The premise of these articles is that the world would be a much better place if all governments would publish all of their information on the web in HTML or XML. You know what else would make the world a much better place? Unicorns.

The issue at hand is not whether governments should pick HTML or PDF. The issue at hand is whether governments are capable of publishing information at all. Show me an HTML creation tool that creates high quality, standards conformant markup from a Word document or any of the zillions of editing tools that government employees use. Now add in all the tools used by people who submit documents to the government. And all the versions of those tools released in the last 20 years. Now make sure that the HTML/XML works correctly even when the user doesn’t have the right browser or the right fonts installed. Guess what? There are no such conversion tools available. And who would pay to make sure that everyone had access to these tools and knew how to use them correctly?

Creating PDFs is trivially easy for all these cases, whether you use Acrobat or something built into your OS. It works regardless of what tool was used to create the content in the first place, and it works on pretty much every OS out there and on mobile.

HTML/XML Standards nerds should get a grip. They aren’t even in the running to compete with PDF here.

What all these things have in common is that people are starting to see the inevitable convergence between laptops and smartphones. The Wall Street Journal published a great story about this trend a couple of months ago. State of the art smartphones are more powerful than some laptops that were sold only ten years ago, and at the same time more and more of the heavy lifting in computing is happening in the cloud. So why would anyone want to carry around a laptop when you could fit a sufficient amount of computing power and data storage in your pocket?

But all of these discussions of which form factor will win are really missing the point: the real questions are:

• What kinds of work are people doing on smartphones today that they used to do on laptops?
• What kinds of work do people still rely on laptops for?
• Could a tablet or a smartphone replace a laptop for such work?

Let’s look at the first question. Here’s a handy chart of the things many people do using smartphones or tablets today, most of which were formerly done only on laptops/netbooks. I give smartphones an edge in Communications and Maps and Directions because of the built in voice and GPS capabilities that aren’t nearly as ubiquitous on other devices.

As you can see, smartphones do a lot of things really well. But for me, the most striking aspect of all these tasks is that they are primarily oriented to looking up and consuming existing information. The only exceptions are geared towards short-form communication: typing in SMS messages, tweets, and short emails.

So now let’s look at the things that people still use laptops and netbooks for, and how well the smartphone and tablet do on those tasks today:

Clearly, this is a different kettle of fish. All of these tasks involve the creation of content, and these smaller form factor devices aren’t very good at any of these tasks.

And that brings us to the third and most important question, which I’ll now rephrase slightly: could a tablet or smartphone ever be a viable device for the creation of content and not just its consumption?

The answer, of course, is a big fat maybe. The biggest limits on the use of such devices for content creation are physical human limits:

• Most people can’t enter text as quickly on touchscreens or on the mini-keyboard of a typical smartphone.
• The screens on all smartphones are too small to show a lot of information onscreen simultaneously at a size that most people can read. Tablets are better, but even a 7 or 8 inch screen is too small for many content creation tasks.

So what can be done to make this better? We need better input and output devices for these small form-factor devices. You can already buy bluetooth keyboards, and mice wouldn’t be hard. Ironically, Palm’s much ridiculed Foleo was actually a step in the right direction, but it focused on emails instead of helping make your smartphone creation experience better. But wouldn’t it be cool if you could hook up your smartphone or tablet to a large display when you got to your office and when you got home? I’d buy two! Even better would be if it could be done wirelessly – imagine working with smartphone or tablet using your HDTV at home as the display. The possibilities are enormous, and inevitable. To my mind, making these small devices work for content creation is one of the key issues remaining to be solved in the mobile space.

Disclaimer: as always, these opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of my employer.

As it happens, I know James from our days together at Apple. He is an exceptionally smart guy and quite the character. I remember reading his presentation at the time of the trial and marveling at it’s sarcasm, its cynicism, its far-reaching vision, and, most importantly, its lack of ethics. Given that I’d just spent two years at Adobe battling with Microsoft on a variety of issues, it was amazing to see how many of those tactics Microsoft were still a key part of Microsoft’s arsenal.

One of the more interesting posts on James’ new blog explains why he is coming forward now to write a new blog. In it, he says:

First, the global financial melt-down forced an epiphany. We at Microsoft always felt that we were on the side of free markets and unfettered capitalism—you know, the Good Guys. But so did the guys at Lehman Brothers, AIG, Fannie Mae, and all of the other failed financial institutions. Even Alan Greenspan, the High Priest of free markets, has had to concede that there’s “a flaw” in free market economics—a flaw that led directly to the current financial collapse.

My belief that I was one of the Good Guys was similarly flawed. This is now inescapable. I was wrong. Many of the TE practices that I developed, taught, and espoused were wrong. Anyone who continues to practice them is wrong. As a first step towards making amends for my past wrongdoing, I must make this clear, and widely known.

Its great to see that James has recognized the error in his ways, at least in part. But I found it telling that the global financial melt-down is what forced James to have an epiphany. You see, when I knew him, James was a die-hard libertarian¹. The kind who would always drive 90 MPH on the freeway on principle. His reference to Alan Greenspan here is not just a comment on the economy – Greenspan was a member of Ayn Rand’s inner circle and as such is one of the heroes of the libertarian movement. I suspect he is one of James’ personal heroes as well.

But what both Greenspan and James fail to have done is to connect the dots: the “flaw” in free market economics is actually the fatal flaw that occurs whenever someone tries to apply a pure philosophy to the real world: people and organizations do not act consistently with philosophies. In the case of libertarianism, the flaw is that self-interest is rarely enlightened, and people can rationalize anything.

James’ strategy at Microsoft was a case in point: they rationalized that what they were doing was justified because the markets reward the strong. The irony, of course, was that they were not acting in an enlightened way: monopolizing the market did wonders for Microsoft’s revenues and share price in the short term, but the damage done to the overall market for computer software was immense. In the longer term, this will hurt Microsoft more than it ever helped it, and in fact you could argue that Microsoft’s stock price malaise the last several years was a direct result of the market ossification that occurred.

¹ I use the term loosely, encompassing both libertarianism and objectivism. Wikipedia has lots of information on the many variants of libertarianism, objectivism, and the arguments between the two camps.

Today I read that someone has actually built such an application, SugarTrip, that runs on google’s Android phones (and others, I hope).

SugarTrip is a great example of a collective intelligence network. Google is probably the best at applying collective intelligence to solving problems – using the web browser as their input device. But mobile, connected devices may very well be the ultimate input device for such networks – pretty much everyone has one, they have web access just like a browser, they have GPS, they have cameras, and so forth. I see a ton of potential for such networks – geolocation provides a host of possibilities that many people are already exploring. Now SugarTrip is looking at applying the velocity data that comes from GPS systems as well. What if phones could provide other information – like temperature/humidity, or heart rate, or blood sugar?

• it lets you “Tap the Cloud” – you can search for recipes other SousChef users have shared. Like flickr, sharing is enabled by default.
• it lets you search your recipes based on ingredients you have on hand
• it has a “10 foot mode” that shows you your recipes fullscreen so that you can keep the computer a good distance from your cooking area and still read the recipe. Furthermore, the 10 foot mode supports reading the recipes out loud and speech recognition.
• it makes it easy to export formatted HTML to your favorite blog
• an import facility to make it easy to convert recipes from unstructured text into structured recipes (title, ingredient list, cooking steps, etc.)

SousChef costs $30, but there is a free download that you can use to try things out before you buy. The tryout version is limited to 25 recipes, shows limited search results, and doesn’t allow blog export. I downloaded the tryout version because I do have a library of recipes in text/word/pdf format on my computer that I wouldn’t mind getting into a nice format. One bug or additional limitation is that the import feature doesn’t seem to work in tryout mode: you can drag the little boxes around, but when you click the Import button the imported recipe doesn’t include any of the text you just imported. Because of this bug, I did most of my testing with the supplied sample database instead of using my own recipes. I hope they fix this bug soon.

I really wanted to like this application: it fits a real need, it had a nicely designed UI (albeit not as sophisticated as Delicious Library which was a clear inspiration), its from an indie developer, and it takes advantage of Mac features like speech recognition. But the program is hamstrung by its business model: cloud-based features depend on large numbers of customers to work effectively, and there will never be sufficient volume of Mac users willing to pay $30 to make these features effective. Furthermore, the developers chose to cripple the cloud-based feature in the free version, in the hopes that it would make more people cough up the $30.

Furthermore, there are large numbers of websites around today that will let you do similar things for free (the best of which seems to be bakespace, though none seem really great). I’ve heard of several people who are trying to build the ‘corkd’ of the recipe world. Guess I’ll wait.

But the more interesting part of the discussion is going on in the comments on the article. Scott Stevenson makes an excellent point:

In my experience, if you try to determine a specific set of rules for every UI convention, you’ll find yourself lost down the rabbit hole. I think this is one of the biggest stumbling blocks for UI in the classic engineering approach: there isn’t always a series of logical decisions to arrive at the destination.

Your example of interior design is a great way to illustrate this. The idea of “mood lighting” doesn’t always lead you to the most practical results in terms of visibility, but it does succeed in creating an experience. In a lot of cases, that’s what the developer is looking to do and that’s what the user reacts to.

Chris W’s comment above mentions that that Weather and Stocks are “unnecessarily” different (and you address these as immersive), but I think it’s a mistake to assume consumers want everything to be as uniform and structured as possible. In fact, that can lead to a very monotonous experience. It’s a delicate balancing act between chaos and stagnation.

I agree with you that developers often use UI conventions in contexts that don’t fit well, but that’s nothing new and will continue to be the case whenever they don’t have the the funds for or availability of a dedicated designer.

I don’t know if it was Scott’s intent or not, but he is clearly arguing against the position of having a rigid set of guidelines (e.g. the HIG) and for a more tailored experience. Interestingly, the next commenter, “JB”, says that Apple is making this much more explicit:

At WWDC, I was in many 1:1s with designers, and every single one pushed me to get more daring with the designs. They told my friend the HIG is for people that don’t know how to design.

This was all strange to hear from Apple, and a little hard to swallow. But there you go — Apple is actively pushing to reduce consistency, and to increase, as they told me “cinematic software experiences”.

I don’t know that Apple’s intent is to actually push to “reduce consistency”, but I agree that the trend at Apple is towards more tailored experiences, and I think that follows along very nicely with the stuff I’ve written about earlier: I have seen the future, and it looks a lot like Flash… and The Death of UI Consistency. I’m curious to see where the conversation goes from here, and whether or not this is the beginning of the end for the HIG-zealots…

I’m curious: what do other people do for Continuous Integration and/or Continuous Testing on their small team projects? What are the gotchas? Any wish lists?

The product is the first from a new company, Balsamiq, started by a good friend who worked on Acrobat.com. Check it out!

It’s also cool how the Mozilla/Firefox effort was fueled in part by the donation of Tamarin and Tamarin Tracing to Mozilla. I hope this collaboration can continue to be productive.

I also have to pass on this scalability post from Ted Dziuba (via Stefan Tikov via Jeff Atwood), which I found very funny (and yet so true) in my punch drunk state: I’m Going to Scale My Foot Up Your Ass.

Unless you know what you need to scale to, you can’t even begin to talk about scalability.  How many users do you want your system to handle? A thousand?  Hundred thousand? Ten million?  Here’s a hint: the system you design to handle a quarter million users is going to be different from the system you design to handle ten million users.

Amen, brother. Subscribed.