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?

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.

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.

“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.

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.

I remember vividly reading the autobiography of great Houston Rockets center Hakeem Olajuwan. He recounted how the Rockets organization passed on several trades they could have made in the late 1980s and early 90s that would have given the Rockets the following rookies developing together as a team:

• Hakeem at center
• Karl Malone at power forward
• Clyde Drexler at small forward
• Michael Jordan at shooting guard

You could have added my grandmother at point guard and still had team that would have put the classic Lakers and Celtics dynasties to shame. But the Rockets didn’t pull the trigger on those trades and the rest is history.

Now we find out that something similar went down 11 years ago in the mobile technology industry. According to Jean-Louis Gassee, formerly of Be and runner up to revive Apple after John Scully’s reign (a job he lost to Steve Jobs):

A perhaps little known fact: in the Summer of 1997, Steve Jobs called Eric Benhamou, 3Com’s CEO (the company owned Palm).  “Give me the Palm and come and join my Board of Directors.  Only Apple can make Palm a true consumer brand.” Nothing happened.  Apple’s foray into the product segment had to wait ten more years.

http://www.mondaynote.com/2008/10/26/android-first-impressions/

As it turns out, Jobs’s arrogance was, as it often is, misplaced. Palm was able to become a potent consumer brand on their own, having a market valuation at the peak of the dotcom bubble higher than General Motors. But even so, imagine what Apple, working with all the Palmies formerly of Apple now brought back into the fold, could have done with the successors to the Palm Pilot. With a ready-made Apple-branded replacement for John Scully’s ill-fated Newton, Apple could have been a leader in handheld computing for the last decade, leading to devices like the iPhone and iPod touch years sooner. I’m no fan of Apple, but I have to marvel at what might have been.