Designing the Obvious is a book I ran into at Books a Million a few months ago. Usually when I head out to bookstores I grab a handful of books and end up scanning over them for tips, maybe reading a few relevant chapters, then putting it back. Very rarely do I end up reading through the entire book at one sitting at the bookstore. That’s just what happened with Designing the Obvious. After reading through the entire book I put it back on the shelf as usual. On a second trip to the same bookstore later I ended up reviewing most the book, gleaming new shreds of information from each chapter. Rarely have I spent so much time on a book, better yet seen relevant bits a second time through. Eventually I ordered it from Amazon and have re-read most of it since then. If you want to check out a sample chapter from the book, it’s available for free on the authors website.

The author, Robert Hoekman, Jr., also has a second book coming out just this week called Designing the Moment which seems to pickup with more concrete examples and run with them. Obvious was more general in what you want the user to think and what you want to convey in your app, while Moment seems to be more about analyzing actual examples. Anyone interested in creating kick-ass interfaces that people love to use should consider reading both of these. Moment comes out this week, so it’s a good time to grab one or both if it’s a topic you enjoy. Like Obvious, there’s a sample chapter on the authors website.

For those of you pained with having multiple Google Accounts, you might be able to associate some of them now! From any Google account you can now add any non-Gmail email address you want to your account. By default your account might have a gmail account associated with it already — but now you can add emails from your own domains, or even your work email. You were previously able to do this — but only with a single external email account — and only if you signed up for a Google Account before you signed up for a gmail account.

It’s important to differentiate this with Gmail accounts. This isn’t a solution for actually receiving your emails (for that check out Google Apps). This allows you to log into your global Google Account with this newly added email address. Think of it more as an alias for your account than anything else. If you go to manage your account and edit your personal information you should see the form for this. You’ll be sent an email you must click on to activate the association.

So why would you want this? If someone sends a Google Calendar invite to you@yourcompany.com and it’s associated with your email it’ll show up in your Google accounts calendar. I’ve received a number of these at times and its always annoying trying to keep up multiple accounts. Also, if someone adds you to Google Groups with a non-Google email, that address can now be used. Anyone have any other uses for this?

There are still a few places where Google is stepping on it’s own toes, but this is a great step. If you add you account as mentioned and use Google Apps with Calendar enabled and someone sends an invite to yourname@yourGoogleAppsDoman.com, where will it go? Well actually your Google Account won’t see it at all — only your Google Apps account will see it. For the time-being it looks like these will need to be two separate, but Google seems to acknowledge the problem. Perhaps we’ll see more integration between the two this year?

Although my experience with Google Apps didn’t start off all that spectacular, I’m still using it after two months. As an independent product in the Google line I’d say it would be a great product, but it’s synergy with the rest of the Google domain is still sorely lacking at this time. Google Apps still only offers Email, Calendar, Talk, Docs, Start Page and Web Pages — meaning that if you want to use Google Reader, Analytics, Picasa, Groups or anything else you need to a Google Account and a Google Apps account — and the two are completely separate.

Talk is one service that doesn’t matter much where it is though. Dreamhost offers Jabber service as part of their setup, but delegating that service to Google for free seems like a more reliable solution. Luckily Google Apps offers an easy solution for this. Also, with Dreamhost you have the ability to edit any DNS settings you want, giving you both the ability to screw yourself over, and try out services without having to contact support. For Dreamhost, it’s just a matter of adding 10 Service (SRV) record DNS entries. One gotcha is that you must enter the full text of the entry into the Dreamhost Control Panel — 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com. (including the period). It’s the same concept for all the entries. Within 10 minutes of getting the DNS entries added, I was online adding other Jabber users.

Although Google Apps may have it’s problems, as a free email server it’s hard to beat. With Google Talk, and the great logging ability for outgoing emails it may just be time to look into it.