Tuesday, October 15, 2002
Daring Fireball has a great writeup of the Microsoft switcher fiasco.
The details of the switcher article, however amusing, are not important. The real story is that at Microsoft—indisputably one of the most powerful, most successful corporations in the world—it is standard operating procedure to fabricate customer testimonials.
I want a Replace All button in the window that asks what to do when there’s a copy collision—in other words a button like in the Mac OS Finder. I welcome the ability to decide on a case-by-case basis, but I nearly always want to replace everything; that shouldn’t take two clicks. Windows actually handles this rather well, if I recall.
And, since this is my first Finder Wish List entry, I must mention the obvious: the Finder should remember views settings such as window positions, icon positions, open/closed disclosure triangles, and whether the toolbar is hidden. The Jaguar Finder is better than 10.1’s here, but I still run into glitches a few dozen times a day.
I want to recant my previous
statement that NetNewsWire is a good idea that isn’t useful in practice. The key, for me, was to give up trying to use it to read the news (too many sites only have excerpts) or to select which stories to read (clicking a headline often jumps to the linked-to story rather than the referring story). In fact, it’s very useful simply as an indicator of which sites have changed and which have stories worth reading. So I basically ignore the preview pane, and click only in the left pane.
