A little belated, but Happy Lunar New Year to one and all!

We’re spending Tết in Can Tho with Kim’s family. This is my second Tết in Viet Nam. I’m hoping that next time I’ll be able to see what the celebrations are like in the Big City.

I have a couple of blog posts in me looking for a way to get out but, in the meantime, my Western clients are unaware that it’s a big holiday here so I actually have work that needs doing.

So Chúc mừng năm mới once again, and I hope everyone has a healthy and successful Year of the Tiger!

A while back, I wrote a blog post about why I wouldn’t buy a Kindle. At the time, I accused the publishing industry of forcing Amazon to hobble the ebook scene. It turns out I was wrong about that. The true story is much more complex, and convinces me even more that I’ll never buy a Kindle.

Charlie Stross, an author that I greatly admire, explains the latest happenings. There certainly is a fight between publishers and Amazon on ebook pricing, but Amazon is not the knight in shining armour that its customers would probably prefer it to be. Customers and authors are both caught in the middle of this, and that’s unforgiveable. There is much to admire about Amazon. Amazon certainly has a duty to its shareholders to maximize profits, and I certainly don’t blame them for trying. But using authors and customers as pawns is flat out wrong.

However this plays out, I will likely be reading ebooks on my Android phone for a while. I’ll wait, patiently, for a tablet that meets my requirements. And I’ll probably write about it when it arrives.

But I still won’t get a Kindle…

This blog post’s only purpose is to propagate a meme…

In which I not only don’t bash Microsoft, but praise them. Who knew?

Microsoft is a company every geek loves to hate. And, really, what’s not to hate? I’ve railed in the past about their operating systems and I still think that for the datacenter there are better alternatives. Their productivity software, on the other hand, has been maturing steadily. If you’ve not had a look, let me highlight a couple of unsung gems:

Windows Live Writer – I use this tool for blogging to my WordPress blog. It’s an excellent, minimalist editor on one hand and a complete blog management tool on the other. It gets out of the way and lets me write. It has a simple interface and automates a lot of the tasks associated with blogging. Things like automagic photo upload, drag and drop text and image insertion, links to the WordPress management page—these are all handy features that just work. I’ve edited a ton of entries on various blogs and it’s been rock solid.

Windows Live Photo Gallery – I am a huge fan of Picasa. I use it to manage my photo library and Picasa Web is where I keep my photos for sharing. Picasa makes it simple to tag photos with faces and geolocation, then upload them to my Picasa Web account. Having said that, there are features that Picasa lacks and Windows Live Photo Gallery takes up the slack. The most notable missing feature in Picasa? Stitching.

It’s hard to tell, but this photo is a composite of 9 photos in a grid (3×3). My camera only has a stitch assist mode for horizontal strips, so the 9 pictures were shot without any kind of in-camera stitch assist. Point, shoot, move over, shoot. Eyeball it all the way. In Photo Gallery, all I had to do was select the 9 photos and select “Create Panorama Photo” from the right-click menu. Photo Gallery chewed on the pictures for a while, then gave me the results. A little cropping and the final photo is as you see here.

Classic strip photos work well too:

This panorama is almost 270 degrees of arc and consists of 7 individual shots. This time, I used the in-camera stitch assist. The panorama function of Photo Gallery was able to generate almost a complete 7 shot stitch. Only minimal cropping was required.

I’ve not given up on Picasa. It’s preview function (for viewing photos in Explorer) is fast and rich. It’s integration with Picasa Web is excellent, of course. I’ve really only used Photo Gallery for the Stitch Assist/Panorama features, but for that it’s truly an excellent tool. I plan on playing around with it to see how it compares with Picasa for more basic functions. Expect a post about that soon.

So. Two Microsoft productivity tools that don’t suck. There are more, and I’ll write about them as I get around to using them.

Anybody that thinks that Apple’s (rumoured, still) tablet release is about the tablet doesn’t remember their history.

Back when the iPod was first released, most people, including a lot of tech pundits, simply didn’t get it. Apple was releasing an MP3 player? WTF?!? There were plenty of MP3 players on the market–most from companies dedicated to that market segment. How did Apple expect to supplant them? Were they crazy?

As history shows, Apple didn’t merely supplant its competitors, it blew them away. Swept them aside like dust. Because Apple didn’t release an MP3 player with the iPod, they released an ecosystem for the enjoyment of (first) music and video.

Same thing happened again with the iPhone. Again, tech pundits called for Apple to be wrapped in a white coat and sent to a padded cell. Companies like Nokia dominate the cell phone hardware business, and there was no way that Apple would get into that.

But Apple wasn’t building a cell phone. It build, again, an entire ecosystem around a smart phone. It did it better than anybody else and, arguably, continues to do it better than anybody else.

In both cases, entire industires were shaken. The iPod ultimately led to the abolition of DRM on digital music. The iPhone showed that the phone companies were not all-powerful–give them a compelling reason and they’d fold.

Tomorrow, Apple will do it again. They will have a nice, shiny hardware device to look at, touch and admire. But behind it, they will have an entire ecosystem ready to go. This time, I think they’re primarily looking to turn traditional print media on its head. They’ll likely take on the cable companies while they’re at it.

Ultimately, the device Steve Jobs shows off will be a game changer, again. But it won’t be just the hardware. And that’s why nobody competes with Apple. They just don’t get it. They think “shinier, faster, cheaper!” But that’s not enough. You need to think different (sorry). You need to think faster.