In a nutshell I think that the User Experience requirements gathering process is a very valuable and necessary process. However it is often a challenge in educating the client on this value and in some ways seems to annoy the client to the point where they say "Alright Already.... just show me a semi working site and I will tell you what I like and don't like. Heck I could almost do this on my own on my Myspace account!"

As an Interactive Producer / Project Manager here are a few of my questions when it comes to delivering value to my clients in driving a project through the User Experience phase.

I got a Tivo for Christmas! Yeah! This time around I am noticing all of the nice new features like being able to download shows to computers on your home network and setup recordings from online.
I am hoping there is some way I can give it an RSS feed that it will pull in video podcasts from my subscription channel list. Maybe there is a plugin for Miro that will allow Miro to play shows recorded by my Tivo. I'll keep everyone posted with what I learn that I can do with it. The big bummer is that I have to pay 9.95 - 12.95 a month to subscribe to their service or else the box is simply a large paperweight. C'mon I am paying for them to make money off of my data. I don't think that is fair. The lease they could do is make the box and service free and pay for it by selling targeted ad time to advertising firms.

In my Drupal experience I have sometimes learned more from the failures Ive been exposed to rather than the successes that I don't fully appreciate. It took thomas edison 5000 tries to invent the lightbulb... to him they weren't failures but 5000 ways how not to make a lightbulb...
So here are a few ways not to build a successful drupal website..
1 Throw developers at the code that dont fully comprehend drupal.. IE developers who put everything in the style.css file and template.php instead of coding into a custom module or put a lot of code into blocks
2 hire rockstar drupal developers who aren't in the trenches hands on with the team and code. Pointing out what to and what not to do is helpful but not when going 200+ miles an hour around a 45mph curve (Unless of course you are the rockstar driving the car - still very risky but with the right skills and tools can be done)

Does anyone know of a UI that can make my antiquated Palm TX UI look like the new iPhone? I mean c'mon, other than the Palm TX lacking a GPRS or other built in cell phone communications. But If I have a bluetooth compatible cellphone like my RAZR in my pocket can't I just remake the entire iPhone interface on the Palm or at least "appropriate" it so that Apple doesn't sue the talented person who goes for it.

The Palm TX and especially the treo has everything needed to do it.
- Color touch screen
- Bluetooth
- WiFi
- Cell access (Treos)
BTW you are not limited to AT&T's crappy network
-powerful enough CPU to play video and audio

According to the iPhone demo activation video you cannot sync Outlook Tasks to the iPhone.
Only Media, Calander items, Contacts, and notes.
I guess you can actually schedule meetings and talk with people while trying to organize your life around your new phone. But never actually GTD by checking off and creating task lists and categories. This could be exactly why it is not considered a business phone.
Someone please update me on this ans say it ain't so.

02/22/2008 update.
Well according to this blog entry at TUAW apparently something is in the works with some upcoming By brian at 2007-06-29 18:36 | read more | brian's blog | add new comment

My clients website went down after I setup the SSL secure domain and assumed that both http and https would use the same folder without issue.
Unfortunately this did not happen and the non-secure version of the site is not working while the secure version is.

Over an hour after submitting my critical emergency ticket to DreamHost I still have not heard anything from them regarding the issue.

Without an emergency phone number to call and nobody contacting me from their company Dreamhost has terrible customer service from this experience.
The least they could to is if you submit a ticket with a "site down" flag they could call you immediately or at least email you back a direct line phone number so you can resolve the issue ASAP.

Well Ive been trying to re-inspire myself and came across this good overview article on broadcatching. There is also a creat wikipedia article on broadcatching here too. Ill spare the explanation of broadcatching... you can just read the articles. My main concern for my whole digitalpimp idea though is to keep it simple. Simplici

Well I predicted this one, Can't Palm just improve the interface to win, proposing that this may happen almost 2 weeks ago with the iPhony interface that has been released on Brighthand and then taken down by Apple.
I now predict that in will spread like wildfire in the P2P networks out there and someone will be smart enough to open-source the code on a wiki if its not out there already.

Legally Apple has done the right thing to protect their hard work and intellectual property.

Its about time that iTunes has added this feature.
I only wish they added it a couple years ago so I could have a better idea of what songs I dont really like that much.

Skip-Count

Unfortunately according to snyder's comment on Digg it only adds it as skipped if you skip it between 1-20 seconds into the song. This kind of sucks.

There should be a better scoring system.... ahem... ;)
DigitalPimp

I still need to find a way of automatically creating playlists that are optimized to my exact mood and preferences.