Well, the deal for me to get a Touch Pro fell through, so I’m still using my Treo 800w. And while I’m thank­ful to my friends for their gra­cious offer to sub­si­dize a Touch Pro pur­chase for me, I’m also a lit­tle relieved. I had a chance to play with one for about half an hour before going over to Best Buy to try to pur­chase one, and some things I really liked, oth­ers not so much.

Putting aside hard­ware issues like a really annoy­ing and inac­cu­rate d-​pad, the user inter­face on the Touch Pro is mad­den­ingly incon­sis­tent. It looks and feels like exactly what it is, a pretty shell bolted on to the more pedes­trian Win­dows Mobile under­pin­nings. TouchFlo3D looks great, but as soon as you tap on that lit­tle mes­sage stick­ing out of the enve­lope, you’re back in Microsoft’s Inbox appli­ca­tion, with the flat, haven’t-changed-since-2000 scroll­bars. It’s a far more jar­ring tran­si­tion than I expected. You can also change some set­tings through TouchFlo3D itself, but for other things you have to go to the Win­dows Mobile Set­tings win­dow, again going from sleek, black and fin­ger ori­ented to flat, white and sty­lus oriented.

My Treo may look old and busted, but it’s con­sis­tent about it. And that con­sis­tency directly equates to speed. I know where every­thing is, and can pre­dict where things will be. One of the things my friend who accom­pa­nied me on my failed quest today bragged about regard­ing the Touch Pro was that it had no fewer than eight sep­a­rate input meth­ods. That’s great, but it’s really not what I’m look­ing for. My Treo has one input method, the thumb­board. Well tech­ni­cally it has two, since I haven’t dis­abled the on-​screen key­board, but I only use it for char­ac­ters or chords I can’t type with the key­board (like control-​c and control-​v for rare input fields that don’t sup­port con­text menu copy and paste). I’ve dis­abled Block Rec­og­nizer and Let­ter Rec­og­nizer, and haven’t installed any­thing else. So when it comes time to type some­thing, I don’t waste time think­ing how I’m going to type it, I just type it.

I’ve heard the same com­plaint from early adopters of Android on the T-​Mobile G1. There seems to be no rhyme or rea­son as to where you’re going to find a com­mand. It could be invoked by the menu but­ton, a con­text menu, etc. Every app does things dif­fer­ently, even the ones pro­vided by Google. This is one of the few things that the iPhone does really, really well. Just about every iPhone app looks and works the same. Once you know how to use Mail, you’ll have no prob­lems with Cal­en­dar, or Safari, or iTunes. They all work basi­cally the same (okay, you don’t have cov­er­flow in your email, but stick with me here). This ease of learn­ing (not really the same as ease of use) is a big part of why the iPhone has been so suc­cess­ful. Even peo­ple who aren’t geeky enough to use Win­dows Mobile can pick up an iPhone and start using it. Now that do most of my writ­ing on my net­book, I’d con­sider an iPhone myself if it would allow con­nec­tion teth­er­ing and not force me to use the truly abysmal iTunes (a rare exam­ple of where Apple really flubbed a user interface).

So I’ll stick with my Treo for another year at least, and I’ll stick with the dated Win­dows Mobile user inter­face. Not because Win­dows Mobile can’t do bet­ter, but because I’d rather be con­sis­tent and pro­duc­tive than flashy and lost.

So here we are, day one of NaNoW­riMo, and I’m already hav­ing moti­va­tion prob­lems. I know I need to buckle down and start writ­ing, but frankly I’m scared out of my mind. Well, tech­ni­cally, I’ve writ­ten 28 words so far today, so I have started. But the fear to really dive into it and start pound­ing out the words is daunt­ing to say the least.

So, I’m going to have to get dis­ci­plined, and fast. In the process of writ­ing this blog post, I’ve switched my blog-​writing soft­ware from Win­dows Live Writer to OneNote/​Word, researched how to use OneNote for blog­ging, switched my pri­mary web browser from Fire­fox to IE8, ver­i­fied that IE7pro will work with IE8…

It’s time to start writ­ing. Writ­ing fic­tion. Writ­ing my book.

So here’s the deal. I’ve been blog­ging every day since relaunch­ing JeffKirvin.net, haven’t missed one yet. I intend to keep that streak going, but for the month of Novem­ber I’m going to make a lit­tle deal with myself. I will still post to the blog every day, but only after I write some­thing for NaNoW­riMo. I’m not going to hold myself to spe­cific min­i­mum word count, at least not yet. Just some­thing. Even one sen­tence if I’m really blocked. As we get into the final two weeks, I might have to impose a word count min­i­mum to keep me on pace to finish.

But for now, just write. It doesn’t have to be per­fect, it doesn’t even have to be good. But I have to write some­thing before I post again.

Yikes.

And I’m already well behind the other wrimos out there who started promptly at mid­night. The offi­cial story is that because a back mus­cle I pulled on Tues­day was seiz­ing up, I skipped a friend’s Hal­loween party, took some mus­cle relax­ants and went to bed early. Which is all com­pletely true, but doesn’t quite explain why I’m writ­ing this instread of my book.

The plan for today is to grab a shower and then head for a Vil­lage Inn halfway across town, and then write there until it’s time to go buy a Touch Pro at the adja­cent Best Buy. Then prob­a­bly more writ­ing at my friendly neigh­bor­hood Chipo­tle while I wait for the Touch Pro to com­plete the ini­tial charge.

(and yes, I’ll explain later)