I’ve been working on a three part article for the last few days called "Pimp my Treo" but now I’m not sure I’ll post it. In short, it’s how to use Kinoma Play, Skyfire and Winterface to "modernize" a Treo or similar device to look and feel more like the "new hotness" devices from HTC and Samsung. It all works pretty well, but I’m doubting now if it’s the right thing to do.

I’ve talked many times before about the Zen of Palm, the commitment going back to Jeff Hawkins to make Palm devices as easy to use as possible. As it turns out, this is important not just in handhelds, but all kinds of computers. Paul Thurrott of the Windows Supersite had an interesting observation on this recently (expanded a bit in this week’s Windows Weekly podcast):

Reading Mr. Carr’s article, it occurred to me that the problem with Windows 7 is the same thing that’s the problem with Mac OS X. That is, Microsoft is confusing “easy” with “simple.”

For example, Mac users have claimed for years that Mac OS X is “easy to use,” when in fact it is anything but. Mac OS X is simple. As noted above, simple is hard [to engineer]. And we should all give Apple credit for that. But simple is not the same as easy. One basic example: The Mac OS X desktop is a barren place with no obvious starting point. And the people who feel that it is easy are fooled because they are simply used to it. Things that are familiar seem easy. But they’re not necessarily easy to those who are unfamiliar with that thing or, in the case of potential Switchers, are familiar with something else. The Mac OS X desktop is simple. But it is not easy.

By contrast, the Windows desktop is easy in that it provides an obvious starting point (a Start button) and because Microsoft and its PC maker partners go a bit over the top presenting information to the user on first boot. Critics will argue that this also makes Windows convoluted. And they’re right, as it turns out. It’s hard to get the right mix of simple and easy. Apple errs to much on the side of simple, in my opinion. But Microsoft errs somewhere else: They overwhelm the user with functionality in a bid to make sure it works for everyone. All too often, the result is something that works for very few people.

Simple is not the same thing as easy. Jeff Hawkins understood this, and made the original Palm devices easy to use. But as many of us Palm veterans know, there was a lot of power in those early devices, too.

Thanks in large part to the iPhone, we’ve seen a flood of “simple” user interfaces on Windows Mobile devices recently. TouchFlo3D on the new HTC devices is only one, Samsung and O2 and Velocity and many others have followed suit with their own spins on how to simplify the Windows Mobile experience. But are they right?

One of the examples Thurrott mentioned in the podcast was old school command line Unix. Here we have a system that was simple, but not easy. Most Unix commands do only one thing, it doesn’t get much simpler than that. Grep finds text matching a search term, nothing more. But you had to know what they were, how they worked, and what kind of output they’d give you before you could string them together in shell scripts to do complex things. Definitely not easy.

The more I tweaked my Treo to work more like the new devices on the market, the more something started to bug me. It seemed slower. It seemed a lot slower. And it was, because I was discarding features designed for ease of use for things that made the experience “simple”. It was simpler to have contacts mixed in with my applications in Winterface, but it was actually easier to get to them by typing directly on the Today screen. I’ll bet my Treo can do anything a Touch Pro can do in a fraction of the time, even with a slower processor. Because it’s easy to use, not simple.

Calm down, liberals. Take a deep breath. I know that trusting your elected officials and being skeptical of the press feels alien and wrong, but times have changed. It’s really okay. Ease down. You’ve blown the transaxle, you’re just grinding metal.

I woke up this morning to a cacophony of Chicken Littling about the possibility that Obama might not roll back the Bush tax cuts! OMG! How could he do such a thing?

Well, if you slow down and read the fine print, he didn’t. Here’s what he actually said.

“Whether that’s done through repeal, or whether that’s done because the Bush tax cuts are not renewed, is something that my economic team will be providing me a recommendation on.”

So the question here is whether the tax cuts for the wealthy are repealed in 2009 or allowed to expire on their own in 2011. And he’s not saying he won’t repeal them, just that all options are on the table to be considered along with the rest of our economic policy. That doesn’t sound as scary. It actually sounds kind of, you know, rational.

I’ve seen this happen almost daily since the election. The media, and their audience, is so used to everything going to hell sans handbasket that they immediately jump to the worst possible consequence of anything coming out of Washington. But the new guy is such a fundamental change from the smirking chimp currently occupying the Oval Office that this approach doesn’t make sense anymore. I find myself in the distinctly uncomfortable place (no, not the backseat of a Volkswagen) of having to trust the politicians and be skeptical of the press. Because every time I’ve seen this happen, it sounds horrible until I actually read what Obama said and say, “Oh, well, that sounds okay.”

It really does come down to trust. I trust Barack Obama to be smarter than me and do the right thing. I’ve trusted Bush for eight years to be dumber than me and try to screw me over, but that different. I know that Barack Obama knows everything about politics that I know, plus a lot that I don’t know, even stuff, with apologies to Rummy, that I don’t know I don’t know. And I trust him to weigh all of that against itself and make the right call for our long term prosperity and security.

And the key to that is “long term.” Politics is the science (and art) of compromise, and if we want the changes we get in an Obama administration to endure, a simple numeric majority in Congress isn’t enough. We need Republicans who might, even though it looks more dubious with every Sarah Palin photo op, be back in charge someday to have some sense of ownership over these changes.

Think about this like a chess grandmaster, looking several moves ahead. Obama knows that historically, our economy has tanked after every tax cut on the rich and rose after every tax hike on the rich. But he also knows that we’re going to be running a serious deficit for at least most of his first term as we try to spend our way out of this recession (the only proven way to get out of a recession), so the money lost to the Bush tax cuts between 2009 and 2011 is just a factor in the size of the deficit, not the cause of one. So if he extends this potential olive branch to the Republicans (and their super-rich constituents), does that grant some Republicans the political cover they need to step across the aisle and pass universal healthcare or a new New Deal to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure?

So stay calm, trust that Obama has his eye on the big picture, and don’t sweat the small stuff. It’s going to be okay. Rational adults are in charge now, give them room to do their jobs.

“She may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts.”
– Han Solo

As a Windows Mobile user, I’m consistently amazed that people take the iPhone seriously as a smartphone platform. Yes, my Treo has an old school 2003 interface and isn’t as shiny as newer smartphones (including “black slab” iPhone wannabes like the Blackberry Storm and even WM devices like the HTC Touch Diamond and Samsung Omnia), but I’m also not hamstrung with arbitrary limitations.

Let me give you an example. Apple recently released the 2.2 update for the iPhone, which finally allows users to download podcasts directly to the phone if they’re on the go. Sounds cool, right? I mean, it must be really good if Apple was willing to kill a popular application on the app store because they were about to provide the same functionality in a better, Apple-sanctioned experience.

Only it’s actually pretty lame. First off, it doesn’t let you download anything over 10MB over 3G, because heaven forbid you actually use that high speed connection for anything where you could actually tell the difference between it and Edge. No, anything over 10MB (and most podcasts are) can only be downloaded via WiFi, which means you have to stay at the hotspot while you download. So much for “on the go.”

But it gets worse. It also doesn’t sync what you’ve downloaded and played with the desktop, so there’s no way to tell your iPhone to check all your subscribed podcasts and download the new stuff. You have to check each one manually (through the same Apple iTunes Music store that should, theoretically, know what you’ve already downloaded) and remember on your own what you haven’t heard yet.

So let me get this straight. Apple pulls a popular app from the app store because they’re going to provide that functionality in the base OS, but then their solution not only doesn’t take advantage of integration with other Apple products (iTunes, music store), but also imposes limitations on where and how you can use it? And iPhone users have been brainwashed into thinking this is a good thing?

On my junky looking, outdated user interface Treo, on the other hand, I can install the open source and free BeyondPod, which allows me to import my podcast feeds from an XML file or from Google Reader, keeps track of what I’ve listened to and what I haven’t, downloads new podcasts both a la carte and on a schedule (I have it download everything at 3am while I sleep) and has no limitations on how much I can download, when or where I download, and can even stream podcasts instead of downloading. It can also optionally delete each file as soon as done listening to it.

Or, if I want a “slicker” user interface, I can use Kinoma Play. It can also either download or stream podcasts whenever I want, as well as play media from Orb, Audible, YouTube and lots of other services, all from the same modern and consistent user interface. Or I could use Pocket Player from Conduits, which also… well, you get the idea.

The iPhone is a great basic media player and internet terminal, but until has the power and flexibility of Windows Mobile, or even Palm OS, don’t tell me it’s a smartphone. It may not be pretty, but my Treo gives me options, not limitations.

I’ve seen lots of people on the left freaking out about Obama’s recent cabinet choices. Let’s review.

• Secretary of State: Hillary Clinton
• Secretary of Defense: Bob Gates
• Health and Human Services: Tom Daschle
• Homeland Security: Janet Napolitano
• Attorney General: Eric Holder
• Rahm Emanuel: Chief of Staff

All familiar names to people who remember the Clinton administration. Hell, one of them is a Clinton. So is this change we can believe in?

Hell yes. Malcolm Gladwell points out that it takes 10,000 hours to master any complex skill. Writing, playing piano, or even running a government. 10,000 hours. If you work a 40-hour work week and have two weeks off for vacation, you work 2,000 hours a year. So we’re talking 5 years at a regular job before you’ve mastered it. I understand the need for fresh faces and fresh ideas, but shouldn’t someone in the new administration already have those 10,000 hours under their belt?

Let’s take a look at each one of these choices and see if just maybe they’re not as bad as the hard core left is saying.

Secretary of State: Hillary Clinton

This is the big one that no one can shut up about, least of which the people who keep leaking every step of the process to the press. Bill Clinton has agreed to do anything the Obama people want to make this happen, so I don’t think he’s going to be the baggage people thought he’d be. The big question here is whether Clinton can and will be a faithful instrument of Obama foreign policy, the single point on which she and Obama seriously disagreed in the primaries.

I think she will be. Everything we’ve seen so far shows that Clinton is a team player. And we also know that Obama won’t hesitate to replace her if she goes off message. More importantly, Clinton knows that being very good at this job is a great stepping stone to the Oval Office in 2016, since Biden almost certainly won’t run at age 74.

Secretaries of State have to be good at two things: talking to foreign heads of state and bypassing foreign heads of state by talking directly to foreign media when necessary. Clinton can do both, maybe better than anyone else. Obama knows this, so he’s willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.

Secretary of Defense: Bob Gates

We knew there would be some Republicans in Obama’s post-partisan cabinet, and as we prepare to get out of Iraq, continuity of command is important. Gates knows the current state of the military, and can enact a withdrawal plan faster than someone who has to be brought up to speed. Plus, Gates has already taken a stand on securing our nukes by firing the top military and civilian heads of the Air Force over nuclear weapon safety. I think he’ll do a good job, and will probably be replaced once the transition out of Iraq is well under way.

Health and Human Services: Tom Daschle

He knows health care backwards and forwards and he knows how to get votes on the Hill. No one is better suited to drive legislation on universal healthcare, not even Teddy Kennedy. Daschle knows where enough bodies are buried to get votes through on this, something we’ve tried 4 times in a century and haven’t done. This time it will work.

Homeland Security: Janet Napolitano

Napolitano has been a voice of reason on immigration and border security, even riding horseback along the Mexico border and walking in the sewer tunnels illegals use to cross over. She’s ideally suited to secure our borders and ports, while not pissing off our legitimate immigrant population.

Attorney General: Eric Holder

Yes, he was Deputy AG under Clinton, but he’s also the best man for the job. He knows Washington and he has an up close look at what Ashcroft and Gonzales have done to break the Justice Department. He can put it back together.

Rahm Emanuel: Chief of Staff

Every administration needs a DA, a Designated Asshole. A Bad Cop to Obama’s Good Cop. Rahm Emanuel was born for this job. He’s the attack dog that Dick Cheney was for Bush, but hopefully he won’t shoot anyone.

So to wrap up, what we can tell from Obama’s picks so far is that he doesn’t care where people worked previously. Working for Clinton’s or even Dubya’s administrations isn’t a deal breaker. What he’s looking for is excellence. People who can do the job they’re given superlatively. In a way, it’s a very anti-Bush policy. There will be no “Brownies” in this administration, no one given a job for political reasons whatsoever. Instead, we’ll have the best people possible in each position, leading with competency.

And after eight years of naked patronage, that’s change I can believe in.

Just saw this on the bookshelf at my local grocery store. Haven’t read it and don’t endorse it (it’s pretty easy to find on Amazon if you’re interested), but I found it intensely interesting that we have a president (or will, on January 20th) that inspires with his oratory skills.

Unlike the current guy, who just embarrasses.

I wasn’t sure they could top Casino Royale, and I”m not sure they did, precisely. What they did with the new Bond movie is continue the story from Casino Royale without missing a beat or dropping the intensity. I won’t give too much away, but I will say I was damn impressed by how smoothly this transitioned from the first film. As a fan of the original Ian Fleming novels, I’m also amazed at how they were able to recapture the sense of no-nonsense (there is no Q, and very few gadgets) bad-assery in a post Cold War world. Make no mistake, this Bond doesn’t quip, doesn’t waste time mugging for the camera. These are serious professionals.

That said, some lessons learned.

• Do not build a building out of hydrogen fuel cells. You’re just asking for trouble. Oh, the humanity.
• If someone implies that they’re watching you, for god’s sake, don’t get up and storm out of the opera.
• Never, for any reason, pull over at a Bolivian traffic stop.
• Oh, and don’t give James Bond a reason to want you dead.

One of the folks at COPTUG (Colorado Palmtop User’s Group) tonight has a brand new AT&T Fuze, a variant of the HTC Touch Pro. I’d already taken a look at Sprint’s version, so it was nice to compare and contrast.

• The keyboard layout might be better than the Sprint version. No number row, but I like the dedicated Windows and OK keys.
• The back is faceted like the European Diamond, which isn’t nearly as obnoxious as it looks in photos.
• I still hate the D-pad.
• Love the way the screen and keyboard backlight fades in and out. Classy!
• VGA is gorgeous. I’m so jealous, even though the 320×320 on my 800w is nothing to sneak at.

France Smartphone posted the two images you see to the right today as a preview of what’s to come in Windows Mobile 6.5. In case you missed it, Motorola let the cat out of the bad a couple weeks ago when they mentioned 6.5 as one of the OSes they had in their new slimmed down lineup for new devices. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer confirmed the existence of the operating system last week (seriously, why do they let him anywhere near a microphone?). 6.5 should should appear early to mid next year, and pave the way for Windows Mobile 7 by early 2010.

However…

Take a good look at these screenshots. While they’re certainly good looking, they’re also certainly fakes. The biggest tip-offs are the color of the Start flag (colored in on one shot, white on the other) and the position of the signal strength and battery icons, which swap sides from one shot to the other. So while this might be a very good guess at what 6.5 might look like, it’s only a guess, and not leaked from Redmond.

Now that we know they’re not real, let’s see what they do tell us. The first one, a program launcher of sorts, uses the hex layout familiar to tabletop RPG folk instead of a more traditional rows and columns grid. Can you say trackball navigation? We know some of the new Moto devices use a Blackberry/G1-style trackball instead of a d-pad, and this is just the kind of UI I’d expect to take advantage of that. But since I don’t think most of the new devices are going to be trackball-based, I think we can skip that one.

But the second shot is far, far more interesting. Here we see the standard Windows Mobile Today screen, but laid out and navigated far more like the Zune interface. This makes sense, since we know that Microsoft plans to bring the Zune software platform to both Windows Mobile and X-Box eventually. If that effort were farther along that we thought, this would be a very credible look for Windows Mobile, a combining of the Zune UI with Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard’s “sliding panels” homescreen interface.

So while I’m convinced these shots aren’t real, I do think Microsoft should take a good long look at them as an example of how they could modernize the Windows Mobile experience without changing it so much that it’s not Windows Mobile anymore. After all, those of us who choose to use Windows Mobile today know the iPhone and Android are out there, and we picked Windows Mobile for a reason.

So NaNoWriMo was a bust for me this year, as I’ve given up only ten days in. Why did I wash out this year when finished in 2006?

No one to race against. One of the big motivators for me in 2006 was racing against my writing partner, Josh Curry of Maximum Geek. Josh sat out this year, preferring to spend his time doing schoolwork for his degree, like higher education is important or something. So I was pretty much going it alone, and couldn’t rely on anyone else to push me.

Lack of incentives. Other than keeping the blog going, I didn’t really have anything to reward me when I did well, nor any negative consequences if I didn’t make my quota. Again, this is where self-discipline should have kicked in, but if I had strong self-discipline, I might be fundamentally unqualified to be a writer.

And there’s one reason I thought might be factor, but I won’t use: lack of time. I’ve had time if I’d really wanted to write. In the past week, I’ve installed OneCare on both my desktop and laptop, cloned and then reconsidered the Windows 7 user interface on XP (I’ll do a writeup of this later), how to blog in OneNote, rebuilt my phone around Kinoma instead of BeyondPod and AudiblePlayer, then back to BeyondPod again, watched nearly all three seasons of "How I Met Your Mother" and found lots of other ways to waste time I could have spent writing.

Too afraid to screw up a book I care about. This is the big one. I know now why Chris Baty makes it a rule not to use pre-existing material for NaNoWriMo. I was rules-lawyering my way around that prohibition by starting an entirely new draft of Ghost Ronin, but I’ve had this story developing in my mind for damn near two decades now. I’ve done years of research for it, have the 17 chapters of the book planned out in some detail, and oddly, that very preparation is what killed me.

NaNoWriMo is based on what Anne Lamott calls “shitty first drafts,” something that no matter how much I understand the concept intellectually I can’t manage to internalize. I kept freezing up, not wanting to get anything “wrong”. While I know I have to work through this eventually if I want to ever finish anything, I doubt it’s going to happen this month. Ghost Ronin’s firm structure and abundant research and backstory will make it great for writing at my own pace, but they also served as constant roadblocks for the silly abandon that is supposed to characterize NaNoWriMo.

I’ll try again next year, and I have tentative commitment from Josh that both he and his girlfriend will be joining me. I’ll pick a story concept that I don’t already have much investment in, but one that seems exciting enough to carry me through 50,000 words. I’ll set up a system of rewards for hitting certain milestones, and try to really enjoy the ride. For now, though, I’ll keep plugging away at Ghost Ronin at my own pace and try to get it finished before Script Frenzy next spring.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about Obama winning the election, about my writing, why I washed out of NaNoWriMo this year (more on that later), and the passing of one of my favorite authors last week, Michael Crichton. I’m also rereading Jurassic Park, my favorite Crichton novel. And in so doing, I’ve come to realize something. My whole life, I’ve served two masters. Worse, two seemingly mutually exclusive masters.

On the one hand, I’ve always been a skeptic, a questioner. While I understand the historic significance of the United States electing an African-American president, I’m still baffled at the racism that, yes, still exists in the south where I grew up. To me, racism never made sense. I learned at an early age that the amount of melanin in one’s skin is a simple genetic trait, not more significant to the organism overall than eye color or handedness. Discriminating against people for skin color was just as ludicrous to me as saying that blue-eyed people were naturally superior, or than left-handed people were possessed by demons. It was only years later that I found out the latter two assertions had also had their turn, and resulted in millions of deaths. I still think it’s stupid.

I’ve always wanted to know why. Why anything. “Because we’ve always done it this way” is never a good reason to do anything as far as I’m concerned. I’ve always had a scientist’s natural curiosity and determination to find a rational explanation for things, even things that, like racism, aren’t rational. This was, I think, what drew me to Crichton’s books. Looking back over his collected works, including those I fundamentally disagree with like State of Fear, the constant thread that unites nearly everything Crichton produced is a healthy mistrust of science and technology. Not from a luddite perspective, but an awareness that with the wonders of new discovery and technological advancement we must always keep a careful eye out to make sure it’s not accidentally or even deliberately misused. Most of Crichton’s books are about science gone wrong, about modern day Daedaluses and Prometheuses reaching too far or playing with things they didn’t truly understand. I think this is an important theme, especially as our technological pace continues to increase, and I hope someone (even me) picks up where Crichton left off.

But the other reason I was such a big fan of Crichton’s work is that his books also reached out to the edge of science and technology, pushing the boundaries of what we considered possible. and while part of me is a skeptic, the other side of me deeply wants to believe. While I have a scientist’s thirst for rational explanations, I also have a storyteller’s sense of wonder and magic. And so I’m willing to give some things the benefit of the doubt.

Keeping in mind Crichton’s constant warning that we never know as much as we think we do about the natural world, I note that until one century ago, 1908, the gorilla was considered a mythical creature. So is the existence of a fifth species of great ape, one more closely related to humans and fully bipedal, but which avoids us and sticks to the most remote parts of the world so hard to find possible, if not plausible? Tales of rare encounters with these shy creatures are so widespread and consistent that there must be more to them than myth. And, if they are descended from the so-called “missing link” they could fill in an important gap in primate evolution. So with all this mind, I’m inclined to believe these creatures exist more than not, whether you call them Bigfoot, Sasquatch or Yeti.

For similar lines of reasoning, I’m also open to the existence or continued survival of Mokèlé-mbèmbé (what sounds like an apatosaur deep in the Congo rainforest where no human but pygmies has ever gone), megalodon (a 60-100 foot ancestor of the great white shark that I think might be no more extinct than the coelacanth) and other things that “rational” people dismiss as imaginary. Because we don’t know. We can never know everything.

So as I bid farewell to Michael Crichton, I’m going to keep both the sense of discovery and wonder he brought me over the years, and the warning skepticism behind his books. And I thank him for helping to shape the reader, writer and thinker I am today.