Since get­ting a Touch Pro a cou­ple weeks ago, I’ve been try­ing to fig­ure out to best to opti­mize the Touch­Flo inter­face. HTC has done some nice things with this device (the Touch Pro on Sprint or out­side the US, the HTC Fuze on AT&T, as well as all the vari­ants of HTC Dia­mond), and in a lot of ways they’ve brought the ease of use from Win­dows Mobile Standard’s slid­ing pan­els home screen and sim­ple Home and Back but­tons to Win­dows Mobile Pro­fes­sional. It’s nice, but there’s one prob­lem. By default, the Start Menu is still up there in the upper left cor­ner, poten­tially con­fus­ing mat­ters by offer­ing a com­pletely dif­fer­ent and con­tra­dic­tory way to launch pro­grams and access sys­tem set­tings. For­tu­nately, you can get rid of it, sim­plify the user inter­face and get a nifty way to switch between run­ning pro­grams in the process. (While one of Win­dows Mobile’s strengths is that there’s more than one way to do almost every­thing, a design goal for an effi­cient user inter­face is to have as lit­tle over­lap in func­tion­al­ity as pos­si­ble; a place for every­thing and every­thing in its place.)

WkTask is a free shell util­ity that par­tially replaces your Win­dows Mobile Pro taskbar. By default, it leaves the Start Menu and noti­fi­ca­tion icons alone, and puts icons for your run­ning pro­grams where the win­dow title would nor­mally be. But for our pur­poses, since Touch­Flo 3D (or 2D, if you’re using an older device and can remap the Win­dows but­ton on the phone to show the Today screen instead of the Start Menu) dupli­cates and expands on the Start Menu func­tion­al­ity, we’re going to get rid of it.

In the set­tings, notice that the off­set from the left edge is set to 0 pix­els. This moves the run­ning pro­grams all the way to left, cov­er­ing the Start Menu com­pletely. With the clock changed to the ana­log clock (you have a huge dig­i­tal one on your home screen any­way), this also gives the entire taskbar a nice “all icons” uni­for­mity fit­ting to a phone user expe­ri­ence. You can enhance this effect by telling WkTask to dis­play only task icons in the Design tab of WkTask preferences.

So how can you use a Win­dows Mobile Pro­fes­sional device with out ever touch­ing the Start Menu? Pretty eas­ily, as it turns out. Here’s how it breaks down.

There are a cou­ple of gotchas. For one, you’ll notice the run­ning apps area, from pix­els 0 to 225 on a VGA screen, com­pletely cov­ers the noti­fi­ca­tion icon if you have Blue­tooth turned on as well. I get around this by mak­ing sure all the noti­fi­ca­tions I have enabled dis­play a mes­sage onscreen in Win­dows Mobile’s love-​it-​or-​hate-​it pop up “toast”. That way I don’t have to tap the now-​hidden noti­fi­ca­tion icon in the taskbar to get clear an alarm. Also, on my screen I only have room to dis­play 5 run­ning tasks at a time. I can run more than that, but when I do, the fifth icon is replaced by a dou­ble right chevron ( » ) and the rest are dis­played in a lit­tle drop down menu.

Over­all, though, this has greatly improved my ease of use on the device, mak­ing it easy to switch between apps with­out going to the home screen, and mak­ing the home screen the one and only way to launch appli­ca­tions. This dra­mat­i­cally cuts down on con­fu­sion when it comes time to do some­thing, and makes Win­dows Mobile Pro­fes­sional feel more like Win­dows Mobile Stan­dard; that is, makes it feel more like a phone. Give it a try and let me know how it works in the comments.

A funny thing hap­pened on the way to the blog this morn­ing. I checked my email, caught up my RSS feeds in Google Reader, and scanned last night’s Twit­ter activ­ity in Tweet­Deck (which is so good it’s actu­ally worth installing Adobe Air, thanks Alli). And I real­ized I didn’t have Google Reader or Live Mes­sen­ger open. That I haven’t had them open for some time now. And that I don’t really use them any­more. Every­one I talk to on a reg­u­lar basis is on Twitter.

This may be not restricted to Twit­ter and more a func­tion of social net­works in gen­eral, but I’m far more active on Twit­ter than I am on Face­book, MySpace or LinkedIn (though I’m try­ing to grok Face­book). But I’ve noticed that since I started using Twit­ter and fol­low­ing every­one I know or am inter­ested in, my instant mes­sag­ing use has dropped through the floor and even my text mes­sage use has dropped off sharply. If I want to get someone’s atten­tion and it’s not worth an email, I’ll tweet. If it’s pri­vate, I’ll send a Twit­ter Direct Mes­sage. I’ve got twit­ter clients on all my com­put­ers, includ­ing my smart­phone (TweekDeck on desk­top and net­book, Tiny Twit­ter on the Touch Pro, though I tend to waf­fle between TT and ceTwit and Pock­eTwit), and even use the Twit­ter web site when I’m at the office behind our proxy. It’s become my pre­ferred method for light not-​in-​person (out-​person?) conversation.

Do you tweet? And if so, has it replaced IM for you?

There are shap­ing up to be four big ecosys­tems in com­put­ing. As all four diver­sify into the cat­e­gories below, I’m notic­ing that a lot of users are stan­dard­iz­ing on using every­thing from a sin­gle ven­dor, a silo­ing of the mar­ket rather than embrac­ing vari­ety. You can do nearly every­thing you need to do with offer­ings from any one of them, and they tend to work bet­ter if you don’t mix and match. But is it really pos­si­ble to put all your eggs in one basket?

Microsoft

Microsoft has, by far, the best selec­tion of the bunch, with every sin­gle cat­e­gory I could think of cov­ered. They have gone out of their way to pro­vide solu­tions for the office, liv­ing room and on the go. Some of the options here aren’t best-​in-​class (though I’d say the Zune is bet­ter than the iPod clas­sic and IE 8 can give Fire­fox and Chrome a run for their money if you give it chance), but they all work. And more impor­tantly, they all work together. If you use the soft­ware and ser­vices listed above, they inter­op­er­ate cleanly and effi­ciently, exactly the way con­ven­tional wis­dom says Microsoft doesn’t do. The biggest prob­lem Microsoft has is the snarky haters who have their minds made up and won’t give them a break.

Google

Google has a lot of gaps in their ecosys­tem offer­ings, but they make up for it with even bet­ter inte­gra­tion than Microsoft. Once you start using one Google prod­uct (Gmail seems to be the most pop­u­lar “gate­way drug” aside from search itself), it’s all too easy to start using the rest. But where Google wins in inter­op­er­abil­ity, they lose in power. Google Docs, for exam­ple, is fine for light use, but most users wouldn’t think of using it to com­pletely replace a more pow­er­ful desk­top office suite. Google also lacks an OS and vir­tu­ally any enter­tain­ment options. Even Google’s Android plat­form offers only the most basic media playback.

Apple

For Apple, inter­op­er­abil­ity is king, but it comes at the cost of choice. Apple’s offer­ings work seam­lessly together, often appear­ing to be one organic sys­tem, but heaven help you if you need to replace one of them because it doesn’t entirely meet your needs. Their gaps are fairly minor, and the lock-​in pro­vided by iTunes over portable media and home the­ater offer­ings keeps a lot of users in their camp.

Linux/​Open Source

The open source route is for the free spir­its out there who so don’t want to be in thrall to one com­pany that they’re will­ing to cob­ble together every­thing them­selves, even when it doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily even try to work together. Think of these as the polar oppo­sites to the Apple users. A lot of this stuff is build your own, but at least most of it doesn’t require you to com­pile it your­self any­more. It’s also so frag­mented between dif­fer­ent Linux dis­tros (KDE and Gnome both have their own photo man­agers, and there are oth­ers as well if you don’t like those), that any kind of consensus-​based inter­op­er­abil­ity is unlikely.

Con­clu­sions, my ecosystem

I tried to stay within a sin­gle ecosys­tem, and my life would prob­a­bly be eas­ier if I did. But because of the var­i­ous gaps or miss­ing func­tion­al­ity, I’ve been forced to mix and match a bit, fully know­ing that that would be up to me to find my own ways to makes the pieces interoperate.

Most of my ecosys­tem is based on Microsoft offer­ings, but I’ve swapped out a bit from the Google and Open Source stacks where appro­pri­ate. Fire­fox per­forms bet­ter on my net­book than IE 8, and the IE Tab plu­gin allows me to use the IE ren­der­ing engine when I need it. Google Talk is lighter and less noisy than Live Mes­sen­ger, and I find Google’s search results a lit­tle bit more reli­able than Live Search’s. My blog­ging solu­tion is also a three-​headed mon­ster with some quick posts done in Live Writer but most of my blog­ging done in OneNote for early drafts, and then Word for post­ing. I’ve also bypassed Zune in favor of Win­dows Media Player and my Win­dows Mobile smart­phone, but I know peo­ple that use both.

What are your choices? Do you stick mostly to a sin­gle ven­dor, or do you play the field?

In Mal­colm Gladwell’s new book, Out­liers, he makes an inter­est­ing obser­va­tion. In any rel­a­tively com­plex dis­ci­pline, it takes 10,000 hours of prac­tice to achieve mas­tery. This 10,000 hour rule seems to apply equally to music com­po­si­tion, soft­ware devel­op­ment, writ­ing, sewing, play­ing hockey, any­thing. No mat­ter what you do, you don’t do it at a pro­fes­sional level until you’ve spent 10,000 hours at it. There are no short­cuts. Even Mozart didn’t pro­duce what peo­ple con­sider his best work until he’d spent 10,000 hours composing.

Doing some back-​of-​the-​envelope cal­cu­la­tions, I fig­ure I’ve spent about 4,000 hours writ­ing in my life­time. Maybe as much as 5,000 if I’m seri­ously under­es­ti­mat­ing my blog­ging. I’ve prob­a­bly spent less than 1,000 hours writ­ing fic­tion. Assum­ing I can lump fic­tion and non­fic­tion together, that means that even if I buckle down and spend 2 hours a day, every day, writ­ing fic­tion until I get my 10,000, I’ll be ready to start writ­ing qual­ity work at the begin­ning of 2016, at the age of 44. I’ve fac­tored in a few skipped days here and there, since I know even at my most dili­gent there will be days where social com­mit­ments on top of my day job won’t allow for 2 hours of writ­ing time.

Seven years. Seven years of writ­ing stuff that I know I won’t be able to show any­one, because I’m not good enough yet. The thought fills me with over­whelm­ing dread, for sev­eral reasons.

First off, I know that in that amount of time I’m going to burn through every idea I cur­rently have in my devel­op­ment note­book. Every project I’m even mar­gin­ally excited about must be sac­ri­ficed to the mon­ster called “learn­ing the ropes.” By the time I’m ready to write pro­fes­sion­ally, I’ll have to come up with all new mate­r­ial. That part doesn’t worry me, since I know writ­ing ideas are like buses: another one will be along even­tu­ally. But I also know there’s no way I can spend seven years writ­ing about “filler” top­ics and char­ac­ters that I don’t care about. So I have to waste the stuff that I’m cur­rently pas­sion­ate about just to make it work. That’s a pretty depress­ing thought, moreso than wast­ing a block of stone or a can­vas for prac­tic­ing other art forms.

Sec­ondly, I’m acutely aware of how much that seven years of daily writ­ing sounds like work. Glad­well also posits that if the work you’re doing is ful­fill­ing, if it’s some­thing that you’re pas­sion­ate about, you’ll do it any­way and the 10,000 hours will come eas­ily as a side effect of how you choose to spend your time. As much as I feel like I should be, I’m just not jazzed about the idea of writ­ing that much “prac­tice” that is unlikely to ever get pub­lished. I write on aver­age 500 words an hour for fic­tion (1,000 or more for non­fic­tion), so we’re look­ing at 2,500,000 words, 2.5 mil­lion, before I’m “good enough.” That’s 15 – 25 aver­age length nov­els. So far I’ve writ­ten 2 and half nov­els and a novella. Ten times that out­put before I’m good enough to go pub­lic makes me want to crawl under my couch.

And lastly, “good enough” for what? Even if I get my 10,000 hours in, that puts me at the same skill level as pro­fes­sional nov­el­ists like King and Grisham. It in no way guar­an­tees the same degree of suc­cess. Glad­well also points out that suc­cess in any field has as much to do on who you know, how you were raised, when you were born and where you grew up as it does on indi­vid­ual achieve­ment and hard work. So while I might be as good, tech­ni­cally, as my favorite authors, I might have no bet­ter results in get­ting pub­lished and onto book­store shelves than I do right now. Is that much work worth it when there might be no reward?

Oddly, 10,000 hours of blog­ging feels totally doable, com­pletely unlike fic­tion. Two hours a day of blog­ging, point­ing out stuff on the net that inter­ests me as well as writ­ing orig­i­nal arti­cles like this one, is def­i­nitely more than I’m doing now, but it would be a pleas­ant and engag­ing use of my time. It is also just about guar­an­teed to make more money for me than fic­tion thanks to Google Adsense, though prob­a­bly never enough to sup­port me with­out a day job. But that doesn’t mat­ter. I’m in it for the LOLs, so they say. So maybe the prob­lem here is my insis­tance on hang­ing on to fic­tion when that’s not were my last­ing pas­sion lies (I’ll prob­a­bly always get a “bug up my ass” to tell a story every now and then, but the excite­ment never lasts long enough to write a book anymore).

What have you spent 10,000 hours doing, and does it sus­tain you, or do you sus­tain it?

Okay, Hol­i­day Cri­sis Sea­son is over, I can get back to writ­ing. and I’ve got quite a bit to cover. While you wait, I highly sug­gest read­ing Mal­colm Gladwell’s new book Out­liers, avail­able on eReader and Audible.

Dri­ving home just now I noticed some­thing. When I’m straight­en­ing out of a turn, I’ll loosen my grip on the steer­ing wheel and let the wheel spin freely just enough to bring the tires back to straight, then tighten my grip again. It seems like an obvi­ous and effi­cient way to allow the laws of physics to straighten out the vehi­cle, but I have no mem­ory of ever actu­ally being taught to do this, either by my par­ents or my Driver’s Ed teacher.

So here’s my ques­tion. Does every­one do this? And if so, were you taught to do this, or does every dri­ver fig­ure this out inde­pen­dently through the daily act of dri­ving a car?

I’m fas­ci­nated by the idea that user inter­faces can be self-​teaching, rather than “intu­itive.” Not some­thing that you can pick up and instantly feel a nat­ural mas­ter of, which is what intu­itive usu­ally implies, but rather some­thing that teaches you how to use it by using it.

Joost released a new iPhone appli­ca­tion that, at first, seems like a pretty cool idea. You can use it to stream any of the videos hosted on Joost to the iPhone and watch them wher­ever you are. Neat! Movies and TV shows on the go! Pre­mium con­tent, because you can only watch that cat rid­ing a Roomba on YouTube so many times.

Well, not so fast.

Like seem­ingly every­thing else about the iPhone, there’s a fatal flaw or two that makes the whole thing kind of WTF. Like you can’t use it over cel­lu­lar data. At all. Nada. WiFi only, so no watch­ing on the bus or the train, but more to the point, let’s think about this. You can only watch it at a hotspot. Mean­ing some­where where you’re sta­tion­ary, prob­a­bly sit­ting down. Maybe enjoy­ing a yummy cof­fee bean ori­ented beverage.

Where you could just pull out your damn laptop.

Is any­one really going to try to tell me that watch­ing videos on the 3.5 inch, 320×480 screen on an iPhone is a bet­ter expe­ri­ence than watch­ing them on even a 9 inch net­book? Really?

So while this is a nice idea, it thor­oughly misses the point. It can’t see the point. The point is, well, a speck.

Con­trast this to Win­dows Mobile. Install the free proxy browser Sky­fire, and just about any Win­dows Mobile device can watch stream­ing video from Joost, Hulu or, well, any­where. And you can do it over cel­lu­lar. On a train. Where maybe a net­book wouldn’t be as convenient.

Unlike other mobile browsers, Sky­fire sup­ports the desk­top ver­sion of Adobe Flash appli­ca­tions so sites, includ­ing those that serve-​up video and music, are ren­dered exactly as you would expect — just like your PC. You will instantly rec­og­nize the con­tent, be famil­iar with the page lay­out — which is not true for most mobile brows­ing expe­ri­ences. We sup­port all that’s good about today’s web — not just Flash, but also Sil­verlight, Ajax, Quick­Time and more. And even bet­ter: Sky­fire evolves with the newest capa­bil­i­ties with­out you hav­ing to do anything.

Yeah, I thought so.