Yes, this is a rant. It’s not politically correct. This one perhaps more so than most of mine. If you want to complain, that’s nice. Send all of your complaints here.

Microsoft is the new tabletard.

Microsoft just released the hounds on the Windows 8 NDAs and I think it’s well and good to finally admit that we have a new word: Tabletard. For those unfamiliar with this word, please see commentard, twittard, celebritard, ad nauseum. And no, I do not mean people who are stupid about tables. I mean people who are stupid about tablets. Of which, now, apparently Microsoft is one of them.

Why do I say that Microsoft is a tabletard? Simple, look at what Windows 8 is. Take Windows 7 and Windows Phone 7, mash them together in the worst possible way, and tada! You now have Windows 8.

When first announced that Windows 8 would have a Metro mode and Windows 7 mode (which within this rant I will refuse to use as a term and will from now on call Phone, because that’s all it is), I rather figured that the Phone part would be something gimmicky that you can on the side. Like how Windows 7 has that Windows XP Compatibility mode. Call me crazy, but I had rather assumed that Microsoft was rational enough to comprehend that PC users use PCs. That Windows was the primary OS people want on their Windows box. That the Phone part is just there to run “apps”.

Apparently Microsoft doesn’t get it.

I guess I can’t entirely blame them. Ubuntu obviously missed the boat on that one as well.  More so than Microsoft, by a mile.

Still, it’s rather ludicrous to suddenly assume that every device you ever install your OS on is now a tablet or phone, and that it has no keyboard or mouse. You’d have to be a flipping moron to make that assumption. I mean you would literally need to be mentally retarded to assume that. Hence why Microsoft now joins Canonical (the folks responsible for Ubuntu) amongst the ranks of tabletards.

I’m already sick and tired of Windows 7’s Start Menu. I didn’t like it any better when it was Windows XP’s. The “Classic” Start Menu is what I vastly prefer, because as someone who actually works for a living, I have a lot of applications which I use. There’s simply not enough room in the psychic ever-failing-to-predict Start Menu that Microsoft has been trying to replace the classic Start Menu with forever. I am constantly using the “All Programs” button any time I can’t have my Classic Start Menu. Which is really freaking annoying.

I do not want my icons hidden.  I do not want my Start Menu shrunk.  I have a lot of icons that I need.  I have a lot of programs that I regularly use.  Stop trying to make me click a lot of extra times to do everyday tasks, Microsoft!

Now enter Windows 8, which replaces the bad Start menu with something even worse: Phone! (Remember, I am not calling it Metro.) Yes, that’s right, now a bunch of tiles make up your Start Menu. Tiles which will mostly lack any and all useful information for people like me who will be using Windows to run applications, not Phone “apps”. It takes up even more room. It’s uglier. And it’s even less useful. Huzzah?

Likewise, you get a schizophrenic experience in Windows 8. If you run a Windows application, it operates just like you’d expect. It’s the Windows experience that you know and love. But if you run a Phone app, it runs fullscreen, and with all of the finger-swiping interactivity that you’d come to expect from apps. Will people be able to figure out what to do when the run an app instead of an application?

And the bigger question is, how well will the dichotomy of application/app … aka app(lication) even work when navigating Windows. So far that’s one that people have been keeping rather quiet on. Will Alt-Tab even work at all? How does Aero handle applications vs. apps? Will navigating from within an app be like apps? Will navigating from within an application be like applications? Frankly, even if these questions are answered right now, until the final binaries hits the silicon, I’m not going to believe for a minute that tweaks and refinements won’t happen, or features of navigation change entirely. It’s a messy messy world that Microsoft is creating by treating apps as apps within Windows.  And it’s a mess the way that Microsoft is cramming Windows Phone 7 into Windows 7 and calling it Windows 8.

Seriously, is it so hard to comprehend that most people are not going to find Phone in any way useful on a desktop PC? Now if you want to enable some goofy Phone interface, as an option, I’m all for that. After all, tablet PCs like my Viliv S5 could very well use some finger-friendlier navigational aid. (Something Viliv tried to accomplish with Cube UI, but failed badly.) But again, Phone should be an option, not forced upon everyone. Not everyone has a touchscreen. Not everyone even owns a smartphone, let alone wants to navigate their PC like it were one, using a mouse instead of a finger no less. In fact most do not! A phone is a phone and a PC is a PC and never the twain shall meet in many people’s minds. So any defaulting to phone behavior or navigation on a PC’s operating system is A Bad Thing! The kind of thing that only a tabletard would design.

So I finally decided to jump onto the Firefox 4 bandwagon and install the upgrade.  And I have to say, so far I am far from impressed.

My first impression was, if imitation is any form of flattery, then Google should be downright chuffed.  After installing Firefox 4 I could swear I had to do a double take to make sure I hadn’t just installed the Chrome web browser instead.  Same tab-is-all-you-need look.

Which is spiffy if you’re on, say, a tiny cell phone screen.  But it’s outright stupid for a large monitor where you have boundless expanses of now unused real estate.

Besides, frankly, tabs are dead to me.  With Windows 7 and the spiffy Aero interface I have something way better than tabs in my taskbar … IF I don’t activate tabs.  Once I activate tabs, well, that just makes pages that Aero can’t show you previews of.  Or in other words, Aero makes tabs pointless and counter-useful.  Tabs are so last season.  Tabs are so cellphone.  This is a PC.  It works for a living.  It can do so much more.

So of course I went and disabled tabs.  Sort of.  Because even after all this time, Mozilla still hasn’t put in a simple option to actually disable tabs.  I can prevent Firefox from opening new windows as tabs, but I cannot change the settings so that the “New Tab”, “Open Link in New Tab”, etc. features that I never intend on using – while I have Aero – stop getting in the way of my mouse.  You’d think by now Mozilla might have gotten the message that tabs suck when you have Aero.  But I guess not.  Not when they have multiplatform goodness and reliance on a lack of innovation.  (After all, they just re-created Chrome…)

Then I had to go about turning off other new features to Firefox.  Because, as I said, I have a big boy monitor and I lots of real estate.  I have file menu choices that I actually use.  So let’s bring that back.

And ugh!  Awww.  Ick.  What is this?  They’ve anchored the menu bar inside of the title bar!  That is so not a cool feature.  They apparently realized that text is hard to read through a translucent effect titlebar where anything could be under the window, peeking through, making words hard to read.  They must have because it’s all surrounded by an additional half-opacity white box to help provide contrast.  But frankly, it just looks like someone threw up all over my title bar.  It’s nasty.  It’s ugly.  And it’s still not all that easy to read.  Worst.  Decision.  Ever.

I’m also somewhat irked that my back and forward buttons have been redrawn.  Gone are the highly discernible colorized versions.  Now we have pale echoes meant to blend in with the translucent world of Windows 7 title bars.  Not an improvement in my opinion.  But worse, a far worse crime indeed, is that gone are my reload and stop buttons!  Just completely gone!  Not even an option to add them back?  WTF?!? I use those buttons.  What, I ask, is the point of offering the option to customize the toolbar if the customization still lacks the two icons you just took away from me?!

If I had known before hand that Mozilla would be screwing up the user interface of Firefox this badly, I never would have upgraded to Firefox 4.  I would have remained in nice usable Firefox 3!  This is absolutely ridiculous.  I’m surprised Mozilla didn’t just screw us over completely by also forcing us to use Microsoft’s god-awful Ribbon UI while they were at it!

Plus, as usual with any major Firefox change, be prepared to lose lots of plugins.  Heaven knows why Mozilla doesn’t make the effort for backward compatibility.  But at least that was an expected annoyance.

Oh, and Firefox 4 seems to be a little faster.  Yipee.

Meh.  Who freaking cares?!?!?!?!

This user interface of Firefox 4 is so less usable!

Mozilla, you done FUBARed 4.  I get where you’re going.  You want to be spiffy like everyone else.  But you see, the thing is, you’re looking to upgrade in all the wrong places.  Besides making it feel like you’re just playing catch up to someone else, you’re also turning what was a good browser for PCs into crap of a Microsoftian experience.  Get with the program Mozilla!  All the speed and sleek looks mean nothing if you can’t use the darned thing!

I’m now going to actively search out an install for Firefox 3 so that I can downgrade.  It may be slower, but at least it’s actually a joy to use.

One of the big stories that was breaking while I was missing internet connectivity was the news that Nokia is ditching Symbian and MeeGo in favor of Microsoft (of all things) and Windows Phone 7. It almost makes you wonder why Nokia even bought Trolltech in the first place if they’re not going to leverage such an amazing UI platform on their cell phones. But honestly, I don’t care about the whys of that purchase. People do weird things, and as long as those things don’t impact me, who cares? Let them do whatever. It takes all kinds.

No, what I do care about is the future of Trolltech and Qt.

Now, there’s been a lot (a lot and a lot and then even more of a lot) of screaming that Qt is dead.

Rubbish!

I can’t even remotely begin to believe such nonsense. I mean to start with, Qt has such open-source roots on PCs and has been around for many many years. I can’t even imagine the impact to the Linux community should Qt die (I mean hello, KDE?) but I also just can’t see it happening anyway. You just can’t kill something that large and entrenched. Even if you discount the whole concept of open source which is another reason why the death of Qt just ain’t gonna happen.

But then there’s that Nokia’s bailiwick is cell phones. They may ditch MeeGo – a cellphone-specific Qt-based OS platform, but that’s an incredibly tiny niche for the whole of Qt itself which revolves around those big clunky boxes we have everywhere in our lives. It’s hardly a death knell for all of Qt to lose Nokia’s cell phone platform when they still have all of those PCs.

And then when you consider the other partners with Nokia on the MeeGo platform, like Intel, who are still interested in MeeGo, it hardly even seems likely that MeeGo itself will even die, let alone all of Qt. Long live Qt for tiny devices!

You also can’t discount the trolls at Trolltech for whom Qt is not just a product but a way of life. Just because Nokia bought them doesn’t mean they’re going to abandon a lifetime of work and four generations of developing the Qt platform just on the whim of their new Nokia overlords. That’d be absolutely absurd. I dare say the only people who could even believe (let alone suggest) such a thing would be Johnny-Come-Latelys who don’t even know who Trolltech is, let alone that Qt existed much longer without Nokia than with them. (That or maybe something like Microsoft toadies trying to spread FUD to kill off Qt, if they even exist. Which when you have a monopoly like Microsoft in the PC world, why would you even need them?)

So I think it’s a sure bet that Qt is still here to stay. I have to say I’m a bit disappointed (if not also greatly confused) by Nokia’s decision. (All I can figure is that it maybe had to involve lots and lots of money or something, but I’m not going to even dignify that with a coherent allegation.) But I still loves me them trolls and have no fears whatsoever about the future of what is in my professional opinion (as a developer who has used Visual Basic, Visual Fortran, VC++/MFC, C#/.NET, C++/Mono, Tcl/Tk, Java, C++/wxWidgets, Python/wxPython, and – of course – C++/Qt and Python/PyQt) the best GUI platform/library ever developed, let alone the best multiplatform solution, which most can’t claim.

(And no, by multiplatform I do not mean Win 9x, Win NT, Win 2K, Win XP, and Win 7. And yes, I intentionally left out Win ME and Win ME2 AKA Windows Vista because they both just really really need to vanish from this world before they can do any more harm.)

Not that other platforms aren’t just peachy in their own right. I mean I grew up on VB and VC++ for GUI development. I’d still happily use them, given a good reason. I’m not 100% sold on .NET (or moreover C#) just yet, but … meh, pay me enough and I’ll convert. Or make it fun to learn and I’ll teach myself. But nothing I’ve run across yet beats the sheer elegance of Qt. (Not to mention that whole multiplatform thing.) Especially on Python!

As for Symbian, well, we all knew that was dying, didn’t we? Dead horse. Beating. Stick. Poking. Yep. Still dead. Whack!

FUD - Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt – are tools of the insecure to use when logic and reason would fail.  It comes as something of a surprise then to see Microsoft throwing FUD at OpenOffice.org.

Now, on the one hand, I get it.  The economy is down.  Microsoft, with it’s exorbitant prices, has probably been suffering for it.  On all sides.  It’s no doubt entered a few corporate minds, “Why should we spend all of this money on Microsoft software when we can find free alternatives?”  Why use Microsoft Windows when you can use Linux?  Why use Microsoft Office when you can use OpenOffice.org?  Certainly there’s some pressure on Microsoft.

And to some limited extent, Microsoft’s FUD campaign here does have a grain of truth to it.  Often times the cost of a product is not just in the purchase price, but in how well a company can support and adapt to something new.  Money is money, but time is also money.  But this isn’t true of open-source or free software specifically.  It’s true of any change to a new product in general.  You will need to train.  Until company-wide everyone is up to speed on the new product, productivity will suffer through the learning curve.  So you have to weigh that “cost” to decide if change is for the better or not in the long run, because for sure, in the short run change always costs more.

And this is certainly true of … Microsoft Office!  When Microsoft changed the user interface of MS Office 2007, it had a completely different look and feel.  Frankly, one that I’ve personally never liked.  To me it feels like going back to Windows XP’s GUI changes of rounded corners and bright primary and secondary colors, which I dubbed “Windows For Five Year Olds”.  In much the same way, I found the MS Office 2007 Fluent / Ribbon UI to be equally as insulting of my intelligence.  More importantly however, a lot of the features that I regularly used were now hard to find, buried away, because they were too “advanced” for most users.  And I could swear that some of them were thrown out entirely.  But perhaps they’re still there and I just haven’t figured out where they were buried just yet.

In that respect however, if your company (or you specifically for individual users) is sitting on Microsoft Office 2003 or earlier, and you have to upgrade, you’re going to find MS Office 2007 or later to be very costly in terms of training and the learning curve.  More so, in fact, than switching over to something free like OpenOffice.org that still has a more classic user interface.

A point which Microsoft’s FUD campaign seems to somehow neglect.

Not that I would discourage anyone from upgrading to the latest version of Microsoft Office.  If that’s the direction that you want to take, learning the completely foreign and overly complicated user interface will be well worth your time.  And it does make simple tasks that much simpler.  It’s just that it also makes intermediate or advanced tasks a lot more complicated.

And there’s another sticking point to not switching over to a FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) office solution: compatibility.  Microsoft doesn’t just hand out their file format specifications.  They have to be reverse-engineered.  Which isn’t as hard as you’d think … except for the bugs.  Microsoft’s document formats often contain bugs, that work just fine in Word, Excel, etc which created those bugs, so reads and reproduces them reliably.  Once you get to products like OpenOffice.org however that don’t create the bugs that Word might expect however, some formatting problems can occur if you open the document in Word.  It’s hard to say exactly when and where these compatibility problems will creep up, but they do from time to time.  Now, if Microsoft were to fix their bugs, this wouldn’t happen.  Or if Microsoft were to release interoperability libraries to the FOSS world to support their file formats, or even just document their file formats, this wouldn’t happen.  But this is Microsoft we’re talking about, so none of that will ever happen.  To Microsoft these aren’t bugs, they’re features.

So, until the open source world manages to reverse engineer all of Microsoft’s little landmines, there will be occasional compatibility issues where the formatting of a document may not always look right in a document created in OpenOffice.org but viewed in Microsoft Office.  These problems are, as far as I’ve ever seen, always easy to fix in Microsoft Office once you find them.  And these problems never occur in the native file formats used by OpenOffice.org when opened in OpenOffice.org.  It’s only in creating things like a Word document from OpenOffice.org.  But yes, it is something to watch for, if you plan on releasing Microsoft-compatible file formats to the public.  But it is not something to worry about in your own intra-organizational usage where everyone has switched.

And, it should also be pointed out, that in the past Microsoft has in fact had this very problem with their own products.  They have not always been 100% backward-compatible.

So yes, does Microsoft have a few points in their FUD campaign?  Sure.  Of course.

Does that mean that you shouldn’t use OpenOffice.org?  That’s for you to decide.  I can say that I’ve personally been using it for many years now, and have not been sorry.  Certainly it can be done.

But the bigger concern here is, I think, why is Microsoft slinging mud?  This is like a bad election campaign.  No matter how “right” or “wrong” you may be, whenever you fling mud by the truckload, you will come out dirty.  Is Microsoft really in such a hard place right now that they have to sully themselves with this kind of attack on OpenOffice.org?

And will it backfire on them?  I can imagine right now  many a CTO is thinking that they need to look into this free OpenOffice.org software that they’ve never heard of before.

And then there’s that 800lb. gorilla sitting there, waiting to be addressed: Google Docs.  Microsoft sure isn’t mentioning them.  And with all of their document sharing and collaborative work environment features in MS Office lately, the very bread and butter of Google Docs, one has to note this glaring oversight.