Christopher Mackay's Blog

‘Digital Manners Policies’ is a marketing term. Let’s call this what it really is: Selective Device Jamming. It’s not polite, it’s dangerous. It won’t make anyone more secure — or more polite”

Best argument for open-source software; now what about open-source hardware?

TechBlog: Mozilla hits its Firefox 3 download goal, and then some: 8.3 million downloads in 24 hours, including 300,000 from Canada.

(Via spreadfirefox.com and chron.com.)

From the Daring Fireball post on Wired’s story on 37signals:

Long profile by Andrew Park in the March issue. Pretty good overall, but there’s an awful lot of ginned-up conflict. E.g. the last paragraph contains the sentence: ‘Call it arrogance or idealism, but they would rather fail than adapt,’ and suggests they’re somehow losing customers due to their emphasis on simplicity above all else.”

Doesn’t seem so “ginned-up” from here. Count me among the lost customers.

37signals have earned their success. They get an awful lot right in their apps, from lack of data lock-in to an admirable overall level of intuitiveness.

So why have I given up on them after trying to use Basecamp for nearly 3 years?

A big reason would be that “vetoing customer requests” is standard operating procedure at 37signals. Don’t take my word for it: it says so on page 62 of Getting Real:

Don’t worry about tracking and saving each request that comes in. Let your customers be your memory. If it’s really worth remembering, they’ll remind you until you can’t forget.

Or until they go away because they have better things to do.

It’s fine with me that DHH would say “fuck you” to this, but he doesn’t get to do that and have my money.

For people looking for something, um, less simple than Basecamp (on Mac OS X) take a look at OmniPlan, recently upgraded to version 1.5.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) (via the Sydney Morning Herald):

However, [Torvalds] went on to say that both companies are using their operating systems to propel more software and hardware sales.”

Simply shocking. I can’t imagine what they’re thinking…

AOL today announced the end of the Netscape web browser. They’re handing the reigns over to Firefox, almost as if it hadn’t already effectively happened.

So it’s time to upgrade some Adobe products. No, the reviews haven’t been positively glowing, but I do generally like their products… I’ve been using Adobe and Macromedia’s online stores for as long as they’ve existed, and today’s experience has been my worst to date.

After selecting products, adding them to the cart, and entering finanical vitals, it tells me this:

Thank you for visiting the Adobe Store.
We are currently reviewing your order!

Apparently Nitrozac and Snaggy weren’t far-off with their Mortgage Your Home Edition… This is now a process, not a transaction.

You will receive an email within the next business day confirming the status of your order.
Your credit card will not be charged until your order has been processed.

WTF? I thought this was ecommerce. I give you credit card info, you give me downloads. Now. Not tomorrow. Not later today. Now.

The only waiting should be for the hundreds of megabytes of data I have to download.

As with Microsoft and its Office suite, Adobe needs to realize that it’s competing with free products.

In some cases that means open source (e.g. The GIMP and the many open source Office alternatives). It often means their own software (“is CS2 good enough? Nah. Wait for CS4…”).

When companies like Adobe or Microsoft or Sony make the purchasing experience painful in this way, who do they think they’re hurting?