I didn’t object when Flickr required all accounts to be tied to Yahoo!, for it didnt concern me. (I was an old-schooler with a Flickr account – but I also had a Yahoo! account. Thus, no reason to have qualms about merging them.)

I didn’t object in plenty of other cases where people would raise a stink about what they regarded as bizarre or unacceptable decisions on the Flickr team’s part.

I do object now. They have turned their sleek, simple, joy-to-use Flickr Uploadr desktop application into an ugly, bloated, several-times-the-size, several-times-the-startup-time monster of an application. Thanks.

I guess I’ll keep using 2.x while I still can (i.e., as long as they don’t break the API / add new features I want to use / etc.), and use FlickrExport in other cases. But sooner or later, the same “I have a picture, lemme upload it real quikc by dragging it onto the Uploadr” will be gone. That Uploadr is now open source is little comfort.

Oh, and Sven is wrong: the app isn’t fifteen times the size; it’s fifty times the size:

ataraxy:~ chucker$ du -ks /Applications/Flickr\ Uploadr.app
1056	/Applications/Flickr Uploadr.app
ataraxy:~ chucker$ du -ks /Volumes/Flickr\ Uploadr\ 3.0/Flickr\ Uploadr.app
50880	/Volumes/Flickr Uploadr 3.0/Flickr Uploadr.app

In true XUL style, the app also ships with beautiful bugs (despite being marked as final), such as the first menu appearing twice.

All this when the 2.x version worked perfectly fine, had an easier-to-use interface, was much faster to launch which is critical for this kind of app, and… did I mention it worked?

I believe that’s what we call progress. Not.

Via ars technica: MiniMail looks like a useful addition to Apple’s Mail.

If only I could use it where I need it most. Even if I could get my VPN access working (certificates: ugh.), I’d still be limited by Mail’s incomplete support for Exchange. And Entourage is too much of a resource hog.

Oh, what I’d pay for a good VPN configuration app and for good bridges between CalDAV (iCal), IMAP (Mail), LDAP (Address Book) and Exchange Server.

Which, mind you, still means it plays (if not for sure, then at least for prolly) – and it will sync with a computer running Windows Vista, too. But Zune, absurdly (yet deliberately) enough, was never part of Microsoft’s “playsforsure” platform – which is now getting renamed “Certified for Windows Vista”. For sure.

Says John Gruber:

It’s hard to imagine how Microsoft’s consumer branding could be any worse. Even harder to imagine: what companies like Nokia are thinking releasing new PlaysForSure devices now.

Indeed. Microsoft screwed its “partners” over by making the Zune incompatible. But now, it seems, they don’t even want their own product to succeed either.

Just how is a consumer supposed to understand that a Zune works just fine with Widnows Vista, yet isn’t “certified”, yet they’re supposed to buy it over a product that is? Who at Microsoft created this lovely graphic and didn’t think “wait, that doesn’t make any sense at all!” And when will Nokia, Yahoo! and all finally realize they’re not just sleeping with the devil, but also with an incompetent one?

I can’t wait to see what they come up with next.

Clever essay by Ian Hickson. The gist: many companies and projects died trying to fight Microsot, but a few fittest – from open source projects like Mozilla to commercial competitors like Google and Apple – have survived.

Dear Software Developers,

please don’t ever assign .dat to your app. Given how many other apps there are with the same generic, non-descriptive file name extension, yours just doens’t and out enough that I’d possibly want it as the default.

In fact, don’t ever store your files as .dat at all. What kind of file isn’t “data”? Why don’t you just use .file while you’re at it? Or .content?

Going through FilExt’s list for applications that use the extension is cringe-worthy, but Microsoft has an answer that is far more to the point:

A wide range of applications create files with this file extension but with different file formats.

Don’t think .dat means “this file isn’t meant to be opened directly by users”, either. Microsoft’s uses suggest this; after all, you wouldn’t generally want to directly manipulate the innards Internet Explorer’s cache. But MPEG1 movies?

The very existence of extensions is a poor design choice already; let’s not make it even worse by using meaningless generic terms as “types”.