paperpools

He had good reason to fret. Signs that Microsoft would be missing the boat in the next decade were already emerging. That very moment at Microsoft’s headquarters, in Redmond, Washington, a group of executives were developing a device that, in 10 years’ time, would transform a multi-billion-dollar industry: an electronic reader that allowed customers to download digital versions of any written material—books, magazines, newspapers, whatever. But, despite its multi-year head start, Microsoft would not be the one to introduce the game-changing innovation to the market. Instead, the big profits would eventually go to Amazon and Apple.

The spark of inspiration for the device had come from a 1979 work of science fiction, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams. The novel put forth the idea that a single book could hold all knowledge in the galaxy. An e-book, the Microsoft developers believed, would bring Adams’s vision to life. By 1998 a prototype of the revolutionary tool was ready to go. Thrilled with its success and anticipating accolades, the technology group sent the device to Bill Gates—who promptly gave it a thumbs-down. The e-book wasn’t right for Microsoft, he declared.

“He didn’t like the user interface, because it didn’t look like Windows,” one programmer involved in the project recalled. But Windows would have been completely wrong for an e-book, team members agreed. The point was to have a book, and a book alone, appear on the full screen. Real books didn’t have images from Microsoft Windows floating around; putting them into an electronic version would do nothing but undermine the consumer experience.

 ...

The death of the e-book effort was not simply the consequence of a desire for immediate profits, according to a former official in the Office division. The real problem for his colleagues was that a simple touch-screen device was seen as a laughable distraction from the tried-and-true ways of dealing with data. “Office is designed to inputting with a keyboard, not a stylus or a finger,” the official said. “There were all kinds of personal prejudices at work.”

Kurt Eichenwald on Microsoft's Lost Decade

Erm, I do have a Mac, but erm . . . Look, if Steve Jobs had happened to audit a course in Ancient Greek or Arabic or Hebrew or Japanese or Chinese, rather than a course on calligraphy, I might just possibly have found Quark aiding and abetting my endeavors a decade and a bit ago; the switch to OS X might not have blighted my second book deal.  So it's just a leetle unsettling to find pp a magnet for Macheads.  And even Linuxheads.  But OK OK OK . . .

The first press accounts of the Apple iPad have been long on emotional raves about its beauty and ease of use, but have glossed over its competitive characteristics—or rather, its lack thereof. Some have characterized the iPad as an evolution from flexible-but-complicated computers to simple, elegant appliances. But has there ever been an “appliance” with the kind of competitive control Apple now enjoys over the iPad? The iPad's DRM restrictions mean that Apple has absolute dominion over who can run code on the device—and while that thin shellac of DRM will prove useless at things that matter to publishers, like preventing piracy, it is deadly effective in what matters to Apple: preventing competition.

Cory Doctorow at Publishers Weekly

I've just been to Julien Kwan, whose Apple outlet in Grosßbeerenstraße is moving on to pastures new on Thursday. Mission: to upgrade the old Powerbook G4 to 1 gigabyte of RAM so's to run CS3 on Tiger, given as how InDesign (now on the new MacBook) crashes in Leopard every time I try to open it. So the mood is aggrieved. Apple! Adobe! Get your act together! Guys (polite for "incompetent techno-wankers")!

I got an e-mail from Rafe Donahue with a fabulous work-in-progress attached, a piece he has been writing on the importance of not letting summary measures conceal what's interesting about a body of data (for example, distributions). He talks about various ways one could use graphics to display data so that important patterns can be discerned. (Rafe has typeset the piece in InDesign; a second e-mail talked about all the amazing things one can do with InDesign, making me glad I managed to pick up a student edition on the strength of my weekend course back in January. )

Over on the Guardian, a commenter noticed that SOMEONE WAS WRONG ON THE INTERNET:

1) The reason Apple cannot stop anyone installing a retail copy of OSX on anything they want is the same reason Microsoft cannot stop anyone running a retail copy of Office on anything they want. It is also the reason Black and Decker cannot stop you using DIY drills in the way of trade, and the reason why Vauxhall cannot stop you installing after market parts in your old Cavalier, and the reason why Faber and Faber cannot stop you reading the Collected Poems of TS Eliot in the bathroom by making it a condition of sale that you agree not to.

It is because post-sales restrictions on use are not enforceable in the EU. Not by EULA, not by signed document at time of sale, not if you have to dance it to a jig and sing your agreement in Mandarin before leaving the store. You cannot relinquish your statutory rights as a condition of buying a product, and one of them is freedom from post sales restrictions on use. Read those guarantee forms vendors invite you to send in sometime. See that part about your statutory rights not being affected? Think that's there out of the goodness of their hearts? Its not, its there because its the law.

2) And no, you did not just license it, you bought a copy. As when you bought your copy of the Collected Poems. Or you bought that copy of the Rasumovsky Quartet. Or you bought that drill. Calling something a license not a sale does not make it so. If it walks and quacks like a sale, that is what it will be held to be.

3) And come out of your dream world about "OSX is written for the hardware, and consequently it is far more reliable. OSX is basically a hand tailored suit made in Hong Kong whilst windows is a mix clothes from Marks , Oxfam and things left on a bus. Nothing quite fits...."

OSX relates to its perfectly standard though mostly mid range hardware in exactly the same way any other OS does. It uses drivers. You may not be familiar with these things, they are bits of software written mostly by vendors which permit an OS to address the hardware in question. Driver quality is important. But there is no material difference in how any modern OS relates to hardware and drivers. Thinking that OSX has somehow a more intimate relationship to an nVidia graphics card than Windows or Linux is idiotic. And by the way - its not that the OS was written for the peripheral hardware. Its that the drivers were written for the OS.

Or maybe you are thinking of the processors? Cannot be. Surely you do not think that OSX was written for the Core 2 in some different way than Windows or Linux was?

Please wake up there!

The rest of the comment (yes, there's more) here; Jack Schofield's article, OpenMac advertised for $399.99, here.

According to Sitemeter, the number of Mac users among Paperpools readers ranges between 20% and 38%. This means, of course, that the Paperpoolship is not typical of the population as a whole, where Macs struggle to achieve a 6% market share.

Ahem. Does anybody know anybody?

The Help offered on a Mac for input in Hangul looks like this:


Help for Japanese input looks like this:
Help for Traditional Chinese Input looks, well, pretty authentically Chinese:


As far as I can make out there are no plans to fix this, ähm, slight impediment to usability in Leopard. I'm a bit baffled. There are many second- and third-generation Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans and Korean-Americans who are likelier to be fluent in Unix than in C/J/K but may well have reason to include one of the latter in a document -- and that's not even taking into account the very large number of English-speakers (or, of course, French-speakers, German-speakers, Italian-speakers and so on) with an interest in the languages that falls short of fluency. Could Apple really not fix this? Seems like there must be plenty of people who'd be only too happy to translate if asked.

So -- does anybody know anybody?

Joel Spolsky has just posted a comparison of the Apple and Microsoft approaches to screen rendering of type, in which he says if Apple is Target Microsoft would be Wal-Mart. Weeeeellllllll -- the problem is neither is remotely like Fog Creek. If Joel ran Apple I would know where to send my couple of hundred complaints about my Mac -- and Joel, who has written about how to achieve remarkable customer service, who has more recently written on debugging as a game of inches, would actually welcome the couple of hundred complaints, and act on them, and Apple bloody Apple would have a product accessible to the telepathically challenged.

About 6 months ago Apple clawed its way up from a 4.3% market share to a 4.7% market share!!!!!!!! Achieving 16% growth!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Poor old Bill Gates would be hollow-eyed and popping Temazepam but for one little thing. All he has to do is look at what you get if you click on Kotoeri Help, seeking assistance with Japanese input, to know he is dealing with lunatics.

What you get if you click Kotoeri Help (yes, you have seen this before):



Now, not to be hasty, this is not userunfriendly. It's VERY friendly to Japanese users. It's friendly to users who are fluent in Japanese. And it's highly educational for beginners and improvers. They'll have to learn all the kanji eventually; why not start now? And it's always good to have a chance to practice the katakana -- as Katakana The Easy Way points out, students of Japanese often lag behind in their mastery of this important element of the written language.



(Would you have had the self-discipline to practice that if the Help facility had been in English? Steve Jobs knows best.)


Yes, Apple Kotoeri Help provides the novice with hours of innocent fun. And for those who want a blast from the past, there's also an online manual at the Apple website -- available for easy PDF download, it's the manual sold with the Japanese Language Kit back in 1997, when the JLK generated its very own income stream and that clinking clanking sound eased the pain of producing documentation. Now absolutely free, and you can have even more fun working out how the GUI has changed. Cheers, Apple!

And yet... And yet...

Guy Deutscher (author of The Unfolding of Language) tried to persuade me last November that I could do anything in Windows that I could do on a Mac, I should switch to a PC, and he showed me how I could type Arabic in Windows and he made it look easy. So I did actually try out a Sony Vaio, but switching between languages really wasn't as easy as it is on a Mac, and now Mellel for OS X has a new release that includes all kinds of typographical tricks previously available only in Indesign and the like -- you can change a letter's fill, change the colour, weight and style of stroke, change the colour of background, raise/lower the baseline by tiny increments (and much much much much more), all this for $49 so I don't know why the glad tidings are not being shouted from the rooftops. You can do all those things on a PC if you don't mind paying $700 or so for Indesign or Illustrator, but you still wouldn't be able to do them in Arabic or Hebrew without spending even more on add-ons, and it's all just messy and unpleasant, and soon the Sony Vaio was a roach-infested horror despite all the virus protection I thought I had installed.

And so... And so...

So it would be nice if Apple did not depend quite so heavily on the Stockholm Syndrome as the secret to customer satisfaction. It would be nice if they'd make Mr Fix-It Dictator for a Day. (Just for a day, Jobusu-san, just for a day!) Mr Fix-It:

Somehow, over the last few weeks, I've become hypercritical. I'm always looking for flaws in things, and when I find them, I become single-minded about fixing them. It's a particular frame of mind, actually, that software developers get into when they're in the final debugging phase of a new product.

(The tragic irony of it all is that this particular frame of mind has been deployed on FogBugz, a debugging program for which I have no use, rather than on OS X, which I have no way of avoiding.) Fix-It:

Over the last few weeks, I've been writing all the documentation for the next big version of FogBugz. As I write things, I try them out, either to make sure they work the way I think they should, or to get screenshots. And every hour or so, bells go off. "Wait a minute! What just happened? That's not supposed to work like that!"

(The mention of the D-word, of course, is in itself enough to drive a Mac user to drink. Something tells me Spolsky's documentation offers little of the dry humour so familiar to the unhappy Macolyte:

Because the menus and preference settings for the JLK are in Japanese, it may be difficult for a non-Japanese speaker to identify the appropriate selections to make. The steps below will identify the appropriate selections with graphical clues that allow a non-Japanese speaker to correctly select the Kana Keyboard and thereby enable one-keystroke Katakana input.

-- a philosophy Apple thought good enough for its users in 1993 and has seen no reason to change in the last 14 years. (It's the use of the word 'may', of course, that's so delicious: non-Japanese-speaking telepaths will have no trouble at all.))

Well, enough of this rant. If Lisa the wheeler dealer could persuade Steve 'It Ain't Broke' Jobs to talk to Spolsky Apple could probably make a Great Leap Forward -- not the kind of GLF that takes a 4.7% market share up to a niche-dominating 5.2%, but the kind of GLF that would turn Apple from a plucky underdog to a serious contender for the nontelepathic dollar.

Meanwhile I have written a guide to inputting Japanese in Mellel, including more general assistance with using Japanese in OS X. Yours here.