randomosity

Yes, iSync has been with us for few years now. It should be rock solid. It’s not — yet. I recently wrote about my impres­sions of data detect­ors. Not rocket sci­ence, but a small and power­ful addi­tion to use­ful work­flow on a Mac. That they also remind me of the prom­ise that was the New­ton makes them all the more wel­come. But what can I say about iSync? One of the things that makes OSX such a com­pel­ling choice for day to day com­put­ing is the con­sist­ency of inter­face between applic­a­tions and their abil­ity to share information…not just data, but con­texts and pref­er­ences and thus recog­ni­tion and adapt­ab­il­ity to user pecu­li­ar­it­ies that anthro­po­moph­ise the laptop. The com­puter becomes some­how just some­thing a little more. A trus­ted com­pan­ion — not merely a clone of mil­lions of other identical col­lec­tions of alu­minum, sil­icon and other substances.

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I feared the track­pad. I am not the biggest fan of the track­pad. I gather that my name­sake, the CTO at Syn­aptics is respons­ible for some of the biggest break­throughs as the track­pad gained laptop cred dur­ing the 1990’s and so I feel a little loy­alty if only by asso­ci­ation. How­ever, my favour­ite means of input is the Track­Point — the little red nubby (that becomes less red real fast) that the IBM Think­Pad is most closely asso­ci­ated with. This is a very per­sonal area. I know many users that could just not get used to using a single fin­ger on an ultra-sensitive tiny joy­stick. The cursor and they could not become friends with the Track­Point in the equa­tion. Ran­dom sur­vey indic­ates most people still carry a mouse with them and con­nect it — this is the case for Track­Point as well as track­pad users. I am glan­cing around the cof­fee shop right now and frankly I am the only one rely­ing on the built in track­ing device. There’s a lot of users with big mice and small mice, but mice non­ethe­less. There is even a user care­fully bal­an­cing one on the arm of an easy chair — that can’t pos­sibly be com­fort­able.
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Last week Sté­fan Sin­clair noted that his upgrade to Leo­pard had largely been a less than awe-inspiring exper­i­ence. he did find some amuse­ment with the new Mosaic screensaver and I will admit that after try­ing it on his instig­a­tion, it’s pretty cool. I have to add another rather impress­ive addi­tion to the list. Dat­a­De­tect­ors! Wow. I can remem­ber being one among many that saw the power of this sort of recog­ni­tion of dis­join­ted info on the New­ton and hav­ing it take a scribble about lunch with Joe and make some assump­tions and cre­ate an event in your cal­en­dar linked to the first Joe it found in your address book. So, Apple’s been play­ing with the tech­no­logy for awhile. Dat­a­De­tect­ors are so subtle that I sus­pect many people might be miss­ing them. I did.
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Per­haps there is an inner his­tor­ian within me. The latest spate of reviews fea­tur­ing the iPhone versus this chal­lenger and that has me think­ing that at the pace that we move today we don’t take enough time to reach a little fur­ther back to con­sider our for­ward pro­gress. This case in point, every­one eval­u­at­ing the iPhone or the iPod Touch (here­after ITouch — as I am sure Apple would have rather called it) seems to be pitch­ing it against the Nokia N95, HTC Kaiser, or the latest Black­berry. All appro­pri­ate for being the cur­rent fla­vour of the mar­ket — and when it comes to cell phones, they have such a lim­ited shelf life. How long does the aver­age phone remain cur­rent these days? Des­pite Apple’s slight revamp of the iPhone, I will go out on a limb and sug­gest that it may have greater longev­ity than most. How­ever, not because for tech­nical prowess, but to Apple’s mar­ket­ing pan­ache. Non­ethe­less, as I look at the com­par­is­ons, I am struck that we might best be able to gauge how much of a tech­nical mar­vel it is by com­par­ing a little fur­ther back.
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So…48 hours back on a Macin­tosh laptop and I am in ser­i­ously danger of get­ting drunk on the kool-aid again. What is it that pulls one back? Hav­ing never really left was part of it. I simply was being interdenominational.

I have my iMac in the liv­ing room and an HP Media Centre in the den. I con­duct most of my daily work on my laptop though. I am a happy user of an IBM Think­Pad X32. I did not come to the X32 blindly. I star­ted using Think­Pads on a daily basis back in 1999. Before that I was that bane of the Win­dows world: the Mac bigot.
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So, another Steve Jobs/Apple key­note over and the hype of the advance pun­dits leaves one feel­ing a might let down. This is the first key­note that I can recall that sparked main­stream news cov­er­age in advance. I was watch­ing my local news sta­tion this morn­ing and they gave Steve & Co., at least 30 seconds of air time in anti­cip­a­tion (admit­tedly of things iPhone). I can remem­ber when intro­duc­tion of machines that would go on to become incred­ibly suc­cess­ful (the phrase ‘insanely great’ waf­ted through my memory for a second) didn’t rate cov­er­age out­side of tech­no­logy media as recently as two years ago. It only took Apple 30 years to achieve this.
On the upside, I am writ­ing this on Safari for Win­dows and so far am very impressed. The anti ali­asing is finer than Fire­Fox and the screen-render speed is some­where in the vicin­ity of where Steve claimed it would be — blaz­ingly fast. Col­our me pleased with it thus far. I really like the little things that you note, such as the browse but­ton beha­viour and bet­ter indic­a­tion (an icon and title) that the file you uploaded is linked to. These are nice touches.
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There’s an inter­est­ing short art­icle on Low-End Mac about how the author uses an Apple Lisa for his writ­ing tasks. He cites the fact that he can turn it off and resume exactly where he was by turn­ing it back on, not hav­ing to worry about either sav­ing doc­u­ments or power out­ages. More import­antly he reminds us to con­sider whether all the bells and whistles of the latest greatest pro­ductiv­ity appas are things we actu­ally use. I blogged earlier on this point and was com­par­ing Word 1.0 on the Mac to the cur­rent incarn­a­tion. Without being some neo-Luddite and pre­tend­ing like the older tech­no­logy is that far super­ior, I think that there are points to be made for simple and fast.

Non­ethe­less, its not quite that black and white. I have tried to find an altern­at­ive word pro­cessor for use under Win­dows with less bag­gage than Word. I have been unsuc­cess­ful. Both Abi­Word and Open­Of­fice seem as bloated and frankly try to emu­late Word at the expense of actu­ally think­ing about how the human actual pro­cesses words. Admit­tedly there are a few chal­lengers of note on OSX. But, what about start­ing with TextEdit or the like and simply being able to mod­u­larly add fea­tures as desired.

One of the other points raised relates to the concept that some tasks haven’t been improved upon by faster pro­cessors and the like. Word pro­cessing can get away with the older 68K…frankly given the choice, I would actu­ally be very happy doing my word pro­cessing on one of the NeXT boxes and WriteNow. That was (and still is) speed with an awe­somely crisp dis­play. Pure mono­chrome (I have little need for col­our when word pro­cessing) and a joy to the eyes. strangely far less eye candy than OSX has become bloated with. A pur­pose built word pro­cessing engine. I should crank up the old NeXT laser printer and see if it still works as well.

As to the age of the machine we use…think about that for a sec — a twenty four year old com­puter. And its not the old­est work­ing ones about…alas, it seems like just yesterday.

Update: The pon­der­ing is usu­ally good enough to get me explor­ing. In this case I happened upon PolyEdit from Rus­sian pub­lisher Poly­Soft. They have a tiny 1.3Mb word pro­cessor that reads and writes .docs and seems to have a rather robust fea­ture set, yet runs like a wee demon. I’ll post com­ments if my trial goes well. So far so good.

Fur­ther Update: Well, if I didn’t need foot­notes or end­notes I’d be doing well, unfor­tu­nately PolyEdit has neither. Addi­tion­ally, while it will import Word 2000/XP/2003 ver­sions, it will only save as Word v6. Pity. Its super fast and does offer a wide vari­ety of fea­tures and the inter­face really works.

Ok. This guy is into some cool, cool stuff. Jeff Han has a num­ber of very impress­ive short movies of some of the fas­cin­at­ing pro­to­types. Not only Multi-Touch (which the iPhone has sud­denly become most pub­licly asso­ci­ated with), but some very inter­est­ing work using LEDS as pho­to­di­odes, and his media mir­ror which pitched as art­work, but is a very inter­est­ing exten­sion of the multi-touch reflect­ive feed­back.
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Mitch Ratcliffe at ZDnet is con­duct­ing a longer term com­par­ison between a new Mac­Book Pro and a Len­ovo X60 as part of a series of art­icles look­ing at broader user exper­i­ence with two OS plat­forms. I nor­mally would not cite an art­icle from the more main­stream eNews media as they often strike me as being removed from the aver­age users exper­i­ence and entirely sub­merged in the manufacturer’s mar­ket­ing mes­sages. In fact, Ratcliffe notes up front that he may take Len­ovo on a as a cli­ent dur­ing the span of his series of art­icles. Well, at least he’s hon­est. So why am I cit­ing this article?

Ratcliffe has presen­ted a bet­ter eNews art­icle. He has star­ted from scratch in look­ing at the way in which manufacturer’s address the total user exper­i­ence. Today’s art­icle focuses on unpack­ing the two machines and appre­ci­at­ing the exper­i­ence that this cre­ates. He notes imme­di­ately that the Apple pack­aging itself rep­lic­ates the exper­i­ence of car­ry­ing the laptop away from the store, with a slim box and a car­ry­ing handle. This com­pares with Len­ovo which packs a smal­ler, lighter machine in a lar­ger, non-descript box that “makes the Think­Pad appear clunkier when it’s not.” Moreover the Mac­Book is ‘framed’ and the pack­aging itself focuses on the product itself, present­ing it as an object of a cer­tain desire. The Think­Pad unfor­tu­nately, with loose fit­ting wrap­pers that fit all Think­Pad shapes and sizes presents the com­puter in a gen­eric way…packed in a pile of unin­spir­ing pack­ing mater­ial to be thrown away. In con­trast, the Apple box is one that begs to be kept (even dis­played). I won­der if the folks at Len­ovo are listen­ing? I won­der if they do care about these things? I cer­tainly can’t tell from my past exper­i­ence with my Think­Pads, but will admit that I am typ­ing this on my X32 which is my weapon of choice, des­pite not hav­ing estab­lished a per­sonal or spir­itual rela­tion­ship with the machine’s manufacturer.

Although its clear that not every­one notes these sali­ent little details, I appre­ci­ate that some are struck less con­sciously by this atten­tion to detail and this is where Ratcliffe is going with this artile. It is meant to look at the all import­ant first impres­sion. Ratcliffe’s choice of words are well chosen and I look for­ward to read­ing his sub­sequent art­icles which will hope­fully con­tinue to explore som of the less dis­cussed aspects of the user exper­i­ence bey­ond simply usability.

This guy’s place puts me to shame. Even in my pre-move glory days, my col­lec­tion was nowhere in the vicin­ity of this one. For those of you that don’t know I reduced my space when I made the move to Hamilton and at least half my col­lec­tion of hard­ware went to the dump along with all the old issues of Macworld/MacUser/Publish! etc. as well as all the soft­ware boxes. I recall the first cull that I did of soft­ware that had col­lec­ted in my base­ment. I had filled the base­ment entirely, with just a walk­way down the middle and the boxes ten­ded to col­lapse everynow and then. So one day, with my neigh­bours assist­ance I moved most of it out. We filled the gar­age to a depth of six feet or so and then star­ted col­lapsing boxes and filling big­ger boxes. Back in those days, garbage col­lec­tion was also not lim­ited to fixed amount and they thank­fully took it all let­ting me use my drive­way again…but I digress.

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