Brandon Live!

I’m pleased to announce that the second tool to join the BrandonTools.com collection is now available!  It’s a new Sidebar Gadget for those who want to see what the indexer is up to and to easily control its behavior.

Click here for details.

Note that the screenshot depicts the gadget running on WS4.  The "index now" button is not available on versions prior to Windows Search 4.

In this morning’s article, Windows: A Monopoly Shakes, Joe Wilcox paints a grim picture for Windows.  Apparently, about 90% of surveyed enterprises adopted Windows XP in 2007, and about 6.3% adopted Vista, mainly taking away from Windows 2000 adoptions.  I don’t know about yours, but my boots are shaking.

Is anybody really surprised?  Enterprise IT isn’t exactly a new thing, and this isn’t the first time Windows has shipped.  These guys refresh their PCs in cycles.  Lots of all-Windows 2000 shops who never started rolling over to XP are now beginning their early rounds of rolling out Vista boxes.  They’re in more of a hurry, since Windows 2000 is pretty ancient.  So much so that it originates from a time when we appended “2000″ after product names and thought it sounded cool and futuristic.

The Windows XP guys sticking with it through 2007 doesn’t shock me.  Most of the XP-based enterprises I’m familiar with are in the pilot stages for moving to Vista.  Lots of them have been working closely with Microsoft to make sure that updates like SP1 and Windows Search 4.0 address their deployment issues.  This is just how it goes.

Some number will even decide to “skip” Vista.  I’m sure it’s not a prospect Microsoft likes to acknowledge, but just look at how many companies held onto Windows 2000.  Throughout the entire (long) lifetime of XP!

Joe says that Windows adoption on the whole declined 3.7 percent over the course of the year (98.6% in January to 94.9% in December).  I have no idea what that means.  Is there some comparison to the year before that might put those numbers in context?  Or are we saying that all months of the year are equal?  Did anyone consider that the impending release of Vista SP1 might have led some Windows-based companies to hold off purchasing for a few months?

I don’t mean to belittle the apparent gains made by the Apple and Linux camps in the last three months of 2007.  I just think it’s silly to make a big deal about three months of “decline” for Windows in light of those other factors.  Joe says that “Vista is in real trouble.”

And yet it looks like last year more companies bought Vista machines than Macs and Linux PCs combined.  I’d say that’s pretty darn good for an OS that was released at the beginning of the year.

Well, that’s my take anyway.

Today we made available the WS 4.0 preview release for Windows XP, Vista, and Server 2003/2008.  You can read details about WS 4.0 at the following sites:

Vista Team Blog - Announcing the Windows Search 4.0 Preview

KB Article describing Windows Search 4.0 (with download links)

This release is mainly an update to the Windows Search indexer, and provides countless performance improvements, bug fixes, and reliability / recoverability features.

The XP/2003 version has been updated with more features previously exclusive to Vista - such as the ability to search remote indexes for network shares, and the ability to host Vista-style preview handlers in the preview pane.

WS4 also provides some cool new query capabilities for developers, which I will describe and give some examples of in future posts.

The most noticeable difference is probably how fast it is.  Those geniuses down the hallway in indexer land really pulled off some impressive feats with this release.

Since there are six different downloads depending on your OS, I’ll just refer you to the KB article for downloading the preview release.

Let us know what you think!

Two points I want to make based on the comments my last post is receiving:

1)  That post, and its title, are mainly about the outrageous ways in which people are jumping to Apple’s defense… not Apple’s action itself.

2)  If your argument is that user’s read the dialog and can uncheck the Safari box if they don’t want it, you are delusional.

Consider the recent report that 24% of internet users can’t find Google.  Now think about this from that user’s perspective.  They see a dialog that says, very clearly, “Select the items you want to update.”  Do you really think those users are going to know what Safari is?  Do you think they’re going to know that they don’t already have it installed?

I bet you way more than 24% don’t even know what “Quicktime” is.  I can promise you my sister, her roommates, and my mom all don’t.  They sure as heck don’t know what Safari is.  If they see it in that list, they are going to assume it is something they already have.  Probably something that came with their computer. 

If they’re “good” users, they will know that keeping their software up-to-date is important, so they’ll choose to update everything they possibly can because they don’t want their computers to be hacked, and we keep telling them that the best way to do that is to keep their systems up-to-date.  Apple is manipulating that to their advantage.  That’s exactly what John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla, said yesterday.  He is right.

You can argue that it’s their software, and they can do with it as they please.  I will agree with you, actually.  However, just because I believe they can do this, and support their right to, doesn’t mean I have to like it.  I think it’s a shitty practice, and if we don’t make a big deal about it right now, it’s only going to get worse.

If you haven’t heard, Apple has decided to start forcing Safari down your throat if you use iTunes, Quicktime, or any of their other Windows software.

In response, lots of Apple fans have jumped to their defense.  They say that users read the dialog before clicking “update.”  They say users will welcome their new Apple overlords.  They say it’s okay because ”Microsoft is worse” - they make me reboot after installing updates!

Some nutjobs are even saying that Apple distributing new software through the updater is the “cost” of using their product - akin to ads in Messenger or fees for anti-virus software.  I don’t remember signing up for that cost when I bought my iPhone.  That same wacko makes a bunch of other outrageous claims about how it is a glorious achievement that Apple is assimilating your Windows machine without asking first.  You should read it, if only for the comedic value.

I think the disconnect here is simple. It’s just like the disagreement that arose over Apple’s font rendering when they first released Safari to Windows. And that is:

People like the way things work on their Windows PCs. They don’t want one app to have different, blurrier font rendering. They don’t want Apple installing apps on their machines without consent.

Apple and their fans don’t understand this, because they believe they are partaking in some sort of “holy crusade” and “bringing the light of Apple to the underprivileged in Windows land.” It’s an absurd mindset, but that hasn’t stopped them having it. They just can’t understand why Windows user’s wouldn’t welcome Apple’s software and UI.

They’re like the borg, “Why wouldn’t you want to be assimilated - we bring perfection!”

Maybe not, but close enough.  Anything that leads to users unintentionally taking an action is a flawed UI.  That could mean this is a design flaw - but Apple doesn’t make those =)  Besides, the intent is obvious - to get more people to install Safari whether they want it or not.  Rationalize it all you want, but you can’t deny the game they’re playing.Is it working?I’m a software developer, and probably one of the most generally computer savvy people I know. I got very used to clicking “Update” button on the Apple Software Update dialog so that it would keep iTunes and Quicktime up-to-date (along with the BootCamp software on my Macbook).I came very close to installing Safari by accident because of this, and would not at all be surprised to see lots of others clicking it without looking.

The right thing for Apple to do here would have been:

1) Don’t check it by default. You’ve gotten people trained to click “Update” since you don’t have an automatic update system, and now you’re abusing that.
2) The text in the dialog is inaccurate. It says “Select the items you want to update” - but Safari isn’t software on my computer, so how can I update it?

I had Safari installed on one of my machines to try it out when they released it. So it was normal for the updater to want to update it there.  Then when it popped up in the list on a different machine I was confused, and thought I had mixed up which machine I’d installed it on months ago. But I had not. They were trying to trick me.

Oh sorry, they were trying to “show me the light.”

Update:

I just posted a follow-up to this entry.

I’m a huge fan of the great work the IE team is doing for this release.  The first beta, targetted mainly at web developers, is now available.  In addition to excellent standards support, it includes some cool new user-facing features like “Web Slices,” Activities (XML driven extensions for doing things like mapping an address), automatic crash recovery, and more.

My favorite feature out of those?  The fact that IE now separates the tabs and the frame into separate processes.  This is part of Automatic Crash Recovery (link contains detailed explanation).  Here are some of the effects of this change that I have enjoyed:

1. When a web page / add-in (like Flash) crashes, you hardly even notice.  The tab(s) restart automatically and the only thing you notice is the little balloon telling you that IE just recovered a crashed web page.
2. Crash recovery saves form data whenever possible.
3. No longer do you need to launch links to trusted/intranet zones into a new window.  In IE7, this was necessary because the process has to start with a higher integrity level (Protected Mode: Off).  Now, because the frame is one process and the tabs are separate, you can have one tab with Protected Mode turned on, and one with it turned off, in the same window.
4. No more ieuser.exe needed, since the frame runs at normal IL and serves the purpose that ieuser.exe used to serve.

Click here for more information about IE 8 beta 1.

Freakin’ amazing.

If you haven’t heard about it yet, or seen the TED presentation, do yourself a favor and go watch the video.  There’s a high-ish resolution MP4 you can download here.

I absolutely cannot wait until this is released to the public.

Seriously Yahoo, what were you thinking?

Today Yahoo announced their “Open Search Platform” - saying that it will “allow third parties to enhance the Yahoo Search experience.”

You might assume that this means they’re doing something cool with OpenSearch - the set of open standards once established by A9 and later embraced by IE / FireFox to hook up search providers, and recently used by Microsoft’s SharePoint and Search Server products as the means by which to support federated search results.

But you’d be wrong.  Apparently Yahoo thinks that by adding a space between “Open” and “Search” nobody will be confused that their offering is not, in fact, OpenSearch compatible.

A commenter I know on TechCrunch even asks if we’ll soon see “Yahoo announced a Really Simple Syndication Platform” that isn’t RSS based?

Change the name, Yahoo.  This attempt to co-opt the OpenSearch label is distasteful at best.  And we’re trying to buy you why?

Today I saw this article pop up on TechMeme and at first thought it was my post from the other day.  But it was actually a new post on the same subject by Eric Bangerman from Ars Technica, who happened to use a similar title.

Shooting yourself in the foot: Time Warner’s usage caps