Random thoughts of a Camaelon

Feels good :)

Publié par Nicolas à Tuesday, May 06, 2008 2 commentaires

Libellés : cool, phd thesis, rant

I just read that article about the new Sony's e-book reader (from the osnews story). That made me think a bit about e-book.

I would love to have a "true" ebook. For what ? well, in my case, for reading technical documentation and research papers, possibly some websites. Another excellent usage would be to read newspapers and magazines, or research journals. Or if you are a student, another really obvious target are textbooks. And think about the manga/comics market.

Why would it be interesting to have an ebook for all that ? What's the pattern ? Simply, it's the volume: in all these use cases, you end up with lots of paper very easily (and in a short time frame), and having one device to gather everything would be nice.

But books ? books do not really have a volume problem -- most persons do not read or carry dozen of books at the same time, and the minor inconvenience to carry 2-3 books for a very long journey is not enough to warrant paying premium to have an ebook. Sure, if you have a device able to read pdf and newspapers, it can handles a book, so you'll have books too of course. Having your whole library in one device could be appealing to some too, I guess. But if the main advantage of an ebook reader is answering the "volume" problem, then it means books almost certainly shouldn't be the main target.

So if books aren't (or should not be) the real target, and if things like documentation, newspapers, textbooks are, what does it mean ? Well, it means your device should provide the same features you'd expect from paper when dealing with these. Specifically, you absolutely need annotation. But more than annotation, the device shouldn't be content to only be "as good as paper" -- if you want people to buy it, you need to be better. An obvious candidate feature (come on, we are talking about electronic documents) is to provide a much better way to manage your document collection. Things like searching, grouping, sorting, adding whatever annotation/metadata you want, do specific things that use these categories (like marking some documents, pages or text to be sent to somebody else via email, etc)...

Then, you will have something that people (and companies, and schools) might be interested in.

The screen technology is imho nearly irrelevant, as long as the battery life is good enough (~7-8 hours in continuous usage) and with a good enough resolution. While e-ink is extremely interesting and answers perfectly the battery/resolution problem, it's too slow for the moment (it's also black and white, not absolutely dramatic but something that reduce a bit its impact). Between an e-ink display and a high resolution lcd screen, even if the battery life would be much shorter on the device with the lcd screen, if it provides the kind of characteristics I described above, I will definitely choose it over the e-ink display, and I bet that many persons would do just the same.

Right now, the sony ebook looks more like a solution looking for a problem than anything else, and they focus their efforts on the wrong side (books).

They fail at everything I described above: it's slow to navigate, management of your documents seems inexistant, pdf aren't even there apparently (seriously!), no annotations... the only good thing (while not perfect) is the e-ink display, but they seem to think it's enough. It's not.

If I had money (and time) and more electronic skills I'd definitely want to create a good e-book device. Why not something based on gumstix + a high resolution lcd screen. There's a market waiting to be picked here.

edit: to be fair, checking the sony page they indicate that the device actually CAN read pdf and doc... But only after converting them to the proprietary format Sony uses. Crap ! :D (oh and it plays AAC and MP3 too)

Publié par Nicolas à Sunday, October 15, 2006 4 commentaires

Libellés : hack, rant

I gave a talk today discussing state and persistence in your work environment, for the No Grownups Seminar Series.. Here is a flash version of the talk, and here is the pdf one. Have a look !

Publié par Nicolas à Friday, May 19, 2006 0 commentaires

Libellés : phd thesis, rant, talk

I received today my new shiny toy, the Nokia 770:



I put online some pictures of it..

First impressions:

• it's light ! yet it doesn't feel "crap" :-)


• the form factor is surprisingly nice (even if coming from a newton I wouldn't mind a (physically) bigger screen)


• applications are a bit slow to start. Hopefully things will improve -- even if as it is it's ok, I wouldn't mind instantaneous starts ;-)


• redrawing is a bit slow too :-/ is it because of X or gnome.. ?


• the screen is absolutely gorgeous !! really beautiful and luminous :-) (the pictures I took don't completely do it justice)


• playing movie is ok (there's a trailer for ice age 2 on the machine), but could be improved..


• lack of pppoe configuration for wifi VPN (or if there is, it's not obvious, but well, I just got it, so I perhaps overlooked something)


• installing a package is easy :-)


• The UI is quite good, as a PDA UI -- definitely better than PocketPC (well, duh..), obviously less good than the newton, but hey, it's not too bad..

So well, overall, I'm quite pleased -- the device is indeed very, very cool. Things can be improved, but it's already quite nice. The UI is ok, even if what I would like to do is (obviously ?) install GNUstep on it, and then modify GNUstep to blend on the Maemo platform (with a possible replacing of maemo in an improbable future). Anyway, as it is running linux, it seems an ideal platform for me -- both for experimenting with etoile/gnustep on a PDA (see a previous post about that, and see what I posted about the newton for what I think is good on a PDA...) and as a good client for the system I'm working on at uni...

I'm not sure if there's a market for a "web tablet" device, but I don't think that the Nokia 770 will only be a "web tablet" anyway :-) -- there's already ports of doom, abiword, the GPE pim stuff, etc.

Nokia has a winner in the linux community I think :-) -- which means that you can expect lots of software for the Nokia, and it already started... It also look like an excellent device for ebooks, administrators (as an X/VNC/ssh terminal), etc.

Publié par Nicolas à Thursday, October 20, 2005 7 commentaires

Libellés : cool, dynabook, étoilé, geek, gnustep, nokia 770, rant

Well, I didn't do anything last week on gnustep, I just moved from my previous flat to a new one, and in addition to that I also got a newton 2100 from ebay ;-) -- so most of the remaining free time was passed playing with it...

The Newton is really an incredible beast. Ok, it's a bit bulky compared to my pocket pc or my palm Vx... (right, it pass the test of the pocket, but barely, and only because I tried on a huge winter coat with big pockets ;-) -- no chances with a summer coat, that's for sure !) but technically it's a marvel. The writing recognition engine is fantastic: it works! :D
And the UI is great, very well thought, you do everything with the stylus in a logical way (example, to erase a word, just scrible on it... to correct a letter (say, lower case to uppercase) you have a variety of approaches, but the simplest is just to rewrite the letter on the previous one ;-) etc.

The most interesting thing in the UI imho is the "assistant" idea. All datas on the Newton are stored on "soups", kind of databases. Any application can read databases from other apps. So it's easy to really have a synergy between applications. The assistant use that fact: basically, it interprets a sentence (one you just wrote and then pressed the assist icon, or one you wrote directly in the assist window). For example, "remember to buy bread" add the task "buy bread" to the todo list; "meet simon friday" add a new meeting in the calendar application with simon (if you have a simon in your addressbook) on the coming friday, etc. It's truely great. It understand some variations of the formulation (eg, the task "schedule" will be triggered when it encounteers the words "schedule, meet, meet me, talk to, breakfeast, lunch, dinner, holiday, birthday, b-day, bday, anniversary). This mechanism is in fact rather simple, but it works very well !

The writing recognition is excellent (by far the best I ever tried) as I already said; you can choose between 2 engines, one which works letter-by-letter (and works really well) and another that works by words (with attached letters) that works really well too ;-) (this one use neural networks, so it's said to improve -- but I think it already works well :-)

You can also choose to save the writing as "ink text", which let you defer the recognition to a later moment. You can also decide to not have recognition and draw instead; there's two drawing modes, one that "improve" the drawings and a raw drawing. The "improve" drawing means that if you draw something close to, say, a square, it will straighten the lines. Great.

It also can record sound, the use of sound in the UI is quite cool (well, after a while you remove the stylus noises though ;-).

The UI is simple, readable, it handles copy/paste, you got lots of connectivity (fax, email, printing...)...
Basically, they got everything right, or nearly right ! After playing with it, it's really difficult to understand why Apple decided to kill the Newton -- it's so much better than WindowsCE (well, duh..) and PalmOS ! and the best thing... the data is stored persistently, even without power -- no more fear of losing datas when the battery run off. And the batteries are simply 4 AA standard batteries..

The incredible thing is that there's still a lot of people using theses, as well as developers -- I'll try plugging a wifi pcmcia card monday on it, and in theory that should work (got the drivers on a memory card -- two pcmcia ports rulez!); it has web browsers, mail clients, even an mp3 player... not bad for a device made in 1997 ! you just have to wonder what it could have become if apple didn't kill it...

You can program it in Java (there's a waba port) or C/C++, although the normal way to write GUI apps is to use NewtonScript, an interesting dynamic language, object-oriented, based on prototypes.

An interesting page showing you some videos of the Newton: http://www.newtenlightment.de/downloads.html#movies
This one is great too, with a commercial video and its transcript: http://www.aresluna.org/guidebook/extras/videos/welcometonewton

In fact, in many ways, I think NewtonOS is a better OS (UI-wise) than current ones for most of the people, with its emphasis on communication, organisation of personal datas (PIM), and in short, with everything centered around the datas, not the apps.

We should have that kind of orientation in our current computers !! (Actually, Apple made the eMate, which was a NewtonOS device with a keyboard, with a shape a bit similar to the ibook palourde).

So obviously, it gives me a couple of ideas for Étoilé. I think we should deliver a small suite of PIM applications, with shared databases (well, we already wanted to do that to some extent, but what I mean is, we should try to have a way to easily create "open databases" that Étoilé applications would use to save their datas. Such "open" databases would be public (well, limited to the user's app) and easily "discoverable" -- probably a good idea to include their schema/docs in them for example... need to think a bit about that, and I should read in more detail the newton programming book. Yes, our talks about db-enabled fs and this remarks about "open" databases sounds like WinFS, I know ;-) -- but WinFS' goals are actually very interesting.

The other thing is, we should have an assistant-like technology (I sent a mail on the mailing list detailing that point).

A last thing... current PDA/TabletPC UI completeley sucks. Étoilé could perhaps be an excellent choice for a linux-based tabletpc or pda -- as everything already works with only one button (even if it handles more, of course), which is great for such devices, and if we manage to have a good synergy between apps, particularly PIM apps, as well as an assistant technology, that could interest people...

Publié par Nicolas à Saturday, July 09, 2005 6 commentaires

Libellés : dynabook, gnustep, newton, rant

Well, after backuping OSX, then formatting my hard drive, then reinstalling the backup image on it.. I was able to easily install ubuntu on my powerbook, and now I've got a working gnustep env :-)
Ok, no touchpad support, no wifi support (damn you broadcom !), no luminous keyboard support... but it works :-)

So I was able to start recoding a palette for Gorm.. with a bit of help from gregory casamento, it now works :-)
Well, sort of. It's not persistent in "test mode" yet. And I need to finish my IB Editor subclass to support the Card connections (eg, connect something to the Card, not just to the Stack object). So what's working ? Well:

• There's a palette containing a Stack object -- you can drag'n drop it on you window


• The Stack object contains one Card by default, and you can drag'n drop things on it (buttons, textfields...)


• There's a Stack inspector, so you can add new cards, and navigate through the existing cards


• There's also the possibility of creating a card from an existing one (eg, the second card will be a copy), which I need to implement the "background elements" thing, useful in the database case

So what needs to be done ? Well, as said before, add connection support to the Card view (so you could for example add a button that when clicked go directly to the card); then add persistency to the cards (I will probably just encode them for a first try... perhaps in the future something with CoreData (if we have a clone ..) or GDL2 ? or a custom solution ? but who knows, simply using encoding will perhaps be good enough for the use I expect, eg, very small databases...)

So anyway, good progresses... and now I have a much better idea about palettes ;-) so i'll probably do some more -- for example, a palette containing NSArray/NSDictionary could be rather useful, particularly if they have an editor to let you add data, and particularly in my "hypercard"-like scenario.. then, I'll just need a Steptalk palette ! :-D

Publié par Nicolas à Sunday, June 12, 2005 2 commentaires

Libellés : gnustep, gorm, hack, programming, rant, steptalk