Breaking Workflows with New Features

I use Microsoft Edge as my primary browser. Don't judge me. I used to use Firefox but found many websites that would not work properly with it. I switched to a Chromium based browser called Ulaa (from Zoho) that was excellent. Unfortunately, with Edge so embedded in Windows 11, I experienced too much inconsistent behavior, and quite honestly, Ulaa was not keeping up with new and useful browser features. So, I begrudgingly switched to Microsoft Edge. 

Edge has a neat feature called Workspaces. This is like a tab group but can be called up with one click. Unlike a tab group, it maintains the current state of the set of tabs. So, if I open a new tab and leave it there when I close the Workspace, it is present when I open the Workspace again. Workspaces are dynamic whereas tab groups are static. Workspaces also open the tabs into a color-coded separate window, visually and spatially separating the tabs into their own space. I use this feature constantly.

What happened recently to Workspaces, provides us with a great example of what is terrible about software today. You see, Microsoft has been retooling Workspaces under the cover, causing the user experience (UX) to change. That can be good, but forcing changes to workflows is disruptive and irritating. In the case of Workspaces, it no longer will maintain a fixed list of Workspaces. Instead, it now insists on what is called Most Recently Used, or MRU, ordering. That means whatever you used most recently goes to the top of your list of Workspaces, even if you only use this Workspace occasionally. I find MRU a silly way to order something. A fixed but adjustable list defines a workflow. Ordering items as Most Frequently Occurring items makes sense in that it highlights something you use a lot. MRU ignores the wishes of the user and frequent usage patterns. It places emphasis on the wrong thing.

This is not a debate about ordering schemes. It's about changing UX without taking into account the end user. It's about not maintaining backward compatibility in workflows. It is about an abrupt forced change in user behavior, without the ability to either ease into it or continue with the old ways. In effect, Microsoft is telling people who use this highly touted feature how they should work. 

If a software vendor introduces a new feature, they don't do it just for fun. They are hoping that his new feature will keep you using their product. If you don't use their product, they can't make money from it. That's why I stopped using both Firefox and Ulaa - they didn't keep up with the features that make my work easier. Once lured into using a feature, however, you can't abruptly and capriciously change key elements of it. Once your workflow has adopted this feature, changes to the feature can become changes to your workflow. In this case, instead of enabling my workflow, Workspace changes have altered and disabled parts of my workflow. 

For me, the most likely solution will be to abandon Workspaces altogether. The MRU ordering is counterintuitive and counterproductive. I can do something similar with tab groups, though not quite the same. When software companies make changes like this, they sabotage their own features. I can imagine the product manager who made these decisions realizing that use of the feature has dropped dramatically and, instead of admitting that he greenlit a change that was terrible, will say no one uses Workspaces and sunset it. I doubt that anyone will want to admit that they themselves sabotaged their own feature.

This is not just a Microsoft or software problem. For those of you who remember New Coke, you know what I mean. It just happens faster and quieter in software. All of sudden something stops working and everyone is confused. End users think they did something wrong and finally, abandon the new thing in frustration.

Oh, and Copilot lied about it and kept telling me how to "fix" my problem. Sudden changes to my workflow and gaslighting all in one package. Nice!

Adventures Spotify's AI Playlists

I've not been shy about how I feel about generative AI, especially for coding or writing. Much if it is too error prone to be useful on its own while the errors can be hard to find and fix. I'm also not keen on the copyright issues. My own book was ingested and used by Anthropic without my permission, possibly creating a non-permitted, derivative work. 

Creating a playlist, on the other hand, seems like the perfect AI application. There's no truly wrong song to have in a playlist, even if my own choices would be different. Artists whose songs are part of the playlist will get paid when I listen to their songs in the generated playlist. And yet...

Most generated playlists, at least in Spotify, tend to have the same songs recycled over and over. There's rarely the "Wow" factor that comes with an unexpected choice. Redundancy and a lack of surprise make for a mediocre playlist. It lacks soul. Spotify has used AI to generate static playlists, likely from internally generated and QA tested prompts. They tend to be blandly efficient and based on whatever I'm listening to at the moment. Just listened to Metallica? Now, my AI generated "daylist" will a be heavy metal focused. Old school punk and New Wave? I get more old school punk and new wave. As Dom DeLuise said in History of the World Part 1, "Nice. Not thrilling but nice." 

Still, I was very interested to try out the new Spotify prompted AI playlist feature. The idea is to start off with a prompt that could generate a playlist such as Unexpected Genre Adventure or Vinyl Nights in Tokyo. By using your own listening data as a part of the prompt, you should, in theory, get something personalized yet fitting within the framework of the prompt. More interesting, though, is that you can customize the prompt to make it slightly different and more interesting. 

I started with the prompt that was titled My Life as A Movie.  The prompt was:

Make me a playlist for when I’ve got main character syndrome. The world’s spinning, the lighting’s perfect, and every step feels like a movie scene. I want songs that make ordinary moments feel epic: walking, staring out windows, overthinking, winning, losing, all of it. For every song, tell me what scene we’re in right now—what’s happening, what it looks like, what I’m feeling. Build it like the soundtrack to my life, focusing on songs I would like based on my listening history. Do not repeat artists.

That's pretty cool. Your own personal movie soundtrack. I decide to make one small change by adding "90s romcom" to the first sentence. This was meant to be a constraint. The playlist shouldn't have music from after the 1990s or else it wouldn't make any sense. In addition, they had to be songs typically found in Rom Com of the era. Granted this made things both easier - narrowing the domain of songs - and more difficult - discerning what should be in a 90s Rom Com.

I hit generate and encountered the first problem. It took forrreeeevvvvver. As in hours with no playlist. What was it generating? A literal lifetime of music? Clearly, I needed to add a constraint on the number of songs. Second time around I added " Keep playlist to 100 songs." to the end of the prompt and very quickly had a playlist of songs that pretty much fit the bill. Mostly. Sort of. Kinda.

See, it didn't quite get the 90s part of "90s Rom Com". So, while Mr. Brightside by The Killers fit the playlist well, it's clearly post-1990s and hence doesn't really fit the prompt. Also, songs were scattered across at least three decades. It should have been a tighter range. Soundtracks for most movies either contain period proper songs, in this case the 90s, or pick a time period that the exemplified the main vibe of the movie. For example, the Rom Com "When Harry Met Sally" uses jazz standards, performed by the amazing Harry Connick Jr., to place the movie outside of any particular time. "Say Anything", on the other hand, uses all contemporary songs. The most iconic scene in the movie only works because the main character is using a time appropriate and theme appropriate song Peter Gabriels "In Your Eyes." The Spotify generated playlist, by contrast, is all over the place, from staples of 70s Classic Rock to 90s Alternative to early 2000s Garage Revival. 

That's not to say that the playlist isn't good. It's quite good, in fact. And there are surprises which make it actually interesting to listen to. A segue from 1979 by the Smashing Pumpkins to Simple Man by Lynyrd Skynyrd was completely unexpected and yet, it worked both musically and for mood. 

A fun feature is the notes that accompany each song. They describe the "scene" in the movie. I especially liked the minutia of notes such as "Kitchen scene: parent's voicemail advice plays while burn grilled cheese and life feels clearer." That's so ridiculously specific and no average human would think of it that way. 

So, what's the final verdict? Spotify's prompted AI playlist really works - mostly, sort of, kinda. It can create a viable playlist. Songs dovetail well with no major shifts in tempo or weird transitions. The notes on the songs are delightful, especially when they begin with "Hungover grocery aisle chaos". That's just fun.

Unfortunately, the AI engine doesn't ask for clarity for the prompt such as "Do you only want songs from the 90s?" or "Is there a genre you want to focus on or exclude?" which seem like something it should do. It's inability to balance the length of time it takes to generate a playlist with the number of songs is also puzzling. Anyone using this service needs to think to put a limit on the number of songs in the prompt or watch it take hours to create something a human could do in a few minutes.

I'll give it a B+. With a few refinements, it could get a grade of A.

Making a Ubuntu Laptop Useful to Me

Reading the headline, you might think that I don't think that Linux or the Ubuntu distribution can make for a good laptop experience. That's not the case at all. A lot depends on the applications you use, what frameworks and stacks you build your workflows around, and what your general needs are. For me, that means the Microsoft ecosystem including Office 365 and Windows.

The Windows part is pretty easy. Ubuntu is east enough and similar enough to the Windows experience that it's easy to navigate for a Windows user. At least for a Windows user with technical expertise. As it turned out, the apps were the real problem.

I have a functional laptop that was my main travel computer. It's a solid Dell machine. Unfortunately, it's just old enough that it can't be upgraded to Windows 11 so, I bought a new laptop as my travel computer. With Windows 10 now end-of-life, it seemed to be the time to upgrade. My daily drive is a desktop by Alienware.  For years, I've had a Microsoft 365 subscription, originally purchased for work. Needless to say, the majority of my computing, outside of gaming, lives in the Microsoft world. 

As an experiment, I wanted to see if I could convert my old travel computer to a reasonably functional laptop that would, at least, approximate the experience of my Windows computers. That means run the same apps, access the same cloud storage, and be otherwise useful for my everyday needs. I wasn't looking to duplicate the development environment that I have on my desktop or run resource taxing games. I just wanted to be able to do relatively normal tasks that I use my other laptop for.

Getting Ubuntu installed and configured was easy enough. I did some simple modifications such as moving the launcher dock to the bottom, like it is in Windows 11, and arranging desktop icons so that it was similar to my Windows configuration. Some changes required using terminal commands, which is a bit irritating and might not work for an average user. The power policy, for example, turns off the screen after a maximum of 15 minutes according to the GUI settings. You have to set using gsettings on the command line if you want something more. 

The primary launcher also just dumps most of your programs into a grid with a few in program group folders. I had to organize my applications manually. That's not much different than Windows 11 though the latest upgrade to the Windows 11 Start menu does some of that organizing for you if you want. 

A major hurdle to using Linux int he past was accessing cloud drives, especially OneDrive. Gnome, the display manager used by Ubuntu, makes that easier. You can connect to your OneDrive drive and access it like a network drive directly from the file manager. It doesn't sync to a local drive, however, so without a network connection you won't have access to your files. That's certainly a consideration for a travel computer.

Adding applications is where things get really dicey. The majority of Ubuntu applications are snaps or Debian packages (DEB file) available through the Ubuntu App store. That fine for installing most Linux applications. Getting the same applications that I use on Windows was ranged from easy to impossible depending on the application. For example, some applications are available on Windows and Linux. All I had to do was install the Linux version. That wasn't always as easy as it might seem. 

Software developers often have a bit of religion around package managers and will only use one of them. That's okay if it's a DEB file or a Snap. Not everyone likes those though. I ended up installing Flatpak as well to get at some applications. That resulting in two app stores that didn't support all formats. 

Unfortunately, even that wasn't enough. Ubuntu finds applications store in specific repositories. Some developers insist on releasing through their own repository which has to be added at the command line or in the Software and Updates app. Even when it is added, it still has to be enabled before those applications can be installed. Microsoft Edge required the adding of a Microsoft Linux repository. Again, it's part of the Microsoft landscape and using another browser, such as Firefox, would not allow for bookmark and setting synchronization. I had no choice but to jump through all the hoops to get it installed. Once installed though, I was able to download and configure Microsoft Teams as well.

Several applications that I use a lot only came in a Windows flavor. The solution there was to install Wine. Wine creates a compatibility for Windows applications at the API level. Once installed, Windows applications supported by Wine showed up in the App store and could just be installed. Wine, however, is not magic. Even though the WineHQ project says you can install Microsoft Office 365, it proved impossible for me to get it to install, even with detailed instructions. By the way, those instructions were command line instructions that were not for an inexperienced user. I tried using some of the GUI interfaces for Wine but, no matter what, the installation choked. So, I'm stuck using a different office suite or the online versions of the Office applciations. The latter is not really the same experience and relies upon a decent Internet connection. That's a heavy lift on an airplane.

A bright spot was gaming. I was able to install Steam which, using its Proton compatibility layer, was able to run some of my Windows games. I didn't try anything too taxing since the graphics card on the laptop likely could handle those games, but some older games were quite playable. If the computer itself was more capable, I don't doubt I could play most of my Windows games on an Ubuntu laptop. 

At the end of the day, I got about 90% of where I wanted to be. I can already hear the Linux apologists saying to switch to a different browser, cloud storage from someone other than Microsoft's, or use LibreOffice. That's a major switch of infrastructure, applications, and workstyle. You can't ask regular people to do that. 

So, the Windows hegemony will remain as long as key Microsoft applications such as Microsoft Office 365 are unavailable as native Linux applications. Maybe that's the point of not supporting Linux in this way.