Unsought Input

Apple gets a lot of credit for putting effort into the user experience. Many attribute the success of the original Mac, iPods, the iTunes Music Store, iBooks, and their other products to ease of use.

But building a brand based on user experience can be much harder than, say, a brand based on low prices (like Dell) or ubiquity (like Microsoft). Because it doesn’t take too much to go from “it just works” to “it doesn’t work,” which has been my experience with iTunes 7. The worst problem: it freezes up whenever I don’t have an internet connection.

(more…)

Have you been having trouble reading Unsought Input lately? You’re in good company – I’ve been having trouble writing for it.

We’ve been having issues with MySQL to the point of hanging connections and pleasant, but not very helpful WordPress error messages. It’s nice that user-friendly errors are built-in to WordPress, since you never want to give users cryptic, blue-screen-of-death style errors. But I needed to get to the root of the problem.

(more…)