Microsoft and the epitomy of fail

Ever wonder why Microsoft lost the Internet? They did. Nobody uses Microsoft products for Internet services except a few losers that don't know any better. The cloud? It's a Linux world, baybee.

Well, here's the deal that I've found out this past six weeks or so: Developing for Microsoft products is a painful and expensive process. What that means is that Microsoft has lost the student and hobbyist markets, and that's where the people who create new stuff come from -- they don't come from stuffy old companies that have $10K hanging around for Microsoft licenses for a single engineering team.

So anyhow, I recently created my first tray app. It used a couple of MFC functions where I could not find an equivalent anywhere else in the system that would do what I needed done. Because of that, it would not compile with Microsoft's "student and hobbyist" product, Microsoft Visual C++ Express. Once I did a workaround for that (temporary install of the demo version of the full Microsoft Visual Studio just to get access to the MFC include files and library), then there was another issue: Visual C++ Express won't create a .msi installer file for distributing your program. I worked around this by using an open source program called WiX to build an XML template for my package, and successfully managed to create a .msi file. I installed it. I used the control panel and uninstalled it. Yay.

But here's the problem. I'm a hobbyist when it comes to Microsoft software. As a hobbyist I only write Open Source software (if you want closed source software out of me I'm happy doing it, just pay me $$$, but that's not my thing with hobby software). As a hobbyist I don't release software that can't be compiled unless you pay Microsoft hundreds of dollars for the full Microsoft Visual Studio, or do possibly-illegal workarounds like installing demo versions on top of crippleware. So you'll never see this tray app and it's probably the last time I write anything for Windows that I'm not paid to write.

Multiply that decision by tens of thousands of hobbyists who look at the same situation and instead go write software for Linux, and you understand why Microsoft lost the Internet. I did this because I needed to learn how to work with Microsoft's software to do some stuff at work, but most people simply aren't as driven as me when it comes to learning new things. They take the easy path... and that's Linux.

Too bad, Microsoft... your stuff actually isn't that bad, it's ugly and a bit incoherent but then so is Linux. But if you make it hard for people to get used to writing software for your platform on a hobby basis, you lose. It's that simple. Microsoft Visual Studio Express is useless -- you can't write real programs for Microsoft without MFC, and creating MSI files should Just Work rather than having to go search for a third-party tool. With Linux, it Just Works -- fire up Eclipse and start developing C++ or Java programs, that simple. With MacOS, it Just Works -- fire up XCode and start developing Mac programs in Objective C or other supported languages, that simple. Windows? It's a painful experience trying to get around cripple-ware. And once that happens, there's one word to describe your company: Fail.

What's Microsoft's future? Microsoft really has no future other than as a legacy company. They lost the Internet and the Cloud because they preferred wringing money out of their devtools division (and it can't be a huge amount of money even) to fostering the next generation of innovators with free or inexpensive tools to use to write software for Microsoft's platforms, and they'll lose the next major innovation to happen in computing too. And one of these days, the accumulated sum total of these innovations will render Microsoft as irrelevant as Unisys -- just another legacy company milking its legacy products for service income long after they've become irrelevant to the majority of the industry.

-ELG

Gnome 3, Mac OS, and the Geeks (Part 2)

So in part two of this comparison, we're going to talk about workspaces.

Both Gnome 3 and Mac OS Lion have the concept of a linear ribbon of "workspaces" or virtual desktops. Gnome 3 lays out its workspaces vertically, while Mac OS Lion lays out its workspaces horizontally. So how do they compare on some routine workspace operations? Let's see...

Switching to Workspaces:

Gnome 3: There are two basic ways to do this: 1) Press the Windows key or swoosh mouse to left top of screen in order to activate the Activities screen. Move the mouse to the right side of the screen to make the workspace list pop out and select the workspace you wish to be in. OR: 2) Press CTRL-ALT-down to go to the next workspace down, or CTRL-ALT-up to go to the next workspace up. Mac: 1. Press F3 button on a recent Mac to go into Mission Control. You can also set a multi-touch gesture to do this (mine is three fingers up on the trackpad). Your workspaces will be listed horizontally at the top of the screen, move your mouse to and click on the one you want to go to. 2. Assign a multi-touch gesture to next-workspace and previous-workspace. Mine is three fingers left/right on the trackpad. 3. Assign a key sequence to next-workspace and previous-workspace. Mine is CTRL-left and CTRL-right. Because I have an Apple laptop, I can use multi-touch gestures to move left and right and to activate the Workspace switcher. This gives me one more option on the Mac. But reality is that navigating to a workspace is ridiculously easy on both systems, either from keyboard or via mouse/trackpad.

Creating Workspaces:

Gnome 3: There is always one "blank" workspace at the end of the list of workspaces. If you move to that blank workspace and open a window there, a new blank workspace is created after it automatically, without you having to do anything.

Mac OS Lion: Press the F3 function key or use the multi-touch gesture to get to Mission Control. Move your mouse pointer to the right top of the screen. A new shadowed-out workspace will pop out of the ether. Click on it. You will now have a blank workspace to work in.

The Gnome approach can be done without touching the mouse, and actually requires no intervention on your part to create the new workspace -- it simply gets created when you need it. It Just Works, which is what a computer is supposed to be -- something that Just Works, without you having to do fiddly things to make it work. It will be interesting to see whether Apple or Microsoft copy this feature in their next release.

Deleting workspaces

Gnome 3: When you close the last window on a workspace, the workspace is deleted and you are then placed on the Activities screen, from whence you can select another workspace to work in using either CTRL-ALT-up/down or the workspace pop-out at the right of the screen. This prevents workspace clutter where you have lots of those automatically-created workspaces hanging around. (Note: I am aware of the "persistent workspace" plugin, I am comparing stock configurations).

Lion: Activate Mission Control. Move to the top left corner of the little workspace icon you want to zap. A little X will appear. Click on that X. The workspace will go bye-bye, and any windows on it will be moved to the first workspace.

Again the Gnome 3 approach to this appears to me to be much simpler than the Lion approach. There's no fine motor skill needed to move the mouse pointer to the exact point where the X will appear, you simply close your windows and poof, you're done. Nothing to remember, nothing to discover, it Just Works.

Moving Windows to a Workspace

For both Lion and Gnome 3 you simply move to the workspace containing the window you want to move, trigger the Activities or Mission Control screen, grab the window you want by clicking on it, and drop it on the icon of the workspace you want to move it to.

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So that's workspaces. As you can see, Gnome 3 is quite competitive with the state of the art that is Mac OS Lion. So that brings up the next question: Why do so many of the hard-core Linux geeks hate Gnome 3? I'll discuss that in the next installation of this series.

-ELG

Gnome 3, Mac OS Lion, and the geeks (Part 1)

I've been using Gnome 3 on Fedora 15/16 and Mac OS Lion on a new Macbook Pro for several months now. What I see are two platforms that have done a significant re-thinking of the user interface to deal with some unpleasant facts:

1. The old paradigm of using menus to select programs has reached its expire-by date because the menus have attained a depth that nuclear submarines would love to attain
2. The population of most major technological countries is aging, and our old eyes simply cannot read the print on those tiny little pull-down menus anymore,
3. Fine motor control of old folks is pretty bad. We can manage to swoosh the cursor to the corner of the screen, or hit a big icon, but fiddly little menu items are hard for us to nudge a mouse into the right box to navigate a pull-down menu, and finally,
4. Pull-down menus simply aren't compatible with small touch-screens, because fingers are too fat to select tiny little things and you can't see them on a small touch screen like on a tablet anyhow.

In the process of dealing with these unpleasant facts, Mac OS Lion and Gnome Shell have also done a major re-thinking of how you do many common tasks in order to reduce the number of mouse movements / key strokes needed to do them. So let's look at some common tasks...

Program selection, Gnome 3:

Method a: Swoosh the mouse to the top left of the screen (one movement). Swoosh the mouse to the 'Applications' tab (one movement). Click left button. Select program from list of icons (possibly using the scroll wheel to scroll up and down the list).

Method b: Press the Windows key. Type the first couple of characters of the program you want to run. Use the arrow up-down to move the highlight to the icon of the program you want to run. Press ENTER.

Program selection, Mac OS Lion

Method A: Move the mouse to the icon of a rocketship on the toolbar. Click. Move mouse pointer to icon of program to run, possibly using left-right wobble wheel on your mouse or left-right two finger swipes on trackpad to go to next page of programs. Click on program.

Method B: Set a hot corner in preferences (I set bottom left), swipe mouse to there, move mouse to program to run, click.

Method C: Set a hot key in preferences such as control-opt-l, use left-right arrow keys to navigate pages. Unfortunately Mac OS has no way that I can find of using the keyboard to actually run one of those programs, you must actually navigate your mouse pointer to it and click it.

Verdict: If using a keyboard, Gnome 3 is very easy to navigate and uses a minimum of keystrokes to locate and run a program, requiring no mouse input at all. If using a mouse, the fact that you can get to the Applications icons immediately in MacOS, vs. having to click on the Applications tab after swooping to the corner, makes MacOS require one less mouse movement and one less mouse click. Score: TIE.

Select A Window, Gnome 3

Method 1: Ye olde alt-TAB, with a kick. For applications with multiple windows, you are shown a down-arrow and a down-cursor will then open window previews. Select the window you want.

Method 2: Hit the Windows key or swoop mouse to left top of screen. The windows will then swoosh out into a thumbnail pane view. Click on the window you're interested in.

Method 3: Hit the Windows key or swoop mouse to top left of screen. Select the dock icon representing the program you want to switch to. Either click it to go to the topmost window, or right-click it to select which window you want.

Select A Window, Mac OS Lion:

Method 1: Command-tab to get a list of running programs. While still holding down Command-tab, then use the arrow keys to move left-right to program whose window you want to see. Release command-tab while that program is highlighted. Note that unlike with Gnome 3, you do *not* get to choose which exact window of the program is going to be switched to -- you get whatever MacOS feels like giving you.

Method 2: Set a mouse button or gesture (I use the Page Forward button on my Logitech mouse or a triple-finger-up gesture on the trackpad). Invoke said mouse button or gesture. The windows will zoom out to pane/thumbnail view. Navigate mouse to the window you want and click on it.

Method 3: Move mouse to bottom of screen, click the dock icon of the program you want to switch to. Right-click will allow you to choose which of the windows to switch to.

Verdict: Gnome 3 wins on command-tab, its command-tab function is full-featured and works well. It ties on mouse button or gesture. It loses on dock, but only barely because its dock is not always visible and you have to move your mouse to the top right of the screen to show it, but that's only one mouse movement extra so not a huge loss. So Gnome 3 by a nose.

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So what have we learned thus far? Well, 1) For two specific tasks, both Gnome 3 and Mac OS Lion have done a lot of work on reducing the amount of mouse movements and/or keystrokes needed to do these tasks, and almost completely eliminated any necessity for fine motor movements or reading of tiny print, and 2) Gnome 3 is quite competitive with Mac OS Lion in doing these tasks. In the next part of this series I will compare some other common operations, and finally I will summarize the results and examine one of the more bizarre things that has happened since the release of Gnome 3 -- the rabid condemnation of it by early Linux developers (including Linus Torvalds) who appear to despise it, and what that means for Linux.