The Scoop sidebar and automatic file management are both very interesting ideas. I’ve a feeling that these two ideas, if implemented well, would be very useful and solve many problems inherrent in the current plethora of dialog boxes that plague a desktop. However, I’d also suspect that they have the potential to be very annoying if they try to be too clever for their own good. Only time will tell which, if the project gains developers, will be the case. Either way, it’s nice to see more original ideas like these about the place.
Yesterday I was talking to Jason, throwing around ideas for future directions in technology and media. A couple of posts back, I had a think about the MS Portable Media Centre and why I think that it is the wrong direction to be heading. Ideas like the Media Centre are a great example of features being added just because they sound cool, without thinking about whether they will actually be useful. I have the desire for a small, unobtrusive device that can play music. Unlike music, television and video are severely affected by the move to a small device. Taking this example, watching a video on a small screen is a far worse experience than listening to music on a pair of earphones.
Reading Scoble today, I noticed a post where he was pretty much asking why you would pay $399 for a top-end iPod rather than $499 for a MS Media Centre that plays videos too. From looking at the media centre pages, I can think of at least two reasons:
Yes, you heard me right, “the MS device plays videos” as a reason against it. I have to make the point that the iPod (or, indeed, any other portable music player) is designed for use anywhere. Most of the places you’d want to take an iPod, you would not want to be watching a video. Going jogging with Spirited Away? Watching Seinfeld at the station? I don’t think so, somehow. The iPod and others have caught on because they allow you an extra luxury (music in this case) without any extra hastle.
A while ago, I wrote on the site about setting my browser’s minimum font-size to 12px. This is larger than many sites use for navigation and, increasingly then as now, main content text. I chose to do this because struggling to read long lines of small text seemed rather like a waste of time. I could just knock up the minimum font-size of the browser up a few notches and be done with all these small font problems. So I tried it.
Over the past year or so, MS have been actively promoting the “fact” that Linux has a higher Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) than Windows. TCO refers to the costs other than the initial outlay, such as hiring more costly engineers — rather than the cheapest you can get hold of — and not having the great bastion that is MS tech-support.
How true this is, I don’t know. Personally, I doubt it. Downtime from viruses would be one factor I’d point my finger at and there are many others.