James Rocchi, critic for Netflix, posted this from the recent Toronto Film Festival:
Oh, and the Press Office computers are Macs; wow, that’s awesome, because I want to deal with learning a whole new OS that doesn’t support Movable Type fully when I’m busy.
So I thought about installing Movable Type before posting this (since I’m a Wordpress user), but the install is way too work intensive for such a simple investigation. So, having not ever used MT before, I will venture a guess as to what Rocchi is talking about here.
Like Wordpress, MT probably has a WYSIWYG element in the post composition tool, which makes use of either MIDAS (Mozilla) or MSHTML (Internet Explorer). Safari (and Webkit) did not support either of those methods of in-page editing until version 1.3/2.0 (for 10.3 and 10.4 respectively). However, according to many of those involved in tools using those technologies, like the Writely guys and the TinyMCE guys, even the latest release of Safari cannot really support full use of those engines.
So James, it’s not that the Mac is incompatible with Movable Type. It’s that the WYSIWYG interface in MT is not supported at this point by Apple’s built-in browser. While this is a problem that Apple should be looking to address ASAP, it is certainly not a game ender, since most blog posts are just paragraphs of text anyhow.
Update: As Drew points out in the comments, James Rocchi has left Netflix. Shout out to Drew and his crazy awesome site from this NYC film student!
If you’re as much of a fan of 37signals as I am, you have devoured their lengthy multi-point essays about both Basecamp and Backpack. Now they have released Writeboard and there is no manifesto to be found. Have they lost their radical, youthful exhuberance?
So I tried Opera, and yes, it is super fast! On my mac there really is a noticeable difference between it and Firefox, which is even faster than Safari.
Scoble has blogged asking any of the Microsoft executives to make a Web 2.0-related acquisition. Everywhere on the web there is rampant speculation as to what company or group Scoble has in mind. Can you guess what is really going on?
There is no way that Microsoft would ever make an acquisition as a result of a public Scoble post. Why? Because it would give him way too much power. As he says, he is “seven levels down” in the corporation, and unfornately, as corporate politics go, it would be too dangerous to allow him to pull strings that way – especially with the whole world watching.
Scoble knows this, so what is he really doing? Simple. With a short paragraph on his blog he has gotten the entire tech blogosphere talking about Microsoft. Go check out Memeorandum and see what stories are ruling the web right now. For a week that will be heavily controlled by Web 2.0 properties and announcements, Scoble has successfully injected the decidedly pre-web MS into the conversation.
Good job, Scoble. Me? I don’t think there really is a company in mind here. Just a little bit of sly PR slight of hand on the part of the reigning king of web PR - Mr. Robert Scoble.