Charles on… anything that comes along

Here’s how badly behind I was on reading my NetNewsWire feeds on May 17. The number shows how many unread articles there are. That’s with 200+ feeds, of course.

10,000+ things to read! OK, so I’m keeping them going back 300 days, just in case; it helps to put together a historical story, or track where stuff has gone, or just build things up. After all, it’s only text. I might extend it to 600 or 1000 days - why not?

But things have got worse. I’m now up to 266 feeds, and my unread total on June 1 is… even bigger, as you can see. At this rate I’m going to be finding out whether NetNewsWire can handle an unread count of more than 99,999 in a matter of days.

(Thanks of course to Flickr, Flickr Uploadr, and to the very wonderful Flickit widget, both of which made it possible for me to put this post together in less than geological time, which would have otherwise have been the case given my rudimentary HTML skills.)

It’s all got me wondering whether RSS really is the future of communication. Though I used to ignore a lot of email too…

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Finding a NNW bug (the tiniest), does Backup backup? and the slow train to Quicktime (18 October 2005; score: 58.72%)
• CSS twiddle means more readable in XP? (11 August 2005; score: 36.57%)
• Using NetNewsWire as a bucket, not a toe, in the river of RSS feeds (25 February 2006; score: 35.59%)

My latest column for The Independent (which I referred to last week; it’s taken a while to propagate to print) looks at PalmOne’s release of the LifeDrive.

Where other people have oohed and aahed over the features, such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and media support, I’m left wondering: who wants it? Without a keyboard (though you can buy one as an add-on), the LifeDrive looks like a piece of jetsam from the late 1990s, a time before the Blackberry, or Treo, or the rise of the PocketPC (which does all the Windows things, but better).

The question is, what is the core function of the LifeDrive? Compare it to a mobile phone, or an iPod. Strip out the games, contacts, calendars from either, and you’re down to their core function. But what is the LifeDrive’s core function? It’s not the same as the old Palm Pilot’s - to hold your contacts and phone numbers - because that has been taken up by the mobile phone. (I contend.)

My conclusion:

I think that the LifeDrive signals that the Palm concept is in trouble; the deep trouble that comes when a company forgets what it’s there for… Palm’s long-term survival hinges on its rediscovering its essence - as Apple did, joyously, with the iPod. Or will it become another victim of obsolescence, along with Osborne Computers and DEC.

Who? They were big - in their day. But it passed.

(My point about Apple, made in the unedited version, was that with the release of Windows 95 by Microsoft, the company went into a sort of tailspin, because it was no longer the best at user interfaces, and Windows 95 was ‘good enough’ to make the Mac OS of the time look not that much better. Apple kept going, of course, but didn’t regain its joie de vivre until the iPod, which reminded all the staff, and the world outside, that what Apple actually excels at is not user interfaces per se, but the end-to-end solutions - putting the hardware, the software, and the user interface into one compelling product.)

My previous post, with links to other reviews of the LifeDrive, is here.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• IBM will crush competition in servers, says Cringley - and Sun's in trouble (13 December 2004; score: 63.24%)
• Want some trouble? Do a religious ad in the style of the "I'm a Mac" ad (8 December 2006; score: 57.78%)
• Apple's Address Book: its search was already broken. And now mine has *completely* broken (9 May 2006; score: 53.43%)