'Til All Are One

Microsoft claim that their UAC secur­ity prompts in Vista are designed to annoy you. I’m try­ing hard to take them ser­i­ously and to not laugh them off… but did they really think it’d work? OEMs and users have been dis­abling it in droves. Other users have prob­ably taught their muscle memory to auto­mat­ic­ally click the Continue/​Allow but­ton without the slight­est acknow­ledge­ment or thought. I think Microsoft need to get their act together when it comes to UIs. Some of their recent efforts have been frus­trat­ingly incon­sist­ent.

A major reason given by Microsoft in their UAC scan­dal was to encour­age developers to avoid priv­ilege elev­a­tions as much as pos­sible. A noble cause, espe­cially in the security-​​inexperienced world of Win­dows devel­op­ment, albeit poorly executed. It reminds me of Apple’s per­petual oppos­i­tion to the multi-​​button mouse. One stated reason is to enforce more ‘sane’, ‘usable’ and con­sist­ent UI design, and over­all I think they’ve done well. They don’t ban multi-​​button mice (‘XY-​​PIDSes’?), but given the simple one-​​button default there’s less need for them. I might prefer using a con­ven­tional 3-​​button scroll mouse, or even Apple’s own Mighty Mouse (a cleverly-​​disguised multi-​​button mouse), but I don’t lose any func­tion­al­ity by not using them.

It goes to show how much the graph­ical inter­face can be influ­enced by its phys­ical input, some­thing a lot of us don’t acknow­ledge in today’s world of >100-​​key QWERTY key­boards, multi-​​button mice and multi-​​finger touch­pads. The real innov­a­tion in that space seems to be hap­pen­ing in the mobile and embed­ded sec­tor, the iPhone being a good example. Play­ers of games on both desktop com­puters and games con­soles might notice the dif­fer­ence in ‘look and feel’ between games designed for keyboard/​mouse versus con­trol pad. Par­tic­u­larly for action and strategy games, ports from desktop to con­sole (or vice versa) often aren’t suc­cess­ful. The soft­ware was designed with the assump­tion of par­tic­u­lar input devices, and any­thing that devi­ates from this will also alter the feel of the game.

LotD: Your Win­dows licence fees paid to make this

I have been com­pletely floored by Ubuntu’s new Migra­tion Assist­ant. It’s cer­tainly some­thing that we have needed in the FLOSS world for a long time. Any­thing we can do to reduce migrat­ory hurdles is by all means welcome.

To play devil’s advoc­ate, how­ever, I’d like to point out a defi­ciency of such migra­tion tools. To take an estab­lished example, wit­ness Moz­illa Fire­fox on Win­dows. When you first start it, you are greeted with a friendly wiz­ard to port set­tings and book­marks from Inter­net Explorer. If, like most people, you allow it to pro­ceed, it will replace the carefully-​​selected default Fire­fox book­marks (not to men­tion the awe­some BBC Head­lines live book­mark) with those from IE. The res­ult can be a cluttered, advertising-​​laden (Win­dows Mar­ket­place, any­one?) mon­stro­city that has lost the sim­pli­city and ori­ginal intent of the product being loaded.

The Ubuntu Migra­tion Assist­ant poten­tially raises this application-​​level mis­de­mean­our to an OS-​​level atro­city. As this review of the util­ity demon­strates, even the Tele­tu­b­bies wall­pa­per of Win­dows XP can be migrated with ease, not to men­tion the afore­men­tioned book­marks. This can ruin the inten­ded look and feel of the OS, thus pre­vent­ing the user from exper­i­en­cing the OS in a clean, ‘pristine’ state.

Is this a good or a bad thing? I’m not sure, but what I do know is that the design­ers of this tool should be care­ful to select default set­tings which do not unne­ces­sar­ily alter the user exper­i­ence. Tread care­fully.
 

LotD: Linux Genu­ine Advant­age

Microsoft have announced their Zune music/​video player to take on Apple’s iPod. Like Apple, they con­sider col­our to be an import­ant dif­fer­en­ti­ator in the mar­ket­place. With white hav­ing been co-​​opted by Apple, and black being the gen­eric (and hence indis­tinct­ive) hue, what does that leave Microsoft?

Appar­ently, it is brown.

Once again, Ubuntu is vin­dic­ated! What’s next, naked people?

Steve “Real­ity Dis­tor­tion Field” Jobs has delivered his key­note address to Apple’s World Wide Developer Con­fer­ence (WWDC). It’s amaz­ing what he would have us believe. Apple has appar­ently inven­ted vir­tual desktops. What does Microsoft have to say about it, given they applied for a pat­ent on the tech­no­logy in 2004 (com­plete with images ripped out of GNOME and KDE!)? Let’s just for­get that they have exis­ted since at least 1985, shall we?

That aside, I am heartened to see that OpenDar­win did not close their doors a couple of weeks ago in vain. Apple them­selves are spon­sor­ing Mac OS Forge, and in the pro­cess they have made read­ily avail­able the source code for Bon­jour, Col­lab­or­a­tion (Dar­win Cal­en­dar Server), Web­Kit (which is really just KHTML on ster­oids any­way), Launchd and even their XNU ker­nel (minus some essen­tial pro­pri­et­ary parts). They have even licensed some of these pro­jects under the Apache Licence 2.0. I pray that this sig­ni­fies the start of a new era of col­lab­or­a­tion between Apple and the FLOSS com­munity, and not just a cheap attempt to con­trib­ute the min­imum amount required to keep the bulk of the com­munity on-​​side.

So with Tiger being favour­ably com­pared to the forever-​​delayed Win­dows Vista, what does that make Leo­pard? Mac OS just gets bet­ter and bet­ter, while the Win­dows débâcle is far from over. With screw-​​ups such as this [video], it’s no won­der that Microsoft feels the need to prevent/​destroy all com­pet­i­tion.

Update (2006−08−13): Here is a much more sober eval­u­ation of the so-​​called ‘copy­ing’ going on between Mac OS and Win­dows. It puts everything into more per­spect­ive, show­ing that some of their killer fea­tures in fact ori­gin­ated else­where. It reminds me of a funny quo­ta­tion: “Mac OS, Win­dows, BeOS: they’re all just Xerox cop­ies.”

As much as Paul Thur­rott likes to claim that Spot­light is a copy of Win­dows Search, Apple had the same func­tion­al­ity in the mid-​​1990s with its Cop­land Pro­ject.

KDE4 devel­op­ment is under­way, and users and developers are hav­ing their say on how it should look. One thing that irks me is when someone posts a mockup of some ‘new’ idea, when in fact that idea is just lif­ted from some­where else. I have no prob­lem with deriv­a­tion or inspir­a­tion from else­where (that’s how soft­ware evolves, after all), but for ghod’s sake please don’t pass off some other idea as your own.

Take for example this mockup. Look at the file browser. Can you say Win­dows Vista? Some per­son, whom I pray is not a Kon­queror developer, was so enam­oured with it that he cre­ated an inter­act­ive ver­sion.

I’m not say­ing that it is unat­tract­ive, but I don’t under­stand why this sort of blind copy­ing takes place. I’ll admit that graphic design isn’t one of FLOSS’s strong points, but with that said we do have some truly innov­at­ive and beau­ti­ful designs. Amarok comes to mind.