Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

Archives for March 2007

Moving to Gmail

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“A toute chose, malheur est bon…”

While my MacBook is being repaired, I have decided to use my Gmail account temporarily to read and write emails. My initial intention was to forward all my email (from avinash AT noulakaz DOT net and avinash AT uom DOT ac DOT mu) there.

But then I discovered this screen…

… and I realised that I could use Gmail like a normal desktop email client. If you look closely, you’ll see that I can send emails from all the addresses I commonly use (notice the “reply from the same address the message was sent to” option – this is a killer feature!) and you’ll also see that I can fetch emails from my two usual POP3 accounts directly from Gmail.

In simpler terms, Gmail is now perfect! Bye bye desktop email clients… Now, if only I could import my old mails to Gmail! Maybe I’ll have to setup a POP3 server and ask Gmail to fetch all emails from it. Any idea?

My Apple MacBook is faulty!

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Yep!

My Apple MacBook which I bought around October last year has developed some chronic diseases. It suffers from discolouration, an erratic trackpad button, an erratic P key and cerise sur le gateau a crashed hard disk.

Yes, you have correctly read the above. My 80Gb inside the MacBook has crashed. But, for once, I was lucky (?) because I had backuped everything on an external Firewire hard drive, a Macway Minipartner.

As you can guess, I use my MacBook professionally everyday. I use it at home and at work. It has become an essential part of my work flow.

I went to LCI today and the after sales service personnel told me that they are going to replace the hard disk and they will replace the entire top case of the MacBook hence solving the discolouration problem, the erratic keyboard and the erratic trackpad button!

(Someone told me once that you should never ever buy a generation 1 product. Now I know why! :-) )

It seems that everything will be covered by the 1-year warranty :-)

Meanwhile, I’m back to Linux. And it’s cool. In fact, I’m busy upgrading my Kubuntu to Edgy Eft right now :-)

Testing the new MyT user interface

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I’ve just found out that my MyT set-top box now sports a new user interface (developed by Thomson (and I suppose customised by our friends at MT) according to the blurb).

On the whole, the new user interface is better than the previous one (which was horrible from an aesthetic point of view). But Christina and I spotted some glitches and issues (especially when using the VoD feature) that might require some looking into by Asvin and al.

First of all, there is a new search facility which looks cool as you can search by title, actor, director (at last!) and year. Unfortunately, when you, say, search by actor, you only get one empty text field (see above) and you have to type the name. It would have been extremely more interesting to get a kind of drop-down with all current actors (i.e. actors in films available through VoD). As it is, you must do a lot of guesswork and, as every one knows, GUI must be as foolproof as possible.

We have also discovered a bug. If you choose to search by year and enter non-numeric characters, the GUI crashes (simply said…)

Basically, the search facility, while better than previously, has some serious usability issues. In fact, Christina and I both agree that the GUI does not allow someone to easily find a film to watch. There are too many pages and too many slowdowns. Another thing is that the price of the film should be immediately visible and not hidden in a sub-page (this is a paid service after all…) Another nice enhancement would be to restrict searches to specific categories.

One nice feature though is that when watching the TNT channels, you can see what program is being broadcasted and when it will finish.

Good effort on the whole… but MT still has some work to do to make the experience seamless!

(Ahem! Christina and I would be happy to be consultants for that usability enhancement project ;-) )