It’s no secret that I’ve been in absolute lather for the past couple of weeks over the sudden and unexplained connectivity problems I’ve experienced with Mint.com. On Aug. 23, Mint stopped refreshing my Citizens Bank accounts. While it’s incredibly easy to stay within one’s budget when no money ever comes in or out, this issue rendering their service completely useless.

I’ve had my go-round with Citizens in the past. It took 2 months and 2 “lost” cards before the new bank card that I ordered arrived. Then there was the 3 phone calls to change my address, 2 of which were related to a backwards zip code. You read that right- they somehow managed to enter my zip code backwards…twice. But in desperation I signed up for a Quicken Online account and voila, it worked like a charm. So I had this one all on Mint, and I was pissed.

Mint didn’t make it easy on themselves. Days passed with no word from support. (Here’s a tip- how about putting some of those fat funding rounds towards customer support?). I had all but given up, and had started to gift wrap a turd-in-a-box to ship directly to Mintland headquarters when this little gem appeared on the Mint forums:

Hi Citizens Bank Minters,
It appears Citizens, www.citizensbankonline.com , is now actively and purposefully blocking Mint.com from connecting. This has been happening for over a week now. We apologize for the frustration and we’re trying to work to a resolution at this time. We’ll post here with any status updates as they are available.
Thanks for your patience while we try to find a way to connect successfully.

If this is true, there had better be a damn good reason for it. Like, Citizens engineers discovered a critical flaw in the Mint data provider. Or Al Qaida were using Mint’s brilliant budgeting tools to handle their finances. Or just a big misunderstanding. Because whichever company is in the wrong here is getting a nice new turd-in-a-box sent their way.

I've embraced your amazingly free service and I love it. Anyone who is not using Mint.com is a silly goose. I only have a single request, and it's a small one. It doesn't involve powerful accounting tools, complex statistical analysis or slick sexy charts. All I want is to not see the above graphic every other day. Please crank up the priority up a notch or two. I'll gladly pay for it.

"Given our limited resources, we’ve decided to support iTunes Import/Export with our own development time, while opening the source to our iPod add-on to the community so other developers can extend and enhance it"... 

"This also means QA won’t be testing against iPods anymore so we’ll need your support to help keep us in the loop on what’s working and what’s not."

The buzz around the rumored Apple tablet grows by the day, but overall reaction has been mixed. Many are anticipating that it will end in disaster, just as many other ventures into tablet computing have. I think the world is ready for a tablet, and Apple is in the perfect position to deliver yet another life-changing device.

Ask people what they think of the Google Chrome browser and you'll often hear the remark "it just feels faster". Testing results so indeed prove that Chrome is a fast browser, but the differences become more difficult to measure when compared to other fast browsers like Firefox or Safari. We're talking fractions of a second. So what is it about Chrome that makes it "feel faster"? The answer is obvious- an ingenious UI design. Speed, or at least the illusion of speed, is becoming increasingly important for web-related apps.

Chrome "feels faster" because of its light UI design. Instead of being modeled after a physical window with thick outer borders and deep edges as was common in older browser designs, Chrome is modeled after a sheet of paper. Thin edges, light 2D borders and use of white + blue colors contribute to the illusion of a slick speedy UI. You can experience this for yourself with Firefox- switch between the Default theme and a Chrome-esque theme like Chromifox Basic, and you can't help but feel the latter is faster.

You can see this design theme popping up everywhere. Google is naturally most famous for this design approach, and it can be seen in nearly all of their web apps. Many social services like Tumblr, Twitter and Ping.FM have gone with light, easy to consume 2D themes. Now Mozilla seems to be experimenting with it as well in the next version of Firefox. It's even spilling over to the desktop, which can be seen with Microsoft Windows 7 themes and many Adobe Air apps. People no longer want thick blocky interfaces packed with features/buttons/options. Light, thin and speedy is the new hotness. It's amazing how much perceived application performance mileage you can get out of simple UI design decisions.

There are many public Twitter Do’s + Don’t out there, but here’s one that many of those lists miss: dotting every one of your Twitter replies is an irritating and egotistical habit. So stop it.

 

For those unaware of what dotting is- Not long ago, Twitter introduced functionality that hides any replies (messages beginning with @username) in your stream which are addressed to users you don’t follow. Since the context of these conversations is usually missing rendering the reply meaningless, it made sense. It was controversial as many people felt it removed a level of discovery. So to work around it, many people add a “.” at the beginning of their replies. This circumvents the filter and makes the reply visible to everyone.

I don’t have a problem with this. If the reply contains useful info which others may be interested in, then it’s fine to broadcast it. What I dislike is how some people use it for nearly every effing reply they send. It’s similar to raising your voice in a conversation to be purposefully overheard by others. It’s obnoxious, narcissistic...and if I still don't know the context then it can be utterly meaningless. Observe:

".@techintrovert You might think that, but sometimes it's best to unlean before one can learn."

WTF am I supposed to make of this little gem of Yoda-esque knowledge? It's a perfect example of why excessive dotting can get old quickly. So please- use it in moderation. Carefully dole out those dot replies as you would carefully dole out a retweet. We don’t need to know what you think about everything all the time.