Tech Paladin

Rarely have I laughed so loudly and so hard as when I read through Adobe Gripes, a user-submitted image blog of all the galling user interface cock-ups in today’s “professional” Adobe software. I like it because I have to use that crap and it’s cathartic to see that others as as annoyed as I am that any company’s UI department could be so bad. If you feel as I do, then you’ll like it, too! Give it a shot: http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/

You’ll groan over things like this obviously fake-ass menu:

GRRRRRR!

The Microsoft of today is the Apple of yesteryear; directionless, adrift, unpopular, deserted by the technical elite, and home to mostly shitty software. Microsoft produces a thousand different products with no unified vision or purpose, and most of them bleed money. Like the Apple of the 1990s, research labs belch forth an unending stream of interesting but irrelevant tech-demo-products that suck away funds and talent from the popular products and the money-makers.

Windows Live Writer, for example. I’ve heard it’s quite good, but why isn’t it bundled with Vista or XP? Since you have to go out and find it to use it, its audience will be very small, dooming it to near-irrelevance in the elephantine-huge scheme of things. It’s also got no real business model behind it save a tenuous link to Windows Live, which itself is free and relies on ads to support itself. Soooooo… what’s the point? Has the product group in charge of Windows Live Writer actually produced anything valuable to Microsoft? If WLW were bundled with Vista or Office or sold for a profit, then it could begin to contribute value to the company. As is, it does nothing. It’s subsidized freeware with a small audience.

And what about Windows Life Photo Gallery? How does it differ from the Windows (non-Live) Photo Gallery that comes bundled with Vista? If you already uses one, what’s the benefit of the other? How does it enhance Microsoft’s bottom line or contribute to its technological prowess or enhance existing products?

For that matter, why does Windows Live itself exist? Microsoft isn’t any good at search and doesn’t make money from it, so Live Search is a dud. Windows Live Hotmail likewise doesn’t earn the company anything, and it’s a constant poster boy for poor software design among nerds.

And what about PhotoSynth? Sure it makes cool panoramas, but where’s the money for it coming from, and what revenus it it bringing in? None! Nada! Zippo!

This stuff is exactly what Apple did during the mid-90s. Its research labs produced plenty of amusing curios, tech demos that never materialized into successful products, and free add-ons for the Mac OS that did nothing but suck resources away from the money-making products. The Newton, for example, was hailed by its few users, but at the time it was a failing product that merely drained Apple’s coffers. An adjunct to the Newton was the eMate, a low-cost laptop with a lilliputian stylus-driven monochrome touchscreen. It was unclear at the time why Apple was producing such products when its Macintosh line was stagnating and public opinion was turning against them, and it was years before Jobs returned to trim the fat.

This is what Microsoft must do: trim the fat. Reduce the bloat, concentrate on Windows and Office, and produce only software that can either be sold for a profit, or comes bundled with the operating system to enhance its value. Apple did this and turned around its fortunes in a year or two. So can Microsoft.

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve been asked (in the role of Windows IT guy) to fix printing problems, install various basic PDF utilities and disinfect malware-infested computers, I’d have enough money to buy all the Macs needed to banish these routine issues for good.

Seriously! It’s 2008 and Windows still doesn’t include PDF support or anti-virus software out of the box,¹ and keeping printers working reliably is still a nightmare.

1. let alone not needing it to begin with [↩]

It struck me today that the problem of software, music, and movie piracy is a fairly similar one to gun regulation.

In New York, there exists a law stating that one cannot own two or more handgun permits. Seems harmless enough, until you discover that New York City requires its own permit and does not honor non-NYC ones. Furthermore, acquiring one in NYC is a herculean task that only politicians, and celebrities, and others with a full time legal staff can reasonably accomplish—a form of class discrimination (hear that, Democrats?) in that only the rich and powerful can afford to defend themselves with guns.

But let’s say such a person decides he wants an NYC permit. Let’s also posit that this hypothetical individual commutes into the city every day, living somewhere north of the Bronx—not en entirely unreasonable assumption. Any handgun he’s licensed to carry in upstate New York will never be legally allowed into NYC, and the reverse is also true; if he acquires an NYC permit, he will never be able to take his gun out into the rest of New York State.

This situation is ridiculous. There exists no justification for preventing someone legally allowed to defend himself with a gun from exercising that right in a more dangerous part of the state! It calls to mind the recent incidents in Chicago whereby law-abiding gun-owners who are trying to re-register their guns in order to comply with the law are being turned away because they’ve missed an arbitrary and draconian deadline, essentially preventing them from following the very law they’re trying to be in compliance with!

The New York State Legislature has essentially said, “In response to New York City’s elevated crime rate, we require that law-abiding concealed firearms-carrying citizens give up their ability to protect themselves in that area.” I’m sorry, but that simply doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

There’s an eerie parallel here to the problem of music piracy.

Basically, the music labels have come up with a “solution” to piracy that, so far, people haven’t really taken much of a liking to: DRM. The idea is that digital files are wrapped in a protective barrier that determines what types of uses are authorized; sometimes a server has to be consulted before the song can be played, sometimes it keeps track of the number of times it’s been burned to disc so as to prevent too much copying—those sorts of things. In other words, DRM-equipped songs are intentionally crippled to protect the music industry, the result being that those who follow the law wind up with an inferior product to those who steal it, either out of disrespect for artists or as a protest against DRM.

Those who break the law appear to have more freedoms; in the case of, say, music piracy, the “pirates” are able to transfer their music to whatever device they want, and to edit, alter, or modify their files in any way they see fit; to make as many backups as they want, or to transcode the files to more modern formats. In the case of gun ownership, otherwise legal gun owners who carry their guns with them in circumvention of oppressive laws gain the ability to use their weapons in locations where entirely law-abiding ones do not. Criminals have always done this because they don’t count on getting caught, while the law-abiding citizens who actually respect the law will generally follow it. All this does is increase the ratio of armed criminals to armed bystanders in gun-free zones!

The core of the issue is that these types of restrictions appear to penalize those who follow them because they wind up being able to use their music/guns in fewer instances and places than they should. Meanwhile, those who will always disregard the law like criminals and music pirates wind up with more “rights”—the ability to carry weapons anywhere, or music they can put on any device, respectively.

Sometimes, following the law gets you a worse deal than breaking it. Such laws will inevitably be changed in the interests of sanity and progress. DRM is slowly but surely being abandoned as the computer-literate howl in fury, just as firearms laws are becoming more liberal (as in “permissive”, not “aligned with the Democratic party’s agenda”). But boy what an annoyance it is for the logically-minded man who ever finds himself butting against one such arbitrary restriction.

So a particularly embarrassing email written by Bill Gates and made public during the company’s antitrust investigations was just put all over the internet, and boy is it a doozy! Here goes:

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:05 AM
To: Jim Allchin
Cc: Chris Jones (WINDOWS); Bharat Shah (NT); Joe Peterson; Will Poole; Brian Valentine; Anoop Gupta (RESEARCH)
Subject: Windows Usability Systematic degradation flame

I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don’t drive usability issues.

Let me give you my experience from yesterday.

I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack … so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.

The first 5 times I used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after an 8 second delay I got it to come up.

This site is so slow it is unusable.

It wasn’t in the top 5 so I expanded the other 45.

These 45 names are totally confusing. These names make stuff like: C:\Documents and Settings\billg\My Documents\My Pictures seem clear.

They are not filtered by the system … and so many of the things are strange.

I tried scoping to Media stuff. Still no moviemaker. I typed in movie. Nothing. I typed in movie maker. Nothing.

So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying – where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?

So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.

They told me to go to the main page search button and type movie maker (not moviemaker!).

I tried that. The site was pathetically slow but after 6 seconds of waiting up it came.

I thought for sure now I would see a button to just go do the download.

In fact it is more like a puzzle that you get to solve. It told me to go to Windows Update and do a bunch of incantations.

This struck me as completely odd. Why should I have to go somewhere else and do a scan to download moviemaker?

So I went to Windows update. Windows Update decides I need to download a bunch of controls. (Not) just once but multiple times where I get to see weird dialog boxes.

Doesn’t Windows update know some key to talk to Windows?

Then I did the scan. This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff.

This is after I was told we were doing delta patches to things but instead just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg.

So I did the download. That part was fast. Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn’t use it for anything else during this time.

What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy. This is after the download was finished.

Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night — why should I reboot at that time?

So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state.

So I got back up and running and went to Windows Update again. I forgot why I was in Windows Update at all since all I wanted was to get Moviemaker.

So I went back to Microsoft.com and looked at the instructions. I have to click on a folder called WindowsXP. Why should I do that? Windows Update knows I am on Windows XP.

What does it mean to have to click on that folder? So I get a bunch of confusing stuff but sure enough one of them is Moviemaker.

So I do the download. The download is fast but the Install takes many minutes. Amazing how slow this thing is.

At some point I get told I need to go get Windows Media Series 9 to download.

So I decide I will go do that. This time I get dialogs saying things like “Open” or “Save”. No guidance in the instructions which to do. I have no clue which to do.

The download is fast and the install takes 7 minutes for this thing.

So now I think I am going to have Moviemaker. I go to my add/remove programs place to make sure it is there.

It is not there.

What is there? The following garbage is there. Microsoft Autoupdate Exclusive test package, Microsoft Autoupdate Reboot test package, Microsoft Autoupdate testpackage1. Microsoft AUtoupdate testpackage2, Microsoft Autoupdate Test package3.

Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.

But that is just the start of the crap. Later I have listed things like Windows XP Hotfix see Q329048 for more information. What is Q329048? Why are these series of patches listed here? Some of the patches just things like Q810655 instead of saying see Q329048 for more information.

What an absolute mess.

Moviemaker is just not there at all.

So I give up on Moviemaker and decide to download the Digital Plus Package.

I get told I need to go enter a bunch of information about myself.

I enter it all in and because it decides I have mistyped something I have to try again. Of course it has cleared out most of what I typed.

I try (typing) the right stuff in 5 times and it just keeps clearing things out for me to type them in again.

So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven’t run Moviemaker and I haven’t got the plus package.

The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11. (don’t you just love that root certificate message?)

When I really get to use the stuff I am sure I will have more feedback.

If you happen to head to the original page, you’ll probably notice that there are one hundred forty thousand million comments. Seems BillyG is pretty popular!

3G iPhone blah blah blah, GPS yadda yadda yadda, app store neener neener neener.

If you’re here I’ll just assume you know about all those things are already desperately holding back the pulsating waves of techno-lust from consuming your body from some sort of all-encompassing orgasmic tinglefest. I’ve been told Apple products do that to people, or something. Yes, yes, the new iPhone is the shit and all, and 3rd party applications will set the world on fire and burn it to bloodied cinders, and the U.S. Army uses the iPhone to coordinate clusterfucks with the power of touch, but the thing that really jolted me awake about Monday’s keynote was the revamping of Apple’s .Mac service, with a name change to “MobileMe.”

Nobody seems to like the MobileMe logo, and I’ll admit that I’m not quite sold yet. It seems a little too cutesy, but I also think it does a great job of getting the point across what with the whole cloud and everything. But my primary objection is the god-awful name. “MobileMe!?!” Is that a noun? A conjoined verb? A command? “Hey, you! MobileMe right now!” What’s with the “Me?” Us Mac users have been making fun of Microsoft’s use of first person pronouns since the virtual dawn of time (My Computer, My Documents, My Spittle-Flecked Rage, etc), so what’s Apple doing adopting the same? I guess it eventually had to go both ways; Microsoft copied Apple’s garish transparency fetish in Vista just as Apple was coming to its senses, and now Apple begins to start smoking the first-person pronoun pipe just as Microsoft kicked the habit.

MobileMe. Feh.

“There’s no software for Macs!” is a common refrain in the Windows world as a reason to shun Macs. Along with “They’re more expensive!” and “They’re only good for artists and video editors and stuff!”, lack of software is part of a trifecta of shame routinely leveled at Apple by Microsoft-centric tech pundits. The problem is that two of the claims–”lack of software” and “only for artists”–are blatantly false, and the third, price, isn’t a problem if you’re the kind of person who appreciates the notion of paying a premium for premium tools. Regarding software, however, a more appropriate charge should be:

There’s waaaay more software for Windows than there is are for Macs!
Easily granted. Easily. But just because there’s more software out there for Windows–even a vast amount more–that doesn’t mean it’s better. On Windows, there are half a dozen pieces of software to accomplish literally any minor task (e.g. managing screensavers), and you can probably unearth 20 or 30 for big tasks (e.g.text editing). Many are good, many are shoddy; many are free, many are commercial; many were written by indie developers, and many were written by huge corporations. It’s going to sound bizarre, but having to slog through all that software can be a daunting task. This concept is well-explained by barry Schwartz in The Paradox of Choice, but in a nutshell, he explains that as consumption and purchasing choices skyrocket, people are more likely to be paralyzed with inaction. Who wants to spend all day deciding between 80 types of cracker? What about 40 kinds of stereo? 15 text editors? 18 antivirus packages? 22 PDF converters?

On the Mac side, there’s certainly less software, but it’s better. Even if you dispute this, you have to admit that there is a massive amount of crufty software for Windows, which makes it harder to ferret out the good stuff. In addition, there aren’t any good centralized online repositories of Windows software^[1], making it difficult to find quality examples of software written by independent developers. Locating good Windows software usually involves asking a knowledgeable friend, following links from sites you already trust, using Google and verifying with Wikipedia, or heading down to CompUSA or Best Buy, which are pretty much off-limits to independent developers who don’t have significant financial support.

On the Mac side, there are several avenues to go online window-shopping for software. VersionTracker, MacUpdate, and iusethis are three such big names, and Apple itself lists a huge amount of software on their site–which is accessible from the Apple Menu of any Mac:

These luxuries make it really easy to find excellent, user-reviewed software (in the case of VersionTracker, MacUpdate, and especially iusethis). Indie Mac developers typically do very well for themselves because it’s easy to find shining examples of the finest the independent developer community can offer online.

In addition, as Mac OS X is essentially a prettified BSD Unix, all Unix software will instantly work on any Mac. Linux and UNIX are related, so a lot of Linux software also runs on Macs. There are even active efforts at increasing compatability between OS X and Linux in the form of Fink and DarwinPorts. For any of this free open source Linux and UNIX software to run on Windows, it has to be partially rewritten, meaning that only the most popular will ever make it to Windows.

To prove the depth of Mac software, just take a look at the stuff Mac-heads actually use. You’ll probably find that while there are some commonalities (iTunes, Quicktime Player, Safari), most also use incredibly varied software from all over the map. For example, here are the primary pieces of software that I use, as well as the alternatives to them I could think up off the top of my head:

• OmniWeb (Web browsing. Alternatives: Safari, Firefox, Camino, Shiira, Opera, iCab, Seamonkey)
• Mail (Email. Alternatives: Mailsmith, Thunderbird, Eudora, Entourage, GNUMail, PowerMail, Seamonkey)
• MarsEdit (Blogging. Alternatives: Ecto, Journler, Bleezer)
• NetNewsWire (RSS reading. Alternatives: NewsFire, Newslife, Pulp Fiction, Vienna, Shrook, Seamonkey)
• Pages (Page layout/Decent word processing. Alternatives: MS Office, OpenOffice, NeoOffice, Mariner Write, Nisus Writer, WriteRoom)
• Maya (3D Modeling & animation. Alternatives: Blender, Wings 3D, Cheetah 3D, Cinema 4D, Modo)
• Photoshop CS2 (Image creation & editing. Alternatives: GIMP, GIMPshop, not really much)
• TextMate (Programmer-centric text editing. Alternatives: BBedit, TextWrangler, SubEthaEdit, Smultron)
• XCode and Interface Builder (Software design & GUI building. Alternatives: none)
• Parallels Desktop (Virtualization. Alternatives: VMware Fusion)
• QuickTime Player (Movie playback. Alternatives: VLC, Mplayer)
• iTunes (Music playback & organization. Alternatives: none)

Many are these products are specialized, and many are common, but almost all of them have a reasonable amount of alternatives. To Mac users out there, I encourage you to post your own abridged lists in the comments!

Aha, but I’ve got you now! Macs don’t have anywhere near the kind of software businesses need!
Ack, Achilles’ heel! It’s true, Macs simply don’t have much business software. It’s only recently that Macs got any decent POS software, and you can pretty much forget about specialized stuff like real estate or dentistry. It’s a problem, and one that Apple will have to overcome if Macs are ever to gain significant traction in major industries.

And what about games, you charlatan?
I have but a single response:

I should mention that I’ve been enjoying Half-Life 2 and Supreme Commander on my MacBook Pro for a while now. Boot camp is pretty much a revolution in Mac gaming. It used to be that Mac gamers suffered through poorly-done ports that were slower than their Windows counterparts and released a year or two later. Though the situation has hardly improved, it barely matters since we can now run Windows games at full speed! Ever since I got my MacBook Pro, I’ve opened up to the massive world of Windows games, and it’s great–especially since I can do it from my existing computer at no extra cost (besides that of buying Windows itself, of course). Truly, Boot Camp is one of the biggest advantages of today’s Macs. Due to Boot Camp and a thriving independent developer community, the software argument can be legitimately boiled down to:

There’s little dedicated Mac software for business or gaming though the ability to run Windows cuts down on the problem considerably.

So there.

Posted in Mac OS X, Software, Windows | 7 Comments »