Samsung's ChromeBook spoiler

It's interesting that Samsung has decided to announce the new ARM based chromebooks just after the Microsoft Surface price announcement and before the rumoured announcement if the iPad mini.

The chromebook is an excellent idea spoiled by reality - as I've said elsewhere the lack of reliable always on internet  makes its use problematical in a lot of locations, and to be honest, after my experiments with the seven incher I can confidently say a no name android table with a keyboard provides a functionally equivalent experience for a lower price, and you can still type on the bus.

So what's the use case for a chrome book?

A low cost laptop for the kids to do their homework on ? Not that stupid a scenario as they're probably relatively unbreakable and if one dies you just get another one the same.

And that's the key - the education market, standard plug interchangeable hardware, the ideal for a repeatable and consistent environment - the thing that's proved difficult to engineer in the iPad world ...

Changes in file format use over time ...

Andrew Jackson of the British Library has recently published a study of the use of particular file types over time, focusing on pdf, image and HTML file versions in an attempt to define whether being widely distributed and in use is a guard against obsolescence.

It's a valuable and interesting chunk of work. However it's possible to pick a couple of holes in the study :

• it dosn't address the problem of different document formats, eg the variation in doc and ppt formats as recently exemplified by Chris Rusbridge's attempt to recover some powerpoint 4 format files
• it doesn't explore the problem of legacy formats – my favourite examples are Claris Works and AmiPro files, and also those legacy foramts without a mime type – such as data formats used by specialist dataloggers

However what it does show is that once a format is in common use it is protected against obsolescence. The real problem is with formats from the days before storing documents on the web became the default for many people and the conventions were not fully established.

For example I recently needed to check some documentation about a legacy file format. The manufacturer had put the documentation on the web as TeX files. While perfectly readable this did entail installing OzTeX to read the downloaded file.

Andrew's study also did not address the problem of legacy media formats such as exabyte tapes and the rest. To be fair he explicitly only looked at the UK web corpus, which by definition is online, which meant that he was only concerned with file formats, not media formats.

It would be interesting to run a similar study over the filestore of a medium to large university and see how large a diversity of file type there were, as well as rerunning the study to look at document formats ...

Microsoft surface ...

I was idly musing about my tablet experience over the weekend, and suddenly I had a light bulb moment.

The iPad is clearly a consummate device for consuming content. It doesn't work for work because work  involves doing things, such as replying to emails, producing notes, other short form documents etc.

My experiments with my no name seven inch tablet show there's a use case there. But it is kind of hobbled by the software base. Android (and iPad) lacks the software base required for serious full out work, at best they can be said to be useful tools for supporting work. That's why people on the whole buy MacBook Airs and other similar ultrabooks rather than Asus Transformers.

Enter the Surface. A computer that's supposed to have a more business oriented software base, but which has the virtues of tablet computers - low power consumption, long battery life inutitive interface (in a year we'll all be using the interface formerly known as Metro and will have forgotten about start menus).

So Microsoft have identified a gap in the market, produced a solution, and given's Microsoft's near total ownership of business computing, grabbed a chunk of market real estate.

Very clever - wish I'd thought of it ...

Using the seven inch tablet as a note taker

As anyone following this thread will know I bought myself a no name seven inch android tablet and keyboard combo as a note taker for work.

I've had a long hunt for suitable tools over the years, and until I tried the tablet and keyboard combo the most effective and portable solution I found was a  palm pilot and keyboard combo back in 2003. Everything else in the intervening years has either been too heavy, had poor battery life or some combination of the two. I also find typing on glass keyboards on tablets a frustrating experience for extensive note taking.

The original use case was that the reasonably long battery life and use of a keyboard would allow me to take notes in meetings and either put them straight into dropbox or evernote.

The long battery life is a definite plus - making it more usable than a netbook - basically I charge it using the car charger when I drive in to work and away on the way home and that gives me adequate power for a working day unless it's one dominated by seminars or workshops where I find myself taking lots of notes.

It also of course lets me check email, twitter, and send me calendar reminders etc.

Basically it works, and definitely improves my effectiveness.

However the actual use pattern  has turned out to be not quite what I expected.

Originally I thought I would use epistle - a simple text editor and save the files to dropbox to be cleaned up a later date.

In fact (having tried ted and rejected it due to its poor export capabilities) I found myself going back to textedit to take notes and then mailing the files to myself as a more effective method.

I found I was more likely to put the effort into cleaning things up if the files were in my mailbox. (I'm not an inbox zero person, but I've evolved my own technique that has the same effect using gmail's starring and labelling).

Once I've got the file in my inbox I cut and paste the text into an empty libre office document, spell check it, tidy up the text and the document structure, and once I'm happy with it put it into evernote as a pdf. If I want to keep the original Libre Office document - for example to reuse the text - I save that to Dropbox

Spellchecking is important - unlike say my original Asus netbook the keyboard has genuinely small keys close together. It also suffers from keybounce or even misses characters - basically a better keyboard would improve matters.

The small keys are also a problem. Having large european male fingers I find myself sympathising with the late Steve Jobs over the need to file down my digits to type effectively.  J, who has small hands and doesn't suffer the key mistrike problem, or indeed hitting two keys at once.

I am however getting better - practice helps.

So, in conclusion,

• the long battery life and lighter weight makes it preferable to a netbook in the same form factor
• concentrating on just being a note taker is less distracting in meetings
• you need to be disciplined - notes do need to be cleaned up later
• a netbook or ultrabook is still preferable for trips away due to its versatility

Would I recommend it ? yes, but be realistic, it's a tool, not a transforming experience ...

Save icons ...

Some time ago there was some chatter on twitter about why the save icon in lots of programs was still a  floppy disk, given that one has actually used floppies for around 10 years now:

part of the answer is of course lack of agreement on what to replace it with. Libre Office uses something that's supposed to be a file being saved to a hard disk

but that really doesn't work. It's odd, does it mean download, is there a different icon for a network save etc etc (and if you're like me and need glasses, it can look like a printer icon on a small screen).

I guess we're kind of stuck with the floppy as the universal save icon until someone comes up with something with universal appeal. I find it slightly amusing that some android text editors (text edit for example) still use the floppy disk icon to mean save.

The other thing would be to be to simply change the default action - when you close a document you are asked to save it. That's ok, except that I quite often want to save a copy of the file I'm working on to dropbox so I can review it at home, and then come back to the version on my machine at work the next day. So I'd need a special push to dropbox icon.

Rather than agonise I think we need to be more like road signs and simply live with them as conventions. In the UK and much of Europe the sign for an ungated level crossing looks like this:

which works,  even though steam trains are thin on the ground these days purely because almost everyone knows what a steam train looks like even if they've only seen them on TV in period dramas.

In contrast the usual Australian sign is truly bizarre

it's a graphic representation of a crossing marker with flashing lights, and not something universally recognizable. It may, like the Libre Office save icon make intellectual sense but it isn't immediately recognisable as it's not part of our graphic lexicon ...

Google Cloud Print ...

I've previously written that I'd never found printer sharing apps on printers terribly useful, and the same held for Google cloud print. Great idea, but in practice not that useful.

Being able to print to any printer you've registered sounds great but the obvious use - printing when you're somewhere other than close to your computer. Sure I can print my boarding pass, but that's no bloody good when I'm in a hotel in Adelaide and my printer's in Canberra ...

That was until yesterday afternoon.

I was working on a document and had got to the stage where I really needed to print out a draft and scrawl all over it.

Except the office printer was down with a dead fuser unit.

To explain, we have a big shared multi function device.  I'm an 'eat our own dogfood guy', ie I believe that we should use our own services rather than bypass them by having a private correspondance printer. The confidentiality arguement doesn't applay to me so I've sent the last two printers that people tried to give me back.

The only downside with the big shared device is that supplies and maintenance are outsourced, and the printer is supposed to send status messages to the maintenance company who are then supposed to pre-emptively arrive with new bits before it goes offline. Most of the time this works pretty well, but sometimes just in time turns out to be just too late.

We do keep an old laserjet on the network as a standby, but rather than that ,I thought I'd just drop a copy in dropbox and print it at home.

Then I had a lateral thought - use Google's cloud print. So I downloaded the webabode cloud printer app of OS X, clicked on the printer I wanted to print to and clicked on the file to queue it, locked my computer and went home.

At home I powered up the printer and opened up my Dell laptop. I did have to restart chrome to get the printing to work, but sure enough, once I'd restarted chrome the printer whirred and out came my document.

Quietly impressive given it was an odt file created with Libre Office on OS X and printed via Chrome on a Windows 7 machine (which for historical reasons has Apache Open Office, not Libre Office installed)

Skydrive killed the student filestore ...

Over the years I've said various things about student filestores, but now is probably the time to finally lay the corpse out in its box.

The reason? The Apple iPad. (actually it's not the iPad's fault, it could just as easily be an Android tablet or a smartphone of some description)

As soon as we get to a situation where students routinely have multiple computing devices they need to share information between them. Historically they did this by walking about with floppy disks in the bottom of their work bags and more recently with usb sticks. However as soon as you start finding people using information access devices that lack usb ports the game changes. They start sharing files over the network between their various devices. And of course sharing information between devices is really just a restricted version of sharing information with other users.

So what do we have in the way of alternatives:

Dropbox – can share files between computers. Automatic synchonisation. Widely supported. Webclient for accessing your files when you don't have dropbox installed. Can share files via magic link. Totally agnostic as to file type

Google drive. Functionality much as dropbox but with the added advantage of a web based editor and co-operative editing facilities. Can export documents in standard (ie Microsoft, Libre Office and as PDF).

Skydrive. Uses Microsoft style formats by default. Generous amount of storage (7GB), and accessible via a standard browser or via Apple or Android clients. Plays nicely with local Office installs.

There are other services, for example Box.net that provides much the same functionality as dropbox. Even the latest version of AbiWord comes with a built in document collaboration and sharing service.

So we can say that student filestores are dead. No one needs to use them and some of the alternatives are possibly better. Even the old canard about getting files back from a backup doesn't really apply – use google docs or skydrive and your deleted files live on in a recycle bin and even dropbox caches deleted files. In fact things are considerably better than if you walk around with your data on a USB stick – and potentially safer.

So we could quite sensibly say that we could run without student filestore provision – all we need do is nominate a preferred service. This isn't as radical a move as it might have been a few years ago – people are accepting of using cloud storage for their music, so having them self outsource their data to the cloud is not such a stretch.

All that is lost is the joy of managing student filestore ….