Adventures in home working

There is a flurry of debate in the blogs because Peter says, I Still like the tablet.  But I am all out of love, well I have a story to tell about Tablet love as well.

I got my first Tablet, a HP TC1100, in January and it was love at first sight,  I just took to the slate format and at the time forgave the terrible keyboard, (although it didn’t take me long to remember my old IBM keyboard with increasing longing).  I wrote all about my early experiences in my tablet blog.  Well my circumstances changed and I found myself working mostly from home so the mobility benefits I was getting from the tablet reduced and I started to look at the platform more objectively.  These are some of the conclusions that I came to, but I think it’s a pretty personal view so don’t expect any conclusions that I draw to apply to you.

The Tablet didn’t work for me when I was mainly deskbound:

1. I love screen real estate, before I had a Tablet I had a 1400*1050 resolution ThinkPad A20p, it had a great keyboard to, (I love IBM keyboards).
2. At home now my desktop drives a 19” 1280*1024 LCD and a 19” 1600*1280 Flat screen LCD and I still have my ThinkPad A20p as a management console for my home lab.  So for me the 1024*768 screen on the TC1100 was just not up to the job.
3. With a screen that size the Tablet is a huge improvement over a PDA, but it’s a lot bigger, I have just settled on an IPAQ 4150 so you can see that size, or lack of it in true portable device is pretty key for me.
4. As an auxiliary display things improved considerably but the docking station was a bit ‘strange’ and I still found myself struggling to use the small screen for anything really useful, when I had a glorious 19” LCD as my secondary.  I tried using it to monitor my email but I found I could do that just as easily on my IPAQ, which had a brighter screen as well.
5. I found it slightly under powered compared to my desktop, but I could have lived with this, it had 1GB of memory and this seemed to make up for the slower processor and hard drive.

The true mobile experience I was hoping for never happened:

1. When I first got my Tablet one of the real benefits I was looking forward to was being able to take anywhere and use it inside and outside.  However all too often I found that the lighting was not right.  Outside it’s practically unusable and this was a real disappointment.
2. I also never came across a really good case that I could use at work and home that was small enough to always take with me everywhere
3. Battery life however was never a problem for me as I had two batteries and I managed 6-8 hours.
4. The end result I ended up leaving it behind and wishing I had a Pocket PC so that I could take something everywhere.  In the end I bought a Pocket PC!

I still needed a keyboard:

1. I was impressed by the handwriting recognition when I got the Tablet and blown away when I started testing XP SP2, but I still needed a keyboard for so much of the work I did when I was mobile, even when I was just sitting watching TV, answering a few emails or reading blogs I missed the keyboard.  This was a real shock to me as I just love the slate format, its just that the slate format is only really useful when you are making very short notes, browsing/reading or making hand written notes or drawings.  If you are doing any serious writing or PowerPoint for example you really need mouse and keyboard with today’s applications.  Strangely enough PDA’s seem much easier to use in slate mode, they are lighter, the applications are better optimised and my expectations about being able to write are much lower.
2. I have found since switching back to a laptop when mobile, a IBM ThinkPad T40, that I use it much more sitting in the lounge or in the garden than I used my tablet.  Quite the opposite of what I was expecting when I let the Tablet go.

So what did I like about the Tablet:

1. I loved the slate format
2. I thought the HP hardware design was fantastic, apart from the keyboard, they should have recognised how important the keyboard was still going to be
3. I thought the handwriting recognition was first class, especially in SP2 and was vastly improved over that on my IPAQ, however it should be put in its place, a useful complement to the keyboard, or a bonus when you just have the slate with you
4. I loved the natural interaction model, and the more applications that are developed to take account of it the better
5. I loved OneNote, but still think it could be optimised slightly more for the pen interface,  look at a product like Pocket Informant for some clues
6. I loved some of the concepts, but not the reality, for example the voice recording and recognition just did not meet my expectations

What needs to be done to get me back in love:

1. I need a first class keyboard
2. I need a much higher resolution screen, one I can read an A4 page on, 1400*1050 would be just fine!
3. I still want to be able to use it in slate mode, keyboard detached, to minimise weight and maximise portability
4. I want some innovation put into cases, or protection so that I can bung it into my rucksack and take it wherever I would take a pad of paper
5. I need to be able to read the screen outside
6. The price point needs to be right
7. It needs to be light enough without the keyboard to hold in one hand

Interestingly all of these improvements are hardware, there have been a lot of criticisms of the platform, but I personally liked it well enough, sure improvements would be welcome but these are unlikely to win me back on their own.  At the end of the day today’s hardware does not allow for the radical new way of working that the operating system and applications already support. 

For another personal perspective, I looked at the needs of one of my daughter’s who suffers from Raynauds and Scleroderma.  I think a Tablet would be just perfect for her, I wrote that up here.

I recently read Getting Things Done, and wanted to apply it using Lotus Notes.  I struggled a bit and to tell the truth I have not fully implemented it even after a month of playing around.  I am trying again now that I have a new PDA, better synchronisation software, mNotes and some hints and tips from Eric Mack on using Notes and GTD and on using Notes for task and action management.

An article in Scientific American, titled The Tyranny of Choice has sparked a considerable debate on the web about the problems faced by western societies as a result of too much choice.  In fact the idea is a very old one, I came cross it years ago but it is not mentioned very often by your every day Happiness literature which tends to talk more about internal changes that people can make to the way they think rather than factors from their external environment.

You can sum up the material prior to this article as follows:

• The intent of advertising is to make us dissatisfied with what we have
• If we meet people who have more than we have, or have different spending priorities or saving priorities then we tend to be dissatisfied with what we have

These two factors are the main environmental factors that effect happiness.  In my experience they are even more powerful than having somewhere warm and dry to live and enough food to eat, which I soon got used to.  However some people disagree with this and consider these to be essential, (Hygiene factors in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

This new article extends the model a bit with the following concepts:

• Too much choice can be a bad thing
• Especially if when faced with a choice you spend a lot of time and energy of assessing the options and agonising over them.  This is a particular problem now days with the popularity of “what xxx” type magazines and the Internet which:
  • Exposes us to ever increasing choice
  • Provides access to a huge amount of information on each option
  • Provides access to a huge amount of often conflicting opinion about each option
• Even worse if when you finally make a decision you then continue to expose yourself to options and opinions that may change the choice you made and lead to dissatisfaction.  In fact this can easily happen anyway because often the way that tradeoffs are prioritised when making a decision then change once the decision has been taken and real life experience refines or overturns them
• These factors are compounded with easy credit which does not provide a natural limit on peoples capacity to dream and plan to acquire things.

I don’t want to repeat the article, but it’s worth mentioning that it identifies different personality types who are affected by the above to a greater or lesser extent.

There are a few articles that discuss this topic in more detail and I have provided a few of the links here:

• Decisions, decisions … the right choice isn’t always the best
• Making The Right Choice
• Studies associate decreased happiness with explosion of options

Worth repeating is a great quote by the great physicist Richard Feynman, who when faced with the dessert menu in restaurants always chose the chocolate option. As Feynman saw it, while the other desserts might be better, they might not be. On the other hand, the chocolate option was always pretty acceptable – so why fret for ages over making a choice that might be wrong anyway?

In many ways Richards approach mirrors my own, I am happiest and most at ease when I am doing simple familiar things, that I don’t have to think about, but which I know I enjoy.  When faced with the option to do something different I will often avoid it to reduce the risk that I won’t enjoy it, rather than take the risk that I will enjoy it more.  However when faced with choice I definitely suffer from the problems described here.  Read my blog entry about choosing a new PDA for an example.

I just read a very nicely crafted article describing 10 tips for writing the Living Web.  Essentially its about writing blogs.  As I progressed I wondered increasingly who could have put together such an article and what motivated them to put in the effort.  When I got to then end I found it was Mark Bernstein who is chief scientist at Eastgate Systems, publishers of Tinderbox, a personal content management assistant.  I went straight there to have a look, (so its good advertising Mark!), but unfortunarely its for the Mac only, but they are working on a Windows version.

Jon Udell of Infoworld says in his blog:

Meanwhile I’ve been working on a story about Longhorn, for which I had long and an extremely interesting interview with Quentin Clark, the architect of director of program management for WinFS. I’d like to transcribe the whole thing to post along with the story, when it runs, but the upshot is that Microsoft is planning more and better integration between WinFS and XML — both in terms of data definition and query — than I’d previously heard, which is welcome news

I’m pleased too because it means we are one step closer to the vision of WinFS that I have been talking about in my blog.  Complementary and not competetive to the web.

He then goes on to talk about the different types of search experience:

It seems clear, though, that whatever can be accomplished by means of what I’ve come to call “managed metadata,” we’ll always want that Google effect to be happening in parallel. When asked about the Semantic Web and RDF at InfoWorld’s 2002 CTO Forum, Sergey Brin said:

Look, putting angle brackets around things is not a technology, by itself. I’d rather make progress by having computers understand what humans write, than by forcing humans to write in ways computers can understand.

From my perspective, this isn’t an either/or choice. I’d rather make progress by having computers understand what people write and by helping people to write in ways that computers can understand. What’s more, I’d like to construe “writing in ways that computers can understand” as a problem for which hybrid SQL/XML technology is a solution. When managed metadata exists, or can be acquired, purely relational query will be powerful. When metadata is implicitly present, for example in XML fragments, XPath and XQuery can leverage it. The combination of relational, XML, and free-text search is the best of all worlds. As I’ve mentioned before, by the way, Kingsley Idehen has been demonstrating this for several years.

I agree but I don’t think its a suprise to anyone that “The combination of relational, XML, and free-text search is the best of all worlds” and its my understanding that that’s what MS is trying to achieve with WinFS, but the trick is that they are capturing as much of that relational and XML information automatically or transparently as people go about working with their emails, contacts, calendars, office documents etc.

The Rich versus Reach debate is raging in the blogsphere at the moment.  The debate has been very healthy with less of the usual emotional clutter that clogs up most debates that touch on the future of Microsoft.  I am an enterprise guy, with a complex home network as well, which gives me an interesting perspective so I thought it would good to pull some of the threads together.

The debate mainly started with a post by Joel on How Microsoft Lost the API War it’s a good article at the start but then begins to lose its focus and starts to make some bold assertions which are hard to substantiate.  These are partially rebutted by Olivier Travers in his post Microsoft Lost the API War? Not So Fast and more thoroughly by Robert in his post Seven Reasons Why the API War is Not Lost After All, which comes over a bit evangelistic but is still a good contribution to the debate.  Robert introduces a new perspective for me on Avalon where he describes how it may be possible to download XAML directly from the web as an alternative UI experience to HTML but still accessing all of the same server side web services.  Piva wraps up most of the discussion with a good summary.  Finally there are a few less emotive discussions on the topic of Thick versus Thin which you might like to look at:

1. You Can Never Be Too Rich or Too Thin
2. How to Decide Between a Browser-Based or Rich Client
3. Return of the Rich Clients
4. Jupiter Research Sees a Return to Rich Client Applications

So what do I think about it all:

First let’s remember where the debate started which is that Microsoft has missed the boat again, and that the world will be a different place application wise by the time Microsoft finally ships Longhorn.  The result Microsoft will have lost its platform advantage and all apps will be delivered to some platform neutral client.  My comments:

1. Organisations, and individuals for that matter do not constantly upgrade their applications, nor do application vendors change platform rapidly.  Whilst I have seen a huge number of web applications appear, many of these are new classes of applications that were only practical or economic to deliver via the web, were information delivery applications, or were reach interfaces that complemented the primary rich UI.  In recent desktop refresh programmes I have been involved with Win32 applications have dominated and very few of these have had web equivalents that allowed us to ease the migration challenge.
2. In building Longhorn Microsoft appear to expect this to continue to hold true, hence they:
   1. Are providing support for legacy applications
   2. Providing UI services today, Winforms, that will still be there in Longhorn and in active use for 5 or so years
   3. Expecting it to take 5-10 years before WinFX is considered the mainstream platform
   4. I hope providing first class support for web applications and the ability for Longhorn to act as a web services client
   5. I hope learning the lessons of the past, see later
3. I have debated here, my view of the Longhorn value proposition.  It’s a lot more than just a platform for the delivery of applications.  Longhorn will provide a rich set of UI services, communications services, data integration services etc that will enhance applications in ways that will be difficult to achieve with web apps alone. 
4. There are a whole class of applications that need a rich client.  This does not of course mean a Windows client but it does mean that some form of rich platform will be around on the desktop for a long time.  If this is Longhorn, and for many millions of desktops I guess it will be, then there is a good chance that applications will build on top of these services if there is a strong value proposition there.  My feeling is that there will be a value proposition but that it will be a very long time coming for many applications.  A lot depends on how much effort Microsoft make to ensure that Longhorn is appealing just with the applications that they supply or hardware vendors bundle with new PCs.
5. There is a lot of third party activity around thick clients, in the OS client space, (Linux and Windows), and in the application space with Java application platforms.
6. Personal computing is likely to see a resurgence, with personal information management, device integration, information aggregation from many different sources, news/change/subscription integration from many different sources.  Some of this works well server side but some of it is just so much easier at the client side.  I have talked a bit about what I want to see here
7. My hope is that Microsoft and others will make VERY sure that the problems we all face with thick clients and rich applications are largely resolved.  With massive improvements in device deployment, device backup and personality restoration, operating system and application maintenance and application delivery needed as a minimum.
8. Information Bridge Framework gives some hints of the type of UI binding mechanisms we might see with Longhorn and how these can be driven by context that is maintained dynamically on the client based on what you do.  I talked a little about IBF here.

Finally let me state my position:

1. I would like to see less emotion in the debate
2. Provided Microsoft make Longhorn a first class web client I have no problems with them
3. There will continue to be a variety of approaches to the delivery of applications, the market will decide based on features and TCO which approach suits which applications
4. It may be that Microsoft is on to something with their Integrated Innovation concept that will bring real compelling value, it may be something that only a company that sells an OS, Office Suite, Development tools, and application servers etc can see and make happen, good luck to them – Linux and IBM will keep them on their toes.
5. It maybe that Microsoft invented Integrated Innovation to protect their Client OS and Office suite revenues, in which case they are likely to be caught out in a big way fairly soon.  I am debating this point in this blog entry
6. There are a lot of VERY smart people at Microsoft now, (a lot of them did not start at Microsoft), and they have a lot of money, enthusiasm and vision.  Don’t under estimate them.
7. Microsoft are being extremely BOLD at the moment, they are facing a huge revenue hole over the next couple of years.  They are undertaking a huge re-architecting of their platform and the applications that run on it.  That boldness maybe born of arrogance, but I suspect not completely!

here is a recent blog entry that gives a fairly thhorough review of the original post by Joel.

In this blog, I started to talk about the evolution of subscription beyond news.  Here is a great example of how this might work.  This site describes the RDF Calendar format.  It provides a few examples, (I have added a few as well), of why you migt want to subscribe to a calendar, and includes ToDo list examples:

1. Subscribe to you travel itinery and have the events automatically added to your calendar, flight times etc, and automatically updated
2. Subscribe to a list of bugs which flow into your todo list
3. Subscribe to an event schedule, for example football matches
4. Subscribe to a favorite TV show

More information is available here

Some of the scenarios are listed below:

• EventDiscovery
• CalendarScraping
• TravelTools, PathCross
• CalendarSynchronization
• ScheduleAnimation
• OpeningHoursUseCase
• AnnounceOMatic
• HTML views of calendars (see datebook2html.xsl in telagent for example)

One more example of the Personal Information Disaster that is the web today!