I was patiently waiting for the feature to be turned for my account, which wasn’t happening.  I kept getting the same old spreadsheet program.  But then I found the setting to enable it.  So I’m sharing with y’all an explanation of how you too can get these great new features.

Go to http://docs.google.com/ and click the select “Settings” link in the upper-right hand corner, and choose “Documents Settings”.

Then choose the “Editing” tab and check the checkbox next to “New version of Google documents”.

Now any new documents you create will use the new real-time editor.  And anybody you share them with will get the new features without having to set this up for their account.

Unless Apple has come up with a better way to do soft keyboards, that is.  When I say “soft keyboard” I mean the kind of keyboard that appears on a touch screen and has no physical keys.  I’ve complained about the iPhone’s keyboard for a while.  While it’s true that people do get better at using these, I still don’t think I’ll ever be nearly as fast or accurate (even with smart correction) with a soft keyboard as I was with my blackberry.  I think that’s probably true on average for most people.  The basic reason is the lack of tactile feedback.  With a physical keyboard, if my fingers are slightly off target, they are guided to the right place by feel.

I’ve argued for some time now that the way to solve this is by figuring out how to make a touch-screen display with tactile feedback.  How would such a device work?  Physically I couldn’t tell you.  But what we’d need would be a way to electronically manipulate texture in a clear material.  A plastic with a matrix of cells that could expand or contract under electronic control.  So the software could create bumps where each of the keys are.  This would allow a software-reconfigurable gadget that could be almost as usable as a dedicated-purpose device.

This is very different from what is commonly referred to as “haptic feedback” on some of today’s gadgets like the Nexus One.  Here, the phone’s vibrator pulses a bit when you press a soft key.  This is a kind of feedback which is tactile in that you feel it, and it gives you information about your interaction with the device without having to look at the screen.  It certainly helps.  But it is not going to improve basic typing for a critical reason — it can’t help guide fingers to the right place.  The basic act of positioning fingers on controls is still basically open loop, feed forward, without guidance.  What I’m referring to as tactile feedback helps the fingers find the right spots to press without looking.  Today’s haptic feedback can’t do that.

To be clear, true tactile feedback like this almost certainly doesn’t exist yet.  This kind of pure technological innovation basically always starts in universities or government run labs.  The ROI on pure research into unproven technology is so low that it doesn’t make sense for companies to invest there.  Even if a company proved this was possible (which AFAIK hasn’t been done yet) they’d need to figure out how to manufacture it at scale before they could sell a device with it.  Last time I predicted it would be about 2012 before we saw these.  Even though Jobs almost certainly foresees the value of such a system, Apple’s expertise is not in material science.  Wired speculated about such a keyboard based on Apple’s patent filings, but what they describe seems a bit too sci-fi for me to believe.

If they have come up with something new and cool, it’s going to be a smarter way to use basically existing hardware.  I’m gonna guess it’s probably something like a touch screen which is pressure sensitive, so you can rest your fingers on it without indicating a “button press”, making typing more natural.  You could combine this with fixed, transparent dimples on the screen under the positions where the keys are, and you’d do pretty well.  Restrict the keyboard to only work in landscape mode and you only need one set of dimples.  This would be a huge improvement in usability and the biggest technological breakthrough would be the ability to distinguish a soft push from a hard push on a capacitive touch-screen.  Like by how much surface of your finger is on it.

Regardless of what Apple’s actually managed to achieve, I wish them the best.  They’re really pushing the envelope on human-computer interactions.  If they’ve done anything significant to improve soft keyboards, they will have once again done something that the entire rest of the industry will want to emulate, and I’ll tip my hat to them.

My girlfriend has a kindle that she very much enjoys.  One of the biggest benefits from it she gets is having a large amount of content in a very small device.  She is a scientist who is very much an information worker.  Having access to a great many research papers in searchable form is very useful for her.  (If only the PDF import worked on multi-column papers!)  She also tends to live out of a backpack, so being able to have several interesting things to read at any give time is very appealing.

So she’s often reading her kindle on the bus.  She’s noted one interesting difference between reading her Kindle and reading a regular book while on the bus.  When she’s reading a normal book, people will ask her what booj she’s reading or will look at the cover and just talk to her about the book itself.  With the kindle the question is always "how do you like the gizmo?"  Which gets old after a while.

Here’s a suggestion to Amazon on how to address this social problzem: offer full-color PDFs of the covers of books that you purchase for the Kindle, so people can print out their own covers.  These could slide into a convenient holder on the Kindle’s attractive leather case.  Long-term it’d be great to have a color e-paper cover for the book, but we’re not holding our breath for that one.

The Prius’s High-Tech Safety Features

The Prius has at least a couple of smart traction control systems which use technology
to help maintain control of the car in difficult situations.  Of course
there’s anti-lock brakes (ABS).  In addition to ABS the braking system
does things called Electronic Brake-force Distribution (EBD) and Brake
Assist.  Beyond that, it’s got Traction Control, and in all but the
stripped-down cars something called Vehicle Stability Control (VSC).
What each of these features does, or how they differ from each other I
don’t know and don’t frankly care.  They help the car do what I’d want
it to do under good driving conditions when the road is slick or uneven
or I’m driving too fast or what have you.  All this is great.  But
there’s one subtle and very bad flaw in the implementation of at least
one of these systems.

The Stupid UX for these Features

When the Prius needs to engage one of its TLA control systems, an
orange light appears on the otherwise dark dashboard.  Sometimes a
sound will beep.  This is presumably done to let you know that the
fancy feature that you paid for is working on your behalf.  Call it a
marketing feature if you will, because there’s nothing you can do with
this information, or way to react to it within the vehicle’s controls.
The stupid thing about this feature is that it’s distracting to have
lights flashing and sounds beeping.  When you’re having trouble
controlling the car is the last time you want something distracting
you.  So the engineers at Toyota have done something completely moronic
– a complex system senses when you’re having trouble controlling your
car, and chooses that time to throw more distractions at you.  I’ve
observed the light and beeping  on when driving over bumpy roads, or
down
something very steep that has a rut in it, or when the back-right wheel
accidentally jumps up the curb.  None of these situations I’ve gotten
into have been serious or very dangerous.  But even still, they were a
bit confusing, and the confusion was confounded by having the car meow
at me demanding attention.  When the car is not doing what you expect it to, the last thing you want is additional distractions.  Bad choice, Toyota.  These features should be absolutely silent.

What you can do about it

If anybody knows a cheat code to disable this light or beeping, please
post it in a comment.  Until then, you can help a little bit by putting
a small piece of electrical tape over the orange light with the symbol
for "I think you’re losing control of the car."

Several startup companies have sold e-book readers in the past, but none successfully.  Sony is the only other large company to have tried.   Assurance that a risky new technology is backed by a company that won’t disappear is important for mass-market adoption, giving Sony and Amazon an advantage.  This is especially important for devices that consume media, as the device’s utility dwindles without new content.  Amazon is especially well positioned to offer media for Kindle through its complementary assets.

Amazon’s established relationships with book publishers are extremely valuable to Kindle.  Book publishers control e-book content.  Amazon’s history of selling physical books has earned them the trust of almost every publishing house, ensuring easy access to electronic versions of books. In addition to existing e-books, Amazon’s scale gives them leverage to encourage publishers to release electronic versions of books.

Beyond that, Amazon has rare technology to make electronic versions of books available with far less work on the publishers’ parts.  Amazon has spent years scanning physical books to enable a feature called “Search Inside This Book” on their website.  Along with Google, they have one of the only large archives of scanned physical books in the world.  This enables selling e-books for books that publishers don’t even have original electronic copies of, with rights negotiations as the only remaining barrier.

Innovators have been jibbing together their own e-book readers out of laptops and PDF files for years.  Early-adopters look for concrete advantages like the ability to search books.  Med-students give Kindle rave reviews for this capability.   The easy availability and portability of dozens of books appeal to the small segment of truly voracious readers.  Kindle seems to serve these early segments well.  To cross the chasm into the mass market of the early majority, Kindle must make the experience simple and reliable.  Kindle’s wireless data connection sets it apart from all previous e-book readers.  By leveraging Sprint’s nation-wide 3G cellular data network, Kindle can load content without the operator even owning a computer.  Thus Kindle dodges the inevitable complexity that arises anytime a PC is involved.  This, along with Amazon’s well-established customer service, promise to make Kindle much easier for the early majority to accept.

Kindle seems well positioned for acceptance by the mass market.  If successful, Amazon will need to balance publishers’ need for DRM against consumers’ desire for open content.  The music industry has exposed these issues but certainly not solved them.

[This is another recycled homework assignment.  Something to keep y'all entertained while I'm in New Zealand!]

Up until now if you wanted to listen to an artist in Rhapsody that you hadn’t previously bookmarked, you would need to guess what top-level genre they were categorized under and then scroll through an enormous list to try to find the artist.  How many times have I scratched my head asking questions like "Is Pink Floyd Rock/Pop or Alternative/Punk?"  Much easier was to find a web browser, pull up http://www.rhapsody.com/pinkfloyd and bookmark music into your library.  That human-writable URL scheme is still one of my favorite accomplishments in the last several years.

I started beta testing this release last week.  As always, the update was fast, easy and works flawlessly.  My biggest complaint is that the search is not interactive.  Considering how fast results typically come back, I would much prefer to have a type-ahead style search where results start to appear as you type.  This would be especially useful considering the somewhat painful scroll-wheel-alphabet typing interface they provide.

Sonos is a great company that makes fabulous products.  They continue to advance the state-of-the-art in digital music systems.  By adding Napster support they have taken another step to commoditize Rhapsody’s music subscription product.  They’ve also released a new product called a ZoneBridge which acts as a WiFi range extender which would address one of my biggest complaints about the system.

Original Web 1.0

Universal access to massive volumes of data.  Being able to search
through masses of data and find what you want.  Connecting people to
huge databases really well.  Key examples:

• Online telephone books
• Web search
• Huge e-commerce sites

But in all of these applications, the data set is static.  User activity will not change the data for anybody else.

Web 2.0.1: Democratizing use of the data

The users of these data make the data better.  They can collectively
organize the data.  (i.e. tags)  They can help filter good data from
junk.  (i.e. voting)  Or they can help you find the data that are most
interesting to you.  (i.e. collaborative filtering).  In other words,
you can interact with the data.

Any "Web 2.0 company" worth their salt has an API that federates out their raw data.  This enables other sites to use the data in new and novel ways.  But the primary problem with this paradigm is that anything built using these API’s is done from the ground up.  Using the gmail POP interface, it’s possible to build a better UI for gmail.  But to do so you need to first build an entire AJAX mail client — no small feat.  Better would be the ability to add features into the gmail UI itself.  But this is really the standard in web 2.0 API’s today.

Web 2.0.2: Democratizing the feature set

The next big trend will be enabling users to make more compelling ways to interact with
the data.  Users can change not just the data, but how other users see
and use the data.  Sometimes this means API’s with UI hooks.  Or other ways to enable new functionality into an existing site.  This kind of platform enables Independent Software Vendors to improve upon the UI’s that the original sites created.

Facebook is doing this by allowing ISV’s to add new communications features to their site.  Google Maps is doing this through maplets that allow developers to create new ways to interact with mapping data from within the fabulous Maps UI.  Right now these are the only two examples of web 2.0.2 platforms that I’m aware of.

Building this kind of API is very challenging.  There are several very different ways to go about doing it.  Here are a couple of ideas:

• Provide a server-server API that includes content generated from the ISV’s servers into the main experience.  Facebook style.
• Allow developers to author XML files that define new algorithms that are interpreted on the primary host’s servers.  Yahoo pipes is a service in this style, but they’re not doing anything to enhance an existing service so it doesn’t really meet my 2.0.2 criteria.
• Allow developers to author javascript plugins to run on the client machine.  Greasemonkey is essentially doing this.  This strategy has the best shot for a lot of applications in the long term, IMHO.  But it comes with some serious problems right now.

Doing this correctly would allow ISV’s to add new features to Gmail.  Think about it — if I wanted to change the way gmail messages were displayed, or how addressing happened, or whatever it was, this kind of platform could provide hooks for making gmail better in a way that a POP interface never would.  And even though a POP-style interface theoretically could do this, there would never be momentum because having a high-level base to build upon means that there are network effects from the extensions.  (Rails achieves a similar advantage over other web frameworks — just having a standard, any standard, means people will build upon that standard rather than argue over which library to use and extend none of them.)

3rd-party javascript

The big problem with this approach is security.  There is none.  You need to completely trust the ISV before you should allow their code to run in the context of your site.  The kind of editorial review required to do this today would completely kill the democratic goal of such a platform.

The world needs a security sandbox to run third-party javascript code inside.  This way primary site hosts could allow ISV’s to run their code on client machines safely.  Here are a few examples of places this kind of tool could be used.

ISV’s could…

• Add UI features to Gmail
• Create alternate ways to share and discuss images on Flickr
• Define new mathematical formulas to run client-side on a web spreadsheet
• Create new playlist selection / shuffling algorithms for Rhapsody

… and much more.  Even better, individual users (not developers) could pick which UI extensions they wanted to use.  Any site which provides such an API has democratized the feature development process in a very important way.  Not only does it provide a distributed mechanism to figure out which features are best, but it allows users to self-segment as to which features work for them.  Without such a mechanism the entire service must have the same features for everybody, which means product designers must play a political game where they’ll never make everybody happy.  Right now I think really only Facebook has solved this problem.

Building a security sandbox is an area that Microsoft could probably do best and fastest.  They are good at code API’s and layered security models,a nd they have a perfect place to do it with Silverlight and the CLR.  They’re trying to position Silverlight as a faster way to run DHTML, which is something else the world desperately needs right now.  But I just can’t imagine them doing anything this innovative or generally valuable.  Doesn’t sell more Office.  Doesn’t sell more Windows.  They don’t even really have many services that could use third party extensions, and they’ve lost touch with the ISV’s who might build such extensions too.  Google Gears could conceivably add such an extension.  There’s precedent there considering the javascript threading extensions they provide.

This will be a difficult problem to solve, I have no doubt.  But I hope somebody with the resources to leverage a solution takes it on, because I think it would really make the world a better place.

Other alternatives include forwarding list-mail to another list-only account and deleting it, but that is frankly kinda lame.  Or if there was a way to create a filter that runs only on messages left in the inbox after the other rules have run, then I could forward the inbox messages to another account that I read with my phone.  But I don’t think that option is currently available either.

We’re quickly approaching a world where we’re always connected to the net in some manner or another.  As we all know, the bandwidth with which we can communicate with the net varies tremendously between locations and situations.  It might be
as slow as AT&T’s EDGE network, or as fast as a dedicated office
line with many Gbps of throughput.  But when we’re in the office, the speed of our pipe to the net isn’t the limiting factor.  Usually it’s the servers on the other end which limit how fast we can get things done.  Even when I’m on my DSL line at home, Gmail is so slow that my pipe isn’t the limiting factor.  Effective bandwidth is limited by the smallest pipe in the series from your brain to the information service.

Sometimes the smallest pipe isn’t a network layer at all.  If you’re using your iPhone on the office’s WiFi network, the network will all run super fast.  But your effective speed will be the iPhone’s virtual keyboard, and there are many small devices which are way harder to use than the iPhone.  There are multiple places the communications pipeline can get clogged:

1. The physical Human-Computer Interface of your device
2. The UI of the software on the device
3. The local processing power of your device
4. The direct connection from your device to the series of high-speed routers and fiber known as "the net"
5. The processing power of the servers running the information service you’re using

Laptops have totally caught up with desktops in terms of #2 and #3, but not #1.  The reason to use a desktop machine is that you can trick out its Human-Computer Interface to be super high bandwidth.  You can get yourself a really nice ergonomic keyboard, multiple high-resolution monitors, and a real mouse.  A friend of mine even built himself a foot-mouse.  Pretty soon your desktop will start to look like Lain’s Navi.  (Pictured above for those not familiar with it — go watch it.  It’s rad.)

You can do some of this with a laptop docking station if
available, or by manually plugging and unplugging things.  Many laptops
support 2 monitors, but generally one of them needs to be the internal
monitor, which won’t match the second one.  A USB port multiplier can
handle all your input devices which is nice.  So if you’re happy with
just two displays, a laptop can probably get enough HCI bandwidth today.

Looking further down the line, someday Apple will extend the iPhone’s multi-touch UI to iMacs and give us the Minority Report interface.  This will offer far more Human-Computer bandwidth than we’ve ever seen before.  This trend will continue towards direct Computer-Brain Interfaces at which point the line between our biological brains and our "exocortex" will get very blurry indeed.  I can hardly wait.

Gmail is written using a classic MVC pattern — Model, View, Controller.  The View reflects changes in the Model, and the Controller tells them what to do.  Clearly the View is our web page, and in this implementation, the Model is stored on Google’s servers.  What this means is that when you do something like archive a message, you’re not going to see the results until a message is sent to Google’s servers and the response comes back.  Now Google has really fast servers, but networks are slow.  By following this design pattern, Gmail is easy to code new features for and maintain relatively bug-free, but it’s never going to be all that fast.

Gmail engineers could code up optimizations for special cases.  For example, when I’m looking at my inbox and I hit archive on a message, they could detect this case, and just remove it from the page and then tell the server afterwards.  This kind of coding will quickly make the Gmail hard to maintain and result in lots of bugs.  Especially when you consider that multiple clients can connect to a single gmail account at once.  Strictly following MVC makes it easy to resolve conflicts in one place — the server.

A Proposed Solution

There is a solution though.  Google Gears can help.  The Gmail UI could be (and for all I know currently is being) re-architected to use Google Gears as the Model in the MVC pattern.  This means any operation in the UI would be committed very quickly to the SQLite database on your hard drive.  Then another thread would synchronize these changes in the background with the master model on Google’s servers.  Everything works — UI operations are reflected to the user extremely quickly.  We don’t lose all the benefits of storing all our data on the server.  And as an added bonus, we can still work on our e-mail when our computers are offline.  Yet another reason why Google Gears is important.

So when is this coming?  Synchronization and it’s evil twin, conflict resolution, are complex software tasks, so it could take a while.  But if I were placing bets, I’d guess we’ll see this in the first half of 2008.

In this environment it’s tempting to design products that assume customers will always be well connected.  It is certainly easier to build compelling services to users that have a good pipe to the net on them at all times.  So this begs the question: If customers will soon always have good broadband net access, why do we need a client-side data store like Google Gears?  For example, somebody working on a subscription music service might conclude that it’s a waste of time building portable mp3-players with local storage since soon enough everyone will have broadband access everywhere, so why not just stream the music off the net?

There are several good reasons why client-side storage is still important and will continue to be important into the future:

• Wireless net access sucks down battery.  Always will.  It’s physics.  Local access to data will always cost less battery.  This won’t change no matter how pervasive broadband is.
• Pervasive net access is expensive. Arguably we’re already in a world where some people have pervasive net access.  Verizon EVDO cards do pretty darned well in this country, for $60/month.  But it will be a long time before most people have it.  Higher speeds will always demand a premium.
• Net access is unreliable.  Especially wireless access, but wired too.  Packets collide.  Transmission patterns have nodes.  Routers flap.  Cables get unplugged.  Laptops wake up and can’t figure out where they are for a while.  Something gets misconfigured.  If your software is designed to gracefully degrade when the network is unreliable, your customers will be happier, because it’s going to happen.  Remember what Outlook/Exchange was like when the entire Outlook UI would freeze while waiting for the Exchange server to respond to any request?  Please don’t do that to your users.

Once web applications are fully embracing it, Google Gears will close most of the functionality gap between native-client applications and web applications.  I believe it’s really important, and I’m really glad that there’s industry consensus around Google Gears and that other offline browser storage projects have deferred to it.  I’d hate to see web app developers trying to choose between several different client-store plugins.

I like to group sets of related browser tabs together into OS windows.  This organizational structure makes it easy to multi-task.  I might be researching something I want to buy, and I’ll have lots of tabs open in a single window with the various options I’m considering and the related research.  When I’ve made my choice and have purchased something, I can easily close all those tabs together with a single click, and not interrupt any of my other activities.  Or if I get interrupted before I can make a decision, I will minimize this window and the whole set of activities is put aside until I’m ready to work on it again. 

The same strategy works for research — if I’m trying to figure out a specific something, I will typically open a half dozen windows before finding what I want.  But once I have the answer, none of those windows are useful anymore.

Suggestions / Requests

Here are a couple of things I’d like to see change about tab management in firefox:

I want the ability to take an open tab and pull it into its own window frame.  Sometimes a new tab will open in the current FF window and I’ll realize it’s going to be the root of an exploration and should really have its own window.  Right now I have to copy the URL, close the tab, open a new window and paste the URL.  It would be great to have a context menu option to do this for me.

Now some might question why that tab opened in the wrong window in the first place.  Sometimes it’s because I don’t realize when I open something that it will blossom into a whole research task.  So I open it in the same window, but then later want it in its own window.  More often though it’s because I click on a hyperlink in another application.  I have firefox set to open new links in new tabs instead of new windows.  Normally this is the correct behavior when browsing — anything I click on that wants to open a new window is related to what I’m doing.  But when I click a new link in another application, it’s generally not related to whichever FF window I happened to be using last.  I want a firefox option which allows me to change the new tab/new window behavior for OS links from other applications because normally I want those to open in new windows.

Update: Ask and you shall receive

It turns out most of what I want is already available in the fabulous Tab Mix Plus plugin.  Thanks to Stuart for pointing this out.  It’s got a lot of options and I haven’t explored all of them.  But I think it still doesn’t give me the level of control I’d really like to move tabs between windows.  I think what I really want is to be able to drag & drop between browser windows.

What I’ve been thinking about building in my copious spare time is a web-based feed-reader that assumes you over-subscribe to feeds.  That is, it expects you to "subscribe" to more feeds than you can fully consume.  These days many of the most popular feeds on the web meet this criterion even if that’s all you subscribe too.  I don’t have time to follow any one of TechCrunch, Scobleizer, Engadget, or even Radar in their entirety — I generally don’t even get to skim all their headlines.  But I know people in my social network do, and when they do it would be a small extra effort for them to help me identify the posts that are worth me reading.

This could be done by explicitly recommending articles to friends, or by tagging, or rating, or any of a number of well-understood-yet-often-poorly-implemented mechanisms.  Additionally, I could subscribe to a meta-feed coming out of a single-friend or a set of people in the social network graph that could expand several levels.  And of course there would be meta-feeds covering the aggregate opinions of all users.  The result would be that I could "express mild interest" in a feed by "subscribing to it" and the system would help me figure out which of the voluminous posts were actually worth reading.  Or if other users tagged posts, I could find good posts on a particular topic.  It would encompass a lot of the utility of digg, techmeme and link blogs all at once.  Another step in the process of democratizing information consumption.

I’ve been talking with friends about building this in the context of a facebook app for reasonably obvious reasons.  I’d call it "the outside world" as a reference to the fact that college kids are generally so isolated from external news, and this would be a social way for those few who do read the traditional-news to share good things with their friends.  Facebook’s restrictions on apps processing social networking metadata would make somegood features difficult, but the advantages in marketing and lower barrier to entry probably outweigh that.  Now my idea is out there for the world, so I’m not getting a jump on anybody.  If anybody wants to take this idea and run with it, drop me a line and I’d be happy to help advise.  I might just do it anyway because the Facebook market and the Google Reader market are both healthy and the basics just aren’t that hard.

But it sounds like you’ll have stiff competition.  Quoting from Blogoscoped’s analysis of the video:

Google’s recent big social effort is called Mocha-Mocha (or
Mocka-Mocka?), and will become the infrastructure for all social stuff
across all of their applications. As a part of this, a new
feature called Activity Streams will be introduced or at least
implemented in Reader this quarter. This will be comparable to
Facebook’s News Feed (Minifeed?) feature, and integrate Gmail’s
addressbook and contact list.

Also there will be some other Gmail and Orkut integration, but this might just mean there will be links to Reader.

Hearing that Brad Fitzpatrick has joined Google and because it’s the kind of thing I do, I’ve been putting some thought into how Google could reasonably add social networking features to their services.  I’ve been talking to folks about how Facebook is currently Google’s biggest strategic threat because they’ve done such a good job integrating the social network into new feature development, and in doing so have democratized new feature development in a way the world has never before seen.  This need struck me as a good way to start integrating social networking features into Google. 

Orkut is and only ever will be a toy IMHO.  Let the Brazilians keep playing with it and don’t push it on the rest of us.  Between contacts and knowledge about whom we chat and e-mail with, gmail has vastly more meaningful set of social networking data.  As we’ve learned watching LinkedIn and okcupid and other social networks thrive side by side, it makes sense to have different social networks for different purposes.  Orkut is a toy network and should not be the basis of anything more meaningful.  Sorry, Orkut.

• Stories or fiction
• Instructional content
• Reference material

For all of these, first-time visitors should be presented with the first post, which would include the most basic information on the subject or the beginning of the story. 

I’ve frequently thought about using a blog engine to write a detailed how-to guide on one subject or another, but this problem has discouraged me.  A plug-in could solve this, and likely there’s an answer since this problem has been identified for years.  Here’s what I’d want the plug-in to do:

Remember how far through a blog each visitor has gotten.  Enable some UI so that visitors indicate that they have read an article.  Articles that have not been read are displayed oldest-first.  By default this visitor state could be stored in a cookie, or server-side in an account.

Clearly this wouldn’t be helpful for a blog like engadget or techcrunch that posts dozens of articles every day.  But these blogs need to help their readers than what I can describe in a few paragraphs today.

Or maybe they’re not there yet, and it’ll take another year or two.  But this is what I think they should do.

• Day 1: I took notes on my Treo
• Day 2: I carried around my MacBook
• Day 3: I scribbled in a paper notebook

My notes from the first day are brief, but useful.  They are generally just names and short phrases.  They remind me of things that I found interesting and that I want to follow up on.  I used the notepad function in my PDA.  It was pretty easy to pop it open and jot something down.  Windows crashed on me of course, which prevented me from capturing a few things.  But overall it was pretty handy.

My notes from the second day are very sparse.  I have a few blog entries that are 5% written and an e-mail draft.  There isn’t a lot here.  I carried my laptop around because I was presenting that day, and wanted to be able to practice and tweak my slides.  I also saw some other people engaging in really high-bandwidth communication with the net using laptops and thought I could too.  The real thing that got in the way was startup time.  Even though OS X is really pretty good at this, the several seconds it takes to turn on and connect to the net got in the way of capturing ideas.  I think another problem was my own fault — I tried to put information in the form that it would be ultimately used rather than just quickly jot down reminders.  Having the ability to author the content in the format it would be ultimately used tempted me to do so, but it wasn’t the best choice in retrospect.  It’s also somewhat anti-social.

My notes from the third day are fabulous.  I have many names and URLs and ideas and drawings and numbers.  The paper notebook took no time to boot up, to load a writing app, a contact management app, a drawing app — they’re all instantly available.  It never crashed.  Switching contexts in it was as easy as flipping a page.

My conclusion is that for this kind of fast-paced environment, reducing barriers to capturing ideas is critical.  A critical measure is the latency from deciding to record something to being done recording it.  By this measure, the paper notebook was the hands-down winner.  As Tim noted, fewer people were carrying laptops, maybe for this reason.

Digression into personal projects…

This problem is what inspired me to build Offbrain, which allows you to record ideas in the cloud using a cellphone for later retrieval.  I’ve seen people using Twitter for this, which I think is a great application.  I might switch to that technique, but it requires looking at twitter in a slightly different light, since very few of my friends want to be plugged into my random-idea-stream that closely, and I often want to capture ideas that I don’t want to disclose publicly. 

I’m re-inspired to finish the SMS gateway for Offbrain.  Since we always have our cell phones and we’ve co-evolved (with our handsets) the ability to quickly jam out li’l notes very fast, SMS offers a great low-latency way to capture ideas for a lot of people.  I think I’m going to borrow Gina Trapani’s command-line interface for task tracking as an SMS command language for Offbrain.  (Thanks, Gina!)  I was impressed with her talk about it — this UI has clearly evolved through a lot of iterations to become a simple, effective, powerful way to record and categorize action items.  Offering a todo.txt export should be an easy and useful hack too.  The obvious follow-ups are hosted todo.txt in the sky with multiple access methods including web, web services, SMS, etc.  Beginning to sound more and more like twitter.  Hmmm…

Thanks to Steve Garfield for the picture.  Yay for CC saving me the trouble of taking my own.

Now my machine isn’t the switftest deer in the forest.  But it’s got a 2GHz processor and 2 GB of ram so it’s not exactly archaic.  What takes so long I have no idea.  After a bit of wrestling I managed to disable the on-anything virus scanner, so I know it’s not that.  Indexing the messages for searching is my best guess.  If I could figure out how to uninstall the MS/Live Desktop Search App I would, but it conveniently forgot to add itself to the add/remove programs list.

I’m sorely tempted to switch to gmail for my corporate e-mail interface.  I admit I haven’t yet made it past the first step of the 3 standard Microsoft troubleshooting techniques.  But I know others who are having similar problems so I suspect it wouldn’t help.  Overall Office 2007 is a pretty nice product once you get used to the menu shuffling.  But it runs painfully slowly.  I guess this is the trend for MS software which supports their symbiosis with Intel — code for the next generation of hardware to encourage upgrades.  The idea being that more CPU power supports a more compelling user experience.  Personally, I haven’t been convinced that the upgrade is worth it yet.  I’m more often impressed with a good web UI than a new flashy aero-glass UI.

All this reminds me of the story behind the fabulous first album by The Postal Service, Give Up.  For those who don’t know the story, this fabulous album was created by two musicians living in different cities who sent tapes back and forth by mail to create the music. 

Now sites like JamGlue and SpliceMusic make this kind of collaboration possible for anybody musically inclined.  It’ll be fun to hear the first big successes from this new kind of band.  You might even call them a transhuman bands since they’ll using modern technology to overcome human geographic limitations to creating music.

It’s modeled after the fabulous mobile gmail interface.  Offbrain’s pages are typically between 1k and 1.5k total — they load very snappily on very slow mobile links.  (Assuming dreamhost hasn’t swapped the app or the database into virtual memory — a perennial problem with cheap shared hosting.)  And by using extremely simple HTML (think 1994) the pages display very nicely on a 240×240 pixel screen like you’ll find on a cell phone.

The idea of the service is to take notepad and list functionality that has been standard in PDAs and PIMs forever, and move it into the information cloud.  Make it accessible through web, e-mail and SMS so it’s accessible anywhere you have a cellphone.  This way you’ll never forget to bring your shopping list to the store again because you’ll always have your phone with you.  Even better, since it’s stored in the cloud, you and your family members can share a group list, which would never have been possible with paper or traditional PDAs.

My buddy Ben and I even came up with a cool way to monetize this free-to-consumers service as a business.  We entered the idea in the UW Business Plan Competition which provided me the necessary motivation to build the beta that’s now live and to do the necessary research into how to connect it to a real SMS gateway.  (Thanks to Jordan Schwartz for all the tips.)

My real goal of course here is to support the upcoming robot revolution by encouraging people to move more of their active minds into computers.  Encourage is a strong word.  Enable.  Moral capitalism requires offering services that are mutually beneficial to all parties with full disclosure of all known information.  By this criterion I think I’m totally in the clear so long as I explain to y’all what I’m up to.

Once I actually wire up the SMS interface, I’m gonna totally use this all the time.  Anytime I want to remember something and I don’t have my journal in front of me, I’m just gonna whip out my cell phone and send a text message to my external brain (my Offbrain) so it’ll remember it for me.

And yes, despite all my whining, I wrote it in Ruby on Rails.  Annoying as the language is for complex projects, it works really nicely for a quick and dirty app like this.

I determined that the problem was not user error.  I had in fact asked it to play the news, not the robots.  But my net connection appeared to be down this morning for some reason.  And when the Sonos failed to connect to KUOW’s streaming servers, it decided that the best thing to do was to play its internal alarm noise.

So I wanted to send some props to the Sonos engineers for yet again building a product that exceeds my expectations in terms of user experience.  Things screwed up, and it still did a fine job.  Now if they’d just add search functionality for Rhapsody content, they’d be 100% there.  As it is to find an arbitrary artist, I need to pop open a laptop, browser to rhapsody.com/(artistname) and add it to my library to get quick access through the Sonos controller.  A bit of a hack, but it works.  Anyway, I’m not here to gripe, but to thank.  And to offer advice for anybody who hasn’t figured out the hack yet.

Good job, Sonos.  Keep it up.

What makes this even more impressive is that one of those two intervening months included the end of year holidays.  When I’m doing long-term project scheduling, I generally write off 3 weeks out of December because of vacations and general lack of focus.  So they did all this in about 5 useful weeks.

I attribute this productivity to a team that has fully embraced agile development practices.  We use schedule-driven releases, which have a ton of advantages over feature-driven releases that I won’t detail right now.  (Avoiding feature-creep is huge.)  In 2006 we put out 10 releases with major new features, and almost no crunch time.  At this point the team has a solid understanding of several important things:

• Their feature velocity — How much work can they get done in a month?
• Staggering dependent work — How to break apart a problem into things that can get done early
• Keeping the pipeline full — This one’s my favorite, and requires explanation.  Read on…

I like to draw analogies between software development and a traditional manufacturing factory.  In a well organized team, the bottleneck is going to be the development team.  Every business function suffers from diseconomies of scale as more people are added because of communication overhead.  But the development function, actually writing the code, has this problem way worse than quality assurance, program management, visual design, user experience testing, or product management.  Writing code requires such intensely detailed knowledge that adding people efficiently requires massive amounts of information to be shared.  The bandwidth between human brains isn’t high enough to support this properly yet.  So, in a well proportioned team, the devs are the bottleneck.

As anybody who’s taken intro to operations management will tell you, the key to keeping a factory running at peak capacity is to keep the bottleneck as busy as possible.  That means accumulating a safety stock of work-in-progress inventory in front of the bottleneck.  In software engineering terms, that translates to having a stash of complete product plans, visual designs and functional specs ready for the development team to work on.  In other words, make sure the devs are never waiting  for anybody else to tell them what to build next.  This is an aspect of agile project management I don’t hear discussed much.  But my team has figured it out.  The overall result is a team that is always working hard, rarely stressed, and extremely productive at putting out products everybody is proud of.

Another great aspect of the team is that everybody feels ownership over the product.  Innovation comes from everywhere.  Try bookmarking something in your library.  You’ll need to sign up for a free trial account first, then hit one of the plus buttons next to some music and select "Add to Library."  Normally you might wonder where to go from here to work with your library.  But if you try it, I’m certain it will be obvious to you what to do next.  This simple, subtle, eye-candy user-education  feature didn’t come from product management or creative design.  It was one developer’s idea that the team ran with, and it’s one of my favorite features right now.  This isn’t an agile practice per se, but it sure makes a difference in the overall product quality.

I wish I could take credit for this accomplishment, but my input has been mostly just guidance.  Good job, team.  Keep it up!  (By the way, if you’re a rock-star java developer looking for a better-than-your-current job in Seattle or SF, drop me an e-mail.  We’re hiring.)

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 the fact that there’s no tactile feedback — you can’t feel the buttons.  Which means you really need to be looking at the device to be using it.  Which means you can’t send text messages from an iPhone while driving.  Some might argue that you shouldn’t even try to anyway, but I’m sure people will try, and I’m also sure they’ll crash trying.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m very excited about this device, and will probably use it as an excuse to ditch my crappy not-so-smart phone.  And I’m guessing that in about 5 years somebody, maybe Apple or MIT or UW, will figure out how to put texture onto a display and solve this problem.  But until then, I maintain that single purpose devices will be better at what they do than generic devices.

What is Dodgeball?

If your friends have discovered dodgeball, I’d guess you’re probably in one of three states:

• Infatuated with this neato service that broadcasts SMS text messages to your friends when you go out
• Wondering what your friends are always doing with their phones under the table and what the big deal is
• Sick of dodgeball spam to the point of being about to cancel it, or having already done so

For those of you lucky enough to have never experienced dodgeball, here’s how it works: every time you go to a bar or something like that, you send a text message to dodgeball telling it where you are.  Then dodgeball broadcasts that out to all your friends.  You can similarly send out non-location messages like "Anybody want to see a movie tonight?"  As a dodgeball user the result is that most evenings you get some (sometimes several dozen) text messages about what your friends are doing or thinking.  So many, in fact, that you will likely start to take the buzzing in your pocket less seriously than you used to.  At this point the service’s name and logo start to make some sense:

You see an innocent guy who’s just been hit in the back of the head with a ball.  Again.  It’s hurts.  It’s not much fun.  But at least he’s used to it.  And for some reason that he doesn’t really understand himself, he continues to put up with it.  Seek it out even.  The SMS noise on my phone now sounds like the "Bonk!" of a cherry ball striking the base of the skull.

Dodgeball Abuse

Knowing that your friends are hanging out at a bar is great.  That’s what it’s about.  These kinds of dodgeballs are intrinsic invitations to come hang out.  But if your friends are at all like mine, pretty soon you’ll start getting dodgeballs reporting that they are "on a small boat in the middle of lake serene" or "in a seaplane over Puget Sound."  These kinds of posts are much more bragging than invitations to join since clearly there’s no way to get where they are.  Private parties, distant airports and obscenely expensive restaurants are similar.  Also, sending messages like "my parents are driving me crazy" or "I’m stuck in traffic" really don’t add value for your friends.  Unless you’ve got a crush on the sender, they’re just whiny and annoying.

Several times in recent months, my social mailing lists have been filled with pleas for restraint in sending this kind of dodgeball, with only limited results.  Generally the consensus seems to be that you can always cancel the service if you don’t like it.  I find this somewhat disappointing because I think there is a good way to use the service. 

I consciously choose to put up with the perpetual annoyance for a couple of reasons.  Most importantly, the extra messages aren’t much of a burden for me — I’m not charged for them and my phone is "smart" enough to handle them.  There’s also some entertainment value in keeping in closer touch this way.  But most importantly it’s because about once a month I’m involved with a positive serendipitous social interaction from the service the way it was intended.  I’ll be walking down the street and my pocket buzzes and tells me that a friend I don’t see much is a block away, so I drop in and say hi, or vice versa.  That makes it worth while for me.

Managing Dodgeballs

A lot of these problems could be avoided by dodgeball adding a few more personalization features around delivery.  Right now you can completely block a user.  The so-called ex-girlfriend feature allows a user to appear to be your friend in the social network, but not exchange any messages with them.  This is a good way of dealing with friends who send lots of dodgeball spam.  Another mechanism that some of my friends have chosen is to have all dodgeballs delivered via email to a dedicated address.

But a better way for those of us with "smart" phones would be to segment which of our friends’ dodgeballs get delivered via SMS and which get delivered via e-mail.  Then certain A-list friends could actually send you text messages, and everybody else’s dodgeballs would get queued up in a place where you could see them, but wouldn’t get interrupted by them. 

Until the newly indocrinated googlers add this, I think there are some guidelines we can all follow to dodgeball responsibly.

Proper Dodgeball Etiquette

It’s become quickly obvious to my group of friends that the only obviously appropriate time to dodgeball is to report your location when others are welcome to join you.  (My friends have collectively chosen to ignore this guideline about as fast as they identified it, but that’s a different issue.)  Saying you’re at a bar or a concert, or even "in bed" are all totally valid dodgeballs, if used when others are welcome.  Sending messages like "drinks for happy hour?" or even "the sunset is absolutely gorgeous" are also completely socially responsible, IMHO.

The question of dodgeballing on a date has lingered as an interesting one.  Some of my friends like to dodgeball as a record of the places they’ve been.  But if you’re hanging out with just one person, do you really want company?  Rose, social genius that she is, figured out the right protocol for that one when she asked me "should we dodgeball?"  Recognizing that a dodgeball is an invitation for company, she asked me if I felt like inviting others to join us semi-serendipitously, or if I’d rather protect our hard-scheduled time as one-on-one. 

Really, asking first should be the standard protocol for dodgeballing.  When you’re with a large group of people at a bar, there might not be a point.  But if you’re over at a friend’s house for dinner or a movie, asking first is the responsible thing to do.  Otherwise whatstheirface might show up.  ;)

Now go forth and dodgeball responsibly.

So you can build a playlist as you’re browsing the music catalog.  You can also (finally) queue up music without interrupting the current song.  There’s also a drag-and-drop playlist editor for modifying existing playlists.  All these playlists are accessible from everywhere Rhapsody works — in the Rhapsody PC Software, on your Sonos system, on your portable Sansa device.  The jukebox in the sky is getting more and more real all the time.

I think this is a really cool new feature, so I just had to share.

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 hour.  For many months I’ve been using this application as my primary scheduling calendar outside of work, so it’s full of stuff for months into the future.  I really didn’t want to update hundreds of calendar entries by hand (I’m a busy guy) so I broke down and called support.

First tier of VZW support says "that’s a feature of the phone." I called his bluff and he connected me to technical data support.  After hearing the issue, Tim from tech support laughed and apologizesdnicely for it.  After a bit of digging we found a knowledge base article describing this exact problem and the workaround steps.  Like Tim had suggested, plugging it into Outlook will fix all the calendar entries that were originally created in Outlook.  But ever since the Outlook sync application broke for the 17th time I’ve stopped trying to synchronize my calendars between my PC and my phone and have just been using the one that I always have with me.  So essentially all my calendar entries are phone-enterred, which turns out to be a mixed blessing.

Reading the KB article carefully it says in a roundabout way that for appointments enterred in the phone you have two choices: erase them and recreate them, or adjust them by hand.  I had to point this out to Tim whose casual reading of the KB article had convinced him that all our problems were solved.  When I said this was unacceptable, we finally got a hold of Carlos at Palm technical support, although it was amazingly difficult even with Tim driving.

Carlos had the creative suggestion of telling my phone it was in Mountain Time instead of Pacific.  Smart move for a smart phone because now all my calendar appointments actually had the correct time again!  Carlos was hoping this would satisfy me and I’d go away, but I realized that with the phone’s clock set ahead an hour I would still get all my reminders an hour ahead of when they should be.  After a bit more monkeying around like this he admited that my only option was to update them all by hand.  I thanked Carlos for being utterly unhelpful despite doing his best and drove off to school planning my revenge.

I don’t think I’ve yet warned both of you my dear readers, but if either of you are considering buying a high-end phone, stay as far away from the Treo 700w as possible.  Its problems are too numerous to list in this blog post, but I’ll write the first few that come to mind.  Like the CDMA stack crashing periodically so it stops receiving phone calls or text messages with no visual indication that anything is wrong.  Or the fact that the POP3 e-mail plugin is only about 10% reliable.  Or the moronic UI that happens if you accidentally hit the prominent side-of-phone volume buttons while pulling the phone out of your pocket to answer it, producing a dialog which covers up the name of the caller, and because the touch-screen is disabled in call-mode you can’t dismiss the dialog.  Or the fact that the camera can only take about 1 picture every 15 seconds because you almost always need to reboot the camera app between shots.  I could go on for pages.  It really is the worst phone I have ever heard of.  At least it’s bulky and expensive.  I periodically hear rumors about a class-action suit against Palm because of it.

All of this infuriates me with a rage I rarely feel in my oh-so-mature late-early-thirties.  I’m often tempted to smash the thing into the sidewalk but I know my insurance plan would just get me a brand-new but just-as-shitty replacement.  Why am I so upset?  Because I hate Steve and Bill?  I don’t think so — I know myself well enough to realize that I don’t get this way unless I’m hiding from something.  I think the true answer might lie in the fact that I was stupid enough to think buying this phone was a good idea.  I wanted to be cool and on the cutting edge and definitely should have known better than to trust an important part of my personal infrastructure to a v1.0 product. 

It’s tempting to spend a lot of energy bitching at VZW or Palm and try to get them to replace my phone with a 700p.  Or to spend a weekend with Ruby on Rails and build a "everything I hate about my Treo" support site.  Or maybe to organize that class action suit.  But few of these things actually add value to the world. What I’d really like is for Palm or MSFT to write a little application that fixes this problem for me.  Instead, I’ll probably spend a few humble hours this week while on the plane to China setting back every entry in my calendar.

Feeding into the main volume is the "mixer."  You can get to it by double-clicking the main volume control.  It lets you adjust the relative volume of various sound sources like CD audio and wave input and midi that were all very relevant in 1997.  Therein lies the problem.  The audio sources that people care about setting the relative volumes today all fall under one channel in the mixer: "Wave" — they’re different applications like WinAmp and WMP and Real Player and Rhapsody and various web pages.  But in today’s windows applications, every one of these applications has to implement its own proprietary volume control.  Having painfully built a bunch of volume controls out of javascript and .gif’s, I can say it would be much nicer if the OS managed this instead.

A modern volume control mixer widget should have sliders for all running applications that are outputting sound.  Ideally adjusting them in the mixer would synchronize with their positions within the application.  This is a bit harder since it requires defining an API would allow applications to sync the display of their volume control to changes made in the system mixer.  Without this synchronization, this system could be retrofitted onto existing applications simply by hooking in at, say the DirectSound level in Windows.

When it comes to installing something free like Ubuntu, it seems that there’s a real "you-get-what-you-pay-for" situation here.  Premium services are highly accurate.  But free services like hostip.info are barely breaking 50% accuracy right now.  But even though it thought my IP address was in the middle of the San Francisco bay, that is at least in the correct timezone.

Hostip.info has the right goal of creating puclicly accessibly web services APIs.  In fact their API is beautiful.  So please, go contribute to their database and help improve the accuracy.  Then we’ll never need to tell the computers what timezone we’re in — they’ll just know.  And we all want the computers to get smarter, don’t we?

Hostip.info thinks you’re in this country:




Wrong?  Please correct it.

Power management.  It wakes up instantly when you pop the lid, and it doesn’t need to blunder around trying to reconnect to the wifi network — if it was connected when you closed the lid, it will be connected when you open it.  It dims & then blacks the screen pretty quickly.  But unlike a windows machine, I don’t feel a need to stop it, because I know it will wake up again.  It never gets stuck in this half-awake mode that windows laptops seem to love.  And I’m confident I will never open the lid to see it saying "Hibernating…" and then have it shut down.  A friend who works at MSFT once sang me a jingle that goes something like "Power management in windows isn’t very good.  They say it will be better in the next version.  They always do."

Filesystem.  When you erase a file, it goes away.  OS X never sits there pondering "Can I erase this file?  I wonder.  Hmmm.  Maybe.  If I erase it, what could happen?  Hmm.  I wonder.  Let me think about this for a minute."  While I generally don’t think much of unixy/open-source GUIs, having a rock-solid filesystem behind this machine is really nice.

Light-sensitive.  Here’s one of those really nice subtle touches that most people will never notice, but just makes the machine work better.  The MacBook has light-sensors under the grills on the sides of the keyboard.  If you’ve got one, try covering them up with your hands.  The screen dims.  It uses this to automatically adjust the screen brightness to the ambient light in the room.  Nice touch.

MagSafe power connector.  I never need to worry about tripping over my laptop’s charger and having my expensive laptop flung off the table.  That’s a nice patent.  I wonder how broad it is.  Really, alot of plugs could be magnetic.  But honestly I think that most new consumer electronics won’t need any cables in about 10 years.  In about 5 years, Bluetooth (or its ilk) will handle data interconnects, and in another 5 years, we’ll be charging our batteries without plugs either by using inductive battery chargers or smart wire arrays that automatically couple to any device placed on them.  I also have to say that while the magsafe plug is great, Apple has a few things to learn from Dell about how to build the charger unit.

A few annoying things:  The keyboard controls for editing text just aren’t as full-featured in macworld as they are in windows.  You are expected to use the mouse.  It’s hard to type as fast. 

But hands-down the best feature of the MacBook Pro: MacSabre.  Props to my old friend Jon Bell for a nice logo.

I also got Woz to sign it the other day.  Woz is rad!

For everybody else out there who didn’t grow up idolizing Larry Wall, there’s a better solution: Sonos.  They’ve built an amazing digital home stereo solution that blows away every other Digital Audio Receiver on the market.  And to make it even better, they just hard wired it into Rhapsody which means you have instant access to a huge catalog of almost 3 million songs anywhere and everywhere in your house.  If I hadn’t invested a ton of energy into my home-grown system, I would have a Sonos system, because it’s just that well done.  I’m actually tempted to throw away what I’ve built.

At CES a couple years ago I shared a booth with some engineers from Sonos.  They’ve done some amazing things with Wifi.  Their amp units have audio inputs as well as outputs, so you can plug your DVD player into a sonos amp in one room, and have the same audio play simultaneously in another room.  Doesn’t sound like a big deal until you consider what’s actually going on under the hood.  They’re encoding the audio into some digital format (probably mp3 or aac or some such), and transmitting it over wifi to another amp unit.  Beyond that, they have to buffer the transmission to account for potentially dropped packets.  The truly amazing part is that they can do all this with such a short delay that you don’t even hear an echo in the audio between the two rooms.  Streaming audio over the internet typically requires 5-10 seconds of buffering.  Sonos does buffering and encoding all in I’m guessing <50ms.  Very well done.

This level of detail and engineering skill is maintained in every aspect of the system.  The UI of the remote control will long be held as the gold standard home audio remote control.  As I mentioned earlier, their business team knows how to rebuild the digital home audio market, basically from the ground up.  (Like iPod docks were ever anything more than a pothole in the landscape of consumer electronics evolution.)

It’s a pricey system, but if you can afford it, it’s well worth it.

I have to say that the magsafe power plugs are really cool.  But the way you have to wrap the power cords around the main transformer unit (undoubtedly actually a switching power supply with hardly an inductor to be found anywhere) is pretty weak.  Those fold out clippy things are flimsy and don’t really hold the cord very well either. 

Compare that to the power supplies that Dell supplies for its latitude laptops, where the main transformer unit is somewhat rounded like a spool specifically designed to have long thick power cords wrapped around it.  And the elastic belt is just genius.  That’s exactly how a laptop power supply should stow its cords. 

Eat your heart out, Apple.  Dell totally beat you at your own game on this one.

When thinking about gadget convergence, physics imposes some intrinsic limits.  For example, optics on a camera — right now you need a certain amount of glass to make a decent camera, and this probably won’t change for 5-10 years.  (MEMS mirror arrays will probably solve this problem at some point, but it’s gonna take a while before this is affordable.)  MP3 players are limited by storage or some tradeoff between storare, bandwidth and battery-life.  (Wireless data costs battery.)  But as Apple continues to demonstrate with their disappearing shuffle devices, there’s no intrinsic physical limitation to the size of an MP3 player except for the UI and the headphone jack, and Apple has shown pretty well you don’t need many controls for a simple music player.

But for a great music player it’s all about the controls.  Some say we’re converging on a world where all controls are done through touch-screens and soft-keys.  You certainly can build some fabulous UIs that way.  But until touch screens have tactile feedback, this is not the end of the story.  I operate many of my devices in very sophisticated ways without looking at them.  (Anybody here text while driving?  Be honest.)  Touchscreens can’t give you tactile feedback today.  Sometimes we get fabulous experiences with specialized controls like half-press buttons on cameras or jog wheels with quantized stops.  It’s hard to substitute for holding an ergonomically designed device and knowing how to operate it.  Different devices require different controls, and right now the technology doesn’t exist to genericize that.

Beyond that, when you pick up a generic gizmo, before you can do anything else you need to tell it what personality you want it to exhibit.  "Be a phone now."  When you pick up your dedicated camera, you never need to tell it to stop being an ipod before it will take pictures.  And while some cameras still take a while to boot up, most don’t these days, and they essentially never hang like my crappy "smart" phone does all the time.  These problems of multiple personalities and instability are also major barriers to gadget convergence.  The optimist in me says "these are just software / UI problems and are solvable."  But I don’t think we’ll solve the UI problem until our devices are much better in tune with our emotions, which is pretty far off.  Also, I don’t think we’ll solve the stability problem until we make a fundamental shift in how we write embedded code — something so fundamental I have trouble imagining it.

The single multi-purpose do-it-all gizmo will always have its place.  It’s convenient to be able to carry a single object around that serves many functions, even if it only does a half-assed job at each of these functions.  But until there are several major technological changes, I believe dedicated single-purpose devices will remain the best way for people to satisfy their high-tech gizmo needs.

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 flash
modules for displaying information.  For example, right now there isn’t
one for showing the weather forecast — if I knew flash, I doubt it
would take more than a couple hours to fix this.

As a business I really hope Chumby succeeds.  Their challenge will be to make the initial product cool enough that it gets aspirational appeal.  At about $150 retail, it’s going to need some solid functionality or solid other appeal to justify a purchase.  If they succeed there then the company will stick around long enough to bring the price-point down through economies of scale and lower-end models. 

There are a couple of things they could change that I think would make the product more successful.  For example, I think the touch-screen is unnecessary for the majority of useful functions in the chumby, and replacing it with a display-only screen would lower the price significantly.  My personal opinion is that single-use devices will always have a usability appeal over general-purpose configurable devices.  I’d love to see $50 chumby’s that just did one thing.  Then you could put a photo chumby in your living room and a news chumby in the kitchen and a weather chumby in your closet.  Having a battery-powered model that recharded inductively (or otherwise without needing to be plugged in) would also be a great addition to the product line.

The marketing strategy of starting with a fantastic device that is priced high is a great way to define a new market segment.  Sonos is doing this right now to re-define digital living-room audio devices.  Their first product was a $1200 stereo that everybody who used absolutely adored.  Is $1200 too much for a stereo?  That depends.  For most people yes.  But if it’s really great then some people will pay it.  And everybody else will just wish they could afford it.  And then Sonos slowly releases lower and lower end models until everybody can afford one.  Think ipod->mini->nano->shuffle.  It also means that with your first few units your marginal profit is high enough that you know you’ll be able to cover support really well.  This was our big mistake with my first startup.  It’s a solid strategy — a great way to get people to understand a new kind of product. 

The Chumby is a cool idea and I hope they live long enough to pull it off.