The official Tori Amos website got relaunched yesterday. This keeps the same look of the version that promoted American Doll Posse, but now shows news in a blog format and generally adds various social networking services such as forums, tour attendance and photo sharing.

All seems fine except for the rampant Ads By Google which appear in three places on each page. One of which, right at the top of the page, completely destroys both the branding and the emphasis of the website. If you need a new Transit Van, be sure to check out the site.

37signals released Rails as open source because they perceived this would give them a competitive advantage, i.e. you get lots of people talking about 37signals whenever Rails is mentioned. It worked.

Joyent has gone a step further with the open sourcing of Slingshot and Connector. Read Joyent’s announcement.

Slingshot “allows developers to deploy Rails applications like a standard desktop application, which work online and offline (with synchronization), have drag and drop, and interact with all the other desktop applications”.

Connector is a suite of collaboration and communication applications targeted at small businesses. Here are the goodies.

Both of these are big news items: Slingshot is the first practicable mechanism for bringing web development (and web developers) into the desktop, which will no doubt be scary to the same people who dissed the iPhone SDK. Connector could be the missing piece for those who want to develop a collaboration suite because no existing on-line or desktop suite is the perfect fit.

I refer to the Help menu option that lives at the top of almost every application. In my experience people never use Help, nor do they use the internet to find the solution to their problem. This means we get a lot of phone calls and e-mails from customers. We act as a verbal reference manual. The consequence of this is that customers don’t learn either. Much of their day to day work is simply replicating what they’ve done previously, without attaining any knowledge of why they are performing specific actions, or how specific actions complement the rest of the things they do.

But software manufacturers don’t make it easy for people to get to achieve their goals. Take this example from Windows Vista: suppose you want to change the resolution of your display. This is what you have to do:

1. Click the Start button
2. Click Control Panel
3. Click Appearance and Personalization
4. Click Personalization
5. Click Display Settings
6. Find the section labelled Resolution
7. Move the slider to the resolution you want
8. Click Apply

This is what you have to do on a Mac:

1. Click the Apple logo in the menu bar
2. Click System Preferences
3. Click Displays
4. Click on the resolution you want
5. Close the window

Note: moving a slider to change resolution is just plain wrong. On earlier versions of Windows – and it might be the case with Vista too – you don’t know what resolutions you can choose from until you start moving the slider. Furthermore, resolution is not a linear relationship.

All of this reminds me of the days prior to Mac OS X. It’s predecessor operating system for Macs came with on-screen guides that steered the user interactively through common operations. Not by just showing a series of screenshots, but by actually doing the work for the user, highlighting the various steps to take. This was far superior to anything around today.

Media Guardian complains today that Channel 4’s new on demand service only works on Windows XP and Internet Explorer. Vista support will be added in the next few weeks. One of the reasons cited for the service not being available on Macs is that Apple’s FairPlay system isn’t available for license to third parties.

Users also need to download special software to view programmes.

Five’s (a.k.a. Channel 5) fee based on demand service requires Windows and Internet Explorer. This too requires you to download special software to view programmes.

Sky Anytime PC is a similar service for Sky customers. This uses the same underlying software as Channel 4’s on demand – Kontiki, but it’s unclear whether users need to download other software in order to use Sky’s service, or if they can re-use Channel 4’s software.

The pattern here is clear. We have a number of companies providing their own solutions to delivering and showing content to viewers. This puts a monumental stall in the usability of the services and potentially hinders the growth of on demand content.

So guess what will happen when movies and TV shows come to iTunes in the UK?

I’ve just received notice from our business bankers that we’re going to get a Token soon. A Token is a small device that displays additional ephemeral security information when you log in to their website. I’ll need to provide that information every time I log in, and when I ring them.

I expect that these Tokens will appear everywhere: one for each personal bank account, each on-line credit card account, PayPal, Google Checkout etc.

Then, when I’m out and about, I’ll need to carry a bunch of Tokens with me. Just in case. Fabulous.