[Updated] Windows Explorer in the nineties was good.

There's on thing I miss from when I used a Windoze machine in my day job in the nineties: Windows Explorer in Win95. It's still there, but I don't know how to make it give the view I found so very useful back then: it had two panes, each one showing a file system tree with flippy triangles, so you could easily oversee the entire file system on the left side, and also on the right side, and so you could move files from one side to the other. I think it's still the best file navigator I've tried, better than Apple's Finder (though the column view improved it).

This is shareware SpeedCommander, which approaches what I mean, even though it insists on separate panels for files, thus ending with four panels instead of two:

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One thing though: I think that OS X has much better text rendering and anti-aliasing than Windows 7. Text generally looks better and is more readable.
(Funny enough, years ago tech guru Nicholas Negroponte migrated from Mac to Windows partly because Mac back then didn't have text anti-aliasing!)

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On the other hand, I think the Start Button menu in Windows is immensely useful for quickly finding and launching apps and so on. I wonder why Apple never made anything similar, there simple is no simple and easy single entrance point in OS S. It's pretty stupid, to be frank. Well, you can put icons for everything in the Dock, but cripes, does that take up space. And with many, it's equally confusing; there are no sub-menus.

The iPhone is not a phone

I don't consider the iPhone a phone, I consider it a small tablet. In fact, from day one, I was wondering why Apple was calling it a phone, when phoning is clearly less than 15% of its capabilities even back then.
I guess it has to do with the popularity of telephoning, I never got that, I barely use it. But the general population surely do. In my town, the center does not have a single vidoe store, but it has six mobile phone stores next to each other!!

So anyway: for years I've been wondering: what did we do before the Internet?
Now I'm already starting to wonder: what did we do before tablets?
Example: I was talking to somebody about the speed of electric kettles.
I thought:  I'll bet anything there are several stop-watch applications for the iPhone. And what do you know, so there was. There was even a free one, which is excellent and very aesthetic.

So I could measure with ease how long it takes my electric kettle to boil two mugs of water. (1.42m.)

Obviously, the point is the bigger picture: this sort of thing will happen again and again and again, in so many areas we can't even imagine them.
(An example is an App which a friend showed me: if he hears a song, he holds his iPhone up and let it listen to it for a few seconds... and the app tells him which song it is, and where to get it!)

"What it's like to own an Apple product"

[Thanks to Jan]

"What it's like to own an Apple product", cartoon.

Quite funny.
It must be very exhausting to have that kind of attitude to your product ownership.

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By the way, I bought an Apple "bumper" case for my iPh4. But I took it off again. It only protects the steel parts, the parts which don't need it. And it ruins the beautiful look of the phone.
But I did get a Zagg film for both sides. It protects the glass nicely against fingerprints and scratching, and gives it a bit of traction so it's less likely to slide around and fall off tables.

Windows shopping (updated)

I saw a big screenshot from a machine running Windows Seven, and I thought it looked very good, so I started considering getting an upgrade to my ol' Windows laptop I have for web site testing and occasional purposes. So I went to my friendly neighborhood PC World store, to go "Windows shopping".

On my way into the store, the Apple Laptops and other machines were closer, so I looked them over first, you just have to, it's such nice hardware.
A lot of interest in the iPad, I saw.

I got approached by a salesman, and I pulled myself away from the aluminium goodies, and asked to see a good high-end Windows machine. So we went and looked at those...

But man, the hardware, how it looked on all the Windows machines! I just couldn't bear it, they are so ugly. Even the most expensive machine they had (about £1100, $1600), a large Sony Vaio*, in its big, faux-silver-plastic majesty, just repelled me. I looked over all the various Wintel machines they had, both laptops and desktops, and none of them attracted me at all. Plasticky, button-y, thrown-together... there seemed to be no wholeness in the design considerations. (By the way, not all plastic is equally "plasticky"... Apple's entry-level MacBook (without the Pro) model is still white plastic, and it looks gorgeous. But then I'll bet that's a different grade of plastic.)

This is not an anti-Windows thing, like I said I very much liked the looks of the OS itself in most recent incarnation, and they say it's good to use. But unless I need the machine urgently, I want to find one where the hardware is equally pleasant to me.

Hmm... maybe I'll just combine 'em, and install Win7 on my iMac or get a MacBook Pro for it. Testers do say that due to the Intel chip, it runs as fast on Macs as it does on PCs.

Update: I did it. Just went to the shop and paid overprice for WinHomePremium, and installed it via the built-in "bootcamp" feature, on my iMac. (My secondary computer, I mainly use a MacPro.)  Went flawlessly, and took less than half an hour. So far I haven't used it much, but it looks very pretty on the big iMac screen, way better than olden-times Windows. And just this fact alone: the desktop is not strewn with friggin icons!! Gotta love that.  Just goes to show that they do listen... it only takes a couple of decades.

Update: I must say, the Win-terface is really improved.  It feels logical, and it's beautiful, the way the windows look and move and so on, I actually feel, for once, that Apple could learn something here, very little has changed in the OS X look at feel over these ten years.
It might be a little frivolous, but for example I like how, if I try to drag a window down so it collides with the Dock, sorry, the Task Bar, then there is a little, tastefully animated "explosion" bubble, which shows there's a conflict. And if I force the matter, I can push the window behind the Task Bar, but it gets blurry like the Task Bar is translucent. I might get tired of such cutenesses, I don't know, but right now they seem nice.
I like the way that windows corners buttons softly light up in different colors when you approach them. It's pretty and it tell you clearly what you're about to do. Apple's round buttons get a little cross in them, it's less clear, and sometimes the botton doesn't actually work even though the cross is activated, a clear flaw.
(No, I'll probably not change platform, I'm just amazed I can find so many things to like about the new Windows.)

BTW, the machine is nagging me to urgently buy some virus software. What do you recommend? 


* I can't find a picture of that model. Those I do find pictures of look better, but I'm not sure if that's just the picture.

The Scary Truth About Marriage

Joe found this amazingly cynical satire. Not sure whether to laugh or cry.

Microsoft Kills Kin

Microsoft Kills Kin, article.
(Rob Glaser commented: did they notify next of kin?)
Just six weeks after launch, Microsoft's Kin, the social phone we wanted to love, is dead. Microsoft is ending its short life, sources close to Microsoft tell us. [...]
The major reason? Sales. Microsoft never confirmed (or denied) that only 500 Kins were sold, but it's clear that the response has been completely underwhelming. 

Wow. Only six weeks after launch!  It must suck to be in the group for one of those MS (or anywhere) products which fall totally flat on their face. If it was a good product, that must be a hard blow, and if it was a bad product, the whole long experience must surely have blown.

Wow again, get a load of Kin's site. (In safari but not in firefox I get a very "MTV" intro video)  It's worse (form over content) than any of the incarnations of David Bowie's site over the years. (His site, by the way, is not loading at all for me recently... what's up with that, is he dead or what? David seemed, personally, to be the one big artist who understood really early on how important the Net is.)

Funny sidebar: Gizmodo says that MS marketed the Kin to "hipsters". This is one of those words who have major definitions which are virtually antonyms: one is a person who is very Cool and In, and another is a person with "a particularly strong sense of alienation from most established social activities and relationships." Heh. I'd like to see how Microsoft would try to market to the latter!
(By the way, I, and most of my friends I suspect, fit way better in the second definition than in the first.)

Also by the by: is the wayback machine not working anymore? I mean not actively archiving?  There doesn't seem to be any newish results.

Update: Ray said:

Here's a screen shot of Bowie's website.
The first time I tried to connect, it wouldn't load,
but a few minutes later, I got this.

(In my opinion, that text is way too small to consider well legible. His site has always been like that.) (Of course too-small text is a *very* wide-spread issue on the web. Thank goodness most of it can be enlarged.)

Pentax 645D Debuts in Japan again

So the Pentax 645D is real now.
I think it's a highly interesting camera. It seems to be really high quality, it's way cheaper than other medium format cameras, and I think it's the only of those which has been developed with landscape and art photography in mind, rather than advertising and product photography.
And from the looks of it, I have a feeling it's more ergonomic than those big pro cameras usually are.

Street photography shots

TCGirl found this collection of good street photos.

Shaving the kitty

[Thanks to Jim]

A block for UK police searches

European Court rejects Home Office appeal, Section 44 found illegal, article.
In short, it's now again a little harder for a bobby to justify stopping and searching a photographer just because he doesn't like his face.

Minor disturbances

I live in a pretty quite neighborhood overall, which I like.
A couple of minor disturbances are 1: a dog which occasionally stands outside barking for hours. 2: the icecream van, coming every day, playing "Greensleeves" with some mechanical method which has forever ruined that nice song for me.
I have purchased poison for the dog and a bazooka for the van. But it occurs to me that sometimes even the most justified of actions can have unforeseen legal complications. But surely getting rid of these pests can't be amongst them?

Zeppellina revisited

I just revisited the art of an old friend and reader of this blog, Zeppelina. I think her stuff is marvelous. Very kinky, and yet very artful.