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This site is no longer maintained.
My current weblog.
Thursday, October 17, 2002Standardization vs. Innovation
Frank followed-up on my post on the lack of PDA innovation, writing that "What one calls a lack of innovation, others call standardization." Steve follows-up on that with a list of some things that would provide him with a "more "mobile" digital assistant."
My take is that Pocket PCs have been commodities since Microsoft dropped support for non-ARM processors. Declining component prices have made them cheap, now it's time for vendors to start taking steps to differentiate their products. Better LCDs, faster CPUs, and more memory aren't enough. I want features that will make my PDAs more usable and useful, like keyboards and cameras, not simply more powerful.
Rumour is that HP is working on iPaqs that will be different, offering a variety of wireless and biometric options. Neither inspires me, especially given HP's reluctance to reduce iPaq pricing, but having those features will be meaningful for many buyers. And then there are those Sleeves that iPaq owners seem to love...
PS: One of the things that has shocked me with Pocket PCs is that, while they are commodities made by just a couple of manufacturers with essentially the same guts, everybody designs their own connector to stick on the bottom. And while almost every design includes an add-on chip from Intel that offers USB Host functionality, amongst many other features, very few make use of it.
Blogroots has picked up on the weblog ethics debate.
My take is that weblogs are rarely journalistic outlets. Having journalistic ambitions and a weblog does not make you a journalist. Being a journalist with a weblog does not imply anything. The intersection of journalism and weblogs is a minute aspect of the community of 500,000 weblogs.
Real journalism involves editors.
It took 26 hours for them to email the most unfriendly registration code I have ever seen, over 80 characters long with mixed-case letters and an assortment of non-alphanumeric characters: /><=^`?]. If I purchased a shrink-wrapped package that required me to manually enter such a code, I would demand a refund.
Other than the delay and ridiculous registration code, I am satisfied with Newz Crawler. MetaWeblog API support is coming. Give me Favorites sub-folders and a way to view all flagged items, and I'll be thrilled.
"Composite is a chrome overlay which enables a streamlined Mozilla Editor for html composition in textareas. To use the editor, hit ctrl-e in a textarea." Unfortunately, seamless inline editing (like WYSIWYG HTML mode in IE/Win) is apparently being held up by an internal flame war among the Mozilla developers. [Dive Into Mark]
The inline flame war is Bug 97284 and has been going on for over a year. To me it has always seemed obvious that they should take a two-pronged approach, creating a "proper" implementation that embeds Composer and providing a wrapper that is compatible with IE's implementation.
I've got one gripe with Composite, aside from it not being inline: it doesn't support pasting of HTML that originates from IE/Win. I think the problem is with Composer, not Composite itself. Composer seems to want the clipboard data as "text/html", while IE supplies "HTML Format". They ought to be compatible with each other, but there's some sort of encoding issue that I haven't been able to figure out...
