Posted via email from Steve’s posterous

when I got a big screen for my home office I thought I would make most use
of it sat at my desk, luxuriating in all that screen real estate. Whilst I
do use it that way, what’s made most difference is that I can sit on my
sofa with my laptop and use the big screen for remote attendance of web
conferences, watching conference videos, vidcasts etc.
 
Now with Windows 7 I can put all these various video sources in my Video
Library and they are available in media center, which means I can control
the whole experience using the remote control.
 
While I watch I can be taking notes or following up leads on the laptop.
 
When work ends of course, it’s also great for movies and TV.

Posted via email from Steve’s posterous

On recovery days like today, the sofa in the office is my favourite place
to work. 
 
 
Posted via email from Steve’s posterous

Does Corporate Failure = PKM? posed by Nick Milton and I must admit I find myself agreeing with Steve, who has a few points of agreement with Nick.  That is up until the point where Nick is quoted as saying:

If the company is doing Knowledge Management properly, and making communal knowledge transparently available at the point of need, then you would not need PKM.

and Steve responds:

Here’s where I think Nick is spot on

At this point we diverge and here’s why:

1. The personal knowledge that I need to manage is not and never will be the same as any pool of knowledge held by my company, although there will be overlaps and gaps in both
2. My personal knowledge spans several different companies, and with 60%+ of the content of my knowledge repository being publicly available information, I don’t want it locked up in some company specific silo
3. In the last 10 years of working for my current company if I’d put my trust in the companies well funded knowledge management infrastructure, it would now be fragmented across dozens of different systems. Some of these different generations of the enterprise system and some functional or project specific repositories that all existed with sound justification
4. A significant proportion of my personal knowledge management system is meaningful only to me based on a context that only I understand, with a subtlety that I’ve never seen in the meta-data support of any enterprise KM system
5. Locating the specific “thing I want” in my personal system relies on many clues that don’t exist in enterprise systems and a narrow search scope “just the stuff I’ve tagged, linked, saved or created or modified”.  I don’t see an easy way to create this search scope in another way
6. I’ve been an avid contributor to enterprise KM at the same time as I’ve built my personal knowledge, but I’ve contributed a small subset to the enterprise, because much of my personal stuff would be clutter to the enterprise, lacking the connections and context that make it knowledge to me
7. I’d never consider my personal knowledge as a substitute for enterprise PKM or Google, but I find many people who use google or enterprise search confuse being able to find “something” on any topic, with being able to find the “specific assets” I want in the way that I do in my PKM system
8. One final point is that some of my best work and best external knowledge has been dropped from issued versions of work at the enterprise level, because it didn’t survive a scope cut or a change in customer requirements or didn’t convince some approver.  I still have that stuff. Unissued stuff still has huge value to me, but would quite rightly confuse the enterprise in a big way

In summary I’m all for enterprise KM, but PKM is a complement to it.  A good KM strategy should see itself in this capacity too.  Take a look at the “my life bits” research to see the direction that PKM is going, taken to this extreme I don’t see anyone suggesting that all “my life bits” belong in the enterprise KM system.  Rather it see’s PKM as an extension of the brain.

PKM is one of the most neglected areas within the enterprise, no surprise that there’s such a rich eco system of tools being created directly targeted at the individual, with many now starting to integrate with the individuals network of contacts, to create a personal knowledge network.

I’ve been mulling over the same issue – but without the nice graphics -when it comes to desktop and application virtualization, and I’m very keen to dig a bit deeper into the user experience impact of a collection of new technologies:

1. Virtualised applications add a small performance overhead
2. Streaming virtualised applications adds a significant overhead to launch time, especially in a VDI environment where caching is of limited value (although pre-caching in the image would be better)
3. Virtualization of the applications configuration and the users personalised settings adds a further overhead to launch times
4. WAN access to data adds a further overhead to application launch times
5. We’ve yet to quantify for many niche applications whether non-persistent VDI images (where only the roaming profile is persisted at logoff) are going to be slower, maybe because they cache for performance in the local profile and assume that the users local profile is going to be there tomorrow 99% of the time
6. Sharing server resources across many users, is likely to work out great on average, but I’m not 100% sure that it will be faster for peak CPU periods which often occur at application start-up
7. Most VDI deployments encourage users to logoff frequently and that’s likely to increase as the logon/logoff cycle is required in order to update the master image, not only does this affect a few of the points above, but it also makes detailed user state preservation very important – ie saving which applications, files, scroll locations, browser tabs, window positions etc the user has open and restoring them when the user logs back in. 
8. I dread to think how regular logoffs would impact my productivity, right now I logoff once ever couple of weeks, and it takes me at least 20 minutes to close everything down and open everything up again, if I had to do this every day – the least of my worries would be the time it takes for the OS to boot.

So one things for sure, in the new word of desktop, end user experience performance monitoring is going to be pretty important.

I heard about Wolfram Alpha today, and it the first time for years that I’ve seen a real revolution in Internet Search, the kind of revolution that depends on the search engine really understanding the information it’s searching and the content of the search query.  It’s not the full vision of the semantic web, but it’s the best demonstration I’ve seen that illustrates the promise of it.

It’s developed by Stephen Wolfram and team, a genius, who’s delivered a series of breakthrough products and insights over the years.

This is going to be ace on the Blackberry!  True information at your fingertips   Check out this article

This short video:

This longer video

Excellent!!!

What I added:

A rack and rack bag, which I’ve padlocked to the rack so I don’t have the hassle of having to carry it around

A mirror, I don’t know how to ride without one now, I’ve had one for 20 years

Handlebar extenders, never had these before but they really vary the riding position, great

Jennie gave me her handlebar bag, this has been very useful

The bike:

The disk brakes are a revelation,

The 8 speed hub gears cope just fine with all the hills around here, changing is effortless and you can change gear while stationary

Overall the bike seems great, a bit heavy but that’s the price I’m paying for tough and comfy

This blog post is also an excuse to try out posting via email using the WordPress Postie Plugin.

The good

1. The core hypervisor is clearly very mature and the most widely used for VDI.  However it seemed to me that the opportunities for VMware to further increase desktop density/core was pretty limited now, from now on we really need to rely on Moore’s law.
2. Memory over commit, this is a nice feature, to decrease memory costs, but my impression is that impact on overall TCO is pretty small
3. USB, VMware have written their own USB support, the team have tested a very wide range of USB devices, iPhones, iPods, Blackberries, Scanners etc – they all work, even though not many of them have yet made it all the way through the rigorous VMware QA process
4. Users who install apps, most VMware VDI customers today have a significant number of users who install applications.  The Citrix Provisioning Server model’s not really suitable for this, although there’s some very interesting third party activity around virtualising end user installed applications at the time the user installs them,  this would allow a users installed apps to roam with them from one pooled non-persistent PC to another, and potentially also into XenApp and Physical Desktops.
5. The Wyse multi media redirection extensions have been licensed to mitigate some of the limitations of RDP

The potential

1. The cloud – I was most impressed by the mid term potential of the cloud services capabilities.  More specifically the ability to describe the characteristics and SLA requirements for a Virtual desktop workload, and its associated infrastructure servers.  This would in theory allow us to have a general purpose VMware cloud onto which we could deploy virtual desktops as “just another workload” but with the confidence that all of our SLA’s would be met.  In this model as our environments scaled and performance characteristics changed over the years, we would just make metadata changes and the cloud would adapt to the changing workload automatically.

   The current approach is to have a server infrastructure that’s optimised for the virtual desktop workload at the physical level which is fine for now, but not so flexible in the long term. 

2. vmSafe,  I really like the idea of taking the anti-malware protection out of the VM and running it on the infrastructure.  Not only does this remove the need to keep running VMs up to date with changes to Antimalware signatures etc, but it should also be more efficient and make it much quicker to respond to a critical events.  However it’s only a nice concept right now.

The stuff I’m not so sure about

1. The protocol – One of my biggest concerns, currently VMware are taking a variety of approaches, using and extending RDP and then also supporting the PC over IP protocol from Teradici both in software and hardware.  My initial impression is that it’s going to be a long time before VMware has a protocol story that’s as flexible and performant as Citrix has with ICA. In our case where we have a very wide variety of use cases to support, Citrix allows us to use one protocol for all of them.
2. The broker – improved in that it now supports access to anything that supports RDP, including physical blades, terminal servers and distributed PCs – however there’s no ICA support or Wake On Lan support for distributed desktops that makes it only useful in a few scenarios.
3. Bare Metal (type 1) hypervisor – I like the idea of a client side hypervisor, I can see that within a year we will have PC’s with all the characteristics of thin clients (low power, no moving parts, cheap, secure, stateless etc) but to which we can stream the OS  (we can already “stream” everything else), however these don’t really need a hypervisor – Citrix provisioning server can do this to physical “thin PCs” now and seems a very good solution, even better when it gets integration with Wan Caches. 

   Where I do see client side hypervisors being popular is the employee owned notebook PC, unfortunately the first release of the VMware bare metal hypervisor will only support a singe VM, so it’s not going to be that attractive for employee owned use cases, also its likely to only support a small subset of laptops, most likely also requiring vPro, and these are likely to be too expensive for employee purchase.

4. Offline VDI – VMware has another (Type 2) client side hypervisor solution, currently available as an experimental release.  This works on the idea of the user having a Physical PC and a VDI PC and then when they need to go on the road they can “check  out” the VDI PC – download it to their Physical PC and then check it back in at some later date.  I’ve always been a bit surprised by this use case, mainly because almost all the VDI deployments I see are for locked down PCs. 

   For a locked down VDI PC – the whole virtual PC image doesn’t flow down to the client, only the users apps, config and personality, and all that needs to flow back up is the users personality.  The config can flow to the client using something like AppSense which can also copy the users personality back to the server as well.  The users apps can flow down to the client device using Application Streaming.  This just leaves the Virtual machine itself, in the locked down use case it’s always the same master image the flows down to the users PC, nothing gets copied back.  So this is really Operating system streaming and caching, similar to virtual app streaming and caching.

   The benefit that VMware has is a solution that works for locked down and non-locked down PCs and its available now.  However the more elegant model is where we dynamically compose the users offline VDI PC from separate OS, App, Config and personality streams and then persist just the Personality back on the server.  Why’s this more elegant?  because it allows us to use the same, apps, config and personality to dynamically compose physical PCs, client and server hosted virtual desktops, and Terminal Server Apps and Desktops.

   Final thought though is that VMware approach will also be easy to extend to user data, sitting in a virtual disk, so whilst I have some concerns over it’s elegance, it’s a pragmatic approach.

5. Cloning, the new cloning support is a big improvement, but I still feel that cloning at the storage layer is a better idea.  For example the Offline VDI stuff doesn’t currently work with the View Composer cloning technology, however I’m guessing that it would work just fine if the cloning were done by the storage infrastructure.   

   I’m also pretty amazed by products like ILIO from Atlantis that looks to the hypervisor just like storage, but actually does amazing image management behind the scenes. 

6. Thinstall, I think ThinStall has some great use cases, but the fact that it doesn’t support dynamic caching in the virtual machine makes some use cases problematic, particularly the Offline VDI and OS streaming ones.  Also it seems to me that precaching virtualised apps in the Citrix provisioning server image would probably be faster than thinstall “streaming” from a network file system, but I’ve no lab results to support that view
7. User personalisation, VMware personalisation ideas are currently focussed on Virtual Machines.  I like the AppSense/Res approach that allows for the users personality to be injected into physical desktops, client and server hosted virtual desktops and terminal servers/XenApp.
8. Configuration, I’ve not seen anything from VMware around OS/User and App configuration

I’ve always been very focussed on workspace design, I can remember over 20 years ago convincing my boss to radically change our office around and – inspired by the book peopleware – I’ve been working to improve the working environment of my teams every few years since then.  I’ve previously written about the great opportunity I’ve had in the past to design a couple of offices from a pretty blank sheet of paper and I think we did a pretty good job and I learned a lot. 

Last year though was the first time I’ve ever designed a workspace for myself and it’s been great fun.  I started with these objectives in mind.

1. I wanted a space that I felt was my own, the rest of the family, friends and colleagues would be very welcome to visit but it would be on my terms and I wouldn’t be storing any of their stuff.
2. I wanted a space that allowed me to seamlessly and easily transition from work to play to exercise.  I suffer from a rare form of arthritis and low intensity, varied but long days are a must for me.  The ability to work for an hour, chill for 20 minutes, work for another 30 then exercise for 20 suits me perfectly.
3. I wanted to feel as relaxed as possible throughout the day, so the space had to feel less like and office and more like a holiday home.
4. I suffer a little from Seasonal Affective Disorder, so I wanted as much light as possible
5. I wanted to be able to able to work in a range of different positions, seated, standing, exercise bike, sofa, to keep my joints and muscles working and moving and it’s just more fun
6. Collaboration and team working are important to me so I wanted to be able to have effective virtual and physical meetings

This is how it turned out:

1. I decided to build a conservatory, it was a pretty cheap option, addressed the SAD issues, has been plenty warm enough through a cold January with mostly no heat required during the day and radiators at night.  I’ve invested in window blinds that have been essential and have worked well.  I’m waiting to see how many days this year I’m driven out of the room due to lack of roof blinds in the summer.  Roof blinds are expensive and the top investment priority right now is to turn our old shared office into a great lifestyle space for Debbie, and that’s where I will retreat to on hot summer days as well.
2. I’ve got a huge glass wall (between conservatory and lounge) that has roller blinds behind it to turn it into a massive whiteboard, it also works great for tacking up A3 slides that a group of people can scribble on together.  I have a Bluetooth eBeam (electronic whiteboard) that suckers onto the glass for virtual meetings.
3. I’ve got a 4 seat sofa that I retreat to whenever I’m on the phone, I just love sitting back and looking up at the clouds on those long conference calls, with my Tablet PC on my lap when I need it.  I’ve a wireless DECT headset that lets me move freely around the whole house (thanks to a repeater). 
4. From the sofa I can watch conference DVDs and downloads, PowerPoint presentations etc on my 27” Dell high res display which is attached to a media centre PC so I get to watch TV as well.  I’ve previously struggled to watch more than 20 minutes of video on a computer, but the big screen “TV like” experience from the sofa makes hours at a time practical.  The big screen is great for watching while doing the ironing as well.
5. I’ve got an exercise bike and it’s perfectly positioned for watching the big screen too.
6. I’ve got all my favourite reference books and books i’d like to read – right there in full view to remind me not to buy any more for a while and hopefully to inspire me to chill out and read for at least 30 minutes a day.
7. Previously I’ve been a dedicated user of 3 displays and It’s still a great setup, but this time around I decided to go for 2 screens, one 27” 1900*1200 and the other 1280*1024.  I’ve loved the extra screen real estate from the large screen and as I’ve already mentioned it’s enabled the “work from the sofa” scenario, further helped by a wireless media centre keyboard and remote.
8. I don’t have a desk chair right now, I’m loving using a – cheap – exercise ball.  It’s great fun and I can feel it strengthening my back already.

From a green perspective it’s mixed:

1. It’s turned the lounge from the coldest room in the house into the warmest, and the conservatory keeps warm with a couple of small radiators with the thermostatic valves cranked down
2. All the lights are ultra low power LEDs or fluorescents
3. When I suspend my desktop PC, all the displays and peripherals auto power off
4. The blinds and glass are both coated to keep heat inside in winter and out in summer

The end result:

1. I’m able to work for longer
2. I feel much more relaxed
3. I feel more effective
4. I’m having a lot more meetings at home, and we’ve had a great Carvery restaurant open just on the sea front that’s perfect for business lunches
5. It’s much nicer to be able to work and interact (through the glass) with the kids without being disturbed and for them to be able to see when I’m disturbable and pop in for a chat or a hug
6. Debbie and I are having more lunches together
7. I enjoy doing the ironing
8. I’m watching more TV – perhaps the only negative
9. I’m getting more exercise
10. When I’m not working we have a great family room
11. The Sofa is actually a sofa bed, so we have a guest room and the girls love having sleepovers there and watching the stars
12. It’s definitely been a worthwhile investment

  When I have a pain free day – like most of today – it’s a great feeling, almost “high”.  Last summer I had a couple of months of good days, and felt so good that I almost made some very bad career choices, luckily a few of my trusted advisors took the time to take me aside and convince me there were better options, so I’m back in a trusted advisor – pretty low intensity and low stress – role and loving it.

My trustworthy Blackberry 8800 was upgraded to a Bold last week and after much anticipation I can definitely say it’s been a very worthwhile upgrade.  I’ve made these notes which might help anyone considering or receiving a bold in the near future.

Background

I’ve previously been an enthusiastic user of a Palm Treo 650, a not so enthusiastic user of various Windows Mobile Smartphones and a pretty happy user of a Blackberry 8800.  I can safely say that the Bold has the best attributes of all of these devices with few if any of the downsides.  My wife has an iPhone 3G and despite it winning over the bold in terms of sheer style and “conceptual integrity” the bold wins out for me in terms of good old fashioned performance and functionality.

The hardware

Overall the Bold seems slightly larger than the 8800, it fits fine in the 8800’s holster though and it feels great in the hand.  It’s certainly not a small device, but any smaller would be too much of a compromise for me in terms of keyboard or screen.

Screen

The screen is amazing, it’s only when you see a screen of this quality – both resolution and brightness – that you realise what a compromise you’ve been living with.  More importantly I’ve started using the bold for reading, video watching and web browsing much more than on any previous device.  Web browsing in particular is so much better, not all down to the screen of course.  I was initially surprised that RIM didn’t take the approach of cramming more information onto the screen in applications like Email and Calendar, but now I think I see their logic, the larger fonts are wonderfully crisp and I’m pleased to say that I can use the device easily without glasses, which is a luxury I haven’t had for several years.

Keyboard

Wonderful!  I was very happy with the keyboard on the 8800, but I’ve been amazed at how much better the bold is.  I have fairly small hands and this last week I’ve been suffering from Arthritis pain in them, but it’s not mattered – I’ve been tapping away faster than I thought possible.  There’s absolutely no comparison with my iPhone experience, which for me at least requires a lot of focused attention to tap out even the shortest accurate message. 

Convenience keys and trackball

I’ve found these keys to be a big differentiater compared to the iPhone.  On the iPhone I often find myself wondering whether I’ve actually pressed a soft key or whether the iPhone’s just responding slowly, pressing the home key and starting again is often required.  The physical keys on the bold are faster, more reliable and pretty consistent in terms of how applications use them, soft keys seem to give application designers perhaps too much freedom.

The trackball is the biggest area of compromise on the bold, it’s nowhere near as intuitive as the iPhone’s touch screen.  But in practice this affects only a few applications, and whilst pinch zoom demo’s well, I’ve quickly got the hang of the equally convenient shortcut keys on the bold keyboard (not always consistent across apps though).  One thing I like is that the trackball/mouse is a much more accurate way of navigating buttons and links on web pages than the finger on the iPhone.

Camera

Although the camera resolution’s not that great at 2M Pixels, it’s fine for most of my point and shoot opportunistic family snaps and wonderful for day to day photographic recording of labels, book covers, whiteboards, things I want to buy on the web when I get home from the seeing them live in the shops etc.  Although I’m missing the Camera integration with the Evernote client that the iPhone has (I love Evernote on my PCs).

Speaker

I use the speaker for listening to Podcasts and music around the house, and the Bold’s speaker is excellent, much louder and better quality than the 8800 and better than the iPhone.

Stereo A2DP Bluetooth

I have a tiny Jabra BT8040 Bluetooth headset that’s mono aural (ie fit’s in one ear) but it supports A2DP so I get good quality streamed music and more frequently Podcasts to it.  It’s working great so far and it also works with my TomTom GPS. 

Stereo Headset

I’m not a big fan of the supplied headset which seems a little too chunky for my ears, but I’m using my wife’s iPhone headset most of the time and that works fine.  At first I was annoyed that RIM changed from 2.5mm to 3.5mm, given the number of 2.5mm headsets I’d acquired over the years – but now I’m happy having realised that I now only need to carry a single headset for the bold, laptop and my car GPS.

Battery life

Seems less than the 8800 but then that’s no surprise.  I’ve not had an issue with running out of power yet.

Charger/Cradle

Before the Bold even arrived I bought a couple of the cute little charger units, one for my desk and one for my bedside table.  The external charger pickups on the Bold case mean that it’s incredibly easy to drop the bold into it’s cradle, which means I do it more often.  The really big plus though is that when charging the Bold displays a great clock – very useful.  The software also supports the concept of bedside mode, which makes for a great alarm clock, which I have configured to automatically switch off all of the radios as well as wake me up to music.

Micro SD card

I have an 8GB Micro SD card crammed full of music, Podcasts and videos.  Larger cards are supported but 8GB is cost effective.  I found inserting and removing the SD card VERY difficult, eventually resorting to tweezers.

WIFI

WIFI is a nice addition to the 3G radio, with the 3G radio off, most – but not all – applications continue to work over WIFI, and downloading software’s is much faster.

Interface and built in applications

Theme

The new theme is very nice, choosing to take a more stylised approach than the easier to identify iPhone icons, although I’m sure that an iPhone like theme will be available already for download. 

So far I’m happy with the built in Precision Silver theme, although I did quickly copy most of the applications out of folders and into the home folder.  I don’t have enough additional applications to make folders that worthwhile yet, I have kept the folders for downloads and games, although downloads that I find really useful get quickly copied to the home folder.

Applications

In the order that they appear in my home folder

Email

The new screen and the super crisp fonts make emails a joy to read (well some of them anyway) and various other minor tweaks make the whole reading experience simpler.

Calendar

A bit of a disappointment, I was hoping for a better week view that would take advantage of the new screen solution (third party products will fill the gap) but it’s fast and functional and makes good use of keyboard shortcuts for jumping around and switching views.

Browser

The improvement in the browser is great, making it so much more usable than the 8800 was, of course the WIFI/3G helps.  It’s not quite in the same league as the iPhone browser which feels almost desktop like, but for me the Bold’s browser does the job I want it to, its fast, following links and clicking on buttons is very precise with the trackball, it seems pretty compatible with everything I’ve used it for, zooming is fairly quick and easy. 

On my desktop and laptop I rely totally on Roboform for password management, which means the only password I know is my master password.  This is a major issue for password protected web sites and I’m looking forward to a solution for automatically entering passwords into web pages.  Roboform has a Blackberry app available, but it doesn’t support auto password entry yet.

Twitterberry

I’m a massive fan of twitter – my web command line, and main social networking/communications tool.  Twitter was the first application I installed and it really takes advantage of the Bold’s screen.  The latest version of Twitterberry is great as well.

Google search

Being one click away from a Google search is just so convenient, so it’s right up there in terms of my most used applications

Sametime Connect – Instant messaging

CSC (my employer) uses Sametime for instant messaging and presence and it works superbly on the Blackberry, it’s not noticeably better on the bold.  CSC push installs Sametime into the downloads folder, I copied it to my home folder straight away.

Media Player

I reprogrammed the left hand side convenience key to start the media player, which I mainly use for Podcasts, video and music.  The media player is pretty good, massively improved for video and now seems to support the videos targeted at iPods, the video quality is excellent.  Playing Podcasts is reasonable, it doesn’t bookmark, but the media player keeps your place so long as your don’t reboot the device. 

If you browse for Podcasts in the file system you get the option to play a single file, a folder or all the files in a folder and the file browser allows you to delete Podcasts and videos that you have listened to which is very useful.

Audio quality is good, but lots of Podcasts don’t have the gain very high – ie they are quiet even at max volume, removing the safety limit on max volume helps here.

I copy media files straight from the PC to the Bold, no Blackberry Desktop Manager required.

Camera

The Camera is ok, as described above, it’s made a big difference to me and it’s made even more useful with the Flickr uploader application and through the integration with Twitter via Twitpic support in Twitterberry (lets you upload a photo and publish a link via Twitter) which is good fun.

Contacts

No real changes that I noticed, although by installing Taskify, it’s now really easy to turn an email into a task which is very useful as I do a lot of email processing on my Blackberry and also send a lot of tasks to myself as emails.

GPSed

A great application for saving GPS tracks for later sharing or personal use.  They can be uploaded to a website and linked to photo’s taken to illustrate the route.  I used this a lot on the 8800, not yet used it in anger on the Bold, but looking forward to it given the Bold’s Camera.

Google maps

Just keeps getting better and better!  Ultra useful application, I especially love the ability to search for – say – nearby Cafes and then get instructions for how to get to them from my current location, and the awesome satellite view, which has saved me from getting lost many times.

Fastforward

Autoforwards by mobile number to my home office phone whenever I plugin the USB, which I almost always do at home. 

gMail

Access to my personal gMail account

YahooMail

Access to my personal yahoo email account

Flickr uploader

Auto upload photo’s to Flickr, these photo’s can be linked to routes uploaded using GPSed

Profiles

Discovered that “press and hold” Q will switch the phone into Quiet mode, press and hold again switches back to Normal, very handy.  I also like the bedside mode.

Clock/Alarm clock

I know it’s sad but the auto display of a really nice clock, alarm clock or countdown timer when I pop the phone into it charging cradle is a small but very useful feature.

Remember the Milk

Integrates my RTM account with Blackberry Tasks, Twitter integration and Email integration is also good with RTM, so I have lots of ways to get tasks to the Blackberry and then back into Lotus Notes.

Documents to go

A massive improvement over the 8800 and I particularly like the Text only view which is easy to read and fast to navigate.  No support for viewing ink annotations though.

To date Maxthon has been just too slick and efficient, especially when combined with Foxit for PDF files (and I have a lot of those!!)

Anyway – last night by the pool I spent a good couple of hours learning FF3 and Acrobat and tweaking and extending it and I’m reasonably happy.  These are the addons that got me there:

1. http://www.roboform.com/ I have hundreds of passwords and form definitions in RoboForm and it works with IE, maxthon and FF and replicates between my different PCs very easily using SugarSync.  It’s essential!!
2. http://scholten.arno.googlepages.com/ Adds “bookmark this page” to the bookmark menu, this is a standard feature in Maxthon, browse to the folder you want to save the bookmark in and click.
3. http://delicious.com/ I don’t use delicious (too lazy) , but this addin promises to synch up with FF.
4. http://www.downloadhelper.net/ I do a lot of video watching offline, plus I can’t stand the stop start involved in buffering so an easy way to download video is key
5. http://www.evernote.com/ I’m loving evernote, Maxthon had a plugin to allow easy capture of web pages or regions of pages, so does FF
6. http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~jchien/code/ftu.html  In maxthon I could just highlight URL’s in web pages and open then by drag and drop, this is the closest FF3 compatible addon I could find, saves a lot of cut and paste, and allows you to control whether the link opens in new window, new tab or existing tab.
7. http://flashblock.mozdev.org/  When I transferred my reading list of 30 tabs from maxthon to FF3 I found that FF was using 40% cpu, whereas Maxthon was using less than 10%.  Flash was to blame, this addon blocks all Flash from executing until you click on it – wonderful!
8. http://www.foxmarks.com/ – Synchronises bookmarks and tags between multiple machines – I like the idea of tags!!
9. http://foxyproxy.mozdev.org/ – One click proxy control.  I have a local proxy and work proxies and this makes switching trivial
10. http://sessionmanager.mozdev.org/ – Not sold on this one,  Maxthon’s groups were so easy and allowed tabs to be added to existing groups and it was easy to see the content of a group and open just one page.  Session manager seems to do some of this, but so far found no way to appends a set of tabs to an existing session, or to look inside a session to see its contents.  Also I don’t like the way that a session includes all my windows by default.  I tend to have multiple task specific windows open, and I want each to be its own session.
11. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/380 Swifttabs, allows me to define keys to move between tabs, delete them etc.  I have left and right arrows for moving previous and next tabs and Delete for deleting a tab.  Disables the key assignments when you are in a form field.
12. http://tmp.garyr.net/ Tabmixplus, lots of little fixes to makes things more Maxthon like, basically I like things to open in new tabs, in the background most of the time rather than replacing my current tab.  This allows me to set all of these options.
13. http://www.oxymoronical.com/web/firefox/TabSidebar Shows this cute little sidebar (I actually have it at the bottom of the screen) with live images of the all of the tabs.  It only displays 6 tabs at a time, but its still useful for keeping track of several windows that are all updating.
14. http://n31m4d.wordpress.com/2008/08/16/tab-url-copier-for-firefox-3/  Right click on a tab and this useful addon copies a list of all the currently open tabs into the clipboard,  I used it to generate this list
15. http://www.abstractpath.com/powermenu/  The only other thing I needed to get off maxthon was a way to keep FF in the background.  For example when I’m scanning feeds in FeedDemon I click on links that I want to read and in Maxthon they open up while maxthon is minimised,  in FF3 each time I click FF open’s up in front of FeedDemon and I need to Alt Tab FeedDemon back in front.  But by using PowerMenu I’m able to right click on the FeedDemon task bar entry and make it Always On Top,  that does the trick.

Outstanding wish list

1. A way to force certain URL’s to open in IE but within the Firefox chome, just like Maxthon does (Maxthon is essentially a shell around IE)
2. A different session manager, that operates at the window level, allows me to see and manipulate the content of saved sessions, and add tabs to saved sessions.

Although SharePoint itself is unlikely to ever be Open Source there’s great value in stimulating an Open Source culture around developing on top of the platform.  Podcasting is a good example because although SharePoint provides some good plumbing in the form of support for taking a document library of media files and surfacing this as an RSS feeds with enclosures, it didn’t have a polished solution.  The same can be said for most of the SharePoint “applications”, great platform – ok solution.  If you’re interested in Podcasting, this is definitely worth checking out, but there’s much more for SharePoint going on at Codeplex.

What Can You Do With Podcasting Kit for SharePoint (PKS)?:

• Listen and watch audio/video podcasts, anywhere on your PC or mobile device (Zune, SmartPhone, or any podcasting device)
• Share content by producing your own audio/video podcasts and publish them on PKS on your own.
• Connect and engage with podcasters via your integrated instant messaging program
• Find the most relevant content using the five star rating system, tag cloud, search engine and provide your feedback via comments.
• Get automatic podcast updates by subscribing to RSS feeds fully compatible with Zune and other podcasting devices
  • Simple RSS feed based on a defined podcast series
  • Simple RSS feed based on a person
  • Dynamic RSS feed based on search results
• Play podcasts in real-time using Microsoft® Silverlight™ and progressive playback
• Retrieve instant ROI and metrics with the ability to track the number of podcasts downloaded and/or viewed, instant feedback via rating system and comments, and subscribers via the RSS feed
• Access the richness of SharePoint to extend the solution: workflows, community sub-sites, access rights, editorial and more
• Customize your own PKS User Experience