Autopoetic

The stylus is mightier than the keyboard

In my work, I seldom use paper anymore, and writing with a pen has become something of a curiosity. These day I type everything: documents, notes, stickies. Typing is faster, accurate, and immensely more readable than my handwriting. If it was possible, I’d probably be tempted to type my signature too. But typing lacks a certain satisfaction that I can’t seem to put my finger on.

There's something pleasing and comforting about the act of writing. I’m not talking about the tactile sensation of the pen tip dragging across paper, although I enjoy that too. I’m talking about the freedom of not being constrained by what the computer “lets” you do.

I can write text with tight, non-nonsense slashes; or with loose and lazy loops. I can doodle in the margins. I can label my doodles with other doodles. There's also something altogether charming about the little imperfections in a stroked line in spots where ink fails to make contact with paper.

I was reminded of this freedom several years back when I bought an Apple Newton Messagepad. No, this wasn’t the model with horrible handwriting recognition. This was the MP2000, the one that actually worked. I had a reason write and sketch again, but this time the experience was better.

Not only could I sketch and write freely, but the ink under my stylus was alive. I could move my drawings and scale them. I could interact with text by tapping on the words. I could make them dance across the page. There’s something magical about that.

Since then, I‘ve bought three other Newtons and have used them on and off since they were discontinued. I’ve used Palm devices, WinCE devices, and even the doomed Magic CAP-based DataRover. I always tend to come back to the Newton, even though the industry continues to describe them as “oversized”, and as having been too expensive, neither of which is true.

Lately, I’ve become interested in the question "what, exactly, fascinates me about these devices?"

Does the visceral connection with stroking letter-forms and pictures translate to anything more than pure emotion? I wonder: how are these things important? Do they make you more productive?

I have a theory that these type of devices, which I’ll call “slate PCs”, are the next logical evolution of the user interface. I believe that my experiences with them are more than emotional—that they have a direct impact on how I work. But I’m a pragmatist. I want to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that slate PCs really do impact productivity positively. Otherwise I feel like a sleazy salesman who eventually starts believing his own lies.

My intent for this blog is to be my place to post essays that help me think about subjects that I find important. In that spirit, this blog will become single-mindedly slate PC-related for a while, in an effort to explain to myself why digital ink and touch-screen tablets aren’t just frivolous technologies.

Although the Newton is a great example of what a slate PC could be usability-wise, it was created in the pre-Internet era. To truly understand how slate PCs help or obstruct interaction in the contemporary world, I need one that is capable of interfacing with the networked resources currently available. Today, this means a Tablet PC, specifically of the slate variety.

I think it’s important that this device have no keyboard. I know what using a keyboard is like, and I want to avoid the temptation of using the machine like all my other ones simply because I’m in a rush and don’t want to go through the learning curve. I want to know how I might get something done without a keyboard.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with keyboards—they have their uses. But I also think they’re well understood. The goal here is to gain insight on the importance of pen on paper, or rather, stylus on screen.

That said, I’ve ordered a Motion LE1600 slate-style Tablet PC.

Before you follow me on this little adventure, I feel I must forewarn you. I enter into this little experiment with a set of opinions that will inevitably affect my judgement. You should know something about me to properly place my thoughts in the proper context.

I am the CTO of Topia Technology, Inc., a software development company in Tacoma, WA (it’s a hop, skip and a jump away from that “big” Washington town you probably know: Seattle). Most of what I do is what I’ve heard termed “knowledge work”.

Basically, I attend a lot of meetings and think about technology. I read papers, evaluate software architecture, and give demonstrations. Because these meetings are all over the place, I tend to be highly mobile. People have called me a wandering nomad. Sometimes I don’t even have an official place to sit. I do not have, nor want, an office. I’m also on a plane a lot.

The majority of the artifacts in this environment are electronic: presentations, Word documents, email, spreadsheets, etc. Sometimes I need to mark them up, in which case I’ll print them.

Another thing about my work is that my company is a Mac-based shop. I won’t go into why or how, but just be aware we’ve got OS X boxes up the yin-yang.

Myself, I am an avid Mac user—I have one for work and several at home. I believe that Mac OS X is a superior desktop experience compared to Windows. However, I also think that the slate form factor has more promise than desktop or laptop ones, so I’m willing to make the switch (hurry up, Apple).

Obviously, my situation will color my judgement, but I think that’s okay. My goal here isn’t to compare Mac OS X to Windows; it isn’t to whine and complain that a button is in the wrong place, or that it doesn’t look lick-able enough.

My interest lies in learning something about the connection between ideas and the generation of supporting artifacts, between process and user interface workflow, and between user intent and application control.

The IT department tells me the slate arrives this Thursday, and if the following isn’t telling coming from a borderline Mac zealot, I don’t know what is: this is the first Windows PC that I’ve ever been excited about receiving.

Watch this space for my forays into using this old-made-new form factor, and the inevitably comical baptism by fire into the Windows world I thought I’d permanently left behind.

If anything, I promise you it will be interesting.

Simplicity and Software

Some summers ago, I was fishing on a pier with my cousin, who at the time was studying to be a mechanical engineer. He was gazing at a series of tires that were equidistantly attached along the pier. He was looking so intently that I just had to ask: “what’s so interesting about those tires?”

“They’re so simple,” he mused, “if I were asked to design that, it would have hydraulics.”

If you consider examples of what people usually think of as design—say architectural or graphic—one of the things you notice is that as the product of that process gets better, the simpler it becomes. It becomes simpler because each revision removes the parts that do not directly embody the ideas that the designer wishes to express. I’ll even go as far as saying that simplicity is the main goal of design. As the poet Alexander Pope once said about sculpture: “I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don’t need.”

The scientific world provides us with a concept called “Occam’s razor”. It states that given two equally valid explanations for a phenomenon, the simpler one is probably the correct one. It’s not strange that both science and design share this concept. The scientific process is, after all, a design activity that invents theories—sometimes really wild ones—and then tests them to see if they hold water.

K.I.S.S., Occam’s razor. However you want to put it, simple is better, and better means simpler. Even Leonardo da Vinci said: “Simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication.”

It’s curious then that software tends to become more complex over time. Software development, like the scientific process, is a form of design. So shouldn’t better software mean simpler software?

The paradox—if I haven’t already made it obvious—is that developers tend to add features to their software over time, even though the additions increase complexity.

Exacerbating the problem is the fact that software developers need to make money. They must supply their users with the motivation to buy upgraded version of their software. This motivation spurs the addition of new features. As software ages, features are invariably added that do not have anything to do with the solution that the software was originally intended to provide.

Sometimes the software attempts to remedy a problem that is poorly defined. Software developers end up over-generalizing features to ensure that they have covered all the bases. This doesn’t always happen due to developer negligence; many times the developer simply doesn’t know that he’s dealing with many problems masquerading as one.

So, how can the software industry fit in with the rest of the design world, where better means simpler?

One naive approach is to refuse to add new features, or to remove features that users do not find useful. But how do you determine when a feature is not useful? I may have no use for a feature that you absolutely depend on. For example, we can all probably agree that Microsoft Word would be better off simplified. However, I bet we would argue for days about exactly which features should be removed.

Once users come to depend on a feature, misguidedly added or not, you can’t remove it. Paul Graham, in his book “Hackers & Painters” writes: “When you make any tool, people use it in ways you didn’t intend […]”

Simply stated, the real barrier to simplifying software is that it always ends up having too many users whose usage of the software is too vaguely defined. Asking which features to remove is the wrong question. The right question is: how do you give users the features they want and make the software simpler?

A possible solution to this seemingly intractable problem occurred to me while listening to a speech given by Malcolm Gladwell at a TED conference. Malcolm, the author of “The Tipping Point” and “Blink”, recounts the story of Howard Moskowitz, whom he credits with reinventing how the commercial food industry thinks about its products.

As Gladwell tells it, Moskowitz was contracting with Pepsi to discover the perfect amount of sweetness for their new Diet Pepsi product. What he discovered was that there was no perfect amount of sweetener that appeased the majority of people. So, instead of recommending to Pepsi that they just average some numbers and use that as a basis for their one perfect product, he told them that they couldn’t have just one product. Gladwell paraphrases Moskowitz: “You don't need a Pepsi, he argued, you need Pepsis.”

Moskowitz went on to discover that this exact same principle applied to other food products, including pickles and pasta sauces.

The core of his discovery is that of horizontal segmentation. It is the realization that there isn’t a single product that meets everyone’s needs, but instead several. When you go to the store and are confronted with thirty six different pasta sauces, that’s Moskowitz’s work. Gladwell says, paraphrasing Moskowitz:

“When we pursue universal principles in food, we aren’t just making an error, we are actually doing ourselves a massive disservice.”

Further, Gladwell states himself:

“[…] it is the movement from the search of universals to the understanding of variability. [For example] now in medical science we don’t want to know how necessarily just how cancer works, we want to know how your cancer is different from my cancer.”

Striving for universality in all things is not always appropriate. Sometimes, how we are different is much more interesting. The lesson to be gleaned from Howard Moskowitz is that it is better to be all things to a few people than it is to be a few things to all people.

Applying this principle to Microsoft Word, instead of one application used for everything from web page generation to flyer creation, perhaps it should do just one thing well: word processing. What do you do with the other functionality? Put them in a different application—perhaps a completely new one. An application specifically suited for web publishing. An application suited to create flyers.

You could even take the concept a step further and realize that there isn’t just one kind of writer, but many, each with their own ways of doing things. Not all of Word’s features are appropriate for all writers. Indeed, one important feature of Word may no longer even be relevant to many of them: “what you see is what you get”, better known by its abbreviation, WYSIWYG. Could it be that this feature can be removed?

WYSIWYG was originated by a newsletter published by Arlene and Jose Ramos in the late 1970s, and its intent was to simulate on the screen how a document would look on its final output device. For the majority of the 80s—and a lot of the 90s—the final output device was some form of printer or electronic typesetter. In other words, the output medium was paper.

What’s interesting is that in recent years, the majority of what is typed is no longer intended for print. Some of it ends up as web pages. The majority of it is transmitted as email.

Take this essay, for example. At no time did I ever intend for it to end up on paper. It was intended to be posted on this blog. You might argue that the “output device” in this case is this blog, and therefore the spirit of WYSIWYG would have my word processor depicting this text exactly as it would appear as posted. However, this would only help to prove my point: because it targets paper as its output medium, Word is not the appropriate tool for me.

Perhaps several word processors are called for, instead of a single do-it-all word processor. In fact, such word processors already exist. Your email program is a word processor specifically geared to writing emails. There exists word processors for writing blog posts. If you write scripts, you’re familiar with Final Draft, a word processor specifically for writing scripts.

Simplicity in software can be achieved by allowing for, at design time, the possibility that the application being designed is actually two applications. It is achieved by realizing that a new feature may actually be the first feature of a new application.

In the future, software that targets specific users will become the norm, and behemoths such as Word will fade away.

If I were Howard Moskowitz, I might say that we don’t need a word processor. We need word processors. Word processors that are diverse, and above all, simple.

Positive reinforcement

As an owner of a brand-spanking new puppy, I’ve come to realize that it would be nice if people would applaud for me when I take a crap in the right place.

This Binary Universe

We humans, though we exalt our individualism and protest notions to the contrary, are really, deep down, one and the same. Blue might be your favorite color and rock & roll your favorite music, but we can all see a rainbow and we can all experience individual notes as a single chord. Neophyte artists often do not grasp this important fact, and many go out of their way to differentiate their art for the sake of being different. The best artists, however, know that the only way a work resonates is if it communicates an aspect of ourselves that is universal. The infinite ways in which we differ are nowhere near as exciting as the relatively few ways in which we are the same. Good art reveals new forms of commonality. A work of genius does more than reveal—it compels you to understand its unintuitive truth. And the revelation of truth is necessarily beautiful.

Our universality is fractal in nature. If you compartmentalize it, it fractures into a myriad of expressive variations, and from these fragments develop disparate disciplines such as oil painting, clay sculpture and electronica music. But digging into any of these disciplines reveals their interconnectedness. And the deeper you dig, the more evident it is that at some abyssal level, all disciplines are one and the same.

It has been a long time since I’ve discovered music that has resonated with me in such a fashion. I’ve spent a few bored nights wading through albums in iTunes, discovering music that almost piques my curiosity only to discover the rest of the album is mediocre dross. But a few days ago I discovered that Brian Transeau, who is better known by the moniker BT, was releasing a new album.

BT is a geek like me. Geeks are a misunderstood animal. They revel in the discovery of the peculiar (and many times inane) details of a subject, a quality that is usually mistaken for unnatural obsession. But it is this facility and willingness to immerse themselves that enables geeks to stumble upon hidden forms of universality. Bill Jay said it best in his book “On Being a Photographer”:

I once watched a television interview with a great violinist. The interviewer asked him to describe a typical day. The musician said he read scores over breakfast, then composed music in the morning, thought about music during a walk, practiced the violin in the afternoon, played in a concert in the evening, met with musician friends to play together, then went to bed dreaming of the violin. The interviewer was aghast: it seemed such a narrow life. “Yes,” said the violinist, “initially my life was becoming narrower and narrower in focus. But then something extraordinary happened. It is as though my music passed through a tiny hole in an hour-glass and it has since become broader and broader. Now my music is making connections with every aspect of life.”

Universality. Whether subconsciously or otherwise, BT gets this concept. It’s this reason that even though I haven’t heard his new album I am already excited about it. Almost fanatically excited. He writes in his own blog:

I wrote a lone piece of music a year ago now. It was the culmination of years of though [sic]. The integration of some of my more esoteric pursuits such as software design, micro rhythms, harmonic rhythm, glitch, classical music and asymmetrical meter. In short a meeting point for the academic and my great muse in music, the transmission of truth.

That piece of music is called Dynamic Symmetry. When I wrote it, not only did I not really know what it is, but I had (and honestly) still have no idea what to call it. It was an important turning point for me aesthetically and artistically, and one that I am now just realizing, its overwhelming significance.

It is a piece written in thirds. The introductory statement of a theme, variant of a theme and then a recapitulated interpretation of the theme. It is almost 11 minutes long and still as beautiful and magical to me, and near and dear to my heart as the day I wrote it. Its a proud moment. But I had no clue what to do with it, or where its potential home could be.

I believe BT has tripped over a universal musical truth.

I try not to get excited about the things that I anticipate. It’s probably a defense mechanism that I’ve built up as a result of being let down too many times. But despite myself I can’t help but be excited about this album. I am excited because perhaps listening to his new compositions will show me a new way to experience our commonality. And in turn I hope to learn something about myself.

“This Binary Universe”, BT’s fifth album, is unleashed upon the world on August 29th, 2006.

A moment at the hobby store

The boxes that were once meticulously stacked now form a staccato wall of printed cardboard in slick glossy plastic. One, in particular, is emblazoned with a photograph of a diminutive truck chassis attached to a foursome of immense monster-truck wheels. He is mesmerized by it. He winces as the pain he had escaped earlier starts to insinuate itself around the edges of his Vicodin-induced euphoria. It’s remarkable that he’s here at all, and I can’t help but puzzle over the alacrity with which he agreed to drive out with me.

I know about that kind of pain, the kind that follows you around like an oppressive rain cloud. At its worst it incapacitates you, turning you into a piteous useless mass. At its best you can almost forget it, but even when you’ve numbed it down with pills and distractions you feel its presence lurking at the periphery.

I’d like to say something witty to get him to laugh. I think a moment of levity might inhibit his pain, however briefly. But everything I think to say only inadequately conveys the gestalt of my intended message. I am as helpless with my sympathy as I imagine he is against his pain. Perhaps there’s nothing I can say or do to get him to feel better.

His hand moves towards the box and his fingers lightly caress the glossy plastic. His grimace melts into a distant smile, as if the slick texture evoked some distant memory of long lost friends and broken toys. And at that moment it occurs to me that there isn’t anything I can do for him that the box with the monster truck and the immense wheels hasn’t already done.

Happiest people on Earth

I just read an article that asks if there is a causation between the tech toys we buy and our happiness: article at Yahoo

After reading it I thought: the only sure way to ensure you’re the happiest people on Earth is to bomb everyone who’s happier than you.

It’s funny, because it’s true.

Odd little games

You hit thirty or so and all of a sudden, keeping the weight off becomes a Herculean effort. I glance down at my belly more often and wonder if it’s getting bigger when I’m not looking. The truth is, it exhibits no modesty and gets bigger regardless of whether I’m looking.

I’m on an airplane waiting to taxi at the moment and as I was sitting, I actually started to hope that the seat belt would snap right on without having to concede some slack, as if this was some signal from my ego that my weight hadn't yet spun out of control.

It snapped right on, and I actually had to tighten it. A victory, even if trivial. It’s been a good day so far.

Some great honor

I have a habit of keeping fortunes that I hope will come true. It’s not that I necessarily believe they'll come true. I'm about as superstitious as a mathematical proof. It's something I do… you know, just in case.

Anyway, this is a fortune I got tonight, which I kept. It’s not that I’m hoping for “some great honor” so much as I hope some day I’ll do something that would warrant it.

But then again, it’s a fortune, and I don’t believe in fortunes. Of course, not unless they come true.