Monday, August 4, 2008

Back from Amsterdam, Usability, and Silliy iPhone Nano Rumors...

I made it back from Amsterdam Saturday night, unfortunately with a bit of a cold. I'm working on shaking that now, since I need to be up in San Francisco for Linuxworld tomorrow (I'm on the "Golden Penguin Bowl" Mobile team!) and Wednesday...

Matthew Paul Thomas has expanded his six-year-old piece on the usability problems in free software, why they're there, and what we might do about them. This is a really important discussion for the community to be taking up as we move forward toward more free and open source software in mobile applications. As the iPhone has demonstrated, usability can trump features; features that are usable are, of course, even better...

Speaking of the iPhone, the blog-o-sphere is filled with stories about a supposed "iPhone Nano" that Apple's ostensibly going to be bringing out by Christmas. It's idiotic, but I hope they do it. In that form factor, battery life will be about forty minutes. The only thing I'd enjoy more would be an "iPhone Shuffle": no screen, one button, and when you press it, it dials a random contact in your address book...

If you're going to be at Linuxworld, please stop by the ACCESS booth (not hard to spot) and say "Hi!" And don't forget to come for the Golden Penguin Bowl, at 4:30 tomorrow in the Keynote room!