Author: Peter Sheerin

Peter Sheerin is best known for the decade he spent as the Technical Editor of CADENCE magazine, where he was the acknowledged expert in Computer-Aided Design hardware and software. He has a long-standing passion for improving usability of software, hardware, and everyday objects that is always interwoven in his articles. Peter is available for freelance technical writing and product reviews, and is exploring career opportunities in interaction design. His pet personal project is exploring the best ways to harmonize visual, tactile, and audible symbols for improving the effectiveness of alerting systems.

Proving Your Identity—Smart Cards and the Sad State of the Art

I am in the process of updating my vCard to the new 4.0 standard, and decided it was time to once again obtain a digital certificate that I could use to sign and/or encrypt e-mail messages with. And since I have a laptop with a Smart Card reader, I figure it would be great to leverage it for more secure logins, file encryption, and a few other things. The only digital certificate that can do all those things is the ITU’s x.509 public key infrastructure (PKI) standard, which dates from 1988.

There are many reasons why the average person, not just this geek’s geek, would want to do this:

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Starbucks’ In-Store Wi-Fi Experience

There is a contagious misconception among those retailers that offer Wi-Fi to patrons. The belief is that the Wi-Fi splash screen should bombard visitors with a wide variety of content that is (mostly) irrelevant to […]

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Starbucks App Critique, Part 3—Drink Builder

What I think should be the coolest feature of the Starbucks App is the most frustrating for me, and I’m guessing is also the least-used part of the program. It starts off extremely well, with […]

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Starbucks App Critique, Part 2

Spending a little bit more quality time with the Starbucks App, I find other aspects of even more frustrating than those I mentioned in the previous post. The first problem I had is part bug […]

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Starbucks Complicates iPhone App

I love coffee. I love my favorite Starbucks even more. A nice comfy leather couch with an AC outlet 6″ away, almost-decent Wi-Fi, an oven to heat up lots of delicious things, and one of […]

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How not to Design a Library Book-Return Robot

I’m a geek, and I love technology—especially anything that automates boring, repetitive tasks. So I should be a huge fan of the barcode-scanner wielding, German-engineered book-return robot that the Foster City library installed a few […]

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The Disappearing Clue

This morning’s software frustration: I entered an address into Google, and it popped up a text bubble that asked if I wanted to share my location, along with a “tell me more” link. Clicking on […]

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Smart Phone, Dumb Software

I’ve got my iPhone out, and the Starbucks app loading, ready to “pay” for my refill, when the phone rings. A true smartphone wouldn’t hide this app completely, and then make me relaunch it after […]

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Universal Remote ≠ Easy Remote

I spent some time this afternoon helping a retired and widowed neighbor install a new set-top box and reprogram her universal remote. There were several things about this process that troubled me. The first is […]

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A Little Hazy on iCloud Setup

The holy grail and cardinal rule for making computer software easy to use is to never leave the user confused. Apple is generally the best at this, but we Windows users sometimes feel like the […]

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