A few things I came across today, during the daily grind:

• Trying to sign up for meetup.com is not as easy as I would like, especially since they do not allow valid e-mail addresses.

  

• Trying to save the previous screenshot, using an invalid filename on Windows (due to the ‘?’ character) gives an error.

  

  Well, in my case it simply refused to save, with absolutely no indication as to why.

I hope none of these things are done on purpose (although the e-mail address bit happens in many places) but please, if the work you do is in anyway tangent to similar system, make sure the people in charge of testing the logic and the usability understand what the problems are. Someone said that “usability is predictability”, that if the user knows what’s going to happen after they click a button, your system is usable¹.

P.S. Yes, in Gmail you are free to use user+tag@gmail.com where user@gmail.com would be your normal e-mail address. The +tag is useful to filter easily on incoming mail, and potentially a giveaway in case some service decides to sell your e-mail address to spammers (although I suppose spammers are at least sophisticated enough to remove whatever is between + and @, but who knows?)

1. Caveat: this is about application design, where action should equal reaction and the interface should always provide some feedback. Games thrive on unpredictability, as do other systems [↩]

Ars is running a lengthy piece on modularized Windows and why it would suck. There are quite a few reasons why I do not believe this to be true, mostly looking at the increased control modularized Windows would bring to all categories of users.

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From a Computer World article detailing the reasons a CTO switched back to Windows after a stint on the Mac:

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Leopard has 300 new features.

Vista SP1 has 300 hotfixes.

‘Nuff said =)

That was a short-lived offer by Microsoft, but they pulled the plug. Either too many people wanted to get it for free or privacy advocates have indeed clamped down on the issue. I think the issue would be  transferred licenses¹. Think corner shops that otherwise sell pirated copies of Windows. Now they would sell ‘legal’ copies, but the customer wouldn’t be the wiser - and their whole life would be under the watchful eyes of Microsoft.

1. If the specific EULA for this program permits that [↩]

I’m sure most of you already know this - but Windows does not play nicely with true multi-user set-ups. But not just because, generally, more than one user would not be logged in to the same machine.

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With a few less security exploits and usability bugs, the Safari got a bit tamer. Not bulletproof, I’m sure, but it’s impressive - 3 days after the original release and the justified shit-storm that followed, 3.0.1 got out. Thor Larholm mentions his finding is no longer exploitable on this version [but still very much so on the latest stable Mac OS X incarnation of Safari¹]. No word from David Maynor yet, I’m curious what the status is with his set of findings.

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1. Safari 2 received no updates in the last 24 hours [↩]

[This was part originally of the previous post.]

A big reason for why Microsoft is still ‘playing catch’ stems from the fact that Windows is so very used in corporate environments. My opinion is that Microsoft should fork off the versions of their OS into Business and User components. So far they’ve been trying to nail two birds with the same stone - despite the relative differences between Home, Pro and Corp. editions of XP, for example. Sure, they’ve made their market research and know better what many companies want. This is me talking.

Average corporate users have little need for multimedia, eye-candy and all of that. They want familiar user interfaces, stability and teamwork-ready applications - and support. No crippleware, no services opened for things that don’t belong in their corporate environments in the first place but that cost them large amounts of money when a cracker gets through.

The end-user wants a machine that does everything around the house. House. Multimedia, IM, socializing. And something that looks good doing it without requiring a machine stolen out of NCERT to run the OS.

For those people that want more control over their machine there can always be the Ultimate, Super-Mega, Meta edition. Although there doesn’t need to be one.

If the entire system would be more modular, the components can be thrown together easier to make the generic technology behind the OS-es relatively the same but the special ingredients present. Corporate users would benefit from a stable UI and a core that’s being constantly improved on in terms of security with new features thrown in gradually [this can even be a good source of profit for Microsoft with a Custom Solutions division where low-level modifications to the OS can be made and sold for a nice development and support taxation.] The User edition, however, could explore more cutting-edge features and a more aggressive take on innovating. Even the target demographic can vary — bring Microsoft Bob back for the retired ladies please!. Most importantly, backwards compatibility can be thrown out of the consumer editions because most users don’t need to run old things and would be much happier with better response times or a smaller install size.

Just a thought.

Everybody’s touting Vista nowadays. That it’s better than XP [I know some who will disagree] and better than Mac OS X, tried and true Windows technology. That it now looks good and macheads should cry in shame looking at their own system. It’s finally beautiful inside and out.

Bullshit.

First off, a professional disclaimer: I recognize - after speaking with a few MS employees and just paying attention to most of the tech world - that most of these decisions are up to management to make. That when implementing a new system, the architects would do things in their own way rather than copy something that’s already out there - it’s a Geek Thing™. Especially when you’re starting up with something fresh, why not? This and all my other rants are directed towards some of those people that make these decisions and, unfortunately, give Microsoft its image.

Imitation is flattery. Everybody in tech has taken things from everybody else and put out their own version with some changes. There are too many examples in tech history to go over at this point. The problem with most of what Microsoft has tried to copy is that they haven’t managed to quite make the mark - and rarely [if even, I can't think of an example] exceed it. They’ve been playing catch because of their complacency as a big company - stability over innovation.

How did they miss the mark this time around?

Vista needs you to buy a supercomputer. That would be fine if it was doing something remarkably shocking.

• UI? I’m doing everything that Vista does on a 1.33 GHz G4 PPC on 32 MB VRAM and 1.5 GB RAM. It’s going quite fine, thank you [to note that the RAM is needed for me keeping open about a dozen apps at any given time; UI can be pulled in just as well on the default 512].
• Multimedia? Well, provided you manage to play any video content on Vista at all, it shouldn’t be that demanding: HD is handled quite spectacularly by any mactel [I'm doing fine with H.264, haven't played with anything above that.] On Vista, though, you need a big CPU to handle all that intensive polling that the DRM system is doing 30 times a second to make sure you’re not trying to - e.g. - splice into the video signal.
• Games? Some BSoD-ing is in order, just to keep in check [MS should change their logo and tag line to "General Protection Fault: You were trying to use the computer"] I assume this is another one of the exciting features [excitement is one way to describe your state post-BSoD].

Photos… Gadgets…

Via Zoso, I got to see Laurie McGuinness’ PC vs Mac spoof commercials. In case you don’t know, these are following along the idea of Apple’s GetAMac series, only in this case PC is the good guy. Oh, and the videos are put up on the website in QuickTime format *snicker*

Both Apple and McGuinness encourage stereotyping through these commercials. They also give the impression that people are locked down to a technology and their work cannot be done in any other way than by using either of the two as they have done always. “I’m a PC and I do spreadsheets”, “I’m a Mac and I do websites”. Yes, different people went ahead and wrote software biased in a certain direction for each platform. PC’s didn’t win marketshare because they could do spreadsheets, but because they were cheaper earlier and a lot of development of specialized software went into Microsoft. At some point Microsoft’s GUI looked better than Apple’s and people thought it would be easier to use in the workplace - not because one was significantly superior to another.

Trends from the last little while seem to indicate Apple’s doing quite well in selling their hardware. Not because it’s pretty, but it doesn’t lock people down to only one technology anymore. This was the winning argument with a few of my friends - you can now run Windows and Linux if you need to, and it costs about as much as your run-of-the-mill laptop anyway. So why not try something new for a change? Even the non-geeks did it and loved it and thanked me.

Me? I bought a Mac for that same reason [but then again I install some obscure OS in a virtual machine every month or so.] To try something new. So I can say I have experience with all the major operating systems and there are good things and bad things in all of them, and that’s simply the way it is.

So try something new for a change. Give everyone a chance.