Windows Rage

Windows XP SP2 multiple monitor support is ruined by one egregious bug. Anyone using multiple monitors, one of them being a laptop, and extending the desktop onto the second monitor knows what I am talking about.

How can it be OK for all my icons to get scrunched together from the laptop display to the secondary display? How can this feature, its got to be one of the most common scenarios, make it out of QA without getting fixed? This is attention to detail stuff guys, it shouldn’t make it 4 years before this gets patched.

I feel Windows Rage. It’s when I encounter something so bone-headed in Windows I just want to stick a pencil in my LCD.

Spotlight vs. Desktop Search on Windows

When people compare OS X 10.4 Tiger to Windows XP, the conversation always heads to desktop search in Spotlight vs. 3rd party solutions on XP.

The 3rd party solutions that I have used on XP are: Google Desktop and MSN Toolbar with Desktop Search.

Both have the same fundamental flaw which Spotlight doesn’t share: there is a delay between file creation and the engines indexing the content. The Windows partisans will say it doesn’t matter that any of the desktop search tools for their platform have a delay, you won’t notice it.

But I noticed today in a few instances, and I sure wish that something on Windows had the inline indexing that Spotlight has.

First case, the size of my mailbox in Notes was starting to creep up, so I wanted to delete a whole bunch of crap. I used Google Desktop to find stuff I wanted to delete, and then I had to correlate that in Notes. Not too bad, but not as tight as Spotlight and Mail.app. I clean out this stuff, and then I went back into Google Desktop to see if I had missed any, and the index hadn’t updated, which struck me as wrong because I am used to Spotlight.

The next one was worse. I was working on a spreadsheet in Excel. I had received the original copy in email, so when I opened it, it was opened from one of the Notes download caches. I have no idea where that is. I didn’t realize this at the time, but when I did a Save As to rename it, I ended up saving the spreadsheet in the download location. When I closed the file and then went to email it to someone, I was confused that it wasn’t on my desktop and was fearful that I actually hadn’t saved. So I think Google Desktop will solve this problem, I really don’t care where the file is, only it didn’t because the index wasn’t updated. This is when I got angry and the Inner Exception was raised to blog this.

If desktop search on Vistows (I am auditioning Windows Vista nicknames) doesn’t index files when the file operations happen, it will suck and there will be no difference from what the 3rd party desktop searches provide now.

Google Talk is a mixed bag

Google Talk is a mixed bag, and not much to get hyped up over.

Things I like:

• Clean UI, not all the clutter of MSN Messenger


• Interop with iChat on Tiger through Jabber. Tried this last night, worked great.


• No Ads. I hate MSN because of this.


• Chat windows and the main friends window “snap” together when you move them close enough to each other. Then if you move the main friends window, it moves everything attached to it. Very nice.


• When you are typing a long message in chat, the textbox for you to type automatically gets bigger so you can see your whole message. Sweet.

Things I might like:

• The Talking. Don’t have anybody to try this with at work, no mic. Since no Google Talk for OS X yet, no testing this out for me. Docs say it should work through firewalls and NAT, so it sounds promising.

Things I don’t like:

• No graphical emoticons. You have got to be kidding me, how can you release without these.


• Tray Icon is plain. Icon looks almost exactly like the iChat menu bar icon. But this is XP, not the OS X menu bar, and you need color to standout from the other baubles in the tray.


• Can’t control the fonts in chat. I like seeing different colors for people chatting so I can at a glance see who sent the last message. This isn’t hard.


• It’s a Beta. Do these people ever release anything?

Random Windows XP Complaint:

• I wish there were shadows under non-maximized windows, like in OS X. Google Talk makes this so obvious because they are using a, possibly, 1 pixel border around all their windows. All the overlapping windows just jumble together.

iMac G5 Recall

Apple has issued a voluntary recall, iMac G5 Repair Extension Program for Video and Power Issues.

I may have already been bitten by this particular problem, but I can’t be sure. Shortly after I moved back to the East Coast in February 2005, I lost power to the house and the iMac of course was unceremoniously shutdown.

It was never right after that, scrambled video, and eventually it just wouldn’t boot. Two self-service repairs later, one for the power module, the other for the motherboard, and I was back in business. The self-service stuff on the iMac G5 was brilliant, once I walked through their troubleshooting wizard on the web. Apple sent me parts, backed by a credit card of course. All I had to do was install the new parts and return the old ones. I also secured the first personal UPS I have owned in a long time to prevent the power outage thing from happening again.

But the iMac G5 fan noise has changed, it is louder or maybe just higher-pitched now, and I always wonder if I messed something up with my open-backplane surgery. I think I might take this repair opportunity to have an Apple Tech put the iMac right, if they will of course. Not that there is anything truly wrong, it runs like a champ and I have “stressed tested” it with 6 hour marathon World of WarCraft sessions.

Is this recall a negative thing? Yes, there is a problem with the original parts Apple used in the iMac G5. However, we all know this happens with any number of PC manufacturers, and instead of manufacturers coming clean and saying they are going to take care of this for you; they make their customers work, and usually real hard, before repairs are authorized, even on warranty equipment. This has happened to me so many times, it’s why I ended up just building my own PCs from scratch because the manufacturers weren’t giving me anything I couldn’t do myself.

Transactional NTFS

Just found the Transactional NTFS (TxF) blog over on MSDN.

This is really good stuff, and something I have wanted in a filesytem for a really long time.

TxF might be the only feature in Longhorn (sorry, I think the name Windows Vista sucks) that I am actually excited about.

If HFS+ isn’t made transactional in OS X 10.5 Leopard, I will consider it a crime.

This is also the first post I am creating using the Blogger for Word that my buddies over at my former company developed for Google.

This work was started while I was there, and I tried to pitch doing something similar for Word for Mac or Pages, but I had no takers.

Word for Mac saves what Word for Windows can't

This is a completely true story that happened to me yesterday. One of my co-workers is writing a spec for the project I am running. She of course is using MS Word for Windows. We have been working on this document for close to a month and she was putting the final formatting touches on the document, adding polish. And then suddenly Word 2003 for Windows crashes on her. She hadn't saved in 75 minutes. Word tries to open its AutoRecover version of the document and nicely locks up instantly. She calls me over to asses the situation. She's already hit all the usual troubleshooting steps, so we copy the AutoRecovered document to a USB keychain planning on trying to open it on my laptop. 10 thought ballon spasms latter XP shows me what's on the USB keychain, and I try to open the document in Word. Same thing, it's completely hosed. So I bring out my personal PowerBook and plug in the USB keychain. Ah, the USB drive just appears on my Desktop, no seizure for this OS trying to figure out what this simple device is I just plugged in. I then attempt to open the corrupt to WinWord document in Word 2004 for Mac. It opens! It's obvious something is wrong with the formatting in the doc, since nearly all table headers have a numbered outline style applied to them. But Word for Mac doesn't barf. No no no, I save the document back to the USB keychain drive as a new file. I bring the USB keychain back over to WinWord, and now it can open the document because MacWord has created a document it can use! This version of the document is now the version of record and what will get delivered to the development team. Mac saved my business lost content and time!

Longhorn name calling

So Robert Scoble is calling for one and all to take there best shots making fun of Longhorn. He says he's fearless, speaking from a position of strength, cause he knows what's comign in Longhorn and implying that it will kick ass. Sorry Robert, but when I read your posts, I though jeez that sounds desperate. Maybe Longhorn has some whiz-bang feature that will be great, a real innovation. But I am not drinking the kool-aid, and MS execute near perfectly in the details to match the stuff that's already in the Mac. And we don't even know whats in Leopard yet. I am far more excited thinking about what Apple has up their sleeve there vs. MS just catching up to Tiger with Longhorn. Here's a Longhorn name for consideration: Longshot

Microsoft's Longhorn Promises

Mary Jo Foley has posted an article stumping, I mean leaking, some performance promises from MS about Longhorn:

• Launch Apps 15% Faster
• Boot PCs 50% Faster and Resume from Stanby in 2 seconds
• Patch with 50% fewer reboots
• Migrate users [to Longhorn] 75% faster than with previous Windows releases
• Clean install in 15 minutes

Hasn't this nearly exact list been touted for every Windows release in memory? Lets take the first one. If Firefox for example launces in 1 second (fairly typical for my pretty heavily loaded laptop right now) and you save 15%, Firefox now launches in .9775 seconds. I am gonna dance a jig with all the time I saved right there. Really, who is going to care about this? Other than that, you can't really complain if MS hits these targets, you have to patch, reboot, and clean install so much the world might get back a few hours of life with Longhorn :) You have to hand it to Ms. Foley for fulfilling the role of mouthpiece for MS beautifully. Will she take MS to task if under imperical review these claims are not met? Of course not, but she sure generated a lot of page views this morning with the article, nice.

Forbes catches on to my Apple Wireless idea

Well it looks like Forbes by way of MacDailyNews has finally caught on to my Apple Wireless idea from March. They suggest Apple buy network access from Sprint, become a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MNVO). I dismissed this as not viable since Apple would be competing with Sprint for big dollars. Yeah, Sprint already competes with Virgin Mobile US, which uses it's network and is successful. I can be totally wrong on this, but I think Apple wouldn't want to be at the mercy of its mobile network operator. They have the cash, buy one of the few remaining smaller carriers, like T-Mobile. I know, they can get most of the benefit by being an MNVO, but the scenario I am thinking of protecting against is when Sprint sees Apple significantly eating into their revenue, what happens then? Does Sprint prioritize their own traffic over other companies it resells bandwidth to? Does it cancel Apple's contract, leaving Apple high and dry? Buying T-Mobile solves these problems, but you do have a phone company to run. I don't think there is any question long term, the phone and iPod are going to merge. Phone makers are already trying to do it, but they are at the mercy of the carriers and an HD-based phone costs to much. The problem with integrating both is the UI. A keypad just sucks for music, the scroll wheel on the iPod is near bliss for navigating large list of information. The keypad has to be real buttons, or something that acts close enough to real buttons that it just works. One way is a keypad slids out of the bottom of the iPod, similar to what Business 2.0 was proposing. If I remember right, the print article had an image of a keypad sliding out of the bottom of the phone. There are other ways, but the sliding keypad seems the most economical and doable now, anything else involves bluetooth and disconnected storage, interface, and headphones, which just feels like it has to cost more.

iTunes 4.9 Review

As most into tech now know, Apple released iTunes 4.9 on Tuesday with podcast support. Until iTunes 4.9, I hadn't listened to a single podcast. Sure I knew about them, just didn't have the time to figure this stuff out. iTunes solves all that. The Good

• Apple updated all iPods to support Podcasts, even back to the original with scroll well. A friend of mine has the click well "brick", and podcast support seems to work here just like in my 4G
• Subscribing couldn't be simpler, just like buying an album, only free. Same thing with episodes, one-click easy and free
• Good organization. Searching only works when you have an inkling of an idea as to what you want, good taxonomies can still be helpful.
• Podcasts in AAC format. Bookmarks, art at bookmarks and links. They make the MP3 podcasts look dated and this is just getting started. Check out Podfinder and New Music Tuesday for example
• Getting new episodes and synching, just as you would expect, just work, very sweet
• iPod Integration. With AAC Podcasts, bookmarks are really sweet. Plus you have the show notes if you click on the middle button enough, real nice. And the fact that shows resume from where you left off, exactly like Tivo and what you would expect, is great.

The Bad

• Glitches abound. Don't get me wrong, these don't detract from subscribing and listening to podcasts, but they still need to be fixed.
• Podcasts Settings Default. The Keep setting should default to All unplayed episodes. Feels closest to Tivo but recognizing you don't want an episode once it's played, could just be me.
• Time. How come the Music Store doesn't have time for each podcasts? I don't think this is that important, but it annoyed me.
• Release Date. This should just work, every episode should have the release date in meta data without issue. Don't know what the problem is here, but needs to be fixed in a lot of podcasts
• Descriptions. The need to have links. Adam Curry's The Daily Source Code is most in need of this, silly not to have them in the description, even in the pop-up
• Click on Podcasts in the left on iTunes, the summary data on the bottom says X Songs, this should be X Episodes
• Subscriptions are locked up on a copy of iTunes. I have 3 different computers, why can't iTunes at least use .Mac to keep them in sync, ideally the iPod. This is the same complaint I have with me having 3 computers and wishing iTunes, via the iPod , kept all the libraries in sync. I would buy so much more music at work if I could just get it immediately.

Conclusion iTunes 4.9 with Podcasts is a great addition to the program, and it really demonstrates Apple's agility. Are all the features you can think of in iTunes 4.9? No, but they don't have to be since the basic functionality is here now and works. Properly prioritizing functionality according to user need is one of Apple's great strengths, I can't wait to see what they add next.