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 debacle 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.
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