July, 2007


7
Jul 07

cables!

ugh. something possessed me today to go through all my milk crates of old power adapters & cables. speaker wire, rca cables, power adapters for nokia phones, for motorola phones. old routers. ugh. i’ve always been a guy who likes cleaning house, likes throwing away stuff to make room for the new, but this is hard.

getting rid of my original palm pilot sync cable — that’s a pretty easy call, really. but my external apple scsi connector? what if someone comes over with a powerbook duo and an external dock for it, and then wants to connect an external scsi drive? what the heck would i do if i just tossed that cable? i’d be in dire straits, that’s what. nonetheless, i think i may part ways with it.

i go in fits like this every year or two — cleaning up stuff that i shouldn’t have anymore, selling some stuff on ebay. just now i’m trying to get my old dell laptop up & running, buti seem to have misplaced the hard drive connector. i’m sure i used it for something really useful, like prying open some other device i have. wonder where it is…

update: crap, dad says he threw away his external scsi cables a couple of weeks ago, so maybe i should keep mine, you know…just in case. i was sorta counting on him. and…when in the world did i use all these damn ethernet cables? thank god for WiFi.


7
Jul 07

Everyware, by Adam Greenfield

The whole title of this book is Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing — it was recommended by Gen Kanai. It’s an interesting book — it’s divided up into maybe 100 very short Theses about ubicomp — what ubiquitous computing can & should be. Greenfield moves from the basics of what’s around us now, to what’s coming (and why it’s hard to tell), to how tricky it is to design experiences that work at all, to the ethics of how to design systems that are mostly hidden and will interact with each other on your behalf.

A lot of the content is stuff that I’ve thought about for a long time, but I may be unusual, having spent time at places like Apple’s research labs & such — i did find myself thinking about all the computing that’s in my house/life now — whether it’s in the obvious computer form like our laptops or less obvious like our phones & appliances.


7
Jul 07

iPhone keyboard

After about a week with my iPhone, I’m going to start writing up a series of thoughts about individual features of the thing — I’ll start with talking about the keyboard, since it’s central to the experience.

I’ll not mince words: it’s not a great experience. I’ve had probably every sort of device since the Newton Messagepad — handwriting entry systems like that, Graffiti-based systems like the Palm, full keyboards like the Treo, phone keyboards with T9, and most recently the unusual 2 letters per key Blackberry Pearl keyboard.

I’ve never really been a very fast typist with any of these — and with the iPhone’s virtual keyboard, I’m getting to where I’m generally as quick as with my Pearl, but it’s pretty inconsistent. My left thumb overcompensates a little bit — I end up always tapping to the right of where I mean to — and both my thumbs end up obscuring a lot of the keyboard, of course — which matters especially much in this case because there’s no tactile feedback.

But I find that mostly I’m unsure of what I’m typing, and as a result, I’m tentative about it. Apple’s done an interesting thing to address this: they enlarge the image of each key after you type it so you can be sure about what you’re typing.  That definitely helps to know what letter you type — it helps a bunch, actually. But it interferes some cognitively with another more important piece of the experience: auto-correct.

Auto-correct — the phone knowing that I didn’t mean to type “Qppke”, but instead “Apple” — is really, really great. It’s the best that I’ve ever used. I think it’s partly because of the large dictionary and partly because they’re doing something with key proximity — knowing that “Q” is close to “A”, for example. (I’m not sure they really do that, but I suspect they do.) And the way that they’re showing auto-correct — with an as-you-type suggestion box showing up under the word you’re typing — works really well — tap on the box or the space bar to accept the suggestion, hit backspace or tap on the original word to keep what you’re typing. (Tapping on the word you’re typing that the iPhone doesn’t recognize will also add it to the dictionary for the future, which is great, except that I just added “Qppke” to my dictionary and don’t have any idea how to take it out again.)

The conflict that occurs is this: my eyes don’t know what to look at — the animated images of the keys that I’m typing or the constant stream of suggested words to fix my typos. So I end up moving my eyes back and forth from one to the other — which I’m pretty sure is slowing me down. I have a feeling that if the keys weren’t animated, I’d instead stay focused on the text entry and be more efficient, but I don’t know that for sure.

Apple & apologists routinely say that the virtual keyboard is great because of the auto-correct experience — but it seems to me that they’re completely orthogonal to each other — the auto-correct system could be implemented with a physical keyboard just as well.

I think things will also get a lot better when more of the applications on the phone will work in landscape mode — right now it’s mostly Safari & Photos that work that way — because a wider keyboard is really what you need. But it doesn’t work in mail currently, so that’s something for the future.

Another quibble with the keyboard is that the “.” and the “,” are hidden under the “.?123” mode key. I use both those keys all the time, and to have them be on the secondary keyboard is a little bit rough. Once you’re in that punctuation & number mode, though, you can get to a third screen full of symbols like international currency & such — that’s a decidedly useful thing.

On the whole, for me, it’s a subpar keyboarding experience, but one that I’m willing to put up with in order to get the large screen. I have a tough time imagining that most of the Blackberry set will ever be comfortable with it, though.


6
Jul 07

The Creation, by E O Wilson

This is an important book, by an extremely important guy — a Harvard biologist who happens to think that we might be screwing up our world pretty quickly. (Check out his awesome new project, the Encyclopedia of Life, a TED wish.) The book’s central premise is that the communities of science and religion, so often portrayed as being at odds with each other, share a common cause: saving the earth.

This is obvious, of course. Wanting to save the earth because it’s God’s creation or because of the incredible science in it — it doesn’t really matter.

What’s not obvious to me is why this idea, this coalition, doesn’t show up more. I have a sense that it’s because religion in America has become politicized by the Right, and environmentalism has become politicized by the Left.

But something that Larry Lessig said at a dinner I attended a year or so ago gives me some optimism: he said that coalitions (like today’s on the Right) are always marked by unexpected collaborations — of groups that decide that one particular common cause is more important than any of their dozens of less important differences.

So maybe. Or perhaps the right word is unless.


6
Jul 07

kid time

I’m taking a few days off to spend with my family, as SPL is getting ready for his 2nd birthday next week — this morning we’ve gone for a walk to Starbucks (our normal routine), taken apart SPL’s baby crib, and put together (most of) his new bed from Ikea. Need to take a trip back to Ikea to get the parts that we forgot yesterday, but should be in place by naptime, I think. He’s really excited for his “big boy bed” — he has a new set of tools from his cousins (hammer, drill, pliers, etc) that he used to work on the bed with me this morning. Fun. Kathy got a fair number of pictures & movies, so I’m sure she’ll post shortly.

Anyway, because of Independence day, this is my third day off, with a couple of weekend days to look forward to — I’ve found that adjusting to “kid time” takes a couple of days — getting used to not being too worried about getting anything done on a timeline — but that once you’re there it’s a great thing.

2 is a tough age — lots of new capabilities, growing language & understanding of the world, and lots of random emotions that are tough for a kid (and his parents) to sort out.

But he’s such a generous, happy, funny kid that I know we’ll miss this random time — such a good ime of exploration and coming into his own.