Unbeknownst to Me

Given that the consensus is that Apple will introduce an ultra-portable notebook computer to fill the void left by the 12-inch PowerBook, I predict the return of this offering will be turned down by my Mac-h8r pal Jason who always would buy a Mac “except for” one of the following reasons:

1. Too expensive
2. Won’t play my games
3. If only it had $FOO technology
4. Not enough default storage (subset of 1)

My bet is #1 above.

(This post may not be entirely serious and may be intended just to get a rise out of Jason… ;) )

In the days of yore, when Extension Conflicts (kind of like DLL hell on Windows, except solveable) ruled the Mac troubleshooting landscape (this was a decade ago), Ted Landau’s MacFixIt site was a must-read. He had the dish on every OS upgrade, troubleshooting tips, and how to do preventive maintenance that made a Mac pre-OS X still more stable than the Windows available at the time.

Cometh OS X, and suddenly a whole new technology resides under the hood. MacFixIt struggled to keep up, as the voodoo of System 7 yielded to the exposed underpinnings of BSD-style Unix. The site expanded but kept with troubleshooting via the post-hoc fallacy. I kept with them for a while (I’ve been using flavors of OS X for seven or more years), but the site has degenerated into uselessness. Witness the following:

Google’s Gmail service has increased its coolness factor considerably by adding IMAP access, but meanwhile, back in the world of Web mail access, one user complains that the initial Gmail Web page has trouble loading under Leopard. He says that there are difficulties no matter what browser he uses.

One user.

And a website is slow in every browser, so it must be Leopard, right?!

Um. I’ve been using this here web thing for a while now, and one of the first things you learn is that a) not every server responds equally well, b) sometimes your internet connection is slow, and c) even when a) and b) aren’t true, there can be breakdowns between you and the server you’re trying to reach.

To raise this as a serious question about OS X 10.5 while admitting you can’t reproduce the problem and not entertaining any other of a host of more likely possibilities means that MacFixIt is being dumped from my RSS feeds (I dropped bookmarks long ago).

Sorry, Ted. I can get real problems reported by other, less Cassandraesque sources, and don’t have to waste time with inane guesswork subsituting for a little education. I can do that myself without assistance, and reading about web application slowdowns that don’t even have a plausible mechanism in the OS is taking away from my valuable TV-watching, eyebrow-plucking, or even just staring-at-the-wall-blankly time. Those are all more worthwhile pursuits than the above article.

Finally, amongst the outrage of over-privileged jackasses braying over the unfair price cut of a piece of technology–as if this didn’t happen eventually with every consumer electronics product ever–Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post captures the real reason for the anger.

The sky-high price was supposed to guarantee a decent period of exclusivity. For a time, if you bought an iPhone, you were supposed to be the envy of your friends. The ability to show off all the neat things it could do was your compensation for the fact that the iPhone didn’t really change your life.

Eventually, you understood, everybody would have one — as happened with the iPod. But after spending $599 for a cellphone, the aura of supercool should have lasted longer than a couple of months.

Yes, it’s not about “fairness” or Apple “screwing” anybody. It’s about a bunch of hipsters with $600 to burn to be the envy of their friends feeling cheated now that the hoi polloi will have iPhones. Then how will they demonstrate their superiority to their fellow man by the mere act of conspicuous consumption?

If you’re upset that a cool piece of technology will drop in price after you buy it, you might want to invest in real estate. Whoops, you’re screwed there, too. What’s a whiny hipster jackass to do?

It continually amazes me the people who react to every new announcement by a computer maker with 3-5 percent market share with a ritual justification of their (usually continued) non-purchase of said item. Apple’s mindshare is truly out of proportion to its marketshare.

Many Slashdotters, for example, will continually declare, “I won’t buy [insert Apple product] until it [insert condition].” Sometimes Apple comes out with a product that meets this condition, and lo and behold, there’s a new and more obscure thing it Must Do before it is eligible for purchase. I can understand this a bit in the realm of MP3 players, as the iPod has a clear (but far from safe) lead in marketshare and hence is the default choice for most.

But in markets where Apple isn’t dominant, it is mind-boggling. Maybe it’s the continual envy of the “cool” factor of Apple products–it’s not something you can quantify on a spec sheet, so it’s not something you can engage the same way you compare the usual list of gadget features. I think many of the people who react this way are gadget freaks at heart who need to have the most features in order to “win” the coolness of having teh hawtest gadget on the block award. Apple products sometimes take away features, and this simply doesn’t fit their worldview, and hence they can’t understand its success.

But above that I think even when Apple does out-compare in the feature list phallus-size substitution game, the “coolness” factor that isn’t related to features makes the gearheads uncomfortable. After all, how can they know they have got the coolest thing if they have to talk about feelings instead of specs? “It’s a joy to use” doesn’t win you many arguments at the comic book convention. Style is just not in their vocabulary.

There’s a crossover of this crowd with Microsoft and Linux users who think that Apple products are “cool” or “usable” because they’re “pretty.” They prove time and time again that they Don’t Get usability, or why the combination of usability and style (the two are not the same) might make Apple products popular with a certain segment of the population. But because they don’t understand these concepts intuitively, it causes them great distress because they can’t engage with it on their traditional terms: there’s simply an axis of “cool” that they can’t argue against.

So they harp on everything else, whether it is really important or not, and then they mention the price, as if Apple’s position as the not-Wal-mart is surprising to anybody who has paid attention to them since the introduction of the Macintosh, 25 years ago. Hey guys: it’s been a quarter-century, isn’t it time to admit you just can’t afford them? Because at this point price is only an issue if you really want it but are looking for reasons to proclaim those grapes to be sour.

Joel Spolsky, one of the better known ex-Microsoft programmers, writes a single sentence that most displays the incomprehension of design and user experience that seems to typify Microsoft products:

In the case of the iPod, the way beauty is provided happens to be through a clean and simple design, but it doesn’t have to be.

His justification for this is his claim that the Hummer is appealing because of its complexity. No, the Hummer is appealing because it’s huge, and thus a good compensation for insufficient virility. But what design statement it has is that its overall shape is simply a box with a notch cut out of it.

Nobody has come up with beautiful design that isn’t clean and simple–even the Baroque period has lots of filigree, but at the base of that are some very simple figures and they’re arranged with incredible care.

Joel’s psychological block is that he can’t see a distributed benefit in the face of a concentrated harm. He sees the additional sales he would lose if he were to remove a feature. He doesn’t see the benefit to his users who don’t need Feature X of one less option to hunt through to Do What They Want To Do.

Even the iPod has [a] gratuitous Solitaire game.

I’m willing to bet a lot of money that the “gratuitous” Solitaire game had to pass through many, many hoops to make it into the product. It wasn’t one marketing survey that said, “We’ll get X more purchasers if we have a couple of games.” I’ll even bet that it had to be shown that it wouldn’t degrade the experience for someone who Just Cares About Music.

Joel is right that simplicity isn’t just “leaving out features.” It’s work to achieve it, and takes talents that 99.99% of programmers don’t have. But simplicity is important, and is almost always the number one failing of software, which is why I still get questions about how to use Microsoft Office products, more than two decades after those products were first released.

An AP story is making the rounds that Macs are newly–maybe–vulnerable to viruses and Apple–maybe–isn’t getting it, just like Microsoft didn’t get it until…um…recently…or…not.

Sigh. No, Macs are not invulnerable to all types of trojans, viruses, worms, or other malware. It should be noted, though, that despite the criticisms of Apple, all the vulnerabilities mentioned in the article have been addressed.

I have been readily getting Security Updates on a very timely schedule from Apple in five or six years I’ve been using OS X, starting with Developer Preview 3 and on through 10.4.6. I do some sensible things, like not clicking on things sent by people I don’t know or downloading programs from dodgy sites I’ve never heard of before and running them. I used to even run antivirus software, but since it never once found a single bit of malware, I quit.

The fact is, and to its credit the article points it out, the Mac is still far less vulnerable to malware than Windows, even accounting for its limited market share. Can you get by clicking on anything and everything and opening up every service on your machine and never updating it? Nope. But can you run it without much of a firewall and not act like an idiot and reasonably expect to stay free of malware? Yep. I’ve only seen one Mac running OS X with malware on it, and it is unclear how it got there.

So the lesson you should take away from this is not that Macs are no better than Windows at avoiding bad things on the Internet, but that you won’t be freed from the very basics of avoiding bad things–running programs from people you don’t know or downloading from sketchy sites. But the situation is so much better that if you are determined to be an idiot, your experience will be better on a Mac than on Windows. And if you’re not an idiot and you’re sick of messing with firewalls and virus updates, well, your experience will be better on the Mac than Windows, too.

The best RSS reader I’ve used on the Mac or anywhere else is now free. Unfortunately, using the online version, shrook.com will now require a subscription. This, however, only matters if you need to check RSS feeds away from your machine or want to synchronize two copies of Shrook.

Another month, another Windows critical vulnerability. Crap, another area that the Mac is behind Windows in software availability–current exploits.

Hackers have created hundreds of web pages that use the bug to take over vulnerable computers.

So here’s the letdown part of the Apple Product Cycle. One of the coolest features the Steve introduced on Tuesday was “Photocasting,” or basically RSS feed creation for photos using RSS 2 enclosures, integrated deeply into iPhoto using .Mac.

The concept is simple: you get a collection of photos, say “Photocast these”, and it uploads them to a server and gives you a URL you can pass around to your friends. If they have iPhoto 6 or Safari 2.0, they can get a feed of your photos that they can view, with links to the full-size originals. Since it’s a standard, then if they don’t have those apps, they can choose any RSS reader that supports enclosures, including the ever-popular Firefox 1.5 to view your stream. So the slickest creation and consumption is on a Mac, but you can share with people who haven’t yet seen the light.

Or Can You?

Turns out every other reader I’ve tested it in, or that any Windows or Linux user I know has tested it in, has gotten a page that looks like this:

Clearly, Apple is sniffing the User Agent string that all browsers and RSS readers create and rejecting any that don’t say “WebKit” (their core HTML reading technology that all Apple apps use). Even other Mac-based ones I’ve tested, like the open source FireAnt, don’t work. [Update: Turns out FireAnt only supports video playback, not photos, so this wouldn’t have worked anyway. But it did give an error claiming the feed was invalid with the original URL.]

I really hope this is an oversight on Apple’s part, but it’s kind of embarrassing, trying to say how cool this stuff is and how nice it is when somebody plays by the rules, when they sabotage those very words in an effort to prevent people with an old RSS reader from using the service.

Lame, guys, hella lame.

Update: I’ve now found a workaround, with some caveats. As long as you’re not using Firefox to read RSS feeds, you can view my Dominica photos at http://web.mac.com/sandysmith/iPhoto/dominicaselect/index.rss.

Read on if you are having this problem with iPhoto or use Firefox and want an explanation why the defaults haven’t worked for you:

(more…)

We’re at the Golden Section of the Apple Product Cycle. This is the fun part, the Christmas that comes with every Keynote or announcement from Apple that features a performance by Steve Jobs.

Really, it is a performance. A three-ring circus designed to amplify the Reality Distortion Field and to build anticipation in a way that rock concerts normally do. It’s particularly telling when Steve (we all call him Steve, even though none of us know him even in the slightest) invites some other CEO to come on the stage and speak. To extend the rock concert simile, these are like the painfully dull 15 minute drum solos of yesteryear. They really highlight how good a showman Steve is, and how few other consumer product CEOs “get it” about generating excitement.

Reverting to the Christmas metaphor, there is also a letdown when it’s over. Invariably there are a couple of rumors that didn’t match reality (and, frequently, even the laws of physics) and no new iBrainImplant is announced by Steve. People wail and gnash their teeth, lament how far behind Apple is, and then begin to be distracted by the new shiny things and go out and acquire them.

While I’m far from immune to this draw (even the letdown), I’m probably not Steve’s favorite customer, and not just because I once wrote him a nasty note when he killed the Mac clones. I tend to obsessively read details about the new products, but rarely do I buy them. I don’t own an iPod. My desktop Mac is three or four years old. My Powerbook is over six years old. I still have a Mac clone that I really should just throw out, because I doubt anybody even wants it (plus I’d need to boot it and wipe the hard drive securely). That Mac clone is going on ten years old.

If that sounds like a lot of stuff, it’s nothing compared to what a lot of people do. In the PC world, a new computer every two years is pretty standard, and a lot of Apple fanboys match that just so they can have bragging rights. Instead, I get my jollies by being the go-to-guy when someone else wants a computer, especially a Mac. (Seriously, Windows people, why the hell do you ask me about what Windows machine to get? Do none of your fellow drones know anything about computers?)

But even if I don’t partake personally (I’m in my mind waiting until the second revision of Intel-based Macs to pick up an iMac or something low-power to replace my PowerMac, unless I get into some serious audio production between now and then), I enjoy the spectacle. I wish I could generate that kind of passion in people with what I do, but so far the people who blog about that seem to say “hey, make people love your stuff,” which is technically accurate but utterly unhelpful advice.

So, after the keynote is over, there’s usually a video available on Apple’s site. Go and watch it this evening to see a master at work, and maybe you’ll learn something concrete about making people love your stuff.