According to Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft is going to announce an "Express" version of Visual Studio this week targetting hobbyists and students. A few months ago, I wrote that such a thing would be a great idea.

Tim Lambert's When Think Tanks Attack does a good job of exposing Microsoft attempts at Astroturfing (paying for the appearance of "grassroots" movement). Sure enough, Microsoft hired as their chief lobbyist one of the directors of a particular think-tank that I questioned about three months ago (I'm not going to give their name because, y'know, why whuffie?).

So this press release comes from this "think tank," and I shoot off an email to them, asking about their logic. Nice, civil discourse. And what happens?  The president of this particular "think tank," writes me a nasty-gram. So essentially, Microsoft paid for me to be insulted by this crap-weasel. 

I hope the other thinking from that particular "tank" is better than "let's gratuitously insult someone with a print column read by 65,000 software development managers."

Evan couldn't resist and adds his two cents to the continuing conversation about improving Tablet sales and seeking Tablet nirvana.

via [Incremental Blogger]

A common theme is that, with a slate or a convertible in tablet mode, a Tablet just looks like a screen showing a screen saver. So how hard is it to create a screensaver that shows the Tablet doing tablet fabulousness -- a 60-second montage showing OneNote, ArtRage, MathPractice, MindManager, Grafigo? I just tried to do it myself, but my M1200 doesn't have the horsepower to run Windows Media Encoder and capture ink in realtime. The screensaver itself would be a trivial piece of code.

My old buddy Eric Faurot (we used to work together on the Software Development Conferences) cancelled Comdex.

via [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

Sara Ford got a four-word email from Bill Gates (in response to an email from her) and apparently this is cause for celebration, skepticism, and general up-roar-ary. That's extremely disturbing. Gates' is the boss^h^h^h^h ... er... "Chief Software Architect" of a 50,000-person business. A technology business. Quite frankly, everyone who's worked at the company for (say) more than a year ought to be able to get in touch with him and expect a response. Yes, he's the world's richest man and no doubt has a schedule chock full of calls with Oprah, Bono, and the rest of the Illuminati, but come on, people. Something's wrong if the majority of Microsoft is so isolated from Gates' capabilities that getting an ACK from him is cause for comment.

One of the t-shirt hurling contest entrants sent some photos of their entry. via [James Gosling: on the Java road...]

For those who've never been to JavaOne, the hurling of t-shirts to the audience (and let's face it: that is what keeps the conference industry alive) in ever-more-elaborate ways is a tradition. Last year, they used a trebuchet (tasteless yet compelling images of a cow flung 1/4 mile). The photo linked to above looks to me like an air cannon, which have come to dominate punkin' chunkin' (http://www.clubmedia.com/punkin/)

The "Tablet isn't for consumers" story is a myth. Tell it to the students using Tablets. Tell it to the start ups that leverage the flexibility of the Tablet in their highly fluid states. Tell it to the doctors, lawyers, managers, engineers, and on and on, that purchased a Tablet out of their own pocket--and not as part of an IT deployment strategy--because they saw it could help them.  via [Incremental Blogger]

If I were a Tablet OEM, I'd create an ultra-portable "Clark Kent" edition and ship copies to the first two rows of the White House Press Corps, the Courtroom TV reporters, and the top on-air reporters in NYC, LA, and Chicago. Then, I'd create the leather-clad "Titan of Industry Limited Edition" and advertise it in The New Yorker, Architectural Digest, etc.

Loren laments that ultra-portable computers aren't Tablet PCs. Check out the Sony U-70:

Man, I'd buy a Tablet in that form-factor in a microsecond! But I've come to realize that I'm more pen-centric and more note-taking centric than most people (I have dozens of paper notebooks going back to High School, and thousands of index cards). Still, I'm not sure that I'd buy a U-70 with a touchscreen, even if the new Tablet Input Panel was available. Touchscreen's are really mushy and get scratched too easily. It's something that I've noticed between my original Palm PDAs, where writing was on a separate area (that I ended up covering with magic tape), and my PPC.

There has been a fair amount of discussion about key bindings in VS.NET, and the fact that they seem to be changing yet again in VS.NET 2005....But the thing that bugs me most about the current set of bindings is the amount of arbitrary stuff you have to remember. via [IanG on Tap]

In the glory days of Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect, the key-bindings were what we now call accelerators -  so you used to be able to trouble-shoot your sister's computer by saying "/-F-O-S-K-X-Y-Z. Okay, so you just printed out the report, right?" And you could even embed those strings in macros and put them in a loop and that was, essentially, a pretty-darn-complete programming system. It was wonderful. By the time you're debating what chords to use to activate obscure functions, I think you've gone too far. Gimme' 10 (okay, 12) function keys and menu-based accelerators.

Richard Callaby's favorite geek movies are:

1. Sneakers
2. War Games
3. Hackers
4. Anti-Trust
5. Startup.com
6. Triumph of the Nerds

Mine are:

1. Minority Report (I loved that pre-crime interface! Oh, and you must check this probably-not-intended-for-public-consumption page at Microsoft Research: http://research.microsoft.com/~dcr/minority/functionality_01.htm)
2. Blade Runner
3. War Games
4. Matrix
5. Lord of the Rings Trilogy

Hmmm... Several of mine aren't about geeks per se, but blissed out my inner geek (I wish I didn't look for matchup errors, rendering artifacts, and kinematic mistakes during movies, but I read Starlog far too much as a youth...)

....Why don't I just bill the user via email using something like PayPal? Think about it, the user enters their email and phone number on their phone, promises to pay the 99 cents when they get to a real computer and that's it. Done. No middle man, no carriers, no aggregators, no e-wallets, nothing. Just an old fashioned billing system....there will be lots of people who will never pay. Fine....Some will gladly pony up for the convenience, others will try to ditch the cost because they're like that.... If they lie about their email or SMS, then they don't actually receive the answer.... Bill My Email. Quick, easy and simple.  via [Russell Beattie Notebook]

Not the first really good idea from Russell.

Apparently some top Xbox execs are quietly confirming that the Xbox 2 isn't going to be backwards compatible with original Xbox games. via [Engadget]

MSDN Magazine: 2, Raymond Chen: 0!!!!

On rereading Joel's article, I think his argument boils down to:

He's not denying the need to rely on "external dependencies," he's advocating that such dependencies be localized. Why? Because when there are several external dependencies, they have a tendency to have internal dependencies, and you tend to need a very specific set of versions and it's a source of complexity and, therefore, application brittleness.

Hiding multiple dependencies behind a single dependency is A Good Thing. This is what I was getting at in my previous post about "touch once, fix everywhere." But I still don't see how this supports his thesis that Microsoft lost the API war, since API dependencies still exist. And it only supports the "Web Apps will rule" conclusion to the extent that the client value really doesn't depend on an external service (API). If you need to make music (which is only a shorthand for "things which, for connectivity, computational, security, or resource issues make sense to execute locally"), you've got to have a local API.

Corporate development choices are driven by the imperative to rapidly deliver customer value. Developers have their own values (language preferences, philosophical agenda, etc.) which sometimes conflict with this imperative but when push comes to shove, a CTO's job is to "get it done."

The great advantage of Web Apps for corporate development, and to a slightly lesser extent for ISVs, is the "touch once, fix everwhere," deployment model. The hyperlink and button Web UI paradigm has a "don't make me think" advantage and is easy to develop, but really, what makes the Web ideal for corporate development is that because corporate apps evolve in a much-less disciplined manner than commercial software, Web-based deployment can get a fix "into the field" in a matter of hours.

Visual Studio Tools for Office gives a hint of how Web-based deployment can be combined with the ultimate fat client: Microsoft's Office suite. The problem is that even VSTO does not yet have an appealing solution for bestowing trust. There needs to be an easy yet completely trustworthy rights-granting process: in a completely trustworthy manner, the publisher identity and a comprehensive list of security requests must be presented to an administrative actor (either a sufficiently trustworthy end-user, a remote operator, or a system process). Basically, .NET's got the publisher-identity stuff down, but the list of security attributes and process by which rights are granted are too obscure.

You need something along the lines of a firewall: I was just configuring a system for my sister and got an alert that something called "Backweb" was trying to access the Internet. I Googled for it and found that it was the result of having just installed a Logitech device: okay. Remove the step of having to manually Google for an explanation and extend the firewall-like "Allow, Allow once, Block once, Block forever" across all security attributes and you've got the type of UI I'm talking about. Modify it so that instead of my sister getting the message I could set up her system to pass the security request to me (her sysadmin) for either manual or automated decision-making.

Short of that type of capability, the fat-client model will always be less appealing than Web Apps on the deployment front.

Those guys rock.

Joel Spolsky's (why hasn't Software Development hired him as a columnist?) Microsoft Lost the API Wars has a series of solid observations and at least one brilliant construction ("Chen v. MSDN"), but I'm afraid his title and conclusion aren't supported by his arguments.

He hoists himself on his own petard when he says "The new API is HTML, and the new winners in the application development marketplace will be the people who can make HTML sing." You need a media API to sing. Maybe not Redmond's mciSendString, but whatever you choose, HTML isn't a complete platform. You still need data access, networking, and threading. Initialization and configuration customization. Error handling and recovery. Logging. File system access. Email. Messaging. Globalization. Security, encryption... Well, I'm just running through namespaces now.

Where have Web Apps and thick clients gone head-to-head? Email. Personal finance and tax software. It seems way premature to announce the thick client dead based on those markets. Anywhere else?

I'm not discounting the benefits of Web Apps, which make form-based UIs as easy to construct as in Visual Basic (you want to say "even more"? Fine, I'll posit it.) and, therefore, vastly easier than with Win32 APIs. Even more importantly, Web Apps are great for occasional use (love that hyperlink!) and are "touch once, fix everywhere." But on the other hand, media clients require fat clients.

You can't get away from the need for lots of APIs when developing applications. That Microsoft APIs must now compete for favor with APIs from Palo Alto, SourceForge, or where-have-you is true, but that's vastly different than losing. The game is barely afoot.

I want everyone who agrees with me to blog the following sentence:

Unit Testing support should be included with all versions of Visual Studio 2005 and not just with Team System.

via [ScottWater]

1. I agree
2. I think a "blog petition" is pretty damn clever
3. But what I really want is for VSTS to provide a FIT interface, which is a declarative spreadsheet interface to unit-tests. If Microsoft needs to differentiate their unit-testing support in order to justify the different SKUs, they should provide basic unit-testing in all versions, basic programmer-oriented FIT in Professional, and FIT front-ends in Word / Excel for Enterprise and VSTS editions. Everyone wins.

These guys have patented a gadget for stabilizing your Tablet PC in an ergonomically correct way. Not in production, and it doesn't look like it holds the Tablet PC in a natural position (it looks like it requires your elbow to be thrust out too far), but I was thinking that there needs to be a solution for writing in hand beyond "grip the far side with your fingers and rest the inner side on your forearm."

That's it: I've just unsubscribed from Scoble's link blog (headlines from 1400 feeds). Whatever the solution is to post-linking while maintaining credit / click-through, titles are insufficient. Scoble generally posts in batches of several dozen things he finds interesting. I've said before that I'm skeptical of linking without commenting, but even if I might accept the value of a "human aggregator," without editorial comment, there needs to be some hint beyond the title.

I had a fascinating lunch with Steve Caldwell (CEO) and Rodney Standage (Major Account Sales) of FinePoint Innovations yesterday....They wanted to know what I thought was important in a Tablet digitizer....They were curious as to what ways people would use tilt information. To them it's not hard supporting tilt, but it's a matter what it costs....If anyone has some thoughts on what they'd like to see in a Tablet digitizer, post your thoughts here or better yet on your blog. The FinePoint team is reading them. via [Incremental Blogger]

I would like fast, semi-automatic parallax correction / calibration. Accuracy is all well-and-good, but when held in the hand or rested on a lap, parallax can easily exceed 16 pixels -- bigger than many controls! However, there are only 6 or so likely eye:digitizer geometries:

• docking station / desktop
• held in non-writing arm
• bottom resting on desktop, propped up with non-resting arm
• bottom resting on lap, propped up with non-resting arm
• resting flat on desktop
• resting flat on lap

Peter Rysavy sez: While selecting with a pen is definitely fast and intuitive, the text editing experience on a tablet is still very lacking. ... only a Microsoft will ultimately bring a decent editing experience to the mass market.

I've investigated writing a Tablet PC editing add-in for Word. Unfortunately, ink-collectors must be created in the same process as the Window for which they collect. Thus, using COM Interop is  insufficient; you get an exception when you try to add ink to a Word application instance.  The next question is whether VSTO could be used to get the process. I don't have VSTO on my Tablet and it's kind of a longshot and even if you could collect ink in Word's window, you're miles from relating it to the underlying text. All of which is to say that I think Peter's right that it will take Microsoft to create a compelling ink editor for Word  documents.

I wrote some of the articles in Intel's "mobilized software" series, including one that presents source code for a GPS interface for the .NET Compact Framework. The articles are finally online.