Thursday 11 April 2013

BACK TO THE FUTURE

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 219  07/10/2012

A wave of nostalgia about old-school personal computing is going around the Web, with people restoring, emulating or reminiscing about Sinclair Spectrums, Jupiter Aces, Dragons, Orics and many more, wherever you look. I'm not too proud to jump on a passing bandwagon, so here's my own reminiscence. I bought my first "computer" - a Casio fx-201P, one of the very first programmable calculators - around 1977. It had a 10-digit green fluorescent display and 127 steps of program memory (no editor: make a mistake, enter them all again). I programmed it to check printers' invoices for magazines with varying numbers of pages, sections and amounts of colour, which impressed the printers who had no such assistance themselves, and when in 1979 Dennis Publishing acquired Personal Computer World, it earned me a column called "Calculator Corner" of which this column could be seen as a direct descendant.

That Casio was a fairly chunky beast at 7 x 4 x 1.5 inches and it weighed 13oz, which hardly mattered since it remained on my desk. By the oddest of coincidences my latest "computer", a Google Nexus 7, is around the same size at 7.8 x 4.7 x  0.4 inches and weighs 12oz, though it contains around 128 million times more memory and runs over 100,000 times faster. Oh, and instead of 10 green glowing digits its display shows streaming movies and TV. Had cars advanced at a similar rate then just one could carry the whole population of England to the moon in under two minutes. The German philosopher Hegel famously claimed that sufficient quantitative change leads eventually to qualitative change, and that's what I'm feeling right now about my Nexus, that tablet computers are poised to change the game.

During these years between the Casio and the Nexus I've spent a lot of energy pursuing a particular idea of computing, deeply influenced by Alan Kay's notion of the "Dynabook", his universal portable information store. I've tried and abandoned several drawers-ful of pocketable computing devices, looking for one that would sync transparently to a desktop computer. I've rejected a desktop altogether in favour of a powerful laptop. I'd reached the point, as described in last month's column, where I can use my Android smartphone to share files with my laptop via Dropbox, but it was all still a bit fiddly with data entry via the phone too slow and a screen rather too small for viewing complex websites. Of course I expected a tablet to improve things in both those respects, but I didn't anticipate by quite how much.

Being an Android device the Nexus immediately grabbed all my contacts, calendar and mail from Google's cloud with no effort, and I soon had all my preferred apps (in latest their Jelly Bean versions) installed. On installing File Manager HD I noticed a new menu option called LAN Connection, and despite my acute networkophobia I tapped the Scan icon to see what would happen. After an agonising delay it came back with a connection to "USER-PC", my laptop! It took me a further afternoon of wading through Microsoft's grim network model - what is a Homegroup and how is it different from a Workgroup? - but eventually I got everything I wanted shared. No need to duplicate any music, videos, documents to the tablet, just access them over Wi-Fi.

You have to understand that I work at home where I'm either sitting at my desk upstairs in front of my laptop, or on the sofa downstairs reading books and making notes - now I may have to adopt some vigorous exercise regime to replace all the stair-climbing I no longer need do. I rarely work away from home so the Nexus's lack of 3G isn't critical, and in any case I wouldn't want to pay for another SIM, but then I discovered that the "Tethering & Portable Hotspot" setting of my phone actually works. BT Fon already gives me free Wi-Fi throughout much of London, but where it doesn't I can Google and Wikipede via my phone's Wi-Fi. 

So far I've never been even slightly tempted by any of the Home Server or Media PC offerings, but now I'm beginning to see the possibility of a different sort of animal: a tiny Linux box containing a 1TB disk and a Wi-Fi router, with no display or keyboard. All it does is locally store data from PCs, tablets and phones over Wi-Fi, while continually backing itself up to Dropbox or some other cloud service. No shared media streaming, do all that at the client ends (I have Spotify even on my phone). And I've started to feel wallet palpitations of almost Honeyballian intensity whenever I see ads for the Asus Transformer...




Wednesday 10 April 2013

NOTA BENE

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 218  06/09/2012

It sometimes feels as though I've been taking notes all my life. Certainly I was already doing it in school, and in university lectures, when in combination with my photographic memory it was a great advantage in exams: I could just conjure up the page of my notebook where an answer lay. (That memory is now fading, but luckily for me computers are improving at more or less the same rate). Right from the start personal computing for me meant trying to find some practical way to take notes on the damned things. Of course for a writer finding a decent writing tool was the first priority, but that proved nowhere near so hard to fullfil. For each successive OS since CP/M 2.2, I quickly discovered a word-processor or editor that would serve me well for years - Wordstar, PC-Write, TextPad, Microsoft Word - but for each OS I also wasted hours trying and rejecting inadequate candidates for the role of note-taker. The top drawer of my grey filing cabinet testifies to my failure, because it's half full of spiral-bound reporter's pads containing 20-years-worth of pencil scribblings.

It wasn't until the first Palm Pilot came out in 1996 that things looked up a bit. A crucial attribute of any note-taking system is portability, because ideas pop into my head at all times and places, even in bed at night, and having to plod to a desktop computer to record them is a total no-no. Palm got me to a point where I could be sitting anywhere, perhaps reading a book, with a Pilot at my elbow to scribble notes using Graffiti handwriting, and have them transfer to my desktop PC whenever I synced. Soon I discovered Natara's Bonsai, a neat outliner that ran on both PC and Palm, and no less than 125 of these Idealog columns were planned in that program. That Bonsai lasted me ten-years proves it was workable, but it still wasn't ideal: it couldn't handle pictures or diagrams, and folding editors actually aren't, contrary to what you might expect, that much help on a tiny handheld screen. And Palm's syncing worked, but only so long as you remembered to do it...

After Palm went under I moved over to an Android phone, which opened up whole new cloudy vistas. Bonsai never made the leap and stuck with Windows Mobile, but there are dozens of Android outliner apps and I've tried most of them. Many of the free ones work well but have neither a Windows sync client nor cloud storage. Then there are big beasts like Zotero, Evernote and SimpleNote that offer both cloud service and PC sync. I decided to try the free version of Evernote and was very excited for a while. It's a whole ecosystem, with add-ons for drawing sketches and clipping web pages, and it has an attractive user interface. Notes handwritten on my phone (using the marvellous Graffiti Pro app) just appear on my laptop without effort. Until one day the Evernote Windows client just vanished from my PC, without a trace. I hasten to add that no notes were lost - they're all still there in my account on Evernote's website - but it  disconcerted me when the same happened again weeks after I reinstalled it. The cloud is mighty powerful, and this ability to remove things from my PC without asking has quite blunted my enthusiasm for the product.

It was around then PC Pro adopted DropBox to deliver Real World Computing copy, and the penny dropped that I can now roll my own cloudy note-taking solution using the excellent DropBox client for Android. Just create a directory tree called Notes in the Dropbox folder and bung all text, pictures, spreadsheets, whatever, relating to a project into the same subdirectory. Stick to a few file formats like text, JPG, docx and xlsx (I have Documents To Go on my phone). And TextPad lets me drag web URLs straight from Firefox into a note and access them by right-clicking. Sorted.

And what, I hear you mutter, about Microsoft's OneNote? Well, whenever Simon Jones has demonstrated it to me on his rarer-than-hens-teeth Samsung Slate PC I've been bowled over by its unique, industry-beating capabilities. But there's the rub: like almost everyone else I never bought a Windows Tablet or Slate PC, and Microsoft never provided me a copy with any version of Office I've had. In fact, so effectively have they've kept this killer app away from the public that they ought to be put in charge of Hantavirus quarantine. Now Redmond is betting the farm on Windows 8 and my advice would be, make your Surfaces (or whatever they're called this week) into dynamite OnceNote engines, and let them communicate easily with your competitors' devices: the iPad currently has nothing to touch it for note-taking.

SOCIAL UNEASE

Dick Pountain /Idealog 350/ 07 Sep 2023 10:58 Ten years ago this column might have listed a handful of online apps that assist my everyday...