All Things

I started out writing this as yet another comment to my earlier post about Twitter, but think I’ll make it a separate post. In any case, here are two good articles about serious uses of Twitter that I found from a post on the Setting Contexts blog:

The Top 5 Ways Smart People Use Twitter

What Twitter Means for Marketers

Regarding the 5 uses in the first article, I’d add:

1. Marketing & Communication: It’s interesting to just look at Twitter and quickly see what so much of the buzz is about. I do think there’s a good chance of picking up on tech or consumer trends much quicker, if you’re listening to the right folks. A good tool for finding those “right” folks is an obvious key add-on to the service.

2. Microblogging: Not everyone’s brain works this way, but for me there’s a lot of times I want to throw out a random thought, question or link that might be of some benefit or deserving of further investigation (e.g. by a journalist). I’ve added my Twitter account to my Technorati blog list, so now there’s a somewhat decent chance these thoughts might get discovered, though Twitter does need an automatic ping function.

3. Business Networking: I’m hopeful about this; I do well in one-on-one conversation but don’t stand out in a crowd. There’s a lot of folks I’d like to connect with that I’ve never had an immediately compelling enough reason to do it, though it would probably be beneficial for both sides.

4. Breaking News & Getting Scoops: I got this part as soon as I saw the CNN logo on Twitter. Unfortunately, I don’t think most news outlets have figured out how Twitter could drive traffic to their sites. As with RSS, the NY Times is at the forefront of this.

5. Streamlining Your Electronic Inboxes: I’m really hopeful that Twitter can help to reduce the email onslaught, since reading a Twitter update is so instant. I made a suggestion about this, for example, to Kristin at French Word a Day last week, as I thought it was an excellent example of a daily email service that could benefit from a Twitter update.

As I noted before, I expect we’ll see a whole lot of other uses emerge for Twitter, since in essence it’s a whole new basic form of communication. Here are a few more interesting examples of Twitter applications I’ve found recently:

Austin Weather

Kansai Train Announcements

French Practice

Interesting Links Forwarded by Robert Scoble

Twitter Timer

Also someone reportedly found some help after a car accident: Thoughts on Twitter.

Finally, with regard to the second article mentioned at the beginning, there’s this interesting assertion: If Markets Are Conversations, Then Twitter Is Money.

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!

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.

I’ve written some of my initial thoughts on NASA’s just-announced Moon-to-Mars plan involving a larger capsule and a shuttle-derived heavy booster on my site AeroGo.

I’ve written some about the Tuskegee Airmen on my site AeroGo, and about efforts underway to preserve their history.

I also noted how I’ve been surprised journalists haven’t given much coverage to Star Wars filmmaker George Lucas’ indications in interviews (such as with Charlie Rose) that he’s working on a film about the airmen, and that it’s something he’s wanted to do a long time.

While this whole discussion is a bit preliminary, I recently added a new category with the somewhat awkward name of “Press Coverage Holes” (… I’m open to suggestions for a clearer term!). Anyway, this is something I’ve been particularly eager to do with my blogs. I intend to add such a category to most of my blogs (more are coming) because I think this is something that has been sorely lacking.

Not that I mean that everyone should necessarily have such a category, but I learned a long time ago that my own particular giftings were such that I was often aware of a lot of things going on that the press were ignoring, for whatever reason.

I don’t want to get into this too much right now, but I recall - as a particularly vivid example - in the 1970’s during the period of the killing fields in Cambodia reading small articles in the newspaper, etc., about what was going on. Years later, when the movie came out, the common reaction was, “If we had only known!” Of course, in the 70’s the articles were in the back of the paper and the atrocities weren’t described in detail or even in proper scale, but the events were known (and knowable to the average American) at the time. The same is going on today. There are always things going on that are known and ought to be front-page news, or at least get covered much more extensively, but aren’t.

So I’m hoping that by adding such a category I can at least occasionally draw attention to something that deserves a closer look. If you’re a journalist needing a story to write about, maybe I can get WordPress to allow you to find “holes” in particular categories of mine that are pertinent to you.

I don’t expect too many such entries in this blog. All Things is about my interests, hobbies, reading, etc., but I think it would get spread too thin if I tried to discuss current events here. So I’m planning to start a separate blog for that, probably with Blogsome at first, if it will let me have two.

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.