It is beautifully designed. Beneath the surface it uses the latest version of Microsoft’s phone software.

This should be good news. Microsoft’s Windows Phone software is a better bet for Nokia than its disastrous Symbian and MeeGo systems.

Alternative to Apple, Android

A practical smart phone alternative to Apple and Android should spur competition and innovation.

Many users who have yet to make the jump to smart phones will welcome Microsoft’s easy user interface and easy integration.

A year ago when Nokia and Microsoft announced their partnership, the idea of a smart phone which integrates smoothly with the desktop PC looked compelling.

Shuffling files and information between Windows 7 applications and an Android phone was clumsy. It still isn’t ideal.

Smart phone versions of Microsoft Office apps, connected to desktops and laptops through Microsoft’s Sky Drive cloud service could be mobile nirvana.

Cutting the Microsoft cord

At the time of the Nokia – Microsoft announcement, I was excited by the idea of bringing all my devices together under one technology umbrella.

That’s changed. Since Microsoft partnered with Nokia I dumped my laptop in favour of an iPad and I’ve connect my Android phone to the iPad and desktop using Drop Box. I’m less dependent on what people in the business call the Microsoft ‘eco-system’. After years of spending my working day in Microsoft Word, I now use other writing tools almost as much.

I’m still keen to see if Windows Phone will work for me, but it’s no longer essential.

It’s not just about me. Others will have jumped ship.

Nokia’s first batch of Windows smart phones still aren’t on sale in New Zealand. The Lumia 900 could be months away. Each month that passes sees more people unhitch from Microsoft’s world.

It’s far too early to count Microsoft and Nokia out. Apple was in a far worse shape before it’s recovery. Yet the clock is ticking for both companies.

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• HTC Sensation, Huawei Ideos X5 compared (billbennett.co.nz)

iPad as typewriter, dwarfed by desktop PC

As Robin Williams’ book title says it clearly: The Mac is not a typewriter. On the other hand, Apple’s iPad just might be.

My iPad links to an Apple Wireless Keyboard and runs iA Writer. This combination gives me the closest thing I’ve seen in 25 years to an old-school manual typewriter.

For a journalist that’s a good thing.

Typewriter easy

Apple didn’t design the iPad with word processing in mind.

On its own the iPad is a terrible writing tool. Although it’s on-screen keyboard makes for better typing than using a smartphone.

Yet here I am tapping away and loving the typing experience more than I have done since my last ribbon dried up back in the 1980s.

Have I taken leave of my senses?

Let me count the ways I love you

Three things make the iPad typewriter-like:

1. Radical simplicity.

The iPad, Apple’s Wireless Keyboard and iA Writer make for simple and distraction free writing.

There’s no mouse – that’s great because lifting hands off the keyboard to point and click is the number one cause of pain for old-school touch typists working on PCs.

Until you stop writing, everything is controlled by the keyboard.

At the same time, the crisp serif text on a plain screen is the nearest thing to a type on a sheet of paper. Wonderful.

2. Text editor

iA Writer is a text editor. Not a word processor.

There’s nothing dancing on my screen. No pop-ups, no incoming email – at least not the way I’ve set things up.

It’s just me and my words. The only word processor-like feature is the iPad’s built-in spell checker, which mainly stays out-of-the-way.

Best of all, iA Writer doesn’t do page layout. I don’t care how my words look because I can’t tinker. That’s one less thing to worry about.

This all adds up to fast, productive writing.

3. Quick on the draw

Typewriters don’t need to warm-up, to boot or load applications. Nor does the iPad.

My normal morning practice is to make a cup of tea while waiting for the PC to be ready for writing. The iPad is ready in seconds.

I can get my thoughts down while they are still fresh. The first 100 words or so are nailed on the iPad before I’d get started on the PC.

The best computer bits are still there

While my iPad writing combination kills the bad stuff about word processing, it keeps the best feature: The ability to go back over copy and make corrections. This was always a pain when using a typewriter.

And I send my writing to just about anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds. Try doing that with a real typewriter.

Other plus points

My iPad and keyboard are a lot easier to carry than my ageing and neglected portable typewriter – and easier than my laptop.

The battery life is long – I can work a whole day without needing to find a power point.

iA Writer uses DropBox. I could write an entire post about why this is a good thing, but the main point is my work is available to me on any computer anywhere in the world.

The jury is out on…

So far I haven’t figured how to send posts directly from my iPad to WordPress – at this stage there’s still cutting and posting involved. I’m sure there’s a better way.

Related articles

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• Ode to Manual Typewriters (freehandlife.com)

Image via Wikipedia

It’s too soon to say for certain if the move from self-hosted WordPress back to the WordPress.com has cost much web traffic. I suspect it has.

The site moved in mid-December. My assumption was a move at this time would minimise disruption. Perhaps it did.

Yet January’s traffic is about 10% to 25% less than expected.

Predicting site traffic isn’t easy. It’s even harder at this time of year. January is the height of summer here in New Zealand and a quiet time for web traffic. Historically this site’s January traffic is around half the monthly average.

There are also fewer fresh posts during the Christmas break.

At the time of writing, traffic is tracking around 25% lower than the normal January level. It could be simple statistical fluctuation, less interesting material posted this month or a direct consequence of the move.

My gut feeling says the move had an effect. Even the evergreen content is getting less traffic than normal.

One of the best tools for digging out more information and finding out exactly where the problem lies is Google Analytics - which doesn’t work with a WordPress.com site.

The site was off-line for a few hours in December, but January has seen fewer than usual disruptions – another benefit of moving back to WordPress.com.

If I turn up more useful information, I’ll update this post.

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Image via Wikipedia

Newspaper publishers struggling to make money from on-line advertising see reader pay walls as an obvious way to boost revenue.

While pay walls work for specialist financial publishers, the jury is still out on whether making general news readers pay is realistic.

Readers happily paid for print newspapers. Some still do. New Zealand’s daily newspapers cost around NZ$2.

So you might think NZ$2 a day to access the paper on-line is reasonable.

I can think of three reasons why it isn’t.

1. Print newspapers are made and distributed. The cost of running a print plant and running trucks is much higher than the cost of moving pixels around. Newspaper sellers take a cut of the cover price. Any on-line sales would be direct. Readers expect publishers to pass on some of the cost savings.
2. Readers who buy print newspapers generally read a number of stories. They could conceivably read the paper cover to cover then do the crosswords and Sudoku puzzles. Nobody reads like this on-line. As a rule on-line reads skip from publication to publication grazing on content.
3. Print newspapers don’t have realistic free competitors. Broadcast radio and TV news is free, but it doesn’t directly compete with printed papers in the way, say, Radio New Zealand’s web site is just a click away from Stuff.co.nz.

For all these reasons, newspaper publishers are asking considerably less from on-line readers than print readers pay.

And rightly so. Instead they sell subscriptions. For example, The Australian charges on-line A$3 a week. It’s not possible to buy one day’s on-line paper, nor can readers make a small payment to reach a single pay walled story. In fact, while the price is advertised as dollars per week, customers have to buy a whole month’s access at a time.

The Australian does many things right. The price is reasonable, the bundle of print paper plus on-line access is exactly what I would choose if I needed to read an Australian newspaper each morning.

Yet asking readers to pay in advance for a whole month at a time seems wrong. Sure, many readers already subscribe to a daily newspaper delivery, but many others don’t. They buy a print paper as and when they feel a need. There needs to be an on-line equivalent requiring less commitment.

Related articles

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I’ve looked at a few in shops and need an iPad keyboard so I can use the Apple tablet while I’m on the move.

It doesn’t have to be a full-size keyboard, but big enough for proper typing and preferably with all the main keys in the usual places so I don’t have to unlearn habits.

When I’m on the move I mainly write news, which is usually short snappy stuff, not long pieces. I’d prefer something that doesn’t need separate batteries, but that’s negotiable.

The site launched on WordPress.com. It stayed with the free hosting service for a year before switching to self-hosting.

It returned to WordPress.com because self-hosting no longer offered any return on the extra work involved.

The lure of self-hosted WordPress.org

Self-hosted WordPress is a great way to learn more about web-publishing technology.

I’m a journalist. Newspapers are the past. WordPress represents a possible future. HTML, PHP and CSS are likely more useful to the rest of my career than sharpening my typewriter skills.

Technology is often best learnt by doing. I installed the WordPress.org software, found a local host, grabbed a domain name and built a tailored site.

Getting the site running took time and effort. I had to learn a huge amount. It was challenging and satisfying.

Learning minimalism the hard way

Self-hosted WordPress is more flexible than WordPress.com. Yet in the end, this proved unimportant.

A key lesson I learnt from my time with the hosted software was the virtues of radical simplicity. I took a minimalist approach to site design. My on-line reading experience taught me simple is good, complex is bad.

It’s tempting to build huge, complicated feature-rich sites. I never fell into this trap, but my site evolved to become more complex than necessary.

Apart from being harder to read. Complex pages load slowly and things – we’ll leave them unspecified for the moment – get in the way of the words.

There are also problems displaying complex web sites on smart phones.

Over time my site evolved – or should that be devolved – to a minimal format. I wanted to strip it back to focus on short, snappy stories. Self-hosted WordPress’s famous flexibility no longer mattered.

Minimal is as minimal does

Minimalism is a state of mind. I realised I could apply the same principles to managing the site. I simplified day-to-day site maintenance by leaving it all to experts. Running the site now takes considerably less energy and effort. I’m free to spend more time on writing fresh content. I can focus on the important things.

I haven’t given up on self-hosted WordPress or on learning more about the mechanics of on-line publishing, I look after a few self-hosted sites and will continue to experiment with WordPress.org, PHP and CSS. However, this one is no longer my test rig.

Related post:

A clear benefit from switching back to WordPress.com

I’ll write more about the pros and cons of switching back to WordPress.com later. For now, here’s clear evidence of one benefit: Pages from my WordPress.com hosted site download more than five times faster than on my self-hosted site.

The graph comes from Google Webmaster Tools. Before the switch it was taking an average of 2200 milliseconds to download a page. Now it takes around 400 milliseconds.

This isn’t the whole story. I tried two hosting companies, the 2200 millisecond average was from the second, more reliable host. I switched to that company from an earlier host, where the average download time was closer to 3000 milliseconds. In both cases I used caching - the speeds would have been much slower without it.

• I missed the integration between email and desktop search.
• Gmail’s contact management is nowhere near as good as Outlook’s.

Recently the first frustration boiled to the point where I decided to revisit Outlook, this time it was Outlook 2010.

While Outlook 2010 has its charms, the experience underlined the reason for my original switch. Webmail clients offer more flexibility.

Gmail remains the best webmail client by a country mile. This is even more important now I move from desktop to laptop to smartphone to iPad. It no longer makes sense to have a client on a single device.

Windows 7 integrated search

My main reason for sticking with Outlook until mid-2009 despite the lure of webmail was Microsoft Windows 7′s integrated search.

Being able to use one central search tool to find documents on my desktop computer and in my main work email account seemed too important. It’s also the reason I wanted a fresh look at Outlook, would integrated search still fire my buttons?

In a word, the answer is a resounding ‘no’.

Multiple email accounts

I use multiple email accounts – some of my regular freelance journalism jobs come with their own email addresses. These all route though a single Gmail account.

Instead of setting up one or more email accounts on the desktop, I connected Outlook to my main Gmail account using IMAP. This approach worked far better than I remember from my earlier attempts to mix Gmail and Outlook – a big tick for Outlook 2010.

Integrated search results a mixed bag

Windows 7′s integrated search managed to pick up terms in Outlook 2010 as expected. At this stage the experiment was looking promising. However, for some reason, the same email message containing the search term would appear at least twice in search results. Sometimes more than twice.

This could prove annoying, especially where terms appear in multiple email threads. In many cases I found the returned results were too confusing. To solve this, I found myself moving away from the main desktop search tool and just searching the hard drive or specific folders for documents.

In other words, integrated email search no longer delivers on its promise. This is why I found returning to Outlook a disappointment.

Better contact management

If search was the only criteria, I could have happily removed Outlook 2010 from my desktop and walked away for good. That decision was made harder for me because Microsoft improved Outlook’s already good contact management. My favourite improvement is a tool that pulls in contact details from my Linkedin connections.

I’ve whinged in the past about the lack of decent alternatives to Outlook’s contact manager.   This is one application cloud providers and others have failed to deliver. I’ve yet to see anything that comes anywhere close to Outlook for contact management.

Outlook tasks still dodgy

During my brief flirtation with Outlook 2010 I found the Tasks feature appears broken or, if not broken, behaving oddly. I never added any items to the Tasks list, but every so often an email would be singled out and listed as a task, not once by multiple times. What’s that about?

Outlook remains a must-have application for many company computer users and in many ways it’s a neat application. Despite this, it feels out of date – the way Lotus Notes started feeling out of date as a collaboration tool about a decade ago. Although I will miss its wonderful contact management, I can’t see myself returning to the fold while I’m working in my business.

This includes ideas like crowd sourcing stories on Twitter or using Storify.

If I was still editing, I’d have my reporters doing this.

Reporters using technology for journalism « ideaLab Heritage’s Blog.

The on-screen keyboard is good enough when you’re knocking out a quick five or six pars on a breaking story. If you don’t mind looking a bit odd, you can take acceptable pictures with the iPad camera.

In practice you can get a full 10 hours of use from the iPad before the batteries fade. That’s enough for a full shift and then some.

Keyboard not ideal

While typing on the on-screen keyboard isn’t ideal, it’s doable. At a pinch there are plenty of add-on keyboards to make life easier.

The iPad is great for taking notes. I haven’t figured how to record audio at the same time as note-taking yet. Maybe I need an app for that.

In my book the iPad writing software, it’s not really a word processor, is better than Microsoft Word. There’s little to distract me from the writing task at hand and all the features I need – that is; not many.

Freelance work

I’m a freelance, editors often expect to receive Word documents, so it’s not always an option for me, but my needs are basic – I learnt my craft on a manual typewriter and barely touch the features in Word.

In case you were wondering, I’m writing this on my iPad.

Not over the long haul

Despite all the praise I can’t see the iPad becoming my main writing tool in the immediate future. It’s great for the odd, quick news story, it’s terrific when I’m running around.

While the iPad is useful, although less desirable for feature writing. It’s an ergonomic disaster for all day writing.

Given I typically write 2000 words or more in normal working day, it quickly runs up against ergonomic limitations. I need a real computer with a real keyboard and a full screen.

Cloud will help

I also need access to the 25 years or so of archive material stored on my desktop. And a proper file system is essential – although I’m sure an enterprising cloud computing company will offer a sensible alternative before long

The iPad is also weak for moving between electronic documents and the writing tools. On my desktop I can display a website or a PDF on one half of the display and have a word processor o. The other half – that’s a huge productivity boost.

So, for news events and maybe when I cover conferences, I’ll use the iPad. Otherwise, I’ll stick with a full-blown computer.

That said, I’m so impressed with the iPad, my next laptop will be an Apple MacBook Air.