Not particularly...

As part of my ongoing rant about of bad UI, I thought this was worthy of note:

The word "help" or "helpful" occurs ten times in this dialog box, all to tell me why it can't help me.

And no, I did not find this particularly helpful...

Sticky and annoying...

I've griped about other UI goofiness in Skype elsewhere, but below is an example of a behavior of which far too many programs are guilty: the sneak attack checkbox.  I generally recharge my Skype balance whenever it gets below about $10, but I only want to do so manually.  That way, my potential down-side is limited.  If auto-recharge is on, and I unknowingly do something expensive, it could just keep drawing down my PayPal account.  If auto-recharge is off, my Skype balance will just go to zero, and whatever I'm doing wrong will stop happening and the problem will come to my attention because Skype has broken.  Except, every time I recharge my Skype credit, they pre-check the "here, let me turn auto-recharge on for you" box:

This is irritating for at least 3 reasons:

1. Things that can cost you should, in my opinion, default to off and require an affirmative selection, at least the first time if not always.
2. They are intentionally setting this to the state they want, not the state that they know I have selected every previous time I've gone through this process.
3. The placement, size, and layout of the checkbox dialog is not such that it leaps out at you.  I have overlooked it at least once, and the had to go into my account control to figure out how to turn it off again.

Now, I understand perfectly well why they do it.  Getting someone to subscribe for automatic payments makes giving them more money the default case.  Health clubs and AOL have built entire business models around making it easier to give them money than to stop.  But it is annoying and an abuse of the good will of the user / client, and we deserve better.

Droid Razr Touch Screen Noise

Last month I got a new cell phone to replace my first generation Motorola Droid.  I decided to get the Droid Razr, another Motorola product, and I've been generally happy with it.  Some of the features just seem nuts to have in a cell phone, like HDMI output, and yet I've used it to watch a movie on a hotel TV.

One interesting sensitivity that I noticed today was that the touch screen keyboard became almost unusable while I had the Razr plugged into a wall charger.  I have been using the "Swype" mode, which allows you to enter entire words as a smooth sweeping gesture around the keyboard.  This time, though, it was detecting finger-lifts when I was still touching the screen, and the path it showed as where I was moving my finger looked like I'd had way too much caffeine.

Now admittedly, I was not using the charger that came with the phone, but it was the Motorola charger from my first Droid.  That's the charger that I usually have in my backpack, and I have actually had occasion to look at the 5V coming out of it with an oscilloscope.  It very clean and well regulated, even under load, especially compared to many other third-party chargers.  On a hunch, though, I unplugged the charger, and suddenly the keyboard worked fine again.  This may merit some further laboratory investigation, and it might provide good justification for building a controllable noise injection circuit...