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.

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?

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…

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…

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 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?

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.

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.

Whose Documents?

However, what happened with the move to NT-based systems with Windows 2000 [NT 5] and Windows XP [NT 5.1] (Yes, I know there was an NT 4. Believe me, I spent years with it at work. I’m ignoring it because it’s really not relevant here) was a severe complication of the file structure. NT was developed as a Microsoft answer to UNIX/BSD/Linux (And as an evolution of VMS), which means it had to include a robust multi-user model in the OS. The file structure was now modified so that there was a root-level “Documents and Settings,” then a folder for each user, and then things like “My Documents,” “Desktop,” and the hidden but quite important “Application Data.”

Now there were many “My Documents” folders all over the user’s hard drive. With the same name the user might confuse them. So here Microsoft broke a major rule of UI design and changed the name depending on who was logged in. If I log as Nate, then in the Nate folder, there is “My Documents.” If I open the Victoria folder or the Bobbo folder, I see “Victoria’s Documents” and “Bobbo’s Documents” respectively. Of course, when they log in, they see what is appropriate to the user. This solution makes sense in theory but in practice it confuses the user to no end. After all the user is looking for “My Documents” and instead they find the same folder with all sorts of other names.

Mother*#%^in’ Library, people!

Fast forward a couple of years and Apple releases Mac OS X. Since they too are now subscribing to the UNIX tradition with multiple users and the whole nine yards, they too create folders with each user’s name and a folder for documents within that user’s folder. Each Mac user now has two folders under their name, “Documents” and “Library.” Documents is meant for the user’s files while Library is meant for files for the user that are kept by the Applications, like settings, plugins, databases, etc. Sounds good enough, except the developers refused to listen. After all, what’s the purpose of littering the user’s hard drive with folders bearing your name if you have to put them somewhere the user will never find them? If you open almost any Mac user’s Documents folder today, you will find a mixture of personal or user-created files and Application-created files. Microsoft User Data, Acrobat Data, eBooks, Widgets, Roxio Converted Items, etc. So now the decent solution that Apple was hoping to foster with both a Documents folder and a Library folder has been mostly undone by thoughtless or greedy developers (To be fair, of all the examples above, Roxio does give you the option to choose another location).

This has had such a serious effect that Tonya Engst, in an article written for .Mac on August 4, wrote:

You may wish to create a folder in your Documents folder, called “My Documents.” I did this because my software automatically put so many support items in Documents, I could hardly find my own stuff.

Yeah, it’s that bad. So much for Apple helping the user by setting aside a directory for them (You hear that developers? FOR THE USER!) Note: I would link to the afore-mentioned article by Tonya Engst, but since it is for .Mac, it is “protected” behind Apple’s pay wall. Sorry.

And Back to Windows…

It is now mid-2005 and Microsoft has just released the next version of Windows (now named “Vista”) as beta 1. This new version sees them removing the “My” from their file system structure. “My Documents” has now become “Documents.” Hmmm.

Yesterday I was reminded how much we really do need something better. A friend of mine was typing something up on Yahoo! Mail for over an hour, and by just accidentally hitting the wrong button, entire pages worth of work was gone. What about undo, I said—but alas, Internet Explorer 6 on Windows does not support Undo or Redo in TEXTAREA (or any other kind of text field). I decided to investigate what happens on the Mac…

Click here to see what happens in Safari or Firefox (sorry for the crappy quality of the video).

I have yet to check to make sure that this works on Firefox on Windows as well, though I think that’s a safe assumption.

Update: I checked, and it does indeed work fine on Firefox running on Windows.

Steve totally blew it off at the time, but only a few months later iTunes 4.9 with podcasting is here and what?

It’s #1! Guess this wasn’t just the mild-mannered test Steve said it was…

All this would be fine, since the podcast is actually quite good, if only it would be available on Tuesdays! For the last few Tuesdays, the podcast listing does not even update until late Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning, and even then it gets an error when it tries to download. By the time it’s actually available, it’s Wednesday afternoon. So much for New Music Tuesdays…