Folder Share Usability Woes
Getting one relative onto foldershare wasn’t too hard - he had his PC here, so I could help him. It went pretty seamless, though he was annoyed with having to pick a nickname “Why the F#)( would I want a nickname”. I couldn’t explain that. I just said they meant login id, but it really isn’t, the login id seems to be the name.
Helping them synchronize a folder wasn’t too challenging either. It’s clumsy, you have to login and do it through the web (like that is in any way convenient). My relative was confused at first and wondered (using cursewords) why the tree view didn’t look like every other tree view on his computer. I didn’t tell him its that way because programmers like AJAX because they like running stuff in a browser - what would be the point? A native interface would be far more usable, but it wouldn’t be in a browser and count as a WEB 2.0 app.
Getting my second relative working was more difficult.
It took over an hour to create his account. He had trouble logging in at first. He tried the reset password but thought it didn’t work, because the server seemed to be taking too long to process the request, so he browsed away from the page and tried to create his account, thinking it wasn’t there. He thought it hung because the server didn’t respond for a long time. That caused us an hour of confusion, with no error messages that would guide us, and I didn’t realize the error my relative made - we seemed stuck in a loop of not being able to create an account.
It would have been easier if we had seen the password in the email invitation to foldershare.
Then it wouldn’t work because of some NAT issue. They were using their neighbors wireless, and it just doesn’t work that way, their neighbors wireless doesn’t support UPnP. No good error messages from the foldershare app, you have to test your connection and be able to interpret the ingoing/outgoing port status. Plugging his high-speed modem back into his computer resulted in foldershare starting to work. I am glad they weren’t using an airport express or other router; mine had to be manually configured to get NAT working with FolderShare (or any other app that needs a port forwarded).
Trying to get that working over the phone would be a nightmare. I think its an AirportExpress weakness, no UPNP support.
Foldershare has a long way to go to improve usability, but once you get it working, it should be straightforward after that.
Technorati Tags: Foldershare, UPNP, TimeSink, SSH, RSYNC, Nat, usability, Web 2.0