Pages FAQ and vi

Here are some common questions and answers about Apple's word processor Pages that is included in their office suite iWork.

Question: How do you split a window in Pages, so you see part of the document in the upper half, and part of it in the lower half?

Answer: You cannot. However, you can do it in vi, a free text based word processor that has been around since the seventies. (Press ctrl-w s in vi.)

Question: How do you password protect a document in Pages?

Answer: You cannot. However you can do it in vi. (Start vi with the option -x.)

Question: How do I activate autosave in Pages?

Answer: You cannot, but it is enabled by default in for example vi.

Question: How do I open text files in different encodings?

Answer: You cannot, but you can do it using vi.

Question: How do I attach a Pages document to a mail?

Answer: You leave the mail client you are using. You open Finder. You right-click on the document in the Finder and select compress. Then you can attach it to any mail client. With vi, you simply attach the document.

Question: How do I make sure a Windows user can open my Pages document?

Answer: You go to the Export menu (no, not Save as...). Then you select either PDF, if you do not care if the reader can edit the document, or Word, if you do not care if the layout is messed up. Then you can give the exported document to the Windows user. With vi, you just send the document. Everyone can open a textfile.

Question: I just changed to Windows or Linux and sold my old Mac. How do I open my old Pages document?

Answer: You cannot. You have to find a Mac with iWork installed. Then you can export it from that one. With vi... well, no one would ask that question for vi documents. It is as easy to open your documents on any platform.

Question: I want to concentrate on the text, and I'm not interested in margins, menus or buttons. How can I display my document just as text, as I can do with MS Word's "Normal view".

Answer: You cannot. However, that is the default behaviour of vi.

Question: How do I insert the filename into my Pages document?

Answer: You cannot do it. However, with vi you can do it using the command :r !ls %:p.

Question: How do I compare two files with Pages?

Answer: You cannot do it. However, you can compare two vi files using a command like vim -d file1 file2.

Question: How do I use a version control system with Pages?

Answer: Pages does not by default support any VCS, even though there are some workaround solutions. With vi, there is no problem.

End of questions.

That is actually not the end. There are plenty of more things that vi can do that Pages cannot do. And, obviously, vice versa. I just wanted to get it off my chest that Apple charges 79 euro for an application that lacks some fairly important functionality that has been available for free for thirty years in other applications.

And yes, I know that there is a difference between vi and the more advanced (but equally free) vim. I know that not all functionality described above is available in all versions of vi/vim. But I anyhow find it remarkable that there still are such a lot of limitations with Pages 3.0 more than three years after the first version came out.

If you want more elaborate and serious answers to your questions about Pages, there is an entire separate blog dedicated to that. In many ways it is actually a very nice application. I promise.

Egword - it is no more

The following was written in November 2007 as a comparison between Apple's iWork application Pages and the Japanese word processor Egword. Just two months later, Egword was withdrawn from the market - hopefully not because of this article. I now remove it from the Pages FAQ, as it was of little use there, but it is kept here, in case someone is interested.

This is not at all a frequently asked question. In fact, it is rare to hear anyone talk about EGWORD outside Japan, but it is such a nifty word processor that it warrants a short review - especially as it is so similar to Pages in a lot of ways.

The good thing with EGWORD is that it is much more mature than Pages 3.0. It has been around since 1984 and its current version number is 16. It implements several features that have been requested for Pages since version 1, but which still are missing in Apple's product.

The bad thing for the vast majority of the potential customers, is that EGWORD is Japanese only. There are no menus in English or any other non-Japanese languages.

As it is a Japanese program, it of course supports standard Japanese features like vertical writing and furigana.

In the screenshot above you also see the chart module used. The two images are linked with a line with connectors. You can move the images around as much as you want on the page, but the logical connection stays. Pages lacks this functionality and is therefore less useful to create flow charts or organisation charts.

EGWORD provides easy access to multiple Inspectors. In the image below there are two Inspector windows open for the same image, so one can check both the size of the background image and the properties of the image shadow at the same time. The number of Inspectors is virtually unlimited, so you can get an overview of about any property of the picture and the surrounding text at the same time. Each Inspector window has a "New Inspector" icon, so it is easier to create one than in Pages, where one has to go through the menus View > New Inspector.



The following are some features that are available in both Pages and EGWORD but not in MS Word 2004:

• Latin alphabet ligatures.
  
• Advanced Japanese typography (Yes, Pages has it too, apart from furigana and vertical script.)
  
• Mac OS X Services support.
  
• Both Pages and EGWORD have Universal binaries, so they run as fast on Intel processors as on Power PC.
  

Limitations Pages and EGWORD share that Word does not have are

• Unusual file format. All three applications admittedly have proprietary file formats, and that is bad. Word's advantage is simply that it has the most common word processing file format in the world - it is a de facto standard. The best way to move a document between Pages 3.0 and EGWORD 2007 is through Word's .doc-format.
  
• Auto-save. Pages definitely lacks an auto-save function. Strangely enough I have not been able to find one in EGWORD either. MS Word has it. Even Blogspot's edit window has it. But not Pages or EGWORD.
  

EGWORD has the following functionality that is missing in Pages:

• Layers. You can add graphics and text boxes to different layers, and switch them on and off in different combinations to try out different layouts. Similar functionality exists in Photoshop and InDesign but not in MS Word.
  
• Page Spread view. You can display facing pages immediately next to each other so you can see a picture span two pages. In Pages you can view pages "two up", but there is a space between them, which makes it very difficult to adjust pictures over page spans.
  
• Japanese furigana (phonetic guides).
• Vertical text.
• Connectors for graphics to be used in flow charts and organisation charts.
• Outlines.
• Mix between portrait and landscape layouts in the same document.
• Password protection.
• Native Save to .doc format if original document was Word.
• Graphics: Arcs. Customisable reflections of images, text boxes and other shapes. In general EGWORD uses Mac OS X' graphics and text engines, just like Pages (but in contrast to MS Word), so the result is usually very impressive.
• The high end version of EGWORD also contains EGBRIDGE, a Japanese input method with handwriting recognition and other features that are not present in Apple's Kotoeri.
• A lot of more minor functionality.
  

A picture adjusted to span two pages.

And yet, there are certain features Pages has, that are missing from EGWORD:

• High quality PDFs. I have not been able to export EGWORD files in any high quality file format. It saves natively to .doc format, and it can export to .rtf and .rtfd, and it can print using Mac OS X to PDF, but the quality is slightly inferior to what you get when you create PDFs with Pages.
  
• Non-Japanese/non-English spell checking. Unfortunately EGWORD does not seem to be able to use Mac OS X' spell checker.
  
• Linked text boxes. This seems silly, but there seems to be no way to lead overflowing text from one textbox to another.
  
• Latin auto-text. For Japanese auto-text, EGWORD can use EGBRIDGE, if installed.
  
• Graphics: Instant Alpha. Adjust image. It could be argued that this kind of functionality is not Word processor or DTP functionality. If transparency is added to a picture in an external program, EGWORD is fully capable of using it for text wrapping.

There is a brief comparison between Pages and EGWORD in Japanese at Ergo's website. Ergosoft also has a comparison between Egword and Microsoft Word.

On the whole, neither program can be fully replaced by the other. EGWORD is very mature, and it has evolved a lot the last few years - perhaps more so than the much younger Pages. Unless you need really high quality graphics, EGWORD is the better of the two programs - provided you can read Japanese.

Prices in Japan November 2007:
EGWORD Universal 2 (with EGBRIDGE) - ￥16,000
EGWORD Universal 2 Solo (without EGBRIDGE) - ￥11,000
MS Office 2004 standard - ￥49,800
MS Word 2004 (separate from Office) - ￥27,800
iWork - ￥9,800

In the US, there is also a student edition of MS Office 2004 at $149.95 (￥16,000).

Update

Egword is no longer sold from 28 January 2008. Sadly, after 24 years in the market, this fine word processor is withdrawn.

Sample pictures, or the lack of them

I have been watching some podcasts about Photoshop and other image editing programs. It seems more and more difficult to give good examples on how to improve pictures. The problem is that cameras are getting better, so many of the problems we used to have 10 years ago are now gone.

It must be very tempting for the instructors to take a perfectly good pictures and then to distort it, so they can "fix" it on screen.

Shuffle - "solution" to the podcast problem

To make sure that podcasts will be loaded to your Shuffle, run the following Apple script before you synchronise. (Open the application Script Editor - paste the script below as a new script - save as application, which you can launch manually.)

tell application "iTunes"
 --first line slightly silly, as the updates wont be processed before the following steps, but one can as well do it now as never.
 updateAllPodcasts
 set tracktotal to count of tracks in playlist "A List of Recent unheard"
 repeat with aFile from 1 to tracktotal
  set shufflable of track aFile of playlist "A List of Recent unheard" to true  
 end repeat 
end tell

To see more about the problem check my previous posts here, here and here.

A similar script can be found at macosxhints.

Shuffle - reiteration of problems

To play podcasts on my shuffle, I perform the following steps.

1. Click on Podcasts and Refresh, to get the latest podcasts.

2. Go to a Smart Playlist I have created, which contains all recent unplayed tracks.

3. Highlight all tracks in the smart playlist.

4. Click on command-I to get to the info.

5. Click on the option "Skip when shuffling" and set it to no.

6. Go to the Shuffle device (customized to include recent unplayed tracks) and select automatic update.


With Itunes 8, Apple added a new step:

4b. Click on Options to display the option to set skip when shuffling to "No".


Questions:

1. Why do I have to check the option "skip when shuffling" to "No", when the Shuffle iPod is not set to shuffle?

2. Why are all podcasts set to "Skip when shuffling"?

3. According to http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1831 the "proper" way to add a podcast to a shuffle is to drag it to the device. Why? Or perhaps better phrased: "Why on earth!"

Are there any tracks that change as frequently as podcasts? Why is any manual intervention at all needed for frequently changed tracks?


I bought my iPod shuffle in the belief that a one button device would be simple. I have not had as many usability problem with any Apple product ever, and I have gone through dozens of their operating systems and machines, including Mac, iPods, Newton, printers...

This post has also been sent to Apple at http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipodshuffle.html

iPhone 3G vs iPod Touch

The difference between the new iPhone 3G and an iPod Touch is that the iPhone has the following functionality:

* GPS with maps. However, this does not include road directions for use in a car, not tracking of where you walked or latitude and longitude display. The iPod Touch has maps as well, but not GPS.
* Camera. But it is just 2 Megapixel, so it is unlikely to replace your DSLR.
* Phone. Of course. One device less in your pocket.
* 3G. Which is the perhaps most useful service, as one can use the 3G to retrieve mails and surf the web even without WiFi.
* Then there is the tight integration with your address book. Finally I can use Chinese names for Chinese friends. With most phones, the synchronisation only works with Latin characters.

Neither gadget has copy-paste, file browser, usage as external harddisk or possibility to add a real keyboard.

Oh, just buy a pen and a blank sheet of paper instead. It is much cheaper.

One big button. A lot of problems: shuffle

Do you remember my ipod shuffle? Or course you do. It is the simple gadget I found incredibly difficult to use.

Not only that. Now it is completely gone. I have hardly used it, as it is a piece of equestrian detritus.

What is the exact problem description?

It does not play music.

What have I done to fix the problem?

I searched the internet for instruction how to update, reset and restore the little beast. I downloaded the manual. I read about flashing lights and their mysterious meanings on long and impenetrable web pages that apparently were written by an energetic Tolstoy (Лев Николаевич Толстой), after he finished War and Peace as a light warm-up.

I reset. I restored. I updated. I deleted all songs. I added others back. I changed name of the shuffle back and forth and got strange messages saying that it could not be synchronised (when I tried to change its name!) properly. I ended up with one name in iTunes and another one in the Finder. I see songs added in iTunes, and the Shuffle happily shows me a top secret light combination which means that no songs are present.

As far as I can tell we are in for some quantum physics here. The songs are only there when they are observed. As soon as they are not observed they are gone.

I think I can safely say that never has such a small and simple gadget caused me as much problems as that shuffle.

Update 24 hours after the problem was discovered

I solved it. Stroke of luck I guess. I connected the Shuffle to another Mac and restored it there. The first Mac has USB 1 but the second one has USB 2. I do not know if that is what made a difference. Anyhow, after I restored it in the second Mac and got a strange error message that "the file" could not be found, I connected it to the first Mac again, synched, and now it works.

Update several weeks later, 27 July 2008. After Christ.

I had similar problems again. This time it was solved by moving the on/off switch to off and then back to on. I have no idea why this helped.

iPhone - take 2

There is a new iPhone out there. It is cheaper than before, but I do not see any reason to pay for a device I do not want.

.mac has been "upgraded" to a new name: mobileme. Considering that I tried using .mac for several years, but that they upload speed to the iDisk was a joke, I do not see any reason to go for that either. I tried using iDisk with several internet providers on several Macs in several countries on three continents. The speed was always abysmal.

Apple may one day come up with a new product I want, but waiting for that, I will spend my money on more useful things, like wine, women and song.

Update:

The new iPhone is actually more expensive than the old one, as the monthly data transfer is more expensive.

The new iPhone is slightly bigger than the old one, in spite of Apple saying that it is slightly thinner "round the edges".

The new iPhone has GPS - good.

The new iPhone can read Word, Excel, Powerpoint documents, but only as mail attachments. It is very likely impossible to add a bookmark to the middle of a long file, so one knows where one left off.

The iPhone is truly a strike of genius. Everyone is talking about it, in spite of it having very few really useful features.

64 bit Vista is great, but don't use it

Plenty of enthusiasts install the 64bit version of MS Vista because it is "better" than the 32bit version. However, not even Microsoft themselves wholly endorse it. Currently, this Microsoft link says:

"The 64-bit editions of Windows Vista are not for everyone, and require a system with a 64-bit processor and 64-bit system drivers. Please confirm that your system, applications, and devices are compatible with a 64-bit edition of Windows Vista before installing."

A not so simple gadget

I just bought an iPod shuffle. Some time ago I bought a La Crosse weather station, a surprisingly simple and useful gadget.

Looking at an iPod Shuffle, one would be forgiven for believing it to be simple. It is not. I have used four previous models of iPods and the shuffle was by far the most daunting. I had to spend time reading manuals and checking discussion boards before I managed to get one single track onto the Shuffle.

Sometimes I had the feeling that Apple complicated the Shuffle, to make people consider Mac OS X simple in comparison.


To the left: simple gadget
To the right: trouble maker

Etiquette

I just stumbled over an extraordinary person in a discussion forum. He did about everything wrong to get an answer. Here are some of the highlights from some of his posts.

Anybody heard of OLE?

The interesting thing here is that the question was posted in an Apple forum, and OLE is Microsoft technology. A fairly big part of Macintosh users shun Microsoft, so asking about OLE was very optimistic.

But not only that, the question was not about what the poster wanted to do. It was not about what he wanted to achieve (for example inserting a spreadsheet in a word processing document). It was OLE and nothing else. He had made up his mind on what the solution was before defining the question.

...essential for many in the real world...

Here he attacks the first person who tried to help him for not living in the "real world".

Judging from the responses so far this is indeed a very limited forum.

He then goes on attacking the entire forum as "limited".

...responses have come from users who must be permanently engaged in posting items...

Then the people who tried to help him are attacked for being... too experienced?

...you either both lack work experience in using spreadsheets, or you don't quite grasp the usefulness and the essence of OLE model.

Still no trace of explanation of what the poster wants to actually achieve, just a remark that the people who tried to help are inexperienced and/or stupid. Further, there is no attempt to prove this lack of experience or stupidity. No attempt at promoting or explaining the advantages of OLE. Just a blanket statement that this Microsoft technology is so great that Apple should adopt it.

waste of time

Those three words, without capital W or any full stop or other punctuation, are so far the last entry from the original poster.

I disagree with the last entry. Other posters in the forum got going a quite interesting discussion about OLE and OpenDoc and other document models. This was no waste of time at all.

I still do not know what the original poster was actually after, and I am sorry if he wasted his time, but I would like to thank him for initiating an interesting discussion.

A typical result of OLE. Take an aspirin and try again tomorrow.

The simplest gadget

How much time does mankind spend each year trying to make electronic devices work? How many electronic devices are never used, because the owner gives up trying to understand the manual?

Personally I dread each new device, because I know from experience how much they shorten my life, tying my hands to manuals and buttons that do not work properly.

Even my first Mac took about a week to understand. I did not even have any programs for it, but just understanding what it was all about, coming, as I did, from a monochrome DOS PC, I needed five full days, before I could say to myself that I grasped it.

Yesterday I bought a much simpler device, a La Crosse weather station. I hesitated a lot. Life is too short, I said to myself. I will not have the time to configure it, set it up and customize it.

It turns out that it took no time at all. Two batteries in an outdoor transmitter. Check. Two batteries in the display. Done. That's all. After that, I now have a display that shows me accurate time (radio transmitted), temperature indoors and outdoors, air humidity and air pressure.

It is not important if I need that information. I is not important if the station was cheap or expensive. I am anyhow impressed that one still anno domini 2008 can build devices that need no configuration at all.

Selling other people's products

Apple is in a quite peculiar situation with iWork. The office suite is so cheap that they probably make more money on people buying MS Office or Adobe InDesign from their shops. In other words, Apple needs to promote their competitors, because they make more money on the competition than their own product.

It will be interesting when they do so overtly. Imagine a product comparison at apple.com: iWork can this... MS Office can this... And then a long list of arguments to buy MS Office instead.

This peculiar situation may be part of the explanation why iWork is not as well maintained as it could be.

The User is Wrong

A common reaction among computer users is that the program or the programmer is stupid.

"Why does it not do it like this? It is so obvious that it should do it like this."

What the User is missing is that there are millions of stupid things, the computer succeeds in avoiding. From the moment the computer is switched on, there are thousands of stupid things the computer avoids doing every milli-second. Every time a computer starts up faultlessly, it is close to a miracle. and yet there are millions of computers around the world that start up without problems every hour - millions of brilliant miracles.

Think about that the next time your computer does not work. It works for millions of others. If it does not work for you, clearly someone is after you.

The perfect way of using an EEE PC

This is a recipe for a serene usage of Asus EEE PC.

1. Follow the steps in http://wiki.eeeuser.com/howto:installrescuemode to install a rescue mode in grub.
2. Shut down.
3. Start up, press F9 repeatedly at the first screen, and go to rescue mode, as described in the url above.
4. In the terminal, type "mount /dev/sda2 /mnt-user" and hit enter. (Skip the mnt-system described in the url above. You do not need it for anything.)
5. In the terminal type "cd /mnt-user/home/user" and hit enter.
6. Use vi and be happy.

Limitations:
* You do not have any access to external networks or inserted SD cards.
* You have only a fraction of all the unix commands you thought you needed. No "less". No "chmod". No "vim", so you are stuck with a stripped down version of vi. \
* This version of vi does not appear to support word wraps, and it goes haywire at more than 256 characters per line. It does not display all possible settings when you type ":se all".

But so what? No one will never need more than 256 characters, as Bill Gates used to say (or wasn't it something like that?).

The least bad system in the world

Today's blog is written using an Asus EEE PC with Linux. I have hardly used Linux for at least five years, and I had almost forgotten how ghastly it is. Not only that, there hardly seem to have been any improvements when it comes to usability. It has taken me hours to set the keyboard to English instead of French. On Windows the same thing takes less than a minute. On Mac OS X less than 3 seconds. It takes slightly longer if you count the time it takes to figure out how to do it, but it will hardly take longer than 5 minutes on a Mac and 15 minutes on Windows. On this "simple" version of Linux, it has taken me about an hour just to figure out how to do it. And then it has taken about one hour of umpteen restarts and trial and error to get it done.

I have not bothered installing Japanese and Chinese keyboards, even though I have heard that Chinese keyboard supposedly is installed by default.

I had to fight with a new installation of Windows as well, a few months ago. Last time I got a new Windows machine it had a minuscule screen and a Japanese operating system. At the time I blamed my frustrations on my limited abilities to read Japanese, but when I now got to see a new European version, I discovered that it was equally bad.

Using a Macintosh is not a pleasure - it just happens to be a decent tool for whatever you happen to want to do. But it is not such an absolute pain and loss of time as using Linux and to some extent Windows.

Update: I have now spent another day on Linux, and I would like to moderate the above: Using Linux is not painful. Using Linux can be almost as acceptable as Windows and Mac OS. However, configuring Linux is painful. Editing configuration and startup files in Linux is like going back 20 years to DOS and autoexec.bat and config.sys.

My word processors

When I type texts, I use TextEdit for about 9 out of 10 texts. It is fast and functional and provides reasonably well formatted files that can be read on both Mac, Windows and Unix.

I use JEdit X for texts where I need to count the number of words.

I use Google Docs for documents I change from different locations.

I use MS Word for texts in Japanese for the ability to use furigana and vertical script.

And once in a while I also use NeoOffice to open documents in unusual formats.

It also happens that I use Pages, but that is only for the rare cases where the layout is more important than the content.

Books as a medium - and their lack of future

It is always interesting to try to predict the future. It rarely works, and when it happens to work, it often is because of pure chance rather than any insights.

Here is my prediction: books will disappear. Soon. And suddenly. Arguments why I may be wrong follow below. They are all followed by counter-arguments that indicate that I may be right anyhow.

Books never run out of power. True, but electronic devices nowadays rarely run out of power either. A digital watch can run for years without recharging. One could easily make an electronic book that could last for very long time.

It is nice to touch a book and the paper in it. True. It is also nice to touch a vinyl record, not to mention a fountain pen. They are no longer available in the main stream market.

Backlit screens hurt the eyes. They used to do, but modern high quality ones do not.

Books are cheaper than e-books. It matters less if you lose one. You can buy digital watches for less than a dollar. It would be possible to produce e-books at very cheap prices as well.

E-books are almost as expensive as real books. Yes, today. However that is just a commercial decision. All the classics could (and should) be free for e-books. That's a price with which real books can never compete.

E-books are too small. E-books have the size the manufacturer chooses. For people who want them in their pockets, they can be small. For people who want big ones, they can be big. Just like normal books.

E-books are too complicated to load. E-books currently are often not easy to load, but that is a problem with software design. Nothing would prevent a manufacturer to create a point and click device which would be at least as easy, as it is to go to the city centre to buy the paper book you are looking for. And potentially all text-files available on the internet can immediately be available for you - regardless of language and origin. If you want a particular paper book from India, it may turn out impossible, if there is no local distributor of Indian books and if the Indian publisher does not do mail-order. If the same book is available electronically through the internet, there is no restriction - you can get it within seconds, instead of not at all.

E-books never get sentimental value. It is true that a copy of an early edition of an e-book hardly has any additional value. However, that makes them more widely available - not less.

A paper book does not break if you drop it. Neither does a well designed e-book.

If you spell coffee on a paper book, it is still readable. Yes, but it gets a coffee stain for ever. A well designed e-book is water proof enough to handle a few drops of coffee, which can be wiped off with no visible trace.

A paper book can be read in direct sunlight. Currently the paper book wins that match, as electronic screens mostly are difficult to read in the sun. However, in dark situations, like in a badly lit bus or a hotel room with bad lamps, an e-book with backlit screen is easier to read than a paper book. Besides, if you are out in the sun, should you not enjoy the view rather than read a book?

One cannot scratch notes in the margin of an e-book. Not yet - no. However, there are such a lot of other things one can do with electronic texts: copy parts of them with no risk of errors, make a full text search through War and Peace, change the size of the font to get the right one for your eyes, and so on.

So, why have e-books not caught on yet? Because of commercial concerns. The publishers do not want to release books in formats that can be copied freely, as that would limit their sales. And people are unwilling to pay for books they cannot copy freely, and which they may not even be able to read in a few years, if there then is no available reader for that format.

As far as I know neither Sony's Librié nor Amazon's Kindle have very good support for anything but their own books. This concept is of course broken. The perfect e-book should not be a dedicated device that only reads books. It should be integrated in your phone or PDA or even your digital camera. And it should support all kinds of files and encodings in all languages.

There is no such device today. But once it will come, there will be no way back, and paper books will be doomed.

You can get prepared for this already today. Get rid of your paper books right now. Just send them all to me, so I get something to read.

VBA - it will be missed

In 1996 Microsoft started licensing Visual Basic for Applications to third parties. In 2007, 1 July, they stopped doing this. According to Microsoft themselves, they expect no "significant enhancements to VBA" and they recommend their customers to look into other solutions.

Part of this strategy is probably their decision to drop support for VBA in MS Office 2008 for Mac OS X. Tragically, Microsoft recommends its VBA users on the Mac to start using AppleScript instead. This breaks compatibility with the Windows version of MS Office completely for all macro authors. On the other hand, compatibility was already limited, as the Mac version was unable to use embedded elements from applications that only are available for Windows.

VBA in some ways is a horrible language, when it comes to memory management and performance and code structure. However, it was wonderfully easy to put together a working and useful small program in just a few minutes. It was right there, in Word and the other applications. There was never any question of getting the right version and ensuring compatibility or installing additional software. It was there, and it was usable.

Whatever comes next has something to live up to.

Nice Carnival 2008 - A Usability disaster

Whenever you drive in Nice, you need to know what events are on, as the Promenades des Anglais often is closed for traffic to make room for them.

At this time of the year, the big event is the carnival. The web site of Nice Carnival 2008 is one of those flash sites. You are looking for information, and you are greeted with some irrelevant pictures of something you are not interested in - if you have Adobe Flash Player installed at all. You also get annoying music, which interferes with the sound of the DVD you try to watch waiting for the slow site to load. After some time you get a "skip intro" link, which sends you to a second flash page, where you have to move your mouse around over different parts of the screen to see which one will display information about the program.

Note this: you cannot look at the page and see where the information is. You have to move your mouse around to see where it is likely to be. Someone has had real fun designing that. That same person would have had the same kind of fun working for the Spanish inquisition in the 16th century.

You move your mouse around and you find the place where it says "Programme et réservation", which opens a menu on the opposite side of the screen, where you can click on "Programme et tarifs".

You decide that it may be safer to read the program in English instead of French, and you click on the British flag, which prompts the entire flash to reload. It takes around 20 seconds on my computer. There is then some error, so I cannot get to the program at all. I click on French again. Wait for another 20 seconds. Click on "Programme et tarifs".

Wait for another 15 seconds. This new page does not navigate using flash, but the annoying music still takes time to load.

In the middle of the screen is a frame with the program. As the program does not actually fit in the frame, I cannot print it out using command-P, as I can with most other pages. Neither is there any button for a printer friendly version.

I instead right click on the frame and choose "Open in another window". I now have a perfectly good ordinary html page, which contains all the information I need, and which prints just like that. It is about 6 kb big. The rest of the navigation that brought me to the page is easily 6 Mb, that is 1000 times bigger. It took about 0.2 seconds to load the programme page. That is all I wanted. Instead the website ruined 5 minutes of my life. For those who do not want to spent those five minutes: here the program is.

A fringe buyer

I currently live in France. We have excellent olives in the shops, and I would guess that the first Beaujolais nouveau comes here much earlier than it does to Muskegon. However, there are other products that come later here than they do in for example the US - like new high-tech products.

Recently a new version of Microsoft Office 2008 made it to the shops in the US and the rest of the world, including France. The version you buy in the US is in English. The version you buy in France is in French. That is fine and excellent for the vast majority of the customers.

But we are some people who prefer all our software to be in one and the same language. As most software is available in English, that is the language of choice for us. Working in the same language in all programs makes it slightly quicker to browse through the menus. Even if you know that Copy and Paste are Copier and Coller, it is quicker to always browse for Copy, than to sometimes browse for Copy and sometimes for Copier.

Besides there is one feature, support for Japanese vertical script and furigana, which is not included in the French version. It is included in the Japanese version, of course. And the English version. But not in the French one.

So the task is to get Microsoft Office 2008 in English, even though I live in France.

That is hard. The knights of the round table had it easier when they were stumbling around looking for the holy grail.

None of the shops here has the English version. Applestore.fr does not have the English version. Applestore.com does not ship the English version abroad. It is like a giant conspiracy to block anyone in France from using an English version of Office 2008. I wonder if they have road blocks on the borders and and strip searches making sure no one brings in an English copy.

My latest attempt was to go to amazon.co.jp and try to order a Japanese copy shipped to France. However, they also had restrictions. Apparently, software produced for the Japanese market cannot be shipped abroad. No MS Office. No Egword. Probably not the Japanese version of InDesign.

People talk about the dangers of globalisation. Is this what they mean?

Anyhow, most people are probably happy with the versions available. Most French prefer the French version to the English one. Most French do not speak Japanese. Everyone is happy. Except the consumers on the fringe.

D40X

I just got a new camera. My old SLR was a D50, which did the job well, but after holding a D40 in my hands on Friday evening, I realised I could not resist such a cute little SLR. I went for the D40X though, to get some additional pixels.

My trusty old AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm lens still works, and so far I think the combination is excellent: a really flexible lens with vibration reduction and the smallest SLR I have so far held in my hand with 80% more pixels than my old D50. Perfect for travel and even to carry around, as one takes a quick walk around town.

I had considered a D300, which I also got the opportunity to hold in my hand recently. I admit that the D300 is a marvellous machine - superior in almost all ways to the D40X, but it is heavy. It is nothing you grab along when you go for a quick walk to the nearest bakery. The D40X is such a camera.

There are people who claim that the additional pixels in a D40X compared to a D40 are a waste. The additional pixels are "only significant if you're printing larger than 13 x 19" (30 x 50 cm) and larger" they say. However, I never print anything. I use the additional pixels to better be able to zoom in and crop small details of photos. In no way am I a fan of huge amounts of pixels for standard photos. I use the lowest possible resolution, unless I know I need more, and when I need more, I usually want as much as possible for the flexibility and joy of zooming around and cropping heavily.

However, it is undeniable that the larger number of pixels sometimes causes problems. I took some pictures of the carnival in Nice today. As I never knew what details I would want to zoom in on, I started off taking NEF (RAW) pictures. Soon a realised that my 8G SD card would not be big enough for all the pictures of the day. I took 800 pictures - roughly as many as I had planned to take. Each NEF is around 7M, and I already had some pictures in the camera to start with. Changing to JPEG with the same resolution, I got the file size down to about a tenth, and that is much more reasonable - even if you loose some flexibility.

The software that came with the camera is rubbish, by the way. It is Nikon's standard "PictureProject". I never used it with the D50, but I wanted to give it a second try. The installation failed over and over again. The error message was something with the shared library "zelkova3". There is a "fix" at Nikon's support site which does not work. My crime was to use the "Installer" instead of the idiotic helper application which launched the installer. Apparently the helper application did some other necessary things as well, which the "Installer" did not do. Besides, Nikon's support site sucks. I had to send a mail to myself to get the right URL to the article. Anyhow, PictureProject is a waste of time, so do not bother trying to make their error prone installers work. That way you will be much happier.

My copy of Photoshop is CS2, and that version cannot read NEF files from D40X. Luckily Preview can do it. So can Aperture and of course CS3, if one has them. I have not yet managed to write any AppleScript to convert from NEF to JPEG.

Why TextEdit is better than Pages

Apple currently delivers two word processors. One comes free with the operating system - TextEdit. The other is paying software included in the suit iWork - Pages.

The strange thing is that the free software is better than the paying one in several respects.

• Only TextEdit opens MS Word 6.0 or MS Word 95 and earlier Word formats.
• Only TextEdit can specify the encoding for exported text documents.
• Only TextEdit saves odt and docx formats.
• Only TextEdit can open text files in other unicode encodings than UTF16.
• Only TextEdit can edit HTML files.
  
• Only TextEdit has a "Save" function to foreign file formats. Pages forces the user to go through an export process.
• Only TextEdit has autosave.
• TextEdit handles some OpenType glyphs that Pages does not handle.
• Only TextEdit handles right-to-left script like Arabic and Hebrew.
  
• Only TextEdit displays the name of substituted fonts.
• TextEdit has kerning while Pages has tracking.
• Only TextEdit can correctly create spaces around French « chevrons ».
• Only TextEdit handles Japanese and Greek wordbreak rules.
  
• Only TextEdit supports Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) grammar checker. It contains some checks for pure grammatical errors like:
• Verb conjugation ("I is". "I have did".)
• The difference between "their" and "there" (as in "there house").
• Sentence fragments (sentences without a verb - like this one).

And then some firsts:

• TextEdit could handle tables in RTF files before Pages could.
• TextEdit could handle subpixel font rendering before Pages could.

If you wonder why this comparison list is not posted at the excellent PagesFaq blog, it is because it is of little use to anyone. Pages has plenty of advantages over TextEdit as well. The list is just compiled as a curiosity.

Yahoo, what is it good for?

I never understood the rational for Microsoft to buy Yahoo, and neither do Microsoft's shareholders or even the occasionally enlightened International Herald Tribune.

My own doubts come from the fact that I think Yahoo is rubbish. Not only that, but they fail to adapt.

Google builds its fortune around its search engine. It has some other good products, but without the search engine, they would hardly have got the momentum to build any other applications at all.

Google search is slick and to the point. It has been so for years. Why has Yahoo not been able to learn from it? Is "slick and to the point" a patented concept? Does Yahoo have to design an ugly confusing interface due to intellectual property laws?

And why would Microsoft want to learn anything from Yahoo? To be certain that they never get better than number two on the internet?

Yahoo's Ajax based mail is useless. It crashes, it blocks one's browser and it keeps excusing itself for not being able to log in to some chat that one does not want to log in to.

Luckily for everyone, the deal does not seem to take place.

If you have comments to this story, feel free to send me a mail at mlewanfr@yahoo.fr.

More features - less information

The evolution of the internet frightens me.

One sees more and more videos and animations - both in pop-up windows and embedded deep in the html code. They interact with flash and javascript and css and downloadable fonts, and the designers will have as many tools they can ever imagine to make the pages look just like they want them.

And what is disappearing?

Text.

There is less and less text on the average page. There is admittedly a saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. However, only good pictures are worth a thousand words. Many pictures contain absolutely no interesting information at all. The net result of a video interview of twenty minutes is often less than the same interview written down. In the video interview, you are not able to copy and paste text to your note book for further thoughts. You are not able to quickly browse back to what was said five minutes ago to compare to what is being said now. You are not able to search for keywords. You are not able to browse through irrelevant parts and speed up the information uptake so you can absorb two interviews in the same time as one. In the video interview, you can spend hours trying to hear what that foreign name was, so you finally can look it up.

Animations, sounds, video - it is prettier than text, but it contains less information and it takes more time, and if there is anything that is limited in man's life, it is the available time.

Avoiding Microsoft

For some good and some less good reasons, there are people who have set as personal quest to avoid all things Microsoft. Messages sometimes come across as if Microsoft was inherently evil, and as if any morally decent person had to shun all their products.

Each person has the right to his or her opinions, of course, and making a metaphysical generic moral judgement on a company with about twice as many employees as the population of the entire country Monaco, is not worse than a lot of other things man does.

However, I do get miffed when Microsoft hunters go after people using any MS software. Inevitably, there are situations in which Microsoft provides the best solution - or even the only one.

If you want to bring down Microsoft, you should not struggle to avoid those of their products that are better than others'. It is much more efficient to avoid those of their products that are worse than others'. That is, after all, a bigger segment of their sales.

Do not develop what is fun

In many industries the main problem is that the employees get bored and loose motivation. In IT the problem is sometimes the opposite. Developers get overly enthusiastic about their job and try to use as much interesting and fun technology as possible. Unfortunately, what is fun is not always most efficient or most maintainable.

Consumers have to fight with bad design

I just bought a book. It is a nice book. It has an inside and an outside and plenty of paper pages. And a CD.

CDs frighten me.

Especially when they come with books or magazines.

In at least 90% of all cases the CD is designed by someone who is paid to make something that looks good and is impossible to penetrate.

In this case, the main value of the CD is a 400 Megabyte video. You might guess that the video would by lying on the CD in some standard video format so I could play it.

No.

It is in flv format and it can visibly only be launched from the CD's dedicated Flash player, which is given the same name as the book, to confuse things. Yes, the Flash player is not called Flash player. (Why?!) The dedicated Flash player then launches some sort of web page view, where the video is embedded (!) among text in thumbnail size.

Clearly I cannot watch a one hour long video like that, so I google around and discover that VLC is supposed to play flv files. I download VLC, and launch the file.

And all this, because some incompetent designer has been paid a fortune to make it impossible to view what I have paid for.

What the book is about? Well, this and that. Usability among other things. Let me quote one of the phrases from the CD:

"You must test your website to understand customer behavior and incorporate those findings into it. Even experienced usability experts test their assumptions."

Clearly, the designer did not read the file s/he put on the CD.

I write only in English. Why would I use UTF8?

You should use unicode on your web site, because you do not know for how long you only will write in English. One day you may want to write the correct accents for Běijīng or you may make sure that your readers know that you are writing about the province Shǎnxī and not the neighbouring Shānxī. And what about writing Łódź like they do themselves in that city?

If you have built your web site around a non-unicode encoding, you cannot do that.

And if you are a mathematician you may one day want to type ε or ∀ or ∃ or ∈.

And even if you just type normal boring English text, you may come into situations where you want to use a curved apostrophe in "I’m" or real curved quotation marks like ‘Hello’ or “Hello”. And what about writing that someone is 5′3″ tall?

With the non-unicode "Western" encoding, you cannot do any of that. You can of course use the straight vertical characters ' and ". I do so myself all the time. However, it is strictly speaking not correct. The sad thing with the Western encoding is that you cannot write it correctly even if you want to.

With Unicode you can write not only that but much more.

UTF8 problems - none

Over at Sitepoint, there is a strange article about which encoding one shall use for web pages. It is strange, because it is written as if there was a real choice. The whole article should have been replaced by this simple sentence:

Use UTF-8. Always. And nothing else.

It is true that other encodings still are used and understood, but there is no real advantage with any of them.

The "problems" Sitepoint lists for UTF-8 are:

1. Not all editors or publishing tools support it.
2. Some browsers don't understand the BOM, and will output it as text. Some editors won't allow us to omit the BOM.
3. Some ancient browsers don't support UTF-8.

The first point is only a problem if you stumble upon one of those old publishing tools that do not support it. If yours does, just use UTF-8. If it does not, it is probably obsolete in other areas as well and should anyhow be replaced. There used to be a problem with the BOM with FCKEditor, but it is now fixed.

The second and third points are about browser limitations. Even if you manage to find a browser that is old enough not to be able to handle a BOM, it is just a blank line at the beginning of the file that may be wrong. However, modern browsers handle this well.

One could add a fourth point: the size of text files goes up for non-Latin alphabets, if you use UTF-8 compared to native encodings. However, so much of most modern HTML pages is javascript, tags and CSS and then images and media that the size of the actual text in 99.99% of all cases is insignificant.

Today there is no good reason for anyone to use anything but UTF-8.

Why would I think about posterity? What has posterity ever done for me?

The first computer I did not buy was an Amstrad CPC back in the eighties. It was the absolutely cheapest one in the market at the time and included monitor, CPU and printer in one marvellous package. The reason I did not buy it was luck. I stood in the shop ready to pay for it, when it suddenly struck me to ask the shop keeper if it would be easy to transfer files from this PC to other ones. Sheepishly he had to admit that it was impossible. The Amstrad CPC used Hitachi's 3" floppy disk drive, which no one else was using. Whatever one typed on an Amstrad CPC had to be retyped by hand on other computers if one wanted to preserve the data.

My most trusty computer was a PowerBook 170. However, it became increasingly difficult to get any files from it, as it did not have USB or Ethernet or Wifi, and as most modern computers do not have diskette stations. It served me for about 10 years before I gave it up due to the compatibility problems.

The question of future compatibility is still surprisingly ignored in the world of high tech.

Hardware is rarely a problem any more, as most computers handle WiFi and USB memory sticks. When you buy a new PC or PDA or telephone, there is usually no big problems transferring files as much as you like.

But the problem with file format remains.

Apple bluntly tries to sell its iWork suite, in spite of the fact that only iWork applications can read iWork files - much like Amstrad did in the eighties. One can, admittedly export files from iWork in more readable formats, like PDF or Word document, but it is completely and utterly impossible to set a widely used file format as default.

This is nothing new of course. Many fine applications have used obscure file formats, which locked the users in - Mellel, egword and iWorks' predecessor AppleWorks, just to mention a few.

AppleWorks is not even fully backward compatible with itself. The last version was not able to write in the formats of the earlier versions. And as Apple no longer sells the program, there is no legal way for your sister to access that pile of old AppleWorks documents you have on your harddisk, unless you have a spare license of the program to give her.

Microsoft Office probably has the most used file formats in the world, but with Service Pack 3 of Microsoft Office 2003, they suddenly decided not to support old files any more. With some documented hacking of the registry, one can still activate access to the old "unsecure" file formats, but if you are not careful, you may disable the OS in the process.

So what is the best file format to choose, if you want to guarantee posterity a chance to read your text?

Word documents of version 2003 is probably still one of the best bets. There are so many Word documents out there, and so many free and open source programs that support it, that it is unlikely to become impossible to read any time soon.

RTF is probably a reasonably good bet, if you avoid pictures and if you only type in Western languages. RTF files created by Mac OS X with Chinese and Japanese may fail in some applications due to encoding problems. (Shy RTFD, which Apple seems to claim is a "variant" of RTF. No application on any Operating System but Mac OS can read them.)

The ISO approved ODF format is all well, but it still has not got enough momentum to tell whether it will last.

The only file format that is promoted to be used for long time archiving is PDF-A. It is approved by ISO for this purpose. However, not many applications are able to create PDF-A files out of the box, and it is difficult to guarantee that there will be applications that can read it in 50 years' time.

My take is that the best format for long term archival is simple unformatted text files. However, even with text, things are not that simple.

Do you feel counted?

If you do not feel as counted as you should today, it is because I "upgraded" the design of some of my blogs. Even though blogspot is google and google analytics is google, the upgrade managed to remove all trace of you, dear reader.

But do not worry if you do not feel as counted as you like. Our highly skilled technicians (a couple of lost cockroaches and a kitten I'm thinking about buying) will without doubt have solved the problem shortly.

Thin air

Apple has come out with a new laptop. Everyone who sees it gets ecstatic. (By "everyone" I mean "I", btw.) It is slim. It is beautiful. It is portable. It is useless. For me, that is.

I really hope Apple sells a lot of them, especially the model with solid state memory. I want it to succeed, and I would really like to have one myself - but I will not buy one. Is it the price? No.

It is the harddisk. It simply is too small. I want to live omnia mea mecum, and I cannot possibly fit all my files on only 80 G and even less the 64 G that the sold state model offers. I would have to have an external harddisk as well. And an external optical drive. And it will all be heavier than buying a simple standard Macbook.

That is the biggest problem I see with it.

The second problem is smaller, but looks bigger. That is, the screen looks bigger. Not only that but it is too big. I do not want a 13.3" screen. 12" is more than enough. It is not because it is lighter, but because it fits better wherever one puts it. I do not need those extra 28 square inches, so why would I carry them around?

Update I: Gizmodo has a comparison between the Macbook Air and a number of other really small laptops. It seems increasingly ridiculous to just look at one dimension - how thick it is.

Update II: This is probably an excellent case for wait and see. The prices of solid state memories seem to be dropping like stones. In six months, either the price of the solid state MBA will have dropped by half or the amount of memory will have doubled or both. Perhaps.

MS Word may one day grow up

Microsoft Word has been around for more than 20 years now, and I still cannot take it quite seriously. It does a lot of things well, but if it were to be sold as a real word processor, methinks it would need to implement at least the following features.

Language

• Right to left writing (Mac OS X version).
• Automatic conversion of kanji and hanzi to phonetics with the phonetic guides (as is already supported in Word for Windows).
• Multi-language spell checking (one setting that accepts words from any of several languages).
• One version for all languages, so the user freely can switch UI, formats, features and dictionaries.
  

Scripting

• Recordable Applescripts (Mac OS X version).
• Applescript code complete in macro editor (Mac OS X version).
  
• VBA scripting in Mac OS X version for compatibility reasons.
  

File handling

• Open and save (not export) Open Document files.
  
• Working Autosave that does not clutter the harddisk with old backups.

Format

• Ligatures, glyph variants and support for other OpenType and TrueType font features.
• High definition graphics.
• Handling of standard vector graphics like PDF and EPS.
• Text wraps around curved objects.
• Decent graphics editing.
• Fixed line height with changing fonts.
• Furigana format modification.
  

User Interface

• Page spread view to adjust pictures spanning two pages.
• Layers to switch on and off certain objects for viewing, printing and export.
• Full screen view. (Mac OS X version)
• Snap objects to alignment guides.

Mac OS Integration

• Support for Mac OS X Services.
• Support for Mac OS X dictionaries.
  

Plus a lot, a lot of bug fixes and corrections to quirky handling of styles and many other things.

Pages may one day grow up

There is an excellent blog called Pages FAQ, where you can go if you want to know more about what Apple's word processor Pages is like.

This blog entry here is about what it is not like. Pages has been around for three years now, and I still cannot take it quite seriously. It does a lot of things well, but if it were to be sold as a word processor not only "for the rest of us", but "for all", methinks it would need to implement at least the following features.

Language

• Right to left writing (Arabic, Hebrew).
• Vertical writing and furigana (Japanese).
• Grammar and spell checking in many more languages.

Scripting

• Applescript access to content of tables.
• Recordable Applescripts
• Customizable menus, toolbars and keyboard shortcuts for Applescripts.

File handling

• Save (instead of "export") to Word, ODT, RTF and text format.
• Save and open RTF files with tables and images.
• Autosave.
• Document comparison (diff).
• Multiple document versions.
• Relative hyperlinks to other files.

Format

• Ability to mix landscape and portrait sections.
• Drop Caps.
• Intelligent caps formatting (like Title Case).
• Multiple tables of contents.
• Numbered table and picture captions.

User Interface

• Displays of the same file in multiple windows.
• Split window view.
• Page spread view to adjust pictures spanning two pages.
• Collapsible outlines.
• Layers to switch on and off certain objects for viewing, printing and export.
• Full screen view.
• "Normal" view without formatting.
  

Modules

• Equation Editor.
• Organisation charts.
• Bibliography.
• Version control system integration.
• Form design.
  

Plus a lot of bug fixes.

Italicized Arial Unicode MS? Never on a Mac!

In the main text processing applications on Mac OS X, like TextEdit, Keynote and Pages, one cannot italicize a font, unless the font designer went to the trouble of creating an italic typeface. Some fonts you therefore cannot put italics on are Arial Unicode MS, Comics Sans MS, and plenty of Apple's own older fonts like New York or Geneva and most Asiatic fonts like Hiragino.

Why?

You can do it without problems in AppleWorks, MacWrite, MS Word, OpenOffice and in about any Windows or Linux application.

I have three theories, and nothing to really back up any of them.

1. "Apple wants to protect the users from ugly fake italics and bolds."

This can be a message to send to users and readers. "It is an improvement." "You will no longer see bad italics." However, I think this message is getting increasingly obsolete. It might have been valid when screen resolutions were lower, but with higher resolutions on screens and printers, it is very rare that one sees an unacceptably bad fake italic or bold rendering.

2. "Apple wants to protect intellectual property rights for font designers."

This is a message to send to font designers. However, it rings a little hollow as one of the biggest font designers, Adobe, themselves produce software to warp their own and others' fonts alike.

3. "Apple does not manage to make acceptable fake italics."

This is a wild guess, but it is possible that Apple had problems getting fake italics right in the first version of Mac OS X. It may have been performance problems with display postscript and getting the pixels right on low resolution screens and things like that. If so, Apple gave up, and promoted the lack of this functionality as a feature.


Personally I cannot see any good reason to prevent italics or bold of fonts that lack the type faces. I have never met anyone who has promoted Mac OS with the words "and thank God, you cannot italicise all fonts" or "it is great not to be able to add bold words to some texts".

If someone had asked me, "do you want to remove the ability to italicize fonts without italic type faces from your Windows PC", I would have said "no" with considerably raised eyebrows, and I have a feeling that others would use their eyebrows in the same way.

I have more than once been in the middle of typing notes in for example Hiragino Mincho Pro, when I suddenly felt like adding italics just as a reminder to myself. (6 eggs, 1 loaf of bread, 200g butter but not salted.) With TextEdit today, I have to change font to add the italics. Open the font panel, click on another font, make sure the typefaces are visible, make sure one of them is "italic" or "oblique". Change the font of the rest of the text to match it. Adjust the text so page breaks and images wraps work smoothly with the new font... And I thought computers were there to try to make our life easier.

But I do see some advantages as well. I appreciate the confidence I can have that the italics I use for publication have gone through the approval of a font designer. I am grateful that I do not have to see ugly italics in printed or displayed public texts.

It is just that the advantages are insignificant compared to the drawbacks with Apple's solution.



Apple's font Skia deformed by Adobe Illustrator.

Market forces and boredom

Once upon a time, Slashdot was an excellent source of information about what is going on in the world of high tech. However, as the number of readers grew, they needed more money to keep the site running, and they had to rely on commercial interests.

Commercial interests want ad revenues, so they want even more readers. Unfortunately, you get more readers with heated discussions, and a discussion is rarely heated unless the subject is something a lot people already know enough to have an opinion on - in other words, it is old news.

Consequently, the "news" at Slashdot is often found in one of the following categories:

• Comparisons between two known systems (Operating systems, standards, ...)
• Provocative closed-ended questions about known subjects ("Is...?")
• Superlatives about known subjects (biggest..., smallest ever...)
• Lists about known subjects (top ten...)
• Scientific news from popular sources (Link to CNN or Yahoo News but never to Science or Nature)
  

If that is what they need to keep the site running, I do not mind. But could they not at least add a filter to remove dumbed down news?

The end of history

People who have lived most of their active lives before the 1990ies may think that the computer age will remove our respect for the old.

They are right in the sense that the school books of 1910 will not bring us much new knowledge.

However, the history we are building right now is impressive. Each and everyone of us can keep more and more data from the past: all the music you listened to as a child, the school essay you write from now on, each bank statement, each travel receipt...

It was interesting to study the letters between Abélard and Heloïse. With the arrival of the telephone, that kind of studies became more difficult, because the number of written conversations went down. However, with computers, the number of written records goes up and up. The sky is the limit. Together with our patience.

Hardware problem

Tech support told me I had a hardware problem. I promptly put the computer in boiling water for seven days and seven nights, and finally it starts getting a little softer.

The reason MS sucks is that it listens to its customers

Year after year Apple has come with much better products than Microsoft. At any given moment, Mac OS has been better than the current DOS or Windows version.

Why?

What is Apple's secret?

How can they with much smaller budget produce much better products? For more than twenty years?

The answer is that life is much more difficult for Microsoft. MS woos the big corporations. All the big corporations want all their requests fulfilled all the time, and that is pretty difficult to keep up with. If a big corporation still has DOS applications, Microsoft has to make sure that DOS applications still work.

In contrast, Apple only has to program for the moment. If old applications no longer work it is not much of a concern of theirs. There are plenty of potential buyers who happily accept that shortcoming, as everything else works so well. No support for 68000 processors any more? No worry! No support for classic Mac OS? No worry! No support for SCSI or diskettes? No worry! They can kick out old standards much quicker than MS can.

If 20% of all Apple users were to quit the platform each year, there would still be a potential market of 90% of all computer users to switch over. If 20% of all Microsoft users were to quit the platform each year, it would be a catastrophe, as there would hardly be anyone to win over.

As Mac OS constantly is cleansed of legacy code, Windows has a much larger overhang of old mouldy code they cannot remove without annoying some of their biggest clients.

That's why I use Mac OS - because Apple is strong enough to say no to its customers.