greenthinks

If the Googleplexniks are serious about that phrase “the world’s information,” they need to look beyond the realm of Windows. The world doesn’t stop where the “Start” menu ends.

from Scott Rosenberg

It seems everyone and their mother is talking about Google’s supposed big announcement tomorrow. Noone really has any hard info about what it will be, but the one certainty is that it will be Windows-only.

Every other desktop product Google has released (let’s say at least in the last year) has been developed for Windows only. Even Google Video (where they are using the cross-platform VLC) is still Windows-only. Yes, Google worked hard to make Maps and Gmail and other web-based products work on Mac, and yes, they have committed to bringing products like Video and Earth over to the Mac platform, but the question is when?

As many have been saying for a while now, the movers and the shakers of Web 2.0 care about or even use the Mac platform. Companies are missing out on a big PR opportunity by not releasing Mac versions first.

Let’s just say I’m not holding my breath for Google Talk for Mac.

Another article, this one from Business 2.0’s September issue.

No matter what Microsoft ends up doing or not doing with Windows LonghornVista, the biggest change people will notice when they boot Redmond’s new operating system will be the clarity of the fonts. Why? Because for the first time since the technology debuted back in the Windows 2000 days, Windows will ship with ClearType ON by default.

I had not realized how much of a big deal this is until I noticed that many of my colleagues at work and many of the machines in the labs that we administer have it off. The next time I installed XP on my own machine, I looked, and in fact it is off by default!

So please, everyone, take a deep breath and open your Display Control Panel, go into the Appearance tab and the Effects button, and where it says “Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts,” make sure it says “ClearType.” Then, if you really want to have it look great to you, go to Microsoft’s ClearType Tuner with Internet Explorer (it does not work in Firefox as it is ActiveX-based).

There, now doesn’t this post look so much better?

So I went back looking over the last 20 or so posts here and realized that this blog has become really quite mac heavy. That was never my intention, but I’ve been spending much of my time at my girlfriend’s apartment and since my macs are laptops and my PC is a desktop, the macs have been getting much more use lately.

I do have a bunch of things I’d like to write about that are Windows or PC-related. I’m working on getting the new IE 7 beta installed on my XP box. I’ve got notes on my comparative experiences with the different PC-based music services. Lastly, there’s a post I’m working on about what we really want to see in the next version of Windows, including comments on an article in the latest (not even on newsstands yet!) issue of MaximumPC magazine.

Just a quick note to say how happy I am to see what I call modern fantasy becoming less niche this summer. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which Tim Burton helmed, did quite well, and the King Kong trailer is stirring up quite a storm online and off. This was an area that for years only small almost unknown players like Terry Gilliam occupied, but Burton joined in during the 90’s, and Peter Jackson gave us the Lord of the Rings trilogy over the last half decade.

Wonderful.

Oh, what’s that image? That’s the real town of Sleepy Hollow in upstate NY as seen on Google Maps.

You’re Special

My Documents. Like “Start Menu” or “My Computer,” the word has become almost a metonym (or a stand-in) for the Microsoft Windows system as a whole. Introduced in the reinvented Windows 95, the special folder was intended as a place for the user to keep her documents. Never again would users complain “I don’t know where my document is!?” for now there would be MY DOCUMENTS. And it worked – well sort of.

The problem was that either programs had to be written intelligently enough as to direct users to save their files into this directory of directories, or the users themselves would have to understand about where My Documents lived, how to get there, and why they should bother. The former never really happened. Even Microsoft Word 2003 does not default to the user’s My Documents as the default saving location. However, Microsoft did such a good job plastering My Documents all over the Operating System and Open/Save dialogs, that users did indeed learn to respect Microsoft’s their My Documents.

Many, if not most, pages now have more than one syndication feed. It is not uncommon to find RSS 0.91 next to RSS 2.0 next to ATOM 0.3 (and now ATOM 1.0 as well)—all on the same page! The idea is that the publisher is platform agnostic and therefore maximizes his audience. Sounds good, and in practice it works well, or at least it has worked well up until now. When the audience for Syndication feeds was entirely made up of techies and devs, the sea of acronyms wasn’t a problem—if anything it was even more inviting. Now however, as browser manufacturers build feed detection into the browsers, and more and more normal users are pushed towards the syndicated future, the breadth of format options only makes things more complicated, and therefore less attractive. For this reason Apple (and now Microsoft as well) has chosen to pick a single format out of the site the user is visting and use that when the user clicks on the Syndicate or RSS button.

How does Apple decide? It seems that they take the first the browser finds when reading the markup from top down. The odd, seemingly unintended consequence of this is that since ATOM starts with an A and RSS and RDF start with R’s, Safari almost always chooses the ATOM feed to use on pages that have multiple options. This situation is especially odd seeing as how Apple chose the decidely unpolitic “RSS” as the overall term they use for syndication over the web. Why snub ATOM only to support them with the browser’s feed autodetect scheme (my guess is that this is all unintended).