November 01, 2006
GLX Stereo Visuals
Oh yeah, I'm really glad that 51 MB of bandwidth was used up so I could have GLX Stereo Visuals! I was dying over here without them. That definitely could not wait until the next major OS patch. Or Leopard. Yeah! Wooooo. Hoo.
Posted by billo at 05:40 PM | Comments (0)
October 30, 2006
Things that bother me about Ruby
I'm getting past that initial infatuation stage with Ruby. At first, you love a new language. It seems so perfect, flawless. The creators are geniuses! You want to use it for everything, especially that pet project you've been meaning to get to. It would be so easy with [insert new language name here], she is so fantastic!
As with any relationship, it's important to communicate with your partner about flaws you see in each other.
OK, Ruby, you know I love you, but here are some things that really bother me:
1. The community web infrastructure stinks. A very large percentage of the time, when I need to go check online doc or whatever for Ruby, the ruby site is down. And, when it's not down, it's S-L-O-W.
2. Ruby is slow. Face it. It is. If you have anything computationally intensive to do, forget it. And don't tell me to implement those things in C and make Ruby wrappers for them. If I wanted to go back to 1991 and write in C (those were good times, C, we're still friends, right?), I would do that. There's no justifiable reason by an interpreted languages should be so slow in straight line execution. I know, programmer time is much more valuable than CPU time, but when you eventually scale to needing several hundred machines or so, it's not true anymore. Price out hardware, rack space, power and cooling for 200 servers and think about how much programmer time you could buy for that.
3. The online doc needs a lot of work. While there are some great tutorials (e.g. from why the lucky stiff), the online reference doc is weird (four-part scrolling frames? ew.) and incomplete. This one will take the most time to work itself out.
4. The cult of 37signals and rails. I like rails; it's once of the nicest web app development frameworks I've seen. And I really like the software that 37signals has created. Those guys are smart programmers and designers, and I would hire them if given the chance. But there's a certain arrogance/contrived wisdom building up there. At work, we've actually had people comment on our UI in some (generally clueless) way, and cite 37signals philosophy as backing them up. Now, I wouldn't say that everything we do on our product is the greatest UI or idea. In fact, our development process and philosophy is very similar to that espoused by the "Getting Real"™ crowd. My annoyance stems from the fact that "you should be like 37signals" becomes a euphamism for "i don't like your UI."
I'm just old and cranky.
Posted by billo at 03:44 PM | Comments (0)
October 26, 2006
Flickr is So Great.
I can't believe it's a Yahoo! service. That's not to say that Yahoo! stuff isn't pretty good. But Yahoo! stuff tends to be slathered in flash ads and have a vaguely 1999 feel.
Flickr is so user-focused. All the time, I find myself thinking "it would be good if I could do X from this page," and guess what? I can.
All for only $24/year. That's the way web stuff should be priced. Whoever thought $10/month was a good price for an web app was on crack. $24 is a no-brainer. $2/month? Of course I'll sign up!
I also love that they limit the account on bandwidth to upload, not total storage of photos. Brilliant! A great way to build-in loyalty!
Posted by billo at 09:33 PM | Comments (0)
October 25, 2006
FireFox 2.0 (Mac) is Crappy, Broken
It hangs (with spinning rainbow of death) all the time. Sometime it just crashes.
I'm switching back to 1.5 for a while. Luckily, it appears you can (at least FF 2.0 doesn't mess up your settings/prefs in an incompatible way...)
I wonder if the Windows or Linux versions are just as bad.
Update: Derek points out that google toolbar is the culprit. I've disabled it, and I'm back to FF2. I'll post later if it helps or not.
Posted by billo at 11:40 AM | Comments (3)
October 20, 2006
WinXP Home under Parallels VM on Mac Pro
Parallels, the popular virtual machine software that is available for Intel Macs, recently came out with a stable patch that works on 64-bit Intel Macs. I downloaded it, found it no longer panicked my Mac (quad-core 2.66 xeon, 3GB RAM), and decided to buy it.
I then installed Ubuntu on it. It works fine.
Then I downloaded the beta version of Windows Vista, just to see what it was like. It's very shiny, a very hungry memory hog and kind of slow. I attributed a lot of the slowness to the fact that it was running in the VM. Vista boots in about 2-3 minutes, and everything is very sluggish to start up.
But then I got a copy of Windows XP Home, and installed that under Parallels*. Holy crap, the thing boots in 6.5 seconds. 6.5 SECONDS!!! FireFox running in XP in that VM starts INSTANTLY, like in zero seconds. If I run FireFox "natively" it takes 3-4 seconds to start. That blows!
This leads me to leap to several wildly unsubstantiated conclusions:
1. Vista is a huge, ugly (but shiny) pig, and I'm not going to buy it for playing computer games until the standard $1000 PC is a quad-core 4 Ghz 64 bit xeon with 8GB RAM. Probably around 2008?
2. An old, old OS like Win XP (from 2001, right?) runs pretty fast on the latest hardware, five years later.
3. Mac OS X Tiger is a lot more bloated and sluggish than it should be. How can a basic app like FF start so slowly?
*You might ask "Why would you want to run Windows XP on your Mac?" There is only one reason: so I can test running IE6 and IE7 against the web site at work. It doesn't happen often, but occasionally I'll make a change where it looks OK on FireFox, but bad on IE.
Posted by billo at 05:52 PM | Comments (1)
September 27, 2006
Online community just jumped the shark.
Well, it's probably already been jumped several million times. But this one really got to me.
This is from a marketing survey I got, presumably because I bought a Honda water pump and registered the warranty online.
Sigh.
Posted by billo at 04:47 PM | Comments (0)
August 15, 2006
Going Private pwns
Going Private is one of my favorite blogs. It's half brilliant financial analysis, half brilliant satire. Figuring out which half is which is what makes it so much fun.
This article is a great example, especially for this nice payoff:
"I expect it is routine maintenance on the Exchange server," Todd stammers.
"You are using... Microsoft Exchange?" You would think Microsoft Exchange was illegal given her tone.
Posted by billo at 10:57 PM | Comments (0)
August 07, 2006
Apple WWDC fanboy-dom
I'm all anxious about WWDC. I'm most interested in Leopard (OS X 10.5) announcements and the Mac Pro.
Leopard: I really hope they turn virtualization into an OS feature. How great would it be to be able to run a little Linux VM and one or two Windows applications right out of the box? Also, spotlight just blows. They should fix it or remove it. If they remove it, maybe google will finally release google desktop for OS X.
Mac Pro: the other nerds at work who run Intel workstations (Ubuntu) endlessly tease me about my slow G5. I've got no upgrade path to fight back until the Intel workstation is released. I hope the Mac Pro is fast.
Jon Gruber (Daring Fireball) has a bunch of WWDC predictions. I'm a big fan of his articles, and I agree with much of this one. However, he takes a little dig at the old "striped" interface decorations in OS 10.0 and 10.1 (X.0 and X.1?), calling them goofy and ugly. What about brushed metal? How can that possibly be considered any less goofy, ugly or childish? I'm hoping they make a universal control in Leopard to set the skin of applications. Let people with no taste make their UI look ugly if they want: let the rest of us have plain, elegant austere windows.
Regarding the Apple Phone: it would be really great if Apple brought focused design and simplicity to the wireless communication device. To me, that means making a phone that is great at making phone calls, and explicitly not an iPod. Adding a phone to an iPod or vice versa ruins the simplicity and elegance of both. (Not there there are any simple and elegant phones these days. How I miss my Nokia 8800!) What I would like to see from Apple in the wireless space:
- A dedicated push email device. Like a blackberry, but no phone BS. Think Nano form factor. But no iTunes.
- A dedicated phone: with big physical keys: 0-9, #, *. Maybe with push email. No iTunes. Please. Think nano form factor again, but maybe clamshell (fold nano in half.)
Posted by billo at 08:10 AM | Comments (0)
July 31, 2006
Apple's DRM-LS
It's interesting how weak Apple's DRM for iTunes is, and how blithely the media seem to ignore this fact. I've never really seen any attention given to the fact that anyone can un-protect any iTunes music file, with no technical knowledge, and nearly zero effort.
This article in information week comes closer than anyone to stating this. That I've seen, anyway. The article is mostly about how DRM really usurps control of product from the content producers and transfers to the wanna-be monopolists (like ITMS.) It's an interesting point, and a nice new way of poking fun at the stupidity and greed of the music distribution industry. But here's the excerpt I'm talking about:
Removing iTunes's DRM is pretty straightforward. It's time-consuming, but it's not too difficult. You just have to burn a CD with the tracks, re-rip the CD tracks as MP3s, and re-enter the metadata, like title and artist.
In fact, this is overstating the actual effort by quite a lot. All you have to do is: burn audio CD; select audio CD you just burned; import audio CD. Since you create a playlist with all the song titles, and iTunes conveniently matches burned CDs (by track length signatures, one assumes), you do not have to re-key in the artists and other track info. The upshot of this is that you need only spend the cost of a blank CD-R to remove ITMS DRM.
This is such a giant loophole that I call the DRM that Apple uses DRM-LS, as in "Digital Rights Management - Lip Service." It does nothing at all to stop serious content piracy (which is impossible in any case, because if a human can hear it, a computer can copy it.) It also does nothing to stop a semi-intelligent person from making a DRM-free backup copy of their music. It seems blatantly obvious to me that Apple and the music distribution industry are just winking at each other that they did something to solve the "problem" created by napster et al. (When, in fact, the problem wasn't caused by napster, it was caused the by the lack of a legitimate, low-friction channel for buying music on line.)
I wish all such DRM systems were so open.
Posted by billo at 04:11 PM | Comments (0)
June 13, 2006
To view this stupid video, you must buy a new computer.
I try real hard not to say mean things on this blog. Really, I do. But give me a break:
What it really means:
To use this product, you need to go to the store, buy a crappy operating system for $150 that will take 10 hours to install and patch, cost an extra $40-60 to protect it from viruses and spyware, and, oh you might actually need to buy a new computer to run it on. Then you can install this free software and see this video.
This isn't a dig so much as Microsoft, but rather at the ersatz media company, which decides to ignore 5% of its audience, and then has the gall to suggest that said audience needs nothing but "free software" watch its product.
Hey guys: quicktime (free viewer on all platforms); MPEG, MPEG2 (free viewers on all platforms); flash video (FREE VIEWERS ON ALL PLATFORMS!!). Media company's job: maximize audience (or maximize high-value demographic, I suppose). Media company's non-job: enhance monopoly power of a software company. Get a clue!
Posted by billo at 05:25 PM | Comments (0)
May 16, 2006
Existentialism in Counter-Strike
This is hilarious, a short film about video game characters that are self aware: Deviation.
Posted by billo at 10:09 AM | Comments (0)
You want that in black? That will be $150.
"How much more black could it be? The answer is none. None more black."
The new consumer-grade Apple notebook computer, the MacBook, is available in black or white. However, as far as I can tell, the black one is $1499, and the white one is $1299. The only difference aside from the color is that the black one comes with a 20GB bigger hard disk. But you can upgrade the white one to the same hard drive for $50.
So being stylish will cost you $150. That's either very clever or very stupid. There's such a fine line between the two.
Posted by billo at 09:49 AM | Comments (0)
April 17, 2006
More support for the dedicated gadget observation.
More support, here from Om Malik, for my "single purpose gadgets are always way (way way) better" position.
If I could find counter examples, I would post them. Really!
Posted by billo at 04:20 PM | Comments (0)
April 13, 2006
Unhappy with Dell
Dell used to be my favorite computer brand, since about 1994. They had cheap stuff, without all the stupid "enhancements" (read: BIOS additions that slow down boot-up and need special drivers in the OS) that Compaq, HP and IBM loved so much.
But in the past two years, the love has turned to hate. We bought a lot of Dells for work, both for people's desks and for our servers. The desktop machines have been croaking left and right: out of a total of maybe 30 machines, we've had at least 10 catastrophic hardware failures, either motherboards, power supplies or disks in two years. To me, that's horrible.
The servers have been a little more reliable (only 3-4 failures among 80 servers), but the recent new servers we got (1850 series) are unbelievable power and heat hogs, compared to the previous generation 1750 series. In a data-center class machine, power and heat are the two most important specs you care about: it's typical of Dell these days to not understand the customer needs.
Then there's the crapware, if you buy a Dell with Windows on it. Come on guys, I want a computer not an advertising platform for stuff I will never buy.
Finally, there is the web site. Dell was a pioneer in letting customers self-configure exactly what they want. But now there are so many different entry points, it's very difficult to create the same system twice in a row. Then there is the home user, small business, large business, etc. You can get significantly different prices depending on how you identify yourself. It telegraphs to me that Dell is pretty much out to trick me into paying too much, and I have to waste a lot of time digging for a better deal. I almost hate to bring it up, but Apple manages to allow customized configs that are easy to reproduce.
So, later Dell. At work, we're probably switching to HP or generic boxes for people's desktops. We have RFPs out to server vendors for blade servers or whatever. Rackable looks pretty good to me, DC power with 88 servers per rack. Or we might just go with no-name boxes for them, too.
Posted by billo at 08:15 AM | Comments (4)
April 10, 2006
Ode to an odometer.
This has nothing to do with anything. Just the odometer reading from my car the other morning.
Posted by billo at 08:28 AM | Comments (2)
March 21, 2006
Riya image search in beta.
Riya image search is finally in beta. This is the photo web site that can supposedly recognize faces, so you can search for pictures of your kids by name without tagging every single one of your pictures. Presumably there is some training that goes on for a few pics.
I'd like to try it, but they use an uploader, which is only available on Windows XP. Come on, how hard would it be to set up a special FTP server so anybody could just use an FTP client to upload their pics?
Posted by billo at 08:25 AM | Comments (0)
March 17, 2006
Do not upgrade your Fedora Core 4 kernel to 2.6.15
I recently ran "yum update" on a bunch of machines at work. They were all "new" machines, and were not doing much anything interesting yet. Which is a good thing.
Apparently, somewhere between 2.6.11 and 2.6.15, some stuff with "udev" and partition labeling changed, because none of these systems would boot any longer. There were two problems: the first, which was that using "root=LABEL=/" in the grub boot loader no longer works. That was easy enough to fix by booting the old kernel and editing the grub.conf. The second problem is that the boot sequence needs /dev/console, which is no longer available early on in boot sequence on kernels that are "pure" udev. Whatever that means.
Ugh.
So my free advice is don't run "yum update." Instead, run "yum --exclude=kernel update"
Posted by billo at 03:21 PM | Comments (0)
February 28, 2006
Nomination for most J-cliché web page of all time.
I'm actually not sure if this is a parody or if it's real.
http://www.jcorporate.com/html/products/productsfm.html
Posted by billo at 04:34 PM | Comments (0)
February 17, 2006
Back in the Day
At the first internet flame out startup I worked at, we all had real IP addresses on
our machines. No firewall. Just us and the router and the big
bad Internet. No one ever bothered us. That was back when you could leave
your front door open in the summer and go away for a
week, at least on the net. We had some insane bandwidth too:
I think we had 3 or 4 DS-3 circuits.
Even our production servers where on the same subnet.
One time we were playing Duke Nukem and took down our own
site. After that we would physically disconnect the network
hub our machines were on to play.
We knew some people over at ATG on the other side of the
river (in Boston), and they were running their X servers with
xhost +. We sent them a screen shot of their screens, and
they stopped doing that.
Good times.
Yep.
Good times.
Posted by billo at 04:50 PM | Comments (0)
Google Blog Search Problems
OK, Google blog search is rapidly becoming useless.
I just did a search for "kayak.com" to see what blogworld
thinks about our new CMO hire. The top 6 entries are all
fake blogs. They are all like 2 days old with a bunch
of generated SEO-spamming crap text and links
to kayak and a few other travel web sites.
How hard is it to make google blog search IGNORE
blogs that are less than a week old? Or have only 2 entries?
It's like they're not even trying!
The sad thing is that most of them are on blogger.com,
so clearly the human detector thing has been defeated.
Posted by billo at 09:08 AM | Comments (0)
February 14, 2006
Why I hate Java, reason #347
Java:
try {
Thread.sleep(1000);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
}
Ruby:
sleep(1)
Posted by billo at 03:13 PM | Comments (0)
February 10, 2006
FireFox Bookmarks Synchronizer that works with 1.5.0.x
I find the FireFox add-on version management system supremely annoying. It's stupid that it assumes that your plugins won't work in the first place, and doesn't give you the option of overriding the installer's decision not to install.
It's extra stupid that an add-on that claims to work with 1.5 will not be allowed in 1.5.0.1. It's annoying how much time I waste tracking down updated plugins when I upgrade FireFox (across the 6 or seven different computers I use at home and work). Some add-ons have good support by their authors, and they are automatically fixed. But many are not. So one is forced to extract the .xpi file, hack it, repackage, then distribute it. (Thank goodness for FolderShare file sync!).
I just fixed bookmarks sync, and I'm putting it here for anybody else who wants it.
Posted by billo at 11:11 AM | Comments (0)
November 03, 2005
As if you didn't need more reasons to stop using Mirosoft Windows
Windows is now the target of corporate-backed hackers who put a rootkit on your system to stop you from exercising your legimate rights to make personal copies of music. Mark Russinovich has the scoop at his sysinternals site.
If you are a Linux or Mac user, there is always an annoyance that this or that web site or software application doesn't support anything but Windows/IE. This illustrates the flip side: those lazy enough to ignore 5-10% of the user base also do so with their idiotic malware. Hooray.
Posted by billo at 08:05 AM | Comments (0)
November 02, 2005
Monumentally Stupid UI Design Award #1
This is the part where I get to make fun of people I don't know, in order to vent my frustration at their crappy products.
Item #1 on my list is the "screen saver" feature on Sony DVD players. This idiocy was introduced a number of years ago, presumably to prevent burn-in on plasma and projection televisions. OK, that is maybe a worthy goal, but that is not what I am complaining about.
The geniuses at Sony said "screen saver... existing paradigm from computers: the computer stays in screen save mode until the user moves mouse, or hits any key. that input is swallowed up, since the user can't see what they would be typing or mousing, and the screen saver exits."
So the Sony screen saver acts exactly like that. If the screen saver is "on" then you can hit any button on the remote or on the DVD player itself, and nothing will happen, except that the screen saver goes away, and you get back to the DVD menu or whatever. Here's the funny part: suppose the TV is turned off. You can't see the screen saver, and you hit the EJECT button to open the disc tray. Nothing happens. You wonder why. You hit EJECT again. The tray opens. Eventually you learn this behavior, and you tend to hit EJECT, wait 1.3 seconds and hit EJECT again. However, sometimes, the screen saver is already OFF (but you can tell, because the TV is off) and the tray starts to open, then you hit the second EJECT, and it closes again. So THREE hits are needed to open the freakin tray. Why must I be subjected to this will-it-open anxiety?
The problem is, of course, that the screen saver notion of eating input works for a computer, because you can't possibly know what a the "Z" key would do if you can't see what is on the screen. So it's right to eat all input. However, the EJECT button on a DVD player does one thing. It ejects the disk. There is no dangerous ambiguity to avoid.
Every time I use my DVD player, I seethe: the design team on this feature should be retroactively fired and banned from ever doing industrial design.
Gosh I feel better now.
Posted by billo at 08:24 PM | Comments (0)
November 01, 2005
Of course they broke it!
Golly, I am some kind of futurist predictor guy. The new OS 10.4.3 patch does break Aqua emacs.
And here is yet another emacs build that works: EmacsInstaller.dmg
Update: this build, which works for me, complains about ncurses versions for other people. I suspect that it is the same old FINK pollution I have had in the past, but I built this version with all fink stuff turned off. So I'm not sure what is up. I'm working on it.
Update 2: OK, Apparently my G5 is corrupted beyond repair with some weird-assed ncurses library. I built a new EmacsInstallerFull.dmg that is nice and clean, and I had to do it on my mini. This version is a full /usr/local installation that will even work from a terminal, which is nice because it supports desktop save mode, unlike the version 21 emacs that ships with OS X. Enjoy!
Posted by billo at 11:28 AM | Comments (0)
September 06, 2005
Just for the record: I don't actually hate Microsoft
People who know me tend to think I hate Microsoft. I actually don't. In fact, I think it is great that Bill Gates and his cohort really stuck it to the established IT industry of the 80s and built a monopoly. That's my dream. If I could, I would build a business into a huge empire and make untold billions of dollars. I'm not even jealous of Microsoft. Great for them, nice job. I think the vast majority of folks who work at Microsoft sincerely want to make great products that people want to use, and make a lot of money doing it.
I feel precisely the same way about Microsoft the company as I do about Google (the company). I love it that smart people saw the state of things, came up with a great idea, and relentlessly built it into a successful, huge, company. It's really annoying the turn of the tide on slashdot (for example) against Google: now that they are successful, whiners and crybabies infer all kinds of nefarious plots in any action they take.
What I do hate, and hate with a deep, burning, firey, flaming, boiling, lava-infused, center-of-the-sun, really, really wicked-hot passion: Windows. It really galls me that this complete turd of an operating system is the world de facto standard on desktop computers. And the public at large, and even the vast majority IT professionals just don't realize how terrible it is. And how much better the alternatives are.
Sometime in the future, I'll rant about what is so irksome about Windows. And it's not primarily viruses and spyware, though those certainly do irk me.
Posted by billo at 05:09 PM | Comments (2)
August 30, 2005
Checklist for making Windows XP Tablet usable
Uninstall MSN Messenger: http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=288
Install firefox: http://www.getfirefox.com/
Install open office; extract the zip file; run "setup.exe -net"; then for each user, navigate to openoffice install dir and run open office setup, choose network install.
Run Norton Antivirus update 500 gajillion times.
Run Windows Update for 5 million centuries until all patches are in.
Set screen saver, desktop settings to something not stupid.
Configure wireless using IBM access manager
Shut off bloated services: Disable the following services: Infrared Monitor, Norton AV Firewall Monitor, Remote Registry, Task Scheduler
Remove Access IBM; Access IBM Message Center; Franklin Covey Crapware; Alias Sketchbook Pro; PC-Doctor for Windows (christ what crap that is); NetWaiting;
Fix and synch Windows Time. Remember to set date first. Idiots.
Go to ThinkPad Config in control panel; disable: Infrared; internal modem; device bay;
install google desktop
Posted by billo at 02:00 PM | Comments (0)
August 08, 2005
Backups
I just got a frantic email from my aunt that she deleted the family tree document she had been working on.
I think backups (or the utter lack thereof) is a big problem for non technical people. It would be a great if somebody could create a NetApp snapshot feature of their OS or NAS drive. Something that consumers could afford, with a UI model that they would understand. Some kind of "Time Machine" paradigm might work well.
Posted by billo at 09:25 AM | Comments (0)
June 30, 2005
Adobe Acrobat Reader please go away.
I tried really hard to get PDF files on my Mac to open with the Apple "Preview" application instead of Acrobat. Sometimes it would just work, but there were clearly some mim types or something that refused to give up the Adobe connection. Finally I got fed up and delete all the Acrobat software from my disk.
Guess what? It worked. Now "Preview" opens all PDF files. I'm so happy. No more fat bloated viewer that takes 15 seconds to open and display an annoying splash screen. (Come on, splash screens are so 1994.)
Delete Acrobat Reader from your disk. You will be happy too.
Posted by billo at 12:07 PM | Comments (0)
April 29, 2005
The Law of Crappy Gadgets
If I rule so much, I should have a law or two named after me. You know, like Moore's Law or Metcalfe's Law. It's only fitting. So here it is:
A gadget's crappyness is proportional to the square of the number of functions it performs.
First, a gadget: any small electronic device that does something or various somethings. It probably must have at least one button, preferably some kind of display, and be small enough to fit in a pocket. Possibly it could be a little bigger, but we're getting to appliance territory there, and WHOA there buddy! We're talking about gadgets.
Next, crappyness: this is a simple concept. Pretty much every gadget has good points. However, it's not the "goodness" that matters. It's the crappyness (or absense of crappyness) of something that determines whether you will like it.
Finally, functions: functions are what some gadget can do. Some good examples of functions are: making phone calls, playing music, storing and organizing stuff, doing math, "doing" email, etc. The point is that a "function" is a pretty big, general thing.
Now, back to billo's law. The basic idea is that as you add functions to a gadget it becomes crappier precipitously. A gadget with one function is going to have an inherent crappyness level of 1. If the gadget is created by talented designers and engineers, and they work really hard and know their craft, they have a good chance of making a nice gadget with very low crappyness. People will like it very much if they succeed.
Suppose we add a function to the gadget. Let's say the gadget started off as a phone, and let's say the creators did a great job, and it was a great phone with barely detectable crappyness. Some genius at the company decides that the phone should do something else: it should be a little PDA, and do calendar and contact management functions. "It will be so great!" says the genius (and by "genius," I mean "idiot"). "People won't have to carry a phone AND a PDA. And when they open the meeting even on the calendar, it will have the phone number of the conference call right in it, so they'll be able to call in with one click!" Nice job genius. You just added a function, thus increasing the crappiness of the great phone by a factor of 4. You're so fired.
There are two problems with cramming functions into gadgets. The first problem is the reduction of focus. Every software developer knows that when you try to make a product to more and different things, the time and attention given to doing fewer and similar things is diluted. People lose track of what's really important because they are juggling more competing priorities. The second problem is that gadgets are (ideally) small. They have a number of things in precious quantities: power, physical dimension, buttons, screen pixels, connectors, memory. As one adds functions, they functions compete for these precious resources, stealing them from the original functions or driving up cost and size of the gadget. Usually both things happen: they other functions are all dilulted and starved, and the whole gadget is bulkier and uglier and costs more.
Up this point, I've been very vague and used theoretical examples.
Let's now look at real examples, and see if this holds water in the
real world.
Nokia 8800 phone (circa 1999): you've probably seen this one. It was super small, with a shiny (but fake) chrome finish. Super small, it had long battery life, great reception. It was a great phone. It was, without question, the best wireless phone I ever had. It did one thing, make phone calls, and it was barely crappy at all. Good.
Original Blackberry (circa 1998): everybody has the big Blackberries now. We'll get to those later. The original one was about 2x3x.75 inches. It had a little 8-line black and green LCD screen. It did almost nothing except send and receive email. Gosh, it was great at that. It had a tiny qwerty keyboard and a little thumbwheel. Good.
Palm Pilot (1995-present): the Palm Pilot is a general purpose gadget. But, in general, I would consider its primary function to be storing data and providing applications that allow mostly read-only access. It's hard to do a lot of input with a Palm. It's easy to run specialized program than manage lots of little records for reference: address book, calendar, and (my favorite) Robert Parker's wine database are some good examples. The great things about the original Palm that carries through to today (mostly) are: instant on (no booting), synchronizing with a much more powerful data management system (your computer), and UI paradigms that nearly all applications follow rather well. Good.
Digital Cameras: pick any one. Some stink, some are fabulous. My favorite one that qualifies as a gadget is the Minolta Dimage. It is incredibly small, has very few buttons, takes excellent quality pictures and turns on and is ready in barely over 1 second.
Nokia 3650 camera phone: Now we get into it. You've seen this phone; it has a huge color screen, and all the buttons arranged in a circle. Trial dialing. It's awful. Battery life: hah! And, a really bad, slow blurry camera. Oh, it's also a crappy PDA too.
Blackberry Nextel. This takes the blackberry email device, adds a
phone to it, and also adds the Nextel walkie-talkie service. OK, the
email capabilities are still great, which is something. But it's a
horrible phone: hard to hear, and hard to dial on the tiny number keys
on the left 1/3 of the keyboard. The killer is that the walkie-talkie
stuff makes the battery go from full to zero in about 48 hours of idle
time. Bad.
iPod. OK, the iPod is great. It's totally focused on one thing: playing music. Sure, it has the odd little extras like a read-only list of your address book, or the "breakout" game. But those are not serious attempts to replace other devices. I think it's telling that Apple did not try to cram a camera onto the iPod Photo. I just hope they don't try to cram a phone in there.
Posted by billo at 09:50 PM | Comments (0)