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Browsers? Yes, browsers

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Don’t just bitch and moan about the Microsoft monoculture — do something about it! Ditch your no-improvements-since-before-the-dotcom-boom Internet Explorer Web browser. You’ll be affected by fewer viruses and you’ll discover that software didn’t have to stop dead in its tracks in 1997.

I’ve always been partial to Opera, a great little browser out of Scandinavia, available in free (ad-supported) or paid versions. But if you’re allergic to ads and don’t feel like paying a paltry sum for the piece of software you probably use the most, there is also an entirely free browser that is much, much better than IE: the open-source Mozilla Firefox has just released its “0.9” version.

The numbering suggests it’s not “done” yet, but the Mozilla people are just hugely conservative with their labeling. Firefox is ready for prime time, from what I can tell, and it’s super: fast, compact and full of features you just can’t get from Microsoft. It’s also available on all the major platforms (Windows, Linux, OSX).

Steve Jobs at ‘D’

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Steve Jobs spoke here this morning and introduced a nifty new product, Airport Express — an all-white plug-in Wifi adapter that’s little bigger than a cigarette pack and doubles as a music bridge between your computer and your stereo. For $129. Available in July. “This doesn’t solve every problem in the world,” Jobs said. “But it’s very very simple, and it works.”

Here’s some of what Jobs had to say:

“Longhorn’s basically a copy of Mac OSX a year ago. Microsoft is chasing our tail again, and that’s kind of fun.”

“What Apple’s great at is inventing cool technology and making it easy to use.”

“A lot of traditional consumer electronics companies haven’t grokked software.”

Mossberg asked Jobs the same question he asked Gates — whether the computer will be displaced at the center of consumers’ digital worlds. Jobs had a similar answer: “Where are you going to put your 5000 digital photos? Or your 5000 songs? You’re not going to put them on your cell phone.”

“The hardest part of making smart products is figuring out something that people want to do.”

Jobs said he’d called the Kerry campaign up to “offer them help on advertising” and a week later he read that he was serving as an “economic adviser.” He wouldn’t comment further on politics: “It’s a personal thing, not an Apple thing.”

About the gulf between Hollywood and Silicon Valley: “Technology people don’t understand the process these creative companies go through to build the things they produce. And the creative people don’t appreciate how creative technology is.”

“The biggest threat to Hollywood is not the Internet but the DVD burners.”

Bill Gates at ‘D’

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[Internet access here at D is really flaky, so I’ll see how much I can get posted here over the next day or so.]

The dinner at the Four Seasons Aviara Sunday night was accompanied by wines selected by the Wall Street Journal’s wine columnists, John Brecher and Dorothy Gaiter, so when Kara Swisher kicked off the Bill Gates interview with a serious question about security, Gates offered a crack about what a great question that was after three glasses of wine — and then delivered an anecdote about Warren Buffett, at a dinner where the costly wines had been seriously fussed over, covering his glass as the waiter came by to pour and remarking, “I’ll take the cash.”

Gates seemed far smoother and more relaxed than on previous occasions that I’ve heard him speak,and better able to parry challenges without getting that impatient, “why are you bothering my superior intelligence?” look of yore. Either age has mellowed him, or he’s just grown into the role of Richest Geek in the World. Here are some of the things he said:

“Longhorn [Microsoft’s next revamp of Windows] is about structured information. The world’s not just about text lookup. Longhorn brings the idea of an object-oriented database to the wayinformation is stored.”

“Already there’s a class of users who basically stay in e-mail. So when they go out of e-mail to the shell, they get disoriented.”

The Journal’s Walt Mossberg asked whether Longhorn was more radical a change than Windows XP or Windows 95: “Radical sounds negative. It’s just way more of a switch in terms of the model of how you think about data.”

Eventually, “Search will be based on semantics, not just keyword matching.”

Users will benefit from the “galvanizing effect” of Microsoft’s competition with Google in search.

About digital music, the Ipod and ITunes: Mossberg asked, “Can you succeed in music without a hot device?”

Gates: “We’ll have dozens of hot devices… We just have a different model.”

Mossberg: “That’s fine, but it’s a failed model at the moment.”

Mossberg: As digital devices proliferate, will they remove the PC from the center of things?

Gates: “Where else are you going to organize your memories?”

Gates said he devotes 10 hours a week to his foundation work. “That’s the time other people are mowing the lawn.”

Mossberg: “So you just let it grow?”

Gates: “Somebody comes and does it, I don’t know how. Maybe it’s astroturf.”

John Battelle has a fuller report on Gates’ comments on Google here.

Random links

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Fascinating tale of documentary maker Errol Morris’s “Interrotron” device, which makes his interviewees appear to be addressing the camera directly, while they’re really talking to a teleprompter-like image of him as the interviewer (Link courtesy Kottke)

Dan Bricklin reports on an interesting onstage conversation between Malcolm Gladwell and Scott Kirsner.

Transcript of brilliant Bruce Sterling rant, turning the saga of an open party he throws each year at South by Southwest into a parable for Internet development, electronic security and more.

Microsoft Word’s Baroque era

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For those of us working primarily on the Web, Microsoft Word’s various “Smart” features (smart quotes, auto correct, auto format, etc.) have always been hydras whose heads one had to repeatedly lop off. Even if you didn’t work in Word yourself, colleagues would submit copy composed in it, and you’d have to deal with the problem of introducing junk characters. Some of us have become reasonably familiar with exactly which boxes and buttons you need to press to “web-safe” a Word installation.

Now Microsoft seems to have grown hip to how frequently we have to tell Word to “stop doing” the things its programmers have spent years enabling it to do. This is from today’s New York Times review by David Pogue of a new version of Microsoft Office for Mac:

  Smart Buttons, descended from a similar feature in Word for Windows, are tiny pop-up menus that appear in your text whenever Word has something to offer you. For example, one appears whenever Word auto-formats something you’ve typed (a chronic sore spot with Microsoft customers): turning a Web address into a difficult-to-edit Web link, for example, or automatically numbering a list. You’ve always been able to turn off these intrusions in a dialog box or undo individual changes by pressing Command-Z. But Smart Tags put “Undo” and “Stop doing this” commands right in front of you where you can’t miss them.

I broke out laughing when I read this. Consider the baroque logic: Microsoft has now reached that rarefied state of software existence in which it can offer “improvements” in the form of new features that make it easier to turn off those annoying “improvements” of yesteryear that were hitherto too difficult to discard!

But how deep within Word’s menus must one hunt to turn off “Smart Buttons” if they get annoying? And is anyone at Microsoft going to flip the page of the newspaper section in which Pogue’s review appears and read “A Design Epiphany: Keep It Simple”?

Random notes

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I noticed with some amusement and glee on Monday that the Wall Street Journal published a list of the fastest-growing employment sectors in the latest jobs report, and what was at the head? “Internet content producer”! OK, it’s not 1999 all over again, and thank goodness for that; the actual number of new jobs in the field (2000) was small. But hey — after what this business has been through, any good news is good news.

I haven’t gotten it together to spend the money on one of those PC-to-stereo bridges that lets you stream music from your computer to your home audio systems, but when I do, I’ll look first and most closely at the Slim Devices Squeezebox — not only because it looks like a good product, but because the company that makes it lets anyone play with the open-source software that runs it: Slimserver. I’ve been having fun with Slimserver: You install it on the computer that has your music library and you can then access your library from any remote computer with a decent Internet connection. Requires a little effort to get the hang of it, then seems to work like a charm. A browser interface lets you control what’s playing. Very cool.

I’ve turned on “item level titles and links” in Radio Userland, so instead of handcoding my little headlines, they should appear in RSS 2.0 feeds as properly coded titles. You can do this too — just look under Radio’s preferences under “item level titles and links.” Thanks to Tim Bishop for the tip.

Another useful piece of open-source software I’m making a note of (thanks to Jon Udell for the pointer): Audacity, an audio-file editor.

Free Press milestone memories

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The Wall Street Journal Online published a good piece earlier this week by Carl Bialik capturing a small but significant (and, to me, personally important) moment of Net history. Ten years ago this coming November, I had my first real experience of Web publishing as part of the team that created the San Francisco Free Press, a short-lived by valuable experiment in publishing an online newspaper during a strike against the S.F. Chronicle and the Examiner (where I then worked). Carl quotes me a couple of times, noting that, for me, the choice between (a) marching a picket line in circles while chanting slogans and (b) working on editing and posting files to the Web was a no-brainer. Like just about everyone else quoted in the Journal article, I told Bialik that the Free Press experience changed my life. Afterwards, the return to the Examiner newsroom — the strike only lasted two weeks — was an immense anti-climax, and there was no question in my mind that I’d be moving my career on to the Web as fast as I could manage.

J.D. Lasica’s book

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“Editing by committee” is a phrase that strikes terror in many writers’ minds, but J.D. Lasica is unfazed. He’s working on a book, Darknet, on a subject dear to my heart: “exploring the idea that digital technologies are empowering people to create, reuse and reinvent media.” And now he’s posting the book, chapter by chapter, on a wiki, which means that anyone can go in and edit the book. Take a look and wade in with your (metaphorical) red pen.

Rip this joint

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For years I was a happy user of MusicMatch to organize and play my digital music collection, and I even paid the company for “lifetime upgrades” to its software. A few months ago MusicMatch did one of these “upgrades,” apparently to support its new online music store, which I have no interest in, and somehow the software developers broke the product. It crashed on my Windows 2000 box, a lot. It froze, it coughed, it was generally unreliable.

MusicMatch provides one of those “automatic update” services so I crossed my fingers and prayed that its programmers would fix the bugs fast. And to their credit, they took care of a lot of the problems. But one stubborn bug remained: I couldn’t get the program to rip my CDs without freezing after one or two songs. Since my habit these days is to rip a CD as soon as I buy it, this was a disaster.

This weekend I finally gave up on MusicMatch and decided to spend $20 on the latest Real jukebox, even though that meant changing habits. Sure enough, Real ripped my CDs just fine. Ironically, a day later MusicMatch updated itself again — and fixed the ripping problem.

Frustratingly, MusicMatch offers almost nothing in the way of serious, in-depth technical documentation on its Web site — or if they do, I couldn’t find it. Consumer software: still a mess!