Over the past few weeks, I’ve been seeing so many updates and articles regarding Vista SP1, I can’t help compare it to the buzz that was created when Vista itself was close to release. This is almost of the same magnitude, if not higher. At this point, I want to try and analyse Microsoft’s position, and why it needs to re-think some things.

Whenever new software is released, the developing company makes sure they remove all the bugs and add the right features so that it captures the users right from the word go. Selling software to new users is almost like trying to make a friend. You need to sell it well — make the correct first impression — because today, there is no software which is ‘unique’. There is nothing that does something original. Maybe differently and more efficiently – but not new. That comes about very rarely.

When Microsoft began work on the successor to XP, I’m sure they knew they had a task at hand. With a market share of over 80% of the operating system market, their task was definitely easier than the average joe software developer company. Nevertheless, people are waking up to alternatives. Next in line and the best alternative (subject to requirements) is the passionately followed and perceived to be snobbish — Mac. While the numbers remain low¹, it’s still a formidable contender for the OS king. Then comes the the Linux distributions, mainly because of the sheer variety of flavours that offer something for everyone. It’s a major hit with ‘power users’, who want nothing short of complete control over their systems.

Microsoft began work on Vista with people expecting a natural successor to XP. Longhorn, the pre-Vista developer builds, were exciting. I, myself, admit that I was extremely (and pleasantly) surprised that Microsoft could think up concepts like that. However, when the actual operating system finally came out, it had become a shadow of what people were promised. The disappointment was all too obvious, and the backlash was huge. Articles like this became all too common. I even defended it, for my part because I genuinely believe people haven’t given it enough time. But it’s a little obvious that the software has not been well received (regardless of what your sales numbers say) when people spend more time with your first service pack than the software itself and they petition to save the predecessor. Also, the fact that companies would rather continue shipping computers with the previous operating system shows that something has gone wrong.

The un-attainable hype

I never expected to say this, but Microsoft probably was a victim of the hype it created itself. They over-estimated their own ability to meet deadlines, and hence ended up using up more strokes than staying at par. Latest numbers show that 75% of the market still uses XP, and Vista has yet to break the double digits. After a year, one would expect the better operating system to prevail. So if this is following the natural selection process, is XP really a better software? With SP3 coming out, and benchmarks proving that XP will remain faster² (by almost 10%), one has to wonder if Microsoft should speed things up for Windows 7, and not spend too much time trying to fix Vista. Screen shots and weakly compiled builds are already showing up everywhere, which shows that Microsoft plans to rectify the mistake quickly.

It’s almost idiotic to think that the failure of Vista will get people to switch operating systems. Even if Apple became more aggressive, and distros like Ubuntu (and its variants) caught on, Windows has too much of a market share and established user-base for a mistake like Vista to take it away. However, the more Microsoft pushes Vista on users (and tries to knee out XP from the equation), the more it risks negative feeling towards itself and any future version of Windows.

In my opinion, they should drop any major updates to Vista after SP1, and should put all efforts into making 7 a solid product. Put it through a rigorous testing cycle, so that what comes out is a worthy competitor in the modern operating system’s market. Microsoft shouldn’t forget that their only monopoly is the OS market, and they cannot take it for granted. The next few years will be very important in Microsoft’s history — in a way that two consecutive failures will really damage their reputation as the biggest software company, and raise doubts in companies’ minds about the future and whether it will be a better decision to switch while there is time or get stuck with a company on the down-roll.

Now that Firefox 3.0 beta 3 has come out (and been blasted by me), I wanted to take time to see which direction the UI refresh was going for the next generation of the browser we’ve all come to love. I’m going to start by saying I don’t like it, to save you the suspense. Also, I’m going to compare only the look (that means no slamming me for extensiveness or features) of the browser out of the box, to its predecessor, as well as other browsers out there.

Disclaimer: I’ve not compared Flock and Safari here. I think Flock’s interface is too cluttered, with there being and insane amount of things built into the browser. Safari has a beautiful and clean look, but it doesn’t sit nicely with Windows. Plus, I was a little too lazy to download them for just one screenshot. And, the screenshots were taken before the template change.

Firefox 3.0

The biggest problem with the UI is the missing feel of a modern day browser. The way we’ve gotten so used to gradients, rounded corners, little icons, glows and shadows … the UI feels utterly unimaginative and painfully boring. I know that developers and programmers care very little about the looks, but when you’re making a browser for the masses, the design takes the second row from the front.

Alex Faaborg, the user experience designer at Mozilla shows us mockups of what the final release might look like. While they’ve taken pains to make sure the browser takes on the native look and feel of the OS it is being used on, they’re not adding anything new which might make it look appealing and ‘new’. UI changes (like the gold star bookmarking and phishing site report) need to be re-worked … or finished, because they look hideous. The location bar completer design is simply bloat.

In fact, comparing it to Firefox 2.0, you can see that it looks almost exactly the same, with the exception that 2.0 feels lighter, sleeker and faster.

Even though it looks dated now, the glassy icons and nicely rounded form elements give it a nice smooth finish. A universal gradient to the theme would have added the remaining touch.

Internet Explorer 7

Even though the browser is a dud, the look and feel goes well with the new design forms we have been getting used to.

In Vista, IE7 looks even better, and right at home with the OS. Highlights and colourful indicators everywhere, as well as the shiny look that’s so “in” right now, visually it is a breath of fresh air at first sight. The lack of a menu bar is a little daunting, but then you get used to it if you use it enough. It seems like they actually studied user behaviour (or made smart guesses) and kept only the required things on screen, hiding everything else away.

Addition of a ribbon-like navigation and Office 2007-like look will set it very high in my books. Of course, features come a close second, and that’s where it fails :P

Opera 9.2

Here is a browser which never took off. They did a lot of things wrong, granted. But the look wasn’t one of them. Opera was easily the prettiest browser in the market even during Firefox 2’s release. I jumped back and forth between the two of them, being wooed by Opera’s speed and look, and Firefox’s usability and extensions.

Even now, while the UI remains unchanged, Opera’s holds its own against other browsers. Gentle highlights on hover, glowing buttons all add to the eye-candy. It lacks the glassy-ness, but you never feel their absence since everything else falls so nicely into place.

Opera is also the only browser to natively have a very functional sidebar. Surprisingly, this has not been picked up by other browsers … going for a top heavy approach. I know Firefox could benefit tons from this, which is why the All-in-one sidebar extension is so useful. Too bad less than 1% actually use Opera.

Maxthon 2

Finally, the most beautiful looking browser today. It’s technically incorrect to call Maxthon an individual browser in itself, but the number of features it adds to IE allows me to cut it slack. I have never used this as my primary browser, and don’t plan to start either. But it deserves the 5 minute spotlight.

What immediately hits you is the gradient. Like a strange version of Safari, the fading Grey makes it immediately stand out from the rest of the applications on your screen. The icons are bright and cheery enough to fit in with Windows, although the spacing could be worked a little more, because out of the box, it looks a little too claustrophobic. There is a functional sidebar, so it’s not top-heavy.

It lacks the expanding UI elements from Firefox 3.0, but then again I find them annoying there, so I like their absence here.

So why is Firefox 3 bad?

One word. Unpolished. Okay, one more … unimaginative. It seems that in their endeavour to make everything easily accessible to the common user, the designers have overly simplified the interface to the level that it’s boring. Even the buttons look out of place, not fitting in with the rest of the theme.

We can easily put aside the ‘speed’ factor. Maxthon, Opera and Safari all prove that the look of the browser has got nothing to do with how fast it works. Firefox has always been inherently slow. I don’t see how it can get any worse (it seems to be getting better in-fact). They can at least make it a slow, but beautiful browser. We’re not switching away any time soon, with the lack of a viable competitor. I’d love to see Personas leveraged as the new way to change the look and feel of Firefox, and given enough privileges that it can affect the look in ways more than just giving a background and changing icons/colours.

Until all that happens, I plan to stick with Firefox 2.0. I’ve become all too comfortable with it.

Selena Frye for TechRepublic:

We’ve seen the rapid rise of Facebook; are we going to see it die just as quickly as it burst in to life?

Short and sweet? No.

Quite simply because social networking websites come and go. There have been too many to mention and eventually people get bored with them and move on to something new.

Name me one network that innovated but still died. People get bored when there is nothing new. Keep innovating, and people will stay. Also, how many social networks out there have changed the way we look at the service itself?

Ever seen developers join a network? Facebook got thousands of developers to join in on the application development fun, and promised them very tangible (and real) revenue streams. Those applications, while annoying, are also a reason people are drawn to Facebook (believe it or not).

How about people like Robert Scoble and Michael Arrington? Facebook boasts the most elite group of users of any other social network. That’s not by fluke.

Five percent fewer people in the UK visited Facebook in January than in the previous month. That’s 400,000 people who decided not to log on any more.

Zuckerberg has something else to say.

I’ve had three or four friends tell me they’ve left Facebook in the past few weeks.

When you have millions, three or four doesn’t make a difference. Plus, consider what value those users were adding to Facebook. The common user doesn’t do jack. A developer, on the other hand, is an asset. I left Orkut to be on Facebook full-time. Instead of sharing my identity in multiple places, I pull in everything out of Facebook for others. There are others like me, and if they leave, Facebook will lose actual ‘users’¹.

One of the biggest complaints was the pointless garbage generated in bulk by applications-someone throws a chicken at all of their friends, someone else sends a video and so on.

And yet these same applications have 3 million+ users. The blasphemy!

Facebook was great as a way of keeping in touch with your friends. They should have kept it simple-friends, photos, groups and messaging. What more does a social networking site need?

If they had, we would have probably never even heard of a Facebook. If we had, the complaint would have been the overly simplistic approach and ‘nothing-new’ syndrome. If you’re bugged by applications, Facebook has actively taken steps to make sure people are not spammed invites. What more does a user need?

Unfortunately I think Facebook is doomed to the same fate as MySpace which saw 14% of its UK users disappear over the past three months. I bet Yahoo are glad they didn’t pay $1 billion for it!

If Yahoo! had, Microsoft would be investing in them, not buying them flat-out. MySpace is losing people (even though it’s the biggest network out there) because there is nothing new. They are playing catch-up to Facebook, and the general un-organised, un-restricted usage of “profile” pages is a major immediate turn-off! People get bored of that kind of stuff.

Facebook and social networking is not dying, and never will. The more new ways of connected you give to people, the more they’ll use it. Every new concept is a trial-and-error. If it strikes, you pat yourself and think of something new. If it doesn’t, you fix it until it strikes. Facebook has taken more risks with the concept of “social networking” than anyone, and they’ve reached where they have because of it.

UPDATE: Thanks for dropping by StumbleUpon users. If you liked this article, consider subscribing to my feed.

I dug this out of my drafts. I wrote this about a month back, but thought it was lame. But I still feel decently strongly about it, and I’m putting it up, with a few revisions.

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When picking a new name for this blog, I took care to keep something that I could immediately relate to. A name that would immediately tell people what the blog was about, while not being too common. This was also the time a friend began calling me a ‘geek’. That was something I had never been called before, although people’s reaction to it told me it was nothing to be proud of. So I went hunting to find the exact meaning of ‘geek’, and why I was called one. Two definitions (out of many) in particular caught my attention:

Geek (gēk)

A person who has chosen concentration rather than conformity; one who pursues skill (especially technical skill) and imagination, not mainstream social acceptance.

A person who is interested in technology, especially computing and new media. Most geeks are adept with computers, and treat the term hacker as a term of respect, but not all are hackers themselves.

But the one that took the cake was “A nerd with social skills”. It defines everything perfectly. Of course, you’ll need to look up nerd as well. The up-side is that it provides a simple but required distinction between the two oft-confused nouns.

The big issue

The reason I’m picking up this topic is because people confuse the two words, and wrongly use either one (thinking they mean the same), when it’s not correct. Ultimately, society looks at both the stereotypes in a not-so-cheerful way. Calling someone a geek is the 8th grade version of taunting. I want to do my part to change that notion.

I pride myself on being a geek. More-so since I find out the difference between a nerd and a geek. Being considered above-average intellectually, someone who prefers to experiment rather than follow a dogmatic way of thinking and a power computer user are all good things. Also, I actively correct anyone who uses ‘nerd’. Most of the nerds today are actually geeks, just mis-stereotyped.

People like me won’t bother with what others have to say about us (it’s there in the definition of ‘geek’ itself). However, bloggers had a field day with Valentine’s day this time around, with posts upon posts about the single-ness and how to spend the day. The stereotype beckoned the worst. It also showed how geeks themselves don’t know that they’re geeks … and resign themselves to being called nerds.

Being a nerd is bad, even according to me. All they have is a brain-full of information, and truckloads of knowledge. Change a nerds setting, and they get unsettled because they are rigid in their habits and patterns. They have an almost non-existent social life, which is bad because the best way to learn is by learning from others. They are duds practically, choosing to speculate and innovate theoretically. Being overly smart is a flaw in itself.

The geeks cometh

It’s the time where people are fascinated by new devices and software hitting the markets. May it be a phone or a computer, the first point of advice that people seek are their friends who are good with those things. Suddenly, geeks are in demand, because they’ve stayed at the front-line, tracking and following news and views. They know what is good and what is bad … what is marketing and what is usability. They are almost the final word on a decision.

So the next time someone calls you a geek, smile! It’s a compliment. They call you a nerd, correct them!

One of my biggest goals when I moved to Wordpress was to be able to achieve new levels of design, something that I could never have with Blogger (not without sacrifices and huge amounts of hacker-y at least). The ability to organise the page sections in a way which makes the ‘layout’ as important as the ‘content’. Which looks good but also works to cut out the noise.

I’ve always admired John Gruber’s Daring Fireball both for what he writes, and the simplicity of the design. Completely devoid of images, he let’s his writing do the talking. That clearly shows that one doesn’t need flashy images and icons to make a page look attractive. In this era of “Web 2.0” designs, I think we’ve simply lost what ‘design’ used to be. Cut out the glassy buttons, rounded corners, bright-bubbly colours. Let’s talk about a clean and simple, sophisticated design.

Designer Geek

I’ve been working on this for two days, and really let things flow. Some presentation-al decisions were inspired by DF, but this is mostly something I had been playing around with the Layered Template on Blogger before I let it go and gave up. I’ve used as less imagery as I could consciously let myself, sticking to unicode magic to keep things clean and uniform.

The blue and black (and such dark shades too) remain as my favourite colours. The sidebar has been squashed thin to allow more content to show through. I’ll continue playing around with the widgets to see which ones should stay. I feel the lesser on the right, lesser the distraction. The big-blue ‘Getthefeed’ button is something I want to try and draw people’s attention to. Although I have a decent number of subscribers, who doesn’t like more, eh? If you complain about the font, save it. I’ve heard enough in the past, and I don’t plan to change it now. I’ve moved away from the modern looking “Verdana”, and gone for a more traditional ‘print’ look — how much ever I could with the limited typeface options.

I managed to come up with something for prime-time use quickly because it was easier with a frame of reference, and a rather clear idea in my head, but I can’t test everything on my own. So if you see something broken anywhere, or you can see that something is not right, don’t hesitate to let me know. That mostly involves things I might not have seen because I’m logged in (pages appear differently to me), or if things are little too subtle or integrated which might create a problem.

This is how it goes

I hope you like this one as much as I liked making it. Seeing as how I’ve finally got what I was looking for, this might very well be the last look-change for Geekaholic. But then again, I’ve said so in the past too! As far as “Web2Geek” (my previous template) goes, I plan to offer it for download soon. Again, I need a tester to help customize it for everyone, so please pitch in if you can. Cheers!

This is not a problem for people who have high-end mobile phones (4 million iPhones means a decent number of you do). I’m not really big with phones (SGH-E250 doesn’t really put out), but I do like the convenience of mobile browsing. The E250 has a terrible MIDP 2.0 based browser. It has one font which looks like the Terminal font on Windows, and doesn’t handle CSS all that well (no floats). Hence, Geekaholic looks like a dump. I can’t imagine what heavy duty blogs like “Smashing Magazine” would look like.

Google to the rescue!

There are different ways of going about trying to fix your page, including this plug-in, but there is a reliable and un-failing method. Google has optimised all their pages to be seamlessly viewable in mobile phone browsers, no matter how bad they are. If you land up on their page using a phone browser, you are served a very stripped down version. In India where charges are based on amount of data transferred, that helps.

The basic functions of starring and marking items as unread are still there, but the page really is stripped down. The fact that Reader stores past entries also comes in use if you want to browse through the archives. You can’t comment or do much from the feed, because if you’re using this, it means your browser sucks. But it’s a nice and easy, cost-effective way. Hope you find it useful!

Ever since definr came out, I’ve been using it religiously for any and every word meaning related doubt I’ve had. It’s really good and fast, and keeps my Google Search history clean :) But the problem I’ve always faced is going to the site and typing in my word. Too much work. So I cooked up this quick Greasemonkey script to handle that situation.

The script adds a tiny box to the bottom-left corner, which stays 3/4^th hidden away, until you focus on it. Focus is through a click, or using the shortcut Shift + Alt + S. Wait for a second after you’ve finished typing, and it’ll start searching. Definr being as fast as it is, the results will show up almost immediately. Click anywhere else, and everything will get tucked away. It’s simple :)

Nothing more to say. You’ll have to use it to like it. Enjoy!

Userscript

Definr
All my scripts