All posts by onlyconnect

microsoft, windows, windows 7

One thing that is not better in Windows 7: Movie Maker

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Microsoft does make surprising decisions on occasion. Here’s an example. Windows Movie Maker is a simple video editing application which ships as a free utility with the operating system. It was scorned when it first appeared in Windows Me, but has improved substantially, and in its latest guise is a popular choice for creating YouTube videos or touching up holiday footage. It is a significant factor in the Apple Mac vs Windows decision, since the Mac comes with a decent video editor called iMovie.

In Windows 7, Microsoft has removed Movie Maker from the Windows box and made it part of a Windows Live Essentials downloadable add-on. That makes some sense: it cross-promotes other Live products (though at risk of annoying users) and maybe helps Microsoft defend against allegations of anti-competitive tying of products to its Windows near-monopoly.

What does not make sense is that the new Live Movie Maker is completely re-written and currently nothing like as good as the old one. Key features like the timeline are simply missing, hence the strong comments to this official blog post:

That’s all fine and dandy (starting from the ground up and all), but if you don’t include the baseline functionality that was in Windows Movie Maker, this will be an abject failure.

says one of the more polite users.

Microsoft says there is more to come:

Hey guys – I’m the Lead PM on the new Windows Live Movie Maker project.  The beta is definitely not feature-complete; having said that, we are taking the product in a slightly different direction so it’s not going to have 100% the same features as the old Movie Maker.  Stay tuned – but please realize that we’re aware that we have work to do before final.

I think this is Mike Torres (warning: spam-ridden comments). In the meantime, the best anyone can offer is to download version 2.6, which is an older version of what is in Vista but apparently works on Windows 7. It strikes me as unlikely that Live Movie Maker will plug all these gaps in time for the release of Windows 7; but who knows, perhaps it will.

The bit that puzzles me: why doesn’t Microsoft stick with the older, better version of Movie Maker for Windows 7, until the new one evolves into a sane alternative?

.net, adobe, flash, microsoft, silverlight, software development, web authoring

New York Times switches from WPF/Silverlight to Flash and AIR for Reader 2

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The New York Times has released Version 2 of its Times Reader, for seamless online/offline viewing of its content. It’s interesting from a media perspective, but hardly a breakthrough, since it is not new. What’s more interesting to me is that the Times switched from a hybrid approach using WPF (Windows Presentation Framework) on Windows and Silverlight on the Mac, to Adobe AIR. Switches like this are bad PR for Microsoft, since it gives the impression that the developers were sufficiently unhappy with WPF/Silverlight, or so strongly attracted to AIR, that they were willing to throw away much of their previous development effort.

I’ve been tracking Times Reader for some years. It was presented at Microsoft Mix07 and I wrote up a panel discussion on the subject:

I asked about the cross-platform issue. According to Bodkin a Silverlight implementation is on the way, which includes most of the features in the full version, in “a matter of months.”

That was optimistic; but a Silverlight version was delivered and I used it successfully on the Mac; though it lacked some features of the WPF edition. It also attracted hostility from Mac users who are Microsoft-averse, as I reported here, and apparently ran into further problems because of incompatibility with Safari 4.

I tried the new AIR edition and it seems pretty good, though my impression is that it is not quite as smooth as the old WPF version. I might be wrong, since I could not install both on the same machine. The new version does add video support. Here’s the old one:

and this is the new effort:

I think this is a fascinating case study which demonstrates a number of things.

First, that cross-platform support is not an optional feature any more (if it ever was) for this kind of public application. Let’s assume here that the WPF version was just fine for Windows users, but was not viable long-term for lack of cross-platform support. It was inevitable that the Times would eventually either use Silverlight on both Windows and Mac, or abandon both WPF and Silverlight for a cross-platform alternative.

Second, that Silverlight is not yet mature enough for this kind of application. Although the Times developers were able to deliver a Silverlight version, it required a bit of hackery for offline support (embedded Safari on the Mac) and apparently ran into version problems when Apple upgraded Safari. Silverlight is also known to be poor for text rendering – a Google search for “blurry text Silverlight” brings back plenty of hits. Adobe also made a big improvement to text handling in Flash player 10, with the new flash.text.engine.

Third, that offline support really is a big deal. Would Silverlight 3.0 have been good enough? Possibly, though I haven’t seen any suggestion that Silverlight 3.0 offline apps will be able to run in the background while showing just an icon in the notification area, to support continuous synchronization.

It is possibel that these problems may be fixed in Silverlight 4.0. That’s a long time to wait though, when you need your application out now (and your industry is in crisis).

It would be silly to extrapolate this case study into a broader statement about the superiority of Flash over Silverlight. For the specific needs of the New York Times though, it is easy to see why Adobe AIR appeals.

internet, search, twitter

Bytemark failure illustrates value of Twitter

This site is hosted at Bytemark, which has a good track record for performance and service. On Sunday afternoon Bytemark and all its virtual servers became inaccessible. Seeking reassurance that this was a temporary problem and being worked on, I tried to get more information. This is a relatively small ISP and there is no 24-hr telephone support; there is an urgent email support address, but since this would be sent via Bytemark’s servers, which were down, I knew there was no point in using it.

I turned to Twitter search, where I found others tweeting about the problem, including MD Matthew Bloch:

is busy working out WTF is wrong with Bytemark’s core network, update on the forum as soon as it’s accessible again

re: Bytemark, both our Manchester core routers seem down, engineer is 20 mins away from data centre to help us with diagnosis.

tracking down enormous source of traffic on Bytemark network

wondering why the network is back up – still poring over switch configurations but things looking a little more useful.

and so on, with the directors demonstrating a degree of personal involvement that larger ISPs rarely display. The outage is still annoying of course; but knowing that it is being worked on with urgency along with a bit of information about the nature of the issue makes a huge difference.

When you need to search for the latest information, Twitter works well because it is rigorously sorted by time and date, which Google never is.

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microsoft, php, software development, web authoring, yahoo, zend

Is Zend really the PHP company?

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I’m at Yahoo! Hack day in London – not hacking, but here for sessions on topics such as YUI (Yahoo! User Interface Library) and PHP.

I had a brief chat with Rasmus Lerdorf who is speaking later. I asked him about Zend, which presents itself as the PHP company (that is actually the slogan on its web site). Is it really?

Lerdorf says Zend has no special status. While acknowledging its contribution, he says there are 1300 PHP committers, and only 6 work for Zend. He emphasises that PHP is a community project and that decisions are made by consensus, influenced by who is actually willing to write the code, not by Zend or any company.

I also asked about PDT (PHP Development Tools), the Eclipse-based open source IDE. Lerdorf says there are lots of PHP IDEs, and people who use generic editors for PHP, and none has any more status than any other; he doesn’t use PDT.

From my perspective as press, there are only two organizations who ever encourage me to write about PHP. One is Zend; the other is Microsoft, keen to establish Windows as a credible PHP platform (Lerdorf says PHP on Windows has made enormous progress in the last couple of years). Zend does seem to do more than any other company to promote PHP for commercial and corporate development.

Lerdorf is not surprised. We’re developers, he says, we don’t do PR.

Zend’s effort is broadly beneficial to the PHP community – provided that it does not give a false impression of who owns PHP.

.net, adobe, flash, microsoft, software development, visual studio, web authoring

Silverlight: developer win, designer fail?

I posed this question in a post over on itjoblog. There are several reasons why Silverlight struggles to get designer attention, including:

1. Designers are pragmatic and target the runtime that is already deployed most broadly, ie. Flash.

2. Flash is already good enough so why bother?

3. The tools: Adobe’s designer tools are a de facto standard, target Flash, and run on the Mac.

Developer is another matter. The cross-platform .NET runtime is Silverlight’s big advantage; and this time the tools tip the balance towards Microsoft (Visual Studio) – not for everyone, but for the substantial Microsoft platform community. That’s going to be further reinforced by Visual Studio 2010 which gets full visual designer support, plus of course Silverlight 3.0.

Microsoft does have a problem with Silverlight out of the browser. Developers need a way to have these run with more local permissions, subject to user consent, otherwise they will turn to Adobe AIR. Actually the whole Silverlight on the desktop story is confused, since you can also do Silverlight Mesh-Enabled Web Applications, or stick Silverlight content in a desktop gadget or other embedded browser. No, not the one in AIR (nice idea though): Adobe only includes Flash support and the PDF plug-in.

The tension behind this is that ultimately developers and designers need to work on the same applications, so this remains a fascinating contest.

borland, database, delphi

The end of the Borland story: acquired by Micro Focus

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It is not unexpected, but still sad to see loss-making Borland acquired by Micro Focus for a knock-down price of $75m. Borland’s release says little beyond the financial details. Micro Focus, which is also acquiring Compuware’s ASQ (Automated Software Quality) tools (such as QADirector, DevPartner and Optimal Trace, I presume) says:

Acquiring Borland and the Compuware Testing and ASQ Business will give Micro Focus a leading market position in the highly complementary Application Testing / ASQ market. This market is estimated to be worth c.US$2 billion a year and is logically adjacent to Micro Focus’ core application management and modernization business.  The move into the ASQ market is consistent with Micro Focus’ stated strategy of extending in logically adjacent segments to expand its addressable market.

Why sad? Well, if you were around in the eighties and nineties you will remember a bold company which came up with a series of excellent products: Turbo Pascal, Borland C/C++, Quattro Pro, Paradox, and of course the incomparable Windows development tool Delphi. The visual development model in Delphi was successfully transitioned to Java in the JBuilder product, which in its early versions used a Delphi-compiled IDE.

These developer-focused products live on, of course, mostly in the hands of Embarcadero. The Borland that has been acquired is what was left when, in my developer-centric opinion, the best parts had already left.

What went wrong at Borland? It is mostly the victim of changes in the industry, made worse today by the economic downturn. It was a tools company, and the tools market was hit by the double blow of excellent open-source competition on one side (Eclipse, GCC) and vendor-subsidised tools on the other (Visual Studio).

Still, there were some spectacular own goals along the way. The 1991 acquisition of Ashton-Tate, at the time the market leader in PC database managers, was one, mainly because dBASE IV was not very good and did nothing to help Borland transition to Windows; in any case, Borland already had a better product in the form of Paradox.

Talking of Paradox, Paradox for Windows was another disaster. Wonderful product, but mostly incompatible with its DOS predecessor, and probably a tad too complex as well. It also had to compete with Microsoft Access, which was both cheaper and part of the impregnable Microsoft Office suite.

The company made up for it with Delphi; but even that under-performed relative to its quality. Enterprises felt safer with Microsoft’s Visual Basic. JBuilder did well at first; but its market share diminished rapidly in the face of competition from Eclipse and NetBeans. In retrospect, Borland should have made its core Java IDE free much earlier, to build a community round it, though competing with free is never easy.

Since it was so hard making money out of compilers and IDEs, Borland changed tack in order to target Enterprise ALM (Application Lifecycle Management). It could have worked, but it wasn’t actually a great fit with the independent developers who formed a large part of its customer base, and who tended to ignore large, complex and expensive supplementary tools in favour of just getting on with coding.

The nadir was 1998 when Borland changed its name to Inprise, to reflect its Enterprise focus. “Many thought Borland had gone out of business”, says Wikipedia. It was changed back to Borland in 2001.

Another mis-step was the way Borland (then Inprise) handled InterBase, its client-server database. In 2000, with a burst of community enthusiasm, the product was made open source. A couple of years later, it changed its mind and continued to develop InterBase as a proprietary product; but by then FireBird had been born, based on the open source code.

Thought for the day: Borland paid more for TogetherSoft in 2002 (around $185m, including $82.5m cash), than Micro Focus is paying now for Borland.

security, windows 7

Windows 7: why you should keep User Account Control at the highest level

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Windows 7 makes it easy to adjust the settings for User Account Control, the system protection feature introduced in Vista. You can access User Account Control Settings from Control Panel, whereupon you see a slider with four settings:

1. Always Notify

2. Notify me only when programs try to make changes to my computer – don’t notify me when I make changes to Windows settings

3. Same as (2) but without the dimmed desktop

4. Never notify

The default is (2). This means Windows 7 is not too annoying, but 3rd party applications still have to prompt in order to do things like writing to a location in Program Files.

Sounds good? Not really. Leo Davidson has an extensive write-up; but all you need to know is actually in the online help for option 2:

It is usually safe to allow changes to be made to Windows settings without you being notified. However, certain programs that come with Windows can have commands or data passed to them, and malicious software can take advantage of this by using these programs to install files or changes settings on your computer.

The problem lies in what Microsoft means by “make changes to Windows settings”. In reality, this is just a whitelist of applications which get elevated permissions automatically, and as online help hints, these are “certain programs that come with Windows.” Davidson observes that it is possible for malware to inject data into one of these processes and have it do whatever the malware wants without a prompt.

Microsoft’s point is that malware shouldn’t be running on your PC in the first place. Very true; but the simple slider control is less than honest about the implications of the default option.

The solution is to move the slider to the highest level. I am sure this should be the default: Microsoft: even at this stage it is not too late to change it. Let the user relax the security if they want; though this stuff about “Windows settings” should be replaced with something which better describes what the option means.

I am not all that worked up about this. UAC will still be achieving its main goal, which is to make 3rd party developers follow the rules more often – though it is still possible for developers to subvert this. And even when fully enabled, UAC is nothing like a complete security solution.

Still, bearing in mind that Microsoft is unlikely to change the default, I’d suggest that users move the slider to the highest setting. It is not painful at all, and at least gives you the same level of protection as Vista.

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.net, microsoft, open source, silverlight, software development, web authoring

First baby steps for Moonlight 2.0: Silverlight for Linux

Miguel de Icaza has announced the first preview release of Moonlight 2.0. This is the one that counts, in that it brings the .NET runtime to Silverlight applets running on Linux:

This is the ECMA VM running inside the browser and powering C# and any other CIL-compatible languages like Ruby, Python, Boo and others. You can use Moonlight/Silverlight as a GUI (this is what most folks do) or you can use it as the engine to power your Python/Ruby scripting in the browser.

The download page has plenty of health warnings:

Keep in mind this preview release is not feature complete. Most importantly not all security features are present or fully enabled in this release. Even existing security features have, at this stage, received only minimal testing and no security audit of the source code (mono or moonlight) has yet been done.

Undeterred, I installed it into FireFox 3.0, running on Ubuntu Linux. The download is under 9 MB. My first effort was unsuccessful; the plug-in appeared to load OK, but no Silverlight apps displayed. My second attempt in a VM worked. Naturally I went along to my Silverlight database example which as it happens runs on Mono. Here it is:

This is what it should look like (Silverlight on Windows):

Well, it is only an alpha preview, and it shows. On the plus side, the data is displayed, the search works, and the buttons operate. It is a considerable achievement. But don’t plan to move your users onto Moonlight applications just yet.

microsoft, virtualization, windows 7

Windows 7 XP Mode dialogs confuse virtual with real

I was impressed with the integration between XP Mode virtual applications and native Windows 7, as I explained in this review. I’d suggest though that Microsoft needs to do better in distinguishing dialogs that come from virtual XP from dialogs displayed by native Windows 7. This may seem perverse – integration is about disguising the difference, not accentuating it. But let me give you an example of where this is a problem. I started Access 2000 as a virtual application, which worked fine, and behind the scenes Virtual XP kicked into life. Then I saw this dialog on the Windows 7 desktop:

This dialog does not mention Windows XP. It just says Windows. How am I to know that it relates to a virtual instance of XP, and not to Windows 7 itself? Well, if I am awake I might spot that the window close gadget is XP-style, and not the Windows 7 style which is wider and with a smaller X. I am sure that is too subtle for many users.

Here is another example:

In this case, Windows 7 has popped up a notification saying my computer might be at risk, on the arguably dubious grounds that no antivirus software is installed. The balloon has (Remote) in brackets. So what does that mean? Actually, it means the virtual instance of XP, but the word Remote is not a clear way of saying so.

If I click the balloon, I get the XP security center, with no indication that it relates to virtual XP rather than to Windows 7 directly.

I’d like to see more clarity, even if it makes integration a tiny bit less seamless.

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