More of my sites

WinInfo Daily News
SuperSite for Windows
Windows IT Pro Magazine
Connected Home
Thurrott Dot Com
Windows Weekly at TWIT

About this site

For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Saturday, November 22, 2003

Mac eye for the Windows guy
Good stuff. Thanks Joe.

[ Posted at 3:54 PM | Permalink ]

Friday, November 21, 2003

NewsGator rocks
Keith has been bugging me for months to try Newsgator, which is described as "a 'news aggregator' that runs in Microsoft Outlook. It allows you to subscribe to various syndicated news feeds (such as weblogs, news sites, etc.) and have news from these sites be delivered right into your Outlook folders. There are thousands of sites which syndicate their content in RSS format, and many more being added every day." Well, it took a meeting with NewsGator at COMDEX 2003 to make me appreciate how powerful and important this tool really is and now I'm signed up. You should too.

[ Posted at 3:14 PM | Permalink ]

STAR WARS trilogy heading to DVD
Reports abound that the original STAR WARS trilogy is heading to DVD next fall in advance of STAR WARS Episode III, but details about the changes vary. Some believe the trilogy will simply include DVD versions of the Special Edition movies that Lucas released back in 1997, while others (perhaps wishfully) believe the movies will be edited yet again, perhaps to make the transition between the prequels and the original movies more seamless. You can read the list of supposed changes on AICN, but remember: They're probably not true.

[ Posted at 12:14 PM | Permalink ]

Family Guy to return?
Millennium. Action. Family Guy. Futurama. The list of short-lived TV shows I loved only to see them suffer an earlier-than-necessary end is longer than I care to remember, but thanks to huge sales of its two DVD sets, the Family Guy might be making a comeback. In what can only be described as evidence that there is indeed a God, Fox is considering bringing back the hilarious New England-based cartoon for 35 new episodes that would debut in January 2005. The first Family Guy DVD set has sold over 1 million copies, while the show is the Cartoon Network's most popular offering for adults, making Fox reconsider it's ridiculous decision to cancel. Make it so.

[ Posted at 12:06 PM | Permalink ]

Intel pushes 4 GHz barrier
Intel president Paul Otellini promised his company would ship a 4 GHz Pentium 4 CPU in 2004, along with ~3 GHz Celerons. And for mobile fans, take note: The Centrino now accounts for over 40 percent of all notebook machines sold.

[ Posted at 11:58 AM | Permalink ]

Home users jumping to Linux? Yeah, right
The total number of Linux users may have surpassed the number of OS X users some time ago, but that doesn't mean Apple has anything to fear in the home market: Despite massive improvements over the past few years, Linux is still fairly unfriendly, widely incompatible with the applications people really want to use, and is inscrutable when anything goes wrong. In these areas, of course, Mac OS X works very well: It's attractive, performs reasonably well, and includes awesome digital media applications; and if you want, you can even install Microsoft Office. But don't tell any of this to LinuxInsider, which recently published a bizarre article claiming that home users--you know, grandmothers and the like--are moving to Linux in droves. Even Red Hat's vice president, John Young, doesn't think Linux is ready for consumers. "We don't have the perfect substitute for Windows," he said John Young. "But for customers who don't require their users to run the full range of applications that comes with Windows, we have a good substitute. In terms of my mother being able to use it, I think that will happen over the next couple of years." The LinuxInsider article is almost insane, even adding a perfunctionary "Microsoft declined to comment for this story" as if that was ever going to happen. But aside from a single example of a mother of five moving to Linux (because her husband supports it at work), it doesn't offer any evidence to support its claims. That's because it's not happening.

[ Posted at 11:56 AM | Permalink ]

Introduction to Mozilla
A draft version of the official Introduction to Mozilla has been posted online for review and comment. "This is an Introduction to Mozilla manual for corporate users. The manual provides an overview of key features of Mozilla, with a focus on Navigator (browser), Mail, and Address Book. This manual is intended to be used by people (Mozilla end-users) who have already had Mozilla installed and configured for them. The manual is based on Mozilla 1.5, and will be produced in PDF format for printing, or for posting to a corporate intranet."

[ Posted at 1:18 AM | Permalink ]

Thursday, November 20, 2003

Microsoft describes inductive UI
Matt Webb pointed me to a good Microsoft article from two years ago describing inductive UI and the work the company is doing to improve the PC user experience. "Also called inductive navigation, the IUI model suggests how to make software applications simpler by breaking features into screens or pages that are easy to explain and understand. This IUI model is emerging in various Microsoft projects .... The overall concept of IUI is in its infancy. Designers employing these techniques are learning and discovering more about it as they use it for their software. The information in this document will evolve over time as research and knowledge in this area increases." Inductive UI solves the most basic software problem of all: Most software is too hard to use.

[ Posted at 1:00 PM | Permalink ]

Inductive (task-based) UIs vs. the typical desktop OS GUI
For some reason, I received a bunch of email this week about a single FAQ entry on my Longhorn FAQ on the SuperSite for Windows, despite the fact that it had been up for several months. Anyway, a large group of Mac users took exception to my contention that Mac OS X is "a classic desktop operating system that doesn't offer anything in the way of usability advancements over previous desktop operating systems. Today, Windows XP and its task-based interface are far superior to anything in Mac OS X. In the future, Longhorn will further distance Windows from OS X." Two issues arose out of this posting: First, people considered me idiotic for comparing Panther to a Windows release that won't ship until 2005 at the earliest. I only added that comment, however, because Apple's Steve Jobs has twice publicly made the same comparison, so I'll forward your thoughts along to him; I was just responding to the claim. Second, virtually every single person who wrote in had no idea what a task-based interface was. They are Mac users, however, so that makes sense. Below is a reply I sent to one of the few people who actually wanted to know the difference, and didn't take the time to snipe at me, my family, or my apparent love of Microsoft, which I appreciated. I'm going to expand this into a longer article for the SuperSite for Windows, which will include screnshots, but I wanted to get this up as soon as possible. So here goes...

A task-based UI is one that is based on "tasks" rather than applications (as in OS X) or documents (as in Windows 95/Office 95, sort of; Microsoft backed off of this concept pretty quickly as the benefits of a task-oriented UI became more obvious).

Here's an example. Let's say you want to print a digital photo.

In OS X, generally, you would think "iPhoto," load it up, and look for the print option, which is pretty easy. This is an app-based approach. Like, I want to write a letter: I need Word.

In XP, you would navigate to the My Pictures folder, or wherever you store your photos, (which I find a bit technical, frankly; people aren't into file systems), find the photo you want to print, select the photo, and then view a list of tasks in the tasks pane. One is "Print this picture." Another is "Order prints online". If you select the former, you are presented with a wizard that walks you through the whole process: Selecting the printer and, if desired, the printer settings; selecting the photo layout to use (which is really cool for photos, especially if you have a photo printer with different photo paper sizes); and so on. Step-by-step.

In Longhorn, Microsoft is eliminating the first step. You don't worry about the file system. There is a special shell folder/collection/Library (whatever they decide to call it) in Longhorn that aggregates all of the photos on your system automatically, and instantly. You can filter the view by various criteria (who took the picture, when it was taken, what it is a picture of; in other words, metadata), making it very easy to find. After that, there is a similar task-based approach to XP for actually printing the picture.

In all three of these OSes, it's possible to use non-discoverable means to print that picture, or what you might call "power user" functionality. In other words, you could load up the Finder/Explorer, navigate to whatever folder, right-click, and select Print. This is nice when you know what you're doing, but you have to learn that somehow and there is nothing to help you get started (there's no reason to think you can even right-click on the Mac, actually). A task-based UI is good for two things: Getting any user started with an unfamiliar but common task (Printing a photo), after which they may choose other methods as their experience grows; and helping any user complete a task that is performed infrequently (Setting up an Internet connection).

Way back in Windows 95, Microsoft introduced the first task-based UI metaphor in the ill-understood Start button. What this really is, is an obvious starting point ("CLICK HERE DUMMY"). In DOS, UNIX CLI, or in Mac OS X, you're staring at the screen when you first start, and there is no obvious "first thing to do." The system makes no effort at all to help you, leaving you to click on things until something happens (and why do some things in OS X require a single click [Dock items] while others require a double-click [alias on desktop]?). That's what I meant when I said OS X was a "classic" desktop OS. It has a GUI (heck, it has a very attractive GUI), but it literally does nothing to help you get started. It takes a very dated applications-based approach to handling tasks, too. You want to listen to music? Load iTunes first. You have to know which app to use before you can do anything. To an accomplished Mac user, this is second nature, and that's why so many people write me and wonder if I'm brain-damaged: After all, they already know how to use the system, so it must be intuitive. But it's not intuitive, and one thing people need to remember is that everything they do is hard until they learn how to do it: You get out of bed each day and walk to the bathroom without thinking about it. But it took you months to learn how to walk.

Microsoft has been working to add more task-based stuff in Windows over the years. The My Documents folder, the My Pictures folder, and the My Music folder were added in previous versions and placed right on the Start menu so you don't have to hunt for them; they're discoverable, in other words. In XP, it's even more task oriented thanks to the task panes (which were also added to Office XP and 2003, along with Smart Tags, both of which make it possible for users to more easily discover functionality that had been in the product all along, but was not discoverable. Hey, I'm more productive as a result). When you select a photo file in XP's Explorer, for example, the task pane changes to show options related to pictures. Select a music file, and the list changes to music tasks. And so on. It's intelligent.

The beauty of this approach--and the irony, when you consider the trouble Microsoft has gotten in for product bundling and the applause Apple has received for supposedly being better to its customers--is that any application--from any third party developer--can overtake the Microsoft defaults in the task panes. So, for example, if you install the RealONE media player and choose to make that your default media player, when you select a music file in Explorer and choose "Play song" in the task pane, it plays in RealONE and not in Windows Media Player. And third parties can extend the shell with their own options too, though curiously few do it (I guess they're too busy complaining how evil Microsoft is).

In short, in Windows XP to some extent and in Longhorn to a greater degree, people will be able to get work done without having to think about what application they need to use. And in Longhorn, they will stop having to worry about "where" that file is. It's a natural evolution of the honestly good UI work Microsoft has been doing for years, and not getting a lot of credit for. It's curious.

Now, because I present this information, I'm somehow labeled a Microsoft lover and/or an Apple basher. That's silly. But Apple has done very little to make its UI better per se, beyond simple enhancements to what is, again, a classic desktop OS. There's nothing wrong with that. Frankly, Apple's crowd is technical enough to deal with it. But saying that such an OS is "easier to use" or "more elegant" than Windows is wrong. Mac OS X is attractive, arguably "better looking" than Windows XP, though that's a subjective declaration. But it is most certainly not "easier to use". And that's not "Apple bashing," it's just the way it is.

I hope this helps.

[ Posted at 11:34 AM | Permalink ]

Apple unveils 20-inch iMac
Now this looks cool, though I'm concerned by the continued use of a pokey G4 in any desktop system. Apple this week unveiled a 20-inch version of its cool iMac (I own a 17-inch model) that features a 1680 x 1050 display driven by an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra, marking the first time Apple has put a decent video card into a desktop machine (before this, all of the iMac and eMac displays were a generation behind what PC vendors were shipping). It's a bit expensive at $2199, but my God ... that display. Looks nice.

[ Posted at 11:22 AM | Permalink ]