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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

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

A community of quality

Drunken Blog:

I think most real users know, in our heart of hearts, that Mac OS X has been misfiring quite a bit lately, and that 10.4 was almost a total misfire in terms of actually using it. It doesn't mean we're going to switch, it doesn't mean we've given up, it just means we know something is wrong.

You can like the idea of XHTML/JavaScript/CSS apps and still know Dashboard was a complete misfire, even if your only clue is that they're bolting on major functionality in a .2 release.

Severe, extreme wonkiness like this doesn't happen by accident, whether it is going on at Apple or Microsoft or anywhere between.

Another interesting expose from an increasingly valuable resource, though his bizarre Microsoft bashing is misplaced. For example, he harps about Spotlight firing a search the second you type any character ("You don't think [that] was rubber-stamped by any time of usability engineer, do you?" he asks), and then bizarrely suggests ... that Microsoft is to blame ("more than one of these [OS X usability problems] appears to be have come over from Microsoft"). That's cute. But the Windows Search feature in Windows Vista Beta 1, which looks a heck of a lot like Spotlight, requires you to press a search button before the search starts. In other words, in his one example, Microsoft got right what Apple got wrong.

Update: drunkenbatman alerts me that he's updated the post to be more clear: He was trying to point out that managers shouldn't listen to themselves or marketing instead of engineers. "Those" coming from Microsoft was supposed to pertain to some specific people in management, he told me, and he's cleared that up in the post.

[ Posted at 9:44 AM | Permalink ]