Monthly Archive for March, 2007

Any questions for Neville Hobson?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 29/3/2007
in PodLeaders, Podcast and Podcasting
. 6 Comments

Neville Hobson is co-host of For Immediate Release, one of the better podcasts on the net at the moment and one I try not to miss.

Neville is a big proponent of the virtues of Second Life and is heavily involved in a company called Crayon, which specialises in helping customers make sense of all the new media out there. Crayon held their launch in Second Life.

I will be interviewing Neville tomorrow morning (March 30th) for a PodLeaders podcast. If you have any questions you would like me to put to him, please leave them in the comments of this post.

Vista sales numbers don’t add up (to much!)

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 27/3/2007
in Vista
. 0 Comments

Microsoft are boasting that Vista is selling twice as fast as XP did when it shipped originally.

From the Microsoft release:

Initial sales figures from Microsoft show its new operating system Windows Vista made a splash in its debut. In the first month of Windows Vista’s general availability, sales exceeded 20 million licenses, more than doubling the initial pace of sales for its predecessor, Windows XP. These initial figures reflect the broad interest in the security and usability enhancements in Windows Vista…. Windows Vista license sales after one month of availability have already exceeded the total of Windows XP license sales in the earlier product’s first two months of availability. In January 2002, the company announced sales of Windows XP licenses had exceeded 17 million after two months on the market.

The more than 20 million copies shipped represent Windows Vista licenses sold to PC manufacturers, copies of upgrades and the full packaged product sold to retailers and upgrades ordered through the Windows Vista Express Upgrade program from January 30 to February 28.

It all sounds very impressive until you analyse the numbers as Paul Kedrosky has done - from Paul’s more realistic take on it:

Back in 2002 PCs were shipping at the rate of 10.8m a month into a worldwide installed base of 680m. Today, in early 2007, Vista is shipping into a market where PCs are selling at 21.4m a month, and into a worldwide installed base of more than 1-billion PCs. (All figures from IDC.)

So with more than twice as many PCs selling worldwide now, the Vista sales numbers are struggling to be on a par with XP, as opposed to being twice as good. I’d love to see numbers for how many of these 20m Vista sales were to people who went into stores saying “Can I have a copy of Vista, please?” as opposed to the number who got it because it was the default option on the new Dell they bought online!

Kathy Sierra hate campaign

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 27/3/2007
in Blogging
. 14 Comments

I was horrified to read overnight of the online hate campaign and death threats conducted against Kathy Sierra, author of the Creating Passionate Users blog, to which I am subscribed.

Kathy is paying a huge price for being generous with her expertise and visible on her blog and at conferences. Now she says she is:

supposed to be in San Diego, delivering a workshop at the ETech conference. But I’m not. I’m at home, with the doors locked, terrified

Kathy goes on to say:

I have cancelled all speaking engagements.

I am afraid to leave my yard.

I will never feel the same. I will never be the same…. I have no idea if I’ll ever post again. I suspect I will. But for now, I have a lot to rethink.

Slagging people off online is one thing but when you get to this level of intimidation, and purposeful cruelty something much more sinister is being perpetrated.

There is no excuse for some of the things which were posted about Kathy. None.

One of the people Kathy references in her post about this campaign is Cluetrain Manifesto co-author, Chris Locke. Chris’ response is here.

More on Techmeme

My move from OS X to Vista - Day 3

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 27/3/2007
in Microsoft, Vista and os x to vista
. 19 Comments

I know it is a cliche that you don’t really realise just how much you love something until it is gone but I am proving that true with this move to Vista from OS X!

What is it that I miss so much? Exposé!

Exposé is a fabulous, much underrated feature of OS X whereby you can, at the click of a key or the flick of a mouse, expose all the windows you have open (or expose all the windows you have open for a particular app, or you can call up the desktop, or the screensaver).

This is an incredible timesaving feature. I regularly have multiple emails open. The ability to hit F10 (or flick into the top left corner) to move between windows of just the Mail app, is fantastic. Similarly for browser windows, or any other app where you are likely to have multiple windows open and need to move between them.

Expose in action

There are a couple of Exposé clones out there for Vista but I have yet to find one which will emulate the app window tiling.

I now find myself constantly let down when I flick the mouse up to the top left corner in Vista and nothing happens :-(

My move from OS X to Vista - Day 2

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 26/3/2007
in Email, Microformats, Vista, Windows and os x to vista
. 10 Comments

It is taking me a while to get into this Vista machine.

On the Mac, I live in browsers (I generally have 4 running) and email. The browsers on Vista are pretty much the same as they are on the Mac but the email experience is very different.

The main choices I have for email client software are Thunderbird and Outlook 2007. I am using both for different email accounts and, frankly, I don’t like either!

Thunderbird has already crashed on me so it is not that stable and Outlook hangs from time to time, seemingly contemplating the task I have just asked it to do, before finally snapping to attention and displaying my mail.

Outlook also has an incredibly cluttered interface (seven panes) in comparison to the clean crisp interface of Apple’s Mail app. This can be very off-putting if you are not familiar with the program.

Outlook 2007

I also hate the way Outlook deals with IMAP. I like it as a protocol but it is unusable in Outlook (if I delete an email, I want it to disappear, not stay in my inbox with a line through it). I originally set up my mail account in Outlook 2007 as IMAP but when I realised Outlook still deals poorly with IMAP I decided to switch to POP.

This is where I hit another UI bug.
outlook account remove stupidity

When I asked Outlook to remove the account it gave me the above error message which basicly says, “I know what you were trying to do but because you haven’t done it the exact way I mandate, I’m going to display this error message scolding you and make you do it again until you do it properly!”

Listen Microsoft, if the app is clever enough to know what I was trying to do, why not just do it, instead of forcing me to start all over again, the way Outlook wants me to do it?

Another Vista bug?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 23/3/2007
in Vista, Windows and os x to vista
. 6 Comments

I have discovered another issue with Vista which may well be a bug. If not, then the OS is certainly not behaving as expected.

On a pc the standard key combo for switching between apps and windows is Alt + Tab. Vista is no different. On holding down Alt and pressing Tab you are presented with a series of windows to chose between. Tabbing selects forward. Shift-tabbing selects back and where you stop, the selected window opens.

switching windows in Vista

But, you can also use your mouse to select out of sequence (if you don’t want to continue tabbing. Selecting the window with the mouse though does nothing. If you let go of the Alt key at this point, you won’t get the window you selected with the mouse opening up.

What you have to do is click on the window you want to have open up. Why? Surely if I select it with the mouse, that should be enough to tell the OS that this is the window I want to have open.

It is the little things like this guys which annoy users.

UPDATE - post updated to correct the incorrect insertion of the image above. Completely my fault - nothing to do with Vista. Thanks to Tis me for letting me know about the error in the comments.

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