Weblog Without Honor or Humanity

A question.

If there was an empirical study showing that file-sharing has negative effect on album sales, would BoingBoing link to it?

Treo killer or a copy-cat? Engadget has just posted a picture of BENQ P50 Pocket PC phone. They call it a “Treo killer” but to my eyes it looks more like a “Treo copy-cat”. Not that I think it’s bad - I fully support using other people’s ideas to create improved products (even if I wouldn’t support it, realistically that’s how things get developed anyway). From the picture it’s hard to tell how big it is compared to Treo 600 but otherwise it looks very much like Treo 600. So the question is: given the little information we have, is it going to be a Treo 600 killer? Let’s see:

• it’s unclear if it’s a phone at all. Reports so far mention wi-fi and bluetooth but they don’t mention any GSM or other phone standard. They do mention using Pocket PC Phone Edition. If it’s not a phone, it’s not even a competition.
• pro: wi-fi, bluetooth and a bigger screen (probably a 240×320, standard on Pocket PC, as compared to 160×160 on Treo)
• con: late to market. It’ll be months before it’ll be available to customers.
• con: Palm OS is still ahead of Pocket PC in terms of market share. More apps for Treo 600.
• unknown: one of the Treo’s strengths is improved software. Handspring took Palm OS and modified it quite extensively to support Treo’s hardware like keyboard and 5-way navigator. It remains to be seen if BENQ did the same for P50, but my guess is not.

So I wouldn’t name Treo’s killer just yet.

BlogJet - yet another weblog client. BlogJet is another weblog client that I’ve tried and won’t use unless it gets better. Currently its a free beta but it’ll turn shareware. Currently, it’s not yet worth paying for. Writing a simple weblog client is simple, as proved by multitude of clients available out there. Writing a good weblog client is hard, as proved by non-existence of such beast. To me, weblog client should make it easy to:

• create and manage new posts i.e. writing the posts
• publish new posts to a weblog
• search through past posts

A new tool has little chance to become the best tool for writing, existing tools like FrontPage or DreamWeaver will always have an edge. I can search my site quite well using Google. So a weblog client only makes sense if it does a good job of integrating all my weblog posting and management tasks into one place. It must make things slightly easier than composing posts in Front Page, using web frontend for posting and searching through google. I should have:

• fairly good text-editing capabilities, including inline spell-checking
• easy access to previous posts
• seamless management of drafts - posts that I’m writing but not finished yet. All the tools I’ve tried so far resolve to the most obvious (apparently) and brain-dead solution: forcing the user to save each post separately on the disk.
• full-text search through past posts

I’ve posted a led design on how to achieve that on BlogJet feature requests forum. We’ll see what the developer will think about those.

And a fair warning: currently (v 1.0.0 build 15 BETA) BlogJet crashes like crazy. It crashed twice when I was writing this entry so I switched to a text editor to finish this post.

Affordable monthly pricing for VideoCall. I just spotted a mention of Logitech’s VideoCalll - software for video calls over internet. The interesting part is how they plan to charge for it. Currently they’re in public, beta (which is free) but in their FAQ they mention “simple, affordable monthly pricing”. Looks like a suicidal move - to charge monthly subscription for a service like that. Even if they’re dramatically better than anyone else, my understanding is that there is free competition (AOL Instant Messenger 5.5 is free and iChatAV-compatible, iChatAV comes free with Panther or can be bought for $30). It’s hard to beat free.

Do bad data plans harm MS Smartphone adoption?
MS Smartphone like Motorola MPX200 are nice, however in US there’s one problem: lack of decent (i.e. not expensive) data plan for them. Currently I have SideKick on T-Mobile network which comes with $20/month unlimited data and Treo 600 on Sprint network with a similiar-priced unlimited data plan. Those are prices that I’m willing to pay. The problem is that none of the networks that provide MS Smartphone-based phones in US have plans like that. AT&T wireless wants $79.99/month for unlimited data ($19.99 for 8MB/month, $12.99 for $4MB/month). Verizon Wireless is similar to AT&T. Not to mention utter pain of trying to find pricing info on their websites. I wonder if lack of data plans doesn’t harm smartphone adoption.

ISO Palm PDA with Compact Flash slot.
Why there is no Palm PDA with Compact Flash slot? PalmOne always uses SD/MMC cards in their PDAs. They have one advantage: they’re smaller that CF cards. On the other hand CF cards are cheaper and you can find higher-capacity cards. But the biggest reason for Palm to use CF for external storage is that most digital cameras use one. Usually you can preview the photos on the camera (or you can buy a specialized gadget just for that) but a PDA with a good screen (e.g. 320×480 as in Tungsten T3 or Tapwave Zodiac) would be a perfect gadget for quick-and-dirty previewing of photos.

Unlocking Philips DVD727 DVD player.

Scarecrow is one perks of living in Seattle. They have a lot of PAL-encoded and non-region-0 DVDs in their 60000+ collection of movies. Unfortunately in order to watch them you need region-free DVD player that can also convert from PAL (European TV standard) to NTSC (US TV standard). After some research I bought a $70 Philips DVD727
DVD player. By default it only plays region 1 DVDs. To region-unlock Philips DVD727 Progressive-Scan DVD Player: open the tray , press 9999 and 0 from the remote with pauses between every digit. You will see Region 0 on the screen and after that you can play all the regions. Tested with PAL, region 2 “Buffy” DVD and region 4, Brazillian version of “The Matrix”.

del.icio.us - bookmarks manager.
I’ve seen people mentioning del.icio.us - social bookmarking service for some time now but only today I’ve actually used it and it’s brilliant. In the past I’ve used those bookmark-management methods:

• using web browser’s bookmarks. The problems with this approach is that I use multiple browser on multiple computers and there’s no a good way to have the bookmarks synchronized (I’m sure there’s $9.95 app somewhere out there that does bookmarks synchronization but even if there was a free one it would be too much hassle to install it). Besides, bookmark management in browsers is surprisingly weak (doesn’t handle a large list of bookmarks well)
• using Powermarks. I was enthusiastic at first, adding and keyword-marking a lot (1369 to be exact) of bookmarks but it turned out that long-term I wasn’t using it. It only integrates with IE and I try to avoid running unnecessary software (not that I succeed at this). And it’s still useless when running on multiple computers (it has a sync option via ftp but I don’t have ftp account).

del.icio.us solves most of those problems. It’s server-based so you can use it on any computer. It integrates with IE and Mozilla/Firebird via bookmarklets - very convenient to use. It does have keyword-tagging feature. It works fast. But the killer feature is ability to browse other people’s bookmarks. I got addicted to that for a few hours.

It would be great if they added (optional) caching of bookmarked pages. That way if the page would go off-line (which happens often) it would still be available.

Palm OS 6 tidbits.

In this interview PalmSource CTO tells the story of Palm OS 6 developement.

In this interview a PalmSource engineer talks about new features in Palm OS 6.

Ben Combee has moved his weblog. Ben was working on Metrowerks CodeWarrior for Palm and has recently been hired by PalmSource. To me that means that Metrowers will stop developing CodeWarrior (it’ll be hard for them to compete with PalmSource’s free, Eclipse-based IDE).

David Fedor has started a weblog. He works for PalmSource and is in charge of developer’s relations so it might be a weblog worth following.

New SideKick.

Danger has revealed a a new SideKick. Very little information is available. The hardware is slightly improved, some new software added (e.g. Yahoo IM client) but that’s pretty much all that was published. I’m always interested in how many SideKicks have been sold so far (because this determines the size of potential market for the applications) and according to Danger it’s “several hundred thousand” which is not bad (if true).