Preference windows were the first big consumer of tabs. And they were largely appropriate. Tabs should group together related functions. Options are typically related. So it’s appropriate.

Excel was also an early user of tabs. Granted, Excel calls them sheets, not tabs, but that’s what they are. It’s already a poor metaphor, as a sheet is a document. It shouldn’t be hidden. However, in Excel, a formula on one sheet can refer to data on another, and so some mechanism for visually integrating the two sheets is necessary. So Excel’s is poorly implemented but necessary.

Tabs lay largely undeveloped for several years after Windows 95’s release. They were used, often even, but their purpose didn’t expand much. Mozilla/Firefox may not have been the first app to add tabs in an unorthodox way, but it was the first to do it with any success. And like Excel and options before it, it was successful not because it let you condense more data into a single window, but because it let you group related data.

However, Firefox changed something. Suddenly everything needs tabs. Instant messaging requires tabs. Toolbars in Office are replaced with tabs. Terminal applications require tabs. FTP clients and file browser need them. Text editors need them

Only, they don’t. Firefox had a legitimate claim, because each page offers so many more links that grouping and organizing the manifold of links makes sense. Instant messaging doesn’t have that kind of exponential information delivery to content with. FTP certainly doesn’t. The code you would read in a text editor could, but again, they’re a poor metaphor.

All these applications have adopted tabs with the goal of saving screen space. The trouble is, managing a user’s screen real estate is not the job of the application. It’s up to the window manager. Expose on OSX exists to manage dozens and dozens of windows at the same time. It’s much less practical with one window per app and 24 tabs per window. The window manager doesn’t know how to arrange an application’s interface. It can only handle the ideas it defines — namely, windows.

Based on this, you would expect Windows applications to be the only ones who fall victim to this trend of tabbification. OSX has Expose. The open source NIXs all have a gluttony of applications, including the Expose-inspired CompizFusion. Windows has tools to do it, but coming naked as it does, it’s not reasonable to expect users to have selected one. Yet, open source applications used predominately on these alternative operating systems feature tabs perhaps more prominently than any commercial Windows application.

So please, stop. Stop taking the easy interface decision way out. Put thought into your application. And know where your application stops and the operating system starts.

The install process, the very first thing you undergo, perfectly exemplifies that model. On one hand, it was significantly faster to install than any other recent version of Windows. On the other hand, there was no available clean install. Previously, the ‘upgrade’ editions were more capable than the ‘full’ version. The upgrade could do a full install, prompting only for media to confirm the upgrade was allowed. Now, the upgrade must be conducted from within an already-installed Windows environment. However, the upgrade it gave me was hardly an upgrade at all. Instead, it was a clean install, with a ‘windows.old’ folder added and my existing Documents and Settings, Program Files and Windows directories moved inside. I could not run any of those applications without first re-installing them. Great upgrade.

The installation process is not something a typical user undergoes particularly often. Yes, even on Windows, an install can last several years. So I moved on.

Home Premium was the flavor I chose to install on the HTPC. It’s hooked up to an HDTV , so the Media Center features seemed to obvious to ignore. The problems were plentiful.

All my music is centralized on an iMac. It’s shared with SAMBA as Music. So it seemed easy enough to add it to the Media Library. Some of it is ITMS-purchased content which only Windows can play. I went in knowing that was the case.

As you’re adding content to the Library, it offers to provide content from a network shared folder. Great! This will be easy. And in fact, it was. At first.

After the first 1400 songs or so were brought in, it got confused. It said it was importing music, but it had stopped. I restarted the computer. No change. So I “removed” that folder. It didn’t really remove. It did give up on trying to pull in more content, but it wasn’t getting rid of what was already there.

Eventually, Google told me that the Media Library was really the Windows Media Player library. I was able to delete the content from there and start again.

I added the folder again. This time, all the music got there. It was playable. MCE finally started to deliver on it’s reputation. Until I rebooted and it claimed the music was no longer there. It was listed, but trying to access it gave me errors. I wiped the library again.

The third time, I mounted the Music folder as a drive, and then added the content as if it was already on the computer. This was the best experience. It found, added and kept accessible all the WMP-playable songs. Even at that point though, album art was gone. My iTunes ratings were gone. Having the remote-controllable full screen music was nice, but it required me to give up too much. So I installed iTunes and accessed the music over iTune’s own shared music feature.

Media Center does have a nice video store function. And that’s about the only mark it earns.

Vista does look better than XP. And I’m not talking about Aero. It’s a 720P 32″ TV. In computer monitor terms, that’s not such a great resolution. 2′ from the screen, 30″ monitors run 2560×1600. This TV is 1366×768, which is roughly a quarter of the pixels. You’d think a pixel would therefore be very large, but from a sofa 10 feet back, text looks really small. XP and Vista both offer font-size scaling. But only Vista offers full DPI adjustments. They make using the computer far more tolerable. They have the side effect of effectivly running the screen at 900×550, which means many applications designed for an 800×600 screen just don’t fit. I can’t fault Vista for that. Vista can be faulted for not handling things better. Even some screens in Vista don’t fit in the scaled environment.

Vista is annoying. I tried to live with UAC. I really did. At work, I use XP, OSX and Linux. Two of those three have account-elevation answers. When OSX wants to do something, it prompts for confirmation. Linux may not even expose something until you attempt it with ’sudo’ prepended. Both of these solutions are tolerable.

UAC is terrible. There are something like 6 different forms of UAC, depending on the severity and trustworthiness of an operation. Some are just “Allow or Deny” operations. Some want a password. Some require you provide another account. Sometimes you’ll get one entering an operation and again on completing it. After about three weeks, I had enough. I disabled it. Vista might as well have entered lockdown. “UAC is disabled, don’t you think you ought to let us re-enable it?” Every 5 minutes. Not running UAC on Vista is even more annoying than dealing with it.

Drivers are in bad shape on Vista. This machine has an old DLink PCI wireless card in it. DLink does not provide Vista drivers for it. Vista, however, happily installed XP drivers with UAC popping up just once. The wireless configuration and network selection screens popped up. Great, it works! I opened Firefox and downloaded sound drivers. Until the first reboot. Then, while the card remained identified and Vista claimed it working, it was completly non-functional. I couldn’t connect to a network. After booting and not touching it, it claimed to be connected to a network, even the right network, but it was non-functional. Eventually, I put an ethernet drop through the wall to keep it network-connected. That did work.

Vista has a touted redesigned network interface. Truth be told, when everything is working on the computer side, it’s nice. If you used any of the Microsoft networking products 3 or 4 years ago, the new network screens resemble the software bundled with their network adapters. While trying to get things working, it’s a big pain.

Sound is one neighborhood Vista gets right. Each application connects independently to the internal mixer. There’s a global volume control. And an application-specific control They did it exactly right.

There’s a pretty generic joystick connected by USB. I plugged it in and it worked. For a couple of months. Now, Windows reads it but when trying to access it in applications, it reads the name as garbage and its completely non-responsive in use. Works find on other computers.

Windows Updates are extremely annoying in Vista. They download automatically (fine) and then tell ME when IT wants them installed. This is a HTPC. It’s not on constantly. It may go a week or more without being turned on. I don’t want the first 10 minutes wasted waiting for updates to install and Vista to reboot.

The start menu is a step backwards. Vista puts a spotlight-like (and spotlight was based on something in the original spin of Vista, fine) box on the bottom of the menu. It’s a combination of the old Start::Run function with a search bar. As an app-launcher, it’s servicable. As a search, it’s slow and has poorly displayed results. Putting the start menu into a tiny tree was a horrible decision.

I can’t sleep the computer without descending into a sub-menu.

Vista is not all bad. Sounds is improved. The control panel is actually functional when task-based. XP’s certainly wasn’t. DPI-scaling is ok. It seems to boot faster. It’s never crashed on me.

But that is a pretty basic list of stuff. When Windows Home Server is released later in the year, I think this box will be re-purposed. And a Mac mini, Apple TV or Tivo 3 Lite is likely to replace this as an HTPC. I know from experience that they actually work. Alternatively, perhaps Microsoft will re-issue my Vista license to use XP Media Center 2005. Seems like it’d be a worthy upgrade to this.

Jobs also confirmed that iPhone won’t support Java. “[It’s] not worth building in,” he said. “Nobody uses Java anymore. It’s this big heavyweight ball and chain.”

Apple Insider on June 12, 2007

About half an hour after first stopping, it made it back. A woman had found them and I collected them. The lenses were fine, but the frame was quite badly bent. I assume they fell off when I put the gas nozzle in and I must have rolled over them as I left. They were fairly new; I got them at Costco in early January.

I stopped at Costco on my way home, to see if they could repair them. The woman started looking at them but the lens popped out. One of the screws on the side that held the frame shut had fractured. “Come back tomorrow,” she said. “I need to drill this screw out.”

So Wednesday evening, I again stopped by. When I asked about picking them up, they were still broke. As soon as the woman realized what was wrong, she grabbed another frame of the same style and transferred my lenses into it. I was fully prepared to spend $100 and wait several days if it had come to that, but instead, she fixed it with new parts right before my eyes. There were no numbers to call, nothing to sign, no RMAs to obtain, she just fixed something that was purely my fault.

Costco may not offer every service under the sun. But of the services they do offer, their execution is unparalleled.

Just now, I was using PhpMyAdmin. It’s not the only application guilty of using reset. More do include it than not. Reset is a control and for some reason, people are driven to use it.

The trouble with it is that its a destructive control and not nearly annoying enough. When you click it, the browser should annoyingly prompt you for confirmation. Perhaps the button should be fuschia and deprive it of its ability to be styled. If its ugly enough, perhaps people will avoid using it, or even better, create a useful version of it tailored to their need. If it’s a cancel button, make it work like a cancel button. Defaulting fields is a useless operation.

This senseless need for an additional button must stop. GUI developers have learned through experience to offer only the functionality you need. You do not see reset buttons in real applications. Why? It’s a useless function. While the web is certainly a different platform than Windows or Mac and therefore has different conventions, reset is no more useful on the web than it would be in a normal application.