Windows 7 uses a different mechanism, and one I find far too subtle.

Looking at this, you’re probably thinking “hey it’s obvious, the orange one wants your attention”. And it does seem that way, but for some reason I find myself, with Windows 7, missing IM notifications and not responding to messages until hours later, because I just didn’t notice that I had a new message.

Maybe it’s because of all the additional noise in the taskbar – it’s harder to tell at a glance that an app wants your attention, so I don’t pick it up “out of the corner of my eye” the way I would with the XP style.

The Mac continues to animate icons that want your attention until you give in and click on it. Windows animates the icon for a few seconds and then settles on the orange look. One solution would be to change Windows 7 so that the animation continues until you respond.

There’s been speculation for years about Google introducing an OS, but somehow the actual announcement seems anti-climatic. Maybe it’s because of the existing prevalence of Netbooks running Linux. It makes me wonder what Google stands to gain by doing this.

This is a scenario that Microsoft has been working hard to prevent, and has apparently failed at. A laptop that runs Chrome (and has the Flash player) is all most people need in a computer. Flash covers the games and rich multimedia, Chrome with JavaScript and HTML5 cover the applications, and what else is there? For most users, that’s it.

Google’s timing on this is bizarre. Second half of 2010? What’s the point of pre-announcing something that’s over a year away? This is also somewhat out of character for Google, who, like Apple, traditionally don’t announce things until they’re ready to use. They’re doing the same thing with Google Wave, and it’s strange there too.

Another interesting aspect is that this isn’t based on Android. Logically, I think it should be. Is there something about Android that makes it unsuitable for a desktop OS? They’re both based on Linux, and I don’t see why they can’t both be distributions of the same core. Two teams that are doing basically the same thing in parallel isn’t a good way to run a business, especially a big one like an OS business.

This is a good move for the industry even if I don’t think it’s a great move for Google. The resurgence of the Mac platform (including the iPhone), and Netbooks, have given the computing world a future that doesn’t depend on Windows. Over 10% of traffic on the web is now not Windows based – still a small number, but a growing one. Windows 7 is a great OS, but now it has to compete on its merits, and not on the inability for its users to choose an alternative.

I love my Xbox 360, but a lot of that love is in spite of all the things the 360 does to make me hate it.

I’m on my 5th console (although this one seems to be a good one – I’ve had it for a long time now). It’s loud. It heats up. It’s hardly elegant.

So my question is, where’s the hardware redesign?

It’s costing Microsoft a lot of money to keep replacing consoles. They just announced they’re going to cover the E74 errors under the 3 year warranty, which is going to cost them a bunch more.

They’ve redesigned the chipset once or twice, but the basic structure of the console seems unchanged. They’ve tried to quiet the thing down by letting you copy games to the hard disk, but then they keep a hard disk big enough to take advantage of that prohibitively expensive. And is it that hard to get a quiet DVD drive? Sony seems to have managed.

What are Microsoft’s hardware engineers up to?

http://live.sysinternals.com

A direct link to a runnable version of the latest SysInternals tools.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has their various video container formats (ASF, WMV, AVI) where the codec that you need to play the content is dependent on the streams in the containers. In other words, given a *.avi file, you have no idea what you need to have installed to play it.

This leads to the various codec packs you can download, which almost invariably are a vehicle for malware. It’s a terrible situation, and I think one of the reasons Flash video has done so well.

Microsoft apparently doesn’t get this, because the latest version of Silverlight has “Extensible Media Format Support”, which means developers can plug in arbitrary video or audio codecs to support other video formats.

Argh.

So one site will be posting Ogg-contained videos and another DivX videos, and I’m going to need to download a bunch of codecs to view videos with Silverlight? No thanks.

First, the Mac. When you’re selecting items in a list by holding down shift and using the arrow keys, pressing the arrow in the opposite direction expands the selection the other way, rather than reducing the selection. Let me illustrate:

Here’s a finder window where I want to select a few files. I start with the first file:

I hit the down arrow a few times to select some more files:

Now still holding down shift, I hit the up arrow.

What I expect to happen is one of the items I expanded the selection onto using the down arrow will be deselected and the selection will shrink. What actually happens is the selection grows at the other end.

This is different from how shift-cursor works everywhere else. In an editor, for example, if you hold down the shift key and move the cursor, the selection extends from the anchor (where you started) to the cursor (where you are now).

So why do some lists in the Mac work this way? I don’t think it’s a bug, so someone thinks this is how it should work, but I can’t come up with a good reason for it. I often shift-cursor-down to select a bunch of files and then realize I went to far and need to back up; I have never hit shift-cursor down and then realized I started at the wrong place.

So that’s my Mac beef. Here’s the Windows one.

When you click the thumb in a scroll bar on Windows and move the mouse, there’s a horizontal range within which you have to stay, or the scroll position snaps back to where you started.

This gets in my way because I click the thumb and start moving the mouse to scroll to read something, and because I’m not watching the cursor, it strays outside the green rectangle. And the scroll position snaps back to the top of the document.

Is this a feature to anyone? Old versions of Windows didn’t do this, so again it seems intentional, but I don’t understand the rationale.

This is how I played games before I got into console gaming. On computers. The Vic-20, Commodore 64, Amiga, DOS-era PCs, and the PCs are all systems I used for gaming. They all sat on my desk, hooked up to a monitor. They all had a keyboard, and most of them had a mouse (even the Commodore 64).

Gaming consoles assume you’re going to play with a controller. Controllers have gone from a single 8 direction joystick and 1 button to the multitude of inputs that the Xbox 360 and PS3 controllers have (including two proportional joysticks, 2 triggers, 8 buttons, etc). But for some classes of games, this just isn’t the right input metaphor.

Real time strategy games, for example, benefit hugely from being able to get around the screen quickly. Aiming in first person shooters and RPGs is better with a keyboard and mouse. And in-game communication with a keyboard is preferable to me most of the time to using a headset to chat.

But PC gaming is slowly dying.

People still want to play these kinds of games, so they’re coming out for the consoles, but the experience just isn’t as good as it is with a keyboard and mouse combo.

So here’s what I want: Keyboard and mouse support in Xbox 360 games.

There are two obstacles to this happening:

The big one is, I think, that Microsoft doesn’t want it to. It doesn’t fit their vision of the 360 as the couch experience – I’m sure they think of the question from the perspective of making a good keyboard/mouse controller that you can use on the couch. But that’s not what I want. Plus they still make a few bucks selling Windows.

And the other one is the extra UI design and testing that would go into supporting two input methods.

But in my opinion, the payoff for that extra work would be worth it. For example, even though I love RTS games, I didn’t buy Command and Conquer on the 360 because I don’t like the control scheme. That’s lost dollars for EA.

The PS3 technically supports keyboard/mouse play, but I don’t think most games do. For example, their headline shooter series, Resistence: Fall of Man, does not.

I think the way to change this is to let the publishers know why we’re not buying their games. If EA sees lost sales, they’ll pressure Microsoft to allow keyboard/mouse. And with Peter Moore at EA now, maybe he’ll still have some pull with MS.

(Okay, a console one on my desk at work would be cool, too).

Except that Microsoft doesn’t charge you $999 to watch them.

Crappy move, Apple.