Apple-like PC Hardware

Thanks to Apple’s hardware design innovations, people are beginning to see the importance of design in products. Plain grey boxes won’t cut it anymore. To be competitive in the computer hardware industry nowadays, the product has to do more than just work—it must also look good.

In the trendy notebook category, one of the latest entries is Dell’s Adamo. Clearly, it has the good looks. This development is lessening the pain of Apple-envy. You can now carry around a hardware which you don’t need to hide in shame every time someone whips out her cool Macbook.

But carrying an elegant PC hardware is one thing, using it is another. Upon turning the beautiful thing on, reality hits you square in the face. Windows still lurks in it. Thus you are still limited by Windows’ quirks and unreasonable will.

It is true that PC manufacturers like Dell, Lenovo and Sony are trying to produce nice Apple-like Hardware—which is a good thing, really. However, Hardware is only one part of the equation. System software plays another and more significant part. Moreover, their integration is not something to be put aside. On these aspects, it’s hard to beat Apple.

Sure, PC manufacturers can also have the ability to design nice hardware but they do not have a say in the design of Windows. The result is that the usability of their products is beyond their control. Apple, on the other hand, has beautiful hardware, a great system software, and nice integration between the two. That’s a tough card to beat.

Improving Microsoft Windows

When Apple shifted its operating system from MacOS 9 classic to the Darwin-based MacOS X felines, it was very well received by the market; and for good reason. MacOS became much more stable and flexible, gained preemptive multi-tasking and other capabilities while retaining ease of use which the Mac is known for.

The Mac OS classics certainly had a pretty face but did not have washboard abs. OS X changed that by replacing the core with Darwin.

I was just wondering if Microsoft could also do the same thing with their Windows OS. Their user interface may not be as pretty as OS X’s, that’s for sure, but it is definitely more familiar than KDE or Gnome (familiar, but not necessarily better). If they’d follow Apple’s lead, they could also produce an OS with the familiar Windows interface and a rock-solid core.

They would have a lot of kernels to choose from. They could help develop Hurd, use Linux, or maybe any of the BSDs. Personally, I think the BSDs—more particularly, FreeBSD—would be better. First, I have the impression that it is better engineered; Second, the BSD license is more commercial-friendly than GPL. But they can always use Darwin too…

What’s clear is that Microsoft seems to have hit the wall in OS innovation. Windows 95 was good in its time, Windows XP also has been nice, but Vista was delivered late, with less features than expected and awfully bug-ridden.

To aggravate the situation, it is not yet long since Vista’s birth but Microsoft will be releasing the new Windows 7. This seems to be an admission by Microsoft themselves that Vista is no good that is why they will be replacing it ASAP—as if Vista never happened to disgrace Microsoft.

Contrast this to Windows XP. It lived to a ripe old age before a replacement from Microsoft came over; and even with that replacement, XP refuses to die. Vista, on the other hand, has not reached puberty yet but Microsoft is relieving it of its post.

That is a sign. If only Microsoft can perceive it.

That’s what I like about Apple: they can recognize a good thing (Darwin) when they see one. If Apple can do it, Microsoft should be able to do it—that is, if they want to. It is an indisputable fact that the change breathed a new life to Apple. Would Microsoft want the same success?

Anti-Microsoft Sentiments

I do not fully understand the hate surrounding Bill Gates and Microsoft. Normal criticism is acceptable but what goes in this page is way overboard. When reading some Web pages and “Micro$oft” jokes, it seems like it is fashionable to hate these guys.

Me, I’m not really a fan of Microsoft; but I don’t call them “Micro$oft” either (or Micro$hit, Windoze, or whatever is the creative spelling of the day is). Like I always say, tools are just tools and not rallying points. You don’t hate or love your wrench, do you?

If the cause of hatred is the inferiority of their products, I do not think the hate is justified. If you think Windows sucks, why live with it in hate? It’s not like you have to go to court and file a divorce or something.

You can, instead, go the Mac or Linux route (or Solaris, FreeBSD, BeOS, Darwin, whatever), be done with it, and be on your merry way creating good things for other people. Can’t switch because your company forces you to stay? Then bash your company, not Microsoft.

Other companies, like Oracle, also made bad design decisions; Apple got it wrong with the Newton; but the focus seems to be solely on Microsoft.

Sure, Microsoft has created some duds like ActiveX but great products have also been coming out their doors—Microsoft Office, Expression Studio, and Visual Studio come to mind and I’m sure there are others. Have we not learned that only those who never tried never failed? Do I have products that suck? No. Why? I haven’t released any, that’s why!

Could it be Microsoft’s business model? Well, theirs is not exactly the most blameless organization out there but it is also not really that evil as some would lead us to believe.

Yes, they want to profit from their product—and who doesn’t? And yes, they take measures to protect their property from theft, like WGA, which in some ways irritate some users. Well, people also fence their homes to prevent theft, don’t they?

I myself am an open source advocate. I like transparency in code, free software and mutual sharing. But that doesn’t mean I hate proprietary software. For me, choice is good. Why fight proprietary software? If they’re not as good as the free alternatives, they’re simply going to fade off anyway. If they make it, they might, at least, be good for something.

True, they might have ideas that are different from our own but should anyone suffer for that? Copernicus was beheaded for his heliocentric idea which happen to deviate from what was accepted during his time. Women were burned at the stake also for being, well, different from other women doing ordinary women stuff. A lot of people have already suffered in the past for being different. Shouldn’t we put an end to this and start respecting each other’s ideas?

Proper Design Invokes The Right Emotion

Whether it is a website or a logo, a good design stirs the emotion of the audience. You get a distinct feeling when you see the theta logo of Toyota that you associate with the company. So too with the stylized H of Honda or the stylized A of Acura. Would Mc Donald’s be the same had its logo been different? Probably not.

This effect is specially important when branding and company image is involved. Like I said, Mc Donald’s bright yellow colored twin arched M has been so much a part of the company that it’s hard to think about Mc Donald’s without that sign or logo popping in your mind. It is therefore important to put some thought into what image you wish to be associated to your company or brand.

Achieving this effect is no mean feat. The designer has to go through a lot of research and study about the client, the intended audience and even the company’s competition. A match must be made otherwise, it may either not reflect the company properly, or not appeal to the company’s target market.

Due to the effort involved in making a proper design, it is a little bit on the expensive side. Design is time consuming. Take Google, for instance. It is not testing just 2 shades of blue and trying to decide between those—it is testing 41 shades of blue!

Apparently, Google thinks that not all shades of blue are created equal in inducing visitors to click at stuff—and they’re right; different designs invoke different emotions. And that’s even just one aspect of the whole design equation.

But there are also cheap logo makers and webpage creators out there who churns out (almost) mass produced graphics. (Note that I did not use the word designers) They can afford to offer cheap works because they don’t put in the time to really go through the design process.

These instamatic graphics makers are killing the real designers. A person who is in the market for a new logo design would not know the difference (who could blame them, they’re not designers) and obviously, would settle for the cheaper ones.

It is tough to sell good design to these people considering that there is no quantitative test to determine efficiency and yield. You cannot say to your client that her return on investment for this logo is such and such. So, customers go for the numbers—price.

Due to the above, I cannot blame Niki Brown for his rant about these el-cheapo operations. I guess there’s hardly anything to be done about it so, caveat emptor!

Microsoft Expression Web

When I decided to venture into Web design and development I ran Internet searches to check out some tools because, as you may already know, this is one field where a lot of changes take place at an alarming rate and tools and practices you learned and use might be outdated in the blink of an eye.

Of course, there is Dreamweaver CS4, the de facto standard in professional Web design and development—no surprises there. It has been taking that spot even during the time when Adobe’s own GoLive was still on the software map. It’s kind of an all-in-one tool where you can do lots of stuff in addition to (X)HTML and CSS code editing.

Then there are also the free and the open source tools like Komodo Edit, Aptana, KompoZer, N|vu, HTML-Kit, SeaMonkey, Selida, Amaya, CoffeeCup free, AlleyCode HTML Editor, AceHTML Freeware and others. They may not have a lot of Dreamweaver’s integrated features but if you’re willing to modify your workflow a bit to incorporate other external tools, you can have a complete Web development tool chain at the price of zero. These tools rock!

Somewhere between Dreamweaver and the free tools, lie Microsoft’s Expression Web. The first thing you have to know about this application is that while it replaced FrontPage, it is not FrontPage with a new name and is not targeted at the same audience FrontPage was. Another thing is, it has a strong focus on Web standards. Microsoft has a legitimate Dreamweaver challenger this time.

It may not currently have all the niceties of Dreamweaver but it also does not cost as much. Furthermore, Microsoft Expression Web might close this feature gap in the not so distant future.

That Microsoft is bent on closing this gap can be seen in their addition of PHP support in version 2 despite the fact that it is a direct competitor to their very own ASP technology. I’ve even read that Microsoft Expression Web supports Adobe’s Flash better than it does Silverlight—Microsoft’s own technology.

If Microsoft wants to, it seems like they can play well with others too. I just hope they’ll keep it up, and not limit their products by making it work only with their own.

Choice is always good.

Why Microsoft FrontPage Didn’t Suck and Why That Matters

In a previous post, I talked about how you sometimes have to choose between ease of use and flexibility in designing applications. And as I said, the choice heavily depends on your intended audience. In the case of Microsoft FrontPage, I really think Microsoft had it right.

I agree that Microsoft FrontPage was not as feature rich as the Dreamweaver of that time. It was not meant to be. I also very much agree that it does not produce a clean and standards compliant code. But let’s set that aside for a while and look at why that is so and whether that was a smart move.

A WYSIWYG webpage creator/builder or visual webpage editor is a terribly complicated piece of software. Unlike word processors, WYSIWYG webpage creators have a lot more decisions to make. In the former, you can change the size of your font and the program just has font points to worry about; in the latter, the program has to consider whether to use percentages, points, pixels, ems, smaller (or bigger), etc. And we haven’t even gone to the layout aspect yet.

“Let the user choose the font unit”, you say? Uh, right; but who are the users of Microsoft FrontPage anyway? That it is included in Microsoft Office should give us a clue. They are the office guys and gals who are the same persons who use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. These guys are far from being Web developers, and using pixels, percentages and other relative font sizes, among other things, would not make sense to them.

Being targeted to these non – Web developers, FrontPage need not be as feature-rich as the offerings directed at the Web professionals. It also has to be easier to use.

The last statement above would have been a major pain for the developers of FrontPage. Being easy to use means not bothering the (non – Web developer) users about a lot of the aspects of webpage layout and design. That means the program has to guess in many instances. The result is a generated code which is not elegant by any stretch of the imagination.

Well, that’s alright, it’s not for professional designers anyway. As long as it renders correctly in the viewer’s browser in their own private intranet, who cares about the code? But to ensure that this less than ideal code does render correctly, Microsoft has to tweak the browser. Of course, it can’t tweak Netscape’s browser or other browsers so it tweaks its own Internet Explorer to make it render FrontPage generated pages more properly. Herein starts the accusation that FrontPage created pages only work with Internet Explorer.

Based on the above, I can’t see how FrontPage sucked; I guess it didn’t. It could only be if you tried to erroneously compare it with Dreamweaver which is clearly intended for a different set of audience and which clearly has different design parameters, although both of them generate code from visual designs. If not compared to Dreamweaver and used only where intended, like in personal sites or private intranets, I think FrontPage was an OK product.

You might be wondering why I ramble about the unfair treatment a long-gone product had. The reason is that while FrontPage is no more, the mistaken idea that it sucked lives on to this day and is unfairly inherited by the new Microsoft Expression Web. If you don’t believe me, just try doing a Web search. That Expression Web is way better than FrontPage ever was makes the unfair stigma doubly unfair.

Perhaps Microsoft figured that since their lightweight WYSIWYG Web page builder had been pitted against heavyweight Dreamweaver despite the impropriety of the match, they might as well set loose a proper contender. I think they’re doing a pretty good job so far.

The Joy of Programming

First there is the desire to create something useful. You might be doing something repetitive or tedious on your computer, like inspecting a log file, doing repetitive calculation or renaming a bunch of files, which you think is better done by a computer.

You then stop and analyze your problem logically. You fire up your text editor and list all that is required of your program. Check that the problem has been properly addressed and nothing has been left out.

Next, you move over to the creative part—figuring out a solution creatively. You start in the box and take a look around; after that, you are well-armed to transcend the box and do your thinking from there. While this part can be done analytically, creative solutions are best.

Now that a solution is in hand you go on to the next stage—design, another creative thing. You design the interface first then the overall architecture of your program next. The user always comes first, as they say, so it makes a lot of sense to start with how your program interacts with them. This step can also be done analytically—but we all know what has come out of that approach.

Finally, you implement the design analytically and logically. Creative implementation or creative coding had, in the past, only given us spaghetti code we cannot eat. Neither is it delicious to look at, read, or maintain. You now use your languages’ constructs and tools and race to the finish line.

And there it is! You have created something useful from nothing at all. What greater joy could there be?

Ease of Use or Flexibility

Ease of use and flexibility are design goals that sometimes do not go hand in hand. In those rare instances that they do, the programmer, of course, has to provide both ease of use and flexibility.

Apple managed to combine both ease of use and flexibility in their MacOS X System. Their Aqua interface gives users ease of use while the core Unix system provides flexibility a power user might want. This is no mean feat and that’s one of the things that make the Mac a great platform.

But there are times when those design parameters do not play well together and trying to provide both would actually result in a program which is neither flexible enough nor very easy to use. In these instances, the programmer has to choose between ease of use or flexibility. If you are the programmer, what will you choose?

This is when the intended users of the application come in the picture. If your intended users are professionals or would use your application professionally, then features and flexibility should come first. If your application is for home users, then ease of use should be the top priority.

A good example of this is Picasa for home users, and Photoshop for the graphics professional. Picasa is easy to use while Photoshop is flexible and feature-rich.

User targeting should always be considered in application development to avoid those applications which try to be all things to all users and, as a result, become something none wants to use.

More Effort Should be Made in Developing, Improving and Using Frameworks or Libraries

Each year, hardware is getting faster and faster but the state of software technology is not keeping up.

Sure, software system requirements are also increasing. We need more graphics capability, disk space and memory (video and system) to run newer programs. However, this does not automatically translate to a corresponding increase of features in more or less the same magnitude. You can always write a more bloated program, if that’s what you like but an optimized and efficient code is more difficult to develop.

Faster hardware and roomier primary and secondary storage allows us to add more features to our software; but to do this without introducing bugs to supposedly stable versions, we need to take a hard look at frameworks.

Frameworks take code reuse a step further. It not only allows you to do away with recreating the solution to a problem which was already solved elegantly, but also provides a guide to the overall architecture or structure of the application. This makes applications more robust and more maintainable.

Fortunately, there are many general and special purpose frameworks available today. We have the Java Native Interface, Rails and Zend Frameworks to name a few. I’m just not sure how often these frameworks are used in modern software projects.

The open source community could also benefit with the availability of frameworks because more complicated applications can be done sooner. With frameworks, open source programmers could better compete with proprietary software companies with deeper pockets.

Frameworks are an important part of a modern developer’s toolkit. It would be nice if more open source frameworks would be available for more specific problem domains in addition to current general purpose frameworks. This will help a lot in the development of software.

The Difficulties of Web Design and Development

Some people are more creative than they are logical. The right hemisphere of their brains are more active than their left. For these people, creativity comes more naturally than logical analysis.

Tasks such as graphics design or desktop publishing are where these people shine. They perform naturally and can easily succeed in this type of environments. Analyzing computer code though, would be like reading Greek to them.

On the other end of the spectrum are the logical types who have a more active left hemisphere. Logical reasoning for them is natural and it never cease to amaze them how others could be so illogical.

These individuals are drawn toward mathematics and programming. They find it easy to break complex instructions into simple steps that the computer can understand. But give them a graphics tablet and a computer running Photoshop and they’ll be staring at the screen for a loooong while.

So, you have righties (right-brained not right-handed) whom you call if you have need of design and you have lefties whom you call if you need some programming done. So far so good.

But whom do you call if you decide to put up your website, the rightie or the leftie? If you say the rightie, then the design would definitely start good but the client and server-side script might be a bit of a mess.

With a leftie, your site will surely function but I’m not too sure about the typography, layout, line spacing, graphics and color combination.

The truth is that Web design and development is difficult. Not because it is inherently difficult but because it requires both creative and analytical abilities which few people posses. Most people posses one or the other.

Designers can learn some programming and programmers can take lessons in design but those are not their respective natural habitat. Man, for example, can learn to swim but can never hope to imitate the grace and speed of a dolphin. Some amphibians can move around on land but not as long or as efficient as land-dwellers.

If you are part of a team, this might not be a problem. The design and development tasks could be split among two or more persons. But if you are a freelancer or a one-man team, this is going to matter a lot unless you are one of the few who have balanced brain hemispheres (yes, there are).

Web Browser Security

How scary is this: “IE8, Safari and Firefox All Fall in Hacking Test”?

That means, if you’re using any of those, your security can be compromised. “But that’s most of the browsers out there”, you say. True. The message, actually, is: nobody is safe.

No system is really 100% secure or unbreakable. Some just make it harder, not impossible, for intruders to break in. As they say, once you’re plugged, you’re a potential target. And once you fall for social engineering strategies like giving info or running a downloaded script or program, you’re owned.

But on the brighter side, not all system intruders are as talented as “Nils”, the winner of the CanSecWest Pwn2Own hacking contest where the above browsers were cracked. Nor do most have all the time in the world.

So, by taking obvious precautions like updating your anti-malware regularly, turning on your firewall and network address translation, if you have one, you’ll be making it more difficult for ordinary intruders and script kiddies to break into your system to the point that they might just give up and look for other easier targets.

Just remember to be careful with what you download. Some software, specially the cracked and pirated ones, may contain malicious code. Running these would expose your system to anything from simple (but annoying) spam to dangerous exploits and anything in between.

The Conficker Worm—Brilliance, Misplaced

The creators of the Conficker worm are clearly smart and clever. The worm has not only been infecting millions of computers, but is also spreading at an alarming rate. And while nothing spectacular happened on the first of April when it was scheduled to show force, that does not mean that that’s the end of it.

Lately, the Conficker worm had an upgrade. It now tries to connect to 50,000 internet addresses instead of just 250 like it did in the past. It also has a new peer-to-peer capability for updating itself and for other purposes. Doing all these take a lot of time, energy and intelligence on the part of the worm’s creators.

But such resources could have been used in better ways. There are still a lot of improvements and innovation that can be done in IT. So, why focus on destruction when you can apply the same talent to help fuel progress? Which do you think is better, spending a year developing a worm or the same amount of time and energy developing something useful and fun, like Mr. Nasser’s GeShout?

I think the answer will depend on how you want to be remembered. This is specially true in this day and age when Internet archives transcend both time and space. News articles and posts in blogs, forums, newsgroups, etc., will be available for quite a long time to come. It is also searchable and can be accessed from anywhere in the world.

From what I can remember during my childhood days, everyone wants to be the hero and no one wants to be the villain. When we role-play, all of us would like to be Batman or Superman and such. All of us ran around pretending to be the masked crusader. I just wonder at what point, in a child’s development toward adulthood, did it became OK and acceptable—and sometimes, even fashionable—to be an Emperor Palpatine and go over to The Dark Side.

Internet Explorer is Back with a Vengeance

The new incarnation of Internet Explorer, IE 8, was just released and a copy has just found a place in my system. This new version is said to be faster than the previous version and, according to Microsoft, the competition. I have yet to test the veracity of this claim but IE 8 does have a lot going for it.

As someone interested in Web development, my primary concern is standards compliance. As I mentioned in a previous post, IE 6's non-compliance discourages a lot of developers from taking advantage of newer coding techniques and new XHTML and CSS features.

These developers fear that viewers using IE 6 might not be able to access their site if it uses a lot of new features which are beyond the old browser’s comprehension. This hinders the Web's overall progress. Had IE6 been compliant or had it not existed, developers would be free to push the limits of the Web to the benefit of all users.

According to Microsoft's John Curran in his interview with TechRadar, that concern was addressed in IE 8. Based on what the guy said, it would seem that the IE team is really trying to make IE adhere to Web standards.

I don't doubt his words considering that Microsoft's Expression Web, a component of MS Expression Studio, really is more oriented toward standards compliance compared to FrontPage, the product it replaced. In fact, MS Expression Web is a serious contender in the visual page authoring category currently dominated by Adobe Dreamweaver.

The problem why IE 8 cannot be as compliant as Firefox or Opera is that the IE team have a commitment to support enterprise legacy users. Understandably, they cannot just leave these users hanging. Firefox and Opera have no such worries. They are free to innovate. For this reason, I will still be staying with Firefox. But the IE guys really did the best they can do given the restrictions they find themselves in. For that they deserve some credit.