Some Simple Thoughts

(For this conversation) there are two types of computer users, or ways that computer users go about doing things. Environment people and Data people. Environment people tend to go with very customized desktop computing configurations, and are super proficient with that set up. Data people don’t give a hoot about where they are, but need to be able to get at their info no matter how complex the path, or how inconsistently that data is presented to them.

I (like just about everyone) stratal these two camps, and struggle with the best way to get my work done. News reading (keeping up on tech - which is a big part of my job) is the latest task that is following a trend for me of moving from the Environment way to the Data way. 

The old (internet) way of keeping up on this sort of thing was to have a bunch of bookmarks in my favorite browser, and then open them one at a time and skim them for interesting stories. Each site had a look and feel. Some sites worked better in one browser or another, so I might have some IE and some Mozilla sets of pages I would look at. I would open all the pages at once, and stack the windows up in order, so that I could read one, close it, and be ready for the next type of info I could consume. I even wrote scripts to open and stack the collection so I could gobble them up with my lunch. Very efficient.  Then the browser support got better, and tab support in browsers came along, so I could go down to one browser for news reading (Safari), and that made the environment even more consistent and efficient. 

Then RSS feeds came along. And Safari’s RSS support made the transition easy. I was able to set up a bookmark collection of RSS pages, and they would alert me when they had unread stories on them. This let me get at ‘new news’ faster, but doing that breaks the Environment of reading things in a set order, and disrupts the efficiency of the mind set I used to use. The RSS reader pulls all the unique formating from the news sites (the environment becomes more consistent then, but the “type of data” queues that the web design gave are now lost as well). And due to the duplication of big news stories across feeds, I started mixing all of my RSS feeds together and sorting them by “newest” so that they tend to clump, and I can skim the headlines. I felt like I had made the logical transition to the “Data” model for this sort of work compared to what I had done before. I was able to skip duplicate data with greater ease,  I able to keep up on the ‘freshest’ news out there, and I did not re-read stories due to them not making an impression on me the first time. Some environmental efficiencies were lost, but over all, it seemed like I was done with the transition and it was a good one.

Then the iPhone came along. I use a laptop for a lot of things, but news reading was not one of them (I would have had to set up my book marks again, the laptop is not ’spontaneous’ due to its size, etc). But the iPhone did sync all of my RSS bookmarks off the bat. It would open them, and I could get a quick dose of news while waiting in a line somewhere. Great. But when I would go back to my Environment of reading  RSS news (Safari on my desktop) the items I had already consumed were not removed from the RSS list there. I was back to re-reading messages, but now they were not even located at the end of a collection. Old news to me was now mixed in with stuff I had not yet seen. This is jarring mentally, and messes up the efficiency of reading the news by forcing me to do some meta work regarding if I have seen some tidbit before.

So now I am testing out yet another step towards the data model. I am using Google Reader to handle my RSS feeds. By using a remote, web based RSS handler, I can get at it from multiple sources, and it will keep track of what I have read and what I have not. It also adds some nice “social networking” type stuff that I can “share” articles that are of interest, and anyone (especially by google talk friends) can see what I noted for sharing. I can also mark specific articles for myself alone, so I can go after them later. The grouping possible in the interface is limited, but it works well enough for me to make a “1 deep tree” that I can keep an eye on, and do some basic sorting of feeds via that. The reader itself (how it presents the data) still seems a little alien to me, and it does not do all the things I want it to (the level of expansion of stores seems to be fixed, I can not open up a full article in a new tab from the bottom of a story (I have to scroll back to the top), the built in “show original story” command opens the story in a new window rather than a tab, etc), but over all I think this move will to the Data view will be a good one. To fix the above things (really Environment issues) I think I will look into some of the desktop reader solutions, and see if those help. The idea is that I hope to get a good, efficient desktop Environment solution, but keep all the tracking in the open, shared, accessible Data solution.

This is clearly one of the things the Web2.0 stuff is all about. The interesting thing will be what happens when this becomes more and more successful. The big companies depend a lot on brand recognition/loyalty. Those are currently Environmental sorts of things. Google seems to be trying to move past that in some ways (you do google searches from all sorts of different places without ever SEEING google, you mix and match their technologies with others to get new tools outside of their space, etc), and I like that a lot. I respect it. But I don’t know yet if it makes me loyal. If I find a better remote RSS tracker thing than Google Reader, I will probably jump on it, and it will probably be easier than any of the transitions above. I guess to keep relevant in the minds of the Data folk, a company is just  going to have to keep producing the best products, and not let anyone get too far ahead of them. 

I have had use of an iPhone for a few months now, and I have not really posted any thoughts on the system yet, so I thought I would jot down a few things I have done to make my life work better with the device, some example uses, and an idea of one thing to make it better.

To make the device work a bit better for me, there are two simple things that took me a while to get quite right. 

The first was getting my bookmarks in order. I was in good shape to start with, as I was already using Safari to organize the sites I use most often, and they were categorized by the type of work that I do. This synced to the iPhone with no problem, but these links were for the main web page of a site, and there are more and more ‘iPhone optimized’ versions of sites out there. So I created an iPhone collection of bookmarks to hold links to these sorts of sites. That worked reasonably well, and once I moved that collection to my “bookmarks bar” (ie I put it up as a peer collection to my other collections) I have found that navigating between this collection and my ‘organization based’ collections is faster, and the iPhone group does not get in the way.

The second thing I needed to do was to copy and paste email addresses. This is not supported on the iPhone (no copy and paste at all). I have some FAQ sorts of things that come to me, and so being able to forward a canned response a few times a week saves me a lot of typing. But my brain is too old to memorize complex email addresses. So what I have created and addressbook entry for a user with the name • • (those are option 8 characters - this sorts this person to the bottom of the iPhone contacts list, and does not make the name that shows up in the email look too strange). Then if I need to copy and address, I just add it to my • • user, with a custom type of the current date. Then I go into the message I want to forward (I keep some as postponed message for easy access to the most used ones) and then add that address in to the ‘to’ filed. All I have to remember is the date :).

As for personal use stories of the iPhone, the most surprising to me was what a great alarm clock it is. I sleep light, so its ‘waking’ ability is not the real benefit here. The jem for me is that as soon as I turn off the alarm, I am holding a device that has all the email that came in while I was sleeping, and knows my calendar. By the time I stager in to brush my teeth in the morning, i am aware of what is waiting for me at work. Forwarding my office phone to the device has also been a major boon in keeping in contact with people looking for me.

My idea for improvement is a simple one. I have not yet sent it to apple via their suggestion path, as I am waiting for the next (soon) update to the iPhone to come out, to make sure it is not already there (no need to make work for others if it is not needed.

I lock my iPhone. I was looking at the screen the other day, and realized that if I lost the phone, the average person would have no way to contact me to let me know they had it. An emergency technician would not be able to look in my address book for an ICE contact item.

I think the answer to this is simple, and might even save a life down the line. I think that part of the iPhone configuration should be the creation of a dedicated “emergency contact” entry on the phone. This system could ask for any known medical conditions, allergies, or special considerations, as well as emergency and personal contact information (in the form of phone numbers). A picture of yourself (for identification purposes in case of real emergency) should be included. This information could then be stored as part of the contacts list on the phone, labeled in a way that emergency staff could find it easily, and a link that allows viewing of this contact entry could be added to the ‘lock screen’ of the iPhone.

But that is probably enough rambling about the iPhone for now. There may be more soon, as the new software should be available shortly :).