Wednesday 30 July 2008

Mojave Experiment

Mojave experiment is now available to watch at http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/. It makes for pretty good viewing, for example it's interesting to note that one of the more popular features appears to be Instant Search. It does highlight an important point about Vista and to an extent a weakness in all upcoming Microsoft OS's, lack of education. These people in the videos do not seem to know what features are actually available in Vista or how to use them.

Microsoft should consider releasing a Power Pack for XP that introduces some of the vista functionality. The people need to feel like Vista is familiar because they've seen some of what it can do already on their XP machine. They have a fantastic marketing tool as long as it's used correctly. People will not embrace Windows 7 if they do not understand it in the same way as they haven't embraced Vista because they don't understand it.

Microsoft Sphere

This is very very cool.

Monday 28 July 2008

Can Apple Be Trusted?

I've been thinking about the MobileMe mess, the iPhone launch and the restrictions imposed on iPhone application developers and I have to wonder if Apple can be trusted. Before I continue I'm not saying Apple would do anything illegal or quesionable. That's not the type of trust I'm talking about. I'm talking about the kind of trust Enterprise customers need before they are willing to purchase your hardware.

The first point to get out of the way is the overly discussed issue of secrecy. It's been talked about so often that I'm not gonna spend too much time on it. Basically Enterprise customers do not like secrecy. They do not like surprise. They like to know months in advance what the upcoming hardware and software can do. They want to know which of their products are going to work and which ones are going to cause issues and they like to test them repeatidly before their customers get anywhere near the new product. That doesn't fit with the Apple "One last thing..." culture.

The next thing to consider is the Apple Ecosystem. Apple software favours the customer who buys only Apple software and interacts only with Apple products. However these kinds of restrictions cannot be imposed on Enterprise customers. Big companies have big clients and these clients will be using different environments. iWork 08 for example does not work well with Microsoft formats even though Office is the most popular word processing, spreadsheet and presentation environment. The fact is that Windows is a very open environment. Microsoft has made Windows so open and backward compatible that Corporations can feel confident that they can use their software on a Windows machine. This is most likely the key problem Vista is having. To code for it requires changes to applications that run just fine on XP, if it's not broken don't fix it.

If Apple are wanting to break into Enterprise properly then they have to start opening up to other companies. For example, blaming IE7 for not working with MobileMe properly is not the way to solve that issue. Apple want to be a big player and therefore they should've just coded to suit the most used browser in the world. Trying to force people to use Safari will not work in Enterprise environments were ordinary users cannot install whatever they want.

The third thing to consider is networking. Adding Apple machines to a network that also has Windows and other OS's on it is painful. For Microsoft Server 2008 only has to be able to play with Windows clients because they are the majority machine. If Apple wants to compete then they need to let OSX server be fully compatible with Windows clients. The compatibility has to go beyond file sharing, it must include permissions and groups. Enterprise doesn't have to replace all client machines at one time, they simply need to replace the servers as they feel they need to and they know that the effect on the clients would not be as noticeable as having to buy Macs would be.

Finally stop being so arrogant towards your investors and customers. If shareholders felt they needed to know about Steve Ballmers health for a justified reason you can guarantee they'd have their minds put at ease. That wasn't Apple's approach. They alledgedly stretched the truth. They twisted and finally an award winning author was insulted for voicing these concerns. This simply isn't the way a trustworthy corporation operates.

Apple could be a viable option for Enterprise if they play it right but their current tactics in the current environment is a receipe for disaster. Respect Microsoft in this field they are the Kings but at the moment Apple are nothing but the court jesters.

Sunday 27 July 2008

"Mojave" The Sequel To Windows XP...Wait Isn't That Vista

Microsoft presented computer users in San Francisco with a sneak peak at what it called "Mojave", supposidly the next OS from Redmond. After these people got a chance to use it they were asked for their opinions and over 90% were impressed. It was only then that they were told that they were in fact using Windows Vista.

It isn't a surprise that Windows Vista would invoke this kind of response but what is interesting is that these people didn't recognise it. I would like to think that I would have been able to identify the current OS but if these XP users couldn't identify Vista how were they able to decide that they didn't like it?

Microsoft have to battle bad press and Apple marketing but with Apple getting badly hammered by the whole MobileMe and iPhone debacle at the moment and even the press having to admit that Apple can do wrong, this has got to be Microsoft's best opportunity to gain the upper hand. It's obvious though that it's not Vista itself that's the problem just the perception and that can be changed....with about $300 million hopefully.

Saturday 26 July 2008

XBox 360: The WOW Is Coming!

screenshot_5325 I've just been watching the trailer for the new XBox 360 Dashboard and it's looking good, it's looking very very good. This is one of the first time's I've seen Microsoft really get the concept of style nailed. The new dashboard seems to use a coverflow style to show different TV shows, films and games that can be viewed/downloaded. An example of the new style can now be seen on the http:\\www.xbox.com home page. I wonder will the new media centre look anything like this?

Another change is going to be the creation of Avatars. These are the little characters that you create on the Nintendo Wii who are then included in some games and online and basically it's a digital version of yourself. The 360 versions seem to be exactly the same and could be quite and interesting new feature depending on whether or not games actually bother to support them.

The third change will be the ability to rip a game to your 360 hard drive. This will turn off the DVD-Drive and allow the game to run directly from the HDD. The feature will allow games to run a little faster but more importantly they will silence the 360 and make it welcome in bedrooms once more.

The final change that I find exciting is the deal with Netflix that will allow 360 users to rent a film from Netflix through the dashboard and then watch them on your 360. This is an excellent new feature that adds tremendous functionality and once we see television shows here in the UK on the 360 this will really start to put the pressure on iTunes.

There's obviously a long way to go yet for Microsoft to bring all it's services up to this kind of level but if Steve Ballmer follows through on his promises to improve the mobile and windows platforms, I have to assume that means the Zune too, then there could be some great things to come.

Image from oxm.co.uk

Tuesday 22 July 2008

Apple Mystery Product Transition, Is It Steve?

Just to clarify this is a piece of pure guesswork which I sincerely hope isn't true. I've read the reports today on the Apple Q2 results and to start with congratulations Apple on a fantastic quarter. During the call however reference was made to a "Future product transition" that was going to have a detremental effect on Q3 results. Now this could be anything from an iTablet to what I beleve is most likely, an iPhone with the built in keypad. Actually I'm going on the record as saying that that's what I think it is but I want to consider one other possibility.

Reading some of the other reports that have been going around recently regarding the health of Steve Jobs and the way Apple dodged the question in the press conference by stating that his health is a private matter, I have to wonder if the product transition is Jobs himself. I really hope he is in full health and I hope he will remain at the helm of Apple for many years but he was worryingly thin at WWDC and while Apple put that down to him recovering from a bug there has been speculation that it's something worse and perhaps his cancer has reappeared. I can't say enough times that I hope it hasn't but if it has and if Steve needs to take time off to recover then the transition will certainly have a negative impact on Apple's Q3 results and what more important "product" does Apple have than Steve?

Sunday 20 July 2008

iTunes Really Is A Pain

Just a quick note to back up Paul Thurrott when he posted a couple of days ago regarding iTunes dragging down his Windows Vista reliability score, posted here. I checked mine today and it's sitting at 5.9! That's dreadful! Strangely there are only two applications that appear on the list and here's another interesting point the reliability was at 9.1 on the day before I installed iTunes. All the red X's are linked to Outlook Sync Client failures or to iTunes failures. Every single one! For those wondering the Outlook failures only occurred when I was trying to sync MobileMe with my Outlook contact list. I'm not anti-Apple, not by any means, but this recent launch has not been good to Apple's Windows customers and as a user I'm just voicing my displeasure over it all.

MobileMe Realisation

I've been using MobileMe since it became available and on the Apple side I've had no issues with it. It syncs easily with iPod Touch and OSX. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the Windows side of things. I've been trying to sync contacts and calendar with Outlook with mixed success. I have my Windows Live account hooked up to Outlook using Outlook Connector. I was under the impression, rather stupidly, that the contacts and the calendar would sync out of the box. There's been none of it. Not even close in fact.

Syncing contacts is the first major issue. If I sync with Windows Contacts then everything works perfectly and the contacts appear. If I use Outlook however OutlookSyncDevice crashes every single time. I'm going to hook in and debug it but I suspect it's linked to Outlook Connector and MobileMe not playing nice. I've no intention of turning off Outlook Connector so that could mean bye bye MobileMe.


Before I jump however lets look at the calendar. Well it's awful. I've tested multiple scenarios with it and so far I'm having no joy with Outlook. In this case I can't even test it with Windows Calendar because for some reason Apple won't support it. I'm now looking at Windows Live Calendar and the cost of using it seems to be perfectly justifiable compared with the cost of using a badly substandard MobileMe.


On a quick note what about the online applications? Well I first used them on OSX and found them pretty useful and responsive. There's nothing really new in what they offer but they are simple enough to use. Move over to Windows and again there's issues. The service doesn't work properly with IE7, I'm very interested to test it with IE8 to see how well it works. You even get an arrogant warning that blames this on IE7 but remember that if Google can develop for IE then you would expect Apple to be able to. So what are the services like on Firefox? Well they work but they're slow and if you're a Firefox user then I'm afraid you can't get your bookmarks synced even though it's one of the support Windows browsers. Weird? Well not really because there's a browser that happens to display the services and let you sync the bookmarks, guess which one? That's right the downright hideous Safari. MobileMe is not a good reason to use Safari, nothing is a good reason to use it in fact. So the online services aren't sitting well for Windows either even though they are meant to be platform independent, kinda the point of the "cloud" concept I would've thought.


The final scenario and the realisation I had was that if I wanted MobileMe to work even a little on the Windows side then I would probably have to abandon my current email accounts and make sure that Outlook is only hooked up MobileMe. I'm not doing it. I've no interest in doing it. I'm sticking with my Windows Live address and services so I'm guessing it's going to have to be goodbye to MobileMe. Let's face it Live Mesh offers a great online storage option along with Office Live Workspace and SkyDrive. There's nothing at all wrong with Live Mail and if I ever decide to sign up to MSN Premium account I'll get calendar sync but lets face it, is it really that important? What about push? Well since it's on a 15 minute delay I can get my Live Mail forwarded to my GMail account and get my N95 to sync every 15 minutes for free. That's a Microsoft flaw however. I shouldn't have to. Live Mail needs IMAP or POP asap.


So what's the lesson from all this? Well I think it's pretty obvious. Computers are still not even close to being user friendly. There's so much infighting and "nerdy" arguments between Microsoft and Apple users, to name but two, that we can't simply get an integrated system that is user friendly. Users don't want to have to understand all the stuff that's going on under the hood. They simply want to be able to sign up to their email, select what they want to sync with and when they look at their Nokia phone they want the same contact list as their email account has and at the moment that is not being offered. It's not just Apple, Google and Microsoft that are to blame for this but they have a lot to answer for. There's room for more than one company in the technology world but only when the systems easily integrate. There's plenty of car companies making money why can't the same be true for IT? Imagine a world were there was a different driving test for each make of car. Then one company would dominate simply due to people not wanting the hassle. I want to see real system integration between the major companies because one will never win out over the rest and the bitter cat fighting is just hurting the consumer. Also lets face it people are sticking to Microsoft because it's familiar and that's a hard habit to break. It's no coincidence that Apple released Boot Camp and Apple hardware sales really started to rise. MobileMe was in the position to really breakdown a few barriers and show that Apple can develop quality software for a different platform in the same way as Microsoft have built Office and Messenger for Mac. I'm not sure they actually can. iTunes is weak as is MobileMe. Lets see something better guys because I'm getting fed up waiting around for you.

Thursday 17 July 2008

Apple Aren't Patching?

An article in Arstechnica highlights how slow Apple can be when patching security flaws.

Although Apple didn't make a big deal about it, one of the security fixes included in the recent iPhone/iPod touch 2.0 firmware is a fix for a fairly high-profile WebKit bug that was used to hack a MacBook Air back in March. People immediately began asking why the bug took so long to fix on the iPhone. Now, the researcher who discovered it, Charlie Miller, has called Apple out over its iPhone patching practices in a recent Computerworld piece, saying that the company "messed up."

When the bug was originally disclosed to Apple, the company asked Miller if Mobile Safari was also affected, and he suggested that it probably was. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to confirm his assertion at the time, and left it up to Apple (which had all of the details) to test the exploit on the iPhone itself. It turned out that the exploit code needed to be tweaked slightly to do anything malicious on an iPhone, but Apple apparently closed the case after the OS X exploit failed to do anything nasty.

Further research revealed that if the actual JavaScript regular expression exploit code was run, bad things would still happen. Apple seemed to have corrected the bug pretty quickly after that. However, the mere fact that it took Apple so long to patch an iPhone WebKit bug has brought up the question: how well will Apple be able to manage two OS versions? Miller has pointed out that most WebKit bugs found on OS X will also occur on the iPhone and iPod touch, so Apple could theoretically patch both at the same time. Whether that will ever actually happen remains to be seen.

Wednesday 16 July 2008

IE8 Adds Browser Navigation To Ajax

The IE8 team have put up a post confirming that the Back/Forward buttons can be used in IE8 with an AJAX application. No more hitting back and watching the app get reset to the start. It's great to see this feature added. I've used IE8 beta for a while now and I must say I do like it. Looking forward to getting my hands on beta 2.
One of the AJAX improvements we adopted in IE8 from HTML5 is AJAX page navigations. In IE8 mode, we provide support for script to update the travel log components (for e.g. back/forward buttons, address bar) to reflect client-side updates to documents. This allows a better user experience where users can navigate back and forth without messing the AJAX application state.

There's Only So Much You Can Blame Microsoft For.

Gary Krakow claims Microsoft Exchange Server is the reason for the woeful iPhone battery life when using push email. Total rubbish obviously and Paul Thurrott quotes the following piece that makes it clear just how bad the claim is. Lets face it Apple don't get it right every time. Check out Paul's posts here.

On the note of Apple getting it wrong I actually intended the quote the article here but I'm using Safari on the Macbook and I'm getting some totally messed up printing results. Safari just can't get it right with Blogger at the moment. Suppose that's why I've downloaded Firefox, I miss Internet Explorer.

Tuesday 15 July 2008

N95 v iPod Touch Apps

So far virtually all the apps I have for the iPod Touch are available for the N95 in some form which is just as good. The applications were one of the major reasons, if not the major reason, why I was considering the iPhone but with virtually every major newspaper having a mobile version, every major email provider having mobile access and most major blogging services having a mobile interface or an application that gives a mobile interface then what exactly sets iphone apart?

I'm looking at moving to the N96 and if the developers deliver to that platform in anything close to the way they've tried to deliver to the iPhone then Nokia could have a massive winner on it's hand. Better camera, better reception, ability to change the battery, Java platform and therefore more welcoming to developers along with.....get this....Multimedia Messaging! The N96 is the better phone and it's the one I'll have in a months time.

Saturday 12 July 2008

The Apple Tastes Sour Today!

I've been quite complimentary to Apple over the last few days and I was fully ready to accept that perhaps they had their game together. Today however has been an absolute nightmare for me in terms of Apple software. I signed up to Mobile Me when I got my first opportunity and got it setup on the Mac with virtually no problems. Everything seemed to sync and play ball. Then I discovered that the web apps were down. Well no big deal it's the first day and they're probably being pounded so I'm happy to wait and decided to get my PC setup. This is where the trouble started.

Trying to sync Outlook 2007, a supported application, with Mobile Me was a horrible experience. The Outlook Sync Client kept crashing and therefore failing to sync correctly. After some investigation I discovered that this was down to an issue with my contacts. So I wiped my Outlook, and therefore Windows Live, contact list under the impression that I could sync again from Mobile Me. After all it did have the most up-to-date version of the contact list. That didn't happen. Instead the contacts did not sync back. Neither did the calendar for that matter. I was left with the task of recovering my contact list from my Windows Contacts. Thankfully the nice people in Redmond have made this task easy with the Windows Live Contacts importer tools. Maybe they foresaw the disaster Apple would have trying to play with the big boys and knew we'd coming running back to them.

Anyway back to the issues. With a newly repaired contact list I switched the Macbook back on to see if the iPod Touch update is out yet, it's not by the way and it's getting frustrating. The Macbook then chirped up with it's list of syncs that had to be done and most of them were blanks! They seemed to be failures from the feeble attempts to sync with Outlook and they remained in the sync log waiting to be written to somewhere. Anyway I'll clear them in a bit and then I have to give some real consideration to the idea of abandoning Mobile Me until the issues are sorted.

I don't want to come across completely negative though so I will say that some of the stuff that has been done with Mobile Me so far is excellent. The Web Apps look fantastic now they are up and running and really are a pleasure to use. The push functionality is something I look forward to testing on the iPod Touch when it gets it's new update, hopefully tomorrow and there are some great looking apps in the app store. It's extremely unfortunate that the teething problems of today have overshadowed an extremely promising service but for £60+ I want something that will operate when I need it and today it didn't.

Now how do I actually go about uninstalling Mobile Me from Vista anyway??

Wednesday 9 July 2008

The coolade doesn't taste too bad.

I've been using my wee Macbook quite a bit lately and I'm really starting to like it...a lot. You see I'm generally regarded as a Microsoft fan and I suppose that's been fair. My Vista laptop has got mostly Microsoft only software at the moment with only a few things like Adobe and iTunes representing the rest of the world. However due to the size of the machine I prefer to carry around the Macbook and the more I use it the more I find useful features that I miss on Vista.

The best example at the moment is the syncing of contacts and calendar between my PC and my Nokia N95. I don't want to use the Nokia software to do anything more than install updates and move photo's so I tried to keep the contacts in sync with Sync Centre. It was having none of it! Couldn't even get the devices to talk to each other. Without too much hope I thought about iSync. Within two minutes my contacts and calendar were synced to the Mac and iTouch. Another couple of minutes and I can have the calendar synced to Google and then back to Outlook. Now for anyone paying attention to Apple in the last few weeks you might have heard about a wee thing called Mobile Me. Suddenly the ability to sync Apple and Windows through the Cloud and my N95 through Bluetooth is very promising.

So what do I want to see? Well I'd like to see Live Mesh being extended to cover hotmail contacts, email and calendar then being implemented on Mac and Nokia. if this happens and sits with the current file sync then I will happily pay a subscription to Microsoft but at the moment I'm giving serious thought to Mobile Me. The main point is that Apple have made the syncing life easier and if someone like me is considering moving to Steve Land others must be thinking the same because lets face it easier wins out in the end.

Tuesday 8 July 2008

Mobile Me on the way

Macworld.com is reporting that .mac will be switched off at 2am on July 10th with Mobile Me coming online at 8am. The site reports Apple as saying:
Apple declares: "As part of the MobileMe launch, www.mac.com will be taken offline at 6pm PT on Wednesday, 9 July. Members will be unable to access www.mac.com or any .Mac services during this time with the exception of .Mac Mail accessed via a desktop application, iPhone, or iPod touch."
It'll be nice to see it live if for no other reason than it gives Microsoft a kick and gets them offering similar services to those of us who are still sticking by them.

Image from Apple.com

Saturday 5 July 2008

A few fun headlines from Paul Thurrott

Paul Thurrott took a fun look at some tech industry headlines and it's a fantastic read. Check it out here. Here's a couple of examples:

Apple's Snow Leopard. What's The Point?
It appears to be a tacit admission that Leopard is horribly broken.

Thinking Like a Cocoa Programmer
Just think, "I'm going to sell 6 copies of this application!"

Paul's blog is my favourite read online at the moment. Keep up the great work.

Friday 4 July 2008

What Should Viacom Get?

A quick post on this before I head out to work. As I'm sure you know Google has been told to hand it's user logs over to Viacom. The reason is apparently to let Viacom see if the legal or illegal clips are getting higher viewing figures. That's fine if the logs didn't contain IP addresses, login names and other personally identifiable information.

So what do you guys think? Should Viacom be allowed this level of access to the logs? What will they do when they know that a user they can now identify has uploaded or viewed copyrighted material?

Thursday 3 July 2008

Where does Windows Home Server fit in?

I have decided that the time has come to buy myself a new toy. My first inclination was to buy a Windows Home Server from HP. I did some research into the options available and regardless of the noise the product is reported to make I was still keen on it. You see I was using WHS a few months ago through the Microsoft Connect Program and I loved it. Great backup, easy to access from any location and very stable.

However I've changed my mind. Why? Well it's quite simple and it's nothing to do with HP or WHS itself. It's all to do with Microsoft's lack of an integrated future. You see I've got Office Live Workspace, Live Spaces, Live Mail, Skydrive, Live Mesh, Vista, XP and Windows Mobile 5 and I have absolutely no idea how it all connects together. Obviously I know that I can save to Skydrive or setup Mesh on Vista and XP but where does WHS fit into all this. Surely there are some obvious over laps between Mesh and WHS and with no ability to map Skydrive onto Mesh, WHS, Vista or XP it's very hard to see the point. I now fully understand the problem people are having when it comes to waiting for Windows 7. I'm thinking the same about WHS. I think, well if I wait for version 2 maybe it'll have better integration with the new services and therefore be more appealing. It's not that it's not an amazing product at the moment, because it is, it's just that Microsoft don't seem to have a clue how to present an integrated environment to the users and this is starting to confiuse us. Apple present new services like Mobile Me, with it's support for Windows, Mac and iPhone it immediately show us what we can do. Microsoft just don't seem to be able to do the same. Why?

So what are we looking for? Well I'm looking for a WHS that stores my big files and backups along with the remote access and basically everything it's offering at the moment. All I really want added is an integration with Mesh, some Media Server capabilities, the ability to map Skydrive as an external drive and perhaps the ability to wake the server over Mesh when I need to. Offer these servcies and I'll buy it without hesitation. Oh and one other thing....integrate it with Mac. Apple are a company that can no longer be ignored. I love Windows but I'm writing this on a Mac. I'll buy into anything Microsoft offers if they can give it to me cross-platform.

What do you guys think? Do the Redmond guys need to start offering cross platform services and better integration or is the current setup working for you?