Gaim

Gaim is a instant messenger program that allows you to connect to many different messenger servers, including MSN Messenger, ICQ, Yahoo!, AIM and IRC all within the same client. As well as avoiding the hassle of using different programs to connect to each messenger server it also has a huge number of ways that it can be customised to make it much easier to use. In this blog I will look at some of these and compare it with the popular MSN messenger client.

For me the biggest problem with MSN messenger is that in your list of friends all you see is the names they have chosen for themselves. This name could be anything from their real name to a random witty quote. As entertaning as this quote may be this is a big problem because when you glance at the list of contacts you have no idea who anyone is! Gaim solves this problem by giving the user the ability to set their own alias' for their buddies. This means that you can immediately spot the friend that you want to talk to and start a conversation. This is demonstrated in the screen shot below:



The other big improvement of Gaim over MSN messenger is tabbed chatting. Much like tabbed browsing used in browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Opera this avoids having lots of separate windows open for each person you are talking to, but instead organises them into tabs which are displayed at the top of the chat window. This not only means that you desktop does not get cluttered but also makes it easier to see who is talking because if someone has sent you a message that you haven't read then their name (which labels the tab) will be red, and if someone is currently typing a message then their name will be green. Here is an example of tabbed chatting:

Online Communities - Newsgroups and Message Boards

What do Newsgroups and Message Boards do?
Newsgroups and Message Boards provide a means for people to meet people with similar interests from all over the world so that they can communicate and discuss in a way that simply was not possible before their invention. The topics that are discussed on these boards cover almost anything, including religion, computers, politics, music and even the Simpsons!

The History of Usenet and Newsgroups
Usenet started in 1979 as a way to connect the University of North Carolina and Duke University so that they could share information about UNIX.. Slowly more people connected to this Usenet and they began to talk about a variety of topics other than UNIX. To organise these separate topics of conversation they were split up into several different Newsgroups. In 1987 the Newsgroups were re-organised into the hierarchical structure we see today, with seven top level groups known as the 'Big Seven.' These seven groups are: comp.*, misc.*, news.*, rec.*, sci.*, soc.*, and talk.*.

How People Access Newsgroups
Today there are two different ways to access a newsgroup, either by using a specialised piece of software called a newsreader which connects to the news-sever of your ISP or by using your web browser to visit a web site that allows access to the groups (such as Google Groups). Whatever method of access you use the way newsgroups are organised stays the same. All posts are sorted into threads and when you make a post you can choose to start a new thread or to reply to a post on an existing thread. These posts within threads are then organised into a hierarchical structure which allows a thread to effectively split into a number of separate conversations.

Internet Message Boards
Internet message are forums accessed by using normal web browsers that are normally associated with a web site and are about related topics. Most message boards are normally made up of a number separate forums about different topics related to the web site that the message board is associated with.. Within these forums users can start new threads which other users can post on. Unlike with newsgroups these threads a flat, i.e. they do not have a hierarchy of posts but instead one post follows after another, ordered by the time they were posted.

HCI Issues Related to Newsgroups and Message Boards
There are many different pieces of software an owner of a website can use to set up a message board on their site. This means that different message boards are slightly different in design, unlike newsgroups which all look exactly the same because they are purely text and their presentation is defined by the newsreader. This uniform design means that newsgroups are more accessible for people with disabilities, because one newsreader specifically designed could easily allow the text to be presented in any way that is appropriate to the user. This is not possible for message boards because of their variety in design, so a different piece of software would have to be made for every different type of message board.
Another advantage of newsgroups over message boards is that you can start the same thread on many different message boards. This means that readers of different boards will be able to access and contribute to the same thread. This is very useful because threads are often relevant to many different groups, and benefit from the contribution people from different newsgroups. Most newsreaders can notice if a thread is on several different newsgroups that you are subscribed to, and therefore once you have read the thread in one newsgroup will mark it is read in all the other ones, avoiding the user the having to look at the same thread more than once. One problem with this is spam, it allows a spammer to post an advert to many different newsgroups at once, therefore greatly reducing the effort required for them to get their spam in everyone's way.

Bibliography
http://www.usenetmonster.com/infocenter/articles/usenet_history.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsgroup
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_board
(Wikipeda rocks!)

No Virus Found?

A few days ago I received an email from a friend of mine with the subject "Hi", no text in the body and an attachment called "details.zip". Because of my computer knowledge I instantly recognised this as a virus, but I downloaded it anyway to scan with my virus scanner, and it turned out to be the worm Mabutu.

It just happens that this email was received in my hotmail account which claims to scan attachments for virus's before you download them and it didn't spot the virus. For me the fact that their scanner failed was no problem, because I scan all attachments myself, and don't open attachments at all if they are in anyway suspicious.

However the hotmail service is aimed at a very broad spectrum of computer users, including the complete novice. I suspect that (even though some will be suspicious at first) after reading this:

the vast majority of new users will believe that the attachment is completely safe, and proceed to open the attachment and infect their computer. It is clear that Microsoft has failed to communicate the fact that their virus scanner is fallible and that the file might not be safe. Such critical applications like virus scanners should make it clear to the user that they make mistakes so that the user can make a slightly more educated decision when deciding whether to trust their findings.

Consistency

Today I was forced to realised how much I reply on consistency when interacting with programs. I wanted to access the properties of a person in my address book in Mozilla Thunderbird. So I opened up the right-click menu and clicked on the bottom item in the menu, expecting that it would be properties. However, for some reason in this menu Properties is at the top of the menu and delete is at the bottom!

There may well be a good reason for this (if delete was at the top I suppose you could slip after right clicking and delete the person by accident), but it is clearly a big problem for experienced windows users who won't read the menu, and just click where they expect the button to be.

Fortunately I didn't actually lose my contact from the address book as Thunderbird has two address books, the "personal address book" from which I deleted my contact and one simply labelled "address book" which has everyone in - now that's a good way of avoiding stress caused by bad design. :)

Tabbed Browsing

For my first post I thought I'd share with you an overview of one of the features of one of my favourite pieces of software - Tabbed Browsing.

Tabbed browsing works by allowing you to open multiple web pages inside the one browser window and then showing you these pages as tabs. By looking at tabs near the top of the browser window you can quickly pick out the individual pages to see which has finished loading and switch between them with a single click (or by using mouse gestures - more on this in a later blog).

Here are a few examples of why useful this is and how it speeds up surfing:

1. When Searching
Tabbed browsing is useful when searching because you often have to open up several pages before you find the information you want. Using conventional browsing this would involve having to go back to your search engine between visiting each link. Using tabbed browsing you can open up all the hopeful links by middle clicking them, and then just work through them one by one without having to keep going back to the search engine to find the next page.

2. When you have a slow connection
Tabbed browsing is extremely useful when you are working on a computer with a slow internet connection. This is because it allows you to load up the other pages you want to visit next in the background while you read another page.

3. When writing a blog and using other pages for reference
Another use of tabbed browsing is how I am using it now to write this blog: I currently have a tab open of the Mozilla Firefox page about tabbed browsing, tabs of several other blogs which I can quickly switch to for inspiration while in the middle of composing this post and also a tab for dictionary.com so I can double check spellings.

4. Opening many pages with one click
An extra feature of Tabbed Browsing in Mozilla Firefox is the ability to open all the pages in one bookmark folder with one click. This is useful because often when I go on the net the first thing I want to do is visit several websites at once and flick through them to read any updates. It is clearly more time consuming to click the bookmark link for each page individually than just to click the 'Open in Tabs' button in the bookmarks folder.