TouchSmart 1, aka SmartCenter, aka LaunchPad (January 2007)

The first version of TouchSmart was not called that. It was named SmartCenter and shipped with the very first modern all-in-one touch-enabled PC, the HP TouchSmart IQ770.

This machine was one of the so-called “Dream PCs” for Microsoft’s introduction of Windows Vista in January of 2007. I’ve written about this version of SmartCenter before, so I won’t repeat much of that here.

Touch-first [+Win8]

Of course, the main point of even embarking on a project such as the SmartCenter software was that Windows wasn’t even remotely ready for touch interactions. Every app on the Windows Desktop requires the precision that the mouse pointer provides. Fingers and touch can’t hit the tiny controls accurately enough. So SmartCenter was designed with that in mind, and as a result had large targets all throughout its user interface. Here are some sample screenshots:

Note that all buttons, checkboxes, radio buttons, scrollbars, etc. are large enough to be easily tapped with a finger. Note also that, for example, the on-screen keyboard that is used for entering a ZIP code in the Weather app defaults to the correct layout, i.e. the numeric one.

Live app data in shortcuts [+Win8]

This idea wasn’t really all that new, of course. Snippets of live app data displayed in a mini-view of sorts had been introduced with Windows Sidebar gadgets and other widget-like UIs on other operating systems, but SmartCenter was the first to use live data as part of the shortcut that launches an app. You could say the shortcuts were more like mini-versions of the full app. Live data is of course hard to demo with screenshots, so here is a small video clip of the SmartCenter home screen (or start screen, if you will), showing shortcuts that update their information as time passes:

This major version of the SmartCenter software was delivered with four total releases: 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, and 1.4. Towards the final delivery of version 1.0, it became clear that a standardized way of getting the live information from the apps was needed. This became a major area of investigation and investment for the next major version of the software.

TouchSmart 2 (June 2008)

The second generation of TouchSmart software, 2.x, was introduced with IQ500/IQ800 series hardware. These two hardware models marked the beginning of the monitor-like appearance of the TouchSmart PCs. The IQ770 was a “multi-volume” chassis – these new models had a “single volume” design, supported by the “easel” style feet that were used in the follow-on generation as well.

The 2.x series of software was released in three versions: 2.0, 2.5 and 2.8.

Fixed layouts for apps [+Win8]

With SmartCenter 2.0, we introduced the concept of fixed sized layouts for the TouchSmart apps. We initially picked three: small, medium and large. You can see two of the three illustrated by this screenshot:

The Tutorials, Canvas and Calendar apps are shown in medium size, while the remaining apps are shown in small size. By tapping on an app, you would go to the large size:

This layout is purposely not called full screen, since there is a reserved area at the top of the screen for navigation, app name/time and music playback controls.

Tiles concept [+Win8]

In order to make it clear that the app representations in SmartCenter were not just icons, we decided to call them tiles, or rather “live tiles.” This term was used in the developer documentation that was produced to help other people plug their apps into SmartCenter, and so we had “small tiles,” “medium tiles” and “large tiles.” For each tile size we gave guidance about how to use it appropriately. We introduced the term “layouts” to suggest that each tile size should use a different layout of basically the same content or information. As you notice from the screenshots above, when the Weather tile is small, it shows only basic information. In the large tile, the information is more full-featured and also provides access to settings for the Weather app. The medium tile for Weather looks like this:

As you can see, this layout for Weather includes only the current conditions and the forecast for the day.

With TouchSmart 2.0, a big investment was made to produce media consumption applications: Music, Video and Photo (often shortened to “MVP”) as well as a WebCam and DVD app. The screenshot above shows other apps that were published later (Netflix and Recipe Box, for example), but that just goes to show that following development guidelines has benefits: newer apps can work with older SmartCenter versions…

Other changes from the 1.0 version include the top and bottom row of “tile scrollers” and the music playback control set (aka. “media plate”) that I already mentioned. The tile scrollers had two different behaviors, depending on how full they were. If enough tiles were present, the scroller would become an infinitely looping container. If not enough tiles were present, it would have “snap-to” endpoints.

The TouchSmart 2.0 software was unveiled at a big press event in Berlin, Germany. Several of my colleagues were invited to attend to make sure everything went smoothly from a technical perspective. The most nerve-wracking part was that the TouchSmart IQ500 was to come out of a pedestal on stage after sitting inside said pedestal for an extended period of time before its unveiling. People were not sure the thermals were designed to handle as little exchange of air as this posed. Here’s a video from the introduction to give you a better idea of what I’m talking about (skip towards 1:18 or so to see the pedestal and the TouchSmart lifting out of it):

As you can see, everything worked out pretty well. This was the biggest introduction ever made for a TouchSmart PC line. No event after that had that much effort put into it.

TouchSmart 3 (October 2009)

With the third generation of SmartCenter, we piggybacked onto the 600/300 series of hardware. The enclosures still used the easel stand design with three feet for support, and the exterior was tweaked a bit along with the screen aspect ratio (now 16:9 instead of 16:10).

Generally, though the concept was largely the same, except for the software. A big investment was made to produce more apps for the TouchSmart software suite, and this brought us apps like Canvas, Twitter, Hulu, Live TV, Link, Movie Store, Recipe Box and a bunch of others. The TouchSmart software development guidelines were augmented with more of a proper SDK with app samples, installer samples and more guidance.

New layout

SmartCenter 3.0 introduced another layout that we called wide-interactive. You see, in SmartCenter 2.x there was no way to interact with the medium sized tiles in the upper tile scroller (except for in the browser, but that’s a small detail). In this version we wanted to provide interaction with the app in the upper scroller. In order to do that properly we needed a bigger size tile and a new layout to have enough space for interaction to make sense. Here’s a screenshot of 3.0 (running on a 16:10 screen, not the aspect ratio it was designed for – so circular elements are “squished”):

In SmartCenter 3.0 the touch scrollers no longer “looped” infinitely, but each had a “snap to” end regardless of how many tiles were present; each wide-interactive tile was given a colored title bar to add a little splash of variety and visual interest. In addition, the “media plate” and other control elements on the home screen were redesigned to appear a bit lighter than before. Also, standard button glyphs were introduced for closing and minimizing SmartCenter. Oh, and the clock was moved around and given a day of the week display. Phew – at least the Personalize button stayed almost in place…

The final big change was that tiles in the bottom scroller no longer used the small layout. They were simply icons to launch the app into large layout directly. This was done to improve performance and load less stuff at the startup of SmartCenter.

TouchSmart 4 (September 2010)

Okay, so here we are, almost at the last chapter of this brief history (which is turning out not so brief after all…) TouchSmart 4.0 was introduced with the TouchSmart 310 (and 610) series of hardware. These departed from the easel-type stand and went to a single-foot design (I know there’s a better term for it, I just can’t think of it at the moment).

TouchSmart 4 didn’t see much investment in new apps, but focused on new capabilities provided by the SmartCenter framework.

Infinite Canvas [+Win8, sort of, on the Metro Start screen]

A major goal of the SmartCenter framework software had been to provide an almost limitless space for apps to live in. With SmartCenter 4.0 that goal was finally realized. Not only did the framework provide for an infinitely expanding space for hosted apps to live in, it also did away with the upper tile scroller and let the apps be positioned freely on the canvas. This is what TouchSmart 4.0 looks like after initial startup:

And once again, things were moved around on screen: The clock from lower left to lower right (and it was given a function: click to show a mini-calendar), personalize from lower right to lower left (and the word personalize removed). The “media plate” music playback controls were removed and put into the music app instead. The volume control was separated out from the media plate and put in the upper left. The bottom carousel was redesigned and had the infinite looping re-introduced (to allow for a bit of visual and interactive playfulness). Tapping a tile launches the corresponding app:

Apps can be moved around freely and the carousel shows a colored highlight for each running app:

If you look at the above shot closely, you’ll notice the Weather app in what looks like another layout. What’s happening there is not a new layout, though. It’s simply the wide-interactive layout, shrunk down to an “inactive” size. Thus we called it “shrunk layout” or “shrunk view”.

The button next to personalize in the lower left can be used if the app you’re looking for in the carousel is hard to find: QuickLaunch is sorted alphabetically:

Parallax background [+Win8, sort of, on the Metro Start screen]

Scrolling the canvas (or panning it, if you prefer) is done by grabbing empty space (with mouse or touch) and moving from side to side. To add a little visual interest to this, and to demonstrate the departure from the 3.0 tile scrollers, we added a parallax effect to the background to give you the illusion of looking into the distance on your screen. Several sets of parallax backgrounds were developed for variety’s sake, to be picked in the personalize area.

Magnets

Another major feature of SmartCenter 4.0 was the introduction of something we called “magnets”. These represent active content that originally came either from an app or from SmartCenter itself (in the case of Graffiti magnets). Magnets eliminate the need to start an app when you want to enjoy a favorite piece of content, be it a photo, video or some music you want to keep handy for quick enjoyment. Here are a few magnets placed on the canvas (they can be “pinned” so they always stay visible or “unpinned” to scroll with the canvas):

Here’s what it looks like after panning a bit (while playing the fireplace video):

You can see the pinned magnets haven’t moved and the background looks slightly different (the islands have moved at different paces to give the illusion of depth as they’re moving).

Okay, let’s see what it looks like in action:

TouchSmart 5 (September 2011)

And that brings us to the latest generation of SmartCenter (as of this date), i.e. 5.0. This version of the TouchSmart framework software was brought to market with the just recently introduced 520/420/320 series of TouchSmart PCs. The exterior of the machines has been updated once more to keep up with design trends, but otherwise the single-volume enclosure is still the chosen form.

Integration of Windows apps, desktop icons

The biggest change in SmartCenter 5.0 regards the blending of the two environments that were previously separated: SmartCenter and the Windows Desktop. This means you no longer need to exit the SmartCenter environment when you want to run Windows apps. Here’s a screenshot of SmartCenter 5.0:

Note that the Windows 7 taskbar is fully visible and that you can use it for launching apps and seeing what apps are running. The SmartCenter app carousel now has the icon highlight turned on permanently and only shows a short animated starburst as an app is launched. You also see all your desktop icons represented on the SmartCenter canvas. As you can see, the magnets overlap the desktop icons, which can be a bit of a clutter issue. No worries, you can turn off the desktop icons via Settings, if you don’t like them on the canvas. Or you can rearrange your magnets so they occupy different space:

In general, SmartCenter 5.0 attempts to bring the touch-first environment of past generations together with the traditional, mouse-centric desktop. That’s a value-proposition you don’t have in Windows 8, which is most likely not available until sometime in late 2012 anyway…

Automatic panning/scrolling

One additional thing SmartCenter 5.0 does is automatic panning of the canvas/desktop whenever an app is launched. This removes the need for you to have to rearrange app windows frequently when you want to switch from one app to another. The canvas pans automatically to make more room for every app you start. To return to an app, you just click on it in the taskbar or the app carousel. Another video might explain it a bit better:

This behavior can be turned off in Settings as well, in case it’s not useful to you. There are many, many areas that I haven’t touched on in this post, such as all the personalization and customization aspects that SmartCenter contains and how they changed over time. Or the fact that you can make your own parallax backgrounds (not documented anywhere, unfortunately, but pretty easy to figure out for enterprising souls). Or the easter eggs, oh yes…

Let me make some general remarks about the last four generations of SmartCenter: Any apps written to observe the guidelines of SmartCenter 2.0 are able to run on SmartCenter 2.0 through 5.0. A nice compatibility feature. Of course, older versions of apps needed updates as new SmartCenter functionality was introduced (or removed, as with the media plate removal in 4.0), but as you’ve seen, the Netflix app (which was published with SmartCenter 3.0) runs just fine in SmartCenter 2.0 and 5.0 as well. What’s more, if you know what you’re doing, you can have all the versions of SmartCenter 2.0 – 5.0 running on the same system. That’s how I was able to collect screenshots and videos for this post. Oh, and the technology underlying all these versions of SmartCenter is Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), 3.0, 3.5, and 4.0. The various apps were written in anything from compiled-to-native-code-Python to WPF to Adobe Flash. The software development process used since about SmartCenter 2.5 is anchored in Scrum, an Agile software development framework.

This concludes my brief history of the TouchSmart software. As you have seen, Windows 8 definitely picked up a lot of the features that the SmartCenter framework pioneered: Live tiles, fixed layout sizes for apps, parallax scrolling with an expandable space and touch-first design. Until Windows 8 is available, the TouchSmart 5.0 software suite is most likely the best alternative for touch – combined with new thinking on how to add something more to the the desktop environment – that you’ll find on an all-in-one PC anywhere.

Linchpin is at its core a self-help book. It’s meant to help you realize that if you want a shot at being indispensable, in whatever human realm (but mostly at work), you have to make some hard choices in your life. The reasoning for this takes you on a brief tour of economic systems, psychology, neuroscience and societal systems, including the education system.

You’ll read about Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Adam Smith and how a system is emerging that leaves an opening for a new role in economic systems: so-called “linchpins,” people who don’t need access to capital in the traditional sense, whose contributions are difficult to make interchangeable/replaceable and who make these contributions for the sake of contributing, not for the sake of making money. Making money, argues Godin, comes as a byproduct of the contribution that a linchpin makes. In a way, part of this book is about how the emerging global economic situation is made up of Communism and Capitalism remixed. And the best (perhaps the only) way to get by in this emerging system is to become a linchpin - an artist who gives of his or her creativity, ingenuity and humanness freely without desire for reciprocation. Linchpins are intrinsically motivated.

The self-help aspect of the book is that Seth is trying to convince you that this is the kind of role YOU want to play, because doing otherwise is a dead-end in the system that’s now emerging worldwide. Seth’s reasons for wanting you to become a linchpin are well-meaning and honest. He’s attempting to give you the best advice he can, based on the way he sees things unfolding right now. It’s hard to accurately summarize what the book says constitutes the behaviors and attitudes of a linchpin, and it would probably diminish the experience of reading the book. There are plenty of examples and inspiring stories in the book, and they make for really interesting reading.

At times it feels like the book is a collection of somewhat distantly related blog post blurbs, woven together loosely by a few underlying threads. It’s a little hard to follow at times, keeping up with the jumps and turns, and maybe this is just a logical consequence of Seth frequently sharing a lot of his thoughts in blog post format. It’s become his style. That doesn’t make the underlying threads any less important, though.

In a way, the case for the linchpin idea is made with a hermetically sealed argument. If you want to argue that the idea won’t work for you, the book has the counter-argument ready that this is your “lizard brain” speaking. It is the most ancient part of the brain (speaking in terms of evolutionary age), the part that is most concerned with survival and basic biological functions. Given the chance, your lizard brain will win over the more developed, more “recent” parts of your consciousness. It takes hard work and tricks to overcome the resistance that the lizard brain represents. The book takes a long, hard look at all that. In fact the book says that your lizard brain hates it when you read books like Linchpin.

I have no doubt that the book is spot on in saying that we don’t need more things cheaper, faster and more average. We’ve lived in a system focused on that for only a short time (a couple of generations), but it seems like forever (we have bad memory). We’re ready for getting back to outstanding things. Art that moves us, makes us feel connected, builds us up, helps us form new tribes. We’re hungry for real, human interactions, ready for forming new bonds with people in whatever way that might happen. We’re tired of the simple exchange, the transaction that leaves us distanced from each other. We look for ways to get more involved, to matter to each other. Linchpin shows us how, by encouraging us to bring all of ourselves into each part of our lives, at work and at home (but it’s mostly about work).

That being said, I don’t think everyone can be a linchpin. All large systems (ecosystems, societies, companies) have hierarchies and layers. Ecosystems, for example, have tons of species that are needed “below” to feed the outstanding species at the top. I think it’s similar in the workplace. And in a way, the book has an answer for that. Nobody is a linchpin all the time. Even the most successful people spend most of their time doing ordinary things. It’s the moments of extraordinary acts that make them linchpins.

I also think that the road to becoming a linchpin is long and hard. The “resistance” can’t be overcome “suddenly.” It’s a slow learning process. In fact, the book argues that the best way to beat the resistance is to slowly try to build a platform that looks “harmless” to the resistance, so that when you’re finally ready to take the leap, you have a network of “friendlies” that are ready to see what you have to give. A lot of the arguments the book makes depend on an assumed network that supports linchpins. For example, you shouldn’t be afraid of getting fired for breaking rules, because it will be obvious to others that you have linchpin characteristics, and they will hire you in a heartbeat. This requires that you’re well-kown. The hard part is getting noticed. The Internet accelerates the “race to the bottom” (outsourcing, standardization, commoditization) and at the same time makes it harder to be remarkable because you have to stand out among a vastly bigger crowd. Seth says you don’t have to be an outlier (probably in the Malcolm Gladwell sense) to become a linchpin, but it seems to me that somehow you do, at least a little bit. Maybe not an outlier in a “global” sense, like a world-famous movie star or musician, but certainly in your local environment.

Linchpin encourages everyone to contribute “art,” saying that it’s the only thing that is hard to commoditize. I wonder if a flooding of the marketplace with “art” won’t commoditize it somehow anyway. Another question in my mind is how today’s megacorporations can become more human, more remarkable? It certainly isn’t going to happen overnight. There’s a lot of inertia in big systems. I suppose the only thing to do is to focus on “art” that’s within your grasp, and slowly build from there.

My own attempt at this (giving things away through this blog) have so far been – how do I put it - interesting. Interesting in the sense that I have given things to people without expecting anything in return, and in specific instances where personal contact was involved, haven’t even gotten back a “thank you.” Maybe what I’m capable of giving away online is not “art” enough. Maybe I have made it too hard to receive.

To me, Linchpin is a perfect specimen of a self-help book, because you really have to do it all yourself. Nobody can help you. Want to make artful gifts, as the book argues linchpins do? You have to figure out what your art is. Want some help figuring it out? Sorry, there is no map (not entirely true; there are seven characteristics a linchpin exhibits, but you still have to figure out how to apply them to yourself or how to develop them). Hesitant to start? That’s your lizard brain holding you back.

Sorry about the bad scan quality (it’s from today’s newspaper – yes, dead trees, and yes, I still read newspapers). It says:

80% of Toyotas sold in the last 20 years are still on the road today.

Is it any wonder that it’s hard to make any kind of change on environmental impact? Not just for cars. Think, for example, about the inefficient lighting systems installed in millions of old houses (that aren’t well insulated, have old, inefficient furnaces/air conditioners, etc.). Things like these have a habit of lasting long and they weren’t designed with environmental impact in mind.

With information like this, it’s harder and harder to stay optimistic, wouldn’t you say?

Part of the meltdown was the ARM mortgage reset:

At the beginning, the income covers the payment. At the reset, the payment becomes bigger (unfortunately), the income is the same and doesn’t cover the payment. Because of higher home value, a loan can be taken out to cover the gap in payment. Over time that loan becomes pure debt. When there is no more of the loan left, the only way out is selling the house. At that point, the value of the house has dropped and is below the amount of the mortgage. In addition there’s now another pile of debt to pay off. The result: great Pain.

I’ve since then learned that someone did a much better job of visualizing the story, using animation and wonderful design. That someone is Jonathan Jarvis, and the illustration is at www.crisisofcredit.com. Worth seeing.

The one thing that I don’t think anybody is shining a light on, however, is this part of my own drawing:

If indeed the whole thing starts with the Global Pool of Money doubling in about six years, and that money was “looking” for a safe return of three to five percent, then isn’t the crisis just as much to blame on what caused the doubling of the Pool? According to the NPR show transcript (PDF)

How’s the world get twice as much money to invest?  Lots of
things happened, but the main headline is all sorts of poor countries became kind of
rich making TVs and selling us oil: China, India, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia. Made a lot
of money and banked it. China, for example, has over a trillion dollars in its central
bank, and there are office buildings in Beijing filled with math geniuses-real math
geniuses-looking for a place to invest it.  And the world was not ready for all this
money. There’s twice as much money looking for investments, but there are not
twice as many good investments.

The keywords here are “making TVs and selling us oil”. TVs of course stand for everything that no longer is made in the U.S.: toys, computers, radios, cars, you name it. So not only did the “highly inventive” American banking system contribute to the collapse, regular consumers actually kicked the whole thing off, in a way, with an enormous appetite for cheap consumer goods. Food for thought, I would say.

I’d like NPR to do a story on that doubling of the global Pool of Money. Would go right with my little bent for “voluntary simplicity”, which I haven’t really written about in a long time. If we all weren’t chasing the dream of bigger – faster – more, maybe we wouldn’t be hurting so much right now. Maybe we’ll learn about the value of “enough”. Check out the links in the sidebar for plenty of reading on the subject of “enough” and “voluntary simplicity”. It’s something I struggle with every day.

At around 45 minutes in the keynote, Steven mentions UAC and, as far as I can tell, pauses deliberately for a second or two to get an audience reaction. If you weren’t in the room at the time, it’s hard to tell, but there was a collective groan and some chuckling at that point.

I think it’s the closest attempt at trying to apologize for a design blunder I’ve ever seen Microsoft make, albeit without words. I found it to be a brave move for someone like Steven to make, and I wager that it put a more human face on the large, often faceless corporation that is Microsoft. It certainly did for me.

If nothing else it gave me the impression that there is someone at the helm of Windows development who is not afraid of acknowledging when things go wrong and who will try to make up for it. I find that very refreshing.

We bought a JanSport backpack three years ago or so for use at school. A few days ago a buckle broke, so I contacted JanSport via their customer service web page. I explained the situation of the buckle breaking and not having a receipt and asked if that would be a problem if I’d like to have a repair done. I got a very friendly reply by email the day after, telling me the service center would send me a new buckle if I just gave them my shipping address. I replied back with my address, but also talking about how I wasn’t sure how to thread the buckle back on, could they include some instructions, please.

Well, today I got the buckle with a handwritten note, telling me how to put the buckle back. Not only that, but the buckle in the package had two pieces of webbing threaded through, held together with paperclips to show me how to thread properly. Brilliant!

Thank you JanSport for showing that customer service still exists in this day and age of outsourcing and automation!

The TouchSmart Has Improved–But Not Enough

I’m surprised at how relatively positive the article is. Thanks Mr. Mossberg!

It would have been nice if they had updated the website with this information. That could have saved us burning all that gas, just to turn around and go back home.

If you’re going, my guess is you should arrive right when the doors open in order to get a spot.

Or even better: take public transportation.

One side benefit for the local economy from this somewhat “wasted” trip: we spent some money at a local German butcher on the way home. Mmm. Delicious German sausages!

Microsoft undoubtedly knew they could never afford to release a Server version in the state the code was in at Vista release. Corporations running mission critical things on Server would never adopt anything not rock solid. So Microsoft took the time they should have put into the “Client” version to finish things off properly for Server. Hindsight 20/20 and all that.

What can be expected of Windows “7″ after this? My guess is Microsoft will cave to market pressure again and release something not quite ready for the consumer market. With Vista, part of the reason for releasing too early was that Windows XP seemed to be getting too old. For Windows “7″ part of the reason will likely be a perceived need to catch up with Apple’s OS X.

With Vista, Microsoft was incredibly open about providing early builds to lots of people in order to get the quality right. And yet it wasn’t enough. It also seems that the biggest “achievement” that came from the openness was that people weren’t much impressed when the final product came out. In my view that’s a bit of a shame, because there are lots of truly great innovations in Vista (one of which is WPF). Microsoft will probably be more tight-lipped about Windows “7″ as a result. They might take a more Apple-like approach and keep things secret until the last minute. Surprise the world when they release Vista’s successor.

The problem is that Microsoft doesn’t seem to understand what it is about Apple’s offer that makes it so compelling. It’s not OS X. It’s not iLife or iWork. It’s how it’s all wrapped up in an end-to-end package. Beautiful, well performing hardware; good OS; good everyday software with features that people find useable and useful, integrated with revenue generating .Mac Internet services. And all because Apple has control of the entire chain, from hardware to software and services. Heck, they even control the retail experience.

Microsoft doesn’t have an answer for that. They play a different game. They play in many arenas and with many, many different partners. The ecosystem Microsoft provides the basis for is much, much bigger than Apple’s. Microsoft can never be Apple. And I don’t think they should even try to be.

I’m hoping that Microsoft will not cave in to market pressure but chart their own course for Windows “7″. Perhaps kick off work for another “NT” project (from the Dave Cutler/NT 3.x days) and focus on creating an operating system that is focused on the total consumer experience. Throw away all backwards compatibility in the consumer market, if needed (ironically, sort of like Apple did for OS X.) Provide backwards compatibility through virtualization or by keeping a separate line for corporate mission-critical applications. But mainly chart a course that doesn’t look too much at Apple or Linux or anything else, but follows new visions for what can be done with software running on ever more capable hardware. They have enough smart people to lead the way. There’s no need to follow anyone.

I can see where these people are coming from. I use plenty of free software myself: Windows Live Writer, Audacity, WinMerge, Process Explorer, PowerMenu, WiX, Notepad2, Firefox, Reflector, JAlbum, Gallery, Linux (contribs.org), Paint .NET, etc. etc. etc. Many of these are essential for productive work and I’m glad they let me accomplish things.

In October 2002 I attended a talk by Richard Stallman, where he was spreading the gospel of free software, which is often equated with open source software, or OSS. It wasn’t the first time I’d started thinking about the implications of OSS, but his comments sparked further puzzlement: Is it really possible for programmers to make a living on open source software? Seeing the comments on Jeff’s blog brought back that question.

It seems to me that a lot of the more successful open source projects out there had their origin in the world of what I want to call the free-conomy, or perhaps the carefree-conomy. It’s the world all around us consisting of people who do not have to worry about real-world problems connected to making a living: Students, living on their parents’ money or borrowed money; programmers employed by large corporations (that have other means of generating income that enable them to pay the programmer to work on free software); professors in tenured positions at universities, contributing as part of their research. You get the idea.

I’d be curious to know how many of the commenters to Jeff’s post fall into that category. I’d also be curious to know how all the people who contribute to open source, or free software make a living, or how they sustain themselves. These are honestly things I’m curious about. If you’re one of them, please tell me.

I think once you transition from the free-conomy to the reality-based economy (“real life”?), your perspective changes. You start realizing that you need an income to pay the rent, clothe yourself and your family, buy food, utilities and transportation. You begin to see that if you don’t pay for the music you like to listen to, the programs you like to use, the books you like to read, the movies you like to watch and the games you like to play, the people who produce those things will not be able to support themselves, and thus there may come a time when you will no longer have that music, those programs, those books, those movies or the games.

So all the hassles that the producers of software or other digitizable content make you go through to access their creations begin to seem like a small inconvenience to pay for the privilege.

Of course, you can still debate what a fair price for such creations is, but that’s a topic for a different post. You can also debate the principles of “fair use” of the creations you may have paid for. That’s also a topic for another post.

What’s your perspective on the implications of open source software for people who make a living at software programming/development?

Deprecated features

The following features have been deprecated:

• Hosting for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) browser applications (XBAPs).
• The Triple-tap/Soft-keyboard ActiveX control for hosted HTML applications.
• Support for using alternative shells to run and host HTML applications.

The reason I’m surprised is that Microsoft announced the support for WPF based extensibility apps at PDC05 with some fanfare.

I guess interest among developers just hasn’t been there for WPF-based Media Center apps, and Microsoft needs to make judgment calls on where to invest in their extensibility platform. The rest of the deprecated features seem to have been made for the same reason: limited interest among developers for these features. In addition I think there might be issues of an architectural nature that just make the three things that got dropped too expensive to maintain or improve.

I’m sad about this development, mostly because I still don’t see a great set of development and design tools around for MCML. WPF seems to me to have a whole lot more momentum than MCML (WPF has the Expression suite of tools and has been billed as the “GDI for the next 20 years”), but who knows what may be coming for Windows 7, or even an earlier interim update for Media Center?

But.

Aluminum?

Yes, it’s recyclable. And it’s highly desired by recyclers.

You know why?

Because it’s one of the most energy-wasting metals to extract from the ore. The more recycled aluminum you can get your hands on, the more money you can make.

And now they make the entire iMac shell out of the stuff? Ugh.

So Steve touts the recycling aspect in his presentation, making everyone think “Wow, Apple is doing a great thing. Great for the environment.”

They’re not doing a great thing. And it’s not great for the environment.

But of course they don’t tell you that.

See my previous post for more details on how much energy goes into making aluminum, illustrated by soda cans.

Now, this is about the only bad thing I have to say about the new stuff that came out of the buildings down the street today. Everything else sounds and looks fantastic. One of these days I’ll have to break down and get one of these JesusMachines.

I’m tired of them. Very, very tired.

Yes, PCs get loaded with software that the “experts” do not want. And they all keep talking about it. Can you say “echo chamber”?

Let’s see. Where else in life do you find things you didn’t ask for but got as part of the deal anyway?

Buying processed foods at the supermarket? Check. No mention of health risks.
Getting a BigMac from McDonald’s? Check. See above.
Getting married? Check. No mention of hard times and fights.
Going to the movies? Check. Advertisements for half an hour before the show.
Watching TV? Check. Commercial breaks every 15 friggin’ minutes.
Credit cards? Check. Rude awakening after three years of paying the minimum payment.
Buying a car? Check. Pushy salespeople and immediate depreciation of what you just bought.
Surfing the web? Check. Google keeps tabs on you.
Listening to the radio? Check. See watching TV.
Driving on the highway? Check. Ugly billboards in your face, rude drivers everywhere.
Sitting home alone quietly reading a book? Check. Telemarketing calls.

Get the picture? It’s everywhere. Things you didn’t ask for. Why complain so much about software on computers when the rest of our lives are so full of crap that we probably don’t want?

Even when you install just the bare Windows operating system you get tons of stuff you probably don’t want. On Vista you have User Account Control prompts, a neverending stream of updates, WordPad, Solitaire, Purble Place and ”services” running that you don’t know about. Yes, it gives you the impression of being clean, but then why was there such an outcry over the bundling of Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player way back when?

I don’t have a solution for any of these problems. But I’m tired of the whining and moaning.

There are so many other areas of life that are in more desperate need of fixing.

Start there, please.

You know how people who give you blogging advice say that you need to post at least once a day, maybe even twice or more? I don’t like that. When I see the number of “unread” posts since my last reading session, and it’s over ten, I’m very turned off and feel like it will be a chore to get through that many posts. So I skip it.

I’ve unsubscribed from a few blogs that went totally nuts and posted five or six items per day. With those blogs, if you stay away for a few days you have a mountain of stuff to go through. No thanks.

So what I do now most of the time is check blogs in this order:

1. People I know personally
2. People I’ve at least met
3. People I’ve read for for a long time
4. People who are “well known” (A-list bloggers?)
5. People who blog about things I don’t know much about, but want to learn

Everything else just piles up until I feel that I really have a lot of time. I think I need to unsubscribe more.

Today, we have no idea how our actions impact the environment or society around us and far away. Machines powered by fossil fuels enable us to extract as many natural resources as we want, crave or desire from the planet. Industrial processes turn those resources into “stuff” for us to buy and use, and often use up and throw away. And machines transport our waste away from our communities.

Most of us are completely disconnected from the natural world by using money to buy stuff. All we know is that this widget or that gadget costs X.

We don’t know how much energy was used in making it. We don’t know what raw materials went into it. We don’t know how the raw materials were transported. We don’t know how production affected the environment. We don’t know how much the people working on it were paid, and whether that was a fair payment. We don’t know how discarding it will impact the environment.  

We don’t know anything except the price. And very often the people making the gadget externalize lots of costs. Especially the costs of throwing it away and how that contributes to slowly making our planet a pigsty for us to slowly suffocate in our own waste. Along with all other living beings. Everything we use and throw away still stays on the planet. It may not be in our neighborhood because it gets transported “away”, but it goes somewhere. We don’t know exactly where. We don’t know exactly how.

Since money is all we know, money seems to be the only answer to modifying behavior. That means that if a society wants to influence the way its members behave, the only way to do that is through taxation. If buying gas for your car causes the atmosphere to heat up, tax it some more to make people think of other ways of getting around. If buying a computer will cause toxic chemicals to leak into our water supplies once it’s discarded, tax it some more so people will think of other ways of accomplishing what they think they need a computer for. And use the taxes to support responsible re-use and final disposal, to support research into ways to design products with re-use in mind, to support mindsets that encourage living sustainably and lightly on the earth.

I know that lots of people bristle at the idea of taxes. It just seems to me that we as a society don’t understand anything but money, so we need to use monetary means to get to societal ends. The biggest of which is our obligation to future generations of the human species to enjoy life as we enjoy it right now.

Kathy Sierra most recently posted about it here. Keith Ferrazzi’s book “Never Eat Alone” is all about giving without expecting anything in return. Hugh MacLeod at gapingvoid uses cartoons he’s “giving away” on the back of business cards to promote Stormhoek wine. Guy Kawasaki showed how he made a photo-diary using iPhoto, Comic Life and Skitch. The Simple Dollar is all about sharing tips on money management and how to get out of debt, and there is a TON of good information there (I don’t know how that guy gets anything else done, he posts so much it makes my head hurt).

I’m just amazed that there’s so much great information out there, free for the taking. I hope to be able to contribute just a little in my own way as well. So far I’ve got a few posts out on Windows Presentation Foundation where I talk about some things I’ve learned.

I’m still struggling with one problem, though. How do you find time to write good posts with trying to read over a hundred blogs on all kinds of topics, distilling some of the things you learn into something useful? There is so much good stuff to link to out there, but would it provide value if I linked as well? How would that provide value? I like the link posts from Steve Rubel, but there are almost too many links in each post to really follow. I used to almost be unable to keep up with the Scobleizer’s posts, but he’s calmed down a bit recently. His link blog I don’t even try to follow for fear of suffering a breakdown from information overload. Oh, and I have a “real life” as well. Can’t spend all my time reading blogs and writing my own rants.

Something to keep working on, I guess.

True.

Then he goes on to saying that all the new Vista DRM technology will form the basis for selling us the same stuff once more, but this time protected from piracy.

I would add the following: The original “re-sell” happened to work because we saw value in going from analog to digital. No more worrying about scratches on the records and deteriorating magnetic tapes. We got better sound and picture quality to boot. Deep down though, I think, we wanted to make sure that we got content that would survive “forever” and be ours “forever”. Well, the transition to digital accomplished that.

So what can possibly drive this next wave of reselling us the same stuff? High-definition digital video (I think Robert Scoble said something like this a while back too). It’s the last chance the studios have to resell us the same stuff once more. And this time they want to get it right: no piracy, hence all the DRM technology.

I can’t wait for the mass market to wake up and find out how buggy, error-prone and restrictive the whole high-definition-with-DRM thing will be. It may not happen until it’s too late. I’m almost hoping that things will be so bad that everyone will just say “I don’t need to own those stinkin’ movies or the expensive equipment to play them. I’ll just invite some friends over and we’ll make music together or tell stories”.

Nothing beats the high-definition of your imagination.

And maybe we should worry less about “owning” hollywood-generated content. Maybe we should focus more on generating our own.

• A light that shows when the Roomba hits a virtual wall, so I can place the wall in just the right spot and at just the right angle to block the robot’s path. My house is full of door-less openings that would make the machine run out of juice if not stopped by virtual walls.
• A “wall following first” mode, so I could be sure it has done the edges of the room before embarking on it’s normal “random” cleaning pattern.
• Detection of area rugs. So far the Roomba gets stuck on our rag rugs and the Christmas tree skirt. Putting up virtual walls for these would be almost impossible.
• Seeing the model of the room that the robot builds up somehow. Also, how much of that model it thinks it has covered and how often.

Other than that I’m pretty happy with this high tech “toy” worker so far.

It got me thinking about my own experience with offshore software development outsourcing. Grossly simplified, what I see as the biggest problem is that the engineers you outsource the work to are good a cranking out code once they have a stable and very detailed requirements specification. But when it comes to testing and independent, creative work they fall quite short on what may be desired. If you don’t have detailed requirements, but loose goals, you’re in for a very bumpy ride in my experience.

Add to that the challenges of communicating clearly across time zones and cultures and you usually end up with delays and projects going over budget. Not to mention quality issues. It seems as if some coders don’t take responsibility for the initial quality they produce, but rely on testing at receiving end.

I’ve seen this personally in the last few months, and I’ve had reports from people I work with who have experienced pretty much the same thing. I know of several projects where the outcome was much much worse than expected.

I’m not saying that offshore outsourcing in general doesn’t work, but my experince tells me you need to be very very careful about who you pick as your contractor and you need to be even more careful about tracking the work on a week-by-week basis, possibly even a day-to-day basis.

I hate this tactic of attempting to get customers. 

I’m sure some unsuspecting people would think this is something they signed up for and have to pay. I know it says on there that it’s a solicitation, but making it look so much like an invoice is sure to fool some people. Which is what weasel companies like this count on. I mean, it even has a “Customer Number” on there for crying out loud.

Don’t be fooled. Don’t do business with these weasels.

Here’s a guy who gets it regarding office space for software developers. But you kind of figured that, didn’t you? I mean, it’s Joel Spolsky.

I used to work for a startup that had an open office space for eXtreme programming (specifically pair programming), and I just loved working in that environment. It was easy to walk over to someone else’s desk, yet at the same time quiet enough to get work done. And there was space, ah wonderful space.

Big corporations don’t seem to get it. We’re about to move into another building where I work, and it looks like we’ll have less space than where we are now. I remember III talking about how personal space for software developers is the number one productivity enhancer miles ahead of anything else.

Sigh.

There’s been a big problem with e-coli infested spinach lately. Apparently this was tracked to a big company in California, which markets pre-washed, bagged spinach to a lot of supermarkets. I’m not sure if the FDA has pinned down exactly what the root cause of the problem is, but Andy, one of the farmers of the CSA we are a part of, says it may have a lot to do with the industrialized processes they employ to get the product out there. That, and the bags make a nice little greenhouse for the bacteria to grow in. For full details read his article on the matter. If you belong to a CSA, particularly twosmallfarms.com, you don’t have to worry about things like this.

The CSA farmers make sure that your food is grown organically and delivered to you in safe condition. One more reason to bypass big, industrialized processes and go small and local.

Go find a CSA near you (Search engines are your friend) and say goodbye to worries about food safety.

One of the airlines that picked up the service was Scandinavian Airlines. They charged $29.95 for Internet access during transatlantic flights.

Gee, let’s do some math: The flight from Seattle to Copenhagen probably takes about 12 hours. So that’s about $30/12 hours = $2.50 per hour. If you pay $46 for high-speed access at home per month (an expensive average, perhaps?) that’s $46/720 hours = $0.063888 per hour, or about 6 cents per hour (taking a month as 30 days, 24 hours a day). Even if you make the comparison a bit fairer by admitting that you don’t use the service 24 hours a day, but perhaps only four, that still is $46/120 hours = $0.38333 per hour.

Who at Boeing thought that people would be so hungry after in-flight Internet access that they would pay between six and forty times more than they do at home?

This quote tells you there seems to not have been much thought behind the whole thing: “Over the last six years, we have invested substantial time, resources and technology in Connexion by Boeing,” said Boeing Chairman and Chief Executive Jim McNerney. “Regrettably, the market for this service has not materialized as had been expected.”