This year Mr. Usability and Co. elected an Intranet well known to me on their hunt to find the best of its kind world-wide. I'm joining in to congratulate the friends at Altana in Konstanz and namics St. Gallen for their great work.

I'm actually interested what UE Guru Jakob and friends wrote about Content Management in Chapter 5 of the Intranet Design Annual 2006: Ten Best Intranets of the Year report. Anybody a summary?

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Posted by Cedric at 1/23/2006 10:44:00 PM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

Ran into one of the nasty differences between Mac and Windows the other day - I was manually installing plugins on Eclipse when I suddenly found myself with a (nearly) empty Plugins folder. Being a switcher I am used to move a folder on-top of other folder (with identical name) and having the merged file structure as result. Not so on Mac OS X that by default deletes the existing folder with all files and then moves the dropped folder there!

Dialog in Windows XP to overwrite folder:



Dialog in Mac OS X to overwrite folder:



This issue has been extensively discussed here and here. My take on this:

Apple - fix it! Why? What is to most likely reason why someone would move a folder with files into an existing structure? Whatever you come up with - if you want to have the existing structure deleted in the first place - you did it before drag & dropping the folder!

And if you think I'm wrong - provide the user with the choice to select the method.

Unfortunately the Finder replacement - Path Finder - is behaving alike and is not yet convinced to add this option.

Update: Use the Merge Folders Script to get the wished result: add to Dock and drop the source folder on the script - provide the destination in the dialog and you are done - thx Bruce.

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Posted by Cedric at 1/22/2006 07:47:00 PM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

Good read to catch-up on the topic (in German): Globale Suchmaschinen entdecken das Dorf

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Posted by Cedric at 1/15/2006 04:13:00 PM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

Although nova media claims the EDGE edition of the Swisscom Unlimited card would work with an Apple PowerBook - I was not able to get in working and they could not help me. They told me it must be an issue with my PowerBook, other customers are happy using this card. Bad luck then - I run the 15' from the last PowerBook edition that will ever exist (1.67Ghz).

I switched card - and use the UMTS edition that works. There is still one issue that the nova media card driver doesn't completely initialize the card after plug-in - you always need to use their configuration tool that does the proper init - then the card is ready to connect.

Bad news for all PC Card with PowerBook users - the new Intel-based MacBook Pro don't have PC Card slots anymore (Apple added the next-gen. ExpressCard/34 slot!). I guess it's time to buy a mobile phone that has EDGE/UMTS and convince your mobile network provider to give you the same (flat) data prices for a voice enabled account (it looks like it's locked to the SIM card you get with the Unlimited Card at Swisscom) and use it as bluetooth modem.

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Posted by Cedric at 1/15/2006 03:14:00 PM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post