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Remembering when I setup one of the first school email systems in Ireland and the UK many years ago, I came across this story on ZDNet, which brings to bear the emmense issue of privacy when issuing individual email addresses to students in schools.

Fears over children's safety on the Internet halt plans to give Welsh school pupils their own email addresses

The Welsh Assembly has halted its pledge to provide every school pupil in Wales with a personal email address because of security fears.

Minutes from an Assembly cabinet meeting in June have revealed that the proposal was shelved following concerns that children could be individually identified through their personal email addresses. Members of the Cabinet feared that school pupils could be approached by paedophiles if their email addresses were given out in Internet chatrooms.

"For the time being, a general domain name will be given out instead, so that all correspondence is addressed to the school rather than an individual pupil," said a spokeswoman at the National Assembly for Wales. "But we're still well on target to have all schools online by 2002."

The Department for Education and Skills' (DfES) says that "the world has moved on from 1997, and class-based email addresses will offer more protection as students will remain unidentifiable within any email address,". The system will however allow individual students to send and receive emails in the same way as with personal email addresses, but the teacher will have the control to filter out any unsuitable correspondence.

News source: ZDNet News UK

I mean for God’s sake I get so frustrated when I see my non-techie friends surfing through a site, double-clicking on links. It doesn’t matter how many times I tell them they don’t need to double click on certain things like websites, “next” buttons, taskbar menu items, they STILL insist on double-clicking EVERYTHING. But can I honestly say it’s their fault? Nope. They’ve been told that they have to double click to open files, so why shouldn’t that apply to EVERYTHING they click? It doesn’t sound logical to us, why would we double click a hyperlink? But to them a hyperlink is the same as opening a file. (and yes I realize you can change the settings so that double click isn’t necessary, but the people I’m talking about have no idea where that setting is.)

And double clicking is not such a big thing. But certain things are. Like finding files. I can’t tell you how many people have called me up saying “I’ve saved a file somewhere but I don’t know where.” I then have to introduce them to the idea of folders and “My Compter” and F3 and the fact that remembering what folder you saved something to is important. And installing software is a major undertaking for most people I know. You’d think installing Macromedia Flash, which is one of the EASIEST INSTALLS on the face of the earth, is like climbing Everest for some.

I say all this to say, WE in the computer community, and mainly OS developers like Microsoft, have a HUGE mountain of our own to climb. Its name, Mt. Usability. Right now, we’re at about a thousand feet. We’ve got a long climb ahead. But I think we’re about to take a major stride with the release of Windows XP.

Let me say this first of all, I am working off of the RC2 release of XP. So while small things may change between RC2 and the RTM, the GUI was set in stone pre-RC1, so most of the usability enhancements will stay the same. I must also say that I set the installation up just as the average user would. No tweaks, no changed settings.

I wanted to test the progress MS has made with their new baby by giving it a couple mundane tasks. One would be to take a 4.64 megabyte .tiff file taken off a digital camera (Olympus C3000 Zoom, great camera) and send that file to a friend via email. Simple enough for us, but I’ve seen disastrous results from “the other half”. To throw in a loop, I want it to conform to most ISP standards so that it comes in well below one megabyte. Secondly, I want to go to download a file that uses a plugin I don’t have and see if Windows can help me out.

First things first, emailing a picture. Assuming I know how to hook my camera up to my computer and download the pictures from it, the pictures should be stored in my “My Pictures” folder. If they ARE stored there, you get nice thumbnails of each picture, as well as a much larger preview picture. I really like what they’ve done with their image viewer this go ‘round. Got rid of the old imaging application and added some new features like a slide show, and if you’ve got an intellimouse explorer you can scroll through your images using the forward and back buttons. So we’re scrolling through and we find a picture of Jenny and think, “Ah my friend Bob would like this. He thinks Jenny’s a hottie.” Simple. Microsoft has added a TRUE task bar to the side of their explorer windows. The first couple panes are “What would you like to do with this file?” sorts of things. The bottom pane is all the info about the file. A GREAT addition for usability’s sake. As long as people know that the taskbar is there, a lot of hurdles can be jumped. So let’s try it out. There’s a button in the second pane called “Email this file”. It doesn’t get any simpler than that, folks. Hit the button and up pops a window asking if you’d like to make your picture smaller or keep it as it. We’re gonna make it smaller. Are you ready for this? The final result is an email with the former 4.64MB file attached, now weighing in at a very svelte 41KB. Not only that, but the file format has been changed from .tif to jpeg. Microsoft, from the bottom of my heart, I give you an A+ for this feature alone. I just got a picture the other day from a friend in Florida. Cute little picture of her kids at the beach. 3 megabytes. A .bmp file. I wish she had XP.

So, that’s one test passed with flying colors. Second test, the plugin test. We’re gonna try the PDF test because, to my knowledge there is no way to automatically install the PDF plugin, or even go to the install page, like you can do with Macromedia Flash. Let’s try it. And where better to find a bunch of useless PDFs than the US Government. The census office has googles of them. Of course they have a warning at the top of their page that says you need Acrobat Reader to view the files, but I know of no one who actually reads the warnings. I design Flash sites and ALL my sites have warnings at the beginning and I STILL have people asking how to access the site. So we download the file, chose to open it, and OOPS, can’t do that. What’s THIS? I can use Microsoft Web Services to find the appropriate program? Miracle of all miracles, click the button and up pops a link to Adobe Acrobat. Who’d have thunk it? Now, that’s just a LINK, so people have to figure out the rest of the process on their own, but at least that’s a start. Windows has tried the same thing before in a different incarnations, but it’s never worked so well. I’m sure there are plugins that it won’t know and certain plugins it denies exists (hmphhh…. RealPlayer), but this is yet another welcome addition.

There are lots of other usability fixes Microsoft has implemented. XP is a lot more task oriented. Although it can be set to be seen in “classic mode”, everything from the control panel to the start menu is task-driven. Which is a good thing for the non-savvy; I liken previous versions to getting in a car, knowing that you WANT to drive, but the steering wheel, gas, brakes and gear selector are all hidden. Now with XP, at least the steering wheel is in full view, whether you can find the gas or not is up to you.

I don’t mean to sound like a Microsoft zealot, trust me, there are things that I don’t like about XP. And I don’t believe that EVERYONE needs to be held by the hand. I wouldn’t mind it if, upon creation of a new user, you were prompted to enter their skill level, beginner, intermediate, or advanced. The OS would stay the same, the prompts would be the only difference. But all in all, XP is definitely a step in the right direction. At least now I won’t get any 5MB .tga pictures clogging my inbox.