The Pre is in the Palm of my Hand

By mike.hochanadel | July 4, 2009

palm-pre-2

Coming in a little late than the rest of the pack is my Palm Pre review.  Hey I was too busy playing with it, er, analyzing it to the best of my abilities so I can give a fair handshake to this polished stone looking device.  We are going to cover the hardware side of things.   We are going to cover the software side of things.  Up and downs, what’s good and what’s not, and what we have to look forward to are all topics that I will cover.  Oh, yeah, the massive cell phone search ended.  I have a Palm Pre.

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Cell Phone: The Next Generation

By mike.hochanadel | June 3, 2009

old_cell_phone

I went ghost for awhile but now I’m back with what seems like the only thing that’s been on my mind this year and that’s the cell phone search.  Since the last time I talked about this, details for the Palm Pre were announced, the iPhone OS 3.0 was annoucned, Blackberry is rolling out more product,  the OS that the G1 runs on, otherwise known as Google Android, had an upgrade, and the launch date for the Palm Pre was announced.  A deluge of information produced lays stagnant in my and we’re now going to stir things up and see what I finally decide upon.  Keeping the original specs in mind, I’ll take a look at where each phone stands and what my final decision will be now that I have the cash to burn.  After that, stay tuned for my series of articles on cellphone accessories……just kidding.

The spur in the saddle for this whole series is the Palm Pre and it’s coming out this Friday.  Some of the details that really caught my eye include multitasking, a physical keyboard, and webOS development environment.  The multitasking portion is a big deal for me because I prefer to listen to music while I’m tasking and sometimes I switch between apps while they are working or processing.   A close second is the physical keyboard.  My fingers are massively thick and they need something physical to click.  That said, the reviews point out the keys are kinda small and somewhat hard to hit the right key.  Lastly the webOS and it’s young and fertile development ground makes me drool.  All one needs to know is HTML, Javascript, and CSS to build apps for the Pre and there are system specific APIs built into the SDK to allow some tasty interactions.

I’m not completely sold on the Pre however.  The rumor mills are flaring up and the iPhone will be getting a major upgrade to an almost 1.5 times the processor speed and a bump in flash memory to 32 GB.  It also sounds like they are releasing the reigns and allowing cut and paste.  Huzzah! The big controversy for the last couple of the weeks on the iPhone point to the almost Draconian application approval process for the App Store.  It seems there are some crazy examples of questionable content approved whereas some rather tame content gets banned.  For me, the deal is how well I can move my data around in there and how easy it is to build an app on it.  But for the latter I would need to buy a Mac.

Again we’re not alone as the T-Mobile’s Google Android Phone, the G1, is still out there picking up steam.  The big news on this little device is the new release of the OS to Cupcake or version 1.5.  Among the feature highlights include a soft-keyboard, more UI polish, and video recording and playback.  I’m a confessed Google apologist.  Most of my online apps are run through Google.  They do a great job of keeping things fast and simple. I’ve yet to really play with either the SDK or the phone as much, but my Google pull tells me that I should at least give this sucker a chance.

I think for me and what I want to do on smartphones for utility and development purposes, any model of Blackberry will probably be out of the running.  I’ve heard the Storm 2 has better improvements of the Storm 1’s interface, but after playing around with my girlfriend’s Blackberry Pearl, I’m not too impressed.  There seems to be some slow load time between apps and the web browsing is pretty weak.  They do have a nice camera and the scroll ball is probably the best mobile peripheral implementation since the laptop mouse eraser head, but I’m just not sold.

What will sell me this time around comes down to the plan.  After researching all that I can on smartphones,  I can see that most of the phones pretty much have the same to offer.  Texting, picture/video, phone, data transfer, web browsing, and some sort of new keyboard implementation are all part of the common thread for these phones.  What matters most is how much the companies will charge a month and how it matches with how I want to maximize my usage on their service.  Cell phone carriers traditionally nickle and dime you to death with surchargers and fees.  Can you believe that it cost about three times as much to buy a cell ringer than it is to download the actual song?  So when I think about the phone, its features, and how much up front I will pay, I think about how I can get the best deal on the Sprint Unlimited Plan.

Sprint’s Unlimited Plan (well the 450 minute one) gives me unlimited everything, with a 5GB cap mind you, and 450 minutes of daytime talk on the phone.  I double checked my records and discovered that I only came close to the 450 limit once in the last 6 months.  The plan cost about $70 a month.  Compared to the other plans, Sprint wins hands down.  They also advertise best coverage of 3G and may have a leg up on 4G over the carriers.  Sprint’s headquarters happens to be in Kansas City, which is also where I live.  When consulting friends, they have nothing but praise for their service.

But I’m not jumping the gun just yet.  I’ve been talking up some series love on the Palm Pre and I’ve yet to get to play with the device.  The Pre comes out this Saturday and I plan on hitting up Best Buy to check it out.  Now more than likely I will hit up a T-Mobile store and an Apple or AT&T store to give a final once around on the devices.   I’m also gonna wait until WWDC to see exactly what Apple will unveil.  It’s getting real close to new phone time.  Once I get one, the next step will be to see what I can develop for on the phone.  Maybe some cell phone shopping helper app.

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Cell Phone Search Update

By mike.hochanadel | March 17, 2009

Old Cellphone

On St. Patrick’s Day, most of the web is teeming over the announcement of the iPhone 3.0 SDK and I figured that it was time to update my cell phone search.  It’s been a couple of months since I first talked about my search and some things have changed.  I still don’t know what to go for yet, but the last revelations from Apple, Palm, HTC, and Blackberry have helped me figure out where to aim when I finally pull the trigger.  Oh and by the way, the contract is now month to month.

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What’s left @todo

By mike.hochanadel | March 10, 2009

A couple of different developments cropped up in the last couple of months that’s pulled me away from the blog.  One of them was a job change.  The company I’m working on a contract to hire basis is great and I’ve had the opportunity to learn many things in my short time there.  I do PHP programming and I had the opportunity to freshen up on PHPDoc.  PHPDoc is a documentation standard much like JavaDoc where you can comment code and drop in identifiers to help with the status of a certain function or class.  One of the identifiers is ‘@todo.’  After working with the history of the ‘@’ symbol and how it relates in context, especially with GTD,  I came to realize how much this 5 character identifier has affected my life.

The ‘@todo’ identifier states one thing clearly:  The following information is what’s left or what’s next to do.  It can be compared to the @NextAction context in GTD.  Once that action is completed, there may be another one next and subsequently a ‘@todo’ identifier with that information will be listed.  The difference between that and GTD is that it’s left in the code.  But, with a good IDE or a simple awk command, you can compile the list of @todo’s for a project thus returning it to a GTD like state.

I’m the kind of person who’s insane attention to detail will leave me always uncovering a rock or looking at a problem from all perspectives.  Some people call this being a pefectionist.  One of the major problems with being a perefectionist is that they will refine and tweak themselves into never getting anything done.  Analysis through paralysis is a common phrase for the problem.   And yes, I have that problem.

As some of you may know, a couple of years ago I hit rock bottom in paralysis and have somehow climbed my way step by step by implementing the GTD mehtod (as well as making other life changes).  The perfectionist in me still lives.  The initial mind dump and inbox organization took me about 3 days.  One of the hardest things to do while implementing the methodology was not being sure I was doing it right.  The common voice of the perfectionist.

So I’m slowly learning ot become an almost-perfectionist.  I still do my tweaks and twinges, but set a time limit before sending the product off.  Whenever I do so, there’s that voice that doubts whether or not I’ve done right.  Even when I use a time limit, it reaches out and pulls me down to make sure I double check and triple check everything.  It’s going to be with me forever.

Last month, an ‘ah-ha’ moment came.  And no I’m not talking about jumping up and singing ‘Take on Me.’   What I’m talking about is when I started brushing up on PHPDoc, I realized that the ‘@todo’ was the trademark for the perfectionist.  I can roll some code out but appease the perefectionist in me with the simple 5 letter incantonation.  The code is out and I can always come back to it to tweak and twinge.

I’ve accepted the fact that I will never be happy with my work.  I’ve also accepted that I will always find something wrong with it and attempt to fix it on the spot.  But with the ‘@todo’ action I can drop the noted fix and move on.  I feel much more relieved and am producing more now that I’ve left @todo’s not only in my code, but also in my other projects, my friends, my family, and my life.

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The Monkey Tail is @ the Paradigm Shift

By mike.hochanadel | March 4, 2009

Commercial At

While I was going through the twitter round up, I couldn’t help but notice that the semantics used to address other tweeps include the @ symbol.  That got me thinking about how the @ symbol shows up not only on some web services, but also email, blog comments, and even in the Getting Things Done methodology.  I also recalled someone saying that the German name translated to “monkey tail” instead of the widely used “commercial at.”  After some research, I discovered where the ubiquitous nature of the @ symbol symbol fits and where it potentially could grow.

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Twittering Around

By mike.hochanadel | February 16, 2009

Twitter

It’s been quiet the last month or so but I have been active online in another format: Twitter.  So here’s a couple of resources I’ve been using and my thoughts on them.  I grouped the sites by different actions or contexts.  The river is wide in tweet-dom so I need some tool that can help me follow like minded twitters.  Because there’s so many, I also would like to see where I rank among the them.  A couple of utilities would be nice to help manage my Twitter account.  Finally, there’s a growing set of applications for Twitter so I need a place to look up any new apps that might fit in whatever mode I am twittering around.

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The Pre-Cognition of a New Cell Phone Search

By mike.hochanadel | January 13, 2009

CES happened last week and one of the big announcements was Palm’s return from the ashes in the Pre. The announcement of their new smartphone pulled together new developments at Palm, including a linux based OS and advances in user interface design. I naturally drooled at the pics. After glossing over in gadget heaven, I remembered that my cell phone contract is up later this month. It’s high time I shop around and see what’s out there in terms of cell phones and plans. Here’s a quick list of what I’m looking for (and really what people should think about when getting a new phone):

  • Does the storage expand?  Can I slide in a card to expand whatever available amount of storage is on the phone?  Most phones come with a decent amount of storage but chances are I want to swap out stuff when the time comes.
  • Is there a touch screen interface?  This is the next step in user interfaces and it seems to be making its headway through cell phone use.  Is there a touch screen on the phone and how crisp or responsive is the interface when I make gestures?
  • How locked down is the phone?  The current Motorola I have needs a special USB connection to charge, use as headphones, and access the computer. BUT, you must go through my carrier’s software to access it.  A phone with a little more open access to its components is high on my list.
  • Will I be able to play music on it?  This goes together with the locked down phone and storage questions.  Some phones/carriers allow you to just plug your device into a computer and drop music files on it to play.  This is a must have.
  • What kind of applications are available for the phone?  Either Windows Mobile, The iTunes App Store, or Palm’s new App Catalog to add software that is non existent on current devices would benefit me greatly.
  • Following up on the previous point, what kind of services can I connect to from the phone?  My current carrier jacks around with SMS text messaging and therefore inhibits usage on some Web 2.0 services I use frequently.  BrightKite is a good example of an online web service that is cut off or not as usefuly because the carrier getting in the way.
  • Is GPS on the phone?  It’s not big, but working with BrightKite and Google Maps would make this feature seem ideal.
  • What will the data plan cost and what can I do with it?  My monthly bill is pretty high for what I can do.  If I can get more data and or text messaging for my buck, I’d go with that company.  I’m looking at you Sprint Unlimited Plan.

Some of the other topics in smartphone usage aren’t that big to me.  Bluetooth and headset capability is nice but wearing a plug in my ear all the time is my cup of tea.  The battery in my Motorola died on my twice and the third battery for this phone works best, mainly because I bought it from a third party and not the carrier.  I know now what to do when the battery runs out again.  Buttons or keypads aren’t that big to me, even when looking at the Pre, because I’ll be entering text on the phone regardless and can pick up any method to do so fairly quickly.

I think I covered all the bases on the smartphone requirements.  If I missed anything, let me know.  I still need to find out if my carrier has some kind of month to month plan after my contract is up.  If not, I may get a phone real quick.  I hope not, because I really want to hold out for a Palm Pre.  I could go iPhone, but I’m doing all in my power to stay away from it.   It’s still an Apple so it will still be super locked in.  If I get one of those two or some other phone, I’ll let you know.  Maybe by typing up the post from the new smartphone.

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Thunderbird and Lightning Helps Bring the GTD Storm to the Office

By mike.hochanadel | January 5, 2009

taskincalendarwithproject

Needless to say, the holidays brought me some changes this year on both the personal and professional side.  A couple of years ago I implemented the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology to help account for changes in my life and to influence the direction it was going.  I recently had the opportunity to start a fresh GTD setup at the office.  Here are the steps:
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Subversion Install Swankiness Part 2

By mike.hochanadel | December 8, 2008
Nothing Like A Fresh Subversion Import

Nothing Like A Fresh Subversion Import

Welcome back to part 2 of my Subversion install series.  What we are going to go over is developing the right structure for the repository, importing a website, updating a website, then testing and deploying the website using some of Subversion’s command sets.  There were some road blocks along the way and I will talk about that as well as some other thoughts about the process.  After that I’ll talk about what’s next but first let’s setup and deploy some code.

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I’m as Free as a Songbird 1.0 Now

By mike.hochanadel | December 3, 2008

After a Thanksgiving hiatus, I’m back and while you are a recovering from the holidays and from my tacky headline, I want to talk about the Songbird 1.0 release.  A lot of other media outlets have covered this release so far, but I wanted to give my take on the media player.  I first found out about Songbird 1.0 since it was announced way back in 2005.  Since then, with each new point release, I’ve downloaded and played with its features.  It’s great to see the evolution of what it was to where it is today.  But some of the issues I’ve had with seem to persist.

The Songbird bird project kicked off in response to the closed sourced media players dominating the choices serious music fans could make.  In the spirit of Firefox, they developed (using Mozilla’s rendering engine) a media player that also browses the web much like Firefox.  What that introduced were new channels of music discovery and collaboration.  It was a good idea to start with and we’re now starting to see a solid base with which other services can build from Songbird.

This took forever on my 300,000+ catalog

This took forever on my 300,000+ catalog

Songbird still has some work left, however.  It seems the goal for the project is to get to the heavy music enthusiasts first and let it float on down to casual music fans.  Importing large libraries and working with them should be a top priority.  For each point release, it seems with my library, which tops 3 digits in gigabytes, Songbird struggles during the initial import and thereafter.  Yes it’s a lot of media to work with but if they want to top my current use of Winamp, they need to resolve that real soon.

The other issues I’ve experienced are somewhat trivial but nagging nonetheless.  They dropped PPC support for the Mac after the 0.7 release, which hinders me because of the Macs I still have running around at home.  Songbird has issues switching between the main view and the mini player view.  Lastly, podcast support is absent in the 1.0 release.  The only, seriously the ONLY, reason I use iTunes is for the podcast support.  If Songbird can champion that, I’ll abandon iTunes.

Not Only is Skreemr Integrated, But I Can Download Direct at the Bottom

Not Only is Skreemr Integrated, But I Can Download Direct at the Bottom

There are some great things about Songbird that make it a contender in the media player market.  The one that most appeals to me is how it displays all media on the bottom of a web page you are browsing.  Say you are hitting up your favorite music blog.  Usually there’s media floating around on the page and you have to scroll around to find it.  This feature collects all of the media at the bottom and allows you to work directly with the files.

Songbird also has some developmental and extensibility features that put it head and shoulders above the rest.  Around the 0.5 release they split out development of Songbird into four factions: Themes, Extensions, Web Development, and Core Development.  This provided a clear path for all different types of coders to contribute to the project.  The most exciting one to me is the Web Development portion because of the API they provide.  You can use the API to setup your own ’store’ to sell music as opposed to the store that iTunes locks you into.  The other development factions mirrors that of the Firefox community and I think we all know how well that put Firefox ahead in terms of browser potential.

It’s great to see Songbird hit 1.0 and I look forward to finally getting in there and digging around in the code.  Somebody needs to improve super large library performance.  I’ve downloaded the source and compiled it, also setting up the dev kit for extensions, but that’s been in the days of TRAC as it now looks like to they switched to Deki Community Edition form Mindtouch.  Hello, Songbird, it’s time we meet again, now that your finally out of your shell.

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