I’ll be making some useful design changes to this site over the next week. I’m sure you’ve noticed the new branding; it’s actually the Facebook cover photo, and I need to make a full width one that better integrates into the site. I will also be moving the blog portion to a subfolder, so I sincerely apologize to anyone who has linked to an article here; it may break as I move the content to /blog but I have worked out the forwarding issues so links will remain intact.

In addition to the visual tweaks, I’ve added a new Facebook Page for my business. I am posting two things there: 1) social and experiential marketing links I find and 2) my speaking gigs.

One thing I added this week was the progress bar on the right. When I was let go and decided to form my own LLC, I was immediately hit with work offers to the point that I needed to refuse some work. A good problem to have!

The progress bar was the ideal solution for showing how much work I currently have. I took the idea from Rob Palmer’s site which features a helpful widget that even says the date he is next available.

It’s funny. Almost everything exists if you Google it. I needed that progress bar and Googled “Progress Meter Plugin WordPress”. Sure enough, one of the first results was Top 12 Writing Progress Meters and Word Count Trackers by Tia Ross.

God, I love the Internet.

Lately I’ve noticed what seems to me to be sloppy user experience design (UXD) in many of the apps I use. If the mistakes were on small, indie apps that lack the budget for a User Experience Designer or an Information Architect, I could let these go (although why are you building apps if you don’t have a strong working knowledge of UXD?). It’s not the indie developers, though. It’s the big guys: Apple, LinkedIn and Pinterest. They have the budgets and should know better. Here are some of the UXD issues I’ve been repeatedly irked by lately:

APPLE MESSAGES: They don’t fully sync across iCloud like they should. As a result, you may message someone from your iPad and get the answer on your iPhone or Macbook. Worse, should you try to resume the conversation from the device the conversation “moved to” you’ll find it jumping back to the original device, and the history of the conversation split across machines. It never catches up, either. Inexcusable.

LINKEDIN: As I mentioned on Twitter, LinkedIn for iOS doesn’t play well with other apps. For example, say I read an article on Facebook that is hosted on LinkedIn, or I get an email from one of my LinkedIn Groups that I’d like to respond to. I am not sent to the LinkedIn app. Instead, I am sent to Safari wherein I am presented with a landing page informing me that there is a LinkedIn iOS app and would I care to download it now? Weak and disappointing considering how well everything else on the LinkedIn app is. This is a fairly major oversight and makes the app seem amateur.

PINTEREST: While the Pinterest app for iOS has greatly improved with version 2.0.4, it still has some irritating bugs. The first is minor, but annoying as Hell. At least once a week, Pinterest asks me to rate the app. That would be perfectly fine—if I hadn’t already rated the app six times. I kept rating it, thinking maybe each rating is for the new version, but that isn’t it. So finally I clicked on “No Thanks” only to be asked again the same day, just two hours later! Ridiculous.

The second bug is not a bug at all; it’s a feature change that I happen to hate for very legitimate reasons. Time was, if you liked an image on Pinterest, you’d right-click or Command click it to save it. With version 2.0, they removed the ability to save photos—or so it seemed. They actually moved the functionality which they had right the first time. Now if you want to save an image, you have to go under the Share menu. What the? Sharing is not downloading. This is just a bad idea and it goes against expected behavior (i.e., every other iOS app lets you click on the image to save). What are you thinking, Pinterest? This is just bad UXD. The dev that made this call should go work for some other team that doesn’t value the user experience. Microsoft’s Excel team, for example.

What’s been bugging you on your various and sundry digital devices, lately? Do tell…

I love free Wifi. We all do. Except when we can’t get on. Sometimes their default login page stubbornly refuses to appear.

Your friends will tell you, “Oh, just type in Google.com, or any site and the page will pop up.” Except that doesn’t always work. And restarting your browser works about 80% of the time.

It’s that one time you really need to get online that the login page refuses to load, right?

I have a simple trick that works on any browser for getting online. Use localhost. Localhost is sort of a default IP address for your computer. Its your computer’s home. [Learn more about localhost here] It’s easy to access it. Just type in http://127.0.0.1. That’s one-two-seven-dot-zero-dot-zero-dot-one. Easy.

On some machines, using 127.1.1.1 will work just as well. On FreeBSD and some Macs, the default mapping is 127.0.0.1 for reasons too technical for my feeble brain to grasp.

On newer machines, you can also simply type http://localhost and it will change it to the numeric values. The main thing is, this always calls up the login page in a Wifi environment (not just Starbucks; use it anywhere Wifi is being finicky).