ThoughtsOnThinking

Online Note-Taking Apps, and Evernote

Interesting post on online note-taking apps here. 

Looks like Evernote has grown and changed quite a bit -- last time I looked at it, it was Windows-only I think, and basically just a note-taking app that featured (was centered around, if I recall correctly) a timeline view / navigation function.  Now, it looks like it comes with some pretty smart OCR/HWR technology, though at first glance (haven't tried it yet) that appears to be server/service centric. Wonder how it compares to OneNote's capabilities in those same departments.

They've also apparently switched from a software licensing model to a software-as-service model.... which I think has it's place, but so does the former, in areas requiring long-term data persistence especially. The other downside I see is the limited web snippet and photo counts (for a serious note-taker), even for their paid version.

On Corporate Transparency -- Kudos to DevExpress

Just a quick shout-out to the crew at Developer's Express for their recent, and seemingly transparent-as-they-can-be, road map post.  Julian Bucknall, the author, left an insightful comment on my Delphi upgrade perspective post a while back.  I found it especially interesting because it shows in part the implications of non-transparency, especially among mutually-dependent firms.  It's nice to see some of the major players in the community laying out their intentions more openly.  Frankly, I think there's enough risk in technology development investments as it is --- why do we need to add to it with non-visible intentions?

I remember not that many years ago, when DevExpress was an absolute black box when it came to such matters -- you really, as a customer, had no idea where they were going to invest their efforts.  Thankfully, those days are no more, for an increasing number of vendors.

Thanks for that, Julian and the rest of the DevExpress team over there -- it's appreciated.

Nice GUI Design / Mockup Tool

Cool Software App #3

More than once in consulting work, I've needed a tool to quickly mockup user interfaces to help client envision the screen interactions, data structures, and/or overall look-and-feel of a proposed system that I'm helping define requirements for.  As I've seen it, the solutions to do that are basically limited to: 1) Photoshop (Fireworks, GIMP, etc) 2) Actually creating the screen in an IDE like Delphi, VB, or whatever, or 3) Visio, using the shapes intended for UI design.

Photoshop works, but in my opinion it's generally a pretty inefficient method for creating what begs to be created w/predefined drag-and-drop shapes. 

Using the IDE directly seems to invariably cause issues when mocking up actual data, needing to be able to compile to get the actual screencap, and is usually too cumbersome as well, in my experience.

Visio, well, no offense intended toward Rob, but I found trying to design UI screens in Visio quite cumbersome, and the outcome results-wise bit less than satisfactory.  (But in fairness, I don't think Visio's primary design intent is to mock up UI screens, and my work with it for this purpose was quite a few years ago).

So it's been interesting, and sometimes a little annoying, wishing someone would come along a create a tool to quickly knock those occasional UI mockups that can be so helpful in the requirements-defining process.  Finally though, someone has decided to address this need.  The app is still a little gooey (pardon the pun) from not quite enough bake time, but I think it's a valiant first effort, and at it's once-introductory price of $24.95, it was a steal.  (Note that now $79.99 for the "personal edition," which arguably feels a little on the high side to me given where the app is at, but I'm sure others will think it's a bargain even at that price).

At any rate, I like it, and look forward to seeing where the author takes it in terms of development.  If it sounds like something you might be interested in, it's called Designer Vista, and a 20-day trial version is available.  You can check out more at the web site here.

Upgrades and Downgrades - an Update

Just as a follow-up to my earlier lament re: Windows Vista (side note: What a book cover!) and upgrading to Delphi 2007: I ended up acting on both. 

Vista / XP / Toshiba: Called Toshiba to see if they would downgrade my Satellite notebook to Windows XP, and though the tech I talked to very much understood and could empathize with my situation, I was informed Toshiba had no plans to offer XP on that machine.  I thought about downgrading manually, but I knew drivers would be a nightmare.  The showstoppers for me with Vista were network incompatibilities w/VMware (the wi-fi adapter wouldn't show up as a virtualize network adapter, which could be a hardware issue, regardless of OS), and various specific-software incompatibilities that were just getting too annoying (namely, some graphic-intensive stuff, and a few older apps that I use regularly).  I ended up bying a Dell Inspiron, which offered XP as a free downgrade, and which had more RAM to boot (but less hard drive space).  I'm running happy as a clam now. 

Not, though, that I basically agree with Joe Stanton's point: "From my POV, this all sounds just like the when XP SP0 was released, everyone hated it and stuck with Windows 2000 until SP1 and SP2 came out. Now XP is the old reliable mule?" 

Truth is, I found XP pretty darned annoying when it came out too, for many of same reasons.  In general, I find Microsoft's propensity for wheel-reinvention and eye candy  frustrating... but maybe that's just me.  Given the choice, give me improved functionality over useless glam any day of the week.  (Not to say that beautiy is not important -- in fact, I think it's one of the key indicators of elegance.  It's just that I prefer it built-in, not bolted on).

OK.... man I've got opinions about UI stuff.... sheesh.... "shut up already, Cass".... <g>

Delphi 2007 / CodeGear RAD Studio:  CodeGear had a special  running until December 31 that enticed me to go ahead and take the plunge.  Since I run my development environment on virtual machines, I've been able to run parallel with my Delphi 6 setup while getting D2007 up to speed.  More on all that later, but suffice it to say I compiled my first real project two nights ago, and overall my impression of Delphi 2007 is good.

Lastly, Rob touches on some of the why-use-third-party components issues.  Short answer: If I have the choice between writing-from-scratch, or instead dishing out a few hundred dollars for say, 250,000 lines of world-class, fully-tested code -- with source -- I'll take option B every time.  ; )   That said, it's still harder to upgrade from one version of Delphi to another than it ought to be.  Like I said, more on that later...

Win32 on Mac without Parallels or Boot Camp

Interesting post from a Delphi developer re: one of his customers deploying his app on a Mac with Crossover.  Hmmm...... sounds pretty cool...

AudioGrabber / Vista, and More Thoughts on the Previous Post

Looks like there are other little dictatorial coercions from Microsoft that cause problems with AudioGrabber.

The other thought that I'm having on the XP downgrade, is that Toshiba doesn't (yet -- but sure wish they would) offer it as an OEM option.... which not only means the driver hassles I thought about already, but also that I'll lose all the included OEM software as well.  : (   

Agh.....

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Update on this -- got this issue fixed.

...and some more thoughts:

Joe Stanton (where's your blog, Joe? <smile>) made a good point here, IMO:

From my POV, this all sounds just like the when XP SP0 was released, everyone hated it and stuck with Windows 2000 until SP1 and SP2 came out. Now XP is the old reliable mule? So far I have had very good, even excellent, results with Vista, and it is the OS that MS is selling and is being put on all new computers.

Reading that reminded me that I've never been anything even remotely close to an "early adopter" on operating system (nor most get-my-work-done day-to-day software, for that matter), for this precise reason -- it's too much of a pain in the neck putting up with all the inevitable hardware and software incompatibilities (usually the latter being the back-breaker for me). 

Joe's right -- when XP came out, I remember all kinds of laments similar to my own here.... but I just happily worked in Windows 2000 for probably a full year after XP came out, and avoided most of the hassles.  By then, the transition was relatively painless. 

Unfortunately, the timing of my last laptop's demise forced buying a new one at that critical moment in time where Microsoft is trying to foist its latest OS on the masses via OEM licensing.  ...and given that, downgrading becomes a hardware incompatibility (and pre-packaged-software abandoning) problem.... which has obvious major downsides as well.

So hey, Toshiba, are you planning on joining the XP downgrade bandwagon for at least a little while?  I sure wish you would. 

Meanwhile, how do they say?  Rock -> Me <- Hard Place

(Where "Me" = Hundreds of thousands of computer users who have better things to do than try to get their computers working normally again....)

Running a Mac in VMware

Prior to buying the G4, I invested quite a bit of time in trying to get some kind of virtual or emulated implementation going.  I really wanted to run Mac OS X inside my Windows machine, because I'm not eager to migrate to a completely new platform, and I don't like switching back-and-forth between multiple mouse/keyboard setups.  I tried Pear PC w/no luck sometime back, and tried it again on another machine later, but again w/no luck (and quite a bit of wasted time).  Once OS X became available on the Intel chipset, VMware seemed to be a logical approach, and so I went after that for a while.

If you're on the same road, let me save you some time: Don't bother.  It IS possible to get OS X to run inside VMware as a fully-fledged virtual machine -- I've done it -- but it is WAY WAY WAY too slow once you get there.  I mean horrendously slow.  Click a button, go-make-a-sandwich-while-the-menu-opens-up slow.  Seriously.  Don't even go there.

The better route, at least as far as I've found, is to just pick up a cheap older Mac (eBay is your friend for this), and just run the thing headless.  It works well, and is easy to set up.  I may post more on that later, but for now, just two links, to save you from some other dead-end options :  Server (on the Mac), and client (on the Windows machine).

Inspecting Mac-Land

Those who know me well know that I have a huge passion for that broad category of software I call "thinking tools".  One such tool that has long seemed worth a look to me (I have a fairly extensive collection of such software), is an app called Tinderbox which, though supposedly a Windows version is in the works, only runs currently on the Mac.  I've never quite found nor yet created the thinking-tool app that is still "in my head", but Tinderbox seemed, looking at it from the outside, to have a number of the attributes I've always thought were essential: multiple ways of viewing the data/notes, caters well to emergent structure as opposed to strictly predefined structure, etc.  I'll probably write more about Tinderbox later, but I mention it here because it's basically the main reason I've been interested in checking out the Mac platform to begin with -- it's conceivably seemed like it could be the "killer app" that would make the Mac platform a necessity to me.  (I'm been running mostly Windows, currently and historically).

Mark Bernstein of Eastgate Software is the creator of the app, and I've been following his blog for some time (My two-sentence review: Thoughtful, well-reasoned, and "civilized".  He sometimes uses words about food that I have to  look up to understand. <g>).  His book The Tinderbox Way is marvelous read, articulating many of the thoughts and inherent design tensions involved in architecting such a tool.  I actually bought the book before I ever saw the software first-hand.

At any rate, the short version of this story is that I finally broke down and spent a couple hundred bucks for an old Mac G4 so I could check out Tinderbox personally.  I have quite a bit to share about the details of trying to set up a "Virtual Mac" that you can run from within Windows... but more on that later.  For now, say "hi" to my new friend, Highlander:

Geo-tagging, Photography, and Virtual Travel

I finally got around to posting another web album tonight.  Prior to that though, I was enjoying some "virtual travel" in Google Earth, freshly inspired by a conversation today at the office during lunch.

I've long believed that ubiquitous wireless Internet connectivity and GPS data receiving are both "givens" as to what the future will bring, technology-wise.  They are both already here, in terms of the technology itself, and have been for quite a while, but I think we're just now on the cusp of the "ubiquitous" part, which is where the sea-changes happen. 

It's just a matter of time, I think, before we see GPS location-stamping built into digital cameras fairly pervasively.  I'm not the first to post about this, obviously, but it's interesting seeing the convergence of technologies surrounding mapping-meets-photography.  Panaramio is built into Google Earth now, which lets you cruise around and find pictures like this, (which looks remarkably similar to this, don't you think? <g>).   From the comments on the O'Reilly Radar article above, I also found yourmap.com (boy, they need a new website design, IMO), GeoSpatial Experts (ditto...), and GPS PhotoLinker looks promising at first glance too.  There's also Mapping Flickr, which I haven't explored much yet, and, not related to photo-mapping at all, TerraServer-USA, which has a nice set of topographic overlays built in -- another way of mapping three dimensions instead of just two.

I've also been checking out Picasa 2.0 recently, which is a big improvement over version 1 in my opinion (I wish it handled date-based navigation in conventional calendar-based ways, rather than just its eye-candy-laden (encumbered?) "Timeline" view, but I digress....).  It has some neat initial forays into integrating w/Google Earth, to allow the user to geo-locate a photo by pointing to the location in GE, which could work well for me.  Perhaps (I'm not sure), the Picasa-hosted web albums could integrate this functionality as well?  I'm not eager to fork over yet more data and pictures into the Google Machine just yet, so for now I'll just watch.

Overall, it's an interesting space though, mapping images to geographic maps in two and three dimensions.  (Here's a bonus link on the three-dimensions front: photo tourism). 

One thought that comes to mind is this: How will things look when Google Earth and other image-mapping technologies start adding a fourth dimension: Time?  I once watched a History Channel show that walked the viewer though the Battle of Normandy by linking all these technologies together -- 3D image mapping (using the aerial shots taken that day, mapped to a 3D map, much like Google Earth does now), but also time-stamped, so they could walk through the day and show / explore what happened.  It was fascinating.  Imagine what it would be like to be able to scroll though time as well as space in Google Earth (wait - isn't that what it's called?... space-time?), seeing things such as the expansion of a city over time, or pre- and post-war (or natural-disaster) shifts, etc.   

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(BTW... What's the point of this site?.... it shows up as a sponsored link when you search Google for "picasa": http://www.24-photo-software.com/, but doesn't look like it's officially related to Picasa, it doesn't appear to generate ad revenue, and it doesn't go anywhere...)

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Update (04/01/2007): Just stumbled across this, looking for info re: Google Earth's KML files.... looks interesting: RoboGeo and Google Earth.

VBA is about as consistent as English...

The kind of language sloppiness that drives you (OK, me...) crazy if you're a Delphi developer mucking around in an Access app.  Agh... 

(I may have to do some Object Pascal work for fun this evening, just to cleanse my brain...)