Some thoughts on Bank of America’s billpay system:
- The list of cooperating companies is long and impressive. I was able to set up all my phone utilities last night in a matter of minutes.
- The signup process is easy and painless; it appears they have done some good thinking as far as finding out when the lead time is for payment of bills and made sure each partner specified this.
- One suggestion would be to have some kind of scheduling calendar set up, where visually-oriented people like me could see when the bills were due in a calendar table and step back a few days to schedule payment. Providing my paychecks arrive on time (a difficult proposition these days) I would like to schedule blocks of payments on one or two days a month after the deposit of funds in my account.
- Another suggestion is for BoA to have some kind of flag as a failsafe to send an email to you if your scheduled pay date arrives and there are insufficient funds to cover your payables; a trigger to advise you of deposits in your account, and a ‘successful’ message to advise you of your payments being made on time.
I know, it’s a lot to ask of a web app, but I see good things begun here and I’d like to see them get even better, so that the site becomes more of a smart appliance and less of a tool.
This is a real nice set of fonts by Susan Kare, the original designer of icons for the Macintosh. At some point, I will have to pick some of these up.
I set up online bill paying via Bank of America today; we’re going to see if I can pay a few of my non-essential bills (mostly phone and utility bills) with it for a month or two, and then if that is smooth I’ll switch the mortgage and insurance bills over as well. It’s good to see they finally made the service free (since May 1); seems to me they will save even more money in transaction costs if they make it free.
Jen called me today to giggle at the new Cidera site; somebody over there got hired on to make some kind of a Frankenstein monster out of the original 2000 design, some of the 1999 graphics I developed, and some of the old advertising materials. Wow.
Catonsville, Thursday July 4
Well, the weekend was a good and productive one. The Fourth was kind of blown by the work situation, but we made the most of the rest of the weekend and had a good time. There are updates on the planters- lots of good news and good luck there, and there is joy in Mudville. Jen and I happened on a massive sale of dirt at Home Depot (and those of you who garden know how frickin’ expensive dirt is) where they had pallet loads selling for $10. Pallets covered with bags of dirt. So we bought about 800 lbs. of dirt and hauled it home. Finished are the two square planters and the front circle planter; long with the dirt I bought about $80 worth of pretty flowers and herbs and we put them all in on Sunday, through clouds of yellow smoke from the Canadian forest fires.
We may be here at work tomorrow for the 4th, depending on how much we get done on the game today. Jen and I have destroyed our 4th plans because of this, and we are both unhappy about it.
At some point in the next month or so, when I get a few back due paychecks (hopefully), I’m going to buy a good-sized IDE hard drive for this Powerbook and set up a dual boot install of OSX. Jaguar, the new update, is apparently a month ahead of schedule, and Apple is submitting OSX to the government for security clearance. There are native versions of Dreamweaver MX and Photoshop 7 now available, and when money frees up somewhat, I’m going to make the jump. I’ve actually wanted to for some time now, but when the project is finished I should have some time to really devote to it. (now I also have to figure out what to do with the 7100 in the basement running MKLinux…) I’m hoping that Scout will be able to handle the new graphics rendering engine shipping with Jaguar, or I may be once again behind the curve…
I have to check and see if there are OSX drivers for the digital camera, the Palm, and the USB hard drive, or I’m going to spend a lot of time switching back and forth.
I’m downloading a free trial version of Adobe Golive this morning; can somebody tell me why the Windows version is 100MB and the Mac version is 161? (update: they are providing installs for both OS9 and OSX.) I also found a really amazing spam tracking diagram on this site.
My good friends Jason and Shelly were laid off from their jobs yesterday. As well as being some of the best people I know, they are both some of the most talented and loyal employees as well—and happen to be husband and wife. In a display of the worst kind of knee-jerk shortsightedness, their management laid them both off directly after Shelly gave her two weeks’ notice.
In a rare shining moment today, I’ve taken the front end of this game and redesigned the selection screens to all follow some kind of process. Where before the screens jumbled buttons, checkboxes, language, sizing and pictures from screen to screen, the new front end has a unified size, language, layout and order.
I got an email from a nice man who told me he lives on Bill Dugan Drive in Etters, PA. I checked the map and it’s not too far away from Harrisburg off I-81, so I think the next time i head north to the folks’ I’m going to detour and find the town to take a picture.
Canton, Sunday June 30
I found a few interesting articles on web usability through Boxes and Arrows today; this is an interesting take on user expectations, done in 2000 (so it’s out of date for 2002) but still interesting.
Dad’s surgery is scheduled for the 22nd; I’m planning on heading up there for an extended visit the weekend afterwards to be by the family. I also made plans with my Scout guy to take some pics with a disposable camera when he’s out there, and he actually offered to call me from the field where it sits so that he can describe its condition to me. I just have to get him the cameras now. What a nice guy.