The official date for the launch of Firefox 3 is June 17, 2008. Click the link, pledge to download, and you’ll receive an email when it’s available.
Internet
Vista and Irony
Yesterday a Dashboard Update was released for the Xbox 360. The console now supports more file formats (i.e. Divx and Xvid) via sharing from a Windows PC.
I have a history dating back to Vista’s release of problems getting my Xbox 360 to play nice with my Dell, running Vista. However, when I installed Vista on my MacBook under Boot Camp, everything worked.
To my chagrin — but not my surprise — the Dell couldn’t even see the 360 on my network. Insistent on trying out the new features, I threw away 19 days of uptime and rebooted my MacBook into Windows.
After typing in my Windows password, I got my first surprise of the night — Windows telling me that my copy of Vista is not genuine. It offered to let me type in the product key. It didn’t work, so I even tried the product key for the Dell’s copy of Vista. No dice. Ever so kind in a black desktop, no taskbar, no Start Menu sort of way, Windows allowed me to search the Microsoft Knowledge Base for help. It turned up nothing in the 90 or so seconds I was willing to give it. I called the 1-800 number. Closed; outside normal business hours.
I decided to boot back into Mac OS X.
I opened up Firefox and jumped into Gmail, and the Web Clip at the top linked to an Engadget article about the Xbox 360 HD-DVD player’s new price drop. I clicked on it and saw a related headline: Vista SP1 kills the WGA kill switch. I even clicked on the link to press release — just to get the story directly from the horse’s mouth. Turns out, when Microsoft updates Vista to Service Pack 1, “Users whose systems are identified as counterfeit … won’t lose access to functionality or features.”
Too bad I just deleted my Windows partition.
Luke Smith and Irony
As some of you may know, Halo 3 was released on September 25, 2007. It was developed by Bungie for the Xbox 360. On October 5, 2007, Bungie announced that it would become an independent company, no longer wholly owned by Microsoft. The Internet lit up with conjecture over why such a split occurred. Some suggested that Bungie wanted to work on intellectual properties other than Halo.
Meanwhile, Bungie has produced a podcast almost weekly since July of 2007. I have followed Bungie.net pretty closely since before Halo 2 launched, mostly because of Halo 2’s integration with the Bungie website. I didn’t give the podcast a listen until shortly after I got my hands on Halo 3. I think I was working on my Halo 3 Emblem Chooser™ but didn’t want to stop soaking up Halo 3 goodness.
The podcast has three regular contributors: Frank O’Connor, Brian Jarrard, and Luke Smith. Luke is new to Bungie, having come over from 1UP.com only in April of 2007. In January 2007, Luke interviewed game developer/producer David Jaffe, who was still Creative Director of Sony Santa Monica at the time. This interview was recorded for the 1UP Show, and is still available on GameVideos.com at this link (embedding screwed up my css). I have graciously embedded the video after the break. Luke asked one question in particular caught my attention:
A lot of these guys — like look at the Bungie situation. They made Halo. Halo’s a hit. That’s all they make now. That’s all they’re making, and you have sort of — you’ve ducked out of that. Like God of War was a hit and well, you’re still — I mean — you’re still painting on top of it, but you’re not — it’s not your grind. It’s not the only thing that you get to work on, like some of those guys. How’d you swing that?
Luke starts his question at about 9:05 into the interview, if you care to skip ahead.
Digg Duplicate Post Aggravation
Every once in a while I (try to) submit an article to Digg. Every time, I:
- click the Submit a New Story link
- paste the URL
- hit the Continue button
- paste in a title
- paste in a description
- choose a topic
- prove I’m human
- click the Submit Story button
And then I get the dupe message. Eight steps. EIGHT STEPS! This could easily — and obviously — be reduced to three steps. Do the damn duplicate check after step 3. It makes about a million times more sense!
New York Times.com Killer Feature
So I’m reading an article I find via Digg. The article’s on the New York Times website. While reading, I run across a word I am not familiar with.
Automatically, I want to put this word into Google. Firefox (and I suppose IE) allows users to highlight text, right click, and choose “Search Google for” the selected text. If Wikipedia is the currently selected search engine in the toolbar search box, the right click allows the user to “Search Wikipedia for” and so on.
Of course, the easiest way to highlight a single word is by double-clicking on it. So that’s what I do. I double click on “abstemious.”
Suddenly a new window appears. While it’s loading, I think I must have done something wrong. Then the page loads. It’s a New York Times.com-powered dictionary lookup of “abstemious.” This is like the coolest thing ever. Well, maybe not ever.
Examining the URL of the newly opened window, we see a few things (with some line breaks to reduce ugliness).
http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?
srchst=ref&
query=more%20valuable%20to%20abstemious%20Martins%20than%20to&
fw=3
The query string includes, from the article, three words before the highlighted term and three words after the highlighted term. The field fw (focus word?) at the end of the query string indicates which word to pass to the dictionary, using a zero-based array. (I tried double-clicking other words in the article and changing the value of fw to test this.) I can only imagine that including surrounding words might provide context to generate an even more accurate definition. Why the target word is variable, however, eludes me.
Oh, and srchhst=ref sounds like search history = reference. Whatever that means.
Please, test this feature out for yourself. Head over to the New York Times site, click on any story, then double click on any word. (The feature doesn’t appear to work from the front page.) Awesome!
New Set of Wheels
I got a Honda Accord. I picked it up yesterday. It’s a 2007 Coupe V6. Black exterior, black interior. I took some pictures today and posted them on Flickr. The Jetta is gone, but I posted the ‘new Jetta’ pics on Flickr, too.
YouTube
After Google bought YouTube, did anyone else think, “Okay, yeah, I can upload content to YouTube, and now I don’t have to worry about it going out of business some day”?
Anyone?
Flickr Updates
This is my first fall with the new camera and the pictures are really turning out great. I uploaded a bunch today. Check them out on my Flickr page.
Vista in XP
Windows Vista comes out in January, but there are currently three Microsoft applications (that I know of) that boast the Vista look.
These are: Windows Live Messenger, Windows Media Player 11, and of course, Internet Explorer 7.
Immediately, I find it strange that of the three, IE7’s interface is the least Vista-fied. Media Player 11 looks exactly how I expect it to look in Windows Vista. Messenger is a little tougher, because although its appearance falls between those the XP versions of MP11 and IE7, I can’t tell if it will look any different in Vista. I can’t tell if its interface has stayed a bit more traditional because it’s generally a small window or because it’s the XP version.
Why would Microsoft hold back the visual progression of its most ubiquitous application? My first thought was that the age of the average IE user might be a bit higher than the age of the average Media Player user or Messenger User. By leaving the traditional title bar and corner buttons (minimize, maximize/restore, close) the same as those found in most XP applications, Microsoft may be trying to minimize intimidation experienced by older users — users who are already intimidated enough by computers. (As an example, I can imagine my dad clicking on a link that opens in a spawned instance of Media Player 11, then saying, “What the hell is this?”) Younger users — teenagers and twentysomethings — might be more appreciative of the glossy new MP and Messenger windows.
However, this morning I used Google to look for the release date of Office 2007 (Is anyone else excited about Excel 12?) and ran across this article on Ars Technica. Author Peter Pollack speculates as to how Microsoft chose Office 2007’s ship date. One sentence from his article bears repeating here:
Sending Office into the world early also runs the risk that some users may install it, discover it works well enough on XP, and hold off on the operating system upgrade.
Might the same logic apply to Internet Explorer? On my computer, the most commonly used application is my web browser (which is Firefox 2). I’d bet it’s also the web browser on most people’s computers, and the numbers tell us that most people’s web browser is still Internet Explorer. If all those people get the Vista visual upgrade on the application they use more than any other — for free — might they be less inclined to run out and buy a new operating system? It’s food for thought.
As a side note, I’ve barely used any of these three applications since Microsoft most recently updated them. Of the three, I use Media Player the most, but since I got my (second) iPod, I’ve been using iTunes a lot. I’m not in love with iTunes, but I’ve been listening to podcasts more lately and as far as I can tell iTunes is the best end-to-end solution for finding and subscribing to podcasts and syncing (which is easier than dragging) them to my iPod. In order to make sure that my iPod is as up-to-date as possible, I make sure that my iTunes is as up-to-date as possible — by leaving it running all the time.
Gmail or Browser?
Lately I’ve noticed that in Gmail’s input fields (i.e., when you’re composing a new email or talking to someone in chat), a right click brings up the option to Paste. Previously, this was impossible. I wrote a brief but astutely titled post about just this subject in August.
So why the sudden change? Did Google finally crumble under the crushing weight of reason, usability, and tradition to put the second half of the “one really just isn’t the same without the other” copy-and-paste combo into their otherwise gleaming interface? Or is it just the browsers? Paste is there in both Firefox 2 and IE7. I wouldn’t hold it past Microsoft to “improve” the interface of someone else’s website. (Yes, I put the word improve in quotes to make a small point — but paste functionality is an improvement.) But Mozilla? Mozilla wouldn’t do that, would they? Well, I guess they did put in that whole immensely useful spell check feature — a feature that shows up in the exact same text fields in which I now have the option to paste using only the mouse (and every other text field I encounter on the Internet).
(This feels like a good time to bring this up: Is Mozilla stepping on Google’s toes with the spell check? Google’s toolbar offered the exact same feature with nearly identical visual cues (which are in turn ripped off from Microsoft Word). Is Mozilla stepping on Google’s toes with the “right click on highlighted text to search for it in a new tab” feature? Again, the browser implements functionality identical to that which the toolbar already offered. I’m five seconds from uninstalling Google Toolbar. The one feature I don’t wish to part with is its AutoFill feature. How long until FireFox offers an identical tool?
And as long as I’m off subject, it’d be great if the built in search box (prominent in both Firefox forever and now IE7, too) opened a new tab automatically. The Google Toolbar gives me a checkbox for that, but I want to get rid of it.)
So it’s possible that the current generation of browsers are correcting deficiencies in Google’s services. If this is the case, perhaps it will wake Google up to make more advances in its products and, oh, I don’t know — get something out of beta? And I’m not talking about Desktop, which I uninstalled months ago.