bitsifter
friday, august 30

[sift this] Having been an avid journal writer for the past sixteen years, I’m intimately familiar with the type of book I think should serve as journal. First off, the cover is usually a solid dark color... no pictures of sunflowers or angels. Second, the size of the pages should be larger the 8 ½ x 11. Third, and most importantly, there can be absolutely no lines on the page because I want the freedom to do absolutely anything.

A good Windows word processor absolutely can not serve as a journaling mechanism for me because they’ve grown arrogant as they’ve grown successful. My word processor chooses my page width and height, my font, my line spacing, and will even try to suggest a title for my document if I’m not careful. I would consider this progress since a lot of people prefer to have these decisions made for them, but I wouldn’t consider it particularly creative.

In comes the latest addition to the web site editing tools, NetObjects Fusion. The bottom line, it’s way ahead of it’s time. It sports a cleanly integrated web site editor, page editor, and publishing facility that will set the standard for these types of tools. Fusion often uses clever hacks to get the job done, for example it uses invisible spacer gifs to give the impression of drag’n’drop placement of objects within a web page, but when we get absolute positioning with HTML, NetObjects will simply adjust their back-end code and leave the front-end code alone.

But, NetObjects is hindering your creativity.

When you enter the page editor, you’re provided with a standard layout containing a header, a body, and a footer each containing dummy links based on the number of pages you have in your site. A body of styles is also provided varying from Astro to Whirylgig, but they all use the same generic header/body/footer style. This means we’re liable to see thousands of sites designed by the HTML impaired that will follow the same boring style.

[rant] I recently attempted to do some editing of the Digest on a 486-DX4 running Windows 95. This involved using Netscape Gold, Paint Shop Pro, and, depending on my mood, the DOS command line. The end result: massive frustration.

I'm an enthusiastic follower of the keyboard. If can't find some way to complete some action via the keyboard, I'm likely to stop using a product. This keyboard fetish was born in a world of slow computing.... it always felt like the keyboard was more likely to respond than the inaccurate mouse. My practices served me well as high-powered computers became available -- folks often watch over my shoulder amazed as I man-handle 3-4 applications in synch -- never touching the mouse.

Which brings us back to the 486 nightmare. Simply put, my fingers were cruising at 133Mhz and my computer was seeing them at somewhere between 75-100Mhz. The whole situation reminded me of a quote, "What Intel gives, Microsoft takes away".

This is why a recent Infoworld article confused me, "Within the next several months, Microsoft will release a pared down version of the Windows operating system, code-named Pegasus. It will include a skinny version of the company's Internet Explorer Web browser, will run most applications written in Visual Basic, and be able to synchronize data files with programs such as Word..."

I'm pessimistic. Here's my take on what Microsoft is doing: they're reducing the footprint of Windows that will become the OS for hand-held devices. And here's my question: When in the history of Microsoft have they ever created a successful "pared down" version of any product? The Redmondians have always counted on more megahertz (and disk space, for that matter) being available to power their increasingly bloated versions of their software. The idea that Microsoft can successfully manufacture a PDA OS based on their Windows architecture strikes me as being as likely as ActiveX being an open standard.