Firefox 0.8

The Mozilla people released version 0.8 of Phoenix Firebird Firefox today. I know I’ve ranted about web browsers before, but to quickly summarize why you should be using Firefox instead of Internet Explorer: pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing, Built-in Search, no major security flaws that let people steal your bank passwords, and standards compliance. True, two of those are features of the Google Toolbar, but they work better when integrated right into the program as opposed to as add-ons. As for why you should care about web standards compliance, it’s really a favor to web designers. When designing a page, you do a lot of work to make it pretty, and then once you’re done you usually spend another two or three days accounting for bugs in Internet Explorer and often dumbing down the page and making it less cool because Internet Explorer’s bugs cause too many problems. If everyone used a better browser, it would save me lots of aggrevation regarding The IE Factor, let you see better-looking pages, and save people money when their tech people have to spend days and days fixing bugs that shouldn’t occur. Windows users: go download Firefox — it has the daveXtreme seal of approval!

Attribution Etiquette

Simon Willison beat me to a point my mind had filed away when I read the same Wired article this morning: attribution is good etiquette. Nothing complicated there, just if you write about an idea or post a link to something, also include a link to where you found the idea. It helps propagate ideas by letting people trace conversations, gives credit to the person who gave you the idea, and helps the magic interconnectivity that’s supposed to make the web, well, a web.

Simon has a cool show referrer bookmarklet. To use, just drag it to your bookmark bar/menu. Click it and it’ll pop up a window giving you a link to the site that brought you to where you are now.

Pepsi and Free Music vs. Dental Health

Coca-Cola has always been, to my tastes, far superior to Pepsi-Cola. True, Pepsi has a hipper, music-oriented image, so I understand why Apple partnered up with it to give away free songs, but it’s just too damn sweet. When I went to the dentist two weeks ago, my hygenist said that my teeth looked great. And while I don’t like Pepsi nearly as much as Coke, if I’m going to spend my dollar on a bottle of sugar water I may as well have a one-in-three chance of winnig a free download. Turns out I’d rather have free music than a Coke and my smile.

Word from Katherine’s friend in dental school: don’t brush your teeth immediately after drinking soda. Rinse with some water first, or the brush will grate the sugar against your teeth because the sugar softens your enamel and the brush could damage it.

Smart Bookmarks

So here’s what happened: I had this post all thought out in my head about how whenever you bookmark a page your web browser should automatically check to see if that page has an RSS or Atom feed so that you’d only have to visit bookmarked pages if you knew they’d been updated. Then I found that OmniWeb 5 is already going to do that, and it comes out tomorrow. So while The Omni Group’s genius was a few months ahead of mine, I’m still going to write about why it’s a good idea.

Most people don’t use newsreaders. Even if one-click subscription worked well and using newsreaders brainlessly easy, it still wouldn’t make a lot of sense for most people to use a separate program for update notification. Obviously there are plenty of hardcore users who read hundreds of news feeds a day and want to be able to quickly scan through their sources, but most everyone else keeps it under seventy-five. Most people just want to be notified that a page they like has been updated. Most people would also prefer to read the page in its original context instead of as a stripped down version in a newsreader. Many pages often contain ancillary content that isn’t syndicated but readers might enjoy. Additionally, many sites are supported by advertising that doesn’t get syndicated into XML, so if readers visited the actual sites, they’d be doing their part in supporting the content provider. Jeffrey Zeldman argues very eloquently against reading pages in really simple syndicated formats:

[…] text alone does not equal content […] We can readily see the benefits of an RSS feed for BBC News, and it also makes sense on sites where page layout is primarily a delivery system for writing, as cigarettes are a delivery system for nicotine.

But most smokers would rather puff than inject nicotine, and most of us used to be as hungry to see a site as to read its words. RSS feeds may subtly discourage that impulse to seek, see, bookmark, and return.

That’s just a small quote; everyone should really go read the entire post. When you come back I think you’ll agree that in context content and form shouldn’t be separable. Power uses may still want to view everything in their newsreaders, but most people would rather get right to the page.

Comment notification

Assuming that OmniWeb’s smart bookmarks work like a charm, it’ll be easy to visit my favorite sites whenever they publish new articles. It’ll also be easy to participate in discussions on weblogs. But as I’ve said before, weblogs don’t do a very good job of keeping discussions going. Weblogs need comment notification. I had suggested that pages should automatically send out emails to let people know whenever new comments are left on a weblog post they’re interested in. xwhite pointed out that this would probably get out of hand. He says:

I’m still not 100% convinced that emails are what i want from subscribing. Ideally for me threads I have subscribed to would appear as something more like an alert/notification. A My Threads section maybe?

I see some problems with the emails too. […] If I went to lunch after commenting on say… 8 posts… I might have 40 emails that are now out of context and i’d have to open and close them each of them.

Also, you only need to know that a new comment has been left on a post, and wouldn’t really want one email per comment. So what you actually want is just to know that the page has been updated since you last visited it, which RSS aggregation would do perfectly (as Courtney suggests).

I usually don’t care about keeping up with comments on most of the posts I read, so I don’t want my aggregator to notify me whenever a comment is left on any post on a page. What I’d like to see is a smart bookmark folder just for comment feeds. Whenever I go to a site and find a thread that I want to watch, I could add it to this folder and my browser would keep a handy list of all the discussions I’m following. This way I’d stay up-to-date on the discussion, and the conversation could move much more quickly as people wouldn’t be simply forgetting to participate. People could stay involved in many threads at once while having notification handled by one centralized solution.

Fun with Ligatures: Zapfino

I found a neat little document today called Using and Managing Fonts in Mac OS X, and learned a pretty cool trick certain clever fonts can do: Apple Advanced Typography. Fonts employing AAT can automatically build their own ligatures. Image above shows how the word “Zapfino” in the typeface “zapfino” redraws itself as connectable consonants are typed.

Zapfino seems to be the only font I could discern that does this, but it’s pretty neat. Combined with built-in text shadows, one could make some cool logos without having to even open Photoshop.

Finder Doublevision

Here’s a screenshot of the Finder window that greeted me when I logged in today. It reminds me of when two mirrors face each other and whatever sits between them gets reflected back to itself. Beautiful in its mystery, but not something a file browser should be trying to pull off.

The Music War and File Formats

A discussion rippled across the web today regarding the upcoming Apple vs. Microsoft music war. Scoble’s A challenge for webloggers: handling organizational difficulties argues for Microsoft’s music format over Apple’s. File formats? A terrible déjà vu chills my spine. Haven’t we played this game before and lost when it came to writing documents (Word), spreadsheets (Excel), editing graphics (Photoshop), and creating presentations (PowerPoint)? After each of these battles, one program came out on top. Each program has two things in common. One, they each occupy a monopoly in their genre. Two, they won their monopoly by locking users into file formats for compatibility’s sake. Another war is brewing, and again it will be one over file format dominance — this time Microsoft’s WMA versus Apple’s AAC. And again the real casualties will not be the application developers but the consumers.

Market competition is good for everyone. When developers compete, consumers benefit from cheaper prices and better products. When people were choosing between Word and WordPerfect, they were making their decisions based on which application they liked better, not on how those programs saved files to a disk. Now, people use Microsoft Word because they need to be able to send the documents it creates to each other, not because it’s a better product. (Yes, other applications are now compatible with it, but that’s now — now that the war has been won.)

Consumers don’t care about file formats. They care about compatibility, and they care about features. They want software to do what they want it to do, but they don’t care about file formats. People want their music to play through their speakers and they want it to sound good. They want their jukebox software to make it easy to find and play their music. Very few care, or even know, which period and three letters follow the name of the song, whether it’s .aac, .wma, .mp3, or .ogg. While some formats offer smaller file sizes or better sound quality, the capacity of hard drive-based players is already well above the size of the average music collection, and the ears of most listeners don’t hear the flatness of lossy compression. To the overwhelming majority of the population, the differences in music brands are imperceptible.

Before Apple released iTunes for Windows, most Windows users ran WinAmp. Now most of them use iTunes. Why? Not because they prefer the sound of AAC to MP3, but because iTunes is a better program and provides access to the iTunes Music Store. It smoothly imported their MP3 collections into its library. Each could be set each one up side-by-side and users could decide which was better. But of course once they start throwing money into the iTMS and building a collection of AAC files they won’t be able to try out any new, potentially better, software.

Scoble’s argument that people should choose WMA over AAC because more devices support the former than the latter misses the point. People shouldn’t have to care if their device will play their music or not. Scoble says:

Let’s say it’s 2006. You have 500 songs you’ve bought on iTunes for your iPod. But, you are about to buy a car with a digital music player built into it. Oh, but wait, Apple doesn’t make a system that plays its AAC format in a car stereo. So, now you can’t buy a real digital music player in your car. Why’s that? Because if you buy songs off of Apple’s iTunes system, they are protected by the AAC/Fairtunes DRM system, and can’t be moved to other devices that don’t recognize AAC/Fairtunes.

In arguing for open formats over proprietary ones, Cory Doctorow has the solution, but it isn’t one that the consumer, who doesn’t know the difference, is going to make. Tom Coates nails it:

It should be obvious to car audio manufacturers that they should be able to play AAC tracks — that there are hundreds of thousands of people across America (and soon Europe) who are going to want to be able to do more things with their bought songs.

Manufacturers of stereo equipment should be making products that play everything. Why should they care that Apple or Microsoft would rather your home stereo only play their format? Their customers just want to be able to play music, and in the digital age there’s no reason why devices shouldn’t play both. Coates says:

The examples that people cite about competing formats no longer hold true for music. It’s not like VHS and Betamax — we’re not talking about hardware with different sized slots that you can only fit one kind of music delivery system into.

The dirty secret is that Apple and Microsoft are happy to pretend they’re caught in a prisoner’s dilemma where the only outcome is war. But that game only applies when the two parties can’t communicate with each other. They could get together and work out a cross-platform DRM, but that would mean that they’d be competing on the same field. What’s really true is that neither company wants to go head-to-head with the other. And because each can lock the other out with proprietary formats, they never have to. With the newly instated number portability, mobile phone companies are being forced to do things like price competitively and offer better service. Why? Because now cell phone providers are now in actual open competition, and the invisible hand can sort out the rest.

To see how all of this could play out let’s say that Microsoft launches a new version of Windows Media Player that connects to its own music store. Say that this new store and the iTMS are basically comparable in price and selection, such that any given individual if choosing one or the other for the first time could choose either service based on their preference for the user experience alone. They buy a few hundred songs from one service, and then the other service releases a new version that’s better in some way or offers some new feature. This individual would like to change to the other service, but can’t because of his sunk cost in music and a portable player. Now he’s stuck using a service he doesn’t like because of a file format he has no reason to care about. Who wins? The software company. Who loses? The consumer. Next Apple and Microsoft get lazy. Since everyone with large music collections can’t switch to a new service with their incompatible music, the companies only court new blood, and have no reason to provide help or better products to current users.

Here’s another way it could go: one company wins because its product is better and its accompanying format/DRM-schema attains the monopoly. Innovation stagnates. Eventually another company wants in and has to pay royalties to use the format. Or maybe someone invents a new, better one, but the old company never supports it properly. (This happened with image files, and five years later Internet Explorer still doesn’t properly render PNG images.) Who loses? The consumer.

Or, both companies could use compatible formats. Both could compete in the open market, using superior products to get ahead. Once equilibrium has been reached, one or the other would be forced to innovate to tip the scales. Maybe a third company would come along and both have to scramble or risk obsolescence. Who wins? The company that makes the best product. Who wins? The consumer.

Snowman Evolution

uComics’ Calvin & Hobbes page has a re-run every day. This one is from eleven years ago today.

TSulli Virus

An email that seems to contain a virus has gone out to the William & Mary alumni email list from “tsulli@wm.edu” with the subject “hi.” It would probably be best not to open it on a Windows machine.

Update 1/21/04: I got the following email last night from William & Mary tech support:

Earlier today, a virus impersonated several William and Mary e-mail addresses and sent many alumni and friends an e-mail message that appeared to come from President Timothy J. Sullivan.

Unfortunately, this message — which appeared under the subject “Hi” and included a warning concerning the virus W32/Bagle-A — was sent to the College’s alumni listserv. Fortunately, however, William and Mary’s server stripped the message of its virus and sent only the corresponding warning.

We regret any inconvenience this may have caused, and we appreciate those of you who alerted us to the bogus e-mail. This afternoon our technicians began work to further tighten the College’s e-mail security and prevent similar transmissions in the future.

If you have further questions, please contact the College’s Information Technology Support Center at support@wm.edu.

Comcast Internet vs. Airport Extreme

Saturday night I spent many hours trying to get an Airport Extreme base station to work with a Comcast cable modem. Comcast apparently implements DHCP slightly differently than the rest of the world does, preventing the Airport Extreme station from getting an IP address. The internet worked fine when hooked directly up to any computer or to an older Airpot base station, but the Extreme version couldn’t handle it. Sunday morning, the Mac Genius at the Clarendon Apple Store said that he had heard other complaints of the problem, and provided a solution: go get the cheapest router you can find ($20-30 range) and hook it up to the modem, and then hook the base station up to it. The router will get the IP address and the base station will work fine. Voila!