Thanks, microsoft
There once was a useful piece of software called
iView Media Pro. It used to be cross-platform, Mac and windows. Then,
microsoft bought it because A) They wanted to kill the Mac version and B) They
can't figure out how to program a new piece of software (or it was cheaper than
crushing them, too). Sure, the open letter reads, "The product that was born on
the Mac will remain on the Mac as well as on the Windows operating system."...
Check out the cross-platform parity of its other products, like
office.
...I guess it makes sense,
since they were definitely hurting for money. They jacked the price of their
software up from $160 to $199 and did a sneaky thing with version pricing a
while back.
...Recently, I had the
misfortune to run into the program SD-Jukebox, used for putting "SD-Audio" music
onto a panasonic product. It's windows-only and has one of the crappiest
interfaces ever. There's actually a 1" x 4" box which is dedicated to showing
how the transfer is doing. On the left side, we have a picture of the HDD and
on the right, the memory card on the music player.... So, you know the total
capacity of the HDD and the memory card. It DOES tell you the free space on the
memory card, though.
Here's where
microsoft helps: When you run out of HDD space, the program just hangs.... The
filesystem simply halts with no message from the OS or
anything.
...As an extra bonus, when
sending music to a device, it has to re-encode it with fun DRM, and that makes
transferring music take longer than long. Not that you'd know because there's no
overall progress bar, just a PER-FILE progress bar. You put a UI like that on a
Mac product and people will never accept
it.
...Computers are supposed to make
things easier and ought to be designed with that idea in mind.
Ack. There once was a useful piece of software
called iView Media Pro. It used to be cross-platform, Mac and windows. Then,
microsoft bought it because A) They wanted to kill the Mac version and B) They
can't figure out how to program a new piece of software (or it was cheaper than
crushing them, too). Sure, the open letter reads, "The product that was born on
the Mac will remain on the Mac as well as on the Windows operating system." But
do we really believe what microsoft says anymore? Check on the feature list for
vista. Check out the cross-platform parity of its other products, like office.
(Oh, no access? Not important.) How about instant messaging? That's easy enough,
right? Ha ha.
I guess it makes sense,
since they were definitely hurting for money. They jacked the price of their
software up from $160 to $199 and did a sneaky thing with version pricing a
while back. It's used to catalog graphics and create online galleries. There are
a bunch of limitations, like # of images and Ver 3 apparently has a bad
rep.
Recently, I had the misfortune to
run into the program SD-Jukebox, used for putting "SD-Audio" music onto a
panasonic product. It's windows-only and has one of the crappiest interfaces
ever. There's actually a 1" x 4" box which is dedicated to showing how the
transfer is doing. On the left side, we have a picture of the HDD and on the
right, the memory card on the music player. PICTURES. Yes, those are necessary.
And there are space listings. So, you know the total capacity of the HDD and the
memory card. It DOES tell you the free space on the memory card,
though.
Here's where microsoft helps:
When you run out of HDD space, the program just hangs. You can't cancel it. No
errors show up. Nothing. The filesystem simply halts with no message from the OS
or anything. You can reboot, so I tried that. I deleted the music file in
question. What kind of crap is this that there's NO information about what's
going on?
As an extra bonus, when
sending music to a device, it has to re-encode it with fun DRM, and that makes
transferring music take longer than long. Not that you'd know because there's no
overall progress bar, just a PER-FILE progress bar. You put a UI like that on a
Mac product and people will never accept it. But here, anything
goes.
Computing is not supposed to be
about making the cheapest, ugliest things ever. Computers are supposed to make
things easier and ought to be designed with that idea in mind.
Posted: 水 - 6月 28, 2006 at 09:07 午前