Another peripherals story

Those who have shared my troubles with uppity peripherals might be interested to hear about my experience with bliink ADSL.

Total installation steps required: Plug computer into wall*. I accept that this step was pretty much unavoidable, though Woosh seem eager to invalidate that particular assumption.

Total user interface displayed: A tooltip saying "A LAN cable is plugged in." And since then, even the little blinkenlight icon has gone back to politely hiding itself.

Total amount of post-installation fiddling: None. It didn't even ask me for logon information: bliink preconfigure the router with the right username and password before shipping it.

In my comments on Vodafone's equivalent offering for GPRS, I quoted Alan Cooper's great maxim: "No matter how cool your user interface is, less of it would be cooler." By this measure, bliink's UI is so cool that even polar bears will be reaching for their woolly jumpers.

If only all software were like this**.

* Actually, I being a little ingenuous here. I actually had to plug the computer into the router, the router into the filter and the filter into the wall. However, since there was only one way in which the cables and sockets could physically fit together, this was still about as easy as any installation can be where hardware is involved.

** Well, maybe not exactly like this. I appreciate that a hidden blinkenlight might not be the correct user interface for an industrial-strength word processor.