tech ronin

OMG: Cheap Nokia 770 Internet Tablet

Announced today at Linuxworld in NYC. Has someone finally gotten it that smaller is better and we need some screen real estate? And could that someone possibly be Nokia? Due 3rd quarter. Big 4.13" screen with 800x480 pixels. Weighs 8 oz. (230 g). $350.

Runs Debian Linux 2.6 and Gnome UI. Has wi-fi and bluetooth. 64 mb RAM. 128 mb flash RAM. Arm Processor. Travel charger included. MMC slot instead of SD slot, but hey?

Unix geeks sure are gonna love this. I can't imagine this not being a huge success. Runs an OS called maemo much of which is open source based.

And there's no cellular wireless - at all. VOIP is planned to be released Q1 2006. This is way outside the box for Nokia. Let 'er rip! Where are you Apple?

UPDATE: Runs a 220 mhz ARM processor. There's word from the show floor here that it's slow. That could be a deal breaker for lots of people. My thoughts. Interesting that Nokia, by not using cellular wireless gets out of the grips of the carriers. And supports WiFi. Taking away power from the carriers is always good by me. I like the open platform Linux play. At this price, a lot of people who want some screen real estate might just try it even if a little slow.

Link: Mobileburn.com

Technorati Tags: debian, gnome, handhelds, linux, mobility, wireless

Resisting the Palm Lifedrive

OK. I found a Lifedrive in stock and on display at my local CompUSA in San Rafael. I like it.

It's big. Tall like a Tungsten 5 and thicker than an iPod by a little. But still very appealing. It feels light though and still seems like I could handle having it in a jeans pocket which is the acid test.

I almost bought it last night. I was right on the edge imagining the whole scenario. Here's why I was tempted and what stopped me:

4 gig hard drive. We need more and more room these days to handle our music, photos, eBooks and movies. This is more like it. Give me some room people. Think of this as a portable hard drive.

SD Slot. How many portable hard drives come with an SD slot I ask? Unlike the iPod which has a hard drive but no slot, this thing can take my cards from my camera directly. I can exchange any data from my hard drive with my card. That's a huge improvement and I am hoping this device will finally push Apple into adding a slot to the iPod. It seems obvious why the iPod doesn't have a slot. It would make it too easy to trade music and would reduce people's willingness to buy the DRMed music sold at the iTunes store. But you can only get away with that for so long. Anything called an iPod photo should have an easy way to acquire photos.

Wi-fi. Wi-fi is perfect for a device that has large storage capacity because it allows for higher bandwidth data transfer than Bluetooth. I can synch and transfer files easily using wi-fi which is a technology I'm familiar with and that has a much better track record and adoption rate than Bluetooth. And it has Bluetooth if you want it for headsets and what not.

Easier. The file management of the LifeDrive is unparalleled for a Palm device. Synching is much better with dragging folders instead of the mysterious synch process that we've inured ourselves to all these years. Drive mode is cool. And I'm looking forward to easily storing my camera pix on the hard drive when I need more room.

Big Screen. Of course, a 640x480 is what I really want, but this 320x480 is a hell of lot better than the crappy 240x320 screens most PocketPCs have and is 50% more screen real estate than my Zire. It works great sideways too which really helps for web browsing in particular.

Excellent Design. This thing is kind of big, but it's very, very appealing. The rounded bottom with mesh is cool. The minimalist front is great. It feels good in your hand.

But, of course, there are downsides that at least slowed me down and kept me from making the purchase last night:

Barely fits in a pocket. It is rather large and since it is a focused device, I have to consider whether I will have room for it. I'm also going to be carrying a cell phone for sure and would like to carry an iPod. Lately, though, I just use an iPod shuffle and leave my *big* iPod at home. Hmmm...

Pricey. This is the early adopter price. $399 would have been so much easier to impulse buy. What do I get for the extra $200 over the original Zire 72? Uh 50% more screen, a 4 gig hard drive and wi-fi. It's worth it. Think of this as competing with a 2-slot PDA except the second slot is better than a slot -- it's a 4 gig hard drive. I think a nice combination. You know those 1 or 2 gig SD cards aren't free. A 2 gig card will set you back $175+.

Tiny 32 mb RAM. That just seems small given the price of memory. But, I'm sure it will still work just fine since it runs off the hard drive.

Garnet. Wither Cobalt support? Maybe Cobalt is not happening. But, there's a small hesitation associated with purchasing what may be one of the last devices that runs the now old OS 5.

Limited battery life. I haven't really looked into this enough yet. More life would be better, but it will probably suit my needs as long as I *dock* it at night. As long as it can run a 2-1/4 hour movie, I'm set. Oh, and the non-replaceable battery is uncool but was probably dictated by space and design considerations. I can see the battery issues being a deal-breaker for quite a few people.

It's Slower. When I used it, it seemed fine. But fine isn't a big compliment in our always rushed world. All of this is due to the fact that the OS runs from the hard drive, not RAM. The 32mb RAM is used strictly as cache to help speed up what would otherwise be a very draggy experience. One of the signature features of the Palm handheld has always been instant on - instant responsiveness. The Lifedrive is more like the slower PocketPCs according to BargainPDA's in depth review. I'll have to think twice before buying a handheld that's slower than my Zire 72. Feels like going backwards.

If you love the Palm platform and want wi-fi, a slot and an unprecedented amount of storage space, definitely try out a Lifedrive in your local store -- you'll probably be swayed. I'm hoping the Lifedrive will meet with success because I'm a Palm fan and I still feel the need for a pocket computer with a large screen. If I wasn't still considering buying a Treo 650, I would be a Lifedrive owner right now.

Links:
Extended Review at PDA 24/7

Technorati Tags: handhelds, lifedrive, mobility, Palm, PalmOne, PDA

ecto 2.3.4 Rocks with more Automator actions

I must say, I love the way things have been going with ecto, the most powerful desktop blogging tool on the planet. Adriaan Tijsseling is the ultimate creative, hard-working programmer.

His latest is major support for Automator actions. He's got a ton of them and I applaud the effort. Excellent decision because it strengthens ecto's hand as the geek's choice for blogging. And, it doesn't hurt user friendliness one bit for the non-geek.

ecto has moved out in front of Marsedit again. For me, that means Marsedit will be sitting in the dock neglected but not too far away if I need it.

Another cool thing with ecto is Adriaan's implementation of tagging. He's got it going. He grabs your tags from del.icio.us and Flickr and shows them in a handy side bar as an option to showing your categories. Also, if you have your focus in the tags sub-area, you can start typing and it will go to an existing tag or create a new one if nothing starts with those letters.

ecto has it's own personality that reflects Adriaan's passion for developing the best possible blogging app. Great stuff!

Another of many examples is the Add Link dialog in ecto. The thing is amazing. Right from the dialog, you can subscribe to the link you are creating with either NetNewsWire or PulpFiction. And you can post the link to del.icio.us!

It would be so easy for Adriaan to settle for making the best possible cross-platform blogging tool -- mostly limiting innovation to areas that work on both Windows and OS X. He so doesn't do this. His work on Automator actions is just one example.

Marsedit lags behind in Mac functionality such as Automator Actions, even though it is a Mac-only app. In a way, Marsedit's role is to take advantage of ecto's bleeding edge work, delivering the *best of ecto* from a minimalist and easy UI point of view. And, I would have to say that the extra time taken on Marsedit does give you more bugfree, stability sometimes. Being the early adopter, though, I love to play in Adriaan's sand box. I have a choice. If I just need to get something out and don't want the bells and whistles, I'll use Marsedit. Otherwise, right now it's ecto.

Technorati Tags: knowledgesharing, blogging, socialsoftware, tagging, Automator, ecto, Macintosh

I'm a pen freak too

I don't feel bad about being very particular about the pens and notebooks I write with. It gives me pleasure and I am a designer (software design, but still), so it figures I would be picky.

Here's the pen I like best and use at the moment. This Pilot Q7 gel pen sells for $3.48 at my local Staples. I would pay more, but I'm glad I don't have to. I can afford to have plenty around so I've got one wherever I need one.

These guys can use the vaunted Pilot G2 cartridges if you prefer. I like the .5 mm Q7 cartridges better, but that's just me. I haven't heard anyone else talking about my favorite pen so I thought I would mention it.

By the way, I used to be a Dr. Grip freak, but that enthusiasm ran out and now I'm into these. Whatcha gonna do? It's only a pen, but to me it's one of those small frequent pleasures that costs little but adds a lot.

Oh yeah, one more thing on the pen/notebook fetishists. I have to believe that these people need to be writing. Blogging has been the perfect thing for me. If you love pens and notebooks - a lot. That's you sidling up to the possibility of doing a lot more or more serious writing or sketching.

Technorati Tags: blogging, gel, moleskine, notebooks, Palm, pens, Q7, rollerball, writing

Delivr Flickr postcards to your friends

This little Delivr web app, not by the Flickr folks but using Flickr photos, will make a postcard out of any selected Flickr public photo. You first choose from the 600,000 available images and then type in a message and your intended recipient's email address. The card received has a link back to the original Flickr photo page in case you want to download a higher rez version. Slick!

Technorati Tags: Flickr | Delivr | postcards | photos | photography | digital photography | photo sharing |

Del.icio.us fills the gap in my knowledge sharing toolkit

I'm a late-adopter when it comes to Del.icio.us. Actually, today is the first day I've really used it correctly. It's not all my fault, I've never seen a decent Del.icio.us tutorial that made it accessible to people like me who don't have time or patience to futz around indefinitely or even for a few extra minutes.

Also, probably one reason it took me a while is that I didn't particularly appreciate the plain-jane del.icio.us UI. But, yesterday I found Cocoalicious and, other than the fact that it too has no documentation to speak of, it looked cocoa-good. So I futzed with it long enough to figure out how to post the pages I like and appreciate to del.icio.us - simply and easily. Yay!

Cocoalicious also functions as a webpage viewer for all my Del.icio.us links. And I've selected Cocoalicious as my NetNewsWire weblog. This is working.

This is a breakthrough. Up till now I had two choices when I ran across a cool post: (1) copy it into my own personal knowledge-stash in DEVONthink or (2) blog about it. Since I don't have the time to blog about every cool post I find, I've been opting for the solitary, hoarding route of putting the full content of each article I like into DT, telling myself I might use the info in a blog piece some time in the future.

But now I have a fantastic third option. I can share what I find by posting annotated links to del.icio.us. And I can still collect it in DT if I must -- I love to use multiple colored highlighters in DT as I read stuff.

Del.icio.us provides the ultimate light way of sharing. Cocoalicious, by the way, makes it a snap to do. So, I can now say that, if you like tech ronin, you might well want to subscribe to my delicious feed or just take a look once in a while because I find a lot of cool stuff and am tagging and bagging it to share - starting today.

Technorati Tags: cocoalicious, del.icio.us, DEVONthink, knowledgesharing, sharing, socialsoftware, tagging

My New Personalized Google Homepage

Google Homepage released tonight. I personalized my page within minutes. First kid on the block almost. This is a My Yahoo killer I'm afraid.

Google Homepage has the Google search at the top and then Gmail, weather, driving directions, movies (IMDB) and local show times by zip. For the time being, they've only got a few big name feeds: New York Times, BBC, Wired, Google News and Slashdot. But RSS feeds are coming en-masse soon (1-2 weeks).

The homepage is Google cool, actually. The look is classic Google minimalist with pretty colors. But they are using up way too much screen real estate at the top. Whitespace is nice, but I wanna use that space to see more feeds. The UI is well done, though. You can simply drag feeds around on the screen and they move - instantly - so you can arrange your feeds on the page and keep rearranging until you get your news just the way you want it. For now at least, you only see headlines and can select how many headlines (1-9) that you want to see for each feed.

Google is a formidable competitor and they have taken the gloves off. Yahoo! will just have to deal. I wish them luck - they'll be needing it.

One thing Sergey said about this Google offering is that they wouldn't have done a copy-cat to My Yahoo! -- they wouldn't do it if they couldn't add something new. I'll be watching this one. Now, get on over if you haven't yet to see it before they put ads on there.

GoogleHomepage

Technorati Tags: Google | Google Homepage | Yahoo | My Yahoo | Search | Portal | News | RSS | Slashdot | feeds |

37Signals' Backpack Breaks New Ground

After reading lots of favorable commentary, I signed up for a free Backpack account. Backpack is one of the very few web apps that achieves a responsiveness that is similar to what I expect from the desktop. It's the most responsive web app I've ever used. And, as a result, my Backpack main page is now my Safari 2 home page.

The 37Signals folks are using a new and better approach called AJAX which produces an unprecedented level of responsiveness. That's huge, but, equally important, 37Signals is religious about simplicity, minimalism and end-user control. Here's what they say in their manifesto:

You should make the rules. Most information management tools are riddled with mandatory fields, complex multi-step processes, and specialized "buckets" for data. ... Backpack adjusts to organize things your way. It's a blank slate that offers you less structure and more space....

Clear, Simple, and Fast. At the heart of Backpack is simplicity and clarity. Things work the way you'd expect them to work. Everything complex has been tossed so the tool is simple to the core. In fact, nothing takes more than a few seconds. Our "Ajaxed" interface elements eliminate reloading hassles. Backpack gives you the benefit of the web (centralized access, no install, no IT nightmares) without the downsides of the web (reloads, slowdowns, poor interfaces). - 37Signals

Up till now, we haven't been able to do some things that Backpack makes possible:

Create web pages without HTML. Backpack has got to be the quickest, simplest way I've ever seen to put up good-looking, modifiable webpages.

Share daily life/work information without extra fuss. You create a little list and notes for yourself in a couple minutes, but that list is an editable webpage that you can share with specific friends, family, co-workers or clients or the general public.

37Signals is pitching Backpack as a PIM that happens to be online. It lets you create lists, notes and reminders and add images and files as you like. The idea seems to be that we've never had the flexibility to share these kinds of things at will so we won't really know what value that represents until we start just using the tool. Then we'll run into places we want to share stuff.

I don't have immediate and obvious needs to share my lists and what not. After all, I've already got a blog where I can do most of that. So I've been evaluating whether I want an online PIM rather than or in addition to the great desktop tools I already have.

Besides the aforementioned exceptional look, feel and responsiveness, what I'm liking so far:

The List Checkboxes are slick. First, you get them with every list item automatically. Then, when you check off an item, it goes to the bottom in gray and smaller and checked off. And there's a little trashcan there if you want to delete it.

Notes are cool too. Each note has a subject which appears in a nice bold and then the separate body of the note. You can put bulleted and numbered lists in your notes along with images and links to web pages.

No synching!!! Great for people like me who use two computers regularly. The first time I went to my PowerMac, it was sure great that my Backpack stuff was right there and I could edit or add things knowing they would be synched without synching on my Powerbook when I started using it again later.

You are backed up. OK. I backup my really important work-related stuff pretty religiously, but not the rest. You’ve got a built-in, automatic and trouble-free backup all the time.

It's got tags. At the moment, tagging is hot. So, I'm glad it's here in this 1.0 release. Haven't tagged a thing yet, but hey, I'm just getting started.

This might work. Adequate. Now, add the benefits of sharing:

Sharing is the new killer app. A tool/environment that is selectively shareable. You are in an instantly shareable and invite-your-friends-to-edit environment all the time. D. Keith Robinson says it: “You can send or share pages with people, thus allowing them into a bit of your world as needed.”

It’s like a wiki but better. Simple syntax to accomplish bullets, numbered lists, links, blockquotes, bold, italics and such.

In place editing. Unlike a wiki page where you edit the whole page or not at all, this little guy has sub-areas that you edit. The edit link appears in bright orange when you hover over something editable. Cool!

What O'Reilly Radar calls "round-trip format for Backpack content: Backpack → Email → Backpack is a breakthrough. I can email Backpack pages to myself or others and they look like they did online. Then, while offline perhaps, I can edit the email and email it back to update the page when I'm back online. Yeah.

Sending reminders to your cell phone and mobile access isn't half bad either.

Downsides:

If you haven't planned ahead and can't get online at the moment, you don't have access to your stuff. Most of us still have offline moments. Backpack works better when you are online at will. And, god forbid, the service could be down.

There's a small privacy risk when I work on stuff that is just for me and that I don’t want others to see. Yes, if everything goes right, it is protected. But, ever heard of chaos theory? Things don't always go according to plan.

A wysiwyg desktop tool would still be easier to use if you want any formatting. Backpack's markup language is great, but can't beat wysiwyg. Geeks will love Backpack, but will everyone else?

Less is more and all that, but I've still got feature requests. And, the more features added, the harder it is for 37Signals to keep things dead simple. I need:

A way to reorder my notes. Right now, unless I'm missing something, there's no reorder feature and my most recent notes go to the bottom of the list. Couldn't you just add the reorder buttons that work so well in lists to notes?

To be able to drag photos in. You too Flickr! This works on the desktop, so I want it here too. I'm afraid this feature requires excessive back flips but it sure would be nice.

To be able to move my content from one page to another easily. To refactor as a I figure out what I want to share. Once again, drag and drop would be perfect.

Lower prices. OK, I'm spoiled by Flickr pricing, but it sure would be nice if the highest level Backpack account was $5 a month instead of $19 and that the second from the top level was $24.95 a year. I know these are good deals for commercial users, but in order for this place to be the ideal play pen, we need plenty of elbow room to experiment. Raise the rates later if you must but not while we are still getting our feet wet. How about a 2-month trial period at Flickr prices?

As I've said before (Collaborative Environments), as a tech-enabled free agent (ronin), I need to be able to work and collaborate virtually. And I don't want a lot of corporate crap and control layered on top. Backpack feels like the perfect next step in this direction.

Update May 17, 2005: I just upgraded to the $9 a month package with 100 pages. Couldn't wait.

My Public Backpack Page

Technorati Tags: Backpack | Collaborate | Virtual | Ajax | 37Signals | PIMs | wiki | Social Software | folksonomy | tagging |

Should you Upgrade to Tiger Yet?

Conventional wisdom in the technical world is that you should not buy a brand new major OS upgrade first thing. There are a number of good reasons for this:

• Once the OS is widely distributed - it gets far more testing with different configurations and uses and bugs are inevitably found. If you wait until at least the first revision which is probably coming out in a week or two, Apple will have a few of those bugs fixed and you'll be able to start out with a more bug free system.
• Some third party software makers won't be 100% compatible on day 1 of a major release. Even though compatibility, judging by the published compatibility lists (which you should check by the way), are showing high levels of compatibility, a favorite or even crucial application for you might not be compatible - yet. Good compatibility lists already exist such as the one at Macintouch, so check them before you throw the switch.
• The bleeding edge early adopters like me will learn a bunch in the first few weeks of Tiger's release and you can benefit from their knowledge.
• If you are operating in a mission critical, rush sort of environment where there's no room for error or new learning curve - early adoption is a bad idea.

However, if you haven't upgraded yet, maybe you've waited long enough. Check the compatibility checklists to see which of your applications are incompatible. If you have two computers, consider upgrading one of them. But why? Only a couple reasons which may or may not be compelling for you:

• You can't find stuff on your hard drive. If you have a number of things you've been looking for and not finding, you might want to upgrade so that you can use Spotlight to find them. Even if you don't, it may be that in the first week of using Tiger, you'll find some stuff you've been looking high and low for. And that value may be high. High enough to outweigh the downsides to upgrading early.
• You are curious and excited about playing with the newest version of the coolest desktop operating system on the planet.
• You want to learn Tiger early because you will be sharing your knowledge with the slow adopters and want to start up the learning curve.
• There's a second computer available that's running Panther that you could use if you can't get a particular function to work in Tiger.

A reasonable middle position, if you are eager to upgrade, is to wait until the first upgrade, 10.4.1, which is rumored to be in the works and expected to be out some time in the latter half of May. However, if you have some of the reasons above to upgrade, you don't see compatibility problems that concern you on the list and you have some kind of backup plan if you run into problems, go for it!

Here's my situation. I have 3 Macs. (1) A dual 867 PowerMac running a recent version of Panther which I rarely use. It's kind of a backup computer right now, (2) A 2 ghz dual PowerMac that I use pretty regularly for heavy lifting and (3) my Powerbook that is my main computer.

I upgraded my Powerbook as soon as Tiger was released. I checked the compatibility list on Macintouch and it looked OK for what I use. About a week later, I upgraded my 2 ghz PowerMac. I've run into some little glitches and questions where I needed to research the issue to figure out how to move forward. But I'm really enjoying my new powerful operating system and getting better with it every day. To me, I'm getting the payoff I was looking for by being an early adopter.

I have bootable clones of both Tiger machines (immediately prior to the upgrade) stored safely and am keeping current backups of those machines. It's nice that there is another machine handy running Panther if I should run into a problem and so far I haven't had to touch it for anything.

Don't just cross your fingers and throw the switch. But if you do a little homework and consider what I've told you here and still want to go ahead with it. You have my blessings. ;-)

Technorati Tags: Macintosh, Mac, Tiger, 10.4, OS X, OSX

Automator is Working for Me

I didn't realize that I had given up on something like Automator a long time ago. Now that it is here, I see how much I've missed a simple, programming-free automation tool like this. Automator might be my favorite Tiger feature. Apple calls it "your very own robot."

There are a whole bunch of cool little actions that are represented as modular chunks (boxes) with various options for each.

Today I made my first little Automator workflow to name photos and also sequentially number them. With two Actions tied together, my workflow lets me enter the name I want, the starting number and how many digits I want for the number. Do I want two digits like 01, 02, 03 or three digits like 001, 002, 003.

Here's how I used it: I went through my unsorted photos folders and started finding groups of photos. I had about 25 of Burlington, Vermont from January. So, I just selected those photos that had names like Pict001, Pictoo2 etc and Typed Burlington into the New Name entry field, left the starting number at 1 and checked the box and entered a 2 to make all numbers 2 digits long.

Automator showed me I would get something like this: Burlington_01.xxx. Perfect! Then I just clicked the Play button and it renamed the photos in 3 or 4 seconds. I proceeded through several other photo sets to give them more descriptive names. Fantastic. I thought of doing this before but never had a tool this cool and easy to do it with. Yay! These are my kind of legos.

In the Automator window, you can select the Finder application and then see all sorts of actions you can take in the Finder. Here are a few favorite actions that look promising:

Add Spotlight Comments to Finder Items
New Text File
Create Archive
Get Specified Finder Items
Label Finder Items
Set the Desktop Picture
Rename Finder Items

Here's a sample: a single action box for Get Contact Information:

Then there are other items for different applications. Here are some interesting ones for a start:

New iCal Events
Get Contact Information (shown above)
Take Picture (Image Capture)
New mail Message
Group mailer
New iPod Note
Set Info of iTunes Songs
Play iTunes Playlist
Subscribe to Feeds with URLs (NetNewsWire)
Add Grid to PDF files
Copy to Clipboard
Set Computer Volume
Text to Audio File
Get Text from Webpage (Safari)

This should give you some idea that there is a ton of possibility in here that will be accessible to those of us who have only a little bit of inclination or time for this sort of thing.

This is perfect for me. I can program if absolutely necessary, but I don't have the time. That's why I've used FileMaker Pro to develop systems rather than a lower level programming language. I would rather use a tool that eliminates the fussiness of programming and helps me get the job done in a hurry. A tool that is a lot more accessible than a programming or even scripting language.

I won't be giving up FileMaker, but Automator will be a first-rate addition without me having to take specialized training to use it (FileMaker Inc. announced today that they "are planning on leveraging Automator's approach to streamlining repetitive tasks"). I'll just play with Automator, get results, experiment and see what others have done and use the stuff I like that is out there for me and customize it. Like that.

By the way, you can combine workflows calling an individual workflow by a larger workflow and you can call AppleScripts for any heavy lifting you might need. I'll leave the AppleScripting to those who enjoy that sort of thing but my guess is that since Automator can take advantage of AppleScript, there will be more demand for good AppleScripts for specific needs since they can be embedded into simple workflows.

Well worth the wait. And fun!

Links:

• Engadget has a great little instructional post showing how to create a simple Automator workflow that takes a selection of news and blogs and outputs them as audio to an iPod. If any of this sounds interesting, check it out.
• Doug Adams has Volume 1 of his iTunes Automator Actions available. His Make AAC tracks bookmarkable action is a must.

Technorati Tags: Automator, FileMaker, OS X, programming, Tiger