techno.blog("Dion")

Holiday travel is often a nightmare, and this season was a total mare for my family. Flights were cancelled left right and center, with poor communication. Communication is key. On one flight the estimated departure time kept moving and they didn’t ONCE say anything on the tanoy system.

Customers hate the unknown.

Another huge pain point was dealing with United on the phone. I purchased one ticket with green, and two others with miles. This creates two separate reservations for some reason which is always a royal pain. The result of this was:

• I can’t login to the website and see the family trip
• So, I can’t select seats and do other tasks for the family
• Which meant that I couldn’t get seats next to each other!

On the flight out, we tried to ask the gentleman sitting next to my family if he would go up to the front of the plane where I had my seat. Even though his seat was the last on the plane, so he couldn’t put his seat back, he said no. He had to put up with Sam saying “Daddy? Where are you?”, and I had to be at the front in Economy Plus. Nice guy.

Now, United may think that this is all a good thing as it takes away the incentive to use miles like this. They are morons for not doing what customers want.

The phone system is so bad that I end up fighting over who is going to call with my wife. The problem is not unique to United, but to every one I have had to call:

• The automated system is crap, so you hit 0 as fast as you can to get a human
• But then that dood in India who is over worked, and doesn’t have the tools to help you, makes you more frustrated.

This happened several times on this trip. 80% of the time, after putting in my mileage number I got the automated: “I will make sure that the agent gets your information” and then it would hang up. It wouldn’t get me through to anyone. My sister-in-law who had a worse time than me would call and hear “we have a huge volume of requests right now, so instead of helping by calling you back later or something, I will just hang up on you now. We don’t care that your flight was cancelled.”

Abstract any technical issue from the customer.

It is time for a revolution in the customer service space that puts a customer first. Instead of trying to screw the customer, help them out. If I call you and the connection dies, CALL ME BACK. If I am on hold for 20 minutes, CALL ME BACK. Help me solve problems. Be creative. Please. So many people told me that they will not be flying for awhile. Under the same situations, if you had been helpful, they wouldn’t feel that way.

The only good experience of the trip was having the family use the Red Carpet Club. I suddenly realized why the airport lounge was good:

• You didn’t have to listen to the announcements that go off every five minutes
• The agents seemed to be a lot more helpful, and able to change things, than at check in.

Oh, and for fun I went to the customer service link on united.com and got this:

Adding an application doesn’t equal endorsement.

This showed up once again to me today as I had to do a double take on a sponsored piece of content in my mini feed:

Hmm. Why is this strange? Well, Bill Scott is the UX dood at Netflix. This ad makes it looks like he is endorsing public enemy #1, Blockbuster. I haven’t emailed Bill, but the case is probably more that he wanted to give it a looksy. Who doesn’t?

What is Movie Clique?

A Facebook app from Blockbuster that:

• Share: List which movies you’ve seen and which you want to see.
• Suggest: Let your crew know about a must-see flick.
• Rate: Stick it to the critics by rating movies yourself.
• Review: Good? Bad? Ugly? Tell everyone exactly what you think.
• Play Favorites: Make a list of your favorite movies of all-time.
• Queue it Up: Link Movie Clique to your blockbuster.com account and add movies to your Queue right from Facebook.

Next we will see “Steve Jobs added the application Windows Vista” and the like.

We realize that to build great applications that use Gears, we need to provide the right tools. From building applications, I have seen how the development cycle is affected by implementing offline support for example. If you are debugging your application you need to create helper methods that can clean up your local database and resource store for example.

There are various tools that have come along to help work with the database, most of them being web based, and some being local tools (e.g. SQLite Manager).

The team wants to offer more development tools for components such as:

• Database
• List databases per origin
• Create new
• Delete
• Interactive DB command line (can just use existing /sdk/tools/dbquery.html)
• LocalServer
• List ResourceStores (and ManagedResourceStores) per origin
• ResourceStore and ManagedResourceStore status (last error, update history, etc)
• command line (like db command line, but pointed at localserver DBs)
• WorkerPool
• Show running workers
• Interactive JS prompt to run JS inside a worker
• Interactive prompt to send messages to a worker
• Logging (requires LoggingModule)
• Show logging in real time as it happens
• Show historical logging
• Sort/filter by origin/page of source page

We also want it to be done via dogfood:

We can implement Gears tools as HTML/JavaScript applications that use the Gears APIs themselves. In order to make the tools available to every application, we should package them with Gears and serve them automatically from a special set of URLs of the form: <origin>/__gears__/<tool_name>. For example:

http://www.rememberthemilk.com/__gears__/databases.htmlhttp://www.rememberthemilk.com/__gears__/show_database.html?mydb... etc ...

Serving the Gears tools from within the origin they are manipulating means that we don’t have to add any special debug override to the Gears security model. The tools can manipulate Gears resources because they are being run inside that origin.

There is a minor chance of the __gears__ keyword conflicting with an existing application. We can make this configurable if people think this is a big deal.

We should reuse the existing Gears APIs to implement these tools. In the cases where there is no Gears API to provide a feature, it would be preferable to add the API. For example, there is currently no API to list the databases for a given origin. But there is an outstanding feature request for such an API. We should implement that API it instead of adding something special just for these tools.

Other Future APIs

• Factory API updates
• Blob API
• Logging API
• Messaging API
• Location API
• Desktop Shortcut API
• Image Manipulation API
• Introduction to the series

If you have any other tools that you would like to see, I am all ears.

Disclaimer: This is early days, and who knows what the final API will look like, or if it will even make it. Do you have ideas for cool Gears that make the Web better? Let us know!.

The simple Gears Factory is the front door to all Gears modules. It is about to get a small update that gives you a touch more configurability.

If you have wanted to customize the popup that your users get when first giving permissions to use the application, you can use the new APIs:

• boolean getPermission(siteName, imageUrl, extraMessage): Lets a site manually trigger the Gears security dialog, optionally with UI customizations.
  • siteName: Friendly name of the site requesting permission.
  • imageUrl: URL of a .png file to display in the dialog.
  • extraMessage: Site-specific text to display to users in the security dialog.
• hasPermission: Returns true if the site already has permission to use Gears.

So, nothing fancy here, but if you want to customize your Gears messages, you will be given control to do so.

Other Future APIs

• Blob API
• Logging API
• Messaging API
• Location API
• Desktop Shortcut API
• Image Manipulation API
• Introduction to the series

Disclaimer: This is early days, and who knows what the final API will look like, or if it will even make it. Do you have ideas for cool Gears that make the Web better? Let us know!.