My Dell arrived last night. As a die-hard Mac user, I do feel a certain amount of shame at the enthusiasm I feel. The out-of-box experience was okay, but hardly overwhelming. It's not a very attractive unit, and the speakers I got with it are butt-ugly, though they sound good.

The sheer amount of crap and promotional junk installed on the machine is overwhelming though. MSN, AOL and Prodigy all hawk their services. The desktop was littered with shortcuts to all sorts of foolishness I don't need. Out it all went.

Some stupid MP3 player that was preinstalled decided to pop up a registration box some time after I put an audio CD in the machine to test the speakers. Since I was in the middle of another task, the dialog seemed out of the blue, and it took a bit of digging around to realize what program was asking for personal information, since the window didn't say. This is just obnoxious. Windows, and Windows applications, are just more rude than their counterparts on the Mac. On a Mac, another application almost never slams another window in front of what you are doing. I deal with this irritation on my PC at work all the time. Outlook will pop up its appointment dialogs, and then proceed to eat a bunch of keystrokes before I look up. If I get lucky, I actually hit the shortcut to dismiss the dialog, so I get the best of both worlds: lost keystrokes and a lost reminder. Or worse, I can be navigating Windows horrible hierarchical menu bars, which require way more precision than the Mac ones do, and a dialog can pop-up interupting me. I much prefer the Mac model, which never allows a user to be interrupted from making a menu choice. If I am clicking on a menu, damn it, let me finish.

Just in case I'm not being clear: a window or dialog should never, ever pop open unless it is the direct and immediate response to an action the user is doing. I don't care if my printer is on fire, a dialog box shouldn't pop open. Notification should occur in a non-disruptive way, just the like the Mac does. (Better yet, the printer should just extinguish itself, but that's version 2.0.) Maybe the situation is so bad on Windows because the notification service there is poor since it relys on the task bar, which most people hide. Of course, the reverse argument is notification on the Mac is too subtle, and inexperienced users often miss important error dialogs. Still I think Apple is closer to the ideal than Microsoft is.

One thing that left me stunned is the absence of an unzip utility pre-installed. How can you claim a machine is "Internet ready" without this? When you install Internet Explorer on the Mac, or even when you just buy a new Mac, Stuffit Expander is installed and ready to go. This neglected detail on the Windows side creates a hostile user experience. Imagine a new user struggles along with his or her first download from the net! What excitement! What joy! "I just downloaded this neat demo! Let's run it!" Click click. Windows has no idea what to do with this file. Sorry. How can Microsoft ignore this, when their Mac group so clearly gets it? You cannot use the Internet without a decompression tool. Making a user download and install it is awfully harsh for the inexperienced.

I actually downloaded something other than WinZip. I've used WinZip at my last two jobs, and I hate it. It constantly assaults you with registration dialogs. It also tries to do all this magic behind-the-scenes stuff, with special "zip folders" and other obscure "features." Half the time I unzip something, I have no idea where it went. So, I downloaded a free (i.e. nag-free) do-dad that let's me right click on a zip file, and I get a nice "Unzip..." and "Unzip here" option. Since unzipping downloads is what I want to do 99% of the time, this is all I want.

Still, I am glad to have the best of both worlds. Now I have lots of options. I installed Half-Life, which I know is so passe now, and had a blast. The auto-update utility could not understand the concept of Internet on Ethernet, though, and kept insisting the Internet wasn't available. Getting an updater off the web was easy enough. Other than that, it installed easily, and played beautifully. I even bought this fancy ass USB 3D game pad, which also was a breeze to install. However, I used it for about 60 seconds before just using the mouse and keyboard, which worked a lot better.

Now I am realizing that I could play Asheron's Call, and I'm really frightened by that. It's a temptation, but I think it's a bad idea.

I suspect I won't be playing Clan Lord much for the next few days, while I enjoy the novelty of my new toy. I will try to get some work on Teller, and clanlord.net done, though. I have so many ideas for Teller. The bot framework lays down the groundwork for a Clan Lord companion application that would work in the background, like a deluxe Clan Lord Extras, but implemented at a higher level. The potential for nifty things like log indexing and retrieval, to note taking and story tools, all the way to very subversive communication tools (read meta-sunstone) is there for the taking. For right now, though, I'm focusing on the clanlord.net aspects of Teller. We will see if it evolves into a player tool.

I'm really curious to do the Puddleby currency exchange... Now THAT'S subversive! But, I'm not going to talk any more about that...
posted 11:45 AM | link |