Does Nokia Have The Guts?

Over at Daring Fireball, Gruber referenced this article at Engadget about the future of Nokia.

Gruber:

Count me as a Nokia pessimist. I think their leadership lacks the balls to move ahead strategically.

He may very well be right, but Nokia has been in a similar position before, and – like Apple – they had to hit rock bottom before bouncing back.

Nokia has been around since 1865. In the past century-plus, they have made everything from tires to cabling to toilet paper. In the 60’s they got heavy into electronics and telecommunications and later TVs, PCs and eventually mobile phones.

By the late 80’s, they still had a sprawling product line, but no real identity – they had been around so long, and produced so many different products, they were the Finnish equivalent of General Electric. Sure everybody knew who they were, but they weren’t dominating any markets. (I still remember visiting the Helsinki Zoo in 2001 and seeing a paper towel dispenser with “Nokia” written on it in Bell Bottom. They hadn’t made paper towels in probably forty years or more.)

In 1988, Nokia’s CEO, Kari Kairamo, committed suicide. The company went into mourning for a time and, soon after, the new management determined to focus their product line on mobile phones and infrastructure. They divested everything else. Imagine GM only making the Volt from now on. That’s how radical it was.

But that singular focus gave them the strength and momentum to dominate the mobile phone market for more than a decade. To the point where in the early 2000’s, there were rumors of Nokia putting Motorola and Ericsson out of business (at least the mobile phone business).

Now, a scant nine years later, Apple is the rising star. RIM is the established leader in business phones. Android is making interesting inroads, and Windows Mobile is scooping up whatever it can get. (I honestly don’t know how well the Pre is doing.) More and more people are buying smartphones over the cheap/free feature phones that are Nokia’s bread and butter.

Nokia is still producing a majority of the phones purchased in the world, but they’re essentially disposable, and their efforts at the mid- to high-end have been also-rans at best (I know they make some quality smartphones, but nothing that’s really made headlines in the past six or seven years). Their platform strategy is ancient and fragmented (Symbian? Maemo?), and their hardware designs are pedestrian.

They need to do what they did twenty years ago (minus the suicide, of course): step back, focus, divest and innovate. Essentially the same thing Apple did with the return of The Steve.

The only problem is that Nokia has a dominant position in the mobile market right now (and all the legacy/support problems that that entails), whereas Apple was barely hanging on  to a few percentage points of the PC market in the late 90’s and could afford to make a break from the past to move forward.

Nokia management had the balls to do it twenty years ago. The question is, do the have them now?

I worked in the Nokia Enterprise Systems division for six years. If their management during the years of 2000-2005 reflects their management now, I have to agree with Gruber – I’m pessimistic.

They had no strategy, no long-term vision. They thrashed back and forth between supporting competing product lines in a single division. The one thing they did really well was lay people off.

It would be a shame for Nokia to fail, in whatever measure, because they are such a big part of the fabric of the Finnish culture (at one point they employed 1% of the population – think about that). I hope the executives can see the writing on the wall and make some drastic changes before it’s too late.

Three Gee Yes!

I’ve had my iPhone 3GS for one week now (yes, I did buy one on the first day they were available, but I didn’t wait in line for it – the AT&T store here in east-nowhere had plenty) and I’d like to share with you my impressions.

Now I’m not going to go on and on about the faster response due to the hardware, although that is impressive, or the fact that upgrading from a first generation iPhone to anything with 3G and GPS is awesome. Nor will I sing the praises of Copy and Paste, although the inclusion of them is of course the long-awaited cherry on the top of the iPhone Sundae.

No, better people than me have written about all these things.

What I want to talk about are some of the lesser publicized benefits of drinking the 3GS Kool-Aid.

Play It Again

On the Edge version of the iPhone (not sure how this worked on the 3G) if you were listening to music (or, more likely in my case, a podcast) and paused it, probably using the button on the earbuds, there was some period of time during with clicking the earbud button again would un-pause the audio.

I never figured out how long this was, but if you waited too long (definitely 10 or 15 minutes was too long) nothing would happen and you would have to dig the phone out of your pocket, unlock it, go back to the iPod application and hit the play icon to start it up.

With the 3GS, the play/pause functionality on the earbuds seems to have no timeout. This, to me, is the equivalent of your car stereo starting up at the same spot every time you turn on the car, versus resetting to some idle state if the car is off for more than fifteen minutes.

Jam and Edge

It was almost comical, a few months after the iPhone came out, everybody suddently became specifically aware of the noise that GSM signals caused when interfering with audio equipment. I remember sitting in the meeting room at work, with severn or eight people packing iPhones and the conference call speaker phone sputtering the whole time.

The worst part, though, was that I had to put my phone into Airplane Mode whenever hooking it up to the radio in my car. This is probably because the radio (and the car) is somewhat old and doesn’t have the shielding necessary to deal with today’s electronic interference. But still it was a pain.

With the 3GS (and I assume the 3G), this all went away. Sure, I still get some interference, but a) it happens so infrequently and has such short duration that it is easily ignorable and b) the 3G interference noise is so much less offensive than the Edge noise.

The Edge interference noise was usually louder than the volume coming out of the stereo and, at least in the areas I tend to drive through, was “on” more than it was “off”. It was so bad that driving the 3 minutes to my allergy shots from work, I couldn’t leave the phone’s GSM radio on because I wouldn’t be able to listen to anything without the interference killing it.

The 3G interference noise is much quieter, and on some level, it also just sounds like the data is being passed so much quicker, which is probably why it doesn’t last as long. It’s like listening to a 9600KBaud modem connection noise versus a 2400 Kbaud.

I’ve driven to and from work and all around town this week with the 3GS plugged into the car stereo, and the noise has been on the order of a few seconds per day, versus 30+ seconds for every minute on Edge.

And lest you think that I’m an anomaly, I don’t live in a major metropolitan area (proof: right down my street is a place that, until recently, had a sign outside that said “Taxidermist/Beauty Salon”) so my 3G coverage should not be any better than most places around the country.

I’m Ready For My Close-Up Mr. Damille

But the most surprising, and coolest, thing about the 3GS is the camera.

Of course this was a major weakness of the original (and 3G) iPhone. Even though it had 2.0 Megapixels (which, coincidentally, is the same as my decrepit point-and-shoot Canon camera) the tiny optics and lack of exposure and focus control made it only useful because it was the one camera you always had on you. My pictures were consistently blurry and lint-covered. Not to mention over/under-exposed.

The 3GS not only has a 3.0 Megapixel camera, with focus and exposure controls (to some degree) which actually work pretty well, but it adds video capability.

You all knew this already. But there is one feature of the video camera that deserves special mention.

How many of us have, when we first got hold of a digital camera that shot video, rotated the camera 90 degrees to capture something in portrait aspect ratio, only to find, upon importing it into the computer, that neither the camera nor the computer could compensate for that, and now you’re stuck with either fixing it in some high-end software like Final Cut or Adobe Premiere, or watching what you recorded with your head tilted at a painful angle?

I mean, the cameras are smart enough to rotate still photos 90 degrees, but they don’t seem to understand how to do that with video.

Engineers at Apple must have run into this because they hooked the video camera into the tilt sensor of the phone, so that if you turn it, it still plays back right-side up. This is one of the many touches that make me think that Apple could dominate the camera market if they a) wanted to, and b) hired enough optics experts away from Canon and/or Nikon.

All Is Not Well

There are, however, a few missteps, as there always are, even with Apple.

First of all, the iPhone 3GS does not come with a dock to set it in while charging/syncing. I don’t know if the 3G came with one, but the Edge one did, and I used it daily. Apple charges $29 for one. Is anyone going to pay that much? I’m not.

The next one is probably a fluke, but the power adapter that came with my phone doesn’t work. I did the whole combinatorial testing suite (old adapter, new cable; new adapter, old cable; etc) and came to the undeniable conclusion that my power adapter does not charge.

So I called up the AT&T store, and using the imperfect choices on their menu, got shunted over to Apple’s support line. Apple’s tech support guy took fifteen minutes and a consultation with a “technical specialist” to tell me to go to the AT&T store for a replacement part.

You’re probably smart enought to predict that when I got to the AT&T store, they said I had to go to the Apple store, since AT&T doesn’t stock replacement parts. So now I need to trek over to the Apple store, which is much farther than the AT&T store, to get it replaced.

I haven’t heard any other reports of anyone’s adapter being DOA, so like I said, this is probably just a fluke.

My third complaint is about the shape. The rounded back of the 3GS (and 3G) is problematic. The Edge phone had a nice flat back that remained stable when you pushed the home button while it was on a tabletop.

Not so with the 3G varieties. I understand that they had to increase the thickness of the middle part of the phone due to increased hardware so the tapered the ends give the illusion of thinness, but I’d rather have a slightly thicker phone all the way down than try to type on a weeble-wobble.

My last complaint is perhaps not unique to the 3GS, but I haven’t tested it on any other platform. And it’s sort of one of those “problems you’d love to have” kind of things.

You see, my company operates a Wifi network. I’ve had my Edge iPhone connected to it for at least the past year. It’s nice because when I’m in part of the building where reception is good, bandwidth was noticeably better than Edge speeds.

Now that I have access to the 3G network (such that it is on AT&T), my throughput on 3G anywhere in the building is faster than the best throughput on the corporate Wifi. So, I told my phone to ignore that Wifi network. Done and done.

Or so I thought.

Every time I open up Mail, Safari, or any other net-enabled application, it asks me if I want to join the very network that I told it to ignore. What was the point of ignoring it?

If anyone knows how to stop the phone from asking me to join this network, please let me know. It’s kind of annoying.

Until then, I’ll keep hitting “Cancel” every time it comes up and enjoying my 3GS speed demon.

Screw You, Fitts!

Does Microsoft hire people to intentionally make working interfaces worse?

It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of Microsoft design, but I will admit that Windows XP is a mostly usable OS – you can get work done on it, pretty much most of the time. I disagree with many of the choices they made, but some of those are just my personal bias.

But when they went and redesigned the interface for all of the Office apps (which has been lambasted by better writers than I elsewhere, I’m sure) I just don’t know what they were thinking.

One of the most egregious problems is their brutal raping of the title bar in general, but specifically in Outlook. First, they went to the whole tabbed toolbar design, getting rid of the menu bar that has served WIMP GUI’s pretty well so far.

Which meant they had to throw a bunch of the other actions into the big butterfly Office-logo button at the top left, and  whatever didn’t fit there was strewn across the title bar, reducing useful area for dragging.

Now, since no one can find the tools they need in the tabbed toolbars, Outlook has decided to put hints above them. For instance, if you insert a table into an email, a “Table Tools” hint appears above the Design and Layout tabs, letting you know to look there as you hunt for the tool that you want.

Fair enough – complex programs sometimes have many options and it’s not always easy to let people know where they are, so little hints are sometimes useful.

But in this case, the entire “Table Tools” area of the title bar does not allow you to drag the window. So now the target area for dragging the window has been reduced by around 40%.  I can’t for the life of me think why they would do this.

I’m Afraid It’s Terminal

Being a developer, I’ve used lots of terminal programs on lots of operating systems over the years, starting with BASIC on my TI-99/4A and Commodore 128* (BASIC 7.0!), various Sun machines in college, CDE/Motif on various platforms, on through DOS, MKS Toolkit, Linux (Gnome & KDE) and of course Mac OS X.

All programmers have their favorite term emulator that they’ve grown accustomed to and know how to tweak, and every time they move to a new system they find some way to re-create that environment. But most of them are wrong.

The best terminal program in the world, I have to say, is Mac OS X’s Terminal.app. It’s the only term program I’ve ever encountered that just works. I’m not really talking about the features of the shell, here – Bash is Bash, and DOS is DOS. What I’m talking about is how the Terminal behaves as an application in the OS.

Copy Cat

Exhibit A: Cut and Paste. All you UNIX hackers, I can hear you groaning. Every UNIX terminal program since the dawn of the epoch has had a different keyboard shortcut for these. Why? Because “Ctrl-C” is used to stop execution of a UNIX process, but “Ctrl” is also the main modifier key for things like Cut, Copy and Paste in UNIX windowing systems. Oops.

So now you have to remember that when you’re pasting to or from the terminal program on whatever flavor of UNIX, that it’s Shift-Insert or Ctrl-Shift-V or some other crap.

Oh, and let’s not forget about Windows. What’s “Copy” on a DOS window? The Return key? Really? You couldn’t think of anything else? And on some others it’s right-click to paste, if you can even get that to work (sometimes by choosing “Mark” from some hidden popup menu, just to enable copy/paste). Yeah, that’s useful.

I use Windows at work and one of the things I have to do while deploying a release is copy three commands from a PuTTY window into an MKS Toolkit Bash window and execute them. I know, it’s a horrifically manual process and should be fixed, but that’s not the point right now.

This is the process I go through for each command:

1. Select the text in PuTTY with the mouse.
2. Switch to the Bash window, right click on the title bar, go to Edit submenu, click Paste
3. Hit enter.

There isn’t even a keyboard shortcut that I can find for pasting into MKS Bash windows. Oh, and I didn’t miss a step there: you don’t need to “copy” from the PuTTY window. For some reason, it just assumes anything you select should go in the clipboard. While it does save you one step, it’s so unexpected that it creates extra cognitive load.

On the Mac, it’s Cmd-X/C/V, just like every other app.

Back in Black

Another classic UNIX sore spot is the backspace. Due to historical reasons that I don’t have enough neck-beard to get into, the backspace code was never quite settled in UNIX, so that depending on what system or what terminal emulator you were using, when you hit backspace/delete, you got a ^H or some other control code appearing on the line, and you had to try to remember what the damn backspace key was on that system. It went on for so long that it became a black eye^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hrunning joke on USENET.

On Terminal.app, Backspace deletes to the left, and Delete deletes to the right. If there are no characters in the indicated direction, a simple beep lets you know.

Paging Dr. Ritchie

Why, oh why, would you do anything except page the window up or down when the user hits the Page Up or Page Down keys? What sense does anything else make? It’s the 21st century people. I realize that many of these UNIX conventions were thought up in 1963 by Dennis Ritchie, but I think it’s time to do away with them.

In a DOS window, I’m not even sure what Page Up/Down do. They seem to go back some number (not “1″) of commands, but I can’t be bothered to spend any more time figuring out how many, or why you would want to do that.

X Windows seems to just puke on Page Up/Down (like most keys that were not on an original teletype, UNIX has never quite decided what to do with them). X11 on Mac OS just beeps and spits out a tilde. Terminal on Ubuntu does the same, except it only spits out the tilde on Page Down, not Up. Nice and consistent.

(A sidenote on the Home and End keys. In Mac OS, they scroll to the top or bottom of a document. Apparently, on other systems, they take you to the beginning or end of a line of text, and some people are used to that. By itself, it’s debatable which is better. But since Home and End sit right next to Page up and Page Down, I think having them be the “more extreme” versions of Page Up and Page down (if you will) makes more sense than having a completely unrelated function. It’s all in keeping with the idea that the windowing system is integral to the OS.)

Stretch Marks

Did Microsoft just give up after DOS 3.3? Have they not realized that you can fit more than 80 characters on a screen now? It’s like they just stopped developing the DOS window program in the early Nineties. You can’t stretch a DOS window any wider than what it is at launch, and given that you tend to start out in “C:\Documents and Settings\username” you tend to not have much space to type anything else without wrapping.

And it’s not like you can’t resize the window – you can make it narrower. For all those six-character-wide directory listings. Come on, now. They have to know that people are still using the DOS window. Especially their precious “Developers! Developers! Developers!” (Yes, you can widen the DOS window by going to the preferences, but you shouldn’t have to.)

Ubunto and Mac get full marks for stretchability on this one, even going so far as to reflow existing text to the new width.

Master of the Obvious

Most of these issues would have been annoying but understandable in the wild west days of competing UNIXes (UNIXen? UNIII?). These systems were developed and optimized for the world of the command line. If you have no mouse or other windows to worry about, some of these conventions start to make sense. But we’ve had windowing systems for 25 years now. Do you really have to maintain compatibility with a 1963-era mainframe? Or if you do, does it have to be in the system’s default terminal app?

And the Linux crowd wonders why they don’t have desktop acceptance.

Rough Edges

Speaking of the microphone on the Apple earbuds, there is one design change I would put to them: lose the hard edges. Just give the mic a tapered top and bottom. Because right now whenever I’m walking somewhere while listening to my iPhone, the edge of the mic constantly catches on the collar of my jacket, tugging at my ear.

Apple of my Ear

For all their faults, Apple’s stock earbuds are the most comfortable audio devices to ever grace my aural canal. I never thought an ear bud could be that comfortable – all through the Walkman years of the 80’s and 90’s I resisted anything that went into the ear, which makes it difficult to listen to music while riding a bike, let me tell you (they didn’t have those cool wrap-around-the-back-of-the-head ones then).

The first earbuds I used for any amount of time were the ones that came with my first-generation iPod. They were fine, but just a touch too large, so if they were in for longer than an hour or so, they would meld with my ear, which I didn’t feel while it was happening, but when I took them out, would feel like my ear canal was coming out with them.

And, of course you needed to use the little foam covers which eventually got lost or torn, requiring many replacement pairs.

The ear buds that come with the iPhone, though, are so comfortable that I can (and often do) leave them in all day at work, without even noticing they’re in there. So much so that I’ll accidentally try to scratch (okay, pick) my ear, forgetting that they’re occupied by little white blobs of plastic.

I’ve had my iPhone for a year and a half now, and I’m on at least my third pair of Apple earbuds. During this time I have also tried three kinds of non-Apple earphones (bud, in-ear, on-ear), none of which had the comfort of the Apple buds.

The first pair died because the plastic outer layer of the cord became detatched from the plug end, eventually causing the wires to be exposed and then to tear. I tried staving this off with electrical tape, but the rubber/plastic of the outer casing seems to resist adhesion.

The second pair is still functioning, but they look sadder than a dachshund whose dinner has been given to the cat: the protective sheath on the plug end has disintegrated, and the rubbery rings around the ear buds have completely eroded. I only keep them around as a backup.

I would say that this speaks ill of Apple’s build quality, but I do use these things literally daily, many hours a day. I listen to lots of podcasts, and I like to use them for any phone call longer than thirty seconds. In fact, I’m eagerly awaiting the iPhone 6th Generation that just feeds audio straight into my brain, so I can be constantly connected, with the music gently fading away if a call comes in, or somebody starts talking to me. Then I can dispense with ever having to purchase another headset or car stereo.

The latest generation of ear buds from Apple has a distinctly different feel to the rubber coating. As Gruber noted, it’s more rubbery, and feels more durable. I hope these will last longer than previous ones. But I’m sure that will just reveal the next weak point.

In the middle of this, I also tried some non-Apple headphones, although I didn’t spend too much on them, as I don’t want to blow $100 on headphones and then not use them because they’re uncomfortable.

Let me also preface this by saying that I probably have overly-sensitive ears (not in terms of hearing, but in terms of tolerating foreign objects in them). Just being at the bottom of a 10′ swimming pool is almost too painful for me. I’ve even had to ask a flight attendant to ask the pilot to depressurize the cabin a bit so my head didn’t explode.

I bought a pair of Sony MDR-NC6 Noise-Canceling headphones. They have very good sound, but their noise-canceling ability seems a bit lacking. I did try them on an airplane ride, and they do cancel out some of the engine noise, but in any other environment, it seems like all it’s doing when you flip the switch is boosting the volume.

Also, they are very uncomfortable – the hard speaker is very noticeable underneath the thin foam padding, so I can’t wear them for too long.

Next, I tried a pair of Sennheiser CX 400 in-ear headphones. I really wanted to like these – the noise blocking and bass response is phenomenal. As far as iPhone compatibility goes, they came with an nice short cable, which attached to my Griffin SmartTalk iPhone adapter with built-in mic.

The main problem with these was comfort – I just can’t wear in-ear headphones, my ear canals are way too sensitive. I could only stand to keep these in for a few minutes at a time, no matter which size tip I put on.

I also tried a pair of Sennheiser MX760 ear buds. Like the previous pair, they had a nice short cable which can plug into the Griffin adapter (more on the adapter in a second), but these are bud-style, not in-ear. Sound reproduction was adequate, but I wasn’t expecting perfection at this price point. Again, the problem was comfort. The buds are just too large for my ears, especially when the foam covers are on (which they need to be, because the buds themselves are nasty hard plastic.

I really tried to give these buds a good shot, wearing them whenever possible. But when the Griffin adapter started flaking out, I threw in the towel and went back to the Apple buds.

Even before it crapped out, though, I did find the usability of the short-cord-plus-adapter combination to be inferior to the almost-perfectly placed microphone on the Apple buds. The placement of the Griffin mic required clipping it to my shirt (and the clip was very weak, so it didn’t want to stay put), while the Apple mic just hangs right near my mouth.

I’ve heard good things about the V-Moda Vibe Duo in-ear headphones. I’d like to try them out, but I don’t want to spend $80 on another pair of phones that will just get tossed in a drawer. Does anyone have a pair they wouldn’t mind getting my earwax all over?

I, For One, Welcome Our New Google Overlords

I’ve been using Google’s new Chrome browser for a couple days now (mainly at work where I’m forced to use Windows), and I have to say I’m very impressed.

Firefox has been my browser of choice since it came out, and before that I used Netscape Navigator. I’ve never been able to get used to IE or Safari. IE, because it’s swill, and Safari because it’s missing a few key UI elements that I’m really used to having in Firefox. Otherwise it’s a great browser, and I use it for the sites that Firefox doesn’t render correctly.

While I am a UI geek, I’m not a graphic designer or typography nerd, so my focus tends to be on everyday interaction and not so much the nit-picky details like font choice, anti-aliasing or things like that. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – we need people to obsess over those things to get quality products like the Mac OS and the iPhone. It’s just not my thing.

So, while I understand there are some anti-aliasing problems in Google Chrome, I would be hard-pressed to notice them.

What impressed me about Chrome is how easy it was to switch from Firefox. All the keyboard shortcuts do exactly what I expect; the controls that I use are available and prominent; and the things that are different or surprising are minimal and pleasantly so.

‘Minimal’ is really the key word here. As the cartoon says, Google really wanted to minimize the ‘chrome’ of the app – just get out of the way of the content. This has been one of my biggest frustrations with browsers, starting with Netscape 3: more buttons, more toolbars, more cruft.

Remember the little grab-handles on Netscape 3 that would allow you to move or collapse individual toolbars? What is the ratio of times that you actually wanted to use that feature vs. the number of times you hit it by accident and went “WTF? Where did all my buttons go?”

That’s the kind of stuff that gets in the way of a good browsing experience, and Chrome has none of it.

Other things I like:

• The download interface is pleasant. For some reason, which is probably more to do with Windows than Firefox, I get interrupted by the download interface no matter what I have the preferences set to. Google does a nice little animation which makes it clear where to go to get the downloaded files and then gets out of your way.
• Text completion in the “omnibar” works nicely. Except that I’m used to typing “domain” in Firefox’s URL bar and having it just tack on the “.com” automatically. Google performs a search, which usually nets the site at the top of the list, but it’s an extra click. The history memory, though, is rather smooth.
• Tab resizing when adding/removing tabs is slick.
• Showing common locations on a New Tab. I’m starting to get very used to this feature.
• Application shortcuts. I’ve already started using this for some internal work web apps that I want opened at a different size than my browser. Very nice.
• Incognito Browsing. Finally. I’m surprised Apple didn’t come out with this already. Kudos to the Google folks.

It’s not all sunshine and roses, however. There are some areas that could (and I’m sure will) be improved:

• Java WebStart support. Haven’t figured out how to get this to work. Anyone know? I’ve tried installing the latest Java SDK, which usually installs the browser plug-in, but it didn’t seem to work. (I need it for work.)
• Performance. One of the tradeoffs Google made was to make each tab its own process, rather than merely a thread. This was done for all sorts of security and stability reasons, but the drawback is that it uses more resources. Normally, I wouldn’t care, as I have 4GB of RAM in my MacBook Pro and hardly even notice when Firefox is bloating up. But, I have noticed that when Chrome is running, my XP PC gets periodically hung up for 10-20 seconds at a time. The CPU is not pegged, so I’m not sure what’s going on, but it’s definitely having an effect on the system.
• No Mac port yet. There’s only so much I want to do with a browser at work. But at home I’d really wring it out.

When it comes to browsers (and email clients), I tend to be very conservative – just give me something that works the way I’m used to and I’m happy. I learned how to work the Internet back in the mid-90’s and my brain still works mostly that way. I was devastated during the dark times between Netscape’s downfall and the rise of Firefox/Thunderbird, and only recently switched to using Apple Mail, which is clearly a superior product to TBird, because it was different enough.

So when I say I could easily switch to using Google Chrome as my default browser (once a few things are fixed), it’s a huge compliment. I realize that lots of people have tons of Firefox add-ons that aren’t in Chrome, or they’re used to Safari’s interface, but for me Chrome could be my new browser.

Since I’ve already switched to Apple Mail, this may be the first time my computer is Mozilla/Netscape-free since, well, ever.

Security Fail

Why is it, that when you put a site into your “trusted site” list in Internet Explorer, that somehow causes IE to start asking you if you are sure you want to go there?

I put it in the trusted site list so you wouldn’t ask me that. Why start now?

Or is it unfair to bash an eight year old operating system? I don’t care. I’m going to do it anyway.

I Just Feel So Dirty

Virtualizing operating systems is certainly one of the most obvious benefits of Apple switching to Intel CPUs. Those of us who choose to use Macs in our personal life can now use them for business purposes that were heretofore unavailable due to little incompatibilities, simply by installing Parallels or VMWare, or even Boot Camp, although rebooting just to open a spreadsheet or run IE sounds like a bit of a pain.

It just so happens I have to open and interpret a couple of fairly complex spreadsheets, with lots of formulas and macros, for some work I’m doing. Since Mac Office dropped VB support in the latest version, I needed to run it on Windows, which runs rather well under VMWare Fusion.

I figured that, being one of Microsoft’s flagship products (the other being “Microsoft Bob”, of course), it would be fairly easy to purchase or demo a copy of MS Office for Windows.

Microsoft, being a pure software company (not counting the keyboards and mice, which I believe are outsourced, and the XBox, which is essentially a cheap PC running stripped-down Windows, and certainly not counting the Zune, which is a rebadged Toshiba mp3 player, and hardly counts as a product) makes the overwhelming majority of their profits by selling countless copies of Windows and Office, which, after a certain point, are pure profit. You’d think they’d make it as smooth as possible. You’d also think you’d be able to move an empty text file to the Recycle bin in under four minutes. In both cases, you’d be wrong.

Once you find the Trial Download page, you need to jump through a few hoops about creating a Windows Live account (why would I want that? I just want a copy of Office) and giving them all of your pertinent information (I’m certainly not giving them a valid phone number for this) before you get to the actual download page.

OK, so you’ve finally made it. You have a Download button and are ready to go. Well, not quite:

Impressive – that one bullet point contains two sentences, and two lies.

• There is no “Download Now” button, and there are certainly not two “Download Now” buttons.
• You do not need to click both buttons to download the product, which I will get to in a moment.

Assuming you need to click both Download buttons, which do you suppose you should click first?

If you guessed “Download 1″, you might think you made some sort of mistake by the dialog that pops up:

I still have no idea what that’s for, even after encountering it three times.

But the important question is: If it automatically does the second download for you when you click “OK”, why does it need to yell at you in the first place?

I know that picking on Microsoft user interfaces is like shooting blind, comatose, fat fish in a barrel with an IED, and the barrel is wrapped with TNT, but with all the money they spend on pushing their products, you’d think they would catch these high-profile gaffes that are right in their profit stream.

Rule number 1 of commerce (e- or brick & mortar): Do not confuse your customers when they’re trying to give you money*.

*Actually, since this was the free trial site, I wasn’t actually trying to give them money, but I probably will after the 60 days is up, as I’ll need to keep using it.

WeatherBugs

I’ve been using WeatherBug on my iPhone for a week now, because it gives some more details than the standard Weather app. But lately I’ve been getting these “severe weather” warnings a lot:

Since when is no rain considered an advisory condition? It’s not like I live in a draught zone. We just had rain last week.

The worst part is you can’t get rid of the little number badge on the WeatherBug icon:

And I don’t know if my OCD can handle having that there.

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