All Things

Since I posted my Initial Thoughts About the iPhone, Dave Winer has described his experience after four weeks, and it’s not too favorable:

iPhone, month 1

He describes, for instance, how he couldn’t quickly retrieve a phone number from an email and return a call, and is generally unhappy with the iPhone’s email function, as well as its touch-screen keyboard.

Worse, in an interesting observation Winer notes:

“It also seems we’re going to have a long-term discussion over whether it makes sense to have a “mobile web” or take the iPhone trade-off, more effort to use its web (lots of scrolling and pinching), but making the whole web accessible, mobile sites or non-mobile sites. I think what Apple has attempted is noble, but it’s not going to work. The screens have limited resolution, and even if they didn’t, even if they could cram a billion pixels into every square inch, there’s the limit of how much detail our eyes can see and how big our hands are.”

It does seem that some people’s eyes and fingers fit the iPhone’s diminutive size better than others. I’ve long felt that the trend toward ever-smaller devices is a mistake. Early in the Treo’s development, when Palm (or probably it was still Handspring) was eagerly describing how wonderful it was that they were going to make it yet smaller, I got frustrated enough to write them about it, but to no avail.

If the iPhone starts to falter, it will be in no small part due to its form factor, and maybe then handheld device makers (besides Blackberry) will finally start to listen. Many devices, especially phone devices, are TOO small, and keyboards are important to a lot of folks, especially for texting and email, and must be gotten right. Some users seem to like the iPhone’s touch-screen keyboard, but clearly it’s not for everyone.

Winer, who’s been involved with Mac software since the early days with the ThinkTank and More outliners, and seen both the good and bad sides of Apple, concedes that “the iPhone is much prettier than a Blackberry and feels better in your hand. I’m not mocking Apple for that, style matters, esp in a personal device.”

He figures that “the iPhone, if it attains success, will reach it the way the Mac did, after the initial fatal flaws are removed, in the “iPhone Plus” or whatever.” Indeed, a lot of folks seem to have forgotten that in 1984, initially Mac sales were good, but soon stalled after the early adopters (including myself, even though I’m not usually such) bought theirs. The original Mac was not really a very useful machine until the memory was bumped from 128K to 512K.

I’m sure that Apple is already working to fix many of the first-generation iPhone’s deficiencies, and will do it faster than Apple did in 1984-7 with the Mac. Nevertheless, the question remains whether they’ll be open to more radical changes - such as a bigger device with a bigger screen and real keyboard - which may be necessary to pull in a lot of the Blackberry’s users and other folks no longer in their twenties.

Internet Duct Tape (formerly EngTech) has an interesting post about proper use of categories and tags in WordPress. Eric says:

“One of my first and longstanding complaints of WordPress is that it does not understand the fundamental difference between tagging and categorizing. Categorizing is like taking all of your socks and putting them into drawers based on colours. Tagging is like sewing a little label on your socks that says when you bought them, how to wash them, … Categories add organization and tags add semantic information. A category can be a tag, but if you use your tags as categories you’ll eventually have a right old mess.”

This is an interesting question because in my experience, there’s never just “one” right way of organizing or presenting information. To find an appropriate way to organize something, you must consider the use and the user.

The goal with tags, categories or whatever scheme is to organize the information in a way that you or another familiar user can find everything, while presenting it to a new user in a way which allows them to easily assess what all is there and then navigate through it to access what they’re particularly looking for. Consequently, I think it depends on the blog how many categories or tags are appropriate.

In my WordPress blogs, I use multiple categories with each post, so I guess that means I’m using them like tags, not true categories. This and my other Blogsome (WordPress) blog, RealCurrents, each have a few dozen categories, used like tags, but it’s not too hard to scan them all as they’re listed on the right side of the page.

My personal blog Light Side on Live Spaces is only allowed one category per post, but that’s OK for a simple blog like that, though I still find myself wanting to add a category every once in a while. If I had a lot of photos on that site, then I’d certainly want a good tagging system, however.

Closer to the other extreme is my aerospace blog (currently still on Xanga), in which I like to note all kinds of esoteric things and so have close to 200 tags,

http://www.xanga.com/AeroGo/tags

so folks can look up specific aircraft, certain famous individuals, manufacturers, etc. This tag cloud really functions more like an index.

For those who want to use categories more properly, as unique groupings, Eric’s post links to an interesting and fairly lengthy discussion by Lorelle VanFossen, Putting Some Thought Into Blog Categories and Tags. She says that

“In the simplest of terms, I think of categories as the table of contents for your blog, a kind of general outline that directs visitors to general topics that you blog about. Tags are more like the index page of a book, a list of key words people will use to search for specific terms.”

She also includes a helpful discussion of how limiting yourself to a small set of categories can help you focus and really think through the purpose for your blog. Nevertheless she notes that she ended up including one category as a sort of “catch-all”, giving it a vague name, “Web Wise”.

Regarding tag clouds, I’ve noticed several ways of presenting them on various sites, typically with the more popular tags in larger type. While that’s a good idea, many times the tags are organized in a rather unhelpful way. I even saw one site where they were in a spiral!

For a site like AeroGo, where it’s likely that the average user is not looking for one of the top 10 tags, it would be better if Xanga presented the tags not only alphabetically as currently, but also in orderly columns, as in a book’s index, though keeping the varying font sizes. This might be overdoing it for many sites, but it would be interesting to see an experiment on a big site like Flickr of several different tag cloud presentations and the resulting click-through rates.

Like Google’s simple but (truly) helpful index, I wonder if on a lot of sites an alphabetical, index-like tag cloud might produce better results, though a simple tag module added to a page wouldn’t have room for all that. In any event, as the “semantic web” becomes more of a reality, I suspect more detailed tagging systems will gain value and prominence, as they help users drill down to the specific information they’re looking for.

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 ran across a post, The Attention Crash on Steve Rubel’s blog Micro Persuasion. In it, he argues that the real danger isn’t another .com financial bubble bursting, but rather individuals hitting a wall of information overload:

“We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore’s Law.”

I agree that there’s still a lot of life left in this tech deployment cycle. At the same time, I’m amazed that the media and society at large still don’t seem to be taking information overload seriously.

There’s been such an explosion of both work and leisure information, not to mention creative tools, games, etc., yet you don’t notice many people outside of the GTD blogging community talking about it. We obviously are going to need some more sophisticated tools than just raw RSS feeds, and these folks seem to be about the only people seriously exploring that. There’s so many GTD-related productivity and project management tools, that I’m having a hard time getting them all sorted out.

In other words, we need a lot of innovation in order to develop tools for handling information overload, and so we should be seeing a lot of experimentation taking place. Right now most of that is happening in the GTD community. I think we should also expect to see a variety of tools tailored to particular individual styles. That’s an area I’ve done a great deal of research in, and hope to see its application to innovative productivity tools.

Beyond GTD, Twitter is clearly generating some of the loudest buzz currently, mainly as a social networking site, where it seems to have great potential. A lot of folks have criticized it as the worst example of pointless info overload but I think Twitter, or something like it, could actually be a tremendous tool to help deal with overload, both by making inputs timely without interrupting (using the web interface, anyway) and by forcing inputs to conform to a quick summary so you can judge whether it’s worth a further look.

Of course, most folks don’t get that yet. I see tweets saying “This is great” and just a link, giving me no idea what it’s about. Others send out a half-dozen or more pointless tweets a day, clogging up my friends page. Some news sources such as the New York Times, commendably quick to get on board, nevertheless send out the same update on multiple channels. All this “noise” reduces Twitter’s usefulness, but even in just the six weeks or so that I’ve used it, I’ve already seemed to notice a certain sort of evolution going on, with many (not all) folks starting to effectively pre-screen their tweets and limit them more to ones that would actually be helpful to others.

I think eventually we’ll see people going to multiple accounts (”channels”?), one with personal info and more security, another with interesting links (as Robert Scoble has already done with his Scoble’s Link Blog), and another with updates from all one’s own blog posts, important comments, etc. The last purpose is how I’m primarily using my own Twitter account, aeroG, at present.

The main point is that Twitter, as with so much of the web, is a grand experiment being done on a huge scale, and it’s likely to evolve rapidly in the coming year or two. If Rubel is at all correct, then we should expect to be seeing a lot more of these tools coming along shortly, to help us sort out not only our increasingly complex lives and connections, but also the huge flood of information that increasingly threatens to overwhelm us, or at least to drown out the truly valuable information tidbits that these tools should help us to find and track.

Thanks to reading blogs such as Dave Winer’s old Scripting News, I learned pretty early on about Google, and was taken by the simplicity of their search page, which loaded fast. This was quite unlike most sites of the time (around 2000, I believe), which were smitten with portal mania, trying to serve up everything on their home page.

Google is still a mainstay for me, though it’s beginning to show its age, such as in the area of blog search. Another site that’s become a constant resource of late is Wikipedia which, despite its imperfections/potential inaccuracies, is often an even better place to start a search than Google. Unfortunately, sometimes their main page doesn’t load as quickly as I’d like, even at broadband speeds, so I began wondering if they, too, had a simple search page that could be bookmarked in place of the main page.

I didn’t see any obvious link to such a page on their main pages, but after experimenting a little came up with this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=&fulltext=Search

This just gives you a simple page with an empty search box. Of course, I guess you could change the “en”at the beginning of the url to your language of choice, and see if that works, too.

Now my WP button on my Safari bookmark bar is set to this, so whenever I need to search Wikipedia, it’s right there.

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.”

After using a Mac for nearly 22 years and enduring Apple’s long decline in the late ’80s to 90s, it’s not possible to look at Palm without wondering if it’s deja vu all over again. The PDA maker has made so many questionable and even seemingly bizarre moves (such as buying the BeOS) that its survivability is certainly now in question.

As with Apple and the Mac in the 90’s, Palm still has a lot of enthusiastic and even loyal users, but the platform hasn’t thrived in years. The simplicity and reliability of the Palm OS and hardware (at least until recent years) is likely even more of an advantage in the handheld space than in PCs, yet Palm has failed to capture a lot of new users lately, despite its lower-cost Zire line. The Palm OS has been steadily losing ground to Pocket PCs and now, increasingly, to the Blackberry as well, which seems to be evolving rapidly.

In other Words, Palm (or PalmOne, or whatever they call themselves these days) is a company, like Apple in the mid 90s, that had a lot going for it, but has pretty nearly blown that advantage, and desperately needs to home back in on their core market and competencies before it’s too late.

In any case, this is the perspective I’ve had in mind as I’ve pondered the events of the past few days. It all started when my wife mentioned she wanted to get the new Zire 22. I was both glad and somewhat surprised, because she had had a frustrating experience with her first handheld, the Zire 21, and had finally returned it.

Susan is the kind of person who would probably be happy just running her life out of a shoebox of records (perhaps you have encountered the type), except there’s way too much information to keep track of nowadays, and even one shoebox would be too much to carry around. Though she had given me a Palm several years ago, she didn’t show much interest in getting one for herself until about a year ago.

She was working as a drapery designer and just had so many people, numbers, and project notes to keep track of that it was getting impossible to keep everything with her all the time. Increasingly phone numbers and other things would be at work or someplace else when she needed them, so she finally went for it and got a Zire 21 last spring.

At first, she was delighted with the 21, and its design was good even though it was a pretty basic PDA. If you haven’t used a PDA but have been considering it, the biggest gain comes from having all your information in one place, and being able to carry it with you (and back it up). It’s just a different experience when you can be working, shopping, travelling or whatever and pull out your notes right then and there from projects, Consumer Reports, past trips, etc.

Unfortunately, after a few days the 21 started having hard resets every so often. I looked it up on the web and was dismayed to find that this was a well-known problem linked to certain kinds of phones (she had a Motorola Nextel phone at the time). Apparently whoever designed the 21 failed to include shielding at a critical point, and so some phones cause a reset when going off close to the Zire (and, of course, she needed to carry them both in her purse).

Most perplexing was that the problem had been known for a year or so and as far as we could tell, PalmOne had not made any design changes. We tried to work around it for a week or so, but after losing her day’s data for the third or fourth time, Susan had had enough. Palm lost an enthusiastic customer, perhaps (I thought) for good. Interestingly, despite their return policy, OfficeMax took it back without a question. Apparently we weren’t the first to have a problem with it.

Anyway, fast forward to the other night when, Christmas money in hand, Susan and I walk into several stores looking for the new, improved Zire 22 (with color screen and flash memory). It turns out that no retailers around us seem to have any left, for either of two reasons, one ominous, one promising. First, the bad news. A lot of the mass merchandisers have dropped the Palm line, most recently Target (Best Buy’s selection has seemed pretty meager lately, too). It would seem the strategy of using the Zire line to penetrate these distribution points hasn’t worked out.

On the positive side, stores that do still carry the Palm brand were apparently uniformly out of Zire 22s in our area. This includes OfficeMax, Office Depot, and at least two nearby Radio Shack stores. While I heard lots of news coverage of how the iPod was selling well this Christmas, I wonder if the Zire 22 was selling as well in other places as it was here. Perhaps this will be a harbinger of better things to come.

While there are an unlimited number of features a PDA maker could supposedly try to cram into a handheld, I hope Palm will re-focus on the basic PDA functions and make sure these remain simple to use and the hardware rock-solid. I have heard enough stories of Palm users who loved their PDAs that I remain convinced there are still millions of potential customers out there if Palm will just get the basics right.

The industrial design of the Zire line seems quite good, but I hope the engineering has improved. As for Susan, she ended up instead buying a Kodak camera yesterday at OfficeMax (we’ve loved the other one we have). She says maybe she’ll still buy a Zire eventually. I wonder if Palm will still be trying to win her business.

Software giant Microsoft is a subject I’ve wanted to write about for some time, but since it seems like everyone is quick to voice an opinion about them, usually either harsh criticism or fawning adoration, I’ve been reluctant to do so. Nevertheless, it does seem like we may be reaching a turning point in public perception of the company, so maybe this is a good time to contribute to the discussion.

What’s been lacking is a balanced view of Microsoft. People outside the tech industry often hold them up as a paragon of American innovation and a poster child of capitalism. Most folks inside the industry seem to scowl at the incredible naivete of such a perception of Microsoft, maintaining that it is actually an 800-pound gorilla fast-follower and a monopolist. While I tend to agree more with the second view, these arguments have become well-worn and not very useful.

My perspective is that of a long-term Microsoft customer, but non-Windows user. I’ve been watching Microsoft ever since I bought Level II Basic for my TRS-80 Model I in 1980. Way back then, I noticed there was a certain professionalism about that product, and the assembler software I bought soon after, that impressed me. It was certainly untypical for the time.

Because of that professionalism, I was not at all surprised Microsoft thrived in following years; in those early years it seemed they were succeeding from having a superior product. In the mid 80s, it seems to me their success started to stem as much from taking advantage of other companies’ missteps, which were many as these grew and often went out of control, typically by trying to do a major rewrite of their software that seemed to never ship.

Microsoft has always been adept at acquiring good software from the outside, and its purchase of the Excel package in the mid 80s was probably one of their best moves. If I remember correctly, it was offered on the Mac by late 1985, long before it took over the DOS market (Lotus never did well on the Mac), and I have used it ever since.

Having made the jump to Mac in Spring 1984, I am well aware of how Apple squandered its early advantage in operating systems. Today, however, the situation is very different. Apple is executing well and has a coherent, forward-looking strategy, whereas Microsoft seems rooted in the past, unable to move beyond its Windows franchise and embrace change from the outside world.

Peter Drucker has often commented on how companies need to kill off the past before they have to, in order to preserve their position in the market for the future. I can’t help but wonder if this is the point Microsoft has reached regarding Windows. Apple spent years trying to build a great operating system from the ground up and finally threw in the towel, bought NeXT and moved to Unix.

I wonder if Microsoft is really not doing that much better. Maybe they should embrace Linux or Unix or something rather than fight it. In any case, Windows is their past, not their future, and their recent enhanced emphasis on MSN as a platform is a long-overdue step away from Windows and toward the internet.

By making everything revolve around Windows, they are stifling product development. They need to gradually wean themselves off their Windows monopoly and put more resources into Office, which despite new competition could have a bright future, Visio, and many of their other productivity packages, as well as MSN and various internet opportunities.

Perhaps one of the greatest threats long-term to Microsoft is the Eclipse tools platform, which continues to rapidly gain momentum. If the theory holds that whoever attracts developers ultimately gets users, then Eclipse’s growth relative to Microsoft’s Visual Studio toolset could have a long-term impact.

In general, while Microsoft prides itself on the billions it spends each year on research and development, I suspect years from now it will be regarded as a case study on how not to do R&D investment. It’s not at all obvious that they have gotten much for their billions. For years they have been touting natural language and usability testing, for example, but there seems to be little to show for it in the first area and still a lot of frustrations at times in the second.

One concept Microsoft needs to embrace is the realization that usability ultimately revolves around proper interoperation with other vendor’s tools, both on the device and the web. Microsoft’s strategy of relying on lock-in at the expense (often deliberate, it would seem) of interoperability has worn out its usefulness as more and more innovation comes from outside the Windows platform. As technology and life in general continues to get more complex, user expectations for interop, security, and other types of stability will continue to increase.

Ultimately, what Microsoft needs to do is to grow up. Gates and Ballmer have long touted the need to be “paranoid” in order to survive in the tech industry. This may have worked when Microsoft was small and IBM was the giant, but now that Microsoft is dominant, the idea of a paranoid 800-pound gorilla doesn’t bode well for the industry as a whole or for the users.

Like a teenager, Microsoft shows much promise in an industry that is entering a new era of innovation, but it must mature and come to grips with its own limitations. It can’t be everything to everyone and must learn to coexist with other independent players who aren’t chained to Windows, such as Google and Adobe/Macromedia. Microsoft must conscientiously incorporate standards from the outside and adjust its business model to one that acknowledges users may want to use its products in a mixed environment with those of other vendors.

The pace of change in the software business is speeding up again and Microsoft will be left behind unless it embraces the change, rather than trying to control it.

There’s a lot of things I like about Business Week, but one thing that really stands out is its unfailing promotion of the importance of industrial design and related creative disciplines to business. Every year, it sponsors (with the Industrial Designers Society of America) the Industrial Design Excellence Awards.

Now they are ratcheting things up another notch, as outlined in the August 1st issue, on using creativity as the centerpiece of a systematic strategy to build innovative companies. It seems the impetus for this new step is a firm conviction on the part of the BW editorial staff that the creative disciplines are key to American industry’s competitiveness in the global market. According to Editor-In-Chief Stephen J. Adler: “we’re saying … that innovation and design point the way out of a lot of the difficulties U.S. companies face as high-paying jobs in tech and manufacturing shift overseas.”

Beyond just an interesting issue on creativity, BW has added a new Innovation & Design Channel on its website. With this step, BW’s editorial staff continues to show unusual foresight (more on this later).

I hope they will continue to lead the way in breaking down the walls between corporate America and the vast body of research that is being done elsewhere, whether in academia, government, or a multitude of private efforts. As I noted in my last post, there are a lot of good ideas out there.

Having done R&D myself for the past 18 years, I know BW is just scratching the surface with the research covered in the August 1st issue. Progress has been rapid in many fields, especially in understanding the differences in how people think and work. Moving forward, I suspect one of the key issues in design and marketing will be determining when to focus like a laser on a particular kind of customer, and when to tailor a design to interface with users in multiple ways that appeal to a broader range of customers.

What we really need at this point is a more rigorous theory of design, which will not only help shore up industrial design’s public image but also make it possible to reliably sort out such issues. In the meantime, BW is to be commended for not letting the issue rest. American industry has a long history of discovering industrial design, turning around its decline, and then redeveloping amnesia about the whole field. With today’s global market, as the BW editors observe, this is no time to let this happen again.

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.

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.