His response?

        --------------------
       /                    \\
 omnigraffle                |
      |                     |
      |          visio      |
      |                     |
       \\____________________/

OmniGraffle is running circles around Visio.

because they often fire when I’d rather they don’t, I’d like to disable the following two keyboard shortcuts:

• the Windows logo key, to invoke the Start menu (which I can do just fine with ctrl-esc),
• and the Menu key (to the left of the right ctrl key), to invoke the context menu (which I can and prefer to use two-finger trackpad tapping for).

(In particular, those events are often fired when I actually mean to switch between apps while using Windows virtualized through Parallels Desktop, or remotely through VNC or RDP.)

There’s a well-published way of disabling the Windows logo key altogether, but I don’t want that. I use Win-F, Win-E and Win-R quite frequently, and occasionally a few others as well.

TweakUI offers to disable some shortcuts as well, as does editing the Group Policy, but I don’t believe these two are among them.

This article discussing disabling individual shortcuts appears to be closer to my needs; however, writing a library using Visual Studio 6 doesn’t really strike me as a fun solution.

So, does anyone have actual experience with this endeavour?

I’m talking about the default icon for computers accessible through SMB/CIFS, as displayed in the new Finder. As CIFS is primarily used by Windows computers, the Finder assumes that’s what they are, and represents them in a rather stereotypical fashion. The three striking features (the CRT screen, the beige hardware, the Blue Screen of Death) all represent a clear message: Windows computers crash often and, both inside and out, are generally technology from the last century.

When I first saw it months ago in screenshots of a pre-release seed, I admit I chuckled; it was a cute joke of the “look just how much detail you can put in a 512×512 icon” sort (the poem in the new TextEdit icon easily beats it on that count, though). But to leave it in the final build, and in such a frequently-used place at that?

I don’t object to teasing, but this seems a fairly cheap shot. Why not something more recent? The average Windows computer hasn’t been beige since around 2000, for a few years now, it’s been hard to find CRTs at regular stores even at budget prices, and as for BSoDs (the one depicted, by the way, being a Windows 9x one – not one you could get in 2000, XP or Vista), they only happen with junk hardware and/or equally low-quality drivers. Of course, you get what you pay for: to avoid BSoDs, you effectively pay very similar prices as for Macs. Once you do, though, BSoDs aren’t any more or less common than kernel panics on Mac OS X: they rarely ever happen.

It’s easy to come up with a more fitting prod that rings true to recent sources of aggravation. Why not have a screenshot of an anti-spyware tool? Or an Allow/Deny message from Windows Vista’s UAC? (Or even Windows Update installing something you never wanted due to human error, blown out of proportion by means of mass hysteria?)

Leopard is another driving factor of Mac sales (I believe this even though, right before Leopard release, they’re already at an all-time high), and with Mac OS X as a whole being a big part of a Windows convert’s first experience, and the Finder being one of its core applications to work with, it plays a big role; it can make or break a “switch”. Clichés that haven’t been true for over half a decade, and aren’t really something ex-Windows users would laugh about (why get reminded of the pain?) aren’t a great encouragement.

I don’t believe “you were a fool to have ever used Windows to begin with” is the right message to send to could-be switchers.

Alternatives to GarageBand – which hasn’t really seen any interesting developments in a while – would be welcome, though, and so I’m looking forward to see how Steinberg’s Sequel turns out. Monaco likely would have been Windows-only anyway, whereas Sequel is out for both Mac OS X and Windows. The website (which its creators apparently decided wouldn’t be complete without an obnoxious intro music video) has a free trial.

(Steinberg, by the way, was bought by Pinnacle in ‘03, only to be sold to Yamaha in ‘04, and then Avid bought Pinnacle – without Steinberg – in ‘05. Confused yet?)

Looking at a brief review, however, I am left with the impression that the user interface is far too cluttered for a consumer application, particularly one designed from scratch. It’s also $99 just for this one app, whereas GarageBand ships as part of iLife for $79. Granted, it’s hard to compete against Apple’s aggressive software pricing (presumably largely subsidized through their hardware sales), but combined with all Macs shipping with an up-to-date GarageBand, Steinberg will have a hard time tapping into that market.

Perhaps Sequel is too ambitious? I would wager to say that it could be a far better value at $49 with half the features (and therefore a far cleaner interface).

Because Microsoft takes its commitment to help protect the entire Windows ecosystem seriously,

(Are we running out of buzzwords yet? Every manager at Microsoft who uses the term “ecosystem” ever again ought to be fired on the spot.)

we’re updating the IE7 installation experience to make it available as broadly as possible to all Windows users.

That is a brilliant concept! Guess competitors haven’t thought of that. Wait a minute.

With today’s “Installation and Availability Update,” Internet Explorer 7 installation will no longer require Windows Genuine Advantage validation and will be available to all Windows XP users.

Yay!

No, seriously: yay. That really is a step in the right direction. But wouldn’t it have been even more beneficial, in light of things like Storm, to get rid of WGA when it comes to any Windows security update? Being denied a browser update is one thing (particularly when there’s competition); no access to security updates that are otherwise significantly more difficult (if even legal) to obtain, on the other hand, causes tons of needless collateral damage.

To avoid a misunderstanding, I actually disagree with Schneier’s assertion that “Redesigning the Microsoft Windows operating system would work”. There are certainly things in Windows that can be improved on the matter of security, just like there are in most other operating systems (mainstream or otherwise), but the biggest problem by a wide margin is, as is often the case, the user. However, Microsoft (and any other OS vendor) ought to assist the user as much as possible in this regard, and that’s where WGA really hurts and gets in the way, not seldom even for legitimate customers.

If you are already running IE7, you will not be offered IE7 again by Automatic Updates.

You don’t say.

Additionally, we’ve made minor changes to IE7 for Windows XP based on customer feedback:

The menu bar is now visible by default.

Double-yay! Common sense has prevailed, users have voted, this new invention of pull-down menus is really taking o…

…wait.

Okay, so the two noteworthy changes in this update are steps back. What does that tell you? Things aren’t looking good for this browser.

Meanwhile, guess what browser has the highest growth rate, and which one has been losing the most.

On September 26, Apple released Public Beta Seed 310A15 of Safari for Windows. You need a free ADC account this time, so I guess they aren’t quite as confident about this build. Nonetheless, there’s quite a few nice fixes and improvements noted in the release notes.

The Finder in Mac OS X 10.4 and Nautilus in recent versions of GNOME support this within filenames, meaning you can input something and have part of it displayed in reverse order to what we’re used to. Windows Vista’s new version of Explorer (as well as the file system APIs for other apps) adds support for the same, whereas XP’s will treat the control characters as unknown (one empty square each) and not swap the text within.

Now heise reports that security researcher Max Ried thought of a way this could be abused to mislead users: prefix a different file name extension (e.g., .jpg, only spelt backwards as gpj.) than the one actually representing the file type (such as .scr), and wrap that prefix within said override control characters, and the Finder, Nautilus und Explorer will suffix the file with .jpg. This may lead users to believe they are opening a JPEG image, whereas .scr files are in fact ’screensavers’ that contain executable code just like an application.

Again, the issue is not specific to Windows Vista. I did not reproduce it myself in GNOME, but did in OS X 10.4. Now technically, Microsoft is doing the right thing per Unicode’s spec, and improving upon XP’s behavior.
heise fails to provide a good answer as to how they think Vista should behave on this matter. Why should a user trust a file name extension anyway? And why does the OS? (Note that, as the screenshots show, the OS will continue to identify and display the actual file type correctly as “Screen Saver”.)

It is clearly not an option to ask Unicode to fix this on their end, as it would take far too long for the result to end up at Windows end users. That said, I’m curious as to why the spec allows Latin characters to be shown as right-to-left at all; is there a legitimate use for that? Likewise, shouldn’t a string Hebrew characters be displayed as right-to-left by default, rather than through the manual aid of control characters?

Moving away from filename extensions to represent types also isn’t a feasible solution for the short term, even though this should have happened a long time ago. If you have to use them at all, please at least educate everyone not to trust them. There are far too many factors – MIME types, UTIs, four-byte Type/Creator codes, magic words, unknown and unpredictable application-specific behavior and whatnot – that could override the extension.

As such, it seems inevitable for Microsoft to revert to XP’s inferior behavior. I’d prefer for them to come up with a way to designate what Explorer believes to be the actual file name extension: give it a slightly shaded color, add some padding, make it italic, etc.

The software appears to offer no remote printing or file sharing.

The screenshots are a bit bizarre-looking. On this one, for instance, the Dock crazily floats in the middle of the screen and has icons that desperately cry for anti-aliasing, and the only window shown has no shadow and no border, making it look quite out of place. Those cosmetic details may not matter much to the intended target audience, however.

(The Dock’s position appears to stem from the Mac’s different resolution: equally 1280 pixels wide, but 800 instead of 1024 pixels tall. Thus, the additional 224 pixels don’t exist for the Mac, and the Dock can’t move there; more evidence that this is merely a VNC-like implementation of a rootless window.)

This shot shows OmniGraffle. If it wasn’t for Winamp also being visible, one might be inclined to think their taste in third-party software is good.

While the trend for cross-platform development definitely has been to buy a Mac (typically a MacBook) and run Windows (and/or a Linux distribution) virtualized in VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop, it never hurts to have a different kind of contender. Although you’d still have to buy a Mac with this approach, the software allows multiple simultaneous users. It is unclear how this is accomplished, but I assume they use OS X 10.4’s little-known support for multiple simultaneous graphical sessions.

I’m still waiting for a “real” network-enabled version of Quartz. This doesn’t appear to be it.

Via reddit (article deleted by now). Somehow, I find this more exciting than Vista’s actual release. As amon said, “nice move”, Microsoft.

Recognizing this, the developers went through multiple steps to simplify the UI while avoiding getting rid of any functionality, no matter how benign:

1. They added a different UI variant that stripped away most of the features: “Express”. Meanwhile, the regular UI remained for “professionals”.
2. Responding to confusion over whether Express offers what the user needs to do, they added a launcher app, “SmartStart”, that automatically opens the right UI depending on the user’s intentions.
3. They added an “Expert” mode to SmartStart, hiding several of its options from the default view.
4. They turned SmartStart into a tabbed interface, and added another tab “Favorites” to SmartStart, allowing you to use commonly used functions even faster.
5. And now, heise reports, SmartStart will even have burning functionality of its own. And RSS feed reading as a “news ticker”. And other such wonderful features.

…and all I wanted to do was burn a disc.

As if those false positives weren’t troubling enough, the real kicker is that a support contact responded, acknowledging that problems may persist until Tuesday. Your legitimately licensed software that you may rely on to do your business with may not work properly for four entire days? TOUGH!

If there’s one thing copy protection schemes have been consistently effective at, it’s screwing users over.

Clever experiment, and interesting read. As an aside, the author notes:

However, it seems to work in the MacOSX world where the download sites are much fewer in number, but with much higher quality and more user interaction.

Indeed. This is one of those areas where the far lower install base of Mac OS X users actually works to the user’s benefit, as scammy sites just don’t have much of a chance at succeeding.

One strong argument against porting Safari to Windows is that, directly at least, there’s no money to be made. iTunes helps sell iPods, period. Safari, not so much. On the other hand, the same is true for QuickTime: Pro version aside, it has always been given away for free.

Safari and QuickTime share one raison d’être: QuickTime ensures that, both on Mac OS and on Windows, applications get built that take advantage of its video editing features. Without a Windows version of QuickTime, they’d be built using something proprietary instead, or something from Microsoft or another third party, thereby making a Mac version unlikely. For Safari, consider a web application that doesn’t support WebKit: by making a prominent browser based on it available on Windows (and by assuming a reasonable installation base somewhere in the near future), the site’s web developers will feel increasingly compelled to fix just that, which means Mac users (and therefore, by extension, Apple) benefit as well.

But there’s another reason. Don’t be so fast to conclude that there won’t be an iPhone SDK; effectively, Safari is the iPhone SDK. Mac OS X’s default browser, a freely downloadable for Windows, and the (one and only) browser on the iPhone will now all use the exact same engine, and since the option to build third-party “applications” is, in essence, to build small web apps, they can now be tested both on Mac OS X and on Windows. Meaning, in a way, Safari for Windows does help sell Apple hardware: iPhones.

By the way, (OS X) WebKit nightly builds work just fine with it, which also means you now finally have fixed keychain support in them. Inquisitor also works; I hear SafariStand does not.

Oh, and for Windows users looking to enable the Debug menu, one Slashdot comment has the necessary info.

Support for keyboard backlighting (MacBook Pro only)
Apple Remote pairing
Updated graphics drivers
Improved Boot Camp driver installer
Improved international keyboard support
Localization fixes
Updated Windows Help for Boot Camp

For some reason, the new drivers have yet to pop up in Apple Software Update for Windows.

Now, a lot of stuff about UAC is just plain broken. It shouldn’t take three prompts just to delete a shortcut on the Desktop. OS X and Ubuntu Linux, in my experience, have a much nicer balance between things you can do without administrative privileges and tasks that do require them.

But the general concept is hopefully here to stay. Not only to beat those developers who still don’t “get” permissions with a cluestick, but also because, much as it’s painful to accept, you just can’t trust the average user in leaving the non-user parts of their computer alone. The rise of botnets (and their unsuspecting users) is only the latest evidence of that.

Of course, that won’t do the trick for people who want to use my app, so I really hope Apple fixes this soon.

Just kidding. Mostly.

Mac users are less likely than Windows users to have business-critical macros, simply because Macs are rarer in large business.

, he also acknowledges, to an extent, that this may well be a shot in Microsoft’s own foot:

[They a]re effectively making it very hard for many Mac Office 2004 users to upgrade to Office 2008, forcing a lot of their customers to reevaluate which desktop applications to use. It’s the same story with VB 6 and VB.Net, and it’s the same story with Windows XP and Vista.

Much as I still find the Mac OS X version OpenOffice.org and its unloved cousin NeoOffice near-useless and almost an insult to potentially interested users, it has to be pointed out that both those solutions do offer comprehensive (albeit not entirely complete) VBA support – for free. Sure, Office:mac’s value proposition will exist in other areas. (Also, it has AppleScript support, which Mac users will prefer by far anyway. But, if you want cross-platform compatibility, that’s of little use.) And, maybe – a man can dream – a project will come up porting OOo/NO’s VBA implementation into an Office:mac plug-in of sorts.

Spolsky neglects to mention altogether, though, why this is an issue to begin with. It’s not so much that the MacBU at Microsoft suddenly decided “aw, heck, let’s throw the feature out”; it’s that the Windows Office team had originally intended for it to be gone by 2007, but didn’t manage to polish its replacement in time.