I don’t spend a lot of time on Microsoft’s website, but today I happened to visit, and was greeted with this on their front page:

This one ad, taking pride of place on Microsoft’s front page, is a showcase for just some of what is wrong with Microsoft.

First, the obvious thing is Microsoft desperately wants to be cool. So desperately. You can smell the desperation.

I can tell you now, using “pretty dope” on your website does not make you cool. In fact, this ad reminds me of some teenager’s father trying to act cool with his teenage son’s friends as they leave to go out partying on a Saturday night:

“Homies…that car is the shizzle! You dudes are dope!!! Where da bitches at tonight? Yo?” (flicks fingers in an attempt to make some cool gang sign he saw on Law and Order).

Mentioning “Twitter” does not make you cool either. You can’t just throw around the latest trends – It makes you look like a try hard.

But there is more. There is always more.

“More reviews”? Was that a review? Well, I guess it was. Just not a particularly good one. A random tweet from a random anonymous user with a one line comment. That’s the quality I’m looking for in a review about an OS that I’m about to drop AU$200 or more on.

But the quality of the copy is nothing compared to the details. Take a look to the right of the ad. We have a number of buttons:

So what’s wrong? Well, first we have different size buttons. This is sloppy when the buttons are all left aligned and not vastly different in text length or position, and even if you argue it is because the text is shorter in some, then you’ll notice inconsistent spacing (between the last letter and the arrow), so that argument doesn’t explain the size variations. And finally, inconsistent capitalisation (“Learn More” versus “Find out more”) – I mean, that is beyond sloppy.

It’s all part of the Microsoft experience – sloppy and inconsistent. Don’t forget this is on the front page of a multi-billion dollar company with an advertising budget of 1.4 billion dollars in 2009 – almost 3 times the budget of Apple in that same year! Compare their ads. Compare their websites!

It’s about sweating the details. It is why Apple’s software is a superior experience to Microsoft’s. It is why the iPhone blows away Windows Mobile. Microsoft still doesn’t get it.

If you are reading this and you still don’t get why those buttons are bad, you see nothing wrong with the ad text, and you can’t smell that desperation, you probably deserve to be using Windows. I can offer you no more.

In a recent post, I said:

Do you think Apple create their legendary interfaces based solely on user input? Even Microsoft are smart enough to not do that.

However, I’ve noticed the following Windows 7 ads on the internet:

I give you, the OS built for Homer. :-)

Tonight, I discovered I had left something on my Mac at work that I wanted at home. The problem: my machine at work is sleeping, like most of the personal machines on our internal network when we are not in the office. It is also wirelessly connected to our internal network, not connected via ethernet (for those one step ahead of where this post is going).

However, my machine at the office is also set up for Wireless Wake on Demand. Those who are interested can read some technical details here and setup details here. This is new in Snow Leopard, and you might recognise that we are talking about waking a machine that is wirelessly connected to a network, not a simple Wake-On-Lan sending a magic packet over ethernet.

So I VPNed to work from home, went to my Finder, selected the menu Go->Connect to Server... and put in “jamie.internal” (my machine’s name on the office network). My machine at work was woken in the background, and I connected to the machine as per normal in the Finder, got the file I wanted, disconnected, and closed down the VPN. My machine at the office went back to sleep and I had the file I wanted.

I could also have shared the screen to manipulate my Mac via its user interface, and apparently even shared iTunes if I had it running.

There is a bit more going on here than just sending a magic packet wirelessly to wake the machine – the Mac is asleep, but our office wireless router is broadcasting over bonjour the services my Mac can actually handle as if it was awake on the network, so that if I try to use these services, it wakes the machine up first. This also means then that my machine in the office, even when sleeping, will still appear on other machines on the internal network as if it was awake, advertising all it’s services. Similarly, if I had it sharing music in iTunes, it would appear as a shared source of music on another machine in iTunes, even when asleep.

This is obviously a very handy feature – possibly more so for my colleagues than for me given I could walk over to the office in 10 minutes from my home to manually get the file (though it is after midnight, and Melbourne streets at night are a little dangerous these days, so I possibly avoided a random stabbing or glassing).

I’m sure you can also see advantages in a system like this for the environment too – machines don’t have to necessarily be running 24 hours a day just so you can access an occasional resource.

This will also work for Macs connected via ethernet. It may also work from a Windows machine to access a Mac at your office (with a SMB share). Not tested, as Windows is not welcome in my home, but I assume it will work.

This post may be useful to anyone using SMB to share files to Windows users, but is particularly important to Leopard Server users because of the way OS X uses hidden files in the file system.

In the office we have a Mac Pro running Leopard Server. This machine acts as (amongst other things) a file server, providing a common area for sharing files (that are backed up as I’ve discussed previously).

OS X users can access the server using AFP or SMB, and Windows users use SMB. I was whinging to a colleague that Windows keeps leaving these files around that we can see when sharing the drive – those files being:

• Thumbs.db
• ~$* files
• *.tmp files
• Rescued Document* files

He pointed out that that was nothing compared to the sheer number of files Apple’s AFP and OS X leaves behind:

• .DS_Store
• .localized
• .AppleDouble folders
• ._* files
• .TemporaryItems

That’s a whole lot of dot files that OS X users never see because dot files by default are hidden from the user (as they are in any Unix/Linux implementation). However, Windows doesn’t use that convention.

I logged in via Windows and he was right – the file system was a mess. I felt sorry for the Windows users (more than I usually do just because they are Windows users).

So, anyway, to cut a long story short, here’s the fix. On Leopard Server, edit the file /etc/smb.conf from a Terminal window – something like:

sudo vi /etc/smb.conf

Add the following two lines to the [global] section of the file, and save the file:

veto files = /.*/Thumbs.db/
delete veto files = yes

From the Server Admin application, restart SMB.

Now, anyone connected via SMB to the shared file system will no longer see the dot files or the Thumbs.db files.

This doesn’t fix the issue with Microsoft Office leaving ~$* files everywhere, or Windows *.tmp files. You could hide them by adding them to the veto file list, but you probably don’t want to just hide the files as they are quite large. I’m thinking I might write a script that automatically removes these files once they are older than a few days, to try and keep things clean. If you have such a script, then you could hide the other files too.