Colin Charles Agenda

Retreat in sales of PCs turns into rout – FT.com: “‘At the beginning, retailers don’t know how to explain it to customers,’ says Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. ‘Marketing the new [operating system] to consumers takes extra effort.’”

Well, skip Windows 8 altogether and just switch to Linux. And for more elegant hardware, there’s always the Mac.

I happened to be awake last night so I caught the announcement via livestream for Facebook Home. I’m glad its just a system launcher. There are many (I myself on my phone use Nova Launcher), but from the demo, this is beautifully designed with a new take on the interface. The demo showed it being smoother than butter ;)

Chat heads look interesting. Some may claim it being bothersome or unintuitive, but most iOS users have this already turned on via accessibility settings assistive touch since the home button breaks far too easily. Why a little white dot when you can now make it do things for you?

I was impressed with the amount of partners on launch day. Buy-in from manufacturers like HTC, Samsung, Sony, Huawei, Lenovo, ZTE, Alcatel. Chipmaker like Qualcomm. Telcos like AT&T, Orange, EE. I can only expect this to grow of course. Gives great competition in the mobile landscape for 2013.

You see, FirefoxOS has a huge amount of partners & buy-in. I continue to be surprised that Ubuntu doesn’t have a similar page.

Am I switching from iOS as my main phone? Unlikely. I’m almost certain that many at Facebook, including Zuckerberg runs on IOS. But I will be playing with this on my secondary device (the Galaxy S3). I’m a little surprised that the April 12 launch isn’t available for the Nexus set of phones… and in Asia, the Galaxy Note form factor is popular, where did that go?

HTC First will be the first device to come with the Facebook Home system launcher as a default. I’m not sure how this is different to them applying skins and admitting that Facebook does it better. This isn’t the first time they’re playing around with a Facebook phone though.

Interesting times as Facebook has confirmed that their strategy is clearly mobile first. The fact that they built this on top of Android can’t really impress Google very much ;)

Others have also covered this well, i.e a strategy for Facebook, how this isn’t good for privacy.

I started using OmniOutliner sometime since 2003. I upgraded to the Pro version in 2006. The software came bundled with a PowerBook I had (so thanks Apple!). This marks my tenth year with the software.

It is an indispensable part of my workflow. I use it daily. The total I’ve had to pay was for upgrades (some $24.95 and $30 – so still much less than the $69.99 fee). I can use it when I’m online or offline as it’s a desktop app! The one thing that always kept me coming back to OSX even when I used Linux daily was this integral piece of software – there were just no good opensource outliners.

I’ve always thought that the one thing I’d like to do in my spare time is write an outliner that lived in the browser. So I could use it on my laptop (online/offline), or on my tablets or my phones.

So it wouldn’t be hard to say that I’m excited by Little Outliner by Small Picture. This is Dave Winer writing an outliner for the web browser! 

However, lately, I’ve been thinking more about depending on tools that I have some control over. I’m getting back to my opensource roots even though I write this on a Mac. Big companies shut services down (look at google reader going away), and small companies have it a lot harder. 

I want to depend on Little Outliner. I would even pay for it. But I’m not sure I’d pay for it in such that I’d stop using OmniOutliner, as there’s a huge TCO gap (even $2/month makes you think desktop software is cheaper than the cloud). And without payment, I’m not sure this is a service that will be around in 2023 (i.e. ten years from today). And thats where I need things to be opensource. 

Long-term I’m bullish on Android. Its everywhere, its like the multiple Linux distributions. I have a preference to Google-sanctioned devices (i.e. the Nexus series), but each and every Android device manufacturer has their own bells & whistles.

The mobile landscape is actively changing. I was in Paris when I watched the announcement that there would be an Ubuntu for phones. I was a little disappointed that the announcement was for the possibility with no manufacturers or no actual device being announced. You’d presume that’s what you would get with the countdown on the website, and all the hype built up around it. To add to my confusion, there still exists Ubuntu for Android, which has been around for quite some time with no one biting. I heard its vaguely opensource so you could run it on a device, but I’ve not seen much.

The idea is amazing (carrying your phone, plugging it in to see a full-featured desktop) and I can’t wait to see what happens in 2014. It seems like the developer environment is Qt/QML for a native feel, but you’ve also got HTML5. They’re going to leverage on the Ubuntu community. I just think the hype around this is being built too early.

However, what’s more exciting is Mozilla’s recent announcements. They have a Firefox OS developer preview phone announced. They tell you how to use Firefox OS today. There are also AppDays happening worldwide. And they have a phone coming soon as a partnership with Geeksphone & Telefonica of Spain. Here it seems clear that your HTML5 apps are going to rock (see the Firefox Marketplace). When I say soon, I’m saying next month, i.e. February 2013. I’ve signed up to buy one.

The mobile landscape is changing. Nokia was the king of phones with Symbian, and today they’re backing Windows Mobile. Most of the top manufacturers are building Android devices (opensource). There are many companies signed up to make Tizen devices in 2013 and beyond (opensource). Now you have opensource Ubuntu & Firefox OS. Apple may have started this modern trend but iOS device sales aren’t stellar (witness Apple’s recent stock drop). iOS to be fair is also built on opensource (itself its closed).

Year of the Linux desktop? Who needs that. You’ve already arrived at the years of opensource computing.

I’ve been using Ubuntu on my Thinkpad Edge 11″ (which has the machine name: magorian) for quite some time now (from 10.10). Today I did an update from 12.04 to 12.04.1 and found my wifi stopped working. Turning the card on/off using the Fn+F9 key seemed to be the fix. Minor niggle.

Some resources: Ubuntu on Thinkpad Edge 11/13/14/15 is a great place to see common problems & fixes. The ThinkWiki also has a page for the Edge 11″.

The update to 12.10 is currently going on and is expected to take 1.7GB of downloads.

I’m thinking about upgrading the RAM from 2GB -> 4GB (I’m seeing prices that are really cheap for this kind of RAM – less than RM100 ~USD33). I have to admit that the machine definitely feels a lot snappier than my aging MacBook Pro (lovegood). 

I last spoke to Simon Phipps about the OSI (Open Source Initiative – opensource.org) and how they’re opening up for membership sometime on a cold february day, in brussels where we were for fosdem 2012. it seems like that time has come and yesterday I became an individual member of the OSI. I presume that if you’re asking what your $40 fee gets, realise that they’re transforming the OSI, so it is an exciting time of change. 

It is likely that all this will be announced on wednesday at oscon. Doing this yesterday I managed to grab a t-shirt. They also have OSI singlets/tank tops this time around. What are you waiting for, join the OSI.