Last week I ordered my iPhone 3GS from the AT&T Store (no Apple Stores out here in the boonies). Five days later it was ready to be picked up and I drove out to the mall to get it.

While the AT&T employee activated it and performed the soul-stealing voodoo that accompanies a new sale, a woman at the next counter was exchanging her own AT&T phone (not an iPhone). I only heard a part of her conversation, but it went something like this:

"Can I use my old adapter with this one?"

"No, m'am. You'll have to buy a new one."

"What about my car charger?"

"No, that will need to be replaced, too."

"Ugh. OK. I'll just throw them away."

What a nuisance. She's got to spend extra money and those plastic and electronic doodads will occupy the bottom of a landfill until The End Of Days. The problem is even worse in the Europen Union. Fortunately, a group of manufacturers, including Apple, is working to change that. Apple, Nokia and Research in Motion have agreed to support a European Union-backed initiative to standardize these devices across the EU. It's a good idea that would benefit consumers and the environment.

The agreement is limited to smartphones for now, but if all goes well, will be expanded in 2012. Good luck to everyone involved.

Hadley Stern at Apple Matters has penned a, shall we say, 'unique' review of the recent RC1 of Microsoft Vista. Since I need to spoil the article for my post here, I'll summarize: he likes it. Hadley found RC1 to be a vast improvement over earlier releases, regarding it as a usable, snappy OS. In fact, the whole experience led Hadley to question whether the lines and differences are going to be drawn anymore between Mac OS X and Windows if once Vista ships.

In particular, Hadley sees Apple's advantage dwindling in terms of software and UI: "what is left? Better hardware? Perhaps. More software selection? Certainly not," but what I think Hadley is not accounting for is that 'more' does not definitively equal 'better,' not by a long shot. I'll admit it's been years since I've truly sat down at a Windows machine and worked on it or searched for software to do one task or another, but an ongoing discussion involving software quality, innovation and accessibility eludes to the possibility that a little consumer fish isn't always at an advantage in a massive, diluted software pond. In other words: there are reasons why Apple is praised so often for including things like iLife with their machines (which still stomps commercial Windows counterparts), and why the typical MacUpdate-savvy, RSS-aggregating Mac users are often asked where and how to find any decent software by their Windows-toting brethren.

The most significant element of Vista Hadley steamrolled over is the truly massive and fundamental changes Microsoft is making to Vista's UI (whereby 'changes' could be interpreted as 'taking a sledgehammer to'). I'm not talking about just the Transparency Everywhere™ technology (that's an entirely separate conversation): this is about the radical redesigning and non-standard placement of traditional, basic elements like menu bars. Remember how much of an outcry ensued with Windows XP's slightly redesigned task bar and Start menu? Office dwellers were hurling themselves out of windows (and of course, forgetting to log out before doing so), claiming the apocalypse had arrived. While the Office 2007 camp has been receiving some eventual praise for the new 'ribbon' interface, I dare you to look at Office 2007, Vista's Windows Explorer, Windows Media Player 11 and IE7, and try to claim their UIs were forged from the same standards playbook.

Take a look at this Microsoft blog with examples of how much Vista's new UI has shifted, and note the non-standardness of everything. Some apps now have 'button bars,' while others have been stripped of a menu bar entirely. How anyone could consider this as looking "very similar" to Mac OS X or even 'understandable by the common user' is beyond me. This is a lot worse than Vista merely being "ugly" - it's like someone taking a shotgun to the Windows UI, duct-taping the results for review and Ballmer slapping on his gold-plated stamp of approval while polishing his two left feet.

Of course, from the guy who's trying to lay the OS down to sleep, I guess this all makes a little more sense. Let's just hope Mr. Stern is never actually faced with his 'desert island' decision, since after all: it still is a decision.

Adding to the small pile of gripes with the new technology Apple is using with iLife 06, such as complaints about iWeb's bloated CSS or RSS standards and photocasting, I just developed a beef that I haven't really seen mentioned yet: the crummy new URL scheme for iWeb sites, both on and offline.

First of all, in the olden day the .Mac "homepage" did't seem to be case sensitive, as in: homepage.mac.com/user will get you to the same place as /User. iWeb is a bit pickier, as a wedding site I'm working on lives at web.mac.com/myuser/iWeb/Wedding/, but /wedding/ will result in a 404 error. Yes, a friend already reminded me that "Unix = case sensitive," but I don't care. While this could be labeled a minor complaint, my fiance and I have plenty of family members who aren't too hip on these computer thingies. They're going to get confused by something silly and minor like this, and I'm sure our relatives aren't the only ones.

Next on my list is the URL scheme itself. web.mac.com/user/iWeb/sitename? Could that get any less friendly? Granted "homepage.mac.com" might seems a little unprofessional to some, but this new scheme feels pretty cumbersome and just plain ugly. Why couldn't we simply have web.mac.com/user and web.mac.com/user/othersites, Apple?

Last but not least is how the new sites are organized in a user's iDisk. Old homepage sites still live in iDisk/Sites/, while shiny new iWeb sites live in iDisk/Web/Sites/iWeb/sitename. Nevermind a discussion about how needlessly buried that file structure is - I'm sure this dichotomy of old/new sites and content is going to confuse plenty of .Mac customers if they ever want to get at any of those files, or make a backup of their sites or entire iDisk.

But enough about my gripes, what do you guys think: do iWeb and its underpinning .Mac support have more issues besides CSS and standards? Let's hear your thoughts.

Not that Dave Winer is the complaining type, just like Mossberg is a "tough critic," but Dave and Kevin Yank have been swimming around in Apple's photocasting business. They didn't like what they saw. Remember Jobs saying something about photocasting using "industry standard" RSS stuff? I remember that phrase specifically, although I don't recall if it was regarding photocasting (I think it was). In fact, I remember looking at my brother and thinking, "yeah right." The RDF shook off for a moment, because I know that Apple, while they do love to look at standards, won't always adhere to a standard if they don't want to.

In this case, looks like they took secrecy over compliance. Instead of asking someone like Winer (who would gladly hold his tongue if it's to promote a standard instead of break it), as there is no standards body for RSS, Apple just kinda forged their own standard. Yeah, it uses standards in the same way I use the military: I'm glad they are there, but I never joined up. Basically the RSS is so screwed up the only way to read the feeds is to use Safari.

The full details of what is broken is over at this unofficial documentation of iPhoto 6.0 photocasting feeds. Dave Winer has his words, witty as always, and Kevin Yank winds up saying what some are thinking: "Apple is the new Microsoft." Although I would like to point out that that unofficial documentation goes to Apple lists, and I have a feeling they are going to look at this. Heck, they might even fix it! So next year I'll gladly pay another $79 for XML that "just works."