greenthinks

David Pogue’s New York Times review of the new Samgsung iPod nano-challenger, the Z5, is actually pretty spot on (though why for the love of God can he NOT do his own battery tests?!). Towards the end though, there is this bit of inanity:

MUSIC STORE INTEGRATION No. At Samsung’s suggestion, I tested the Z5 with Rhapsody’s store, which is available directly from the copy of Windows Media Player provided by the Z5’s installer. After banging my head on the keyboard for an hour, unable to get it to work, a Rhapsody rep finally let me know that, in fact, Rhapsody’s subscription store doesn’t work in Media Player — only with Rhapsody’s own software jukebox. (So much for the Microsoft “Plays for Sure” logo. Try “Plays for Some People.”)

Now, perhaps I should be blaming Samsung for sending this particularly clueless customer of theirs to WiMP instead of Rhapsody’s own client, but for the technology reporter of the New York Times to be clueless enough about Rhapsody to try to run it from inside WiMP is just absurd. While I generally like Pogue, this example just feeds the flames of the “David Pogue is an Apple shill!” slurs—and given his clear lack of knowledge or understanding about iTunes alternatives (and a complete lack of a sense that he should be embarrassed by that?!), I guess I would just have to agree.

So I was going to comment on the lack of Applescriptability in iTunes for Windows (not that I would expect it to be included since its underlying structure, the System Events system, is a pretty low level part of the Mac OS). This was in response to some blogger’s list of 5 improvements he’d like to see in the next version of iTunes. He was clearly talking about the Windows version, because multiple items on his list have been solved for me for a long time with scripts (he also said he was running it on Windows). Unfortunately, try as I might, I cannot for the life of me locate said article.

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.

First things first. I will, for the time being, no longer be linking. At least not often. Why? Because my own issues about blog post quality have been getting in the way of my ever blogging. Case in point, this will be my first post in over a month. I know how important linking is (though it has gotten less important with Google), so I will try to resume doing it at some later point.

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.

I love Firefox. On Windows I use it for 97% of all my browsing, with IE 7 beta occupying the other 3% (if it was a choice between IE6 and anything else, I would choose anything else). One of the most helpful extensions for those of us in the “real world” is the View in IE extension. Once this is installed you can right click on any page in Firefox and click View in IE and voila! instant opening of IE with that exact page. No cutting, no pasting, no mess.

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.

It’s a Razr!

I’ve got a new cell phone, as of Saturday evening at around 8PM. What’s the big deal? Well, it’s a black RAZR:

That would be enough to go crazy about, but it’s replacing utter crap in the form of the Sony Ericsson T635. I’ve now used each model of this phone from the original iMac-inspired one on. My previous phone was the SE T610, and when that was stolen I lived out the remainder of my T-Mobile contract with an old Nokia. I then got the (then new) SE T635, hoping and hearing that they had indeed fixed some of the major flaws of the previous models. Alas, after about a year, I can safely say that not only have they not fixed those problems (hanging interface, no I/O interrupt system, bad joystick hardware implementation, etc.) but they actually introduced some new ones!

Anyway, this is supposed to be about how overjoyed I am with my new phone, the Motorola Razr V3 Black Edition. First, the geekiest thing I love:

Yup, that’s a standard mini USB connector right smack on the phone. In fact, it’s the ONLY connector the phone provides other than the cellular connection and the Bluetooth wireless. The included power plug is an AC/Mini USB cable. This is absolutely amazing for me – after years of struggling with Sony Ericsson’s flimsy proprietary connectors, I finally can connect my phone to anything over mini USB/USB. Proprietary connectors are not inherently evil. Case in point, my iPod mini uses Apple’s own private standard “Dock Connector” for connection to computers and other devices. But it has never broken on me, I have never had a problem with either the cable or the port on the iPod (am I jinxing myself) and believe me, I am not so gentle with either sometimes. SE’s connectors, on the other hand, even when I treated them like newborn babies, would stop working, need to be jiggled, and any time a cable went bad, it was back to eBay to see how much it would be for a new one this time, cause buying one of those charging cables out in the real world is just too damn expensive. OK, so I love the USB connection (the same as on recent Palms and Digital Cameras, like my fiancée’s Palm Z22 and our Canon S410).

(more…)

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?

Dave Winer, who is now using a mac for many things, is having some trouble with the latest release of Firefox, version 1.5 (rc2):

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.