Weblog Without Honor or Humanity

Tufte speaks. And some people make notes. Edward Tufte is most known for his books on information design.

Net Words. Finished reading the book
Net Words: Creating High-Impact Online Copy. Overall, I’m disappointed. Too much talk about why good copy is
important, not enough practical tips on how to create a good copy. So let me quote the good part, 3 examples
of a good copy. A sign in a beach in California:

So that others may enjoy our fragile tidepools and kelp forests,
please take only photographs, leave only footprints.

Headstone on a tombstone of a station agent in the cowboy days of the 1880s:

Here lies Lester Moore
Four slugs from a .44
No Les No More.

Or what do they have in some gym instead of “Authorized Personnel Only” signs:

Staff Only.
Don’t feel left out.
Please apply at the front desk.

I quote them because they show that, with a little bit of love,
one can go above avarage and that wisdom applies not only to copywriting.

Safari disappointement. Safari is O’Reilly’s on-line books project. You pay a monthly fee to access a number of books (mostly O’Reilly books but not only) where the number depends on the size of a monthly fee. Every month you can swap books i.e. replace a book with some other book from a big catalog. I have 10 books and I just tried replacing one book with another book. To my disappointement it seems that one can only do a “swap” once per-month i.e. if I swap only one book, my swapping period gets reset and I can’t swap any other book until next month. That’s not how I expected it to work - each book should have its own swap date and I should be able to swap any book independently of the others. The way it works now greatly diminishes the value of Safari to me. Luckily, a recent newsletter about Safari mentioned that they plan to implement just that Real Soon TM.

Deconstructing Palm.
PalmSource (a Palm Inc. spin-off company that now drives development of Palm OS while the original
Palm Inc. switched to only doing hardware) has a href="http://www.palmsource.com/palmos/">marketing blurb which is,
as marketing blurbs usually have it, full of half-truths and outrageous lies.
Let’s deconstruct it.

Today, the Palm OS runs on almost two out of every three handhelds

In other words it has less than 66% of market share. What they don’t tell you is
that they had more than 90% not so long ago and that their market
share continues to decline, assaulted by PDAs based on Windows CE
(Pocket PC) OS.

Why has the Palm OS achieved its remarkable leadership role? …
In handheld computing, user needs vary tremendously from person to
person, and from department to department … The Palm OS is the only
handheld operating system that can satisfy all these different needs
many more. That’s because the Palm OS is built to support a wide
variety of devices with a single, consistent software platform.

This falls into “blatant lie” category. Palm OS, up until the latest
released version 4.1 is the most inflexible OS you can imagine. Every
hardware maker that made products that Palm OS was not designed for
had to add its own extensions (additional APIs) to the OS. Those
extensions are very poorly supported by existing software so they might just as
well not exist. For example, Palm OS is fixed to 160×160
resolution. Sony and Handera produced PDAs based on Palm OS with
higher resolution screens but, as stated above, they had to modify (i.e. hack)
the OS and add their own APIs. Did Palm learn from their past mistakes? Hardly.
Upcoming Palm OS 5 is fixed to 2 resolutions: 320×320 and 160×160.

Supporting the same range of hardware as Palm OS using Microsoft
software would mean deploying two or three different software
platforms Pocket PC, Windows CE, and Stinger significantly
different software compatibility, interfaces, user training, and
custom development required for each.

This statement relies heavily on the ignorance of the reader. The
differences between Pocket PC, Windows CE and Stinger are very small,
not “significant”. Furthermore they implement a subset of Win32 APIs
which means that any Windows programmer (and there’s a lot of them) can be quickly
trained for programming Pocket PCs. In contrast, every programmer has to learn
Palm OS programming from scratch (except Mac programmers given that Palm OS is,
shall we say, heavily influenced by the old Mac OS).

The huge Palm OS community has also created wide choice in add-on
hardware, ranging from digital cameras, to MP3 players, cell phone,
GPS, and high-speed LAN connectivity (802.11b).

MP3s can be played natively by any Pocket PC. Overall, Palm
OS-based hardware lags behind the Pocket PC-based because Pocket PCs
have support for CF slot (which gives all those GPS and LAN
connectivity capabilities). But that won’t stop marketers from alluding
that Palm OS is superior in that area.

From the very first Palm Pilot, the designers of Palm OS have sweated
the details of how a mobile product actually gets used, and how to
make that usage simple and lightning fast.

According to the book “Piloting Palm” this is actually true: Hawkins
was obsessed (in a good way) with making a good designed. Too bad he
doesn’t work at Palm anymore.

The Palm operating system software was designed just for mobile
devices. It uses memory and battery power very efficiently, enabling
Palm Powered hardware makers to design extremely small and lightweight
systems.

This is also true. However, the point becomes more and more
moot. Latest Pocket PC-based devices (like Toshiba e370) rival Palm
OS-based in terms of the size. The design decision that proved winning
during past 7 years (first Palm devices appeared in 1996) is now
holding Palm back and if they don’t do something soon they will be
eaten alive by an alliance of Microsoft’s Pocket PC and Moore’s
law. The battle now is
in the features. People demand more and whoever will fill that demand
will win.

Show me the code. Raph:

But opinions are damn cheap. Any idiot can have them, and many do. Even smart people are tempted by pretty ideas. We’re surrounded by a flood of wrongheaded opinions. The best way to convince me that your idea is one of the few good ones is to show me the code.

Another excellent post from Raph. The proof is always in the pudding.

Arms race is good for you.. Dave says that if he had a great idea he would patent it. His argument is simple and plays on people’s fear and greed: they’re doing it, if I don’t do it, I’m going to loose. I’m going to be a chump. The same selfish, fear-induced thinking is a reason for arms race: they got guns, if we don’t make our own guns, we’re going to loose. But the problem with arms race is that it never stops and when it finally comes to using the guns, everybody looses (even those who, in the meantime, got rich selling guns). It’s true that the underlying reason for this mess is extremely bad patent system but by accepting the mess as necessity and playing along people reinfornce the system. What you do matters. Think about.

Close but no cigar. I wrote that Sony Ericsson doesn’t get it, as evidenced by the fact that they don’t have any free dev tools for their upcoming P800 phone. This article brought the news that now you can
download free SDK for P800/P802 phones. That’s a step in the right directions but they’re still far from getting it. To use the SDK you still have to purchase Metrowerk’s dev tools for the low price of $1395. That’s the price given on Ericsson site. Metrowerk’s site doesn’t even post the price, instead they give you a phone number and an e-mail address.

But they don’t really want to sell you the software. I sent them an e-mail asking for the price and how to purchase the software but 5 days passed and I didn’t receive an answer.

Multimedia need not apply. This idea is so wrong. Why is anyone pushing video for cell phones is beyond me. First of all the bandwidth isn’t there and won’t be there for years to come. Currently we can’t even get wireless speeds that allow comfortable web browsing. Second, no one really wants that. There must be some mass delusion going on among wireless carriers/equipment makers, one that rivals WAP delusion. They invest money in services that they think might be popular but have exactly zero data to confirm that. It’s all wishful thinking. And why would anyone want to watch video on a smallish screen? Everybody already has a TV and that’s much better technology for watching moving pictures. And on top of that there is no content and who’s going to break the chicken-and-egg spell? No market - no content. No content - no market.

Comments need not apply. Ok, it’s not like anyone’s asking, but I’ll lay it down anyway: I disabled comments on my weblog. MovableType doesn’t care, it’s just a check-box. The reason for that is that I think that comments don’t work on blogs in general. On all the blogs I’ve read I’ve only seen comments on a tiny percentage of posts and only a percentage of those comments were useful. It’s not worth it. The nature of the blog is that posts are dying quickly. Blog that doesn’t move is a dead blog. Therefore a single post has relatively little value and by its very nature will quickly fall into obscurity. That’s the way the blogs are.

No money in content. I wrote that there’s no money in blogging.
This article is much more extensive treatise on why there isn’t much money in on-line content. It features Economics 101 and shares my point of view that in order to have a business, there must be scarcity and there’s hardly a scarcity in the on-line content area.