Ah, what could have been. I love the premise (superhero who couldn’t care less and is universally hated), and the way it’s presented in the first ten, maybe twenty minutes. What comes afterwards, not so much.

So, fine, PR guy Ray feels sorry for the man (perhaps, too, because he arguably just saved Ray’s life), is unsuccessful himself, and comes up with the pitch of actually making John Hancock well-liked. And his wife isn’t fond of the idea, what with all the collateral damage that is John’s trademark with anything he does. Still amusing.

And amusing, too, to see the alcoholic superhero actually join an anonymous group. For countless meetings, he passes, never speaking up. But this subplot is never resolved: even when finally urged to by the others, he only mutters a few words, not actually introducing himself.

It goes downhill from there. Ray urges Hancock to turn himself in. When, as predicted by Ray, the police actually ask for his help, and he does his job politely and fabulously (and is applauded for it and suddenly a beloved community member), the movie is pretty much over. Well, it should be. Sorry, another 40 minutes to go! Gee, how do we fill them…

Oh yeah! Let’s go all Dogma style, reveal that Jay’s wife is also Hancock’s wife, and that the two are in fact angels. Then, have the two senselessly fight each other and finally explain that, sorry, they can’t be close, lest they lose their powers in favor of mutual affection.

Yeah, that would make sense. Cut!

For a script stuck in development hell for a decade, pathetically little time was apparently put into improving it. The film doesn’t suffer from bad acting or from unoriginality, as is often the case with superhero flicks. It suffers from what’s-going-on incoherency, and from leaving you to wonder just what point it was trying to make.

Self-loathing people just need to disappear for a while as to become recognized as necessary and good? Alcoholism is something you just shed like a piece of skin? Women can be superheroes, too, but they’re too afraid to admit it, and become cranky liars when found out? Who knows.

Congrats on shipping the second beta.¹ It achieves more than I had expected, and makes 7 look more like a stop-gap release.

The Good

• 

  Tabs automatically grouped and colored by “trail”. I can see myself getting used to those fast.
  The first-run assistant is now a dialog, rather than an obnoxious, slow-to-load Web page. It still has too many steps, though.

• Per-tab crash recovery without relaunching. The one thing I’ve always missed from IE in other browsers was its optional ability to launch one process per window, so having one window crash wasn’t quite as bad. They’ve apparently improved this to work for each tab! Nice. Crashes are a reality in any browser engine I’ve tried as soon as it comes to complex pages, whether through JavaScript parsing errors, messy markup or Flash, which is why you see features like Firefox session recovery. This sounds even better.
• Support for DOM Storage. This came as quite a surprise to me. Also sweet: Selectors API. The spec gives the perfect example of what makes this awesome:

  var cells = document.querySelectorAll("#score>tbody>td:nth-of-type(2)");

• 
  

  AwesomeBar-like autocomplete enhancements. Not just for the location bar, but the search bar as well. Really enjoying the way it lets you pick between search providers. They also now have a Firefox-/Safari 3-like Find bar, although the highlighting isn’t quite as pretty.

• Not quite so sure I’ll get used to features like Accelerators and Web Slices (it’s far too early to tell), but they deserve mention anyway for attempting something new.

The Not-So-Good

• Two “Tools” menus. Sure, it’s a beta, but it’s “feature-complete”, which I interpret to mean that all that’s left is bug fixes. You know, like… in a beta. With Internet Explorer 7, they decided to drop the menu bar (with an opt-in means of turning it back on) to bring the app somewhat more in line with the Vista chrome. They eventually reverted that default.

  Now, with IE8, they’re actually adding menus to the toolbar; many of their menu items already exist in the menu bar, but look different (they have no icon), and are sometimes ordered differently. “Compatibility View”, for example, exists in Tools (the menu item), Tools (the toolbar item), Page (another toolbar item) and to the right of the location bar (but only sometimes). Tools (menu) includes “Windows Update”, but Tools (toolbar) does not, whereas Safety does. Conversely, Tools (toolbar) includes “Explorer Bars”, but in the menu bar, that’s in “View”.

  It’s like two UI teams are feverishly competing against each other. FWIW, the toolbar has a much cleaner layout, but resides at a bizarre, completely non-standard and unique place.

  Sure, they put the menu bar back because people expected certain menu items at certain locations. Tough. Clean up the menu bar, but this time, do it properly, and then leave it in. Make the toolbar a toolbar. You know, with commonly-used items. But most of all, stop giving the impression that you can’t make up your mind.

• 

  As much as they have clearly put work into improving Web standards support, 21 is not a good Acid 3 score for a browser scheduled to ship in late 2008. One redditor appropriately jokes that the score hasn’t improved one bit since IE7’s 12; a text reversal bug has merely been introduced.

  And, by the way, I’ll spare you the sight of this blog on IE8. Maybe for 9?

The Truly Ugly

• The update experience sucks. That there’s a document of upgrading guidelines really says it all. Oh, and let me just quote this priceless series of instructions:

  To avoid getting into this situation, we strongly encourage you to follow these steps before installing Internet Explorer Beta 2:

  • Uninstall Windows XP SP3
  • Uninstall IE8 Beta1
  • Re- install Windows XP SP3
  • Install IE8 Beta2

  If you don’t, you won’t be able to downgrade back to IE7, but only if you’ve installed IE 8 beta 1 before installing Windows XP Service Pack 3. Which isn’t an unusual scenario at all.

  Oh, how I wish they could just bundle such betas in a little sandbox-esque environment which would allow for clean uninstalling. You could call it a “folder”, or perhaps a “directory”, and then run multiple versions side-by-side, and even have a tool that lets you conveniently test several different versions. The mind boggles. Microsoft’s solution? A complete Windows XP VM download.

• Microsoft can only be partially blamed for this, but it will be a long ways until we can take much advantage of IE8’s developer improvements. Just this week, I had the frightening experience of a server with 18 important updates that weren’t installed. Needless to say, it also still had IE 6.

Oh, and it doesn’t come with a free pony.

1. By calling this beta “feature-complete”, aren’t they essentially retroactively calling beta 1 an alpha? ↩

Please, please let these screenshots be not fake. (via fscklog)

‘There’s no Nike+ app for it!’ has been one of the few remaining counter-arguments of me buying an iPhone. My late iPod nano has left me with a remaining, unusable (on its own) Nike+ set of pedometer and receiver, and I sure wouldn’t mind being able to use those again. At the same time, replacing my mediocre¹ Sony Ericsson T610 with a more powerful substitute might make sense, especially when that substitute can also serve as my new portable music player. Who doesn’t like convergence, when it’s done really well?

Each day, I spend close to an hour commuting in the train (25-ish minutes back and forth), during which I currently have no Internet connection. Now, if I could spend some of that time more usefully, other than reading unread tweets or solving Sudoku, that might be nice indeed.

Issues with the App Store aren’t the only kind of thing that scare me. It’s hard to believe, but this device would actually be a step back in Bluetooth support compared to my T610. Puzzling, because Apple arguably pioneered Bluetooth support on personal computers, offering a useful solution years before Windows XP finally did with Service Pack 2. Then, in 2007, it quietly dropped Address Book Bluetooth support (such as for sending text messages right to the currently open contact) with OS X 10.5², and shipped the iPhone with only supporting headsets. No A2DP, no file transfer, no modem tethering… I was hoping these were simply features they’d ship after higher priorities have been resolved, but even with the 2.1 previews, we have no improvement. No cabled tethering either, unless you count the unsupported, currently unavailable NetShare app, which is merely a SOCKS 5 proxy, thus hardly offering a full solution.

On the bright side, we have a user interface that doesn’t try to scale down the traditional personal computer desktop to a small screen variant. Many of the controls have clearly been conceived from scratch, which is in stark contrast to most other smartphone UIs.

And then, finally, we have T-Mobile’s rates. I have yet to see a single comparison where any other provider in Germany comes out cheaper (the ones I’ve seen need to go back to arithmetics 101, it seems), but there’s a difference between being competitive and being affordable. You see, before last summer, I didn’t have a cellphone for years. And I kind of liked it that way. Or, shall we say, I didn’t miss it — most of the time. There are those moments where you’re unexpectedly and randomly stuck someplace, sometime, and if you could make just this one phone call, it would fix it all. And with the job, of course, I get called quite a bit more. But overall, I’m not even sure I average one call a week.

So you can perhaps tell I’m not exactly the most likely target audience for this product. I’d use the iPod aspect daily. Same goes, probably, for e-mail and other lightweight Internet-bound apps. And the PIM aspects — calendar, contacts, notes. But as for all things cellular, whether audio or text, I’m just not much of a user.

And so I’m in this unusual situation where what I’d really like to have is unlimited (or a very high limit of) data, but very low limits of calls and messages. Shame I’m in such a minority.

Why not the iPod touch, you ask? Because I’d be back to square zero regarding Internet connectivity in the train. (A 3G ExpressCard plus an iPod nano would be a more feasible alternative to that.)

1. Yes, I know what they say: gift, horse, mouse, yaddayadda. Now that the battery and charging cable have been replaced, it does the basic job fine! ↩
2. Although, at the same time, they did add A2DP support. ↩

Now this is just pure brilliance: Telescopic Text

Via Jesper.

Finally, an adjustable solution.

Kinda makes me want to write telescopic essays.

Matthew Thomas has updated his legendary “Why Free Software usability tends to suck” (and “Why [it] tends to sucks even more”) with another installment, more than six years down the road.

The verdict?

I’ve mellowed a bit since then, and so has the software. Today’s best Free Software applications and operating systems are much better than they were six years ago. But this is largely from slow incremental improvements, and low-level competition between projects and distributors. Major problems with the design process itself remain unfixed.

I’m not sure “a culture in Free Software of design first, code second” is even remotely realistic, but the write-up comes with many constructive ideas, most interesting (and suddenly obvious) of which I found the idea of “annual Free Software design awards”.

After all, the Apple Design Awards are exactly that. Highlighting extraordinary results makes for a great incentive to try harder (when you don’t win), or book a trip to Malibu (when you do).