I’ve been trying various mapping APIs and took a look at Google’s new Earth browser plug-in. It looked a bit odd in IE7 so I tried Google Chrome. Not supported:
Given that it now works in Safari on the Mac (which also uses Webkit) I’m a little surprised. No doubt the team will add it soon, but this sort of thing doesn’t help Chrome adoptiom.
I wrote a short summary of Microsoft’s latest (I think) guidelines for well-behaved Windows applications.
It is a significant topic. A large part of the thinking behind Vista’s contentious User Account Control (which is being continued in Windows 7) is to push app developers into writing applications that conform more closely to the guidelines, especially in respect of where they write data. If all applications conformed, there would be little need to log on as local administrator, and Windows would be more secure.
I saw Richard Thompson, accompanied by Judith Owen (vocals, piano) and Debra Dobkin (percussion, vocals), perform his 1000 Years of Popular Music set at the Corn Exchange in Cambridge (Friday January 16th).
This is a great atmospheric venue with good acoustics, but we arrived slightly after 7.30pm thanks to traffic and parking problems, to find that the show had started on the dot. We missed the first two songs and ended up in seats that weren’t the ones we’d booked, but they were good seats which is what counted.
The concept is that RT and his ensemble play songs from the ages – from Medieval to the present day. Why? A few reasons. Because he can, and few others could. Because he’s exploring his cultural history. Because he wants to introduce songs that are old but good to a new audience. Because he wants to pay tribute to the past. Because it’s a hoot. All of these.
It makes for an enjoyable evening, though it is inevitably uneven. I studied English Literature and knew some of the older songs as poems; it was good to hear them in a new context, especially with Thompson’s dry,witty introductions. I enjoyed his 19th century social comment songs, Blackleg Miner and I Live in Trafalgar Square. He caught the mood of the Kinks’ See My Friends brilliantly. His rendering of Abba’s Money Money Money is hilarious. I didn’t think he carried off the Beatles so well, though we saw some striking Beatlemania photos.
I was sorry he did not perform Oops! … I did it again (yes, the Britney Spears song) as this is one of my favourites on the CD, another ode to failed relationships.
The paradox of RT is that he is fascinated by mortality, decadence and despair, yet is among the most clean-living, disciplined and downright healthy artists out there; he is sixty this year but his voice is strong and physically he looks almost the same as he did twenty years ago, with his trademark beret.
He carries it off really well, but would I rather have heard 1952 Vincent Black Lightning, Wall of Death, and The Ghost of you Walks? I suppose I would; but at the same time kudos to RT for doing something different.
This is the set list from the day before in London (I didn’t go but it was posted to the discussion list); ours was very similar but I’ll update this post when I have the exact set list from last night.
Hevene Queen
3 Ravens
So Ben
False Knight
Pipe Shepherds Pipe
When I am Laid in The Earth
Remember Thou O Man
Shenandoah
Blackleg Miner
Trafalgar Square
Sally Gardens
When a Man Goes to Woe
Interval
Java jive
Night and Day/Something Wonderful
Wine Spo-Di-O-Di
All Right I’ll Sign the Papers
See My Friends
Friday on My Mind
Money, Money, Money
everybody’s Got to Learn sometime
Maneater
Encores
Ja Nuls Hom Pris
Cry Me a River
Beatle Medley
SQLite developer D Richard Hipp has posted to his mailing list to announce a third release in the space of a few days, to fix bugs discovered in version 3.6.10:
Some concern has been expressed that we are releasing too frequently. (Three releases in one week is a lot!) The concern is that this creates the impression of volatility and unreliability. We have been told that we should delay releases in order to create the impression of stability. But the SQLite developers feel that truth is more important than perception, not the other way around. We think it is important to make the highest quality and most stable version of SQLite available to users at all times. This week has seen two important bugs being discovered shortly after a major release, and so we have issued two emergency patch releases after the regularly scheduled major release. This makes us look bad. This puts "egg on our face." We do not like that. But, three releases also ensures that the best quality SQLite code base is available available to you at all times.
He goes on to say that an extended beta period would be unlikely to reduce the risk of bugs found on release, because most bugs in SQLite are found by internal testing rather than by external users. He also argues against withholding releases until they “testing is finished”:
The fallacy there is that we never finish testing. We are constantly writing new test cases for SQLite and thinking of new ways to stress and potentially break the code. This is a continuous, never-ending, and on-going process. All existing tests pass before each release. But we will always be writing new tests the day after a release, regardless of how long we delay that release. And sometimes those new tests will uncover new problems.
Anyone who has ever developed an application will know that sinking feeling when problems are discovered in code that has been distributed. Thoroughly implemented unit testing, as in SQLite, improves quality greatly. When bugs are found though, full disclosure and prompt fixes are the best possible response, so I agree with Hipp’s general approach here.
I’m writing on mapping applications right now and came across this impressive example from Port Metro Vancouver. It uses Microsoft’s Silverlight and Virtual Earth. The bit you want is the interactive map on the home page. Wait for it to load, then click the uncaptioned button (to the right of Webcams Wall) for full screen mode, and try some of the menu options.
There is more about the app in this blog entry on the Virtual Earth for Public Sector blog.
The Guardian has posted a gallery of screenshots I took from the Windows 7 beta.
It includes an actual Device Stage, for the Sansa Clip. I did actually use this to update the firmware, which is not something you can do from the generic device connection dialog. It wasn’t truly seamless though, involving a download and a separate setup application.
I also illustrated the Library feature with three screenshots. The third of these illustrates a wee snag with this feature – documents with the same name, but in different folders, can appear identical in some views.
You can get a similar effect in Vista. If you look in \users\public with hidden items showing, you’ll find a folder called Public Desktop. Items in this folder show on your desktop merged with items in your user desktop. Put an item here with the same name as one in your user desktop, and both appear without any indication that they are different. This is also the reason why desktop.ini appears twice on the desktop if you show hidden files.
I guess it’s something users won’t run into very often (it’s pretty hard to do by accident in Vista); but it would be good if Windows could detect this situation and indicate it in some way. Bad outcomes would be if you deleted one of them thinking it was a duplicate, and lost some data; or sent someone a draft thinking it was the final version.
While working on a Windows 7 piece recently, I tried to write a description of what happens when you click on an icon in the Windows 7 taskbar. Trouble is, there are so many contextual variations that it is hard to describe concisely. Here’s what I’ve got so far; I may have missed a few things.
If the app to which the icon points is not running, it runs and comes to the front.
If the app is running and there is only one instance, it comes to the front.
If the app is running and there are two or more instances (might not be real instances; could be several Word documents or tabs in IE), then preview windows appear – provided that Aero is enabled. Neither comes to the front until you take further action. If you move the mouse over a preview window, the associated app window comes to the front temporarily and other windows go transparent; if you move the mouse away from the preview without clicking it reverts to the background.
This can be counter-intuitive – if you move your mouse over the seemingly activated window without clicking the preview first, it disappears because it does not really have the focus.
Previews can contain their own controls such as buttons – so strictly, clicking a preview will only bring its main app window to the front if the click is not overridden by a button or other control on the preview.
Hovering the mouse over an icon is almost the same as clicking: it raises the previews, though it will do so even if there is only one instance. The exception is when previews are already locked to another icon. Clicking an icon locks its previews into view, and they remain until you click somewhere else.
A right-click (or secondary mouse button) raises the jump list – a contextual menu that app developers can customize.
Click, hold and drag up also raises the jump list. This is really aimed at touch users.
A middle-click (or mouse wheel click) or SHIFT+click, starts a new instance of the application. Users may have trouble with this. It is not obvious how to start a new instance. There is also a link on the jump list, but again it is not really intuitive.
SHIFT+CTRL+Click starts a new instance with elevated permissons, subject to an elevation prompt if UAC is enabled.
The Show Desktop icon is special. If you hover the mouse there, app windows go transparent so you can see the desktop. If you click there, all apps minimize. If you click again without activating any app, all the apps which minimized are restored; however if you restore an individual app first, the Show Desktop icon loses its memory and reverts to minimizing all apps.
Describing all the variations makes it sound confusing, but in practice you soon learn what to do. I can see the reasoning behind the behaviour. I do find it odd that left-clicking an icon doesn’t necessarily bring the application to the front – but Windows doesn’t know which instance you want. The full-window preview could do with a special outline or a degree of opacity to show that it is not fully activated. You can turn both features off from taskbar properties if you prefer. Overall the behaviour is OK and a step up from Vista.
Here’s the Apple OS X Dock (Leopard):
Here’s the Windows 7 taskbar (Beta 1):
Note: the running apps in the Dock are indicated by the small white dot in the reflection. The running apps in the taskbar are indicated by the extra illumination in the top left corner of the icon (IE, Word and Adobe reader in the example).
I do not make posts like this just to needle Microsoft. I’d like to see it compete better with Google, not because I have anything against Google, but because competition is good. So I’m explaining why I can’t use Microsoft’s search product as currently implemented, in the hope that it will help to improve it.
I am aware that the Windows 7 beta SDK is now available, and wanted to download it. I tried the search on Microsoft’s site:
Top hit is from November 2007 and is a forum discussion of dxtrans.h. Correct result nowhere to be seen.
So I tried Live Search:
I get ads for double-glazing and a top hit for the QuickTime 7.3 SDK from Apple. Correct result nowhere to be seen.
So I tried Google:
Top hit is relevant but wrong. Second hit is a blog post which has the URL I’m looking for, not bad. Fourth hit is the exact URL. By the way, the Windows 7 SDK beta is here.
It is no use Microsoft doing search bundling deals with Dell. If it cannot fix the product, users will run back to Google.
Incidentally, I believe US searchers get better results from Live Search than I do, because of faulty regionalisation. Live Search seems to have a heavier bias than Google towards what it thinks are (in my case) UK results. That doesn’t explain why it gives an Apple QuickTime site as its top hit for “Windows 7 SDK”.
There are various reasons why someone might be impressed with the performance of the Windows 7 beta. One is that the beta is a clean, plain Microsoft install – no anti-virus, no cruft and clutter, no OEM foistware. The only fair comparison is with an equally clean install of Windows XP or Vista on the same hardware.
That can be arduous to arrange, but I was given an opportunity perforce. I installed Windows 7 beta 1 on a laptop using an old hard drive, from which I upgraded last year. I have a second hard drive bay in this laptop, making it particularly suitable for multi-boot. However, in order to install Windows 7 I wanted to boot from CD, which means removing the hard drive bay, so I took out the main internal drive temporarily and replaced it with a spare drive for Windows 7.
Everything went fine until I replaced the old drive. I’m still not sure exactly what went wrong; suspects include the storage controller BIOS possibly detecting the drive as RAID rather than JBOD, or vice versa, or a resume failure. The outcome though was a thoroughly scrambled Vista installation – file corruption and then refusal to boot – that “missing winload.exe” message.
This was going nowhere so I reformatted the drive and did a clean Vista install (with SP1). It struck me that this gave me a good opportunity to run PassMark on the two relatively clean systems (just Office 2007 is installed, on both). Note that you are not meant to publish benchmarks for beta versions of Windows, so treat this as for anecdotal interest only. I am not going to give the exact figures.
The test was not quite fair, since the newer hard drive is faster than the old one, and the graphics driver is a different version. The drive difference probably accounts for why overall Windows 7 result was slightly below that for Vista – the “disk mark” was over 40% worse. Windows 7 was also slightly worse for 2D and 3D graphics, by 5-10%. The result was not all bad for the beta though. The CPU score was around 4.5% better, and the memory score was over 9% better. On the memory allocation tests Windows 7 came out nearly 25% faster.
One final observation: performance is not just about raw speed in tests. I believe some of the most annoying Windows slow-downs are to do with synchronous API calls that time-out before they return, or inefficient Windows utilities. I hate seeing the progress bar that Explorer shows sometimes, when trying to enumerate files in the current directory. If Microsoft simply manages to speed up Explorer and reduce the number of mysterious Windows pauses, users might perceive Windows 7 as faster even if benchmark tests showed otherwise. Some of the changes in Vista since its first release have improved performance by addressing specific defects. Zip extraction and file copying are examples.
Talking of file copying, I can’t resist posting this Vista dialog which I saw when copying a CD image to my new laptop install (note the time remaining). Fortunately for me, it was pessimistic, and the copy completed a few minutes later.
