waffle

Gruber comments on Apple’s Windows Software Update tactics, in which offering up Safari as a “software update” for any other of Apple’s Windows applications is deemed “interesting”.

Well, no.

Apple knows how to behave on their own platform. When I talk to Windows-using friends, Apple is legendary for being bad Windows citizens. I don’t think that’s the case myself. iTunes, for example, is often brought up as a slow resource hog, something that I never saw after the initial dog-slow iTunes 4.1 or the initial dog-slow Safari 3.0 beta. (Maybe Apple’s Windows QA leaves something to be desired.) But Apple’s certainly not doing their best to be a good Windows citizen.

• Installing QuickTime reinstates that bloody fucking tray icon every time. Even if they’ve stopped doing this, putting it there by default is complete bullshit. Just because everyone else is doing so doesn’t mean people like these arcane tokens in their bottom right. There’s absolutely no need for there to be a tray icon, just like, say, there’s no need to stick a tray icon there every time Java is running in a browser. (Hello, Sun!)

  Update: An anonymous tipster claims that QuickTime no longer puts the icon in the tray by default.

• Installing QuickTime without iTunes is not the default. This is important. People expect Apple, as the provider of a secondary platform, to show that they know how to behave and not bundle crap like everyone else does. Hosting iTunes with QuickTime bundled is fine since QuickTime is what makes iTunes able to play music in the first place. But it’s not the other way around, and Apple should know better.

• Listing new applications in the Software Update list is wrong. It’s Software Update, not Software Installer. Google, even if they too call it an ‘Updater’, does this right on OS X by making it ridiculously clear that you’re about to install a new product instead of updating an existing product, but even so this is not a feature that most people expect of an updater.

• More or less silently installing completely new applications is so much bullshit it’s hard for me to stomach. Imagine downloading QuickTime, running Software Update and hitting the “Update” button (and the “I agree” EULA buttons). When you return from lunch, there are two new icons on your Desktop: iTunes and Safari.

  Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong!

  Even if we concede that yeah, Apple Software Update should be able to install new apps from Apple, and sure, Apple should be able to point out to you that there are new applications, and okay, these applications may even appear in the same list as the updates, there’s absolutely no fucking reason whatsoever for them to be pre-checked for installation, the same fate as actual updates and actual security fixes to the products you’ve actually got installed already.

  This is disgraceful. It fails the user in favor of serving Apple. It is, in fact, malware-level tactics. You don’t get to push new applications to people just like that, you just don’t, no matter how good you think they are, no matter how good they actually are. Software Update is a malfunctioning application since it can’t be relied on to just update. It fails “first, do no harm”.

Apple’s done three good things for Windows in the past year: they’ve introduced Safari, making it possible for web designers to not have to run out and buy Macs and ending decades of bad excuses; they’ve adapted most products to run well on Vista and they’ve introduced 64-bit versions of iTunes, QuickTime and Bonjour. This is progress, but they still haven’t really gotten their act together.

Safari 3.1 just got out of beta and is quite literally over twice as fast. Using SunSpider, the JavaScript benchmark backed by the WebKit team (as it contains “real code”, is varied and does statistical analysis), the Safari 3.0.4 build that came with my computer — 5523.15 — clocked up 8821.4ms +/- 0.4%, and 3.1 clocked up 3132.0ms +/- 0.7%. It’s also got CSS web fonts, local SQL storage, support for the HTML5 <audio>/<video> elements, better SVG support and CSS transforms and animation (contrary to everything else in that list, a made-up extension, which is in fairness how <canvas> got started).

Firefox 3 has been shaping up to be awesome for a few months, starting with the wonderful URL completion (sorted by “frecency”) and continuing with rendering improvements and recently a gigantic push to keep memory usage down.

Even the Internet Explorer 8 beta is looking good these days with better support for new standards or good support for old standards (cough). Joel Spolsky notably pissed on progressive, uh, “idealistic” web developers in the name of actual users recently, completely managing to ignore or at least downplay the fact that Microsoft put itself in their merry bed by allowing IE 6 to a) track IE 5’s broken implementation of the box model by default, b) suck and c) stagnate horribly. We can either keep playing this fucking game a few more years until people do switch from IE to other browsers or IE can aspire to approach a decent modern web browser again.

Joel’s right that there’s precisely no middle ground, but also seems to think that the IE team will go wrong in picking the side that will bring us back on track again and won’t go wrong by aiming towards yesterday’s situation; as if leaning back and thinking of England would undo the progress that has been made. IE7 mode being available is great, but IE7 mode being the default is just a wonderful way to set a horrible precedent (how many of you would be willing to update all of your sites at least twice this year; one to say “yes, I will support IE8″ and “yes, I will support Firefox 3″, notwithstanding any upcoming major Safari or Opera upgrade?) and hold back any sort of effort to get us out of this situation. It’s going to be a painful transition for some IE users, and it would have been way less painful if Microsoft had played their cards right and did the right thing years ago.

(Mark Pilgrim said it later, but better.)

And in case you missed it, I’d like to welcome our friend the Browser Wars back again. It’s a good time to be alive and browsing.

It is wonderful.

I am stupid.

With a new MacBook Pro and newly-found non-trivial amounts of available hard disk space, RAM and GPU memory comes the urge to finally experience Portal. Thus, in goes Steam.

I don’t like DRM, as you probably know, but Steam honestly looks designed to take advantage of what “boxless gaming” should be all about. Download everything: from trailer to demo to manual to actual game to patch to episodic content (which is newspeak for “short sequel that costs about the same as a regular sequel, is in development for as long as an ordinary sequel and has lower expectations”). We have competent broadband wiring, so the concept is sound.

I’m not sure that I agree with Steam’s graphic design, but I know that tacky wonders are par for the course as long as gaming GUIs go. (Excluding most HUDs, which need to be effective.) What bugs the hell out of me is that the text is non-antialiased 8 pixel Tahoma (Tahoma’s a great screen font, it’s just even better in ClearType), and that exotic characters like “ä” aren’t allowed when entering personal details, because even in 2008 Steam can’t allow display of Unicode characters using a system font, or storage of Unicode characters using their own software in all tiers, or whatever. Or maybe it’s due to one of the few unequivocal weaknesses Windows has; the concept that if you can’t find that odd glyph in one font, you’d rather display a box than, you know, look in another font.

The payment screen was a bit of a travesty: the wizard was fixed height, which led to one page with a popup menu, excuse me, dropdown list containing the payment methods, then about 350 pixels of white space, a page with the credit card’s first/last name and vast white space pastures, a page with the credit card number field (bonus points for silently accepting but surpressing spaces into this field as I’m never quite sure whether I should leave them in) and expiration date and lots of white space and finally a page with the CCV code and enormous amounts of white space. This could have fit in one page easily. Jiminy, as they say.

Oh well — let’s not lose track of what’s important. I expect cutting-edge game design from Valve. Game designers are part of the old guard as far as great “non-immersive” UI goes. The experience has been fairly smooth so far, and the concept is solid.

I have enabled VMWare Fusion’s “experimental” DirectX support, Portal is currently downloading, and I await this experiment in glee. (And should it fail, I guess it’s off to Boot Camp, which I’m told Fusion can also do. And I think I know what sort of performance I can expect there.)