Christopher Mackay’s Blog

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.

Katemonkey.co.uk: X-UA-Lemur-Compatible: “Lemur 11: It’s been a few weeks since we’ve had an Internet riot. Let’s go for it.”

The blue Zeldman toque is an instant internets classic.

(Via Digital Web.)

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.

Remember those wonderful web badges that obnoxious webmasters used to put on their home pages? You know, “Optimized for Netscape 3.0″? As if people would go to the trouble of downloading and installing a web browser just to see some idiot’s latest enhancement to their web site (usually something involving the “blink” tag).

Well, I had a flashback to those days today. I visited Bell.ca, and I had the audacity to do it with a Mac and ?

Apple’s beta release of Safari 3.0 has certainly got lots of people talking. While I didn’t have any issues with installation or launch, as some have reported, I did have it crash on me once, which is quite uncharacteristic.

Today I noticed a really odd behaviour: I was doing some data-entry, copying-and-pasting data from BBEdit 8.6.2 into a web form in Safari 3. Copy, switch, paste, switch, copy, switch, paste… The weird thing is that it was sometimes (maybe 10%?) remembering previous clipboard data. E.g.: first “a” is copied-and-pasted, then “b” is copied, but “ab” gets pasted. Impossible; each new “copy” clears the previous one.?Ǭ

This story on Slashdot suggests that email addresses used for ameritrade accounts wind up getting spammed. A quick visit to ameritrade.com shows that it’s owned/co-branded TD — Toronto Dominion — AMERITRADE. Have Canadians had similar experiences with online TD accounts? I’ve certainly never heard of any Canadian banks behaving like this…

This story (“Web site” baffles Internet terrorism trial judge”; Yahoo.com) has been making the rounds, typically accompanied by howls of laughter.

What’s so funny?

I admit, it’s difficult to grasp how anyone — especially someone presiding over a case on internet terrorism — could be so insulated from the everyday realities of modern life. But I must say I’m really quite impressed that Judge Openshaw is brave enough to admit this. Clearly, he has the courage to do what many, many people would not. Would those laughing at him prefer that he quietly sit back and pretend to understand things of which he has no experience? How could that be an improvement?

I applaud Judge Peter Openshaw.

Summary: Dreameaver 9.0.0.3481

If you skipped Macromedia Dreamweaver 8, have an Intel Mac or Photoshop CS3, then this might be worth upgrading to. Otherwise, the ugly new icon is the most noticeable new feature. They want you to open your wallet far too wide for this upgrade, if you ask me.

Read the rest of this entry »

There seems to be a theme today…

What is it with Adobe.com? I tell it to remember me as a registered user, and it never does. It’s not as if cookies aren’t set — it shows “welcome, ” and then my account ID. It knows me. But if I click on “Your Account”, it asks me to sign in. How stupid is that? It wastes my time, every time. They’re important, and I’m not. Not a great way to treat customers.

Normally, the way these things work, is that once you log-in to a site, you can close the window and come back later without having to log in again — as long as you don’t quit the browser. Not with Adobe.com. It forgets every time.

And what’s up with those horrid drop-down menus? Are they trying to trigger an epileptic seizure?

Of course, this is how it works in Safari on Mac OS X. No doubt it works just fine in Firefox, or IE7, or IE6, or some other browser I don’t use (when not testing web sites). But Adobe ships their products for Mac OS X, and their web site should work in the default web browser for Mac OS X. Period. It’s not as if their site navigation is some minor feature on their site…

That’s enough ranting for today. Stay tuned for a look at my experience with Dreamweaver CS3 (aka DW9).

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?