Thinkcage

A recent Wired News article really captured some of my feelings as a new car owner. It details the increasing frequency of computer glitches or malfunctions on today’s high-tech automobiles. With nearly every part of your driving experience being computer-controlled, what happens when there is a glitch? Something tells me this is a more severe problem than a BSOD.

I have had similar concerns in my new car. Not that anything has happened, but there is something very solid and reassuring about mechanical control versus electronic controls. With my old Toyota when something went wrong it was easily fixed on the side of the road with a can of spray lubricant to the carburetor float. In my new car, I’d probably just be stranded. I guess its the feeling of reliance that is tough to get used to.

One of the most practical and ingenious uses of RSS I have seen in a long time can be found at EbayListings.Net FreeBiddingTools.com. Here you can create custom RSS feeds that will monitor ebay searches of your construction. Looking for a certain item? Setup an RSS feed that will hourly (or as determined by your aggregator) show you all ebay auctions that match your query. Filterable by price, seller id, gallery, etc. Seems like you could also use it to monitor your own auctions as a seller. Very nice!

Its not clear from the site, but I suspect this is an ebay venture. Here’s hoping it will be integrated into the main site. It would be nice to have a “subscribe to this search” feature within ebay, itself.

Update: I just got an email from Brad who runs EbayListings.Net FreeBiddingTools.com, contrary to my assumption that it was an official ebay offshoot. Due to legal issues the site’s URL has changed to www.freebiddingtools.com. I’ve modified the link above to match.

I broke down and joined the head-bobbing, white-corded masses and bought an iPod a couple of months ago. There is little that I can say about this fantastic little device that hasn’t been said time and again. As a designer of user experiences, this is the holy grail from the tiny word “enjoy” greeting the purchaser as he opens the package to the way the backlight fades out instead of merely shutting off. Its a lovely piece of electronics that doesn’t feel technical or well, like electronics. It changes the way you listen to music.

An article in Wired News today captured my feelings on this device very accurately.

So, for example, music allows people to use their eyes when they’re listening in public. I call it nonreciprocal looking. Listening to music lets you look at someone but don’t look at them when they look back. The earplugs tell them you’re otherwise engaged. It’s a great urban strategy for controlling interaction.

It’s also very cinematic. The music allows you to construct narratives about what’s going on.

Its amazing the detachment, the feeling of being in a personal space, that one gets by putting on a pair of headphones and listening to music. I particularly enjoy listen to music while shopping—perfect for canceling-out the hubbub of a busy grocery store or mall. And, of course, the ability to tune out the periphery at work is another great use.

The iPod has liberated me from the mundane and given legs to portions of my music collection that I haven’t touched in years. Pretty powerful stuff.

The Mac-faithful no doubt know that Apple upgraded their Safari web-browser to version 1.2 last week, and the usual cries of outrage soon followed as some users soon discovered that it was a Panther-only upgrade not available to users who had not bought the latest version of OS X.

Many assumed this was part of Apple’s strategy of the annual fee, that is, releasing a new version of the OS on a yearly basis for $130. Many Mac users feel like its almost a rental of the OS, a fee to keep current and many, like myself, think it’s a fair trade. However, Apple’s response to the outcry as reported by MacWorld UK is quite different:

Apple says: “Safari 1.2 has been designed to leverage advances in Panther not present in the Jaguar release of Mac OS X. These Panther technologies are needed to deliver Safari v1.2’s most significant improvements. For example, personal certificate support is made possible by Panther-specific security technologies that are simply not available on Jaguar.”

The company explains that is does in fact continue to offer support for the Jaguar-friendly Safari 1.0: “Safari v1.0 continues to be available for customers running on Jaguar-based systems and has recently been updated with the latest security improvements,” it points out.

Essentially, Apple explains that the browser is so tightly integrated into the OS that it is not possible to offer a version for the previous OS. Sound familiar? A key argument in Microsoft’s long-running anti-trust case has been that IE was an integral part of Windows and could not be completely removed.

So, what is happening here? Is Apple pulling a Microsoft and using their OS dominance to ensure that all Mac-users use Safari and continually buy paid upgrades? Or is this idea better related to Microsoft’s recent announcement that they were ending stand-alone development of their Internet Explorer browser? Essentially both makers are saying the same thing: you have to upgrade (buy) the OS to get the latest version of included software.

As a web designer, this has several points of interest. For one, it could potentially simplify web development as the number of browsers and versions that have to be supported would most likely dwindle. It would be convenient to know that a user running Windows version x.x has y capabilities and Mac user running OS X version z.z has xy capabilities.

While that might be convenient, another point worth noting is that only updating browser features (and potentially bugs) with an OS upgrade is a very slow process. Already Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 is several years old and the next version is not scheduled to appear until it is released with the next version of Windows, speculated to see the light of day in 2005 or 2006. That is a long time to wait for fixes to well-documented rendering bugs and other failings of this market-leading browser. Even Apple’s annual upgrade is too infrequent in the current world of web development where a single browser non-conformity can hold back the state of development for years, despite only affecting a small percentage of users. (Any developers still supporting Netscape 4.x know what I mean?) And that is not to speak of upgrade rates and adoption, which can take years. In fact, Windows XP which was released in October 2001 still does not have the majority of OS version share among Microsoft users. Similarly, Mac OS X cannot boast more users than its previous version despite three years of trying.

While the prospect of an OS where the web browser is no longer a stand-alone application has some appeal, the reality is it will likely retard an already slow-developing web. What we can do as developers, is make sure that content is browser independent and make browser/OS versioning irrelevant.

Finally, Apple has done it. They took their fantastic MP3 player/organizer/music store, iTunes, to Windows. I am user of both Mac and Windows computers — in fact I have both side-by-side at work and at home. I use each for its strengths, though the PC is getting used less and less each passing day. Music is one thing I do only on the Mac and iTunes is the reason.

Not only is it a fantastic MP3 player with neat playlist management, but iTunes also is great for organizing your collection. Using the MP3 format’s ID3 tags, iTunes automatically and behind the scenes organizes your music into folders on your hard drive based by artist and album. Change the artist field of a song within iTunes and it will automatically reorganize your music folder to reflect the change. This is a really under-discussed feature that is now available on Windows computers, too.

And of course having one-click access to hundreds of thousands of songs for $0.99 is great. Apple, combined with its marketing partners, AOL and Pepsi, is sure to own the online music download market.

After downloading the Windows version of iTunes I was thrilled to see it is a complete and identical port — feature-by-feature, the same user experience as the Mac version. Look for many shared playlists in the office very soon!

Now, if I only had an iPod.