Articles on Personal Computing

I’ve been lusting after a great tablet device for a long time. The iPad has its faults, but it’s the first that really appeals to me. Bottom line: I can’t wait to get one.

Is it an entirely new category of device, as some have claimed? It’s true, of course, that it’s not much more than iPod Touch Jumbo. From a technical perspective, it’s cool, but not earthshaking.

From the perspective of how it will be used, however, I think it will create a new category. It is the most intimate merger yet of computing and consumer electronics.

A Clear View, Not a Short Distance

A dozen years ago, I wrote an editorial for Microprocessor Report about tablets being the future of news, and suggested that they would become common living-room appliances. As futurist Paul Saffo is fond of saying, never mistake a clear view for a short distance. My vision was clear, but the distance was a decade more than I anticipated.

My previous startup, PhotoTablet, was founded to build a tablet that would be a consumer’s digital photo world. For a variety of reasons, it wasn’t realistic, and PhotoTablet turned into Fotiva, a software company.

So it was with some interest that I’ve watched the emergence of the iPad. As usual with any major Apple introduction, it was way overhyped by some of the press, and it’s been attacked by many in ways that just miss the point.

An iPod Touch Jumbo is enough for me, and I expect it will be quite successful. I think this will be an excellent living-room device. It feels (or, I should say, it looks like it will feel) much friendlier than a notebook computer for reading the news while drinking my morning coffee, or to share photos while sitting on the couch, or to casually look something up on the web while away from my computer.

I expect it will also give eBook readers a run for their money. Will users choose a dedicated device without color or video but with a lower price, longer battery life, and possibly an easier-on-the-eyes display, over one with many uses and color video? My gut is that most will not, and that over time Apple will match or exceed the available libraries for the dedicated devices.

Not Without Its Limitations

It does have a number of limitations, of course, but as the first member of a family it looks pretty darn good.

The limitation that frustrates me the most is the lack of Flash support, which makes Apple’s claim that this is the best Web experience ever just wrong. Apple could surely put Flash on it if it wanted to. The lack of Flash support must, I believe, indicate some sort of pissing contest between the two companies. There is no shortage of bad blood between Apple and Adobe, and there is every appearance that Apple would like to see Flash die, though I don’t understand their motivations.

I don’t see this as a business device, or as something I would take traveling. If I’m going to take something this big, I’d take my MacBook. It is not just the lack of a keyboard and physical protection, but the lack of multitasking and rich applications. I would take it over to a friend’s house to share pictures, though.

The Long Road

No company could have built a device like this from scratch. Apple was able to do it by cleverly extending its product range over an extended period.

The iPod started out as nothing more than a slightly better MP3 player, which was catapulted to dominance by its iTunes integration and great marketing.

Then Apple added the ability to play tiny videos.

The big leap was merging with a phone and adding applications, which initially were proprietary Apple apps only. Apple would have had a very hard time jumping into the phone business if it were not for the iPod, which gave lots of people a strong reason to buy an iPhone independent of its quality as a phone.

Then Apple opened up the App Store, and the iPhone became the most important new computing platform since the Mac and Windows.

And now Apple is leveraging all of that design evolution, and the momentum of the iPhone, to create the first really exciting consumer tablet.

It’s the kind of strategy that few companies have ever been able to execute on so well.

Videos and Entertaining Criticism

In case you haven’t seen it, here is the official video, which is full of hyperbole but gives a good feel for the new apps:

Of all the spoofs and criticism, I found this to be the funniest:

The Fake Steve Jobs live blog from backstage also has some nice comic relief.

And the name, of course, opens Apple up to all sorts of ridicule. Most amazing is that people started the jokes years ago, before there even was such a product; this MadTV video is more than three years old:

I’ve had HP printers for a long, long time, since the earliest LaserJets. The latest is an all-in-one printer/fax/copier that we bought a few years ago. It is the last HP machine I will buy until I hear that they have completely revamped their service department.

A month or so ago, my wife’s PC’s hard drive starting acting up. I replaced the drive and decided to take this opportunity to “upgrade” the machine from Vista to Windows XP. For some reason, the XP install decided that the machine’s built-in memory card readers were drives C, D, E, F, and G, and the hard drive was H. By the time I noticed this, I had reinstalled a bunch of apps, and although it is an odd configuration, everything worked fine. I did a brief google search looking for an easy way to change the drive letters, and it appears that there’s no easy solution for changing the letter assigned to the boot drive. So I decided to leave it.

The only problem I’ve had is with the drivers for the HP all-in-one printer. HP’s installer appears to be hardwired to look for drive C, and the install fails. I tried various tricks, even putting in a memory card into “drive C” and trying to install from there, but nothing worked. After hours of frustration, I decided to call HP service. That was the beginning of the real frustration.

Turning “service” into sales

After navigating through a circuitous voice menu system and waiting on hold, I finally got to a live person. After providing my serial number, they told me that they would be glad to help me, but that it would cost $35 since the printer was out of warranty. I asked if I would have to pay the fee even if they couldn’t resolve my problem, and the “support” (really sales) rep assured me that they would connect me with an expert who would work with me until the problem was resolved. With some trepidation, I agreed to the charge.

They then transferred me to a woman who seemed to be starting over. She had no idea what my problem was, or that I had paid for the service call. After another 20 minutes, we got this worked out, and started in on the actual problem.

She then launched into a sales pitch for how for “just a few dollars more” than the $35 service call fee they would exchange my printer for a new model and refund the service call fee. I asked how many dollars. She ignored my question and kept on with a pitch for the new printer. After asking literally five times for the exact price, she finally gave it to me: $250. That’s more than a few dollars above $35 in my book, and the printer works just fine with the other computers on which the driver software will install.

I told her I didn’t want to do the exchange, but wanted to solve the problem. After a very brief discussion, she concluded that my printer was just too old, and wouldn’t work with the “new” drivers, and that was my problem. This is total BS—the issue had nothing to do with compatibility between the drivers and the printer, and the driver software on their site was dated 2007, just a year newer than the printer. The problem is their software’s brain-dead installer can’t deal with the hard drive being something other than C. Not only could she not propose a workaround, she couldn’t seem to even understand the problem. Some expert.

She launched back into the sales pitch for selling me a new printer. At this point I said I wanted to speak to a supervisor. She tried again to get me to buy a new printer. I said I wanted to talk to a supervisor. She said none was available then, but one would call me back tomorrow.

“We’ll call you back”—never

I waited three days, and no one called. Finally I called back, went through another 10 minutes of voice menu hell, and explained the situation once again to a live person, who once again was no help. I asked for a refund on the service call fee, since they weren’t able to help me, and she said she had no way to do that. I asked again to talk to a supervisor, and she said one would call back.

No one ever did. After a few more days, I contested the charge with the credit card company and bought an Epson printer to use with that computer. It just wasn’t worth any more time or grief trying to get that printer working with that computer.

HP’s service operation is broken. They don’t understand what they’re talking about. They don’t seem to care about solving your problem. They push expensive upgrades on you even after you’ve paid for a service call. And the policy for responding to requests to speak to a supervisor seems to be to say one will call you back, but no one ever does.

My first job out of college was working at HP. I used to have a great respect for the company. I’ve been loyal to their printers for 20 years. And because of their ineffective and irresponsible service operation, I am unlikely ever to buy another one.

Update—HP Follow-Up

After a couple weeks, I started getting phone calls from HP folks in the U.S. who were apologetic and eager to help. I believe these calls originated from a complaint email I sent in, but maybe this blog post had something to do with it too.

By this point, I had replaced the printer, and all I wanted was a refund of the service call fee, which they gladly provided. In fact, they called back repeatedly when I was slow to gather the information I needed to give them. These people were typical of the HP of old (albeit engaged in damage control). If I could have reached them when I asked to speak to a supervisor the first two times, all of these problems would have been avoided.

One of the HP people I spoke with acknowledged that my problem with “someone will call you back” and then no one ever does has been an issue with this call center.

So my conclusion: HP has a big problem, not at the core, but with the way they have offshored their support. The offshore support organization does not reflect the values or quality of service for which HP has been known for decades. Maybe a better-managed offshore operation could solve these issues. Or maybe the savings from sending support offshore are offset by less tangible, but very real, costs. One cost: I remain disinclined to buy an HP product in the future, because I don’t want to have to deal with this support organization.

One of the curses of the computer age, especially for those of us who do development work, is the vast amount of detail that one has to keep track of. Among other things, there’s:

• The sites I like to read regularly
• The sites where there’s some tidbit that I just might want to find again some time
• The usernames and passwords to the dozens of sites I have accounts on
• My to-do lists for various projects
• Commands that I have a hard time remembering for administering my Linux hosting boxes
• Tips on something or other than someone gave me that I mean to follow up on someday

... and so on. I used to deal with all this with a combination of Outlook notes, word documents, post-its, and my increasingly unreliable memory. This all worked reasonably well as long as I stuck to one notebook machine, and one desk, as the center of my life.

I’ve been moving away from that approach, so I can be more mobile and use multiple machines without worrying about syncing. I’ve found a few tools that have been very helpful.

For sites I want to read regularly, RSS feeds of course are the answer. Add the feed to my feed reader, and the content comes to me automatically. (Of course, this changes the problem to one of too much stuff to read, but that’s inevitable.) I’m using FeedDemon as my feed reader, sync’d to a NewsGator Online account. This setup isn’t free ($29.95 for FeedDemon, plus $19.95 per year if you want the premium version of the online service), but I like the fact that I can read feeds offline or online and everything stays sync’d.

For those web sites I just want to remember in case I want to come back to them some time, I’m using del.icio.us for all my bookmarks. I use their Firefox plugin, which gives me one-click access to either add a bookmark or view my bookmarks. And now it doesn’t matter what browser I’m using, or what system I’m on—I always have the same bookmarks available.

For everything else, I’ve found 37Signals’ Backpack invaluable. I keep to-do lists for various personal projects there, and I use their “writeboards” (online documents) to keep all my miscellaneous notes. I’ve been training myself to always keep my notes there, so I always know where to look for them. I started off with one writeboard will all sorts of miscellaneous notes, and as it grew, I split it up and now have about a dozen different ones. There’s lots more that Backpack can do that I haven’t gotten to using yet. You can start with a free account, but I quickly hit its limit and splurged for the $9/month premium version.

I struggled with whether or not it was reasonable to keep a list of usernames and passwords on a writeboard. It is really convenient, but I’m sure security-minded folks would frown on it. I ended up with a compromise: I made up my own personal secret code, so what I record on the writeboard is not actual passwords, but a coded version that is easy for me to translate to the real thing but hopefully not so easy for someone who finds this data. I suspect this still isn’t really good enough; I’d prefer it if the information was encrypted on the Backpack server. One thing the premium account gives me is SSL access, so I feel a little more comfortable with some of the sensitive information I’m storing there.

For projects that involve multiple other people, I’m using Basecamp, also from 37Signals. I use it much like I use Backpack, but it allows me to manage a list of other people who have access to individual projects.

Do you have solutions to these problems that you’re happy with? Please leave a comment and share your approach.

A central presumption behind hosted applications is that Internet connectivity is becoming universal. There are some obvious problems with this presumption, such as when you’re on an airplane, or when your home Internet connection is down.

But there can be problems, even in the big city. Ironically, at the Web 2.0 Summit conference this week, the demand for connectivity completely swamped the hotel’s and the conference’s ability to supply it with any reliability or speed. Inside the conference rooms, free wireless connectivity was sponsored by AOL, but often I couldn’t get connected at all, and when I could connect it was painfully slow and erratic. Even on a wired connection in my hotel room at the Palace, the throughput was reminiscent of dial-up days. Apparently having more than 1,000 people paying $3500 a head to be there wasn’t enough to pay for an adequate Internet feed for this connectivity-hungry group.

As Paul Saffo from Insitute for the Future quipped many years ago, never mistake a clear view for a short distance. It’s easy to believe that someday IP connectivity will be as common and reliable as electricity, but we’re sure not there yet.

I’ve been using Outlook for a long time, for email, calendar, contacts, and notes. (I realize this may immediately lower your estimation of me, but at each step of the way it seemed a sensible thing to do for one reason or another—most recently because of Adobe’s edict that ‘thou shalt use Outlook’.) Now that I’m on my own, and trying to embrace the idea of hosted applications and transparent use of multiple computers to access a single source of data in the cloud, I’m working on weaning myself. So far, it’s been modestly successful.

For email, I wasn’t satisfied with any of the webmail clients offered by my hosting company; they just seemed too clunky. Gmail was attractive, but I didn’t want to give up using my personal domain. Then along came Google Apps for Your Domain, and now I have the best of both worlds. I still have my own domain name, but Google hosts my mail and provides a Gmail interface. I’ve been using this for a few weeks now and it has been working quite well.

I expected to feel a big loss in the quality of the interaction, but I haven’t. The AJAX interface is pretty responsive, although I have seen it fail from time to time. I’ve also been accustomed to filing my mail in an array of hierarchical folders, and Gmail’s “archive and then search” approach at first seemed limited. But then I realized that since I’ve had desktop search on my PC, I’ve found it easier to use that than to sort through the folders anyway. So now I have essentially the same behavior, my PC doesn’t have to spend cycles indexing my mail, and I don’t have to file any of it.

There are some things I miss, though:

• The Delete button (along with the Archive button and other controls) scrolls away when you scroll down a message. There’s another set at the bottom of the message, but for long messages, I find it a pain to have to scroll to get to the buttons. It would be nice if the buttons stayed put instead of scrolling away.

• I enabled the shortcut keys and learned a few of them, which reduces the need to scroll to find the buttons. But there seems to be no shortcut key for Delete—an action I use often. Google seems to want you to archive instead (for which there is a shortcut key), but I get a lot of mail that I just don’t see a reason to archive. Why should I archive daily news updates or mailing list postings when there’s a much better archive readily available online?

• The action I most frequently want to take when going through my mail is “delete and read the next message”. Since there’s no shortcut key for delete, this requires scrolling until the Delete button is visible, clicking the button (which returns you to the message list), and then clicking on the next message. I’d sure like to have a shortcut key that would do this.

• There’s no support for embedding images in HTML email. I really miss this.

• You can’t drag and drop a file from the file system into a message. You have to click Attach and then browse the file system, which I find to be slower.

• Typing names doesn’t automatically look them up in the contact list. If it is an address I’ve sent to recently, it appears in the type-ahead pop-up list, which works fine. But if it isn’t in this list, I have to go to contacts, find the person, and then start the email again.

I’m sure that many, if not most, of these limitations will be fixed in time, and so far I can live with them. Perhaps the most fundamental limitation is the inability to do anything off-line. With Outlook, I could read mail, write messages to be queued for later sending, and search existing mail, even if I was on an airplane or otherwise without a network connection. If I end up traveling a lot, I may start using Gmail’s POP3 option and going back to a desktop client at these times.

For my calendar, I’ve switched to Google Calendar. So far, this is working well, and I haven’t found anything I miss about the Outlook calendar (other than the frequent opportunity to swear at my computer). I like the quick entry mode of Google calendar—you can type “Lunch November 15 at 12:00” and it will put it on your calendar. And I love being able to easily share my calendar with my wife.

The Outlook calendar as used at Adobe is a complete mess. It’s model of managing meeting invitations by sending messages back and forth, and then storing state information independently in each client, is a horrible idea and has caused no end of grief for hundreds of people there. Not only do you get a constant stream of calendar notices to which you have to respond, but the system is full of bugs (for example, sometimes marking the recipient’s time as busy even when a calendar event invitation says to mark it as free) and limitations (e.g., meetings you’ve declined are gone forever and there’s no easy way to change your mind). This is an application that should be centralized, not distributed in this way. Being out of a big organization now, my needs are much simpler, so I’m certainly not stressing the Google Calendar to the degree I stressed Outlook. But so far, so good.

The two other things I use Outlook for, contacts and notes, surprisingly haven’t been quite as obvious how to switch over to hosted solutions. Gmail will import the Outlook contacts, but it is clearly designed just for an email address list and isn’t adequate as a general-purpose contact manager. Plaxo seems like one possibility, but I’m still looking.

As for notes, I’m converting tem to a series of documents in my Basecamp account, but this doesn’t feel quite right yet.

For more than 10 years, I’ve arranged my computing around a single notebook PC that went with me everywhere. With docks, monitors, and keyboards at home and in the office, this was a pretty good solution. It avoided having to install software on multiple systems, and it ensured that I had everything I needed wherever I was.

This strategy began to fall apart for me largely because of my photo collection. With about 60,000 photos, I can’t fit them all on any notebook disk drive. For about a year, I carried an external drive with my notebook. Then it was two external drives. And then one of them died. I had everything backed up, but this drove home the fragility of this solution. Plus I wanted a higher performance system than a notebook can provide for working with large images, especially panoramas, and I wanted a system that my family could use to access all the photos even if I’m traveling with my notebook PC.

Going out on my own also added another set of issues and opportunities. Now that I’m freed from the dictates of corporate IT, I no longer need to use the accursed Outlook calendar, and I can craft my own IT solutions.

So I decide to move as much as I could to hosted solutions, so my data lived independently of any of my computers. I’ll chronicle this effort in a series of follow-up posts.