These people can't handle two buttons on a mouse, but they have no problem with the 102 buttons on a keyboard? Seriously, I just don't understand this argument.
Just because you don't understand it doesn't make it untrue. I learned how to program BASIC from a guy who had parkinsons and no fine motor control. He could not use a two button mouse, because all his fingers contracted at the same time, and when he typed he had to hunt and peck with a single finger. Even with his disability he was still a great programmer, because if he was gonna type something he had to make damned sure it was what he wanted to do. This is also why I am unimpressed with people who measure their code in lines per day.
This was during the win 3.1 days, when it didn't matter so much -- nothing had context menus and the right button was mainly ornamental. But I can see where not being able to right click could kill the usability of a modern PC. A modern mac, on the other hand, does not have this problem.
As for moving the complexity from the mouse to the keyboard: duh, of course that's what you're doing. But in doing so, you've eliminated a variable. You've also added the ability to modify the cursor before the action, and a lot of Mac developers program for this. A single variable plus visual cues makes it much easier for anybody -- including us clever-dick programmers -- to figure out and perform new functionality very quickly, which is the whole goal of the mac OS. Hence why every action you can perform has a corresponding menu item...it's an alternate execution workflow but also a keyboard command "cheat sheet."
Support for a standard IS barebones. What IE lacks in any user services beyond "SUPPORT" -- there's no anti-spyware or anti-popup tools, no built in customizable search bar, no tabbed browsing, no robust links management system, no advanced history display, none of the really cool features that sell people on Firefox or Opera.
Yeah, it's got complete support for XHTML, CSS, PNG etc, but this is just more evidence of how much Netscape sucks. Web developers would start using a feature, and they'd stick their fingers in their ears and shout "LALALALA." Microsoft, on the other hand, wrote a browser that worked with what you gave it. It is by no means in this post-modern age a full featured browser -- in fact, the most recent version of IE should still be considered the bare-minimum requirement for browsing.
It's not a matter of UNDERSTANDING with sufficient explanation. It's a matter of EXPLORING, and the meta system is much better at that. There is no guessing what button will perform what function, which becomes more and more important as programs become increasingly complex and tech support more useless. Good programs go so far as to change the mouse cursor depending on the current meta combination. Take Photoshop for example...ordinarily, you have a tool cursor. Press shift, you get a different cursor. Press ctrl, you get another different cursor, this one telling you it will drop a menu. This makes sense. Expecting a person to guess which mouse button will perform an action does not (though you are correct that if the second button ALWAYS brought up a menu, as it does by default on a mac, it would make more sense).
Incidentally, if you're having trouble command clicking with one hand on a Powerbook, you must have small hands. The Meta keys are close to the trackpad to facilitate one handed use of this common functionality...use your pink and/or ring finger on the meta and your thumb to click. I do it all the time, so don't try telling me it's a hassle. It's far, far better than most of the PC interfaces I've used.
You know, I don't know what the fuck "sticky with DRM issues" means, but I do know that WMP 9 is not that bad, aside from skins. After all, you don't HAVE to rip songs with WMP9. You don't HAVE to rip them using WMA, and if you do, you don't HAVE to wrap them with DRM. It's all optional...and defaulted, those rogue...but optional just the same. It's like the lock on your house, don't lock it, there's no protection. And cries of "Someday they'll force us to lock it" are silly...when that day comes, we'll deal with it. Until then, use whatever works. And a lot of content -- porn, mostly, but also Weed files -- won't work without it. I turn up my nose at DRM too, until something I want to hear is DRM-only. Then I clam up real quick and get out the Sennheisers.
Through sales of licenses to play and create WMP content.
Think about it: Apple is making money through hardware sales. If you boil off the cost of the hardware, all that's left is margin. If Microsoft can receive a PIECE of that margin through mandatory licensing costs to hardware manufacturers, they'd be making money without having to make any hardware or pay for any support.
It really is print-your-own. Assuming it works. Apple has such a head start here and has maintained such a lead in features and desirable content that MS is gonna have to work their ass off to impress people. Plus there's the millions of iPods already sold which aren't WMP compatible. MS, to gain any market at all, is going to have to invent one.
IE was given away free and was (still is) a very bare bones browser. Netscape could have survived by one-upping IE on a feature by feature level and selling a low cost, high value Netscape Gold package that enabled surfers to do something interesting.
Instead, they failed to compete even with the meager feature set offered by IE, pumped their money into one of a million useless portals, and they fell apart.
Is this Microsoft's fault, for exploiting their monopoly to crush Netscape? Maybe. But the prevalence of IE hasn't crushed Opera. It hasn't killed off the much smaller OmniWeb either. In fact, Netscape's sorta-funded Mozilla arm is doing fantastic against IE, almost everybody who tries Firefox sticks with it.
Moral of the story: if you're gonna survive competetion from Microsoft, you'd better get on your fucking toes. Make sure you're always one step ahead (not hard, Microsoft maneuvers with the speed and grace of a Cadillac Brougham) and don't ride your success.
I don't think we have anything to worry about from Apple in these respects. Unfortunately, the key to doing more than simply surviving Microsoft is keen marketing in the face of price cutting and a good-enough mentality. Microsoft is, after all, the Walmart of software companies when it comes to price cutting. If they can shave $.11 off the cost and sell at a loss for two years, they have a chance of burying Apple and everybody else.
Yes, but this is a non argument. If you want to use a mac, and want middle click to open a link in a new tab, map middle click to COMMAND-Click in System Preferences. In fact I think that's the default -- I map middle click to Expose All, so I dunno...I never have my hands off the keyboard and I sip coffee with my mousing hand, so mapping middle click to Expose All means I don't have to move my left hand away from the "meta zone" in the lower left hand corner to see all my windows.
The point is, you don't have to kludge things to get them to work with one mouse button, and the path to use more than one is as simple as makes no odds. Simplicity before generality, common things before powerful things...this is how you make a computer good. Programming for the power user and expecting everybody else to catch up is bad design for everybody.
Well, it is a shame that you can't play Doom 3 above medium detail...but remember that even at LOW detail, it still looks better than any game on the market.
It reminds me of when Unreal first came out...the best computer on the PLANET couldn't play it at low res without hiccoughs. It took years of engine optimizations to get fluidity out of the system, which was annoying, but it also meant that the game was still looking good after two rounds of video card enhancements. Each new card meant activating more cool features -- Coronas, curved surfaces, reflection, etc. Heck, the game still looks pretty awesome to me, though I play it through the UT2k engine.
Well, the iPod itself is pretty simple and ugly if you look at it that way. White face, few simple buttons, silver plastic back is no different from this white box, aluminum foot deal.
Of course, what this means is that your DESKTOP, not your computer, is the focus here. Can the Apple desktop sell a computer? That's like asking if the Mona Lisa could sell a frame.
Desktop taking precidence over the computer...it's almost a paradigm shift, but it's more of cunning marketing stunt.
Right. Now take that same machine, upgrade the video card to a GeForce FX 5200, the hard drive to 80 gig (from 40) and the CDR/DVD drive to a DVD-RW. You can't do it on that model from IBM, but from manufacturers where you can, your loadout is in the $1300 range -- and it's hardly integrated, so it's hardly a fair comparison. The closest thing I've seen is the Sony W700G, which is much wider and deeper and starts aroung $1900.
Furthermore, pricing the cost of buying your own hardware and putting it in isn't fair, and it's silly besides. Who wants to buy half a computer, especially if you're in the market for an all-in-one?
Apple explains the one mouse button in its HI Guidelines. The idea is simple: there are people who can only use one mouse button, for reasons of disability or what have you. Coding for one mouse button allows you to avoid having to program especially for these people, while allowing those who want a second mouse button to use it however they like. You don't lose any functionality, because you can just modify mouse drags and clicks with meta kets. Four meta keys = 4 additional actions by a single meta and a further 6 actions adding two meta keys. Ctrl-Click is generally used to pull down context menus a-la Windows, and this is the default functionality of the second mouse button.
Apple does not ship computers with more than one mouse button mostly because of this philosophical choice, but partly because doing so would give developers justification to require the use of more than one mouse button for their target market.
Incidentally, I hadn't realized how confusing the two button paradigm was until I got a mac and tried to learn Blender. Blender is a mess of multiple mouse clicks, metas, rolls, etc. It's a good program, but you really need the tutorial before you can even figure out where you are. This isn't good design...an interface that does not lend itself to exploration will go unexplored, and you might as well write for the command line at that point.
The best value for Apple computers is to buy a refurbished model shortly after a new model comes out. Generally, the price is substantially less than the decreased price of the older model and it comes with a year of Applecare. I got last year's TOL Powerbook for $1900, my buddy got the g4 800 iBook for $700
If you read their marketting literature, the goal here was to make a PC with the same ease and look as the iPod. Hence the white, the rounded edges and the locked angle mount. It's no aluminum beauty like the Power series, but it makes up for it with its light, compact design. And the movable screen, which I thought was a great idea, made the DVD Lamp look flimsy to a lot of people (even though it wasn't). I see definite improvements, and I *LIKED* the old iMac.
Really, this is ingenious. This look builds off their strongest selling product in a way that encourages people satisfied with current offerings to branch out. And the price is right...$1300 is not that bad for a computer with a 17" flatscreen and a compact design. I'd say this thing has potential beyond even the original colored iMacs if they stress the key components: comparable performance and superior graphics with a smaller footprint, better service and few virus and spyware worries. Of course, they'll probably just do a commercial with Tobey Macguire or something, but marketed right, this could be a valuable product, one that could take the competition a while to clone.
Incidentally, Sony did the whole slim-LCD-PC thing a while back and sold it for about $400 more. It was a cool unit, but WAY bigger than this in both width and depth.
I disagree. Apple doesn't mind being first (Firewire, Quartz Extreme, colored cases, etc). They don't mind being second or third, either. Apple develops at its own pace, using their own research which may or may not include ideas from competetors, and releases products when they're well designed and ready for prime time. If Apple is searching for a video and wireless development team now, expect to wait at least two years for a video ipod.
C# is the conceptual child of C++ and Java. If you have three or four years of C#, another three of Java, and another three of C++, I'd take you over a guy who's had, say, 9 years of C and six months of C#. Or a background in perl or something. "10+ years of C# experience" takes less newspaper then "10+ years of programming experience in object oriented languages, at least two of which should be in C#"
Of course, it could also be written by a complete idiot.
Yeah, that's a good idea. Let's all wait for Apple to spend a ton of cash on research and development to make a cool UI for video devices, and they we can all just steal the interface instead of buying their shit!
You mean a small, light, nearly handheld device with a hard drive and robust OS?
Or do you mean a bunch of hyperbolic promises and hardware specs that keep improving while press claims an actual device is always in immanent release?
Whoa. It's not MY assumption. I don't write web applications that require plugins and if I did, they wouldn't use ActiveX.
My point it, that if you're starting with that assumption and intended to stick with it, ActiveX quickly become a great choice. Of course, a company like yours could never be a customer, but if the money saved going with a Windows-only solution is greater than the cost of developing for and supporting a cross platform plguin, there's no point in doing it.
The company I'm thinking about when I write this is run by a guy who thinks Windows is the way to go and he's run three highly successful Windows software companies. I don't think he cares that people using OSX can't become customers...it wouldn't affect his bottom line in the slightest and he would hate to see those Macs sitting in his test lab. This is INTRANET software, mind you, not INTERNET software. His website works fine in Safari, but I'm sure that's accidental.
Shit, as a Mac user myself I'd get pretty ticked off at assumptions like this, too, if I actually wanted to use the software in question. I don't, because I think it's crap...but it's VERY popular with micromanagers and future outsourcers who want platform agility, not platform flexibility. If you asked me, I'd say those were wrong assumptions, too...but like it or not, they are VERY profitable ones. Cross platform compatibility is hardly a progenitor of success (in fact, it can be quite the opposite). Take a look at the top selling video games of last year and you'll notice that very few of them had versions that ran on anything other than Windows with Direct X.
Don't be too impressed with Word -- the whole point of good object oriented design is to make a program where the user can do whatever they like at whatever pace they choose and have the program operate as expected. If a class is truly bug free, then you should be able to poke its functions in any order and from any direction without harming the caller or the instance of the class itself. In this, a bug free class almost becomes its own program.
Well, I have a several thousand line codebase and I often have bugs I can't fix, usually because the bug report is something like "checkbox still checked after closing window."
I go in, look at the usual suspects (checkbox code, window code, population code, database code, event handling code), try and reproduce the problem...but sometimes, the difficulty isn't with the code or the database...it's with some unexpected relationship which will only be set with certain workflows.
This is a problem which I think is unique to heavily object oriented applications relying on dynamic relationships, such as performing arbitrary actions in a word document. With an OS kernel, you have much more procedural code with much more control over state and hopefully fewer cascading relationships. But what do I know.
You know, just because you say it doesn't make it so. I can name at least a dozen companies that make web controls using Active X that do very, very well, because customers LOVE not having to jump through hoops. Whip out a brand new machine, connect to the intranet, and boom! It works. People like that, and good administrators find ways to support what people like. I used to have to use an ActiveX client for Test Director, because the per-seat license was way cheaper on that then on the desktop client. It was obnoxious sometimes, but great when it came to interfacing with OLE...drag and drop formatted text, files, etc.
Stop assuming nobody will stand for idiot friendly software when plenty of people are using it already. Yes it's a bad idea, but that doesn't mean that we can just ignore it. If I ignored all the bad ideas other people had for our program...well, it still wouldn't be working.
If you're seeing this, it's because you're using Word wrong. Office uses a stylesheet based formatting engine, much like the modern world wide web. When you change the font using the FONT field in the taskbar, you're changing the font at the paragraph level. Hitting enter twice starts a new paragraph, which causes word to load up the original paragraph style.
What you're asking for -- markup based layout -- is how Word Perfect works. There are pluses and minuses to both styles and markup, though styles are really the way to go if you write a lot. They permit you to change ALL the attributes of a paragraph -- size, spacing, font typeface, size and decoration -- just by changing its style. But for short docs, or for tricks like bolding every other letter, style based markup can lead to very confusing behaviour.
When my wife's office switched from WP to Word (when it looked like WP had been EOL'd), I had to help her fix a 50 page document that she had written ENTIRELY paragraph formatted. I spent an hour building a stylesheet and was able to very quickly format her document with it (she had spent three hours previous to this just hitting the enter key trying to get shit to line up, like it was a fucking typewriter). She refuses to use the stylesheet, partly because she thinks WordPerfect is better, but mostly because she doesn't want to admit she was wrong.
If you want your paragraphs to remain one style, that's easily done. Change the font in Format -> Style -> Normal (Font can be selected from a drop down button, which is really the most retarded thing about MS' styles).
Okay I'll bite. Here's a fantastic excuse for using ActiveX: every one of your customers will be using Windows with Internet Explorer anyway, and you want to quickly develop a program that will permit them to locally control their machine without having to download and install software.
Java won't cut it (security models vary too greatly). Flash won't cut it (no access to local libraries). Only ActiveX will do. I know entire software suites in the $1000+ range that rely on ActiveX's "security flaws" for proper operation. I would never buy one of these, but I also wouldn't want to be told that software I purchased is no longer usable because of a security patch. I've been told that in the past (an old Bently automotive manual that no longer works due to Java "security enhancements" that make it unable to start) and it sucked. It wasn't my decision to use the technology...I shouldn't be punished because of someone else's technology choice.
I dont' like Active X. I don't even like this kind of website. But for many developers in the intranet services market, it's a godsend. Rapid development and a trustworthy, no-obtrusive, support free platform. Basically, all the same reasons it's used to spread spyware and viruses.
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These people can't handle two buttons on a mouse, but they have no problem with the 102 buttons on a keyboard? Seriously, I just don't understand this argument.
Just because you don't understand it doesn't make it untrue. I learned how to program BASIC from a guy who had parkinsons and no fine motor control. He could not use a two button mouse, because all his fingers contracted at the same time, and when he typed he had to hunt and peck with a single finger. Even with his disability he was still a great programmer, because if he was gonna type something he had to make damned sure it was what he wanted to do. This is also why I am unimpressed with people who measure their code in lines per day.
This was during the win 3.1 days, when it didn't matter so much -- nothing had context menus and the right button was mainly ornamental. But I can see where not being able to right click could kill the usability of a modern PC. A modern mac, on the other hand, does not have this problem.
As for moving the complexity from the mouse to the keyboard: duh, of course that's what you're doing. But in doing so, you've eliminated a variable. You've also added the ability to modify the cursor before the action, and a lot of Mac developers program for this. A single variable plus visual cues makes it much easier for anybody -- including us clever-dick programmers -- to figure out and perform new functionality very quickly, which is the whole goal of the mac OS. Hence why every action you can perform has a corresponding menu item...it's an alternate execution workflow but also a keyboard command "cheat sheet."
Support for a standard IS barebones. What IE lacks in any user services beyond "SUPPORT" -- there's no anti-spyware or anti-popup tools, no built in customizable search bar, no tabbed browsing, no robust links management system, no advanced history display, none of the really cool features that sell people on Firefox or Opera.
Yeah, it's got complete support for XHTML, CSS, PNG etc, but this is just more evidence of how much Netscape sucks. Web developers would start using a feature, and they'd stick their fingers in their ears and shout "LALALALA." Microsoft, on the other hand, wrote a browser that worked with what you gave it. It is by no means in this post-modern age a full featured browser -- in fact, the most recent version of IE should still be considered the bare-minimum requirement for browsing.
Hey, I pirated his hit "Developers, Developers, Developers" back in the Napster days. I thought he retired after that one.
It's not a matter of UNDERSTANDING with sufficient explanation. It's a matter of EXPLORING, and the meta system is much better at that. There is no guessing what button will perform what function, which becomes more and more important as programs become increasingly complex and tech support more useless. Good programs go so far as to change the mouse cursor depending on the current meta combination. Take Photoshop for example...ordinarily, you have a tool cursor. Press shift, you get a different cursor. Press ctrl, you get another different cursor, this one telling you it will drop a menu. This makes sense. Expecting a person to guess which mouse button will perform an action does not (though you are correct that if the second button ALWAYS brought up a menu, as it does by default on a mac, it would make more sense).
Incidentally, if you're having trouble command clicking with one hand on a Powerbook, you must have small hands. The Meta keys are close to the trackpad to facilitate one handed use of this common functionality...use your pink and/or ring finger on the meta and your thumb to click. I do it all the time, so don't try telling me it's a hassle. It's far, far better than most of the PC interfaces I've used.
You know, I don't know what the fuck "sticky with DRM issues" means, but I do know that WMP 9 is not that bad, aside from skins. After all, you don't HAVE to rip songs with WMP9. You don't HAVE to rip them using WMA, and if you do, you don't HAVE to wrap them with DRM. It's all optional...and defaulted, those rogue...but optional just the same. It's like the lock on your house, don't lock it, there's no protection. And cries of "Someday they'll force us to lock it" are silly...when that day comes, we'll deal with it. Until then, use whatever works. And a lot of content -- porn, mostly, but also Weed files -- won't work without it. I turn up my nose at DRM too, until something I want to hear is DRM-only. Then I clam up real quick and get out the Sennheisers.
Through sales of licenses to play and create WMP content.
Think about it: Apple is making money through hardware sales. If you boil off the cost of the hardware, all that's left is margin. If Microsoft can receive a PIECE of that margin through mandatory licensing costs to hardware manufacturers, they'd be making money without having to make any hardware or pay for any support.
It really is print-your-own. Assuming it works. Apple has such a head start here and has maintained such a lead in features and desirable content that MS is gonna have to work their ass off to impress people. Plus there's the millions of iPods already sold which aren't WMP compatible. MS, to gain any market at all, is going to have to invent one.
IE was given away free and was (still is) a very bare bones browser. Netscape could have survived by one-upping IE on a feature by feature level and selling a low cost, high value Netscape Gold package that enabled surfers to do something interesting.
Instead, they failed to compete even with the meager feature set offered by IE, pumped their money into one of a million useless portals, and they fell apart.
Is this Microsoft's fault, for exploiting their monopoly to crush Netscape? Maybe. But the prevalence of IE hasn't crushed Opera. It hasn't killed off the much smaller OmniWeb either. In fact, Netscape's sorta-funded Mozilla arm is doing fantastic against IE, almost everybody who tries Firefox sticks with it.
Moral of the story: if you're gonna survive competetion from Microsoft, you'd better get on your fucking toes. Make sure you're always one step ahead (not hard, Microsoft maneuvers with the speed and grace of a Cadillac Brougham) and don't ride your success.
I don't think we have anything to worry about from Apple in these respects. Unfortunately, the key to doing more than simply surviving Microsoft is keen marketing in the face of price cutting and a good-enough mentality. Microsoft is, after all, the Walmart of software companies when it comes to price cutting. If they can shave $.11 off the cost and sell at a loss for two years, they have a chance of burying Apple and everybody else.
Yes, but this is a non argument. If you want to use a mac, and want middle click to open a link in a new tab, map middle click to COMMAND-Click in System Preferences. In fact I think that's the default -- I map middle click to Expose All, so I dunno...I never have my hands off the keyboard and I sip coffee with my mousing hand, so mapping middle click to Expose All means I don't have to move my left hand away from the "meta zone" in the lower left hand corner to see all my windows.
The point is, you don't have to kludge things to get them to work with one mouse button, and the path to use more than one is as simple as makes no odds. Simplicity before generality, common things before powerful things...this is how you make a computer good. Programming for the power user and expecting everybody else to catch up is bad design for everybody.
Well, it is a shame that you can't play Doom 3 above medium detail...but remember that even at LOW detail, it still looks better than any game on the market.
It reminds me of when Unreal first came out...the best computer on the PLANET couldn't play it at low res without hiccoughs. It took years of engine optimizations to get fluidity out of the system, which was annoying, but it also meant that the game was still looking good after two rounds of video card enhancements. Each new card meant activating more cool features -- Coronas, curved surfaces, reflection, etc. Heck, the game still looks pretty awesome to me, though I play it through the UT2k engine.
Well, the iPod itself is pretty simple and ugly if you look at it that way. White face, few simple buttons, silver plastic back is no different from this white box, aluminum foot deal.
Of course, what this means is that your DESKTOP, not your computer, is the focus here. Can the Apple desktop sell a computer? That's like asking if the Mona Lisa could sell a frame.
Desktop taking precidence over the computer...it's almost a paradigm shift, but it's more of cunning marketing stunt.
Right. Now take that same machine, upgrade the video card to a GeForce FX 5200, the hard drive to 80 gig (from 40) and the CDR/DVD drive to a DVD-RW. You can't do it on that model from IBM, but from manufacturers where you can, your loadout is in the $1300 range -- and it's hardly integrated, so it's hardly a fair comparison. The closest thing I've seen is the Sony W700G, which is much wider and deeper and starts aroung $1900.
Furthermore, pricing the cost of buying your own hardware and putting it in isn't fair, and it's silly besides. Who wants to buy half a computer, especially if you're in the market for an all-in-one?
Apple explains the one mouse button in its HI Guidelines. The idea is simple: there are people who can only use one mouse button, for reasons of disability or what have you. Coding for one mouse button allows you to avoid having to program especially for these people, while allowing those who want a second mouse button to use it however they like. You don't lose any functionality, because you can just modify mouse drags and clicks with meta kets. Four meta keys = 4 additional actions by a single meta and a further 6 actions adding two meta keys. Ctrl-Click is generally used to pull down context menus a-la Windows, and this is the default functionality of the second mouse button.
Apple does not ship computers with more than one mouse button mostly because of this philosophical choice, but partly because doing so would give developers justification to require the use of more than one mouse button for their target market.
Incidentally, I hadn't realized how confusing the two button paradigm was until I got a mac and tried to learn Blender. Blender is a mess of multiple mouse clicks, metas, rolls, etc. It's a good program, but you really need the tutorial before you can even figure out where you are. This isn't good design...an interface that does not lend itself to exploration will go unexplored, and you might as well write for the command line at that point.
The best value for Apple computers is to buy a refurbished model shortly after a new model comes out. Generally, the price is substantially less than the decreased price of the older model and it comes with a year of Applecare. I got last year's TOL Powerbook for $1900, my buddy got the g4 800 iBook for $700
If you read their marketting literature, the goal here was to make a PC with the same ease and look as the iPod. Hence the white, the rounded edges and the locked angle mount. It's no aluminum beauty like the Power series, but it makes up for it with its light, compact design. And the movable screen, which I thought was a great idea, made the DVD Lamp look flimsy to a lot of people (even though it wasn't). I see definite improvements, and I *LIKED* the old iMac.
Really, this is ingenious. This look builds off their strongest selling product in a way that encourages people satisfied with current offerings to branch out. And the price is right...$1300 is not that bad for a computer with a 17" flatscreen and a compact design. I'd say this thing has potential beyond even the original colored iMacs if they stress the key components: comparable performance and superior graphics with a smaller footprint, better service and few virus and spyware worries. Of course, they'll probably just do a commercial with Tobey Macguire or something, but marketed right, this could be a valuable product, one that could take the competition a while to clone.
Incidentally, Sony did the whole slim-LCD-PC thing a while back and sold it for about $400 more. It was a cool unit, but WAY bigger than this in both width and depth.
It is indeed a strange world where our stereo components are dumb terminals but our remotes are full of music.
I disagree. Apple doesn't mind being first (Firewire, Quartz Extreme, colored cases, etc). They don't mind being second or third, either. Apple develops at its own pace, using their own research which may or may not include ideas from competetors, and releases products when they're well designed and ready for prime time. If Apple is searching for a video and wireless development team now, expect to wait at least two years for a video ipod.
C# is the conceptual child of C++ and Java. If you have three or four years of C#, another three of Java, and another three of C++, I'd take you over a guy who's had, say, 9 years of C and six months of C#. Or a background in perl or something. "10+ years of C# experience" takes less newspaper then "10+ years of programming experience in object oriented languages, at least two of which should be in C#"
Of course, it could also be written by a complete idiot.
Yeah, that's a good idea. Let's all wait for Apple to spend a ton of cash on research and development to make a cool UI for video devices, and they we can all just steal the interface instead of buying their shit!
God. No wonder Apple patents everything.
You mean a small, light, nearly handheld device with a hard drive and robust OS?
Or do you mean a bunch of hyperbolic promises and hardware specs that keep improving while press claims an actual device is always in immanent release?
Whoa. It's not MY assumption. I don't write web applications that require plugins and if I did, they wouldn't use ActiveX.
My point it, that if you're starting with that assumption and intended to stick with it, ActiveX quickly become a great choice. Of course, a company like yours could never be a customer, but if the money saved going with a Windows-only solution is greater than the cost of developing for and supporting a cross platform plguin, there's no point in doing it.
The company I'm thinking about when I write this is run by a guy who thinks Windows is the way to go and he's run three highly successful Windows software companies. I don't think he cares that people using OSX can't become customers...it wouldn't affect his bottom line in the slightest and he would hate to see those Macs sitting in his test lab. This is INTRANET software, mind you, not INTERNET software. His website works fine in Safari, but I'm sure that's accidental.
Shit, as a Mac user myself I'd get pretty ticked off at assumptions like this, too, if I actually wanted to use the software in question. I don't, because I think it's crap...but it's VERY popular with micromanagers and future outsourcers who want platform agility, not platform flexibility. If you asked me, I'd say those were wrong assumptions, too...but like it or not, they are VERY profitable ones. Cross platform compatibility is hardly a progenitor of success (in fact, it can be quite the opposite). Take a look at the top selling video games of last year and you'll notice that very few of them had versions that ran on anything other than Windows with Direct X.
Don't be too impressed with Word -- the whole point of good object oriented design is to make a program where the user can do whatever they like at whatever pace they choose and have the program operate as expected. If a class is truly bug free, then you should be able to poke its functions in any order and from any direction without harming the caller or the instance of the class itself. In this, a bug free class almost becomes its own program.
Well, I have a several thousand line codebase and I often have bugs I can't fix, usually because the bug report is something like "checkbox still checked after closing window."
I go in, look at the usual suspects (checkbox code, window code, population code, database code, event handling code), try and reproduce the problem...but sometimes, the difficulty isn't with the code or the database...it's with some unexpected relationship which will only be set with certain workflows.
This is a problem which I think is unique to heavily object oriented applications relying on dynamic relationships, such as performing arbitrary actions in a word document. With an OS kernel, you have much more procedural code with much more control over state and hopefully fewer cascading relationships. But what do I know.
You know, just because you say it doesn't make it so. I can name at least a dozen companies that make web controls using Active X that do very, very well, because customers LOVE not having to jump through hoops. Whip out a brand new machine, connect to the intranet, and boom! It works. People like that, and good administrators find ways to support what people like. I used to have to use an ActiveX client for Test Director, because the per-seat license was way cheaper on that then on the desktop client. It was obnoxious sometimes, but great when it came to interfacing with OLE...drag and drop formatted text, files, etc.
Stop assuming nobody will stand for idiot friendly software when plenty of people are using it already. Yes it's a bad idea, but that doesn't mean that we can just ignore it. If I ignored all the bad ideas other people had for our program...well, it still wouldn't be working.
If you're seeing this, it's because you're using Word wrong. Office uses a stylesheet based formatting engine, much like the modern world wide web. When you change the font using the FONT field in the taskbar, you're changing the font at the paragraph level. Hitting enter twice starts a new paragraph, which causes word to load up the original paragraph style.
What you're asking for -- markup based layout -- is how Word Perfect works. There are pluses and minuses to both styles and markup, though styles are really the way to go if you write a lot. They permit you to change ALL the attributes of a paragraph -- size, spacing, font typeface, size and decoration -- just by changing its style. But for short docs, or for tricks like bolding every other letter, style based markup can lead to very confusing behaviour.
When my wife's office switched from WP to Word (when it looked like WP had been EOL'd), I had to help her fix a 50 page document that she had written ENTIRELY paragraph formatted. I spent an hour building a stylesheet and was able to very quickly format her document with it (she had spent three hours previous to this just hitting the enter key trying to get shit to line up, like it was a fucking typewriter). She refuses to use the stylesheet, partly because she thinks WordPerfect is better, but mostly because she doesn't want to admit she was wrong.
If you want your paragraphs to remain one style, that's easily done. Change the font in Format -> Style -> Normal (Font can be selected from a drop down button, which is really the most retarded thing about MS' styles).
Okay I'll bite. Here's a fantastic excuse for using ActiveX: every one of your customers will be using Windows with Internet Explorer anyway, and you want to quickly develop a program that will permit them to locally control their machine without having to download and install software.
Java won't cut it (security models vary too greatly). Flash won't cut it (no access to local libraries). Only ActiveX will do. I know entire software suites in the $1000+ range that rely on ActiveX's "security flaws" for proper operation. I would never buy one of these, but I also wouldn't want to be told that software I purchased is no longer usable because of a security patch. I've been told that in the past (an old Bently automotive manual that no longer works due to Java "security enhancements" that make it unable to start) and it sucked. It wasn't my decision to use the technology...I shouldn't be punished because of someone else's technology choice.
I dont' like Active X. I don't even like this kind of website. But for many developers in the intranet services market, it's a godsend. Rapid development and a trustworthy, no-obtrusive, support free platform. Basically, all the same reasons it's used to spread spyware and viruses.