While following Friday’s ruckus on Signal vs. Noise, I noticed the prior post was a reader shoutback entitled “The tools you use”. I like monkeying with new tools and toys as much as anyone, so I scanned through it and noticed a reference to a web application called iUseThis. Think of it as Digg for your hard drive. You can submit a program to the site, and everyone else who uses that app can sign up and say “I use this application.”

I went ahead and created a profile of the software I use. I was going to add it to the Signal vs. Noise comment thread, but said thread is several days old now, so I won’t bother. Feel free to link up your own profile here, though.

iUseThis, being a good little Web 2.0 app, features application tagging. However, only the “owner” of an application (is that the author, the submitter, or both?) can add tags to that app. I think that’s missing the point. People use tags to categorize their own data. The list of apps I use is my data and I can’t organize it (actually, there’s not even a way to sort the list). Compare it to my del.icio.us page — I can add whatever tags I want to my links, and that adds value to my information. On iUseThis, I would have liked to tag my “work” apps (TextMate, Transmit, Minuteur) and my “play” apps (Google Earth, iTunes) separately. Do all the programmers out there care that I manage my photos with iPhoto, or that I like to write with Scrivener? I’m guessing not so much. I hope the folks behind iUseThis pick up on that, and add user tagging to applications.

And finally — yes, I recognize the irony of trying a new toy that helps you find new toys to try. It’s almost as bad as writing about writing…

Last Wednesday was my wife’s birthday. She asked for a pair of white rocking chairs for the porch. Newly-minted househusband that I am, I hauled two big boxes home from Wal-Mart and spent ten minutes assembling two nice new rocking chairs.

This was followed by twenty minutes scraping the gooey residue of several “this end up” stickers off said chairs. (I know, lighter fluid would’ve dissolved it right away.) Yesterday, Signal vs. Noise confirmed what I knew in my heart: whoever produced these chairs cares not a whit for the butts that sit in them.

As of Thursday, October 27, my main brain once again has an Apple logo on it. You may recall that I was expecting to wait until Halloween to get it — ground shipping from Shanghai and all that — but FedEx really pulled a fast one on me. It showed up at my door on Thursday — twenty-five hours after leaving China. Yeah, there may be some International Date Line magic in there, but I don’t believe so. Major cool points to Apple and FedEx for managing customer expectations and then brilliantly exceeding them.

The Powerbook is a great machine, and I’m really enjoying it. I’ve even been able to buckle down and do some actual writing with it. I expected to spend a good week tweaking and playing on it, but as soon as I got all my settings and apps copied over from the iMac (a process that occurred flawlessly while I slept), I wanted to start writing with it. So here’s my first post from the Powerbook (well, yesterday’s Startup Junkie ping was the first, but who’s counting?).

I had to sell my first Powerbook because it wasn’t suited for the job I was trying to use it for. It feels good to know that this one is serving its exact purpose so far.

If you haven’t read this series of posts from a few weeks back, I’ve been itching to sell my Tablet PC and make the Switch to a Powerbook. I made myself wait until Apple came out with new, higher-resolution models — which was originally rumored to take place a month ago. Uncle Steve made me wait until last week, during which time I halfheartedly watched two dozen Powerbooks come and go on EBay, but after last Wednesday, I have no more excuses.

I took the plunge on Monday and surfed on over to the Apple Store. After a brief but violent disagreement with the Apple Credit application, which I lost (I couldn’t convince those automated anti-fraud questions that I did not know anyone named “Barbara Rd”), I dropped the order on my poor Amex card and eagerly awaited the email that said… my order should ship by the end of the week, and should be here by the end of next week.

Like Tom Petty said, when it comes to gear lust, the waiting is the hardest part.

(Continued from Part 3)

OK, I’ve given a few reasons why I love and hate my Tablet PC. Here’s the reason I’ve come down on the hate side, and why I’m selling mine:

The Tablet PC is terrible for writing.

Ironic, no? Unless you’re the type of writer that writes every word out longhand first, this machine is not going to be much help. Sometimes I do lean that way. I wrote the first 4 or 5 SRC posts by hand on the Motion and then converted them to text. However. By the time you run the recognition engine on your chicken scratch, fix all the wrong words, and delete all the random line breaks, you may as well have retyped the whole thing — and retyping has its own benefits. A post often begins life in my Moleskine notebook. I do most of the editing with fresh eyes as I’m transcribing into the computer. You don’t get the same effect when you’re correcting the tablet recognizer’s typos.

When I bought the Motion, I was looking for an ultraportable machine, something that could replace my generic Windows laptop. I wanted a machine I could program on, and something that might change the way I looked at portable computing. For two years, the Tablet PC did just that. Despite its immaturity as a platform, the tablet is perfect for many users: managers, students, medical professionals, artists. Anyone who moves around a lot, and needs to jot things down literally on the go, would be very happy with a Tablet PC. That’s not what I’m looking for anymore. I want to write, and I want a machine that gets out of the way and lets me write. I’ll need something portable that also happens to be a good platform for development using open-source tools — just in case I find myself doing odd software jobs while making the career jump.

Which leads me back at long last to the Powerbook. I’m hoping for one more update to the line before they switch over to Intel processors next year. That’s the rumor, anyway.

So, anyone want to buy a Tablet PC, with docking station and sleeve, for $700ish?

(Continued from Part 2)

Last time it was all about the love. Today, as promised, here are my top few tablet gripes.

• No one has yet come up with a decent user interface for the pen. There are some decent third-party apps, but Windows itself is still very pen unfriendly. Column-based menus are a pain to navigate. Entering ad hoc text into, say, an IM, is aggravating. You can peck at the onscreen keyboard, use Graffiti-style single character recognition, or write your text out longhand and hope the tablet understands what you wrote. There is no way to teach it your personal handwriting. I hear this may be improved in Windows Vista.

• The Motion is SLOW. It’s barely adequate for development at a blazing 933 MHz. I finally got a desktop machine at work, so that’s not as much of an issue anymore. Newer, graphics-intensive apps like Google Earth tend to crash a lot. Yes, I know there are newer tablets that perform much better.

• I don’t go to many meetings. That sort of negates its usefulness in that arena.

• Orienting the screen in portrait mode is the most natural for me, but most Web pages and applications are optimized for 800×600, not 768×1024 — leaving the tablet user with some horizontal scrolling to do.

• The display driver doesn’t play well with some apps. Like I mentioned, Google Earth tends to crash, among other things.

• I can take notes in my handwriting, organize them just like I would a paper notebook, and search them later — but the format is proprietary. If I decided to leave the Tablet PC platform, I’d have to change my entire organizational paradigm. If I leave Windows, all the notes I ever took with the tablet are history, unless I print them all out. This is great for Microsoft, but not so good for me. So I never really committed to Journal or OneNote fully. I don’t want to get locked in — something I’m facing with PersonalBrain right now.

I’ll leave my biggest personal gripe (which may or may not be an issue for others) for the next post.

(Continued from Part 1)

Fast forward a year, from spring 2002 to spring 2003. The Vaio was my main workstation (work being too cheap to buy me a desktop machine) during that time. However, the object of my gadget lust was a Motion Computing M1200 Tablet PC. I just had to have something I could tote around to meetings and still run programmer-type apps on. I cashed in a developer discount, endured the long wait for the tablet to arrive, and sold off the Sony.

With 1GB of RAM, it outperformed the older Vaio slightly. The 12-inch screen was huge for a slate-style tablet. With the docking station, I could plug it in at work and use a keyboard, mouse and separate monitor. And boy, did I love taking it to meetings and showing people how I could write right on the screen. No one had ever seen anything quite like it.

After two years with the Motion, I still find it incredibly useful for many things. Here’s a short list:

• Couch surfing cannot be beat. Unlike a typical laptop, you can comfortably goof around on the Web and watch TV at the same time… as long as you aren’t doing a lot of data input or IM. More about that tomorrow.

• Stall surfing. Yeah, um, so I’ll leave the details of that one up to you.

• Ebooks are almost practical. The screen is big enough for two pages side by side if you like, and you won’t break your back carrying the tablet around.

• Notetaking is completely natural. In a meeting environment, you have to hunch over your traditional laptop, peering at the screen and banging away at keys. You aren’t looking anyone in the eye. You look antisocial. The tablet, however, balances right on one knee, or sits on the table like a notepad. You scribble your notes in it and can search back through them later. Microsoft’s OneNote is actually pretty good at this, although it tends to force you into too much structure.

• It’s a social device. You can load up something on your screen and pass it off to someone else to look at. They can mark up what you’ve done and pass it back.

• It’s a good quick-and-dirty recording platform. I loaded n-track on it and recorded several band practice sessions.

• It’s a digital picture frame. When people come over for parties, I set it up on its easel and have it slideshow through our photo library (which is stored on the iMac upstairs and accessed via WiFi).

• Instant messaging using ink is way cool. This assumes that you’re both using a current version of MSN Messenger.

I also have a list of gripes, of course. Check back tomorrow for those. Hey, I think I’m getting the hang of this serial posting business.

I love my Tablet PC.

I hate my Tablet PC.

I’m about five seconds from buying a Powerbook.

First, some background.

Rewind to early 2002, when I started a contract job doing Windows development. After working in the server room for a few days (no empty desks in the office), I realized I’d need a laptop so I could work in the relative comfort of the conference room. I had seen and drooled over Apple’s Titanium Powerbooks for awhile. I’d also heard of this little application called Virtual PC, which would let you run Windows applications on a Mac. Time for an experiment. I bought a lovely TiBook from a nice fellow on eBay, grabbed a copy of Virtual PC, and installed a few small apps: Windows 2000 Advanced Server, SQL Server, and Visual Studio. I proceeded to work on a large web project in Virtual PC on my Powerbook.

It was a miracle (or at least a testament to Apple and/or Connectix) that this worked at all. I was debugging an IIS application in Visual Studio, running on Windows Server, in a little window on an Apple laptop. It was also like working on a 286. It took Studio ten minutes to compile the app and another ten minutes to attach the debugger. It would be tough to justify my $90-per-hour paycheck at this rate. With a heavy heart I sold the masterpiece that was the TiBook, and picked up a Sony Vaio. A little bit of color left my world that day.

(to be continued)

Gizmodo has a great rant this morning on why backup should be idiot-proof. Synopsis:

• RAID is a proven technology
• people would gladly pay a few extra bones to never have to worry about losing data
• why is this not a standard option in consumer boxes?

Guilt strikes as I realize that my backup plan consists of burning CDs of our baby pictures every few months — when I remember to do it. I need to suck it up and go pick up a Firewire hard disk.

Back into my shell I go for a while, but I promise I have a few posts cooking.