Category: Computers & Technology - Page 58

Little by litl, I’m being won over…

Last week I ripped on longwinded, narcissistic douchebag tech bloggers, indirectly ripping on the fandango that is (or appears to be) the JooJoo along the way. I can be a bit of a snark at times, and I take pleasure in ripping on things. But it’s a hollow pleasure, and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

On the other hand, I do occasionally take the much rarer pleasure of delighting in something really cool… in Steve Jobs’ words, from the days of the original Macintosh project, something insanely great. But those “insanely great” things don’t come along very often. And along the way, there are a lot of false alarms. Many things claim to be the “next big thing” (even if big means being… “little”)… some even go so far as to claim to be… “it.” But in the end, they just turn out to be the Segway. No thanks.

Netbooks have been the “next big (little) thing” for a while now, and although I do see their appeal, they all just seem like cheap, underpowered, too-small laptops. Building a tiny device and then putting Windows XP on it is not going to change the world. Yawn.

But then a few weeks ago I heard about another next big thing, called the litl. Part of the hubbub surrounded the fact that there were some heavy hitters in the design world involved in its creation. This was not just another tiny computer made out of cheap plastic, running an 8-year-old OS from Microsoft. This was something different.

But still, it seemed kind of silly to me. Why would I want a netbook that stored all of its data in “the cloud” (especially given some of the notorious problems “the cloud” has had lately), and especially why would I want one that doubles as a digital photo frame. Yawn… maybe.

Tonight I was reading Slashdot when… of all things… a banner ad caught my attention. I’ve clicked on banner ads maybe 3 times in my entire life, but this was a banner ad for the litl, and it intrigued me. So I clicked, and began to discover that there may, in fact, be some really cool things about the litl that make it worth some serious attention. There’s a litl blog where you can read some press the litl’s been getting, along with some background info on (and from) the team, including some pretty interesting videos. My curiosity is piqued. I’d love to see one of these things in person. I think, as superficial as it may sound, whether or not I would ultimately be interested in a netbook of any kind is determined largely by how cheap the plastic it’s made out of feels. It’s kind of hard to tell from the videos, but one thing I can tell is that a lot of care and love went into creating this thing, and it’s unlike any netbook out there today. Have a look at these videos to see what I mean:

The card concept is cool. This is truly a revolutionary interface… it’s what the JooJoo dreams of being.

I’m still hesitant about having all of my data in the cloud — does this mean you have to be connected to WiFi to be able to do… well… anything with the litl? I didn’t see anything about 3G access. And what happens if there’s a catastrophic server failure? Does litl (the device) become a fancy paperweight while litl (the company) scrambles to get things back up and running? What about privacy and security? (I’d be surprised if these questions aren’t addressed somewhere on their site; I just didn’t encounter those answers yet. And they’re questions any sensible potential customer is going to want answered before they hand over their money.)

Not quite an Apple package design, but close. And this looks like it might actually be made out of post-consumer recycled materials. That’s a plus. I like the overall attention to detail. The people who made the litl love their work, and they want you to love it, too.

Will I get one? I’m not exactly itching to drop $699 on this, or anything else, at the moment. I’d like to see it priced at $499 or less. I’d also like to, you know, see it. In person, I mean. I like the money-back guarantee, but I still think they need to have some retail presence for the litl to really take off.

Consider me impressed. I think this has the potential to be something “insanely great.” I’ll be interested in seeing where this leads… and, if the long-rumored Apple foray into this niche actually happens, how the litl will affect it, or not, and vice versa.

On the other hand, maybe I’m just being seduced by decadent marketing.

Panic’s “Atari” game art, framed and hung at Room 34 HQ

The other day I mentioned the super-cool watercolor-and-pencil game art Panic recently commissioned as part of a reimagining of their Mac software as early ’80s Atari 2600 games.

I ordered both the reproduction game boxes and the art prints, and they arrived just four days later (i.e. yesterday). They look amazing. As recommended by Panic, I headed out to IKEA this morning and picked up a couple of Ribba frames. The art prints were specifically designed to fit perfectly into these frames. I contemplated getting frames for all four of them, but at $20 a pop it seemed a bit much. So I went with two, for the two Panic programs I actually use (Coda and Transmit). It was just as well, anyway. Since they’re so big, two is all that fit on the wall above my desk!

The photo below shows Room 34 HQ, now graced with these fantastic looking prints. This wall was blank for months, and I had just been thinking I really needed to hang something up there, when these prints became available. The timing was perfect and I couldn’t be happier with the results! (Unfortunately the photo probably reveals, more than anything else, the limitations of the iPhone camera, especially indoors at night. I had every light in the place turned on but this was the best I could manage.)

No design is good design

I’ve been noticing an interesting trend of late with blogs I find interesting: their design is minimal to non-existent. And sites that did have elaborate designs are severely scaling them back or removing them entirely.

A few examples:

Daring Fireball: Of course. This is one of the most “designed” of the sites I’m talking about today. It actually has color. Well, if you call gray a color.
43 Folders: Merlin Mann’s site may be the inverse of my own, and not just in name. It was once loaded up with “clever” design elements suitable to its “get your (creative) work life organized” philosophy: manila folders, paper clips, etc. But in its latest incarnation it’s stripped down to a bare minimum of design. The only remnant of the old look is the red color of the title at the top of the page, and outside of images and a subtle yellow highlight hover state for links, that’s the only color on the site.
rc3.org: Rafe Colburn’s site is the very definition of minimalist design. White background, black text. But clearly a lot of thought went into the choice of font (yes, even though it’s Helvetica), relative text sizes, and the sporadic use of shades of gray for things like block quotes.
Subtraction.com: Khoi Vinh’s site is masterfully designed, even though (or perhaps specifically because) it’s black-and-white-and-Helvetica-all-over. Oh, except for the slap in the face of bright orange when you mouse over a link. Pow! Bort! Mint! Snuh! (That one’s for CheckersSpeech.)
Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report: Zeldman’s site is an explosion of designy-ness compared to the others on this list. But compared to something like Web Designer Wall it’s strikingly spartan, and deliberately retrograde. (And, in trying — unsuccessfully — to find his old post where he discussed this latest incarnation of the site, I discovered that he also covered this exact topic six months ago. Looks like I’m late to the party, as usual.)

If less is more, then none is all.

Resolved: All tech bloggers (including myself) are longwinded, narcissistic douchebags (except maybe John Gruber, depending on what he means by his latest post)

There are some tech blogs I read a lot, and there are others I rarely read.

The ones I read a lot tend to have certain characteristics in common: they’re relatively simple in design; they frequently veer off-topic into tangential areas I also find interesting (meaning they’re written by real people instead of corporate tools); and they usually have few if any ads, usually served by invitation-only ad networks like The Deck. (I’d love to be invited to make ancillary income from an exclusive ad network but for now I am settling for the pittance Google throws my way.) Most importantly, they usually get right to the point.

The ones I rarely read also have certain characteristics in common, and unsurprisingly, most are diametrically opposed to the characteristics of the blogs I do read: they’re cluttered, with too many navigation tabs leading you to related sites in the “network” owned by the same faceless holding corporation; they usually stay within their narrowly-defined topical box dictated by said faceless holding corporation; they’re swimming in obnoxious Flash ads that creep across the text and force you to interact with them, if only to shoo them away. And they blather on and on, clearly paid by the word, with insipid, uninformed (despite their extensive network of industry connections and apparently large readership) opinions.

Now at this point you may be thinking my own blog more closely resembles the second group, save for the corporate overlords and industry connections (and money). And maybe you’re right. But that’s my own failing, and is probably why this blog falls into the “audience of one” category.

Anyway… by now it’s probably obvious to anyone reading this blog regularly (i.e. me) that one of my primary sources of tech news is John Gruber’s Daring Fireball. Gruber is an Apple fan, but he’s also highly insightful and more than willing to criticize Apple when he thinks they’ve screwed up (see the ongoing App Store debacle). I’m less appreciative of Gruber’s enthusiasm for the New York Yankees. But my favorite aspect of Daring Fireball is probably the “Claim Chowder” posts, where he cites foolish claims from the past — often focused on Apple’s perpetually-impending demise — that have since been proven egregiously false. There are two of what I would call “corporate bloggers” who are frequent targets of his ridicule: Rob Enderle and Michael Arrington.

Today Gruber hit the jackpot: Enderle is commenting on Arrington. Well, sort of. He’s actually commenting on the JooJoo: the poorly named phoenix rising from the ashes of Arrington’s ill-conceived and now doomed device concept, the CrunchPad.

I still do not “get” tablet PCs. I especially don’t get the JooJoo: as large as a regular laptop, and priced as high as an entry-level model, but with no keyboard, and a handful of other frustrating limitations for the form factor. What it really comes down to for me is that it’s as big as a laptop, but it can’t do everything a laptop can do. And it’s not cheap enough for price to make a significant difference. What niche is this thing supposed to fill?

I’ll be honest — when I first heard rumors that Apple was going to make a phone, I thought it was a terrible idea. I managed to avoid my own case of claim chowder by not really mentioning the iPhone announcement on this blog when it hit, but suffice to say as much as I thought an Apple phone was never going to happen — even right up to the beginning of the keynote where it was announced — by the end of the demo, I was convinced that the iPhone was the best invention ever. Like the iPod, it filled a niche. Before the iPod, MP3 players… well… they sucked. And before the iPhone, cell phones, even “smart” ones, pretty much sucked too. The iPhone worked because it brought together all of the best qualities of a number of disparate devices that had never previously existed in the same unit, along with a few brilliant new ideas of its own (all while getting rid of most of the “suck”), wrapped up in the first such device designed with the level of polish and perfection to satisfy Steve Jobs.

Ultimately though it was all about the niche. The devices we could carry in our pockets before the iPhone simply couldn’t do the kinds of things we now take for granted, thanks to the iPhone. I just don’t see a laptop-sized device, with a subset of the features of a laptop and a low-end laptop price tag, filling any kind of a niche. The thing needs to be able to do things current, comparably sized and priced devices can’t. And this doesn’t.

The question of whether Apple can produce something that does is another matter. At the risk of cooking up a steaming pot of claim chowder, and with my early disdain for the Apple phone rumors still in mind, I have to say I just don’t see something like this coming out of Apple, despite the incessant rumors of parts orders from Chinese manufacturers.

All the rumors say Apple’s tablet will be based on the iPhone OS, which seems more likely to me than a Mac OS tablet. But there’s too much about the iPhone “ecosystem” that just wouldn’t seem to translate to a larger tablet device, most obvious being the fixed display resolution. No way is Apple going to produce a device with a 10-inch screen and 480×320 resolution (even the original 1984 Macs had 512×384 displays), but by that same token, I don’t see the iPhone OS interface suddenly supporting multiple resolutions when there are over 100,000 apps all built around this one fixed resolution. Though I haven’t worked with iPhone development, I’m willing to bet that enough iPhone app interfaces use bitmapped images (not scalable vector graphics) that they’d appear completely broken at any other resolution — and even if they are vector-based, they’d scale up in a way that would look ridiculous. And this is just the most obvious reason to me that an iPhone OS-based tablet seems far-fetched.

But all of that doesn’t even get to my point. My point is bloggers like Arrington and Enderle, who make their livings spouting nonsense speculation far worse than what I’ve undertaken in the past two paragraphs, and other bloggers like Gruber who make a (more modest) living partially by calling them out on their bullshit. Which brings me back to Gruber’s latest post. I’m not even sure what to make of it:

Further proof that Enderle’s idiot shtick is an act.

I know Gruber has been speculating lately that Enderle is deliberately writing crap (for whatever nefarious purpose one would have to do such a thing, much like how Gretchen Carlson dumbs down her commentary on Fox News, as revealed by Jon Stewart last night), and that’s entirely possible. But I honestly don’t know what Gruber really means by this comment, in regards to Enderle’s specific post on the folly of the JooJoo (which seems right on) and his thoughts on what it might mean for a future Apple tablet. Personally I think this kind of does spell trouble for an Apple tablet, but only because I think the tablet is kind of a stupid idea anyway.

Time will prove all of us right or wrong. If nothing else, Enderle and Arrington (and Carlson) give us an interesting spectacle to watch… just like a train wreck.

Update: In the time it took me to write this post, Gruber amended his original post with the following, which provides some much-needed (though perhaps not enough) clarification:

I mean, come on, no one really believes that the JooJoo is going to affect Apple even one iota, right?

This can be taken in one of two ways. It all depends on whether or not you think Apple is actually working on a tablet.

Holy. Freakin’. Crap.

I love Panic, Inc. They make two of my indispensable web developer software tools: Transmit and Coda. And they have a great attitude. Their founder is a cool guy. And now, to top all of that off… they’re Atari freaks.

Oh man. I love this. I have a few quibbles with some of the details of their fake screenshots — things that aren’t actually possible (as far as I know) with the technical limitations of the Atari 2600. But it’s no matter. I absolutely love this stuff… it’s even better than the Venture Bros. Season 3 DVD art. Check it out: