I remember when Mozilla first announced that they would be shifting main focus over to Firefox, and what their core aim with this new browser was:

Firefox is simply smaller, faster, and better – especially better not because it has every conflicting feature wanted by each segment of the Mozilla community, but because it has a strong “add-on” extension mechanism. We recognize that different users need many different features; such demand is legitimate on its face. Attempting to “hardwire” all these features to the integrated application suite is not legitimate; it’s neither technically nor socially scaleable.

It’s been 4 years since then, and Firefox has not become any ‘smaller’ or ‘faster’; ‘better’ being a relative term, depending on what you want from your respective browsers. What’s worse is that there are so many features in the browser out-of-the-box, it ‘feels’ heavier than it actually is. Adding extensions on top of this makes a perfectly good browser behave erratically as far as memory and speed goes. Different test and benchmarks I’ve been following show that 3.0 seems to be even more loaded, albeit not at the cost of speed. That doesn’t make the screams of ‘bloatware’ in my head any softer.

It seems like the pressure to make it ‘just work’, and in their attempt to try and reduce the damage caused by broken extensions, Mozilla has lost it’s focus. Adding features upon features, they’ve managed to make it the biggest necessary evil on any computer.

The same goes for operating systems. I know I have vouched for Vista in the past, but I’ll agree that Microsoft actually has traded performance for features. It might be tremendously secure, and very good looking, but it’s slow; and unless you have the hardware to support it, almost non-functional. Not everyone has a Macbook Pro to to blaze through their work, but let’s be honest, if you did have a Pro you wouldn’t be working on Vista anyway. And why is that? Because Leopard (and Tiger more-so) are easily at the pinnacle of usability today. They’re fast, functional, feature-rich while not being bloated. Sure, the changes aren’t as obvious as they are with Windows releases, but I consider that a positive because it keeps the element of familiarity intact.

Measure of usability

I think it’s wrong to measure the usability of software that comes our way through its features. We should judge it by what it has helped us achieve. How much more productive did it make us. Are the features being touted actually used by the common user? Rather than think of a software as good or bad, we should think in terms of good or bad ‘for us’. If you’re a power user who needs 90% of the features, by all means go ahead and use it. But if you want to use Outlook as a mail-client, then obviously you shouldn’t complain of it being heavy on resources.

The same concept should be aimed at developers as well. Whenever you’re planning the next version of your software, don’t plan as a developer. As programmers, we tend to over think the requirements of the common person. I always say, it takes a child to think like one. Put the common man in your place, and let them decide what they want. All you get to do, is see how feasible it is to include that feature, as compared to the time it’ll take. That way, you’ll save yourself tons of time, and make your user base happy as well. This is one of the reasons open-source software works so well.

At the end of the day, you can’t use a sword to cut a steak, no matter how fancy your sword.

The last month has seen a couple of big privacy related issues being raised by the people against two of the biggest companies on the Internet today—Facebook, and Google. Facebook’s beacon program, which aims to bring updates on people from around the web to their profiles (while raking in revenue for Facebook for promoting these services), couldn’t have had a worse start to it’s lifespan. Facebook made the mistake of making the service an opt-out, instead of opt-in. The fact that Facebook receives your actions even if you opt-out out of the feature didn’t sit well with consumers as well as advertisers alike. Digging deeper, people found yet more reasons to be worried about.

Facebook responded to all this (though not as quickly as people had hoped) by making it an opt-in feature, and allowing people to quickly opt-out of all the advertisers. Combined with an apologetic Zuckerberg, things seem to have reached a decent balance.

Google on the other hand, didn’t face so much of a ‘crisis’, as a privacy annoyance. Google Reader started sharing your ‘shared’ items with all the people (who use Google Reader) in your GTalk contact list. There is no opt-in, opt-out, or limiting options. So you’re in, and you stay in. Google offered a rather political reply to all the complains, and that was it. That’s much worse than what Facebook did, but since ‘feeds’ are not something many users are aware of, forget about subscribing to them in a reader, it didn’t cause so much of a stir.

What, me worry?

Even though so much has happened, it’s all nice and calm now. Bloggers are no longer writing flame posts, analysts aren’t predicting their demise from popularity, and I’m writing about it. Anyone who thinks that moves and decisions like these are the reason companies fall, needs to get their pants the right way around. These are big companies, with millions of users. No move ever sits well with all of them. Remember when mini-feed came out? That died down too, and Facebook rose in our social-network rankings. Everyday people complain of bloat, but it’s remained where it was — at the top. Google Reader through all the issues, remains the most used feed reader¹, and this is just a minor setback.

It’s a simple case of causality, and people eventually get used to it. Sure, measures must be taken to fix things so that the adaptation comes in quicker than it would have otherwise, but the result is the same. You’ll never see a feature discontinued, or cancelled. What you will see is what I call a ‘calm-down’ period. There will be a fairly decent amount of time gap between two ‘big’ updates. This might be due to complexity of developing the feature, or (in my cynical mind) a time period to allow the last feature to have settled and balanced with the users. Too many changes too soon is never good. But these people have also understood the one thing that people ought to understand by now: no matter what happens, they’re not losing their user-base once it’s established, and in the case of these two companies the user-base is far from established—they’re hooked!

Bumped into this article. I really do feel sorry for the Wired writers.

Where Facebook’s platform provides a proprietary programming language for developers to build applications that run inside the site (so you can send you friends a fresh pair of virtual diapers or whatever), LinkedIn has created a platform in the sense of what the word used to mean — a way of mixing, mashing, repurposing and sharing your data. Think Flickr, not Facebook.

This is rich. So, if Facebook doesn’t allow the data to be pulled off it’s site, applications like iLike and DivShare must be inventing all the data that they keep flashing around. Or even something as simple as my Photos2RSS must be doing something very very illegal.

As an example of the second half of LinkedIn’s new platform, the company has announced a partnership with Business Week which will see LinkedIn data pulled into the Business Week site … Call it six degrees of Business Week, but it does something Facebook has yet to do — it connects your data with the larger web.

And what is Facebook’s beacon supposed to be an attempt at? Sure, it is data coming in, not going out; but the final result is the same. All your doings and workings from everywhere on the Internet comes to Facebook, and they make it available through F8 for anyone who wants the data (for the people who have allowed it to be shared).

Many of the gritty details about the new APIs haven’t been released yet, but we can tell you that the LinkedIn platform uses REST-based APIs and will have access to data like your profile, your network, other LinkedIn profiles, network feeds and more.

And Facebook has done nothing of this sort! Those bastards!

However, all applications will need to approved by LinkedIn, so it’s more likely we’ll see useful stuff like conference calendars or job listing apps than virtual drink swapping.

Exactly what we signed up on Facebook for! To look for jobs, colleges and schools. Who wants friends … we’re trying to build a resumé here!

LinkedIn may lack some of the buzz and magazine cover hype of Facebook, but kudos to LinkedIn for taking inspiration from APIs like Flickr’s rather than the much touted, but still essentially useless, Facebook platform.

Forgetting the fact that Facebook’s platform literally created employment, if used correctly, it is the perfect repository of data when you are looking for info on a person. Wasn’t it only a few months ago that Facebook profiles were being snooped and scrutinized for details on potential employees which are usually hidden for the sake of an image?

I actually see these two platforms working in perfect harmony with each other. Facebook holds all the details (made publicly available) about a person’s social life, and LinkedIn holds information about their professional life. Bring these two together, and you have your identity completed to share with others. There’s no point in comparing the two, and actually blasting the F8 platform. They both do their job well. It’s how one uses the data that makes the difference.

I read a lovely article over at Coding Horror about a week back, and I’ve been thinking about how we programmers deal with code. To start with, I think there are mainly two types of programmers today. 1) Programmers who don’t care about the looks of their code, and just care about getting the product out the door, and 2) Programmers who follow all the rules they’ve read in books and on programming sites/blogs, i.e. documenting, indenting and beautifying their code.

But what Jeff Atwood says pretty much sums it all up:

I have a friend who works for an extremely popular open source database company, and he says their code is some of the absolute worst he’s ever seen. This particular friend of mine is no stranger to bad code– he’s been in a position to see some horrifically bad codebases. Adoption of this open source database isn’t slowing in the least because their codebase happens to be poorly written and difficult to troubleshoot and maintain. Users couldn’t care less whether the underlying code is pretty. All they care about is whether or not it works. And it must work – otherwise, why would all these people all over the world be running their businesses on it?

Till now, I’ve only worked on one group project. I’ve always coded for personal projects, and have written my code in a way which works for me. It’s only recently that I’ve started paying attention to what my code ‘should’ look like, so that it is easy to port and debug.

This has involved adoption of ScriptDoc, which I think is an interesting concept. Documentation is a very important part of your coding, since it saves you tons of trouble if your have ‘lots’ of code. Standardizing it will result in all programmers getting ‘tuned’ to analyzing documentation in a certain way. Also, to make the entire coding process fun, I’ve switched full-time to TextMate. Let’s just put it this way: everything you’ve heard about it, and some of the things you’ve not heard, are all correct. Auto-completion, macros, in-built syntax recommendation, and custom bundles makes it just the perfect companion for any coder looking to focus on the coding, rather than the code itself (the layout and formatting, atleast).

A few steps

Spending a hint of time after your coding quota for the day is over to just skim what you’ve just written to add comments here and there, remove unnecessary line-breaks, and add necessary line-breaks is a good habit. Brackets you can do without (or ones you need), indentations and things like that should also be taken care of. This hardly takes more than 15 minutes (I do it, I know), and the end product is code that is pleasing to the eye. When you sit down to it the next day, you will not feel like giving up the moment you start, because your code looks inviting.

I’ve always felt that the more tempting you make something to the eyes, the more easily your mind accepts it. Why should your code be any different?

The past 2 weeks I’ve been busy with exams, but the past 2 days I’ve been busy with migrating my blog over here. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, and have hinted it in the past ¹, but never really got around to it. I got me a nice new domain, and had this server space going to waste. So I thought why not :)

I’ve imported all the posts over from my Blogger account (The Last Word), and the comments. It was really simple thanks to Wordpress’ importing tool. I’ve been working on the template all the while, and I think I’ve managed to cook up something nice, simple and usable. I’m using a few plug-ins, and they’re all rather simple but useful. Plus, I finally get to have a separate ‘random’ link list (the ‘Surfings’ on the right). It’s not really a three-column template, but yeah!

As far as the name goes, I wanted to change it from ‘The Last Word’. It was pretty obvious mine was not the last word. Although, I am a geek (as my friend puts it), and I’m proud of it – and considering the subject matter of 80% of the posts here will be ‘geeky’, I figured a topic related to geek would be a welcome change. But ofcourse, with a name change comes a URL change, and everything else changes. I’m not very fussy about the page-rankings and Technorati rankings ², but I will have to put you readers through a little bit of trouble of updating feed addresses. Next weekend, I will change the feed address of this blog completely over to ‘Geekaholic’ and disable the old feed address. This will kind of work to give me an accurate ‘active’ reader count. So please, begin updating your feed readers :)

Now let’s see how quickly I get bored of this ;)

It’s been just about more than a year (if I’m correct) since the release of F8, Facebook’s platform for developers to create ‘social’ applications which Facebook users can add to their profiles and make merry. Just about more than a year later, a browse through the top 10 applications (ranked by use) shows the problem. Well, not so much of a problem; considering there is nothing wrong, but more of a worry. Atleast for me.

You see it? No?

Utterly useless

Not more than 2% of the applications have any ‘use’ value. The only part of Facebook ‘from’ Facebook they use is the userbase. Not their details. Them. These applications are trying to come up with any little excuse to make people invite more people to use them. Take ‘SuperWall’ or ‘FunWall’ for example.

These two applications do ‘nothing’ more than what the native Facebook Wall does not. The only difference? There is no difference! It’s just that people don’t know that their wall can do all those things, and more. And yet, they are top of the list, ranks one and two respectively.

What makes them tick

It seems people flock towards applications that are ‘fun’. Not necessarily useful. Application makersI’ll not call them developers, since they’re just coding; not really developing anything seem to understand this, and are resorting to making their applications dumber, and dumber so that it appeals to the common person. I can give you proof with my very own applications here.

I have three:

1. So much to do!: This is a simple to-do list tracking application, which allows you to make lists, and show it those lists on your profile.
2. Photos2RSS: This allows you to get photos from anywhere in Facebook as feed (RSS/JSON), which can be further used anywhere feeds can be used.
3. Thought for the day: Another simple application to show a ‘thought’ or a quote on your profile. It also lets you tag quotes as favourites, and share them with friends.

Take a quick guess as to the order of ranks based on number of users of those applications. Answer’s at the end of the post.

So, to come back to the point I was making. I don’t know what Zuckerberg’s main motive was to creating the platform, and allowing people to develop applications on it. Maybe this ‘was’ what he wanted. Maybe it isn’t. But on thing is for sure. This defininitely undermines the genius behind the technical proficiency of F8. I can only begin to imagine the kind of work that has gone into it, and the amount of effort that goes into it everyday for maintainence and cleanup. The use it has been put to till date, doesn’t even begin to do justice to it.

Sure, it got more users to Facebook. It added value to your profile, and increased the worth of every user. But from a broader perspective, it hasn’t added ‘anything’ at all to Facebook in itself. There is no application which will make people join Facebook, because it’s true potential is only visible when you use it on the social level.

I’m currently making another application. I’ll be all hush hush about it until I’m ready to release it. It only grazes the ideas I’ve touched here, because honestly, it ‘will’ take some serious brain racking to be able to come up with a concept like that. If someone can, it should be worthy of a job at Facebook itself.

Eitherways, valued at $15 billion plus, Facebook will make him a rich guy ;)

The answer

As far as the answer to the question in the post goes, it’s:

1. Thought for the day
2. So much to-do!
3. Photos2RSS

What did you think? The geek app will have most users? Phsshh… You obviously didn’t read the post properly :P

All those who are getting a little tired of the lack of things on Google’s pages raise your hands! Now now, c’mon! I know you want to, don’t be shy.

I am quite tired of it to be very honest. Seeing pages like Yahoo’s new homepage, or Live.com, it makes me cringe when I have to go to a drab Google page. And unfortunately, it’s not only the search page. Google’s white, a sick green, light sky blue and light red have made their way to every Google service on the web till date. That is the reason I stopped using Docs & Spreadsheet when they removed the beautiful Writely look, Google Reader after I got sick of itIn all fairness, I got sick of Bloglines’ look as well. I opted for the tons better looking, and modestly functional Netvibes over an obvious superior, but downright ugly Bloglines and GReader, and Google.com for my searches after Firefox got it’s own version of the Google.com search page.

A little overdone

I know they became famous of their minimalistic simple design, which was copied by a lot of other sites. It was great for the time it came out, and it works to a limit even now, but I think eventually things should change with time (look at Microsoft and Live.com and Digg). I think this signature Google look has kind of outlived it’s glory.

A look which got 3001 (including mine) diggs is this one, by Andy Rutledge:

And I think it looks ‘much’ better the current one, because it firstly adds much brighter colours, and offers more visual cues than the current one. The other design elements are explained on his page, with a mockup page. This ‘could’ be improved further improved, no doubt. But this is the direction I think Google should be thinking in.

Not enough

There have been silent touches being added to different services, to make them a little more aesthetically pleasing. Like the recent new look of Google Groups, and gentle additions to the Google HomepageThey added (wow!) tabs. But this is not enough. They really need to get their pants up and start to make some serious design decisions. Blogger is the only Google service which looks good. I thought the hiring of Douglas Bowman would open the doors to some much needed visual changes, but it’s been almost a year, and I’m still waiting.

It would be a valid argument if one asked ‘Why fix something which is not broken?’. I’d answer that with the fact that a redesign will bring in more people to use Google services. If you think adding designing elements makes things slow, then you just need to look at Yahoo! Mail. Its new avatar is the perfect proof. Amazingly fast while looking really good. It just depends on what you change and what you add.

It is about time, don’t you think?

I’m sure everyone by now has read the infamous Vista sucks… article. I don’t know if it was a deliberate attempt at trying to catch attention, or they really believe what they wrote¹, but I really don’t think putting Vista 10th on the list of worst things —- and not even of 2007, but all time —- is the right thing. We know Microsoft got a lot of things wrong, but Vista surely deserve’s better.

Personal experience

I’ve been using Vista for about a month now. It is a better operating system than XP, that’s for sure. Integrated search, the memory management, the looks, usage pattern recognition algorithms are all much superior. Sure, something that took 6 years to make should have much more to speak for, but I think this is a worthy product. Not worthy of the $300+ price tag, but worthy nonetheless. Some things that are wrong with Vista are probably one’s that become clear over time. The hardware requirements are high. 1GB just doesn’t cut it anymore, if you’re a multi-tasker like me (Photoshop, Firefox, Outlook all at once :P). The final cost of using Vista is much higher than the price tag of the OS itself. And one thing that irritated me tons, and still does a bit, is that Microsoft very clearly traded features for performance. XP was ‘way’ faster than Vista has ever felt; even a clean new installed Vista seems like a slug compared to my year old XP SP2. And from what I’m hearing, Vista SP1 doesn’t seem to help issues.

Someone who wants a fast operating system, should certainly have no qualms about how it looks. Hence, turning Aero off should sit decently well with them. I like my OS to look top notch, and hence, would rather keep Aero on. But I can see a good difference when the load starts to mount. Also, I was also re-introduced to the concept of ‘restarting the computer’ after long periods of use to speed it up again. I hope Vista’s garbage collection and repopulation of the memory cache is improved in SP1.

So why doesn’t it suck?

In a single line, I’d have to say because once you get used to it, and with UAC off ( :P ), you will really see your productivity increase. Vista is extremely intuitive. It has made repetitive tasks simpler, and will make you a much more efficient user. From simple things like hitting the windows key, and starting to type to launch applications, to creating advanced scheduled tasks. And after a month, Vista does feel faster than it used to in the beginning². It’s networking is much better than XP’s, with creation and recognition of networks, and their settings far better and easier. Device installation is a breeze for most of the things, since some or the other driver is already present for it. And security … even with UAC off, it seems to be a stable and hardy operating system coupled with Windows Defender (and constant updates from Microsoft).

I’d really say that bar the price, Vista is a good operating system to try out. And I don’t suggest a day or a week for a trial. Give it atleast a month. Get used to the slightly different ways of doing things. Instead of making a giant leap, Microsoft has eased the changes in, so that we can get used to them slowly and steadily. It will take a little time to get used to them. And once you do, you’ll see it isn’t ‘all’ that bad :)