Over the past couple of years two new open formats have appeared on the scene and they are causing confusion. OpenDocument also known as ODF or by it’s extension odt and Office Open XML or by it’s extension docx. Now in a perfect world you think one of these standards could have been decided on and transferred to the doc extension to make everyone’s life easier, but it’s not a perfect world.

Microsoft feels that everyone needs a new Word Processor every couple of years, but many people are still using old versions of Word which will not open either of these new formats, and of course the newest versions of MS Office still won’t open OpenDocument files out of the box, although there are add-ons that will do the trick.

The real problem in all of this is that the average users doesn’t care what standards are or even what a format is, they just hit save and that’s the format their documents are in. In the case of Open Office that format is an odt file and in the case of Microsoft, it’s a docx file. The nightmare starts here as co-workers send incompatible files back and forth, students get to school only to find out their Open Office assignment that is due in five minutes will not open to print, and the list of scenarios goes on.

Understand your save dialogue box

When you save your documents remember the format you want them in. Will you be able to open this file when you get to school or work? If you are unsure then select the doc option. Yes it’s an older format, but I think 99% of us have not needed a new word update for about the past 10 years. Can you name a new feature that was added in the past few years that you actually use or need? Unless you like the new UI introduced in 2007, then probably not.

Change the default

If you really can’t remember to save your files in doc format or whatever format you need, then change the default. It’s a one time change and may save you much frustration. In both OpenOffice and MS Word it’s found under the options or settings menu under the save section. You will find something like “Save Word files as:” and a drop down of formats. You will probably want something like “Word 97-2004 Document (.doc)” selected.

Google to the rescue

What if you’ve already got yourself into a pickle or a friend has sent you a document you can’t open? Well the good news is you can convert docx or odt files for free with Google docs, all you need is a Google account.

Log into your gmail account and you should see a “documents” link at the top of the page. Select this and Google Docs will open. Now you should see an “upload” button to the left, here you can upload odt, docx and other document formats. You may lose some formatting, but that’s a small price to pay to get your content when you need it, which is probably NOW! You can always reformat it in Google Docs anyway. Once you have it in Google Docs you can open it and go to “File / Download as” and you will see all the popular formats. Is there anything Google can’t do? What am I thinking right now Google?

Why Adobe … Why?

The posts mentioned above are two of the most popular on my entire blog and have received a lot of feedback. The Internet is littered with questions about this very issue and even the Adobe forums are full of angry posts. So why hasn’t Adobe done the right thing and added an import animated GIF feature that used to be there? The functionality is there since you can trick Photoshop into opening an animated GIF. I think it comes down to money and the fact that Adobe has become a monopoly in this area, especially since it bought Macromedia several years ago.

Adobe does have an official solution to this issue though.

Open the animated GIF file in Adobe Fireworks. Fireworks provides editable layers and timelines for animated GIF files.

Adobe’s official response to all this is to buy fireworks of course. Yes, buy an entire software package that you don’t need just to open animated GIFs. I love Adobe products, but this is just ridiculous especially since all everyone is asking for is a feature that was always included with Photoshop in the past. Many of us need to open an animated GIF once a year.

My suggestion is to always save all of your animated GIF source files as layered PSDs. You can quickly create and edit animated GIFs with these as often as you wish. If you do need to open GIFs without the original source files try the work around or use a 3rd party product to screen grab each frame and create a new layered PSD.

Why it’s so bad

First it disables your middle mouse button; second it disables your right mouse button, if that’s not bad usability I don’t know what is. Now you can no longer open links in new windows via middle click or right click. You can’t access your right click menu, which also means you can’t use the built in spell check some browsers have when filling out the websites contact form to complain about this terrible script they are running. The only thing you can do is left click your away around the site and if you cease this behavior you will get a punch in the face message that basically tells you not to steal their content. Thanks for assuming the worst and insulting me at the same time.

Who are you fooling?

So you have thoroughly annoyed any power user by now, but not only have you annoyed some of your visitors you aren’t protecting anything. Anyone who is even remotely computer savvy can take a screen capture of any page on your site or even save the page. A slightly more savvy user will just use the only remaining left button and drag the image to the address bar and bang, the image is loaded all by it’s lonesome ready for the taking. An even more technically minded person can just view your source via the view source menu and take your code, content or images and do as they please with them.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Chances are your site has been indexed by hundreds of crawlers many of which are the ones most likely to steal your content in the first place. Your copyrighted images are probably showing up in paces like Google images too, so do us all a favour and get rid of the ridiculously annoying script. If you happen to be the victim of one these sites take two minutes and find the contact form and fire off an email informing them of their ill ways, or better yet, send them this article.

Here are the two boxes zoomed to 300%.

What the $#%??

This is enough to drive any web designer mad and I don’t really know what possible use the non pixel perfect box would have, but maybe that’s because I’m a web designer and I like clean straight edges and lines. Luckily this setting is super easy to turn off. Select the Rectangle tool then at the top of Photoshop click on the little arrow which will open the Geometry options for the rectangle. If you selected the Rectangle tool, you should be seeing the dialogue below.

Select the Snap to Pixels option and now you will have clean pixel perfect rectangles. This option is also available for the Rounded Rectangle tool. No more blurry edges.

Moving day was coming fast

It started with my recent move. This was also not my first bad experience with Bell. When you have a problem with this company, there is no phone support that I’ve ever dealt with that approaches the depths of uselessness that Bell displays on a regular basis. Yes, I’ve dealt with Rogers support in the past and yes you may be put on hold for 40 minutes, but that’s a cake walk next to Bell support.

So two weeks later from my first phone call to bell and I still had no Internet. Before I moved a thought popped into my head and I wish that thought had of been stuck. There’s a thing called intuition folks, and I think I’ll start listening to it. A voice in my head told me not to transfer Bell, but to sever the ties all together. Canceling my phone line when I got an iPhone was quite an ordeal, and trying to get my TV to work a few years before that was also a challenging. Bell had failed me twice already, why bother with them this time around, this was a chance to start a clean slate, but no, the only efficient part of Bell’s support got to me, customer retention. If the rest of Bell’s many call centers came even close to their customer retention center quality they would probably still have me and many others as happy customers.

It all sounded so simple

Support told me a service transfer to my new place would be seamless. I give them my new address, move in, receive a modem in the mail with cables and instructions and plug it in. I would also be receiving a box and shipping label to return my then current bulky VDSL modem in exchange for a tiny DSL modem. So I figured why not just stay with Bell, it would be less work for me right? Wrong, oh how I was so very wrong.

At the beginning of the week there was a package for me, it was from Bell, how wonderful; I was glad I stayed with Bell. I opened the box, and this is where things started to go wrong. Inside was a small modem with no cables or instructions other than a single sheet of paper. It apologized for a defective modem and any inconvenience it had caused and hoped that the new modem would satisfy me and for me to return my old modem. I started scratching my head thinking “what modem?, I don’t have a defective modem and there’s no way the VDSL modem will fit in this box”. Oh well, there was obviously some kind of mix up, I had my own cables and how hard could it be to set up. Grab an Ethernet cable and a phone cord and we’ll be in business. Plug everything in and what do you get? A blank DSL connectivity light. Plug in the computer and no, there’s no connection. I run to the other phone socket, plug it in and still no good. Then I do all the typical refresh, recycle, power off, plug in, stand on one’s head etc, but still no good.

Now the rest is a bit fuzzy, because I figure I have spent well over 4 hours on the phone with Bell over the next week. First, when you call bell you are faced with the most idiotic voice and touch tone system you may ever come across. The voice activated menu system doesn’t work half the time and Bell human support never seemed to know who I was. I think the only thing working at Bell is the billing system. The voice system constantly said my number was not on file even though I had to provide it on every call I made over the next week.

Day one, mistakes happen, we are human

The first day the entire support system was down and no one could help me, I can understand this, I’m a web designer and developer, systems go down. The second day they would not help me when I was at work because they wanted me to do the plug in unplug ritual at home even though I had told them it had already been done several times. That evening I got home to find another package form Bell. Possibly a return box for the VDSL modem? No, another DSL modem apologizing for my broken modem. What is wrong with this company? At least now I could rule out defect modems, neither worked.

After a few days of calling and going through the whole ridiculous plug in your modem unplug it routine I got frustrated and said I want to cancel the service. It was obvious to me that there was no dry loop setup, especially considering I received a replacement modem, not a setup modem. I was redirected to someone who knew what he was talking about and was very polite. He said this was a very unusual situation and that they would rectify everything in no time. I believed him, heck I’m sure he believed himself. I was quickly connected to top level support and they spent several hours trouble shooting the problem and calling me back with questions. Eventually they said it was the phone number and that my account was linked to my new address but they didn’t know where the phone number for my dry loop was linked, possibly my old address? They fixed all my contact information and said Monday a tech support person would call me once they had moved the line.

Sorry doesn’t cut it – the last straw

The phone call never came, so that evening I called back. They sounded confused like usual and again I said I’m canceling. Again I was sent to top level support. Apparently my phone jacks had the wrong voltage and a tech support person would come to my apartment and rectify the situation. I told them I could not be home until 6:30, which was fine, the tech person would be there between 6:30 and 9:00. At 5:00pm that day the tech guy called to say he was at my place. I told him that I was at work and he was not supposed to be there until 6:30. I rushed home to be on time and called Bell to confirm it was still on since I was called at 5:00. They said yes it was still in the records. I waited all evening hoping I could leave eventually to grab a bite to eat. 9:30 rolled around and I called back, spent another 20 minutes on the phone while the tech guy told me how sorry they were. Bell support is always sorry, but you can only say you are sorry so many times before it becomes meanings. I was told there were no techs in the area and that I would have to rebook for the next day. I had plans for the next day and enough was enough. I said no re-booking, I’m canceling the service. I would have to wait until the next day since the business office was closed. When I called they tried again to retain me, but I said no, I’m so through with this company.

My question is how does a place run like this? Every time I call this joke of a company they acted like they have no idea who I was. I constantly had to tell them my address, phone number, and situation. Is there no record? No red flags? Like “hey we are about to loose this customer, make sure the tech guy shows up!” I was even told I would not have to pay for my down time? Wow, how nice, you mean I don’t have to pay for service I was not receiving. Then I was told I could have a month free, and that I could cancel without a 30 day notice if I gave them another chance. Yes thank you bell, thank you for letting me leave your disorganized disaster of an organization. Thank you for wasting several hours and two nights of my time, I have nothing better to do than hear how sorry you are.

Avoid Bell like you would avoid a sharp and prickly object

My suggestion to anyone thinking of Bell as their next service provider is to think long and hard, there are alternatives. My suggestion to Bell is to get organized, empower your employees, stop making them act like machines and let them make some decisions on their own. Don’t treat customers like morons, some of us do know what we are talking about. Keep a record of your customers complaints and don’t ask them the same thing every single time they call.

Who do you use?

I really wanted to go with TekSavvy as my next provider. They have incredible service from what I have read on DSL Reports, are proponents of network neutrality and every time I called them I got a real person and no automated service. Unfortunately TekSavvy is a reseller and uses Bell’s lines. They said a Bell technician might have to come into my place and that I would have to be around between the hours of 9 am and 5 pm. Most of us are working during those hours and that’s a huge time frame. In the end I grudgingly called Rogers. There are many many things I don’t like about Rogers, but too their credit they had me up and running in less than 24 hours and it took less than 10 minutes to set up.

If you have been making email newsletters that work in the majority of email clients out there you already know this; if you want your work to display the way you intended in web based and stand alone email clients then you have to use inline styles and tables, and a lot of them. You would also be wise to ignore any modern CSS, because most of it won’t work. Inline styles work well for email clients that strip out all the embedded styles like Hotmail (also a Microsoft product). Hotmail has come a long way over the past 4 years, but unfortunately Outlook took several steps back when someone came up with the brilliant idea of using Word as the email render engine. Previous versions of Outlook are much easier to support. 

I’ve done everything right, why are my links turning purple when clicked!

So you have your inline styles set up everywhere including on your links, but when you send out your deployment the links turn purple when clicked in Outlook 2007. This is Outlook ignoring your inline styles and applying the default link colour for visited links. If you have an embedded style at the top of the page, it will respect those. I had stopped using embedded styles all together since inline styles were much more reliable. The fix for this is to add your link styles back in the embedded style at the top of the page inside the head of your markup.

<style media="all" type="text/css">
a:link, a:visited {
     color:#64698c;
     text-decoration:none;
}
.sideBar a:link, .sideBar a:visited {
     color:#893d00;
     text-decoration:underline;
}
</style>

In this example all link styles are set to a specific colour and the second style sets a different set of colours for links within a sidebar class. All you really need to fix your Outlook link woes is the a:visited declaration, but it can’t hurt to add the links in there too.

Inline styles are still king with email

Remember, dont’ get rid of your inline styles. One of the reasons I got rid of my embedded styles is because I could not tell when I was missing an inline style. This is a real pain for links, because using this fix will show your links as the right colour while working on the email. If you or others use editors to work on your HTML they will not add inline styles, so you must always remember to add them after. Again, the down side with this fix is now you cannot see which links you have missed. At the time of writing Gmail still strips out the embedded link styles and I’m sure a few other clients still do this too.

As a web designer I constantly run into browser bugs and 90% of these bugs belong to either IE6 or IE7. Remarkably these two browsers don’t even consistently break the same way. What is messed up in IE6 may be completely messed up in a different way in IE7. The standards compliant WebKit and Gecko engines used by popular browsers like FireFox, Safari and Chrome rarely see many of these annoying bugs, but the masses use IE, so we as designers and developers must make them work.

Fixing these bugs usually requires a lot of head scratching and pounding of fists and Google searches until I figure out a work around or hack that will fix it. I may not run across said bug for several months or even a year or more and then inevitably I stumble across the same bug and of course not realizing it is one I have dealt in the past. The IE6 redirect bug is one of those nasty ones that has caused me much pain and suffering, and it’s very simple to fix, although sometimes remembering the fix can take precious time, so I thought this time I would write it down and share it with others.

An anchor link, sometimes called a jump link, is pretty straight forward HTML, so you would think IE would have no problems with it. You would be wrong though, very wrong.

<a href="http://www.sitename.com/yourPage.html#AnchorName">Link to anchor on page</a>

Within yourPage.html you have an anchor

<a name="AnchorName"></a>

This is where it all went wrong

Under most circumstances this will work just fine, even in old clunky IE6, but where it won’t work is when there is a redirect involved. My issue started with an anchor link from an email campaign. This link would be clicked from an email client and then sent on to the email deployment platform, where it would then be redirected to the actual page. From here a nasty 404 would pop up. This is what threw me, because usually redirecting an anchor link in IE6 will only result in the anchor not working, but the page still loads fine.

The fix

The fix is quite simple if you can remember it the next time this happens to you.

<a href="http://www.sitename.com/yourPage.html&#AnchorName">Link to anchor on page</a>

See the difference? No? Check out the little ampersand “&” at the end of the html file and before the pound “#”. This will fix your broken anchor links in IE6 and they will now jump to where they are supposed to go.

My issue was a little more dire since the anchor links were actually breaking the page and giving a 404 error. We probably could have just ignored the issue if the jumping was the only thing broken. I think the reason for this is IE6 must parse the URL incorrectly when being redirected and ignore pound sign “#”. My page was a PHP file and contained a query string:

yourPage.php&var1=foo&var2=bar#AnchoreName

The last var2 was interpreted as bar#AnchoreName instead of bar. An ampersand “&” fixed this issue also. IE6 and IE7 never cease to amaze me with how badly they interprets the HTML and CSS specs. This particular bug is only an issue in IE6. I hope this saves some people a bit of sanity.

There are a lot of options out there when it comes to transferring your files. There are free solutions, paid solutions, and solutions that require hacking or jailbreaking the device. Some of the methods only work on certain firmware versions, and some of the paid transfer applications have limitations on the shareware versions. After much digging around and several failed attempts I finally found a program that will work on the newest iTouch firmware as of this writing and I also quickly tested it out on my iPhone. It’s called SharePod, a really polished little app that is completely free. This nifty little program recognized the iTouch in seconds and allowed me to copy all the mp3s on the device over to the laptop. I did have problems with some video files, but that may have been my mistake, I’m not sure, but I recommend testing out your files after copying them off your device onto a new computer before resyncing your iPod.

Basically SharePod lists all the albums you have and lets you select each file you want or all of them. The great thing about SharePod is that it seems to be updated on a regular basis to support the new releases. When testing it out on my iPhone it did say not all features were currently supported on my version of the phone, but I could still transfer files from the iPhone to my computer, which is really all I need. It’s nice to know that the developer is keeping this app up to date and I really hope they continue to do so.

So if you have a massive collection to transfer over to a new computer, or even just a few songs, try out SharePod, it’s the best solution I have found for something that I think should be basic functionality built into iTunes. You can see screenshots of this great little app on the SharePod site too.

I recently got a new cell phone and was going to transfer my regular phone number to the new cell, but then thought about how many telemarketing calls I get a week. On weekends sometimes I get 2 or 3 on Saturdays alone. There is constantly messages left on my machine too. These are not places I do business with either. It’s always a survey, or I have been selected for a really great interest rate, or if I could just give a few moments of my time. No I can’t give any of my time. My time is important to me, especially on the weekend. No you can not have one moment of my time, if you are my client and you want to pay me for my time then fine, I’ll hear you out, otherwise buzz off and stop calling me. I am always as polite as I can be, but I do interrupt them as soon as I realize it’s a sales pitch. I usually cut in and say I’m very sorry I’m not interested and could you please take me off your call list. I do not allow the conversation to go beyond this point, but usually as I’m putting the receiver down I can still here the sales person on the other end pleading for one more moment of my time just before the click of the receiver.

Again, my question is why do we get so bent out of shape about spam, even make it a crime, but then when it comes to harassing me on the phone, which is far more intrusive and still wastes my time, it is considered okay? It shouldn’t be, you should not be calling my number for any reason other than to tell me something about an account or business transaction I have initiated with you or if you are my friend or family. Otherwise you have no business wasting my time.

These so called do not call lists don’t seem to work either. Canada is getting a new one soon; although I already signed up for one in the past and it obviously didn’t work. I really hope my new number does not get called, because not only are you wasting my time now, but you are wasting my minutes too. Does anyone else feel the same way about unsolicited telemarketing? I loath spam, but to me telemarketing is no better.

I recently bought an iPhone which was also my first cell. It’s rather pricey and I don’t really have a need for two phone bills so I called up Bell to cancel my home line. I will still continue to use their Internet service, so I have not completely left them. I fully expected the customer retention spiel and even put up with it for the first five minutes of the conversation.

Right from the get go I said I wanted to cancel and he asked why. I told him and then he told me many people cancel and reconnect, let me see what kind of “deal” we can get you. I was curious to see how much I could have been saving all these years. This alone kind of irks me because the price was more than half what I had paid for the past two years, mind you it had no voice mail, or long distance, but removing those features would not have reduced the bill by over half. Basically my phone bill could have gone from 45 dollars a month to 20. I still said no, I can’t justify a phone bill for a phone I won’t use.

So then he said my intercom will no longer work and what if there is an emergency, a lot of people find cell phones unreliable. I wonder if they say this when they are trying to sell you a mobile plan? Finally I calmly say “I really don’t like the hard sell”. This must have gone completely over his head, because he continued to push, and when I said I can always get another phone line if I want, he said “but sir that will cost you an extra 50 dollar connection fee”. This is when I lost my patience and calmly said something along the lines of “well, it won’t cost me 50 dollars if I go to your competitor and oh by the way maybe I should cancel my Internet right now also, this is ridiculous, I have things to do and work to get done” This for some reason got him to start the lengthy process of disconnecting my line. He said no sir no sir, I am canceling your line. I even told him I understood it was his job to try and keep me as a customer, but it was getting kind of ridiculous, it should have been glaringly obvious by that point that I was not going to keep my line.

What bothers me is I hate being like this, I felt crappy after saying that and I should not be made to feel this way when I call a company I have done business with for 10 years and continue to do business with. I understand customer retention, but there is a point when a service representative should know when to stop, I would say that time is definitely when the customer starts getting frustrated. Do these tactics work? Maybe they do, but I don’t think they do much for your brand, I am left with a very bad taste in my mouth now in regards to both Bell and Best Buy. In fact, I was already annoyed with Bell to begin with. I’ve never been able to get a hold of their support after work hours, and when they were trouble shooting an issue once it was quit a long and painful process. I would love to go to TekSavvy, their direct competition, unfortunately Bell charges them a 10 dollar dry loop fee since they use Bell’s lines. A dry loop is a phone line without a dial tone so you can still use DSL Internet. I’m still tinkering with the idea of switching, I’ve called TekSavvy twice and they have fantastic support. They even tell you that you can buy a modem from them or get it cheaper elsewhere! This is a company you remember and I have recommended them to others based only on reviews I have read and my own experience with their service reps.

Bell on the other hand only has me as a customer by sheer force. It seems like their whole business model is based on the fact that they control a lot of the lines. I know that if I ran a company I would want my name to shine because we were fantastic, not because we owned the market. What happens when competition comes? Bell you have a new logo, now you need to start treating your customers like people.