The list of apps with Vista compatibility problems is truly mind-boggling. We’re talking about stuff I use every day. Dreamweaver, ColdFusion, Eclipse, iTunes, Irfanview. Add to that the fact that my Photoshop disc is on the fritz and you’ve got a major productivity roadblock. But perhaps the app that I miss the most is one that works in the background: Diskeeper.

Diskeeper is (or was) probably the best defragmenter available for Windows. It’s got a feature called “Set It and Forget It” which allows you to configure the program to defrag your hard drive in the background whenever it sees the need, and then, as advertised, forget all about the damn thing. But the bastards at the Diskeeper Corporation want me to pay $30 to upgrade to their new Vista version, even though I already bought an upgrade less than six months ago. So I decided to look at alternatives. (Update 3/8/07: Never let it be said this blogging thing is a waste of time. I just received an e-mail from a nice fellow at Diskeeper Corp. apologizing for the upgrade confusion and offering to make it up with a coupla extra licenses. Thanks, Diskeeper!)

I opened up the built-in Windows Vista Disk Defragmenter, and I was astounded to see this:

In case you’re looking at this image and wondering what’s so astounding, the only thing you can configure here is the schedule. No setting priorities, no setting unmovable files, no program menus, no help file, no nothing. I wasn’t expecting a robust interface like Diskeeper’s that allows you granular control over what files get positioned in what place on the hard drive, but I wasn’t quite expecting this either.

Windows Vista is full of these kinds of user interface decisions. Places where the operating system presents you with a limited set of options and tells you, “don’t worry, Windows Vista will handle it.” We’ll defragment your disk for you, we’ll switch color schemes when necessary, we’ll block you from handling the nasty files, we’ll decide when the computer should sleep and when it should wake.

Remind you of anything? It reminds me of a Mac.

Mac OS X doesn’t have a built-in disk defragmenter. Why? Because every Mac comes with a team of Magic Disk Gnomes that scrub your hard drive every night? No, because OS X does all of the disk optimization it needs to do in the background. It defragments as a routine process of the operating system, and just doesn’t tell you about it. (See the article on the Apple website About disk optimization with Mac OS X.)

Macs are famous for making things easy on the user. But along with that usability push comes a configurability hit. As far as I know, there’s no Registry Editor sitting right off the Apple menu that will allow you to muck up your system with a few mouse clicks. There’s no “Run” command that lets you wreak havoc willy-nilly just by tapping random keys. People claim that things “just work” on a Mac, and that’s because the engineers that built OS X have taken out most of the options that don’t. (Update 3/7/07: Oops. See Toby’s and Brian’s comments below. Didn’t realize a command line was so close at hand on OS X.)

The *nix operating systems (i.e. Linux and Unix) lie on the opposite end of the scale. You can do practically anything on a Linux command line, from rebuilding the kernel to deleting crucial files to rolling your own device drivers. (Where disk defragmenting is concerned, however, Linux, like OS X, does its thing in the background. See the article Why doesn’t Linux need defragmenting?)

One of the reasons I’ve always liked Windows is because it occupies the middle ground. You get 60-70% of the Mac GUI experience and 60-70% of the Linux command line experience. The best of both worlds, some might say. But now, with Windows Vista, Microsoft seems to be wising up to the Apple way of thinking. Let the computer do the work for you in the background. After all, who really wants to worry about how fragmented your computer files are? The geeks and the code monkeys do, and they can go buy a third-party utility or just install Ubuntu like they’ve been threatening to do anyway.

The implications of this philosophy go beyond mere disk defragmentation. They go to the heart of the question of what computers are supposed to do for us in the first place.

The whole reason we use computers at all is that they’re supposed to simplify things for us. Many of us seem to have lost sight of that. We get caught up in fetishizing the computer itself and forget that every minute we spend tweaking and configuring a computer is, in essence, a minute wasted. The ideal computer would be a completely invisible computer, one that could anticipate what you’re going to do and then make that task quicker, easier, and more efficient when you decide to do it.

It’s only now, however, after 20 or 30 years banging our heads against these things, that computer technology has grown and matured to the point that it can begin to achieve that goal. Your measly Pentium II processor couldn’t spare enough cycles to try and figure out everything you were trying to do ahead of time; all it could really do was respond to your commands and give you a few shortcuts. But now your smokin’ Dual Core chip can churn through a thousand possibilities and contingencies in a millisecond. (Stop snickering, readers from the year 2017.) It can figure out the trivial things you don’t need to figure out, like whether you’re using the latest device drivers or what kind of screen resolution you have.

What this means is that starting now, operating systems won’t have to present you with options that will mess up your system. In fact, they’ll be presenting you with less configurable options rather than more. The computer will anticipate what you’re trying to do and automatically give you the configurations that make the most sense for you. The era of humans trying to figure out how programs work is coming to a close. The era of programs trying to figure out how humans work is now underway.

A seemingly small semantic shift, but one that will change your relationship with technology in the very near future. What this means is that at some point you’ll be able to boot up a computer and it will just instantly know that you’re a left-handed attorney in Taiwan that doesn’t care about the engineering functions on the calculator.

There will be lots of privacy issues to sort out, you betcha. And lots of amusing fuck-ups along the way. (What happens if you’re a left-handed patent attorney in Taiwan that does want to see the engineering functions on the calculator?) But it means that those Disk Defragmenter controls ain’t coming back anytime soon.

(For further thoughts on the topic, see my previous article Look Ma… No Program Menus!)

I like Google. I have great faith in their ability to bring new technology to the masses in an intuitive, highly functional package. Google Maps quickly supplanted MapQuest as my street directory of choice when it came out. And I’ve got high hopes for Writely, an online word processing application that Google bought earlier this year and promptly rechristened Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

So why is Gmail so irritating?

Gmail should be a slam-dunk for Google. After all, I can build a simple POP3 application on a ColdFusion web server in a couple of hours, and that includes time for me to consult the Macromedia documentation to fix my mangled CFML syntax. I’m not saying that that’s all there is to it, of course. (If you want to see a ColdFusion-based application gone horribly awry, look at all the flaws in MySpace.) But I don’t have some of the world’s best developers and billions of dollars in cash lying around either.

Here are my major problems with Gmail:

• Gmail breaks the browser Back button. To me, this is an absolute cardinal sin. Yes, I understand how difficult it is to make a functioning web application that obeys the Back button in a stateless environment like the web. But certainly Google can do better. I back up into blank, non-functioning pages at least two or three times a day, usually when following links from the Gmail module on my Google home page. And when Google isn’t breaking the Back button, they’re opening up new and unwanted tabs in my browser.
• Gmail breaks the Reload/Refresh button. Try opening an e-mail message, and then hitting your browser’s reload/refresh button. You get taken back to the list of e-mails. I get hung up on this several times a day too.
• The interface is very, very slow. I lose patience very easily with the “Loading” messages that pop up at the top of the screen — there are actually two different messages, one that appears in the top right and one that appears in the top left — and they’re up there a lot.
• No folders. Google assumes that we don’t care for the convention of filing our e-mail into different folders. Therefore Gmail does away with this metaphor altogether in favor of its own Label system, which I can’t seem to get used to. Couldn’t they at least give you the option of using folders, even if it’s not set by default?

• What’s with the Reply textbox? There’s a textbox at the bottom of every message that suddenly expands into a full-fledged e-mail reply once you click on it. It’s very bizarre and counterintuitive, considering the fact that the e-mail reply looks nothing like the textbox.
• Threaded conversations are just confusing. Message replies and forwards are all tacked on to the original e-mail to form one long chain of messages. It sounds like a good idea to have a record of the entire conversation in one place, but in practice things get very cluttered very quickly. When conversations start to branch off into multiple threads, it’s almost impossible to keep track. Furthermore, threaded e-mail conversations cause messages to jump around in chronology. That message that used to be halfway down the page suddenly jumps to the top of the page, rendering any attempts to order your messages useless.
• Why can’t I easily sort? Every other e-mail program in the world — hell, just about every other program period — lets you sort objects. Usually by clicking the header at the top of the column. Gmail doesn’t let you sort messages at all. What if I want to view all messages to or from a specific person? You need to type that person’s name into the Search box. What if you want to view e-mail in reverse chronology? Sorry, can’t.
• Gmail doesn’t play well with POP3 clients like Outlook. Sure, you can easily download messages to Outlook — which is more than you can say for some webmail clients like Microsoft’s own Hotmail — but Google renders some of most effective POP3 management tools null and void. Messages you’ve downloaded into Outlook don’t automatically get marked as read in Gmail. And Gmail doesn’t obey the standard POP3 setting allowing your client to automatically delete webmail messages after x days on the server.
• The “Compose Mail” link is hard to find. Maybe it’s just me, but I find it difficult to remember where the “Compose Mail” link is. Yes, it’s right there in the top left under the Gmail logo, but after using the program for a year, I still hesitate a second or two every time I need to use it. That’s generally a sign that there’s a serious design flaw at work.

There are all kinds of smaller problems too. Why, when you click on the “New window” link, is the new window too narrow to see your entire e-mail message? Why are message threads sometimes collapsed and sometimes not? How come clicking on the paper clip icon doesn’t take you to the message attachment like it does in every other application? In fact, why do you need to scroll all the way to the bottom of the message to download attachments?

The main problem with Gmail is one that I’ve started to see too much at Google: product arrogance. It’s the attitude that Google knows what’s good for you, and they’re going to proceed with their internal logic despite what the usability standards say and what the customers think. It’s the same Achilles’ heel that Apple has suffered from for years. (Why did Steve Jobs wait until 2005 to finally ship a mouse with a right-click button and a scroll wheel?)

There are some things I like about Gmail’s interface — the autosave, the fact that sent mail downloads to your POP3 client, the e-mail RSS feeds — but generally they’re outweighed by the annoyances. Enough that I’m seriously considering switching back to Yahoo! for my webmail. Their new interface is supposed to be very nice.

By program menus, I mean that narrow bar at the top of every program in MS Windows which usually starts with “File” and ends with “Help.” These menus have been a part of day-to-day computing experience since the first Macs in the ’80s, and have a history that extends back to Xerox PARC in the early ’70s. And now Microsoft is putting them out to pasture.

I’ve got several of the new breed of Vista-related betas installed on my desktop — Internet Explorer 7, Windows Media Player 11, Windows Defender, and Windows Live OneCare — and the menus are tucked away in places where the ordinary user isn’t likely to encounter them. In IE7, you need to click on the Tools icon and select “Show Menu Bar” in order to see them. Windows Media Player makes things even more difficult; unless you want to dig through the multi-tabbled Preferences window, you need to right-click on a blank patch in the top or bottom of the screen and select “Show Classic Menus.” Defender and OneCare lack menus altogether. Look ma… no program menus!

Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

I can see what Microsoft is trying to accomplish, and in theory it’s a laudable goal. Microsoft is trying to change the standard paradigm of users commanding their software; instead they’re creating software that pre-emptively responds to users. Instead of hunting for the command to Burn a CD in the menus, the software should anticipate that you might want to burn a CD and present the option in a big shiny button that’s hard to miss.

Software is growing more complex every year, and the day is rapidly approaching when it will be ridiculously unwieldy to try to wedge every little bell and whistle for Microsoft Word into seven or eight menus. Already you need sub-menus and sometimes sub-menus scrolling off of those sub-menus. Clearly the software needs to grow more intelligent about what the user wants.

But here’s the problem: the software doesn’t always anticipate what you want. Then what?

Windows Media Player is a good example. It’s a relatively chunky piece of software that lets you rip music from CDs, burn music to CDs, sync music to mobile devices, organize your music, etc. Most of the basic features are pretty intuitive, to Microsoft’s credit, and although the program isn’t particularly speedy, it’s plenty stable.

But there are a number of annoying little things that I just can’t figure out how to do. For the longest time, I would select a group of songs in an album, right-click and select “Play,” expecting them to play in order. But no — the songs would inexplicably shuffle into a random order. There’s nothing in the right-click menu that indicates these songs should be shuffling. So I learned to select “Add to Now Playing” instead of “Play.” Which worked fine most of the time, except sometimes the list in the right-hand side wouldn’t change over to show the Now Playing list for some reason, and I’d have to switch views to edit it.

The point is, without an orderly system of menus, we’re back to trying to figure out the logic of each program one at a time. We no longer have the simple mnemonics of “File/Print” or “Tools/Options” to guide us. And I bet that this lack of uniformity will hurt user productivity more than the menu clutter did in the first place.

I applaud the effort for software to anticipate what we want to do, and I look forward to seeing how good software can get at this. In fifty years, I’m betting that we won’t need program menus. But in the meantime, software programs should have an easily accessible index of commands. Maybe this could be a standard button that appears in the top right of every program, next to the question mark for help. And you’d be able to click on this button and get an alphabetized list of commands. I can’t think of any program offhand that has a feature like this, but it’s sorely missed.

Oh, and the shuffling thing? It turns out that there’s a button on the bottom of Windows Media Player with three parallel lines that turns shuffling on and off. The button isn’t labeled, and I don’t ever remember turning it on. Isn’t that intuitive?

Sigh. And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.