It’s time to play help Kris with an annoying bug in an application he uses. On today’s episode, we’ll be adding a New Link to the Quick Launch bar within a WSS 3.0 Sharepoint site. When he adds any url that starts with “p” after the “http://” such as http://pstime.hhgroup.com, Sharepoint magically changes the URL to an “https://” URL. This therefore makes adding a link to that site very difficult. A URL beginning with any other letter does not do this.

I should also mention that our Sharepoint instance is on a secure https:// server if that makes any difference at all. Would anyone in the development world care to point me to the right place to submit this bug, or can they point me to a place where it has been addressed? I don’t even know what to search on or where to get a response to this. Thanks for your help!

Add New Link to Sharepoint including “p” as first letter in URL

The URL changed from http:// to https://

I feel special, as a blogger user, I can’t publish an RSS feed (unless someone tells me otherwise) but I’ve now been invited to beta test Gmail. That rocks! If you’d like to send me an email at my fresh new Gmail account send it to krisrz@gmail.com.

Apple Tries to Patent the iPod Interface.

On Thursday, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office made public patent application number 20040055446, covering “graphical user interface and methods of use thereof in a multimedia player.”…Apple lists three inventors: Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs (news – web sites), as well as Jeffrey L. Robbin and Timothy Wasko…Wasko, Apple’s visual interaction designer, came to Apple in 1997 from Next Software Inc. when Jobs returned to Apple from Next.

It’s nice to see the work that interaction designers do get a little love every once in a while. As with many of Apple’s products, it is not the technology that is so revolutionary, but the ease of use. This ease of use can, and should be patentable. He and his cohorts invented the equivalent of the hammer – the ideal object for embedding a metal fastener into a piece of wood. iPod is becoming the ideal way to navigate through lists of electronic media. Unfortunately, as with hammers and steering wheels, Apple may suffer from having invented a a tool that litigation cannot catch up to.

More on Tim Wasko:
Tim’s Patents (he did the Quicktime interfaces, and the iApps)
Look at the friends he has.
Nerds think he’s a nice guy.

More on my past patented user interfaces:
Kris’s Patents (the other Rzepkowski patent is my Dad’s who was making Cellular technology before the term Cel Phone was even coined.

I’ve been researching Social Software for a few weeks now, first hearing about it via an invite to Friendster. I’m intrigued because the whole “revolution” is based on a concept that flamed out personally for me 3 years ago. At the height of the dotcom boom I was the lead UI designer for an internet startup named “Who2Trust”. Our model was to build a directory of recommended service businesses (doctors, dentists, financial planners) through people you trust. We had the whole 6 degree of separation thing. We wanted to make money from businesses buying profiles, just like they buy Yellow Page ads. Our competitors included iThought.com, Servicelane.com, and others. We failed for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was motivating people to make connections and recommend businesses for the shear joy of it. Anyways, it’s very interesting to read a designer’s view of his own little startup from 1999 called epinions.com. In Peter Merholz’s view epinions is the Social Software website that’s got it all.

I wrote a few epinions and certainly got into the pay per review earnings model. It was cool to see how many people read and liked my reviews. And there certainly was some competition to get more friends into my web of trust and keep doing better and better reviews to make more money. The thing is that the affinity is very loose. I knew none of the people in my web personally, and I don’t feel bad for having left the site unused for 3 years. My point is that I don’t put too much stock in Social Networking as a primary means of maintaining relationships unless I’m getting relevant information. I think that the social networking caused by interlinked blogs has some potential to get me there. Is there a way to have an RSS feed with 6 degrees of separation from the friends list in my blog?

Can someone please explain to me how Microsoft discontinuing Internet Explorer for the Mac is a good thing. I thought the browser war was over 2 years ago. How does Safari, that has been around for a year, scare Microsoft away from the platform? I’m just not in the mood for web design that looks different on my 2 favorite platforms. Sure Safari is a McGeek’s dream. But I just want standards support. I do not want any more bells and whistles. Just give me a big white window that gets painted with a web page inside it. And if Yahoo would just build a Mac Compatible Companion that stays docked there, so I can access my unversal bookmarks, yipee! I guess I was very easily converted to the iApps, so why not Safari?

Yes, I have almost acheived computing Nirvana. The other day I installed a DVD burner on my Mac G4. I got it mad cheap from Staples.com – only $170 after rebates. It’s the same drive as the Apple SuperDrive (Pioneer DVR-105) and even though Apple itself doesn’t allow you to buy a SuperDrive and put it into an old G4, they kindly put up the world’s greatest user forums where other kind souls helped me pick out the right drive. To find the best price, I used Dealmac.com, another lifesaver. which required an upgrade from Mac OSX 10.2 to 10.2.3.

And last night I installed iLife. Now I could care less at this point how they tweaked my iMovie, I assume it will rock, and iTunes, and iPhoto too. But I really wanted to use iDVD. So I did. And it crashed, and crashed again, and crashed again. But in the end I did get the tutorial to burn. And man, iDVD is a lot of fun.