In the travels for my work, I meet all kinds of people. Today I had the chance to meet one of a kind though who has read (or written) way too many conspiracy theory web sites. He explained to me in painstaking detail how Intel’s processor technology has been given to us by aliens. After his 20 minutes of build up, all I could say was, “interesting.”
He’s the exception rather than the rule though. For the most part, I get to meet and work with some amazing geeks around the country. For example, I also met a gentleman today who has built a million dollar a year business following his passion of building computers. I will be in Houston for a couple of days, and I wish I would have contacted one of the more intuiging geeks I know of: James Kendrick.
For the last few days, I’ve been trying to make the new Evernote Beta work for me. I absolutely love the idea of using the internet to keep my laptop and UMPC notes in sync. Plus, the concept of having them web accessible through any web browser is absolutely brilliant! I’ve just run into a few too many problems.
The formatting options are terribly limited in Evernote. First, the fact that I can’t mix ink and text is not a deal breaker, but I do this regularly enough that it’s a feature I would miss. Second, there is no support for dragging and dropping text within a note (I use this function all of the time in OneNote for indenting, organizing my thoughts, etc). And third, Evernote appears to use HTML formatting and so it does things I think are really ugly - as one example, it places unnaturally large breaks between body text and bullets. I’ve included a small portion of a screen shot (to avoid sensitive data) that illustrates the bullet issue.
This last complaint may seem like nitpicking, but I use spacing and formatting in my notes to provide structure, context, and meaning. Believe me, I’ve tried to be forgiving and make it work because I really like a lot of the other features of the software. OneNote is a very feature-rich application though and it looks like I will be sticking with it for now. Maybe some developer could write an interface for OneNote that emulates the tape and allows for the web functionality of the new version of Evernote.
The first time Josh Bancroft showed me his iPhone, he (half-way) jokingly said, “Let the countdown begin.”
“To what?” I replied.
“Until you buy one” he said.
Well, in the end, I chose the Touch over the iPhone, but Josh knew me well. :^)
Today I find myself wanting an Apple computer worse today than ever before. You want to know why? It’s so that I can play with the developer kit for the iPhone/Touch. I’m not a professional programmer by any means, but I am a hobbyist and I would love to play in the world’s newest mobile playground. Now if I could just convince my wife that I need an Apple computer worse than our kids need to go to Disney in May…
I spent the weekend (not-so-successfully) fighting the flu, and found some relief in distracting myself with reading. I downloaded the latest in a series I’m reading from Fictionwise in Microsoft Reader format and had the book on both my UMPC and my Pocket PC.
I have read dozens of books on different PDA’s and enjoy the format a good deal. This time, I read about 80% of the book on my UMPC because the I was able to consume more text on each screen and found that it was just easier on my eyes. I have included screen shots of the same text from my UMPC and the Pocket PC for comparison.
You should probably check out the full UMPC image here to get a real feel for what the text actually looks like on the device (since I had to scale it down to a reasonable width for the post).
As a true geek, I have an unhealthy appreciation for hardware just for hardware’s sake. It’s alright though, because I am seeking professional counseling. I have cut the number of trips I make each week to the Apple Store and Best Buy just to drool on the hardware in half and my counselor says I’m making fine progress. She tells me that most people do not share this addiction and that it is not healthy.The reality is that hardware alone is well…kind of boring for most folks. The hardware is like the engine in your car. It has inherent value and represents thousands of hours of engineering. Yet without a transmission and chassis, it will never get you where you want to go. As an integral part of a complete automobile, you must have all of the components working together to have any real value. Similarly, computers require a combination of hardware, software, drivers, etc working together to work properly.
Taking the automobile analogy a bit further, in the average consumers mind it’s the body of the car that gets most of the attention. The average car buyer is more concerned about how the car looks than the merits of the exhaust system. Similarly, in the computing world, it’s usually the software that gets most of the attention. User interface, usability, and eye candy are important at every level from the operating system to the web browser. A beautiful interface on barely adequate hardware will always have more consumer appeal than an inferior interface on the latest hardware offering.
It turns out my iPod Touch has a pretty good email client. Like every other email application in the world, it has a delete button for getting rid of your unwanted mail, but Apple implemented theirs with class. When you touch the trash can, the icon tilts to the side, the lid pops up, and your message is sucked down into the trash in an animated vortex that has never made spam more fun to delete! [I have included a video below for those who have never seen it - I apologize for the video quality] I introduce this as an example that well written software can be powerful, fun, and liberating. Many developers could take a few dozen lessons from the team at Apple (who clearly understand this concept).
The reality is that well written software is not as common as it should be. It takes time and effort to really think through the user interaction and implement it effectively. As a geek who likes to dabble in Visual Basic once in a while, I know how difficult it is to write extraordinary code. Salute to the software developers of the world who are willing to do it though…you’re making a difference!
I couldn’t stop wondering how well my Samsung Q1 would drive my new 23 inch monitor at work. So this afternoon, I hooked it up and took it for a test drive.
For business applications, it worked very smoothly and could easily be used for daily use. My guess is that the graphics engine on a 915GM chipset could easily be overwhelmed with this many pixels to drive. I didn’t try killing it, but suspect that you probably could with a couple of videos playing on a display this large.
If Samsung made a docking station for the Q1, I would use my UMPC even more than I do now (perhaps as my primary computer). It’s just a bit too much work to connect the VGA cable, USB keyboard and mouse, etc every time I get to my desk. The computer is very capable and I would love to do it, but I would need some sort of docking solution for it to be practical. So today’s experiment really falls into the W?BIC! category.
After reading Matt Miller’s post, I installed the latest update from Apple on my iPod Touch and I am VERY pleased to report that the bug with the time changing has been resolved! Now I can plug my iPod into my PC without having to kill iTunes first. Thank you Apple!
When I started this blog, I was much more interested in the concept of Ultra Mobile Personal Computing than Ultra Mobile Personal Computers. Now don’t get me wrong, I love the current UMPC hardware options, but I know we are only beginning to see what is possible here! More than the hardware, I am super excited about the possibilities of mobile computing moving forward.
I think the industry is getting hung up on definitions at this point and I fear that it may stand in the way of the progress of the concept. I personally consider smart phones, iPhones, PDA’s, MID’s, UMPC’s, and even subnotebooks to be ultra mobile computing platforms. They all have their merits and their drawbacks and each has their place in the market. My concern is that people who are not as geeky as me may get confused with all of these categories and delay their adoption.
All they know is that they want to be able to be productive while they are in the waiting room at the doctor’s office. Do they care what segment it falls into? I don’t think so. I think the whole industry needs to focus more on computing in general than on specific hardware verticals. That’s my two cents, you want to throw in yours?
I’ve been dealing with the date and time being wrong on my iPod Touch since I bought it. If you’re not familiar with the problem, I’ll give you a one sentence summary:
Under certain conditions (don’t know the specifics), when you sync your iPod Touch with your Windows XP computer, the time zone on the iPod defaults back to “Cupertino” and the time is randomly generated for some day back in November of 2007.
Although it doesn’t present a solution, it does present the workaround of closing iTunes before every sync then relaunching it after the iPod is already attached. This is working well for me and now I can finally synchronize my iPod with my coputer without messing up the time and date. I’ll be satisfied with this for a while, but I’m expecting Apple to fix this bug.
BTW, the other option of turning off daylight savings detection did not work for me.
I mentioned earlier that I recently picked up a iPod Touch. It truly is a great device and I’m using it a ton. It’s an average music player, a very good video player, and a great mobile internet device. I think Josh Bancroft hit the nail on the head that Apple was “pwned” the MID market by beating everyone else to the punch.
I love the Safari browser on the Touch. Using my finger to navigate web pages and flick the screen to scroll couldn’t be more natural. With the one exception of the inability to view Flash-based pages, it’s perfect. Even with that one (pretty significant) shortcoming, it’s still the best mobile browser I’ve ever used. I look forward to other platforms learning from the usability of the iPhone/Touch experience.
I’m also looking forward to the release of the SDK and hope that it will open a firestorm of sanctioned applications for the device. I think it would be great to get better PIM functionality and some productivity apps written for off-line use. Originally I thought that the soft keyboard would limit effectivness of this device as a mobile computing platform, but the keyboard works better than I thought. It is the perfect size and weight to replace any non-phone PDA on the market and I believe that it will.
So far, it’s great. I only really struggle with two things:
Should I have bought the iPhone instead?
I need a better answer for my son who keeps asking why we need 4 iPods in the house.
