EricCloninger.com

“What do I do with this?” the wife asked me, pulling yet another logoed piece of crap out of the cabinet above the coffee maker. Thinking it was another coffee mug or metal water bottle, I didn’t even look over my shoulder when I said, “Put it with the others.”

“I think you’ll want to think about this one,” she replied. Like most times, she was correct. In her hand was a frosted reminder of my time in Hell.

If you were at PalmSource in the mid 00′s, you might remember the Palm OS 6 project, code named Sahara. If you weren’t at PalmSource, chances are you don’t remember it. The market had given up on PalmSource by that point, as had most of our partners. Palm was working on Windows phones and even had a secret project called Hollywood that was going to be the Next Great Thing (it wasn’t). A couple of OEMs were interested in licensing Palm OS, but it wasn’t the cash cow it was earlier in the decade.

Like many companies facing extinction, the execs convinced the rank and file that we were doing great things, but we needed to work harder. When we were done, we would have a party and the market would reward us by making us rich. So we worked harder and we delivered Palm OS 6, it seems, shortly before Christmas of 2004. I recall that our party was at The Tech in San Jose, but it could’ve been elsewhere. There was champagne and the execs toasted us for getting everything out the door.

Now all we had to do was convince the OEMs to get on board.

They didn’t.

Six months later, Dave Nagel was out on his ass along with most of the executive staff. And me. I got the notice from HR quite literally as I walked my wife out of the hospital of her last chemotherapy treatment. I kept that glass for years out of spite. When I would see it, it reminded me just how low someone can go when they don’t give a shit about the person on the other end of a phone line. Just another person on a list to RIF by the end of the day.

ACCESS is all but gone. So is Palm. There’s no point in hanging on to hatred that long. There’s no point in hatred, period. Cast it off. Move on.

But have a little fun with it…

I just finished my summer reading. OK, it’s a few days after summer is officially over, but technically I started in the spring time.

I’ve never been a big reader of Stephen King’s work. I don’t care for horror, so a lot of his work is just lost on me. But there are some exceptions. I enjoyed The Stand the first time I read it back in the 1980′s, so I bought it as an e-book earlier this year and read it on my Motorola XOOM. After I finished it, Jackie suggested I try Kings’ Gunslinger series (a.k.a. The Dark Tower). He had written the first book in the 1970′s and had developed the series over the next 30 years as a labor of love.

The first book caught my interest. The pace was good and it was an engaging tale. The next books added new characters and dimensions to the story. I found myself drawn into the storyline and enjoying them. During our 2 week road trip to Cape Canaveral and Orlando, I read two books, staying up late the night before the shuttle took off because I couldn’t get enough of the story.

Then it happened. (Beware: minor spoilers)

Somewhere around the sixth book, he lost me. What had been a perfectly good knights errant tale, suddenly became something else entirely. Instead of going toward their eventual doom and defending the helpless along the way, the protagonists found themselves crossing into “our” world and running into characters from King’s earlier books. It wasn’t the crossing over that was the problem. It wasn’t even running into people like Randall Flagg from The Stand or Father Callahan from Salem’s Lot.

What disappointed me was when King inserted himself into the storyline as a character who influences the story. I knew he had a tendency to cameo himself in his books, but not like this. He tore down the fourth wall, poured petrol on it, and lit the damned thing on fire. He dropped self-deprecating jokes into the narrative and made his real life an element of the storyline. The reader was forced to read through his accident, where he was hit by a minivan on a country road while out walking. It’s such a cheap device to use and I don’t understand why he felt the need to use it, other than to punish the poor bastard who ran him over.

In the end, the series turned out alright. I liked the way he wrapped up the quest and he did his surviving characters some justice. For what it’s worth, I also like the way the movie Inception ended and the last episode of The Sopranos.

I know he was ready to be done with the series. In fact, in his afterward, he says he not entirely happy with the way it ended. It’s not the ending that I hated, it was the book and a half where I was forced to slog through his life instead of dealing with the characters and storylines that drew me into his world in the first place.

Now, onto my Autumn reading. I picked up an omnibus e-copy of the Hitchhikers Guide trilogy (all 5 books). That ought to keep me occupied through the chilly evenings.

If you know me, you know I have an affinity for beer. When I travel North America, I always search out the local brewpub or I order the local micro on tap. When I’m overseas, I stick to the local brew. For several years (before children), I helped organize the Great American Beer Festival in Denver, which was (and probably still is) the largest celebration of fermentation on the planet.

So, I find it ironic that I have absolutely no loyalty when it comes to American beer at my local package store. Anyone who can claim to distinguish between Bud, Miller, Coors, Pabst, Pearl, etc. in a blind taste test is lying. I know this, because I’ve conducted this experiment among a group of biased individuals who make claims such as “Coors Light gives me the runs”, and “Bud tastes like horse piss”.

Truth is, they all taste like horse piss. Oh, and my Canadian friends have no room to talk. Your beers taste like moose piss.

If I could say that I “have a brand”, I suppose it would be Original Coors (the “Banquet Beer”). Nobody drinks Banquet Beer anymore, so I think I buy it just to be different and because it was my fathers’ brand. It certainly isn’t the taste.

So yesterday I was getting some gas and preparing to join my friends in the field for my annual “pretend to be a farmer” day. I help out during wheat harvest for a few hours and smell the dirt. I had some snacks and bottled water in my cooler. I went into the beer cave to get something for everyone to enjoy. I deliberated on a couple of choices, but in the end it wasn’t the brand, the price, or the calories that was the deciding factor.

It was the shape of the can.

I chose Michelob Ultra because a dozen cans would fit better into my ice chest than the others. The Ultra can is taller and narrower than the traditional US beer can, while still containing 12 fluid ounces. I’ve never been a loyalist to Michelob in the past, but I don’t hold any bias against it. At 10 pm, when the wheat was in the trucks and we were standing around the bumper of my pickup, it was cold and quenched the thirst.

And I guess that’s the only measure that counts. Those guys who claim they only like Bud light were perfectly content drinking a cold Michelob Ultra. Even if they didn’t brag about it the next day.

All those marketing dollars that are spent on talking frogs, beautiful mountain scenes, and race car drivers, could be saved if they just spent some money learning how their customers buy their beer and why.

I want to do something simple. It seems simple to me, but apparently it’s hard. I do not want to learn all of Ruby, Python, Java, Rails, Javascript and Perl just to do this. I’ve tried to search with my favorite search engine, but the terms I’ve come up with are used in too many contexts for me to get usable search results.

Here goes…

I want to rearrange the components on my Google Apps email pages. Namely the email list and the email view. For the uninitiated, Google Apps is the “corporate version of GMail” and it works great. Except for a couple of specific features, I don’t miss Exchange/outlook one bit. And even those I can work around to my satisfaction.

But the thing that kills me is the layout of the email pane. It’s so inefficient and rigid. I spend hours a day back and forth between calendar, email, IM, task management, etc. I want to build a dashboard so I can put what I want, where I want. There’s this nice plugin architecture in Labs that lets me do things like “move contacts to the right side”. Oh, how deviant and radical.

How about we expand on that idea? How about we let me put anything I want, anywhere I want? Like iGoogle does for my personal account. Let me build a dashboard just the way I want it. With Google widgets and third party widgets, like RememberTheMilk. Why are the Google Apps layouts so narrowly defined? I’m guessing most of the problem lies at the feet of my corporate IT department, but assigning blame doesn’t help me get what I want.

Here comes the reality.

I am using FireFox 3.6.x and will continue to do so until the bugs are ironed out of 4.0.x. I will not use Safari and I will use Chrome only under duress. Nothing that relies on GreaseMonkey or any man-in-the-middle technology is out because they require constant tweaking. Anything that requires installing something from the app market is also out (I’m still trying to get them to activate Google Reader which has been free for Google Apps since last November).

I’m offering a bounty of cold, tasty beverages for good ideas.

-E

NewEgg is one of my favorite online retailers. They have a great selection of the things that I want at competitive prices. They handle orders quickly, usually the same day, and they have a very affordable expedite option. Their shipping costs are reasonable and because they are located near FedEx and UPS hubs, I usually get my order in only a few days. In 5 years, I’ve needed their customer service a few times and they always handle the problem to my satisfaction without any hassles. It’s because of these things that I rarely look elsewhere when buying computers, peripherals, electronics, etc.

I bought a 27″ 1080p monitor from NewEgg a few months ago. At the time, I mounted it on the wall and connected it to my existing peripherals. The picture quality wasn’t perfect with the VGA connection, but it was good enough. This morning, I found the DVI cables while moving piles around in my office and decided it was a perfect time to switch. Except that the monitor is mounted to the wall with only a few inches to spare and I can’t see the connectors on back.

One of the reasons NewEgg rocks is because they take photos of every product they sell. They unbox the products and take photos from every angle. They photograph the power cord and even the manuals that come with it. Most folks probably think this is overkill, including myself at times.

This morning, I was able to look at the photo of my monitor on NewEgg’s website and know exactly where the DVI connector was and which way it was oriented. It took 15 seconds to work the cable up the back and plug it in. Now I have ghost-free output on this lovely monitor. In fact, it took longer to write this blog post than it took from the moment I spotted the DVI cable.

This is what makes separates an average retailer from a great one. Lots of places sell monitors and I probably could’ve gotten this one a bit cheaper at one of those fly-by-night NYC places. But NewEgg has done such an incredible job for so many years that I don’t even think about anyone else. That kind of loyalty doesn’t happen by accident–it’s hard earned and NewEgg has earned my loyalty with this kind of attention to detail.

We’ve had over a year to learn how to write Android apps correctly. This time last year, everyone was forgiven for having an ugly app because there weren’t that many apps in the Android Market. With choice in the Market, it’s important that developers not drive a wedge between themselves and their users.

1. Activity-based apps with ‘exit’ buttons/menu items. If an app doesn’t have a service associated with it, then it doesn’t need an exit button. Period. The scheduler will kill the app when it deems it necessary. Just play nice by the lifecycle rules and the app will go away when Android is good and ready. If an app is structured in a way that the user gets to a point and are asked if they want to restart or exit, the developer needs to redesign the way their app flows.
2. Apps that make users wait. I’m not talking about apps that take time, I’m talking about the wait/force close alert. This means the app isn’t managing the clock. A lot of the processing that’s going on should probably go into a thread that can be managed correctly. There was an Android developer blog post on this, but I’m having trouble finding it. Or perhaps it was in Reto Meier’s book. I’ll have to track this down.
3. Not handling the lifecycle correctly. Every Android book written and the Android developer site has a graphic showing the lifecycle calls. It’s not that difficult to support those dozen calls. If an app can’t save state on rotation and restore it, it’s not Android’s fault, it’s the developers.
4. Portrait-only UI. We’ve had keyboards and landscape UIs since the original G1, there’s no excuse for an app only working in portrait. Especially if it has forms. when I rotate the phone and pop out the keyboard, the form should rotate.
5. Ads that get in the way of the action. If an app is really something I want, I would prefer to shell out $2-$3 for it. But, I understand that option isn’t open to everyone, so ads are fine. If an app is going to have an ads-only model, at least structure the layouts so the ads don’t intrude with the action. Sure, the user needs to see the ad so the developer can get click-thru revenue. But, if the users gets so annoyed with the ads that they uninstall the app, then what’s the point?
   Two cases:
   • Mahjong by MagmaMobile. I loved the gameplay and I would’ve gladly paid several dollars for it. But the ads interfered too much and I uninstalled it.
   • Angry Birds. Arguably the most successful mobile app ever. But, some levels are made much harder by the ad in the upper right corner. This becomes more evident in later levels where the “boomerang bird” is used. I won’t uninstall Angry Birds, obviously, but I might consider finding a hack to let me disable the ads. I think I speak for most of the world when I say I’d pay $4 for this game to be ad-free on Android.
6. Third-party payment options. I understand the Android Market doesn’t work for everyone. Products where a web or desktop component is required are obvious examples, but reliable payment options have existed there for years. There are countries where paid apps don’t work and I’m not denying anyone’s right to be paid. BUT, if an app is a device-only app and the developer is targeting the countries that are already in the paid Android Market, then don’t make me go off to a third-party site to pay. GetJar and other distribution channels are fine, but don’t put a crippled version in the Android Market and make me enter a 20 digit code to unlock it. Because I won’t.
7. Tying apps to specific phones. Developers who came from older mobile OSes think the right way to handle piracy is to force the user to send them the MEID or other unique characteristic of the phone to create an unlock code. Yes, Palm users knew how to find their hotsync ID and were accustomed to entering hex digits. Android is a much more consumer-oriented OS, not exclusive to nerds, suits, and early-adopters. The real drawback to this practice is when I switch phones, I have to buy the app again. Guess what? I won’t buy it the first time.
8. Android Market. OK, this isn’t a third-party development issue, but it’s still an annoyance. I’m sick of using my phone to search the Android Market. I want better browsing abilities and I want to manage my device account from the desktop browser. This should’ve been released when Froyo became available and it’s embarrassing that it’s still missing.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time recently looking at third-party apps and these seem to be some of the most egregious problems that persist. 2011 is shaping up to be an exciting time for Android developers, so maybe in 2012 we will have few of these annoyances.

If you’re paying attention to what I write, and chances are you aren’t, then you’ve probably figured out that I’ve been quiet on Facebook and other social sites lately. If you had been following me on Twitter, you might’ve seen this post …

The short of it is, I’m pulling back from Facebook and many other social sites. I’m either closing my accounts or setting them to their most private levels. I will continue to run this blog and post to Twitter, but my Twitter account will be private.

The New Green

In 2008, one of our new phones was going to have Facebook built into it, so I created an account and linked to a few friends. That’s when the pivotal event occurred. A random check-in from my friend Joel, talking about being in Dallas on a last weekend with his son before moving to China on an ex-pat assignment. By chance, we were in Dallas also. I had no idea Joel was moving, so I called his cell. We met for dinner and he ended up getting a room in the same hotel as us. We had a relaxed breakfast the next morning and ever since, I’ve lived vicariously through Joel and Elisa’s posts from Shanghai. That was what Facebook could do and I bought into it and many other things “social”.

I ignored the less desirable aspects for a while. We were changing the world with this social stuff. We elected a black President in the US, one non-corporate donation at a time. I’ve always been the optimist and organized events, so I jumped into this social stuff with both feet. I created accounts, participated, checked in, and shared. Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, Gowalla, Radar, yelp, TripAdvisor, TripIt, MeetUp, LinkedIn, etc. Not to mention dozens of user communities devoted to some activity or piece of equipment.

Most companies had no idea what “social” meant, but they wanted it, whatever it was. They hired experts and spent a lot of effort to socialize their offerings. Consumers were encouraged to offer up their contact lists and private information in order to find their friends and be connected.

One big happy hive mind.

The cracks started appearing in all this open sharing of information. Photos of celebrities doing things they shouldn’t made headlines. Somewhere along the way Social became Social Media. It stopped being a way to meet friends and started becoming a mouthpiece, an asset to be managed.

Then one day, the pivotal event occurred. I was looking at a gorgeous photo on Flickr from a photographer I knew. Down in the comments was a toss-off remark from some random jerk. It was at that precise moment I realized I don’t care what Joe in Hoboken thinks of my photos. So I stopped posting to Flickr. I wasn’t pissed off, I just stopped caring. And that is a dangerous quality for a community that’s based on sharing.

A few weeks later, my wife casually mentioned that she had deactivated her Facebook account. When I pressed her for a reason, she said she didn’t need it any more. Didn’t need it any more. And that’s where the seeds of the Unsocial Revolution were sown. Like my wife, I realized that I didn’t need it any more.

I’m no revolutionary and I appear to be way to the left of the chasm on this one. Will a gradually increasing flow of disaffected people follow? Will there be an event that catalyzes everyone into action? A digital 9/11 of some sort? Or, will I slip back quietly because I’m the only one out in the street, listening to the party inside?

I suspect that everyone will keep doing as they are doing, because it’s easy. They’ll move back and forth in response to small events, not seeing beyond the horizon. Then one day, they realize their personal data will no longer be theirs. CNN will tell the world which articles you read because you’re logged into Facebook when you load the CNN website. The photos they posted to social sites are no longer accessible because the company went bankrupt. Lazy newspaperwomen will browse Facebook posts for their columns, and edit them as they wish, regardless of the authors’ wishes. And then people will wonder how the hell did this all happen?

I’ll be outside, on the back stoop, if you need me.