tewha.net

One of my pet peeves is “hint hint, nudge nudge.”

Why? Because you’re asking for something and trying to make it appear as if you’re not. Is it really that hard to ask for what you want? I should add that I have no problem with this as a joke, it’s when you actually expect to get results by hinting that it starts to bother me. Are you afraid people are going to be afraid to refuse you? If so, wouldn’t you be better served by — oh, I don’t know — allowing them to refuse without jumping down their necks? Do you think you could stop trying to manipulate people around you?

It would be really great if people had backbones and asked for what they actually wanted. Hint hint, nudge nudge.

Gadgets seen as best way to tell white lies.

My relationship with Microsoft Word for the Mac has always been a love/hate one. I can’t really describe why I love it - there’s just something about the way the main document window behaves that fills me with word processing joy, as stupid as that sounds (once the keyboard shortcuts have been de-Microsoft-ized, at least). However, the rest of the product seriously sucks.

We have multiple testing checklists that need to be followed, and items checked off, every build we’re seriously testing. I could go into a whole rant about these lists, but I think everyone who’s seen them (and especially had to use them) would agree with me on it. At the moment it has to be done, and that’s it.

Microsoft Word for Windows handles these with ease. It’s only when they’re brought over to my PowerBook that they start to cause problems.

The spinning wait cursor abound as I try to work with this document. A lot of it is caused by the documents being in Page Layout mode. Switching to Normal mode fixes this, but I hate Normal mode. It confuses me why I’d have to use it, considering how responsive Word for Windows is, even in Page Layout mode. Still, I can put up with this.

More significant, though: I fill this form out by repeating the formatting change that checks an item on the list. Sometimes I apply it to the wrong line, and then it’s time to Undo. Undo has about a 70% chance of crashing Word. Not every use of Undo, but just undoing this particular formatting change.

Seriously.

How did this ship? And how did Microsoft manage to release roughly ten minor updates to Microsoft Word without ever fixing this? Does the Mac team at Microsoft use Word on Windows for all their large documents? Are the Mac team at Microsoft perfect people who never use Undo? That’s a trick question. If they were perfect, Undo wouldn’t crash. (Not that I expect perfection. I can’t attain that myself, after all.)

This seriously, seriously sucks. It’s cost me serious amounts of time. What good is software that crashes all the time? Why do people - including me - keep paying for products like this?

“Programs that crash have been proven to be less useful than those that don’t.” — Apple Technote #117

This is the first year I’ve decided to completely ignore the scary side of Halloween. And yes, this is a permanent thing, and will include when I have kids. In fact, that’s the main reason I gave it up.

I have to admit, I’ve been thinking about this one for a while. My pastor said something about it in early October 2005, and nothing since, but I’ve been turning it over in my mind since then. It makes sense to me. We don’t have a “Let’s pretend your mother and I are married to different people” night, a “Let’s pretend it’s okay to kill people” night and we don’t really need a “Let’s pretend we’re afraid of ghosts, witches and the dark” night. Fear is not rational. Good sense, sure, but not fear.

My parents walked a very fine line when I was a kid, making it fun while completely discarding the idea that we were pretending to be afraid of things. I went out as a clown or something. Not a scary clown, either. I don’t think I can walk that line, of pretending to participate but not traumatizing my kids.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I’m going to be a complete stick in the mud about it. There’s other ways to celebrate, and I’ll do my best to make sure my kids don’t feel left out completely. There will be parties, and there will be candy, and there will be fun. Just no scary costumes. Here’s where it’s good to know some like-minded people.

Honestly, the only thing I miss about giving up Halloween is I’ll never get my chance make up a really great medieval/priate/Jedi costume. I do have a friend planning a medieval wedding. Maybe I can convince another friend to have a marriage at sea. The Jedi thing is totally out, but after the last three movies, who cares anyway?

Several attempts to re-install Ubuntu 6.06 later, I was forced to conclude that something was wrong with my power supply. Since it was an integrated power supply from Antec and I don’t feel like giving them any more business, it was time for a new case.

I picked an X-QPack, which is a microATX case. It’s available in several colors, but the Langley NCIX had only black and blue in stock, so blue it was. (I have something of a hatred for black PCs. It has always struck me as the trendy way to avoid beige for the clueless.)

It’s slightly larger than my Antec Aria was, but this is both good and bad. Bad, because it’s slightly too large for my desk. Good, because it’s much easier to work inside and seems to do a better job of keeping components cool.

The X-QPack offers a 420watt power supply (compared to, I believe, 300watt). Oddly enough, there doesn’t seem to be a fan on the power supply.

The case is actually remarkably well thought-out; the motherboard mounts on a drawer that slides in and out. There’s an carrying handle integrated into the front panel, and has knock-out panels for two 5.25″ devices and a single 3.5″, plus space for two internal 3.5″ drives. Despite the small space, there’s room to screw everything in on all mounting points. If I was going to describe this case in just a few words, it would be “tabs into slots mounting hardware.”

It’s a good thing it was well designed, or I wouldn’t have figured it out. There was no documentation at all.

The downside to this case is that all the sides are clear plexiglass (or something), and the rear fan has an integrated and bright blue LED. Not a big deal until you combine it with how ugly the inside of my PC is. At least I’ll know if someone steals my hard drive.

I’m largely back up and running now, and trying the 6.10 upgrade again (but this time, through the GUI). I think this is the very last piece of adhoc hardware I will buy. My next purchase is going to be a Mac mini, even if it is to replace my PC.

I wish I had a prize to give out, but nevertheless — can you top this? I’m sure you can. Video and audio card manufacturers have been racing for years to produce terrible interfaces. Surely someone has made a bigger abonimation towards mankind than this.

I wrote this in November 2004. It remains just as applicable to this day.

I wanted to make a few comments on the state of Palm OS tools and such, and I didn’t want to post them publicly because they’re not exactly positive. If there’s a better place to send them, please let me know. Don’t worry, there’s no questions here… and I don’t mean any of this to be insulting, either, if I’ve phrased some of it that way I apologize…

PalmSource seems to be focusing mostly on “Cobalt.” This is important for the future, I definitely agree with that. But in the near term, there are no Cobalt devices actually shipping and will not be for months yet. How long until the majority of shipping handhelds are Cobalt? I’ll be a bit optimistic — I figure it’s at least two years. Developers in the business of making a profit over the next few years need to focus on Garnet. I have not even looked at the Cobalt tools yet, and have no intention of doing so for many months yet.

The current state of affairs for Palm OS Garnet development is rather poor. PalmSource seems to be putting the majority of their efforts into the Palm OS Developer Suite. I am starting a new Palm OS product, and am no longer actively involved in maintaining the first one (which is on the market and being maintained by someone else; if you’re curious, see www.principalm.com). So it was the perfect time to switch to the new tools. I downloaded PODS and gave it a try, but I ran into a few problems.

The first is that the IDE is pretty unfamiliar. And this is from someone who has used a dozen or more IDEs over the years. I couldn’t even find a way to “quick open” SDK header files within the IDE. Making a makefile was easy (and, to be honest, I prefer this approach to an IDE) but getting the files recognized by the workspace was a pain. I’m not exactly sure how anyone uses a SCM with it; just the limitation of storing everything in Program Files is huge, and I never found a way around that one.

But finally I had everything in the workspace and compiling. Here’s where the real problems began — I had to segment. Segmentation is a fact of life under Garnet, and the documentation for segmentation is very weak — did I say weak? Between myself and a co-worker (working on yet a third product, with no code in common with either of the first one or mine), we couldn’t find anything on it as part of the install. I had some ideas how to do it for C, but none at all for C++. He figured out how to segment eventually and emailed me on it…

Now, which segments were too big? The error messages were next to useless for figuring it out. Still, through trial and error I reduced the size of my segments. That’s when I started running into data segment size issues. What was wrong? Well, I still have no clue at all.

So one night after about a week of fighting it, I threw threw in the towel and moved back to Codewarrior Palm (the latest Mac version). I sent an email to my coworker: “I gave up on PODS. It struck me last night that even if I got everything compiling in PODS, there was no real advantage over Codewarrior that was likely to matter to me for a while. [With Codewarrior, I] had my project compiling within ten minutes. No segmentation issues at all. Hopefully by the time I start to run up against the limitations in Codewarrior Palm’s tools will be ready, because they’re not right now…”

I expected him to tell me to keep fighting PODS, but apparently he’d done the same thing the vary same day, only he moved to the latest Windows version: “I came to same conclusion late last night and am now doing my demo work in CodeWarrior.”

So I just put in an order for the latest version of Metrowerks’ Windows-hosted tools. Will they save me? I don’t know. I’m worried — the new version of Codewarrior is based on the PRC tools,. So am I probably going to be fighting it for data segment size. (I know the standard RTTI/exceptions off trick. I need exceptions. I’m trying to write 21st century C++ here, not 1988-era ANSI C….)

As an aside, this is wrong — Codewarrior Palm 8’s linker is not based on PRC-Tools. This is why I ended up settling on Codewarrior as my development tool.

My conclusions:

1. There has to be a greater focus on Garnet development. Cobalt is the future (maybe.. if it’s late enough, the future is probably going to be the dreaded PocketPC), but it isn’t going to keep me or anyone else in business now.
2. There has to be a lot more work done on both documentation and tools for Garnet. The current (PRC-based?) toolchain — in particular, the linker — needs a lot of work and is under-documented.
3. All of these segmentation issues I’m dealing with are “artificial,” in that segments don’t actually hold any meaning other than legacy to the current Palm OS. If there was a way to write an application for Palm OS 5 that wasn’t PACE/68k, this whole series of problems wouldn’t exist. But still, there’s a couple years to wait until I can stop worrying about this mess.

Anyway, I hope none of this insulted you. Not my intent at all. And I could very well be wrong, I just call it like I see it.

We’re almost in 2006. What’s changed since then? NOTHING. Cobalt still doesn’t exist in any tangible way, and there’s still been no significant efforts put into the Garnet toolchain.

(Also, I want to add: For the one guy out there who recognizes this email, I do not blame the lack of progress on you. I dug up this particular email only because I felt it was the best one I’d written on the subject.)

Got this in response to a spam report. Yes, I said spam — I’ve never subscribed to any PC World mailings, and have years of archives to prove it.

Unfortunately, since you chose to have SpamCop conceal your actual e-mail address, we have no way to respond by opting you out of PC World e-mail.

If you will reply to me with your actual e-mail address, I shall be happy to comply with your request immediately.

Michael England
PCWorld.com Customer Service

This image was forwarded to me by a reliable source in Apple. It seems that in addition to compiling Mac OS X for x86, Apple has a backup plan for the Intel backup plan: AMD.

See, geeks all along have been arguing that Apple should have gone to AMD instead of to Intel. AMD offers higher performance, you seee. But, of course, we know the main reason for the switch to the x86 architecture is that IBM can’t produce a portable version of the G5. AMD doesn’t have much in the way of lower power, high performance chips yet, either.

But Apple’s ready anyway.

Here we have an actual photograph of a prototype Opteron-based PowerBook. Get it quick before Apple legal forces me to take it down! Remember, this is a prototype only — the final version will have a color screen. The black and white screen is actually touch sensitive.

I’m a bit surprised at the negative reaction surrounding screen shots of Microsoft Office. For those who have been living in a cave, the menu bar is gone and replaced with something new at the top of the screen, a kind of tabbed graphical menu. I’m not sure what Microsoft is calling them, but I’ll call them Task Panes.

The problem comes from people thinking of this new control as a tool bar. Don’t.

Let’s start with a quick review. For years, we’ve had several primary approaches for providing access to complexity: the menu bar, toolbars, context menus, double-clicking and hidden keyboard shortcuts.

• Menu bars show users everything, but only when dropped down and picking the right item relies on reading items (or guessing what a little 16×16 icon is supposed to mean, which is not bad for 10-20 icons but bad for the hundreds that Office uses).
• Toolbars show the “most common” commands, but are picked by developers and very often wrong. Users can customize these, but comparatively few bother. They’re generally not very task sensitive, either.
• Context menus show the most common commands for an on screen object. Items are more difficult to lose in the clutter than the main menu, but they still rely on reading.
• Double clicking typically “opens” an object. No problem with this, except that the concept is a little limiting.

Now, ahead to 2005 (well, probably 2006). Microsoft is using this new Task Pane scheme. A few things spring out:

• Like menus, the Task Panes are easily selected with a single click.
• Now, Hick’s law says (roughly) that user decision time is positively correlated with the number of options:
  • Unlike Windows’ menus, the Task Pane interface does not impose a significant cost for subitems. This results in fewer top-level choices.
  • Since the Task Panes are categorized instead of flat like toolbars, we avoid the mess that mess of options that toolbars have become.
• Unlike menus but like tool bars, Task Panes do not hide their items when you select an item.
  • This means if you’re doing multiple operations from the same menu, you’re actually saving time. Not only that, but the environment is perceived to be more stable (there’s a principle in interface design about this, but I can’t remember the name of it).
  • The items show more status information as you move about in your document.
• Items vary not only in text, but also in shape and a more descriptive icon.
• Items that are more likely to be used are larger (hello Fitts’ Law!).

Looking at them, I’m reminded of Office 95’s Office Bar launcher. I miss this. It’s so much better designed than 2000 and XP’s launch toolbars. I could switch between tasks and make my selection.

Why are we so stuck on menus? There’s nothing that makes them clearly superior to this method. Menus stay out of the way primarily because they were designed for a 512×342 screen, which we’re way past. We’ve even Task Panes before in Apple iLife products; Microsoft’s just biting the bullet by removing the menu entirely. Someone had to do it first. I just hope they’re not patenting it…