It looks like Google has decided to screw up Reader with a new design:

I guess they wanted it to have a more modern-looking design, and I suppose it looks nicer, but it's kind of goofy from a usability standpoint. The biggest problem is that everything is, well, bigger. They're following the modern web design trend of separating things on the page with space rather than graphical components.

The thing is, though, nobody visits a web page for its use of space. You visit a web page for its content. Now, your enjoyment of the content is affected by how it's presented, of course, but the presentation should enhance the content, not hinder it or overwhelm it.

So what's the content of Google Reader? Links to other content. Users of Reader want to be able to scan through dozens or hundreds of items to see what looks worth reading. That means a good page design for a feed reader should present as many links as possible, so users can scan them easily for something of interest. The new design simply doesn't display as many links as the old one.

And here's another thing they could do instead of filling the page with space: Let us see the full names of the blogs we're reading. The column on the left can't be resized, so I'm going to be left reading "Marginal Revolut..." and "Technology Liber..." I can't remember if the old page design occasionally cut something off, but it's certainly become more of a problem now.

Oh, and the scrollbar is slightly narrower, making it slightly harder for me to click. And the scroll thumb -- the part that moves up and down -- doesn't appear until my mouse is over the scroll bar, which means I can't position the mouse vertically until I've got it positioned horizontally.

It's like one of those weird buildings, where all the architecture critics ooh and aah over how swirly and unconventional is, and no one seems to be noticing that the offices are cramped, there aren't enough bathroom stalls, and the roof leaks.

There's an animated video making its way around the legal blogosphere in which a cynical older lawyer tries to convince an idealistic prospective law student not to go to law school. As a non-lawyer, I'm probably missing half the jokes, but it's still pretty funny.

I was more fascinated, however, by the web site used to create the video, xtranormal.com, which provides tools for anyone to make a video in a similar style. Once you register for a free account, you can use a simple interface to create the shooting script. You can change the characters and setting, and you can annotate the script with facial expressions, animations, sound effects, and changes in camera angle. When you're ready to see what you created, the site can generate a low-res version of the video for you to preview. Once you've got something you like, you can re-render a high-quality version for downloading and publication.

I had to give this a try. In keeping with the theme of the first video, I made it about what I do for a living. I don't know what the job market is like for a beginning software developer, but I'm not nearly as cynical about my job as these lawyers are about theirs. Still, there are some annoying surprises for people just out of school. After a few years, the surprise factor is gone, and only the annoyance remains.

So here's my video of a conversation in which Mark, a software engineer, finds out about his next software project from Ted, the boss. My clients are too smart to waste my time and their money this way, but back when I was an employee at a mid-size corporation, I had a depressing number of conversations like this. You see, a lot of people launch software projects with almost no thought to the details, except for one curiously specific requirement...

When I figured out that my Sony Vegas video editing software was crashing because of a bogus file date, I filed a detailed problem report with Sony Creative Software, and I emailed a short description of the problem to Premiumbeat, the suppliers of the music files---created by a guy names Styve---that had bad dates on them.

I got a reply email from Premiumbeat early the next morning:

Hello Mark,

I'm am sorry you had problems with one of our music files.

I had no idea Styve was that old!

Seriously this is a most bizarre mistake. I checked the creation date of the file and it says November 30 1979 on my end. So I don't know what to think of it.

I have sent your comments to both the composer and to our technician. We'll do what we can to correct this.

Thank you for taking your time to let us know about this issue with all the details.

We appreciate.

Regards,

Gilles Arbour

Fast, nice, good natured, and thankful for pointing out a problem that would discourage customers from buying more of their product.

(Although, the 1979 date on the files isn't much of an improvement, unless Styve was really pushing the envelope with Apple IIe sound technology...)

Sony Creative Software took a day longer to respond to the problem, and their message was professional, but, well...

Hi Mark,

Thank you for contacting Sony Creative Software, and thank you for the update on the problem. Please let us know if you have any further questions or concerns on this issue.

If you still have a follow-up question on this particular incident, please feel free to update it. If you have a completely different question, please create a new incident.

Sincerely,

Padraic C.

Sigh. Is it too much to expect a "thank you for sending us a problem report that described how to reproduce the problem in detail and pointed us to exactly the place where the problem was occurring"?

Now that I'm experimenting with video for the blog, I'm learning how to use video editing software. Currently, I'm experimenting with Sony Vegas. I like it a lot, it seems intuitive and fairly powerful.

One of the more interesting features of Vegas is a tool called Media Manager which helps you index and track your media. That's important because video files are huge---the original file for my drive home is 3.5 GB---and I won't be able to store them all on my hard drive.  (Although, terabyte USB drives are less than $200...) I'll have to burn them off to DVD, and it would be nice to have a database of what's stored where.

While I was experimenting with Medial Manager, I tried to load the .WAV file that contains the music playing in the background of my last video and Vegas crashed.

A little experimentation showed that it was only those music files that crashed Vegas, not any of the the other sound files or any of the video files. Also, the problem went away when I disabled Media Manager.

Each time Vegas crashed, it popped up an error message box that said "This application has encountered a fatal exception and will close." Not very helpful by itself, but there was a Details button, so I clicked it. With most Windows applications this would be some ugly bit of hex code and address offsets useful only to someone with access to the source code. But parts of Vegas---or at least Media Manager---are apparently written using the .NET framework because this was a normal .NET exception trace dump, and .NET has a much more helpful standard of error reporting.

Media Manager uses an embeddable desktop version of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 as its database, and it was clear from the library classes involved in the problem that Media Manager was calling the .NET framework SQL Client code to access the database, and it was blowing up because it was using a date value that was not a valid SQL Server date. The .WAV files I downloaded must have had a bad date in them somewhere, and Media Manager was blowing up when it tried to use it in a SQL query.

I poked at the .WAV files a bit, and I think I found the problem. The SQL Server datetime data type can hold a range of dates from January 1, 1753, through December 31, 9999. The .WAV files, however, were all timestamped with a creation date in the year 1601.

A lot of software bugs have this pattern, where a defect in one program---whatever was used to create the .WAV music files---generates data that exposes a defect in another program---crashing Sony Vegas.

In cases of invalid data like this, you normally don't want the program to just crash. It should either fix the problem, report the problem to the user, or both. In this case, it's an understandable mistake. If I were a developer or tester at Sony Creative Software, I doubt I would have given much thought to how the software should handle a file that purported to have been created 350 years before the invention of the computer.

Wow! 5000 hits today!

Although I'd love for you folks to stick around and check out my blog, I suspect you just want to download the latest release of Google Earth Plus—3.0.0336 (beta)—which you can get here:

http://www.desktop.google.com/download/earth/GoogleEarthPlus.exe

Enjoy!

Update: Google has suspended downloads. Better check the official page:

http://earth.google.com/

Update: Looking for the latest Google Earth beta? Go here.

Google has released a new version of the Google Earth beta. This is version 3.0.0178, replacing bersion 3.0.0149.

I described the first beta here. Also, Stephen DesRoches has a nice review.

No new features, they say, but a few fixes:

• No more crashing on exit from full-screen mode.
• Edited placemarks are correctly tied to the Earth.
• GPS points are represented correctly and GPS devices using USB now are detected.

Oh, and since everybody keeps asking, this time there's a public link for the download:

http://www.keyhole.com/downloads/GoogleEarthPlus.exe

Enjoy.

Update: I'm pretty sure that while the Google Earth software download is free, you still have to pay for the service that provides the images. I think Google wants to cover their licensing costs.

Google is also planning to use trucks equipped with cameras and lasers to photograph and measure the buildings on U.S. city streets, according to Tom Foremski at Silicon Valley Watcher.

I don’t know what Google are up to this time, but they’re living up to their mission statement of screen-scraping the world in order to plaster its virtual copy with universally accessible ads. I’m paraphrasing here...

Google just released the next version of their Keyhole software. It's called Google Earth, and of course it's a beta release.

(Update: All I got was a message from a Google email address saying that they were making the beta available to current Keyhole subscribers, which I am. The message included a download URL that has a parameter that looks like some random key that probably links it to my keyhole license. Otherwise, I would have posted the link. More about the release here, and here's a link to the original Keyhole software.)

I first heard about Keyhole last October when Google bought Keyhole Corporation. I use Keyhole LT—the non-professional version of the Keyhole software—and it's a fascinating piece of software that allows you to view satellite imagery in an intuitive way.

Although it seems likely that the satellite images in Google Maps use some of this technology, Keyhole takes it a few steps further. For one thing, Keyhole is a whole lot smoother than Google Maps imagery because it's an application that runs on your PC and renders the images locally, essentially distributing this task out to the end-user's computer.

The application starts with view of the whole Earth floating in space.

You can use your mouse to drag it around in any direction, and then you can zoom in and out with the mouse wheel. There are also controls to rotate the image and to tilt the camera up toward the horizon.

The program downloads images from the database in the background, leaving the user interface to run smoothly: Zoom in on a city and the display reacts immediately. The initial image is blurry, but as Keyhole downloads updates from the server, it makes the image progressively smoother. Naturally, it caches the images so that the next time you zoom in on the same place it's clear all the way.

There's nothing quite like the feel of zooming from the whole earth down to my condo building. I can even see my car in the parking lot.

Google Earth adds a bunch of improvements to Keyhole. The most visually interesting is the 3D buildings available in 39 cities. Here's what Chicago's lakefront looks like from the southeast with 3D buildings enabled:

If you want, take a look at the whole Google Earth user interface. It's prettier than the old one, and does some more stuff.

The most interesting new trick is the integration of Google's Local Search and Driving Directions services directly into the application. You can search for local businesses or type in addresses and then generate a driving route between them. Here's a simple route between two Wendy's restaurants on the northwest side of Chicago:

There are lots of other tweaks and changes. In particular, the program is faster now because it has been modified to make efficient use of Google's servers to provide the images.

I've been waiting for this for a long time. It's pretty cool.

Update: You can now add lines and polygons to your map markup, in addition to the point placemarkers it's always had. Here's the site of the crash of American Airlines Flight 191 on May 25, 1979, the worst single-plane crash in U.S. history:

Update: Nope. Got that wrong. According to the NTSB report, the actual site is the field just to the left of the marked area.

Here's the complete list of new features from the Release Notes: