greenthinks

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.

Back towards the beginnging of July, Jon Udell wrote a piece on the dominance, nowadays, of typing into a text field on the web. He discussed the reasons why TEXTAREA is not optimal, and put forth some potential successors to the web typing mantle.

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.

It was only a few months ago—Steve stood onstage at D:All Things Digital, and showed off podcasting in iTunes. One of the podcasts he showed, in fact the last one he highlighted, was a “test” that Apple was doing. It was a podcast version of the New Music Tuesdays email newsletters that Apple has been sending out since the Music Store launched.

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…