One of my biggest annoyances with the Mac version of Firefox is it’s lack of Mac-like chrome (the look of the buttons, text fields, pull-downs, etc.) in HTML form objects. I had heard that version 3 of Firefox would actually be written natively in Cocoa and would, thus, have Mac-like chrome.

To test this theory, I downloaded and installed Alpha 2 (called GranParadiso). So far, at least, the chrome and other interface elements are identical to the currently shipping Firefox 2. Let’s hope that this changes in future versions. Stay tuned.

Paul Therrott of Super Site for Windows and Windows Weekly fame has posted an excellent and brief set of tips for IT pros who might just be getting used to Vista:

Windows Vista Tips for IT Pros [link]

If your clients are drowning in spam, follow the link below to a good article about practical ways to fight address harvesting and other spam-prevention techniques. (Note: The article is aimed at web developers, not end-users.)

Building Your Personal Anti-Spam Strategy
by Michael Herrick

The article is a bit dated, but still useful.

Spam may seem like a big problem, and it is, but you can do something about it. In fact, you’ve got to. You don’t have a choice. If you’re one of those people who receive 50 or 100 or more spams every day, you’ve simply got to find a way to manage it. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to reduce the time you spend dealing with spam. In this article, we’ll look at some of the ways you can reduce or limit the amount of spam you receive by becoming invisible to spammers. In the next article, we’ll discuss some ways you can automatically identify and remove spam you are already receiving. Put them together and you can build a personal anti-spam strategy that works for the kind of mail and the kind of spam you receive.

[Article summarized with Apple's Summary service.]

One critical piece of business software on any Mac is Office 2004. The reason this is so critical is that two versions of office on the two platforms have been completely interoperable since 2004. With the introduction of Office 2007 on the PC and its new and highly-touted XML-based file format, many Mac users are wondering what the impact will be on this critical interoperability. The short story is that Mac Office 2004 users will not be able to open files saved to the new format…yet. In the short term, Microsoft is advising that Mac users request that PC users save to the older 2004 file format until Microsoft releases their file conversion tool.

According to Microsoft’s head of the Mac Business Unit, converters are on their way:

We’re building file-format converters that will allow Mac users to access Office Open XML Format following the general availability of the 2007 Office system at the end of January. We will release a public beta version of the converters in the spring of 2007, and final versions of the converters will ship six to eight weeks after Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac is available. For now, we recommend that Mac users advise their friends and colleagues using the 2007 Office system to save their documents as a “Word/Excel/PowerPoint 97-2003 Document” (.doc, .xls, .ppt) to ensure the documents can be easily shared across platforms. [bold, mine]

According to Sheridan Jones, a Group Marketing Manager in the Mac BU, the converters are “expected late March/early April.” Stay tuned.

I have just spent the day at a Microsoft Launch event for Vista and Office 2007 aimed at IT Professionals and Developers. CES, this ain’t, but I came away with some useful information and much more concrete support for my continued advice to all clients, friends, family, and String Foo readers: Hold off on Vista, upgrade immediately to Office 2007.

If you’re new to this blog, let me sum up my recommendation on Vista: the OS is not worth the pain and expense of upgrading unless it comes with a new machine. You should not buy a retail copy of Vista and attempt to install it on any PC that wasn’t bought within the past year, and even then, your chances are dicey. Not only is a retail copy of Vista shockingly expensive, you don’t get much bang for your buck. Some pretty eye candy: yes. Some nice, long overdue default security features: true. But that’s it. Today’s product demonstrations simply supported my own experience with the product: Vista is not worth the price and trouble of an upgrade.

A complete 180, however, with Office 2007. Today’s demonstrations by Microsoft simply underscored and strengthened my belief that Office 2007 is an unusual release for Microsoft: Office 2007 offers a lot for the money, and you should upgrade immediately.

The ribbon interface is fantastic, despite the moderate learning curve [see the ribbon in action here]. But the truly Special Sauceâ„¢ is with the Galleries and live updates that make formatting a breeze. While Office 2007 really doesn’t offer anything new, per se, it does a fantastic job of exposing and, more importantly, simplifying the features that were already there.

Gallery is a truly different animal. In just about every place you touch that has to do with formatting, you get a set of canned, well-designed templates and styles. The net effect is that with a click or two, you can create slick looking documents and presentations that look better than those that took you hours to noodle into submission in previous versions of Office.

Microsoft offers a free trial of Office so you can evaluate the benefits for yourself. The trial is downloadable here.

I visited Staples the other day and experienced a practical lesson in price inelasticity. Elasticity is the measure of how sensitive a given economic widget is to pricing. An elastic product can withstand changes in pricing. An inelastic one will see dramatic declines in sales as the price goes up. In this case, the economic widget is an operating system: a retail copy of Vista. I would argue that Microsoft is learning the hard way that Vista is a highly inelastic product. In addition, they’re doing a surprisingly bad job of going that last mile at retail to close the deal.

Staples, like many retailers, has tables and end-caps set up specifically to showcase Vista. Laid out on the table are the various versions available: Premium Upgrade, $159.99; Premium full, $239.99; Business Full, $299; all the way up to Ultimate full at an astounding $399.99. 8 boxes in all, and with multiple copies of each, to boot, making the visual array even more confusing. I have read about these prices for months, but seeing them there at retail and holding the small, empty display box in my hand puts it in context: “You’ve got to be kidding,” I thought. “You want $400 for this???”

I was wondering if I was the only one, so as a bit of an experiment, I stood off to the side and watched the Vista display. Person after person came up and performed the same procedure: pick up the box, look at the price, widen eyes in surprise, put the box down, and walk away empty-handed. I counted 10 in a 5-minute period. Not scientific, I admit, but I do have better things to do with my time than get kicked out of Staples for some unauthorized retail research.

This experience hit home some of the lessons learned in my MBA program in a real and literally tangible way:

Lesson #1: Keep it simple, stupid. Refine the product line and don’t offer a seemingly infinite and confusing array of product variations.

Lesson #2: Pay attention to touch-points. The display boxes should not be empty. When you pick up a $400 product in your hand, it should feel substantial, not vacuous.

Lesson #3: Pay attention to price. If my experience is any indication, $400 is simply too much to ask for a new OS, especially when you consider that most purchases of Vista will require at a minimum a new graphics card and some extra memory. You’re asking someone to plunk down $1,000 of hard-earned cash for…what? A slightly better user experience? Slightly better security? I’ll stick with XP, thankyouverymuch.

In the end, this amounted to nothing more than an interesting mental exercise. I know that Vista will one day become the predominant OS in the world. I know that Microsoft will eventually pry some amount of money from my pocket for Vista; it’s like a black hole in my life as a developer into which I will eventually fall. I also know that Microsoft hardly listen to someone like me. After all, I’m just a customer. However, I wonder if, just maybe, if my experience, replicated at tens of thousands of retail stores around the country, will equate to a slower than expected adoption rate. Time will tell.

This isn’t a “trick” so much as a discovery: use a series of similar images with OS X’s ability to change desktop pictures every 5 minutes. Here’s how this works:

First, you pick a series of very similar pictures. In my case, I happened across some mesmerizing photography of smoke created by Graham Jefferey of Sensitive Light in my travels across the InterWebs. He has a number of smoke images available for download as desktop pictures. Download these and save them to a folder.

Note: Any series will work. For best results, try to pick pictures that are variants on a theme and have similar background colors. For instance, I use only the smoke images with black backgrounds.

Next, open your System Preferences, go to Desktop & Screensavers, and select the Desktop tab. Now, in the list of available desktop images, scroll to the bottom of the list and select “Choose Folder…”. Select the folder containing your series of images. Finally, make sure “Change Picture…” is checked, and select a frequency from the pull-down menu. I find that 5 minutes is a good length of time.

When all is said and done, you will have what appears to be a normal desktop picture. However, just as it does with screensaver transitions, OS X gently fades between the images randomly while you’re working. The effect is calming and fascinating.

Enjoy.

Parallels Desktop for Mac Release Candidate 2 (Build 3150) is available for download. Details are available on Parallels’ Beta page.

Google is the king of search. (Also, this just in: the sky is blue.) Yet, I’m continually surprised at how difficult it is to find things on Google’s own web site.

Case in point, I’ve found it surprisingly difficult to find two specific pages: 1) the “Add a Link” page where you add a site URL to their database, and more recently, 2) their Webmaster Tools.

Well, in my most recent search, I came across a clearinghouse for their tools, their Webmaster Central page. Here, you can find a number of very useful tools including their Webmaster Tools and a blog devoted to issues affecting webmasters.

I’ve found the Webmaster Tools page especially useful. This resource is a clearinghouse for the stats and health of all of the sites under your control. You can find crawling stats, query stats, page analysis, and the latest indexing stats. All very useful stuff that is made all the more useful by the fact that they are all in one spot now. Their Webmaster Tools are available for free here. (Note: In order for these to work, you will need read/write access to any sites you want to track.)