The Ribbon is introduced in the Help file thus:

And if you’ve used previous versions of Word, you’ll wonder where the menus and toolbars have gone. That’s the beauty of the Ribbon. No longer do you have to wander through the maze of menus, submenus, and toolbars searching for what you want.

No, instead we now have to wander through a bewildering array of Ribbon tabs and drop-down menus. It’s as if the Office 2007 design team didn’t realize that everyone who’s been using Word for more than a year or two already knows their way around Word’s menu structure. It’s as if someone re-arranged my local neighborhood so that I “no longer have to wander through” the streets I already know. Indeed, SecretGeek finds the Ribbon so hard to find things in, he suggests that the Ribbon should include its own search feature so people can find features that are hidden among all those tabs!

It’s not just Microsoft. Check out Qwiki, “the information experience”. It is very clearly optimized to look cool in a demo. A demo, of course, is the ultimate in “aimed at new users” — it’s aimed at people who aren’t even users yet, but might become users. And user interface guru Bruce Tognazzini has been decrying the OS X Dock for years, partly on the basis that “It makes for a great demo, but not a great product.”

Interestingly, while I was prepping this post for publication, I became aware of Paul Miller’s article, “The Condescending UI”. It excoriates many of the very same problems in Apple’s and Microsoft’s recent OSes, saying that “these new tricks are horrible and offensive. They’re not only condescending and overwrought, they’re actually counter-functional.”

It’s as if usability tests and design reviews are all conducted with people who have never used the software in question before… and those who already have some domain knowledge are left out in the cold, forced to discard their knowledge every few years.

Are we really always newbies at everything? Or do developers even believe that we are? Or, heck, do marketers and product managers actually believe that we’re all still newbies? Or that there’s some vast, untapped market of prospective new users out there, just waiting for an even more dumbed-down interface before they’ll buy their first computer?

Just in case anyone out there believes any of those things, please, let me be the one to disabuse you of the notion. Anyone who doesn’t already use a computer is not ever going to. The only exception here is people under about 10 years old, and they’re not scared of unfamiliar UIs — to them, every UI is new, and they’re eager to learn new things. Stop dumbing things down, and stop sacrificing your long-time users’ skills in the name of changing things just for the hell of it.

A friend of mine notes that one of the problems of the current Google+ “real names policy” is that “Google is attempting to deal with (I’m assuming) manufacturing a community of 1-to-1 RL presence-to-online presence” — in particular, he says that while he does have questions about how Google is attempting to do this, he also has a lot of respect for the fact that they are trying to.

I’m not so sure that I do. Partly because I’m not convinced that there’s any value in creating a community of 1-to-1 real-life presence to online presence.

That’s partly because I’m not convinced that there’s any such thing as a 1-to-1 correspondence between real-life presence and real-life presence. I mean, seriously, are you the same person at work as you are when you’re down at the bar with friends? As when you’re having dinner in a nice restaurant with your lover? As when you’re in bed with him or her?

The idea of a 1-to-1 correspondence between real life presence and online presence is based on the idea that there’s a 1-to-1 correspondence between identities (personalities) and physical bodies. That idea is wrong. We all shift identities based on who we’re interacting with and what situation we’re in. That’s part of why we even shift our names based on that:

• My fiancée calls me “Darling”, “Sweetheart”, “Dear”, “Love”, or “Honey”, according to her whim at the time. (We like variety, and we like to avoid getting too canalized to one particular term of endearment.)
• My co-workers usually call me Kagan.
• My friends usually call me Kai.
• My siblings usually call me Kai, but my brother sometimes calls me “brother” or “bro” — and, truth be told, I like this occasional familiarity.
• Sales people and waitrons and so on call me “Sir”. And this is not an outlying data point, because I answer to it, and I expect them to call me by this name. We all consider it right and proper.
• Telemarketers and professional service people (bankers and whatnot) would do well to call me “Mister MacTane”. They often presume that they can call me “Kagan” — but this is a mistake on their part, because they are presuming a level of familiarity which (unlike my brother) they have not earned and do not deserve.

All of these different names, and different reactions to them, are signs that indicate that I enact different identities in different contexts. We all do.

And a social network that tries to straitjacket me into a single identity is doomed to omit huge chunks of who I really am. In so doing, it fails to serve my needs. It makes it harder for me to engage with the network at all… which makes it much more likely that I’ll leave.

I understand that Facebook is very deliberately built to enforce a single-identity model, because (as I’ve posted here before) Mark Zuckerberg actually believes that “[h]aving two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” But Google doesn’t have to subscribe to Zuckerberg’s delusion.

Sadly, I see little hope that they’ll deviate from the “one physical body, one online identity” model that Google+ currently tries to operate under (and can never successfully enforce without causing even more problems).

But now, I almost expect it when I’m scrolling through certain types of web pages. It’s slightly disorienting to me when I bump into the bottom of a page and have to manually click “next” or whatever.

What happened? In a word: New Twitter.

Okay, it’s not really “new” Twitter any more (it was rolled out from September through October of 2010 — less than a year ago, but those 9 months are an eternity in Internet time). But still, that roll-out was the impetus for my change in opinion. Twitter, a site I use every day, changed its UI and started doing infinite scroll. And now that interaction is a part of my daily life, and somewhere along the way, I got used to it. And now I expect it, at least in certain cases.

And it’s because one site changed its interface. And because that one site is one I use many times every day.

Logically speaking, there’s no reason why I should expect, for example, Google’s search results or my Dreamwidth reading page or TechCrunch’s front page to behave like Twitter does. One site’s UI shouldn’t — and doesn’t — have a damn thing to do with any other site. But the things we use frequently shape our habits, and that includes habits of thought.

As a side effect of my having gotten used to Twitter’s infinite scroll, I’ve gotten far less inclined to check the position of the scroll-bar “thumb” to see how far through the page I am… except on the kinds of pages that I expect to not have infinite scroll. For example, an article or story has a natural end, and it just makes sense for a calendar to be paginated.

But blogs? Or search results? Or anything that doesn’t have a natural break-point in it? There’s no reason why these things should require me to find the “load more” link. And there’s really no reason why that link should load stuff in a whole new page. Dynamic pagination with URL parameters like “?skip=40″ was always a kind of awkward idea; it’s just that there didn’t used to be anything better. But now there is.

Right? I mean, that really is the case, isn’t it? I don’t just think so because one of the sites I use every day has retrained the way I think… right?

1. Obviously, it wastes the user’s time and may even annoy them.
2. It also contributes to the general problem of “too damned many dialog boxes in computing”. This is subtly but importantly different from the previous point: It trains the user to unthinkingly click the default option in any dialog box, just to keep it from wasting their time.
3. Finally, it may actually hinder the user’s ability to leave your program. Look at this page by Joel Spolsky, and search for “exit Juno”. A user thought the “Are you sure you want to exit?” dialog meant that the computer was advising her that there were ill effects from doing so.

Okay, that last one seems like sort of an edge case, right? But even the first two items are enough reason to pay attention to when you should — and shouldn’t — ask the user to confirm something.

My proposal: Only ask a user for confirmation when the action was initiated by a single click or keystroke, and it has some kind of bad effects. Yes, this means that any time you ask someone to confirm whether they want to exit your program, and they have already saved all their work, you just wasted their time. This one’s particularly prevalent in the gaming world, I’ve noticed: Even if you’re in between games, and your scores are all saved — meaning the worst possible consequence of exiting the game is that you’ll have to start the application again — most games will show you a “Do you really want to exit Game Name?” dialog anyway.

MS Word gets this exactly right. If your document hasn’t been changed since the last time you saved it, then exiting the program has no ill effects. If you click the little X, or press Alt+F4, MS Word won’t even bother to ask you “Are you sure?”; it’ll just exit with no muss and no fuss. It’s only if you have some unsaved work that you’ll see the “Do you want to save your changes?” dialog. And if your document already has a filename, Word doesn’t bother to prompt you for a new one; you only get the “Save As…” dialog if the document doesn’t yet have a filename.

The program only bothers the user if it has to; if it can figure things out on its own, it does. Just the way it should be.

If you’re writing another application — I don’t care whether it’s whether it’s a web application, Rich Internet Application, desktop application, or smartphone application — please take a hint from the way MS Word handles confirmation questions. Don’t make your app be the software equivalent of “that guy”.

Getting used to it has occupied a fair bit of my time, but here are a few early impressions. Obviously, some of these are impressions of the Android OS, and others are about the phone’s hardware.

• The Android calendar will let me set alarms anywhere from 1-99 units in advance of events, where the units can be minutes, hours, days, or even weeks. This actually beats what the old PalmOS used to let me do (and the webOS replaced by a simple drop-down of 5, 10, 15, and 30 minutes, 1 hour, and 1 day — not very useful; sometimes I want 3 hours’ warning).
• The Epic is a much bigger, chunkier device than the Prē was. It still fits in my pants pocket, but not so smoothly. Not only is it just plain larger than the Prē, it also has less-rounded corners. Also, the protective case I got for the Epic is the rubberized kind, noticeably thicker than the “invisible skin” I had on my Prē.
• What’s with the battery gauge not giving an actual percent? That seems so… naff. I’ve found a nice app to give me usable information: Modded Logic’s Battery Status Bar.
• Live Wallpaper is cool as anything. It also seems to eat batteries like a very hungry thing. I’m still trying to decide if it’s worth it or not.
• Also, the battery seems to take a looooong time to charge. I could plug in a Prē with a nearly-empty battery and have it back up near full in only a couple of hours. The Epic seems to gain only about 20% or so of battery charge in a similar period of time. Yikes!
• Swype works impressively well. Even using the phone one-handed (and hence Swyping with my thumb as I cradle the phone in my fingers), I can frequently get it to understand me well enough (after only a day and a half!) that I rarely slide out the physical keyboard.
• On the other hand, having that physical keyboard available is still really nice, not least because it has cursor-arrow keys, allowing easy editing of text in a way that was tooth-grindingly frustrating at best (and sometimes simply impossible) on the Palm Prē.
• Another big win: visible scroll bars while you’re scrolling a list (then they fade out). The lack of any indication of where you were in a list (especially a long one) was one of my strongest complaints against webOS when it first came out, and Palm hasn’t addressed it in the various updates over the past more-than-a-year. Google’s gotten this right: The scroll bar doesn’t take up any screen space except when you’re using it, and at that point, it gives you both size and position feedback, like a good scroll bar should.
• And, for yet another win that I wasn’t expecting: Haptic feedback! It turns out to be really useful, not just a bell and/or whistle. (Honestly, I’ll have to put some thought into just what’s so cool about it — and what’s so useful; they’re not quite the same things! That can become another article for another time.)
• The standard Android Memo application astounds me. I didn’t think it was possible to design one that was worse than webOS’ “sticky-note inspired” design, but this actually manages it. In its favor, it has 5 colors instead of 4. To its detriment, it can’t display more than 4 of them on the screen at once (as compared to webOS’ 12), and it won’t let you sort the memos by anything other than last edit time. This is a total loss for user experience: Not only does the sorting look completely random until you figure out what’s going on, but it keeps changing, meaning the user can never learn where in the list a given memo’s going to be.

Obviously, there are other memo- and note-pad apps in the Android marketplace. I have faith that quite a few of them will prove better and more useful than the one that came with the OS.

Also, the screen is big and bright and clear. That huge screen is part of the reason for both the device’s size and the battery-life problems, but it sure does look pretty.

All in all, I think I like it. I’ve certainly found more to like than to dislike in the past couple of days, which puts it noticeably ahead of the Palm Prē and webOS, which caused me such grief and anguish last summer (and last autumn, and this spring).

If only it were smaller and had twice the battery capacity… (Yes, I know I’m asking for something completely unreasonable. After all, I’d like that smaller phone to still have the same size screen. Who cares if it’s geometrically impossible?)

I’d never realized there was so much variation just in one letter. I was converted into a fontaholic on the spot (though not so completely as my sister, who now designs typefaces professionally for a prestigious font foundry — way to go, sis!). But it’s easy to get too absorbed in the letters.

Like Debussy, who noted that “music is the space between the notes”, I’ve become enamored with the kind of typography that happens between the letters. It’s more important than you think it is, because: It makes your text easier for people to read.

Non-Breaking Spaces

The humble non-breaking space has been a full-fledged HTML entity code since the late ’90s. Entering   will produce one in any browser that’s still in use… and yet, nobody makes use of them. It’s a shame that this character’s being wasted; it’s very useful in places like:

Before dashes

I’ve got a couple of em dashes in my very first paragraph. Go ahead and try changing your browser window’s width so the text re-flows. No matter what you do, you can’t get those dashes to show up at the beginning of a line. Ah, but this dash — this one, you can get at the beginning of a line. Looks ugly, doesn’t it?

If you look at a properly typeset book, magazine, or newspaper, you’ll see that dashes work nicely at the ends of lines, but if they wind up at the beginnings of lines, they look awkward. Almost orphaned. Putting a non-breaking space before your dashes will ensure that the awkward layout never happens. (I’ve got a pair of keystrokes in my editor bound to the sequences “ — ” and “ – ” — note that each of those sequences includes a trailing space, to save me even more typing. And in laying out those particular quoted strings, I used non-breaking spaces at the ends, so that the closing quotes are always on the same line as the rest of the sequence.)

At paragraph endings, to avoid orphans

I mentioned things looking “almost orphaned” earlier. In typesetting, the word “orphan” can refer to either of two things: One is “A single line of text at the top of a (physical) page” — this is the meaning commonly used by word processing programs, which will apply “widow and orphan protection” to ensure that no fewer than two lines ever appear together at the top or bottom of a page.

But the other meaning is “one or two short words of text forming a sole, final line of a paragraph”. For example, consider:

This is the sort of thing up with which I will not
put.

Once again, this looks horrible. And once again, it can be avoided by using a non-breaking space between the penultimate and final words of your sentences. (Okay, this takes a bit of mindfulness, I’ll admit. Honestly, it’s the sort of thing that works best when you’re editing, not when you’re writing the first time around. And you only need it with short final words; there’s no need to bother if the last word of your paragraph is “elephantine”.)

At beginnings and ends of inline titles

The history of literature and the arts is filled with titles that start or end with very short words. Titles like As You Like It, and The Importance of Being Earnest, and Of Mice and Men; titles that run the gamut from A River Runs Through It to The Wizard of Oz; from To Kill a Mockingbird to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; from The Godfather, Part II to The King and I.

Depending on just how wide your browser window is, and what your font size is, probably at least one of those titles has a lone, orphaned word at the beginning or the end of a line. But you can resize your browser window however you like, and the titles in this paragraph will never have that orphaned-word effect. I’m sure you can guess exactly why. And the titles are: As You Like It, and The Importance of Being Earnest, and Of Mice and Men; titles that run the gamut from A River Runs Through It to The Wizard of Oz; from To Kill a Mockingbird to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; from The Godfather, Part II to The King and I.

If Only We Had Non-Breaking Hyphens!

All this talk about non-breaking spaces is pretty cool, but what do you do when you list a phone number, and you want to avoid having (415) 555‑1212 get broken across a line-break? Or a book’s ISBN, such as 020530902‑X or 030010699‑8?

For some reason, the W3C never bothered to provide a decent non-breaking hyphen code, like &nbhy; or &nbh; or some such. More’s the pity. But the Unicode code point U+2011 (or 8209 in decimal), found in the “General Punctuation” section, is defined as a non-breaking hyphen. (It occupies the next code point after U+2010, simply called “hyphen”.) So using either ‑ or ‑ should get you a nice non-breaking hyphen in any modern browser.

If that doesn’t do it for you, you could set up a .nowrap { white-space: nowrap; } definition in your sitewide CSS file. Then just wrap any hyphenated text that you want to keep on one line in span tags with the class “nowrap”, like so: <span class="nowrap">123‑456‑7890</span>

You probably won’t be surprised to find examples of these basic principles in the source code to many of my previous posts. I’ve been doing this kind of thing for a long time.

It might be a welcome trend, if the replacement widgets people were building had more functionality than the OS-native ones that are available for free in any other context. But usually, the widgets I see in these frameworks have less than half the functionality of the things they try to replace. I’m going to pick on scroll bars for now, because I’ve seen them horribly mangled too many times.

To start with one aspect of scroll bars that we often take for granted: Can you guess which of these text boxes contains more text?

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. Quisque est est, luctus quis suscipit et, lacinia ac odio.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco.



Of course you can; you don’t even need to guess. The one on the left has more, and you can tell immediately because the movable slider on its scrollbar is smaller. This is a feature you get for free from the native OS widget, and one I have never seen implemented in a Flash, AIR, or similar interface.

Here are all the things a native scrollbar does. I absolutely guarantee you, if you’ve reinvented a scrollbar, your implementation is missing at least two of these features:

1. As mentioned above, the slider object changes size automatically, to give a general impression of how much content the scrollable area contains.
2. The arrows at the top and bottom of the scrollbar are clickable, and clicking them once will move the content up and down by a small amount (typically 1 or 2 lines).
3. Clicking and holding the top and bottom arrows will cause the content to scroll more rapidly.
4. Clicking and dragging on the slider will scroll the content smoothly to any position the user chooses. (Yes, I have seen scrollbar implementations in which the slider was not a draggable item!)
5. Scroll wheel support: If the user’s hardware includes a scroll wheel, scrolling it will move the content up and down. This is many users’ preferred method of scrolling content these days, and yet it’s totally ignored by over half the Flash interfaces I’ve encountered in the past year. I’ve bolded it because it’s the one that gets so egregiously ignored.
6. The “gutter” in between the arrows and slider is also clickable. Clicking on it once will scroll the content up or down by, roughly, the size of the visible area (a “page”, as it were).
7. Of course, clicking and holding in the “gutter” area will repeatedly and rapidly scroll the content. (This is rarely apparent unless you’re dealing with a tall scrollable area and a fairly long document. Try loading a 25-page or longer document into a word processing program, and set the program to full-screen.)
8. When the content is scrolled (by whatever method), the slider will move up or down to indicate how far from the beginning or end you are. (Essentially the converse of item #4: Moving the slider scrolls the content, and scrolling through the content moves the slider.)
9. The arrow buttons and the gutter area give a visual indication when they’ve been clicked, so the user has better feedback. (This is one of those little things that makes the user experience so much better. It’d be so easy to do, and yet I’ve seen about 2 Flash scrollbars in my life that have bothered with that feature.)
10. If you set your cursor focus on the scrollable area, using the up and down arrow keys will scroll the content. Either the Home and End or Ctrl+Home and Ctrl+End keystrokes will move directly to the beginning and end of the content. The PgUp and PgDown keys may also move the content by an amount similar to clicking in the gutter.
11. The scrollbar — including its arrows, gutter and slider — looks just like every other scrollbar on the user’s computer. The user can immediately identify the items and finds them familiar.

Even if you have done a smashing job of replicating the first 10 points on this list, you simply can’t get the final one in an AIR, Silverlight, or Flash interface. If your whiz-bang interface platform provides some other benefit, then dropping that last feature might be worth it.

But it’s no excuse for dropping all the other stuff. Most non-native scroll bars I’ve seen support only 3 or 4 of these features, which means anyone who normally uses any other ways of interacting with scrollbars winds up cursing and deciding that this broken implementation is cheap and chintzy.

Which it is. If you’re going to reimplement the wheel, at least make it something that will roll smoothly.

By the time you get back to WordPress 2.0 and try hitting the blog installation directory in your web browser, all you get is a plain, unstyled page that says:

It doesn’t look like you’ve installed WP yet. Try running install.php.

The funny thing is, that page works just fine. You click the link, it takes you to install.php, and… that’s really just a splash page, which talks about what you’re going to do, and requires that you click on a big link that says “First Step” in order to proceed. So, while it does “work”, it does so at the expense of making the user click the mouse twice, unnecessarily.

In the past 4 years, the WordPress team has made the install process look sleeker and more styled. But I think the real improvement in user experience isn’t the visuals — it’s the removal of those two unnecesary, time-wasting mouse clicks.

• When I press F11 to bring up the Style Picker list, why does typing letters not navigate me through that list? Why do I have to use the down-arrow to navigate to “Heading 1″, rather than just typing “he” and then Enter?
• Once I do hit Enter to apply the style I’ve chosen, why does the picker window remain open even though my cursor focus has returned to the document? This is the worst of both worlds: part of the document I’m working with is obscured by the picker window, and now I have to hit F11 twice in order to apply another style. If the window went away, I could just hit F11 once to bring it up the next time I wanted to apply a style.
• And, for the love of all that’s sane, why are the styles not sorted correctly? Seeing this:
  
  Heading 1
  Heading 10
  Heading 2
  Heading 3
  …
  
  is not just cheesy and amateurish, it also costs me extra work every time I want to select a heading style other than Heading 1.
• When I’m trying to set up a new keystroke shortcut, why is that I can use Ctrl+[digit] and Ctrl+[alpha], but I can’t use the Ctrl+. or Ctrl+, combinations? Nor can I use square brackets. Ah, but I can use Ctrl++, Ctrl+-, and Ctrl+/ if I want… and I can use Ctrl+* and Ctrl+Shift+8. (I haven’t yet checked to see what happens if I have those assigned to different things.)
• And I can’t use any combination that involves the Alt key. Not Alt+[digit]; not Ctrl+Alt+[key], and not Shift+Alt+[key]. This means the number of available keystroke shortcuts is painfully small compared to what I’m used to in MS Word.

Okay, I just finally made a reference to MS Word. I know OO.o Writer is not MS Word, and there are things that I should expect to be different. I haven’t said a thing about using F11 instead of Ctrl+Shift+S to bring up the Style Picker. But honestly, having fewer than half as many possible key-bindings? That’s not a case of “we do it differently here; get used to it”, that’s a case of “this is flat-out worse than the competition”.

Or is there a good reason for ignoring the Alt key that I haven’t thought of? If so, please let me know.

2:50 PM Connecting to Rescue Gateway: control.app51.logmeinrescue.com…
2:50 PM Connected to Rescue Gateway. A support representative will be with you shortly.
2:51 PM Support session established with Kade.

2:51 PM Kade: Hello.
2:51 PM Kagan MacTane: Hi.
2:51 PM Kade: I understand that you are getting signed out and erase all data screen.
2:51 PM Kade: Am I correct ?
2:51 PM Kagan MacTane: Yes.
2:51 PM Kagan MacTane: And when I press “Just Restart”, the phone restarts and then shows that same “Signed Out” screen again.
2:52 PM Kagan MacTane: I tried taking out the battery and putting it back in, but it still does the same thing.
2:53 PM Kade: Thank you for the information.
2:53 PM Kade: I apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused to you.
2:53 PM Kagan MacTane: Is there any way I can sign in without losing all my data?
2:54 PM Kade: Let me confirm when exactly did you noticed this error message (date and time) ?
2:54 PM Kagan MacTane: When I woke up this morning, the phone had downloaded the webOS 1.2 update overnight.
2:54 PM Kagan MacTane: It said I needed to restart the phone to complete the upgrade. I said okay.
2:55 PM Kagan MacTane: Then, when it came back up, it showed me the Signed Out screen.
2:55 PM Kagan MacTane: Date: today. Time: around 10:30 am? I wasn’t checking.
2:55 PM Kade: Have you recently update the device to WebOS 1.2 version?
2:56 PM Kagan MacTane: Like I just said: “When I woke up this morning, the phone had downloaded the webOS 1.2 update overnight”
2:56 PM Kade: Okay.
2:58 PM Kagan MacTane: Hello?
2:59 PM Kade: Yes, I am with you.
2:59 PM Kade: I am sorry for the delay.
2:59 PM Kagan MacTane: As long as you’re still here.
2:59 PM Kagan MacTane: I recognize this one might take a little time to research.
3:00 PM Kade: Palm is investigating this issue, however I will make a note of it and escalate this issue to Specialist team also.
3:00 PM Kade: Could you please provide me the below given details information :
3:00 PM Kade: 1. Let me know your Palm profile email address.
3:01 PM Kagan MacTane: Should be kai@mactane.org
3:01 PM Kagan MacTane: That email will certainly reach me.
3:01 PM Kade: Let me know your MEID number.
3:01 PM Kagan MacTane: How do I find that?
3:02 PM Kade: You will find it under the device battery.
3:02 PM Kagan MacTane: Just a moment…
3:02 PM Kade: Sure.
3:02 PM Kagan MacTane: You want the hex, or decimal version?
3:03 PM Kade: Yes, MEID Hex :
3:03 PM Kagan MacTane: Okay. MEID HEX: A100000064331AF
3:04 PM Kade: Thank you for the information.
3:04 PM Kagan MacTane: (I may have gotten one too many or one too few zeroes.)
3:05 PM Kade: Not a problem.
3:06 PM Kagan MacTane: Now do I stay on the line, or will someone email me later on?
3:07 PM Kade: To create a case record and submit the request, I need the following information: First and last name
Primary phone number
Secondary phone number (if any)
Primary email address
Device serial number
Purchase date
Country where you purchased your device
Place of purchase (Ex: Palm store, retail store, wireless service provider store, online)
Do you want to receive promotional email from Palm?
Wireless service provider

3:07 PM Kagan MacTane: First: Kai
3:07 PM Kagan MacTane: Last: MacTane
3:09 PM Kagan MacTane: Primary: 415-REDACTED
Primary email: kai@mactane.org
Device Serial: PSPE06D95093
Purchased: approx. 7/7/2009
Country: USA
Place: Sprint store
No promotional material, please
Wireless Service: also Sprint
3:10 PM Kade: Thank you for the above given information.
3:11 PM Kade: I would like to do, is place your case into a special team that develops technical solutions. They will do further research on it. They would be in touch with you once they have further updates. I cannot commit to a specific callback period, but please know that we are working on your case.
3:11 PM Kagan MacTane: Looks liek purchase date was actually July 6th.
3:11 PM Kade: Okay.
3:12 PM Kagan MacTane: Until I hear back from the special team, my phone is useless.
3:12 PM Kagan MacTane: I hope they’ll be quick.
3:12 PM Kade: Yes, you are correct.
3:12 PM Kade: Thank you for your understanding and patience.
3:12 PM Kagan MacTane: You’re welcome.
3:13 PM Kagan MacTane: Can you tell the team that email is my preferred contact method?
3:13 PM Kade: Sure.
3:13 PM Kagan MacTane: Thanks. the phone number you have is my home phone, which won’t reach me during normal office hours.
3:13 PM Kagan MacTane: (At the office, I use my cell phone… which is currently a brick.)
3:13 PM Kade: Okay, I understand it.
3:13 PM Kagan MacTane: Cool.
3:14 PM Kagan MacTane: Thanks for your help.
3:14 PM Kade: You are most welcome.
3:14 PM Kade: I apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused to you.
3:15 PM Kade: Here’s the reference number for our chat: Chat session ID number: 40711457

Keep this number as a record of this chat, and if you need to contact us again for this same issue, please refer to this number.
3:15 PM Kagan MacTane: Thanks.
3:15 PM Kade: Thank you for contacting Palm and feel free to contact us for further assistance. After our chat ends, you’ll receive a survey.
3:15 PM Kade: Have a nice day !
3:15 PM Kade: Bye !

How long should I wait for a response before giving up and blowing away all the data on my phone? Especially since I can’t imagine what the special team will be able to say, other than, “We’re very sorry, Mr. MacTane, but there’s no way to avoid destroying all of your data. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.”

(Of course, if I decide to just get it over with, they’ll get back to me with some arcane keystroke combo that would have saved me… if only I’d been patient.)