Decrepit Old Fool

I’m typing email addresses into a spreadsheet.  Excel helpfully turns them into hyperlinks that automatically start up a “new message” in Outlook if I click on them.  They reformat themselves into unreadable 7.5-point, blue, underlined type. 
I never asked Excel to do any of this.

After some investigation, I found out that the auto-correct options have been moved to “proofing” which is buried under the “Excel Options” button which is well isolated from the flow of menu items, under the new “Office” icon in the upper-left of the screen.  I drilled down and killed the offending feature, but IT WON’T DIE!!!  I’m still getting tiny hyperlinks when I type in email addresses.

It’s probably because the spreadsheet was created in Excel 2003 – not that I care about the reason for Microsoft’s incompetence – but when will they get it through their heads that fancy isn’t necessarily better, and just because they can dream up a function is not a sign from heaven that we want it in our software.  I have seen many users reduced to screaming rage by the counterintuitiveness of their uncooperative applications.  Sometimes the voice is my own… it is difficult to be certain.

I got a new Fuji Finepix S5200 camera, and like all new cameras it came with a CD full of software.  And man, they’re serious about it!  You’re looking at the business end of the USB connector cable.  They put a little sleeve on the USB connector that says “Important” (on the other side, it says “Achtung!” which I like even better.  It’s physically impossible to plug in the camera without handling this warning.

So I wonder, is it really “important?”  what tragedy will happen if you are foolish enough to connect the camera without installing their crappy software?  Will the camera get screwed up?  Will you have to send it in for service?  Lost in device-driver hell?

Try “none of the above”.  Windows will recognize the camera as a removable drive.  You can use My Computer to cut the picture files from the camera, and paste them into your “My Pictures” folder.  Then use your favorite picture software to manage the pictures. 

Really.  I’ve been telling people this for years: resist the gravitational pull of the instructions – don’t put that CD into your computer.  You don’t need it.  Being in computer support, I’ve encountered a lot of computers totally jammed up with aftermarket device software, conflicting utilities that try to make the process “easy” for users.  Just Say No. 

(The camera was on sale at Sam’s Club for $175 – really a very good deal if you can put up with all the consumer doo-dads built into it.  This is for times when only a 10x zoom will do – eventually I’m still going to get a waterproof pocket-sized Olympus Stylus 720 like Webs05’s, for everyday use)

As Don Norman says; “the biggest problem in design is keeping features out”.  Bloated “featuritis” is in full flower in Microsoft Office, to the extent that your friendly Office suite has many more controls than a Boeing 747 cockpit.

One way of coping with such complexity would be to reduce to essential features, but there is already free software that does that.  So Microsoft is faced with the problem of finding a better menu system.  The tabbed interface is a good approach to that problem, allowing larger interface components in an intuitive layout.

Office 2007 does have some “change for the sake of change” starting with the desktop icons.  They’re less readable and intuitive, but they are pretty.  The situation improves once you figure out which icon to click on and get the application started.

Notice the tabs beginning with Home, Insert, Page Layout, Mailings, Review, View, and Add-ins.  Click on each tab and the whole ribbon switches to that function.  It’s much more intuitive and easier on the eyes than the old menus. 

One quibble: all the functions of the File menu are hidden behind the Office logo at upper-left, which keeps blinking all the time unless your document is saved.  Also I wonder if conversations at Microsoft are just exchanges of concept icons instead of using words now.  Because there’s no “Help” menu either, only a
icon.

Repeat after me, Microsoft:  “F-i-l-e” and “H-e-l-p”.

When you click on style and color swatches, a huge matrix drops down showing visual examples.  It is a super-quick way to restyle the whole document.  This is probably great for the beginning user but the more experienced user will also learn to open the “Change style” dialog next to it. 

The whole get-up leaves LOTS of room for your content, which is well-differentiated from the ribbon menu.  On the whole, I would say the “Ribbon” is a major advance in interface design.  Good job, Microsoft.

Notes:  if you click on the partial image above, you will get a full-length picture of the “Ribbon”.  But if your browser tries to shrink-to-fit, it will be distorted and difficult to read.  Either turn that odious feature off, or right-click the resulting image to select “view full size”. 

Paul Graham, the venture-capitalist who wrote Hackers & Painters, founded ViaWeb, and took a major part in the rise of Yahoo!, is one of my favorite essayists.  And he proposes that Microsoft is dead.  They’d better read this essay carefully unless they want to wind up as a negative example in business classes.

I’ve tried to work with Linux a couple other times, but made a mistake in how I went about it.  Trouble is, I would put it on a separate laptop or in a dual-boot partition on my main laptop, so I still had the Windows option.  Well hell, I’m only human.  It’s just too easy to do the familiar thing and use Windows, which gets the immediate task done but doesn’t expand my skills any.

One reason it’s worth the effort to try is that Linux can be a real problem-solver for certain purposes.  And, we use Linux on at least three of our servers and our network administrator might like to take a trip somewhere or stay home with the flu once in a while.  So it would be nice if I weren’t a complete dolt around penguins.  (I don’t usually say Windows/Mac/Linux is “better” or “best” but they are variously suited to different purposes.)

This time I blew away the Windows partition on my main laptop, installing SUSE 10.x. So it’s sink or swim. There are friendlier “distros” of Linux, such as Ubuntu and – I can’t remember the other do-gooder distro – but I chose SUSE because it’s from Novell, a company that seems really serious about getting work done, and because that’s what we use on our three servers.  This is one of the annoying things about Linux; once you’ve tried one distro, well, you’ve tried one distro.

Early impressions: installation was geek-easy but not user-easy.  Some things aren’t working yet, like the SD chip reader so no pictures on the blog until I get that working.  The wireless set up perfectly on the first try – easy if you have the right chipset, damn near impossible if you don’t.  This laptop has an Intel ProSet wireless chipset.  (You can use an NDIS envelope to run Windows drivers on other chipsets, but this solution displeases me esthetically).  The oversize mouse pointer is beautiful – better than even Windows’ and much better than Mac, which was clunky and pixilated.  The video drivers seem of above-average quality.  I already managed to crash the file manager but it just restarted without a hiccup and the system went on running – very nice.  And it comes with a tremendous array of software, most of which has goofy names.  I spent an hour editing photos with “Gimp” last night and it is very comparable to Photoshop 6, maybe a bit easier to use (and runs considerably faster).  But why the hell did they name it “Gimp?”  And of course it comes with OpenOffice, which I do prefer to Microsoft Office because of its cleaner design. 

UPDATE: I’ve got the suspend-to-memory configured so when I close the lid, it goes to sleep.  Couldn’t get the SD chip reader working – Webs sez it’s a chip issue so I picked up a tiny Lexar USB chip reader for eighteen bucks that works fine.  Slightly less convenient but now I can upload pictures again using “gnomeFTP”.  The center IBM pointer button scrolls after some configuring.  The wireless works great but I have to remind it to connect (which it does easily) when waking up the computer.  So far SUSE is a lot less slick than Windows out-of-the-box, but looks like it can configure up very well.  We’ll see if I go back to Windows after using it for a month.

Recently one of the users I support (in an all-Windows environment) told me why he has a Macintosh at home.  He said, “I bought a Mac because I don’t have an IT department to call on when there’s a problem.  And after two years it works exactly as well as the day I bought it, which is perfectly.”

To us Windows users, that sounds like a fantasy.  But I’ve heard it from enough credible sources to believe it.  So I’ve been trying to become more familiar with Macintosh computers.  Not only because I’d like to see some Macs in our computer labs, but also so I can give some integration support to personal Mac users in our college.  Also, I wanted to give a more useful answer to people who ask “What kind of computer should I buy?”  More on that question at the end of this post.

Way back in November I visited Apple’s Chicago office, and wrote at length about the “Apple Briefing, a PC guy looks at Macs”.  That post describes the variety of applications that runs on Macintosh computers as it was presented to me, plus reposting some thoughts I’ve had about Macintosh marketing and culture over the years. Briefly, I wrote that Apple computers come with an astounding array of excellent applications, that Apple now has an outstanding server line, and that the Apple corporation has changed to become more corporate-compatible, though some Macintosh users, have not.

In last week’s post, Apple computer review part one: hardware, I looked at the physical design and function of an Apple Macbook.  Briefly, I found it to be a top-quality device with a couple ideas I really liked, but a couple features in which it seemed that ergonomics had been sacrificed to visual appeal.  I would consider owning one if they made a smaller (3 lb), enhanced-durability model with very long battery life.

In this installment, I’m following up on the November post by describing my subjective experience as a PC guy using the new Macintosh operating system, OS-X.  This is really the most important because the operating system is the personality of any computer.  I am not and do not pretend to be an expert on OS-X, which should be of interest to Windows owners considering a Macintosh purchase (because expert opinions on ease-of-use are worthless).

OS-X impression

In the past I’ve not been terribly impressed with Apple’s offerings.  OS-X changes this picture.  It is far more compatible with Windows than previous Mac OS versions. Even if you don’t like Windows, this is important unless you enjoy isolation.  OS-X is also a much heavier-duty operating system than OS-9.  It’s rock-stable and secure.  It’s fast.

If you read my other two posts, you know I think cuteness is for kittens, not for computers.  I like an interface that draws as little attention to itself as possible, so right away I found OS-X annoying.  The default Mac desktop is plagued with the same crayola-color interface that obscures so much graph data in USA Today, but don’t let that put you off.  With a little customizing you can mute those loud colors and put the focus on your content.  (Illustrations show the default colors)

But all that stuff is superficial.  What matters to me and to my users – is this a computer or an expensive paperweight?  Is it really easy to use or is that only sales hype?  Can I get my work done on it?  Can I get new kinds of work done on it?  What happens to all my files?  My email?  What if it breaks?  Us PC folk remember non-transferrable file formats, pointlessly different floppy-disk formats, and the general isolation of Mac systems that – for some reason – Mac users were smugly proud of.  Is it worth the learning curve? And why were they so damn expensive?

The file compatibility issue is pretty much solved.  There is no longer a “Macintosh” or “PC” version of a Microsoft Word file, for instance.  Graphics files adhere to a standard now.  With most popular file types you can bounce a file back and forth between your Mac and your PC with no worries.

Macintosh computers have a reputation of being only for graphics, and the one I used was exceptionally smooth at handling media files.  And by smooth, I mean a completely new experience for a Windows user.

One exception is Windows Media files.  You can still download WM9 for Mac, or use Telestream’s Flip4Mac but Microsoft “has no plans” to continue developing Windows Media for Mac.  So save your videos in Quicktime format whatever platform you use.  Another exception is using Outlook Web Access from your Mac.  The full functionality requires IE6 or higher, which Microsoft says they “have no plans” to develop for the Mac.

You can get new kinds of work done on your Mac.  OS-X comes with some wicked-cool bundled apps.  Us Windows users are used to pretty much ignoring bundled apps because, well, they’re crappy – but the ones that come with OS-X and in iLife are non-crappy.  In fact, they actually have features you need that actually work to get actual work done, and are actually easy to use, and the computer doesn’t lock up when you try to use them.  This is a bit disconcerting to an experienced Windows user; we’re used to paying top dollar for anything useful.  Keep that in mind when you think about the price. 

Just for example – suppose you’ve used Windows Movie Maker, which is cheap and clunky.  The Macintosh equivalent feels more like a piece of expensive professional software, only logical and smooth.  And the professional version is a superset of the bundled version, so if you upgrade you are ready to begin working.  Very different from the transition, say, from Movie Maker to Adobe Premiere (which is really more at home on a Mac anyway).

Or for example, the bundled photo editing software.  We Windows/Photoshop users are accustomed to a linear relationship between functionality and cost, and an inverse relationship between those things and ease-of-use.  We’re used to ads that say; “intuitive” when they really mean; “You will be lucky to ever figure out five percent of what this application can do”.  Editing a photo on the mac with the included software is a surprising experience.  (Of course Photoshop is a longtime Mac favorite and industry standard, but for most of us non-professionals…)

Both Apple and Microsoft advertise stability.  We Windows users are accustomed to being stopped cold by a misbehaving application – the computer basically locks up.  You try to close it and after a minute or so, you get; “This application is not responding.  End now?”  But “now” is a cruel joke.  For several minutes you click and argue with one dialog after another, watching CPU usage bounce between 50% and 100%, and try to stop the loop that has taken over your computer, hoping not to crash entirely and lose unsaved documents in other applications that are running.  “Multi-threaded, my ass!”, you fume.

Contrast this with what I experienced on the Mac.  One unstable application I use is Mozilla Firefox, and it’s no better on the Mac than it is on the PC.  But the first time Firefox got jammed up on the Mac, it just disappeared.  A little dialog popped up: “Firefox had to close unexpectedly.  Do you want to restore the session?”

Suspicious, I clicked “Yes”, and as if by magic, Firefox started up again and all the same websites opened up in the dozen or so tabs I’d had open.  Total interface involvement, one click.  Total time lost, twenty seconds.  Workflow interruption, nearly zero.

Miraculous.  I’ve never seen a computer recover that fast from a jammed-up application.  I had a chance to try it several more times with the same result each time.  The only time I saw an application that had to be ‘force-closed’ was Entourage, which is from Microsoft.  But after it was force-closed (which worked on the first try), the computer ran fine.  On a PC when you finally succeed in forcing a Windows application to close, you’re well-advised to restart the computer. 

Using a Mac is not without its annoyances.  Some of these derive from the fact that half of “intuitive” is simply whatever you are used to.  With continued use, the Mac will become easier.  But many derive from Apple’s attempt to be stylish and cool.  A good example is the use of terms like “Finder” which, while descriptive, is sort of dumb.  And the “Magnifier” that follows your pointer as it sweeps across the “Dock” – it’s just sort of silly.  Of course Windows is full of this sort of crap too, and worse. 

And at least one is inexplicable to me.  In Windows and Linux, I always set larger mouse pointers.  This is useful for my eyesight but also a boon to the victims of my presentations – they can see where I am clicking.  The Windows and Linux pointers look smooth and professional.  On the Mac the only control I could find for a larger mouse pointer produced a blocky, pixelated pointer of ugly.  Oh, well.  No doubt there’s a fix but it wasn’t obvious.

On balance, after many years of supporting Windows’ computer users, my intuition is that most users will find the Mac more intuitive.  This is not the only factor in deciding what to buy (you can get used to anything) but it is very important.

Wireless connection and other network issues

I have set up hundreds of laptops for wireless, and the Mac was by far the easiest. It literally took me 15 seconds to connect to the elaborate campus network, and the system’s memory for external wireless networks was uncanny.  Really, pig simple, and once it connected it held onto the signal like ductape. 

Windows laptops’ wireless spans a wide gamut of difficulty levels.  My Thinkpad is medium difficulty.  Toshiba’s gee-whiz wireless utility, amazingly difficult.  None as easy as the Mac. Linux laptops, once you get the wireless card recognized (difficulty level, seldom easy ranging up to 10+), medium difficulty to operate.

I found connecting to network resources a mixed bag.  Joining a Microsoft Active Directory¹ required the assistance of a MCSE with massive cross-platform savvy – my admin status and experience wasn’t enough.  Once that was done, however, mapping network drives was easy enough, with the exception of drives on Linux servers that were joined to the domain via Samba.  Here’s a tip for connecting to Windows network resources, whether mapping to drives or getting your Exchange mail into Entourage – FQDN is your friend.  Use the Fully Qualified Domain Name when mapping to anything and you’ll be fine.  Obviously this is of little importance in the home.

Running Windows on a Mac

I did not experiment with “Parallels”, the extra-cost aftermarket program that allows you to run Windows, and Windows applications, on your Macintosh.  But I have seen it work and it is flat-out amazing.  Windows applications just float free on the Macintosh desktop.  You can cut and paste data from Win to Mac applications, open and close them at will.  They’re not speedy but if you have special Windows applications that you have to use, you can be pretty confident of running them successfully on your Mac.

OS-X and Vista, and cost-effectiveness

Having said that, excessive visual slickery does seem to be the order of the day, as evinced by Windows’ “Vista”.  If you have not used Vista, well I don’t want to ruin the surprise or anything but basically I hate it.  Someone called it “the longest suicide note ever written by a corporation” and that isn’t a bad description.  Vista tries so hard and yet fails on many levels.  To this is added the annoyance of many different flavors of Vista so that if you make a mistake and buy the wrong one, you won’t have capabilities that you wanted.

In OS-X, there’s one desktop version and it has every feature Apple makes.  You can set up more sophisticated functions and there’s very little that would have to be bought separately.  Which brings us to the issue of cost.  Macs are more expensive than PC’s to buy (though not as much more as you might think).  But once you get your PC home, the money starts flowing in the other direction. 

Need to upgrade your PC from Vista Home to Vista Media?  Shell out.  Need software to work with media?  Shell out.  Application crashed?  Get your wallet.  Virus updates?  Mo’Money.  Whoops – your hard drive is getting fragmented.  Do you know how to fix it?  Call your support guy.  Can’t figure out how to run it?  Pay for training.  Then in a couple years your system runs like crap and you need to pay someone to blow it all away and “reload everything”.

So if the most important thing about a computer is what it costs, reckon the cost of ownership, to say nothing of the value of your time and frustration.  Buy a Mac, you suffer through maybe a month of declining frustration as you climb the learning curve. (Visit Apple’s ‘Switch’ page.  Run the tutorials, and maybe read a book, for crying out loud.)  Use the Spotlight.

So why doesn’t everybody just switch over to Macintosh?

In the corporate network environment, any change to the computer platform is a huge undertaking that begins with presenting a sound business case to the pointy-haired boss, who does NOT want to re-learn how to get his email. And he has a point – he really doesn’t care about elegant design, he cares about getting his work done.  Then there’s staff training, and applications that were created at great expense for the company, and legacy data files, and support-staff expertise (not easy to acquire) – the list goes on and on.  I could definitely imagine a good business case for switching but it isn’t as easy as plunking different boxes down on desks.

Also, corporate culture and “Mac culture” tend to clash.  If you doubt this, imagine (as an extreme example) the drive-by commenter “Heath” from my Macintosh hardware post, as a consultant to a big corporation telling them that they need to switch the whole company to Macintosh right away, or they’re all a bunch of morons.  For that matter, imagine the chances of the smart-assed “Mac” guy from the “Mac vs. PC” commercials even getting hired.  (I’m a lot more like the PC guy)  Yes, it can happen, but there’s considerable resistance.  Smug and superior is not an attractive way to begin any conversation.

For individuals, the picture is a little different. 

• If you are a gamer and want to run high-end games developed for Windows, that’s probably the way you should go.  (Check the forums because I’ve heard Vista isn’t exactly taking the gaming world by storm) 
• If you are a tech and don’t mind taller learning curves, and you use older equipment, but still want a heavy-duty operating system, Linux is for you. 
• But for most purposes, with Vista metastasizing all over the Windows’ world, there’s no contest.  It is true in many areas that local Macintosh support is harder to find than local PC support – but you’ll probably need less support anyway.  And though you should buy the AppleCare hardware warranty, the Mac is likely to be more cost-effective when you factor in your time and support costs.

So I am now actually recommending that most individuals buy a Mac to use at home or on the road. 

Huh.  Never thought I’d say that.

Updates:

1. July-August ‘09, we ran into a major snafu when our campus upgraded to AD08.  Somehow it knocked all the Apples off the cart, and it took Apple weeks to come up with a solution to the disaster.  The college of visual arts was hardest-hit with the most Apples, but we have some crucial Apple servers and it played havoc with essential services.  None of this showed up in the pre-testing that was done prior to the campus rollout of AD08.  It also doesn’t change my recommendation to individuals that they get a Mac for home, though I’ve been using Ubuntu Linux now and am very happy with it.  But for enterprise applications, think twice.

2. OpenOffice is available for the Mac, and now there’s a straight port of it into OS-X; NeoOffice.  Don’t pay for an office suite!

Being a big fan of Bill Gates, I’d rather think well of Microsoft, but Webs05 has the lowdown on a pretty neat scam.  Suppose you want to try out the new Microsoft Office 2007 version.  You download it, install it, and at the end of the trial period, it stops working.  OK, fine – that’s what we expected.  But it also ‘locks’ your files – your stuff that you created – and won’t even let you copy your own files to another computer unless you install a licensed version of their software on that computer.  It holds your files hostage until you buy their product. 

This is a low-down, dirty-dog trick even for Micro$oft.  Bad Microsoft!  Bad dog!  And a good reason to use OpenOffice.  I’ve been using it for 3 years exchanging files with MS Office users, and no one has noticed. 

Maybe someone at the Federal Aviation Administration has been doing lunch with someone at the Department Of Transportation.  Check out Information Week: FAA May Ditch Microsoft’s Windows Vista And Office For Google And Linux Combo.  I’ll be interested to see how that works out.  I doubt I’d have the courage to migrate a major agency to a different OS, a different office suite, running in a completely different delivery paradigm, all at once.  And this is the agency with 40-year-old vacuum tube computers in control towers.

But we’ve played with Vista and it looks like the longest suicide note ever written by a corporation.  Maybe the FAA is so fed up they’re willing to take risks.

Thinking of upgrading to Vista, Microsoft’s new gee-whiz whimmydiddle?  The US Department Of Transportation says, “Woah!”  And they’re not keen on IE7 or Office 2007, either.

Wonder if somebody got hold of a copy of Open Office?  I’ve been using it for 3 years – even for presentations – and nobody’s noticed.  Or maybe they picked up on this release from the Free Software Foundation.

Last week I switched from Thunderbird to Microsoft Outlook for my desktop email client. (No, I have not gone insane, but using a better different product weakened my ability to support Outlook for other users)  Here are my complaints impressions:

• Outlook must have been designed by someone with perfect eyesight

• When using “large icons” for the toolbar, the application just scales up the small icons so they look crappy and pixelated.  As bloated full-featured as Outlook is, couldn’t they have created a large icon set?
• Very illogical workflow.  One example: “Purge deleted messages” is in the Edit menu.  Wouldn’t you expect to find it under the Action menu, along with all the other message actions like “New Message” and “Reply”?  Purging deleted messages isn’t really an editing function.
• Good luck finding the signature dialog.  Oh, wait, there it is… buried way the hell down into a dialog.  But I change my signature quote every week.
• Don’t bother having any of your own viewing preferences as to type size, font, etc.  Microsoft knows better than you and will undo them for you next time you start the application.
• Outlook is noticeably slower than Thunderbird.  When outlook is thinking, you may as well sit with your hands folded on the table because your mouse and keyboard are purely decorative.
• Outlook pipes http links to Internet Explorer, even though my default browser is Firefox.

That’s all for now.