Microsoft won’t shoot an arrow in Apple with the Zune anytime soon.

Microsoft just doesn’t get it.  If you make it hard for your end users to use your product, they will look somewhere else.

Apple gets it….

As much as I hate to pay so much for Apple’s high priced gadgets, I have to admit that they really do have the end user in mind.  For example, you buy an iPod, go to Apple’s website and download iTunes and install it, plug the iPod in and away you go.  If they have an update, a box pops up when you bring up iTunes and it asks if you want to install it.  If you click “yes” it brings up the end user agreement, you click “accept” and away it goes.  It’s so easy, I would guess a caveman could do it.

Microsoft, have you looked at iTunes….

Don’t get me wrong, I really like my Zune player.  I feel that it sounds better then my iPods, both the second generation  iTouch and the third generation Nano, and it has a really good looking screen.  The user interface on the zune is no where near as easy as the iPod but it works well enough when you get used to using it.  The Zune Market Place cannot hold a candle to the iTunes store but it is functional and the subscription service is excellent if you want to rent songs and not buy all of them.

Here is the problem…

So you are wondering why am I picking on Microsoft when the Zune is a decent product?  Tonight, I wanted to sign into the Zune Market Place to look for a song that I heard in a video.  I brought up my Zune software and when I clicked the sign in button, it said that I had to agree to the new terms of service agreement.  No big deal, right?  Wrong!  I clicked on the terms of service link and it opened my internet browser.  Since I will not use Internet Explorer, which is the topic of a future post here, clicking the link opened up FireFox, which is my default browser and it gave me some cryptic error.  Luckily, I realized that it opened Firefox and I was able to copy the URL from my browser, past it in Internet Explorer and sign into Zune.net.  From there, I was able to accept the terms of service and then sign in on my Zune software to find out the song I was looking for is not available.  I did end up finding the song on Amazon though but there’s another story.

Why couldn’t Microsoft have the terms of service agreement built into the Zune software instead of making users open up a browser and sign into Zune.net?  I am sure that they have more than enough programmers who can figure out how to do this, I would guess.

If Microsoft plans to take market share away from Apple, they should at least make the user experience the same or better than their competition.  I guess it isn’t a big deal since I was able to figure out this problem pretty easily but for those that aren’t too tech savvy, it might be a big deal and give them another reason to buy an iPod and not a Zune when it’s time for a new portable music player.

Finally, Facebook for the Google Android platform.

I was one of the first people to get a T-mobile G1 running the, open source, Google Android operating system.  Because it was open source, I expected there to be more and better applications available for the Android Platform than even the iPhone but sadly, even after a year since it was announced the applications and the Android Market place haven’t been stellar by any means.  They didn’t even offer a usable Facebook application and rumor had it , because of the issues between Google and Facebook, there might never be a ” official Android” Facebook application.

Fast forward to September 8, 2009 and suddenly there was an official Facebook application for the Android Platform.  Not only was it more than just a wrapper of the mobile Facebook website, it was an actual application written for the Android platform and it is free.

Since I am a somewhat heavy Facebook user I couldn’t find any satisfaction in the other Facebook applications.  There is even a paid Facebook application that started out with good intentions but soon and quickly went downhill.

As you can guess, I was really excited to try the new application and ended up installing it almost as soon as it showed up in the Android Market Place.  Within seconds after install I was logged in and reading my feed.  Most of the other apps that I used often took 30 seconds or longer to load my feed, even on the the 3G data network but this application loaded my feed in just a couple of seconds.  I thought that my eyes were playing tricks on me but it has been consistently fast over the last five days that I have been using it.

Some of the main features are;

• Reading your feed.
• Reading and posting to your wall.
• “Like” from the main feed.
• View user (friends) information.
• Take, upload and attach a comment to photos.
• Upload photos stored on your phone.
• You can also post from the main feed page.
• It is free.

There are also other settings for notifications and the way the application behaves;

• You can refresh the feed by shaking the phone.
• Message notification.
• Poke notification.
• Friend request notification.
• Event invite notification.
• Other features like vibrate, phone LED and ring-tones for notifications.

There are a couple of things that aren’t integrated into the application.  When you get messages, poke or other notifications and select them, it opens the internet browser and takes you to the mobile Facebook website (m.facebook.com), which seems kind of clunky but it is functional.  I am hoping, as the application matures, it will have many of those features integrated into the application itself but only time will tell.

Now that I can use Facebook on my Android phone, my thoughts of trading my G1 in for an iPhone have been put behind me.  The Android platform has a long way to go before it can stand up next to Apple and their iPhone mountain but I feel that this effort will bring Google a few feet closer to the top.

ScribeFire – An integrated blog editor for FireFox.

It all started with a lost comment in WordPress late one night. I spent almost an hour replying to someone on one of my blogs and my browser locked up. Needless to say, I got caught up in my writing and did not save my comment like I always try to do and of course, the worst thing that could happen did happen. I could not remember what I had written so I ended up looking for some type of editor with an auto save function.

While I was searching Google I happened upon the ScribeFire website. What I found was a full featured blog editor that integrates with FireFox. With ScribeFire, I can write posts and edit my blog from with my browser. It doesn’t seem to allow me to save comments like I was searching for but it seems to do some other things pretty well.

For writing a simple post like this one, ScribeFire more than fits the bill and I have a feeling that I will be using this instead of the admin panel on my blogs. It also offers some nice features that allow you to easily insert images and YouTube videos with a simple mouse click.

I need to spend some more time working with it but for now, I like it and I think you will too.