable to get location on Gingerbread, which is exceeding annoying if you’re trying to use one of Android’s flagship apps, Navigation. To fix this problem, I had to add an app that would clear the GPS cache. I’m cautiously optimistic that this issue is fixed now.

Another observation that I haven’t fully vetted yet is improved battery life. On Gingerbread, I had to add Juice Defender to get through a full day without charging, but so far, ICS seems better at managing the battery. The real test will be turning off Juice Defender, but I haven’t been brave enough to do that yet.

Now that I’m running ICS, I can try out the Chrome beta Android version. So far, I like it, but that’s only from a very limited amount of use.

Overall, the UI is much more polished. I like the new Android font, Roboto, which, like any font has its fans and haters.

That’s pretty much it so far.

Stuff I don’t like

My biggest annoyance with ICS is that it’s sluggish, which lends some validity to the long wait. Tasks I’m used to performing on Gingerbread are no longer as snappy, which is one thing, performance. Plus, when I tap and get no response, I continue to tap, which is another thing, affordance.

Couple these two, and you get some wild behavior. I doubt this will ever change, given that ICS is built for faster specs, and adding affordances is essentially a backport. Google wants me to upgrade, so I don’t see a lot of incentive for them to build nuances into ICS for older devices.

I’m also highly irritated that Picasa uploads are wonky on ICS. I use the Picasa integration all the time to upload pictures of my daughter; ICS actually adds a shortcut to the Gallery to do this with one tap when viewing a photo. However, I’ve hit two issues; first, I hit the “Failed to retrieve account information” error, which appears to be caused by conflicts with other synced accounts. Removing the accounts for LinkedIn and Dropbox resolved this problem.

Now, I’m able to upload, but the new photo doesn’t show up immediately in the Gallery on the phone or on Picasa Web Albums. Not immediately anyway because uploaded photos eventually do show up, leading me to believe this is a sync lag. I tried manually syncing to get that sweet instant gratification, but without success. I’ll have to spend more time diagnosing this one.

One Gingerbread annoyance that hasn’t been resolved is the default ringer volume is too quiet and more importantly, the volume resets after you raise it. For me, this has resulted in a bunch of missed calls and texts, and ICS doesn’t seem to retain a volume setting either.

Semi-related, the Phone app has been a bit dodgy as well. I’ve entered phone numbers and tapped the call button, only to have the app silently fail, without remembering the number. I’ve also had the Phone app redial the last number I called right after I ended the call.

Some UI annoyances I’ve noticed:

• ICS adds a Google search widget to every desktop, and to remove it, you have to disable Google Search.
• The wifi and carrier signal strength icons don’t always show blue (used to be green in Gingerbread) to indicate data flow, and the addition of arrows to the wifi icon greatly decreases its usability IMO. Classic overdesign.
• The Phone app is elegantly redesigned, but there are UX problems. First, the end call button is very large, a good thing, but I quickly noticed that the tappable area is smaller than the button. I understand why (accidental taps), but why not make the button smaller and fully tappable?
• The Favorites window of the Phone app is nicely rendered now, implementing a pane design (vs. a list in Gingerbread), similar to what I’ve seen of WP 7. However, the panes are too big, forcing scrolling, which is not what you want in a favorites (i.e. shortcut) feature.
• Those accustomed to long-pressing the physical Home button to get the list of the last eight apps launched may be disappointed with the Honeycomb-style switcher, which is a wide list of apps and screenshots. On a smaller screen, this list requires scrolling, making it much less efficient than the old icons.

But what about the features that had me excited back in October?

Camera updates: I was stoked for zero-lag shutter speed and rapid fire snapshots. While the shutter speed has improved, I’m not sure it’s zero-lag, and I don’t see any rapid fire options in the new Camera app. Perhaps this is a hardware limitation of the Nexus S. Maybe someone can comment.

Face unlock: Requires root, bit of a bummer, but honestly, this is a Siri-like feature that I’d probably show off to people, but not use regularly.

So, what’s the early verdict?

Android continues to inch closer to iOS, but there are a lot of little details that I’m sure Apple would not abide. Of course, Apple tends in the other direction, adding fanciful touches that are patronizing. I guess I fall in the middle somewhere.

The evolution of Nexus phones, L-R Nexus One, Nexus S, Galaxy Nexus, Image from Techcrunch

What’s clear about Android is that big screens are its target and future. The Nexus S is a great balance between screen size and usable dimensions, slightly bigger than an iPhone with a noticeably larger screen. ICS on the Nexus S, with its four-inch screen, feels cramped, and that’s a bad portent of things to come.

The Galaxy Nexus is a monolith by comparison, impossible to use with one hand, unless you can easily palm a basketball. You’ll never carry that phone in your pants pocket. Please don’t try.

I’m stuck in a two-year contract, but I don’t expect that I’ll have a ton of attractive (to me) Android options when that ends. Form factor is a big deal for me, given how much I use my phone, and bigger isn’t always better.

Have you jumped to ICS? Thoughts?

Find the comments.Possibly Related Posts:

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Collaborate is the annual user group conference that brings together several of the largest Oracle user group communities, OAUG (@oaug1), IOUG (@ioug) and Quest (@questusergroup). I haven’t been to a Collaborate since 2008 in Denver, and this time, I’ll be pretty busy, a good thing.

If you’re going to the show and you’re interested in WebCenter (@oraclewebcenter) and/or hanging out with me and my three of my four fellow WebCenter evangelists, i.e. Christian Finn (@cfinn), Noel Portugal (@noelportugal) and Peter Reiser (@peterreiser), read on for details.

The show gets started for us right away at 0900 on Sunday with the WebCenter Deep Dive, one of the IOUG Deep Dives that run 0900-1500 on Sunday.Here’s the skinny:

#918 Deep Dive on Oracle WebCenter
Date: Sunday, April 22 9:00 am – 3:00 pm
Location: Room 6
Product Line: Oracle WebCenter
Track: Infrastructure Technologies
Description: Spend your day with the experts from the Oracle WebCenter product management and development teams as they go in-depth on all of the pillars of Oracle WebCenter, from Portal and Content to Sites and Oracle Social Network. They will show you the power of each pillar and how they integrate, as well as share a sneak peak of what’s coming in WebCenter 12c. This can’t miss session will be detailed and demo-heavy! To keep things lively, throughout the day we’ll have great giveaways. And to top the day off, you’ll get to “Meet the Developers” behind WebCenter and get your questions answered directly from the development team in a moderated open mike forum. Bring your enthusiasm and your questions to this WebCenter showcase so you’ll be ready to Collaborate on all things WebCenter after you have spent your Sunday with us!

I don’t where Room 6 is, guess I need to figure that out pretty soon, given how large the Mandalay Bay conference center is.

Here are some other WebCenter sessions presented by various Friends of the ‘Lab that might interest you.

#773 – Build an iPhone app using WebCenter Portal REST APIs
Date: Wednesday, April 25 9:30 am – 10:30 am
Location: Surf E
Product Line: Oracle WebCenter
Track: Infrastructure Technologies
Description:
WebCenter Portal’s Spaces iPhone app was built using the powerful RESTful APIs. Come and learn from the people who built the iPhone application and get an overview of the techniques they used.

Chris (@cbales) is an old pal of mine, and he and Rodrigo Lima (@rodrigo_lima) are responsible for the WebCenter iPhone app, which debuted on the App Store back in July 2010. That’s a dog’s age when it comes to iOS, and they’ve been through several versions and have done a great job designing a useful app that uses all the power of iOS.

They’ll be talking about how they built the app and the REST APIs into WebCenter that underpin it. This will be fun, and I’m bummed that I won’t be able to make it. Read on for why.

John Sim (@jrsim_uix) of Fishbowl Solutions will be giving three sessions, showcasing the WebCenter REST APIs at work.

#600 – Exposing WebCenter Data on Mobile & Desktop Devices through the REST API
Date: Tuesday, April 24 10:45 am – 11:45 am
Location: Reef C
Product Line: Oracle WebCenter, Oracle Universal Content Management
Track: Application Strategy and Services
Description:
This session will cover how best to leverage the WebCenter REST API and create cross-device compliant mobile and desktop applications using a single code base. We will review web-based frameworks like Jquery mobile, Zepto, Sencha Touch, Phonegap, Appcelerator & Adobe Air. Learn how these frameworks can enable content from WebCenter to be pulled, synced, and even stored locally for when instant access to content without internet access.

#595 – Achieving Real-Time Social Collaboration in WebCenter 11g
Date: Wednesday, April 25 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Location: Reef C
Product Line: Oracle WebCenter, Oracle Universal Content Management
Track: Application Strategy and Services
Description:
This session will cover the latest 11g PS5 Presence Integration in WebCenter Portal as well as discuss and demonstrate custom taskflows that leverage WebSockets via nodeJS and ADF comet integrations. We will review the pros and cons of using AJAX, WebSocket, and Comet communications in a browser to enable real-time communication and collaboration across a team or organization from a single social platform.

#604 – WebCenter User Experience and Interaction – From iPads to Xbox
Date: Wednesday, April 25 4:15 pm – 5:15 pm
Location: Reef B
Product Line: Oracle WebCenter, Oracle Universal Content Management
Track: Application Strategy and Services
Description:
This session will showcase and demonstrate the evolution of User Interface design and experience including how we can now bring other input technologies like touch, gesture, and voice interactions into a web browser. Examples will include multi-touch gesture interactions from an iPad to quickly scroll through a web-based image library and manipulate on content on the fly. We will also demonstrate how organizations can bring in visual hand gestures and voice-activated support to WebCenter Spaces by using the Xbox Kinect as a low-cost plug-and-play device for Windows. Learn how to escape from your keyboard and explore new approaches for interacting with information.

I’m looking forward to meeting John IRL; I’ve been following his work since he built the Iron Man skin for WebCenter Spaces.

Another guy I’m looking forward to meeting IRL is John Brunswick (@johnbrunswick), who builds fun projects on WebCenter, e.g. the Dropbox Experience on WebCenter Content.

#775 – WebCenter Portal Template Design and Development Best Practices
Date: Wednesday, April 25 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm
Location: Surf E
Product Line: Oracle WebCenter
Track: Infrastructure Technologies
Description:
Organizations deploying extranets and intranets need to maintain corporate branding and apply user interface designs often developed by traditional web designers. By understanding a few key aspects of WebCenter templating, it is possible to style your portal to adhere to these designs. During this session you will learn how to: – Develop dynamic navigation based on CSS standards – Accurately style ADF components added to a WebCenter template – Apply common patterns to update common key UI areas – Best practices to externalize styles and images to empower design teams

Aside from my session duties, I’ll be manning the WebCenter Sites booth on the Exhibit Floor Tuesday and Wednesday morning. I’ve told you about Sites, so you should come by and see for yourself.

This only scratches the surface. For the big picture of all the WebCenter goodness at Collaborate 12, check out the WebCenter blog, where you can also get a handy pdf of all the WebCenter sessions.

So, are you attending Collaborate 12? Drop a comment, and we’ll hang out or something.Possibly Related Posts:

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First, I post content for my own information and reference. I’m not the only one who does this (e.g. @oraclenerd), and I’m not the only one who finds it useful as a personal history. Second, I find tons of helpful technical tips and information from the Google, and thanks to SEO, blogs tend to rise to the top. Finally, the intertubes is a big place, and I frequently remember where I read something memorable and use that as placeholder later to focus a search.

To the content. Marc Chanliau (@sysconmedia) posted instructions for installing JDeveloper on OS X Lion over on Shay Shmeltzer’s (@jdevshay) blog back in August. He did the same for earlier versions of OS X, so if you’re not on Lion yet, check out the older instructions.

In Lion, Apple stopped including the JDK as part of the OS, but you probably already knew that and already accounted for it. For the uninitiated, you need the JDK before you continue. So, open the Terminal and type:

java -version

If you don’t have it, OS X will prompt you to download and install.

The instructions are very easy to follow. Marc’s script didn’t work for me, but it did help me find the path to the Java home. The steps are below, and if you’re feeling charitable, hit this link and show Shay and Marc some love. Thanks guys.

(1) Download JDeveloper from here to your desktop.  (Choose the *generic* Studio Edition from the pull-down menu.)

(2) Double-click on the package you just downloaded, which should be jdevstudio1112Oinstall.jar. Be patient because it may take a few moments for the first screen of the JDev Installer to come up.

(3) Follow the Installer’s step. The tricky part is when you get prompted for providing the path to you local JDK. When you get there, just follow step (4) below.

(4) To make it easy for the JDev Installer to find the all Java libs it’s looking for, you need to run the following bash script. Just copy the script below in a text editor and save the file as jdev_on_lion.sh (or any other name.sh you choose).  Here is the bash script:

#!/bin/bash

mkdir /system/library/java/javavirtualmachines/1.6.0.jdk/contents/home/jdk6

mkdir /system/library/java/javavirtualmachines/1.6.0.jdk/contents/home/jdk6/bin

ln -s /system/library/java/javavirtualmachines/1.6.0.jdk/contents/home/bin/java /system/library/java/javavirtualmachines/1.6.0.jdk/contents/home/jdk6/bin/java

ln -s /system/library/java/javavirtualmachines/1.6.0.jdk/contents/home/bin/javac /system/library/java/javavirtualmachines/1.6.0.jdk/contents/home/jdk6/bin/javac

ln -s /system/library/java/javavirtualmachines/1.6.0.jdk/contents/home/bin/javap /system/library/java/javavirtualmachines/1.6.0.jdk/contents/home/jdk6/bin/javap

ln -s /System/Library/Java/Support/Deploy.bundle/Contents/Home/bin/javaws /system/library/java/javavirtualmachines/1.6.0.jdk/contents/home/jdk6/bin/javaws

ln -s /system/library/java/javavirtualmachines/1.6.0.jdk/contents/home/bin/jar /system/library/java/javavirtualmachines/1.6.0.jdk/contents/home/jdk6/bin/jar

ln -s /system/library/java/javavirtualmachines/1.6.0.jdk/contents/home/bin/xjc /system/library/java/javavirtualmachines/1.6.0.jdk/contents/home/jdk6/bin/xjc mkdir /system/library/java/javavirtualmachines/1.6.0.jdk/contents/home/jdk6/lib

ln -s /system/library/java/javavirtualmachines/1.6.0.jdk/contents/classes/classes.jar /system/library/java/javavirtualmachines/1.6.0.jdk/contents/home/jdk6/lib/tools.jar

mkdir /system/library/java/javavirtualmachines/1.6.0.jdk/contents/home/jdk6/jre mkdir /system/library/java/javavirtualmachines/1.6.0.jdk/contents/home/jdk6/jre/bin

ln -s /system/library/java/javavirtualmachines/1.6.0.jdk/contents/home/bin/java /system/library/java/javavirtualmachines/1.6.0.jdk/contents/home/jdk6/jre/bin/java mkdir /system/library/java/javavirtualmachines/1.6.0.jdk/contents/home/jdk6/jre/lib

ln -s /system/library/java/javavirtualmachines/1.6.0.jdk/contents/classes/classes.jar /system/library/java/javavirtualmachines/1.6.0.jdk/contents/home/jdk6/jre/lib/rt.jar

(5) Now that you’ve saved the script as described in step (4), you need to run it. Before running it, however, you need to change the file access permissions by entering the following command at a terminal prompt: chmod +x jdev_on_lion.sh

(6) You’re ready to run the script. Enter the following command at a terminal prompt: ./jdev_on_lion.sh (if the bash shell complains that some permissions are (still) denied, just enter the command preceding it with “sudo” (you’ll be required to enter your Mac password), that will always work!)

(7) Now you should see the JDK’s path automatically entered in the JDev install screen.

(8) You just need to follow the remaining JDev Installer steps to complete installation.

Possibly Related Posts:

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• Geeky Project Part 3: Create a WebCenter VM

Now that I’m back in the iOS fold, I can start yapping about apps again.

So, let’s begin. Justin’s (@oracletechnet) post about the OTN content in the Oracle iOS app reminded me to check out the recent updates to the Oracle iOS app. The Oracle app encapsulates much of the content you’ll find over on oracle.com, all in a handy app for both your iPhone and iPad.

Check out the screen grabs for iPhone.

The iPad version is slightly different, but you get the gist, all your Oracle stuff in an app. FWIW the app includes a listing of Oracle-developed iOS apps, a handy shortcut. I don’t see a way to login to my account, which was made much easier for mobile devices when they deployed CSS3 media queries, but hopefully, that’s coming soon.

This app isn’t new, but I’ve been slow to cover it. I believe this app is brainchild of Friend of the ‘Lab Marius Ciortea (@radu43), so kudos dude. Maybe Marius can answer a question I’m sure we all have, is this coming to Android? Hey maybe as a fun project someone can put together a mobile web version in jQM. Just spitballing.

Find the app here.

 Possibly Related Posts:

• Carl Backstrom, Oracle ACE
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• Answering Questions about Mobile Devices
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Erascan (h/t User Illusions) scans and saves content on a whiteboard as it erases, and it can send the scanned images via email wirelessly.

Obviously, the whiteboard is a great tool for collaborating in groups, but inevitably, someone has to transcribe the whiteboard’s contents, onto paper, into notes or email or more commonly, via a smartphone picture. Usually, this happens at the end of the meeting, when everyone is rushing on to the next meeting.

It’s tough to tell if Erascan is real product in the making or just concept. Apparently:

A team of six designers has designed Erascan for MIMOS Berhad. The individuals behind the digital eraser and scanner include Mohd Rohaizam Mohd Tahar, Nuzairi Yasin, Saharudin Busri, Mohd Nizam Najmuddin, and Nazjimee Amat Omar.

Anyway, very cool concept, I’d love to add this to my bag of gadgets. Imagine the wow factor when you pull this out of your laptop bad and start erasing.

 Possibly Related Posts:

• I Might Pay for JotNot
• Another Cool Design Tool, UXPin
• 3D Printing Officially Has My Attention
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The comic’s title, Umwelt, is explained in the alt text.

Umwelt is the idea that because their senses pick up on different things, different animals in the same ecosystem actually live in very different worlds. Everything about you shapes the world you inhabit–from your ideology to your glasses prescription to your choice of web browser.

Why is this comic so cool? It’s displaying one of several thousand based on information gathered from your browser. Check out the Reddit post for more details.

On April 2, when I first read it from Chrome in Texas where I was “vacationing,” I got a Texas-weather-themed comic, ironically about tornadoes. Checking the comic from Firefox gave me a snake comic, which changes as you change your browser’s width.

XKCD Umwelt

Back home in Oregon, I’m seeing a PNW-Northern Lights-themed comic, and on VPN, I’m getting a funny corporate-themed one. If you’re an employee inside the firewall, hit the link to see.

XKCD Umwelt

Very cool stuff and given that more than 2,000 different comics have been reported (it’s become a treasure hunt), Randall put in an enormous amount of effort drawing all the comics and configuring which to show based on specific browser information.

Maybe at some point, he’ll published a description of the techniques he used to pull off this epic trick.

Hit the link and see which comic you get.Possibly Related Posts:

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So, I reached out to friend of the ‘Lab, Eddie Awad (@eddieawad) for ideas. Eddie is a shutterbug, and he has lots of Oracle-related pictures. So, I figured he’d have a few that would work. Happily, he obliged and sent me some ideas.

I picked one, and now we’re live with Eddie’s shot of OpenWorld a few years ago, maybe 2006 or 2007, that shows the pageantry that is OpenWorld under construction at Moscone West, against the backdrop of a lovely San Francisco Fall day.

Thanks Eddie.

Anyway, I’m happy to consider other options, since Timeline offers a neat way to showcase cool pictures. Let me know if you have photos to suggest, the only real guideline is keep it Oracle-related. Oh, and make sure you have the rights to use the picture. In this case, I obviously have permission.Possibly Related Posts:

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Sites is the new name for what used to be called FatWire, a company Oracle acquired last year. Sites does what’s now being called web experience management (WEM), but if you’ve been around for a while, you’ll know it as website content management or something similar.

It takes a lot of people to manage a major web presence, people to write content and create imagery, people to edit content, people to move all the right files into place without bringing the whole site crashing down into a glorious 404. Most of these people are good at what they do, but not necessarily good at the tasks the other people in chain do.

If you’ve ever self-hosted a blog, you’ll understand this problem. I once volunteered to help a group of people learn self-hosted WordPress blogging, and most of the time I spent was on the basics of FTP and file manipulation, not necessarily the tools and technology, but the whys. Like, why do I have to move this image to the host?

And that was before we even posted the first entry.

These people weren’t slow; they were uninformed. A website looks simple when you hit in a browser, but building one is a whole different animal. These people were experts at making cakes and organizing fund-raisers, not experts at internet.

And this was just a simple blog.

Image that problem compounded by thousands of pages and images, spread across scores of contributors, translated into dozens of languages and hosted on different infrastructure all over the World. Oh, and now on different devices with different screen resolutions and capabilities.

So, if you’re a huge brand like Red Bull, Toyota, Ford, General Motors, or Best Buy, you need a way to manage all that content and make sure your creators can create, your editors can edit, your developers can build and your IT can keep it all in sync and, most importantly, up and running, all without stepping on each other’s toes.

After all, no one wants downtime.

That’s what Sites does, or rather my interpretation of what it does. Don’t take my word for it; my pal Noël Jaffré (@noeljaffre), who came to the team from FatWire, gives the full rundown here.

So, the other Noel (@noelportugal) and I spent a week in developer training learning the product and kicking the proverbial tires, and it turns out, Sites is a fun toy, if you’re a developer because it has a ton of open interfaces, can be carried around on a thumb drive and runs locally with ease, just the right thing for a developer to learn.

Those of you out there who practice Oracle and want to expand your knowledge pay attention to Sites and stay tuned. Lots of customers out there are interested and ready to hear more. Sites isn’t yet on OTN, but I’ll definitely let you know when it is, along with all wonderful collateral I know is in development right now.

So, if you were wondering about the silence, that’s the reason. I’ve been playing with a new toy.

For the record, I don’t get Pinterest. Or Instragram. Or Path. So, if you do, I’m all ears.

Also, the airline found my iPad, just in time for a new iOS.

Wins all around.

Find the comments.

Update: It occurred to me after I published that I focused a bit too much on the web content management aspects of Sites. This is what Noel P and I spent last week learning, so forgive my narrow focus. Sites does a bunch more, including analytics, visitor segmentation and contextual targeting, personalization, UGC, and pretty much anything needed to run and manage a web presence.

I’m still new to the product, so I’m not really even sure I hit all the bullets.Possibly Related Posts:

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For the unfamiliar, Posterous made blogging dead simple by allowing you to post via email; just send a message to the email address they gave you and presto, you just blogged. I’ve been using it for a while, and I immediately read the fine print to see how to export my data out of there.

This is the risk we all take, knowingly or not, when we use a cloudy, or SaaSy, service, i.e. your data aren’t really yours unless they allow it to be. Plus, all the accounts I read say this is a talent acquisition, so it’s highly unlikely that Posterous will exist after Twitter closes the acquisition.

Image from Lifehacker

For now, Posterous is saying all the right things. They promise to keep the service running as-is and to provide export mechanisms to other services, e.g. WordPress.com, Tumblr.

Still, I figured I should investigate my options, rather than wait, and happily, Lifehacker provided a how-to aimed at people like me who might not want to wait.

Tumblr is a no-fly for me, and I initially chose Posterous over Tumblr specifically because of the latter’s track record of customer indifference. Plus, I’m a longtime fan of WordPress, so WordPress.com was the first logical choice. Turns out WordPress.com offers an easy import for Posterous, which many people are using.

Unfortunately, the import fails on my private Posterous blog.

My only other option is self-hosted WordPress, but rather than add another domain, I decided to go with a local install.

A quick search led me to MAMP, you know, Mac-Apache-MySQL-PHP, the lesser-known sibling of LAMP, i.e. Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP. Yes, there are a bunch of WAMPs too, if you must know.

WordPress even has instructions on how to install MAMP and get WP running.

Why would anyone need a local install of WordPress? Well, for a local development environment, of course; if you were so inclined, you could develop and test plugins and themes all offline and without borking a live site. Other uses include, testing WP upgrades, testing new plugins and plugin upgrades, taking local backups of your live site, and many more.

Makes a ton of sense. So off I went.

Installing MAMP is a cakewalk, and soon, I got to this point.

That’s when the fun began.

What follows is for my own (and Google’s) edification, i.e. I’m documenting it so I won’t fail again and maybe others will also benefit.

The first thing I did was change a few preferences, e.g. the default storage location. By default, MAMP puts Apache’s document root in /Applications which I’m not backing up with Time Machine. So, I changed this preference, and then MySQL wouldn’t start.

To the Google.

It’s difficult to retrace my exact steps after a night of technology fail, but they went something like this. I searched for my problem and got a ton of possibly related problems after other changes, e.g. changing the Apache and MySQL ports and changing the MySQL root password, which MAMP uses to connect.

Those both sounded like important steps, so I filed them away and decided the quickest way to solve my problem was to reinstall MAMP and walk through all these changes.

After the reinstall, I hit the MAMP FAQ to change the MySQL root password first. After completing those steps, both servers started, and I headed to phpMyAdmin, which is bundled with MAMP, to make sure everything was cool.

It wasn’t, with phpMyAdmin complaining about connection issues.

More searching ensued, leading me to two (part 1, part 2) very detailed and helpful videos from Lucid Nerd (@thelucidnerd), but even after following these tips and reinstalling a couple times, I was still stuck with the same error from phpMyAdmin.

Small consolation, but along the way, I learned how to reset and flush privileges in MySQL. So, there’s that.

I also came across and interesting solution that involved the corruption of the root password hash. This specific to a 1045: Access denied for user ‘root’@’localhost’ error, which I did get at one point. I also did notice the root password hash had an extra character, as described and thought for sure that would do it.

Nope. It did resolve the 1045 error, but phpMyAdmin still throwing the generic connection issue complaint. Keeping in mind that I’ve rarely used phpMyAdmin in the past, I stared at that page for a while and finally noticed this little icon whose hover text is “Open phpMyAdmin in a new window.”

Sure, why not, and there it was, connected and everything, in the new tab.

This gave me more confusion, but hope. I finally got lucky after even more search keyword string refinement. The key piece: clear the browser cache.

Doh.

After clearing the cache, everything was working fine. To be fair, everything was probably working fine for a long time, I just wasn’t thinking clearly. Before you hate, keep in mind this was several hours invested at night, and my toddler has been teething.

So, yeah, I’m pretty punchy and haven’t been thinking like a boss thanks to extreme sleep deprivation.

We’ve all been there with technology problems.

Anyway, #lfmf and install MAMP (or xAMP) to get a local WordPress or Drupal installation up and running.

Find the comments if you like.

Update: Thanks to Alain in comments for reminding me to mention the Posterous Importer plugin for self-hosted WP blogs. From what I’ve read, this plugin won’t work because it hits a Posterous rate limit, but that’s likely to change, given the increase in demand.

The workaround you can use right now is to do an import into a new WordPress.com blog and then an export via WordPress’ tools which can be imported into your self-hosted instance. WordPress obviously does a great job exporting/importing its own content between instances.

Hit the Lifehacker post for details.

Of course, if you can’t be bothered or have faith, you can wait for Posterous to fulfill their promise on content exportability. I’m confident they will provide something usable.

I also neglected to mention the (assumed) reason I couldn’t import into WordPress.com was due to my Posterous blog being private. I’ve heard it works like a champ for public Posterous blogs, including comment import.Possibly Related Posts:

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Some highlights:

Over the years, we’ve become the virtual equivalent of hoarders, tacking on content and features without stopping to clean house. As a result, sites and services have become obese and sluggish to adapt to this fast-moving landscape. Users bear the burden as they slog through slow page loads, awkwardly huge navigation, sidebar clutter, and a kitchen sink full of half-baked features.

Using the phrase hoarders here is the best characterization of that unique problem (a.k.a. the Frankenapp) I’ve heard. It really captures the psychological attachment we product people have to features and the effect they have on users.

Whether we’re prepared or not, people are already interacting with our creations on devices that in many cases didn’t exist when we originally built them. This realization led mobile interaction designer Josh Clark to proclaim that we need to think of our content like water that can be poured into a multitude of containers.

Another great metaphor here, encouraging designers to think of content as water, very applicable to the tenants of responsive web design and mobile-first thinking.

Anyway, hit the link; it’s well worth the read, even if you’re not a designer.Possibly Related Posts:

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