End of the Week Notes: Laptops, Bloggers, OneNote and More

A couple of other random items for a Friday afternoon:

1. The Laptop Hunt: Is now over. Sometime soon I’m going to spring for a new Thinkpad x Series. As intrigued as I was by the possibility of snagging one of the new Powerbooks – all the more so since Kelvin informed me that Gentoo for OS X was out – this pretty much killed any chance of me getting a Powerbook. It if it had been an isolated incident, I could have ignored it, but that post seemed merely to echo the concerns of others like Jason. So unfortunately, no Powerbook. Sorry Cote 😉
2. Speaking of the Power Bloggers: Just as the youngpup’s above post killed my desire for a Powerbook, so too did Christopher and Ev‘s experiences with Vonage finish off any chance they had of winning me as a customer. The lesson? If you’re a vendor of any type, you need to be setting up watchlists for your products to identify problems. Marten Mickos of MySQL has said many times that a huge portion of his product planning is Googling “MySQL sucks,” if Vonage is smart they’re PubSubing and Technorating too.
3. Timezones and Calendars: I got a few notes in private about my critiques of Outlook and Evolution’s ability to handle timezones, so let me be clear: I was criticizing past clients, not the current iterations. Outlook has come a long way since my last experience mucking with timezones, and Evolution actually handled the transition very nicely (no messing with text files – it’s actually just a calendar option). I still think timezones are a huge pain in the ass (I have to deal with 4 on a daily basis), but the current crop of PIMs deserves credit for handling the complexity better.
4. Open Note Format?: We have an Open Document Format, any guesses as to how long we’ll have to wait before we get an open Note format? Maybe they’re one and the same, but having made the transition from Windows to Linux, I’m now in agreement with my old colleague Gordon Haff, that OneNote’s (an application I *love*) critical limitation is the proprietary format. Want to leave Windows? Sorry, no dice (unless there’s now a Mac version that I’m not aware of). So despite the fact that I give up significant functionality, the bulk of my note-taking is now done in Tomboy because at the end of the day, my notes are just XML files. Go figure, Udell’s right. If the Open Document Format doesn’t prove to be ideal for note-taking – which it might not be as notes increasingly include dynamic elements like audio, video, etc – I’d love to see the Open Office folks a.) push out a OneNote style of application, and b.) a corresponding open standard. Even better, maybe Microsoft could submit the OneNote format to a standards body, as I’d sure like to have all my old notes made portable 😉

And that’s it for the week. Enjoy your respective weekends.