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.

had to share this photo, since both kids are smiling and anacapri is showing off her new missing tooth…

Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire. — Reggie Leach

This is advice I appear to have taken a bit too literally. I resigned from Adobe a few weeks ago, and Monday was my last day. That was a big life change, but it was one I was looking forward to. I’ve got a startup idea I’m working on, and I’ve been talking to some really interesting startups.

Unfortunately, the powers that be decided that wouldn’t be quite enough upheaval, so they set my house on fire Sunday morning. Thankfully no one was home but my older dog, Ozzie, and he got out safely. But the damage is pretty extensive and we won’t be able to move back home for 2-4 months.

Still, it could have been a lot worse. Our house didn’t burn down completely – the firefighters told us another ten minutes and it would have been all over. Here are some pictures for the curious.

I wouldn’t call it a courtesy call.”
Steve Ballmer on the call he placed to Jerry Yang last night.

There was one thing in there that caught my eye, though. Something that I hadn’t seen previously, and that might explain why Apple hasn’t released an SDK:

Some disturbing revelations from these discoveries and analysis of crash logs from the iPhone reveal that Apple are using SUID root executables inside their Cocoa apps (everything is effectively running as root) and that the real root account is enabled (and has a weak password that everyone knows now). As several individuals have noted, all it would take is a single nefarious exploit to gain root access to the iPhone and begin wreaking havoc. The fact that a few of the applications on the iPhone have been a little crash-prone for some (Safari?) means that exploits will probably surface quicker.

If it is true that apps need to run with setuid, then any native third party apps would have unfettered access to the entire system. It may take Apple quite some time to fix the iPhone architecture to work around these problems.