The Fish That Was Ahead of Its Time

By | November 22, 2011
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This is old news but it still comes as something of a shock to me: You have probably never heard of Enfish but you see its legacy in every desktop search program you’ll come across. That’s because the company helped promote the idea that searching your own files was as useful an activity as searching the Internet. This was back in 1998. It wasn’t entirely novel (there was something called Discovery put out by Altavista), but they did it amazingly well with an application called Tracker Pro that has, in my view, never been improved upon (including by Enfish themselves).

The software, as far as I can recall, only worked on Windows 98 but it was powerful, powerful stuff. It indexed your hard drive, network drives and removable drives in the background (OK, there were some performance issues, but nothing you couldn’t overcome) and searches were lightning fast. What I particularly loved about it were the trackers — complex searches you could save and launch from a sidebar. You could give those strings a user friendly name and then share them with other users. You could also, if I remember correctly, tag files to make for more customized, personal searches. All this in a pretty cool interface, which let you view the document, email or whatever within Tracker Pro itself.

Those days have long since been over. Enfish — Enter, Find, Share — developed in different directions. Since late last year, Enfish as a company and product basically doesn’t exist. Instead you find this message on their website:

Dear Enfish Customers, As of November 1, 2005, Enfish Software will no longer sell its own products, but rather license its technology and patents to others.

From now on the technology has been licensed to another company, EasyReach, which I’m hoping to try out. The sad thing to me was that Enfish, despite a really strong first product, seemed to veer off in the wrong direction, instead of focusing on their core strength: powerful indexing flexible search. I found this immensely frustrating, although I also found their team, including still chairman Louise Wannier, very approachable and enthusiastic. They just never quite built on the promise of their first product.

Perhaps it was just a simple case of Enfish being ahead of their time. Now all the big players are throwing out products that pretty much do what Enfish Tracker did eight years ago. But none of them have quite the style that Tracker Pro did, in my view.

How To Handle Your Communicator With Style

By | November 22, 2011
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Nc-00I wrote a couple of weeks back in the WSJ (subscription only, sorry) about the Nokia Communicator (aka The Brick) and its enduring popularity in Indonesia, where it plays important role as fashion symbol, ostentatious and yet deliverable gift to impressionable officials and, where necessary, hand combat weapon. What I found difficult to capture in print are the distinctive, and distinct, ways in which Indonesian users carry, hold, or use their Communicators. It’s a subculture of its own that deserves a grant or two.

Nc-01

Luckily while I was in Surabaya, where the conference of Nokia Communicators was held, I stumbled upon a National Leadership Meeting of Gapeknas (a horrible website, I don’t recommend you visit it. Gapeknas is the acronym for Gabungan Pengusaha Kontraktor Nasional, or National Contractors’ Association) where the photos outside captured better than I could these important behavioural indicators.

First off, usage. As illustrated by our Gapeknes model, Communicator users are most likely to be found hunched over their open devices, the right hand cradling the buttons on the right hand of the screen, the left resting somewhere near the ‘A’ key, either about to fire off a deal-making SMS message or else trying to figure out how to to turn the unit on.

Nc-02When not in use, the unit can either be placed on the table in front of you, usually closed but at an angle in case the above action needs to be perfomed in a hurry. Alternatively, if engaged in conversation, the user can hold the device in his or her right hand, the keyboard facing inwards (see picture). This ensures that a) the device is visible at all times to the interlocutor, b) it can serve to emphasise any points the owner should choose to make, by raising the device around while being careful not to knock over any of the ubiquitous glasses of water found at such events, or, c) the unit can be deployed as a weapon should the conversation get heated.

Nc-03Finally, when mobile, the device is best inserted in a leather holster (provided) attached to one’s belt. The holster can be as ostentatious as one likes, since much of the value of the Communicator lies in its visibility. Holsters can be horizontal (see picture) or vertical. The important thing is that they should not be hidden by outer garments, and the user must be practised in removing them quickly, in case, for example, of passing through metal detectors or comparing them with fellow enthusiasts.

Nc-04Lastly, I mentioned in the piece that Nokia was successful at the convention — the biggest ever gathering of Communicator users, they say — at getting everyone to stand on their seats and wave their devices around in the air in exchange for prizes (more holsters). Here’s a picture, courtesy of Nokia, of them doing it. I particularly like the blue glow given off by the units’ displays, and, the fact that only a pregnant woman and an elderly, somewhat baffled, gentleman on the left, aren’t joining in. Clearly not die-hard Communicator users.

 
 

Staying Productive in Your Underwear

By | November 22, 2011
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I’m researching a piece on how to cut back the amount of stuff you have to read, particularly RSS feeds. So I have spent the morning reading blogs related to the tools I’m writing about. In the process, of course, I find more than 20 new blogs that are interesting enough for me to add to the feed reader that I’m supposed to be in the process of thinning out. It’s the online equivalent of packing up all your stuff in newspaper ready to move and then sitting down and spending the whole day reading fascinating news items on scraps of year-old newspaper.

Anyway, I realise I should write more about working from home, something I’ve done (the working from home, not the writing about it) for more than five years now. Here’s a great bunch of tips from Kevin Yank, who’s based in Australia although, yes, he’s a Canadian:

He recommends maintaining your morning routine as if you’re going to the office, unplugging the TV, and, most interestingly, purging your work PC of distractions. His home PC, meanwhile, “constantly checks my personal email, downloads podcasts, fetches low-priority feeds from a plethora of distracting web sites, and is replete with cute little apps that generate eye candy and always seem to need upgrading when I should be doing something else.”

Great idea to have two computers if you can manage it. Although I’m divided on whether it’s possible to divide work and personal stuff these days. Doesn’t one feed off the other? I found myself yesterday arguing fiercely with a friend from a major U.S. bank who said she was not even able to access web-mail on her work computer. To me this is daft; limiting workers’ access to such things merely panders to lazy IT staff and undermines the chances workers will be well-informed, motivated and well-connected. Of course, as smart phones take over these kinds of connectivity roles — email, IM, VoIP, presence, RSS, blogging, photo taking and sharing — all these efforts will be worthless anyway. Then we’ll have to check our phones at the door. Or work from home.

Anyway, I like Kevin’s ideas. The more professional you make your environment, the better you will function. Now I’m off for a lie-down.

The Holy Grail is Not Ready For Primetime

By | November 22, 2011
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There’s this commentator/host/presenter guy on the soccer channel I watch and he’s awful. Well, he’s not awful, but he uses words to fill up the time instead of conveying information, which really shows, especially when compared to a colleague, who packs in so much useful stuff into the same allotted time you’re left believing for a second that soccer is a sport worth of closer study. The other guy, meanwhile says “two goals to the good” when one team is winning by 2–0 and other cliches that aren’t just irritating, they’re clearly a tic he’s adopted because it fills up more space than saying, as any normal soccer fan would say, “two up.”

He manages to fit three more words in there than necessary, which means a second or two less to fill up. Annoying, and once you’ve noticed it you can never relax listening to him again. (His latest one is “in the driving seat” which he was saying all the way through the game; when the team he had been saying was “in the driving seat” was actually getting pummelled, he changed it to “no longer in the driving seat” which not only meant he didn’t have to think  up another cliche, he could add another three syllables to the phrase. Ugh.)

Anyway, it’s as agood an example of any I can think of to illustrate how naff cliches are. They are a window on the thinking of the person writing/presenting/speaking, showing a) how little effort the person is putting into their presentation/speech/writing and b) how little they know — otherwise why would they be trying to fill up the space? I don’t mean that writing or speeches or presentations should be just jam-full of facts and nothing else; there should be pacing, and even repetition if that repetition helps to hammer home a point and is done by paraphrasing or illustrative anecdote. But filler is not that. It’s just filler, and it wastes everyone’s time.

So, here’s my promise. I realise I use some cliches that aren’t particularly useful: “Holy Grail” is one. Another is “not ready for primetime”. Any more you notice me using, let me know.

How Not to Record Interviews

By | November 22, 2011
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I call it my Aung San Suu Kyi Moment, mainly because I’m a show off and like to drop names of famous people I once interviewed over the phone. It was September 1988 and I was a rookie reporter in Bangkok, one of several of us in a wire service who spent most of the day trying to reach Rangoon, as it then was, via one of less than a dozen phone lines between Thailand (as it still is) and Burma (as it then was). If any one of us got through, it was an important moment, because news was so hard go get out of the growing street rebellion against the military government. One of the leaders was Aung San Suu Kyi (as she still is), and if we managed to get her on the line everyone would crowd around to listen to the interview on the speaker phone. We’d record the interview too, via a cable that plugged into our tape recorder, in case we missed anything. It was a wild life.

On my first week on the job I got her on the line and asked all the right questions, mainly because my boss was writing them down and passing them to me. I hung up, elated. Everyone gave me a slap on the back, right up until I realised I had put the cable in the earphone socket rather than the microphone socket. I had recorded only silence. In my excitement, of course, I hadn’t taken any notes. One of my superiors, an American helicopter pilot, gave his wry smile and said, “better luck next time, kiddo,” or something like that. I was crushed, and learned an important lesson: Never to let people call me kiddo. Sorry, I mean to never let technology outwit me at key moments.

Since then, for example, I’ve tried to tape over the earphone socket so I don’t make the same mistake, but occasionally I do, and the Law of the Aung San Suu Kyi Moment seems to be: The Likelihood that You Will Plug the Wrong Cable into Your Tape Recorder Is in Exact Proportion to the Importance of the Interview and in Inverse Proportion to the Quality of Any Handwritten Notes You Take During the Interview.

My first bugbear is this: Why don’t I take better notes? That of course, is related to my own incompetence at shorthand and the fact that if the person I’m interviewing is important I want to maintain as much eye contact as possible, reducing the time available to take notes to about three seconds, usually long enough to write something trite and meaningless, and then only to show them I’m listening. This important Journalistic Technique is less effective over the phone, of course. Then I don’t take many notes because I’m usually staring out of the window or scratching some body part, often one of my own.

Anyway, my second bugbear is this: Why can’t people who make these recording devices put the sockets further apart, color-code them (some do, admittedly) or at least mark them so they don’t look exactly alike, as per this one from Olympus?

Olymp

As you can see, in a hurry of an interview situation, scrambling to plug the microphone in to the socket, you’re likely to miss entirely and jab it it into the ear socket next to it, which would result in you recording an interview with yourself, and any other ambient noises that happened to be going on (such as the scratching).

It’s not as if laptops are any better. In fact they’re slightly worse. Many put their sockets at the back of the unit, with no color coding and with icons that make about as much sense as a junta press conference. Take this one from Acer for example:

Acer

Not going to win any design awards, that one. I’m in favour of putting them somewhere we can actually reach them, color coding them clearly and intuitively, labelling them, and not putting them next to each other. Us journalists should be allowed to scratch without these kind of worries.