Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: PDA blues...
Iconoclast said:
Arguing a point does not imply defensiveness. What you wrote implied that the Pocket PC delivers an inferior user experience compared to other devices such as the Palm.
That's your inference, not my implication.
De gustibus non disputandum est. Judging whether a user experience is "inferior" or not is as arbitrary as deciding whether the Caterham 7 or the Taurus SHO is "better" to drive.
Hey, if anything, the Zaurus is even
less PDA-like than either the Pocket PC or Palm platforms. But still, I like typing little Python programs into it, so when I'm in the mood to do that, that's what I'll use.
I might have had strong opinions about what user interfaces should be in the past, but I gave them up a few years ago after reading Alan Cooper's
The Inmates are Running the Asylum. In it there's an extended rant about how waves a thousand dollars when going into Circuit City but can't buy a VCR that allows him to set the time with a dial instead of buttons. This bugged me, because I distinctly remembered there having been a universal remote controller with recording capabilities that had clock dials on it, with saturation advertising on television. I went to all the electronics stores in the neighborhood and visited the websites and called places that specialized in remotes.
I did finally find one sold at Walgreen's drug store and bought it. It was cheaper than most of the universal remotes that I had seen. I think it's pretty cool. It works with any VCR without programming (simply by sending out all known Record and Stop sequences).
But obviously, that's just because I like it, and it's purely ideosyncratic to me. Alan Cooper, no matter what he says, doesn't want one, because if he did he would just have gone out and bought one and shut up about it. Also, for all the design of the device might give me, Alan Kay, Donald Norman, Ben Shneiderman, and the rest of the UI Guru Crew shivers up and down the spine, it's obviously not what people want.
Because if it were what people wanted, with saturation advertising, a solid design, and a good price, it would be hideously popular. People could get it in Circuit City, and there would be knock-offs and upscale models with shiny Champagne knobs (or whatever the design trend is this week). Major equipment manufacturers would even license the design, and you'd see them starting to have this be the default remote. But this doesn't happen.
Another case in point. I bought a Go video deck. I was relatively flushed at the time, so I figured I might as well Buy American. It's the only deck I know that can copy a tape with one button press. It's also, and I only found this out after I bought it, the only deck I know of that sets the time automatically when you hook it up. I have no idea how--signals from WWV, perhaps? Anyway, it Just Works. But I haven't seen them conquer the market lately. Nor have I met anyone who notices, or cares, about this kind of thing. At all.
Oh, I think you've misread me there, the applications I write are industrial data logging apps, written for devices with onboard GPRS that transparently upload/download their data to or from a remote server whenever they have connectivity available.
Not sure whether or what I misread. I've written on contract a fair amount of Palm stuff, including the Symbol scanner library for NSBasic (and the shared library mechanism itself), and certainly these things have a big use in industrial settings.
I'd like to do more Pocket PC development, but right now I just cant justify shelling out relatively Big Bux for a device and development tools.
Who's blaming anybody? I'm not. I'm not even making any value judgements. Why so defensive?