The lack of open APIs may disappoint programmers but may not mean much to the average consumer as more and more desktop capabilities migrate to the web as services.

iPhone’s web display capabilities offer a terrific opportunity for small to medium sized businesses to provide services to non-office employees via the web. The average Cocoa programmer may not get to make his game run on an iPhone but everyday productivity capabilites like networked addresses, time billing, shopping (America’s favorite passtime), to do lists, and basic word processing are already available for us. This iPhone positioning makes a lot of sense. (standard disclaimer – remember that I am a web designer)

Yes, Steve Jobs did try some slight of hand in trying to pass web apps off as an API. And, yes, telling traditional developers that their development platform of choice wasn’t being opened up on the iPhone now should cause a stir, but the end result for the consumer is still an extremely flexible tool. The future is networked. iPhone fits right into that future.

I tell him no.

It turns out that he already purchased the program and has attempted to use it to design his own site – with typical results.

Joe has found that both Dreamweaver, in particular, and web design in general are a bit more complicated than he imagined. No surprise there.

In talking with him it became clear that Joe has fallen prey to the more, bigger, better bug. He used the word ‘best’ often to justify his purchase. He asked around and found out that Dreamweaver is the “best” web design program and had to own it.

I’m not knocking Dreamweaver. It is a very good program. For professional web designers. Unfortunately it is complex and comes with a pretty steep learning curve. For a pro, the time spent learning the program is just part of the job. And the learning curve is less steep because pros should already understand HTML and CSS and how the parts of a web page fit together with the site as a whole. We are building on a (hopefully) solid foundation, not having to learn Dreamweaver and web design at the same time.

Using a Mac isn’t any real help either, not when it comes to Dreamweaver. Big and complex are big and complex on any platform.

Of course Dreamweaver isn’t the only overkill program that people purchase then never learn how to use. How many copies of Photoshop fill up hard drives, but are used only to resize photos. How many copies of Excel are used only to make simple lists? How may copies of Word are never pushed beyond formatting a letter?

But we have to own the “best”, don’t we?

In the majority of cases something simple would be easier to use, adequate for our needs, and much less expensive. But where are the bragging rights in owning less than the “best.” We are not talking practicality here but vanity, and vanity is a powerful motivator.

For all practical purposes a Timex watch is the functional equivalent of a Rolex, which costs a hundred times more, but where is the status in owning a Timex? And a Rolex works the same way as any other watch so there is no learning involved. It simply costs more to own , so is therefor “better,” but isn’t harder to operate.

But the “best” software is typically much, much more complicated than consumer software. It is designed for professionals who spend years learning their chops, and who know a lot more of the technical aspects of their craft than just the software.

In Joe’s case, he will probably have to be satisfied with owning Dreamweaver and using a Content Management System (CMS) that we set up for him. Then he can be happy knowing that he used the “best” web design firm in town. (And that his site will look and function better than anything he could have created on his own.)

The $400 he spent for Dreamweaver will just have to be marked up against the cost of “owning the best”.

Another Elizabeth, surname Castro taught me HTML through several versions of her book, HTML for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide, though now the title includes XHTML and CSS.

I have other reference books, most more inclusive but this is still the first choice when I need to look up a bit of seldom used syntax.

I’m currently finishing up a series of introduction to Mac OS X classes that are a joint project with our MUG and WSU NOP Learning Center. The text I chose is the Little Mac Book, Tiger Edition by Robin Williams, whose The Mac is Not a Typewriter, was my introduction to graphic design on a Mac.

The general Mac reference books I recommend in the class resource list include Maria Langer’s Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger : Visual QuickStart Guide.

When I was teaching web design, my basic text was Learning Web Design : A Beginner’s Guide to HTML, Graphics, and Beyond. Another woman, Jennifer Niederst wrote this.

If I were teaching the class today I would probably use Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML by another Elizabeth, Freeman along with Eric Freeman.

And I certainly don’t want to forget Photoshop learning with Lynda, Laura, who taught me what Perl I know, or Molly, who helped me with Movable Type and who has been strong voice for Web Standards for years.

A question to ponder is why in a field that has such a small percentage of women professionals do women write such a high percentage of the better training books?

That sounds harsh, but the truth often is. There are all kinds of community building programs for the web. Many of them are excellent. But software doesn’t make a website successful. People do.

The web is littered with unused and un-updated sites that were built with the best of intentions. But either nobody claimed the site as his or her own, or it was assumed that because there was an organizational chart, and people were assigned the responsibility of keeping the site going it would happen. Dream on.

Effective web presences are not fueled by PHP or Perl, but by passion and people. Until this project finds someone who passionately wants to create a community web site and is willing to constantly urge others to participate, it would be a waste of time to put in place. As you can imagine that opinion was not well received.

People power websites, people who are willing to put in a lot of time and effort. It is so easy for designers and developers to get caught up with the technical parts. They’re fun. The challenges are straightforward and solvable.

Creating content, week after week, month after month, year after year is a lot of work. Sometimes, when the ideas flow or when there is a lot of positive feedback, it’s easy and fun. Sometimes it is sheer grind-your-teeth effort.

Cajoling others to contribute is a delicate and thankless job. Manage an organization site and see how people avoid you around deadline time, even good friends.

That’s not to say that maintaining a community site isn’t rewarding. If it were, there would be no sites at all. If a site can be integrated into an organization’s structure, with people participating and enjoying the experience, then yes, it can be very rewarding as well as successful. But without the spark-plug of at least one enthusiastic person, the engine just won’t run.

I’m totally in agreement with him there. John counters that the Mac OS is a better tool, more elegant, more polished and easier to use. Again I find myself in total agreement. That’s why I’m using a Mac right now, even though like most Mac web designers, I also have a Windows Box. I even have a copy of Yellow Dog Linux on an old iMac that I play with occasionally.

Back to John’s position regarding Open Source and open standards. I sometimes resent that Macs are so much more elegant and easy to use. Like him I’m pretty pissed off that Apple decided to change Mail’s storage format from mbox to an Apple proprietary format. I want my email to be my email, portable and accessible on any computer I chose to use.

Yes, I can use a different email client than Mail. I use Thunderbird on Windows. But it is a more polished product on Windows. And, it doesn’t integrate with Apple Services, Address Book and a couple of other products I’ve become dependent on. Apple claims that the reason for the change was to better integrate with Spotlight. Yet Spotlight seem able to access any text based file, which mbox most certainly is. I laugh at most conspiracy theories, yet I’ve come to believe that the format change was a lock-in decision, to make abandoning Macs more difficult.

The simple fact is that I mostly love Apple products but dislike Apple’s high-handed policies. I guess that is to be expected with a CEO like Steve Jobs who holds incredibly high standards and is absolutely tyrannical about things happening his way.

So I really have a love/hate relationship with Apple. A couple of years ago my old G3 tower finally died and I spent about four months running Windows as my main OS. It’s not that I love Microsoft more than Apple. Each seems to be run by megalomaniacs. One wants to control all of the worlds computers. The other wants to completely control the end user’s experience. Perhaps that’s what’s necessary to be successful at the level these men have reached. It doesn’t make me loyal to their products from any personal sense of admiration for the individuals.

Anyway, I bought another Mac because using Windows was just too slow and clunky. Windows Explorer totally frustrated me. But even that wasn’t as bad as endlessly telling the computer through multiple confirmation dialog boxes that, yes, I really do want to do what I want to do, got to me. I gave up and got an iBook.

I thought of going with Linux. My sympathies and basic inclinations are for Open Source Software but I’m not willing to give up the elegance, ease of use, and polish of a Macintosh and OS X.

However, as much as I admire its philosophy, Linux isn’t as easy to use as OS X. And, the iBook is an excellent computer that has performed reliably. Mac OS X is such a relief to use after Windows XP. An Linux would have been more frustrating still.

Yet, I sometimes feel trapped with Macs. It’s like loving a particular restaurant even though I know the chef is a total tyrant and bully. I feel addicted, having experienced withdrawal symptoms when I didn’t have my Mac for four months. And Linux is so clunky. The desktop software, Firefox and Thunderbird excluded, mostly consists of more inelegant knockoffs of inelegant Windows programs. I actually feel a mild revulsion at the thought of having to work with such a primitive and inconsistent interface.

I have Linux using friends who still use emacs and are proud of it. But for me a computer is a tool not and end in itself. I need to produce content. Lots of content, day in and day out. I no longer care to spend months mastering a (expletive deleted) text editor. I want to write. I want to code. I want to edit images. And for better of worse, the Mac still makes doing those things faster and easier than Open Source Software. I even wish I had the intestinal fortitude that Mark Pilgrim shows and could let go of my elegant tool. Alas, I don’t and can’t.

I recently found myself sitting in front of my Windows box looking at a web page I’d been working on. What I noticed was not an IE display problem but the fact that I’d misspelled page the title. Normally I only use XP to see how web pages display on Internet Explorer, not actually edit pages. But this was a small problem, and rather than go back in the other room and fix it on my Mac I just fixed the problem then.

It has been a couple of months since I actually edited anything in Windows and I was struck at how different my Windows editor, HTML Kit, looked than skEdit my current Mac favorite. I think it’s informative to see screenshots of each program here.

First, I want to point out that skEdit is one of the few Mac programs that follows a couple of standard Windows conventions that I appreciate:

• Like modern web browsers, but few other Mac programs, it has tabs. I can have several documents open without having to juggle multiple floating windows.
• skEdit also uses panes instead of floating palettes. I don’t understand why some Mac programs offer, often different sized, floating palettes instead of integrating everything in a single unified interface. If we need to have palettes, then I’d like to see them follow Adobe’s lead and make the dock-able, the same width, and able to attach to each other. Macromedia and Microsoft both did that to good effect.

These have been standard conventions in the Windows world for years and we are just starting to see this kind of interface in Mac programs. This may strike old Mac hands as sacrilege but it’s a place where we’ve lagged behind in ease of use.

On the other hand, what struck me anew, during my Windows foray, was the incredible number of buttons on HTML Kit. This profusion of buttons is standard on most Windows programs. We see it in the Mac world with, of course, Microsoft Office, and to a lesser degree in Appleworks. I remember once during the era of the ill conceived Word 6, someone published a screenshot of Word with all of it’s menu bars activated. The entire screen was filled with menus and buttons, leaving no room at all for text.

But most Mac programs don’t duplicate the File and Edit menus, let alone other menus, on the program menu bar. It appears that in the Windows world that if there is a program function there will be a corresponding menu button.

To be fair, HTML Kit does allow for a fair degree of menu bar customization. If I wanted to take the time I could streamline the interface considerably, that is if I could remember in which menu (but not on the menu bar) the preferences, er, settings, er, options or whatever this particular Windows program chooses to call it, is. Since I don’t use it that often, I’ve just never bothered. And, I’m not knocking HTML Kit. It is a very capable web editor. This is what a lack of human interface guidelines gets us: non-standardized names and locations for common program elements.

Is it inherently better to limit menu bar buttons and menus to a few, or in the case of TextMate, zero, options than to put every potentially usable button up front and personal? Most user interface (UI) experts would say so. They would say that the goal is to offer the simplest interface that will do the job easily.

On the other hand, I’ve watched numerous Windows users never touch the application menu bar, or use keyboard commands, at all. (I used to teach at a computer learning lab) It seems that they want every option in plain view.

So, while the Mac has a widespread reputation of being easier to use, it’s Windows that actually does more to hand-hold the beginning user. Putting all of a program’s functions on the menu bar is one manifestation of this. Another is the seeming endless number of confirmation dialogs you have to click through to change anything. Do you want to delete this file? Do you really want to delete this file? Are you absolutely sure you want to delete this file?

One other common element in Windows editors is a built-in file browser. I’m pretty neutral on this. It’s there. I don’t know if that’s just because it’s easy to build it in, or because Windows Explorer is more awkward to use than the OS X finder. Whatever the reason, HTML Kit has this feature and Mac editors don’t.

What we’re seeing here is the Windows world catering to the lowest common denominator. I’m going to assume that anyone who choses to edit HTML, let alone PHP, ASP etc., is not a novice who needs to have copy and paste buttons cluttering up the menu bar. It’s a case of protect the beginner at the expense of slowing down the more experienced user.

Maybe I’m wrong here and too deeply indoctrinated into the cult of Mac. Certainly the majority of computer users seem to have no problem with a proliferation of buttons. Maybe it’s a Mac-Zen thing. Maybe Windows users reach a point where they simply don’t see the buttons after a while, the way we don’t see the power lines that inhabit every one of our outdoor views. Or maybe that’s just the way it is and they don’t think to question it. Or maybe it’s a philosophy of attempting to do the user’s thinking for her that seems built into all of Microsoft’s products. And maybe, that’s what the majority of people want.

For me, the whole experience was a reminder that I prefer the Mac because it gets out of my way and simply lets me do what I want to do.

You see, the problem is “disinhibition.” Yes, the internet allows those of us not wearing Armani, or other multi-$K suits to just say what we want, in just the way we want to say it.

Obviously, those of us who blog, but not under the auspices of the Wall Street Journal, cannot be trusted. Why, Henninger found two women who blog in their underwear and a photo of a man flipping a bird through a car window. (he wasn’t wearing Armani either) Henninger was nice enough to add, even though “Kevin Ray Underwood, the repressed Oklahoma cannibal, kept an Internet “blog” of his compulsions for years before kidnapping and killing a 10-year-old neighbor last week,” Henninger was nice enough to admit that he doesn’t believe that blogging will turn us all into cannibals. How open minded.

He states:

At the risk of enabling, does the Internet mean that all the rest of us are being made unwitting participants in the personal and political life of, um, crazy people? As populist psychiatry, maybe this is a good thing; the Web allows large numbers of people to contribute to others’ therapy. It takes a village.

This is, of course, in strict contrast to the, um, crazy people, running our country. Remember the WMD’s? I’m sure that Rush Limbaugh has much saner things to say because he is nationally syndicated.