In the wake of Apple’s announcement that Macworld 2009 would be their last year as an exhibitor, I’ve seen a number of stories to the effect that Apple is “screwing the little guy” by pulling out. As a little guy who is about to exhibit at Macworld for the third year in a row, I thought I’d weigh in on the subject.

Yes, the timing is awkward. The announcement seems rushed, and ideally Apple would have said something about what, if anything, will fill Macworld’s rather large shoes in the Apple ecosystem. That said, I’m happy they made the announcement now, rather than after the show, for the simple reason that I can make an informed decision about whether to exhibit next year or not.

You see, IDG asks exhibitors to commit for the following year while they’re at the show. They assign priority-based meeting times for you to stop by the show HQ, view the available booths, and sign a contract. Booth assignments are first come, first served (at least at the little guy level), so it really is to your advantage to reserve your space early. If you do, your name goes on the floor plan and you’ve locked in your place. Incidentally, if memory serves, Apple’s name was NOT on the board last year when I signed up for this year’s booth. Presumably they have a slightly higher priority for booth space than I do…

But is Apple “screwing the little guy” by pulling out?

I certainly don’t feel that way. In recent years, Apple has had a good track record of helping the smaller developers. A case in point: My first “booth” at the show was actually an Apple-subsidized kiosk in the Developer Pavillion. It was part of a package Apple and IDG offered to help smaller companies get recognition and included space next to the Apple booth (what better location could you ask for?) and they took care of most of the hassle of getting the booth setup and wired. Thanks Apple!

I see no reason why they won’t have our backs in some other form in the future. There is a lot of innovation at the little guy level, and they’re not, um, stupid.

As for the keynote kerfuffle: The media and investor community can’t simultaneously demand a succession plan and balk the first time Apple takes baby steps towards implementing one. This is “grooming” in action–heck, it may even be an audition. I’ll be interested to see how Phil handles it–and I hope he hits it out of the park.

Am I sad to see Macworld decline (and let’s face it, it will decline)? Yes. Absolutely. This year, I’ll probably stay a little later at the parties, indulge in the whole “end of an era” scene that is sure to evolve, and then, on the 10th, get back to work making great software.

What if you wrote some software that scoured the internet for content on a specific topic and compiled it into an eBook that you could sell on Amazon? According to an article in today’s New York Times , Philip Parker, a management science professor at Insead, a Business School with campuses in Europe and Singapore, has done just that.

Now, I have no problem with the research. AI is an interesting and important field. Visions of Skynet not withstanding, it holds great promise. But compiling and selling medical books using this research technology is just plain irresponsible.

People assume that information printed in books has received at least some editorial review, and is therefore more authoritative than the information you might find on the Web. For some fields of knowledge, violating this trust may not matter. But for medicine? Astounding.

On a lighter note: According to the New York Times story, Parker is also interested in computer generated novels.

And he is laying the groundwork for romance novels generated by new algorithms. “I’ve already set it up,” he said. “There are only so many body parts.”

Rest assured that I have no plans to add algorithms like this to Storyist.

Do people really want to cuddle up with a piece of technology? No, I don’t mean it like that. I’m talking about Kindle, the wireless reading device from Amazon. The prevailing wisdom is that for an e-reader to succeed, it will have to make people want to “cuddle up” with it like they do a good book.
A number of consumer product companies have taken a shot at it, and to date, haven’t been able to put together a package that appeals to general readers.

But if anyone can do it, Amazon can, right?. They have the brand, the relationships with publishers, and the infrastructure to pull it off.

So how does Kindle stack up? Here is what I found.

Availability

If if you want a Kindle, you’re going to have to wait. On the Amazon website, Jeff Bezos apologizes for the fact that people are waiting up to six weeks to get one. I fared a little better. I bought mine on February 2nd and received it on Valentines Day. Jeff, you sure know how to make a guy feel special!

The good: The device arrived charged and registered to my Amazon account. No set up. Ready to go. I suppose the only way the out-of-box experience could have been better would have been if they had pre-installed a title from my wish list.

The bad: While selling out on the first day says “hit product”, being continually out of stock four months after launch says “rookie consumer products company”. I’m sure that a number of people are waiting to take the $399 plunge to see how well Amazon supports a consumer product.

The Industrial Design

Kindle had the privilege of launching shortly after the iPhone, and unfortunately for Amazon, the iPhone raised the industrial design bar quite high.

The good: Much has been made of the fact that the Kindle is bigger than the competing reader from Sony. I think this is a benefit. When reading on your couch or in your comfy chair, the device rests comfortably on your lap or stomach. A thinner device would put more pounds per square inch on said lap or stomach, and be less comfortable.

Another plus is that Kindle is not a simple box. It has lots of angles. Not curves, gently rounded angles that fit nicely in the crook of your palm.

The bad: The Kindle industrial design has received some pointed criticism, some of it with good reason:

• When holding the device, it is very easy to inadvertently hit the Next Page button. Distressingly easy. I couldn’t find a way to hold it in my right hand without pressing either the Next Page or the Back button.
• The power switch is located on the back of the device. If you keep the device in its cover, you have to take it out to turn the machine on. Why isn’t the switch located on the top?
• The Home key (a frequently used key) is buried in the middle of the keypad.
• The page flashes when you advance to the next page. This is distracting.
• No touch interface. This isn’t Amazon’s fault, really. Apple raised the bar. Unfortunately, it is easy to imagine that Kindle would be greatly improved with a touch interface.

The Cuddle Up Factor

So can you cuddle up with Kindle?

After some experimentation, I found that I was able to balance it in one hand, thumb placed over the Amazon logo and within striking distance of the “Next Page” button, and read comfortably for several hours using less physical energy than a conventional book. I didn’t develop the almost pavlovian attachment to the Kindle that I did to the iPhone, but neither did I find the technology intruding on the reading experience. “Cuddle” may be too strong a word, but the experience was perfectly acceptable.

Conclusion

Kindle is a good (but not great) 1.0 product. The industrial design issues aside, I found the reading experience to be a reasonable replacement for paper when reading text-only books like novels or biographies. Not having stacks of books littering my reading area will be a welcome change and after using the device for about six weeks, I look forward to using it more.

And I’m looking forward to 2.0.

Use ye software while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same license that smiles to-day To-morrow will be dying.

Shortly after the ball made its way down the pole to ring in the new year (well, shortly after the time-delayed broadcast of the event aired–the West Coast always gets a bum deal on New Year’s Eve broadcasts), I turned on my computer with the intention of wishing the wonderful folks at the Storyist forums a Happy New Year and was met with a forum error message saying “This file has expired.” Expired?

A quick check with the hosting company confirmed that the account was current and in good standing, and I realized what had happened. Obviously, a developer had picked a BIG ROUND NUMBER for an expiration date and had forgotten about it. This is an all-too-common problem, one of those “there but for the grace of God go I” problems.

Note to self: When choosing an expiration date for Storyist beta releases, pick one that doesn’t fall on a day when no-one will be around to field the support tickets.

The countdown to Script Frenzy is almost over. You can feel the excitement in the air … Well can’t you? What? What is Script Frenzy? Oh!

It is a month-long screenwriting event is sponsored by the same folks who organize National Novel Writing Month. And if NaNoWriMo (as it is known by the literati) is any predictor, Script Frenzy should be a blast and a huge success.

If you are “In the Frenzy” too, drop me a comment or send me some FrenzyMail (username: storyist) and say hi.

I’m delighted to announce that Storyist 1.2 is out, and just in time for Script Frenzy. Version 1.2 supports screenwriting and includes a new screenplay template as well as some screenplay-specific power features. It also includes much improved header and footer support and support for mirrored pages. Take it for a spin.

December is here, which means that NaNoWriMo is now officially behind us. As NaNoWriMo Director Chris Baty (shown here raising a toast to NaNoWriMo participants at the TGIO Party) put it

Shoot…Does it really have to be over.

This was my first year participating in the event, and I have to say I’m impressed. I’m impressed that what started as a loosely organized noveling binge by 21 friends who wanted to “make some noise” grew to a world-wide event in which over 79,000 people participated. I’m impressed that in addition to providing a warm and welcoming place for people with a story to tell to actually go ahead and tell it, the organizers are using their success to promote a love of writing in kids and help establish children’s libraries in rural Southeast Asia. And I’m impressed that, despite the size of the effort, it still feels like a group of friends getting together to have fun.

‘Cause it was fun. Lots and lots of fun.

Kudos to everyone involved!

I generally think FedEx does a great job, but a recent experience left me scratching my head.

I ordered something online and paid for express shipping. The package left Oregon on Saturday, arrived in Tennessee on Sunday morning, in Oakland Sunday evening, and in my home town early Monday morning.

There it sat for 24 hours.

The reason given on the tracking report: “Package not due for delivery.”

Sheesh.

I know that load balancing is a complicated problem and am willing to believe that Monday is a busy delivery day, but the image I’m left with is something like this:

SHIFT BOSS: Hey Vern, ya want to run this up the street?

VERN: (picking his teeth) Ain’t s’posed to be there until tomorrow. Besides, I gotta finish my TPS report.

SHIFT BOSS: Good man. Make sure ya finish that TPS report.

Sometimes you just get lucky.

I was at my desk last Sunday working on some items for the upcoming release of Storyist, when my unit tests (I am religious about unit tests) started complaining. Since the problem was in an area of code that I hadn’t touched for quite a while, I was curious to see what broke.

The assertion was in some date code. Date code?

Drumming fingers on the keyboard. “Something about today… What is it? Aha! Spring forward, fall back!”

Sunday was the first day of standard time.

A quick debugging session identified the culprit: NSTimeZone. The offending line of code was

int seconds = [[date timeZone] secondsFromGMT];

Now, the intent of the code was to do some arithmetic with “date”. However, the documentation for secondsFromGMT reads

Returns the current difference in seconds between the receiver and Greenwich Mean Time.

The bug lies in the fact that the method returns “the current difference,” not (as is obvious in retrospect) the seconds from GMT of the date of interest. The correct code is

int seconds = [[date timeZone] secondsFromGMTForDate:date];

I would never have found this bug without unit tests. The way the code is structured, the bug only occurs two days a year. And any bug report not investigated on these two days would have resulted in the bug being closed with the dreaded “works for me” status.

So some times you just get lucky–if you are prepared for it.

Do you have a story to tell?

I’m looking for beta testers for Storyist, a new story development tool for novelists. If you are interested and have Mac OS 10.4 or later, drop by the beta page for details on how to sign up.