You try to get through airport security with that one.

Uru doesn’t have more drama, it just has less of everything else.

I do think that’s part of the problem, but Blade is ignoring the powerful force of frustration: a lot of people would like for Uru to be a smashing success, but have lost faith that this is even possible any more at this point. Rationally, they should leave and move on, but instead, many let out their frustrations on each other.

Allow me, then, to instead enumerate some of the things which aren’t problematic; not so much because I believe it to result in helpful comments, but more for the observed cathartic effect.

In September of last year, my brother pointed me to an internship offering at a small Windows software development shop in Bremen. I’m more of a Mac developer, but I try to be open to all platforms. I was intrigued by the opportunity, especially considering that, since the middle of ‘05, I hadn’t really done much to push my life forward. Graduation. Canada. A few days of fame with a little Mac freeware. Successful launch of another Myst website. Diabetes. Now, a job.

As they have told me much later, they were somewhat unsure about me. Not so much my developer skills, but my social ones. This didn’t come as a surprise to me; however, very few software developers manage to have both.

On the third day, I was told I’ve exceeded their expectations; over the coming weeks, I was pressed to decide on when I would start full-time; beyond that, they wanted me to start an apprenticeship. Three months of interning; a bit over half a year of full-time; now two or three years as an apprentice ahead of me.

Can’t complain, right?

No, the job has been great. I’m very thankful for everyone involved that I got this far, and I think it’s safe to assume that I still have plenty of potential ahead of me at that company. Beyond that, I should be just fine elsewhere, too. There are no reasonable grounds to believe that I’m particularly bad as a software developer¹.

We’ve had a difficult project which — just my kind of luck — I’ve been working on almost from day one; it’s become increasingly stressful. Customer provides incomplete specifications; project lead is overwhelmed and unable to press the customer for more detailed information; I waste far too much time developing in the wrong direction. One thing after another, we miss deadline after deadline; worst yet, we eventually decide to go live anyway (due to pressure from the customer, of course), thus multiplying the problems as what would otherwise be minor bugs now start causing huge amounts of incorrect database rows. It’s manageable, but not fun. Lessons learnt from it? Yes: when my gut tells me that we need more information before starting to implement something, I should at least try to press for just that. My gut would have been very right, but my mind told me that I was new still and didn’t understand the process well enough. Turns out I understood it better than the others did.

As the stress kept piling on, I had to move other projects aside, which made things difficult for everyone in the company, as customers complained about the backlog (which nobody could really be blamed for — certainly not me). It was, as two people close to me had been saying for quite a while, getting time for a vacation.

One of the two invited me over to her place, and it seemed just the right idea. Since early 2006, I hadn’t gone anywhere, and even before that, it’s hard to say what recent trip of mine qualified for a “true” vacation. London in fall 2004, perhaps? Now, having spent about 9 months doing increasingly difficult (though still well within my capabilities) work, a feeling of exhaustion started filling me. The sense of accomplishment (I have a job? Check. The bosses respect me? Double-check. I’ve been getting great feedback from some customers? Triple-check.) was still there; the feeling that I could go on and on like this, however, was not. No, I did need a break, and now I have it.

For a while, I had fooled myself that this wasn’t necessary; some false pride made me not even bother to ask my bosses. I’m glad I got over that. Yet as the date of departure drew closer, something seemed off. I was not truly looking forward to this vacation. Part of it was just the anxiety over the whole flying-shebang: security theater, possibly forgetting to pack something important, knee pain during the transatlantic flight, not finding my friend at the airport. But there would, I’m afraid, be another part.

The theater was fine. The US has two fingerprints of mine now, as well as an iris scan. The customs officer was direct, but kind, finishing with “Thanks, have fun!” when I had revealed to him that my friend and I shared a passion for Myst. The pain was there, but bearable. The plane had in-seat video, with actually a rather good selection. I watched P.S. I Love You and Juno, both of which, while far from great, felt worthwhile and definitely a good way to forget the agony of limited legroom. Frankfurt airport was somewhat confusing, though most of that stemmed from me having arrived very early from Bremen.

And then I got out of customs. My friend was waiting right there.

I could be all dramatic and say “…and that’s when things went downhill!”, but that would be terribly unfair. She and her husband have been kind hosts, and I’m not sure any kind of preparation on their part could have changed things.

Sometimes in my life, the pieces just come together as if they had always been meant to. I had always wanted to work in a software company with a relative lack of hierarchy and a rather strong emphasis on the individual, where I could shine, and I got exactly that. And yet, a year ago, even mere days before I started, it was virtually inconceivable to me that this would actually happen. It seemed but a dream, or an ideal; not a reality. Still, it happened.

Perhaps one day, I will look back at this vacation and discover that every single moment in it was meaningful. Or, more likely, I will find out that every moment was actually an opportunity (that I did not use) to accomplish something. But for now, I’m lost. I can hear the voices of “just do something!” from everywhere, but they’re not helping, and while some may take this as an insult, I don’t mean it like that when saying that those people miss the point.

What I regard as the common picture of a vacation is that you hop on some chartered plane to a tropical island, drink cocktails and read magazines in the whirlpool, then fly back. Oh, dang, I forgot the mandatory massage. That doesn’t appeal to me. At least I think it wouldn’t; I don’t truly know, never having done this. I have my moments where I want to give that a shot, just like I sometimes feel like climbing Mt. Everest, skiing in the Alps or going on a safari, but I think that’s a world too foreign for me to spend much time in.

The trouble is, as much as I believe to understand what I don’t want from a vacation, I have a hard time defining what does excite me. Meeting a friend that I hardly ever get to see in real life? Sure, that is a great thing, but we talk almost every day anyway, so what is there to say? Learning or practising something I haven’t done in a while or ever before strikes my fancy, but not enough to motivate me all the way through. I’ve started a small project in Visual Studio, only to give up soon. Started writing something in Ruby, but only for two days. Wanted to practice my flowchart-fu, but, no dice; it just isn’t enough fun.

I can push myself to work a bit on various projects here and there, or to write posts like this very one, but all the while, this feeling of “what’s the use?” comes creeping over me.

Carpe diem

A few weeks ago, someone well-known in the Myst community died. If you knew him, you’ll know whom I’m referring to; otherwise, it isn’t relevant. His death was a tragic reminder of You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, or, the shorter version: carpe diem.

Seizing the day is a motto that should matter to everyone; indeed, I try to remind myself of it.

Rather fortuitously, that was the very subject of a kids’ sermon last Sunday that I happened to be at: make as much as possible of the time you have, for it is limited. Whether that’s a concept whose consequences children can understand, I do not know, but I appreciate the attempt to emphasize it from early on.

Maximizing the time at hand requires potential, and I do believe that to be an asset of mine. It also, however, requires aspirations. What do I want to do with the time?

I can define long-term goals. Stable job. (Check.) Happy relationship. Move out / apartment / house. Kids / pets? Company of my own?

Not very useful. What do I want in the short term? What are some baby steps that I can do right now, beyond just sitting on my behind twiddling thumbs, wasting time sighing over having wasted time?

Check out random cafés hoping to score a chick? That is so not me. Walk around the block hoping for inspiration? Yeah, does the trick every now and then. But there’s no real bigger picture to that one.

Routine

I’m actually not interested in a normal life. I’ll admit that much. Normal has very negative connotations to me; normal means shedding the definition of who I am; I believe so even though I do not know what that definition is.

Getting a system, a routine, a form of stability into my life was crucial, and the job played a big part in that, but there is something destructive to it as well: it encourages me to settle for less than there is to my life. Don’t settle. Not yet. I’m nowhere near that.

Yes, I’ve made progress. But even though it has given me some temporary sensations of happiness, yes, even of satisfaction, it doesn’t cut it. I want more.²

I’ve had happy moments in the past. Is it too much to ask that I know how to, to use programmer jargon, ‘reproduce’ them? Probably. But perhaps I should know how to encourage them? To increase their likelihood?

I’m not getting a clear answer on whether I need to work harder towards my goals — which would seem to make sens — , or, in a vaguer sense, just pray, work in the right general direction, and let things happen. The job, for example, would suggest the latter: I had been hoping for a situation just like that for years, and now I have it. Perhaps, largely unknowingly, I did play a big role in getting there? But perhaps I largely worked against it and needlessly postponed it, or made it less pleasant than it otherwise could have been?

If anything, this vacation allows for a massive amount of reflection. I simply haven’t had time for this since September. Most of the thinking steers towards the negative, but some analysis has actually led to interesting lessons.

I just need to fully figure out what they are.

1. I’m deliberately avoiding the term “programmer”, for I like to be involved in project planning, UI design, support and other areas as well, even when, primarily, I do write code.
2. Cue lame Myst Online references.

Oh dear.

This is not at all a slam against Gorobay; I highly appreciate his contributions to MYSTlore.

It is instead me failing to comprehend how anyone could have thought that a software should treat “Guild of burial workers” and “Guild of Burial Workers” as distinct articles to begin with. Without a redirect set up (as Gorobay did), going to the non-existant one will simply lead you to a 404-esque page, with a search link, which will then redirect you to the correct page. Why have that interim step to begin with?

There are actually cases on MYSTlore where we take advantage of the case-sensitive nature of MediaWiki article titles. Off the top of my head, “MYST” and “RIVEN” come to mind: they point to the games, whereas “Myst” and “Riven” point to the Ages. This distinction makes sense insofar as spelling the two in all-uppercase is a marketing thing; they’re not acronyms, initialisms or anything, but instead names, so they should be capitalized as proper nouns. Therefore, when one writes them as all capitalized, they are more likely to refer to the product.

But that’s an extremely rare occasion, and still a very questionable one. Perhaps you meant the other one after all? Perhaps (quite likely) you don’t really think of them as distinct at all? And how are you supposed to know the aforementioned rationale for the redirect?

This one rivals Monsters, Inc. as my favorite Pixar feature film.

Valve’s website points me to their Steam site, where I get to find the title I was looking for, among a choice of bundles that would include it. Next to it: a price tag, and a button labelled Purchase. So far, so good.

That button asks me if I have Steam installed. Still good. After downloading and running Steam’s installer, it updates itself, then asks me if I have an account, or offers to create one. This is where it gets not so good.

1. Its password fields don’t properly work with my keyboard layout, or the software doesn’t seem to understand keyboard layout changes. That is, I have to exit Steam, change my keyboard layout, then relaunch it, just so I can enter my password. A minor annoyance, but an inexplicable one nonetheless.
2. It doesn’t support the plus sign (+) in an e-mail address. Many websites pull this nonsense too, never having read the appropriate spec. Still, this means I can’t use GMail’s wonderful support for this, nor can I use that sign for any other reason.
3. It masks the passwords when entering… But then, without warning, it shows the password you in clear text when it’s done setting up your account. If you’re going to proudly show it off, why mask it to begin with? I don’t remember the last time I saw any app or web site do this.
4. I installed it by clicking “purchase” at the Team Fortress 2 website, but after installation, it says absolutely nothing about TF2. I would have expected it to remember I was looking for TF2. Instead, I basically had to do the same search twice — once in my browser, and then in Steam’s embedded browser.
5. I get all the way through purchasing, only to have it tell me the game is not available in my country. Yeah, uh, thanks for collecting my address, credit card number, blood sample and fingerprint, only to tell me I don’t even get to buy your game? (Which, by the way, doesn’t make sense. You’re your own publisher. Why would you not want to distribute your game to Germany, one of the countries with the largest gamer populations?)

I’m still going to play this one way or another; that’s not the point. My problem is that the average person would have or should given up after those steps, and unnecessarily so.

1. Why doesn’t Steam use standard controls, so it can work with keyboard layouts just like any other Windows app?
2. Why can’t software developers wisen up that, yes indeed, you can have a plus sign in your e-mail address?
3. Who thought having a masked password field only to reveal the password mere minutes later was a good idea?
4. Why can’t it pass on the information what game I was looking for when I clicked the Purchase button? Making this as seamless as possible is the whole point of Steam, at least as far as the consumer is concerned.
5. And if country limitations are so relevant, why not ask me much earlier what country I’m in, so the software and I both waste far less time?

1. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/downloads/ie/getitnow.mspx?wt_svl=10005WDH_OS_Other1&mg_id=10005WDHb1
2. http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
3. http://www.apple.com/safari/download/

As Denis says, you can pretty much type apple.com/<productname> and expect it to either work or at least redirect. Firefox’s URL isn’t too bad; Microsoft’s could use a lot of work. In fact, anything past the /ie/ is or should be completely redundant.

This isn’t just a minor nitpick. For one, it really shows which company’s culture emphasizes simplicity more. And, you can be sure which of the three is least likely to change after a re-design…

Mudpie Parable Myst Online Uru Uru Live Myst Online: Uru Live is back for yet another iteration, MORE¹. Not the outliner from the days when Winer was still relevant and Symantec could still publish useful software; no, MORE is short for Myst Online Restoration Experiment. I suppose I appreciate the candor on Cyan’s part that this isn’t much beyond an “experiment”, but that doesn’t make me worry any less that it hasn’t been thought through much.

I know for a fact that I’m not alone with my opinion, but I remain shocked by how few people share it. The popular type of response to Cyan’s announcement², judging from the average post on MO:UL Forums, is cheerful.

I cannot blame anyone for getting excited. I can, however, ask that people refrain from attacking someone for being critical. So when someone writes:

It is my firm belief that a major contributory factor to the low numbers on MOUL was the vociferous presence on this and other public forums of a section of the player base who felt their function was to complain, at each and every opportunity, that there was no new content [..]

…then I can barely contain my anger. There’s about a thousand reasons Uru has yet to be much of a success, and it is my firm belief that too much criticism is not one of them. Seldom has this been as obvious as with this announcement.

Among the people who do dare be critical is Zardoz, who writes:

At the risk of incurring the wrath of the NCC (No Complaints Crowd), that is one strange press release. It uses the word “roadmap” three times, yet never clearly identifies what the heck the “roadmap” is.

He goes on to quote the release³:

The plan is to start to move the content creation - the “Art” - to you.

You could argue that this is little but a 2008 version of Untìl Uru, at a higher price tag, with a far more mature toolkit. Or that the above statement is a euphemist means of saying “we’re turning Uru into little but a hobbyist project”?

I’m cynical enough that I’m not even quite sure MORE is better than nothing. Depending on how well it goes (and I hold that Untìl Uru did not go well), it may very well end up damaging Uru’s reputation even further, thereby needlessly making it even less likely that there will ever be an “Uru” that remotely resembles the original vision.

But my criticism isn’t that they’re doing this; it’s that they’re making it sound as if they did their homework. Perhaps there’s something significant we’re not being told, but while getting the rights back is an impressive feat⁴, it is a great exaggeration to speak of a “plan”, much less a “roadmap” here. What is MORE but a piece of unfinished technology thrown at its enthusiasts for them to play with?

The hard part of Uru has never been to play it. It hasn’t been to create worlds for it (for lack of experience/motivation/effort, a lot of fans are struggling, but interesting concepts are out there), or to want for it to become popular. If you ask me, the hard part has been to convince yourself that the concept is compelling, capable and coherent enough to, well, actually work. And MORE hasn’t made that any easier. If anything, it has shifted the burden of ‘making much sense’ towards the fans to resolve.

The Uru concept fails as soon as you try to imagine more than 200 people roaming about the city. Or as soon as someone solves any puzzle on, say, Eder Gira. In-story instancing just doesn’t cut it. There likely is no alternative to instances, but it confounds me that Cyan chose to put it inside the storyline. Quite the breach of suspension of disbelief, don’t you think?

Challenges

In fact, popularity aside, believability will certainly be among the hardest challenges for MORE to face, and I can’t help but worry that the leadership of the explorer-based guilds just isn’t up to it. Is anyone actually expecting fans to accomplish what Cyan couldn’t: to deliver a concept you can immerse yourself in?

Closely linked to this is avoiding retcons. Again, this is something Cyan didn’t fare too great at during Myst Online: Uru Live. Examples include “Bevins” (I can hear some people shudder)⁵, or, as mentioned, instances suddenly being part of the story. And in the original Uru already, the drastic change of making linking rules optional was implemented.

Next up: quantity. Oh, I know what you’re thinking: you’d rather have quality. But, see, the most gorgeous, breathtaking place with the most frustrating, tough but rewarding puzzles and immersive, suspenseful, inspiring storyline isn’t going to be worth much when everyone has gotten through it. I’m not discouraging the Guild of Writers from putting a ton of thought and work into what they do; far from it. But when it comes to (most of) Cyan’s content, especially what they did for the original Uru Live, it had quality. It delivered.⁶ What they didn’t deliver on — and, given the low amount of resources they had, I don’t blame them at all — is quantity. Now, while there are naturally many more fans (thus, potential Age designers) than there ever have been Cyan employees, churning out a sufficient amount of content that keeps people busy (and joining!) won’t be a breeze.

Sustainable growth. This was already alluded to with Untìl Uru’s name, but MORE makes this even clearer: Cyan is doing this as an attempted precursor to an ‘actual’ Uru where they get to contribute again. For them to do that, MORE needs to attract two kinds of people: those who have long since given up as well as those who have never bothered to try, or possibly never even heard of it. Growth doesn’t mean someone new joining in every day or two. Growth means having such an influx that everyone — Cyantists, Age writers, guild members and mere explorers — is equally motivated to keep going. Such an influx that, at some point, Cyan can flip the switch and turn this into something commercial again, which — like it or not — needs to happen sooner rather than later. Nobody could possibly want for Uru to remain in the life-support state of MORE.

Example. While Cyan has pushed out a lot of content over time, they haven’t actually shown much of the development process. Conversely, the explorers who are more open about that don’t have anywhere near as much experience. It’ll be a while until suitable tutorials and “Good Practices” guides start appearing.

These challenges aren’t easy. They are difficult enough that Cyan never truly managed to tackle them. They’ll be even harder for the community to work on, given its relative lack of structure compared to a company. That’s probably part of why Cyan emphasizes guilds and authority in their statement, but we’ve seen this fail miserably before with the liaisons. Not because the liaisons failed to try, but because their authority, despite elections, was not taken seriously by community members, as well as because their function and non-function hadn’t been clearly defined by the DRC (or anyone else) beforehand.

Likelihood

You can call me cynical and accuse me of pessimism all you want, but I don’t feel the odds are good. I’ve seen too many failures around Uru, and then too much finger-pointing in the aftermath. And bluntly? I haven’t seen a truly successful product come out of Cyan since Riven. Hard to live up to, but then Presto’s Exile or Ubisoft’s Revelation were probably successes about as big as realMyst, Uru: ABM, Uru: tPotS, Crowthistle, End of Ages and MO:UL together.

I could make my job simple and ask Cyan to think outside the box, but everyone and their son and mom have already evoked that cliché… or have they?

You have to admire the doggedness Cyan has shown about wanting this to work somehow. But then, you also have to wonder if they’re doing themselves — or anyone — a favor with it. Try as I may, I just cannot stop wondering what would have happened had they not discarded the original, single-player idea of DIRT. Still ambitious, sure, but much more within the realm of what they were familiar with. And the best part? Had it been a smashing success, they could have built Mudpie on top of it. With more money, more resources, and an existing, excited, user base. A user base that — excuse the pun — would have wanted “MORE”.

Et toi, Cyan?

And don’t they still have that option? Sure, they have since retconned the fictional universe like crazy, and yes, End of Ages features much of what DIRT would have, but don’t they still have the opportunity to show us D’ni from a completely new perspective? The Myst Movie purportedly does, by interpreting The Book of Ti’ana in its own right.

As much as I agree that casual games could be a way of getting Cyan’s name back out there, I also believe they shouldn’t throw away their potential of doing something more… grand.

Fortunately, they’re not ruling it out entirely: the roadmap does list a suitable “pie in the sky milestone”. The other very positive aspect of it; one that exceeded my expectations:

Release of the 3DS Max Plasma plugins for creating MORE content. Release of the source for the plugin (only) to the Guild of Writers.

This is great, unexpected (to me) news. Their toolkit likely won’t compete well against Spore Creature Creator, or even just Second Life, but it will be a leap from what has been possible so far, especially for people already familiar with 3dsmax.

I don’t want to be that guy. The one who incessantly bashes. I don’t criticize to make everyone feel bad, to discourage, to destroy.

Truth be told, I’m scared. I think that’s the right word. I’m scared that, once again, Cyan comes up with a concept that isn’t really thought through entirely, and everyone gets all excited over something that, as it will turn out mere months later, just isn’t going to work. Proof?

Create methods and processes for testing fan created MORE content. How this will work has not been determined but is crucial for fan created content.

If it’s “crucial”, its mode of operation should be “determined”, wouldn’t you say?

I don’t trust the community to simply figure out and fill in blanks like that. I do, however, wish them all the best. Cyan deserves it, the fans deserve it, and the original vision of Uru sure does.

1. Not listing DIRT here because that was a distinct concept.
2. They don’t seem to consider important enough to put on their website’s news page. Instead, a blog broke the story. Does Cyan want to garner attention?
3. Despite its name suggesting as much, it neither has the typical form of a press release — where’s the company description? what does “Shorah” mean to the average person? — , nor has it apparently been spread to any news distribution companies such as PR Newswire. Why not?
4. It should be noted that Cyan did not entirely accomplish this:
   

   [A]t some point, if a commercially successful revival comes about, [Cyan and GameTap] have an agreement on how each will be compensated, he added.

5. Previously, Bevin was one single particular neighborhood; now, it has become the template of a particular common kind of neighborhood. Not quite the same.
6. Arguably, not a single of Uru’s ages were quite as magnificient as Riven, but then that one’s going to be hard to top.

You can temporarily fix this by editing your hosts file. On a Unix-like system (including Linux, Mac OS X, etc.), this file resides in /etc/hosts; on Windows NT-based systems (including 2000, XP and Vista), %WINDIR%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. Open the file in a text editor and add a few lines like so:

216.127.69.124 mystfans.com
216.127.69.124 www.mystfans.com
216.127.69.124 chucker.mystfans.com
216.127.69.124 mystcommunity.com
216.127.69.124 www.mystcommunity.com
216.127.69.124 www.mystlore.com
216.127.69.124 en.mystlore.com
216.127.69.124 linguists.bahro.com

On Mac OS X, you also need to flush the hosts cache using dscacheutil -flushcache on 10.5 Leopard, or lookupd -flushcache on 10.4 Tiger and older (otherwise, the change won’t take place immediately).

Afterwards, launch your browser and the URLs should work as usual.

The model isn’t a big deal. As long as you have a way to uniquely identify the window’s contents, you’re good to go with the most relevant piece of information. Could be a URI, could be a local file path, could even be additional data from the session. OmniWeb, I believe, actually stores unsaved/unsubmitted form data in addition to the mere URLs. Or you could store previous history items so back/forward buttons continue to work. Storing window location and size is a plus, too.

Likewise, you don’t have much to think about when it comes to the controller. You could do it the lazy way and save this data when exiting the app, but then you don’t have the worst case (and ironically the one where this feature would help the very most) covered: that of your app crashing, thereby not exiting safely. So instead, you could store this (asynchronously, please: wouldn’t want to annoy the user with such mundane tasks!) as windows get opened, closed, moved around or resized. At any given time would you have an up-to-date data structure.

But then you get to the view. How does the user interact with such a feature? Does every user want such a feature?

In the simplest case, we’d just turn it on for everyone, whether they like it or not. Quit the app (or crash it, or have the computer go down from a power outage), then launch it again later on, and boom, all windows are back. Nice, huh? But that can get annoying fast. What if Joe just wanted to pull up some contact real quick, without having to wait for twenty other windows to come up just because he had them up the last time? Having to deal with launch time at all is bad enough; having several seconds added on top of it adds insult to injury.

Oh, I know what you’re thinking: suppress the ‘reopen the windows from my last session’ feature by holding the shift key (or some other modifier) when launching. Sure. For the computer-obsessed like us, that’s a perfectly fine way of asking the application to diverge from the default behavior. Unfortunately, even if everyone were to learn about such a non-obvious feature, they still wouldn’t think about it when a phone call comes, they’re stressed, almost panicking, having to look up something as fast as possible because they were technically supposed to know it before the call even took place. They would not remember to hold shift, I assure you.

Next up? “Make it an option!” Of course. Just add a checkbox “Always Reopen All Windows From Previous Session” checkbox to your already-bloated Preferences window — there’s no better way to ensure that 95% of your users will never opt against the default behavior, and, should they dislike said defaults, they’ll be annoyed and hate your app, rather than even considering the possibility that they can change them. That is, if you default to leaving this off, most won’t even know the feature exists to begin with. If you default to turning it on, most will assume that’s the way your app works, no alternatives. Consider Safari 3. As Gruber puts it:

I love Firefox’s auto-restoration of tabs and windows. Quit Firefox, relaunch it, and your previously-open tabs and windows are restored. Safari 3 has this feature, but makes you do it manually via the “Reopen All Windows From Last Session” command in the History menu. I’m sure most Safari users have no idea this feature even exists. At least as a preference, Safari should offer the ability to do this automatically.

That last sentence, however, somewhat clashes with the previous one: such a preference would only be of benefit for those who do know about the feature’s existence in the first place.

Then there’s Firefox 3’s way: when you quit while tabs are open, you get a dialog:

Do you want Firefox to save your tabs for the next time it starts?

In addition to the well-labeled buttons “Save and Quit”, “Quit” and “Cancel”, there’s also a “Do not ask next time” checkbox, thus informing any average guy that yes, this feature does exist. And when quit unsafely, you get the following upon next relaunch:

Your last Firefox session closed unexpectedly. You can restore the tabs and windows from your previous session, or start a new session if you think the problem was related to a page you were viewing.

The button labels “Restore Previous Session” and “Start New Session” are a bit lengthy, but clear enough.

But the trouble is, quitting safely is not the point in time you typically know whether you do in fact want those windows open again. The next launch is.

That’s presumably why Safari’s developers instead opted not to have any dialog at all — neither when quitting nor when launching — , because both of those get in the way of your normal workflow. Rather, there’s a menu item underneath “History”: “Reopen All Windows From Last Session”. Which brings us back to lack of discoverability.

To recap so far:
A typical application does not sport such a feature. Therefore, a user does not expect it to exist unless they are inadvertently exposed to it, at which point it is likely to annoy them. A preference would not be discoverable, and leaving the preference out would require a default, which some users would inevitably dislike (and assume to be unchangeable). Moreover and needless to say, any added preference needlessly obscures the potentially more relevant existing preferences.
Asking on quit or on launch gets in the way. Whether quitting or launching, the user probably wanted to accomplish something swiftly without being interrupted. Asking on quit also doesn’t handle the crash case, which is why Firefox gives special treatment to that one — something to be avoided as well.

And yet, I look at Firefox 3 for the solution. When you’ve entered a password, it features a new, non-modal panel asking whether you’d like it remembered. It doesn’t get in the way of your regular workflow; you can dismiss it but don’t have to in order to proceed.

That, I think is what’s needed here as well: a bar, a portion of the status bar, or perhaps even so little as an icon, to inform you that you could restore windows from your previous session if you were so inclined. An offer. One that you have plenty of time to think over and don’t have to deal with now, or even at all. This also allows another addition to the feature: a popup menu letting you choose particular windows to restore, one by one. Just have an “All Windows” option in bold as the default, a separator, and then one menu item per previously stored and now recoverable window. On Windows, bonus points for decorating each menu item with the respective window’s icon. On Mac OS, not so much.

The bad news is that implementing it this way takes a ton of time. Such a UI control, while increasingly commonplace, still doesn’t come standard with most frameworks. But on the upside, you have just implemented this in a way that, even if arguably not right¹, you put a ton of thought in, and only a fool wouldn’t applaud you for that.

1. UI design is hard. Getting UI design right for everyone is virtually impossible.

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Denis, then, makes the amusing suggestion of giving Internet Explorer a new name. In doing so, they would have plenty of justification for ThisNewBrowser to have a significantly changed (or wholly replaced) engine, with different behaviors; it would, effectively, give Microsoft some breathing room and a fresh start at establishing their browser as one that complies with standards and moves everyone forward.

Stop laughing.

This isn’t quite as absurd as it may come across at first. Not only is it not the first time for Microsoft to use a different engine: Tasman, back in 2000, was well ahead of its time, being the first to ship complete CSS 1.0 support. It also isn’t the first time they drop one Web-related app in its name, brand and face, replacing it with a superior substitute: Expression Web is a refreshing change from years of FrontPage, and Microsoft alleges its engine is “the most accurate rendering engine available today”. Denis’s suggestion may not seem quite so unthinkable now.

Of course, it still isn’t very likely. Microsoft has already made the first beta of IE 8 available, and luckily for us, they had previously rolled back on their initial decision to make IE 7-style rendering the default. Still, they don’t seem very confident about this: why develop multiple mutually competing engines in-house, other than one not fulfilling the requirements of the other? Had it been in any way feasible, I’m sure they would have preferred to ship Expression Web with Trident, their IE engine, and still call it “the most accurate”. But it wasn’t, and everyone knows that, so they had to impress us by creating a new engine, and creating it well.

How well do they stack up to that goal?

To me, the first part of giving a good impression on that would be to make the product page validate, or at least come close to that. getfirefox.com validates, as does opera.com; however, neither microsoft.com/ie (173 errors) nor apple.com/safari (7 errors) do. So, does Expression Web’s page? No, sir; 72 errors.

In fact, the errors start with the incorrect claim that the page is XHTML 1.1. It’s delivered as text/html, presumably to make it compatible with Internet Explorer, a compatibility mode that isn’t allowed in XHTML 1.1. Among the more glaring problems in the hard-to-read markup are a duplicate head element as well as the odd decision not to close li elements. I say ‘glaring’ exactly because they would seem so simple to fix.

To be fair, their claims focus largely on CSS, and the page fares a lot better in that regard; in fact, most of the errors from the CSS validator are due to pre-CSS 3 feature Microsoft makes use of.

Still, I question the value of their “support for XHTML” when their very own browser still fails to properly¹ support it.

But perhaps the engine itself is better than the promotional website.

Well, I’d be happy to tell you the current Expression Web 2 beta comes close to passing Acid2, if only that were true.

This result is hardly any better than those of Internet Explorer 6 or 7, and doesn’t quite constitute “most accurate”. One can argue that some of the mistakes stem from the fact that Expression Web is an editor, not a browser, and thus deliberately positions things slightly differently (such as by providing rulers and visual guidelines), but that wouldn’t explain some of the crass rendering errors.

Expression Web is not a bad app. It’s quite a leap from Front Page, provides nice autocomplete functionality and, in 2.0, even integrates a lot of PHP functionality — despite Microsoft having its own, also-supported alternative in ASP.NET. But it falls very short of the marketing claims regarding its engine. I cannot find a single objective piece of information on the Web on how it is better at all, much less in any way, and it certainly does not deserve a superlative. A shipping version of Safari (with WebKit) passed Acid2 over two years ago; multiple browsers did in 2006. Given that IE 8 will pass Acid2, it seems as if the Expression Web team should simply move back to the Trident engine and work to improve that even faster, if they haven’t already.

Meanwhile, WebKit is at 95/100 for Acid3
. I’d feel a lot more sorry for the conundrum faced by Microsoft’s engine developers if only they could show that they’re trying as hard as they can to solve it.

1. Where by properly, I mean served as application/xhtml+xml.

Arguably, relationships are the core aspect of your personal network. Facebook calls them “friends”, as do MySpace and similar sites. LinkedIn, in an attempt to come off as more professional, calls them “connections”. And Twitter? The URL says “friends”, but the concept is largely presented as “following” someone.

And “following” is indeed what it is: when they shower, leave for a trip or have thoughts while doing somestufforother. From the mundane to the intriguing, plenty of information is constantly pushed to the site, then pulled by clients and distributed to many a user.

Some “tweets” are amusing, including the occasional nerd humor; others provide in-depth insight. E.g., despite the common misperception that Apple employees are barred from publicly participating on the Internet¹, people like Deric Horn or Bill Bumgarner have happily done exactly that².

But our hours per day are limited. We could just follow everyone, thus minimizing the risk of missing out on something worthwhile, but would that be practical? Bizarrely enough, some seem to think so. Others pride themselves on a seemingly absurd number of followees, such as nearly twenty-five hundred, or close to seven times the monkeysphere. Apparently in response to me having BarackObama, “he” (presumably a staff worker or bot of his) added me back — but so did “BeatMcCain” as well as, uh, “RudyGiuliani32″. I’m hardly alone in my bewilderment of this apparent desire to follow such complete strangers in person as well as personality. Says Matt Gemmell:³

Why do such random people follow my tweets? “Married mom of 3 toddlers who’s loving real estate”, welcome to… Cocoa development?

I still pile on to my list of “friends”, “connections” and “followees”. But I also occasionally carefully pull some out from the bottom. Instead of the entire stack falling apart, it actually ends up more stable.

This may seem too much of a business approach, but I find that if I don’t build my network carefully, choosing whom to include as well as whom not to include, the concept doesn’t benefit me. Following fifty people on Twitter, give or take a few, works for me.

When people add me on top of hundreds of others, are they really interested in me? Inspired by me? Do they learn from me? Uli Kusterer is, of course, right:

Well, if they don’t have anything better to do, let them

…but my puzzlement remains.

1. As found, for example, in this article’s assertion of “Forget corporate blogs — Apple doesn’t seem to like anyone blogging about the company.” (which, unsurprisingly, isn’t backed up at all by any references).
2. Consider Deric’s enthusiastic fielding of questions after the iPhone SDK press event, such as here.
3. Update: turns out she’s a Mac user.

In addition to average three-star hotel rates as well as airfare (split by coming from West Coast, Central or East Coast) and notable attractions, you are presented with a quick breakdown of relevant taxes (to the uninitiated and/or European: those can vary quite a bit from region to region in the US).

The data could be presented better, as I have already discussed with Matt, but even as it is, it helps people answer the survey better, and gives a good “we did a whole lotta research” impression.

Possible improvements include:

• Extracting this data from the survey itself, maybe even with one page per location, as to make the survey itself more lean and clean
• Adding hyperlinks for each town, such as to the respective official tourist information site (e.g. visitdetroit.com), Wikipedia article
• Yet another hyperlink per town to some mapping site (Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, Windows Live Local, whatever), which would also give you information such as distance, not to mention showing you available hotels, etc.

The game had a number of endings and possibilities for a player and, during production, we quickly we began to get bogged down in trying to keep track of everything. So we created a set of flowcharts.

(I’ve done better summaries. Honest.)

Overall, the result is a tremendous improvement. I’m stressing this because, towards the end of this post, I’ll talk about something not-so-positive, so let me say it again: I think the new committee is very much steering in the right direction.

But how is that, and how is it not?

The Pleasant

• The committee has been oh-so-much-more transparent this time. There is, oh my, an actual about page! With names, functional descriptions and even photos! There are meeting protocols, like this one. Long overdue, but better late than never. A big win.
• There is a clear, streamlined process for donations, instead of leaving potential donors in agony over wanting to help.
• There’s a news page that you can also subscribe to as a feed if you so desire.
• There’s no confusion left as to what is the official, real, current, proper Mysterium website. mysterium.net it is. Puzzling that this was so hard in the past, but here we are now.

The So-so

The Aggravating

The above would be relatively minor, tolerable issues. I don’t think they alone make for fair arguments for not attending. Sure, they give the impression of an amateur-ish, perhaps sloppy approach, but the former is what it is (the committee don’t get paid full-time for the organizing, or at all), and the latter is part of being human. It can’t all be smooth; it never will be. But there is one kicker left.

Not all of us have relatively short trips to Mysterium. Some travel a few thousand miles, perhaps from one North American coast to the other. Others travel even more, perhaps across the Atlantic Ocean, or perhaps even all the way from the Southern Hemisphere, like that weirdo I met (hi!). It doesn’t take rocket science to understand that, the further your travel, the more complex and expensive it will become. But in addition, as everyone who has travelled relatively long distance before knows, you better book your flight a long time in advance. Months. Perhaps a year. And if there is one thing that has remained constant with this reformed committee, it is that, whatever the reason, they seem unable to commit to a location and set of dates early on.

What does that mean? It means that, when in early March there’s surveys for location and dates for a convention that will take place in late July or some time in August, something is screwy. Assuming there won’t be an extension, the polls will close on the 15th, only to be evaluated then. For anyone keeping track, that gives people roughly four months to book the airfare, and that’s assuming they even can do so at that point, i.e. have enough in savings, have time to figure out the airline, and so on. That’s ignoring hotels and other kinds of accommodation, getting crucial info from the embassy, etc.

That’s not enough time to prepare. And yet, it has happened this way every passing year. It is something that could be easily prevented by, gee, planning a liiiiittle bit further ahead. If, by the beginning of the year, you still don’t know the location, it feels like a slap in the face. And if, more than two months in the year, you still don’t know it, you screwed up even more. What do you think I’m going to tell my boss? “Oh, I don’t know when to take my holidays yet, I need to wait on the Mysterium Committee to pick the date first! But I guess I do have a bit of a say on that through a survey… sorta…”

I really don’t understand how this has gone on for so long, and continues to. Are you trying not to have international people come and join in the fun?

Again, I think things have gotten considerably better. But, the above has to change. Or, in the words of Fry, FIXITFIXITFIXIT.

Until then, we have a problem. Because we haven’t quite settled yet on the “right” implementation — and, in particular, the one right interface, aforementioned ones such as git all go for their own little ways, and end up being incompatible.

Via David: “the new portability nightmare”.

echo 1 > foo
$vcs add foo
echo 2 > foo
$vcs commit

What was committed, “1″ or “2″? Depends on which $vcs you use.

That says it all.

But I did go to CeBIT today, and it didn’t disappoint — I got exactly as much and as little as I had expected. They say stereotypes hold a grain of truth; in the ones I admittedly had, it was more of a bucket.

I think a big problem with CeBIT is its direction. Wikipedia describes CeBIT as a “computer expo”; the official website (dumb background music alert) calls it “the leading business event for the digital world”. What a mouthful, though not entirely meaningless: the stress on business is key here. While CeBIT originally was meant to be a means of establishing professional ties, it strayed away from public perception during the 1980s and 90s, essentially doubling as a consumer electronics expo. The late-90s attempt to extract that portion into its own fair, CeBIT Home, wasn’t exactly met with success, and these days, we’re back to something that wants to be one (business) and yet is perceived by media and misera plebs as the other (consumer).

I did go there as a “consumer”. I did not represent my employer, nor was I personally interested in finding business contacts (see above), but wanted to go nonetheless just for the heck of having done so, and took my father and an ex-colleague of his with me.

Because the fair was largely business-oriented, we found very little of interest. At the same time, I was astounded both by the amount of kids hanging around¹ and by the crappy products sold at some places. Cellphone jewelry? Really? Oh my.

We did take brief looks at various stands in a hall covering all sorts of semi-anglicisms, buzzwords and pseudo-intellectual terminology. It is generally at this point where the Germans fail to communicate themselves in plain German²; while they do manage to invite a more international crowd of people this way, they also gain a lot of deserved ridicule (look no further than the word “handy” if you want a popular example). You have to wonder who’s bullshitting whom when you’re surrounded by the buzzword galore of SAP, Microsoft Dynamics and the like. Perhaps the people who stayed there — there weren’t few of them — were quite happy with that cloud of means-nothing, but I sure wouldn’t have been. Underneath that thick layer is a void; the has-beens didn’t really manage to fill the place with meaningful ideas. Wrap old stuff in new clothes, and you got yourself a crowd. Not for me.

And then, walking through a hall full of security vendors (hellooooooo firewalls), we made the mistake of looking at the marketing-laden spec sheet of a backup utility. A guy comes up and, rather than letting us read, begins his 15-minute uninterruptible sales pitch. I suppose I couldn’t make a face that look disinterested enough, but when I finally gained half a second of breathing between his self-contradictory blah, I got my confirmation that this wasn’t much of a professional-grade tool. Let’s believe for a moment that it literally takes thirty seconds to back up an entire hard drive (no details on what amount of data or I/O throughput this figure is four, of course!).

But when claims of “exact copying” and “lower level than the competition” keep on coming up, that doesn’t quite match with “not copying free space” (that’s hardly exact, then) or “live copying allowed”, much less “optimized for FAT32 and NTFS”. And when he lists “5000 customers, 100% satisfied”, I cannot see how he boasts that when they did discover a bug, they fixed it for free. Don’t be disingenuous: if you hadn’t, that 100% satisfaction would be gone by now. But while these things don’t quite add up, what really made it clear for me what grade of software I was dealing with was his response to my question of EFI support. The spec sheet mentioned “MBR” but not specifically “BIOS”, nor did it make a mention of the EFI counterpart, GPT. When I asked about EFI, it took him a bit to figure out what I was talking about; he repeatedly got the acronym wrong as well (no, “extended” isn’t quite the same as “extensible“).

How would you like your intelligence insulted at a trade fair? He’s not a politician and I’m not a potential voter at the next election. There shouldn’t be dodging, much less trying to mislead. I would have been happy to accept the honest answer that EFI is not relevant to them at this point, but that they will add it as required. That is the secondary answer he gave me (”we can have it by next year if a customer so desires”), but he kept trying to convince me that if I do have an EFI PC, it would be best to turn on MBR compatibility mode. Uh, no sir. That’s quite true for many consumers, but doesn’t answer whether your software supports it. What’s more is the kind of hogwash he came up with: that EFI is only relevant if you have more than 26 partitions (I assume he’s talking about Windows drive letters, which have absolutely zilch to do with the underlying firmware), and that servers and workstations rarely ever need more than 100 GB anyway. Frequently true, but… what does that have to do with anything? I wanted to know whether I could use disks with a GPT layout instead of an MBR one, not whether I should use GPT to begin with.

Salesmen have a duty to sugarcoat what they say. It’s their job. A good salesman would have recognized, however, that he was talking to a tech person, not just another customer. I was looking for straight information, and a simple “no, but at this point, you will find that compatibility mode covers most cases, and works just fine with our product” would have been honest and satisfying. Having him tell me that I’ve been evaluating my needs incorrectly just so his product can look a little bit shinier, however, is unacceptable, and is going to turn away what might otherwise have been good customers.

I’ll chalk it up to bad luck: we could have easily talked to more competent people about more interesting products instead. However, I would have hoped for more enthralling and mutually satisfying conversations than… that one.

We also went past stands from magazines; I mentioned the recent bankruptcy protection filing of Ziff Davis. Seemed a bit like the exhibiting zines were a bit desperate for attention. A medium from the past?

Perhaps the highlight of the day was an Apfelstrudel. I only eat that kind of stuff about once or twice a year, so it’s all the more alluring. When leaving, we were all disappointed in our own ways, and yet, like I said, I wasn’t surprised about that. We mostly went there with the wrong premise that CeBIT ought to be a consumer expo when, as far as the organizers are concerned, it is primarily decidedly not one at all.

Maybe next time, I’ll go someplace where organizers, exhibitors and attendees agree on what they want. Until then, thanks to the power of feed syndication, social networking, social news and so on, I have plenty of sources to get information from — the kind of information I find relevant. Little wonder mags and expos aren’t my cup of tea.

Okay, I lied: the weather was the highlight of the day. So sunny, so bright, such exciting early signs of spring. Though we could still feel the cool air, it became clear that warmer, nicer days are ahead indeed.

1. I don’t mean it that way. We were all ‘young nerds’ at some point, of course. But these people didn’t come across as nerdy at all, or in any way interested in the technical aspects of computing.
2. Given my mother tongue, you can call me a hypocrite for saying this while writing this entire blog in English.

This morning, it crashed. [Not a] big deal; crashes happen. I was curious why, though, and while the crash report didn’t help me figure that out (the topmost call in the stacktrace is MBUMutex::Acquire(unsigned long), which tells me absolutely nilch about the actual intent), I did find something else.

Here’s a portion of the Binary Images section from the crash log:

Binary Images:
    0x1000 -    0x23fef +com.microsoft.rdc 2.0.0 Beta2 (2.0.0 Beta2) <0775a7210cb4454ea17af3dfdec33e2c> /Applications/Remote Desktop Connection.app/Contents/MacOS/Remote Desktop Connection
   0x92000 -   0x108fe6 +com.microsoft.netlib 12.0.0 (12.0.0) <9fac28ca22ff49bf9185194497585126> /Applications/Remote Desktop Connection.app/Contents/Frameworks/Netlib.framework/Versions/12/Netlib
  0x436000 -   0x5bafc7 +com.microsoft.rdc 2.0.0 (2.0.0) <ad448d7a974d4d90ad5b89b5dfa08bc1> /Applications/Remote Desktop Connection.app/Contents/Frameworks/RDCPAL.framework/Versions/12/RDCPAL
  0x86c000 -   0x94dff7  libxml2.2.dylib ??? (???) <ccd6e2cb514fcd0b541bf153aae13481> /usr/lib/libxml2.2.dylib
  0x9c8000 -   0x9e6fe7  com.apple.OpenTransport 3.0 (3.0) /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/OpenTransport.framework/OpenTransport
[..]

Notice something? That they still use OpenTransport strikes me as weird, that they use the same bundle identifier com.microsoft.rdc for the two distinct bundles RDCPAL.framework and Remote Desktop Connection.app, which furthermore run simultaneously, is even stranger, but oddest yet? This explosive combination actually works.

After all, a bundle identifier is supposed to be globally unique. There are several API calls that let you launch and otherwise access a bundle through its identifier. How would that ever work when two bundles which clearly, while related, are distinct in their nature and purpose, have the same identifier? Should Xcode prevent you from building a project whose identifier matches one that already exists? Probably impossible to do on a reliable basis. Should dyld refuse to link or XNU refuse to launch a bundle when one with the same identifier is already running? Or should Microsoft simply have someone smack the CFBundle documentation over developers’ heads?