The phone itself looks stunning and feels nice in the hand. It easily slides up to reveal the small keyboard which actually isn’t that bad even with my big hands. The screen is gorgeous too.

It was downhill from there. I tried to launch an app but was told there were too many cards open. There were only 2 open but I closed them anyway but still got the same message. I rebooted the phone and it seemed better. The Pre did take a long time to start up though, much slower than my iPhone 3G.

In operation I found the phone to be slow and somewhat unresponsive. I managed to add a contact, some tasks and a memo with ease but it wasn’t as quick as the iPhone. WebOS does seem nice though. Hopefully the next model will be better. I’ll stress again that this was an O2 demo model and I don’t know what O2 may have done to it or how much abuse it’s received.

On the whole I was slightly disappointed. I’d love to own one just for the cool factor but it can’t replace my iPhone. The 8GB of flash memory isn’t enough for my music so I’d need a separate iPod which is a step backwards.

TwitBird Pro 2.0 should hit the app store by mid-November if all goes to plan and will feature a number of interesting features to go with it’s already very impressive feature set..

Package management is a major selling point for server-side Linux (and server-side BSD for that matter). It’s much loved by a vast majority of Linux users. It’s brought up as a benefit time and again in many Slashdot discussions and generally I agree.

Where package management falls down is on the desktop. I’ll admit that I love installing new versions of software willy-nilly on my desktop systems so I’m biased towards the bleeding edge but I know I’m not alone. The idea that some faceless developer gets to tell me what versions of what software I can install using the nice, simple package manager really urkes me.

I have two examples of where package management has failed me. Both of these are trivial but should highlight what I’m getting at here.

The first relates to GnuCash. I was looking for a finance package and had already tried and discarded GnuCash 1. GnuCash 2 was getting some really good reviews so I thought I’d give it a try. I was running Fedora at the time which only provided GnuCash 1 through Yum. I’d have to wait until the next version of Fedora (some 3 or 4 months away) to get GnuCash 2 officially via the package manager. I had two choices:

1. Compile from source, build my own package and generally manage it myself. All this for a piece of software I just want to test? No thanks.
2. Find a package, or better yet, a repository that’ll have all the hard work of choice 1 done for me. I didn’t have much luck there.

So I waited. GnuCash 2 was very good by the way.

The second example centres around Firefox 2. I was really looking forward to FF2. It had a feature that I loved in Konqueror and Safari: an inline spell checker. A trivial feature but one I’d learnt to really on.

Firefox 2 was released on 24^th October 2006. Fedora Core 6 was released the same day. Exciting times for me as a Fedora and Firefox user. But Fedora shipped with Firefox 1.5. That seems fair enough until you look at what Ubuntu did. Edgy Eft shipped two days later and included the last Firefox 2 release candidate. Ubuntu updated Firefox to the final 2.0 release within days. So why couldn’t Fedora do that?

I can understand not wanting to ship an OS with a release candidate and Ubuntu took a gamble but it was a gamble that worked. I switched to Edgy Eft.

By contrast, on my Macs and my last remaining Windows machine all I had to do was download a file and install. Neither Apple nor Microsoft were there telling me I’d have to wait 6 months for a piece of software I wanted without jumping through hoop after hoop to do it myself.

I now use Arch Linux on my PCs. It uses a rolling release idea so all the latest versions of the software I care about trickle in in just a few days to a couple of weeks.

I don’t know how many people are like me and want the latest release of a piece of software as soon as it’s released but this could keep a few users away from desktop Linux. I know that the Mac community goes wild when new versions of certain coveted software is released.

The solution? Decouple the OS and desktop environment from other software just like OS X does. Firefox is tricky with Gnome because Gnome uses Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine for some of it’s own needs and that means Firefox gets tied to Gnome. KDE doesn’t have this problem. A new version of Konqueror only comes with a new version of KDE.

So by basing a distro around KDE’s release cycle and shipping only the kernel, KDE and the libraries and other software needed to make it all work and having another mechanism for controlling third-party software, something like OS X’s app bundles or PC-BSD’s PBI installer files, we could have a real solution.

Why now? It’s not for the better quality you get. The free account’s quality was good enough. It’s not to go ad free. The ads aren’t all that obtrusive.

It’s the ability to download music for offline listening that did it for me. Being able to grab a whole load of music so I can listen to it when I don’t have network access is the killer feature that makes Spotify worth £10 per month.

Today it was announce that EventBox has been bought by Realmac Software and renamed Socialite.

My biggest fear was that, having paid for the beta, I may have to pay again when version 1.0 is released. I needn’t have worried. As was mentioned in the link above, all existing users will get a new registration code when Socialite ships in November. Many thank Realmac Software!

Tweetie is awesome but then came TwitBird Pro. As much as I love Tweetie, TwitBird has one feature that Tweetie doesn’t: I can create groups of people I follow. This makes it easier to find tweets I want to read from the many, many people I follow.

Now Tweetie 2 has been submitted to Apple and it sounds very impressive. It doesn’t appear to have a group feature.

TwitBird Pro 1.2 has also been submitted to Apple and already has an impressive feature set.

I guess the only option is to wait for both new clients to hit the App Store, buy Tweetie 2 and compare them. I’m already using TwitBird more than Tweetie but I could end up swing back to Tweetie again.

To be continued…

Slayer are one of the few bands that have never put a foot wrong so I’ll be buying this on release day.

I’ll say here and now, I don’t download copyrighted files that I don’t have permission to download. I don’t condone it but I don’t condemn it either. I get my music by buying CDs or downloading from iTunes or one of the other legal download services.

Now that that’s out of the way I feel I need to describe how I discover music and how that affects how much I spend. I should also mention that my taste in music centres around metal, jazz and many niche genres that don’t get played much on TV and radio.

When I was in my late teens and early twenties I’d get together with friends and we’d listen to music. My friends’ tastes and mine overlapped so I’d get to here new stuff and then go out and buy it.

As I got older and my social group changed I ended up with friends who didn’t share my taste in music. Consequently I discovered less new music and spent less on music.

During the first 5 years of this century I think I only bought 2 or 3 CDs. A lot of the bands I liked had stopped making good music or stopped making music altogether and I had no avenue to hear new stuff that I really liked.

Then I discovered last.fm and Spotify. I can now listen to lots of new music and my spending on music has gone up again. I could easily name at least 10 new bands I’ve discovered in the last 2 years that I love.

All of this rambling so far has been to prove that, for me at least, having access to music can generate sales. Music is still too expensive to take a chance that something may be good. We live in a world where DVDs of fairly recent films can easily be bought for £2 – £5. This puts DVDs in the realm of the impulse purchase, something that needs to happen to music too. Music is something I listen to in the background. Films I actually sit down to watch. Films are more valuable to me than music is which actually makes music seem much more expensive than it is.

So to the arguments. To be honest I’m going to be pretty one sided here. The arguments for file sharing are often pretty stupid but do at least make a little sense to me. It’s the arguments against that seem to the most extreme. Here they are:

1. You wouldn’t steal [something] so why steal music?

This is the one that outrages me most and is used by the record companies and anti-file sharing individuals alike. The [something] has been anything from someone’s CD to their car or a CD from HMV. This is ludicrous because in all cases you’re taking something and depriving the owner of their item. If I take your CD you can’t play it anymore. If I take a CD from HMV they no longer have that CD to sell. In all of these cases I’d be costing someone some money and inconveniencing them.

A closer analogy would be “would you come to my house and copy my CD”. This isn’t as effective though. You’d still have your original CD and I’d have a copy of the music. I haven’t cost you anything or inconvenienced you. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the anti-file sharing people have ripped/copied a friend’s CD at some point.

This argument leads on to…

2. You’re depriving the artist of a sale.

This argument supposes that if you download an album from a file sharing service you won’t buy it. Let’s suppose I download an album just to see what it’s like. I may not buy it because I don’t like it so I delete it. I may like it but think it’s overpriced and may keep the download until I can find a copy in a sale that is a more reasonable price.

In the first example I won’t buy the album anyway so no sale is lost. In the second example there will be a sale, it’s just deferred. I’m well aware that some people will download music as an alternative to buying it. That would be a lost sale and I hope they’re in the minority.

Reading this back it sounds like I’m actually in favour of file sharing but actually I think that services like Spotify are the future. A legal way to sample music is vital to people like me. If Spotify goes away I’ll just make do with what I already have and spend my money on other things.

Everything centres around the tasks I have to do and being able to focus just on the tasks I can actually do right now. The most important concept for me is contexts. A context can be a place (such as ‘Home’) or something you need to have available in order to complete a task (such as ‘Internet’). For example I can only paint my spare room when I’m at home so I only want to see my ‘Paint spare room’ task when I at home. Contexts give me this view.

On their own contexts are very powerful but I need a way to further filter my tasks. One method I use is start dates. I may decide that I can only paint my spare room at the weekend because that’s when I’ll have the most time. By setting a start date for next Saturday the ‘Paint spare room’ task won’t get in the during the week.

Organising tasks in other ways can also be very useful. Projects allow me to group related tasks together. My ‘Paint spare room’ task might be part of a bigger ‘Decorate house’ project. I might be able to group similar but otherwise unrelated tasks into folders.

There isn’t much more to it than that. I’ll talk about specific software in other articles. At least those articles should make more sense.