Neil Mix

My blog is on a new host with a new, modern design. The transfer has given me a chance to reflect on nearly 6 years of intermittent blogging. Here’s what I’ve learned about what it takes to write a successful blog (from the point-of-view of someone who yearns for a better blog):

Blogging is hard. To understand why, it’s important to define what “blogging” means. When launched my first blog, I defined blogging as “the act of writing a blog post.” I now define it as “the act of building and maintaining an interesting, frequently updated blog.” The former, challenging but not hard. The latter, hard.

It’s not just what you say, but how quickly you can say it. Time is the enemy of blog maintenance. So is perfectionism. A single post can be planned, crafted, reworked, slept on, and then finally published. But not daily, while holding a full-time job and raising a family. To be successful, you have to quickly produce engaging content in one try that’s good enough.

The most interesting content is also the most controversial. Back when I was developing Pandora Radio for iPhone, I grew accustomed to reading inflammatory, raging iTunes “reviews” that hated on me and my company for a host of minor irritations that, for some reason, really pissed certain people off. Such is the Internet. But angry comments directed personally at me on my blog? Different story. Plus, I hesitate to write anything that might embarrass or strategically hinder Pandora, which knocks out a bunch of interesting topics.

Writer’s urge isn’t guaranteed to align with spare time. And that’s the crux — spare time. My blog is a spare time activity. To have a successful blog, you need to prioritize and schedule time for it.

Casual reading doesn’t translate to casual writing. Like all great art, a well-written blog looks effortless from the outside looking in. But in reality a ton of effort lies beneath that silky text.

So those are a few of my lessons learned. Though I haven’t been as successful at blogging as I’d hoped, it’s been well worth the effort. I’ve learned a ton and it’s nice to “build” a product that “ships” so easily.

I’m surprisingly not an early adopter type. I have my conventions for doing things, and I don’t like to change my patterns very often. So it’s pretty rare that I find some gadget that makes me feel like I’m going to change the way I do things. I think the iPhone 4S might just do that.

Speed: it’s not eye-poppingly fast, but it is intrinsically fast. You don’t notice it at first. But as you move around and play, you begin to notice that everything flows with you in a way that it didn’t before. It doesn’t look faster, it feels more intuitive. And that’s pretty subtle but important.

Siri: amazing first try, nowhere near its potential, but still quite useful. As with most AI systems, it’s the odd quirks that get you. It asks you if you want to send, and you say yes or okay or yes please and it does nothing but give you an error. But if you say send it, it works. There are also problems with the conversation flow. It’s hard to tell if we’re done with one conversation or not. And there have been several times where I’ve thought we were starting a new conversation but Siri thought I was still continuing the old conversation. I’m hopeful that they’ll work out a lot of the kinks during the beta period. And the fact that it’s in the cloud should help make it easier to develop iteratively.

Speech recognition: this is the killer feature. I’ve never used speech recognition that didn’t annoy the hell out of me. But speech recognition on the iPhone 4S delights me. It’s amazingly accurate and way more efficient than thumb typing. My only complaint is that I haven’t found a way to cancel if you get tongue-tied midsentence. So far, I love it and I plan to use it a lot. In fact, I used it to write this post.

Is there anything more amazing in nature than the process of metamorphosis? It’s wondrousness didn’t hit me until I started reading “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” to my son. And even then it took a few months to sink in. The ending is so quick – spoiler alert – just “It was a beautiful butterfly!” and you’re done. Really? That’s it? Shouldn’t it at least fly around for a while, visit its old hangouts or something? A worm pigs out for one week, hides out for two in his self-built home, and voila he’s colorful and fancy and can fly. If that’s not a miracle…

Believe it or not, I’ve been meaning to follow up on my last post, that amazingly bad prediction of handwriting recognition for (what turned out to be) the iPad, for over a year now. Every once in a while the embarrassment hits me, usually when I vanity-Google, but I just haven’t had the urge to write. I’ve been…out of touch.

I’ve lost my footing with social media. Facebook is an endless stream of updates from people I lost contact with long ago for good reason. And on Twitter for some crazy reason I’ve lost the ambition to out-snark the snarkiest snark that ever snarked. Solvable problems for sure, but what’s the purpose here? I haven’t missed them. And the real world is proving to be a pretty awesome place. I’m sure there’s a good nerdy high-tech-expert blog post lurking in my post-social-media experiences, but that would be for another day, if at all.

And what about the blog? This has been my old friend, distant, out of touch, but always missed and never forgotten. Coming back here is returning to form, re-connecting to that which I never really disconnected from. Different, but only in a way that feels good, re-affirming, and mature.

Will I be back again soon? Who knows, but the point is that I’m here now and that’s what’s important.

I’m turning off comments. I’m tired of managing the SPAM (about 3 per month would get through my security-through-obscurity trap, and increasing in frequency lately) and I don’t feel like the comments added enough value to be worth the effort. If you have something to say, by all means please do – via email.

And with that, I steal away again…

I’ve long been reticent to jump on the Applet tablet bandwagon because of a fatal flaw in the overall concept: key input. An onscreen keyboard doesn’t make sense: one-finger typing is too slow and the device is too big to be held for two-thumb typing. That leaves 10-finger laptop-style typing, but that requires the device sit in your lap with the screen tilted away from you, plus it provides no touch feedback. So you end up with either an iPhone-like slow input device without the portability, or an unfriendly keyboard that is no more portable than a laptop. Without a revolutionary advancement in key input, in my opinion this device is DOA.

But Apple isn’t likely to release a device with such a tragic flaw (are they?) so I think it’s a good bet they’ll revolutionize key input with the tablet. Which leads to the obvious question: how? The requirements are: you need to be able to give key input while standing up and cradling the device in one arm, and it must be relatively fast — fast enough to do creative writing, for example. Given that I see two options: handwriting or speech dictation. And speech dictation is out because no one wants a world filled with Macheads talking to their computers on public transportation, least of all Apple.

So that leaves handwriting recognition via stylus. Of course this has been tried before and failed, but Apple’s mechanism will differ in two key respects: 1) it will be really accurate, and 2) you will be able to write with the heel of your palm resting on the touch surface. (Ah, the beauty of multitouch.) So it will be just like writing on a pad of paper — without the ink smears.

So there’s my big tablet prediction. Can’t wait to see how wrong I am.

Prior to this past week, I’ve had several theories about the fabled Apple Tablet computer (in order from least cynical to most cynical):

• A brilliant new product with a revolutionary keyboard input mechanism
• An interesting product idea waiting patiently to become technologically feasible
• A really cool-sounding bad product idea whose keyboard input sucks
• A long-since failed product idea that just won’t die
• A series of individual, disorganized hoaxes with a common theme
• An active disinformation campaign designed by Apple to foil competitors and/or root out leaks

After the past week, just in case the rumors turn out to be yet another mirage, I’m adding one more to the end of the list:

• A conspiracy by tech blogs to drive traffic and increase ad revenues