• Girls – Lust for Life
  
• Dead Man’s Bones – My Body’s A Zombie For You
  
• Lusine – Operation Costs
  
• Raphael Saadiq – Big Easy
  
• Soha – Mil Pasos (feat. Antoine Essertier)

Although I’ve never bought a product from Microvision, I feel like I have a bit of a history with them: one where they’ve constantly disappointed by having incredibly cool technology that never made its way into my grubby little hands. Back in the early 2000’s I went through a huge AR nerd period. At the time, with academia failing to pull through with gear, I started looking at what was commercially available, and found the Microvision Nomad – a $4-6K system that had a red laser pointed at your eyeball running Windows CE (breathtaking I know – I decided to wait for the next generation). Unfortunately, after hitting some financial difficulties, Microvision all but abandoned their AR displays, and no one else (Olympus, Brother, Sony, or Microvision themselves) has released any commercial AR overlay displays since (there appears to be a booming military market for these, however)…

Which leads us to Microvision’s recent focus on pico projectors. While this may have been the right financial decision to make, it was always for me, a pretty boring path, both in comparison to the AR products and also when considering the limitations of the projectors themselves. The Microvision SHOW WX at version glance doesn’t seem to be all that great – it’s only 10 lumens, battery life of 1.5-2 hours, and a WVGA resolution. (Oh, and it’s about 50% overpriced compared to its competition.)

That being said, one thing did catch my eye. Because of their projector is laser-based, it has infinite focus. That is exactly what you think it is – multi-planar (and non-planar) projection is automatically focused, no mathematical tricks required.

Which isn’t to say that there isn’t awesome math that can’t still be applied. Check out these vids on using structured light and pixel shaders to do some astounding color and geometric correction on arbitrary surfaces:

Of course, there’s even more fun stuff that can be done, with structured light (such an awesome term) like Johnny Lee’s work on projector based tracking:

In the same way that AR on simple magnetometer/accelerometer equipped cell phones (no IMUs or HUDs ma!) proved to have surprisingly useful (well, at least interesting) applications, so will, I suspect, these pico-projectors. Assuming there are some fast GPUs w/ flexible shader pipelines available in portable form… – well, even without that, there should be lots of interesting visual applications…

This is a problem that affects Apple more-so than it’s competition at the moment primarily because of it’s scale (almost a magnitude greater # of apps than Android’s Market), but one that any successful app store will need to address. I believe that it does affect Apple a bit more because of the lack of a trial or easy refund path, which basically makes the cost of trying out an unknown paid app, well, the cost of the app. Android’s Market, in contrast, has a trial period, which somewhat lowers the bar there (although that’s offset by the insane lack of “Update All” functionality and cumbersome uninstall procedure). In terms of browsing, however, both the Android Market and Palm App Catalog basically otherwise ape Apple’s browse functionality: lists of apps with filtering by category and ordering by recency and global popularity.

This is somewhat surprising to me because it seems that there are tons of pretty trivial ways to make apps more discoverable. This week saw the launch of First & 20 – which is on the right track – but this type of functionality should really be built into the marketplace, and should allow you to see the most popular apps that your friends are using (no offense, but I kinda don’t give a shit about what Dan Lyons has on his home screen). This of course, could be built as a third party app – just recently, I was discussing something similar with a friend about automatically slicing and parsing Home Screen screenshots to programmatically determine popularity (err, someone with some spare time go do that, OK)?

Now granted, social has never been something that Apple has been any good at (or even understood, really), but hey Palm, isn’t Facebook sync BUILT INTO YOUR PHONE ALREADY? (yes yes, having a working store and err, enough apps for discoverability to be a problem probably takes priority). (Note: even if you don’t have a social network, you could do something clever w/ opt-ins based on analysis of your active address book or something like that – it doesn’t have to be invasive, just a one time click to opt into the system either as an individual or even as an anonymous/aggregate fashion.)

The attention network aspect is just one potential solution (albeit, the one that to my mind gives the most bang for the buck). Along the social lines, there are two other paths to explore – the activity stream – having a view to see what your friends have just installed, starred, reviewed, etc. and on the other end, aggregate stats of usage – you’d probably get a pretty good ideas of which apps were worthwhile if you could see what apps were most used during the day (either in opens or in minutes). This could also be applied to other aggregates, like the global population, or to clusters (recommendations: people who used the apps you use also use these apps).

The last low hanging fruit (off the top of my head – I’m sure there’s more but I’m headed to bed now) is in how badly reviews and ratings are collected. Apple beats the competition here by both allowing the easiest removal of apps (by comparison, app removal is pretty painful in both Android and WebOS) which has a rating (but no review) roadblock. While better than nothing, the uninstall review roadblock is still fatally flawed. Because the ratings are only collected on uninstall, and reviews multiple clicks away (also after a search step, since there’s no list of installed apps), you inevitably end up with both skewed ratings (of primarily the people who by definition didn’t like it enough to leave it installed) and skewed reviews (those that loved or hated it enough to go through the huge pain of writing a review).

You could try to mitigate these issues by including options to rate/review whenever you’re updating, or even with an opt-in that might bug you say on the 10th time you opened an app. Hybrid solutions with the previously mentioned approaches could involve having active recommendation/rating requests through your network (to my friends that have installed this app, do you like it?) or, probably more simply by getting rid of manual ratings and switching to showing the aggregate metrics that actually matter: retention rate, opens and minutes used (per day, totals, graphs) as “ratings”. These have the bonus of also being enormously useful to developers and being completely passive to end-users, which is good both for the data quality and for the user experience. (The self instrumentation potential is also interesting.)

None of these ideas are rocket science, but I haven’t really seen much written along these lines, which is just been a bit surreal to me because it seems like no one has been really acknowledging how sub-optimal the current app discovery experience is. (I can’t be the only one that feels this way, can I? Does everyone just discover news apps through NYTimes ads and Lifehacker posts? We’re thankfully past the “have to show all my friends this (not really) awesome new app” phase, right?)

Yesterday, Cyanogen, an Android community developer who maintains the most popular (and arguably best) alternate Android firmware, CyanogenMod, mentioned receiving a cease and desist from Google Legal.
Alternate firmwares (or custom ROMs) are along the lines of the custom WinMo firmwares that enthusiasts have been putting together for years (and in fact, there is at least some community crossover, including some shared forums). I only recently discovered CyanogenMod after complaining to the one Android superfan I know about how slow the Android phone I had was, and it was to me a night and day improvement over the stock firmware – performance went from unusably laggy to downright zippy.

Now, while Google is obviously within their legal rights (the C&D was specifically about redistribution of their closed source components), honestly, I’m rather baffled by this. It just doesn’t make any sense from a practical perspective – these apps are distributed with all the phones that the Cyanogen firmwares can be installed on, and are mostly used by a small set of the platform’s most dedicated enthusiasts (low tens of thousands at most, less than 1% of the Android userbase) – and of course, by a select few hobbyist developers putting in an inordinate amount of time in maintaining the firmwares and supporting those users. Not only is there no upside in attacking this community, but I can’t picture any scenario where there would be a net-positive outcome for Google.

As you can imagine, once word spread about the C&D, a community reaction was inevitable. A petition app was quickly put on the Marketplace (not the worst idea, honestly), and there were a few mentions in the more general tech news, although I haven’t noticed a big splash (say on Techmeme)… yet. That may change soon, I believe, as the fallout is now much bigger than inconveniencing a few “modders.”

Earlier today, Dan Morrill posted an official position statement on the issue. His statement about redistribution of closed source components seemed straightforward enough, but the implications are still unfolding. It turns out that by explicitly outlining the legal boundaries for closed-source components, we learned that not only core parts of the Android experience (like the Google Mobile services and Marketplace app), but also parts of the SDK and other base components are also protected. This news doesn’t just kill custom ROMs, but potentially makes Android as an open source project not viable at all. From Cyanogen’s Twitter stream:

@crazywizdom it’s pretty much like a bare bones linux install without the google bits. no contact sync or anything like that. #

From what they explained to me, you are not even allowed to copy the proprietary applications from your device. #

@gacktoh but you can’t distribute the market app. And it relies on the Google Mobile services anyway. #

I’m trying to get clarification now on what can actually be included. There are things in the SDK that aren’t in AOSP. Very confusing. #

Oh yeah, one last tweet before I violate the don’t-tweet-while-drunk rule. Nandroid is probably illegal. Awesome huh. #

All this woe (that’s counterproductive towards Google’s interest even if weren’t a PR, and now full on developer community nightmare – the custom firmware releases brought steady streams of improvements to tide over the true believers to what has been thus far, a somewhat lacking software product), probably set in motion because some PM got wind of the v1.6 Marketplace app being on the phone and got in a snit, setting the legal wheels in motion. And poof, over the course of a day, a cascade of events leading… who knows where.

Which is not to say that this can’t be fixed. The Google folks (even the legal teams) are smarter and more agile than most – if this is a priority, there are many ways to patch things up, from offering some sort of non-commercial redistribution terms, or having the Android team announce that they’re working with the community to make sure that they’re making it a priority to make sure that custom firmwares can be installed w/o touching the proprietary APKs, or that the AOSP is useful as an end-user installation (both of which jbqueru at least appears to already be moving on).

As it is though, it appears that Google has just shat on it’s biggest enthusiasts, and has given a good cause for those who are supporting Android as an “open” alternative to actively consider how far that openness extends (and realize how ostensibly “open source” Android really is). And of course, it’s a shame that there won’t be any more CyanogenMod builds. Still, this has been pretty fascinating to watch unfold, and should be of interest to anyone managing developer communities or trying to create an “open” platform…

(If you’re interested in following the conversations moving forward directly, the Twitter streams of cyanogen and Android developer jbqueru seem worth following.)

UPDATE: To some degree, this will probably blow over, since over the weekend Cyanogen announced he will continue w/ his work (after developing a new backup procedure to allow backup and re-installation of Google apps and with the inclusion of an alternate marketplace). Still, these are the types of incidents that chip away at social capital and reputation (until suddenly one day, the public no longer gives you the benefit of the doubt and any action taken gets looked upon in the worst possible light) – not to mention the amount of ultimately, pointless (or at least, repeated) man-hours that will be spent engineering a technical workaround to a policy problem.

2009-08-26 Kaossilator by lhl

• The Ghost Orchid – Horseshoes and Handgrenades
  
• Jay Reatard – It Ain’t Gonna Save Me
• Fanfarlo – Ghosts
• Sol.illaquists of Sound – Harriet Tubman Pt. 2
• The XX – Islands

• Reception – having carried the phone around in SF, LA, NY, Portland, and Boston, I’ve been extremely happy – it’s an amazingly huge improvement over my AT&T service- my only dropped calls happen with friends on AT&T, and the data connection is very good – I even get data underground on BART throughout SF.
• Voice Mail – I’ve remembered how much I hate voice mail. I have Google Voice… my initial reading seemed to be that call-forwarding for Sprint was an all or nothing proposition, but there might be some options for that… I’ll be trying to get that setup (even at 20 cents per minute, it’d be worth it to not have to listen to VMs).
• Maps – my original hope was that the GMaps app would be decent, but really it’s pretty pathetic. It’s worse than the Android version, and far inferior to Apple’s Map application. It’s been a bit surprising to me how much better Apple’s implementation is (they write their own app, they just use Google’s tiles). You’d think that Google would be able to do a better job. On the other hand, I’ve found myself using TeleNav’s Sprint Navigation app more and more – it’s not ideal, as it’s hard to get out of turn-by-turn mode (I often find myself wanting to see the next turn) and sometimes it loses (or just won’t acquire) a GPS fix, but I’ve been a lot happier with its behavior in general (no problems w/ map tiles, or forgetting what it’s doing – it also has a history and interacts with my contacts) – it is however pretty battery intensive and takes a while to load up
• Battery Life – this was my biggest complain when I first got my Pre. And for the first month it remained a huge problem – it just couldn’t last a day, which since I’m not office bound, means lasting at least from say 10am until 3am – even when I didn’t make any calls or even wake it, it’d run itself down just from its syncing. This was improved somewhat by the 1.1 update, but the main reason that it’s no longer a complaint is that I bought an extended battery – this thing adds an extra 5mm (it looks and feels like a lot more) of depth, and makes my Pre creak like no tomorrow, but it also comfortably gives me over a day no matter how much I use it (it seems to last just under 2 days in regular usage). If you’re getting a Pre, I’d say you pretty much are going to want to get either a spare battery or an extended battery.
• Performance – My new top annoyance is now the intermittent lag/lack of responsiveness with the phone. When it’s working well, it’s really quite nice, but I find the Pre lagging out quite a bit. The dialer and autocomplete are particularly bad (not to mention that the autocomplete doesn’t have any sort of learning algorithm – no matter how many times you send to an address, you’ll never have to type less letters and it’ll never move up). Apps that have listings are also quite slow – i.e., while the 1.1 update sped up photo rendering, when you jump into the photos from the camera, it takes you to the folder list, which renders incredibly slowly. The same thing holds true for listing MP3s when jumping into the music app. But it’s not just limited to that – sometimes the launcher lags out, or app launching, or any number of things. I can’t explain why these things aren’t cached or why responsiveness isn’t made a higher priority. My biggest gripe is that when the phone lags out, it isn’t just a rendering issue, all response just grinds to a halt. I haven’t tested whether reboots do much w/ performance, but since despite using Upstart, the Pre still takes almost 2 minutes to boot (what’s up w/ that? when Ubuntu boots in 10s, I’m not sure what excuse the Pre, running on a fixed hardware platform, really has)
• Copy and Paste – oh the irony. The iPhone now has superb copy and paste support, and it turns out that the Pre’s copy and paste is completely useless – time and time again I need to copy something from an email, web page, or text message. And I can’t! Also, the few times I can, only serves to show how awkward Palms copy and paste command/gestures are.
• Other UI – It’s not all bad though – I remain impressed w/ the cards implementation, and the notifications just plain rock. Every time an alarm goes off, or something else pops up and I can keep typing through what I was working on, I get a nice warm fuzzy feeling. This is how it’s supposed to work people!
• Apps – The official app store remains pretty anemic – I find myself missing some apps, like a decent Yelp app (Where is pretty substandard) or a Midori/Shazam equivalent, but the homebrew scene has been just plain making me happy. There are hundreds of homebrew apps that have been filling in the gaps (include a homebrew app “store”, scientific calculator, timers/stopwatches, a terminal, and yes, a great tethering app).
• Headset/Microphone – one thing that is maybe a bit esoteric for some, but is actually up there with my biggest niggles, as I use this all the time is that there are some strange things with how the Pre interacts with my wired headsets. I use Ultimate Buds as my primary headset. They’re great for music and they conveniently have a remote and microphone – which the Palm Pre actually supports, with both the single click play/pause, and the double-click next track. That’s great! Unfortunately, after pausing for 5 seconds, the Pre “goes to sleep” and stops responding to the TRRS signal – to unpause, you’ll need to hit the power button or otherwise wake it before it’ll respond again. This is took a while to figure out, and is somewhat maddening – it also makes pausing somewhat useless and makes me wonder if anyone bothered to test this feature. The second big annoyance is that unlike the iPhone, which gives no microphone feedback, the Palm Pre gives you lots of microphone feedback – in fact, much more feedback than the other side of the line receives – so much so that it becomes impossible to hear the other side when there’s even moderate wind or traffic noise. This doesn’t happen without the headset and is downright retarded.

Now, while the list looks a bit weighted towards complaints, and while there are definitely some issues that well… verge on total brokenness (I’ve submitted the worst problems to Palm), most of these issues seem like they can be fixed via software updates, and on a day-to-day level, I’ve been mostly satisfied with my Pre.

The experience is absolutely not as good as the iPhone, but I guess at the end of the day, it’s still much more usable than the Android, and for me, it’s worth supporting an alternative because well, despite Schiller’s outreach, the the App Store really is abominable, not just in its practice/actuality, but also, after having given it some thought, and reflecting on its implications, as a general model.

Mobile devices are the next generation general computing/network access platform and having a device manufacturer as a post-facto gatekeeper is just not right. Getting rid of end-to-end not only reverses the freedoms that spawned the innovation on the Internet, but also creates a bottleneck on software development/distribution that I’ve never seen in modern general computing…

Oh, also: AT&T can suck it.

Definitely the movie I’m most looking forward to this fall.

• God / Admin Interfaces: Wielding Them on Social Applications, Gavin Bell
• Gaming the Crowd: Turning Work Into Play, Andy Baio
• Selling Physical Things in a Digital World, Zack Rosen
• Understanding Lies, Deception, and Truthiness in Social Media, danah boyd
• Products vs. Users: Who’s Winning?, Chris Wetherell
• Stay Classy, SXSW: Building Respectful Software, Matthew Rothenberg
• Building Your Local Open Government Tribe , Hillary Hartley
• In Code We Trust: Open Government Awesomeness, Noel Hidalgo
• Flickr Engineers Do It Faster, Myles Grant
• Persuasive Design: Encouraging Your Users To Do What You Want Them To!, Andy Budd
• Maps, Books, Spimes, Paper: Post-Digital Media Design, Chris Heathcote
• Design Strategies: Driven By Data or Inspired by Intuition?, Kate Aronowitz
• User Experience Without Design, John Zeratsky
• Designing For The Mobile Web, Now, Kevin Tamura
• The Aesthetics of Pervasive Gaming, Dan Dixon
• Search Patterns: Tangible Futures for Discovery, Peter Morville

Overall, I’ve remained relatively happy with the Kindle – I continue to carry it around with me pretty much anytime I’m traveling (bus, train, or plane) and the day to day experience, remains largely the same. This sums up both the pros and cons – it’s useful enough to be probably my most used device after my computers and cell phone because it just works – it takes only a few seconds to wake up before you’re up and reading, and only requires a few minutes of charging every few days (whenever I get around to it). On the flip side, there haven’t been (m)any major software updates. The listing screen remains as useless for managing a larger number of books, and the browser, which I use a fair amount for reading longer articles remains as weak as the day I got it.

As for the deletions, post-hoc edits, and other issues… it’s certainly remains problematic – hopefully the high profile of these occurrences force more people to think about its implications and consequences (as I did when I bought my Kindle, I’ll point out Mark Pilgrim’s essay – in light of what has happened, those that attacked the essay as polemic or hyperbolic might reconsider these dangers as quite real, and without the proper checks and balances, inevitable). That being said, in practice, my personal usage hasn’t been impacted much. I’ll probably feel differently when I decide to switch reading devices.

When I got my Kindle, I started keeping tracks of my purchases in a spreadsheet. Some details:

• I’ve bought about two dozen books on the Kindle this past year. Lower than I would have thought, but I’ve been pretty busy this past year…
• About 3/4 of these books are Mobi vs Topaz formatted. While there are tools for decoding your mobi books, there are none for Topaz books
• Over 3/4 of the books are also non-fiction, for whatever reason
• I didn’t keep track of the samples I’ve downloaded and while you can see your order history on Amazon’s site, they don’t display your sample downloads (I can’t imagine Amazon not actively crunching those numbers internally)
• I marked down the price on Amazon when buying the Kindle books, my overall savings rate vs the Amazon price for the physical book was 39.07% or $157.84, (nowhere near the cost of the device).

On that last point though, even beyond factoring in the convenience factor, I guess that’s not quite a complete picture. I’ve also read about about the same amount of books from ManyBooks.net and other sources. And I’ve sent myself lots of documents (it seems that Amazon only started charging the delivery fee recently), and I’ve also read a few hundred articles via the browser (primarily using pushpopurl) – in fact, my default behavior for longer online articles is now to save them for reading online later. It’s not perfect – the Kindle browser really sucks, has not control over font size or line-height, and often has strange spacing issues, but even with those drawbacks, the reflective e-ink screen is so much easier on the eyes that it’s still worth it.

Nicholson Baker recently wrote a long article in the New Yorker which was pretty negative about Kindle (which I read on the Kindle, of course), and while many of his complaints are valid, I think he misses some of the point – while the E-Ink screen might not be as good as paper, for reading big chunks of text, it’s a huge improvement over a monitor. If you travel or are in the habit of reading multiple things at at once… well, you just can’t do that with physical books. He ends up recommending the iPod Touch for reading, but that doesn’t work very well outdoors or in sit-down transit (I’ll agree the iPhone is much more convenient in the subway). That he talks about the bright glow and the pleasant experience of night-time reading though seems to tell me that he doesn’t spend nearly as much time staring at screens as I do. Lastly, I’ve found that none of the other alternatives (even the iPhone) are as slick as the Kindle for personal documents. Emailing yourself a wide range of formats and getting it converted and delivered via 3G and having it pop up at the top of your reading list is just a very pleasant experience.

My major frustrations really revolve around form factor (well, being able to reasonably read A4/Letter sized two-column technical papers) and that I’m not able to better track my reading activity – not that I’d want a third party to have that information necessarily, but the types of self-instrumentation and tracking for reading patterns and the like is… exciting to me.

My next report will probably be in a year, or maybe a bit earlier if there’s a compelling alternative (the Plastic Logic reader form factor and feature set look great, however the performance might be a bit of an issue – having already gone through one horrible reader, I don’t think I’d be willing to compromise much on power management, wake-up and page turning performance).