Andy's Mind

I’ve had a chance to test two different eBook reader devices recently thanks to my friend, Paul Klipp. He is a fan of e-readers and has been trying to “convert” me for some time. Finally, he he gave me his two readers to try them out.

I did get the FoxIt’s eSlick first and I immediately liked it. The device is very light and therefore easy to carry around. It supports SD cards, but has enough internal memory to hold dozens of books. It connects to any computer with a standard USB cable and is visible as a USB drive, so it is easy to manage books stored on it on any operating system. And of course it loads its batteries from USB too.

But what I liked most about eSlick was its display – very crisp and paper-like, with characters clearly rendered in a very print-like manner. It was a pleasure to read in any light and I did read a lot over those few days I had it.

I tried it with some books and articles I had on my computer in PDF form, but I was mostly reading Peter Schiff’s “Crash Proof” which I have in both electronic and paper form. I was able to get a hundred pages further into this great book within just a few days – while the paper version has been collecting dust on my bookshelf for some time now. The reason is simple – eSlick is lighter and smaller than even this one book and therefore so much easier to carry around and get those quick reads while waiting for a bus, taking a break from work etc.

However, eSlick did have one annoying quirk with advancing pages. The device has just a few buttons (probably to reduce costs) and they are laid out in such a way that only the biggest square selector button is comfortable to use. This main button also serves the purpose of advancing pages – again, not very comfortable but enough to serve its purpose. However, the problem was the device was like falling “asleep” during the time it took me to read a whole page of my book. When usually just one press got me to next page after reading through it I had to tap the button a couple of times to get any reaction. This was distracting, because I had to mentally disengage from reading and keep on looking at the LED at the top of the device while taping the button to see when I’ll get the device to react. And it also did hang badly a few times – once I had to press simultaneously reset and power buttons to get it back to life.

Also, eSlick can only do PDF and text. And it can’t handle password-protected PDFs, so my attempt to read my copy of the PMI PMBOK failed with “corrupted file” error message.

But even with all those quirks and limitations I was starting to like the idea of having an e-reader after those couple days with the eSlick. So, when Paul handed me his Sony PRS 505 I expected an even better experience. After all Sony has been into ereaders for some time now and PRS 505 is a very popular reader.

The PRS 505 is much sturdier than eSlick thanks to its metal casing and – frankly – has a way better design. It is also significantly heavier. Keys are laid out in a way that makes it much easier to operate even with one hand and the navigation software is also superior to eSlick’s. However, I was utterly disappointed with it.

First, the display is much worse than eSlick’s, which was a surprise as it is based on the very same e-ink technology and I think made by the same company. While eSlick’s screen was crisp and sharp Sony’s looked dull and grey. The background was light grey and characters dark grey – not black on white paper-like display of the FoxIt’s reader.

But even worse, the Sony’s software can’t handle PDFs properly and above all fails utterly at zooming in any format maybe except plain text.

Only after trying PRS 505 I was able to appreciate way eSlick handled PDFs – and especially zooming in on them. eSlick zoom is what you expect it to be: when you zoom in it is the same page, laid out in exactly same way, with same typeface, same diagrams, pictures and sidebars only bigger. Not so with Sony – there zoom means reflow, that is a crude attempt at extracting plain text from the file and displaying it with built-in fonts. So on my “Crash Proof” PDF I had the option of either trying to decipher minutely small print of the 100% zoom or suffer with the reflowed version, without diagrams, with sidebars text just messed up with the main text etc.

Paul suggested that Sony’s zoom may work better on books from Sony’s ebook store which are specifically optimized for the device, so I tried “The back of the napkin” which Paul had on the device (great book BTW, will have to read it one day). Again, zoom failed miserably – while it zoomed text nicely it completely failed to zoom the images, so again it was hard to decipher them – and in this book they are quite an important part. Maybe there is a way to zoom them that I was unable to find, but certainly not by just pressing the zoom button as one would expect.

So, for those two reasons I didn’t read much on the Sony and in fact look forward to giving it back to Paul to get rid of it. To my utter surprise eSlick offered an overall better experience, especially thanks to its way superior display and better PDF handling. If they only fix the software glitch with advancing to new page I think I would be happy with it. In any case even as is it’s the clear winner in this comparison.

Also, after considering it I think that I like some design decisions Foxit made to keep eSlick reader simple. The fact that it handles only PDFs and not dozens of ebook formats like other readers maybe a very good design decision – after all almost anything can be converted to PDF and it is definitely the most popular format for books, articles – any written material other than web pages. The fact that it doesn’t have connectivity means you are kind of forced to focus on reading and are not tempted to browse the web, check blogs or download new content as would be the case with other readers.

Overall Paul did succeed to converti me to the idea of having an ereader and I think I’ll be buying one myself pretty soon. I’d just love to test hands-on (or, rather, eyes-on) the BeBook before I finally decide.

Anyone out there willing to lend me one for a week? 🙂

I have been a computer freak for longer than I would like to admit (I just realized that when I was writing programs on my first computer – the venerable C64 – most of my current team was not even born yet). The shape of computing has changed a lot over that time. Computers now have infinitely more memory and processing power than my first machine. But one thing didn’t improve as much: overall software quality.

Every new programming paradigm or idea coming along since computers crawled out of government labs had “better quality” as part of its promise. Yet somehow we are still surrounded by unreliable, poorly designed software. Making it more graphical didn’t change it fundamentally. And sadly web applications are no exception.

At first at least “hard to use” part was partially solved, because the web interfaces were simple which made them clean and easy to grasp. It also made them fast. Now, however this is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Modern web apps are full of heavy graphics, JavaScript is being pushed to the limits of its capabilities and the result is heavy UIs browsers barely cope with. Opening a few of those modern web apps in Firefox makes it the most CPU consuming process on my system, usually eating lots of memory (and frequently leaking). Frequently sites display errors, get overloaded or otherwise malfunction.

Why it is so? Let me offer two reasons, that don’t exclude each other so both can be true.

First, I think we are all spoiled by the computing power and memory getting cheaper and more abundant. In the past machines changed very slowly. For example the C64 I mentioned didn’t change at all over a period of 10 years, yet software for it did improve immensely. Programmers studied the hardware and by late eighties made it perform things the machine’s original designers didn’t think it would be capable of. That was truly pushing the limits.

Now if an application is a resource hog it is easy to just give it enough to make it run. That’s why each release of MS Office is slower and bigger than previous with marginal functional improvements. Same happened to web browsers and almost all desktop apps. Increase in speed & memory sizes mask the fact that today’s desktop apps are usually bloated and slow, but only to a certain degree. The subjective perception is that they work as fast as the previous generation and everyone accepts that – even though everything should run way faster considering how much the machines this software runs on improved.

Clusters and now cloud computing made it an easy solution for server-based software too – and that’s what web apps are apart from the UI. You can throw a whole bunch of servers on the problem and forget about optimization. And this works, also economically. Sites still make profit on mediocre codebases, because the computing power is cheap and because usually very little depends on web apps. If they break or run slow no one dies and nothing of importance is lost – the impact of low quality is not easily seen. So, there is no economic incentive to improve.

This and overall acceptance of software as buggy (effect of customers being trained for decades to accept dismally poor software from Microsoft) causes buyers of software products to accept low quality as the norm. They learned to live with it and it takes some effort to bring quality into their prospective at all. In fact, I think even some of our clients don’t appreciate all the effort we put into optimization and testing because they don’t see benefits of having a piece of web software that is robust and scalable.

Second, I think many of the web applications today are created by people with little or no education (formal or otherwise) in computer science as such. I think many of “cool web 2.0 kids” have no idea how the computers they use really work inside. I don’t think many of them know for example what preemptive time sharing is let alone are able to calculate the computational cost of the algorithms they use (if they know this difficult word with Greek roots). Very few know and understand the operating systems they use or ever heard of highly available design and other such practices.

Tim O’Reily’s predicted in late 90-ies that easy web technologies (which back then meant PHP and early CMSes) will allow people with little or no technical knowledge to express themselves on the web. And indeed they do – but much of this “creative expression” is, well, crappy software.

All this means that despite everyone saying a lot about quality there is very little push to actually deliver it in web apps. In fact, quality is squeezed out of prospective from both sides. Client’s don’t care for it when they order their web apps and developers frequently don’t have the knowledge necessary to deliver it.

The upside is that this will change as more and more will depend on IT systems that are based on web technology. Crashes, data loss or hour-long “scheduled downtimes” (like Twitter’s) won’t be acceptable. And also the buyers will with time bear the cost of neglecting the quality from the start and – learning from their mistakes – will insist on it in their next project. Which is great news for us, because we already have the knowledge and practices in place to deliver web apps that are also good software. In the meantime we have to keep on educating people that even in web apps quality counts.

I have been using Twitter for a couple of months now. It is a useful tool to follow people & trends. And a nice toy at times. But there is one thing about it that spoils the experience: it’s just one huge ad.

This tool supposedly invented to help people share what they are doing with friends has become one huge fest of shameless self promotion, a true 21st century global vanity fair. This self promotion seems to be centered on one thing: being “cool”. Maybe it’s the people I follow but in many of the tweets (that are not re-tweets and links) I see a disproportionate amount of words like “great”, “awesome”, “exciting”, “kick ass” and – of course – “cool”. All those messages paint an image that is reflecting our current culture as we already see it through mass media’s twisted lens: everyone is doing something exciting on groundbreaking projects in fancy offices of superb companies, then “chills out” at chic clubs or doing some “crazy” activities. Then goes back again to their “cool” work. Everyone is young, physically attractive, smart and interesting. Everything is “cool”.

This image is not new. It has been the backdrop for most advertising for decades, as vendors promised people entry into the paradise on Earth if they buy a pack of coffee or a fancy car. The change here is that before it was just the advertisers pushing this type of BS out in paid slots and now it is the masses trying to market themselves, their jobs, their lives – and in that and through that live up to the ideal they all try to follow and seem to subscribe to: the un-holy grail of coolness.

The desire to follow this ideal – or anti-ideal rather – is not new, too. Ever since mass media – and especially all-persuasive moving images coming from TV screens – started to push this unreal model of life people wanted to live up to it. But before masses could only buy products advertised and try to imitate the behavior and look of the “stars”. Now they can join the band and broadcast their own version of the “brave new world”. On Twitter. And Facebook. And possibly other sites like it.

In this sense the “social media” both reflect the state of society and amplify the trends that shape it.

I hope this is just a shinny facade people put up there and deep inside they realize life is so much deeper and more meaningful. But some are so good at advertising I start to suspect they believe it.

I just devoted 1.2h of my time to view the Google Wave video in its entirety and I’m impressed. I wholeheartedly agree with glowing comments by Tim O’Rilley and Matt Asay. I’m not sure it will retire e-mail or traditional IMs, but it has a potential to change internal communication in companies. It is the first thing that has really a chance to challenge MS Exchange’s reign in corporate communication. Here is why.

First, it will be opensourced and based on an open protocol unlike most of Google products so far. Most corporations won’t use hosted web tools like Google Apps precisely because they value their data and want to retain control over it. They won’t use tools they can’t host on their own servers behind their own firewalls. So Wave is something that can get adopted where Google Apps (and all other hosted apps for that matter) didn’t stand a chance.

But even more important is the ability to integrate almost everything with Wave through extensions and bots. Here lies the real strength of Wave as a corporate solution.

Typically large businesses have already different specialized systems that are supporting their processes – CRMs, accounting systems, ERPs, logistics & order tracking etc. And much of the communication inside those companies revolves around same processes and data stored in those systems. Currently this communication goes in e-mails with data pasted in or attached as spreadsheets etc. With Wave it is easy to imagine integrating all those systems and creating a customized, comprehensive corporate communication environment. People would be able to talk and discuss invoices, orders, reports & other stuff right in their Wave inbox seeing up to date information fetched into context from other corporate systems.

Of course, it will take a while – Wave is still beta and protocol to connect different Wave servers is still being developed. There are issues to fix before Wave will be used and then it will take a push from both corporate IT and companies like us to create all the integration, build extensions, robots etc. But we are definitely seeing something very interesting here. And we are eager to deploy it.