![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Electronic Organizers Stink
Aug. 17th, 2010 06:45 pm
With all the watches I have, and all the calendars I keep (three, at the moment) I guess I qualify as obsessed with time.
It does mean I know about organizers and the like, though. For example, I know which electronic organizers don't suck: None of them.
For all their advantages, all the ones I've tried suck. If you get around the form factor problem-- desktops or full laptops are too big, phones are too small-- and the battery problem, the biggest issue that remains is data entry. That's the one that gets me, in the end.
And the problem with data entry is not the tiny keyboard of a Blackberry or trying to enter things with a stylus using Palm Graffiti. Those problems you could avoid. No, the problem is more fundamental than that.
Consider the following bits of information:
Jack Dakota chews a cud. Some expert is going to pop on and tell me that I'm an idiot because jackrabbits don't chew cuds and I made HIM chew one. Then later on they'll find out that he DOES chew a cud, and the fact that he does is a plot element and a CLUE. It will be fun!
Tom's Glass Shop, 517 South Midway, Gaylord MI 49735 989-555-5555
Doctor 9:30 Wednesday
Get car's tires rotated
You look at them and you know immediately that one is an address, one is an appointment, one is a task, and one is miscellaneous-- probably a note to myself. OK, fine. If I'm using a paper organizer the whole page is there before me. I immediately jot everything down in its proper place. Or if I do it in an improper place-- if I jot a phone number under "EXPENSES" for example-- it's all cool, nothing bad happens.
Now think what happens when I try to enter those random bits of info into a Palm, or my Blackberry, or a desktop organizer program. I have to open entirely different applications for each one, or in the case of the desktop PIM I have to open different modules within the same program, which is just as bad. Then, for the address for example, I have to individually click on the data field I want to fill, fill it, click or tab or something to get to the next field, fill that, and so on. And heaven help you if you try to put the wrong kind of data into the program, even temporarily.
What's frustrating about it is that in the examples above it's fairly obvious, just from the way I typed it, what sort of data it is. There might be a question about the task and the note-- "get" or "do" starting a line implies it is a task, but it doesn't have to be. But that would be easily solved by having the organizer ask you what kind of data this was if it wasn't sure.
What you really need to make an electronic organizer not suck is to have a text parsing algorithm that figures out what kind of data you're entering and puts it in the right place for you. Just type all your information out, in English, in one place, hit return, and it goes where it should. Do that and then you'll HAVE something.
We've got programs out there that convert voice to text, and do a pretty good job of it. Compared to that, how hard could it be to make a program that takes addresses typed out in English and drops them into an address book database for you?
Ah, the Deadly Question from the Ignorant: "How hard can it be?"
It does mean I know about organizers and the like, though. For example, I know which electronic organizers don't suck: None of them.
For all their advantages, all the ones I've tried suck. If you get around the form factor problem-- desktops or full laptops are too big, phones are too small-- and the battery problem, the biggest issue that remains is data entry. That's the one that gets me, in the end.
And the problem with data entry is not the tiny keyboard of a Blackberry or trying to enter things with a stylus using Palm Graffiti. Those problems you could avoid. No, the problem is more fundamental than that.
Consider the following bits of information:
Jack Dakota chews a cud. Some expert is going to pop on and tell me that I'm an idiot because jackrabbits don't chew cuds and I made HIM chew one. Then later on they'll find out that he DOES chew a cud, and the fact that he does is a plot element and a CLUE. It will be fun!
Tom's Glass Shop, 517 South Midway, Gaylord MI 49735 989-555-5555
Doctor 9:30 Wednesday
Get car's tires rotated
You look at them and you know immediately that one is an address, one is an appointment, one is a task, and one is miscellaneous-- probably a note to myself. OK, fine. If I'm using a paper organizer the whole page is there before me. I immediately jot everything down in its proper place. Or if I do it in an improper place-- if I jot a phone number under "EXPENSES" for example-- it's all cool, nothing bad happens.
Now think what happens when I try to enter those random bits of info into a Palm, or my Blackberry, or a desktop organizer program. I have to open entirely different applications for each one, or in the case of the desktop PIM I have to open different modules within the same program, which is just as bad. Then, for the address for example, I have to individually click on the data field I want to fill, fill it, click or tab or something to get to the next field, fill that, and so on. And heaven help you if you try to put the wrong kind of data into the program, even temporarily.
What's frustrating about it is that in the examples above it's fairly obvious, just from the way I typed it, what sort of data it is. There might be a question about the task and the note-- "get" or "do" starting a line implies it is a task, but it doesn't have to be. But that would be easily solved by having the organizer ask you what kind of data this was if it wasn't sure.
What you really need to make an electronic organizer not suck is to have a text parsing algorithm that figures out what kind of data you're entering and puts it in the right place for you. Just type all your information out, in English, in one place, hit return, and it goes where it should. Do that and then you'll HAVE something.
We've got programs out there that convert voice to text, and do a pretty good job of it. Compared to that, how hard could it be to make a program that takes addresses typed out in English and drops them into an address book database for you?
Ah, the Deadly Question from the Ignorant: "How hard can it be?"
