-
Hardware vendors, hire me to do your UI
I always harp on UI as I think that it shows a lot about a product. While the old saying is to not judge a book by its cover, in the case of a UI, it shows me that developers are either lazy or clueless and what else is wrong with the software if they can't spend a little time working on the UI.
-
State of the Art UI, 6 years ago
In my travels today, I poked my head into the EPSON booth and asked for a demo of their scanner software (I could care less about the scanner), so that guy fires off the Scan from Photoshop and the awful UI pops up. I said, "oh it looks like your UI hasn't changed in 10 years"; the guy responded "it has only been 6". You've got to be kidding me, they can't come up with a better UI in 6 years? He did say that the driver is now a universal binary which is good news for all the poor souls still using EPSON scanners with ReceiptWallet.
-
Ill informed sales guy
One of my stops today was to see the IRIScan Express2. It seemed like an OK scanner, but with crappy software. The guy demonstrating used their Readiris 11 software to scan. I happen to have a copy of Readiris that was free with my Fujitsu ScanSnap. Here's a screenshot of the version I have (the one he demoed looked the same).
-
NEAT Receipts could be quite slick
I know in the past that I wondered if NEAT Receipts would take some of my UI and put it in their Mac product. I stopped by their booth today and was pleased to see that their UI didn't take anything from me, in fact, they have some ideas that I'd like to use in ReceiptWallet! They have an iTunes like source list on the left that is separated with things like Library and Collections (I can't recall exactly what the titles are). That definitely makes the app look more up-to-date than ReceiptWallet (not that ReceiptWallet's interface is all that old). In addition, their "image" view (like my thumbnail view) is actually useful; my thumbnail view has small thumbnails or receipts that I personally think is useless. In their implementation, they have decent sized receipts on the left side and the metadata on the right side. So when you scroll down, you see the receipts and the metadata. Finally, they do have a Cover Flow like view of the receipts. I'm not sure how useful this is, but I've had a user ask for this in the past, so it has been on my radar, just not high up on my list.