Grumpy Old Man

Just did another of my periodic “New Look Gmail sucks” searches and came up against this interesting post on the techeye.net website.

It is interesting because it looks at the issue of New Look Gmail now that the option to revert to the Old Look has been removed. Note that this doesn’t affect me as I chose to use the HTML Gmail interface and IMAP email clients a while back. For my webmail needs I and am slowly moving myself to my existing MyOpera email account. MyOpera email has a much more usable UI with unfashionable things such as text labels next to icons and clear separation of page elements.

Back to the article at Techeye.net, the interesting thing is that it makes the same points I have been making for some time, not just about usability but also about the problems of becoming dependent on Cloud computing solutions.

It is also good to read that I am not alone in my reaction to New Look Gmail and the generally undesireable direction that Google have been taking recently.

If you want to use a linux computer to watch Flash video content AND you want to avoid Google’s vertical lock-in, then this is about to get a little more difficult.

Versions of the Flash plug-in after version 11.2 will no longer be available as a standalone plugin for Linux users. Instead you will have to use Google Chrome.

Although, maybe it isn’t quite as bad as it seems at first glance. At least Flash 11.2 will get five years bug fixing support. A small price, (but clear price) to pay to keep Google products off your computer.

Scroogle, the King of Anonymous Googling, is dead.

Long live DuckDuckGo.

After a raft of injunctions against Samsung, in a dispute over patents and the ‘look and feel’ of the new Galaxy tablet, Apple have now decided to start threatening retailers in Europe.

You have to wonder why Apple appear to be so scared of the new Samsung tablet. According to reviews the Galaxy is good but no class beater. The legal action is even stranger given that Samsung supplies important electronic components for Apple’s iPad. So why all the lawsuits and where is it going to stop? Is Apple’s next move going to be to demand that Samsung hand over details of individual Galaxy Tab customers so they can go after them? That seems to me to be an obvious next step, given Apple’s behaviour so far.

I decided a while ago, as Apple became more and more litigious, that I would never buy another Apple product. However, this does not mean that Apple will never get another penny from me in the future. Apple, like other big players in the IT market, have a huge portfolio of patents. These relate to all aspects of computing and especially to mobile devices.

Chances are that any mobile/internet/wireless device I might want to buy will have an Apple/Microsoft/Google/whoever tax built in. Unlike the taxes that our governments levy, it is well nigh impossible to know who is getting the money and equally importantly, how much each party gets.

Until consumer rights are improved to give us an irrevocable right to such information, (from the purchase price down to how much Mrs Chang gets for assembling each iPad) the only way to be sure you are not contributing to Mr Jobs’ war chest is to just stop buying consumer electronics.

After a raft of pointless UI changes and a move to a senselessly rapid development cycle, the Mozilla developers have decided in their wisdom to make it harder to find the version number in Firefox. Way to go guys, that will solve so many problems in one go.

The rot at Mozilla Central started when Mozilla released the alpha quality Thunderbird 3. It auto updated itself without first directing users to the “What’s new page” so that we could check if we really wanted to update. TB3 was buggy and slow, introduced UI changes that many didn’t like/want and broke the Lightning calendar plugin. Even worse, the Mozilla developers insisted that because we liked tabs in Firefox we’d love them in TB3. I ditched Thunderbird at that point.

It was only a matter of time before Mozilla started messing around with Firefox.

It is a remarkably refreshing revelation to find out that this style of arrogance towards your customers, typified in the past by Microsoft, has nothing to do with your software being open or closed source. It has to do with the fact that organisations forget that their user base, their market, is built on mutual respect and not on an immutuable right to exist.

Opera have just joined the ranks of “companies unable to write auto update software”. My working install of Opera, running on a Macbook with Tiger auto updated itself yesterday. Of course, the Opera auto updater, like the Skype for Mac auto updater fails to check the OS version used before it installs the new version.

Yes, you guessed it, the version of Opera that the Opera auto updater installed was not compatible with Tiger.

So it was back off to the Opera website, where I tried to find the last good version of Opera. I thought I had been using 10.63 but once re-installed it refused to fetch webpages as did 10.62. Eventually I discovered that the last version of Opera for Tiger was 11.11 and re-installed that. Voila! My bookmarks and Speed Dial were back as they were.

So this week’s brickbat goes to Opera. It is a shame as I thought Opera were better than the rest. Nothing like a cock-up to bring you face to face with reality.

Suffice it to say that auto updating is now turned off in my copy of Opera.