It is now about two weeks since I have begun splitting my time between work here at Salon and work on my book, and I’m still trying to regain my balance! I have shelves of books to read, and mountains of notes to organize, and piles of research to do. There seem to be several people out there who are able to keep up a prodigious blogging output while also working on a book project. So far I don’t seem to be among them.
Programmers — and writers — at work
I had the pleasure on Tuesday of attending the “Programmers at Work” reunion panel at SDWest. My column covering the talk — which featured Andy Hertzfeld, Charles Simonyi, Dan Bricklin, Jaron Lanier, Scott Kim, Bob Carr and Jef Raskin — is now up, here.
As it turned out, the discussion centered on some questions about software development that fascinate me. In truth, they have obsessed me for the last year and a half. During that time, an idea for a book on this subject gradually assembled itself out of the bits and pieces of my enthusiasm. The idea acquired its own force. I could not ignore it. After a career of helping friends write book proposals, I wrote one myself (I’d done this only once before, in my previous incarnation as a theater critic, and the results were negligible). One thing led to another, and now, to my amazement, I have a deal to publish it (with Crown, a division of Random House).
So it looks as if I am actually going to get to write the book I want to write. Which is really all any writer can hope of the world.
Though I don’t plan to write the book on this blog, I’ll probably be posting occasionally about it, as time permits. If you’re curious, today’s column touches on many of the themes I’ll be exploring. I’m not leaving Salon — not after pouring my heart into it for 8 1/2 years! — but beginning soon, I’ll split my days between my job and research on the book. I feel comfortable doing this because — compared with some of the bumpier periods since the collapse of the Internet boom — Salon is in a good way, overall, with lots of new editorial energy and strong business leadership.
Now, if we can only unseat the Bush administration, 2004 may turn out to be a pretty good year!
Is there an analogy in the house?
People who create software are forever trying to explain their somewhat obscure disipline by offering friendly analogies. The most common one is that making software is like building buildings. Recently there’s been some discussion of this notion, including an article on Kuro5hin suggesting that “the software construction analogy is broken.”
Maybe making software is more like politics, or writing laws. Or like writing music. Or like growing critters in vats. Or like…
Brian Marick and Ken Schwaber are trying to broaden the thinking in this area and are organizing an event at an upcoming software conference that they call the Analogy Fest: “The Analogy Fest is an attempt to manufacture serendipity, to create the circumstances in which clever people might have an ‘Aha!’ moment. We’ll do that by having semi-structured, small group conversations about papers that draw analogies between software development and something else.”
Sounds interesting to me. I think they’re still looking for more papers to make the event happen.
PIM cups runneth over
Outlook may have killed the commercial marketplace for “Personal Information Management” (PIM) software. So the new Outlook challenger is going to be the product of an open-source project, backed by a foundation. Dan Gillmor writes about it all here.
Mitch Kapor is funding the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF), and its first project will be “a new take on the Personal Information Manager. It will handle email, appointments, contacts and tasks, as well as be used to exchange information with other people, and do it all in the spirit of Lotus Agenda.” Kapor — the Lotus Software founder who later was one of the key people behind the Electronic Frontier Foundation — is blogging the project here.
I missed Agenda during its heyday, fell in love with Ecco Pro and have been mourning its death (or at least its cryogenic suspension) for years now, so I greet this news with delight. Kapor’s team includes the legendary Andy Hertzfeld, a key creator of the Macintosh and later one of the masterminds of Nautilus, Eazel’s Linux desktop. I can’t wait to see what they come up with.
Don Park (via Scripting News) raises a question worth pondering: “What I am afraid of is the erosion in the sense of value for software. If OSAF succeeds, consumers will have access to a wide array of high quality software for free. Most likely, every PC will start to ship with them preloaded. Every time a new OSAF product ships, a market segment will die.”
To me the key thing here is that this market segment is dead already. Outlook killed it. No one will fund commercial PIM software, and brilliant, wonderful pieces of software have withered on the vine. So how else can we get good software into users’ hands?