Great article about why open source projectsw are so UNusable for end-clients.
I think this ties in with why the great Web 2.0 software so far has been proprietary!
I also like the take on the value of interface design and wireframing:
Coding before design. Software tends to be much more usable if it is, at least roughly, designed before the code is written. The desired human interface for a program or feature may affect the data model, the choice of algorithms, the order in which operations are performed, the need for threading, the format for storing data on disk, and even the feature set of the program as a whole. But doing all that wireframing and prototyping seems boring, so a programmer often just starts coding — they’ll worry about the interface later.
http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2008/08/01/free-software-usability
Google Calendar Sync syncs it to my Google Calendar — and since I also have Google Calendar Sync running on my desktop, the event then syncs from Google Calendar to Outlook calendar on my desktop. All of my calendar views are always up to date, and I can choose whichever one I want to use.
Official Google Blog: Google Calendar Sync
Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide for O’Reilly
Business thinking and strategies behind successful Web 2.0 implementations.
Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide | O’Reilly Media
Some excellent and humurous graphs about Usability and Community
Creating Passionate Users
OpenLaszlo | the premier open-source platform for rich internet applications
OpenLaszlo is an open source platform for creating zero-install web applications with the user interface capabilities of desktop client software.
The Big Switch to web-based services. A profound book: www.nicholasgcarr.com/bigswitch/
Nick suggests that these changes are not voluntary so much as economic and societal in nature. The waste inherent in single-purpose servers and personal computers stems more from the conflict between two Intel executives: Moore’s Law that indicates an extremely fast rate of improvement in processing capacity and Grove’s Law that suggests that bandwidth between machines will improve at a much slower rate. Dramatically increase bandwidth, however, and suddenly the Internet can truly become the computer, as processing can happen efficiently “in the cloud” rather than being relegated to the client.
But Nick points out that at least some of the jobs are being replaced by amateur, work-for-reputation or fun “community members” who remove the ability for newspapers, for example, to fund “hard journalism” since it won’t generate page views that are optimal for pay-for-click advertising (155). “We may find,” he writes, “that the culture of abundance being produced by the World Wide Computer is really just a culture of mediocrity–many miles wide but only a fraction of an inch deep” (157). YouTube, anyone?
Nick Carr’s The Big Switch
The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition…The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
Nick Carr reckons that the Internet is affecting how we think; reducing concentration and depth in our thought processes.
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is recreated in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
Motismo
Motismo is a simple, no fluff, time tracking solution for creative professionals. It has been designed for both freelancers and small businesses to provide a bit more organization and management than the usual Post-it system employed by so many creative professionals (including us before Motismo).
