unwiredben

Work continues with Mozilla.  We're about to go into a week of testing on the first beta release of Fennec for the Nokia N810.  I've got one major patch that should be in this release.  I've been working in the JavaScript code that acts as the front-end of the browser.  We had a problem that we could drag around the content of the page, but lists that were in the chrome around the page, like the URL suggestion list or the bookmark list, couldn't be moved.  My patch moved the drag handling to a higher level so it can be used to handle both cases.  Most of the implementation strategy came from Stuart and Mark, but I did the actual grunt work of writing the code and getting it to run correctly.

I really like the Mozilla review process.  Basically, I do work on my own machine and post it as a proposed patch to the bug.  Other people on the team get a change to review the change, and if they like it, they give it a thumbs up.  If they have issues, they post them back to the bug, I fix them, and produce a new patch.  Once the reviews are all accepted, the change gets landed in the source repository, and it goes into the next official build.

Outside of Mozilla, I've started doing some work with a new hacker group here in New York called HTINK.  The h is silent, so it's pronounced like "tink", and makes me a htinker.  We've got a big workshop we're doing here in NYC on March 14th where we'll be building lots of Arduino-compatible microcontroller boards and hooking them up to RGB LEDs and robot servo motors.  There's more stuff being discussed later in the year too.  I'm also working on material for an Arduino web server workshop where I'll show how to hook up one of the boards to your Ethernet and run a simple server on it so you can read sensors or change outputs.  That class will happen at NYC Resistor, probably in early April.

I'm wrapping up my first week as a paid employee of Mozilla; I'm still out in Mountain View right now, but I'll be heading back to New York tonight.

So far, it's been a great experience, although it's a major change from how I was working at Palm. It reminds me of when I first went to Metrowerks 10 years ago; I'm the new guy dealing with a lot of technology that I'd not seen before. While I've been using Firefox and the other Mozilla products for years, I never really had to dig into how it all worked. I'd a passing understanding of XUL and how the browser's front end used JavaScript to interface with a big pile of C++ code, but now I'm actually responsible for knowing how that connection works in intimate detail. There's been a lot to absorb.

However, most of the week has been more mundane stuff, like handling all the HR stuff, setting up a new laptop and figuring out how to build things for myself. Alas, Mozilla isn't 100% Joel test compliant; building the product isn't too hard to figure out, but it's not just "run this script". My current stumbling block is getting the Fennec build for the Nokia N810 working. It relies on a weird compilation environment called Scratchbox that tries to hide the fact that I'm building ARM code on a x86 machine from the build process. In theory, this works great. In practice, it means I occasionally get really weird error messages that require very analytical decoding.

I am excited by the UI possibilities of Fennec. It's core is the same as Firefox, but it's the UI where things are different. Buttons are bigger and designed for hitting with fingers, not mice. The UI tries to go away, giving you the maximum space for content. We're just now figuring out how to determine the best width to use for a given web page so we can zoom the appropriate amount to display content. We're also tacking problems like using a five-way navigator on a mobile device to move around a page effectively. These are things I've seen other browser do well, but they're problems that the Mozilla team hasn't had to handle before with their desktop focus.

The big difference with Mozilla is that we want to do all of this in an open fashion where it's easy for users to install add-ons that enhance their browsing experience or add capabilities to the browser. This justifies the work on getting the Gecko core into a widely distributed mobile web browser over just giving into Webkit. The Firefox add-on community does amazing things, and I can't wait to see that creativity on mobile devices. I'm already thinking of a few add-ons I'd like to write from the silly (turn all of the pictures on a page into low-res versions to simulate running on 8-bit computers) to the useful (e-book reading).

OK, back to work. I want to see code I built running on a N810 before I leave tonight.

I'm writing this from the San Jose airport, waiting for my flight back to New York on a late Friday evening. Earlier today, I turned in my employee badge at Palm. I've got another week working for them remotely, then I'm unemployed. This is only temporary.

Later this month, I start my new job as a software engineer at Mozilla working on their Fennec mobile web browser. I'm not entirely sure what I'll be doing there right now, but I expect it will have a lot to do with making the core web browser component (what they call Gecko) run faster and use less memory on mobile devices.

My leaving isn't an indictment of Palm. I'm really quite impressed with the new Pre phone and webOS, and I think the new products will be quite successful. I think we've found a really great way to help people manage their information and their life in a simple, elegant, and powerful way. When Palm releases the device and the SDK later this year, I expect to be among the first to start making applications for the system. I might even camp out at one of the Manhattan Sprint stores.

However, professionally, I've realized that it's time for me to move on. I've admired Mozilla and their Firefox browser for years, and when they contacted me about joining the team, I paid attention. I found their mission to be quite worthy, their people to be smart and friendly, and the technical challenged to be interesting. I'm also excited to be working on a vibrant open source project and to work in an environment built on worldwide collaboration. Plus, I can blog about my work again!

To all my friends at Palm: you've got my respect and my love, and I really wish you all the success in the world.

To my new colleagues at Mozilla: I'm very excited and can't wait to get started doing great things.

This is just a note for those who need to figure out why they can't use USB debugging with their Palm Centro smartphone. Apologies to my non-geek friends for this.

The Centro does support USB debugging, but you need to jump through some hoops to get CodeWarrior for Palm OS V9.3 to work with it.

CodeWarrior uses a DLL called USBPort.dll to talk to the device. It tries to be smart and looks in the Palm Desktop folder for this DLL. However, with the new desktop and HotSync manager, the API calls made to find that folder now tell CW to look in your "My Documents/Palm Desktop" directory. To get CW to find the DLL, just copy USBPort.dll from "C:\Windows\System32" to "C:\Documents and Settings\{USERNAME}\My Documents\Palm OS Desktop".

On the Centro, I also had to make sure other programs didn't use the USB port on the device before I got a reliable connection. Pocket Tunes Deluxe has a PC connection mode that you should disable by going into PTunes, going to "Prefs/Copy to PC Prefs..." in the menu, and changing the connect mode to "Off".

Also, the Centro's USB cable may not keep a good connection all of the time. When I tried debugging, I had to hold the cable in place to make sure it stayed tight. Using one of the older Athena connector cables that also had power can help with connection stability.

Reports are that USB debugging for Palm OS devices doesn't work at all with Windows Vista. I've not tried that OS to verify this, but it may just be the Palm Desktop 6.22 issue that I described above.

While organizing a drawer this morning, I decided to take a picture of most of my collection. If you click through to Flickr, you can read notes on each device.

The Foleo has made another end-of-year list. Wired has it at #8 on their list of Heartbreaking Gadgets for 2007, while Popular Mechanics had it at #1 on their Worst of 2007 list. Both lists don't rag on the device for its functionality; instead they attack Palm for how they launched it and then canceled it right before it was to ship.

While Apple's iPhone had a deserved #1 spot, the Palm Centro placed a respectable fourth place in Time Magazine's top 10 gadgets of 2007. Congratulations to our Centro development and marketing teams.

Palm returns to television ads with this one from Sprint for our new Palm Centro smartphone:



I like it; it's got a neat idea with the "more you" clones and it shows off the phone without being too geeky. The last TV ad that I saw for us was a Verizon ad for the 700p that ran back in the spring, and it was pushing their whole "the network" thing a little hard, with the army of peeps following the Verizon guy.

If you've seen today's tech news or the official Palm Blog, you'll see that my project, the Foleo mobile companion, has been canceled. I'm disappointed in this, but I understand the decision. We weren't ready to go to market with this, and it would hard for Palm to support two different Linux-based platforms going forward. I think we did some really great things with the platform; I'm proud of the concepts and a lot of the execution, but I think the cancellation was the right decision given Palm's future direction for our smartphones.

There's some exciting work here at Palm for me with the new phone platform and I'll be spending the rest of my trip out here looking at various options. I probably won't be able to talk about any of my work here again for a while, as I'll be in secret mode again.

Thanks to all of my supporters and friends online and in real life. ...and no, I can't get you one of our prototype units, although I fully intend on keeping my own devices for my personal use :)

Earlier today at the Palm , I was interviewed on camera for VUNet.com's website talking about our Foleo mobile companion device. You can watch the footage and see me in the "Learn" t-shirt at VNUnet's website.

Edit: Palm Infocenter also links to the story in their article LinuxWorld Hands-On Foleo Demo Video if you want to follow the usual "playa-hata" comments.

Edit 2: #comments made comments about the Foleo and referenced my video. The writer likes my marketing spin, and wishes Palm did that for other kinds of communications.

My panel from South by Southwest is finally online for your listening pleasure. You can get it from the SXSW site at http://2007.sxsw.com/blogs/podcasts.php/2007/08/08/designing_for_convergent_devices. It's not great entertainment, but I'm glad it's available and archived.

Right now, I'm out at LinuxWorld, about to go join my collegues on the show floor for the second day of the event. I fielded lots of Foleo questions yesterday, despite being sick with a cold. I'm still somewhat sick today, but I'm a trooper.

FedEx brought a package from California today, a black men's shirt that has "Foleo" above the pocket. I'll be wearing this on Thursday when I go to the Palm event at the store at Rockefeller Center.

This is actually the first shirt I've gotten for this particular project. It was secret for so long! I've actually gotten a few shirts out of Palm though; there was a polo shirt for beta testing the Palm Backup software, a grey t-shirt with a wire frame model of the Treo 680, the "Spring Launch '05" t-shirt that came out with the LifeDrive and features icons of a flower, a rocket ship, and 05 all in a row. My favorite shirt was from last summer when Palm had it's 10-year anniversary of the PalmPilot; it's another black t-shirt, but it has a reproduction of the napkin sketch that Jeff Hawkins made of the original Pilot 1000, the product that started the whole mess.

I got a couple of shirts out of PalmSource, but most were generic logo tees. My favorite was a bright purple shirt that we gave out for a developer sync-up for a project that was codenamed Dialtone. The shirt doesn't mention the codename, but below the PalmSource logo there's the caption "350Hz + 440Hz" which references the two frequencies that go together to make a dial tone signal in the US phone system.

When I was at Metrowerks, I accumulated a lot of shirts. I still have a couple of the "CodeWarrior for Be" and "CodeWarrior for OS-9" shirts that were new when I started. I've got one of the alien "They use CodeWarrior" shirts that's well-worn, and there's a lot of now-useless CodeWarrior-logo golf-shirts hanging in my closet at home.

I don't remember getting any interesting shirts at Motorola; I've got a Veriprise t-shirt around, but nothing that mentions any of our products, although there's a VChat sticker on my badge from the 2000 PalmSource show. I hear there's a big corporate party the week that I head to California, so maybe I'll come back with yet-another-shirt to add to my growing collection.

I just read an article that usability expert Jakob Nielsen wrote about the Palm Foleo mobile companion, a device that my team is developing at Palm. Based on the date on the article, Jakob wrote this immediately after seeing the introduction of the device. By that time, I'm sure he actually got to use it, to hold it in his hands, see how it fits in his bag, and try out the built-in software. I'm sure he got to install a few third-party applications. I'm sure he got to do some thinking about how he uses computers and see if some aspects of that could be made simpler and more efficient.

Actually, I'm sure he didn't do any of that. I can tell by the tone of the article, which is all negative, and by what he doesn't say about the device.

First, he repeats the claim that you should just buy a small laptop that's been made all over the press. Well, people haven't been buying them, even though they've been around for a while. Perhaps its because they're too expensive.

Our device was sized based on the human interface, not on the available technology. We wanted a full sized keyboard without any of the compressed keys you see on lots of laptops. We wanted a place to rest your hands while typing or using the wheel or trackpoint. There's the basic width/height footprint. If you make the device smaller, you have a poorer user interface. Could we have made it thinner? Maybe, but you'd give up battery life because we wouldn't have as much room for power cells or you'd have a weaker case that didn't hold up to extended use.

Also, the use case for the Foleo isn't replacing your laptop. I don't expect many users to give up their laptop computer for this. However, having a device like this around means you don't need to get the tiny laptop that's got the small screen and the lower capabilities; you can replace your desktop system with a more capable laptop that's portable when you need it, even if it's usually docked and hooked up to all your gear. This is a device that can remotely access your system, your files, and your email. In a sense, it's as much of a companion for your laptop as it is a companion for your cell phone, as it supplements what both can do.

I've got a Dell Latitude D610 that I take with me to California. When I'm in the office, it's locked to my desk and has an Ethernet cable tethering it to the Palm network. At home, it's usually either up on my desk or downstairs on a table. It's pretty powerful, and the screen is very nice. However, if I want to take notes in a meeting, do research web browsing on the couch, go sit someplace nice to write a web posting, or play a game of solitaire, I grab my Foleo. I don't have to grab a power brick, I don't have to wait for it to boot up, and I don't have to do some weird shutdown key sequence when I'm done, I just close the lid.

Jakob makes a big deal about us not announcing full specs. They are coming -- he misses the point that we've not actually shipped the device yet. The D conference was a technology demo and a launch of the "idea" of Foleo, but we're still finalizing everything. Some of the ideas behind Foleo are very powerful. Instant on and instant off are big. They made PDAs useful, and it's taken a lot of work to get that same experience into a larger device. Email sync to a phone is really big; it introduces the idea that your data is going to by physically on you or close to you, and that other systems, be them big or small, get to the data through that. There's been a lot of talk about "clouds of data" out on the net. While that makes sense for the information that we all own, having the "master copy" of your own information be on a device that you carry with you all the time seems better from a usability and security view.

Yes, there are some limitations to the device. Some can be fixed by refining and adding to the software that we'll ship with it, some will have to wait for future versions. Some are artifacts of our team having to pick and choose from features to spend time on in order to actually ship the device.

I respect Mr. Nielsen; I've read many of his columns and several of his books. One of his tenets is testing things on actual users. I'm disappointed that he'd dismiss our idea without actually testing what we're doing.

Last night's 1SRC Podcast #131 was fairly positive about the device, thinking it's got lots of potential. We've not done a great job of stressing the platform aspects of this, but I think a lot of the gaps in what we'll ship out the door initially will be filled both by our own updates and by our friends in the Palm and Linux developer communities.

There also were some articles talking about the Foleo experience that I found heartening. From David Beers Software Everywhere blog:

I was looking at the Flash demo and still scratching my head a bit before the webcast of Palm's new product announcement when my wife walked into the room. It took her about 15 seconds to figure out that the Foleo is the small personal computer she's been seeking for a few years now. She is not at all a gadget freak. In fact, it was only after I explained to her how the Foleo works that she finally relented and said she now wants a smartphone, too. Hey Palm! She's available if you need someone to do infomercials about this thing!

And from an article on TreoCentral about an interview with Jeff Hawkins:

In between interviews, as I waited for for my turn for a real hands-on, a funny thing happened. I found myself itching for a Foleo. I had an hour to kill and my standard MO is to just whip out my Treo and browse some web pages and write some email. But suddenly the screen seemed too small, the way that Pocket IE renders web pages too cumbersome. I could have brought out my laptop, but it's awfully big - I was sitting at the bar while I waited and pulling out a 15" Macbook Pro seemed a bit much. Somehow the Foleo had crept into my subconscious and was quietly whispering to me: "I'm exactly what you want right now."

Finally, ComputerWorld's mobile columnist also seems to understand what we're trying to do in his two-part blog entry (Part 1 and Part 2).

In the home market, the Foleo basically becomes a $500 computer. With the right applications, this can tap a market of people who just are not going to spend $1,000 for a laptop but who can see the advantage of having a computer that they can pack up and get out of the way when they want and carry wherever they want. It also is going to be lighter than most, if not all, laptops -- another advantage of not having a hard drive. And home users can rent their software and access it over the Internet through Web portals without installing and maintaining it on their mobile devices. This can be cheaper and easier, and it eliminates the problems of upgrades and of moving everything to a replacement computer when the old device finally dies.

We've got lots of launch info on the new device, the Palm Foleo mobile companion up on the Palm website.

Palm Infocenter also has a good summary of our presentation and webcast with more technical details than Palm's site.

I've been working on this since early 2005... I'm very proud of what my team's done, and I hope to share a lot more about my experiences with it soon.

Edit: awash in a sea of negativity, a few positive comments about the device from Rafe Needleman (who actually got to use it at the D Conference) and David Beers.

A thread on the Palm Entrepreneur's Forum today where people were speculating about Palm's upcoming announcement was titled "[PEF-Talk] The end of Ben Combee's long silence?". I guess I'm a little honored that I'd be the one singled-out to be mentioned, but maybe I should be a little scared too... I'm surprised that I didn't see anyone on the thread go "who the hell is Ben Combee?"

If you're interested, just pay attention to the tech press for the next 24 hours... I'm sure there will be plenty of talk and opinions once we go live.

I've started yet another blog empire with a little entry :) Check out http://blog.palm.com/palm/2007/05/pocket_tunes_an.html for my first contribution to the Palm corporate blog. I'm sure I'll have a bunch more to write about soon.

Jeff, the moderator, has a post about the panel at his weblog with links to a few bloggers who covered it.  The most detailed coverage is at In Transit, but unfortunately SXSW messed up the panelist signage, so I'm identified as Hoffman and Adam, the CEO of Zannel, is identified as me.

I started out this morning early, getting down to the convention center by 9AM to go to the green room to prep for my panel, "Designing for Convergent Devices".  I was surprised by the large turn out of geeks at the early hour of 10AM after the DST switch.  The panel went quite well; we ran over a few minutes and there were a few tech glitches that we were able to overcome through flash drives and laptop sharing, but I got to show the SXSW app and talk about our design issues, and we had a good discussion.

Films today were hit and miss:  my first outing was a batch of shorts by two of Austin's film-making brother teams, the Zellner's and the Duplass's.  It was all done wrestling style in front of a packed Alamo South screening room, with firecrackers, man thongs, glittery boas, and a girl with a placard all participating in the fun.  After that, I got an amazing parking spot on Congress and zoomed over to the convention center for the documentary "Does Your Soul Have a Cold?" about depression in Japan.  It just depressed me and made me frequently check my phone to see when it would be over.

After that was a quick dinner at Rio Grande, the Mex place that took over the Real World Austin house, the a sprint to the line at the Paramount for "Hannah Takes the Stairs" where Annelies was waiting for me.  This is the new film by Joe Swanburg, and it continued his successful run of honest relationship-based films with a really great cast of collaborators.

Following the film, we got drinks and free t-shirts in black Chinese take-out boxes at the IFC party at Light Bar, then headed away from downtown amid heavy rain and thunder.

Tomorrow: panels in the morning and afternoon, followed by The Heather Gold Show at the Ritz at 7PM, and maybe "Smiley Face" at the Paramount at 10 if we're up to it.

Due to sleep deprivation, my trip to San Jose wasn't as bad as it could have been.  I was out cold before we took off from Austin, and managed to stay dormant for most of the flight.

My rental car for this trip is a brand-new white Ford Mustang Convertible.  It's pretty, but it's also raining and cold in Silicon Valley and not likely to get much better before I fly back. :)

I'm in my favorite place to stay out here, the Wild Palms Hotel.  While it took a walk through the misty air to get there, the hot tub and its jets were quite nice, and I'm finding the wired net connection in my room to be quite fast.