Derek K. Miller - Penmachine words music comment - Vancouver, Canada

I used to teach courses about Microsoft Word. Stuff like this (via John Gruber) is what made me stop.

Labels: apple, macosx, microsoft, publicspeaking, software

I summarized my opinion of the proposed $45 billion takeover of Yahoo! by Microsoft in my comment on Robert Scoble's post:

I think if the merger happens, it will take ages to bring the two companies together, Yahoo!’s best people will bail out, and by the time the smoke clears, Google will have lapped Yahoosoft/Microhoo several times. Bad for both sides, and in the end for users, in my opinion.

Then again, I know nothing about running a business. These are just my instincts.

Here's what some other people had to say:

• Scott Rosenberg
• Andrew Leonard
• Kara Swisher
• Jeff Jarvis
• Dave Winer
• Angela Gunn
• John Gruber
• Marshall Kirkpatrick
• Kevin Kellher at GigaOM
• Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch
• Merlin Mann
• Tim Bray
• Adam Engst at TidBITS
• Farhad Manjoo
• Time Weber at the BBC
• Dave Pell
• Scott Schnaars
• John Siracusa
• Fake Steve Jobs
• David Drummond, Senior VP at Google

Labels: geekery, google, microsoft, money, web, yahoo

A bunch of stuff I've been accumulating over the past few months:

• Types of coffee beverages
• U.S. regional pizza styles
• Build your own Apple Store
• Google Maps mashup of how Greater Vancouver would be flooded by a 4-metre sea level rise (move around to check out your own area nearly anywhere in the world)
• J Allard's thoughts on the first year of the Zune
• Very useful Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) reference for web developers
• How well does restoring from Apple's new Time Machine backup work?
• Intro to Fully Flared features slo-mo skateboarding, explosions
• When you post to your blog, where does the information go?
• Tips to give presentations more like Steve Jobs
• What other sites are on your shared web server?
• How Microsoft would reveal it hasn't done its homework in school (see?)
• New Apple instructional videos
• Long Radiohead video that features all the songs on In Rainbows

Labels: apple, backup, band, blog, environment, extremesports, food, google, linksofinterest, macosx, microsoft, music, publicspeaking, web

Robert and Dave are right. Macs don't work properly all the time. No personal computer does, or ever has, unless you get it into a working-perfectly-for-a-particular-task state and then don't change anything. Sound engineers and video techs who use their Macs (or PCs) to make money know that, which is why once they've got a system wired up and configured and working, they lock it down, keep it off the Internet, and avoid even innocuous things like bug-fix updates until they have a bit of spare time to tinker if something goes wrong.

We Mac-heads enjoy all those "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads, but we know they lie. The new Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" breaks things just as Windows Vista does. People have fun with their Windows PCs (seen all those games?). My in-laws had their iMac lock up after playing a YouTube video yesterday, but they managed to sort it out without my help. The brand promise Robert talks about of Macs "just working" is true a lot of the time, but not all the time—and not in the way we expect of our cars or fridges or TVs or stoves or pacemakers or jet aircraft or roadways or electrical grids or dialysis machines.

It's also true that, despite the problems—and I've had a few—I enjoy using my Macs, and do find they stay out of my way, more than I ever did with any of the Windows or Linux (or DOS or Unix or Apple II or PDP-11 or mainframe) computers I've worked with over the decades. In part that's Apple's doing, in part it's the hard work of the people who design the Mac software I like, and in part it's my familiarity with the platform, because if I have a problem, I also usually have some idea how to fix it. (After working with Windows a lot, it's true for me there too, but not as much.)

There are reasons people like me have stuck with Apple machines even when they weren't very fast, or very cool, or even with any apparent future. It's not just running with the underdog either. I'm not impressed with some of Apple's behaviour recently in markets where it now dominates, such as the iPod and online music and video sales. But it is no shock: Apple has always spun its stories, and has always had a streak of hubris—a pretty wide one at that. I don't think many people would like a computing world where Steve Jobs beat Bill Gates in the early '80s.

Yet when I open the lid on my MacBook to get something done, it generally helps me do it, and seems friendly in the effort. Even if you don't see it as much anymore, the smiley face is still there in spirit.

Labels: apple, davewiner, microsoft, robertscoble

Microsoft has been diligent in releasing updates to its Office 2004 suite for Mac, largely to address security vulnerabilities. That's good. But their updater software sucks. Here's why:

The latest update is version 11.3.9. It turns out that I hadn't updated since 11.3.4 or thereabouts. Now, you'd think that the 11.3.9 update would update any version of Office to the latest version. Nope, here's what I had to install today:

If you look at those screenshots above, you'll notice that only one update appears in Microsoft's AutoUpdate software at a time. That's right, I had to run the updater, apply the version 11.3.5 patch, quit that, run the updater, apply the 11.3.6 patch, quit that... and so on.

I fear to think how long it would take if I had to reinstall from my original-release Office 2004 (11.0.0, I guess) disc. I suppose I should be glad I didn't have to reboot each time!

UPDATE: I forgot to link to my previous rant from last year about the even worse procedure I went through with Adobe Reader.

Labels: design, macosx, microsoft, software

I like what the Mozilla Foundation developers are doing with the user interface for the upcoming Firefox version 3 web browser: matching the interface elements to the operating system:

While Firefox looks good now...

...sharing a general appearance with other applications in Windows or the Mac OS will make it a better experience, and I think it's a good investment of developer time.

Labels: apple, design, firefox, macosx, microsoft, software, web, windows, windowsvista, windowsxp