At this moment in the baseball season I'm hardly in the mood to defend him, but that said, if you read his blog regularly he's devoted ample time to the actual failures of those tablets on the merits (as well as the failures of the companies making and marketing them).
He is certainly reliably an Apple fan, but I've found him willing to give credit where due (he loves the Amazon tablet, at least conceptually) in general.
So, as somebody who was thinking about getting an Android tablet at some point, would you recommend that I plan on waiting another year? Or should I just give in and concede that if I do get a tablet it should be an iPad?
I initially misread the title as "Help me understand Jon Gruden". I was pretty surprised that Ben had started following the NFL closely enough to even know who Jon Gruden was and was about to helpfully offer a link to Bleacher Report's weekly Jon Gruden NFL Monday Night Football Fact Check ("Jon Gruden says things. Sometimes those things are factual.").
But then the post was about tablet computers. And, in a burst of synchronicity, we had our company-wide fiscal-year-end meeting this morning, at which they announced that we'd had a surprisingly strong year in the teeth of the crap economy. So, in addition to better than usual profit sharing checks, every employee was also given a spanking new iPad2. Yay! New toy!
2: I'm hardly the one to ask, as I have used and enjoyed apple products for decades, and generally believe that they're smart about things that are important to me (and which no other computer company is smart about), despite being a corporation, and thus annoying like a corporation. That said, most android tablet manufacturers seem to have failed quite thoroughly at figuring out (or figuring out how to implement) the things that make iPads cool and fun.
If you were going to be developing your own tablet apps, on the other hand, I could see an android tablet being a fun, cheaper way to get into that.
And if you just want to read books and watch movies/tv and maybe occasionally check out unfogged, the amazon tablet seems interesting and very cheap.
I thought he was referring to Jonathan Groubert
Gruber is utterly biased, but he does have a point about the tablets.
Ordinary people (that is, not tech journalists) need a reason to buy a tablet, and so the manufacturer better have a good one. For the iPad it's "watch movies from iTunes and use apps from the App Store". For the Kindle Fire it's "read books and watch movies from Amazon". But what's the story for, say, the Motorola Xoom? Apparently it has a dual-core processor, lots of pixels in its cameras, and it supports Adobe® Flash® Player 10. Gruber's right to point out that this is not a particularly compelling sales pitch for most people.
every employee was also given a spanking new iPad2. Yay! New toy!
Your company is run by Tom Haverford and Jean-Ralphio?
How come "Adobe" and "Flash" get the circle-r treatment but the other brand names don't?
How come "Adobe" and "Flash" get the circle-r treatment?
That's how they appear on Motorola's own blurb for the device. In full:
"Don't wait. Experience the future right now with MOTOROLA XOOM, the world's first device powered by Android™ 3.1 (Honeycomb)--a platform designed specifically for tablets. The dual-core processor MOTOROLA XOOM has a larger screen, more pixels and higher-quality front- and rear-facing cameras than the competition. It is also Adobe® Flash® Player 10 ready. MOTOROLA XOOM--it's the tablet for the next, next generation."
Trademark rules confuse me. Anyway, if it get a bunch of money, I'm getting a Kindle.
I wonder if Kindles have completely killed the large-print books market.
11: Surely that's a slow-adopter market. (Though we got my grandfather a Kindle and he loved it.)
My dad, who doesn't need large-print books but who was born during the Hoover administration, also has a Kindle and uses it frequently. He also has two generic MP3 players that he called iPods no matter what that does to Apple's trademarks.
7 was my thought exactly. Jean-Ralphio is such a great character.
But what's the story for, say, the Motorola Xoom
Its a powerful tablet that's not an iPad. "Not an iPad" goes a long way for those of us who find the Apple aesthetic unappealing. "Not having to deal with iTunes" goes even farther.
I have an old, cheap mp3 player that's smaller than my (also old) iPod and it's better in many ways (better sound, easier to carry around in pockets) than the iPod but the "shuffle"/random setting isn't very random and the file transfer process is infinitely worse than the iTunes/iPod connection.* It's really annoying because I otherwise don't particularly like iTunes.
*Windows media player will play some files but not recognize them in the music library for some reason. So I have to drag and drop them directly from the file folders.
It's a powerful tablet that's not an iPad.
That's not really a unique selling proposition, though, is it? I mean, it doesn't distinguish the Motorola Xoom from the RIM Playbook or the Samsung Galaxy Tab.
If you count ibruprofen, I have a bottle in my desk that is full of tablets that aren't iPads.
That's not really a unique selling proposition, though, is it? I mean, it doesn't distinguish the Motorola Xoom from the RIM Playbook or the Samsung Galaxy Tab.
Perhaps not. But it does kinda mean that tablets are on track to become commodity hardware, like PCs have been for years.
I guess that sucks for Motorola, but as a consumer I like it just fine.
4: If you were going to be developing your own tablet apps, on the other hand, I could see an android tablet being a fun, cheaper way to get into that.
This is why Android will eventually win. The iPad is a great way to do the things that Steve Jobs thinks you ought to do with it, but there is little potential for someone to come up with a completely novel use for it. It has kick-ass design as is typical for Apple, but it's also much more restricted in its potential than Android tablets.
Also, what Spike said. I'm a recovering Apple fanboy, driven away by iTunes and Apple's various suits against other tablet makers.
|| God knows what the rabid sportswriters will say, but Francona's departure looks to me like the kind of class act you'd expect from him.|>
Gruber is best read as a critic of tech journalism. Whatever you think about Apple products vs. those of their competitors, Apple inspires more painfully stupid tech punditry than any other company.
I don't cover all the bases, but the only person I know of that write more true and interesting things about the markets that Apple participates in is Horace Dedieu (who writes REALLY interesting things).
I like Macs, use one all day at work, and I'd have one at home if I had the cash, but iTunes is truly shit. And my 3 (4?) year old MP3 player sounds significantly better and has a much better UI than the iPod on my phone. Shame, as for everything I do at work, my Mac is near perfect.
Steve Jobs loves us. He knows best and he wants what is best for us and at the last day will come again in a turtleneck to sell consumer electronics to the living and the dead.
iTunes is terrible, and I've been an Apple user (and developer) for over 10 years.
Re: Gruber, he's a fanboy par excellence, but I think 24 is about right. His particular axe to grind here is that Android tablets have been selling terribly, and by and large the tech space is pretending that this isn't so.
24: See, that's exactly what I find odious about Gruber: tech journalism in general is shit, but to read him you'd think Apple in particular gets a raw deal. I'd respect his "claim chowder" posts a hell of a lot more if he did them for a wider range of companies.
I'm perfectly willing to believe that iTunes is terrible, but it's pretty much the only mp3 jukebox app I've used over the past decade so don't have much to compare it with. What are its big drawbacks?
28 - Did you read Gruber in, say, 2004? There were some truly stupendous pieces of idiocy being written back then by click-whores like Dvorak. At this point Apple is a juggernaut, but I think there genuinely was a point when Apple stuff was treated dismissively by the tech press above and beyond a baseline level of journalistic incompetence.
Yeah, I'm with apo -- I haven't used anything but iTunes since 2003 or so, so: what's better? It was miles better than Windows Media Player or xmms or any number of other Unix-based programs I had played with up to that point. (Most of them, for instance, required making explicit playlists, and didn't have a way to, say, immediately bring up every song on the computer by The Beatles. And they required navigating the file system way too much to find things.) I assume competitors have advanced, but I don't know what's so bad about iTunes. It plays songs and has a simple interface for finding the ones I'm looking for, which is all I can think of that I need.
Since there's nothing I love more than a long argument about whether or not Apple sucks goat balls, I'm going to go ahead a blurt out a minor complaint followed by the two most surprising things I learned this week.
Minor Complaint: I was exposed to poison ivy again.
Surprise 1: It is possible to get "athlete's ankle" but nobody calls it that.
Surprise 2: If a fungus gets very well established, when you start to apply fungicide, the area treated looks like it has a bad bruise.
Foobar2000? Audacious? Neither of these are jukebox-style players. Xmms and descendants had/have a plugin that let you do smart playlist-esque stuff, IIRC.
Google turns up a lot of complaints that iTunes doesn't play .ogg files and things like that, but that's a Quicktime issue, not an iTunes issue -- install a Quicktime component for those file formats and iTunes will happily play them.
Another major complaint seems to be that iTunes makes the whole computer sluggish, but I've never experienced that one (though I have to kill Firefox every week or so because it gets confused or something and makes my laptop unusably slow, and Preview crashes everything when I have order 100 PDF files open, and Mathematica often hangs, and Spotlight -- let's not talk about Spotlight.)
28: and that's what I find reassuring about Gruber. He writes about Apple because it's what he likes and what he knows about. He's a guy with a blog; he's not obliged to pretend to be unbiased.
But his bias is right up front and as far as I can see, not corrupting. He does what any of us who unashamedly like Apple products would want to do in his position: effectively rebuts stupid Apple criticism to make room for meaningful Apple criticism, which he does actually offer from time to time.
But it does kinda mean that tablets are on track to become commodity hardware, like PCs have been for years.
It doesn't at all, no.
Gruber is best read as a critic of tech journalism.
There's a lot to this, and also 27. Most tech journalism is shit, shit, shit. And most tech commentary is stupid, ritualized, craven, or simply corrupt. At the root of a lot of crap in this area was a failure or unwillingness to understand what Apple has been trying to do, especially since the launch of the iPod. Gruber was one of the first regular online writers who had a good Theory of Apple, and he's been a lot better-positioned than the vast majority of the field to explain their success as a result. He also did it without taking most of the paths to perdition.
I could do without the Kubrick/Yankees/Bond stuff, but c'est la vie.
More recently, John Siracusa (initially just for the software design side on the Mac, but increasingly for market-level analysis, too) and Horace Dedieu (for market-level stuff) have emerged as smart commentators, though Siracusa doesn't write enough--you have to listen to his podcast instead.
At the root of a lot of crap in this area was a failure or unwillingness to understand what Apple has been trying to do, especially since the launch of the iPod
Because none of those things are important, and have never been. What's important is specs.
I can't believe we're having a Mac vs. [ handy PC substitute ] discussion on the internet in 2011. Am I fourteen again?
There were some truly stupendous pieces of idiocy being written back then by click-whores like Dvorak.
I was on a live talking-head TV show once with Dvorak. (Kind of the TechTV version of PTI.) God, that guy is a moron.
Theory of Apple
I have no idea why, but that phrase makes me want to travel to England and smash looms.
What are its big drawbacks?
In my experience, iTunes on Windows is horribly unstable, hanging and crashing with outrageous frequency.
Additionally, I have a strong distaste for the non-native look and feel of the UI, with its Fisher-Price-chicklet-button-not-enough-settings-and-options-having annoyances that keep me from wanting to use a Mac a to begin with. Probably its the same revulsion an Apple user would feel using Internet Explorer in a Mac environment.
Also, does iTunes still sell you .aac files instead of .mp3s? Those always pissed me off.
Finally, somewhere in Georgia there is a lady I don't know who signed up to iTunes using my email address. I'm constantly getting receipts for the lame music she buys, and I've never been able to figure out how to get rid of them.
40: Someplace foreign like that.
I was on a live talking-head TV show once with Dvorak
Was it "Cranky Geeks"?
I can't believe we're having a Mac vs. [ handy PC substitute ] discussion on the internet in 2011. Am I fourteen again?
Which is exactly what is wrong with most tech journalism.
Probably its the same revulsion an Apple user would feel using Internet Explorer in a Mac environment.
There is no current internet explorer for mac.
not-enough-settings-and-options-having
You 100% definitely don't get the Apple UI philosophy. Which is definitely fine! Go in a different direction. But hoping that the things that are allowed by Apple's philosophy will be made available to you -- but with all the bells and whistles and eight different ways to do the same thing that you crave -- is probably going to lead to heartache and/or foolish pronouncements on the internet.
What Gonerill said. I find Gruber's sneering at Android pretty aggravating, but I have my own bias in that area. Where he's valuable, if you are interested in Apple, is that he has real insight into what Apple is up to, why their products are the way they are, and what their future products will probably look like. (For instance, I thought his piece on why Apple will never support flash on the iPad was extremely informative.) Whether his insight is due to a groundbreaking Theory of Apple or really good inside sources or both, I don't know.
Additionally, I have a strong distaste for the non-native look and feel of the UI
Gruber hates that too. Comity.
41 not-enough-settings-and-options
Huh. I think it has too many, but luckily I can ignore most of them.
I like Dvorak, because he's the only person in the world who can make Leo Laporte stop talking about Twitter. He's clearly daft, but he's entertaining.
I have also met Leo Laporte! He is also an idiot.
There is no current internet explorer for mac.
I know that. But there used to be one, back in the day. I used it on a Mac and it sucked.
You 100% definitely don't get the Apple UI philosophy
Oh, I get it. I just don't like it. I don't want a system that tries to protect me from myself at the expense of control.
For example, my boss had a large mp3 file on his Mac. It was spoken voice, and didn't need to be at high quality, I just wanted the file size to be smaller. So I wanted to crank down the bit rate to something like 48 kbits. Could I use the iTunes tools to do this? I could not. The minimum was something like 128.
I'm sure there was no technical reason that iTunes could not have offered this a lower bit rate capability, it seems the designers just felt that users couldn't be trusted with the power to accept audio distortion inherent to shrinking their files that much - even if that rate would work fine for a spoken voice recording.
Anyway, I find Apple products tend to be rife with that kind of design decision. And its probably fine for 95% of cases. But I tend to spend a lot of time in that 5% zone.
47. I do commend Apple for not supporting Flash on the iPad. I fucking hate Flash. I don't think Android is doing itself any favors by trying to differentiate itself as Flash-supporting.
I don't want a system that tries to protect me from myself at the expense of control.
You 100% don't get the Apple UI philosophy.
You 100% don't get the Apple UI philosophy.
Fine, explain it to me.
It might be annoying for computers, but now circular saws can tell when they are cutting flesh and stop themselves fast. Sure, this limits you, but I know too many people (n = 2) who have been sliced by a circular saw.
56: I think I probably can't, but: did you figure out another way to convert those MP3s to 48k? I certainly know I could. Have you ever, since that moment, had to convert an mp3 to 48k? Every single item that you add to a UI makes the other elements of that UI incrementally more cognitively complicated to access. If you want a UI that does anything you can possibly think of, with as much flexibility as can be arranged, you want a programming language. That's fine! I love programming! But programming languages are not efficient ways to traverse a world. And in some way you know this, right? Because you use operating systems with windowing and icons and animated transitions and all of these simplifying assumptions that Apple (mostly) pioneered. But you also want them to have every single option available a click or two deeper, and that's incoherent.
I was thinking about how I would convert an mp3 to 48k on OS X; I came up with a couple of options, neither of them inconsistent with my use of iTunes: I would open xld or some other freeware front-end, or I would use the terminal and call whatever mp3 converter I was interested in that way; why, for operations that are way out on the tail of what any users (including power users like yourself who never do things like navigating between folders or switching windows or loading a web page) is that so bad?
58 is missing a "are likely to do" before "is that so bad".
Have you ever, since that moment, had to convert an mp3 to 48k?
Just ask, "Would you like a free copy of the Book of 48k?"
I mean, even if you know that 48k mp3s are useful for voice only, and even if you know that you're converting music and that music should obviously be circa 258k VBR with the particular build of the LAME codec that you're looking for, and even if you know that the particular half-dozen prog mp3s you're planning to convert would be best served not by VBR, but by 384k fixed bitrate, even still, if you're using a GUI that has all of those options, it will take you several milliseconds (at least) longer to do what you're trying to do than it would if you were using a GUI that guessed correctly at what you were trying to do. If you use a computer for eight or ten hours a day, and those extra milliseconds accumulate on every operation that's within the 95% interval of things almost everybody does all the time, even if you're way out on the power user curve, you're still going to have a faster, smoother user experience if the operating system designer makes some intelligent (evidence-based!) decisions about what you're likely to be doing in any given circumstance. That, taken to the extreme of fastness and smoothness (to, indeed, the detriment of flexibility) is what I suspect is the apple philosophy of interface design.
61 is missing any consideration of execution time, which is nearly as important. cf. all the reports of terribly slow scrolling on Android tablets.
Android phones kind of suck for cut and paste, but I think they scroll fine.
My model of Android phone actual is a horrible phone, but I don't really use it to make calls so I'm O.K. with that.
I've had a "trial" Xoom from my work for a number of months. No real opinion; it was way too expensive when it came out (no idea what they cost now) and I don't use it enough to remember how to do stuff. But I am an old enough fuddy-dud that I was quite pleased today seeing our location and direction of travel tracked pretty freaking accurately as we crossed an (admittedly narrow) body of water on a ferry (but of course not unique to tablets, much less a Xoom). It does have surprisingly good camera, but otherwise, you know, a tablet.
I don't use it enough to remember how to do stuff
I have already gone on at tedious length, but this is evidently the problem. Nobody forgets how to do stuff on the iPad because it's immediately obvious, and anyhow you use it constantly.
There's a lot of room between an Apple UI and a programming language, though. I don't find the VLC player to be much more complicated for simple things than iTunes, and a combination of using a variety of filetypes and the occasional need to fiddle with subtitles or audio tracks has made it my default video player.
I don't listen to music on my laptop that often, but my preference would be to have something even more scaled down than iTunes for that. A compromise would be a mini-player version that does just a bit more but remains built into the same app. I don't blame Apple for that one.
Safari for PC, on the other hand, is a total nightmare if you do a significant amount of work that involves opening pdf links. It's too bad, because in important other ways, it's better than Chrome. (I have to reserve Firefox for certain applications, so it can't be my default even though I prefer it over the others.)
66: Yes, that was my point. But you being the expert and all, thank you. You are right on this but insufferable.
67.1, 67.2: well, right. And if Apple was in the business of being all things to all people, they'd probably address both of those concerns. But they tend to focus on the core use (narrowed down, again, by testing) (which supports their business goals, which can be nontrivially annoying) and leave the rest to independent developers (which has worked out fine over the past three decades from my perspective, but mmv).
67.3: that seems like a weird thing to use. I'm not sure I even really realized there was a Safari for PC. (my regular browser is Firefox; I don't have a helper for PDFs, so they download, and then I open them manually in Papers if I want to hang on to them. I offer for completeness.)
68: I completely am, and it's horrible.
I was worse at fourteen.
68 reads more dickish than I think I intended.
So, to replace the cognitive load of having extra options buried in a menu or dialog someplace, you are instead encumbered with the cognitive load of having to learn about, install and use an entirely different application to accomplish an activity which is only slightly outside the mainstream, and which would be entirely possible to do with the software at hand, if only the user interface allowed you to do so.
I think well-organized UIs are perfectly capable of supporting large amounts of functionality, and, to me, not having the options I need is far more frustrating than having too many. I think Apple is too wedded to its "less is more" philosophy. I don't care for that. Less is not more. More is more.
Every time I use a mac it takes me a while to figure out what those buttons do to control the windows, what keyboard shortcuts are operable (if there are any), and a few other things. It's pretty embarrassing.* The issue of course is that every time I use a mac it's not my mac.
*This happened during a fortunately informal presentation last year. I could not figure out how to switch windows or navigate the file system from the applications that were open. On the other hand, there was no prep time and by the end of the class, enough people had had problems that I wasn't as embarrassed. A couple of my mac user friends told me that the prof had customized the settings in an unusual way, even for them.
it's immediately obvious, and anyhow you use it constantly
How could that not make people think about dicks?
72.2: well, you're wrong. I don't think we can go further than that without my trying to dig up a bunch of cites on HCI, or you telling me I should shut up (fair), but Apple has done much more user testing than you're likely to.
76 has cracked the code.
This is discussion is so fucking humiliating. I feel like someody dissed the original comic book series of The Tick or something like that. No, internet! Your gravely mistaken opinions about the new character classes in Cyberpunk 2020 will find redress at the point of my rhetorical sword! Fnord!
So, I finished my work. Goodnight invisible, foul-tempered, nerds.
Back in the early Mac days, I was always impressed at how easily first-time users picked up the interface--even/especially the action that made me cringe like ejecting the floppy by dragging it to the Trash. And I still don't know if anything I've used matches the quick simplicity of MacPaint and MacDraw.
My main gripe with Apple these days is the Disneyfied censoring of the software content in the app store. RIP the days of playing Happy Weed in a university Mac Lab in '94.
Apple has done much more user testing than you're likely to.
Oh, bullshit. Everybody knows they just ask Steve Jobs how he wants it, and convince the focus groups to agree.
Converting MP3s to an unusual bitrate seems like exactly the kind of thing that one would go to a dedicated command line tool for. Luckily Mac OS is Unix so the command line is very powerful.
Apple used to do interface testing for large system updates by bringing total computer novices into a room with a computer and telling them to go nuts while they watched from behind a one way mirror. I assume they still do something like this, but finding utter novices must be more difficult.
I've been looking into software to help me do research stuff - simple notetaking apps, more complicated things like DevonThink, batch file renamers, - and the stuff available for macs, but not necessarily made by Apple, is for the most part better than things made for PCs, at least for my usages. It's frustrating because there's no reason people can't apply the same UI principles to both platforms.
Converting MP3s to an unusual bitrate...
Thats the thing. Its not an unusual bitrate. Its a pefectly reasoable bitrate to use for spoken voice. I was pretty shocked that it wasn't supported.
Maybe I'm just weird, but I like GUI programs for simple standard tasks and I want them to have only the most obvious things there because I'm using them over and over and over. If I'm doing something nonstandard, I would much rather open a terminal and start writing a script or whatever than dig through menus and checkboxes and tabs and whatnot searching for the hidden option.
There's a file rename utility that I'm using now that is hilariously over-enabled. It's violates every principle Sifu is talking about. I should go look for screenshots.
85.last: there sort of is, though. Apple basically makes it easy to go with the program and develop a consistent UI; windows makes it maddeningly difficult.
In summary, Windows drools and Apple rules. Steve Jobs 4-eva! </childish>
The Tick comic was, and always will be, great. Also the cartoon. We've been watching a lot of Angel recently and I was tickled to see Ben Edlund was a producer in the last two seasons.
Apple has done much more user testing than you're likely to.
It would be sweet if Spike proved this wrong.
I couldn't possibly be less interested in this debate, since all I want to do is have enough word processing functionality so that I can write my cease and desist letters and help destroy innovation, my true goal. But I will say that Microsoft Word, which seems to offer 10 billion ways to do things but without making any of them easy or intuitive, totally sucks it. There was a nice period when law firms used Word Perfect for like 10 years after everyone else had abandoned it; I still miss good old WP.
Apple used to do interface testing for large system updates by bringing total computer novices into a room with a computer and telling them to go nuts while they watched from behind a one way mirror.
I guess that's the problem. I'm not a computer novice, and don't really want a system designed for one.
89: I was wondering as I typed that if there was some back-end development issue I'm just not aware of.
82: Everybody knows they just ask Steve Jobs how he wants it
Possibly apocryphal, but one of my favorite Steve Jobs/Bill Atkinson stories:
Steve suddenly got more intense. "Rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere! Just look around this room!". And sure enough, there were lots of them, like the whiteboard and some of the desks and tables. Then he pointed out the window. "And look outside, there's even more, practically everywhere you look!". He even persuaded Bill to take a quick walk around the block with him, pointing out every rectangle with rounded corners that he could find.
When Steve and Bill passed a no-parking sign with rounded corners, it did the trick. "OK, I give up", Bill pleaded. "I'll see if it's as hard as I thought." He went back home to work on it....and the rest is history.
This is probably the wrong thing for me to be doing right now, but I've recently started experimenting with using Vim (technically GVim) for notetaking (partly because I'm going to start marking up my notes). I'd been using notepad, but it's not quite functional enough, and I don't want to launch a word processor for stuff that needs only minimal visual formatting.
91: more recently he's been the head writer on Supernatural, which given your expressed preferences, you might check out.
Back when I was a Linux user, a decade ago or so, I spent too much time switching window managers every so often and going back and forth between KDE and Gnome and Gnustep and configuring and re-configuring things and while I would have said I liked having lots of options and customizability, the point is I kept changing things because I wasn't satisfied with any of them. Then I got a Mac and everything just looked nice the way it was and I couldn't really change it but I didn't really want to. And then I found five dollars.
The file renamer. It works pretty well, but I don't think it can watch a folder and rename stuff as it comes in, which the mac software (that I can't remember the name of) I was looking at can do.
Supernatural is a show for Android-loving John Dvorak fans?
I'd been using notepad
Man, how I wish Microsoft could be bothered to make notepad into a decent text editor. It seems like it would be such a relatively simple thing to do and it would be a huge improvement to the Windows platform.
When I had a Mac, the one thing I really wanted to do was to fatten up that skinny-ass scroll bar that they use for scrolling windows. It looks pretty, but its simply not a wide enough target on the screen.
I told myself I would focus today and write the talk I'm giving on Monday instead of waiting until Sunday night, and I've watched a week's work of DVR'ed trash and now I'm comparing software products on the internet like it's 1999. Someone needs to invent an anti-procrastination drug or something.
I'm comparing software products on the internet like it's 19991
I've watched a week's work of DVR'ed trash
Did you watch TerraNova? Its all about shooting dinosaurs with machine guns.
I totally watched all two hours of Terra Nova, spending the entire time thinking "this isn't much fun; I'd even prefer to be writing that talk right now."
19991
No, in 1991 I was still using an Apple. Mac Classic, baby.
You would think dinosaurs would have a different reaction to getting shot. Like, I don't know, bleeding or something.
I think whats going to annoy me about that show is the Daddy issues. I got sick of that shit on Lost.
I vaguely remember doing some programming in Pascal on a PC in 1991-2. I didn't do any programming again until a couple of years ago.
I also remember writing up some assignments in wordperfect for DOS.
104: I don't think I had internet access in 1991. I was a late bloomer when it came to Unix vs Windows bickering.
I don't think I knew what the internet was in 1991. Actually, I'm still not sure I know what the internet is. A series of tubes sounds about right.
A series of tubes that lets you be an asshole pseudonymously, of course. That's the definition I'm going with.
We were most definitely rocking the Pascal in 1991.
My school had a VAX machine that you could dial into. When I ran "finger" on it I could see that some other users were were on the internet, but I had no idea what that was.
But I did have an email account, and that was really cool.
I think whats going to annoy me about that show is the Daddy issues.
Right now someone at TWoP is saying "wait, why don't we have Jacob recapping Terra Nova?"
But yeah, I feel like they had to map out some kind of quota of stereotypical family conflicts to introduce in the pilot. And I'm not sure what aspect of the show would make me tune in again. Pretty CGI dinosaurs? I'm not that nostalgic about my middle-school Jurassic Park memories. I guess the mysterious diagrams etched in the rocks are supposed to be the hook that makes us come back. Kind of like... mysterious polar bears on a tropical island, I guess.
One's asshole is traditionally connected to a series of tubes, yes.
96: mvim/MacVim is really nice.
In truth I was mostly on BBSs in '91, although I think I got my first email account that year (and definitely tried irc via various dialogs and rms's account).
You know who's old school when it comes to computers? George RR Martin*:
I still write my books on WordStar, on a DOS computer.
*Who's ^V-ing Sansa Stark?
And I'm not sure what aspect of the show would make me tune in again.
For me its the expectoration that the series will be cancelled soon, and I therefore have a decent expectation of being able to watch the entire series without putting forth a whole lot of effort.
Which, come to think of it, is not a particularly good reason for watching a show....
I never did really figure out BBSs. I think I successfully connected to one once, and, once there, didn't really have time to figure out what was going on before my dad started yelling at me about hogging the phone line.
One of my best friends at the time was really into BBSes. He's now a developer or engineer or something at a giant media company.
I think I connected to a BBS once.
53: 24 hours of 128Kb/s is about a gigabyte. I'm trying to envision a scenario where I want 24 hours of spoken word and that extra 600MB is the dealbreaker. I am failing.
Apple is the only computer company that willingly removes or leaves out features. They do it by saying "you know what, 90% of people don't really need this any more." Floppy drives, optical drives, 48Kbit/s codecs. A few people wail and rend their garments about it, then a year later they can barely remember what it was like to have it.
Apple has done much more user testing than you're likely to
Wait, so I missed a large chunk of this thread, but is Tweety really defending the UI of *iTunes*? For serious?
(Apple's UIs, when they give a shit, really are awesome. They stopped giving a shit about iTunes years ago.)
(P.S.: Fuck you, Ste/ve J/obs, for making me maximize my windows by hand.)
Also, I just figured out in a few clicks how to encode an MP3 at 48Kbit/sec natively in iTunes. From this I conclude that both Spike and Tweety are on crack.
Yeah, the primary problem with iTunes is not how it handles tunes (though that's not ideal either). It's the giant cascade of how it handles all the other stuff that really should not be controlled by your jukebox.
Finally, somewhere in Georgia there is a lady I
don't know who signed up to iTunes using my
email address. I'm constantly getting receipts for
the lame music she buys, and I've never been able
to figure out how to get rid of them.
I've only skimmed, so apologies if this has been said. Go to the iTunes store. Do the "forgot my password" thing with your email. When they email you the password reset link, change it. She'll have to set up a new account after that.
Among my many gripes are the ways in which iTunes handles compilation albums or albums with multiple artists. It'd be nice, when transferred to my phone, not to find 25 different albums and artists, rather than just one.* Also, it'd be nice if it wasn't so MP3 centric. Most of my music is ripped as lossless. It's possible to play it, by buggering about with Quicktime plugins, Xiph, and so on, but it'd be nice not to have to.
Apple do so many things right, but iTunes is, unfortunately, not one of them.
* yes, there are fixes of a sort, but it involves a lot of tagging and buggering about.
127: Go to the iTunes store. Do the "forgot my password" thing with your email.
Is there a way to do that without installing the ghastly Windows version of iTunes on my PC? Some kind of web version perhaps?
ways in which iTunes handles compilation albums
That is definitely a weakness. OTOH, I'm more than a little OCD about my ID3 tags so I do a lot of tagging and buggering about already. I don't use the iTunes store at all except to find album art.
I just figured out in a few clicks how to encode an MP3 at 48Kbit/sec natively in iTunes
Yeah, you can encode down to 16 kbps natively.
53: 24 hours of 128Kb/s is about a gigabyte. I'm trying to envision a scenario where I want 24 hours of spoken word and that extra 600MB is the dealbreaker. I am failing.
I used to use an iPod to record interviews, before Apple kindly broke compatibility with pre-Touch accessories. I had well over 60 gigs of spoken word on my Classic, most of which I had to ditch when I moved to the Touch.
re: 130.1
I've never had a problem using other apps. Obviously the tags that are coming out of freedb must work OK with my streaming server, and my MP3 player, and foobar and winamp, and etc, but not with iTunes and the iPhone.
131: I don't understand this at all. I've got a chunky old iPod photo that still works fine, and syncs to the same library as my iphone 4.
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Hitler Youth having been taken, Glenn Beck's new children's show debuting Monday will be called Liberty Treehouse.
|>
The treehouse of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of children.
Right now someone at TWoP is saying "wait, why don't we have Jacob recapping Terra Nova?"
Just wanted to add an appreciative "heh" to this.
Also, Sifu is totally right about everything in this thread.
We need to have Jacob recap Glenn Beck.
In other, better news, I just noticed Jim Henley has been blogging again.
Nobody forgets how to do stuff on the iPad because it's immediately obvious
This has not been my experience either with the (few) interactions I've had with an iPad, or with many other Apple products I use regularly.
In any case, I think 72 makes a good point: you can hide a lot of options under "advanced" tabs that most people need never bother with, but are there if you want them.
I don't think it's necessarily true re: Apple taking the wrong approach to UI design, and software functionality. I am, by any standard, a power user on the Mac* and I almost never find functions lacking that are present on the PC. In fact, often the reverse. I could list, at length, the things I can do natively, or with minimal installation required, on the Mac that are barely do-able at all on my PC.
Not meant as a Mac versus PC thing. I use both, have no real complaints re: PCs either, but, for my own particular work needs, OS X just works for me in a way that windows doesn't without starting to chuck on cygwin/X and lots of 3rd party tools.
* not meant in an big-headed way, I just mean that in my job I have to do things ordinary users don't -- coding, using 'X', working with automator, shell scripts, working remotely, etc
I love the design aesthetic of Apple stuff, but I'll confess to being terrified by their overall strategy, particularly their legal strategy. Insofar as the economy becomes increasingly oriented in a similar direction, away we go towards the Anti-Star-Trek dystopia of lawyers, marketers, an increasingly proletarianized creative class, and the guard labor necessary to keep the mass unemployed in line.
It's hard to articulate my views on this without sounding completely unhinged. Oh, well.
Also, dear god do I hate itunes. I find Clementine fairly satisfactory.
Anything anti-Star Trek sounds good to me.
141: Do you use that with an iPod? Does it work well?
It works well with my Android phone; not sure about how nicely it plays with ipods. It claims to do the job.
Nobody forgets how to do stuff on the iPad because it's immediately obvious
I was thinking today about the fact that I'm semi-illiterate at reading symbols. Whenever I have to do something on my phone that I don't do often (like use the camera) I end up scrolling over all of the icons to read the labels to find the function.
I'm sure I could eventually figure out the "camera" icon, but it isn't something I can spot at a glance, and would be slower than reading labels (even the items I use more often, I don't recognize the symbols, I just know the location).
I've been frustrated with Office 2007/10 for this reason -- they've replaced several of the menus with icons and, with no text, I forget that there's a menu accessible there.
That isn't the reason that I have an aversion to Apple products, but it does suggest that my preferences for UI are not typical.
they've replaced several of the menus with icons
And called that new feature "The Ribbon". *shudder*
For the next version, they are going to use icons that slowly morph into different shapes, just to keep you on your toes.
My mom recently got a new computer with Office 2010, and the way they changed all the menus and stuff is driving her crazy. It drives me crazy too, but I'm more comfortable searching around the UI to figure out how to do stuff than she is, so when I was staying with her I helped her often with it and she still calls me sometimes for help figure something out.
149: You might point her to this. Or, if you're less adventurous, to the thing I linked to there.
Oh, wait. I'm not sure if that thing works for 2010. Maybe there's one like it for translating 2010 into 2003-speak?
I don't use most of the advanced stuff, but for basic things I haven't really noticed a big interface difference between the 2007 Office stuff and the 2010.
I like the ribbon, but it amuses me how it scares the crap out of people who aren't used to it.
I heard the Ribbon put an opponent's wife's hand in a jar of acid at a party.
I heard the Ribbon forces automakers to compete over who can run the stupidest truck commercial during football games.
So Mineshaft. How do you get over someone you still love but who for all variety of good reasons you can't be with?
156: Thundersow says, "You find someone new whom you can love, someone who doesn't have all those reasons. It sucks. It's a tough situation to be in."
156: Liquor, ill-advised home renovation, and Big Ten football.
Go all Mrs. Robinson on some lucky college student.
They call the cops whenever I try.
Take up a hobby? Have casual and inappropriate sex with various people? Wait it out? Have conversations with yourself about the things you enjoy and find absorbing in their own right, and try to do more of those things? I favor 4, followed by 3 and 2.
To 146, though: it does suggest that my preferences for UI are not typical
I don't think so; you're not the only one who's not a fan of icons without text.
On preview: Unfortunate typo there, Stanley. A friend once texted me in connection with something he'd been explaining and which I wasn't quite getting in a mere 2 seconds, "[parsimon] is a little sow." I still haven't forgotten: I mean, for heaven's sake, it was something about how a mac interface works, and I've never used a mac, so geez, and the typo, the typo.
But I will say that Microsoft Word, which seems to offer 10 billion ways to do things but without making any of them easy or intuitive, totally sucks it.
Amen.
Right now I switch back and forth between three different versions of Word each day. Every time I stop to consider how many hundreds of hours of my life are getting wasted while I hunt around for menu items that have been randomly and arbitrarily moved around between versions for NO APPARENT REASON, my blood pressure starts to rise. It's like Microsoft took the QWERTY mentality and gave it the finger.
In related news, I am giving extremely serious consideration to buying a typewriter for the office. The amount of wasted time, paper, jammed machines, etc. we spend to print envelopes is just enormous. Not to mention having to call around the office all the time to make sure nobody else tries to print to the printer while you've got an envelope in it.
All of my interns are too young to remember the bliss of typewriters, but this is the first place I've ever worked without one, and I feel its absence at least two or three times a week.
Witt, I don't know what kind of volume of envelopes you're printing, but would it make sense to be printing self-adhesive labels instead? In that case, you can have a dedicated label-printer, and if it jams in some way, those who need to print actual documents needn't be held up.
Of course if you're printing labels, someone does need to manually affix said labels, and if you're sending out hundreds of envelopes, this could be problematic. It may or may not save time.
156: I recommend doing anything irresponsible that you can liveblog, especially if you can do it tonight, because I'm home alone and our house is feeling big and empty.
... And of course what helpy-chalk said.
I add to my list 5: Work out. Add an exercise regimen of some sort. There's nothing quite like this to take you into a different space in your head (and body). Just imagine coming home and saying to yourself, "I feel great, actually!"
Or, 6, be foolish enough to respond to a text message. Oh yeah. Now I remember.
parsimon, to me your 4 looks like an elaboration of your 1.
the QWERTY mentality
What is this?
Actually, I most strongly recommend Apo's 160, and will just add that if you can liveblog it, that would be icing on the cake.
Sorry, taking a vow of celibacy. So not worth it. So not worth it at all.
170: I considered that. 1 refers to a new hobby (a person might decide to take up knitting, or pottery), while 4 refers to the kind of thing I myself inevitably do, which is remember that I really like, for example, philosophy and political and social theory; or have harbored in recent years an interest in the history of alchemy, and I have those Jung books on the symbolism in alchemical texts over there, maybe I'll pick them up; or I could read some of that stuff on my nature shelves, John Muir maybe, or more of the Foxfire books, which last would get me thinking about, god, all sorts of things.
4 is a grounding thing. As someone said to me once, "Find your center."
I guess all that could be an elaboration of 1.
Of course if you're printing labels, someone does need to manually affix said labels, and if you're sending out hundreds of envelopes, this could be problematic. It may or may not save time.
If you're operating on that scale, buy window envelopes. Do they still make typewriters?
As someone said to me once, "Find your center."
Can't trust those dang tootsie roll owls, though.
As someone said to me once, "Find your center."
If you find the center, measure sixteen inches to the next center if you want to build a wall to code.
171: The layout of keyboards has remained essentially unchanged* for 100+ years in part because it would be a pain for everyone who has already learned to touch-type to change to a new layout, even if there might be other good reasons for such a new layout.
*I am aware that there are alternative keyboard layouts. They have not been widely adopted.
Regarding the envelopes, the issue is a constant stream of one-time tasks, including filling in forms and typing short cover notes, that would be monumentally less work to stick a sheet in a typewriter and be done with, rather than the elaborate work-arounds one has to do with computerized printing. Yes, sheets of labels, great. But a single envelope? Typewriter every time.
179: ah. Well, there are good points (people don't have to relearn typing) and bad points (everybody types slower; carpal tunnel is worse, maybe?) to that, but I'm not sure it analogizes well to computer user interfaces.
What the heck is a tootsie roll owl?
179: A single envelope? Cripe. There are single-label printers -- you put in a strip of labels which print single file, as it were, instead of a whole sheet. I think they're kind of miniature, but I'm not sure. I have no idea what your office budget is. I agree with you about the headaches involved in the situation you describe, especially if the forms in question can't be filled in computeristically and then printed out as a sheet of paper.
What the heck is a tootsie roll owl?
181: You from Nebraska or something?
I didn't bet on the game or anything.
I think the great think thing that Apple accomplished was to ensure there was a market for small to medium software developers on almost everything they sell.
In general, I don't like macs for the usual boring reasons and would always, on Windows, use mediamonkey instead of Itunes. But it does seem that the quality of most mac software is much higher than the windows average, even when it's not made by Apple.
And now back to bloody work
Witt, I think that you can buy label makers. I know that you can buy them. We just did. I don't know whether they'll do an address-size label. Brother seems to make label printers which take rolls of printable sheets which get perforated during the process which look simple enough to use.
Can't you print on envelopes directly?
In our office some of the staff use a typewriter and others use labels. The sheet of labels has to be inserted in the manual tray but you can do one at a time (some kind of template lets you select which label on the sheet to print to).
The typewriter is handy for other forms and also for amending documents not generated here.
