Aware of the other side of your application ?

Logged in from eBuddy

For the past few months, I left office at sharp 6 p.m. I felt I should not invest more hours just because someone's estimate was wrong. So, I always took the 6 p.m. cab to home instead of the 8 p.m. or 10 p.m. cab.

To be connected to my colleagues and other friends who want to contact me on Google Talk, I enabled eBuddy on my mobile. Even when I was away from computer, I was able to respond to my friends and anyone who pinged me. I like to keep my status message simple such as a ':)' unless there is a particular link to be shared or I need information quickly.

Last evening, my colleague pinged me asking for some information.
I replied to it after two hours. This morning, I pinged him again and asked why he pinged me and did he get the answer to his question.

He replied that he got the message but the status message seems to repeat nearly 8-10 times. Wow, I never knew this. I had seen similar issues when the recipient was on a vacation or was online from mobile. I never paid much attention to this behavior.

Today, when my colleague highlighted this issue and also named the screenshot as 'SPAM', I understood that he was not happy with this behavior. I was totally unaware that my friends got such messages from my account.

I'm Sorry. I thought:

Are we aware of the side-effects of any application?
How many customers complain if they face a problem?
How many times we learn to live with the problem?
How can we train ourselves to see what others might see?
Do we keep silent if the value outweighs the problem?

Finally a thought from Jerry Weinberg's book - "Are your lights on?" struck me:

The trickiest part of certain problems is just recognizing their existence - Jerry Weinberg

Have you faced such problems - which you were not aware of unless someone else pointed it out?

Leia Mais…

Online or Offline??? Gmail or Gtalk doesn't matter

This is a strange behavior I observed while I was chatting online with my friend.

Application Used: Gtalk and Gmail chat

Reproducibility: 100%

Machine specific: No

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I expect people chatting with me to reply within 5-10 seconds after I send them a message.

I also promise to reply instantly unless I'm not infront of my monitor.

It so happened that I sent my friend a message and I did not get any reply for a minute.

I got irritated by him not responding and I started banging the keys on my keyboard.

Infact I banged only one key - the DOT '.'

I pressed the '.' (DOT without quotes) and pressed enter key.

This continued for 15-20 times continuously.

Then these messages were displayed on Gmail chat window(pop up) and Gtalk application respectively.

As you can see on both the screenshots, the user is still Online indicated by the Green dot against the name.

And the message reads: "The user did not receive your chat" or "The user's email is offline and can't receive messages right now"

I liked this bug... Use of emotions helped me find this bug.

I don't really care if this is fixed or not but the behavior definitely brought a smile on my face.

:)

Leia Mais…