I really like reading the Cultured Code blog about Things.app. It’s probably my very favorite application on OSX (after Firefox, naturally), and after Firefox & Mail, I probably spend more time using Things and managing my various to do items than anything else.

update: oops, their blog is actually here. The other link is a bit of a special case. Both are great.

Well, hmm. Featured on Fake Steve Jobs today — my dad will be so proud. No, seriously, Dad loves Fake Steve. Not sure how to respond to someone who’s wishing you a big dose of crabs — case of crabs? not sure what the word is there — so I’ll just go with “Hey, thanks!”

Anyway, lots and lots of interesting conversations going on about this the past few days — Mozilla is in an unusual position in that we are a mission-driven organization, but also have an actual product in the market that does compete with commercial organizations. Because of that competition, I think much of what we do & say gets viewed through a revenue/marketshare lens, regardless of intent. It’s easy to fall into that line of thinking — the world is geared towards it. And so it’ll continue to be a challenge for us, as Mozilla, to point out practices that are troubling in products that are competitive.

I think that no matter what we say, we’ll get articles and blog posts written about our motivations and whether they’re related to revenue.

But we’ll continue to make decisions and build products based on user experience first and let folks make their own minds up regarding our motives. That’s the way Mozilla has always been, seems to me.

update:  beltzner points out that Zoidberg is really more of a lobster-oid. To quote the good sideways-walking doctor himself: “Now Zoidberg is the popular one!“

Keeping software up to date is hard — hard for consumers to understand what patches are for, how to make sure they’re up to date.

It’s also critically, crucially important for the security of end users and for the security of the Web at large that people stay current. If people don’t update software regularly, it is impossible for them to remain safe; good software developers are creating improvements constantly. That’s why Mozilla spends so much time making sure our own Automatic Update Service works, and why we spend so much time agonizing over the user interface for the updates. We look at the data every time we do an update; we obsess about what we call “uptake rates” — the percentage of Firefox users who are on the most current version of the browser a day or a week or a month after release. As a result, Firefox users are incredibly up to date, and adopt very quickly.

There’s an implicit trust relationship between software makers and customers in this regard: as a software maker we promise to do our very best to keep users safe and will provide the quickest updates possible, with absolutely no other agenda. And when the user trusts the software maker, they’ll generally go ahead and install the patch, keeping themselves and everyone else safe.

Anyone who uses iTunes on Windows has Apple Software Update installed on their machines, which does just what I’ve described above: it checks for new patches available for Apple-produced software on your Windows machine, alerts the user to the availability, and allows updates to be installed. That’s great — wonderful, in fact. Makes everyone more likely to have current, patched versions of Apple’s software, and makes everyone safer.

Here’s screen that comes up on Windows XP if you’ve got iTunes installed:

(photo credit CNET)

The problem here is that it lists Safari for getting an update — and has the “Install” box checked by default — even if you haven’t ever installed Safari on your PC.

That’s a problem because of the dynamic I described above — by and large, all software makers are trying to get users to trust us on updates, and so the likely behavior here is for users to just click “Install 2 items,” which means that they’ve now installed a completely new piece of software, quite possibly completely unintentionally. Apple has made it incredibly easy — the default, even — for users to install ride along software that they didn’t ask for, and maybe didn’t want. This is wrong, and borders on malware distribution practices.

It’s wrong because it undermines the trust that we’re all trying to build with users. Because it means that an update isn’t just an update, but is maybe something more. Because it ultimately undermines the safety of users on the web by eroding that relationship. It’s a bad practice and should stop.

[I'll make 2 points that I want to make very clear: (1) this is not a criticism of Safari as a web browser in any way, and (2) I have no objections to the basic industry practice of using your installed software as a channel for other software. This is specifically a criticism of the way they're using the updating system. I'd much prefer to be writing about Firefox, but this practice hurts everyone and is important to note.]

The physical characteristics are all completely wonderful. It’s light, it’s thin (so thin that it’s actually hard to find a good bag to carry it around in), and the feel of it is just terrific. It’s a clearly different feel to carry it around, and when it’s closed on a table it tends to disappear. In general, it just gets in the way less than most other computer technology does. It’s hard to overstate how good the physicality of the machine is — it’s the best feeling machine I’ve ever worked on.

The screen is incredibly, incredibly bright. And I’ve come to really like the flat chiclet keyboards that the MacBooks (but not the MBPs) ship with. I also really like the SSD in mine, although, as reported many places elsewhere, it doesn’t seem worth the $900 premium — but in my experience, in addition to making the machine mostly totally silent, it makes application startup & switching feel very very snappy, even on the slower MBA processor. And overall, the machine runs much cooler than my last Intel MBP — never gets too hot.

I’m a little indifferent to the multitouch trackpad — it’s not super-easy to map gestures to command key combos, so only a few applications have support presently — which means that it’s not yet becoming muscle memory for me to use pinching & swiping. Maybe once the new MBPs with multitouch become more prevalent we’ll start seeing better support.

It’s consistently annoying that there’s no battery life indicator on the outside of the laptop — so I have to open the machine to figure out if I’ve got any juice left.

But the main problems, really, are that (1) there’s very little disk space, and (2) the ports & connectivity are very minimal. Disk space is self-explanatory — with 64 GB, I haven’t really fully moved in — have left most of my music and all of my movies and photos off the machine so far, not to mention all my virtual machines. That’s causing me to move more aggressively to using web applications for everything — I now use Pandora for most of my music listening (and have discovered a couple of great bands already), Google Reader for my newsfeeds (in particular because it lets me read news in a synchronized way on my iPhone), and mint.com for our finances (no more Quicken, which I was running Windows in a VM for). And for someone like me who works at a Web company, it’s a great prop (“runs Firefox great! what else do you need??”). [and, btw, it does indeed run Firefox 3 Beta 4 wonderfully -- it's a really nice release that I think everyone is going to be very happy with.]

The ports are a bit of a bigger problem. No optical drive, so far, is okay, although it makes it pretty tough to do things like recover from a catastrophic failure. We have an external drive at the office, which I’ll undoubtedly have to use. The remote disk stuff is neat, but not particularly performant. Sort of have to ante up for the ethernet adapter, too, and it’ll help if you get an external USB hard drive — since there’s no firewire, you can’t start this machine up in target disk mode (and can’t connect to one in that mode), so overall it’s a big PITA to get even a few GB moved around.

None of that stuff is a huge problem for me, for a couple of reasons. First, I’ve had a lot of Macs over a lot of years, and I’m resourceful (relative to the mass market) in terms of getting outcomes that I want in over-constrained situations (like no ethernet). More importantly, though, I’ve got more machines around when I need them — an iMac in the office at home, a community superdrive at work, etc. Lots of folks have written that the MBA is a great secondary machine for traveling & such — that’s not my situation — mine is the primary machine, but I’ve got enough supporting infrastructure around to make it really work.

Anyway, I like it, and it’s making a big difference in how much junk I end up carting around — it’s way smaller, lighter, and still provokes double takes at how thin it is. So far so good.

Now when I hover over “Monday November 5th at 2:00pm”, I get a clickable menu with 2 items: “Create New iCal Event…” and “Show Date in iCal”. Selecting the first gives me this menu, mostly filled in with all the right information (note that it even picked up San Francisco as a location later in the sentence – amazing! – even though it didn’t understand enough about the context to get it right):

For my money, this is just one of the coolest things ever. Works for contact information, too — tends to work well on the contact blocks at the bottom of peoples’ e-mails. (Although I think I’d like contacts to be somewhat more automatic — I’d like to just have a big always updating database of all the contact info in all my mail all the time, synced to my iPhone — so while I think the data detector tech is really neat here, I think the usage context is a bit different.)

performance seems really good — most things are snappier than with 10.4 (i think). lots of little upgrades that make things better — smarter finder windows, better wireless UI, stuff like that.

the visual redesigns are driving me a little bit crazy — in particular all the stuff where they’re showing off new effects. the sort-of-but-not-really-translucent menu bar is driving me a little bit crazy, but the translucent menus everywhere are the most annoying thing in the whole system — i just don’t understand why anyone thinks that’s a good idea. they’re not super-translucent, but enough so that the stuff behind them really impacts legibility of menu choices. it’s a bummer.

the new dock is mostly just silly. shadows & reflections everywhere. shiny effects, but mostly distracting, honestly.

calendar has been pretty completely reworked, and it’s a much more refined look now. i’m finding it not quite as readable as it used to be because there’s no active calendar notion anymore (where the appointments would be dark color backgrounds with bold white text) but just the active item. but on the whole, better.

mail has gotten a lot better, i think. more refined visually, although still with the icky lozenge buttons. you can drag top level folders around in the sidebar now, which is much better. there’s an activity display that tells you what’s happening on the network now (very helpful). i like the RSS subscription capability — i’ve subscribed to a small number of feeds that i treat more like my e-mail workflow, and it’s working great, although html display doesn’t seem to be working. for me, the jury is out on To Dos and Notes. we’ll see. data detectors are neat (they give context menus on things like phone numbers & addresses, but are a little subtle for me — i keep forgetting they’re there.

i’m unsure about time machine yet. backed up over the weekend, but don’t have enough incrementals to know whether i like the user interface or not yet. (early best guess: i think they’ve done an admirable job in making backup easy to understand, but their tools are miserable for actually finding something you’ve lost.)

coverflow is visually stunning, and basically useless. not just in itunes, but everywhere, in my opinion.

i’ll have more thoughts before too long. but for now, seems like a good upgrade — doesn’t yet feel like a completely new OS. feels decidedly incremental, although i think that will start to change as new applications get released from 3rd party developers using things like Core Animation.

i also think, fwiw, that the user interface on the Mac is both good and starting to get a little bit confused. toolbars are incredibly inconsistent, even from one Apple application to another, let alone 3rd parties. i think it’s going to get a lot more jumbled for a while, as developers start to throw in HUDs and animations for everything, and as we start to get more and more direct manipulation with rich media types. (in the coverflow view of the new finder, for example, you can flip through the pages of PDFs, play movies, etc.) i have a feeling there’s going to be a large amount of experimentation with new styles of interaction now. i think, also, that it’s going to be influenced more & more by flingable interactions like on the iPhone.

anyway, so far so good.

Pages, the word processor/page layout application sucks less than it did before, and is mostly usable now, even in track changes mode. I mostly don’t need to open up Word anymore (painful on Rosetta) at all. There are a few things that don’t work quite right, but mostly it’s acceptable.

Numbers is basically a toy. Math performance is very very slow; interoperability with Excel is crappy. No pivot tables, only 150 numerical functions, and basically the quirkiest spreadsheet you’ve ever seen. On the other hand, like the other 2 apps in the suite, it creates documents that look beautiful. I think it’s basically a presentation tool for calculations.

For $79, Keynote is worth it by itself. If you’re not doing complicated spreadsheets or lots of contract work, I think it’s getting to the point that with iWork and googleApps, there’s really no reason to buy Office. It’ll be a close decision when Office 2008 comes out for the Mac. I’m honestly not sure I’ll get it. From time to time I need to do complicated contract work (lots and lots of revisions — I’m unsure that I trust Pages for this at present), and sometimes I need to throw a few tens of thousands of rows into a spreadsheet to do some analysis (and I don’t think there’s any way to do that right now that isn’t Excel).

But for 95% of everything I do, I’ll not use Office again to create new documents or share them with others. I think that train has left the station.

[a slight aside: I actually really like the ribbon UI in Office 2007 on Vista -- I think that's a good innovation (and one that will look completely out of place on the Mac). i also think that the newest version of Excel is fantastic. but not fantastic enough to really want it, and not fantastic enough to justify 4x the price of iWork or an infinite pricing markup on google spreadsheets.]

but my first thoughts are these:

1) keynote is mostly the same. the auto-alpha stuff is going to be really, really handy for cleaning up graphics

2) pages seems to have been considerably de-sucked. in fact, it may not actually suck anymore, although i’m not prepared to pronounce it non-sucking. word processing mode is a huge leap forward, if not actually an innovation, and change tracking looks like it works (and it looks beautiful, fwiw)

3) numbers is going to take some time to get my head around. i *think* it’s a spreadsheet that’s more about communicating than figuring, but we’ll see. the expressiveness there is shockingly good, and, as usual, it looks fantastic.

anyway, more soon. this release is going to be a little brutal for the Mac BU of Microsoft.

(i still would really like these rich client apps to auto-save to something like Google Apps on the server side.)

I have a feeling that it’s going to cause a very funny consequence — I think that all sorts of software/hardware vendors are going to start making their UIs flickable, flingable, draggable — and, very often, in incredibly inappropriate ways. Sort of like when everyone thought that “drag and drop” was always appropriate for everything, when sometimes it just wasn’t (isn’t).

Anyway, after 3 weeks, I have a high level of attachment to the iPhone. I’m about to get on a plane to London, and will need to switch back to my Blackberry Pearl — more about that in a posting soon — and already I’m feeling a little sad about it.

Hmmm… There seems to be a bug where I can’t see all my tags, so this one will be uncategorized for a while.

I’ll not mince words: it’s not a great experience. I’ve had probably every sort of device since the Newton Messagepad — handwriting entry systems like that, Graffiti-based systems like the Palm, full keyboards like the Treo, phone keyboards with T9, and most recently the unusual 2 letters per key Blackberry Pearl keyboard.

I’ve never really been a very fast typist with any of these — and with the iPhone’s virtual keyboard, I’m getting to where I’m generally as quick as with my Pearl, but it’s pretty inconsistent. My left thumb overcompensates a little bit — I end up always tapping to the right of where I mean to — and both my thumbs end up obscuring a lot of the keyboard, of course — which matters especially much in this case because there’s no tactile feedback.

But I find that mostly I’m unsure of what I’m typing, and as a result, I’m tentative about it. Apple’s done an interesting thing to address this: they enlarge the image of each key after you type it so you can be sure about what you’re typing.  That definitely helps to know what letter you type — it helps a bunch, actually. But it interferes some cognitively with another more important piece of the experience: auto-correct.

Auto-correct — the phone knowing that I didn’t mean to type “Qppke”, but instead “Apple” — is really, really great. It’s the best that I’ve ever used. I think it’s partly because of the large dictionary and partly because they’re doing something with key proximity — knowing that “Q” is close to “A”, for example. (I’m not sure they really do that, but I suspect they do.) And the way that they’re showing auto-correct — with an as-you-type suggestion box showing up under the word you’re typing — works really well — tap on the box or the space bar to accept the suggestion, hit backspace or tap on the original word to keep what you’re typing. (Tapping on the word you’re typing that the iPhone doesn’t recognize will also add it to the dictionary for the future, which is great, except that I just added “Qppke” to my dictionary and don’t have any idea how to take it out again.)

The conflict that occurs is this: my eyes don’t know what to look at — the animated images of the keys that I’m typing or the constant stream of suggested words to fix my typos. So I end up moving my eyes back and forth from one to the other — which I’m pretty sure is slowing me down. I have a feeling that if the keys weren’t animated, I’d instead stay focused on the text entry and be more efficient, but I don’t know that for sure.

Apple & apologists routinely say that the virtual keyboard is great because of the auto-correct experience — but it seems to me that they’re completely orthogonal to each other — the auto-correct system could be implemented with a physical keyboard just as well.

I think things will also get a lot better when more of the applications on the phone will work in landscape mode — right now it’s mostly Safari & Photos that work that way — because a wider keyboard is really what you need. But it doesn’t work in mail currently, so that’s something for the future.

Another quibble with the keyboard is that the “.” and the “,” are hidden under the “.?123″ mode key. I use both those keys all the time, and to have them be on the secondary keyboard is a little bit rough. Once you’re in that punctuation & number mode, though, you can get to a third screen full of symbols like international currency & such — that’s a decidedly useful thing.

On the whole, for me, it’s a subpar keyboarding experience, but one that I’m willing to put up with in order to get the large screen. I have a tough time imagining that most of the Blackberry set will ever be comfortable with it, though.

having said that, the phone is showing 14 hours 18 minutes of standby time (which might be right, since it’s about when i woke up this morning — very possible i started using it right away), and 6 hour 19 minutes of use, which i guess includes everything.

26 minutes on the phone, and about 6.3 MB of data received over EDGE and 1.1 MB sent.

we’ll see what happens in the days ahead (and how much longer the phone lasts now), but i think this may be a problem for me. today, like all mondays, was an active day — i didn’t get to sit much at my desk, and so was checking my mail a fair bit (and doing demos), but after about 4p, i found myself really watching the battery meter a lot and thinking that if i had been talking on the phone more or using the ipod more that it’d be even lower.

i have a couple of ideas on why it depleted so quickly — i have 2 e-mail accounts set to check every 15 minutes, and mostly stayed within WiFi range of the office all day (and i have it set up to auto-join WiFi networks that it recognizes).

i think the way the WiFi works is that it connects when it needs to (to check e-mail or something) and then disconnects after a period of inactivity — if WiFi drains significant power (and that’s my guess) then i may have effectively kept the WiFi power drain on for most of the day. i may move e-mail checks to every 30 minutes and change the brightness setting a little bit for tomorrow — that would reduce the load, i think.

anyway, we’ll see, but a little troubling for the first day. lots of other things i noticed — mostly i really like using it, and the pictures of my family on the main screen & when they call really brighten my day — they’re just shown in a vivid, fun way.

so hopefully i’ll be able to figure out a way to get the battery life more workable…

1) i really miss a few things from other devices — even back on my original palm pilot, there was a row of 4 application buttons — you could assign them to any applications. the iPhone would really benefit from those — 1 button access to calendar, mail, phone and ipod (or whatever 4 apps you want). i think there’s plenty of room on the front to accommodate, and it’d help a lot.

2) i haven’t done a lot of testing on this yet, but seems like when you wake up the phone, it’s connected to EDGE (naturally, since to receive calls you’ve got to always be talking with cell towers), but the WiFi takes maybe 3-5 seconds to wake up. so for a guy like me, who wakes it up to check e-mails in a sadly OCD quick way, sometimes i get to checking mail before the faster connection kicks in, which results in a slower e-mail checking time than if i had taken longer to do the…um…what do you call these things…gestures? swipes? you know what i mean.

3) it’s killing me a little bit that you can’t rearrange icons on the home screen — that would help a lot very quickly.

i set up a Flickr contact this morning so that i can send pictures that i take to flickr automatically — but haven’t gotten the flickr2blog stuff to work right yet. will play with that later.