Author: devangoldstein

Hour Zero with Office 2008

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I’m 30 minutes past my late-adopting install of Office 2008 and its three updates, and already there are problems. I’ll skip the major issues that have already been covered, and commence griping about the user experience:

  1. Office applications don’t respect my heretofore system-wide preferences for how fast the cursor blinks, and mine is way faster than theirs. This seems like an easy fix for how aggravating it is, and a terrible oversight (or decision?) up front.
  2. They haven’t fixed any of the interface problems that emerged with the last release (at the latest). For example, in Excel, to edit cell data, I have either to use my trackpad/mouse or use bogus keyboard shortcut Ctrl-U. That this is a problem is not news. I should be able to click either Enter or Return to toggle the edit state of the cell.
  3. Again, after downloading and running three software updates, and after a restart and a rebuild of my Mac’s LaunchServices database, I still can’t open Word documents by double-clicking them, a bug that has apparently plagued Word since the day of its release. Instead, I have to launch the application and then choose File > Open….

(I’ve set this last one apart as it requires more explanation, and is absolutely emblematic of Microsoft’s inattention to the details of the user experience.)

Instead of going with the time-tested tab interface for their preferences box, Microsoft chose to adopt Apple’s “Preference Panes” approach. On the one hand, you want to applaud their attempt to be more OS-integrated on the Mac side, but here’s the problem: Their implementation is problematically incomplete.

The Panes approach works relatively well for the Mac OS’s System Preferences because those groups of preferences are largely unrelated to one another, falling into largely disparate categories and affecting tasks and behaviors no less varied. So, anecdotally, there seems not to be rampant need to jump from one pane to another before leaving the interface, which is where tabs might help. And just in case, Apple has provided not only “Back” and “Show All” buttons, but also a keyboard shortcut, Command-L, to return to the list of panes.

But, I would argue, an Office Apps’s preference groups are much more closely tied together, as they all affect a similar group of behaviors, namely, those affecting the way one works in the application. This is a broad category overall, but in Word, for example, there’s significantly more overlap between the View, Edit, Spelling & Grammar, and AutoCorrect panes than between any four at the OS level.

In my experience with Word 2004, this means more switching between preference groups in the same visit to the Preferences dialogue. Again, this wouldn’t be much of a problem with a tabbed interface, in which you can always see the other options available. But instead, switching from one pane to another requires two clicks. And, perhaps more to the point, there’s no keyboard shortcut for viewing all panes. For a keyboard-centric users like me, this greatly reduces the effectiveness of the Panes model.

But honestly, I’m a lot more grumpy about the slow-blinking cursor.

Alisa Miller on the US Media

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In an oldish TED talk I just got around to watching, Alisa Miller, CEO of Public Radio International, begins with an argument I agree with: that US media coverage is heavily weighted towards the trivial and towards a limited range of international stories, and that this is some kind of problem.

But as she goes on, our points of view diverge sharply. She asks, rhetorically, why this problem has come to be, and answers: “The reality is, is that [sic] covering Britney is cheaper” than covering international news. This may be so, but it’s probably more relevant that covering Britney makes way more money.

Let’s go with an overwraught analogy, comparing Britney and international coverage to two very different movies that I love: Halloween (1978) and Sideways (2004). According to Box Office Mojo, the first cost $325,000 to make, and has grossed $47,000,000 domestically. But its 8 franchise films have seen a combined domestic gross of another $228,000,000 or so.1 It’s reasonable to think that more cheap sequels and remakes could profit similarly well.

Sideways, on the other hand, cost $16,000,000 to make and grossed $71,000,000 domestically. Not bad, to be sure, and all the talk of a new mid-cap Hollywood model really came out of Sideways‘s success. But it’s reasonable to assume that, after just four years, the well has run more or less dry. Will Sideways keep earning at the pace Halloween and its franchise have? Will there be a sequel? Will there be a genre of thoughtful boys-will-be-bourgeois romps that emerges around the film’s success, in the way that the modern slasher film really emerges out of Halloween‘s?

To paraphrase the 8 ball, all signs point to no. The difference parallels the one Miller points to, between Britney coverage and international stories. It’s not so much about how much cheaper the one is to make—though the difference betwen $325,000 and $16,000,000 is significant, even adjusted for inflation.

Rather, it’s about whether the body of films or news that will emerge from one investment can sustain itself. In Hollywood, the question is answered by moviegoers, represented by box office figures. In the network media, the question is answered, by and large, by the complex relationship between stories, ratings, and advertising dollars. I’m very, very confident that the networks have, with a scientific precision Newton would envy, determined that they can make more money with more Britney than with more international coverage.2

And who’s to blame for this? Ultimately, it’s hard to hold the networks responsible, as Miller wants to. If they buck the viewers, they go into crisis. As I recall, this happened a few years back, amid talk one or all of the network news bureaus might collapse. It seems some combination of viewers with bad priorities and our free-market economy is at fault, and that’s too complex a culprit to support the emotional simplicity of blame.

As Miller asks, “Is this distorted view what we really want for Americans in our increasingly interconnected world?” Of course not. So what do we do? We give to NPR and PRI, we watch and read UK publications, which have (depending on which one you look at), government support or a more internationally-minded audience or both. We identify the problem, as is Miller, in public forums. (I shy away from commending her because she is, after all, CEO of an interested party.) We write on our blogs, talk to our friends, join our FaceBook groups. Is all that enough? It’s hard to know, but what good does blaming the networks do? What ends can come from that line of argument?

1: The production budgets of these other Halloween films are mostly irrelevant. First, they are similarly low with one or two exceptions—for example, Halloween H20, which cost $17,000,000 in 1998 and has already outgrossed the original at $55,000,000+. More to the point, though, as each film can be seen as paying for the next out of its profits. [Back to text]

2: I should note Miller does cite a Pew study in which the percentage of “Americans who say they closely follow global news most of the time grew to over 50%.” But surveys are notoriously unreliable indicators of respondent’s actual preferences and behaviors. If there’s one thing the free market does well, it’s tell us where the real money is to be made. [Back to text]

Who Do You Love?

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I know I’m behind on this one, as I’m just catching up with my feeds after a long busy spell. But I thought I’d relate a little story from when I saw Bo Diddley, in 2000 or 2001.

I caught his act at the Iron Horse in Northampton, a little club that seemed like it held no more than 60 or 70. I was seated at a table that had been set up more or less in the middle of an aisle, with a mom, dad, and daughter in from Boston to visit Amherst.

Bo played included all the songs you’d have wanted him to, but many were made slightly unfamiliar. For example, the classic desert-road hambone haunt, “Who Do You Love,” was an extra-long encore with a jumpy, major-key interlude.

I learned a lot from that song in particular. Bo’s tweaks showed a creative passion—an interest in process, in revision—that, culturally, we don’t often attach to the “classic” blues singers. Which is foolish, of course: Bo, for one, famously designed his own boxy guitar, and . In short, with an attention to traditional craft and a ceaseless drive towards innovation, he helped shepherd the blues into rock ‘n’ roll’s growing hands.

Finally, the classic “touching brush with fame” moment: On a break between sets, I was getting a Coke at the Horse’s back bar. Bo walked up next to me—I heard his boots coming before I saw him—and ordered his drink.

I didn’t want to just stare at him, so I said, “Hey—I really love what you’re doing up there, how you’re changing things.” (I’m sure it came out more clunkily.)

Bo glanced over, smiled, and asked, “Do you play, brother?” Then he paid for my Coke.

Force-Feeding for Foie Gras

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I’ve just written a substantive comment on a post by Michael Ruhlman about foie gras that’s not force-fed. See, Ruhlman uses the existence and deliciousness of (more) humanely produced foie gras in support of an “Oh, lighten up!” attitude about force-feeding. I expected the opposite.

As you might think, his argument is weak and sometimes quite weird. You might get an interesting read out of the original post and my (and other) comments; let me know what you think. Or, better, let Ruhlman know.

Flashback to 1994

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One of the early developers working on Netscape Navigator has put the 1994 version of the company’s website online. [via kottke.org]

One interesting surprise comes on the Netscape 1.0 product page:

IT’S CONSISTENT: Netscape is available – and is functionally identical – on Windows, Mac, and Unix X Window systems. This common look, feel, and behavior is a major advantage in mixed computing environments, where training and support are minimized.

This “feature”—an iron-fisted cross-platform consistency—dates the browser’s development considerably, in a more subtle (and more interesting) way than, say, the <b> tags in the original content or the Netscape products logo. To see how, compare it to Mozilla UE designer Alex Faaborg’s position on Firefox 3 from late last year:

Visual integration with Windows and OS X is our primary objective for the Firefox 3 refresh.

Faaborg goes on to detail their efforts on both operating systems—the post is more than 1700 words long—and to point to related discussions of Linux integration (significantly more complicated due to the variety of distributions available). The post has prompted 105 comments in the months between its appearance and this writing.

More to the point, taking just my home OS as an example, there are more integration-related bugs filed than I care to count, ranging from the minutest of interface details to heart-wrenching cries for help.

In short, the Firefox dev team has taken great pains to work towards seamless integration with a variety of operating systems, and the user community has shown great interest in this movement.

What has changed since Netscape’s early days to propel these integration efforts? My guess, an obvious one, is that we no longer live in a computer culture in which the biggest decision-makers about browsers are administrators of large-scale computing systems. Though many of us do use systems on which we have limited control over software, at work and in computer labs, we also use our home machines, on which we have free reign. And even on those limited-access computers, we may be presented with several browsers to choose from.

Evidence of this older model may be even more striking, in the pitch for Netscape 1.0 above, than the cross-platform consistency itself; the audience for the pitch is clearly a set of people in a position to impose use of a single browser on many other people. By contrast, one need only look at the background image on the Firefox website to determine the target audience: empowered single users participating in a consumer economy. 14 years is a long time, but my, how things have changed.