Tech regressions: MORE, Quicken, PalmOS, iOS, Podcasts, Aperture, Music, iPad photo slide shows, and toasters.

One of the odder experiences of aging is living through technology regressions. I’ve seen a few — solutions that go away and are never replaced.

Symantec’s classicMac MORE 3.1 was a great outliner/editing tool with the best style sheet implementation I’ve seen. It died around 1991. The closest thing today would be Omni Outliner — 16 years later. There’s still no comparable Style Sheet support.

Quicken for DOS with 3.5” monthly diskette records of credit card transactions was the most reliable and useable personal accounting tool I’ve experienced — though even it had problems with database corruption. I think that was the 1980s. Today I use Quicken for Mac, a niche product with unreliable transfer of financial information, questionable data security, and limited investment tools.

PalmOS Datebk 5 was an excellent calendaring tool with good desktop sync (for a while the Mac had the best ‘personal information management’ companion). That was in the 1990s. When PalmOS died we went years without an alternative. I briefly returned to using a Franklin Planner. Somewhere around year 3 of iOS we had equivalent functionality again — and a very painful transition.

iOS and macOS have seen particularly painful combinations of progressions and regressions. OS X / macOS photo management was at its best somewhere around the end of Snow Leopard and Aperture 3.1 (memory fuzzy, not sure they overlapped). OS X photo solutions had finally reached a good state after years of iPhoto screw-ups — the professional and home products more or less interoperated. All Apple needed to do was polish Aperture’s rough edges and fix bugs. Instead they sunset Aperture and gave us Photos.app — a big functional regression. Apple did something similar with iMovie; it’s much harder to make home “movies” than it once was.

iOS was at its most reliable around version 6. So Apple blew it up. Since that time Podcasts.app has gone from great to bad to not-so-bad to abysmal. The iPad used to have a great digital picture frame capability tied to screen lock — Apple took that away. For a while there was a 3rd party app that worked with iCloud photo streams, I could remotely add images to my father’s iPad slideshow digital picture frame. There’s nothing that works as well now; as I write this I’m working through a web of bugs and incompetence (I suspect a desperate timeout stuck into iTunes/iOS sync) to sneak some photos from Aperture to an iPad.

Apple Music is following the path of Podcasts.app as Apple moves to ending the sale of music (probably 2019). At the same time iTunes is being divided into dumbed down subunits (iBooks regression). The last 2-3 revisions of iTunes have been so bad that this feels almost like a mercy killing.

We don’t have a  way to avoid these regressions. Once we could have gotten off the train, now the train stations are dangerous neighborhoods of lethal malware. We need to keep upgrading, and so much is bundled with macOS and iOS that we can’t find 3rd party alternatives. Data lock is ubiquitous now.

I think regressions are less common outside digital world. It’s true toasters aren’t what they were, but since 2006 Chinese products have become better made and more reliable. Perhaps the closest thing to tech regressions in the material world is the chaos of pharma prices.

This takes a toll. There are so many better ways to spend my life, and too few minutes to waste. I wonder what these regressions do to non-geeks; I don’t think it goes well for them.

Device size: clothing makes the choice

An App.net thread reminded me of some analysis I did in the 90s on what device sizes we should build our Cloud ASP service against. That analysis focused on pockets and purses; it came in an era when men still had shirt pockets and Jeff Hawkins carried around wooden models of the Pilot until he settled on one that fit his.

Since that time our devices have evolved a bit -- thought not as much as many think. We had slates in the 90s too -- they were just heavy and ran Windows variants or Windows thin client OS. Our clothing may have changed more [3]. Shirt pockets are gone, suit jackets are less common, and pants pockets are larger. Pocket location may also have shifted as men have gotten fatter around the world. (I don't know what's popular in China).

This produces some interesting size options based on clothing. Here's my own personal list of exemplar devices for each transport option with a gender assignment based on typical American practice.

Gender	Clothing	Device
b	None [1]	watch
m	Traditional pants front pocket	iPhone 5S
m	Expansive pant front pocket	Samsung Galaxy [2]
f	Purse	Samsung Galaxy
f	Purse	iPad Mini
b	Backpack / shoulder bag	iPad Mini
b	Backpack / shoulder bag	MacBook Air 11"
b	Briefcase	iPad (full) + Logitech Kb/Case
b	Briefcase	MacBook Air 13"

Running through the list, and disregarding whether one wants a phone or not, device options are probably best determined by one's clothing habits. The list also suggests the women should disproportionately prefer the Samsung Galaxy to the iPhone but that men should split 50/50 -- so the Samsung Galaxy should outsell the iPhone 5 about 1.5:1.

If the iPad Mini provided voice services the list predicts the combination of iPhone 5 and iPad Mini(v) would equal or exceed Samsung Galaxy sales.

This analysis suggests a narrow niche for the 11" Air. I have one and I like it, but if I were buying an Air today I'd get the 13". If I'm carrying a briefcase I might as well get the 13" Air or an iPad with Logitech Kb/Case. The 13" Air vs. iPad tradeoff is an interesting one -- for many travel cases I think the iPad wins on power and bandwidth consumption -- but see the comments -- Charlie Sross and Martin Steiger disagree. I can imagine a future version of OS X and OS X hardware with iPad like power and bandwidth use -- in which case I'd go Air.

[1] Swimsuit, running gear, nudist colony.
[2] I haven't seen mention of this, but my understanding is that Android handles variant screen geometry more easily than iOS. 
[3] Our devices must be influencing our clothing styles by now.

Divorcing Google - and hoping for GoogleMinus

Google hired a hit man, and was shocked to find bodies. Now the remnants of Google 1.0 are punishing Google 2.0, though Matt Cutts hasn't said anything. He didn't used to be so quiet.

Google 1.0's glorious Data Liberation Front is pretty quiet too. Their Twitter feed went silent on 9/15/2011.

It's sad. I loved Google from my first searches in 1997 until the Google-Apple war began in 2009. Even then I wanted to believe in their original mission to free the world's knowledge. I didn't really lose faith until Google deleted my Reader Share memory - with 1 week's notice.

Yeah, I was denying simple arithmetic. Google's is an algorithmic corporation that iterates on its goals, and its goals are to delivery value to their paying customers. Advertisers. Yes, Google, like health insurance corporations, has an Agency problem.

Notice how much junk their is in Google searches these days? How many "plus.google.com" pages? How ads are growing across Google's search pages? This isn't going to stop -- not unless Google divides into two companies.

Now I'm moving off the Google platform. It's a slow and painful process. Just as painful as moving from DOS to Mac Classic, from Mac Classic to Windows, Windows to OS/2, OS/2 to Windows 2K, Windows to OS X, Palm to iOS…

Especially like moving from Palm to iOS. That's because there was a wasteland between the end of PalmOS and the rise of iOS. It was a kind of technological winter; a gap between one life and the other. I nursed my aging Palm devices along because the alternative was to resurrect my Franklin Planner.

That's what life is like post-Google - because there isn't a good alternative to Google. iCloud? Please. Microsoft? I wish. Yahoo!? Ok, you get the point. I won't go on.

So it's a tough divorce. It would be even harder if I were an Android customer. I wonder if Android users understand how tightly they're tied to Google -- and why.

How will this winter end? Amazon? Apple? Microsoft?!?

Or … perhaps …. GoogleMinus.

GoogleMinus, because there are businesses in Google that make money selling value to users. Google Docs, for example, sells ad-free solutions to schools and corporations. These aren't not huge businesses, but they might be profitable if they could lease infrastructure from GooglePlus.

GoogleMinus, because there are still, I think, some idealists left at Google -- and they might prefer to work for GoogleMinus rather than GooglePlus.

It could happen. The EU might require a breakup. Civil strife within Google might make a breakup internally acceptable.

Imagine a future when GoogleMinus packages GooglePlus search. For an annual fee of $100 I get the ability to block plus.google.com searches, and a control that lets me filter out web sites that run ads. Wouldn't that be interesting?

Update 1/9/12: This Android retrospective is relevant. I'd forgotten the day Google made its deal with Verizon; a deal signed in blood at midnight

Update 1/10/12: Today Google dedicated their search function to promoting Google+ properties.

The $80 ultra-portable - in unexpected form

Jean-Louis Gassée, once CEO of Apple head of Mac development, drops a stunner in mid-column ...

The Carriers’ Rebellion | Monday Note

... Google wants to see smartphones priced at $79, without subsidy, thus taking away the carriers’ opportunity to dictate features. At $79 and no contract, consumers can change handsets and carriers at will. This frees Google to have a direct relationship with the consumer, allowing their money machine—advertising today, entertainment and business services tomorrow—to run unimpeded.

That's quite a precise number. Not "below $100", $79.

Think about that. Take your time. I'll be back.

We're talking about a computer that outclasses the desktop G3 iMac of 2001. There's no reason it couldn't work with an external monitor as well as an external keyboard. Incidentally, it's a phone too.

Yeah, they're thinking big. Forget the "Chromebook" I was so excited about a year ago (though I still hope we see it). This is so much bigger.

Can they do it? Today's smartphones cost about $500-$800 without a (carrier) subsidy. This seems like a big price drop -- unless you're about 50 years old.

If you're old enough, you remember the calculator price drop. In a few years they went from about $500 to cereal box prizes.

That never happened with computers. Instead the capabilities skyrocketed -- but the price never truly fell. A 1988 Commodore 64 and a 2010 bottom-of-the-heap netbook cost about the same. The difference was partly moving parts, calculators were almost pure silicon -- computers had drives and big power supplies and keyboards and so on. A lot of the difference though was IP protection and patent licensing.

I think this would have happened to the original Palm III if it had survived, but they didn't have a business model supporting a $10 PalmOS device. Google has the business model.

I don't doubt that it will be possible in 2012 to produce a somewhat junky version of a 2009 iPhone for a marginal manufacturing cost of less than $80 -- if you can manage the IP costs and if the payor has a separate (subsidizing) revenue stream. To do it Google will have to buy some IP, and cut deals that appeal to IP holders only when you start to talk a billion devices.

In the meanwhile, China will be doing the same thing internally -- and they don't really worry about IP costs.

Interesting times.

Palm/HP is still dead

A few weeks ago I said Farewell Palm. Now HP has paid $1.2 billion in cash to acquire Palm ($5.70 a share).

It's good news for those who bought Palm stock in the past few weeks, but it's no reason to consider buying a PalmOS device. Whatever Palm was yesterday, it's now being digested by a very average large publicly traded company. Palm is now HP.

An average PTC like HP can compete effectively against other clumsy but powerful PTCs like IBM, Dell, RIM, and Microsoft. HP is capable of turning out devices that are every bit as good as Windows Mobile phones of 2008.

Except it's not 2008, and the competition is not RIM or Microsoft or Dell. The competition is Google and Apple.

Google and Apple are also publicly traded companies. They are not typical however. They are very deviant. Google has an underestimated two tier ownership structure that gives great power to its founders. Apple has Steve Jobs, who in addition to being an insane genius with mind-control powers is also Apple's founder and has cult like authority over the company and its shareholders. Both Google and Apple behave like privately held companies with public money.

Palm is still dead. I don't know why HP did this deal. Maybe it was all IP, but they paid a lot for IP. I think they hope to stay in the only game in town. It won't work; there's no room for them at the table.

This is about Google and Apple. Microsoft will take 3rd place. RIM will fall by the wayside within three years. HP won't last a year. They can't compete.

Farewell Palm

I work in an IT shop. I can almost always find a home for my old gear. Tomorrow will be a real test though, I'm bringing in my Palm stuff to give away ...

The five PalmOS devices shown above are probably 1/2 to 1/3 of the total Emily and I bought between 1998 and 2006. I underwent the exquisitely painful Palm to iPhone transition in Aug 2008 (in some ways it's still continuing).

I don't think anyone will want the devices, but the chargers and accessories might be of interest. I have zillions of styli.[1]

One SONY made device uses AA batteries. It's the only one that would still work; I might keep it around for grandchild show and tell (I bet there's still an AA equivalent in 30 years. If there's civilization.) The others had LiOn batteries that are pretty dead by now.

Ahh, Palm. They were great in their time, but they peaked in the 90s with the Graffiti One Vx. Even after they lost their way, the company was sustained by some terrific developers like Pimlico Software (DateBk).

I'm not tossing everything. I added the Vx manual and Pogue's PalmPilot book to my shelf of computer book honor:

Even though Palm Inc's WebOS seems to have no relationship to PalmClassic, I'd hoped it would provide some inspiring competition for Apple. Judging by their share price, however, that seems unlikely ...

They fell of a cliff in the past week or so. I assume the price was being sustained by hope of a Nokia or Microsoft acquisition, but that news of Windows Mobile 7 made that unlikely. Instead the key people are likely to go to Microsoft or Google and someone will buy up any useful patents.

Farewell Palm.

See also:

• AvantGo RIP - memories of the roaring 90s
• The descent of the PDA: Newton, Palm, Blackberry and iPhone
• What the iPhone needs is Gorilla Haven’s DateBk6

Update: Details on the sad future from Gasee (via Gruber).

Update 3/23/2010: The best pre-iPhone smartphone was the PalmOS Classic Samsung i500. Also, the Palm Vx pioneered the non-removable LiOn battery.

[1] Update 3/24/2010: My coworkers took almost every accessory, but nobody wanted a device. I love Minnesota -- the home of geeks who hate throwing things away.

Tech churn: The Franklin Planner and Google Calendar

In the too brief glory days of the Palm, between the Palm III and the Vx, my wife used a Palm III and the Palm Desktop.

Then Palm added color and died.

I fought on to the bloody end, but Emily was wiser. She returned to the Franklin Planners we’d started using in 1994, when life got too messy for Letts of London.

Alas, we live now in the tech churn days of regency – when the old is gone and the young are unready. Change unwanted is upon us and the change we want is not yet ready.

Franklin’s business market has fallen to the BlackBerry and Exchange Server, and their home market is tempted by cheaper solutions, and – painfully – iPhones. Their web site is decrepit, their offerings increasingly disorganized. They appear to be going the way of the wrist watch.

So goes the aged, but the replacements are unready. We’re not going to run Exchange Server at home, and Apple’s calendaring products are, to put it diplomatically, hideous failures. Google’s alternatives are the best of the lot, by which I mean they are barely acceptable if you’re an uber-geek.

Which I am, so we have a solution. In two weeks Emily’s cursed BlackBerry Pearl contract concludes, she’ll get my iPhone 3G, and I’ll get the new contract 3GS*. She’ll likely complement her gCal/Calendar.app pair with a wall calendar and a wire bound notebook.

The Franklin Planner will move into history, but I bet she’ll miss it – especially when Google-Apple wars blow our calendaring out of the water.

Tech churn means that it will be ten years before it’s all somewhat seamless again.

* Yes, I get my new phone off her contract and she gets my aging 3G. Sorry. In the words of Sméagol … “My preciousssss”. [1]

Update 9/26/09: I lied. Emily, you see, reads my blog. She got the new phone in a lovely black blue case, and she was quite delighted. After playing with the fully prepped and loaded 3GS for a few minutes she went into deep future shock. She has a new appreciation for Apple's Satanic genius.

Apple's iPhone Calendar makes me miss my parents' anniversary

I blogged about this four months ago, but it's the Apple gift that keeps on giving.

For the seven or more years that I used various versions of Gorilla Haven's DateBk on my Palm, I got 2-3 week warnings of birthdays, anniversaries on the like.

It was great. I rarely missed a card or an event

Then I got my 21st century iPhone, with a locked down, no API, Apple authored Calendar.app. A calendar that allows a maximum 2 day reminder of events.

Events like my parents' anniversary, now 2 days away.

Two $!#$#$ days!

That's the problem with devices built by children. In their world, 2 days is a long time.

Nettie, how many days warning does the Pre calendar allow you?

Update: It's unchanged in iPhone 3.0.

Update 6/20: The Pre isn't all that much better - suprisingly!
Via Nettie:

... for all-day events in the Pre calendar you can remind 1/2/3/7 days before. For meeting-type events you can remind 5/10/15 mins and 1 day...

It must be something in Cupertino water supply.

The Pre advantage: $1,200 cheaper

The Pre has three significant advantages over iPhone 3.0 [1].

1. PIM. Palm is far more committed to productivity (PIM) apps (calendar, contacts, tasks, notes) than Apple. To a first approximation Apple despises this entire domain.
2. Sprint. AT&T leads the League of Evil with cramming, rebate scams, SMS spam, overselling network capacity, and other low class trickery. Sprint is merely wicked, but AT&T is the Microsoft of phone companies.
3. Price.

The last is a biggie ...

We know the iPhone isn't cheap, but Billshrink shows the numbers

... , the cheapest phone to own over a two-year period is the Palm Pre, which clocks in at $2,400. The cost calculated is based off of a service plan with two years of unlimited voice, data, and messaging services. The Android G1 follows with $3,240 and finally the iPhone 3G S at $3,600...

I hope these are enough advantages to either make Palm viable or get a committed buyer for the company.

[1] I think limited battery life will make Palm multitasking a modest improvement over iPhone 3 notifications.

AvantGo RIP - memories of the roaring 90s

The demise of AvantGo has not received much attention. I am one of the few who remember the deceased Palm application, so I'll deliver the obituary.

I knew it well. In 1998 I did a little presentation on AvantGo for the primary track of the American Medical Informatics Association (my little JavaScript driven slideshow applet still works btw - 10 years later on Safari 4beta). It got a mention on my 1998 PalmPilot web page and my old AvantGo targeted medical notes page is still around.

In its youth AvantGo was bright, clever and reliable. There were two parts - a server and a client. The net server based web spider processed a URL to specified limits and stored the results in AvantGo format. Then, whenever I serial cable synched my Palm III or Vx the results updated the Palm AvantGo client.

AvantGo was a way for me to carry static snapshots of web pages. Even then my extended memory was moving to the web, but there were no portable browsers, no G3 networks, no wireless to speak of - so a static snapshot of my web memories was pretty handy.

At work we built a handheld prescribing application around AvantGo and a server we controlled locally. In the late 90s AvantGo wanted to become a platform provider to the palmtop. That prescribing app was one of my ideas, for what it was worth (not that much unfortunately!).

Alas, the strategy didn't work for them. Their main business, unfortunately, was streaming newspaper output to the Palm. Yes, like Byline or Google Reader, but before feeds. Newspapers have been looking for electronic delivery options for a long time, AvantGo was just one more failure. You didn't really think anything was new, did you?

It was a nice idea, but there was no money in it. In retrospect AvantGo's failure heralded the death of the traditional newspaper business.

Even before the dotCom crash AvantGo was getting bloated and buggy. They wanted to become a handheld browser, but that was a tough road. We didn't get a decent small scale web browser until the iPhone -- AvantGo never got close. Even as AvantGo struggled the PalmOS platform was slowly dying.

I lost track of AvantGo, though even now I wouldn't mind the ability to offline cache spidered web pages on my iPhone. Heck, I'd even pay for that, though I'm probably the only one who would.

Now the AvantGo I knew is gone. Wikipedia says they the company was founded in 1997 and that it once had a market cap of $1 billion. It was sold to Sybase in 2002 for $38 million.

$1 billion. Back when a billion dollars was real money.

Man, the 90s were good times. 

Who will acquire Palm ... and the Pre?

As a long-suffering and occasionally joyful iPhone user, and as scarred and bloodied Palm-era road-kill, I'm very happy that the Palm Pre is receiving first class review coverage. Yes, Pogue and other reviewers are keen to praise the underdog, but this is a genuine achievement.

It's also a desperate Hail Mary pass -- and the goal is not corporate survival. The iTunes hack (the Pre forges iPod credentials) and the expected severe product shortage are just two early signs of how badly Palm is limping now.

I'm with Blodgett ...

The Palm Pre Will Bomb (PALM, AAPL) - Henry Blodgett

.. The smartphone game has become a waltz of elephants, and Palm is just a Jack Russell terrier.  In the US, the smartphone war is between Apple, RIM, and, to a lesser extent, Google.  Palm can yip a bit and run around nipping at the others' feet, but it's too late to become one of the big dogs.

One thing Pre does do for Palm is turn it into a more attractive acquisition candidate.  We doubt Apple, RIM, or Google would buy it, but there's always Nokia, which is nowhere in the US smartphone market...

Nokia is everyone's number one guess for the soon-to-be home of the Palm Pre. I'd wonder about SONY and Samsung -- neither company can afford to surrender the computer infrastructure of the next 15 years.

I also wouldn't write off RIM. It's difficult to describe how badly the BlackBerry OS sucks. Yes, I know it sells well in the consumer market, but that's because most consumers are clueless. I don't think that's going to continue. If RIM's only strength is Exchange server they're in trouble.

So my choices for the future home of the Pre are Nokia first, RIM second then SONY and lastly Samsung. Dell is a wildcard. Any other lists out there?

The Way of the Palm - I'm a lapsed member

I've abandoned the Way of the Palm for the seductions of the iPhone, but reading this description I realize I was almost a charter member once ...

True believers: The biggest cults in tech | Adventures in IT - InfoWorld

When Jonathan Ezor walked into a J&R Music store in the fall of 1996 and encountered his first Pilot 1000, it wasn't exactly a religious experience, but it was life-altering. He immediately began speaking in tongues -- or, more accurately, writing in flawless Graffiti, the Pilot's handwriting recognition alphabet...

.. Ezor says he's owned seven Palm PDAs in his life (he currently uses a TX) ...

...You can identify true devotees because they're the ones standing around beaming contact info and free apps to each other through their Palms' IR ports, says Ezor....

..."I think the true believers are the ones who had the Pilot 1000 or 5000, who jumped on the Palm before it went mainstream," he says. "And the orthodox sect belongs to people who prefer Graffiti 1 over Graffiti 2...

I'm not sure I qualify as a true believer (I think the Palm III was my first), but I do think I had about 6-7 devices and I was definitely orthodox. Graffiti 2 was a grievous wound.

As a former member of the tribe, I have nothing but fond wishes for the Pre. In fact, I'm praying for it to put "the fear" into the heart of Apple, and force them to rethink their disdainful support for the "Four Paths of PIM Productivity (contacts, calendaring, tasks, notes).

I missed the Tao of Newton, but I was almost there. I'm so disappointed that they omitted the Flagellants of OS/2.

The straw that broke my iPhone love

It is a small thing, by itself.

Unfortunately, it is just one more bit of nasty among so many more, and it's such a quintessential bit of Apple nasty.

The maximal interval for an iPhone Calendar alert is 2 days.

This is a problem. I need to be alerted of upcoming birthdays and certain other events at least 2 weeks ahead of time. That has been possible with all the calendaring software I've used over the past fifteen years -- except for the iPhone Calendar.app.

Now here's what makes this so perfectly Apple. The iPhone development team had dozens of examples to draw from, not least the original PalmPilot. They must have consciously decided to omit this feature. I imagine the team was proud of dropping a feature few people would use, proud of their minimalist aesthetic.

Ok, bad enough, but I'm used to that. I'm way off in the extreme tail of software users. There's very little I'm really happy with (Windows Live Writer, Gmail, and Google Reader come to mind). Apple's desktop iCal software reaks about as much as their iPhone app.

What makes this straw a back breaker is not simply that iPhone calendaring is pathetic, it's that Apple forbids alternatives. Even on OS X there are a few alternatives to Apple products, but on the iPhone only Apple can use the USB cable, and vendors are explicitly forbidden to distribute alternatives to Apple's core applications. On the iPhone it's Apple's Calendar.app, or it's nothing.

It's a bad story, and, short of a revolution in Apple's attitude, it's not going to get better. Astonishingly, the Apple iPhone and MobileMe have made me miss the old Microsoft.

So I've stopped recommending the iPhone to others anyone who needs at least PalmPilot 1994 functionality, and I won't be replacing my wife's BlackBerry Pearl with an iPhone.

Which brings me to the obvious next question. If the iPhone is a dead end, is their anything better?

Not yet, but I'm going to be watching the Android even more closely, and, I've got my fingers crossed that the Palm Pre will beat very long odds, and I'm watching for the jailbreak team to add a Calendar replacement that runs against Google Calendar.

Update 2/9/09: Google to the rescue? I feel for Nuevasync. The iPhone calendar app still sucks, but I can use the WebKit interface to Google Calendar to make changes.

Update 2/14/09: Saved by Google.

Palm Pre has search, iPhone doesn't

Yeah, and the Pre has cut, copy paste as well ...

Palm Pre: The Definitive FAQ

... The entire contents of your phone are searchable. Whether it's contacts, old conversations, appointments, media file, etc., you can easily find what you need on your phone with all the results provided in a single screen...

Whoa! Smackdown Pre.

The Pre also has background multitasking and background notification.

Did we mention cut, copy, paste?

Eat that iPhone.

Design gone bad: form over function

There's nothing so good it can't be ruined by excess.

Even the ideals of elegant design can be carried too far (emphases mine) ...

Palm Pre: Palm Chats with Facebookers, Explains Pre's Lack of MicroSD

... Crowley is currently holding an open chat on Facebook to answer any questions people might have, although it's heavily selective. Among the questions Crowley won't answer: how intrusive is the multi-platform personal information program Synergy going to be? What about the lack of desktop synchronization, or cloud storage? But he does take a crack at a question on MicroSD expandability.

‘Design' was the highest goal on the Palm Pre project. The phone has to look and function great in the hand and up against the face on a call. The decision to include or not include expandable storage is an easy one when design is the highest priority. The physical size of the device would have been compromised if we added another physical component to Pre. Just a millimeter can seriously impact the curvature of the design in a way that minimizes the design intent...

My iPhone doesn't have a removable memory card, and I don't miss it. So I'm not griefing Palm for that call. I'm just taking the opportunity to call for balance, especially at Apple.

Design is a high goal, but function matters too. The MacBook Air should have had an ethernet cable, the MacBooks should have had a firewire port, the iPhone needs a Calendar API.

DateBk 6 is ugly, but the iPhone Calendar is lousy. There's more to good products than being pretty.

What the iPhone needs is Gorilla Haven’s DateBk6

DateBk6 is ugly, eccentric, and complex.

I miss it terribly. The iPhone’s Calendar is pretty and swooshy, but, as a tool, it’s pretty pathetic. It’s one of the reasons I don’t sing the praises of the iPhone. (My lack of praise is probably fully responsible for weakening iPhone sales.)

Give me an ugly jackhammer like the PalmOS DateBk6 any day …

Pimlico Software - DateBk6

When was the last time that you missed buying a birthday present because there was no ADVANCE warning of an event? Or missed a task because your tasks were not integrated with your calendar? Or spent more than two taps inserting a commonly used event for which DateBk6 has a built-in template? Or needed to look at a week-at-a-glance with the TEXT listed of your appointments? Or wanted to use color on your Palm handheld to emphasize important events? Or wanted to keep your spouse's or co-worker's calendar on your palm - but visibly separate from your own? Or have DateBk6 time-zone aware so that alarms and events are properly keyed to the correct timezone? Or wanted to recover an event that you accidentally just deleted? Or link an event or ToDo to an address book entry and automatically log to it? Or put an alarm on a ToDo? Or handle events that span midnight? Or.....? DateBk6 handles all of these tasks and more. No wonder it is one of the most popular Palm programs ever written…

…Best of all, the proceeds from this product go towards wildlife conservation and the Dewar's Gorilla Haven project in the North Georgia Mountains

Of course nobody would seriously consider porting DateBk6 to the iPhone.

What a developer might do is to make a deal with Pimlico. Work with the engineer (singular I think) to reverse engineer DateBk6. Understand what it does and why it does it. Then build a true iPhone app with a similar set of ideas, but have it sync to Google Calendar and Contacts (maybe sync notes/tasks to Evernote).

Yeah, in theory Apple could produce a good solution and take this niche away but, really, there’s no sign they’ll ever do this. Waiting for Apple to open up their Calendar APIs is waiting for Godot.

So screw Apple.

I’d pay $100 if it worked.

Update 12/23/2010: It's not on the iPhone, but Pimlical for Android has been released.

Palm Pre - unimpressed

I don't care if the Palm Pre is the world's greatest mobile web wonder.

I have that problem solved.

The problem I have is work/home calendar/task/contact integration in a world where corporations hold tight to their Exchange data.

If Palm were addressing that problem, I'd be interested. The original US Robotics PalmPilot made a stab in that direction, and in the 90s we could connect a serial cable and suck data from Outlook at work while synchronizing at home.

It wasn't pretty and it didn't work that well, but the Palm Pre appears to be in a totally different zone.

A zone owned by the iPhone.

The Palm Nova – doomed from the start?

The Palm Nova is getting a bit more news lately, with rumor of a CES showing in a few weeks. There’s not a lot of information out; Google suggests this May 2008 posting (emphases mine):

Palm Nova OS Details - Treonauts

Asked why Palm was still developing its own OS, Colligan stated that “We’re focused on executing our own system, mostly because we really believe that to create the most compelling solution it should be an integrated package much like we started with the Palm OS and doing the original Palm Pilots: we did the operating system, we did the hardware and we did the whole synching architecture and the desktop tie-in, which is equivalent to the Web these days…

… That ‘next generation’ Palm 2.0 OS will slot in between the Centro and Treo lines under a new ‘prosumer’ brand that’s yet to be decided, Colligan explains.  “We’re going to continue to look at those three line areas – consumer, prosumer and enterprise…

Supposedly the Nova is going to aim at people who are shut out of the corporate Exchange Server environment (my whimsical guess -- 90% BlackBerry, 9% Windows Mobile, 1% iPhone) but are frustrated by the iPhone’s pathetic productivity offerings (weak to nonexistent home/work calendar sync solution, no tasks, truncated calendar and contact notes, no cut/copy/paste, etc).

So what will Palm do for the desktop? Colligan is very clear that they need to own the end-to-end solution, and he’s 100% right about that. He also says “the desktop tie-in, which is equivalent to the Web these days”. That’s ominously clear – they’ll do a web service, not a desktop app.

So here’s the killer problem – how are they going to get at corporate data? Corporations are even more possessive of their data than they were 10 years ago. On the other hand, what good is a prosumer solution without corporate data integration?

Will Palm provide a tool for sucking data out of Outlook through the back door? Corporations aren’t going to be happy if it’s going from Outlook to a cloud store – even if the cloud store is theoretically more secure than a phone *. If it’s going via a cable from Outlook to a hardware device it’s easier for corporations to look the other way – but not if the ultimate destination has to be a cloud store.

On the other hand, it seems that nobody remembers how to create significant desktop apps any more – so there’s no way Palm will deliver a desktop – especially when Colligan has said the modern desktop is the web.

So the Palm Nova has a very big business problem – access to the corporate data store. Without it they don’t have a hope, but so far they seem to be shut out.

I want the Nova to be a raging success. We Mac iPhone users are desperate for someone, anyone, to put the metallic taste of impending doom in Apple’s mouth.  Alas, it seems Apple will have nothing to fear from the Nova.

* In reality of course most users choose pathetic passwords, and cloud stores are still password secured, so corporate fears are well-founded.

Root causes: Why you can't sync your work and home calendars to your phone

Tales of the Audrey have put me in a reflective mood. I've been thinking about my calendar sync wars.

I've spent a lot of time and energy trying to get an integrated view of my work, personal, and other assorted calendars -- without putting all my personal life on the corporate server.

Ten years ago the answer seemed at hand. I could sync my Palm with Outlook at work, and with Palm desktop at hand. Alas, sync bugs did me in. The brass ring slipped from my fingers.

I settled for synchronizing KeySuite at work, and DateBk4/5 at home. So I had two calendars on one device, but they had nothing to do with one another. It really wasn't a great solution, but there was still hope.

Now I have an iPhone, but in many ways it's a step back from the Palm III. Heck, it's even regressing from iPhone 1.0; Apple recently pulled corporate Outlook support from its Windows MobileMe control panel. (A wikipedia article claims this is by design; the function won't be restored.)

All the solutions that now work for an iPhone either require extensive corporate support and wipe out your personal calendar (Exchange) [1], or they require synchronizing corporate calendars to an Internet service [3].

Corporations don't like sending corporate data to the net. With good reason. Imagine a billion dollar acquisition going down the tubes because someone left their phone on the bus, or accidentally made their net calendar public.

So why do corporations tolerate Blackberries? Because of a killer feature of the Blackberry (or is it an ActiveSync feature?) that Apple has emulated. If an iPhone is lost, it can be sent a remote instruction to wipe its Exchange server records. That's not possible if you sync Outlook to MobileMe, which is probably why Apple removed that feature.

So we see clearly now. We understand why something that's merely hard to do has become impossible Your work calendar, and your work contacts, don't belong to you -- even if you're the CEO. They belong to your corporation. Indisputably. Your corporation, who doesn't want to risk losing that data.

I could live with that if, say, work ran from 9-5 every day and we didn't have business travel.

Problem is, work and life aren't set like that any more. Today I started work at 9:30 and finished at 7:00 -- by choice. As long as I don't miss my meetings nobody cares too much when and where I work.

The downside of this flexibility is that work and family calendars mix all over the place. I need to have access to both ... all the time.

Oh, and like most oddball R&D types I don't fit the corporate rules for a Blackberry, so I can't even carry a BB for work and an iTouch for home.

This data ownership and life/work overlap problem is why, ten years after the Palm, we're moving backwards. We used to be able to "sneak" corporate calendars onto our Palms and MobileMe via Outlook and USB/serial data cables, but those options have gone away.

There's only one option now, the Exchange server option and over-the-air sync. That requires your corporate IT department's support, and if you go this route the only option for a personal calendar on the iPhone is MobileMess.

Or you can give up, embrace the public self, and put all your personal and family data on the work calendar -- but then you can't share that with your spouse and children. It becomes locked to the corporation.

I think the only plausible way forward is to push corporations to support iPhones with Exchange server (very hard) while also pushing Apple (much harder) to either fix MobileMe or give other vendors MobileMe's magic power to coexist with Exchange synchronized data.

I wonder what the gPhone does?

-- footnotes --

[1] Unless you also pay for a MobileMe account, but MobileMe doesn't support CalDAV or even iCal publication/subscription.
[3] Apple won't give 3rd party vendors access to the physical cable -- probably to protect their FairPlay franchise. So, unlike the Palm days, vendors can't create products to sync Outlook/Exchange data over the cable.

Update 12/23/08: See an earlier post with a similar theme.

Update 1/31/09: "Democratic Republics" never are. The same logic that can be applied to Citrix's "Project Independence". If we're going to have work/home calendar integration it will be entirely on the terms of the corporate IS department.

The 3Com (Palm) Audrey

I'd almost forgotten the Audrey, the high water mark of the Palm PDA platform ...

An Apple in your kitchen - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

... 'Welcome to Audrey.' With those three words, I experienced my first Internet appliance. 3Com's Audrey was meant to deliver lightweight 'internet snacking' from a user's kitchen, and offered email and internet access, a calendar and contacts database, plus synchronization of up to two Palm devices. It had a touch-sensitive screen, wireless keyboard and a clear plastic stylus that would glow green when new mail arrived....

This was a time when 3Com imagined that everyone would have a Palm device. They'd all beam appointments and contacts and even software (peer-to-peer IR-based viral app distribution) back and forth.

Families would sync to Audrey, and view the family calendar.

Sigh. Those were the glory days. Back then Palms used Graffiti One, not the evil spawn-of-Jot that came before Palm's long fall. Palm devices were going to be wallet, key, planner, memory manager, aide and more.

It was a noble vision. Maybe the gPhone will get us there some day. In the meantime, the Audrey deserves a special place in the museum of extinct computers, an alternative reality artifact.