First off, let’s look at the good stuff. The Diamond sports a razor-sharp 2.8 inch VGA screen. 480 x 640 pixels at that size looks almost like print, and the graphics on the Diamond are closer to glossy magazine pages than what we usually think of as a cell phone screen. Even the iPhone doesn’t look this good.

And the Diamond makes excellent use of that high resolution display with its new TouchFlo 3D user interface. A significantly more thorough replacement of the stock WM UI, this gives a clean, animated look to all the most common functions. Looking up contacts, scanning music or photos, checking time or weather can all be done from this slick Today screen plugin without going into WM proper.

The Diamond has a few other nifty tricks, too. It sports an accelerometer like the iPhone and rotates from portrait to landscape and back automatically. It’s got a completely new browser co-developed by HTC and Opera for a desktop-grade web experience. It’s got Bluetooth, WiFi and full HSDPA for connectivity. And it’s tiny, smaller than the Touch.

Sounds great, right? Well, not so fast. The devil is in the details.

The Diamond has pretty beefy memory specs for a Windows Mobile phone. 192MB of RAM is probably more than enough, even considering the additional overhead of VGA graphics resources, and the 256MB of flash is plenty for installing software. The Diamond also comes with a secondary built in store of flash totaling 4GB for all the music and photos you play with on the new home screen.

But that’s it. Just 4GB. The Diamond, like the iPhone, lacks any sort of card expansion. What you get is what you get. But even Apple doesn’t sell the 4GB iPhone anymore, and the 3G iPhone will probably come in 16 and 32GB flavors. Hell, I’m using more than 4GB of the 8GB microSD card in my Mogul. 4GB is far more than any other WM phones comes with stock, but it’s a strange limitation for a phone that touts media capabilities, and comes up way short on the spec sheet of the competition.

The Diamond has only one headphone jack, and it looks suspiciously like a USB port. The only jack on the entire phone is for HTC’s proprietary extUSB specification, which piggybacks audio pins into a slightly altered mini-USB port. Not only is this not an industry standard 3.5mm or 2.5mm headphone jack, it’s not even pin-compatible with Motorola’s far more common “audio crammed into mini-USB” jack used with the RAZR and other feature phones. Again, considering that the design of this phone and the UI that goes with it practically screams for media use, this is a puzzling compromise. If the included extUSB headphones aren’t up to your audio standards (or just don’t fit comfortably, not all ears are shaped the same), your only option outside of an adapter that manages to be both bulky and easy to lose is to use Bluetooth A2DP headphones. While this is an option the iPhone doesn’t provide, it’s also not likely to be acceptable performance for audiophiles.

The Diamond sports a 900mAH battery in its slim, sleek chassis. This is about two thirds the capacity one would expect from a media phone, and it’s even more confusing when you consider this is also a phone capable of push email. I realize Windows Mobile 6.1 is much, much more power frugal than previous versions of Windows Mobile, but I’ll believe this is enough juice to get an enthusiastic Diamond user through an entire day when I see it. I would have been much happier with even an 1100mAH battery.

Now I know well that mobile technology is a zero sum game. If you want to add something, you have to sacrifice something else. I know a larger battery, a standard headphone jack and a microSD card slot would all have added size to the Diamond. But my question here is whether that was a wise trade-off. These design choices in favor of shaving off a millimeter here and there may have relegated a world-beater device to an also-ran.

It’s far from HTC’s only device, and they have lots of phones that don’t have the Diamond’s limitations (but also, lack its benefits). But this is a phone clearly intended for the same kind of buyer that would strongly consider an iPhone. HTC has compromised on exactly the wrong features for the Diamond’s intended market. How many sales is HTC going to lose by getting right what the iPhone got wrong, but getting wrong what the iPhone got right?

The project I’m working on now, Ghost Ronin, has been tumbling around in my brain for the better part of two decades. One of the problems I’ve had is keeping the science fiction fictional. For example, when I came up with the idea in the mid 80s, I thought it would be really cool if Mike had a receiver in his helmet that triangulated his position, bearing and speed anywhere in the world based on signals from a military network of geosynchronous satellites. I’d never heard of GPS at the time, but now this gee-whiz feature of Mike’s high-tech armor is duplicated in the smartphone I use for writing about it. And don’t get me started on what I could have done back then with Google Earth.

Most of the tech I used back then, like ceramic armor, myomers in place of muscles, GPS and more, has become real, at least in the lab. In the new version, I’ve got a whole new collection of science stuff powering Mike’s adventures: armor woven from synthetic spiderweb, regenerative nanotech, reinforcing bones from the inside out. I’ve also added concepts from Zen meditation, the increasing reliance by our defense department on independent contractors, and the resemblance of modern multinational corporations to feudal states to the mix. It should be an entertaining book, and part of what I like about it is that it should be just plausible enough to feel real, like it might really happen. Like it might have happened already, on some black budget line item.

But that brought me to wondering who I’m doing this for. It’s important to me that I get this right. That I get the science right, the military culture of Army rangers right, the political in-fighting of defense contractors right. But why?

Since I started writing again, it’s been with the idea that I’m writing because I want to write. I’m writing these books because I want to read them. If they’re published or not doesn’t matter to me, or shouldn’t. Because if I start writing with the goal of publication, it’s going to become work, all the fun will go out of it and I’ll do whatever I can to avoid it. So why is it so important to me that my science fiction be plausible, even to geeks like me who understand the science?

Or is that precisely the point? I want to get it right because I’m writing it for me, because I’ll know if I’m bullshitting the reader? Is it enough to tell the emotional truth of your characters, or does telling the truth as a writer apply to everything?

That size with a VGA, 640×480 screen? And:

• Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional
• Qualcomm MSM 7201A @ 528MHz
• 256MB ROM/128MB RAM
• 7.2MB HSDPA/HSUPA (rev A EVDO for Sprint versions)
• Wi-Fi
• Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR
• eGPS
• 3.1MP camera with flash
• Forward facing camera
• Samsung MoviNAND 4GB internal flash storage
• Orientation sensor
• FM Radio
• microSD expansion
• 900mAh battery

Perhaps unsurprisingly, mobile tech to the rescue! I fired up Total Commander and used its FTP plugin to remote into my website’s underlying file structure and renamed the plugin. Once again, my phone prevails where my desktop was helpless.

I’ve also had some bizarre issues with the Windows Mobile 6.1 custom ROM I’d been using on my Mogul, so I flashed back to the official stock Sprint 3.35 ROM. I’m going to try running as bare bones as possible for a while (check out my Today screen) and see if it runs any smoother without all the extra crap I usually load it down with gumming up the works. While it’s not much to look at, it’s surprisingly functional. About the only thing I might change is installing the Spb Phone Suite 1.3 release candidate 3 to replace the voicemail and messaging plugins. I really miss automatic profiles and call filtering.

You might also notice the calendar item for Developer One’s iFitOne. I’ve been using this for a few days now and I really, really like it. It’s leaner and less math than typical fitness programs, and that’s on purpose. It does one thing really, really well. It keeps you motivated and aware of your progress (or lack thereof). Not a bad deal for $15. For the price of three combo meals, you could get down to a healthy weight.

Besides leveraging the desktop, there’s a paradigm in WM which most critics just don’t get. MS has a view that when mobile its all about "glanceable information" ie. it’s not about the apps, but the information synchronized from the desktop or exchange server. WM is not app centric. Its not even task centric. It tries to be information centric. Its not brilliant at it, but the today screen is the center of activity on a WM device, and for someone that’s very busy having info that’s glanceable is very valuable… If MS were to copy the iPhone and its playskool interface, one can only hope they don’t lose one of the most powerful aspect of their OS, the ease with which apps can expose and surface their information to the user on the home screen. — Surur, WMexperts.com

Surur has an excellent point here. Windows Mobile devices revolve around the Today screen, particularly the way it can be extended to display just the combination of information sources each individual user needs. Where the Palm and Apple concept is to make a simple grid of application icons the home screen for the device, Microsoft chose instead to go with what users need at a glance, what they’re likely to want to see within the first second or two of turning on the device.

By default, this makes the Windows Mobile home screen (I’m talking about Windows Mobile Professional or Pocket PC versions here) a bit pedestrian by today’s standards. It gets the job done, but not terribly efficiently. There is a clean simplicity to a list of plugins, their icons forming a column down the left edge of the screen in front of indented content, but it’s not a great use of screen real estate.

It’s also worth noting that the stock Today screen does not even attempt to mimic the application launchers at the core of Palm OS or the iPhone. While there is a brisk business in third party plugins to let you launch applications from the Today screen, this seems to be counter to Microsoft’s design intent. Microsoft’s design intent is confusing, inconsistent and contradictory, but I’ll get to that in another article.

Let’s stick with the Today screen for now. Given that it’s supposed to be the center of the Windows Mobile experience, the "desktop" if you will, and intended to show varied information at a glance, how best to optimize this experience?

My answer to that question changes constantly, but I’ve learned a few things.

First, it’s vital to keep everything on one screen, and if possible do away with the scroll bar as well. A lot of the more popular Today screen plugins provide a tabbed interface, including the popular Home plugin from HTC, the biggest Windows Mobile device maker. From a usability standpoint, this is a mistake, since only one tab can be visible at a time. All the information in the inactive tabs lose their "glanceability" and require more finger pressing or d-pad gymnastics to get to. Similarly, anything you have to scroll to see usually won’t be seen (just like the less important front page stories in a newspaper are below the fold), so make sure information decreases in importance as it falls lower on the screen. Anything that scrolls offscreen should be something you can afford to ignore (and wonder why you need it on the Today screen in the first place).

Secondly, and related to the scroll issue, is keep the important stuff near the top. In the screenshot above, you’ll notice I have Spb Phone Suite at the very top of the screen, where the big, finger-friendly notification, profile and speed dial buttons are quickly and easily accessible by finger, d-pad or scroll wheel. Jeff Hawkins, inventor of the Palm Pilot, was famous for "tap counting", being absolutely ruthless about streamlining and cutting any extraneous steps out of a workflow on a mobile device. He was right. Every single button press counts, so make the stuff you use often easy to get to. I may fine tune my Today screen a bit myself, moving the Live Search box to the bottom and bring the clock one click closer.

Lastly (for now, I’ve got some other thoughts that need to simmer a bit more before I post them), keep things finger-friendly as much as possible. The iPhone and the WM-based HTC Touch have proven that the stylus isn’t necessary or even desirable on a touch screen device. As you can see by the third screenshot in this article, when Pocket Player is running I have big finger-friendly buttons right on my Today screen, making it easy to control my tunes from my home screen. The clock is also big enough to hit with my thumb, giving me quick access to my alarm settings. To accommodate this without scrolling PocketBreeze at the bottom dynamically adjusts itself to fit into the remaining space.

Next up in UI Musings: dissecting my Today screen plugin by plugin, why I selected each and why they’re in the order they’re in, and a look at how to launch programs in Windows Mobile and how to optimize that experience.

The problem I have with those is that they’re all too bulky. They either don’t sync with my Exchange server or they don’t do it well. It’s too much effort to set up the system, and too cumbersome to use it in the moment. One of the hallmarks of GTD on paper is that it’s fast. Fast enough to be usable. Fast enough to become a "I don’t even think about it anymore" habit. Every second, every fraction of a second, that you add to that process makes it less likely you’ll actually stick with it.

"Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler."
– Albert Einstein

So I set out to create a GTD implementation that used as little outside software or structure as possible. I wanted it to sync, mostly, via Exchange, which meant limiting myself to Contacts, Tasks and Calendar (with one exception). I wanted it to be fast to use on the device, just as glanceable as the paper version, but with even less overhead due to the digital nature of the data. It should be easy to collect, process, decide and do. And I think I pulled it off.

As you might expect, the system is based around tasks. According to Allen, you should not prioritize your task lists, and for the most part I agree. This freed me up to use the high/normal/low priority system in Outlook/Exchange for something else: defining your lists.

Three kinds of things go on task lists in GTD. Next Actions (things you can actually do something about), Projects (lists of Next Actions relating to the same goal) and Someday/Maybes (things you might do at some point but have no commitment towards). In my system, Next Actions are all set to High importance, Projects are Normal importance and Someday/Maybes are Low importance. When sorting your task list by priority, this shows all your Next Actions grouped at the top of the list, then your projects. Running out of Next Actions is a good sign to look at your Projects and create more Next Actions to move things along.

In each Project (normal importance task), I use the note field to jot down potential Next Actions. Allen cautions against doing too much or too detailed hierarchical planning on the theory that it will almost certainly change once you actually get into it.

"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy."
– General George Patton

Allen instead recommends "back of the envelope" planning, just jotting down a simple list of things you know the project will require. This gives you the flexibility to do things in whatever order makes sense in the moment and still be sure you hit the major points. When necessary I copy each line to a new Next Action (High Importance task) so it shows up on the main list, and the next time I have the Project open I put an X in front of the ones I know I’ve done. When all of the actions are done and I can’t think of any more, the Project itself gets marked as complete.

When viewing the list as a whole, I can either look at all my Next Actions or I can filter the list by context. A curious side-effect I’ve noticed of using mobile technology is that I tend to need far fewer contexts than most people. I don’t need an "@phone" context, for example, since my smartphone is always with me. Nor do I need @internet, etc. I only have four contexts that are meaningful for me:

• @Computer, for things that require a desktop PC
• @Home, for things to do inside or around my apartment
• @Out, for things I can do pretty much anywhere, or things to do on the go
• @Work, for things to do at my office

That’s it. Individual tasks can be assigned to any or all of those categories, and I can filter the list to show just the Next Actions I can actually do in any particular context. This filtering is a built in feature of the Windows Mobile tasks application, as is filtering to show only Active Tasks (not complete, with a start date either null or before today). I assign Projects to the !Project context, so they don’t show up in my normal context lists (Projects will usually span multiple contexts anyway) and so I can catch things I forgot to categorize by using the built in "No Categories" filter.

The nice thing about this system is that it’s all in Tasks (so far), which means it all syncs automatically to Exchange and thus is all available to me anytime, anywhere, no matter if I’m using Outlook at home, my smartphone or Outlook Web Access at the office. But tasks will only take you so far. I still need to capture ideas about stuff to do in the first place.

I talked about this recently. I have a simple plain text file called Notebook.txt on my device set to sync to my desktop, and I have shortcuts in my desktop and handheld Start Menus to open this file quickly and easily. When a thought occurs to me, no matter what it is, I open this file and jot it down. Every so often, usually once a day, but sometimes more frequently and sometimes less, I open up that file and cut and paste from it into new tasks, appointments, other documents, whatever is appropriate. Notice that I said cut. Once it’s processed, it’s gone from my notebook. I like to keep the notebook as clean as possible. If I’m doing my job and processing new ideas regularly, that text file should be 0 bytes big more often than not. I use PHM Notepad for this just because opening the file is nearly instantaneous, but Word Mobile works nearly as well if you don’t want to install extra software. It takes a second or two to open the file, but I’m looking for speed. (This is also why I keep my notebook in a plain text file instead of a Word document; I want it to open instantly on the phone and the desktop.)

And that’s the whole system. It’s quick, simple and all but one text file syncs via Exchange. The only part that doesn’t sync doesn’t strictly have to, if you don’t mind having separate "collection buckets" on different computers. And it catches the basics of GTD without unnecessary overhead. Give it a try, and let me know how it works for you in the comments.

But where I do most of my UI tinkering is in mobile devices. Mobiles are, by definition, even more personal than the “personal computer” and thus the interface between the person and the machine is even more important. The iPhone has proven that UI matters on mobile devices. It can’t do half what a Windows Mobile device can do, but is so intuitive and so slick looking that people don’t care. They can pick up an iPhone and use it. They pick up a Windows Mobile device, or even a Treo, and don’t know from square one half of what the device can really do for them. It’s not enough to have features. They have to be usable, discoverable, and consistent.

For months I’ve been trying to write an article about what I’ve done to maximize the usability of my Mogul, but every time I get halfway into it, I change something and have to start over. It only just recently dawned on me that I should make this a running series, explain the reasoning for my changes and let my readers follow along on my journey to find the perfect (for this week, anyway) user interface.

So watch this category for more installments. I’m still thinking about how to structure this, what to talk about first. But the important thing for now is to get the conversation started. What do you look for in a mobile user interface? What quirks of the device you’re currently using slow you down the most?

And the winner is: a text file. Yup, a simple ASCII text file that I’ve dumped into the Personal folder in My Documents and called !Notebook.txt.

Now the key is how I use it. I’ve created a shortcut directly to that file and put that shortcut in my Start Menu. Not in the Programs screen, but directly into the Start Menu itself. And because of the ! at the beginning of the name, it’s always sorted to the top, alphabetically. This puts it directly under Today in the Start Menu, as few taps away from any other app as possible.

But wait, there’s more.

I also have that shortcut mapped to a button, in my case the voice record button on my Mogul. So now it’s just a single button press away no matter what I’m doing.

Instead of using Word Mobile, which could take up to 2-4 seconds to load, I have PHM Notepad installed and associated with text files. That way when I open any text file, like this one, Notepad pops up just about instantly.

One of the features of PHM Notepad is defining the behavior of the OK button in the upper right corner. It can be set to close the app, smart minimize or the standard Windows Mobile OK behavior. I have it set to OK, which means that when I’m done typing in a thought, a simple press of either of the Mogul’s OK buttons or tapping the one on screen automatically saves my changes and closes the application. No prompts, no worries. It just goes away.

I use Touchpal as my default input method, which gives me the ability to quickly, easily and accurately enter text one handed on the go. I could also use the the Mogul’s thumbboard if the idea is a little more involved.

And lastly, because the file is in my My Documents folder, it gets synced to both my work and home desktops. And guess what? I have shortcuts on both PCs on the desktop to go right to it, making it just as easy to quickly jot something down when I’m at my desk.

Every so often, I go into the file and convert each item to a task, an appointment, a new text file/Word document as needed. But that’s not capture, that’s processing, and that’s a whole different post.

That’s one of my favorite things about being a writer, after all. Being a writer means constantly learning new things to inform the writing. That’s you end up with kindergarten teachers who stay up nights learning how to build a nuclear bomb, or in my case what it’s like to be a soldier in Iraq and what it means to be Samurai. In particular, I have two books to read as soon as I can. One is Zen and the Way of the Sword by Winston King. The other is Chasing Ghosts by Paul Reikoff. Both of these will lend detail and weight to Mike as a warrior.

The problem, of course, is that I’m reading these books instead of writing. It’s all too easy to put it off until I know a little more. Chapter one is set in Iraq, so why not read some more about what it’s really like to walk those streets as American infantry?

Because if I do that, I’ll never get around to actually writing the book. There will always, always be more to learn. There will be details to insert, assumptions to correct.

But in the end, that’s what second drafts are for. The first draft should be pure story, and it’s time to get back to work.

Why am I revisiting this? Several reasons, really.

The first is comfort level. I’ve been picking at this story for 20 years. I still feel a strong connection to the story and the characters. I know these people, which should make it easier to maintain momentum.

At the same time, I’m making some pretty big changes this time around. Mike is no longer an athlete crippled and then recruited by a shadowy government agency. Now he and his friend Chris start out as soldiers in Iraq, where Mike gets blown up. The agency that “brings him back from the dead” is a independent contractor (such contracts account for over 70% of the Defense Intelligence Agency budget) which doesn’t always work for the United States. I’d already decided to use a form of Zen to allow Mike to control his nanotechnologicially-enhanced reflexes, and I’m taking this even further by having the agents trained in a 21st century Bushido, with the corporation taking the place of the Japanese feudal lord.

All of this brings the story solidly into the present day (not bad for an idea that came to me during the Reagan administration) and gives it a lot of new angles for me to explore.

Finally, this is the kind of story I want to tell. Homeworld, my Nano ‘06 project, is probably next on deck, but I really want to tell a fast-paced and emotional action story. Maybe I’m going back to my roots (I read more comics than novels as a kid) but this is the kind of adventure I think can build momentum and get me back into the writing habit.

Plus swords and stealth armor are cool.