I just screwed up. I accidentally marked all of my Google reader items as read when what I intended to do was mark a specific folder as read. If this was a desktop application I could hit undo and I’d back up, have all of my data the way I want it, and be ready to read all of the delicious feeds I’ve been missing this week. But Google Reader is a web application, so I can’t do that, I’m just SOL.

This is actually just a problem with Google Reader, and not with web apps in general. In fact, many of Google’s applications make wonderful use of Undo. I was alerted to this fact by a talk that Aza Raskin (the late Jeff Raskin’s son) gave at Google, called the Death of the Desktop. He talks about “Are you sure” messages and why they were so problematic. Raskin explains what we all know instinctively, that when you have initiated a task any message that is trying to warn you away is going to be ignored as you are trying to complete your task. Over time we begin to develop muscle memory to just click OK. What works much better is realize that it is only after you have completed your task that you then may want to not have done it in the first place. This is why Gmail’s status messages that double as Undo controls work so well. Just selected 20 messages and marked them as junk? Gmail gives you the option to Undo. Just changed the labels on your work messages from “work” to “from mom?” Gmail lets you undo. As Raskin points out, though, some other Google apps need to get on board this train as well (he uses Calendar, Stewart is frustrated with Reader). For my money, this is how web apps should work, at least whenever they can. Anyone know what technical limitations on this feature might be?

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.

Something like this would be really useful on the Mac as well. While Firefox on Mac has been getting steadily better, there are many times when I want to open something specifically in Safari and an extension that passes the URL to Safari would be great. I could Applescript it, but FF does not have AppleScript support, as least not as of yet.

So, any extension devs up to the challenge?

UPDATE: Check the comments for the solution. I checked—it works.

I’m using the old version of Firefox on my laptop, and it confirms my impression that they took a feature out of the browser in the latest release that I want back.

If you single click on the URL in the address field, the whole thing is selected. That’s the old, correct behavior. The new behavior is to give you a caret and make you manually select all the text. But it’s so easy to select part of the URL if that’s what you want (when exactly do you want that, btw). As a blogger selecting URLs in that bar is on the path to my linking to something, and I fight against anything that makes that path longer. The Firefox guys just did that. Why?

I figured out the solution. It turns out the Mozilla guys did not totally alter the functionality Dave is talking about. Rather they just swtiched the default. In versions of Firefox prior to 1.5 there was an entry in the config (about:config) called “browser.urlbar.ClickSelectsAll,” which was by default set to True. The only change in 1.5 was to set it as default to False. Not sure why that makes sense to them, but in any case Dave, all you need to do in 1.5 is change that back to True and you’re on your way.

Yesterday Microsoft made some pretty big announcements, and while much of the web does not seem to understand their significance, at least some of the stuff they showed off yesterday is getting some real buzz. Only problem, there is no stream of the announcement available from Microsoft’s web site. We know that one exists, since Scoble was watching it internally. Microsoft, please open it up to the rest of us?

Maybe it has something to do with Dave Winer’s comments on the presentation…

Ah well, we switched back to Writeboard and things moved quite well, though she has to learn the Textile system that 37sig uses (a post on that is coming real soon – I promise) and it does not support simultaneous editing, but at least its system does not behave like Alpha software.

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?

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.

I love the new Yahoo mail. It’s rapidly becoming my primary mail system. Good spam blocking, great user interface, really works on all my computers/browsers. Gmail doesn’t. And the Gmail UI is looking pretty pale compared to Yahoo’s. Now we’re in a sweet spot, possibly a very sweet spot. Two great development companies competing for our attention, and neither of them is Microsoft. Come to think of it, neither is Apple. Yahoo!

Scoble:

Dave Winer says that Microsoft isn’t trying to compete with Google’s Gmail or Yahoo’s new (and awesome) email system. Um, Dave, that’s not true. You might want to watch this video about the new Hotmail that’s under development or this one about the new Outlook Express, now called Windows Mail, that’s also under development.

I have to disagree with Scoble here. The new Microsoft Mail web app that is shown off in that video is quite cool indeed, but notice that the one feature that Dave Winer was talking about in his brief post on the subject was “works anywhere”—which, for all you Microsofties who aren’t Sanaz or Steve or the rest of the awesome Start.com team, does NOT mean everywhere that runs Windows. When Scoble asks the new Mail team about other browsers, they say that “the majority of our [must be Hotmail’s] user base is on IE 5 and 6” (by the way, I love the use of version numbers of the SAME BROWSER to make it sound like they are supporting more configs). When Scoble then asks Scott Isaacs about browser/OS compatibility for these web apps, he says “it works on Firefox.” While not awful, Microsoft needs to get its act together. The WPF/E team showed off their wares on OS X running Safari, which after all is the default browser on the Mac. If Safari is a bit anemic right now, then Microsoft should approach Apple’s team (as I’m sure they’ve done in the past) and try to solve this. You cannot have a web platform (whether it be the MSN one, ATLAS, or WPF/E) if it only runs on Wintel Machines running IE. Firefox is really important and Safari is somewhat important, and this is what Google really understands, and what from what we’re hearing Yahoo is understanding with this new Yahoo Mail. It remains to be seen, but from what I’ve seen I would pick the Microsoft offering over the Yahoo one[who knows what Google is up to], but alas it probably won’t work on my Safari browser. Maybe next time, right Microsoft?

Go check out this really awesome video!

Microsoft thinks they have a GMail killer…

It remains to be seen…

It began on August 31:

And the incredible Xeni Jardin kept it up, posting great piece after great piece, pointing us at content from the MSM, as well as the individual stories that were coming through the internet and cellular networks.

She provided background and informative analysis from experts, like in Civil Defense in Cuba and Disease Threat Analysis.

There was the anonymous message from the relief worker and the updating on the state of the New Orleans nuclear power facility.

She chronicled the horrible responses from Barbara Bush and the Army Times.

She also followed the FCC’s attempts to restore some kind of infrastructure.

Last, there was the heart-wrenching video from the president of Jefferson Parish, and the applause-earning statement from MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann.

This is the new media. When the Lusitania was sunk, Americans read about in the newspaper. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, they listened by their radios. When JFK was shot Americans watched it on the Broadcast News. We tuned in to CNN and Cable News as the Towers fell on September 11. Let history now show that when the levees broke in New Orleans, Americans turned to the internet and to a new breed of journalist – a journalist who has as much heart as she does guts, and a journalist who isn’t afraid to publish something controversial, but is equally unafraid to correct her reports when new facts are brought to light.

We are living in a bright new age of technology and communication, all the while the world around us becomes darker and more dangerous. Let us continue to build this new transparent communications network as it makes weathering the gathering storm just a little bit easier.

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.

Many people were disappointed with Google Talk. There was an expectation that Google was going to redefine this sector of the internet as they have done with so many others. Alas, it was not meant to be. Although, if they’re master plan calls for the other three major IM players to break down their walls and allows IM to enter the real mainstream by enabling users to converse with anyone across the networks, then perhaps this was the plan all along. After all if they had just wiped the floor with Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft, the chances of those big 3 sitting down at the bargaining table might be much less than it is right now.

But that was not really my point in any case. I tried to like Google Talk, I really did. I read Steve Gillmor’s nicely surrealistic post about how it made his PC feel like a Mac, but it just did not work for me.

Then this happened. I tried sending a link from Adium:

and this is what showed up on Google Talk:

So, this nice simple Google IM app cannot understand a link tag? If I cannot even send a link to a GTalk user, it really is quite useless.

Update: Yes, Google Talk can indeed display URL’s as links, as you can see here:

However, that simply is not good enough when every modern IM client makes it super easy for even the novice to send a link as a link to someone. ahref is NOT that complicated and the fact that the Google guys left it out leads me to believe that they are not really using this (or at least not the public version of the tool) for work, as was claimed.