Sure I have Windows 7 installed via Bootcamp with Steam all set up. It runs my games great, but there’s something to be said about being able to quickly just start playing and stop on a dime. Alt-tabbing to handle emails and chats, monitor servers, or to quickly look something up is also pretty handy. I have an iPad – I could do it there, but I still really like my hardware keyboard for doing things fast. I guess it’s a curse of spending the extra time figuring out keyboard shortcuts for everything.

So, now that I’ve been using Steam for Mac for a couple months now, here’s my wish list.

1. Smooth Scrolling

It seems to be a requirement of using a Mac these days, but not only would Steam for Mac fit in with the rest of my apps a bit nicer, smooth scrolling just feels more natural with a touch-based trackpad and mouse (Magic Mouse).

(No I don’t use my Magic Mouse while in game).

2. Better positioned aqua buttons

Note: This has been fixed in the beta version released today (July 30, 2010)!

For reasons unbeknownst to me, Valve decided to place the aqua buttons with a huge left margin – different from the UI of all other windows in OS X. It’s weird and seems out of place, although it is admittedly not a show stopper.

3. Tabbed chats

Note: Apparently this was added in the July 30 update (or recently anyhow).

I don’t consider the chat system an elaborate IM application, but tabbed chatting is really handy and helps keep window clutter to a minimum. I think this would be especially useful while not in a game, but still chatting with someone who is – perhaps about potentially joining them in an epic battle in L4D. I say while not in game specifically because you typically want to cut down on window clutter while not in a game.

Once the game becomes full screen, the window clutter in-behind is largely irrelevant – the game takes over your entire field of vision and flattens your layered windows into nothingness while you’re sucked into the depth of the game environment instead. Since the Valve Community system already brings those windowed chats to the world of the game, tabbed chats would serve the same purpose as before but in a different place, they would de-clutter your Steam Community overlay.

4. Better (lower) memory usage

Way back before I got my first Mac, I used to have no trouble leaving Steam running in the system tray because it only took up 20-30MB of memory – at most. On my Mac, it seems to always be eating 150MB+. Now, I’m quite used to my Mac apps using more memory (on average) than my Windows apps did for two reasons. One, apps just use more memory now that more is available and the software is more complex, and two I think the architecture for memory management on OS X requires it. That said, most IM programs like Skype and Adium can easily manage 60-80MB. Since Steam is basically a browser (store) mixed with an IM client and Finder (for the games list), prior to launching any games, I don’t see why it needs to take up 150-250MB consistently.

This becomes a usability problem. I want to know when my friends are playing games, so the notifications that arise from having Steam running constantly would be very useful to me, but I simply cannot leave it running when its memory footprint is so large – I need that memory for my more important apps, including Safari (which eats too much memory itself), Espresso, Mail, Calendar, Tweetie, iPhoto, Pixelmator, Adium, Skype, you name it… my productivity apps trump gaming apps any day.

For the record, I don’t care if the games themselves take up every last morsel of RAM – that’s what I expect of them. It’s purely Steam I’m referring to here.

5. Growl notifications

It baffles me why any Mac application would come up with its own proprietary notification system for OS X. Growl has plenty of features, customizable themes and is open source! If Valve wants to make Steam fit in with OS X, then Growl would be one of the key methods of accomplishing this task. If they need a feature that is missing, help out the project and submit a patch! The guys that work on it are easy to get along with and I’m sure they would be happy to work with the Valve devs.

I’m sure more ideas will come up. If you have a suggestion, let me know in the comments.

Why are they doing this to us?

Because it saves the manufacturers money. They figured out at some point that it was getting costly having to ship French Canadian keyboards to Quebec and US keyboards to the rest of Canada, so to save some cash and simplify shipping, they all started shipping with French Canadian keyboards – regardless of the destination.

Why do I care?

I care because every time I type on one of these extremely annoying French Canadian keyboards, I’m reminded how horribly laid out they are for anyone trying to type in plain old English. If you are a hunt-and-peck typist, then you probably won’t care, but if you have been trained in proper touch typing at any point, then these keyboards will drive you mad.

What’s the big deal?

The big deal is that the left shift key is split in two; the left side is normal shift and the right side becomes a slash. When touch typing, it is not only convenient, but simply more comfortable (and probably better ergonomically) to curl your left pinky down a row and SHIFT away. When the key is split so that its ‘sweet-spot’ is no longer actually a shift action, your typing becomes a myriad of slashes in places you certainly did not intend.

What’s more, the enter key is also broken. Typically an enter key is reached by the right pinky finger directly beyond the apostrophe. However with these ridiculously designed keyboards, reaching for that spot actually writes some other unwanted character.

Conclusion

Well… I can’t change it, but I sure as hell am not going to like it. At least I don’t have to own one! In all honesty, I think the manufacturers should allow free keyboard swaps to those who request it, without the owner having to pay for a new US-style keyboard layout. It’s not the customer’s fault that the manufacturers are opting for laziness and cost savings over their satisfaction.

The large and vibrant screen showcases the colours of the comic books beautifully, making it the perfect medium for this purpose. Reading with the Marvel app is simple and elegant – I love it. But it does have its drawbacks. I have a number of comic books in CBR and CBZ formats on my computer, from old classics to independent fan-created graphic novels, all of which could surely benefit from such a fantastic reading environment. I couldn’t do it with the Marvel or IDW (similar) applications because they are limited to purchases in their own in-app stores. So I went on the hunt. I found a free app called CloudReader and began using that, and while its reading experience is well done, the file/comic book navigation and cataloging is terrible. It’s a simple list with no covers, no title parsing, and no folders – not very useful if you have a number of comic books you wish to read and keep on the device. And thus, my search continued.

I looked for reviews and eventually came upon a Gizmodo review comparing Comic Zeal for iPad ($7.99) and Comic Reader Mobi ($15). Not only is Comic Reader Mobi more money than I’m willing to spend on a comic book reader, but their entire website is done in Flash. How clueless can you get?

I visited the Comic Zeal website and found a beautifully designed site that showcased their iPhone version of the app wonderfully. This must be it, I thought, who could make such a nicely designed site and iPhone app and fall short on the iPad version, probably the best physical device made for their market? And so I went to the iTunes app store and paid for and downloaded the latest release at the time – version 4.0.5.

Note: the review is now updated to reflect some great new changes in v4.0.13

Setup

Comic Zeal provides two options for transferring your comic books to your iPad. The first uses the built in file transfer within iTunes and is by far the best method of sending over your comic books. I highly recommend using it for all your comic book transfers. I also tried out the wireless Comic Zeal sync app and found it to be useful in very specific situations, but overall I was unimpressed. It uses a seemingly intuitive and simple drag-and-drop mechanism for converting and sending comic books to your iPad, but appearances are deceiving.

User Interface for Comic Zeal Sync

My first reaction was to drop my comic books where it clearly states “Drop files here”. I then set the Series and Issue names and target device and I’m all set. The problem is that processing begins as soon as I drop the comics in the app, meaning I need to set the series and issue names first. The UI indicates no order (with numbers or arrows) for how to do things and if there were an implied order, then it would be telling me to drop the images first, then set the series and issues names because I naturally process the app from top to bottom.

My only remaining complaint with the main window is that the target device dropdown does not remain consistent across restarts of the application. This caused me to accidentally convert some comic books to the “All devices” resolution of 1024 pixels which is not suitable for the iPad since most of the speech bubbles become difficult to read. I’m not sure why this “All devices” format is even there considering it is even smaller than the target resolution for iPhone which is 1546 pixels (with iPad at 2048 pixels).

Synchronization Agent: SyncDocs

The sync feature uses what I assume to be a third party plugin entitled SyncDocs. I would like it to be well hidden. I think the user should click the Sync button and an indicator should appear that it is waiting to begin syncing with iPad/iPhone. Instead, it launches a separate window with a list of all the files that you have converted and an array of buttons that are surely confusing to most users. Why not hide this window and manage it all through visual indicators in the main window’s interface? It also binds itself to a common port (8080) by default. This conflicts with XBMC or Boxee, which could be running on your Mac or on another computer on your network. This means Comic Zeal Sync might fail to work if you’ve got one of those media centre apps running on your computer (or a proxy app using 8080, which is also common). It also means that when your iPad or iPhone scans your network for devices, it finds XBMC and Boxee servers, which might be confusing to some users. These last few points are not problems, per se, but they made the sync app seem a little rough around the edges.

But, enough about syncing and set-up. Let’s get to the app itself!

First Impression

The first time the application is opened you’re presented with this plain textured background with nothing on it. It’s empty, with not even a gloss or brand applied to it. Right off the bat, my thought was, “well what exactly do I do?” I expected to find an iBooks style interface with my comic book collection on shelves or in boxes (like real-life comic filing boxes as the iPhone app video walk through on their website shows). Instead I’m given nothing. I’m disappointed that this application doesn’t present something fun, like a closet with shelves full of comic book boxes with sharpie-marked comic book titles and the comics themselves popping out from within. I am certainly hoping for something more engaging for two reasons. First, I consider $7.99 a slightly high price for this application and because of my perception of the price I expect a high quality user interface. Just about every application I’ve paid for was purchased due to their impressive UIs. Second, and this is something I will mention again later, the iPhone app and their website are really nicely designed – I wanted to be just as impressed with the iPad version of ComicZeal. Considering these are the first few releases for iPad, I’m willing to forgive the lack of such an engaging user interface, although I am still hoping a redesign will be provided eventually.

Still in search of my comic books, I immediately looked to the bottom to see if there was a tab bar that I could navigate the app with, as nearly all iPhone/iPad apps have, but there was no such option. To the bottom right I found controls for viewing comics, including buttons for taking a picture, rotation lock, some sort of eject option (WTF?) and back and forward page buttons.

There are a few problems with this:

1. If I don’t have a comic book open, the buttons are useless, so why are those options even there? They simply serve to confuse me at this point.
2. Why do I need a rotation lock button when the iPad has a hardware option for this?
3. What the hell am I going to be ejecting from my iPad with that eject button?
4. Why do I need page turning buttons if the iPad has gestures for this? These buttons are not quite as unnecessary as the others since many people have expressed their preference for buttons over gestures for such things – I just don’t happen to agree with that sentiment.

On a more positive note, having the screen capture button could be useful. Many are unaware of the ability to take a screen capture by pressing the home and power buttons simultaneously and others may have simply forgot about the inherent OS level functionality. Although I rarely feel the need to store a picture of anything from a comic book, I’m sure more invested readers do at some point or another.

The progress bar is also very handy. Although Comic Zeal’s plain slider control implementation isn’t as pretty as Marvel’s thumbnail bar, the thumbnails in Marvel’s app are not differentiable anyway. In other words, I bet nobody can tell the difference from one page to another while using the Marvel app’s thumbnail bar, so in that regard it doesn’t provide any additional functionality over Comic Zeal’s slider. There are still a couple downsides to using a slider over thumbnails. First, thumbnails make it pretty clear what the control does. Comic Zeal’s slider could initially be perceived as a zoom or pan slider or some sort of volume control – perhaps for those who like to listen to music while reading their comic books. Second is something I discovered only after quite a bit of reading. When you’re looking for a particular page, you often know approximately where it is in the book in relative terms – “I think the page I’m looking for is about three pages from the end.” This provides a big bonus for thumbnails, as they allow direct page-by-page indication of where you are from the beginning and end.

Marvel for iPad Thumbnail Progress Bar

Navigation

Now that I’ve examined the middle and bottom of the screen, my gaze drifts upward to the only remaining UI elements that I can interact with, and I discover the tab bar on top. I read a review somewhere (that I can no longer find) that described the reasoning behind the top-positioning of the tab bar as being due to the bottom of the screen being hard to reach while reading. This reasoning makes no sense to me.

1. If that’s true, then why are all the controls that are provided specifically to manage your reading on the bottom? (No, seriously… I’d like to know.)
2. This belief should not be considered more important than consistency. Nearly every other application available on the app store has tabs on the bottom and iPhone, iPod Touch and now iPad users are accustomed to it. Having tabs on the top is downright confusing. But I digress.

Severely width-limited viewing area. Background is useless!

Having discovered the tab bar, finding my comics was then simple. I tap on Collection and up pops my comic books. Not in a full screen grid or list as I was expecting (the background is still plain and doing absolutely nothing for me). The comic books show up in one of those scrollable pop-up widgets that are found throughout iPad apps. Thus my area from which to view my comic book collection is limited to a vertical strip taking up less than half of the screen. I have nothing against these iPad UI widgets, but I feel like they have their place, and this particular use for it seems wrong. Why not take advantage of the entirely unused screen real-estate and show the collection there? One does not need to see an individual comic book and their collection simultaneously except when heading to the next comic book in a series. Thus, I suggest converting the collection pop-up into a series pop-up, showing only the series within the box that is currently being read. They could even have it show the top of your comic book box at about a 45º angle, with the next comic book in the series showing and the previous books flipped down – as if you were flipping through a box of comics. I believe this suggested implementation represents an excellent combination of user friendliness and powerful features.

The widget overlay is the first part of the collection navigation that really strikes me as being ‘off’. I want to clarify before continuing that I believe the comic book collection mechanisms in Comic Zeal to be a brilliant extension of a real-life comic book collection, with the use of boxes and sleeves. Despite this, the graphics used to represent these ideas are lacking, leading to a feeling of lower quality than I had anticipated. More detail on this topic in the following few paragraphs.

Viewing My Collection

Blur around edges and off-putting shadows

I can sort my comics into their respective boxes and the covers are immediately grabbed from the first pages and shown right there as thumbnails. When I navigate within a box, the covers of all the comics show up within. It looks pretty slick apart from a collection of odd graphical issues. For some reason the comic books (and boxes as seen to the left) have a really ugly blocky-grey drop shadow. I suggest using a proper alpha channel smooth drop shadow, as long as its not the current Word 2000 style drop shadow – it’s ugly. The second graphical issue is that when using large icons, the boxes appear to be low quality with blur around the handles, and stripes that are not very sharp – these need to be cleaned up around the edges a bit.

There is also a very subtle problem with the background of the collection’s toolbar (and other similar widgets throughout the app). Take a close look and you will see the Apple provided black transparent background being covered by a custom black gradient background. It leaves a feeling of inconsistency with other applications for iPad and that there is something ‘off’ (although it’s hard to tell without taking a close look). I think this might have just been overlooked when transferring from the iPhone version. I hope it can be removed as the buttons appearing directly on top of the Apple provided widget is considerably nicer looking

In terms of view options, you can have small covers to the left with titles and ‘reading status’ on the right and you can also have a grid view, with two, three or four covers per row. The problem with this view is that I don’t see any indication of reading status or numbering. Because of this I can’t tell which comic is the next one in sequence while reading through a series. This is a bit annoying. I was in fact wrong about this. Bitolithic uses a clever mechanism for showing which comics have already been read – a plastic sleeve! All comic books which have been read are placed within a sheath, just like we do with our print comic books. It’s a fantastic idea, however its implementation isn’t quite worthy of the praise. I didn’t notice this feature until it was pointed out to me on their website, at which point I looked closer on my iPad and found that the covers of those within plastic sheaths are slightly faded. I think this problem could be remedied by giving the plastic sleeve a more glossy look – it needs to be clear to the user that these comics appear different from those that have not yet been read, otherwise the feature is not useful.

Box View

Small Box View

Cover View

Tap on any comic book and it loads immediately in behind, with seemingly no load time at all. Cool. For some reason my collection is still hovering above the comic, which is a bit irritating, although I suppose could be useful if you accidentally tapped on the wrong one (I never did). I await the usual 3-5 seconds for the controls (bottom buttons and tab bar) to disappear so I can focus in on reading, just like it works in iBooks and while watching movies. It doesn’t happen. I wait a little longer, bupkis. I finally notice the little upward pointing arrow in the right hand upper corner of the screen and tap it. Controls disappear as I was expecting them to do automatically. Odd, but manageable. You can also tap anywhere in the middle of the screen for the controls to disappear, which feels a little more natural. With version 4.0.13 tapping on a comic book in the collection now results in the comic book appearing full screen and the interface disappearing automatically. Perfect!!

Reading

Background on sides is distracting

Reading the comics themselves is generally pleasing with a few minor quirks. First is that textured background I mentioned before. Since the aspect ratio of most comic books is slightly skinnier than the screen, there is space on both the left and right side of the screen where the comic book does not take up. In movies and the Marvel app, this is filled in with black; it’s easy on the eyes and provides a sort-of smooth transition into the black frame of the iPad. Comic Zeal sticks with its plain textured background, making it brighter on the eyes in dark rooms and simply put, not a very nice border for reading.

This has since been fixed! In version 4.0.8 the ability to change the background has been added and I was able to change it to black to make it easier on the eyes in dark rooms and for better consistency. Even better, the magic background feature auto-detects the background of the comic and sets it accordingly. It works very well resulting in me leaving that mode on at all times. Additionally, the zoom lock feature added in 4.0.13 means you rarely need to look at the background anyway!

My next quirk is in page-turning. I can slide my finger across and it slides smooth until the left side of the comic reaches the left side of the screen. At this point it suddenly stops and then appears to do a really fast slide off screen before revealing the following page. It’s slightly awkward looking and inconsistent with iBooks (real-feeling page turning) and other readers that slide the pages across. While I like iBooks page turn animation, I don’t think Comic Zeal could pull it off since you’re often zooming in and out and panning up and down – detecting a page turn would be rather difficult amidst all these other gestures. A smooth slide across could work, though it might feel less authentic. I think the smooth slide might be the better option as it would feel like it fits in better with other iPad applications, though I’m not entirely sold on it either. Perhaps I’ll have more to say on this after further time is spent reading in Comic Zeal.

Pinch zooming works flawlessly. Although I expected double tapping to zoom in to the frame, it instead revealed the tab bar and controls again, despite there being a button for this in the upper right corner. Why do we need two methods of bringing that up? In the preferences there is an option to enable double-tap zooming rather than bringing up the controls – I think this should be enabled by default. The odd thing about double tap zooming is that it appears to not zoom in to anything in particular. It would be nice if it could approximately detect a panel and zoom into that or, if tapping on a speech bubble, zoom the bubble alone (without zooming the rest of the page).

Tapping on the “Collection” button in the tab bar to see my comic collection again doesn’t seem to work the first time. I always have to tap it twice. When it does come up, it takes me back to the root of the navigation every time rather than showing me where I was. If I want to get to the next comic book in the series, I must bring up the tab bar, double tap the Collection button, find the series again, tap on it, then find where I was in the list (which is hard if you are in any type of covers view). Not very intuitive.

Both of these bugs have been fixed in 4.0.8. Double tap no longer required, and it automatically shows wherever I left off in the hierarchy of my comic book organization.

Conclusions

When it comes to comic book collection management, Bitolithic has the right idea with a poor implementation. They know how people want to navigate their comics, but they haven’t yet made the best use of the iPad’s screen real-estate. People take pride in their comic book collections and since comic book covers are illustrious and normally more vibrant than regular book covers, showing them off should be a huge benefit of this application.

When it comes to reading, this app is the best of all I have tried hands-down. Although page turning isn’t quite as smooth feeling as others, the zoom lock feature, magic background and extremely fast load and page turn times make it near-perfect for reading.

The company has shown with its iPhone apps and very nicely designed websites that it knows how to design. It has shown from its iPhone and iPad apps that it knows how people want to read comics on their mobile devices. I’m now awaiting the trifecta that would combine those two huge benefits with a powerful and beautiful comic book collection management system. I’m looking forward to further updates to this application that set the standard for presentation of comic book collections on the iPad.

If you’re a comic book lover that has downloaded your comic books from a variety of sources (or plan to do so in the future) and you would love to put them on your iPad – as you should – then definitely download this application. If you don’t own any electronic comic books and would like to start getting into new series, perhaps the Marvel or IDW app is best for you, as you can set up subscriptions to automatically purchase and download new comic books.

Pros:

• Shows the makings of a really powerful interface for organizing comics
• One of the few ‘reader’ apps on the App store that actually focuses on Comics and not general purpose reading (like PDFs, etc.)
• The developer(s) are very keen on updating the app – this is something that is very important to me
• Opening a comic book is instantaneous
• Zooming and panning is as responsive as doing so on pictures in the Photos app
• Has its own Wifi Syncing application AND supports syncing wired through iTunes
• Magic background colour feature is truly magic – I really really like it.
• The newly added (v4.0.13) zoom lock feature feels natural and makes reading a fantastic experience
• Saves your exact position in a comic book when existing the app so you can get right back to it upon launch

Cons:

• Comic book collection is presented in a half-screen widget as opposed to using the entire screen to show it off. The background remains unused with a default plain background, which unfortunately is the same background used in the collection viewing widget.
• Controls appear even when they’re not needed/useful. These same controls probably don’t need to exist at all, except perhaps the progress bar slider
• The tab bar is on the top unlike almost every other application for the device and the device’s siblings
• Some UI elements appear to be lower quality than I’d like to see. These include boxes, which have blurry edges and shadows which are clunky and don’t feel natural.
• The majority of views for comic books in the collection make it impossible to see your progress in the series
• The plastic sleeve effect used to indicate comics which have already been read is not noticeable enough to be useful
• After selecting a comic to read, it appears in behind with the collection still remaining on top Fixed in v4.0.13
• The background should probably be black while viewing comics to blend in nicer with the black border on the iPad and for consistency with other applications. (Like while watching videos on the device) Fixed in v4.0.8 with the option to select your background colour.
• Clicking on Collections while viewing a comic book requires two taps and takes you back to the root of the collection rather than where you left off. This means you have to navigate the hierarchy again just to find where you were in a series. Fixed in v4.0.8

[Note: this article has been updated to include new findings with v4.0.13]

I worked at Future Shop the AM of the Windows 7 launch, so although I didn’t miss the launch itself, I missed the long-form news reports on the topic, along with the always-excellent review from Ars Technica. So I sat down today to read through the many page review and quickly realized there were going to be many parallels between the reviewer, Peter Bright’s opinions, and my own. As with all reviews, there will also be things I disagree with.

Since my memory is not always the best and since I love summaries, I thought I would take the opportunity to include some of Peter’s writing here – the parts I find most interesting, whether it be sections I agree with wholeheartedly, or pieces that I disagree with.
I’d like to start with this paragraph on the first page

Although Windows Vista may have caused vendors and users alike some amount of pain, it was all for a good reason. To take advantage of modern video cards, Windows needed a new graphics stack; to withstand the increasing malware onslaught, Windows needed to tighten security and make running as a regular user more comfortable. These changes were not made lightly; the break with the past was necessary to put the operating system on the same footing as its competition and to address long-standing, legitimate criticisms of the platform. Microsoft was never going to revert to a more XP-like operating system, no matter how desperately some cling to the old OS.

Amen to that. Despite my frustration with customers, friends, and everyone else I talked to who insisted that Windows XP was the best, that Vista was terrible, that they would never upgrade, I’m confident that they all wound up upgrading eventually. The best part? I bet they loved Vista once they gave it a shot. In the end, the true problem was the quasi-enthusiasts – the people that didn’t really know why Vista was a necessary step, that didn’t actually try it (or if they did it was a short try-out), and that stood in a position where people asked them their opinions on software, hardware, and anything IT. They abused their position of power by not giving Vista a true chance and went around proclaiming how bad it was and how everyone should stick with XP. It was the company’s ‘IT guy’ or the computer-savvy nephew that I was constantly having to shoot down in order to get the facts through to those that asked.

And the paragraph right after I agree with completely – it’s amazing how such a seemingly simple feature becomes so important to your daily flow.

I have way too many icons in my Start menu and way too many documents on my PC for hunting through hierarchies to ever be an effective way of finding, well, anything. Hitting the Windows key and then just typing what I’m looking for beats browsing hierarchies hands-down. And it’s like crack; I was hooked from the first time I ever did it, and using Windows XP (with its dumb old-fashioned Start menu) feels like stepping back into the 1980s. People put up with that? And for so long?! Unbelievable. But I digress.

Last sentence of the first page speaks the truth.

Third parties could, and should, have done better, but they have at least caught up now.

Along with the following tidbit on the different version of Windows 7.

Starter Edition is worthless; it’s crippled (it omits most of the user-visible features that make Vista and Windows 7 worthwhile), only available for 32-bit systems, only available as an OEM pre-install, and really should never have seen the light of day

Internet Explorer 8 can be removed?

One thing that has people excited—especially legislators—is the ability to remove Internet Explorer 8. If IE8 is unticked, then Windows removes all user-visible ways of invoking the Web browser. The “working” parts of the browser are unaffected because so many applications (including the OS itself) embed them for various reasons, so the rendering engine is still present and still important, but as an actual Web browser, IE8 can now be fully removed.

I’m well aware of the European release requiring a browser selection (which we don’t get in North America), but I wasn’t aware of the fact that IE8 can be completely removed. Although I support the browser selection concept and I believe it should have been implemented in all releases of Windows 7, I don’t see a real benefit to having IE 8 removable entirely. Despite this, at least it should mean that Microsoft applications that once ignored your default browser setting, and loaded IE instead, should no longer be able to do so since IE will now be modular – if it doesn’t exist on the system, what would those apps do?

Post install, Bright describes the default wallpaper as irredeemably ugly and horrid.

Once up and running, after briefly admiring the new startup logo, you’re presented with probably the ugliest default wallpaper of any current OS; even the fecal brown of Ubuntu is more aesthetically pleasing. The Windows 7 betas had an amusing fish as their wallpaper (a betta fish; betta, beta, geddit?). The fish has unfortunately had his chips and is gone, replaced by a frankly gross Windows logo overlaid with silhouettes of trees, butterflies, and random dots. The styling is inconsistent with the visual cues in the rest of the operating system (it doesn’t follow from the theming of either the new startup screen or the logo on the Start orb, or anywhere else that the logo is used), it’s inconsistent with the Aero Glass appearance that 7 inherits from Vista. And, most importantly, it’s just irredeemably ugly and horrid.

Here is where my first disagreement comes in to play. I very much enjoy the default wallpaper – it embodies many characteristics which I love for wallpapers. First, the majority of the wallpaper is subtle gradients which make it simple and easy to look at without being distracting from your actual windows and icons. The centerpiece is not just the Windows flag, but a version of it that feels fresh and new – exciting. It has little patterned images representing summer or spring and evokes feelings that we only get 5 months out of the year here in Halifax NS. I love it.

Bright’s intriguing comments on Internet Explorer vs. Windows Explorer UI.

And OK, it’s being picky, but why oh why do Explorer and Internet Explorer look different? They are meant to look the same. An attempt has clearly been made to give them the same styling and appearance. Yet they’re gratuitously different. Not terribly different, but different all the same. The spacings are different, and the address bars are different heights. It’s just haphazard and random. The widgets have been plopped down onto a window and someone’s just said “yeah, that looks close enough”, even though it’s wrong. Fit and finish matters. As the new UI guidelines say: Pay attention to detail, and make sure everything is polished. Don’t assume that users won’t notice small things. They will.

While I agree, I had not noticed this, despite my usual uncanny ability to notice 1 pixel differences in margins and padding on websites and applications. This is likely due to my use of Google Chrome the majority of the time and very rare use of Internet Explorer.

On the topic of taskbar features.

The big problem is that the number of applications offering this level of integration is currently low. Even within Windows itself, most of the built-in applications offer either no customization at all, or they drop back to the default automatic Jump List that is available to any application that uses the built-in Most Recently Used feature. This makes the experience quite hit-and-miss, which rather detracts from it. Granted, Windows 7 is brand new, and so it will be quite some time before software is updated to take advantage of these new capabilities; and we’re already beginning to see third party software add Jump List items (for example, Chrome adds entries for recently closed tabs and opening incognito windows, and iTunes has playback controls in its thumbnail and adds tasks for visiting and searching the iTunes Store).

This exactly represents my feelings on the topic, although I wouldn’t be so quick to shrug it off as “Windows 7 is new, so we’ll see what happens.” Windows 7 has been available for free in Beta form for quite a few months. It wouldn’t have killed application developers to have put support for this into their apps, and yet we have next to nothing. When new functions become available to app developers for the iPhone or OS X, it’s like a race to see who can put them in first, but when it comes to Windows the developers just don’t care? That’s not a very good attitude to take regarding something as neat and useful as this (as well as other features now provided to developers by the OS).

Note: Back at PDC last year, we talked to Steve Sinofsky about this; Windows adds UI capabilities and then Microsoft software fails to use it properly, resulting in an inconsistent experience and leading one to question why Microsoft even bothers adding new features and guidelines if they’re not going to be used. He told us at the time that the reason for this is that within Microsoft, the software that sets the UI standard isn’t Windows, but rather Office; if the Office team’s UI rules don’t match up with Windows’ UI rules, then the Office team prevails. He did tell us that the Office team was involved in the new UI features of Windows 7, and so I hope that in the future there will be closer alignment between what Microsoft says you should do, and what it actually does. I’m not going to hold my breath, though, because interface consistency is not something the company has ever been good at.

Wow, that is not just interesting and shocking to me, but also sounds quite backwards. I’m not going to pretend I know very much about the topic, but why should the Office team get this much power? I realize they develop the most profitable software Microsoft publishes, but it’s Microsoft’s job to ensure the two get along so well that the experience between the two is seamless – not to battle it out over who gets to use what features and what should be where.

If you’re coming from XP, or if you disabled the new Start menu in Vista, then you might be in for a shock, as the new Start menu is now mandatory.

They should have done this in Vista. Those that refused to switch by then should have just crawled under a rock and given up on using computers – these new features and designs are provided for a reason. They allow for more efficient use of the computer through quicker access to the things you need and now the lack of being able to change back means the operating system will finally have start menu consistency. Finally. The Office team got to remove menus entirely from 2007, so why didn’t the Vista team get the same thing? It got so bad, that when I saw a machine with the classic start menu I would refuse to work on it without changing it back. The ability to use the classic start menu destroyed the entire experience of the operating system for me.

The Virtual WiFi architecture even permits a WiFi connection to be shared by WiFi, with the same adapter both connected to an access point, and acting as an AP. The feature currently lacks any kind of user interface; configuration is all performed through the netsh command.

Whoah, that is pretty neat! Too bad there’s no UI for it yet…

Windows Vista came with lots of bundled applications; Windows Media Player, Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Mail, Windows Media Center, and Windows Movie Maker. Windows 7 has scrapped Mail, Photo Gallery, and Movie Maker moving these applications into an add-on pack called the Windows Live Essentials. Microsoft has decoupled them from Windows so that they have their own release cycle and sidestep bundling and anti-trust concerns. The company hopes that OEMs will preinstall the Essentials, but apart from a download link, the company does not otherwise promote them within the OS.

The funny part is that I’m pretty confident that none of the OEMs that we sell at Future Shop have included the Live Essentials. (It’s possible I didn’t notice it installed on some). This includes Sony, Toshiba, HP (and Compaq), MSI, Acer (and Gateway/eMachines), LG, Dell, and perhaps a couple others I’m forgetting. Although we install the Live Essentials pack as part of our paid set-up routine, we also install Mozilla Thunderbird – giving the user the choice. Similarly we install Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox to provide the user a choice of browser.

Finally we get built in codec support – this officially beats Apple’s support out of the box… does this mean Windows users don’t need codec packs anymore? I doubt it – as the article says, the built in codecs are slow, plus I would be willing to bet there’s still some missing, such as MKV support.

The big changes are WMP’s new codecs, and the ability to stream media to other devices. Windows now ships with built-in support for, among others, MPEG2, MPEG4 (which covers DivX and similar widely-used implementations), and H.264 video, along with AAC audio. The support seems to work well enough; the codecs aren’t the fastest ones around, which can be a problem especially with H.264, but a large proportion of downloaded video will now play in WMP without requiring the use of third-party codecs.

WMP11 would use embedded album art in preference to the hidden JPEG images stored in each album’s directory (the hidden folder.jpg and randomly-named friends that are readily visible on any WMP-managed directories). The hidden files would still only be the small images that WMP downloads, but within the program itself it would display the large embedded image. With WMP12 that’s no longer the case. The hidden JPEG files are the only thing that WMP will display. Make the Now Playing window anything other than tiny, and it looks stupid.

That’s unfortunate. I find album art has become an increasingly more important part of our music libraries over the past 10 years to the extent that it now annoys me when there isn’t album artwork for a song. This is especially true when playing back from my iPhone – it just looks so much nicer when the artwork is there. Thankfully iTunes does a better job of this, so I don’t have to worry about it on my phone.

Conclusions on Windows Media center:

The look and feel has been refreshed, and overall feels quite a bit quicker. I might be imagining things, but MC on Vista always felt quite sluggish; my main Windows 7 machine is a lot slower than my main Vista PC, but Media Center certainly feels far snappier.

This makes me a bit sad that I sold my media center PC. While I always loved the provided features in Vista Media Center, I had two overarching problems with it. First, network hard drives would cause the spinner to just lock up the software. This would then lead to an ‘end task’ and re-launch where it would then tell me that my tuner was in use already (frustrating). My second problem was that QAM support was for cable-card devices only which was ridiculous. Microsoft reps said this was to be fixed for SP2 on thegreenbutton.com, but nope, never came. It’s frustrating that I would have had to upgrade to 7 just to make these things work properly, but at the same time I kinda wish I still had that PC just to try it out.

On a related note, I switched to AppleTV many months ago and I’m quite dissatisfied with it. It’s only saving grace is that I have installed XBMC, allowing it to be used for bigger and better things.

It has become a popular pastime amongst government employees to load as much sensitive data as possible onto a laptop and then deposit that laptop in a public place so that someone can find it. This hobby has likely spread to the private sector too, although it attracts less attention there. There are many spoilsports out there who regard this as a poor use of resources; they argue that sensitive data should be kept out of the hands of thieves. To appease these meanies, Windows Vista’s BitLocker feature enabled encryption of whole partitions, requiring a PIN or suitable USB key to decrypt them.

Hahaha, very much enjoyed the first sentence. It refers to articles describing lost laptops by the FBI and other government officials. One might think this happens rarely, but this article helps put it in perspective.

The Problem Steps Recorder should be a boon for helpdesks everywhere. This simple tool lets you make a recording of the steps required to reproduce a problem (yeah, I guess the clue was in the name). The recording includes screenshots, system information, and optional annotations as necessary, and should do a good job of taking the guesswork out of supporting end-user problems.

Very cool. As someone who is constantly trying to reproduce problems with computers at Future Shop along with bug reports for Adium, this type of logging/tracking system would be extremely beneficial.

Hitting Win+P provides a neat little tool for choosing how to handle an externally connected monitor on laptop systems; all four options (laptop only, mirroring, extending the desktop, external only) are available at the click of a button. This certainly beats messing around with Fn-key combinations and trying to decipher the consistently unclear icons on my keyboard.

Love this feature.

If this isn’t enough to fix the problem app, it’s time for virtualization, in Windows XP Mode. It’s not really a “mode”—it’s an XP SP3 VM running in the new Windows 7 version of Virtual PC—but it should provide a solution to most remaining compatibility issues.

I’m not going to go into it in much detail now; the final RTM version of Virtual PC and the Windows XP Mode system image weren’t available at the time of writing (though they are out now), so a follow-up article will cover XP Mode in more detail. But in brief: the virtual machine is somewhat integrated into the host environment, so that programs installed in the compatibility environment can be invoked from the Start menu or launched via file extension associations, and moving data between the VM and the host environment is mostly seamless.

First: it sounds like VPC finally is getting support like VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop does for OS X.

Second: there’s one catch to the ‘new’ version of Virtual PC that is used by XP Mode. It ONLY works with processors that have VT-X (and of course a motherboard that allows it to be enabled). I had a customer with one of those few Core 2 Duo processors that didn’t have the VT-X extension and he was not pleased that it didn’t work. It should be mentioned that running Windows in virtualization without VT-X is doable and even usable, just not quite as fast. This does NOT mean that it’s not fast enough to work well, which is why I was surprised that they made VT-X an absolute requirement.

One last thing about this. When I installed XP Mode (and couldn’t run it on that customer’s notebook), I discovered that it places the WinXP activation code in the XP Mode ‘application’ folder in C:\Windows\Program Files … so if you want a free XP license, just get someone who bought Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate for a computer without VT-X and you’re all set!

Overall, it’s pretty clear that Windows 7 is “Vista R2.” Hell, the branding of the server counterpart is a dead giveaway here. Windows Server 2008 RTM was exactly Vista SP1; Windows Server 2008 R2 is exactly Windows 7. Why does one retain its branding but not the other? Because the Windows Server 2008 branding is popular and successful (the OS was, quite rightly, very well-received) in a way that the Vista branding is not. If Vista had gotten the reception it actually deserved, and become a brand worth keeping, it seems highly likely that the name would have been retained. And Microsoft knows it, which is why internally, Windows 7 is only version 6.1. Sure, the company has made specious claims that this is to avoid breaking applications with bad version checks, but the logic doesn’t really hold; many of those applications are just as broken by “6″ as they would be by “7,” and if that were such a concern then the minor version wouldn’t change either.

But at the end of the day, that doesn’t really matter. Windows 7 is, overall, a fantastic OS. It builds on a solid platform, and just makes it even better.

Very intriguing parallels drawn between Vista and 7 and Win Server 2008 and its R2 release. The conclusion is something I agree with and, as I’ve written before, I’m a supported of Windows 7 and use it often on my HP Mini Netbook.

This summary has helped me gather my thoughts on some of the key features of Windows 7 as presented by Peter Bright over at Ars Technica, and I hope some of my comments and additions might come in handy for others as well.

Things have changed a lot since then. Microsoft released 7, finally a respectable Windows operating system, meaning that the cautious folks can finally upgrade from Windows XP. Vista and 7 have some excellent DirectX-based user interface (UI) animations that make working with the UI a pleasant experience, but of course virtualizing these features was a long-time in the making. The Parallels folks started responding to people in their forums and their downloadable application just started working right after download – without requiring tinkering with the settings. The lines between the two applications began to blur, both in terms of features and support.

Despite this blurring of differences between the two products, when I heard the announcement for VMWare Fusion 3, I thought, finally! Aero will work and I’ll be able to upgrade for a good price ($39.99 rather than $79.99 for the full version). I ignored Parallels Desktop 5, thinking that I could get the same thing cheaper with my upgrade copy of Fusion. Was I wrong? I certainly didn’t think so at the time – I thought, how could VMWare have released 3.0 without it performing similarly (or better) compared to Parallels Desktop 5? I simply didn’t believe they would do that.

Here we are, a week later, and Parallels Desktop 5 is out. I’ve already paid for, downloaded and installed my copy of VMWare Fusion 3. I love the faster resume and suspend times and am enjoying the Aero effects in Windows 7, but I’ve noticed some problems. After all these months of working on Fusion 3, the performance (excluding the aforementioned suspend/resume times) feels the same as it was with Windows 7 on Fusion 2. This is by no means an actual benchmark, simply what working with Windows 7 running in Fusion 3 with 1GB of RAM and a single core feels like to me – the end user. Being of the belief that the VMWare engineers tweaked and tuned the hell out of Fusion 3.0, I took this to be the best they could do, and assumed that Parallels couldn’t have done better (or at least, if they did better, it would be negligible).

Then I read this post from list-whisper.com – admittedly an unknown source to me, however the writers words sound sincere and I have no reason to doubt them. And then came Ars Technica. Ars Technica is not just a well known source for news, but the most informative IT news source I’ve found on the web. I’ve been reading them for years and I put a fair amount of trust in their collective opinions and reviews. The Ars article describes Parallels Desktop 5 as being much faster than VMWare Fusion – the catch? They compared it to VMWare Fusion 2 – not a truly fair comparison.

Interestingly eWEEK.com indicate that their “testers preferred VMWare Fusion 3 to an earlier version of the Parallels solution.” But again we find mismatched comparisons between versions and they don’t discuss whether or not their preference comes from performance, a feature-for-feature comparison, stability, or whatever other methods they might have used to compare the two products.

Andrew Bednarz from theappleblog.com writes “More importantly than all of that, its super fast. For me, it’s much much faster than VMWare Fusion 3.” Add to this the number of tweets that @ParallelsMac has retweeted describing how much faster it is. Of course Parallels would only retweet the positive ones, but still, there have been more than enough tweets and reviews to give it credence. I have seen nothing of the sort from VMWare users, and my own experience matches the social media outcry perfectly.

Sure, I could ignore the reviews that directly compare the two and come out with Parallels Desktop on top, leaving only those describing Parallels 5 being faster over previous versions of Parallels. But even in doing that, we get users of Parallels 5 describing the major performance improvements over Parallels 4. I haven’t seen any such thing from users of Fusion 3 exclaiming their surprise with the newfound speed over Fusion 2 (I certainly didn’t). This leaves us with one question – was Parallels 4 slower than Fusion 2 to the extent that the perceived differences to the upgraders were shocking for Parallels users vs. Fusion users? Not according to the benchmarks [mactech.com].

For the time being, it does seem that I have chosen the wrong application – I should have switched to Parallels before I spent the money on VMWare Fusion 3. I believe that the stability problems associated with Parallels Desktop that the lost-whisper article describes can be solved rather easily, at least when compared to the amount of work required to optimize performance of VMWare Fusion for better performance. Because of this, I won’t be expecting much from VMWare Fusion 3 updates along the lines of performance, however I will definitely be hoping that they will come so that Fusion will once again provide stiff competition for Parallels Desktop in the Mac virtualization arena.

As an aside, I will mention that there are features other than performance that will likely benefit users of VMWare Fusion over Parallels, however in most of the reviews it is described that Parallels provides more features than does Fusion. This doesn’t mean that Parallels does the equivalent features better (ie: Coherenece vs. Unity), just that the general consensus is that Parallels Desktop 5 has more of them. In terms of Coherence vs. Unity, from the reviews I read, it appears that Coherence is actually doing a better job – with less ‘wiping’ effect (where the background from Windows shows through when you move windows around) and better corner rounding to make the windows feel more Mac-like, although I have not used Parallels desktop 5 myself to confirm that. I will update here when I have more!

Adam, my partner in crime (and by crime I mean business), loves Woo Themes and because of this, the new Web Savers site began with a Woo Theme at heart. Although we modified it heavily, the original theme remains in spirit. I think the WooTheme template we used was the first template for WordPress that I have ever felt comfortable modifying and working with – it wasn’t a major hassle and didn’t leave me running into constant roadblocks.

Since I had such a great experience with Woo Themes for Web Savers, I figured, why not try it out here! So thanks to Woo Themes for the lovely design. I’ve never truly been much for designing sites from scratch – my forte has always been at nitpicking at details after starting with an existing design. Therefore, sticking with my personal creation (this site’s previous design) was not a great move, as it really didn’t represent what I would consider a nicely designed web site. If it didn’t meet my own standards, how was I to expect it to meet the standards of others? This new design is the answer to that question.

Thanks to Woo Themes for this great design – I look forward to enhancing it and modifying it to my needs in the coming months.

After some searching around I found the solution found about half way down this forum thread from the Ubuntu Forums.

Ubuntu

1) install the bluez-compat package with terminal

sudo apt-get install bluez-compat

2) Pair the mouse with the bluetooth manager. The manager will say that the pairing is “successful”, however the mouse still won’t work.

3) In the terminal, type :

sudo hidd –search

You should see something like

Searching …
Connecting to device 00:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX (your mouse MAC)

Done. Your mouse should be working now.

Moblin

I recently found that you can do much the same thing for Moblin!

1) Go to Applications > Settings > Manage Applications

2) Search for bluez and install the “Bluetooth pairing and control applet.” Run the Bluetooth application and pair your mouse.

3) Run the following in terminal and you’ll be all set!

sudo hidd –search

While this worked after sleep and reboots in Ubuntu NR, it did not in Moblin.

While I had been contemplating the purchase of a netbook since just before my trip to Hungary in May, I did not actually wind up buying one. Although the purchase for the trip’s sake would have been a practical use, its usefulness following that would be purely novelty, and the $350+ pricetag was not justifiable. Recently I was able to avoid that downside altogether! Just last week I won a draw from a local self storage company which consisted of an HP Mini 1035nr as its first place prize – and thus the search began.

I used my new HP for about a day with Windows XP and constantly felt the creaking of the old operating system’s bones. After a quick search for netbook operating systems, I proceeded to download and install Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.04.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix

Ubuntu NR has a nicely laid out home screen, making it easier to find and launch apps than does vanilla Ubuntu. With your application categories in the left column acting like tabs, a large middle column to show a grid of apps within the selected category and a right column for common folders like Documents, Pictures and Music, it’s got everything available for easy access.

One of the greatest features of using Ubuntu NR is that is is basically just Ubuntu with a Netbook optimized app launcher skin. This means that I could install any Ubuntu compatible software with relative ease! So I loaded up Synaptic (the Ubuntu package manager) and went searching for apps, such as Skype and a Twitter app: results – 0. Perhaps I just didn’t try hard enough, but I could not get Synaptic to work as an app store, essentially what I thought it was supposed to be for. This is going to be a major hindrance for your average user of a netbook OS – the software search needs to be as simple and straightforward as possible, and this was not.

Having used Ubuntu in the past, I knew I could simply fall back on apt-get, so I proceeded by doing exactly that. Launching terminal and running a simple `sudo apt-get install skype` did the trick. I also searched for a few other apps and found Twitux and gTwitter to install with just as simple a command as was the Skype install. Why I couldn’t do this through Synaptic, I don’t know and I really didn’t feel it should have been my responsibility to go looking for a solution – the OS is supposed to take care of these things for me. This is one of those things that Jolicloud was built for – skip ahead to the Jolicloud section to read more on that.

Another complaint I have about Ubuntu Netbook Remix is the icons. Someone on the Ubuntu dev team decided that it would be a great idea to show larger icons than what I would assume to be the default standard icon size. While I didn’t look into the exact size difference, I can easily tell this is the case because many of the icons were ‘blocky’ and clearly had been enlarged from a normally smaller size. I do not disagree with the decision to use larger icons – I think it complements the netbook OS by making things look clean and simple. Or at least it would look clean if the icons weren’t so ugly because of their resizing! Those that came with native large-sized icons looked beautiful, those that did not were hideous. Now, I’m not expecting all third party apps that I install through apt to natively support all icon sizes – especially considering some have not been updated in quite some time, but at the very least all of the applications that come with the distribution should match the system default icon size.

One last issue I had came in the form of window sizing. Some applications had windows that were not meant to be maximized, but were forced to be by the Ubutnu NR window manager. I think Pidgin’s contact list was fine, but some (perhaps older?) apps like one of the Twitter apps I tried was forced to be fullscreen, which was unnecessary and downright intrusive – why should a twitter feed need to take up an entire screen? I’m not sure if the app developers need to update their applications to be fully compatible or if the window manager got a little overzealous, but someone needs to put a bit more time into window management on this OS.

I saw the screenshots of Ubuntu NR 9.10 and it looked so much cleaner and sexier than 9.04 does, however when I downloaded the ISO it was not easily imageable (I dd’d it over to my USB drive like all others and it did not work), so I did not get a chance to try it firsthand. Thus I cannot include it in this review – perhaps something for a followup review.

Jolicloud

Having heard rumours of this Operating System nearly (or over?) a year ago now, I already had a good feeling and high expectations prior to installing it. I remembered watching a video of it in action and thinking that it was a really nice looking OS, but not being clear on exactly how it worked. So my next attempt at satisfying my netbook OS craving became Jolicloud. I downloaded the torrent and installed it and was a bit disappointed to find Ubuntu Netbook Remix with a different – in my opinion not as nice – skin. So what more could I gleam from this than Ubuntu NR? It turns out nothing… the fancy UI from the YouTube video and all the hype was showcasing a web-based Jolicloud application of sorts, and I did not have elite access! As soon as I booted into the OS for the first time it wanted me to sign in with my 1337 c0dez, which I did not have.

I wound up wiping Jolicloud and installing another couple of Operating Systems (their respective reviews follow this one) but re-installed Jolicloud (dual-boot style) afterward. Why? Because I received my elite membership codes by email, and there was no way I was going to avoid taking that sexy OS for a spin!

So on it went again, but this time I was able to peer beyond the veiled curtain that was previously blocking my way. I finally got to see that rich UI filled with translucency and dozens of applications with high-res icons (unlike my old friend Ubuntu). But what exactly was this Jolicloud webapp? How did it work and how was it different from its core Ubuntu-based OS?

First to explain what I mean by Jolicloud webapp. From what I can tell Jolicloud is basically just a website running in Mozilla Prism. That’s not to say that’s a bad thing or a simple thing – the webapp is very fully featured and quite functional. When you load Jolicloud it is not a fullscreen app, it runs like any other app runs in Ubuntu Netbook Remix by filling most of the screen, but leaving the taskbar at the top of the screen so you can see your battery status, wifi, bluetooth, etc, along with the currently running apps, open windows and the lovely Home button to take you back to the Ubuntu Netbook Remix homescreen I described above. Thus it does not take over the entire user experience like Boxee, nor is it meant to (yet).

The Jolicloud webapp is essentially a really beautiful looking package manager (remember how terrible I thought Synaptic was?). It goes beyond just installing native Ubuntu apps by bridging the gap between native apps and webapps by putting them all into one place. It’s as if Apple had taken their webapp catalogue and merged it with the iPhone’s app store so that the only identifier to tell you if the app you’re installing is a native app or a webapp is a single line denoting it as such. While I believe this to, generally, be an excellent move on their part, it is not exactly what I was expecting.

I was expecting a beautiful new OS and got a package manager with some cool new qualities. To make matters worse, once I got an app installed (be it the Twitter webapp or the Skype native app), I still had to go back to the comparatively ugly Ubuntu NR interface to launch it. I hear that the Jolicloud folks eventually plan to make their own – likely matching – skin for Ubuntu NR, which would be great, but until then we’re stuck with a not-so-nice UI. The worst part about it is that most users only spend the initial set-up stage in the package manager getting the apps they want installed, then move on and only need to launch them and switch between them – leaving the uglier UI to the most use.

The webapps themselves also launch in Mozilla Prism, so they’re not native and not necessarily fast if you’re using a 3G internet device for web access. This can be a great thing and a not-so-great thing. It means that webapps with a great fullscreen UI like GMail and Google Calendar work very nicely, but it also means that we miss out on some of the key advantages of native apps. Although I did not spend a huge amount of time in Jolicloud I didn’t once get any sort of notification of Twitter updates or Facebook updates – I always had to launch the web app and manually retrieve them. All or most native Twitter apps do this by default. Another problem is one I already mentioned regarding bandwidth usage and speed on limited connections, though this may already be remedied by caching in Prism (I did not test the theory).

Another potential problem with webapps is that they do not have a unified OS design theme. This shouldn’t be an issue for those coming from Windows as I find that most app developers for Windows don’t seem to care about making their apps fit in – they just do whatever they want. Coming from OS X, this is a whole other story. Because of Interface Builder – an app that is part of Cocoa Development tools for OS X – many of the OS X developers use the built in UI widgets since they already look quite nice and are very functional. I’m used to apps that all have common UI elements resulting in an elegant simplicity to using applications on OS X – this cannot be had with webapps unless they’re an entire suite like Google or MobileMe. This is not a direct flaw or problem with Jolicloud, but really just a setback for those who have an eye for consistency.

Overall, I love the concept of the Jolicloud package manager, first because Synaptic annoyed me and also because of its webapp integration. I look forward to a completely re-done and matching UI for Ubuntu NR so that we can be taken out of Ubuntu mode and transported into a world filled with lots of lovely eye candy, which I’m known for being suckered into. If you’re looking for an OS that smoothly and easily integrates your social media sites and other web-based tools into one system, then Jolicloud is for you. If you need your social media to come to you with notifications, then read-on – Moblin may be the netbook OS for you!

Moblin

Moblin is essentially what I thought Jolicloud was going to be – an OS entirely integrated with social media, contacts, and everything that keeps your life in order. It also has this really hot UI with great little animations throughout and a totally re-thought layout for a portable computer OS. It’s a bit overwhelming to describe, so I suggest taking a look at the video here:

You basically set up Moblin by providing your Twitter account, Last.fm account and other social media sites (more plugins coming – including Facebook), as well as a place to get your contacts, calendars and todos and give away your IMAP email settings and it takes care of everything for you.

Moblin’s home screen, myzone, is really neat. It shows three columns, the first contains upcoming appointments from your calendar, upcoming todos and common applications. Next up is your recent history across media and web browsing – a neat mixture. Then comes the coolest part – your Twitter feed appears in the third column. I assume Facebook status updates and Last.fm stuff will appear there too, but the Facebook plugin isn’t available yet and I only have a couple friends on Last.fm. My problem with the status updates is that I can’t tell who wrote them, nor when they were posted until I mouse over them. I was surprised to find that, since other aspects of the UI are so intuitive and well integrated. A user’s status update is virtually useless unless you know who posted it and when it was posted, and it takes a fair amount of effort (that does not need to be required) just to mouse over them to find out.

The next tab over shows your statuses on all accounts, including Twitter and your IM accounts like MSN, Yahoo, AIM and Gtalk. While I love the concept, there were two big problems for me. First, every time I changed my status, it would duplicate the status entry for that service, causing me major confusion and annoyance. [This was fixed with some updates!] Second, there appeared to be no way to set your status message across all protocols simultaneously. Perhaps I’m spoiled by the feature rich IM client Adium for OS X, but it seems like that should be a standard feature!

Then you get your contacts tab (including all contact pics showing as thumbnails), web pages (your browser history and a new page launch tool that’s pretty neat, although a bit slow), the media player, pasteboard, applications, and zones.

The media player was quite slick, but the only (working) source was my local hard drive, which makes little sense considering this is a netbook – I shouldn’t expect to have room for all my media on the local hard drive. It also has built in support for network shares according to the website, but despite installing all Samba related packages, I could not make it read my network hard drive connected to my time capsule (which Windows and OS X see with no trouble). It would be been fantastic if it could access iTunes shares and even better, it would be really neat if you could install a small app on OS X, Windows or Linux for your home computer that would allow you to stream any media to Moblin wherever you are! Sadly this is not a feature and I’m not sure if it’s even in development.

For those wondering, the network error is: Could not display “smb://networksharename:445/”. The file is of an unknown type

The applications were available in well organized categories under the apps tab. There were smooth animations and all the icons were high-res and looked great! My first problem with the section is pretty minor – whenever you expand a category, it sometimes would slide open off-screen, so that you had to expand and scroll to make it visible. It should auto-scroll for you every time. The second one is pretty big. There are about 4 applications for dealing with the installation of and management of applications. There is a favourite apps button (to control what shows on the myzone page), an add/remove applications button, a repository manager button and another one which I cannot recall what it was for. I believe these should all have been merged under one common app for simplicity for the end user.

The final tab and feature is Moblin’s Zones. Zones are basically virtual desktops, each of which contains a single application – often with multiple windows for that app. The zones tab allows the user to see all your zones so you can switch between them easily. It’s like Mac OS X Expose or more accurately what happens when you click on the Spaces app in the dock. Generally this was really well done, with a smooth animation and effective app switching. I had a case where terminal launched in another app’s zone, and I found it difficult to manage, but other than that, this was a major benefit to keeping your window management clean.

Right off the bat I got my Twitter feed hooked up and my contacts imported through Google Sync, but that was the extent of what I could do easily. Sadly, the only sync protocol supported is SyncML, a supposedly outdated protocol. Google supports CalDAV for calendar syncing, but Moblin does not. I wound up having to sign up for a 3rd party service – GooSync to make it work, which I was not too pleased about. On the plus side, once I did so, data sharing worked quite smoothly.

A possible problem for many users stems from the fact that the founders, and many of the current developers of Moblin, are Intel employees. This meant that getting my Broadcom wireless card working was a struggle. That is, until I signed on to #moblin on Freenode and asked – my problem was greeted with an immediate response, linking me to this solution which worked great! My previous post here also consists of these steps. Since Ubuntu NR notified me that the Broadcom wifi driver it was using was not open source, I assume this is something the Moblin folks could also do, however chose not to, due to their Intel heritage. Hopefully we’ll see a change on this in the future, but for now, at least the workaround is available.

If there’s any one thing Moblin does really really well, it is notifications. MyZone easily shows you everything up-to-date with a quick glance. On top of that new instant messages appear in a neat black bubble that fades in quickly and instantly switches you to the zone with the message window when you click on it to reply.

Although pleasantly surprised by the efforts of the development team for Moblin with regards to its UI design, social media integration and overall ‘netbook experience’ intelligence, the bugs were enough to keep me from using it as my primary OS. I also found limited 3rd party app support since the core of Moblin is not truly Fedora compatible (although very loosely based on it). Once 3rd party app developers start writing Moblin plugins and the bugs and feature-oddities I mentioned above are worked out, Moblin will surely be a competent competitor to Jolicloud and Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

Windows 7

Windows 7, although a fully-fledged PC OS, also makes for a great netbook OS. It runs very well with only 1GB of memory and has a completely redesigned taskbar for better window and application management. Amazingly, the HP’s battery life while running Win7 was equal to that of Ubuntu NR and just under that of Moblin.

There are clearly many applications available for Windows 7, since the majority of Windows Vista apps work great with 7. My problem with the existing applications is that none of the ones I used seem to take advantage of Windows 7′s new taskbar notifications (that would be so very handy for a Twitter app). This includes Mozilla Prism, which would allow me to do exactly what Jolicloud does for webapps on Windows 7, albeit with a bit more work to set each app up. It would be great if I could load Facebook in Prism and have notification badges appear on the taskbar icon, but sadly I could not make this happen.

My second complain about Windows 7 applications is that they haven’t yet worked to make their system tray icons match that of the 7 icons – flat white and elegant. This attempt to unify the user experience is part of what makes me enjoy using Windows 7 so much. So much, that the OS surprises me with little features and subtle changes in features ranging from UAC to the new WiFi connection pane. Not to mention the big changes like the entire taskbar and performance improvements – including during file transfers.

Conclusions

I’m currently dual booting Windows 7 and Jolicloud and I am excited to try out Moblin again sometime in the near future to see how much progress they have made. I’ve found most of my time to be spent in Windows 7, perhaps because I really wanted to try the OS out in a limited resources environment, and perhaps because of the consistency of the new UI. I think I’ll await Jolicloud’s UI updates to the underlying Ubuntu NR before I start using it more.

If you’re looking for a beautiful UI throughout the OS and want basic functionality like notifications of calendar updates and Twitter feed integration with the OS, along with the potential for some of the best social media integration ever found in an OS, go with Moblin.

If you’re more of an enthusiast with a bit of Ubuntu (or any *nix) background, you might try out Ubuntu NetBook remix as you can add your own repos and switch to the standard Ubuntu desktop whenever you wish. You can also install pretty much any Linux app available with a simple apt-get command in terminal.

If you’re trapped in the middle between those types of users or you simply love the Facebook website, Twitter website and all your other useful web apps, then definitely sign up for Jolicloud.

If you want most of your existing Windows apps to work and don’t mind paying a bit for an OS, wait for Windows 7 final (and try any of the other ones out while you’re waiting). You’ll be pleasantly surprised with the changes from Vista and certainly overwhelmed by them if you’re coming from the (now) horrid Windows XP.

If you have any other operating systems specifically for netbooks that I should try or suggestions or corrections for my comments/complaints write it up in the comments!

But! Never fear! Apparently the Dell Mini 9 also uses this chipset, and luckily this kind person (who apparently also has a Mac) has placed instructions for how to install the wireless drivers for his Mini 9 on his website.

Just follow them closely and you’ll be all set!

[Updated Nov 15 to include the new links on slaine.org's tutorial]

In case his site ever goes down, I have a copy of them here…

1) Activate the moblin toolbar and select the applications icon
2) Choose the Accessories section and select Terminal
3) Install the various tools you’ll need

sudo yum install rpmdevtools

4) Install the compilers and other tools,

sudo yum groupinstall "Development Tools"

5) Install the kernel-netbook-devel package.

sudo yum install kernel-netbook-devel

6) Now we’re ready to build and install the new broadcom drivers

wget http://slaine.org/files/moblinv2/wl-kmod-5.10.91.9.3-1.moblin.src.rpm

(This build will download the broadcom driver archive directly from their site)

rpmbuild –rebuild –target=i586 wl-kmod-5.10.91.9.3-1.moblin.src.rpm

7) Install the resulting rpm,

sudo rpm -ivh ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/i586/wl-kmod-5.10.91.9.3-1.moblin.src.rpm

I might bring back the certifications page after I get my diploma and put that up along with my A+ Certification, but I also might not – I haven’t fully decided yet.