Companies getting blogging

Whether it's them "getting" blogging or getting going with a blog, here's a company that's getting it right: a new blog named Nectar, from my faves Peachpit Press.

Yeah, we do a lot of work for them, and we just got back from a very nice party they threw (which is where I heard about the blog, btw). But if I didn't think that it was actually good, I wouldn't have mentioned it or linked to it. Full feeds? Check. Links to their author's blogs? Check. A personal voice, even though it's written by several contributors? Check. Regular posts? Check. Comments? Check. Comment feed? Check (hey, I wish we had that!).

That's how it's done by people who get it. Check it out.

From the mouths of...

Just got off the phone with our 17-year-old son Sean. I asked if he'd seen the announcements from the Apple keynote. He said, "Don't you think the name 'MacBook Pro' is, well, kinda lame?" Oh, yeah.

On the other hand, he won't let the name keep him from taking one off to college this fall.

Our Macworld Week

The week before Macworld, we usually put up a post saying where we can be found during the show. This year, it's a little late, but hey, at least the show hasn't actually started yet!

Tuesday:
11:30+: There's a blogger lunch, but I don't know if we'll make it.
1:00-2:00 pm: Tom & I in the Peachpit booth (#1507) talking about Dreamweaver.

Wednesday:
11:00-12:00: Tom & I in the User Group Lounge (Room 250) talking about, well, pretty much whatever we're thinking about.
6:00-7:00 pm: Dashboard Developers BoF (Room 123): if you're interested in Widgets, this is the place to meet like-minded people. Oh, and I'm listed as the speaker, but I'm thinking of it more as facilitator.

Thursday:
9:30-10:30 am: The MacBrainiac Challenge (Room 134). I'm a Team Captain this year! Come and cheer us on as we go forth against those who would deny us our rightful position.
1:00-2:00 pm: Tom in the Peachpit booth (#1507): Keynote versus Powerpoint smackdown! The author of three books on Powerpoint does verbal battle with the author of two books on Keynote. Oddly enough, both authors are Tom, so expect serious cognitive dissonance and schizophrenia while learning about which app is right for which users.

Friday:
Nothing whatsoever. Got any good ideas for us?

See you at one of these, we hope. And if you make it, please say hi and tell us that you read this blog. And if we owe you email, sorry, but you may not get a response immediately — we're kinda busy.

Family Calendars?

Tim Bray has a post titled PHP Calendar Fun, in which he says:

The conclusion is painfully obvious: whoever first provides a family-scheduling tool that non-geeks can use and Just Works with the tools most people run their calendars on is going to make a lot of money and do Humanity a major service.

Anthony Coates picked up on that and wrote in his post Poor and Stupid:

I also want a solution

• that will let me share a calendar with a few colleagues;
• which is available offline when my laptop is offline;
• which can be synchronised with my phone calendar.

Chuq responds to this in his post, kontrawize: Poor and Stupid, where he says:

My mac does this out of the box.

No. It does not.

Tom and I were talking about this earlier today: why isn't this an obvious application? Why does it have to be so hard to cobble together something that works?

This is the problem when people who are familiar with technology try to work with non-geeks: they don't understand that what's simple to them is rocket science to everyone else. Chuq uses the two words that should not be allowed anywhere near a conversation about family calendars: export and sync. That stuff's easy to him; it's not to most of the world. A real, honest-to-goodness family calendaring system cannot use either of these words — it has to just work.

Here's a scenario:

Let's take your typical household: Mom and Dad, and kids Sue and Tim. They each have their own Mac and their own local calendaring application, which for the purposes of this example I'll call iWish. The whole family is tech-savvy enough to be able to put their own schedules into their calendars and check them regularly. The part of iWish that doesn't exist is how to make these calendars work together.

[Note: I'm not talking about PDAs and cell phones and such like that, because the simple boring stuff doesn't even currently work as yet. Yeah, it'd be nice if the mobile stuff worked too, but we'll put that aside for iWish 2.0.]

How it should work: It's the weekend, and Mom is looking at her calendar for the upcoming work/school week. She sees that on Monday, Sue has soccer practice after school from 3-5 and that Tim has a orthodontist appointment at 4:45. She changes Sue's soccer practice appointment to say that she's talked to Jane's Mom, that Sue should go home with Jane after soccer, and that Mom will pick her up after Tim's done at the orthodontist.

Monday morning, Sue looks at her schedule on her Mac before leaving for school and sees the changes her Mom made.

Monday afternoon, Dad looks at the schedule, reads the details about the orthodontist appointment and sees where it says that Tim's getting braces and it should take about an hour. He knows that that means the family won't be home until after 6, so he plans dinner for 6:30.

Note that in the above, there's nothing about syncing. There's nothing about exporting. And it doesn't work at all unless one person can change another person's schedule. This is where most of the existing stuff completely falls apart.

Tom and I use Now Up-to-Date, but it's expensive (it would cost our hypothetical family $400-500 for the current version) and it requires a server. That's not acceptable for this situation. We also both use Entourage for email which we wish had this kind of calendaring in it, but it doesn't.

What I'd like to have is a network-savvy, sharing-savvy version of iCal. If it required .Mac for its full functionality, well, that'd be a good reason for Apple to put the work in that it would require (remember, Apple's a for-profit corporation, not a religion or a charitable organization, no matter what you hear this week.)

Here's how we would use it: Sean would set up sets in his calendar named "High School" and "College." I could view those sets, and prioritize them according to how I think that he ought to be spending his time. I have a set called "Business Appointments," and Tom ought to be able to both view what's there and set up meetings that both of us should be at (especially for this week!). Sadly, most calendar apps have a "you can look but not touch" attitude towards other people's schedules, and that just doesn't work for us here in the real world.

In short: the only way that Chuq has a setup that's doing this is if he's using as-yet unannounced software. And boy, do I wish that was the case, because I'd buy it the second it was available. But considering that I've been asking for this for about ten years now, I'm not holding my breath.

Why is this so hard to do? Have you come up with a solution to work around these problems? If so, tell me in the comments.

Buying the wrong things

Now that the acknowledged direct costs of the Iraq war have topped $500 billion, it's time to think about the real-world, long-term costs. Some economists have done that and here's the result: Economists say cost of war could top $2 trillion. That's a lot of money for a war of choice that Bush and the Republicans scammed the country into. Of course, the Bushies are dismissing the study as "speculation", but naturally have no long-term numbers of their own.

Turns out that you can buy a lot of stuff for $2 trillion. You can fix America's crumbling infrastructure for $1.6 trillion, and still have more than enough left over for universal health care. Hell, you can buy universal health care for way, way less than the $500 billion the Republicans admit to spending on Irag. Plus, we could do the work of securing American ports and chemical plants, which still hasn't been done. Instead, much of the money spent on domestic homeland security has been frittered away on Republican-connected pork.

If it had been put to the American people, "What would you rather purchase, a three-to five-year war to overthrow Saddam and that would fail to make America safer, or many things that would help Americans right here at home, including health care that can never be taken away?", what do you think they would have said? What do you think their answer would be today?