Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Last night I started a project I’ve been thinking about for a while – going paperless.

No, I’m not talk about files of paperwork, old bills, medical records etc. I would love to get rid of those – move them all into Evernote and not have to deal with my huge filing cabinet again, but that would require an immediate investment of at least $200 for a decent scanner with a multi-sheet feeder and Evernote functionality.

No, I’m starting, at least, with books.

This was somewhat spurred by My father-in-law bringing 10 bagfulls of books for my 6-year-old daughter after Thanksgiving.  A couple times a year he gets books from his wife who is a librarian and has access to lots of extras that the library can’t use. My daughter’s bookshelves filled up at least a year ago and excess books have been in various piles around the house. When the latest selection of 100 or maybe even more books came a couple of weeks ago, a kind of answer for this accumulating sea of clutter dawned on me.

But first, let’s flash back fifteen or twenty years, when CDROM’s were just coming out, and about as cool as tablets are today.  I remember having a dream (yes, the sleeping kind), that I walked into a “book” store, but instead of books on the shelves, there were  CD jewel cases presumably holding CDROM versions of the books that would have taken up more (although admittedly not THAT much more) space. While this interesting vision might have come to pass had technology more or less stood still for another 10 or  20 years, it’s obviously now somewhat anachronistic now that we can store the equivalent of 10,000+ CD’s on a thumb drive the size of a thumbnail that costs $10 or less retail, and now that we have the Cloud and instant purchases and transfers of large amounts of data in the form of content (movies, mooks, music, you name it), and apps, a variety of subscription, rental, and ownership models models, etc.

Now that eBooks have really come into their own as a sustainable retail reality (albeit one that still sorting itself out with respect to the future of publishing houses), the idea of putting all of my books in digital form and accessible not just in my house but anywhere I go, is kind of irresistible, albeit monetarily impractical for all but the most dedicated, or wealthy, or uncaring towards the legal ramifications of piracy.

Being a technologist and computer owner since the 1970′s, I’ve never had a problem with reading things on a screen vs. paper.  Indeed I find it a more powerful experience, although admittedly with some glitches and without the tactile and olefactory niceties that paper provides.  But to me the advantages in functionality and space-saving far outweighs those niceties, and really aren’t those things that we just associate with books because they’ve just happened to come with them?  If we’d somehow managed to make a plastic version of paper that was easier and cheaper to manufacture 50 years ago, would most of us then associate some plastic sent and feel to our reading?  I’m sure of it.  I don’t think there’s anything inherently great about whatever those chemicals or textures happen to impart, they just are what we are accustomed to, and that’s all.

That being said, I’m not suggesting that paper books have no value, or no value above their electronic counterparts.  Indeed, for now anyway, I’m not buying eBooks for my daughter.  Ok, I bought one, kind of as an experiment.  But it was one that she probably won’t be able to read herself for another year or two anyway.  I do think books have value as physical objects in that they contain artwork, size and shape, occasionally binding decorations, etc., that do not require us to turn a device on and search through a library to enjoy.  One can enjoy seeing a book on a shelf just in passing and remember when you first read it, etc.  You can do something similar with eBooks, but it’s not quite the same.  Then again, maybe that’s just because I generally don’t own eBooks and haven’t had the opportunity to have this experience.

In any case, let’s get on with the story already!

So my project started thus: I brought up a couple of shelves worth of books into my office and one by one entered their ISBN numbers into Amazon and then added them to a private wish list I named “Library.” I used ISBN numbers for the most part because, as it turns out, I have a lot of books that have had new additions since I bought them and I wanted to have a record of the exact edition on my shelves.  Simply adding these books to an online catalog is enough to placate my immediate digitization jones.  And really, it’s probably many, many years late.  I pretty much always had my DVD’s cataloged, albeit with some holes here and there, but never my books, probably because I have way more of them than I ever had DVD’s.  It’s nice to know that even if we have a flood or fire and everything is destroyed, I’ll at least have a record of the books I used to own.  Is that too morbid?  Maybe.  It just feels like a kind of insurance, if only informational insurance, since I’m guessing these books are not worth enough to claim much, given that the fast majority seem to be available for twenty five cents plus shipping used at Amazon!

We know a couple who have actually tackled this job for real – converting all their paper books to eBooks (if it wasn’t obvious, they have the financial means to do this), although rumor has it that they still read paper books.  I haven’t talked to them about this, but perhaps their strategy is to do the initial reading of the content via book, but once complete, the book gets sold or boxed or given away and an eBook version gets purchased and archived for when needed.  I’d love to be able to do this, but then I’d also love to have several tablets, a few smartphones, a new kitchen, and a few other small items.

But here’s the thing.  Honestly, I don’t read all that often.  Not books anway.  The vast majority of what I read are articles on the web, blog entries, and Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ feed items.   I mostly stopped buying books (other than programming books for my profession) 10 or so years ago after discovering Audio Books via Audible.com.  Since then, any fiction, or even non-fiction long-form that I’ve attempted, with a few exceptions here and there, have been through Audio Books.  This is because of being increasinglty busy, but also due to having a slow reading speed.  The ability to listen instead of read also means I have opportunities to “read” an audiobook that I wouldn’t have with paper – while doing something else, like driving, taking public transport, washing dishes, doing yard work, etc.

So I guess if I could, I would even opt for audio books rather than eBooks.  Optimally it would be great to have both so that I could listen to audio book but then have the eBook handy if I wanted to find a specific passage via searching.  Even if all the books I own were available in both forms, buying these would most assuredly bankrupt me.   I think if you’ve already purchased a book in paper form, you should be able to get 90% off it’s eBook price, and perhaps 50% off it’s audio book price!

I guess I’ll have to be content knowing that in some distant future there might actually be a time when content is essentially free (and legal), and one can find at least eBook versions of everything in print and out.  It doesn’t seem that outlandish.  At that time I can then start bemoaning the fact that there’s no way I’ll every be able to read or list to all the books I have, let alone all the books that I’d like to own at some point.  But until then, I’m at least boxing and/or donating 95% of my books – so that I can make room for 20 more bags of new books for my daughter each year until she decides that finding something on a 7-inch tablet is a whole lot easier, albeit less fun and fortuitous, than finding it among the hundreds of other books scattered in various rooms of uncategorized shelves throughout our house.

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I bought my first Android phone in June, the HTC Evo 3D, and have mostly been pleased with the experience.  Before it, I’d used many other types of smartphones, including Windows Mobile Treos, PalmOS Treos, and an old Danger Sidekick, finally ending up with a Palm Pre that lasted me for two years until the Evo 3D.  Going from one phone platform to another to me is not a big deal. You get accustomed to one way of doing things, but it’s not THAT hard to retrain yourself – or at least so far it hasn’t been for me!

One of the nice things about Android is the degree to which you can customize the user interface.  It’s somewhat the opposite of the iPhone’s philosophy  that there is a “perfect” design, or at least universal rules of design that one can use (or “dictate” depending on your view) to make an easier interface for 90% of users and discount the other 10% as freaks.  Ok, so it’s probably true that you can follow design principles to come up with a general “best fit” way of operating a cell phone for most people, and this often just means simplicity. But for those 10% of us who like to tweak things, it’s nice to be able to have a phone that you can monkey with, even if you end up spending way more time tweaking things than you would ever save by having an interface more conducive to your brain.  In other words, Google does not dictate design, they suggest it and let users change things around, even if those changes are bad for most people.  To a certain extent it’s democracy vs. tyranny or perhaps letting your kids make their own choices (and mistakes) in order to learn things for themselves, instead of making all their decisions for them.

Unlike with iPhones, there are many tools made by Android developers that offer enhancements to the user interface, including folder apps, widgets, etc., etc.  One could seriously spend a life time looking at these and evaluating them!  The most complex of these add-ons is the “launcher” which replaces the main interface of the device – the home screen, app drawer, etc.  IE what you see when you exit out of all apps and are facing the main user interface of the phone itself.

When I got my phone, I knew that these launchers existed, but I resisted the temptation to play with them.  My phone comes with a “skin” which is a kind of launcher itself, but one that has been installed by the phone’s manufacturer, often embeded in the phone’s Read Only Memory.  My phone’s skin is HTC’s “Sense” and it is pretty good as these go, having gotten pretty good ratings overall.  Still, I knew that eventually I would feel compelled to look for more sophisticated launchers and so decided to finally embark on this project.

There are probably a couple of dozen Android launchers available for download, maybe more.   But there are a “Big 3″ that normally get discussed most in Android circles because they have a large set of features and are very popular compared to the others. Those Big 3 are ADW Launcher EX, Launcher Pro, and Go Launcher.  In addition to these, there’s Zeam, which some people seem to like because it is lighter on their older, less powerful phones that can’t handle all the sophisticated features (and memory requirements) of the Big 3.  There’s another launcher I decided to look at as well, but kind of from “afar” – SPB Shell 3D.  The company that makes that launcher has been around for many years, well before the first Android phone, makeing similar products for PalmOS and Windows Mobile. The reason my look was from “afar” was that SPB Shell 3D is  priced well above the average Android app (launcher or not) at $15.  That price might be reasonable if some of its competitors were anywhere close, but that’s not the case – it’s more than triple the price of any competitor, and I doubt it’s really more than three times as good as any other launcher out there.  Without any way to actually try the app out, I refuse to shell out so much for the app.  There are many, many more launchers out there and I tried several others, but none of them seemed to have half the features of the Big 3 and there was something not quite as polished about most of  them, so I stuck to ONLY 5 launchers.

I won’t include a big descriptive piece about each launcher in this article – that’s been done on many similar posts by other authors who try to distill a given launcher into a long paragraph that’s supposed to summarize its strengths and weaknesses.  Instead, I will share a link to a Google Docs spreadsheet I created that attempts to seperate and organize the various features for each launcher.  This spreadsheet is far from perfect or complete, I’m sure I missed many features and possibly it has some inaccuracies due to my not being able to figure out how to accomplish a given feature. And for SPB Shell 3D, I had to simply leave much of the features blank because I couldn’t play with the app myself.

So, because there are probably lots of deficiencies, as well as features which will be added to some of these Launchers after this article is posted, I’m hoping that you the reader can enlighten me so that I can continue to make this spreadsheet more accurate and complete.

I often find making these kinds of spreadsheets helpful because they can quantify features in a way that is hard to grasp by simply using these apps for an extended period of time.  To quantify things a bit further, I also created a kind of scoring system where I assigned points based on whether a feature existed, didn’t exist, or existed but in a less complete way than others.  All of this was very arbitrary of course, and I didn’t assign any weighting because I knew what is important for one person may not be for another.  So while my spreadsheet gives a big point advantage to Go Launcher EX, I still haven’t decided myself whether I’m going to choose that over the others.  Rather, this is the starting off point.  I personally won’t use Zeam because I think it just has too few features for me, and I won’t use SPB Shell 3D because of its price, but otherwise I still need to decide which features are most important to me and pick one of the Big 3.

I have actually been using a “launcher” app for a few months now that is different from all of the ones in the Spreadsheet.  It has no home screens, dock bars, app drawers or the like.  It exists simply as a way to quickly launch apps, shortcuts, and more recently widgets.  It’s called WaveLauncher and I won’t say much else except that I find it so useful and well thought out that I will continue to use it no matter which other launcher I eventually switch to, because it can be used on top of any of those as a great supplement.

Whatever launcher you pick I’d love to know why.  What was the killer feature that it had that the others didn’t or did you just try one out first and after using it for a while just stuck to it out of habit?

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Many people who know me both online and off will know that I’ve been somewhat of a diehard webOS user for the last two years – since Palm came out with the first Palm Pre in June of 2009 and I picked one up on the day it launched on Sprint.  Since then I got to know many of my fellow webOS users and many webOS developers through Twitter, podcasts, meetups, and the Developer Day event in New York last year.  In fact I’ll be heading to the Baltimore meetup this Saturday to meet up with some of these great people and to get a look at the Touchpad (which I’ve yet to go to seek out at a store).

Despite my love of the community, a couple of weeks ago I traded in my trusty Palm Pre 2 (“FrankenPre”) for an…. shudder… Android phone!  The newly released HTC Evo 3D.  This phone boasts some of the best specs in terms of hardware, including a 3D screen for viewing video and stills in 3D, as well as two cameras that can actually take said video and stills.

While some may consider this “disloyalty” to a cause (that of webOS), my reasons were mostly financial.  I’ve been a Sprint customer just about as long as I’ve been a Palm smartphone customer, and frankly their prices are hard to beat.  But also I’m tied to some degree by the fact that I’m on a family plan, with some of those lines not transferable (without fee) until September.  Sure, I could have waited till then, but I like Sprint for other reasons as well (they aren’t quite as monopolistic-minded as their larger brethren, and don’t donate to political causes or candidates I disagree with).

Aside from the financial aspects, I’ve been continuously disappointing with how sluggish things have been since HP took Palm over (not that they were speedy to begin with).  There was so much talk about how HP would save webOS because of it’s huge size.  “Scale, scale, scale!” they chanted.  And yet it took them a year to come out with a tablet that seems to be a generation behind at least in terms of hardware.  Their flagship Pre3 phone (which, while a spec improvement over the Pre 2 and Veer still lags behind many current Android offerings) now looks to be delayed from its targeted summer release to “the fall” if reports are to be believed.  There was so much waiting and hope that HP would produce something impressive, but from the February event onward, there seem to have been so many bumps that it was getting difficult to maintain much hope.  I’ve been through so much of these dark times with the platform, part of me simply needed a break, a rest.  I think many webOS faithful would understand the term “exhausted” when used in referring to being a webOS user.  Not to say there wasn’t a lot of fun and excitement too, but if nothing else, it was a bit too much of a roller coaster ride!

I still with webOS and HP/Palm the best with it.  I hope it quickly grabs the foothold that so far has remained illusive, but this time around I wanted to watch from a bit farther of a vantage point, so as not to avoid that queasy feeling that I got it seemed every other day when being a full member of the community.

With that out of the way, I thought I would jump into some initial impressions of the Evo 3D that I’ve had for the past two weeks.

Hardware

In general my sense is that the hardware is very solid.  It doesn’t feel cheap or plasticky, and so far I’ve not heard of others having developed any hardware issues.  It’s only been out a couple of weeks, but this hasn’t stopped other phones from developing problems in this short a period.

Not having a physical keyboard is difficult for someone like myself who’s had one for the last 8 years on one device or another, but not insurmountable, and really I think cuts down on the potential problems that come with sliding mechanisms not to mention keys that are being pressed many, many times each per day.  So far I’ve only played with the standard Android keyboard and it’s mostly effective with it’s predictive functionality.  I tried Swype on a different Android phone I was playing with a while ago and never could quite get the hang of it, but there are many alternative Android keyboards out there and I’m sure one of them (if not many) would allow me to become more efficient at typing.

The phone is big!  At least compared to the Pre and Pre 2.  I have an Otterbox case on it, which admittedly ads even more bulk.  It is difficult to one-hand the thing, especially for someone with smaller hands like myself, and this for me is reasonably important, but I suppose something I’m going to have to sacrifice for having such a large screen.

As most reviews point out, the Evo 3D is fast!  This is both hardware and software-related, I suppose, but it’s normally credited to the tremendous processing power of the dual-core 1.2Ghz Snapdragon processor .  Generally there is no or very little lag to doing anything.  Really the only waiting is for stuff to download, not anything as far as displaying stuff that’s already on the phone.  Restarting the phone takes maybe a minute or a minute and a half max.

The screen is qHD (960×540) and is pretty bright, except outside in sunlight, where it’s kind of hard to see.  Not much else to say, everything I’ve viewed on it, from pictures to web pages, etc., looks great.

There are actually three cameras on the phone, a front-facing (1.3MP) one meant for video-conferencing (which I haven’t used yet)  and two (5MP) cameras on the back meant for both 2D and 3D still image and video capture.  I have only taken a couple of 3D images and 1 3D video with the phone, so I can’t really vouch for quality quite yet, although having a dedicated camera button is definitely a lot nicer than having to hit a button on the screen.  The thing that would really make it nice would be an optical viewfinder so you don’t even have to use the screen, but I think that’s not a feature we’ll see any time soon on a phone!

The battery is one that is a good deal larger than what comes with most devices, rated at 1750mah.  There are lots of ways to drain the battery, and 3D is of course one of them, the 4G (Wimax) radio another, and bluetooth yet another.  I haven’t done a great deal of testing, I really try to keep it charging whenever possible, as I’ve done with most of the phones I’ve had.  I’ve found that battery life ratings are in general all across the board, not just for this phone, but for almost any phone.  Mainly this is due to to how a person uses the phone, but I think another aspect that’s probably even more a factor but not mentioned nearly enough is simply what kind of cell reception one gets.  I’ve had phones that could make it 20 hours or more at home die after 6 hours at the office (uncharged) because reception was so poor.  I’ve often gotten extended batteries because I know I’m liable not to always be either at the office, at home, or in the car, but so far it hasn’t become an issue.  In fact, even with trying to keep it charging much of the time, there are points where hours will go by without charging and the battery meter seems to rarely go beyond what looks like 50%, but again, take that with a big YMMV!

 Tweaking

Most people could care less about “tweaking” their phones.  For those people, iPhones are great because it’s designed for people who don’t want to tweak much, they just want something that’s designed well for most people to be usable.  Apple is good at that.  But for some of us, it’s fun to modify our OS (whether on the desktop or phone) to enhance efficiency as well as aesthetics.

Many people call Android “clunky” compared to iOS and webOS, and while I can understand that perception, after using the Evo 3D for two weeks, I don’t think it’s really fair.  Perhaps out of the box with plain vanilla Android, and maybe not even the latest version (Gingerbread), Android is not as elegant, and actually requires you to go into settings to change things more than I’d like, rather than having apps to do the same thing.  But Android also makes up for this in it’s “widgets” which are essentially pieces of live app functionality running on it’s screens (without having to open the apps themselves).

With HTC Sense or any of a variety of 3rd party launchers (none of which require rooting), you can get things working in a way that provides a great degree of ease of use and functionality, and suited to almost any taste. There’s an application I’ve become enamored with called Wave Launcher which adds a webOS-like draggable launchbar, infinitely more configurable than webOS’s ever was, even with Homebrew patches.

Speaking of Homebrew, much of what I loved about webOS was really Homebrew – the ability to tweak the phone in ways that Palm didn’t initially provide for (not to mention the overclocking without which the original Pre was almost unusable).  Without these patches, webOS was an elegant but pretty limited mobile operating system, not even providing a way to add new launcher pages until 2.0.  Although 2.0 allowed for more customization of the launcher, it also locked some things down so that a lot of the patches no longer worked to tweak things like icon size.  My point is that on both platforms, the out-of-the-box system is only going to suit a select group of users, and most who consider themselves ‘power users’ are going to take to tweaking things pretty quickly.  I’ve never written patches, but as an avid consumer of them, it feels like there are some that on Android would require rooting, while a lot would not -  you simply download an app of one kind or another to change things more to your liking, or just change something in the built-in settings, or use the integrated UI of the Android screens which are inherently more configurable than webOS’s.  In that sense it’s even easier to tweak Android than webOS, albeit perhaps not as emotionally satisfying

Synergy

A word about synergy, since it’s relevant to the webOS perspective.  Android has it’s own system of Synergy that includes your various online social media accounts, Gmail, Exchange, etc.  Personally I find it just as effective, perhaps even moreso in some areas, than webOS’s Synergy.  Synergy was probably the “killer app” for me in convincing me to switch to webOS in the first place, and while HP/Palm still touts it as one of their selling points, I don’t see how it is effectively different from what you get on Android at this point.

Software:

Not much to say here, the catalogs for the two platforms vary dramatically, not just in the number of apps, but in the offerings of big name apps.  If you need something on Android, it’s likely to be found.  With webOS, this still isn’t the case, unfortunately.

3D:

I guess it’s not too surprising that there’s been a lot of criticism of the 3D aspect of the Evo.  It’s really both Sprint and HTC’s fault for marketing it with such an emphasis and hype around that one feature. On the other hand, as many have noted in various reviews,  it is one of many aspects of this phone, and one that you can simply avoid by not taking or looking at 3D video or images..

And while some may consider 3D a “gimmick” I don’t. I consider it a feature that still has more potential than real usefulness. My main issue is being able to transfer the image or video to a larger screen so more than just one person at a time can view it. When we all (or a big chunk of us) have monitors or tv’s that can view this stuff natively, then it will be a different stoyr, but even without that, it does add a great deal of visual interest to both stills and videos. Sometimes it looks a little cheesy, but sometimes it really does add to the feeling of reality. I’m wondering if this is something that our eyes simply need to get used to. I’m sure that the early color TV’s and even photos were scoffed at by purists for adding colors that were not true representations of real life, but rather garish faximilies, making the image less artistic and more of a “gimmick.” This was probably due in part to an immature technology but also due eyes that were used to seeing things in black and white.  I wonder if there’s similar phenomenon going on with 3D and our eyes still need years, perhaps even a decade or more to adjust to an image that carries more depth. I also wonder if it’s just a subjective thing. I’ve heard a lot of people talk about how it makes their eyes or head hurt, feel queesy, etc.  But I’ve never had that experiece, even watching 3D video for upwards of 20 minutes streight (the Green Hornet movie that comes with the phone).

Did I miss anything?  If so, please add your own additions (or questions) below!

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