For the unfamiliar, Growl is a system that can give you notifications about events that happen on your system. The list of things that it can tell you about is quite extensive and range from when you get a new email or IM to when your system mounts a volume¹. It’s kinda a fiddily thing, but if you use an app like Adium or Dropbox² you probably have some version of it installed.

It’s a great product, some great people work on it, and it’s a valuable service when you need to be notified that a thing happened. It’s also easy for that value to be lost when you’re buried in notifications.

But I noticed something: constantly being notified of the myriad of things happening on a modern computer were taking their toll. One by one each sign-out event chipping away at my concentration. And the email. Oh God, the email!

Ultimately, I was spending more time reacting to notifications then I was actually making things.

Notifications are like a candy bowl for your attention span

When your environment makes it easy to consume a given thing chances are, you’ll consume it at a higher rate than if it was more difficult to obtain. For example, if there’s a candy bowl next to your desk, you’ll be likely to eat more candy than if that bowl was across the room³.

Notifications are that candy bowl shoved into your face. They appear over other windows, they stack down the screen, They’re relatively large and obvious in your peripheral vision. In short: they’re disruptive by design.

You don’t need to know everything to make something

Most of the things you can be notified about when doing creative and information work aren’t really things you need to respond to right away. IMs, email, iTunes track changes⁴. The most important thing is that code, design, spec or whatever else I’m making right now, bar none⁵.

Anything that takes away form that has little value. So Growl goes until I find something that legitimately needs to be disruptive (but that’s not a lot).

Well, not if you’re developing professionally, anyway.

Sure, there’s the occasional luddite out there who’s just afraid of upgrading their computers (hi mom!), but that alone can’t account for the ~20% of users still using IE6¹. You can’t ignore 20% of your user base.

Who makes up that ~20%? Corporate and government users are tied to IE6 by legacy internal webapps that are incompatible with other browsers—even IE7—and who are locked out of upgrading IE or installing a second browser by their enterprise security policy.

There is some hope, a thin, microscopic, atomicly thin sliver of hope. Vista ships with IE7 in it’s baseline distribution². But, unless those enterprises update those webapps, they’ll be stuck on good ‘ol IE6.

So, if you work at one of theses places, please try to make the case to do the updates necessary to get everyone onto at least IE7. It’ll be hard though, MS policy obliges them to support WinXP SP3 (and thusly IE6) with security updates through the year 2014³.

What does this mean for web developers and programmers now that IE8 is out? We have to support 3 versions of Internet Explorer now.

Is it 2014 yet?

Top 5 processes, all over 100MB each.  Yikes.

The first iPhone hardware was widely and rightly criticized for it’s recessed headphone jack

I get that there’s no desktop sync, it’s all linked to your google account and all happens in that ill-defined “cloud.”  I’m not sold, but I get it.

As for the hardware… only 1GB of memory, but upgradeable with an SD card slot, so whatever – I’m not going to argue.

However…

All I want to ask about the new G1 Phone is: How do you make an all-in-one communication/media device that doesn’t have a 3.5mm headphone jack?  Why the need to purchase an extra adapter for what’s supposed to be an all-in-one device? Audio output through the USB jack is non-obvious and requires an adapter to use the cheap box-store headphones.

The first iPhone hardware was widely and rightly criticized for it’s recessed headphone jack – something that budget headphone designs quickly adapted to — as making headphone jacks fit the iPhone didn’t harm their usability in any other device.

I’m nitpicking, for sure, and something that’s easily corrected in future hardware revisions, as with the iPhone 3G… but, considering that music (the phone ships with an Amazon MP3 Store app) and video (YouTube) playback are two of it’s biggest advertised features,  it seems like a glaring omission.

However, a couple of months ago my contract with my wireless provider expired, and a few weeks before that, my iPod was pick-pocketed.

Now, my phone still works fine, but I’m considering upgrading to a smartphone.  I would also like a new iPod.  Suddenly, the iPhone becomes an intriguing option, and the flashy, yet useful (in that “why-hasn’t-anyone-else-done-this-yet?” kind of way), visual voicemail doesn’t hurt.

But, as we’ve all heard by now, Apple is preventing anyone from offering an incentive by dropping the price of the iPhone with a new contract. So, cost is definitely a consideration.

Let’s look at that cost and compare, shall we?

The iPhone supposedly comes in 2 flavors: 4GB for $500, and 8GB for $600. (Rounded. $499 is the same as $500. Deal with it.)  Well, a new 4 or 8 GB iPod nano is $200 or $250, respectively.  I plan to purchase a new iPod anyway, and I’m cheap, so let’s assume I’m looking at the 4GB versions of each.  So, that brings the comparable cost of the 4GB iPhone from $500 down to $300.

“But!” You may shout.  “Most smartphones have media players on them as well; it’s unfair to compare them by reducing the cost of the iPhone by the cost of the iPod!”

This is true; well, the first part anyway.  Any recent “smartphone” would be remiss without some form of multimedia capability these days. I have also played with their media players on other people’s phones and in store displays.  And from my experience, and please do not get personally offended by this if you happen to like them; they all suck.  Do I know the iPhone’s will be any better in practice?  Ostensibly not, I have not seen the finished product yet.  However, Apple has at least some small experience designing in this area, and it’s presumably been part of the iPhone’s design from the beginning.  Besides, if I don’t end up with an iPhone, I’ll be getting a new nano anyway. We’re talking about opportunity cost here; so, for me, this is a fair method of comparison.

So, as I was saying, $300, US, to compare to cingul..er… AT&T’s other smartphones:

• RIM BlackBerry 8800: $500, $350 w/ 2 yr. contract, $300 w/ 2 yr. contract + $50 mail-in rebate.
• Palm Treo 750: $550, $400 w/ 2 yr. contract, $300 w/ 2 yr. contract + $100 mail-in rebate.
• RIM BlackBerry Pearl: $400, $250 w/ 2 yr. contract, $200 w/ 2 yr. contract + $50 mail-in rebate.
• Samsung BlackJack: $325, $175 w/ 2 yr. contract, $75 w/ 2 yr. contract + $100 mail-in rebate.

See where this is going? $300 isn’t a terrible price for a smartphone in this market, some are even at that point with rebates.

Now, I’ll need a voice plan.  450 minutes isn’t enough, I barely fit in 600 now. I can get 900 minutes at $60/mo.

For a data plan, well.. it’s possible AT&T might offer something here since it can’t offer an incentive on the cost of the phone, but let’s not make plans on pure speculation.  However, since the iPhone is just a smartphone without corporate (blackberry) e-mail capabilities, I think it’s reasonable to use the “Smartphone Connect” plans as a reference point: $20/mo for unlimited data.

And we should probably figure on about $10/mo more for miscellaneous services like a messaging bundle or insurance.

To review, that’s $90/mo: $60/mo for voice (900 mins), plus $20/mo for data, and $10 for miscellaneous services. Not terrible for a smartphone, and I think it’s a reasonable estimate given it’s about what I’d pay for a BlackBerry on T-Mo.

Of course, the only reason this works out at all is because I’m planning on buying a new iPod anyway.  Ok, well, that and visual voicemail is sexy.  Just not $200 sexy.  And it all depends on reception, battery life, and call quality too.  It is a phone first, after all… and that new MOTORIZR doesn’t look too shabby either…