Archive for May, 2007

After relative radio silence for a while, Palm has announced its newest device. The Palm Foleo is billed as a “smartphone companion”, and allows users of Palm’s popular Treo devices (and maybe others) to wirelessly sync all the stuff they have on their phones onto something a little easier to type on and read from. The Foleo sports a 10″ LCD, full size QWERTY keyboard and lots of other features for road warriors who do tons of email with a Treo-type device.

And I have to admit: this seems like a really nice sub-notebook for the very narrow demographic its intended for. It’s small, light, and has zero-startup time so you can rapidly check your email in line at the airport or in the back of a taxi and stow it away. However, I think it’s also susceptible to the “but where’s the” treatment from everyone else. I think a smart way to get around that stigma would be to do what Palm will likely do and aim this thing squarely at the same folks who buy Treos—corporate types with a huge need for constant email access.

But with all its neat features, even when aimed precisely at the domain where it might succeed, it reminds me of some other miracle convergence products that came and went with little fanfare—The 3Com Audrey, and to a lesser extent the PowerBook 2400.

When the Powerbook 2400 debuted in 1997, it was the ultimate subnote: fast, full(ish) sized keyboard, 10.4″ display. It was a huge hit in places like Japan where tiny laptops are still all the rage. In the states, however, where laptops of the day came with every option onboard or hot swappable the 2400 suffered and was cancelled a mere 8 months after its release. Something about trading in your peripherals for a tiny footprint, coupled with having to lug around a separate floppy drive and CD-ROM drive (and their attendant custom tether cable) was not so appealing. And I’m not saying that the Foleo is the same; but something about the brains of the computer being attached to your hip while all the display capability is in your briefcase seems a little schizophrenic to me.

The release of the Foleo is not the end of the story though, it’s the beginning. It’s an opportunity for Apple or some crazy Chinese manufacturer to release a tiny, flash based laptop that does everything a MacBook does but with zero startup time and a DVD drive. Slap a $799 price tag on it, take a $50 loss on each unit and you’re good to go. You’ve built a market on subnotes that only bloggers will buy that adds to your coolness factor, and pads your market cap nicely.

When I started blogging almost ten years ago, there were hosted services like LiveJournal and there was Movable Type. MT was the king of the hill as far as features and mindshare went; it found its way into most hosting accounts and it became ubiquitous.

When I moved to Media Temple I did so in part because my account could include, for a paltry $5 extra per month, a Movable Type installation. For several years my sites ran on MT, and I cursed it constantly. Nothing was easy; almost any plugin (if you can call them that) required template edits by hand. Linking templates to files meant static content finding its way into my carefully redesigned pages. When my domains were hacked about three weeks ago, all of these factors compounded to make recovery almost impossible. All my domains, even the minor ones, had been severely compromised and would need endless handwork—even with backups—to work again because of the draconian way you do everything in MT.

Yesterday I started to read a little bit about WordPress, a CMS package that I had been brainwashed to think was “oversimplified” and “childish”. I, after all, was used to having to do sitewide rebuilds after changing errant punctuation with MT. I was a power user! But somewhere I saw a screenshot of nothing more than the WordPress login page. I understood then what I had been missing. WP was to MT what OS X is to Windows Vista. Endless simple customization, powerful editing, no rebuilds, a common-sense template engine. I’ve been all over the system and I’ve not seen a single table yet. WP is semantic, easy and rewarding. MT, on the other hand, was the only piece of software in 14 years of computer use that still made me bang my hands on my desk in frustration.

WordPress has made blogging an immersive experience again, not something I do rarely and with trepidation. Besides, I have to blog just to see the admin interface and all its Ajaxified goodness.

The set up—including creating a user and moving my MT database—took about half an hour thanks to Media Temple’s “One Click Apps”. I’m thinking that even on a non-managed machine this would be a trivial, forty-five minute thing. If you’re languishing in MT hell, or still use Blogger or another managed system I urge you to convert. If you’re half as glad as I am you’ll be dancing in the aisles.