Monday March 12, 2007

Life imitates art

Apple has a delightful series of ads comparing Macs & PCs ("I'm a Mac", "and I'm a PC", ...). One of their recent ones focuses on the way Microsoft implements security enhancements in Microsoft Vista (hint: it involves a series of dialog boxes that appear each time some software on your computer does something potentially risky).

In a case of life imitating art, I was recently watching a demo of the JAWS screen reader on Vista. When Eric Damery gave the demo, he used a new projector (new to that Vista installation - the laptop and projector had never met electrically prior to the demo), and so Vista promptly started to auto-install the necessary drivers to support the projector. And being that software installation is a potentially risky endeavor, Vista promptly put up a whole series of dialog boxes, warning the user of the security risk involved and asking the user's permission.

Since JAWS was already running, all of this was spoken aloud in the nifty new (and very human-like) voice of JAWS. To the entire room of around 100 people. In dialog box after dialog box. And while Eric Damery doesn't usually resemble John Hodgman (the "I'm a PC" actor), at various moments working through the technical glitches to get the projector working, the resemblance was rather striking. (2007-03-12 12:58:57.0) Permalink Comments [1]