May Contain Nuts

(Seriously, who names these products? Microsoft even lampooned themselves on their ludicrously overwrought names with their “Microsoft designs the iPod packaging” video, and yet they keep doing it!)

So, Windows Phone 7 Series. Phones. Yeah. I’ma just call it WP7 for short.

I have to give MS some serious kudos on this, actually. Despite the completely atrocious design-by-committee branding in the name of the product, they’ve taken a pretty damn bold step with WP7. Zero backwards compatibility with Windows Mobile 6.5 and earlier, strong emphasis on the retail consumer (to the point of tying media sync to the Zune software platform… will be interesting to see how this device plays out in corporate IT, given the holy hell that was raised about iTunes), minimal multitasking, and a complete and utter departure from the UI of not only Windows Mobile, but pretty much every other smartphone out there.

Conceptually, there is a great deal about WP7 to like, and I think Microsoft can easily position themselves to become a serious contender again in the mobile market that’s basically left them behind over the last 2.5 years (3.5 by the time Wp7 comes out, actually) since the release of the iPhone. Things like the live-updating, rich-content home screen tiles, the broad and deep integration with social networks like Facebook, and the concept- or task-oriented nature of the device’s software, rather than a strictly application-based usage model are things that are very interesting to me, and it’s good to see Microsoft intentionally differentiate itself from the rest of the market in such substantive ways. I think Windows Phone will live or die on this differentiation, rather than its branding as a Windows device (though as always, such branding is probably more beneficial than not).

I’m more ambivalent about the actual execution of the concepts put forth in the WP7 user experience though. The entire platform is built on the Zune HD interface model, and there’s no possibility of carriers overriding this interface as there was in the past with Windows Mobile (something I’m sure HTC is less than 100% pleased about), so I really, really hope you like the way the Zune HD behaves. I, personally, don’t.

Maybe it’s because I get a little OCD with my digital interfaces (having an uneven number of apps on one screen of my iPod is enough to annoy me until I “fix it”, even at the expense of my application grouping methodology… and don’t even get me started on the elaborate and complex maze of folders I use on the Mac to store everything), but the Zune HD’s UI just strikes me as lazily executed because of all the overflowing text and wasted space in many of the screens. I know large, thin, sans-serif type and bold, flat colors are “in vogue” right now, and they do make the device look very stylish, but I don’t think “hip” and “useful” necessarily converge all that often (I mean, have you seen Lady Gaga’s wardrobe?), and I kind of worry that MS is painting themselves into a corner with this UI being so closely tied to the branding of the platform. Chucker argued back at me that Apple’s Aqua interface has made considerable evolutions since its introduction in 2001 2000 with super-glossy buttons and translucent pinstripes, and I agree that Apple has done a very good job with keeping their OS’s interface fairly fresh and in-line with current trends. However, I think the changes Apple has made to Aqua in the past decade are largely superficial: tweaking gradients and transparencies more than anything else. At its core, Aqua is still very much the same as it was 10 years ago in terms of its appearance and behavior. The Zune UI, I think, faces a larger uphill battle against trendiness because so much of its UI is fundamentally not just trendy-looking, but trendy-feeling (again, overflowing text, large monochromatic iconography, whizzy spinny animations). Revamping that UI to keep up with the times without seriously altering the behavioral characteristics of the UI on a fairly fundamental level will probably be much more difficult for Microsoft than it has been for Apple, though I do wish them the best of luck.

My other gripe is related to the first, and it’s got to do with the design of the “hub” applications. I’m not personally a huge fan of the broad two-dimensional navigation in apps like Windows Media Center, because half the time a number of my options are invisible and inaccessible. Similarly, with the Zune UI, it can be hard to tell what all can be done in an application hub without first exploring it fully, which can take some time. This secretive UI concept also requires the user to maintain a much larger conceptual map of the application, as well as the navigational requirements needed to reach various far-flung regions, which strikes me as far more complex than the model which Apple has adopted for the iPhone. It’s bound to be a great interface for chic geeks, because Microsoft is pretty good at building interfaces that geeks and tech enthusiasts feel very comfortable with. I just wonder if the breadth of the navigational capabilities (and requirements) for some of the task hubs in WP7 will be off-putting to people who are less comfortable with digital devices.

As a furtherance to this point, I think Microsoft has misunderstood the utility of animation in a user interface. The WP7 animations are very slick, very intricate, and very dimensional, but they do very little to aid the user in visually navigating through the device’s software. Tapping a tile on the home screen causes the tile to angle away from your finger (which is a nice touch, assuming it actually responds contextually to where you’re pushing on it), but then everything spins off-screen and new content whizzes in seemingly from nowhere. There’s no real “physical” connection between these two layers of the interface the way there is when navigating through the iPhone. Tapping an application icon causes the program to “float up” to the surface, with the home screen UI proceeding out of the field of view. Movement within the application itself is generally very physical, both vertically (with inertial scrolling) and horizontally (with sliding displays). Exiting an application causes it to recede into the background, and the home screen UI falls back into place. These animations are very basic compared to those in WP7, but they also give the device a more physical and connected feel, whereas the WP7 animations just seem to be there because “everybody likes animation in their UI these days”.

I realize I’m doing a lot of complaining about a device which I said at the beginning of this post was a very good idea. The reason is, I think that it is a very good idea, just that the execution of that idea doesn’t fit my personal tastes.

I would love to see some of the more dynamic capabilities of WP7 come to the iPhone, and I think Apple should focus more on providing platforms for developers to build into, rather than just an operating system to build on top of. For example, the Photos application on the iPhone is very basic, and if you want to get photos from Facebook, Flickr, or MobileMe, you have to go into different applications to access them. Even the Apple TV does this better, with a Photos “category” where you can move between services with comparative ease. Better than even that model, though, is WP7’s, where photos just show up from wherever they’re posted, all collected in one place.

Similarly, the People hub is another great idea, which ideally third parties can build into to expand its functionality without adding full-blown applications to the system. Consolidating Contacts, Twitter, Facebook, etc. into one place is a really cool concept. I don’t think it would work quite as well for geeky folks who have multiple Twitter accounts (unless the UI got really creative and potentially overly-complex), but for the average Joe who may have only just figured out what Twitter even is, it’s a very slick implementation.

I also like the ability to pin pretty much anything to the home screen, from hubs to applications to individual items in a hub (like a person or an album). It gives the home screen much more utility for people than a collection of icons with numeric badges on them.

I think a lot of the initial development for WP7 is going to be oriented towards expanding the functionality of these hubs through plugin-style programs, rather than strictly fully-fledged application-based development. Given that the platform will also run whatever new applications developers create, it will be interesting to see how these two branches of functionality compliment or conflict with each other going forward. I suspect WP7 apps will be held to an even higher standard than iPhone apps because of the increased capacity for integration with the various content hubs, as well as the obviously unique and distinctive Zune-like UI. I just hope Windows Mobile developers are up to the considerable challenge after the past decade-plus reign of Windows Mobile’s often atrociously-designed and now-archaic-looking UI.

I’d also be interested in seeing what exactly Microsoft decides to do with the Zune from here out. Given that the Zune and WP7 share a pretty obvious commonality in their UI department, I wonder if they’re both running the same basic OS, with considerable efforts being made to expand its capabilities for the phone. If that’s the case, I wonder if Microsoft will attempt to do with the Zune HD what Apple has done with the iPod Touch: create a gateway product with a lower barrier-to-entry that people can use and get used to without the risk or expense of a phone contract or data plan. If they do, it will definitely be worth keeping an eye on, because Microsoft always plays to win, and while their efforts thus far in the MP3 player market have been pretty dismal at gaining any traction, coupling the Zune HD with a completely overhauled Windows Mobile Phone 7 to create a new Microsoft-controlled mobile computing platform could start driving greater adoption of both devices.

One last thing that wasn’t discussed at the reveal, is whether updates for the OS will be pushed to all users, either free or for a minor fee. This is something that the iPhone platform does pretty consistently better than anyone else, so hopefully Microsoft is learning a lesson from Apple and pressuring carriers and handset makers to allow OS upgrades without making people buy a new phone or resort to tech-nerd solutions like custom boot ROMs.

It will definitely be interesting to see where this goes from here. Unfortunately, I think the biggest problem Microsoft has now is that they’ve tipped their hand a full 8-10 months before their first product will hit store shelves, which gives the competition (especially the whenever-we-feel-like-updating-it Android platform) a considerable head start on getting their copy machines running.

Update: Chucker tells me I’m wrong about the intro date for Aqua being 2001. While I was going off of OS X’s general availability, it was demoed much earlier.

So Microsoft announced yet another critical IE security vulnerability (shocker, I know…) that enables an attacker to access and view your computer’s entire filesystem. While the vulnerability is mitigated by IE’s Protected Mode in Vista and Win7, 66% of the Internet is still using Windows XP, and 20% of those people are still running IE6. That’s a huge attack surface.

While this once again provides an excellent argument against tying your HTML rendering engine so deeply into the operating system that such attacks are even possible in the first place, Microsoft’s proposed workaround illustrates an even WORSE idea (from the Ars piece):

… enable Internet Explorer Network Protocol Lockdown for Windows XP. It requires editing the Windows registry, but thankfully Microsoft has created a “Fix it for me” for this workaround, available at KB 980088. Just click the “Fix this problem” link and you’re good to go. The Fix It automates Network Protocol Lockdown and can be run on individual systems and deployed by enterprises through their automated systems.

Really, you’re going to let an application with open access to the Internet modify the registry because a very possibly untrusted web page told it to?! What the hell, MS?!

Also, anyone who says “well if the link triggers a security warning that’s okay then” is an idiot. The users who would most benefit from this automated resolution method are the ones least likely to either understand or care about the security implications of such an action, and because of Windows’ tedious tendency to ask the user to approve damn near everything they do, those users are going to be trained to click “OK” just to make the dialog go away. It boggles my mind that such low-level OS-impacting capabilities are exposed to such completely un-trustable resources like remote web content.

It seems like IE6 (and Windows XP in general) is becoming an ever-increasing risk to individual and corporate data security on an almost weekly basis now. I wonder how much longer it will take companies to realize that the cost of overhauling their IE6-only internal web applications is far cheaper than the cost of losing enormous piles of sensitive or even classified information to a hacker in China…

I’ve been ruminating a lot on the approach that various companies, like Microsoft and Apple, have taken to the mobile computing space, and have a few random thoughts that are way too long for Twitter, but not exactly coherent enough to be considered an article or anything, since I don’t really have an ultimate point here. Anyway, I’ll just ramble endlessly as usual and see if anyone cares .

Microsoft’s approach has been very similar to their hugely successful approach to the desktop (and laptop) computer market: provide a powerful, extensible operating system that can run on damn near anything, and set few or no minimum requirements for hardware. This gives hardware partners an enormous amount of flexibility in how they design their phones and other devices, which they love, and it gives the market considerable differentiation between products, which both consumers and manufacturers love.

On the desktop, this approach’s greatest strength is a developer’s ability to write an application and be assured that it will, generally speaking, work everywhere (or at least, on every machine that meets the minimum requirements). In the mobile space, this is perhaps its greatest weakness instead. Because phone manufacturers are very closeted when it comes to hardware specifications, it’s much more difficult to tell if you’ll be able to run a given application. The smaller display space and variable dimensions of the screen make it difficult for developers to build truly effective and intuitive interfaces for their applications, because unlike the desktop’s relatively spacious screen real estate, a phone has very little, and building to the wrong display size can make your app feel either over-crowded on smaller screens or vacant and featureless on larger ones.

Further frustrating Microsoft’s approach has been the reluctance from carriers and/or hardware manufacturers to allow users to upgrade the OS when new releases become available (I’m also aware of tech-oriented work-arounds to this problem, but the average user isn’t going to want to futz with custom boot ROMs). Often the only way to get the new OS is to buy a new phone, and this often comes with a re-extension of the carrier’s contract, which is an unpalatable option for many people. This makes it much more difficult to ensure that users are on a new version of your OS, so developers are hesitant to start using any new features that these new OS releases make available to them. As a result, those users who do manage to upgrade or get a new device see very little difference in the user experience, and this further demotivates people from getting new devices.

Google’s Andriod platform seems to be succumbing to the same pitfall, in that there are no clear rules to manufactureres for implementation or hardware usage, the application market is already starting to fragment because not every app will run on every device, and once again carriers and/or hardware manufacturers are reluctant to offer the latest version of the OS to existing customers. It will be interesting to see if Google’s Nexus One phone can serve as a good example to other manufacturers on how to build a first-class Andriod device, and if the platform can resist or overcome the fragmentation and poor application device compatibility issues that Windows Mobile has presently.

By contrast, Apple’s approach, while also very similar to their own desktop strategy, has been far more effective in gaining market share and mind share. Apple treats their desktop line-up like a consumer electronics line-up rather than an a-la carte buffet as most computer manufacturers do. As a result, they have easy-to-understand delineations between each product category, and it’s fairly easy to chart their machines in a straight line from least to most capable all the way up the price range. While this does make buying a new Mac easier for first-time buyers than staring at the (admittedly improved of late) sea of complementary options on a site like Dell’s, the lack of cheap, low-end computing devices does limit the reach of this strategy for many consumers.

Apple extended this approach into the mobile space with the iPhone, creating a single, simple product line-up of identical devices differentiated only by storage capacity, and varying in price along a single axis. The hardware line-up has fragmented slightly with the latest iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch devices because of the improved graphics performance, but generally speaking, the target market for an application built on the iPhone OS is “every iPhone OS device ever sold”. This makes things much easier for developers, because they don’t have to worry about market fragmentation and reduced sales as a result. It also makes things much simpler for consumers, because they can buy applications with considerably more confidence, and know that their device will be able to run them. The fact that the iPhone platform provides a built-in place for users to look for 3rd-party applications also simplifies the purchasing process and undoubtedly increases sales, which may explain why Apple’s app store model is being replicated on every other platform under the sun.

A lot of what this boils down to, I think, is the simple fact that people want different things from a mobile device than they do from a desktop or desktop-class computer. With the iPhone, iPod Touch, and now the iPad, Apple seems to understand this difference in usage. On the other hand, Microsoft and – to a much lesser extent – Google seem to be pressing onward with their “desktop in your pocket” usage model, which fits awkwardly into such small devices and creates considerable usability issues. A phone is – first and foremost – a phone, not something to write Word documents or build 3D models with. By and large it’s something that people use incidentally for short periods of time, as opposed to the desktop’s “sit down and stay a while” usage model. The iPhone OS seems much more suited to this sort of interaction than Windows Mobile, though with WM finally getting support for capacitive touch-screens, Microsoft is at least trying to move to a more incidental use-friendly input model.

I will be interested to see whether Windows Mobile 7 turns the ship around and starts pushing into more user-friendly waters, but I think that despite the comparatively paltry collection of offerings in Apple’s mobile product line-up, they are better served by their sales approach when it comes to the average user who just wants something with which they can make phone calls, check the weather, and play a game of checkers. Choice is good (as is competition, which is why I’d rather see MS get their mobile OS into the current millennium than tell them to quit while they’re still [slightly] ahead), but sometimes giving people choices they don’t need to make within a platform just creates problems.

(As an aside, I think it’s interesting that it wasn’t until the iPhone SDK was released that gaming on mobile phones really became a big, profitable deal… Nokia tried entering that market at least twice but their devices never seemed to get any traction, and I could probably count on one hand the number of games that exist on Windows Mobile.)

I think it’s time to turn to the interwebz for help with this one… I’m looking for a simple, snappy TV listings app for the iPhone. I’ve tried several, and while they tended to start out decent, they’ve all suffered from bloat and feature creep in successive releases.

I’ve tried i.TV, the comcast listings app, and What’s On. i.TV ultimately got so bloated and unstable on my iPod that I just gave up on it. Comcast’s app had annoying full-screen ads that showed up on every launch of the app, and had a generally lackluster interface IMO. What’s On was good for a while, but it’s starting to get bloated now too, and is also starting to use more and more ads throughout the UI, including the annoying full-screen ads on launch.

Does anyone have suggestions? I’d even be willing to shell out a couple of bucks for an ad-free app, so paid apps are by no means off the table here.

So it’s been more than a day since Apple’s big announcement, and I thought I’d weigh in on it with my own thoughts, for whatever they may be worth.

First off, I’m not sure if this will be the game changer Apple thinks it will be. I can see potential in it, but I don’t think it will change the computing landscape outside of the portable realm… The desktop and even the pro laptop have too many things that they’re better at than what can be accomplished on a mobile device, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. I also don’t see this replacing PMPs and smartphones entirely, since it’s just too big to be practical in those terms.

That said, I can see what sort of market Apple is targeting with this device, and it’s not the computer whiz population. Those of us willing to put up with poor performance and shoddy build quality in exchange for a mini laptop that can run a browser and an email client at the same time, and theoretically run the same applications as a desktop machine, are probably going to be ill-served by the iPad, and that’s fine. I think there is still plenty of space in the market for things like the Eee PC and the MSI Wind for those who want a familiar desktop operating system and the capabilities that go along with it. However, the poor market performance of tablet devices thus far seems to indicate that for the average consumer, the existing products are not the sort of experience they’re looking for.

I think Apple’s take on the mobile space has been vert refreshing compared to the offerings from Redmond. Microsoft wants to put Windows on everything, even when its user interface and complexity get in the way of accomplishing everyday tasks. Apple on the other hand has built an entirely new interface for their mobile platform from the ground up, with the explicit goal of making it user-friendly, touch-oriented (rather than simply touch-capable), and intensely intuitive to use. The key factor to their success with this platform, I think, is how spatially-oriented it is. The interface behaves like a physical object and responds naturally and intuitively to user input. It also provides considerable visual feedback when changing screens, so users have an easy time understanding how they got where they are, and how to get back to where they were. Apple has also done a great job of building an entire interaction system on 3 basic gestures: tap, swipe, and pinch. Without expanding their gesture library, Apple has built much more advanced functionality into the iPad OS, which is both incredible and praise-worthy. It would be easier to create all manner of new gestures for more complex tasks, but Apple has resisted this impulse and built on a simple interface language that their users are already familiar with.

Apple seems poised to capitalize on the ultra-portable tablet computing market by taking what they learned from the iPhone and scaling it up, rather than trying to pare down Mac OS X to fit in the confines of a tablet space. Again, this is a clearly different strategy from that of the rest of the industry, which seems intent on trying to put the familiar Windows desktop on even the lowliest and least-capable portable devices possible. I think Apple has the right idea, though. Desktop operating systems are needlessly complicated for everyday one-off tasks like checking email or browsing the web. The iPhone OS, on the other hand, is built to be always-on, highly responsive, and easy to directly manipulate with your fingers. For a device intended to be used for quick, light computing, that sort of OS makes much more sense than Mac OS X or Windows.

I’ve seen a lot of people decry the iPad as a giant iPod Touch, and while this is true on it’s face, it ignores the depth and richness of the iPhone OS app space, and what additional capabilities a large-format display like the iPad’s can afford developers in the future. In this way, the iPad isn’t really aiming to solve any specific problem; instead, it’s a vessel into which people can put their own problems to be solved.

I’ve also seen a lot of complaints about the lack of multitasking on the iPad, and to a certain extent, I can agree with this as being something that Apple will eventually need to address as the platform matures, especially on the larger-screen devices. Being able to run apps in the background like Pandora or Skype would be a huge boon to the device’s capabilities, and I think it will get here eventually. For now, though, Apple is focusing on making the OS do one thing at a time very, very well, and maturing the OS before wildly expanding what can be done via background processes. In terms of productivity though, a singletasking OS like the iPhone’s isn’t that much farther behind an underpowered multitasking OS on smaller netbook devices. iPhone apps remember their state far better than desktop apps, and in general they launch much more quickly than their desktop brethren too, so little time is lost swapping between apps.

People have also, bizarrely, been lampooning Apple’s decision to develop a version of iWork for the iPad. I think it’s a wonderful idea, and I think charging $10 per app is beyond reasonable considering how much power there is in the apps, and that the desktop suite sells for $80. I can’t help but wonder what Microsoft would charge for an Office suite on this device… (incidentally, I’d love to see Office on the iPad; competition is good!). I think folks who wanted to see iWork on the iPhone are reaching; it’s just not something that translates down to a screen of that size without becoming practically useless. The iPad screen, however, is much larger and the interface far more capable than the iPhone’s, and I think a productivity suite makes sense on such a device for light work that can be transferred to and completed on a primary work machine.

I want to close by presenting a theoretical use case for the iPad, since so many people seem utterly perplexed by who could possibly use it. I will be taking a few liberties by assuming the iPad-specific development of a few apps that already exist on the iPhone, and treating the iBookstore as a mature product, but I hope you’ll agree that none of the assumptions I make are out of the realm of possibility.

Assume, if you will, that I’m a college student with an iMac at home. I also have a 16GB iPad that I got for an educational discount at $479, and have been able to buy most of my textbooks on the iBookstore for a fair amount less than it would have cost at the college bookstore. I have a reasonably sizeable iTunes library, a handful of games, the iPad-optimized version of Notebooks from the App Store for taking notes in class, and the iPad and desktop versions of the iWork suite. While other students are lugging around 10 to 20 pounds of textbooks, an iPod, and a notebook full of paper (and possibly a laptop as well), I can grab my iPad and take off to class with nothing else. After class, I can go to the library to research a paper, taking notes and working on a preliminary outline in Pages while roaming the aisles. On my way home, I plug my iPad into my FM transmitter and listen to some tunes while I drive. Once I’m home, I sync my iPad and keep working on my paper on my iMac. The next morning, I sync it back to the iPad along with a Keynote presentation that’s due today and head back to class. To present, I just plug my iPad into the projector with the docking cable and get started immediately. Between classes, I can hop on the college wifi network to browse the web, or play a quick game of Star Defense while I wait for the teacher to arrive. For the sake of brevity, I will leave out the scene where I get mugged for my iPad in the parking garage.

I think this device will be most popular in the educational market, especially higher education, but its usefulness as a teaching and learning aid can be seen at almost every grade level. If Apple scores big anywhere, it will probably be there, especially with their aggressive pricing and educational discounts.

The iPad may essentially be a giant iPod Touch, but there is a ton of potential in such a device for people who want an appliance-like computer, not a car-like one. Apple is going after the 10,000-miles-without-an-oil-change “it should work like my microwave” crowd with this, not the gearhead crowd that replaces their car’s computer ROM or changes their own transmission fluid, and I know for a fact that there are more of the former than the latter in the consumer marketplace.

I have some more thoughts to expound upon, but it’s late and this post is already beyond long enough as it is.

So now that I finally have a replacement for my dead external media drive and things seem to be on their way toward stabilizing on the bug front, I’m looking at getting a copy of Snow Leopard to install on my iMac at home. I’m seriously considering doing for SL what I did for Leopard, which is to wipe the drive and do a fresh installation of the OS to get rid of any cruft that’s accumulated in the intervening 2 years (and there’s been quite a bit of that, to be sure).

I’m also going over all of the applications I use/have/installed-but-never-touch with an eye toward upgrading or replacing some of them as needed, keeping the ones I really like, and dumping the rest. Most of the “plugins” I use in Safari are already Snow Leopard-compatible, and I’ve found a possible replacement for the one that isn’t so that I can run the browser in 64-bit mode. I’m taking a long, hard look at Photoshop and contemplating whether I’m going to even bother re-installing it again once I upgrade. I have a couple of applications I’m eyeing as possible replacements, like DrawIt, which, in addition to Pixelmator, covers pretty much everything I ever seem to use Photoshop for in the first place, at 1/6th the price (plus hopefully a considerable boost to productivity that comes from not fighting with Adobe’s POS software).

The other application I’m eyeing for retirement is Fetch. It’s served me pretty well throughout my time on the Mac, and is one of the first apps I actually bought after CyberDuck started behaving poorly on my G5, but its interface seems dated, and if I’m going to have to shell out for a fully-Snow Leopard-compatible update anyway, I might as well play the field and see what I can find that might work a bit better. The alternative I’m currently looking at most favorably is Flow. I especially like the column view support it boasts (I live in column view now, and hate that Windows has nothing comparable), as well as the general look and feel of the application as a whole. Added bonus: Flow doesn’t seem to try and replace my cursor with a running dog which, since upgrading to Leopard, has been a spasm of flickering cursor icon fighting.

Sadly there doesn’t seem to be a downloadable version of DrawIt that doesn’t already require Snow Leopard, so I can’t really play with that app until after I take the plunge, but I do intend to fiddle with Flow tonight, and if nothing else I’ll suffer the indignity of Adobe’s absurdly bloated and unstable crapware until I can find something better if DrawIt and Pixelmator don’t measure up enough. I just have to get a couple of lingering things done in Photoshop first before upgrading to Snow Leopard so I can carry on without it and not lose anything in terms of time or effort.

I’m also hoping to pick up a copy of Versions, but it’s kinda pricey and I don’t have a lot of funding to lay out for stuff like that right now. Maybe in a while, and until then I can use something else for SVN, like svnX (don’t tell me to use the command line. I frankly hate doing things by command line; it’s just not how my brain works).

So I sort of twatted about this earlier, but I wanted to go a bit more in-depth, so I’m blogging about it as well. Thank god I’m at work or I might be compelled to do a video commentary and record a song in GarageBand… I’m a bit loopy today.

Anyway, ever since NewsGator announced that they were going to be getting out of the RSS sync business, I’ve been trying to come up with some form of reliable system that doesn’t utilize NewsGator’s products. Their track record for handling major conversions is pretty much 0 for 2 now, with an earlier botching of their now-extinct browser-based interface and the most recent epic FAIL on deactivating their sync service and migrating their users to Google Reader, which is taking place almost a month late and with seriously rushed products. Given that, I’m not exactly confident in them to be able to continue to provide quality products or services in the future, and so I’ve been trying to find a different way of handling RSS feeds since the announcement came out on Mysterium weekend.

For the interim period, I’ve just been using the existing MobileMe sync support in NewNewsWire (or as NNW 3.1.7 still calls it, .Mac) to sync feeds between home and work. It’s worked acceptably, but by no means perfectly (in comparison with the practically flawless NewsGator sync), with feed items regularly showing up on other machines despite being marked as read and freshly synced, and requiring either a manual sync command or quitting/relaunching the app to force a MobileMe sync operation. It’s also left me completely without a mobile sync solution, as NNW 1.0 for the iPhone doesn’t provide any means of syncing beyond NewsGator’s service. While not vital, it is nice to be able to check news when I’m either out and about (and have wifi access) or when I’m chilling out at home and don’t want to sit at my computer to read, and I’ve been missing it more and more of late.

I’d previously tried to find a Mac-based RSS client that syncs with Google Reader, since it seems to now be the only remaining cloud-based sync service in existence, but was unable to really find anything that worked as well for actually reading content as NNW does. Apps like EventBox provide sync capability, but their presentation seems to be geared more towards casual use, and the showmanship of the UI gets in the way of their functionality, while Mail and Safari’s built-in RSS support is also geared toward limited usage and still provides no viable mobile solution.

I finally got tired today of not having a mobile or forward-compatible desktop alternative to RSS feed syncing (NNW 3.1.7 seems to work with Snow Leopard, but future releases are always a gamble) and went looking for solutions again. This time, I stumbled across Gruml, which is still in beta but which seems to be under active and rapid development, and which has a presentation very similar to NetNewsWire. It’s still a little rough around the edges to be sure, but I’m liking it so far in my trial usage today.

I’m also considering picking up a copy of Byline for my iPod Touch for mobile Google Reader access. I’ve thus far been quite unimpressed with NNW for iPhone’s functionality in 1.x, and the complaints leveled against the 2.0 release are not encouraging (up to and including the purported obnoxious behavior of ads in the free version… I’m fine with ads: I use several ad-supported free apps, but they need to be unobtrusive).

I think NewsGator has shot themselves in the foot a bit with how horrendously they’ve botched this move to Google Reader for sync services. They’ve basically thrown the barn door open and told users they can sync with Google Reader or get stuffed, and then provided utterly un-compelling in-house solutions for consuming the content that is now being synced through an open service. I suspect their user base is going to shrink considerably as a result, because I can’t be the only person who’s been put off by their handling of this transition.

Those who dislike listening to people gripe about the ever-advancing march of change might want to skip this post, because it’s largely a “get off my lawn” complaint aimed at NewsGator…

So for whatever reason, NewsGator, a seemingly popular online service to sync one’s RSS feeds between multiple platforms, is discontinuing its RSS sync services to focus on… whatever nebulously vague “enterprise” solution it is that they offer (I’ve read over their website a few times in the past, and aside from being big on the buzzwords, I have no idea what else it is NewsGator actually does). As a result, they’re transitioning everyone to Google Reader.

This is all well and good for most folks who are okay with the Big G knowing everything about their lives, but the way NewsGator has gone about this migration is asinine to say the least (and I swear to the gods, “asinine” should be spelled “assinine”, because it only makes sense). They essentially provided 30 days notice that they would be permanently shutting down their service, and don’t seem to have given the various developers that they employ – who create the applications relying on NewsGator’s services for their sync functionality – any more of a heads-up than their users, as the developer of NetNewsWire and NetNewsWire iPhone has apparently been scrambling to get two new stable apps out before the deadline. This is especially crucial for the iPhone app since it’s useless without a NewsGator account to sync with.

In addition to shutting down their online sync, NewsGator is plowing rather large and obtrusive-looking ad panels into their desktop applications (with, of course, a way to turn the ads off if you pay for the privilege). Now, I don’t mind ads as long as they stay out of my way. In fact, I’m using the ad-supported versions of several iPhone applications, as well as the ad-supported version of Tweetie for the Mac. However, given NewsGator’s previous decision to axe its pay-only policy for NetNewsWire and FeedDemon only to reverse course and start saddling users with ads after that plan apparently didn’t work out as well as they expected, I don’t know if I can really trust them to keep providing me something I’m interested in using. The botched manner in which they’ve handled this forced migration to Google Reader is not helping their standing in my eyes either.

Now, I have a few options. First, I could suck it up and deal with the ads, wait until the end of the month, and continue on happy as you please once the iPhone app comes out and I migrate to Google Reader. This requires perhaps the least amount of effort, but NewsGator has gotten under my skin with this move, and I’m not really inclined to put up with it.

Second, I could pay to get rid of the ads, but that still has me giving money to NewsGator. Again, given their shoddy handling of this and past large-scale changes to their service (the move to the “improved” NewsGator Online feed reader last year was equally terrible), I’m not inclined to put a lot of faith in them not to screw me over at some point in the future. I love the way NNW works, but the company paying for the development presently drives me up a wall.

Third, I could stick with the current release of NNW – 3.1.7 – and sync it using MobileMe between home and work. It would, however, mean I’d completely lose access to my updated feeds on my iPod, and via the web in a pinch. I’m rarely in a situation where I need to pull up my RSS feeds without having access to one or the other machines these days though, and NNW iPhone’s inability to cache anything but the text of a feed item for offline viewing is annoying at best (please tell me somebody’s iPhone RSS reader caches images).

Fourth, I could move to Google Reader, which is pretty much my only other option for RSS syncing after August anyway, and replace NNW and NNW iPhone with different apps. Unfortunately, I’ve had little success so far today trying to track down a Mac app that syncs with Google Reader that isn’t NNW 3.2. I saw EventBox mentioned, and gave it a spin, but its handling of RSS feeds is for casual users at best; the UI is lovely, but the keyboard shortcuts are bizarre, there’s no way to sort the list from oldest to newest (I’ll admit, I’m opposite man. I like having new items at the bottom so I can arrow down from least to most relevant content quickly), and the “article preview” view is enormous. Running the app at a non-fullscreen resolution, the best I could do without making the articles themselves cramped in the in-app viewer was get two previews to display at a time. It makes plowing through a backlog of Engadget posts more difficult than it needs to be.

Besides EventBox, I can’t really find anything else that syncs with Google Reader that isn’t either Google Reader in Safari, Google Reader in Firefox, Google Reader in a Site-Specific Browser (i.e. Fluid or Prism), or Google Reader in a Firefox add-on. Considering that I really dislike the way that Google Reader displays its content (it’s perfectly acceptable, I just don’t like it personally… it doesn’t work for me), that pretty much nixes all of those options right there. No amount of Stylish CSS or Greasemonkey scripts are going to give me a list-plus-viewer two-up option in Google Reader. It’s either Article View, or List View, where clicking on a list item blows away the list view and displays the whole article inline with the list. Grr!

I guess if worst came to worst I could go back to reading RSS in Safari, and hope that MobileMe would sync the read status of the feeds between home and work, but that still leaves me without a mobile option, because I don’t think Mobile Safari supports RSS feeds.

For now, I think I’m going to try doing the MobileMe sync on NNW 3.1.7, disable auto-updates, and see how it goes for the next week or so of desktop-only sync fun. If anyone has any suggestions on where to get a NNW-like Google Reader app for the Mac in the meantime though, I’d appreciate it.

I’ve been ruminating on this for a while, and I’ve come to the conclusion that Microsoft still isn’t taking Internet Explorer very seriously. Sure, they’re taking it seriously enough to continue development and make overtures to improved standards compliance, but let’s face it: Microsoft is not funding IE’s development because it wants to make the web a better development platform. Microsoft is funding IE only because browsers like Firefox, Safari, and Chrome are starting to seriously erode the monopoly that Microsoft held over the browser market for the better part of 5 years, and they want that share back. The problem is, this is precisely why Microsoft is still losing ground in the battle for browser market share: they’re doing it for the wrong reasons. In fact, Microsoft – and especially cheerleaders for the company -have been taking what seems to be an increasingly hostile role towards web developers who dare to argue that Microsoft isn’t doing enough to satisfy their needs. The attitude seems to be one of “you’ll use it and you’ll like it, now STFU!” This from the company whose CEO famously leapt around a stage screaming “DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!” Blamer had it exactly right… the way to build a platform is through developers… nobody will buy it if it won’t do what they want. What boggles my mind is that they’ve let other companies and organizations completely trounce them when it comes to the web as a platform.

WebKit and Gecko have been blowing IE’s Triton engine out of the water for years now, and despite Microsoft’s best efforts to play catch-up, the gap is widening. Gecko and WebKit already support several components of the HTML 5 specification, such as the <audio> and <video> tags, as well as offline storage databases and numerous portions of the CSS 3 spec, most notably stuff like border-radius, @font-face (for reals, not the proprietary MS implementation), and text-shadow. They seem like such minor things, but they really can make a world of difference in a web design, and doing them with CSS rather than Photoshop makes it so much more flexible and compatible.

Meanwhile, the IE team gives us dubiously-useful Web Slices, occasionally-useful Accelerators, tab grouping (which I find both useful and supremely annoying), and the bare minimum of CSS 2.1 and HTML 4 compliance. Their JavaScript engine is orders of magnitude slower than every other competitor, no matter how they care to doctor their statistics on the matter, and still lacks some DOM selection and manipulation methods. And while their Developer Tools are certainly much appreciated, they’ve driven me up the wall more times than I care to count because of how poorly-written they are, especially compared to Firebug, which is pretty much the gold standard for browser developer tools.

It’s really no wonder that developers and designers are starting to actively revolt against Microsoft’s browser platform. We were ignored for almost five years, and have been getting pretty marginal improvements at a dreadfully slow pace since development started up again in the face of an impending Firefox Apocalypse. Even today, Microsoft is still more concerned about making sure the HTML file you saved to your hard drive in 1997 will render properly than they are in ensuring that their browser can compete in the current fast-paced browser market.

This brings me back to my main point, namely that Microsoft isn’t taking IE seriously. (Or perhaps, that Microsoft isn’t taking the web seriously. Still.) There seems to be a fair amount of schizophrenia at Microsoft about how to handle the web, and it doesn’t help that they’re a massive company trying to compete against all comers. The simple existence of Silverlight as a Flash competitor is evidence that they’re dealing with a relatively fragmented web strategy aimed at dominance rather than support. It also, I think, hampers efforts to ensure that IE supports the latest and greatest HTML/CSS standards, because the counter-argument (which I’ve actually heard a few too many times by now) is simply “do it in Silverlight”.

Further, even the Windows Mobile team isn’t taking IE seriously. They shipped Windows Mobile 6.5 with Internet Explorer Mobile 6. And if you think the 6 is a typo, or somehow a misrepresentation of the IE version to keep it in line with the WinMo release number, you’d be sadly mistaken. Microsoft shipped the Internet Explorer 6 engine on a new product in the year 2009. It’s likely that release timetables kept them from even remotely being able to put IE 8 into WinMo 6.5, and it’s possible that architectural differences between Windows and WinMo prevented them from bundling IE 7, but simply put, it’s inexcusable and frankly embarrassing that an 8-year-old product has been bundled as the default browser on a new mobile OS in the year 2009. Blessedly, Microsoft has elected to provide proper 24-bit PNG handling and a more recent version of the still-glacial IE JavaScript engine for this build of IE 6, but Triton is still the same old non-compliant, glitchy, buggy POS that it’s always been on the desktop. If this situation doesn’t change with Windows Mobile 7, it will be just another nail in IE’s coffin of obsolescence. But hey, at least they’ve finally gotten away from IE Mobile 4…

What I’m most interested in seeing is what they do with the browser in the forthcoming touchscreen Zune HD. The Zune folks (like so many at MS) seem to be big believers in NIH, judging by the fact that the Zune desktop software and Windows Media Player development continue apace simultaneously for no apparent reason. As a result, any number of things could happen with this new Zune. They could go with the WinMo build of IE Mobile 6, and be an utter laughing stock. They could go with a third-party browser, like Skyfire or Fennec (though given Fennec’s current level of development, that seems unlikely). They could even build their own browser based on WebKit or Gecko (or, quixotically, the latest version of Triton). It’ll be interesting to see which possibility wins out, though I’d personally put more money on the IE Mobile 6 possibility than anything else, with a home-grown Triton-based browser a close second.

The really bizarre part of this whole escapade is that the IE team themselves seem fairly committed to reaching feature parity with other browsers’ rendering engines, and other departments within Microsoft are actively promoting the expiration of IE 6 support in future releases (like SharePoint 2010, which is opting to focus on ensuring broad compatibility with IE7 & 8, Firefox 3, and Safari [and speaking as someone who has the IE Tab Firefox extension installed just to deal with the slow-ass SharePoint 2007 at work, this is a welcome development]).

It may be a furtherance of the schizophrenic behavior I noted earlier, but some portions of MS seem to be trying really hard to embrace the modern, open web, and all that that entails, while others are still clinging – either through neglect, laziness, or stubbornness – to the outmoded days when IE 6 controlled about 98% of the browser market. As a whole, I really don’t think Microsoft is willing to put the sort of serious effort into Internet Explorer that would actually make it a modern, first-rate, first-class browser. It may be because there’s no profit engine behind such a move when other proprietary technologies like Silverlight can be used to much more powerful effect to control the web rather than operate within it, I don’t know. But I do know that Microsoft is starting to turn off wave after wave of their vaunted developers with their ongoing antipathy toward pushing Internet Explorer into the same category as Safari, Chrome, and Firefox. There doesn’t seem to be any sign of them trying to turn that ship around, and because of it, their market share will continue to decline, to the betterment of the rest of the web.

Recently, the game development IDE I use to pretend to build games was updated, and it was pretty substantial. The IDE now runs on both Mac and Windows, and while it’s always been able to build for both platforms, I could only ever use the Indie version (which is 1/10th the cost of the Professional version) to build for the Mac. This in and of itself wasn’t exactly a bad thing, but it did rather substantially limit the market I could target. The new version removes that restriction, favoring less severe (but still occasionally frustrating) restrictions like realtime shadows, post-processing effects, render-to-texture capabilities, and most live asset streaming. The practical upshot of this is that I can now reach a potential audience that’s 90% larger than it would have been before.

Now all I have to do is freaking build a game… and on that note, I fired up my long-ignored Labyrinth project a couple of days ago. Blessedly, the control scheme still works flawlessly, and the marble behavior is possibly even a bit better than it was in the older versions of the IDE (PhysX implementation improvements FTW).

My biggest stumbling block with this game has been coming up with unique board designs that are challenging without being Nintendo-hard, and that take advantage of the possibilities of a digital version of Labyrinth. Since I’ve hit something of a roadblock in the board design department, I’ve decided to just build what I have and go from there. Maybe modeling some of these boards will give me the creative boost I need to design some more. As it stands, I’ve got somewhere between 10 and 15 designs already, which I think makes for a decent low-end, low-price game. If I can work out how, I’d like to leave this thing somewhat open-ended and provide downloadable content packages for a fee, so that I can always return to this game if I need a break from another project.

So, tonight, I build Labyrinth boards. Tomorrow, I work on the game’s UI. Since the control scheme for the game is already in place (I even have server-side high score reporting, so all of the really hard stuff is pretty much done), I can hopefully get this thing released by the end of the month. Fingers crossed!

By the way, if anybody has any experience with or knowledge about selling games on services like Steam, MacGamesArcade, or Greenhouse, let me know, eh? I’d like to hit as big of a target audience as possible, and the fewer billing-related things I have to worry about, the better.