application metering APIs
September 1, 2002
Speaking of missed opportunities in programming interfaces, why don't mainstream Windows applications support usage metering at the function level? Meaning, when I deploy Microsoft Office across my enterprise, I want each installed app to track which menu choices are selected, and how often, by my users. At the simplest level, I could use this information to inform my choices about customizing the default configuration for the suite when I install it. At a more advanced level, it would help me see which custom extensions were being used, and where future development efforts should be directed.
This information's already being collected, of course. Office has supported personalized menus for some time now, as has the Favorites menu in Internet Explorer and the Start Menu in the Windows shell. But there don't appear to be any public APIs for administrators to view or access this information.
Yeah, yeah, privacy implications. Except that most business users don't really have any privacy rights in regard to their usage of their desktop application suite. We've already got crash reporting, in Mozilla and IE and for Windows XP and Office XP. Extend that reporting button to copy crash data to network admins as well as to Microsoft, and then add in features for reporting on what 20% of Office that particular enterprise's users work with.
Maybe I'm just spoiled, but this is one of the types of measurements that web apps do really well, and it's also one of the few platform options that Office wasn't ten years ahead of the web in developing, so I think developers have gotten used to having this sort of data available to help them make decisions. Amazon's platform supports it, why doesn't Office?
9:33 PM
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- Earlier: Google Go Bye-Bye?
- Next: save the straw men!
Damn. You mean I can't even use my Tools | Porn menu without being snooped?
This is probably something that could be reverse-engineered, although not with any certainty that the storage format won't change. Hmmm.
because consistancy across user interfaces is much more important than "customization." Which is why web apps suck. This is also why my XP machine looks suspiciously like a 2k machine (even the improved start menu had to go) and why my office toolbars look pretty much the same as when I installed it. While my IE toolbar has some added features (google, mostly) other things that I could and probably should remove are still there. And it really annoys me when Windows hides programs and favorites that I dont use every often. It confuses me and doesnt seem to hide things with any particular rhyme or reason. Audible.com manager is shown while Warcraft 3 is hidden? huh?
theory: Apple doesn't "innovate" with keyboards is that Steve Jobs because notorious for hating typing. He didn't even want one included in the original Macintosh. Perhaps this is why Apple's making such a big deal of the Ink thingy in Jaguar, despite a resounding lack of demand or interest from the public...?
w/r/t the mouse, I got in an argument with some Apple Faithful at Slashdot over that. One guy claimed that "billions of dollars in lost productivity have been lost due to that second, redundant mouse button." I'd love to dismiss that statement, but I've spent wayyy too much time trying to explain the difference between the buttons to newbies. I've come around to Apple's perspective on this: Ship with a single button, but have support for multiple ones. If the user is experienced enough to customize his working environment, get out of his way, but otherwise Keep It Simple, Stupid.
My big gripe with the new Microsoft keyboard: The cut/copy/paste etc. keys are awesome, and 15 years overdue. But why are they "buttons" instead of actual keys? Keys on a keyboard have been refined over decades to be typed at, but these new buttons require a different motion to be activated. Lame lame lame.
It's nice that MS has replaced the F1-12 text with labels; maybe we'll finally see some standardization across apps for those keys.
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