We at Stout were pleased to present a session with Mary and Tom Poppendieck at Marr Professional Development in Ann Arbor on Tuesday April 20th. As most of you already know, Mary and Tom are world renowned authors and consultants in the fields of lean and agile software development. They literally wrote the book on lean software development – several of them in fact. Currently they travel the world doing a variety of highly sought after presentations and workshops on these topics.

Our own Bill Heitzeg and John Stout attended such a workshop at CodeMash earlier this year and developed a good relationship with Mary and Tom. It was this relationship that opened the door for the session.

With limited seating available Stout hosted a sold-out crowd of 50 business and software professionals who were treated to an in-depth discussion of lean computing concepts.

There was also a detailed exercise demonstrating the power of value-stream mapping in identifying organizational and process waste. It is the elimination of such waste that defines lean processes of all kinds.

Mary and Tom were good enough to stop in between engagements and conduct the workshop. All proceeds from ticket sales went to benefit the Ann Arbor Chapter of the Association for Women in Computing and their scholarship fund.

You can find more information about Mary and Tom’s work and travels at their website www.poppendieck.com.

When I moved last spring I had a garage sale and one of the things I sold off to save storage space was my 75 gallon aquarium. I’ve been lugging the empty thing around for years because I’ve been moving so much and it was time for it to go. Well, now that the wife and I are finally in an apartment and an area that we like, I wanted to set up a smaller aquarium but I didn’t want to buy one new.

So I began browsing Craigslist and after a while started realizing what a pain it was going to be to try to surf through that every day because there were two different areas where I was willing to go to get what I wanted—Detroit and Ann Arbor—and those areas are split into two different sites on Craigslist. I noticed an RSS link at the bottom of all the pages including the search pages and I thought about subscribing to those. But then I remembered Yahoo Pipes.

I thought about how I would create my own Pipe to handle some filtering from both the AA and Detroit sites at once but I decided to do a search first. That’s where I found the “Craigslist Free Search” Pipe. Amazingly it was already set up for Michigan:

“Searches Flint, Ann Arbor, Saginaw and Lansing for FREE ads. Features include limiting the search to the 20 most recent, sorting by most recent across the 4 cities searched, prefixing cities with city codes for easy identification. Additionally, you can get only items with images by adding &hasPic=1 to feed URL.”

I cloned the Pipe and started customizing it. I replaced the searches to look in my areas and then I changed the RSS feeds to the more general “For Sale” category instead of the “Free” section. I then added two filters between the sort and the pipe output modules.

The first filter checks the item.title and item.description for my search terms (aquarium, fish, reptile and tank). The second filter narrows it down a bit further by scanning the URL of each item. Craigslist uses three-letter codes for different categories in their URLs so I set the filter to allow the categories that I wanted to see. For example, http://detroit.craigslist.com/gms/ is the category for garage sales so I added “gms” as a criterion to allow. I didn’t want to see any posts about “gas tanks” so I left out “pts” which is the auto parts category. I still see a few posts that aren’t what I’m looking for, but this helps a lot.

After I finished customizing the Pipe, I subscribed to the RSS feed in Thunderbird and now I get regular updates on my search terms pushed right to me. I know there are a number of ways to set this up and I wouldn’t say that original Pipe or mine are the best, but I’ve found some good deals without much effort and I wanted to share. If anyone has some tips on making this better, I’m listening.

You can check out my Pipes at http://pipes.yahoo.com/nickstaroba/.

Who has the time to spend a week learning how to use something they just paid $X,XXX for?! I don’t.

Every day something new is unveiled, but not every day does that something new create the reaction you would expect of these “fantastic, look what you can do, cutting-edge” items. The products and services that take off are easy to pick up, learn and use. The iProducts and the Twitters and the whole realm of social media are intensely complex behind the scenes. But up front, they’re accessible. They’re USABLE and people are USING them.

The speed of advancement we experience now has magnified the need for human factors/usability people.

When did personal computers become popular? Mainstream acceptance happened when knowledge of all the codes, abbreviations and structures behind operating the system became unnecessary. Accessibility came with the revolution of graphical user interfaces like Windows OS and Mac OS.

More than ever we get interest from clients when they learn that we have human factors/usability personnel available for projects. I think that’s good, because it suggests that we are all learning this lesson.

Screen estate is frequently gaining value in the world of intense computer users and this is especially true for those using a 9″ monitor for example.

A common screen hogging program is the web browser. Every day I spend more than a few hours using Firefox and after noticing some interesting extensions for my favorite browser, I took a little time out to make it more friendly for this user.

The default look of Firefox’s toolbars is this:

And with a few add-ons I now have this:

It may look sparse but almost all the functionality is still there and easily accessible.

Here is the list of add-ons I am using:

Hide Caption
This will hide the bar across the top of the program which displays the title of the Web page and contains the minimize/maximize/close buttons (called the Caption Bar). The buttons will be displayed on the menubar once this extension is enabled, but if the menubar is also hidden, they will show up on the navbar. Also, the title of the Web page can be seen on your windows taskbar. Note: This is an experimental add-on which requires you to log in to Mozilla’s site to download it. I’ve never had a problem with it myself so I don’t know why it’s still “experimental”.

Tiny Menu
With this you can collapses all of the menus normally at the top of a Windows program: File, Edit, View, etc. (called the Menu Bar). They can be taken off individually or completely and replaced with text or an image of your choice. I chose an image from a free icon set I found.

Smart Bookmarks Bar
The bookmarks toolbar normally shows a favicon and then the text for the bookmark. This extension allows the text for both folders and bookmarks to be hidden from view. It also has adjustments for the spacing between bookmarks and an auto-hide feature which I do not use for this setup.

Favicon Picker
Pick and choose your bookmark’s favicons. This one is not necessary, but it’s nice for added control of your bookmarks. I just wish it would allow me to change the individual folder icons.

The process:

1. Install Hide Caption and leave its options at default settings.

2. Install Tiny Menu and also leave its options at default (unless you want to choose an image instead of the “Menu” text).

3. Install Smart Bookmarks Bar and set the bookmark spacing to small. Also uncheck “Show bookmark names on mouse over” as this can be a very annoying feature because it causes everything to shift when you hover the cursor over a bookmark. Changing this extension’s options requires a restart of Firefox.

4. Right click on any empty area on the toolbars and choose “Customize”. This opens up Firefox’s built in customizer for its toolbars.

5. Check the “Use Small Icons” box.

6. Be sure “Icons” is selected in the “Show:” drop down menu.

7. Then start dragging the buttons and toolbars around to arrange them however you like. I have removed everything but the Tiny Menu button, the bookmarks toolbar, the back/forward/stop buttons, the address bar and the activity indicator.

8. Right click on any empty area on the toolbars again and uncheck both the “Navigations Toolbar” and “Bookmarks Toolbar”.

9. The final step is to start organizing your bookmarks toolbar. I have 2 bookmarklets and 3 folders: personal, work and everything else. This gives me access to all of my bookmarks without surfing through the Tiny Menu or the bookmarks sidebar.

There isn’t much more to the visual aspect of it than that.

Some things to consider for usability of this setup are Firefox’s shortcut keys which can help you to reduce the number of buttons needed on your all-in-one-toolbar. Also taking advantage of smart keywords in your bookmarks will streamline your browsing if you removed the search box as I did.

The only major problem I have with this setup is the loss of the ability to grab the caption bar to move the browser around. If you have the status bar enabled (view > status bar) then you can grab the window there to move it or a javascript bookmarklet can be set up to move/resize the window automatically.

This setup does not have to be done strictly as described above to improve your Firefox experience. The beauty of Firefox + add-ons is that it gives you the option to customize any which way you choose. I’d love to see screenshots of your custom Firefox setup in the comments. Enjoy.