Vinh talks about how he has been planning on replacing his Palm Treo 650 with whatever Apple decides to release in the mobile phone arena:

In fact, when I think of that passel of features in terms of what a design tyrant like Jobs might release, it seems somewhat unlikely. Very unlikely. I mean, think about it: does it seem remotely possible that Steve Jobs would release a phone that’s a browser, an application platform, a camera, a PDA, an email client and an iPod? Would you bet money that he would? That kind of modal schizophrenia seems like it would be a clear affront to his sensibilities, and none of this even addresses whether the phone will sport a keyboard. I’d be happy if I’m wrong, but can we really expect a phone with a keyboard from the Barnum-like genius who gave us an iPod without a screen?

It’s a great piece – go read it.

Now, that does make some sense, because Macs don’t by default have a right click button and some people would not otherwise know how to access the right click menus, but there should certainly be a way to turn it off.

Does anyone know how to turn it off?

Update: I figured this one out myself, thank you very much…

The answer? A setting you can reach in Firefox by using the “about:config” function (for all your newbies, that’s type about:config in the Address Box and hit Return/Enter). If you search for “dom”, you will see an entry called “dom.disable_open_click_delay” with a default integer value of, I think, 1000. I changed it to 5000 and now have no problems dragging all sorts of stuff around in Google Calendar. Wonderful!

Another Update: So it appears that I was entirely wrong. The previously mentioned entry in the Firefox config has no effect on the issue I was dealing with. The reason Google Calendar started working was because Google modified their site’s code. Ah well, still looking for a solution for this behavior on Firefox for Mac.

Final Final Update: I just tried this again (holding down the mouse button over a web page in Firefox on Mac) and found that the functionality has either been disabled or completely removed in Firefox 2.0 RC1. Wonderful! Case closed.

Oh well, I just wanted to recognize the fact that the grass is still a little greener for us Mac users here in terms of iTunes functionality.

Now, on to more substantive matters. There are some major areas in Apple’s OS X OS that need improvement. While Tiger (10.4) was a terrific release, it has only marginally improved through the subsequent point releases (now at the Universal 10.4.4).

Let’s get it started:

1. Safari – Chief amongst the stagnant and dire bunch is Apple’s browser. While rumors have been brewing about a myriad of new features coming in the fruit company’s upcoming Leopard release (10.5), new features are NOT what Safari needs the most. The biggest problems with Safari still lie with the rendering engine itself. Comments from Dave Hyatt and the rest of the WebCore/WebKit team on their blog make it sound like they are convinced the engine is done and are now just tidying up and getting ready for the next gen content rendering stuff. The engine is NOT DONE. Most of us who follow at least some blogs have seen puzzled posts like one from James Rocchi (then the film critic for Netflix) that he could not figure out how to post to his weblog from a film festival’s press center, because they were using macs. Are macs really that different? Do they have keyboards that look different or require fundamentally different skills to use? No. The problem was simply that the WYSIWYG functionality in Movable Type does not work in Safari – the default browser on the Mac. Robert Scoble had the same problem with Wordpress at an Apple Store. So did his son Patrick, though he was using Blogger. In all these cases (and many more), these PC users got very bad impressions of the so-called “ease of use” of the Mac, when it required that they know and remember the HTML link tag to link on their blog posts. This is the sort of problem that should be first on Apple’s list of things to fix in Safari.Why am I so riled about this? Because there is no good explanation. If they’ve already solved this problem and are simply waiting to give us the new rendering engine in Leopard, then that in and of itself is unacceptable and unprecedented. New features? Fine to use to sell a new release. Bug fixes and rendering engine improvements? Bordering on exploitative when used to sell their new release. And in fact, Apple has shown this to be their view as well. When WebCore/Webkit underwent a serious overhaul, they released the upgraded engine inside basically the same Safari as version 1.3 for current users, and that same engine, albeit with many new features in Tiger as Safari 2.0. So it would not seem that they are merely waiting for the next release to bless us faithful customers with these fixes. Which means they are simply not fixing them.There are many other issues with Safari rendering I could talk about. Apple needs to continue to work with banks and e-commerce sites to make sure that they do not lock out Safari users. There is nothing more confusing to my mom than thinking that Safari is the web, until she reaches The Gap and finds that it will not work on her nice white Mac computer. Us techies may be able to abstract the application and its particular compatibility issues away from the computer itself, but normal users don’t. If they cannot reach a website or interact with it succesfully on a Mac using Safari, then they will blame the Mac – not the application.


2. iCal – This one is not nearly as dire as the other, but is still pretty important. Calendering is an area where not much innovation is taking place and where so much innovation needs to happen. Jon Udell talked about this recently on his blog, though he was certainly not the first and will definitely not be the last to have this problem. While at least Microsoft believes they have solved the calendering space for corporations, noone has even really tried to deal with group calendering on the consumer level. That is except Apple. If you’re entire family is on Macs, you can each use iCal and subscribe to each other’s calenders, and things will basically work fine. There is not such a great web story, but then again, Apple has never really gotten the web, so that’s no surprise. What I have been hoping for (and am seeing glimmers of in the Hula project) is an Open Source web calendering initiative that would use any of the standards used by iCal for syncing to interoperate with desktop clients. This would give us the best of both the web and the desktop and once someone wrote a killer Windows client that could handle this (MS has a new Windows Calender in Vista that may play this role) things could really be peachy.So what am I asking Apple to do? Most of what I wrote above does not rely on anything that they may do or not do. Well, I would like them to push forward. While the rest of the pack are simply trying to replicate basic calendering functionality on the web, Apple should be doing what they are really good at – moving the pale a football field further. I’m not a researcher, nor am I a software dev, but I am certain that there are many ways that we can improve upon the basic calender functionality that is contained in every calendering application. I’ve seen no indication that anyone else is working on this – so I really hope Apple is.


3. iChat – Here is where I want Apple to do a bit of following, in contrast to my last point. Microsoft has already started showing off the next generations of MSN Windows Live Messenger. The piece that Apple should have gotten first, and that Microsoft seems to be jumping right into, is the collaboration over IM application. Microsoft is tackling this on two levels: on the consumer level with Windows Live Messenger and on the corporate level with Office Communicator. The fact is that Apple needs to give us a way to better collaborate over iChat with our documents and browsing.

There’s probably some more, but this has gone on long enough, so I’ll cut it off here. I’m staying realistic but here’s hoping Apple will deliver.

Dave Winer is now using LemkeSoft’s GraphicConverter on his mac instead of Adobe ImageReady, which he had been using on Windows:

Anita Wilhelm, illustrating the spirit of TagCamp in Palo Alto on October 29. Notable because it’s the first graphic I produced on the Mac. Took about an hour, but I figured out how to use Graphic Converter Pro, which is pretty nice, but not quite as easy as ImageReady. The good news is now I should be able to do new little graphics in the margin. Ever since switching to the Mac, I’ve just been snarfing old ones from the archives.

Why not use ImageReady on the Mac, Dave?

I’ve tried Quicksilver, that up and coming free youngster, but it just was too much of a mess for this OCD detail nut. LaunchBar knows what it is meant to do, and it does it beautifully. More recently, as LaunchBar seemed to be in a state of languor, and as Apple introduced Spotlight in Tiger, I have tried to do away with my LaunchBar habit.

Today I go to Objective’s site, just for the hell of it, and lo and behold, a new beta version! And they haven’t been sitting around doing nothing, either. 4.1 boasts full spotlight integration, further integration with Address Book and iTunes, support for Automator workflows, and a bunch more features, performance improvements, and bug fixes.

I’m impressed.

Don’t underestimate Apple; they’re moving hella quicker than Redmond these days. Front Row isn’t close to an MCE competitor today, but it won’t take much to tweak it to deliciousness. Pretty soon, I expect Apple to start selling computers that are “iPod-compatible.” Watch it happen, folks. This isn’t about surfing the Web anymore – it’s about having a lifestyle that doesn’t require you to think or reprogram. The days of the blinking 12:00 are long gone, but it’s obvious Microsoft and its vendors don’t know that yet.

Infinite Loop – I caught the West Wing on television for the first time in a long time (since the election, I think, I stopped watching it since then really). It dawned on me how ridiculous it is to focus a television show on such a unique individual as the President of the U.S. And now they’re doing another one with Gina Davis? So wacky. I was thinking after this morning’s Apple keynote that Hollywoood should create a show loosely based on Apple computer, no? It’d have a enigmatic, yet complex leader, various VPs with ranging agendas, crisises would not involve asteroids hitting the earth or Norht Korean terrorists, but blogs leaking confidential product plans and competitors launching similar products, IP theft, etc. You could have cameos by luminaries in tech. You’d have a picture-perfect antagonist in a Gates-like Billionaire of a competing company, etc. Quirky programmers and French-born directors of Engineering would add a light element. How much more drama could you want?

Terrific.

The conventional wisdom about Apple’s announcements tomorrow says that Apple will be introducing some new iPods. Maybe a new set of higher end iPods and perhaps a pink Madonna iPod nano.

Some people have been talking about a video iPod, but most experts have poo-pooed that idea, saying that Apple would need to re-engineer its online store for movies and that bandwidth, and the deals with movie studios necessary for such an undertaking, are not in place.

However, today another piece of the puzzle fell into place. Every week on Tuesday Apple updates the Music Store with new music. This week Tuesday came and went with no new music, no newly released albums, no new additions from older catalogs.

So even if the more conservative prognostications are accurate, it seems that Apple is at least updating the iTunes Music Store as well tomorrow. It may in fact be more than that, however.

MacRumors reports that a new iTunes version may be released sometime soon. They guess it is 5.0.2, but I would put more money on 5.1. iTunes 5 was a typically underwhelming x.0 release (remember v4.0?) and now Apple probably plans to add all sorts of more interesting functionality in point releases over the next year or so.

It might even turn out to be more significant than that. Think Secret is now speculating that Apple will indeed release video iPods tomorrow and that the iTunes video store will debut. My take is that Apple will announce such devices without the vital functionality (vital according to Apple executives) of ripping DVD’s to one’s HD, but with big collaborations (e.g. BBC) and with a big push towards music videos and vlogging. The company will then attempt to use its iPod cache to exert pressure on the government and the industry to make ripping one’s own DVD’s for use on one’s video iPod a legal and feasible reality.

Well, here’s hoping…

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!

FEMA to Mac, Linux users: drop dead: A stupid usability flaw in the FEMA website is causing frustration for some of the Hurricane Katrina survivors fortunate enough to have computer and internet access. Bottom line: if you’re not using Windows + IE, it appears that you won’t be able to file a disaster assistance claim on Fema.gov.

Absolutely unbelievable.

I think Microsoft’s clearest threat still comes from Apple, though not the way most people expect. Yes, Apple is about to take Microsoft to the woodshed when it comes to Internet movie distribution. Yes, Apple already super-dominates the music player market where Microsoft doesn’t even really exist. But the real jewel is one Microsoft has to lose, not gain—the PC platform, itself. What could Apple do to take down Windows, with or without the help of Intel? What seems to me to be the answer came to me this week from a reader who had a disruptive idea that I gleefully embellished. Here are the clues. Microsoft is woefully late with its next Windows upgrade, while Apple is far ahead with even the current version of OS X. Apple is moving to Intel processors and hackers have already shown that OS X can run fine on non-Apple hardware. But Apple doesn’t want to give up its profitable hardware business to compete head-to-head with Microsoft. And remember, Apple totally dominates the portable music player market and will probably sell 25 million iPods or more this year. Every one of those iPods is a bootable drive. What if Apple introduces OS 10.5, its next super-duper operating system release, and at the same time starts loading FOR FREE the current operating system version—OS 10.4—on every new iPod in a version that runs on generic Intel boxes? What if they also make 10.4 a free download through the iTunes Music Store? It wouldn’t kill Microsoft, but it would hurt the company, both emotionally and materially. And it wouldn’t hurt Apple at all. Apple hardware sales would be driven by OS 10.5 and all giving away 10.4 would do is help sell more iPods and attract more customers to Apple’s store. Like that kid in line at the bank, it would drive Bill Gates crazy.

Tiger to the rescue:

For the uninitiated amongst you, that’s System Preferences/Keyboard and Mouse/Keyboard/Modifier Keys button at the bottom.