All Things

Jane Quigley has posted on her blog Setting Contexts a quite positive report of her first two weeks with an iPhone, declaring that her 8GB iPhone has exceeded all her expectations. In particular, she notes “iPod sound is … a definite step ahead”; “While the keyboard was a little challenging at first, I was a pro after just a couple of days”; and that “battery life … has been great”.

While there are apparently already well over 100 iphone apps available, she lists some of her early favorites, as well as some other resources. The ones Quigley recommends include Mockdock, PocketTweets, gOffice, Meebo, and Ta-Da. Perhaps not surprisingly, there’s already a new GTD (Getting Things Done) app for the iPhone, iNozbe, as well.

The iPhone launched to a tremendous amount of anticipation, and even a funny video by long-time Mac & Palm author (and tech journalist) David Pogue. Despite the hype, it seemed that most all the initial user feedback was, indeed, similarly positive.

Now we’re starting to see some detracting reports. Some think usability issues will make the iPhone unsuitable for business. That raises one of my own questions - how good is the iPhone, actually, as a phone? It’s one thing to just try calling, but what happens when you’re busy - can you use it easily one-handed, or while driving, or is using the iPhone about as bad as texting while driving?

There’s also the question of whether the iPhone (without physical keys) will satisfy teens, young adults and anyone else who’s a texting addict. I’m certainly curious about the practical usefulness of the keyboard, probably what I most miss in my current Palm handheld. If Apple does succeed in making a good (not barely adequate) touch-screen keyboard, it will be a major step forward in interface design.

Now to my own impressions. I’m not in a hurry to jump to the iPhone, but have spent maybe 10-15 minutes on it a couple of times. It’s clear that I’m getting a little better on the keyboard, but am not yet convinced I’ll really get good at it. It was really surprising, though, that the horizontal keyboard isn’t available for all the applications.

That said, I’m sure there are a number of improvements Apple will continue to find to better the keyboard experience. This is where thinking about the little details, an area where Apple excels, can really pay off. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of such features are already there waiting to be discovered. GeekSugar has already noted one tip for speeding up punctuation.

The second time I used the iPhone, it slowly dawned on me that what I really miss isn’t so much the keyboard, but the mouse. Just editing URLs in Safari was quite annoying. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but the keyboard layout didn’t seem to help much for editing, either. On the other hand, the multi-touch screen works quite well for navigation, but you can’t really get the full benefit of it when browsing the web on the slow Edge network.

One thing that surprises me is how little discussion there’s been of basic Palm functionality on the iPhone. Does the iPhone come with apps that can replace the basic Palm Datebook, Address, To-Do and Memo functions, and import their .pdb files?

There has been a lot of discussion about whether the iPhone will run OS X applications (and presumably Mac apps like Excel). Right now the answer is apparently no, but I don’t see why Apple couldn’t set up some kind of partitioning or something on the iPhone that would make that work, while still protecting the reliability of the phone and connectivity functions.

Perhaps the real hold-up in such a scheme for running OS X apps is memory, and with more flash memory will come OS X as well. Certainly, 4 or even 8GB seems to be an awful limited amount of memory for a multi-function device that’s also supposed to be a media player. With the way flash memory prices have been falling, waiting for a bump up to 16GB (at least) would probably be a good idea. Apple has a long history of introducing computers without enough memory, and I suspect the iPhone is the latest example!

Obviously, the Palm and Mac compatibility are important issues for current Palm and Mac users like myself, who are looking for a handheld device that really moves forward the “handheld computing” part of the equation as an important part of moving to one unified device. I expect the iPhone will satisfy these needs, as well, given time.

While the iPhone as a beautiful gadget and interface is itself rather compelling, perhaps the main question, really, is how long will it be before there is an equally-compelling must-have application that drives the second wave of its sales?

I wrote last fall about how Apple Needs Better Support for Mac Printer/Scanner Problems. Thankfully, it appears Apple may be aiming to invest more in printer functionality, as it has reportedly acquired the rights to CUPS, the Common Unix Printing System.

My previous post described how I’d continued to see occasional problems with printers on OS X, noting a particularly difficult problem I was having at that time with my HP 1320, that ended up taking up more than a day of my time and several weeks to get resolved. I still get fairly regular hits from Google searches for “hppostprocessing” error messages, so if that’s you, check out the comments to the previous post.

One of my main complaints involved the lack of diagnostics. While Mac OS X printing support through the Printer Setup Utility is fairly automatic, when there is a problem, there’s virtually no diagnostics to help you sort it out. I’d hope that improving such diagnostic support would be a priority for Apple.

Besides that, I’m still noticing various little quirks with printing on OS X (and am still running 10.4.8). Usually these aren’t showstoppers, but the system is doing something unexpected, which makes you wonder if there are lingering bugs. The bugs do occasionally bite, as they did the other day when everything kept printing with my 2 pages/page preset, regardless of what I entered in the print dialog (restarting resolved that).

As I wrote before, I hope Apple will put somebody in charge of this, say a “driver evangelist”, who will work with peripherals providers to iron problems out. The Ars Technica article does suggest that “The purchase could also be a good thing for CUPS, since Apple’s support for the project could lead to further improvements (if Apple chooses to release them) and to more pressure being placed on printer manufacturers.”

In any event, it’d be a lot more efficient for Apple and the peripherals folks to get together and iron things out, before millions of users have to scratch their heads - and then bang them against the keyboard in frustration.

Back in March, I wrote a post entitled My Own Ten Peeves About the Mac. The last of the ten was the need for Apple to tackle printer/scanner/etc. driver issues more aggressively:

“10. Third-party driver issues. I know this, too, isn’t really Apple’s fault, but I’ve read of so many people having problems with scanners, multi-function devices, etc., that the plug-and-play capability of the Mac seems seriously threatened. I hope Apple will put somebody in charge of this, say a “driver evangelist” who will work with peripherals providers to iron problems out. I also wonder if the Intel transition will make this situation better or worse.”

In the eight months since I wrote that, I’ve continued to see problems with printers. I’ve recently upgraded my Mac to one running the newest OS X (10.4.8), and still haven’t managed to get my laser printer to work. It isn’t some odd-ball model either, but an HP 1320. I had to mess with it a fair amount as well on my last Mac, which ran 10.2.

The key point here is that chasing down driver problems is a huge waste of time. I’ve spent probably 12 or more hours on the latest case, over the course of a week, which is worse than usual, but not as much as you might think. Other problems have typically drained an afternoon or so of my time, maybe once a year in recent years, something which never used to happen with the Mac in times past.

What’s particularly frustrating is that in theory, it’s supposed to be very easy (pretty much automatic in many cases) to set up a printer on a Mac, using the Printer Setup Utility or Print Center (as it used to be called). Unfortunately, the diagnostics are extremely weak.

If you do run into a problem, there’s almost nothing to help you on the Mac itself. The latest problem apparently - this message only appears intermittently - involves some sort of stoppage of “hppostprocessing, status 2″. I’ve checked the Apple Discussions and other places on the net, tried perhaps a half dozen or more things, with no success so far.

I’m fairly technically inclined, though not a computer geek, and wonder what average Mac users do in this sort of situation. Even the technical types on the forums often claim to have spent many hours troubleshooting their printer problems.

If others have had similar experiences, I’d like to hear about them. This seems like a situation that is getting worse rather than better. It’s also made me very reluctant to take the plunge on a scanner, even though my wife has been bugging me to get one for some time. Scanners are fairly cheap now, but I really don’t want to get stuck troubleshooting another bunch of problems!

I just want it to work, without getting in my way, which is why I bought a Mac in the first place.

Years ago, Apple ran an ad with a bunch of lemmings all following each other off a cliff. After all, why think when it’s so easy to just NOT think? Well, here we go again. This year it seems like most all the major blogging/social networking services are one by one getting blinded in the headlights of MySpace.

As if we really need more of the lowest common denominator! There’s so much opportunity for innovation in this area, yet everyone wants to be the same. I’ve complained previously on my MSN (now Live) Spaces blog about Microsoft in this regard, and now the latest casualty apparently is Facebook.

With only 10 million users after two and a half years of operation, I guess Facebook just feels like a failure next to MySpace. Never mind the fact that they own the campus network space, they would rather throw out that distinctive so they can compete head-on with everybody. Usually these sorts of commoditization strategies don’t end up being as profitable as the competitors expect (the airline industry comes to mind).

Perhaps the Facebook users will again make a big fuss. Maybe management will listen, but chances are, based on the past history of fast-growing tech companies, they won’t. Most keep determinedly going in the wrong bone-headed direction until they go right off the cliff.

Xanga, which I use for my blog AeroGo and perhaps my favorite of the bunch, is likewise feverishly adding multimedia features, to compete not only with MySpace I suppose but also Flickr and YouTube. So far these changes seem mostly positive, but if Xanga can add these features so readily, they will very likely end up as standard on all sites.

Hasn’t anybody (or at least any VCs) noticed that there are a lot of people out there who don’t like MySpace? I mean really, it’s pretty raunchy by and large. It’s as if there was a town full of nice, somewhat distinct neighborhoods, yet all the developers were racing to fill these places with trashy businesses and dumpy apartments.

So why don’t any of these sites carve out a unique identity for themselves? I think the only plausible answer is the dramatic, rapid growth of MySpace. Why have 5 or 10 million users when you can have 100 million? Of course, these users apparently are also spending a lot of time on MySpace and so, presumably, potentially a lot of dollars.

Nevertheless, it seems that money is best made on the net by tightly targeting customers, not with mass marketing, so I suspect sites that are oriented around specific topics, activities and user demographics will ultimately yield a superior return. As I’ve noted before, these social networking sites need to differentiate themselves and find niches where they can thrive, as Facebook has (even if they don’t grasp the value of this).

Let me use Facebook as an example, since it has done the best job of targeting a very large yet tightly-defined niche (high school and college campuses). College students in particular have so many things they have to (or want to) buy, that the marketing/advertising opportunities seem almost endless, both at the local and at the national or branding/name recognition level. Everyone from the local pizza restaurant to students selling used textbooks to Hollywood film studios will want to target their users.

I’m not in school so I don’t use Facebook and don’t know how good a job they’ve done of capitalizing on this opportunity, but the folks developing (and funding) these sites need to remember that traffic often, but not always, equates to sales. Ultimately, it boils down to trust. I suspect that MySpace, as many city centers did, will begin to collapse of its own weight as many head to the “suburbs” of seemingly safer sites like Xanga and others.

The planned growth ideal for urban development might in fact be a useful metaphor for these social networking sites, which may do best if they concentrate on growing at a sustainable pace with a clear demographic or interest group in mind. Users need to come to trust these sites and feel safe in them. Then they will end up spending a lot more time and money there, and for the long run.

I wrote about Ford’s selection of former Boeing Commercial Airplanes President Alan Mulally as its new CEO on my blog AeroGo. As I note there, I don’t agree with William Clay Ford’s assertion that there are many parallels between Boeing’s recent challenges and Ford’s.

In a narrow sense, maybe yes, you can say that Ford needs to renegotiate union and supplier contracts, etc., but really Ford Motor Co. has been its own worst enemy, and is much more a victim of its own ineptitude and lack of decisiveness as any external circumstances. It was only a few years ago that it was the strongest of the Big Three, and now it appears to be the weakest.

If you want to draw parallels, a much better comparison could be made between Ford and Apple Computer than Ford and Boeing. As a long-time Apple user, I can assure you that Apple has long been its own worst enemy. Even when Apple did make outstanding products at intelligent price-points, for years it would suffer severe logistical problems that cut into the potential gains. Even in recent years, I suspect continuing skepticism of Apple’s ability to ramp up production of hot products is one reason folks underestimated its iPod business for so long.

The difference with Apple now is that it finally has a clear, focussed direction for its products and the brand is healthy again. In the same way, Ford needs to make up its mind what kind of car company it is and develop clear differentiators for each of its brands, whichever ones it decides to keep.

It wasn’t too many years ago that William Clay Ford was declaring that Ford was going to be a leader pushing for better fuel economy and lower emissions. Along came a few problems, and apparently that vision was tossed, and now, with gas prices up and highly dependent on truck sales, the failure to follow through on that vision is really hurting them.

Product-driven companies like Apple and Ford must set a course and stick to it long-term, and not constantly adjust to every external up and down, whether in the market for their products or their stock. Even recently, nearly a decade into Apple’s turnaround, analysts were calling Apple’s plans for the Mac unrealistic, that they needed to focus on market share, etc. Of course, the reality of the computer business has long been that significant market share gains are made on the mistakes of one’s competitors, mistakes which are all too common, and which even Microsoft has been making of late.

In other words, stability and staying the course are far too under-rated. On the other hand, there is one crucial difference between Apple and Ford - even when things were their worst, Apple had large cash reserves, something Ford may not be able to count on. But any “quick fix” that damages the Ford brands will probably just end up making things worse.

The sad thing is, William Clay Ford’s “greener” vision for Ford may well have been on the mark, and it’s a shame they didn’t stick to it. Perhaps a return to his vision coupled with Mulally’s demonstrated management ability can turn the company around. As with Apple, there’s probably a lot more life left in the Ford, Lincoln, Volvo and Jaguar brands, at least, if they can set a clear direction and stick to it. For a few years things may not look so good, but a consistent product vision will eventually yield leading products and strongly-differentiated brands.

Owen Linzmayer got me thinking again about the Mac with two recent articles at informit.com, Ten Things I Hate About Mac OS X and Ten More Things I Hate About Mac OS X. Some of the items on his lists don’t really affect me. Nevertheless, as a Mac user from the beginning, you can be assured that I’ve had time to come up with a list of my own. Maybe it will be helpful to actually write it down here. I don’t know if Apple will find my list, but since Linzmayer is a Mac author I hope they will at least take his suggestions to heart.

I’m sure some will find fault with what I write here, but hey, this is my list, and after suffering through the valley in the 1990s I’ve got a right to my opinion. If there is a crazy part, it’s that I still sort of hope Apple will take us to the personal computing mountaintop! Well, here are at least ten of my top peeves with the Mac, mainly OS X:

1. OK, I’m going to cut right to the chase. Without a doubt, my Number One Pet Peeve is that after 22 years, Apple still hasn’t delivered on its vision for making the Mac easy to program. Originally, there was a whole group of components/aspects to the Mac revolution. These included the Mac itself (as an information appliance), an automated factory in Fremont, California, which was to crank them out inexpensively (so they could be sold to the masses), a capable serial network - AppleTalk - with many possibilities for expandibility (even though the initial hardware wasn’t expandable), and Macintosh Basic.

Macintosh Basic?? Yes, that long-lost but highly-touted language, rumored to have been sold to Microsoft to get it to renew the Apple II Basic license, was a key piece of the original vision. I’ve long wondered if Visual Basic has its roots in Mac Basic. I really don’t know, but did read once that it just kind of emerged in Microsoft, and was a surprise success for them. In all the years of press coverage on Microsoft’s alleged anti-competitive practices, I’ve never once seen Macintosh Basic mentioned. Since Microsoft is often criticized that it isn’t truly an innovator, it’s odd that they haven’t held up Visual Basic as an example of innovation.

Anyway, the vision for programming by the masses, a key part of the original Mac vision, didn’t die completely at Apple after Mac Basic disappeared. Bill Atkinson developed HyperCard, which was introduced in 1987 and was a huge success, probably the most popular thing Apple did between the Apple II and the iPod. Unfortunately, HyperCard languished, perhaps because Atkinson insisted it be given away for free. Eventually just the reader was given away, and the programming tool was priced around $100. It was obvious Apple management didn’t share the vision of programming for the masses, and HyperCard remained in limbo throughout the 1990s, until Steve Jobs pretty much killed it when Apple refused to carbonize it or let anyone else do it either (now that Apple is switching to Intel and Classic is being abandoned, HyperCard won’t run at all on the new hardware).

Around 1990, Dave Winer created a scripting language, Frontier, for the Mac. Apparently Frontier wasn’t visual or really all that simple (I don’t know what Winer’s vision for it was), but Apple management woke up long enough to scuttle Frontier by creating AppleScript, a supposedly easy-to-use scripting language for the Mac. Several years ago, after refusing to heed the pleas of HyperCard devotees, Jobs seemed to hold up AppleScript as an entry-level programming language for the Mac by creating AppleScript Studio.

This is just my bias, I suppose, but I’ve always been rather skeptical of AppleScript, and have never wanted to mess with it. Even Matt Neuberg, who wrote the book, has noted that “AppleScript is a curious language, to say the least. It’s a dinosaur, an almost unchanged survival of code written in 1993 to run on a slow computer with a mere speck of RAM. The language suffers from peculiarities of architecture and design, from a dearth of accurate documentation (which my book is intended to correct), and from the fact that all scriptable applications are utterly different from one another.”

Maybe AppleScript will somehow end up being a great language, but Apple still has AppleScript Studio hidden away from users, which hardly helps to make it a programming tool for the masses. On the other hand, with OS X 10.4 (Tiger) there is now Automator, a much more visible and simpler tool than Studio that some seem to like, so maybe this is progress. Nevertheless, I’m still waiting for Apple, as the vendor of choice for creative types, to exhibit a real devotion to the vision of programming by end users.

Well, moving right along …

2. Doesn’t run Windows apps. Need I say more? OK, I guess I ought to mention that now with Intel, perhaps a future version of Virtual PC (or just OS X?) might finally do this efficiently.

3. Wasted screen real estate. Screens are huge compared to the original Mac’s 512x342 monochrome display, yet as screens have grown, Apple seems to have wasted a lot of that space, with bigger icons, etc. It’s nice that you can have big icons and fonts, and some things are adjustable, but I wish Apple would put more thought into making the most of the screen, since it’s still a major limit to productivity.

4. Folder panes. This is related to #3. I don’t use Windows, but one of the things I notice is that folder panes, which are in my opinion a highly-productive interface, seem to be used more commonly, and the listings are smaller, so more can be seen at once. Entourage uses a folder pane, but I can never fit enough on the screen at once. When I was recently trying to decide between a new eMac or 17″ iMac, my choice was made once I realized the 17″ LCD (because of its different aspect ratio) actually would display less vertically. That would make the Entourage folder pane even less visible at once, and I can barely stand it as it is!

5. Drawers. This seems to have been Apple’s answer for a ubiquitous folder pane interface. When I first read about drawers, I thought I would love them, but as they’ve been implemented, I hate them, because they impact window positioning (see #6) and the listed items are too big (see #4). What would be better would be a reallocation of window real estate, rather than having to reposition to see the drawer, etc.

6. Sloppiness with window positioning. To be fair, this is mostly an application programming issue, but I wish Apple could find some way to get applications to always remember precisely how windows have been positioned and to return them when they are reopened. Dave Winer’s outlining program More, for example, offered a great deal of control over window positioning, which again is important in order to make the most of screen real estate. More also had a Resume file that would save the exact state of opened files, so when you restarted you were returned to just where you were. I know some programs have something like that, but it would be nice if Apple standardized it somehow.

With OS X, apps aren’t restarted as often, but I hate wasting time getting started on something, when the computer could easily do that for me. Besides, unlike Apple’s mostly visual types, I’m the kind of person who looks at the edge of things, so misaligned edges look messy and distracting to me. I know this will sound like a rather minor quibble to most folks, but to me it isn’t.

7. Small/clunky open/save dialogs. I agree with Linzmayer on this one. One of the most obvious things about using an old program such as More in Classic is the tiny size of the open/save dialog boxes. On the early Macs this was done both because the screen was small and also so if the program crashed you might be able to retrieve (by hand) some of what you just wrote (well, it worked for me a number of times). The new dialog boxes are a vast improvement, but as with window management, resizing them is an unnecessary recurring annoyance.

8. The spinning pizza/beachball. The pizza is cute for the first couple of times you see it, but it’s all downhill after that. One culprit behind this is Apple’s longstanding policy of not packing Macs with enough RAM (or even room to add enough RAM). This prompted the accusation that the Mac was underpowered and continues to feed that perception. The problem has persisted with the recent Mac Mini.

9. Inconsistent strategy for a low-end Mac. Here I’m not talking about Apple clones. That’s a separate debate and maybe Jobs was right on that one. In any case, Apple’s market share, and Apple’s user base, have both suffered tremendously over the years from Apple’s lack of commitment to having a competitive value-priced Mac in its product lineup. At times Apple has had a strong entry at the low end, such as the Mac Classic or the first-generation iMacs, and these have just about always sold well. At other times, there has been little or nothing for someone on a budget.

Right now we are unfortunately in the latter situation. To be fair, Apple is in a transition to Intel which is ostensibly going to lead to lower-cost hardware, but right now prices are going up. The Mac Mini was raised to $599, but this isn’t really the kind of computer that would appeal to a budget user. Its frame-rate benchmarks are pretty bad, so it wouldn’t appeal to kids, and it isn’t really suitable for a home office either.

I think the magic price point is somewhere around $649-699 for a full system. If Apple could hit that target with something that did well playing games, they could probably sell a ton of Macs (even the Mini sells for a lot more than this once you add in the memory, display, etc.). Even if they can’t reach it, a price void all the way to about $1000 is just too much. The iMac and eMac used to fill this void, but the iMac is now way above that range and the eMac has been discontinued.

This kind of thing would never happen in other industries. Can you imagine Honda discontinuing the Civic? As with the Mac, the Civic isn’t the cheapest small car, but in the same way Apple needs to stake a claim at the low end of its market and stick with it.

10. Third-party driver issues. I know this, too, isn’t really Apple’s fault, but I’ve read of so many people having problems with scanners, multi-function devices, etc., that the plug-and-play capability of the Mac seems seriously threatened. I hope Apple will put somebody in charge of this, say a “driver evangelist” who will work with peripherals providers to iron problems out. I also wonder if the Intel transition will make this situation better or worse.

Bonus Peeve: Yes, Owen, those eternally-bouncing dock items are downright irritating! Like the pizza, the physics of computer-screen motion is fascinating for a brief while, but when you’re deep in concentration enough is enough. At least I was fortunate to discover recently that Entourage has a preference to turn that off. Now I don’t get that bouncing icon every 10 minutes when my email comes in.

Someone ought to design a widget to shoot those bouncing dock items, and provide some needed comic relief. Well, maybe you could make it an arcade game and shoot them all!

InformationWeek is reporting on new navigation features for GM’s OnStar system, now 10 years old. OnStar hardware is to become standard on all GM vehicles in 2007. The service, which costs $16.95 per month or $199 per year, has been heavily advertised in recent years and now has about 4 million users (although a substantial portion of those may be recent car buyers who have yet to actually pay a subscription fee, since the first year’s subscription is included in the vehicle purchase price).

The new plan, Directions & Connections, according to GM’s feature comparison chart, will cost $34.95 per month or $399 per year. I just have to wonder if this is really going to be an attractive package for many people, when you can buy quite nice, portable GPS navigators and databases for only a few years’ worth of just the extra cost of the new plan.

An interesting comparison might be made to Apple’s .Mac service, which costs $100 per year, but has been steadily adding features without a price increase. While I haven’t yet signed up for .Mac, every year the value improves, so I won’t be surprised if I do eventually subscribe. Apple’s focus on increasing the value of their pricey service seems more prudent than GM’s looking to squeeze revenue out of OnStar, especially since either service may do a lot to stimulate customer loyalty.

On the other hand, neither vendor has done anything, as far as I can tell, to develop their service into a platform for third parties, which might be the more lucrative source of revenue in the long run, especially as subscribers increase. It seems to me that with services such as OnStar (where the system is only used rarely, at least in situations that require a human operator) or .Mac (online), much of the cost will be setting up and maintaining the system, with relatively low marginal cost per user.

Apple seems to at least understand that .Mac’s value improves as more of its software (e.g. iPhoto, iSync) ties into the service. GM might do well to remember some wise words from its old competitor, Henry Ford:

“The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed.”

Mitch Wagner had an interesting article on his blog at InformationWeek recently about David Allen’s Getting Things Done book and using PDAs to manage to-do lists, etc.

Wagner is right that “GTD has spawned a thriving subculture online.” In reading others’ blogs, etc., I find myself frequently drawn to sites whose author either uses a Mac and/or who’s written about GTD. I guess that’s sort of the intersection of my interests with a lot of others, i.e. personal productivity and creativity.

I’m not quite sure what Wagner meant when he wrote, “the popularity of GTD and related productivity philosophies has spawned a sort of backlash against Palm Pilots and other PDAs”. The PDA is still a great concept, though I think Palm has forgotten the form factor’s obvious weaknesses, i.e. a very small screen and lack of keyboard.

If Palm would put more emphasis on a better/slightly bigger screen and put decent keyboards on more models, I think they’d be moving forward again. While connectivity is certainly helpful, they seem stuck on adding more multimedia features, but I don’t see many teens buying Palms, anyway, and what I really want is for them to keep advancing the productivity software.

Anyway, here’s the comment I left on Wagner’s blog:

I read GTD a couple of years ago and now am reading Allen’s newer book, Ready for Anything. It is a discussion of many nitty-gritty productivity issues with a lot of useful tips and will be helpful to many who are having trouble implementing the GTD approach.

I’m amazed how this bandwagon of opinion has arisen that PCs are dying and PDAs as well. PDAs will become increasingly connected, I suppose, but that’s just a semantics issue in compiling statistics. I use my Palm constantly. At the same time, one of my biggest frustrations is not having enough time to really take advantage of all the wonderful software tools available on my Mac. These are both very useful tools for me.

What hasn’t worked for me (and apparently for a lot of others) are all the to-do list tools. The to-do list is the only part of my Palm that I really don’t use much. I think there’s some kind of problem with to-do lists that no one’s figured out yet. Lists are very helpful for planning and breaking down complex activities but unless we pretty much get everything done each day, the lists just start to grow to where they’re no longer of much help.

David Allen’s approach is basically to write everything down and review it on a regular basis, not to work off a to-do list. Instead, by clearing things out of your head, you can effectively keep the day’s list in your active memory, and actually concentrate on one thing at a time.

Since my last post on note-taking software, I have run across another program, Curio, which claims to be “the ultimate brainstorming and document management environment”. While I’m not sold on all this yet, and haven’t yet checked Curio out, their assertions attempting to differentiate it from note-taking software brings up an interesting idea.

Zengobi, Curio’s developer, asserts on its web page that Curio’s free-form design allows you more freedom to put things wherever you want, so that your creativity is enhanced. This doesn’t seem like such a big deal to me, but it brings up an interesting controversy. Most design novices seem to think that a wide-ranging lack of constraint is what stimulates good design, but I strongly disagree. This is at root a philosophical issue - does greater freedom alone invigorate something, or not?

I would say that greater freedom does add life to something, to a point. But without some boundaries to constrain a design, the choices become so limitless that only internal limits of the designer will keep the design on track. A good example of this is what happened in the early years with the Mac when font choices exploded. Only those with a great deal of good taste managed to minimize font usage to the few that were really needed. Apple’s original Mac documentation was an early example of tasteful font usage.

So in other words, most people, even average creative people, need a considerable amount of constraints in order to produce quality designs, and even top designers will probably find limits helpful most of the time.

The point of all this is that in looking for software that helps me think, write, and plan other creative work, I’m generally not looking for some totally free-form approach (this may be where Microsoft is missing it with the Tablet PC). As I reflect more on this, it’s dawning on me that what I really need is an array of tools that all allow creative expression in differing ways but that can be integrated together (unified search, project management, templates, etc.).

It seems to me that most really creative designers have quite a range of tools at their disposal. Susan once worked for a successful industrial designer and he had all sorts of “toys” in his office. Probably the most creative person I’ve ever met, my friend Dave, always amazed me at the wide range of media in which he worked. Maybe the constraint that software should be trying to lift is that of being limited to just the several tools any single program is likely to implement well.

This makes me wonder if what would really fill the bill for idea software would be something like an Eclipse (programming) environment oriented toward creativity, rather than programming. Eclipse allows many plug-in tools to be used together while managing various projects.

The next question I can’t help but ask is, Is there any fundamental reason why the Eclipse environment itself wouldn’t be suited for this? I’m not familiar enough with Eclipse to assess this (maybe the GUI would be a problem for drawing, etc.?), but I wonder if at least parts of it could be used in this way. Then all these different drawing, outlining, note-taking, search/agent functions might be made into Eclipse plug-ins (as is happening with all the programming tools now), and we could work much creatively.

I’ve also done some more checking on HyperCard replacements since the earlier post. I tried out HyperCard Dissolver, which integrates with HyperStudio, a Win/Mac product I’m surprised I didn’t know about, though it is aimed at schools, not individual users.

The problem with HyperCard dissolver is that it saves every single field (for each card) as a separate text file, which is not of much use (except for HyperStudio, which imports these). What I’d like is a single tab-delimited text file that I could import into any number of programs. Maybe that wouldn’t be so hard to script, actually. If anyone knows of a tool that has already been made for this, I’d like to know about it.

The simplest and most obvious solution for moving HyperCard to MacTel is Runtime Revolution or its new variant DreamCard, both of which are Win/Mac/Linux and still being vigorously developed. As I understand it, these two programs, which are based on the earlier MetaCard, can directly import HyperCard stacks.

In any case, I’d like a way to get a tab-delimited text output, or some format that I could put into a full database program down the road. Maybe Revolution offers such an export option.

Since I wrote the previous post on the MacTel hardware apparently killing Classic and so two commonly used (by me and apparently a lot of folks) Classic apps, More and HyperCard, I’ve done a little more investigating.

I still haven’t found an application that will definitely import More files correctly. There are a number of More replacements available now, including NoteTaker, NoteBook, DevonThink/DevonNote, and the new TAO outliner. Some of these are more oriented toward outlining, some toward notes. If anyone has experience importing More files into these, I’d like to hear about it.

So far I think (judging only from screenshots) DevonThink is the closest to the sort of interface I’m looking for. I clearly need a pane on the left to access and group multiple writing files (as DevonThink has) to manage my writing, but I also really like the tabbed notebook style interface that NoteTaker and NoteBook have. I’m surprised how hard it is to find a writing program for the Mac that has the file pane on the left (not a pop-out drawer - the worst feature of Aqua - by making me have to move my window around). I guess you could create something like this in NoteTaker, but it should be a standard interface. Again, if any NoteTaker/Notebook users have implemented a left file pane, I’d like to know how you did it.

I guess the issue on the interface really revolves around the fact that you’re trying to do three different things in a notetaking program - create content/writing/notes, manage/find content, and then present content. The real appeal of an outliner is its ability to help organize one’s thinking, but an outline document is far too limiting for this. An overall notes program is needed, but it should have a good outliner in it.

One other program that may eventually make it to the Mac is EverNote. Some folks seem to like it. Its chronological memory could be very handy for finding stuff.

In my own case, I really don’t want to have to use two different programs for writing (and organizing my writing) and for storing notes, and I’d really like what I have to integrate with my Palm. In this category (for the Mac; Microsoft’s OneNote isn’t available for Mac, at least yet), it seems that NoteTaker is the leader right now, and I like the direction they’re taking with adding programmability, which could make NoteTaker a powerful tool. So I’m inclined to go with them, but I want a good writing interface.

I guess I need to try converting some of my More files with Brad Pettit’s More2XML (see last post) and then seeing if any of the note programs can import that fairly well. That might be a good two-step solution.

In all the discussion about Intel chips coming to the Mac, I haven’t seen a single specific mention of what will happen to the Classic environment (one of two legacy Mac OS X environments, which runs Mac OS 9 & previous software; the other is Carbon). One or two articles seemed to imply that Classic is doomed, but never even mentioned it directly. These articles indicated that all software was going to have to be moved to Cocoa, which would mean Carbon is apparently doomed, and Classic with it.

I know this will seem irrelevant to a lot of folks, but with 21 years on the Mac, sometimes I’m amazed I don’t use Classic more than I do. I have really only used it for two programs, More (outliner) and HyperCard, but I use it for these two nearly every day. Obviously, I have a LOT of files in these formats, not so many HyperCard stacks but probably hundreds of More outlines, most of which I will need to convert eventually if More is no longer available (or, more accurately, need to convert BEFORE More is no longer available). While I use just a handful of stacks, some have a lot of data in them (up to 925 cards), so I will need to convert these somehow.

Obviously, this looks like a lot of work, so I’m not likely to want to move to MacTel anytime soon (if Classic will be lost). Fortunately, when the time comes, there are some tools that might help. For More, there are two programs, More2Text and More2XML that I downloaded long ago just in case but haven’t yet tried out.

I didn’t bother trying them because I was hoping I could convert to a notes organizing program like NoteTaker and have it simply import all my More files. Unfortunately, I recently tried out NoteTaker and it did an awful job on one outline. I’m curious if others have gotten it to import More outlines successfully or have found another package that does the job well.

For HyperCard, there’s a program called HyperCard Dissolver that may be of some use. I don’t recall what format it outputs in.

In my own case, the timing should actually work out pretty well for me. I’m on about a 3-year upgrade cycle, which I might compress down the road to 2 or so if the updating software intro’d in 10.3 (which moves all your files, etc., to the new machine) works well when I try it out next purchase. With my current Mac 2 years old, I was planning to buy next in mid-2006, right about at the beginning of the switch-over. So maybe I can get a good deal on a phased-out G4 (likely still good for a couple of years) or G5 machine.