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This site is no longer maintained.
My current weblog.
Monday, March 11, 2002Lions and Tigers and Typos, Oh My!
If there is one thing that truly sucks about using the web browser as a writing environment, it's the lack of spell-check. I've become spoiled by the on-the-fly spell checking trend than began with Office 2000. Even FrontPage has it! I've just spent half an hour searching for typos and correcting them. They embarrass me.
I often use FrontPage to write longer pieces. It's more convenient than the tiny edit box that Radio and my own CMS offer. I do it for the bigger edit box. Spell-check is just a free bonus. It's quick and easy, just type away, switch to the HTML pane, and copy everything between the body tags. Or if you aren't particular about your HTML, copy from the Normal view straight into Radio's WYSIWYG editor.
(Hrm, I wonder if FrontPage is embeddable. Time to put Office XP Developer Edition to use)
As an aside, I have been a FrontPage user since before Microsoft was involved. As Charles Ferguson would eloquently put it, I was one of the dozen or so v1.0 customers for Vermeer Technologies. I have never actually needed FrontPage, for me it has always been a tool for quickly creating layouts. Establish the baseline in WYSIWYG, switch between the HTML and Preview modes to get it "just right" (and usually in my case, copy the relevant bits into Visual InterDev to be used with ASP) .
I used to work for a large FrontPage partner, featured on the inside cover of the ISP guide shipped with FP2K. The Vermeer / FrontPage story, as explained to me by Charles over dinner some years ago, is a great one. It's available in book form, as well as an HBS case study and class. To me, Charles is one of the few Internet Entrepreneurs that isn't an embarrassment to business or the Internet itself.
It appears that I have been confused about the distinction between "Pocket PC 2002 Phone Edition" and "Windows Powered SmartPhone 2002" devices. Bluetooth will eat the Phone Edition's lunch, not the SmartPhone's, at least in the consumer space. Hopefully some of the good things from the Phone Edition will filter back to the standard Pocket PC. I sorely miss the "Jounal" function in Outlook, and the "Call Notes" feature from the Phone Edition seems to partially address that.
What does SmartPhone bring to the party? Devices sized comparably with "normal" compact cellular phones. Integration with Outlook. A pretty face. On the downside, being so compact means that data-entry will be just as bad as on a regular cellular phone.
That may be enough for the SmartPhone to be a success. Asian consumers go nuts over feature-rich phones at nearly any price. Europeans will likely dig the SmartPhone too, if the price isn't much over EUR200 with contract (the Brits and Swiss might go higher). In the US market, they would have to be under $100 with contract. Or have excellent product placement on "Friends" and "Ally McBeal".
One of the things UserLand has said it hopes to do with RCS is enter the enterprise through the back door. Because almost all enterprise IP addresses are dynamically assigned by a DHCP server, the desktop model isn’t the best and may not even be workable. What happens when users receive new DHCP leases? At best, it’s difficult to relocate the desktop servers. [Link] [ARTS & FARCES internet]
In the land of Microsoft, this sort of issue has long been "solved." In the bad old days there was NetBIOS and WINS, miserable solutions that didn't scale but sometimes worked. In modern times we have Active Directory and DNS servers that support Dynamic Update. Not just Microsoft's DNS server, BIND does it too. Check this out.
Overall, I think that Michael and Todd have completely obfuscated the message in their rants against RCS. The message seems to be:
Radio's "desktop" nature makes it unusable away from that "desktop" unless it has a static, Internet-accessible IP address. RCS does nothing to address this, and is therefor of limited value.
And they are kind of right. RCS really doesn't do anything of great value. Rankings and referrers, whoopie! Plugging into Frontier's discussion mechanism, I can barely contain myself! Automating user sign-up is about the only worthwhile component of RCS, and that wheel has been invented countless times.
A mechanism in RCS to proxy weblog posts destined to a firewalled Radio desktop would be a neat trick. Why not just use Frontier + Manilla instead?
Project MOB has officially begun. Mobile Offline Blogger, a Pocket PC program that will store blog entries in a database. When connectivity is available, the program will forward posts to the user's server using the Blogger API over XML-RPC. Most of the popular blogging systems support this API, including all of Userland's products. Later I will consider implementing product-specific APIs the provide richer features (the Blogger API is quite limited).
This is my first project using Embedded Visual Basic. It is essentially VBScript 3.0 with a Forms designer and many broken things. Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Compact Framework will make eVB and it's ilk obsolete, but I don't have either of those things just yet. Soon, I hope.
Networking support in eVB is terrible. Using the cradle for connectivity I am seeing throughput of around 0.75KB/s. With my WLAN card things crank up to slightly over 1KB/s. Pathetic.
Fortunately, blog entries tend to be no more than a couple of KB, and the data-entry limitations of most PDAs would further encourage short postings.
