We've all signed up for a service in haste only to realize our 15-minute lunch period is about to begin. You activate your account, you open it up, and there's this clever little intro presentation that begins... only you don't have time for that right now. So you close out the window and go away. Hours later, you return to learn. But the intro is gone, and like Homer missing Mr. T at the mall, your life is missing something that no help file can return.

Or can it? I've been poking around the excellent WizeHive (which we've mentioned before) and noticed this, which set me upon the above mini-rant. I dig it when services bother with an intro at all, be it video, Flash or some AJAX business. But please put that somewhere easy to find should we need to bail upon logging in.

If you ever have this happen to you, I've added the intro screens for WizeHive in the gallery below. I did speak to the folks at WizeHive and suggested they put a link to these basic screens in their help pages.

Our readers are a pretty savvy bunch. You're up to speed on what software is and isn't worth downloading, and you're likely the "friend that knows about computers" to a lot of people. Wouldn't it be nice if some of those people started paying attention to our advice - and quit downloading things like...

1. A second (or third...or fourth) antivirus program. Despite what we tell them, some people think "more is always better" when it comes to PC protection. Inevitably, those people end up bringing their computers in for service saying "it just slowed right down" and - here's the kicker - "maybe it has a virus."

So wait...You installed Norton, AVG, Spyware Doctor, and Ad-Aware because you thought it would keep out all the badness and you still think it's a virus slowing down your machine? /facepalm

2. Just...one...more...toolbar (thank you J-Walk blog for the image). Apparently a lot of people love to search. So much, in fact, that they need dedicated toolbars for Google, Yahoo, Ask, Live, MyWebSearch, and a handful of others. They wind up with less browser real estate than an iPhone on their 22" LCD.

I launch their browser to download something, and it's like a punch in the face. Enough is enough, people. Use your browser's search box already.

There are plenty of things I'd love to quit reading about, and the EU's continued moaning about unfair browser bundling is pretty high on the list.

We get it. You (and a number of competitors) think Microsoft needs to do something more substantial than allow users to uninstall/disable/burn down Internet Explorer. Your latest fabulous idea? A download dashboard, which will present a number of browsers from which the consumer is free to choose. How Utopian!

So I presume this dashboard will include all kinds of browsers, like Maxthon, Flock, Arora, Lunascape, SRWare Iron, Kmeleon, and QTWeb, right? After all, including only big non-IE names like Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera isn't really fair to the little guys. There's a big ol' list at Wikipedia if you need to see all the options the dashboard should include.

I'll also assume that this dashboard will be mandatory for all operating systems. Apple and Linux users probably need to be told they have a choice, too.

Oh, and devices like cell phones, PDAs, and MIDs usually only have one browser out-of-the-box, so make sure you put a stop to that as well.

You'll also need to tell Apple that they have to allow non-Webkit browsers on the iPhone and iPod touch, because that's unfair to browsers based on other rendering engines.

Because really, if you're not going to do all those things, it's time to shut up about this issue and quit singling out Microsoft.

[via Slashdot]

Moblin beta 2 just dropped a week ago, and things are looking good for the lightweight Linux distribution. It's innovative, sexy, and has already received loads of praise from reviewers for its ease of use, integration of activity streams, and uniqueness.

Tech Republic's Gary Marshall, however, thinks Moblin has to be stopped - now. Why? Because he's afraid developers (and the inevitable Moblin remixes) are going to ruin a good thing. "...naturally, somebody's going to bugger it up. Of course they will. It's Linux!" Later he states "Again and again, we've seen early promise ruined because people don't know when to stop."

Perhaps someone can explain to me how Ubuntu has suffered because of projects like Mint and Linspire, because it sure seems like the project keeps moving ahead and getting better with each new release. A promising Linux distribution continues to show more promise - like the possibility of running Android apps.

To claim that shutting the project down will turn Moblin into a kind of Linux martyr is utter nonsense. Projects like Moblin and HP's MIE are creating the kind of buzz Linux needs if it's ever going to gain mainstream acceptance. Kill them off, and people are left thinking "That was a cool idea. Pity it never amounted to anything."

Get Moblin on devices. Let developers innovate. Because as concerned as Marshall is about "buggering it up," someone could just as easily create something amazing.

Unrelated, but he's wrong about the Stone Roses, too. If they'd have quit after the first album, I would never have gotten hooked on the wicked guitar riff from Love Spreads.

Without giving it a little thought, I don't recall when I got my first Athlon 64 mainboard and CPU. It's been a long time. AMD first released the chips in September, 2003. Here we are six years later, and we still haven't really begun to make use of the added processing power.

Six years is a pretty long time in computer terms. My tower at work is now equipped with eight times as much memory, 50 times more capacity on its hard drive, and four processor cores instead of one. All those improvements, and yet I'm still stuck running primarily 32-bit applications on it.

What a waste. Perhaps now there's a light and the end of the tunnel.

I was thrilled when Adobe decided to release an x64 build of CS4 for Windows. Days ago I installed the Office 2010 technical preview - also a native 64-bit version. With two of the most prominent commercial application suites making the jump, maybe we're finally going to see more widespread development of 64-bit apps.

Can you imagine our systems not taking advantage of other hardware technology that's been around for six years - like SATA or 802.11g wireless, for example? It just doesn't make any sense, does it?

Don't get me wrong - the people developing various cloud desktops like eyeOS and iCloud have created some very interesting apps with slick features. There are just a few nagging issues I have that prevent me from using one - or even thinking about using one any time soon.

First, there's my concern over data. I don't even want to consider the possibility of a company I don't control storing all my data. Heck, my GMail account doesn't even contain any really sensitive information and I've used it full time for five years. I just don't have any desire to place things like family videos, photos, and records in the hands of a business that could shut down at any time (screenshot?).

What if my cloud runs out of capital? What if they do something shady and their harware is confiscated? Where does that leave me?

Of course for that to be a dilemma, I'd have to be able to upload a significant amount of data somewhere at a reasonable speed. Which I can't.

There's been a fair amount of buzz over the past couple days regarding TipJar, a place to share money-saving advice powered by Google Moderator. It started with a Tweet from the official @google account, which nearly warranted an immediate post from us, but we let it sit for a couple of reasons. The biggest one: ambiguity.

Twitter has been flooded with tweets about TipJar, saying it's like "Digg for money saving ideas." Take a look yourself, though, and see if you notice what we did: most of the tips are left by other money-saving websites. While it's not something to be blamed on Google, the end result looks like a flood of shameless self-promotion, regardless of how useful the tips are.

To Google's credit, there are no links that can be clicked to visit the URLs that tipsters leave.

It's bit disappointing, but this is what we've come to expect on the web. If there's a good, new service available somewhere, you can bet that it won't take long for opportunists to use it as a way to drive traffic back to their own sites.

Content and questions aside, TipJar is a nice showcase for Moderator and we will no doubt see more applications build on its foundation. Hopefully they won't all wind up as a dumping ground for shameless plugs.

According to a statistic I just made up, almost half of all interfaces for software (web or download) look like garbage. Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. With that subjectivity in mind we want to ask you: what are the ugliest, most cumbersome, least effective interfaces out there? Mind you, we're talking GUI here -- command line interfaces are a kind of beauty you simply can't assail. Let's not devolve into a ClearType battle, OK?

Submit your nominees in the comments and we'll take a look at the fugliness. Web apps, downloadable stuff, on any platform you wish, we'll open it up and peek at the steaming guts. Starting next week and running for every Friday (until we wipe out bad taste from the internet, naturally) we'll highlight one special ugly duckling. We'll try to be constructive in our criticism.

Despite the harsh moniker, we're not looking to take cheap shots. The ultimate goal is for developers to learn a little something about user interface design. While we'll keep it tongue-in-cheek, there's always a lesson to be learned in doing things wrong. Considering the specialized nature of design (and UI design in particular), it's completely understandable that indie devs will do what they can. If you take a look on the iTunes App Store, you'll see dozens of atrocious designs, but those are devs who likely have no training in this area. Again, totally understandable. Hopefully we can all learn a little something from these mistakes. Keep it constructive, but don't be afraid to point out foibles, that's what I say.

On Sunday we watched a short segment on CBS Sunday Morning about Google. The company, 10 years old this month, represents the best of what came out of the dot-com bubble in the 90's. Today they are madly profitable, focused on their core services and yet, still crazy after all these years. Massages, naps and gourmet food? Why, that's the kind of hubris that brought down dozens of companies in the first boom, so what's Google's secret sauce?

The fact is, Google is known to the mass market as "how to find stuff on the internet." Their success, like most success stories, is wedded to a fortuitous series of events: the price of computers and internet access dropping like a stone and the democratization of page creation and monetization. That's a mouthful, for sure. Cheaper computers and easier, faster access made computing and creating pages within the grasp of more people. As more people came online, they saw ways to make money by generating content and running the drop-dead simple AdSense on their pages. From memes to spy shots, Google helped the new wave make their wee blogs fiscally sensible.

What all this brought was brand recognition. The average person uses Google as a verb now, and that really means something. Another happy coincidence was the emergence of mobile and mobile browsing. Now you've got a vector of adoption that can reach even more folks who merely see the home computer as a porn/game machine but use their mobile devices every day. So the brand is unquestionably huge, which brings us to Chrome...

OK, I'll admit I own an iPhone. Thing is, I refuse to pay AT&T's completely ridiculous rates. Why are iPhone data packets at a premium, exactly? Anyway, I use the thing as more of a PDA, and I like the mic, speakers and camera. Sure, my Palm has two of those, but that camera is great for sending shots while on the go (and within a wifi hotspot). If I had the dough I'd get a Nokia N95, however.

So after using this 1st-gen iPhone for a few weeks, here are five things that Apple got completely wrong:

5. Codecs? We don't need no steenking codecs!
Just like Apple TV, the Cupertino Ivory Tower refuses to acknowledge the existence of codecs outside their shiny white walled garden. That's a shame, as Divx and a couple of others are really superb codecs, providing efficient and gorgeous playback. On everything but iPhones and Apple TV's, that is. I'm not sure if they are afraid of competition, licensing fees or just snobs. Hm, one of those rhymes with Jobs...

4. Sandboxes are for kids, not a multitasking OS.
Oh copy and paste, where art thou? I'll keep banging this drum, because the beat goes on. The Macintosh pioneered the ease of a clipboard. Microsoft did one better in Office by providing multiple copy/paste repositories. And you're telling me copy/paste was an afterthought? I call malarkey on that! Every proper mobile OS can copy/paste. It's stuff like this that gives you a very solid feeling Apple rushed the entire iPhone experience out the door.

3. App Store? How about Crash Store?
Last night I saw the "App Store" ad. I laughed out loud. If only my iPhone could install apps so easily. The first time I tried using third-party apps, all downloaded via the iPhone, they locked up, started crashing and wouldn't come back. Guess what? A 5-hour journey to "Erase and Restore Land" made things mostly better. Yeah, I had to grab pen and paper to keep track of what I lost. And yeah, I had to re-enter all my settings. Even today installing an app is major fail. It never finishes the "installing" progress bar. I have to reboot a couple of times for it to appear. Google apps on my BlackBerry may hang up, but they install properly, at least. Don't get me started on the wonky "updates" system, either. Seriously.

2. The maze of settings a Minotaur could be proud of, with customization tossed to the wayside.
Wouldn't it be cool to have profiles so you don't have to tweak a dozen settings depending on whether you are at home (with wifi) or in the boonies (EDGE)? Too bad usability and simplicity were lost when the iPhone was born. Or how about the fact that you can't really customize the organization on the screen? Sure, you can try -- but either restoring or re-installing apps will shuffle things around. There's no category-based system, as you find on the Palm. There are no folders. Just a massive, sliding list of stuff with no rhyme or reason. This makes it very frustrating when you need certain apps to always appear front-and-center (like Camera, Evernote and ShoZu). I spend about 1/3 of my time shuffling apps knowing that all that hard work is one crappy install away from being shot to hell. Decades of UI and brain research gone with the flick of a finger.

1. Backups, only 3 hours to go!
Actually, I wish it was 3. Shoot, I wish it was at least predictable. Most iPhone users are now trained to plug the thing in at night. I guess that makes sense, but you know what also makes sense? Iterative backups. You know, like a little thing known as Time Machine? Once again, this smacks of sloppy, rushed coding. iPods do a fast sync and BOOM, you're ready to rock. The iPhone makes you wait hours for a backup, and even then you might wind up with a corrupted backup... Which isn't really a backup at all, is it?

I think the bottom line is that Apple rushed the App Store, rushed the OS 2.0 release and is currently playing the averages. The average iPhone user appears happy. They are wowed by the glitz and glamour of such an advanced machine. But like at Vegas, by the time the cocaine and hooch wears off, they are gonna wind up sore and bruised, wishing they could take it all back. I sincerely hope Apple takes the necessary time to fix this stuff instead of adding more bells and whistles to an already precarious platform.

That's sort of like saying there's no killer app for the Internet. Oh wait, there is! It's called a "browser." Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch bemoaned the lack of a "killer app" for the iPhone but wound up admitting "...the app I use the most is Gmail, followed by Web browsing." So email and web-browsing? Sounds like the killer apps that launched the current explosion of technology and brought computing home again for the average user (would people really get off the Xbox 360 if their computers had no net access?). Today's killer apps are stored in the cloud, not locked away in your hardware.

The fact is that modern computer user habits are staggeringly fragmented once you move out of the email/browser/office apps arena. Just like browsing habits-- who goes to a generalized portal like AOL.com or Yahoo.com on a regular basis? Computer use is now specialized. A video editor will use apps pertinent to his job, while a cook would likely use a suite of apps for food planning and prep and purchasing. There's not likely to be a killer app outside of your specialization, unless it has to do with massaging data-- something along the lines of syncing your contacts, for example.

Ultimately the new killer apps are fixes for existing applications. One of the reasons 90% of iPhone users browse the web on their phone? Mobile Safari is hands-down the best portable web browser out there. It still isn't as robust as the desktop equivalent (hence the plethora of iPhone-tuned pages out there), but it is much better than the competition. The ultimate killer app is your window to the web, and the competition keeps making things better all the time. Hear that Mozilla? We're ready for mobile Firefox already!

Moralize.us is a site with an interesting concept: users post hypothetical scenarios, and other users vote on whether a course of action is right or wrong, according to their own personal moral codes. It's a nice theory, that we can crowdsourcing our tricky moral dilemmas. In practice, though, the responses mostly seem to hover around the level of discourse you might find in the comments on a YouTube video.

For example, someone asked "is it right or wrong to push a fat man off a bridge in front of a speeding train to stop it from killing five people?" The responses ranged from "Right: he's fat" to "Wrong: the fat man is Michael Moore." This is not exactly erudite stuff here, friends. Our recommendation: if Moralize.us is going to be more than a place for lame jokes, they should just ditch the ability to leave a justification, and just ask users to vote right or wrong. The data would probably be a lot more meaningful -- because hey, they're at zero now, and it can only get better.

Continuing on our obsession with RSS today, comment 87 from James on my RSS Readers: Sound Off! post got me thinking. If anyone out there does not use RSS, why not? What don't you like about RSS, or what makes you not want to use RSS? Living in a very saturated tech world myself and being an IT administrator, I use RSS as a part of daily life, and don't really understand why you wouldn't use it (especially in my job), but what do you think? If you don't use it, why not? I have always wondered, and know that I am not going to get all over your case about it either, I am just curious. Since I am not a cat, I figure it is safe to wonder. I've heard that the majority of our readers do not use RSS, and I realize that I am a geek, not a normal person (kinda wish I was normal sometimes), so here's your chance to enlighten the binary brain of a techie. Consider this a "10 things I hate about you" aimed at RSS.

Google has a lot to offer a business. The bread and butter of their B2B offerings would have to be the Google search appliances, in full and mini configurations. I'm sure that makes a little cash for the Goog, when the Desktop and Toolbar for Enterprise do relatively little. There are a few software tools for business, like the Video tool for buying videos online, or (most notably) AdSense, which allows you to monetize web traffic— to an extent. But with all this talk about a Google-born WebOS, what if we're looking in the wrong direction?

Google's beta products, too numerous to list here, make the beginnings of a powerful business suite. Google Analytics obviously provides great data. Google Base? Maybe there's something useful in there... But look at how Gmail and Google's Calendar app have begun working together. Using Google Pages, a busy secretary can easily make a web page. Or Blogger could allow a team to establish a quick way to share topical conversations. But the acquisition of Writely, and it's delay in migration, underscore a growing problem with Google: disconnection. One thing Microsoft has been working on for a decade now: integration. If Google can get their applications tied together more cohesively, they may yet make inroads into the office environment.

The Google workflow? I'll give an example. Mayor McCheez decides he wants to build a better web page for his company's product. He creates a "vision" page using Pages. Using his integrated Google Desktop, he schedules a meeting with the appropriate people, all of whom are on Gmail, and builds a blog (integrated into his Page) for discussion. During the week between his call and the actual meeting (which will be held using GTalk), he gathers data using Analytics, collects and sorts data using a Base-like tool and his online storage, Gdrive. He drafts a formal proposal using Writely, and again posts it online. During the meeting, everyone collaborates on the documentation, pulling images out of Picassa or data from online... There are lots of other possibilities, but you get the idea. There's a lot of fantasy in there, yet some workable tools already exist. Frankly, it'll be interesting to see what betas come out of Google next, if only to ponder what possible real business use they might have. Office on the web? It just might happen, and Google might be the one to get there...