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I've earlier written a norwegian piece on why Vista isn't coming near my computer over at Nettvint.net, but since the arguments have grown during time and I felt the need for a recap, I'll do it again.

To sum it up: Vista isn't coming near any of my computers, and I'll tell you why right here and now:

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My pet peeve regarding usability is the lack of (let's face it, most) developers ability to put themselves in the situation of computer beginners (aka newbs). Eric S. Raymond describes exactly how bad this can get in The Luxury of Ignorance. And in my own opinion, this also describes why Linux is still miles away from being a viable desktop alternative for the regular Joe. I've had too many similar encounters like this myself.

A key point in understanding users is also discussed in Raymond Chen's The default answer to every dialog box is "cancel". Nice to see that Microsoft has people around that realizes this. Now if they could only understand that the default answer to security alerts is "allow" as well (atleast after the users learn what cancel does to them), they'd probably understand why those are useless aswell.

Todays lesson? People shouldn't need to read manuals to get things working, and they don't read dialog boxes. I've always meant that any piece of software should be so straight forward that the manual becomes redundant.

Two more imports from my old homepage, and this time I'm really done. The first article is Snille gutter får ingenting, a small norwegien piece on good boys vs. bad boys. The second is MPAA Notice, a p2p "incident report" my old school got regarding my uhm... activities. :p

Over at New Scientist's Space section you can read about 13 things that still baffles scientists. An incredibly interesting read, especially for the scientifically inclined.

Just to state some basic facts...

1. Flash doesn't work everywhere, unlike normal HTML. My computer runs a 64-bit OS without 32bit emulation, and Adobe has yet to provide a Flash player for any 64-bit platform.
2. Flash requires a proprietary plugin.
3. Flash does not let users change font sizes or contrast settings using personalized stylesheets.
4. A lot of screenreaders and other accessibility tools does not work with Flash (some screenreaders does using a Windows-specific API).
5. Flash is not indexable by all search engines. Some does index text in Flash files, but since there is no way to link to the subpage your query was found in, people can't be redirected to the result, making the result useless for users.
6. If a browser doesn't support Flash, you get nothing unless the entire website is also saved in a standard compliant (also know as HTML) way. If a browser doesn't support CSS, you will still get a readable website.
7. Flash doesn't not present my usual OS widgets (textfields, submit buttons and such) or use my OS settings for these (larger fontsizes, higher contrast and such).
8. Flash is owned by a commercial entity and even though the format specification is open, it is not licensed for free use.
9. Flash sites breaks the back button, a fundamental function that users are used to.
10. There is no way to bookmark a subpage of most Flash-only sites.
11. Flash doesn't work in most alternative browser devices, like PDAs or Smart phones.
12. Printing content from a Flash site is extremely difficult and most of the time comes out weird on paper, if at all.
13. Flash doesn't provide a standard way of navigating without the mouse (tab navigation is possible by default).

Note: I'm not saying Flash should be banned from the net, I think there are numerous valid reasons to use Flash. But my opinion is that it should only be used for interactive multimedia which cannot be represented in HTML/CSS/JS in an easy way. Stuff like games, ads and (because of terrible object tag support in browsers) video playback. If you need to use Flash to have graphical menu buttons with mouseovers or display a logo in the header of your site you really should reconsider your profession.

Edit: Item 5 moderated, item 13 refuted.

Sidenote: Tadeusz Szewczyk at Fadtastic talks about the demise of Flash.

Edit: Item 4 moderated.

As some of my readers might know, I started using Horde webmail (and it's addons) half a year ago. But after a while, I just had to cave in. Even when running against a local IMAP server on a computer with plenty of CPU-power and RAM left, it was very sluggish. On top of that you had a terrible user interface that forced you into way too many clicks to perform even the simplest tasks. I needed something snappier and easier.

So the time came to revisit my old friend, Google. I imported all my old mail into GMail using GMail Loader and set all my other mail accounts to forward into it. Since GMail lets you reply to mail with the same from-adress you received the original mail to, this setup is transparent to people you communicate with. I also moved my todo-lists to the Google Personalized Homepage todo gadget, my notes to Google Notebook, my calendars to Google Calendar, my RSS-feeds to Google Reader (which by far is the best online RSS-reader I've tried, and I've tried a lot!) and presto! I'm back at the Google Personalized Homepage. After trying it a while, I really can't say I regret the migration. It has everything I need and then some. Click on the picture to see what it looks like right now.

And with Google recently adding Tabs and drag'n'drop to their API, developing new gadgets should be a breeze!

Via Learn Out Loud you can read about why DRM is a bad, bad thing... And for the less technical of my readers, DRM is the copy protection on all music bought online from MSN (for your Zune player) or iTunes (for the iPod). This is a must read, the end of the article contains a lot of tips on where to get music without DRM, even cheaper than MSN and iTunes!