• Music Notation with HTML5 Canvas (via WebKitBits)

• Q&A: Why was it Entourage:Mac and not Outlook in the first place?

  After the release of Entourage, the Exchange team decided to stop development of Outlook for Mac. This left the MacBU with a dilemma: there were two separate code bases, neither of which did everything that was needed.

  Uh, I have a question: how messed up is a corporate structure that this happens in the first place? How did communication fail such that Outlook and Entourage were first developed independently (surely somebody said “uh, guys, we’re also developing a mail client for the Mac!”), then one of them abandoned, then the other destined to (insufficiently) replace the former (surely somebody said “we kind of do want to have an Exchange client on the Mac, though!”)?

• Peter Serafinowicz steals movies, even if he’s in them. (via Jesper, whose commentary you’ll want to read)

We’ll start with the very end:

Daniel Eran Dilger is the author of “Snow Leopard Server (Developer Reference),” a new book from Wiley available now for pre-order at a special price from Amazon.

I don’t find it unreasonable to expect someone who writes such a book to strive for a certain level of accuracy. Having said that, let’s go:

Open source?

More importantly, Apple is providing its users with additional options that benefit both Mac users and the open source community.

What additional options for the open source community does Snow Leopard provide in the PIM area? A quote later on provides a clue what Dilger apparently thinks Apple has added:

Because Apple makes its money almost exclusively from selling hardware, it has opened up its own Snow Leopard Server applications, Address Book Server and iCal Server, as open source Darwin servers that can be compiled to run on Linux.

10.5 Leopard introduced the Apache-licensed Darwin Calendar Server, a subset of Leopard Server’s iCal Server, and this has been continuously updated (Snow Leopard Server ships with version 2). But while Snow Leopard Server ships with the new Address Book Server, there doesn’t appear to be any open source project for that. Marketing-wise, the iCal Server page mentions:

To further the widespread adoption and deployment of these standards, Apple has made the complete source code for iCal Server 2 available through the macosforge.org website.

No such thing for Address Book Server. Maybe they’re planning on it; maybe they’ve even said they are — but so far, this looks quite untrue. Dilger goes on:

That means Apple is essentially giving away both the client (to Mac users) and the servers (to the community) in order to encourage the use of open standards in messaging and collaboration.

No, the clients (Mail, Address Book and iCal) are most certainly commercial, closed-source software. Of the servers, all three are commercial and closed-source, although a subset of one is available in an open-source fashion. Which, by the way, is great on Apple’s part — but let’s not deny that a good configuration interface adds plenty of value, and Apple does not provide that for free (or otherwise openly).

Outlook not needed?

Next up, Dilger compares Apple’s trifecta of client apps to Outlook, with rather bold claims:

Integrated support for Exchange beginning with last year’s iPhone 2.0 means Apple’s mobile platform simply doesn’t need an Outlook client. Now Snow Leopard can also get by without Entourage/Outlook, thanks to new and improved baked-in support for Exchange in Mail, Address Book and iCal.

Microsoft has responded with the announcement that it will now be delivering a real (but still scaled back) version of Outlook for the Mac again

Now, unlike many, I’ve always been a fan of the separation into three apps. But even in 10.6, they are a far cry from Outlook being “simply not needed” or possibly to “get by without”. Public folders, anyone?

The Microsoft Bashing Tangent

With Snow Leopard and the iPhone each now providing their own client layer for accessing Exchange Server, Apple can now offer its users alternative access to other server products as well, from its own MobileMe and Snow Leopard Server offerings to web services from Google and Yahoo. This effectively turns Microsoft from a direct seller into a wholesaler that has to deal with Apple as a middleman retailer.

I’m sure this made some vague sense when it was written. It doesn’t when it’s read. The entire section goes on about Sears, CompUSA, Netscape, IE, IIS and off-shore wind energy. Actually, that last one was a lie. But a discussion of PIM client/server solutions this is not. He could have discussed Netscape’s brief ill-fated journey into the groupware market, but he didn’t. Instead, he’s talking about Microsoft’s evilness, implying a dominant position IIS has never had (“Microsoft first took control of the client with Internet Explorer and then began tying its IE client to its own IIS on the server side with features that gave companies reasons to buy all of their server software from Microsoft.”), and then switches over to everyone’s savior Apple with their open sourcing of Address Book Server, which hasn’t in fact happened. Finally, Snow Leopard Server apparently includes a “Push Notification Server”, which Apple knows so much about, nine out of the top ten results from Google are all articles of his, or links to them. So let’s skip this entire part.

Protocol confusion

Apple’s support for Exchange and its promotion of its own Exchange alternatives are two sides of the same coin, in the sense that they use the same technologies.

Well, this certainly is exciting news for Microsoft, who didn’t even know until this point that their very own Exchange Server has support for CalDAV and CardDAV built right in. (To be fair, it does for IMAP and LDAP, although it’s typically disabled.) Wouldn’t you love it if your developers don’t even have to build features, your marketing doesn’t even have to promote them, and yet you get to offer them?

Apple built its support for Exchange using WebDAV

No…

, the open specification that Microsoft supports on Exchange Server as a way to deliver messages to mobile clients.

…and no.

While Exchange Server has support for WebDAV, and WebDAV is very much an open specification, it’s such a broadly-specified protocol for file transfer and versioning over HTTP that it isn’t intended for mail, contacts, calendars, etc. in particular, so Microsoft has had to layer plenty of proprietary additions on top of it.¹ Yes, it uses WebDAV. No, that’s not all there is to it. It’s about as vague a claim as calling XML or CSV a format. For transferring files, WebDAV is a sufficient specification; for storing mails, contacts, calendar events, notes and more, including a ton of metadata, it’s incomplete — by design.

Apple did not license Microsoft’s Windows-only “Exchange Active Sync” software; it merely licensed the rights to implement a compatible EAS conduit with Exchange. Apple owns the Snow Leopard software that talks to Exchange.

This may be, but given that it’s in the same paragraph, I’m skeptical, and also question the relevance. It seems a poor and unnecessary attempt at making Apple look independent. Maybe they didn’t pay a licensing fee; instead, they had to pay their developers to develop client code of their own. So what?

The client applications Apple has upgraded in Snow Leopard to connect to Exchange, including Mail, Address Book, and iCal, also use WebDAV to talk to Apple’s own Snow Leopard Server applications.

The latter part is correct insofar as that CalDAV and CardDAV are extensions to WebDAV for calendars and contacts, respectively. They’re entirely incorrect for Mail (there is no WebDAV-based mail specification aside from Exchange Server’s proprietary method), as well as for Exchange.

This all leads to an entirely wrong conclusion:

This effort to support everything from integrated client software owned by Apple makes Snow Leopard’s support for Exchange of use to everyone, even if they don’t use Exchange. The client work Apple has invested in making Macs Exchange-friendly also improves the features available via MobileMe, Snow Leopard Server, and even some other third party services such as those from Google and Yahoo.

On top of incorrectly believing that Snow Leopard interfaces with Exchange Server through WebDAV, Dilger apparently goes even further that, since CalDAV, CardDAV and his imaginary MailDAV² are built on top of WebDAV and Exchange uses WebDAV as well, Apple is saving duplicate effort. That would be great. It’s also entirely off. First, Snow Leopard communicates with Exchange Server through the much newer, SOAP-based Exchange Web Services protocol. That’s why it requires 2007 Service Pack 1 Update Rollup 4; this entire interface is lacking in 2003 (and in the original 2007 release). Second, even if they were to use WebDAV, this wouldn’t help them much at all.

Imagine two CSV files, one with the columns Surname, Name and Birthday, and another with the columns Last name, First name and Phone number. Superficially to the human eye, they both clearly contain contacts. To the computer, they’re entirely different formats. One column is missing from each other’s format, and while two out of three columns have the same contents, they’re differently named. You’d have to write a converter to make them match. You have the same situation with different XML formats³, and with two different takes at implementing, say, calendars on top of WebDAV. And given that Microsoft is moving away from WebDAV, citing lack of efficiency, they probably won’t implement CalDAV any day now.

The App Store Tangent

App Store? Really? What does that have to do with anything?

The success of the iPhone App Store has benefited both developers and users by establishing a competitive market based on meritocracy. Snow Leopard’s support for Exchange, because it opens up equal access to alternative competition, similarly creates an iPhone-like market for desktop messaging services ranked by merit, not the vendor’s current market position.

Yes, vendors like, say, Microsoft. Also, software companies located in Redmond, Washington state. Can someone explain to me how an interface to a proprietary PIM protocol “creates a market ranked by merit”?

This will provide Snow Leopard users with not just the ability to talk to corporate Exchange Servers, but also the ability to access Apple’s own offerings and other third party services.

I’ll get right around to implementing Exchange Web Services in my own groupware. Surely the specification is somewhere on ietf.org. Oh, wait.

1. That’s not a criticism; it’s just a fact of life. ↩
2. MessageDAV? LetterDAV? Running out of corny specification names quickly. ↩
3. Consider Atom vs. RSS. ↩

There are two things that I find most puzzling about Microsoft’s recent advertisements (including the bizarre Roger Kay pseudo-”report”): first, that nobody has anything to gain from those who are influenced by them, and second, that so few people point this out.

I don’t know how it works over in Bellevue, but in most parts of the world, when you invest in making a commercial, you actually have the remote interest of not only getting the money back, but profiting even a little more. Usually, that implies that those who watch your ad are the last bit more inclined to buy a product or service of yours, or at least have a better opinion of your brand, or perhaps get to know your product(s), service(s) or brand.

Now, Microsoft is indisputably very well-known, so that can’t be it. They do, however, have a slightly controversial reputation, so that’s one possibility. And, they have a very wide range of products to sell, and have been losing some market share on a few of them, so that, too, could be their goal. I’m willing to rule out the former (an attempt to polish their brand) insofar as the “Microsoft” brand is concerned, but as it gets to “Windows” as a brand (not as a product), we’re on to something: if we can forgive the mediocre typography and the excessive amounts of copy, the jackhammer-motifed “life without walls” print ad from a while ago is actually somewhat clever. It does not, however, do the latter: it doesn’t really say anything concrete about Windows (or Microsoft).

In making a statement about the image of your product, you have to look at what other products are out there. Though wildly different in nature, those would be Mac OS X and Linux¹. From what I can tell, the ads are largely interpreted as a response to Apple’s “Get a Mac” campaign, so that mostly leaves out Linux as a target. One would expect, then, the ads to focus on how Windows differs from Mac OS X in good ways.

But the ads don’t show Windows any more than Apple’s ads show Mac OS X: just as Apple focuses on the hardware (or, as they’d say, the “platform”), Microsoft, too, has allegedly random people² looking at hardware, specifically laptops, which Microsoft does not produce. So unlike Apple’s ads, Microsoft’s do not directly discuss the superiority of a product of their own, but rather of a product that happens to be included with that of a third party (such as HP).

Through sales of that laptop, Microsoft does make some money. But they’re not advertising high-end laptops; indeed, their ads seem to be primarily based on the idea that a Windows laptop is cheaper than a similar one sold by Apple (and the absurd “study” of Roger Kay’s is supposed to support this assertion). Assuming that to be true³, that must mean they’re actually telling the world “hey, awesome, HP makes less money per machine than Apple does”.

Is that really the message HP wants Microsoft to spread? And, by extension, it also means “our Vista Home Premium Edition is more than enough for your needs; nobody actually needs Vista Ultimate”. Why did Microsoft bother with an extensive selection of “editions” (comics 1; 2), with the highest retailing at $399, only to advertise that the “lesser” OEM one that comes with the machine (and which makes them a fraction of the revenues) will fulfill your needs just fine? And if cheaper is better (or “good enough”), why not go with, heck, Ubuntu Linux?

There are valid points, particularly in the third ad, to choose “a PC” over a Mac: to get Blu-Ray support⁴, or to be a more viable gaming platform. And yes, of course Apple has a far more limited selection of laptops; there’s no low-end 17-incher any more than there is, say, a 13-incher with an ExpressCard slot. But can you truly communicate such details in a meaningful way in a TV commercial? Do they reach the right target audience or, really, any audience at all?

As tiresome and repetitive as the Get a Mac campaign has gotten, it managed — in most cases — to pick a subject, focus on it, and get across a clear message. And a message, at that, that directly makes products of Apple’s look better. Does Microsoft believe so little in the merits of (retail copies of) Windows that it can’t do the same for that?

After all, just like Dell would rather sell you a Latitude, Microsoft would rather sell Vista Ultimate. Now they just have to figure out how to make the ads tell the same story.

1. The media, by extension the general public, and certainly any marketing executive at Microsoft, largely ignore the hundreds of other operating systems out there such as OpenSolaris and FreeBSD. I cannot be faulted for that. ↩
2. Who are, of course, actually actors — but in Microsoft’s defense, the pretense of “You find it, you keep it” is not unusually dishonest for any company’s marketing claim. ↩
3. Which, of course, has been proven wrong time and again. I’ll leave it to Microsoft’s Nadyne to be the voice of reason on this one. ↩
4. At this point, however, Vista doesn’t ship with built-in support for Blu-Ray recording yet; that’s coming in the Feature Pack for Storage. Fancy name, that. ↩

Congrats on shipping the second beta.¹ It achieves more than I had expected, and makes 7 look more like a stop-gap release.

The Good

• 

  Tabs automatically grouped and colored by “trail”. I can see myself getting used to those fast.
  The first-run assistant is now a dialog, rather than an obnoxious, slow-to-load Web page. It still has too many steps, though.

• Per-tab crash recovery without relaunching. The one thing I’ve always missed from IE in other browsers was its optional ability to launch one process per window, so having one window crash wasn’t quite as bad. They’ve apparently improved this to work for each tab! Nice. Crashes are a reality in any browser engine I’ve tried as soon as it comes to complex pages, whether through JavaScript parsing errors, messy markup or Flash, which is why you see features like Firefox session recovery. This sounds even better.
• Support for DOM Storage. This came as quite a surprise to me. Also sweet: Selectors API. The spec gives the perfect example of what makes this awesome:

  var cells = document.querySelectorAll("#score>tbody>td:nth-of-type(2)");

• 
  

  AwesomeBar-like autocomplete enhancements. Not just for the location bar, but the search bar as well. Really enjoying the way it lets you pick between search providers. They also now have a Firefox-/Safari 3-like Find bar, although the highlighting isn’t quite as pretty.

• Not quite so sure I’ll get used to features like Accelerators and Web Slices (it’s far too early to tell), but they deserve mention anyway for attempting something new.

The Not-So-Good

• Two “Tools” menus. Sure, it’s a beta, but it’s “feature-complete”, which I interpret to mean that all that’s left is bug fixes. You know, like… in a beta. With Internet Explorer 7, they decided to drop the menu bar (with an opt-in means of turning it back on) to bring the app somewhat more in line with the Vista chrome. They eventually reverted that default.

  Now, with IE8, they’re actually adding menus to the toolbar; many of their menu items already exist in the menu bar, but look different (they have no icon), and are sometimes ordered differently. “Compatibility View”, for example, exists in Tools (the menu item), Tools (the toolbar item), Page (another toolbar item) and to the right of the location bar (but only sometimes). Tools (menu) includes “Windows Update”, but Tools (toolbar) does not, whereas Safety does. Conversely, Tools (toolbar) includes “Explorer Bars”, but in the menu bar, that’s in “View”.

  It’s like two UI teams are feverishly competing against each other. FWIW, the toolbar has a much cleaner layout, but resides at a bizarre, completely non-standard and unique place.

  Sure, they put the menu bar back because people expected certain menu items at certain locations. Tough. Clean up the menu bar, but this time, do it properly, and then leave it in. Make the toolbar a toolbar. You know, with commonly-used items. But most of all, stop giving the impression that you can’t make up your mind.

• 

  As much as they have clearly put work into improving Web standards support, 21 is not a good Acid 3 score for a browser scheduled to ship in late 2008. One redditor appropriately jokes that the score hasn’t improved one bit since IE7’s 12; a text reversal bug has merely been introduced.

  And, by the way, I’ll spare you the sight of this blog on IE8. Maybe for 9?

The Truly Ugly

• The update experience sucks. That there’s a document of upgrading guidelines really says it all. Oh, and let me just quote this priceless series of instructions:

  To avoid getting into this situation, we strongly encourage you to follow these steps before installing Internet Explorer Beta 2:

  • Uninstall Windows XP SP3
  • Uninstall IE8 Beta1
  • Re- install Windows XP SP3
  • Install IE8 Beta2

  If you don’t, you won’t be able to downgrade back to IE7, but only if you’ve installed IE 8 beta 1 before installing Windows XP Service Pack 3. Which isn’t an unusual scenario at all.

  Oh, how I wish they could just bundle such betas in a little sandbox-esque environment which would allow for clean uninstalling. You could call it a “folder”, or perhaps a “directory”, and then run multiple versions side-by-side, and even have a tool that lets you conveniently test several different versions. The mind boggles. Microsoft’s solution? A complete Windows XP VM download.

• Microsoft can only be partially blamed for this, but it will be a long ways until we can take much advantage of IE8’s developer improvements. Just this week, I had the frightening experience of a server with 18 important updates that weren’t installed. Needless to say, it also still had IE 6.

Oh, and it doesn’t come with a free pony.

1. By calling this beta “feature-complete”, aren’t they essentially retroactively calling beta 1 an alpha? ↩

The browser download URLs, from 37signals’s announcement “Phasing out support for IE 6″:

1. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/downloads/ie/getitnow.mspx?wt_svl=10005WDH_OS_Other1&mg_id=10005WDHb1
2. http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
3. http://www.apple.com/safari/download/

As Denis says, you can pretty much type apple.com/<productname> and expect it to either work or at least redirect. Firefox’s URL isn’t too bad; Microsoft’s could use a lot of work. In fact, anything past the /ie/ is or should be completely redundant.

This isn’t just a minor nitpick. For one, it really shows which company’s culture emphasizes simplicity more. And, you can be sure which of the three is least likely to change after a re-design…