Monthly Archives: November 2007

Kindle

All we do at “VitalSource”:http://www.vitalsource.com/ is e-books, from working with publishers on converting their content to our format, to managing the delivery of digital files and building the web-based infrastructure to support it, and finally to designing and coding the Mac and Windows applications for reading and annotating books. My “Kindle”:http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Amazons-Wireless-Reading-Device/dp/B000FI73MA arrived on Tuesday, the day after it was released, and here are my initial thoughts after using it over the Thanksgiving weekend.

Out-of-box experience. Amazon really nailed the first-use experience. The Kindle came in a nice box and was pre-configured with my Amazon account. No syncing or setup necessary; you can start reading books immediately.

Screen. If you haven’t seen an e-ink device — actually held one in your hands, like the Sony Reader — don’t bother “reviewing” it. The iPhone screen is beautiful and I would love to have a small Mac tablet, something even a little bigger than the Kindle, but for reading books, nothing beats e-ink. It’s in a whole different class, and this is one of the areas where the Kindle shines. (It says a lot that the first FAQ item in the Kindle manual is about how the screen “flicker” when flipping pages is normal, though. It’s a little distracting but not a show-stopper.)

Connectivity. Amazon has been innovating with free shipping for years, so in a way it’s perfectly consistent to also offer free wireless connectivity. As a long-time Apple fan, I’m a little disappointed that Amazon is the one innovating with service plans, while Apple is stuck in the past with service contracts and high monthly fees with silly text message caps. I pay about $80/month for the privilege of using my iPhone; with the Kindle, I pay only for purchased content.

Purchasing. You can buy books from Amazon on your computer or from the Kindle itself, and I’ve tried both. My first purchase was using Safari on my Mac, and less than a minute later the book “magically” appeared on my Kindle. Again, no cables or sync necessary; the Kindle notices a book purchase and downloads it wirelessly.

Hardware. It couldn’t all be good news, could it? The button design is where the Kindle just falls on its face, and it’s bad news for both major areas of the device: the keyboard and the page navigation buttons. I just don’t see how they justified taking up so much room for the keyboard, because in truth you almost never need to use it. For the page buttons, try handing someone a Kindle for the first time and the first thing they do is accidentally hit next or previous page. It takes a while to train yourself on the best way to hold the Kindle.

There are other things I could say — about DRM (unavoidable) or emailing documents to the device (clever) or the book cover (clunky) — but I want to keep this short. Despite it’s flaws, the Kindle is a good device, and it goes beyond being the first usable e-book reader to offer seamless purchasing and book delivery from Amazon’s large selection. It’s not as polished a 1.0 as the iPhone release was, but it’s a solid offering and more innovative in some ways. I’m looking forward to both reading books on it as a user and experimenting with ways to get other content on the device as a developer.

Android and getting real

“Steven Frank”:http://stevenf.com/2007/11/try_again.php on Google’s phone announcement:

“Find someone, ONE person, with a unique vision. Lock them in a room with some programmers and a graphic designer. Twenty people, tops. Change the world. Quit re-hashing the same old bullshit and telling me it’s new, exciting, or in any way innovative. Be ready to fail, many times, but for love of all that is holy take a stand on something.”

I heard about the Google phone consortium pretty much exclusively through Twitter, and the reaction seems about universal from the folks I follow (admittedly, half of them are total Mac geeks). I’m honestly not sure how the Google phone is relevant to me, but then again, I don’t like Gmail.

Although this week’s “37signals post on personas”:http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/690-ask-37signals-personas isn’t about Android, some of the points are relevant to committee-led design:

“I don’t think you can build a great product for a person that doesn’t exist. And I definitely don’t think you can build a great product based on a composite sketch of 10 different people all rolled into one (or two or three).” […] “Every product we build is a product we build for ourselves to solve our own problems.”

Not using your own product can turn into a real problem, and I realized after I bought an Apple TV that “Wii Transfer”:http://www.riverfold.com/software/wiitransfer/ suffered from it. So I forced myself to use my own product instead, and that made all the difference. Plus, it was easy to unplug the Apple TV because the thing got so hot I was worried it would burn the house down while I slept.

Ironcoder (now with prizes!)

A new “Ironcoder launches today”:http://ironcoder.org/blog/2007/11/02/ironcoder-7-bigger-better-and-uncut/ with a longer hacking period and a nice iPod touch as the prize. I’ve come close to participating in the past and just haven’t had time. Although I don’t expect that to change this week, I’ll be keeping an eye on this one to see what the theme is. It could be a great opportunity to get more hands-on with some of the new Leopard APIs.

Five days, one paragraph

So I am 5 days or 700 characters in to my Story 140 experiment. Even though separation between each tweet is only implied, this is the end of the first paragraph, and on the web site I will be formatting it that way.

If you were to put the ideas you have in life into two buckets — and I don’t meant the little one-off ideas, I mean the big ones you care about and could passionately defend — you might divide them into ideas which are truly great, and ideas which sound great. The key here is to avoid the ideas which are neither great nor which sound particularly good at all. It’s too early to know which one of these idea types Story 140 is, but at this point I’m leaning toward the “sounds great” side.

Put simply, writing something 140 characters at a time is exactly opposite to the way I normally write. It is much more challenging than I thought, and after 2 days I immediately wanted to start cheating and writing a bunch ahead, so that the story flowed properly.

I’ll keep at it, but I did realize that I have to at least partially plan what the story is about. I have only a vague idea in my head, but as I give it some more thought I will probably jot down notes so that when it comes time to write the tweet each day I know a little bit about where it is going. Even so, please don’t expect greatness from this work of fiction. You will be disappointed.

On the plus side, I have received feedback (see “Ryan Irelan’s post”:http://www.ryanirelan.com/past/2007/11/03/story-140/) that it would be great for multiple people to contribute. As I said about NaNoWriMo, what makes some of these projects work is the community. I’d love to open up this concept, and I can turn the web site into more of an aggregator of sorts. If anyone has suggestions, please email me.

MarsEdit guilt trip

In which I am the last person to point to the “MarsEdit 2.0 release”:http://www.red-sweater.com/marsedit/. I figure if James Duncan Davidson is “just now purchasing MarsEdit”:http://duncandavidson.com/archives/643, I don’t feel bad waiting so long to say good things about 2.0. (Rumor has it Duncan used to post to his blog with a set of Ant XML build files that he would run with custom Lua scripts as part of his Lightroom workflow.)

Seriously, though, it’s easy to believe that Daniel is right when he “talks about the potential for Mac desktop clients”:http://www.austinheller.com/2007/11/interview-daniel-jalkut.html. MarsEdit had a great start back in the early NetNewsWire days, and 2.0 shows that it has a strong future as well.

At lunch with “Brent Simmons”:http://inessential.com/ and the “Rogue Sheep”:http://www.roguesheep.com/ guys after C4, just before I left Chicago, we joked that what MarsEdit really needs is a Dock badge with the number of days since you’ve last posted to your blog. A big red guilt trip icon staring you in the face: “25 days since you last blogged, slacker!”

Story 140

November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), but I’m way too busy to participate this year. (See “my wrap-up post from 2005”:http://www.manton.org/2005/12/50136_words.html for the last time I did it.) I would love to write something, though. Maybe I should consider “Ficlets”:http://ficlets.com/ or a similar site, but I’ve had Twitter on the brain lately. Why not take the embracing constraints approach and write a story through Twitter?

Introducing “Story 140”:http://www.story140.com/, a new web site and “Twitter account”:http://twitter.com/story140 where I will be writing a short story in 140 characters a day for 140 days. To make things interesting I set a few rules for myself (listed on the site), including that every tweet must be written the day it is posted and be reasonably grammatically correct while still exactly 140 characters. (I say “reasonably” because there will be the occasional use of incomplete sentences, and some people may question my spelling of dialog without the ending “ue”. That must be influenced by years of programming the old Mac toolbox.)

Even though it is extremely serialized, my hope is that the resulting story will actually be readable. We’ll have to see how successful I end up being at that goal. It’s already more challenging than I expected; the first tweet took me about 10 minutes to write, and the second one even longer.

How I use Twitter

“Twiterrific 3.0”:http://iconfactory.com/home/permalink/1887 is out, with a new price of $15 or free to use with ads. The ads are very effective and difficult to ignore, but really they don’t take anything away from the Twitter experience. The new version is great, though, and I’ll be sending my $15 to Icon Factory sometime in the next few days. “As Fraser Speirs said”:http://speirs.org/2007/11/02/twitterrific-3/, it’s a small price to pay to be connected to friends and colleagues.

I post to Twitter much more often than I blog now, and I think I owe some of my followers an explanation. I made a rule for myself early on to only follow people who I have met in real life. I’ve only made a couple exceptions to this, and none recently. It keeps the flow of tweets easier to manage and relevant.

So if you follow me on Twitter and wonder why I don’t return the favor, that is why. You probably have interesting things to say, so say hi to me at some future conference so I can add you to my list. I’ve actually been thinking about taking it one step further and protecting updates, because I tend to post about what (to this blog) have been traditionally private matters. Jury is still out on that decision.

The following numbers are interesting, though. I only do very basic Mint stats for this blog (I just care about referrers, not number of readers), but it does make me wonder how many people read this blog. If you’re reading this, add a comment to this post. (Haha, gotcha! I don’t have comments.)

Bush veto

Yes, it’s a politically-themed post. Probably the only one before 2008, so don’t run away just yet.

The Bush veto of the bipartisan children’s health care plan a few weeks ago really made me angry, but it wasn’t until “Justin Miller responded”:http://twitter.com/incanus77/statuses/310113392 to “my tweet”:http://twitter.com/manton/statuses/310110182 that I started to think about why. Here’s the reason.

When Bush was elected in 2000, I expected this kind of stuff from him. Vetoing stem cell research? Killing children’s health care funding? Sure, par for the course for this Republican. But then 9-11 happened and everything changed. The war. Our president’s priorities changed.

Bush got a free ride from the media during the 2000 election, and again after 9-11. He would make the most incompetent and clumsy mistakes and yet be cut slack because, frankly, expectations are just so much lower for him than any other president in recent history.

At some point in 2004, opinion started to shift, led by folks like Howard Dean (who I’ve “written about before”:http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amanton.org+howard+dean). Eventually, after Bush won re-election, there would be enough anti-war momentum to matter. And that brings us up to now and this veto.

Everyone is focused on the war. Everyone understands the significance, the mistakes. Most of the country wants it over but we know that it’s complex, and the consequences for any given action will be felt for a decade. Compared to the lives lost in Iraq and the harm done to the stability of the Middle East, the rise of a new generation of terrorists — what does a health care bill matter? Is it worth fighting for?

Democrats in power by a slim majority probably think they have to choose their battles, have to give in on some issues so they can hold on to the important ones, like the war. But I say no. The only thing that works against this stubborn ass in the White House is to take the fight to him. Cut him off at every turn. Don’t give him a freakin’ inch. Call for an override vote again and again.

Every. Single. Day.

That’s how you win. You put people on the ground in every state — organizing, protesting, getting out the vote. You put letters in the hands of our representatives — email, blogs, editorial, flyers. You put a loud voice to what you feel and never, ever back down.