This is the first post of a few about my using an HP Veer. First up are disclaimers:

• I’ve used iPhones since the day the first one launched, I’ve owned and used each iteration of hardware except the iPhone 4, but I am quite familiar with it. Fully expect that this will color my opinions of the device and OS.
• I’m well invested in the Apple ecosystem and have been quite happy with it, this means I use Mac’s, an iPad [2], MobileMe, iTunes, etc.
• I don’t use and am not a fan of Facebook. Additionally I’m not a big fan of Google’s services for mail, calendar, and contacts. For the purpose of this test I have setup my mac to sync contacts with Google, I’ve been unable to find a way to dual sync my Calendars thus far.

webOS Impressions

Now, first impressions of webOS are very good, while the OS and apps seem to take a quite a while to load up, they are fast and responsive after that, multitasking is instant and very cleverly designed. It seems like I can have tons and tons of cards open (webOS’s metaphor for an individual user controlled process) and there is no slow down or lag when switching between cards. One thing that I find both very cool and very odd is the insistence of syncing with online services for personal data, to the absolute exclusion of pulling it from a local machine, this is cool in that once I had Google contact sync setup on both the Veer and my mac it worked painlessly. It’s annoying in that I can’t take the iCal files on my mac and put them on the Veer or do any kind of machine to phone syncing. In fact the only computer to phone syncing I’ve found is the wonderful DoubleTwist app which only does music and videos.

Hardware Impressions

My impressions of the hardware are mostly positive, it’s a very small solid feeling device with fantastic buttons, even the keyboard is pretty good. I’ve never been a fan of physical qwerty keyboards on phones, but this one seems pretty serviceable, I find that I make very few errors on it. I have no issues with the size of the screen or the gesture area, size only matters if I’m doing long form reading, playing games, or watching movies on it; none of these are a significant limitation for me. The screen’s display may be small but it’s super sharp, making text very easy to read.

Last Section

This is the section where I ramble on with unorganized ideas.

The largest I have with the keyboard is the fact with a hardware keyboard instead of a software one, it is no longer possible for me to type out kick quick text messages or google searches one handed as I have traditionally on my iPhone. In fact that is probably the biggest problem I’ve encountered with the Veer so far, it’s insistence on dual handed operation. As a sidenote, I have same problem with the growing physical size of Android phones, one handed operation is very important to me.

Oh and the lack of apps isn’t a big deal, it’s the lack of important apps, stuff like an official twitter client, an instapaper client, and a good Google Reader client (a Google service I actually do like). Oh and I would kill for someone to implement a CalDAV standard synergy service so I can pull in my MobileMe calendar.

WordPress stands a strong possibility of blowing away your themes if you use the automatic updating mechanism, normal theme is coming back soon, I apologize for the interruption of normal service.

I was thinking the other day about why I don’t like the ribbon. And the conclusion that I ultimately came to was that it broke consistency with the bulk of the apps of the platform, in fact it’s so different I wouldn’t claim that it is even close consistent with any user interface before it (on any platform I’ve seen). Consistency is something I feel is vastly under-appreciated in software design, having a consistent look and feel across applications means that users will be more comfortable with the application.

As an example of how consistency helps users, think about the mobile phone. Let’s consider these two phones:

Ericsson T610

Apple iPhone

As an iPhone user I have no issue using either of these phones, but, if I hand my grandmother both of these phones she is comfortable using the Ericsson, while with the iPhone there is no such comfort level. Despite the fact that she never grew up with cell phones (or even cordless phones) the Ericsson is consistent the phones she knows.

Sorry for that rather long example, back to my original point. I guess the point I’m trying to make is that before you go crafting a “sexy” new user interface convention that you think is cool, think about the platform, think about the other applications and what they’re doing, if there is one think about the HIG (Apple has one for the Mac and I believe there is one for the iPhone, but I’m having difficulty tracking it down.

Above: example of several interface styles in used in Windows XP.

As a joke and a challenge I recently built a URL shortening service that I’ve named Gemer It. It’s a neat little service, it’s quiet simple and I’m not going to make any claims of greatness about it.

As with many of my projects the source code is fully available, I’m exposing this one via an SVN service called beanstalk. This is not generalized code, it’s the exact code (except the database info) that’s on gemerit.com.

So if you’d to like to improve it or add some stuff to the main branch, just give me a shout and I’ll set you up with an account.

IE8 is going to implement a new version targeting system that is going to coincide with their new rendering engine which is supposed to be significantly better at web standards. The big catch is that in order to enable this you have to insert a meta tag in to the header of every single page you want rendered in standard’s compliant mode. – Source

The big problem with this assumption is that it assumes we’ve all been making broken sites just for IE, which as you can tell if you use IE on my site, many of us do not. Sure the IE has the largest usage percentage, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s demographic that’s worth caring about, hell here at bonta-kun.net our biggest browser is Firefox (43%), followed by IE (42%), with Safari in third (8%). The other arrogant assumption it makes is that you have time and the knowledge to go to every single one of your pages and add this meta tag to their header.

The best argument in favor of this is done by Aaron Gustafson of A List Apart (brilliant web design site). The primary ground his argument sits on is the idea that all browsers would use this meta tag to target specific browser versions to ensure that pages are rendered with the engine they were built for (neglect the fact that this would require a really flexible rendering engine or a pool of different rendering engines). The primary problems with this argument are:it assumes we care about the layout of old content (unlikely we probably only care about the content) and that doctypes are useless. Doctypes were designed to lock your page into a set of standards and that gives the browser the rules to play by, it’s much cleaner than this browser engine targetting non-sense.

I found an excellent blog post that sums up most of my points much better than I have so far here. The writer is a little more worked up over the matter than me, but his points are valid.

I found an awesome compilation of IE8 version targeting shortly after posting this article.

I’ve sent the past few days at Tulsa Tech Fest, a developer’s conference primarily targeted at enterprise and Microsoft developers. My focus at the show was to learn about .NET 3.5 and it’s new features and frameworks (primarily WPF ,LINQ ). I feel the need to warn that I’m some what of a skeptic with Microsoft stuff, partially because of previous bad experience and partially because I’m still a pretty strong mac and linux enthusiast.

C#

• Anonymous Types: cool, almost javascript like, I say almost because you can’t return them from a function or otherwise get them out of the scope of a single function.
• Static Type Inference: lazy man’s variable declarations, again, as they are now, not much use.
• Extension Mehods: awesome, the ability to extend functions (and I believe properties) to built in classes is extremely powerful and useful in a practical way. I’m looking forward to using this feature
• LINQ : A new way to deal with databases. The automatic database mapping and a cleaner look for building SQL queries, honestly I doubt this is going to change much, but it’s not a half bad feature.
• WPF : The big deal for me, hardware accelerated GUI comes to Windows (at last, after mac and linux).Expression seems to be pretty cool, the dedicated app for building interfaces (similar to mac’s interface builder), will hopefully drastically improve the appearance and form of Windows apps.

Other Observations

• Windows developers LOVE IntelliSense , something I didn’t expect since I usually leave it disabled. I got the impression that may of the developers couldn’t envision a world where you would program without it.
• Silverlight is a big deal at Microsoft and people seem to be getting genuinely excited about it, i still think Adobe’s dominance with Flash is too strong to challenge at this point, unless they’re willing to commit to decades of loss to get it’s acceptance up (like the Xbox project).

Tulsa Tech Fest was a blast and great opportunity to learn more about Microsoft platform development and the communities around them. Plus it’s hard to argue with a free conference with free food.

Update: sorry for all the edits, I’m experimenting with a beta version of ecto.

A late game is only late until it comes out, but a bad game is always bad.
-Shigeru Miyamoto (宮本 茂)

I have a few spare Pownce invites (9 to be specific), head over to the contact page to get one.