tech ronin

Rumored Palm LifeDrive Looks Interesting

Hey. I just saw this unannounced Palm handheld on Engadget yesterday (with additional pix). They found it on Amazon. Major feature besides the cool design is that it sports a 4 gig drive. Also a 416 mhz Xscale processor, WiFi and Bluetooth. Understated elegance. Wonder what it would be like to have a Palm with a 4 gig hard drive. Amazon is listing it for a May 18 launch.

In some ways a Palm with a hard drive makes perfect sense. It gives you a lot of room for all those photos you are taking. And a large screen (320 x 480) to view them on unlike the much smaller iPod photo screen. And the cool thing is that this thing almost certainly has a slot somewhere (hope and pray for that one). If so, it will work great for exchanging photos and music. It would be cool if it has a standard high-speed USB 2.0 port that could connect to other devices too (I'm not expecting it, but it sure would make sense.).

I can't see a camera on it, but maybe Palm figures you've got that in your phone already (which would be a reasonable assumption for the type of customer who would buy this).

Lately, a lot of people have been going back to analog for the note taking function with Moleskines and 3x5 cards (probably helped along by the removal of graffiti 1 by the way), but some are still using their dedicated handhelds as a mobile reference store. Mike Rohde was just saying yesterday that he uses his Palm as mostly a read only device these days. A way to carry around a library of books, RSS feeds and other reference materials and maybe a few songs.

Just when the non-cell Palm handheld was losing life, this new 4-gig device shows up in the nick of time. I look forward to trying it out.

Technorati Tags: handheld, mobility, Palm, personal technology

Dashboard: I think I'll keep it

Sean Billig's Wikipedia Widget is my favorite so far. I get my own personal wikipedia desktop search. Full-text and graphics of any wikipedia article plus saved searches so I can go back to what I'm most interested in or to what I'm following at the moment.

Downside. I can't copy stuff out of it. [Update: Sean has already added the ability to copy as of May 5 - yay!]. Pleasant surprise, I can enter edit mode for the wiki page I'm looking at with a single click, either.

I went over to Sean's widget's page and read up on this widget. There's quite a lot more polishing in the works.

Although kind of mundane, my second favorite widget so far is the Addressbook. Anything that makes it easier to get a quick phone number is welcome. It doesn't hurt to be able to see a monthly calendar, a pretty clock and the local weather with a single click.

Third favorite widget which is cooler than the addressbook is the Dictionary/Thesaurus. Any blogger needs one. Can't say I appreciate the twenty-something Americans comment here, though.

And, of course, the Yahoo! local traffic widget is necessary to help me decide how early to leave when I take off somewhere. I set mine to monitor traffic within 4 miles because if I go to 10 miles I get San Francisco traffic which I usually don't need. I can see how it's in the interest of the various information websites like Yahoo! to have a widget. It gives you value and gives them priority placement on your computer screen. win-win.

I hope they'll make it resizable, though. It takes up a post-it notes' block of space and I want it smaller. There's only so much dashboard real estate, so the best widgets will win giving an incentive to widget-makers to improve their value propositions.

There's a ton of widgets out there. The flores widget that adds flower stalks as gmail comes in is outside the box amazing! Flidget, by Red Panda Studios uploads your images to Flickr! along with any tags and Dashlicious looks promising.

What's cool about Dashboard in general is:

1. It opens a new and easy Mac development avenue for those who like to do their coding in css and javascript. A way to excite and leverage the creativity of Apple's userbase.
2. It gives Mac users a virtual desktop, albeit specialized, to stash little apps in.
3. It provides a mechanism to easily access web services.

Your first reaction to Dashboard may be a sort of shock. We aren't used to the UI chaos that a gaggle of widgets is. Without guidelines, these widgets are all over the place. Fortunately, they are simple things, so it doesn't take too long to figure out how they work. The advantage of this chaos is that it leaves lots of room for developers to experiment. My guess is that the chaos will die back a bit given a little time. Meanwhile, chaos is the price of innovation and you get to decide which widgets meet your aesthetic and usefulness criteria.

Technorati Tags: Dashboard, Tiger, OS X, Macintosh, Mac

Tiger vs. Longhorn, Small is Beautiful

I cloned my Powerbook with SuperDuper! (I like it) and did an erase and install and then a transfer from my clone Saturday afternoon. My machine feels more solid (clean installs probably don't hurt) and faster. This is excellent. I've played with new features a tiny bit and am happy to have what feels like a new Powerbook. This is definitely working for me.

I've read most of the geeky but excellent and very educational Ars Technica Tiger piece by John Siracusa and was reading a Washington Post article about Longhorn this morning. It looks to me that, unless something changes radically, OS X is going to run rings around Longhorn. The reason is that Microsoft has to move a mountain to innovate and Apple doesn't. Microsoft is trying to move a gigantic code/installed/legacy base forward and keep nearly everyone on the planet (their customers) happy. That isn't likely to lead to rapid innovation. I know, duh! but reading the details about Tiger's technical virtuosity and potential really made this all so clear.

Microsoft has tons of money and programmers to throw at Longhorn. But, ever since The Mythical Man-Month came out 20 years ago, we've known about the severely diminishing returns you get when adding programmers to a development project.

Apple is small and agile relative to Microsoft and I believe that agility will serve well in the OS wars ahead. Now if only Apple would start acting like the good, cluefull citizen it is capable of being, the tiny crack we are seeing in the wall of Microsoft might begin to open up.

Technorati Tags: Macintosh, Mac, Tiger, 10.4, OS X, Microsoft, Longhorn, SuperDuper!