Since a few years ago, I've been longing for a light portable library that can hold a couple hundred books, articles, and news papers in it and I can read anywhere when convenient.  I've tried a bunch of devices from Franklin to Palm and read about Sony's Reader which, although features electronic ink technology, didn't caught much popularity at all.  Amazon's newly launched Kindle seems to begin to light up the candles of the portable reading.

It take much to build a electronic book reading device that could compete with paper books.  First of all LCD still causes much more eye fatigue than natual ink on paper.  The electronic ink technology in the Kindle could simulate natual ink and the ability of changing the font size is a plus for eye comfort.  Content quality is the next most important thing.  For example, the Acrobat Reader for Palm has to transform normal PDF files into a special format to be displayed on Palm.  It not only take a long time to transform, but also lose a lot of formatting for graphics, tables, and math formula.  Content collection is also a challenge, where Amazon definitely wins with its unbeatable collection of books, partnership with large content providers, a aggregation of community contents (e.g., blogs).  And don't forget these can all be access wirelessly while you are on the go and they are fully searchable!  Isn't that cool?

Since this is only the first version, there must be a lot that could be further improved.  While I'm reading, I like to see more per screen.  So while not change the physical keyboard into a touch screen and let the screen be as big as possible?  Kindle won't have the dilemma as iPhone's small touch screen keyword, because Kindle has bigger screen.  Even many people got use to the iPhone keyboard after practicing, Kindle will be even much easier.

It has been reported that due to the burgeoning advancement in digital multimedia content on TV and Internet, reading and literacy capability of young generation is decreasing.  Hopefully this cool gadget could bring books back into the competition with TV and Inernet.

Reading map isn't always an easy job for lots of people.  In Friends TV show, Joey put a paper map on the gound and step on it in order to get a sense which direction is right.  Though that's a little bit of a extreme case, it illustrates the challenge.  Many people need more intuitive online maps too and especially the driving directions, so that they don't have to put the computer monitor on the ground and step on it :)  Some GPS devices like TomTom came up with really nice 3D UI to show the driving directions in a much more intuitive way.

Live Virtual Earth Map provides a rich set of APIs with which interesting map applications could be developed, even in 3D and birds eye view.  As an example, I built an animated driving direction that kind of simulates TomTom.  Turn by turn the map will move as if you are driving and what you see is a view of 45 degree looking down from above your "car" and you can see clearly what road and intersection is ahead of you.

The basic idea is to call the routing API to get the itinerary with all segments of the driving direction.  For each segment, the map orientation will be adjusted so that the next point is right ahead and then pan to the next point while showing the textual turn by turn instruction. Some suggestion for the API is that the panning APIs are mostly asynchronized so that the calls return immediately while the actually panning is done a while later.  This causes a little bit trouble in showing the textual turn by turn driving direction in sync with the map animation.  Map events help to some degree, but still some work needs to be done to keep the map and text in sync, because events are generic and there doesn't seem to be a way to assign per event instance parameters.  Also the detailed road of each segment is not available, so when the road between 2 points is not straight we can't follow the curve of the road in order to simulate the exact driving experience.

After loading the project into Visual Studio, bring up the exception dialog by menu "Debug" => "Exceptions..." and check the types of the exceptions that you want to investigate.  After this attach to the process in question.  Whenever the statement will cause exceptions to be thrown, it will prompt and let you choose whether to break at that trouble statement and do further investigation.

Yahoo! Mail begins to roll out unlimited storage today worldwide.  Feeling lucky that minutes after their announcement, I'm getting this great offer already.  Now I don't need to worry about overflow any more. :)

Making the client side scripts work across different major browsers is not easy, especially when client debugging is not as convenient as more strongly typed programming languages.  Try the following web page.  It works fine on IE but on FireFox clicking the button will trigger nothing to happen.

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" > <head><title>Untitled Page</title></head> <script language="Javascript"> function document.onclick() {   alert('doc event'); } function foo() {   alert('foo'); } </script> <body> <input type="button" value="ok" onclick="foo();" /> </body> </html>

The page will silently fail and none of the event handlers works.  Change the document.onclick handler assignment into the following and it works on both browsers.  Tools like the Error Console on FireFox is very helpful in diagnosing these type of errors.

... document.onclick = function () {   alert('doc event'); } ...

In live search, when users type in a non-English keyword, there are very small amount of snippets/summary for the non-English sites in its own language, which is not very international user friendly.  Those who typed in a non-English language keyword most likely know that language well enough to read the results in that language.  Having summary in the website's native language is a very natural thing to do and an expected result for the users.  Even if the search engine is facing NA market, since there are a large number of foreign people in NA, having some degree of International language support makes sense.

The importance of usability is elevated to a even higher level in the web 2.0 era.  The center of computing is shifting from computers to human users.  After many years' of advancement, computers begin to fade into the background as commodity.  The real power is organizing and combining exploding information generated by people and eventually used by people.  However, people are "lazy", "impatient", and "greedy".  Making the human users satisfied becomes more and more critical to the success of software and services providers.  The business model and vehicle to deliver the software and services in Web 2.0 era is so unique that contributes in "spoiling" the users too.  The barrier of entering and Web 2.0 industry is so low that a few good programmers with a good idea could make a very successful website.  The services of huge number of those websites are very innovative, powerful, and, more importantly, free most of the time thanks to the online ads business model.  The release and delivery of newer and nicer online services has so low impact to the users, with no hassle of installation, upgrading, or troubleshooting on the client side.  With all these things together, the users end up being the spoiled king!  They have so many choices and they are free.  So they can switch to any better product without much difficulty.  Now it's time for the software and service providers to worry about the user experience their products bring to the customers.

One big resistance to achieving good usability is from the software developers.  Most of them are passionate about technology and tackling challenging problems, while feeling bored about non-technical stuff.  Being customer obsessed and having a mind set of building software for human instead for machines would be a very appreciated capability of an excellent software developer.  The new ways of organizing emails in gmail, the search engine keyword spelling correction feature, and so on are all from developers who made this step ahead.