Foleo: Hawkins peculiar extension to the mobile phone

Hawkins designed the original (since debased) PalmPilot as an extension to the PC rather than a Newtonish replacement for a PC, now he's imaging the Linux-based Foleo as an extension to a phone (emphases mine):

Hands-On with the Palm Foleo: More Cool Features - News and Analysis by PC Magazine

... To respond, you need to be near a Wi-Fi spot or use the smart phone as a modem via its Bluetooth connection, which is why Hawkins calls Foleo a mobile companion and emphasizes the role of the smart phone in this type of digital lifestyle.

... It weighs about 2.4 pounds but feels much lighter, and even with its small battery it can deliver five full hours (even while using Wi-Fi the entire time). The large screen supports 1024-by-600 or 1024-by-768 VGA resolution. Navigation is done through a TrackPoint nub in the keyboard and it has a roller wheel below the keyboard to provide fast and easy scrolling. Foleo's price at launch will be $499 and it should be on the market by mid-summer.

... Foleo would give them a light, lower-cost option that could make it easy to hit the road without a laptop. But, whether planned or not, Hawkins may have actually hit on a more powerful mobile-computing idea. Since this is a small, lightweight Linux computer, it could eventually become a new stand-alone portable-computing platform that the Linux or open-source crowd embraces...

I don't get it. You can't put it in your pocket and it weighs and costs about as much as an XP laptop, but it doesn't replace a laptop. I assume it uses Flash instead of a hard drive. It sports an OS that corporate IT types will never accept (i.e. not Microsoft). It reminds me of the legendary Tandy 100 (I think that was the number -- the original road warrior palmtop), the numerous failed WinCE palmtops, the very shortlived Newton portable, the never-released PenPoint device ...

I just don't get it. A computing/email/browser extension for something like the hideous Motorola RAZR makes sense, but this isn't it. Either Hawkins has lost it or there's another part of the puzzle we don't know about ...

Update 6/2/07: Stross says there's another part of the puzzle. He claims it's a covert web 2.0 network computer device, Larry Ellison's old dream made real. I hate to think Hawkins has lost it, so I hope Stross is right. I still can't see it working within Palm's life expectancy however.

Update 6/4/07: Still trying to figure out how the Foleo makes sense. It makes very little sense by itself. What, however, if the Foleo enabled Palm to produce something like the iPhone?

via Brighthand

... Since that announcement, Palm's Jeff Hawkins told CNET that because the Foleo gives smartphone users the option of full-sized keyboard, then it might no longer be necessary for the Treo to have its own smaller one.

I don't want to reveal too much. But I can now think through the problem differently. I can think through tradeoffs. Well, if I have something with a bigger screen and a keyboard -- whether it looks like this (Foleo) or something else -- where I can view and manipulate data, does it change how I design this guy (pointing to Treo)? Yes.

Hawkins also suggested that Treo with larger screens or smaller form factors might also be possible.

Now it sounds like a multimedia Linux Palm/phone with an external Linux screen/keyboard option. The first part of the equation sounds a lot like an iPhone, but Apple hasn't yet announced its plans for an external screen/keyboard. This is something I used to ask about eons ago (on usenet actually); it makes sense to me.

MacLinkPlus Deluxe 16: a handy but costly tool for old-timers

The big news for the venerable $83 MacLink Plus 16 file format translator is read-only support for Office 2007 documents. There's still no support for OpenOffice/StarOffice open file formats, which is disappointing. It's also still a Rosetta application, running in emulation on Intel Macs. That's not too surprising considering the age of the code-base; version 6 came out in 1991 and I first started using it @ 1986. Looking at the release dates it seems to have been on hiatus since 2004, that suggests it was brought back from the dead recently.

There's no way to download a trial version. That's particularly worrisome given the age of the codebase -- does it really run safely on new machines? There's also no support for presentation software, such as PowerPoint - a viewer would be much appreciated! Symantec MORE 3.1 is not supported (Brad's site still has his 1999 MORE2XML converter and this dated page describes other options.)

So, is there any reason to be interested? Microsoft, for example, supplies free Office 2007 converters and I think NeoOffice and the soon-to-be native OpenOffice will open those documents. Heck, I expect the new version of my favored Nisus Writer will do it as well, not to mention a future update to Google Docs. Why spend $83?!

The only good reason can be support for very old file formats. MacWrite, WordPerfect, etc (but not, for example, Volkswriter and all those long forgotten apps of the early PC era). If you're an old-timer converting to the Mac this application probably makes sense. I'd be tempted if they offered a demo version I could hammer on for a month or so. I don't trust DataViz quite enough to buy a non-universal app without a trial ...

Apple Mail plug-in roundup

Apple Mail plug-in roundup - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) is a handy reference. I don't use any at this time, but most of my mail is still in an ancient Eudora archive ...

Using SymbolicLinker Symlinks to enable SMB share of an iMac OS X attached external drive

OS X Aliases are not useable by SMB clients (Windows machines). They appears as an unrecognized file type. BSD Symlinks, which you can create with SymbolicLinker, on the other hand, are visible to SMB clients. That's useful by itself, but that's only part of the trick I just learned.

I moved the 9 GBs of our image server (slideshow for several machines) JPEGs from my iMac to an external drive to reduce backup of redundant data (the images live in iPhoto Libraries as well) and to provide a bit of redundancy (images live on a separate drive as well as multiple other backups). That was fine for the iMac, but the SMB clients couldn't see them. Default SMB shares only work for the user directory.

Symlinks to the rescue! I used SymbolicLinker to create a symlink to the external drive folder (drive is set to ignore permissions) and put that symlink in my iMac user directory. When I access the symlink from the SMB machine it nicely resolves. The Symlink works below the level of OS X at the BSD level, so it brings BSD Unix behaviors to the file sharing process. That's what I wanted.

Slick indeed.

Scanning negatives: a workflow

Writing for O'Reilly Micah Walter describes a film scanning workflow. He's using Aperture, so he runs into Aperture's ridiculous limitation on editing timestamp metadata. Still, it's a good overview.

I'm surprised that no scanner vendor has really thought much about how to make this process more efficient.

Silverlight: WMV for OS X Intel

MS is porting a media centric portion of the .NET framework to OS X. This is Microsoft's Flash-killer. Nothing for Linux, but a Mac client is promised. Alas, the next version will be Intel only, no PPC support.

The lack of PPC support is revealing. This is a project to kill QuickTime/Windows and Flash. Once that is done Microsoft will abandon the Mac.

Google spreadsheets - keeping portions private

This is a handy Google Spreadsheet feature. You can now share just one worksheet in a files. So if you're using Google Spreadsheet for your baseball team you can share the page that has positions, but not the page with phone numbers and email addresses.

Now if only I could figure out how to use the Lookup function to reference a range on a different worksheet ....

OS X annoyances: user switching and the iPod

Apple does some things well, but it has its share of persistent defects and annoyances.

A search of Apple's kb on "user switching" iPod iTunes doesn't find any articles as of 5/07, but anyone who's switched users (accounts) on a machine with a connected iPod knows bad things can happen. The iPod is bound to a user account, not to a machine. When a new user takes over, the connected devices is passed to the new user -- and the OS offers to fix the corrupted device.

Yech.

This is a non-trivial problem to fully solve, but Apple could have done a lot to mitigate it. The OS should suggest dismounting connected iPods on logout or switch, and iTunes should be smarter about how it responds to a connected iPod post switch. Apple hasn't fixed this because only a small minority of their customers have multiple users on a single machine. In other words, they don't have enough family customers.

Grrr.

Update 9/9/08: iPhone/iTouch 2.0 finally fixed this problem! They are fast-user switching safe on OS X.

Shimo a GUI for the Cisco OS X VPN client

Shimo is an OS X app that constructs calls for the Cisco VPN command line client.

JavaScript: a modern update

Coding Horror reviews JavaScript. The links are particularly interesting for up-to-date sources. CH is somewhat Microsoft friendly, so I'm surprised they missed the chance to point out that Microsoft (gulp) made two very large contributions to AJAX. They established the asynchronous XML data exchange and they forced JavaScript into the standards world.

It's one of the great ironies of computing history that Microsoft's actions, which were in part efforts to torpedo Netscape, instead enabled Gmail.

Google on the move: Flash slideshows and way better book search

The shredding and digitization of a 2025 UCSD library was one of the central events in Vinge's recent novel, Rainbows End. In the book Vinge refers to Google's digitization efforts, and today the Memex company ("all knowledge all connected") has another big book announcement.

Note especially that Google Book Search is now integrated with local library services. Wow, what a slick way to mollify librarians ... (I'm now subscribing to Google's book search blog.)

Also, Flash slideshows -- which I'll certainly be playing with ...

Official Google Blog

... Now when you search you'll get both digitized book results as well as records for millions of other books that still just exist in the analog world.

When you view these new added [jf: analog] book records, you can often read reviews, a summary, or see what other people had to say about the book around the web.... we offer links to buy the book or find it in a library near you.

To find out more, check out our post on Inside Google Book Search.

and on another Google front today

... You can use our free photo sharing service, Picasa Web Albums, to create nifty portable Flash slideshows that you can easily embed in any blog or web page.

I tried the book search on my son's favorite book "So Others May Live", but our local libraries are not onboard yet. I'll have to see if I can encourage them to participate.

How to move a domain name

Moving a domain name from Network Solutions to the OpenSRS service used by my service provider (Lunarpages) was surprisingly complex. For the sake of anyone having to do this, these are the key steps:

1. Go to Network Solutions and login in to my account there.
2. Find the domain name, click on it, and find the control that locks the domain. Unlock it.
3. Now there's another obscure link on the same page that, confusingly, says "lock" or get "transfer code". Click on it and request the code. It's emailed out.
4. Now to to Lunarpages and fill out their form. They needed all kinds of things, including my credit card info (for verification - yes, it's stupid), domain information, copy of domain record, password for my cpanel access, etc.
5. Now it should hopefully transfer ...
   

Google search views: map and timeline

Google has opened their Experimental Search to the public. The cool ones are timeline and map, and you can use them for any Google search (they work best for people, organizations, places):

timeline: use the search term "view:timeline"
map: use the search term "view:map"

Try these:

"dark matter" view:map
"bill clinton" view:timeline

The standard view is "list view" but view:list doesn't work. I tried some other views but didn't find any easter eggs ...

Google redoes their search: Integrated search

The announcement suggests we try the new improved steve jobs search. I took more notice of the the new top menus associated with personalized search. They produce an odd fusion between search and Google services associated with my Gmail username. I'm not sure I see the point, but I'll keep playing with it.

Word 2007 XML File Format Converter for Mac

TUAW has the story. Alas, we all need this. BTW, TUAW is being quite impressive lately.