tech and chicks, but mostly tech and treos.
1. on being household CTO
Hi Art. I married someone who thinks it's hot when I write shell scripts. And she's cute, too. I know it sounds made up, but it's not. On the negative side, she just bought a Mac.
2. tech and treos
(or "Art and Scott continue debating the Treo's relative quality, via blog")
About the Treo 600's crappy sound: it really sounds crappy. But what's weird is that even though it's a phone, I didn't mind trading sound quality for the convergence stuff and the little keyboard. Having all my contacts in one place, carrying only one gadget, reading email when I'm in line at Subway, having a USB modem whenever I need it -- that's all been great. Too bad the audio is so sux0r.
When I was at the Treo 650 Roadshow waiting for my $250 coupon, I asked PalmOne's VP of Product Design if the 650 sounds better than the 600. He admitted that they "didn't know a lot about audio" when they were designing the 600, and that they spec'd a speaker that was too small, then overdrove it a bit -- no wonder all my friends sound like Al Jorgensen -- but that they had hired some audio experts for the 650. Bigger speaker, better mic, etc. I borrowed his 650 and called my brother, whose voice eats telephone speakers for lunch. He sounded fine. So here's hoping. Plus, 320x320, and the opportunity to buy new chargers and ugly-ass cradles!
I have a 650 on order. It's all very exciting, this technology treadmill.
That VP's presentation was interesting -- he talked a lot about PalmOne's design philosophies (at which point most of the roomful of twitchy email-checking exec types lost interest). "Better fast than pretty" was one of the mantras he quoted. He talked about keeping interfaces as productive and simple as possible. For instance, you add new contacts pretty often, but you rarely delete them, so "new" gets a button on the contact UI but "delete" goes through a menu. Their goal is something like this: everyday functions should be available in one click; weekly functions in 2 clicks; and rarer functions 3 or 4 clicks. On a desk, he said, most people have their stapler on the desk, but their staple remover in a drawer. Nice. And finally, PalmOne iterates like crazy and fails early and often. They'd rather spend $5 on foam than $200k on tooling up to produce prototypes.
These philosophies come through in Palm/Handspring products, and they're why I've always liked PalmOS. I get nervous whenever I hear about Palm adding video recording or other flashy-but-useless features.
3. merry xmas
(or "isn't technology exciting")
On Christmas day (when I wasn't shivering under a pile of blankets with the flu) I watched the in-laws play with our new Robosapien robot thingie ("wow! it can walk!" as it stumbled around the room), then we came home and had a quick videoconference with my family so they could say hi to Ian (turns out that "hi!" is just about all you say in a family videoconference). Between the robot and the videocon I felt like we were in the 1986 Christmas that 1955 envisioned.