The brother just got himself a MacBook and was going through the usual switcher phases and it reminded me of this ad from almost two decades ago. To this day it takes great self control to keep from blurting out the last line from this ad whenever a PC user is bitching about computer problems.

I’m not sure whether this is an ad for Apple or Microsoft. Notice the way the woman wistfully says “I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person.” Geez.

I’m betting this ad campaign dies still-born, just like the Seinfeld-Gates one did. You heard it here first.

This awesome clip from the animated show, ‘The Family Guy’ is doing the rounds of the internet. They’re taking the piss outta Microsoft’s Zune MP3 Player.

I consider myself a pretty nerdy, techy guy. I’ve been around computers for twenty years now. I’ve built computers for friends, worked in tech support, I can edit video and audio with ease. Yesterday, to test the performance of a new hard drive I disassembled this laptop. Twice.

So why the fuck is it that in all my days I have NEVER found a single text editor that doesn’t make me want to throw the computer I’m using out the window? Am I specially-abled or something? Am I fucking retard? 

I’ve tried them all. Microsoft Word is the most vile of the lot, every now and then when I’m stuck on a Windows machine and confronted with doing any writing on it, my scalp tingles. So many years of Word crashing on me after I have slaved over some writing for hours has left me with an instinctual, feral, aversion to it. Oh and by the way, the fine folks at Microsoft that designed the ‘Autosave’ feature in Word? Please mail me for my home address so you can come over here and kiss my arse.  

Even simple stuff like dragging a margin or creating a hanging indent in Word damn near drives me to tears. Word on the Mac is better by an infinitesimally small amount. Geez. 

Open Office sucks too but I’ve always lived by the adage that you get what you pay for and Open Office is free. My point proven.

Apple’s Pages is bearable, until you start getting adventurous with the formatting at which point all bets are off. Also you usually have to export your work into the de-facto Word Format (so the 99% of the world not using a Macintosh can read your opus) which is another crap-shoot.

And now there’s a new joy in my life. WordPress! For the most part I still use the online interface. It’s actually that good, even for an old school ‘apps for everything‘ dude like myself. Except for the text editor.

Now and then when I’m making a post WordPress will decide to totally fuck with me by adding a line-feed where I don’t want it or right justifying something I want left justified. The previous post was an example. After half an hour of trying, I gave up on getting WordPress to format the post the way I wanted. I rewrote the entire post from scratch and this isn’t the first time this has happened. Brought to my goddamn knees by some HTML and some javascript. Pathetic.

So. Can anyone please tell me, why is a self-confessed ubergeek like myself flummoxed by what are essentially fucking text editors on steroids? Anyone?

This is the new Microsoft OS for Smart-phones (for those masochists who don’t get enough of the awesome ‘Windows Experience™’ on their computers. Thwaack! Thank you sir! May I have another?)

Notice how even in the demo the phone isn’t actually doing anything.

Oh and BTW! My favourite part of all this? This might be Microsoft’s answer to the Apple iPhone. It’s iPhone killer as it were.

And what have they called it? The MyPhone! LOL. This shit just writes itself! I don’t even have to try with stories about these monkeys.

Thank you for coming ladies and gentlemen. Don’t forget to tip your waitresses. I’m here all week.

So, thanks to the drivel you read here, I got offered a sort of gig to write a few pieces for the Hindustan Times’ Mumbai Supplement called ‘HT Café’ and I took them up on the offer. The first piece came out today and I’d have linked to it but HT’s online version (or epaper) requires a (free) user account to view. I know most people can’t be bothered to go through the hassle of setting this up (I wouldn’t) so I’m posting the article right here, after the jump. To the powers at HT please get with the program and remove the login requirements for your epaper. Even The Times of India dropped their login for the epaper sometime last year. Imagine that!  Welcome to the year Two Thousand and Nine.

The piece I wrote was about Gmail Offline, a new Google labs feature available in your Gmail account. The article is refreshingly free of cuss words and snarky euphemisms (mostly) for those who’s fragile sensibilities are offended by such stuff. If HT’s readers like the piece (and more importantly, if HT ‘shows me the money!’ I’ll probably do this occasionally) Read on..

 Gmail: ‘Offline’ is the new Online?

Last week saw the debut of Gmail ‘Offline’, a new feature from the ‘NOT EVIL’ folks at Google.(Google’s well publicised corporate slogan is ‘Don’t Be Evil’.) Read on to find out how ‘Offline’ is going to change the way a whole generation of people use email and how you can get the most out of it.

First things first. What is Gmail Offline?

It is an experimental new feature in Gmail that lets you compose messages and read old mail even if you don’t have access to the internet, like when you are on a plane, or if you are like me, when you can’t find an open wifi network and are too cheap to pay for access to a closed network.(Don’t smirk. I work in the media industry.)

So basically, with this feature enabled, you can log in to your gmail account from your web browser, while offline, view mail that you have sent and received and compose new mails to send later. Let me add once again, you can do all of this without a connection to the internet. Truly mind-bending stuff from the folks at Google then. 

Not so fast. The setup.

Before you go yanking that LAN cable out of your ethernet jack, there are a few steps you have to go through to setup Gmail Offline.

The simplest way to do this is to use Google’s own browser which is spectacularly fast and much more secure than Microsoft’s own ‘Internet Exploder’. It’s called Google Chrome and even if you aren’t interested in Gmail Offline you should definitely download Chrome right this minute and never, ever use IE again. Do it now. 

Get Google chrome here: www.google.com/chrome

Done? Now delete that shortcut icon for Internet Explorer from your desktop. You can thank me later.

1. Start Chrome and go to Gmail.
2. Log into your Gmail account.
3. Click on the ‘Settings’ link in the top right corner of the window.
4. Under Settings look for a heading call ‘Labs’ and click on it.
5. The first feature in the list should be Offline by the Offline Team’. Click to enable it. Click to save changes. (If you aren’t using Chrome a dialog box will pop up asking you to if you would like to install ‘Google Gears’. Google Gears is a tiny, safe program that enables Google Offline. Install ‘Google Gears’.)
6. Next you should get a dialog box asking you if you want to allow Google to store data locally on your computer.
7. You should see a tiny green logo in the top right hand corner of you Gmail window and when you click on it you should get a status messages like this.
8. You are done. The little green logo with the arrows should look like a check mark now.
9. From now on whenever you log in to your Gmail account you should see the little green check mark in the top right corner and when you click on it you should see the status message to the right.
10. Now disconnect from the internet (turn of your wifi and disconnect and LAN cables from your computer) and try to log into Gmail. You should be able to login and view mails and even compose new emails just like normal. The only difference should be that the little green check mark is replaced by an unavailable sign. When you click on it you should get a message similar to this. Any mails you compose will be stored on your computer till an internet connection is detected and will only be sent the next time Gmail syncs.

Caveats Galore! The Fine Print.

1. Let me turn the usual warning on it’s head. DO TRY THIS AT HOME. i.e. If you want to use Gmail Offline please make sure it is working for you at home or wherever you have an internet connection. First do a dry run by disconnecting from the network temporarily and see if you are being able to log in and access your email. You definitely don’t want to find out that you didn’t configure it correctly when you are thirty thousand feet up in the air with some smelly, fat guy snoring next you or when you are in a hotel room where internet access costs as much as the black market rate for one of your kidneys.
2. Smart as they are, the boffins at Google haven’t been able to defy the basic laws of the internet. You can compose mails but they will obviously be sent only the next time you have a connection to the internet. So if you need to send an urgent email you can compose it but it will just sit there in your outbox silently mocking you till you next connect to the internet. Rule of thumb: If your subject line is something like “Emergency All Hands Meeting! 2:50 PM” you probably don’t want to rely on Gmail Offline.
3. Currently you only get access to a month of old mails though that should be good enough for about my 97.3 % of people out there. (My utterly scientific percentage guesstimate). But if the mail you want to refer to isn’t available, well then it just isn’t. You’re out of luck.
4. Despite the fact that almost every man, woman and child has a Gmail account, Gmail is still in Beta. So this new feature is an experimental feature on top of a service that is in Beta. That means it WILL crash every now and then. When I was trying to enable Gmail offline my browser crashed twice and Gmail itself behaved quite funky while my messages where being downloaded in the background. Your mileage may vary but you really ought to do this in Google’s own Chrome browser as it will make things much simpler. Honestly, save yourself a lot of trouble, get Chrome. If you are on Mac OS X like me, Safari is your best bet.
5. Privacy has always an issue with Gmail. With this new feature the privacy-nuts are definitely going to raise a stink soon because now your emails are stored on the computer and how long is it going to be before some smart teenager in a basement figures out a way to read them? Your guess is as good as mine. You have been warned.

Finally. this is NOT a replacement for a proper desktop mail program like Outlook Express on Windows or Mail.app on the Mac. For people who need access to every single email that they have ever sent or received, a proper mail client program is still the way to go. Gmail Offline is limited by the fact that it has to run in a web browser and it only downloads a month of emails. So think of this more as a something you would use on a second computer or laptop while away from home. 

If you understand the terms POP mail or IMAP, GMail Offline is not for you.This more as a step forward for people who normally use web-mail quite happily and hate email programs.

The Bigger Picture.

For people who are interested in these kinds of trends Gmail Offline is yet another piece in the puzzle that is Google’s plan at the mythical Cloud OS. A computing device where almost everything you do happens in a web browser. You have very few dedicated applications and the operating system you are running doesn’t matter a whole lot.

Google has previously introduced features like Google Docs and Google Calendar that are in direct competition to Microsoft’s expensive office suite of applications. I’m guessing that this feature is going to be more of ‘killer app’ for the simple reason that mail is one of the foremost activities online today and absolutely everyone has a Gmail account.

Also unlike people from my generation who were frustrated by the bugginess and lack of speed of early web-based email services such as Hotmail, kids these days (I love saying that) have grown up with Google and Facebook and are totally comfortable with doing everything in a browser window. 

As you can imagine, Microsoft hates the idea of being sidelined liked this and its handsome CEO, Steve Ballmer (seen here with his game-face on) has famously vowed to ‘Kill Google’. Microsoft is also making an effort to move its applications online with its ‘Windows Live’ service but in typical MS fashion its efforts are half-baked, lame and generally unusable till three years after their release date.

Apple is also making a play for online apps with its MobileMe service and iWork.com but despite the success of the iPod and the iPhone the California based company is still a bit player in the computer industry with its single figure market share.

So the big fight is between Microsoft and Google and the next round starts now.

You may have come across these warning flags, quite often if you search for warez or hacked software or serial numbers or porn. (I’m just sayin’) Google’s search result page will have a link with a warning saying “This site may harm your computer” more than once and it refuses to link you to the site directly. If you are sure you’re safe (on a Mac) or if you really want to see ‘Teh nekkid ladies’ you have to manually copy and paste the web address or URL into a fresh browser window and go there at your own risk.

Many people do this. I have done this very often too. You make a stupid mistake. Idiot at keyboard.

So, because of the gaffe at Google every site on the internet was flagged as unsafe and because Google is truly the lord of the internet these days it basically BROKE EVERYTHING for an hour. What happened? Fire? Server crash on a massive scale? Power outage? Internet link break down? Nope. Google’s servers and infrastructure are spread far and wide and redundantly enough that it could survive all these mishaps simultaneously with nary a hiccup. You and I wouldn’t even know about it.

What happened was someone (a human) was checking the list of sites that Google flags as malicious and blocks and to this list he/she added an innocuous little / symbol. Now anyone who knows how the internet works nows that / means everything. So the engineer basically flagged everything on the internet as potentially harmful. Every single site was bad. The whole internet. All of it. The whole kit and friggin caboodle. As you read this the said engineer is probably hanging upside down by his/her ankles in a large room where Larry and Sergey (Google Founders) beat him/her with sticks. 

This isn’t an exaggeration. The fuck up really was that enormous. Someone made a stupid mistake. 

This illustrates the weakest link in internet security. You & I. That’s right. We do stupid things on the internet. We send stupid e-cards from websites knowing that they are going to spam both the sender and the receiver for life. We visit sites knowing they look dodgy and nefarious and might do bad things to our computer. We open stupid attachments that our equally stupid friends send us because we want to see Anna Kournikova in her birthday suit or some cat riding a bicycle. We use Microsoft Internet Exploder when we know that there are better, safer, faster browsers out there for free.

Which brings me to Microsoft. The entire world uses their computers and I blame them for two things. (No. Not Vista) The first is for making software that has more holes than Swiss Cheese and the second is making people believe that the internet is for everyone. That it is so simple that you just buy a computer and plug it in.

I’m sorry. It isn’t.

You need a licence to drive. I know, I know, to get an Indian driving licence all you need is a goddamn pulse. Sometimes, not even that. But work with me here okay?

Why should anyone be allowed to get on the information highway or ‘teh internets’ without some basic training, skill or education about how things work?

Think about it. How many people do you know who have got into huge trouble because they didn’t know what they were doing on the internet? Many I’m guessing. One person I know got his US visa rejected because during his application process his computer got infected with the Kournikova virus and his computer mailed an alleged nudie pic of the young tennis star to the application officer at the US Embassy!

How many intelligent people do you know that just seem brain dead about security and common sense when they are in a web browser? Clicking on suspicious links, opening strange mail attachments, installing free screen-saver programs?

So. I have two proposals.

1. Basic training to use the internet. When you buy a computer you should get a few hours of free training. Maybe online. Maybe a video. Maybe an actual class you have to attend. But compulsory. With a test at the end.

2. If you click a stupid link on Google. Or you try to go a site that is known to be malicious. Or you try to install some questionable freeware programs from the internet. Or you open an attachment that your virus scanner WARNS you could be a virus.

Your screen goes dark and a large message flashes across the entire screen….

YOU ARE TOO STUPID TO USE THE INTERNET.

And your computer turns itself off. For a week.

This is Microsoft’s official infomercial for SongBirdSmith, their <cringing> GarageBand Killer. While you watch it please remember that Microsoft is one of the biggest software companies in the world and this is the best it can come up with.

For those not in the know GarageBand is Apple’s entry level music production software that comes preloaded on every Mac. It makes it very simple for anyone but the most tone-deaf moron to quickly throw together a jingle or soundtrack like this one here. Try sitting through the entire film. I couldn’t.

P.S. Those shiny silver laptops in the Microsoft ad? ALL Apple MacBook Pros. MICROSOFT FAIL!

P.P.S. Thanks to Aditya for the tip. Its SongSmith not SongBird. In my defence MS’s naming isn’t the most intuitive in the world. Look at Windows’ names: 98,ME,2000,XP,Vista,7 i.e. A year,two letters, a year, a word and a random number. Geez.