By Example

Microsoft's recent introduction of Live Mesh is a perfect example of a core difference between Apple and Microsoft. Apple is, at heart, a product company. Microsoft is, at heart, a platform company. Both produce products and platforms, but the way they approach the problem and communicate with developers is decidedly different.

With Live Mesh Microsoft says, "Come, build on our platform and do amazing things!" What is the oft cited example for using Live Mesh? Multi-device synchronization of data. Now, to be sure, this is a big and very hard problem to solve. In fact, I really wish Apple's Sync Services were much, much better, but do you wake up in the morning thinking, "Man, I really have a Multi-device synchronization problem?" Most people don't. What they do think is, "Man it's great that when I put stuff on the web, I can get it wherever I am. All I need is a web browser." You see, syncing folders or sharing data across devices isn't top of mind in the way a developer thinks about it. Microsoft's challenge is mapping their platform to real problems in a persuasive way.

Contrast this with Apple's normal product focused pattern. First they release a product that solves a real, tangible problem people have. Say, "I hate it that I have to carry around my iPod and my Cell phone everywhere!" or "Man I wish I could buy that cool song I just heard, right now." or "I have so many digital photos, I wish there was an easy way to do something cool with them." or "Man I hate it when I loose files on my computer, I wish I could just go back in time." To solve these problems Apple, like Microsoft, has to build a platform, but this platform is built for a product first, which they use and improve. Then when they talk to developers they can say, "Did you see this cool thing we just did? You can do the same thing or even something better! Here's how we did it..." It's the difference between saying, "Here are the tools, let me show you how to use them." and "I used these tools to do this great thing. Let me show you how and maybe you can do the same thing." Ultimately, it's leadership by example.

Another great example is Apple's use of the Cocoa APIs in their own applications. Apple builds amazing products and then is able to say to developers, "We used the same APIs available to you today!" Contrast this again to Microsoft. Windows Vista was released with some remarkable new C# APIs. Many of them very cool and very interesting, but what is Microsoft Office written in? C and C++. What APIs does Office use? A multitude of Office only APIs and libraries shared among the applications. Does this hurt C# and the new "WinFX" platform "street cred"? I think so.

Ultimately, Apple and Microsoft are trying to solve many of the same problems, but the path you choose while logical to you, may not be so logical to those you most need to persuade and inspire. No one can argue with the results. For me Apple's "solution first, platform second" approach makes for easy understanding of new ideas as well as providing the activation energy needed to try something new.

Forward Looking Font Display

Yesterday, Apple released their own Safari 3.0 web browser for Windows XP and Windows Vista. Amid the security and performance comparisons, folks are also noticing that Apple has also ported their own sub-pixel display technology to Windows. Joel Spolsky summarizes the differences sucintly:

Apple generally believes that the goal of the algorithm should be to preserve the design of the typeface as much as possible, even at the cost of a little bit of blurriness.

Microsoft generally believes that the shape of each letter should be hammered into pixel boundaries to prevent blur and improve readability, even at the cost of not being true to the typeface.

I think Apple's method will turn out better when we all have resolution independence along with hi-resolution displays. The real question is will the current font display fuzziness in Safari turn off the current unwashed masses, so that even when hi-res displays become standard, it's too late. If that happens, Safari will follow a great Apple tradition: high technology ahead of its time.

Credibility

I was just skimming through the Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines and while in the Design Principles section I came upon this title, and I just had to laugh:

There is a point where marketing ceases to be marketing and becomes information; relevant, valuable information. There's also a point where something, truly informational becomes marketing. Branding folks like to say that any interaction with your product defines your brand. Whether you are working on marketing or strictly informational stuff, it's important to pause and ask yourself, "What does this say about me?" Sometimes, it's that simple human question that's enough to help you know when you need to work a little harder to remove a subtitle.

Full Radio Silence on the Mac

I was just listening to the most recent Security Now Podcast episode 83 wherein Steve Gibson goes to pains to describe what it takes on Windows to turn off your wireless hardware. Here's an excerpt from the transcript:

STEVE: Believe or not, yes. We’ve basically snuck in an entire show on maintaining full radio silence on Windows WiFi.

LEO: Well, it started when we were talking about this Free Public Wi-Fi that pops up on Windows from time to time, and what it was, and how now Microsoft has offered a fix but never told anybody about it, and you have to explicitly download it. That’s what we talked about last week. And if you didn’t hear last week’s episode, you should absolutely download that update.

STEVE: Right. So that was our second mention. Then the week before, Episode 81, we talked about – we actually showed the dialogues required to turn off the functionality, just sort of this promiscuous connect-to-anything-that-I-hear, and also this idea of broadcasting the names of any networks you had connected to before, which by default Windows tries to do. It turns out that it’s trying to do that still, even after you’ve got the update, because Microsoft added a checkbox to one of the configuration dialogues which is checked by default, and you have to go turn it off. So here in our fourth serialized How to Get Wi-Fi Just to Shut Up, we have additional instructions. People can, if they go to the show notes for this Episode 83, I’ve got a link back to the new and enhanced instructions that are over now on Episode 81’s notes. So Episode 81’s show notes are enhanced with this additional information, and this episode links back to those.

LEO: So this is if you installed the patch that Microsoft offered in November to fix wireless zero config, it’s still promiscuous unless you uncheck this box.

STEVE: Yes. There’s a box which enables it to connect to networks which are not broadcasting. And so if the networks are not broadcasting, then your computer does. And it’s just like, okay...

LEO: Is this ad hoc only? Or is it infrastructure networks, as well?

STEVE: It’s both. And so anyway, the idea is – in fact, I realized, okay, I started using the term “maintaining full radio silence.”

LEO: Yeah, that’s a good way to talk about it, yeah.

STEVE: As the famous jargon. And that’s what we want. We want to be able to carry a laptop around. If we forget to disable our Wi-Fi, we don’t want it sending out stuff of any sort. We want full radio silence. And so it turns out that following the instructions that are now on the show notes for 81, with the update which we talked about in 82, which we’re all pulling together now in 83, when we first opened the topic in 80, we basically snuck in a whole Security Now! episode on maintaining full radio silence."

Here's a link instructions to the instructions from Security Now:

For details on "Maintaining Full Radio Silence" from Windows WiFi systems, please see the updated show notes for episode #81. They assume (and require) that the system has been updated with the Wireless Client Update for XP as described in episode #82 and notes.

If it's not clear, the step by step instructions for how to turn off WiFi are located at http://www.grc.com/sn/notes-081.htm

Because Steve didn't mention how to do this on the Mac, I think I'll take the liberty of providing a comprehensive guide complete with pictures, so you can follow along. This guide applies to at least the last 3 versions of Mac OS X. Here goes:

Step 1: Click the Airport Menu

Step 2: Select Turn AirPort Off

Steve was talking mostly about WiFi radio emissions, but since most Macs have Bluetooth these days, I thought I'd go a step further and document how to turn off Bluetooth radio emissions as well.

Step 1: Click the Bluetooth Menu

Step 2: Select Turn Bluetooth Off

In conclusion, if you are ever responsible for designing the "turn it off" use case, please consider the above mentioned comparison before completing your design.

Update 1: As a companion article, Joel Spolsky talks about the trials of turning off Windows Vista.

Update 2: It looks like I misunderstood what Steve was talking about. He wasn't talking about how to turn off WiFi, but how to keep the Windows WiFi system from broadcasting data about which networks you've connected to in the past. Does the Mac OS do this? I don't know.

Windows Vista releases to manufacturing

It's funny, here at Microsoft when we finish a project, we "release to manufacturing" which is implied to mean that we carry the "golden copy" of the product to the replication factory which they then use to manufacture millions of packaged copies for everyone. This manufacturing might start right away, but most people will not get their copy until next year. It's been a very long road for Vista, but it has finally RTM'd. Over the next few months Microsoft IT will be rolling it out to everyone here at work. Volume license business customers will get their copies by the end of this month, while regular PC users will get their copies on January 30, 2007.

From my perspective I'm glad it's finally shipped. I hope all my underwater stock options become wildly valuable! I'm also glad because since it's "done" there's a very good chance that Apple will finally fully disclose what ever secrets they were hiding from us at WWDC. MacWorld in January will be the perfect time for Apple to try to 1 up Vista, and I'm sure they know it.

I've been playing around with Vista and I've watched a few demos, but it's not on my main PC yet. Even with my limited knowledge of the features in Vista, there are two features I'd like Apple to copy right away: ASLR and Windows Meeting Space.

ASLR

From Wikipedia:

Address space layout randomization (ASLR) is a computer security feature which involves arranging the positions of key data areas, usually including the base of the executable and position of libraries, heap, and stack, randomly in a process' address space.

Basically, this really has a chance at making Vista much more secure. I'm all for it. More info can be found here.

Windows Meeting Space

This is a very cool collaboration application included with Vista and referenced from Microsoft's Tips and Tricks document as follows:

Collaborate with a co-worker.

Want an easy way to share files and applications with a colleague or customer—even when you may not be part of the same network? Windows Meeting Space is a new experience in Windows Vista that enables you to start an impromptu collaboration session with other Windows Vista users. Simply open Windows Meeting Space and start a session. Windows Vista will automatically detect other Windows Vista users that are on the same sub-net infrastructure or close enough for you to create an ad hoc (direct PC-to-PC connection) wireless connection. Once you have invited them and they have accepted, you can share documents by simply dragging a document to the Handouts area on the bottom right which instantly replicates that file across the other meeting participants’ machines. Dragging the file to the presentation area on the left side starts application sharing, enabling the other participants to watch as you present that file. If someone has a good edit for your file, you can make that edit in real time, or pass control of the application directly to that participant for them to make that edit for you.

This tool works with any document or application and finds people near by just like Bonjour. It's a little less concurrent than SubEthaEdit, but for all your applications! Having something like this, system wide on the Mac would be very cool.

And yes, I think the MacBU is at least partially responsible for inspiring the cool new Vista box. :-)

Joel on His MacBook

Joel Spolsky talks about his Mac at home experience:

I have a few complaints though: OS X antialiasing, especially, it seems, with the monospaced fonts, just isn't as good as Windows ClearType. Apple has some room to improve in this area; the fonts were blurry on the edges. Also, I don't understand all these people who say that Macs never crash. I probably had to reboot the MacBook Pro (hard reboot -- hold down the power button for five seconds) about every two hours. It was always the same problem: the Wifi network would go down for a second, something which happens to everyone, but on Windows, it just comes back, while on the Mac, I get a spinning colored ball and everything is frozen. Everything. Forever. If I try to wait it out the beachball will still be spinning the next morning. If anybody is aware of this problem and knows of a specific fix I'd love to hear of it. It was like a Windows 3.1 deja vu all over again thing.

I've only recently been getting the same behavior. I agree with Joel that it has something to do with the wireless, but I see this happen most often when I VPN into work. This didn't happen before 10.4.7, so I think this is a new bug introduced recently. Also, while Apple's sub-pixel text rendering has improved markedly, ClearType on Windows still is just a bit better, but some fonts seem to work much better than others. My basic understanding of how sub-pixel smoothing works leads me to think there are only so many ways to do it, so it's amazing to me that you can notice a difference.