Embracing Chaos

A few months ago I wrote about why single-purpose devices will always have better UI’s than general purpose devices. Here, always really means for about the the next 5 years. I’ll explain why in a second. In the iPhone, Apple has built a completely generic UI. All the controls are software reconfigurable “soft keys” — you touch a part of the screen that has a picture of a button on it. This offers a fantastic level of flexibility, allowing them to build a lot of useful functions into a small package. But soft keys like this are intrinsically limited by…

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I generally find CES exhausting. It’s amazing how far you have to walk to get anywhere in Vegas. It’s about a half mile walk from the hotel lobby to the elevators to get to your room. And there’s this inflation field caused by everybody living on an expense account — $4 for a small bottle of water or $10 for a small sandwich. It’s worse than an airport. So while I’m always happy to go there and get some hands-on market research and competitive analysis done, or try to close some deals with partners, I’m also generally just as happy…

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Yesterday morning I woke up feeling like a zombie and was happy to figure out that with the end of daylight savings time, I had an extra hour to do homework. I started turning the clocks in my house back. They were all pretty easy except one. My inappropriately named “smart phone” just needed to reboot (not at all uncommon) to get its clock reset. But before too long I realized that not only was my smart phone was smart enough to move back its own clock, but that it also moved back every appointment in my calendar by an…

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A couple of recent product announcements out of Redmond have me thinking about the current big struggle in the software industry: GOOG vs MSFT. Frankly, GOOG is eating MSFT’s lunch on the consumer software front. But MSFT still dominates in the enterprise, and will for a long time. GOOG’s model is hosted solutions, which enterprises are really hesitant to deploy. And with good reason — if you were a CIO would you trust all of your company’s IP to somebody else? Regardless of what promises they make, I wouldn’t. So Microsoft continues to turn into IBM. The two announcements I’m…

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I’ve been installing OS’s a bunch lately. Every time I do the installer asks me what part of the world I’m in so it can set the timezone. This totally seems like 20th century technology to me. There are really accurate IP-geo lookup databases these days that can tell from your IP address where you are in the world pretty reliably. So once the OS has my network stack working, why does it need to ask me what part of the world I’m in? When it comes to installing something free like Ubuntu, it seems that there’s a real “you-get-what-you-pay-for”…

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A little while ago, I got my hands on a MacBook Pro. I’ve been slowly switching over to it as my primary machine. It’s pretty. It’s fast. When using it, I feel calm and happy as if I’m sitting in a japanese garden. (I bet if it wasn’t so expensive, this effect wouldn’t be so pronounced. But that is part of the charm too.) I haven’t had the guts to switch over to it as my mail e-mail machine yet, but maybe the new .mac email will convince me. Here are a couple of thoughts on why I’m liking it…

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I consider myself a transhumanist. I spend probably too much time thinking about very long-terrm trends of humanity. Some of the trends I see seem obvious to the point of being irrefutable, while others I’m sure are controversial. Nevertheless, I’ll lay out a few of the basic tenants of transhumanism, and begin to explain why they lead to the very deep and personal implications they have for me. Computers are getting faster and more powerful. As they do so, they’re helping humans be smarter. Maybe not invidual humans, as some studies have shown that things like e-mail and powerpoint can…

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Are we moving towards a world where all our pocket-dwellers merge into one device? We’ve finally seen the PDA merge with the cell phone, I think for good. They all have cameras now, but the cameras are mostly horrible and never better then mediocre. The question of the season is “What about mp3 players?” Surely they should merge into the phone too, right? Because nobody wants to carry a phone and a separate mp3 player, right? Actually, I do. When thinking about gadget convergence, physics imposes some intrinsic limits. For example, optics on a camera — right now you need…

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I finally got my Chumby running. It’s sitting happily between my couches in my living room showing me pictures, telling me the news and occassionaly insulting me in middle english. It’s very cute. Chumby is a really neat idea — a fun hackable platform for small information appliances. It’s embedded linux running a flash viewer. It’s got wifi network access and a really pretty touch-screen for UI. The designers encourage hacking of both the software and the hardware — I’ve seen chumby-units sown into all sorts of pillows and stuffed animals. The bread and butter of customization is writing custom…

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