WTF Microsoft?

The Redmond software giant have been airing their two new ads recently, certainly as a response to the long-running series of "I'm a Mac - I'm a PC"-ads from the Get a Mac campaign. I watched both and seriously, what are they talking about? Is it really a good idea to bore people out... I was hoping for something better when they announced Jerry Seinfeld would be featured in the ads, but this is not good. Check it out for yourself.

Can somebody explain to me, please? I feel confused... 

One of those must-see videos

While reading my daily RSS feeds today, I ran across this video. Featuring Jobs & Gates, and some other special guests, definitely worth watching, if so for the Finder song. Not as geeky as one might think, so give it a go!

Why? Because I'm forced to!

Okay, so just so you know: I'm not doing this voluntary. I'm not doing this because it's fun. And I'm not doing this because I want to.
Nope..the reason is..school. Sure, I could design an interface in Macfriendly applications such as Flash, but seriously, if it's got to be, it better be got! So the prototype will be build the same way as real applications are. For that to be possible I need to install something I can run at school (i.e. Windows...). So here it is, those of you who didn't know already: Macs are perfectly capable of running whatever you need (need is not the same as want in my case) them to run.

Running Windows 3.11 on Mac

This one goes out for all the geeks out there ;)
Here's what's possible to do with a Mac nowadays:



Kinda ol' school feelin' ;)

Microsoft Norway Demos Vista on a Mac

As The Unofficial Apple Weblog wrote earlier this week...

"Some things just speak for themselves. In this video on the Norwegian site VG TV (apparently associated with Norway's largest newspaper), a Microsoft Norway executive demonstrates Vista on what is clearly an Intel iMac (they don't even bother to hide the Apple logo)."

Now this is great!

iChat, MSN, Jabber - A big mess

So I thought it's time to solve the problem. Here in Sweden everyone uses MSN (except from some "geeks" who go with a way better alternative: Jabber). "So what?", you think, "all my friends use MSN too and there's no problem with that". As long as you stick with a Microsoft products - MSN and Windows - everything works pretty good, I agree. But here, on Mac OS X, although it exists, the MSN client from Microsoft sucks really bad. I'd like to compare it to...hum, let's say Windows Messenger version 4.5. You've got the text messaging. You've got emoicons. And...that's pretty much all. Well, there is some file transfer support, but it uses the old MSNP4 or maybe 5 (or maybe something else?), which means that the files are transfered via MSN's servers insteand of peer-to-peer as in the newer versions of the protocol. The result? Speeds like 4-5 kb/s. That worked in 1999 perhaps, but try sending a gillion-something megapixel photo image with it today. Add no support for all the new "cool" effects as well as no audio nor video support. That's the reality for Microsoft's official MSN client for Mac OS X, 2006. No wonder folks try to go different ways.

Yesterday I found this excellent tutorial which I had time to follow today. To sum up: it gives iChat (the default Mac OS X messenger client) an ability to connect to a MSN account via Jabber. I'm not going to get too technical here so if you want more detalies, just read the first paragraphs of the tutorial.

The result? I'm not sure, but it looks like everyone I ever had on my MSN contact list and everyone who ever had added me on their got notified about me adding them (requested authorization). Since I haven't changed MSN account since 1997 you can imagine how many people got affected.

I'd like to say sorry for the inconvenience, it was completely unintentional. I'm not blaming anyone, I just hope you all understand now that even if you are happy with Microsoft and their products, it is still concerns you whenever they can deliver quality products for all supported platforms (after all, MSN on Mac OS X is officially supported by Microsoft), or not.

Oh, and by the way, since MSN - like it or not - is the de-facto standard for IM in many countries, why can't Microsoft just open up the protocol? It's not like they are making any money on this... Or are they?