This is a guest post by Dana Harrison. Check up on his other activities at The Linux Experiment and his other posts on audiophonik.

Hi, all!  You may have noticed already by reading my slightly different name, or perhaps you’ve heard of me over on the wildly popular site I co-founded, The Linux Experiment, but I am not the usual Phil.  My name is Dana, and I’m a young professional working in IT for a large insurance company.  I work with Phil and also had the pleasure of founding The Linux Experiment with him.  This is my second guest post for audiophonik.

This time around, Phil has asked me to do another review for an application available on Google’s Android platform.  This time, it surrounds my new (I use that phrase loosely) HTC Magic+ phone on Rogers, sporting Android 1.5 because HTC and Rogers are too damn lazy to have updated me yet to Android 2.1.

Swype: An Introduction

Swype is a multi-platform, and rather kick-ass, replacement to the usual hum-drum keyboards offered with today’s touch-screen smartphones and other devices.  It offers gesture-based text entry for all of the usual applications included with these devices, like e-mail, messaging, and web-browsing.  Here’s a nifty screenshot:

The idea behind Swype is simple: instead of individual key presses on a QWERTY or T9-based keypad, the user simply slides their finger around on the screen, covering the keys for each word they want to type.  The sequence above could correspond to “or” or “our” – in this situation, both options would show up on a prompt.  To better simulate “or”, you could slide your finger up and around the other buttons, stopping at “r”.

Sounds awesome – how about in practice?

While it takes a bit of getting used to, Swype works beautifully in real-world applications.  It’s intuitive, quick, and incredibly accurate – more than once have I randomly scribbled my thumb over a few different keys, and nine times out of ten it gets the exact word I was thinking of.  Getting used to single-thumbing a full QWERTY setup can be challenging, after only two days of full Swype use I’m sure that I’ve improved over my previous typing speed.

The only real ‘issue’ I’ve encountered is actually with my phone itself.  I’ve found that having a second-generation Android device can… lag, at times.  Word choice can take up to a few seconds to show up, depending on how badly I’ve butchered the key gestures.  On the upside, I can continue typing along, hoping the whole time that the proper words are going to come up (before they all do at once).  The screen on the HTC Magic can also get a little… moist at times, which will sometimes cause sliding motions to skip over the screen, missing letters.  Maybe I’m just a sweaty bastard, I don’t know.

The Verdict

Swype is a fantastic, easy-to-use, and super-fast alternative to the standard keyboard of any touch-screen device.  While the public beta is closed for now, I’m sure it’ll either be up again shortly or pop up on the Market for several mobile devices in no time.  I suggest you get it as soon as you can.

Screen captures to follow – video, if I can manage it – as soon as I figure out how the hell to get it to work on Windows.

This is a blog post about my experiences. If you hit this page from a search engine looking to fix this issue click here to skip to the solution.

Recently, I’ve been reorganizing my computers based on their usage. My old HTPC, has resumed its duties as my primary desktop/server, my Mac Mini has been attached to the my desktop through Synergy, my server was given to my brother for personal use, and his old computer – a nettop – is now being used as our new HTPC.

After a painful decision making process – a topic for another time, and another post – I decided that this nettop, named Apollo after the Greek god of many things including “music, poetry, and the arts” [as close as I could get to entertainment],  should run Ubuntu 10.4 with XBMC as the media center app. After testing it’s media playback capabilities from a local file, I was rather impressed. I set out to add a SMB share from within XBMC, and was prompted to add a username and password.

I wasn’t really expecting this, because Leviathan – my desktop/sever running Windows 7 – has public sharing turned on, as well as a guest account. I entered in my credentials, and was asked yet again for a username and password. After trying multiple times, I decided to quit XBMC and see if I could get Ubuntu to connect to the share. Here too, I was prompted for a username and password, again and again.

Next I headed to the terminal to run smbclient. This didn’t work either, as I was shown a message saying smbclient failed with “SUCCESS – 0″. I guess success shouldn’t be zero, so my next move was to attempt mounting the network share using CIFS. Again, I was met with repeated defeat.

Begrudgingly I took to the internet with my problem, only to find that there were many people unable to connect to their Windows 7 from Ubuntu. The suggestions ranged from registry hacks to group policy administration, none of which worked. One repeated suggestion however, was to un-install the Windows Live Sign-in Assistant. However, as a user of the Windows Live Essentials (Wave 4) Beta that was recently released – I had no such program. I did however have a similar application called the Windows Live Messenger Companion, which I chose to uninstall – again, to no avail.

However, I soon reasoned that perhaps whatever was blocking people using the Windows Live Sign-in Assistant was now being used within the actual Windows Live Messenger client or the other Windows Live Essentials apps that I’d recently installed. I started by uninstalling everything but Windows Live Messenger – because I really, really like the beta version. Alas, this did not help. Next I uninstalled the actual Windows Live Messenger client and voila – I was able to connect with no prompting for passwords at all. Because that makes -any- sense.

As a matter of interest, I installed the regular WLM non-beta client and made sure that the Windows Live Sign-in Assistant was installed, and tried to connect again. Not surprisingly, I was no longer able to connect to my Windows 7 shares. After un-installing the Windows Live Sign-in Assistant my shares were back up and I was mostly happy. Except that I couldn’t use the new Windows Live Messenger beta.

I can’t be sure if the other tinkering I did also helped clear up my problems, but as a recap here are the steps I recommend to access your Windows 7 shares from Ubuntu:

1) If you have the Windows Live Essentials (Wave 4) beta installed, you’ll have to uninstall all of the applications that come with this. For now, you can install the current version of Windows Live Messenger and the other Windows Live Essentials.

2) If you have Windows Live Messenger installed, or ANY of the Windows Live Essentials programs installed check to see if you have the Windows Live Sign-in Assistant installed. If so, uninstall it.

3) Hopefully, now you can enjoy your Windows 7 shares in Ubuntu

Important Note:

Beta software has this nasty habit of leaving beta status sooner or later. If this issue is not resolved when the newest version of Windows Live Messenger is officially released, you may not be able to use the Window Live Messenger client if you need your Windows 7 shares from Ubuntu. I would suggest using an application like Pidgin as your instant messenger, as it can also connect to the Windows Live Messenger service. Other options include Digsby, Miranda, and Trillian.

Software mentioned in this article:

Windows Live Messenger
Windows Live Essentials (Wave 4) beta
Synergy
XBMC
Ubuntu 10.4
Pidgin
Digsby
Miranda IM
Trillian

About two weeks ago I was looking around the blog for IxDA Waterloo – a local group which holds monthly meetings to talk about various topics in user experience/interaction design – and I discovered something. I have developed a new mental model for red links.

It happened when I was looking at an older post on the site, one with links I had already visited, but forgot that I had seen. For whatever reason, the theme used at the blog styles visited links a red colour. Not really a big deal right? Red’s a nice enough colour.

When I considered hitting the link, I noticed it was red. Immediately I changed my mind and kept browsing. Moments later, I found another red link, and was a little irritated. It took me a few seconds to realize why, but thanks to Wikipedia‘s styling, I have apparently started associating red links with missing content.

For those readers who aren’t familiar with Wikipedia, it hosts a bunch of information on basically everything. Each page on the site is full of links to other pages within the site, but sometimes those pages get removed, or links to pages that don’t exist are added to remind someone to make that page later. To help out their users, Wikipedia has styled these links in a red colour, so that readers know that there’s no page at the other end of that link.

Realizing this, I went ahead and clicked the links to find that I’d already seen the content. So what does this mean? For starters, the blog’s operators should probably fix this problem, being as it is a blog for a user experience group and shouldn’t go around messing with people’s mental models. It also means that the next time I design a web-based system I’ll have a new mental model in mind to optimize how my users will interact with it.

I’d like to point out that IxDA Waterloo is an awesome group. If you’re in the Waterloo region and interested in user experience or interaction design, I’d highly recommend joining the User Experience Peer Group at Communitech’s website, joining the local IxDA group, and coming out to their monthly meetings. March’s meeting was on table-top computing, and in April we did a UX Show and Tell where I recently gave a short presentation on Project MORIS. Its definitely worth your time.

Has anyone else noticed they’ve started to treat red links in the same manner? Questions/remarks about mental models or something else I mentioned in this post? Let me know in the comments.