17 May 2004

Doh! That will teach me. Someone just quite rightly pointed out that you can go to Apple's website and type www.apple.com/G5 to get to the G5 towers page. So, once again Apple got it right. The other example I chose though was Handspring's site and with good reason. I just ordered a new cell phone to replace my ageing Sony T68i. I've gone for the Handspring Treo and heard a rumour that it included a headset with the phone (it does). I wanted to quickly go to the manufacturers website to find out and typed in www.handspring.com/treo - which didn't work. So my point stands - so there.   comment []3:02:43 PM

Website architects, listen up! The boffins have done a great job of studying what makes a website usable, and what doesn't. Frames have been frowned on for years for example since many browsers don't like them (personally, I think they're great, but I've never designed a website). There's a push towards use of more standard client side scripting languages as well as a general feeling that exploiting the idiosyncracies of one client browser over another is a bad thing. There's one area lacking though, and I want you web-boffins to listen up. Pay attention to the in-site URLs. Here's an example. I'm a busy guy and I don't often have a lot of time to click through page after page to get to what I want. In fact, I don't often feel like navigating around the home page to find the miniscule link that I have to click to get just one page deeper. Make our lives easier guys. Most companies are known to deal with just or two things, right? I mean, if I went to Apple's website I could reasonably be expected to be interested in Powerbooks, G5's, or iTunes. So when then do I have to go to that site, click hardware, then choose the model I want to see. Fix your URLS so that I can just go www.apple.com/G5, or www.handspring.com/treo. That would make life so much easier, particular if you are browsing on a small PDA type device or over a dial up connection. comment []2:59:03 PM

The great Linux lock-in I like Linux a great deal. I always have. I'm not a big fan of the somewhat religious tone the free and open-source advocates take towards 'freeing the source', nor am I completely enamoured of the idea that closed source companies are morally wrong. The operating system itself though, I like. I used to love it though... When I got my Macs I moved all personal mail from Outlook onto the first decent Mac email client I could find. At the time that meant Microsoft Entourage. When Panther got released, I fell in love with the anti-spam measures it includes, and so I migrated, painlessly, all my mail from Entourage to Mac Mail. Along the way I also played with Evolution, Ximian's 'Outlook Killer' on Linux. When I recently completed my Debian Linux installs I figured that would be a great opportunity to really embrace Ximian's Evolution. After all, Ximian worked very hard to produce a mail client that did practically everything Outlook did, but for free, and within a free operating system. It seemed ideal, and by and large it was. But, I've found something quite worrying about it. As I said before, I need now to fully return to Microsoft and really embrace the Microsoft way of doing things. Whether you agree with the open source way of thinking or not, you have to at least acknowledge the fact that Microsoft have done something right along the way given that most of the world uses their software day in and day out. One of the many things that they have done right is make their software intuitive and easy to use for both layman and expert. Sure there are cases where things are not quite as flexible as they could be, but Microsoft went for the lowest common denominators. When developing a development system for example, they decided to pitch the ease of use features of the software at non-gurus. In developing the GUI shell of Windows they pitched ease of use features at the novice to intermediate level. In that respect, Microsoft got things right. Now Ximian claim that their goal in life is to make Linux more usable and flexible than Windows. So, I figured, it should be fairly easy then to get Ximian to release my mail to move it into whatever mail client I wanted. In my case, that's Outlook 2003. Bad assumption. I have about 2 gig of mail going back about 4 years that I need to have at my fingertips, but for some reason the advocates of "everything should be open and flexible" at Ximian and the Evolution developer community decided not to make it so. It's almost trivial to import mail from Outlook PST files into Evolution, but there is no option to go the other way. Evolution also uses the somewhat antiquated Unix standard of MBOX for mail files, a standard that Microsoft are forbidden to support because of anti-trust issues. I'm sure it's not the case, but on the surface at least it appears to me that the Evolution developers went almost out of their way to make the transition to their software a very much one-way route. In fact, if you Google for "Outlook MBOX import", you'll find a bunch of free and open source converters for moving mail out of Outlook, but none to put it back. It's almost like the Linux community is saying "Embrace us, embrace what we do, and if you don't like it - tough!". So now I have a few gig of email that sits in a bunch of mbox files practically useless to me unless I keep a Linux install to hand. To put it another way, I have a bunch of data that was previously managed by an open mail client that is now as closed as a bomb proof safe, simply because I choose not to embrace the "open" way of doing things. Can you imagine the uproar if Microsoft (most of who's software now fully supports really open standards like XML) did the same thing? Beware the Linux lock-in.   comment []11:32:35 AM