We’ve had some great internal discussions about the iPad here at Intuit. In the Innovation Lab – (aka iLab – I wonder how long we’ll get to keep calling ourselves that?) – we started wondering about “always connected small portable devices” back in 2003 during contractor visits. Even then, a few of them had laptops and printers in their trucks so that they could deliver estimates and invoices on the spot.

I like my gadgets – I had a digital voice recorder when they first came out, one of the first Palm phones, even a “luggable” computer – about 30 pounds – with a 5″ Hercules monitor. THAT takes me back…

I don’t have an iPod or an iPhone, though. I was happy with my Palm phones before either existed – and happily synced my music and listened to it through the phone. I’m still happy now with my Droid, having gotten it working the way I want. My main computer is a tablet, small, easy to watch videos and such.

But what about the iPad? You know, I think that we can already check our email, stream movies, read books, browse the web, buy stuff from Amazon. I don’t need another device to do that.

I’ll tell you what I do need, though, and I’d sure like the iPad to do it for me. Video. The home movie experience is currently a pretty bad one. Not watching, or the quality, but the dis-integrated nature of all the video we have lying around.

So here’s the 3 things I want the iPad to do:

1. RIP my DVDs I’m tired of hunting for my DVDs. Is the one I want in the basement game room? Upstairs? Living room? Family room? In one of the myriad DVD cases? I paid for them – I don’t want to RIP rentals – I just want simple access to my collection. Oh, and it needs to RIP the video in high quality as well as preserve the surround sound.

2. Stream videos Since I can get streaming movies via Netflix, or stuff from services like YouTube, I want to quickly and easily select what I want to watch. On my XBOX 360, it’s a pain to find a movie that’s not in my queue. Voice recognition would be good here – sitting in a chair, typing using a remote = not good. Speaking into my remote = good.

3. Record my home movies I have a variety of home movies – VHS, Hi8, HD on SD cards, MP4 from a Flip and even MOV from some phones. Let me easily get those movies onto the device, or better yet, onto my RAID1 2TB NAS device. Simple categories and/or dates is fine.

It’s time for the final vestiges of SneakerNet to be abolished. I hope the iPad, or something like it, will do that.

I switched my phone to the Motorola Droid yesterday and began fiddling around to get it working the way I want.

My previous phone was a Palm Treo 755p. I’ve had smart phones pretty much since they became available, always Palm OS. I had Sprint on a Kyocera 6035, but switched to Verizon on the 6035 for better coverage, then a Kyocera 7135, the Treo 755p, and now the Droid.

My primary reason for switching was that the Treo was flaky – and it was the second one with problems. After about a year, the Treo started to intermittently reboot, lock up, microphone wouldn’t work. I’d hard-reset the thing and it still had problems. I had similar issues with the 7135.

There are three main things I need on a smart phone – securable Notes, a sync to my Outlook calendar, and a decent camera. Palm has always been good with the first two, and the camera was quite good on my Treo.

Unfortunately, the Droid fails in all three of my needs – at least right out of the box.

Notes
I can get notes on it, sort of, through the sync with Gmail. And there are some freebie applications that let you sync some Google Docs and other service notes, but they aren’t secured. I keep login and password info with me on my phone, so they need to be password protected and encrypted, and available on my Desktop and synced with the phone.

I’m able to get what I need with an application called Keeper. It has secure notes on the Droid, but I had to pay $30 to get the Desktop version and sync. The sync isn’t as good as the Palm – it only works through WiFi, and has to be manually initiated on BOTH the Desktop and the Droid. The Palm was one button – push it and the sync fired off. Keeper requires that I run the Desktop version, log in, go to Sync, enter the IP address of the Droid (which won’t work when I’m VPN to the office or even AT the office on its secure WiFi connection), run the Droid version, log in, go to Sync, and turn it “On”.

However, Keeper is more secure than Palm’s password protected notes. You could hack the Palm’s notes by just deleting the profile and re-syncing to a new Desktop profile. The passwords are removed and you have the data. Keeper doesn’t allow that sort of thing.

When it comes to Sync, the Palm had it right – one application that everything syncs through, you hit it once and everything just works. The Droid is every application to itself – build your own sync and each one runs separately.

To be fair though, the Droid expects to always be online, so sync is often not so much copying the data around but just making your online data available to you.

So at least for now, my Notes situation is resolved – Callpod’s Keeper is Good Enough.

Winner: It’s a tie! Palm for sync simplicity, Keeper for security.

Outlook Calendar Sync
Intuit is hooked on Outlook, and so, I suppose, am I. My Kyocera Palm devices included excellent Outlook sync tools. The Treo tried to make you pay extra for them, but I found that my old sync modules worked just fine with the Treo. I had a selective sync – Notes and Contacts came from Palm Desktop, and Calendar came from Outlook.

I was quite disappointed to find that there wasn’t a good sync on the Droid. I’m hoping I can just get some sort of direct connection to my Intuit Exchange account a la Blackberry.

What I did find, though, is a sync tool between Outlook Calendar and Gmail Calendar. AND the Droid’s calendar is essentially the native Gmail calendar, so I figured a double-sync would do it: Outlook to Gmail, Gmail to Droid.

I found a freebie tool from Google called Google Calendar Sync that looked very promising. I installed it and the tool immediately began the sync. Outlook appointments started showing up in my Gmail Calendar and on my Droid. Success!

Or so I thought… I had it set to sync between the two – exactly how it worked with my Palm – but it’s missing some appointments and I can’t figure out why – seems random. I changed it to Desktop overwrites and synced again. I opened one of the appointments that didn’t get into Gmail Calendar, changed the description, saved it and synced again. Still no luck. Most of my appointments show up, but not all of them.

One peeve with the Droid is that when you go to look at appointments, it always starts the display for a day in the same place – about 2pm, even if the current time is 9am. That means appointments before 2pm don’t show up unless you scroll. The Palm was smart enough to know it was 9am, or 2pm, and it automatically scrolled to the appropriate (next or current) appointment.

I’ll have to go through and check which ones are missing to make certain I’m reminded of all my appointments – not just the ones the sync tool decided I should know about!

Winner: Palm for accurate sync and display

Camera
So it’s looking like my choice to switch to the Droid wasn’t the best one I’ve ever made, but I definitely had to do something as my Treo was practically unusable. Unfortunately, so is the camera on my Droid.

I was excited to get what sounded like a great camera – 5 megapixel and a flash. I think… that I have a bad unit. I’ll be taking it in to a Verizon store later and comparing it with a store Droid demo or something, because the pictures it is taking are completely unusable. Colors are messed up – it looks like a 16 color GIF or something! My settings are all default – no special color effects (which you can do on a Droid). But the pictures are totally lousy. Check out the photo below – my TV with some ceiling in the shot shows the wacky color problems.

Sending a picture is a little different – the Palm always sent via Messaging, with a sort of unified way of selecting the recipient. With the Droid, you first have to choose your way of sending. Let me explain… with the Palm, I can take a shot, click the Envelope icon, and start typing a contact name. Then I’d get a drop down of addresses – both phone numbers and emails. With the Droid, I first have to select Messaging (where I can send only to phone numbers unless I manually type in an email address) or Gmail (where I can only send to email addresses, but they can come from my Contacts). It’s better in one way – sending via Gmail doesn’t compress the picture to Messaging limitations.

Winner: Palm… pending getting a fixed camera on the Droid, and assuming I’ve got a bad one.

I’ve owned some development tools for the Palm for quite some time, and I am able to create my own applications. I’m currently downloading and installing the Android development tools, so we’ll see how that goes. It’s certainly easier to install applications on the Droid.

There’s practically no manual included with the Droid, just a small booklet. You have to very closely look at any dialogs you see on the Droid in order to know how to do things – OR keep your Desktop computer close by (like I did) so you can do fast an easy searches to find answers. Yeah, you can do that on the Droid, but it’s a much slower process.

I really like the Google Maps Navigation on the Droid. It nailed exactly where I am in my house, and even includes my long, 4/10ths of a mile gravel driveway as a “road” in its directions.

The voice commands are decent, but it’s foolish to require touchscreen interactions for voice actions. For instance, I have to 1) Press the Voice Call button, 2) Speak, e.g. “Call home”, 3) Push the OK button to confirm. I should be able to say “Wake up”, “Call home”, “Yes”.

What’s really disappointing is that, well, it’s 10+ years since the release of the first smart phones. It’s been 20+ years since we’ve had the Palm. Sync has been solved. Voice commands have been solved.

Here at Intuit Labs, we have some design philosophies that we try to follow. When you have a new product with delightful features, e.g. Google Maps Navigation or simple App installation, it isn’t enough to get those done really well to give a great customer experience. There are also features that people simply expect to work well – like sync, voice commands and cameras. If you don’t get those right, it doesn’t really matter if your new device can sing, dance and do your taxes. Get the basics done right, get the minimum viable right before you try to delight me.

I anticipate doing some development work to get this thing working the way I REALLY want it to work.

I’ve been trying to find good methods for creating digital versions of videos, including old tapes and DVDs.

I was browsing in a Bed, Bath and Beyond, and saw a little video to SD card device for $80. I figured I’d give it a try, and I’m quite happy with the results.

I have a small laptop that has a DVD player on its dock, but not on the computer itself. That means I’m stuck without movies on a plane.

Also, my old VCR and camera tapes are getting on in years, and I’d like to get rid of them. DVDs are also dependent on media and are not “fault tolerant”.

The VuPoint Digital Video Converter works great. It’s a very simple device – video and audio in, video and audio out (essentially a pass through), a button to record or play videos, and a slot for up to a 32G SD card, up to class 6 speeds.

I’m recording old videos onto the SD cards and then moving them onto my home Buffalo LinkStation 2TB RAID 1 fault tolerant network storage – also a great deal for about $350.

The resolution is regular TV, and the audio is stereo – no HD or Dolby Surround here – but you don’t have that on your VCR tapes, either. It’s a simple and effective way to get your videos onto a digital medium that is easy to backup and recover without loss.

Outlook 2007 and Office 2007 in general has annoyed me ever since it was pushed to my computer.

First came the change in the interface. And not just a small change, but a radical departure from, well, pretty much every other Windows application on the planet. My Alt-I F to insert a file became Alt-N A F. Then I have to dig around for the Word Count thing. Not to mention the really annoying blinking dot that wouldn’t go away until you hesitantly clicked on it, hoping it wouldn’t blow anything up like it appeared it would.

Then Outlook – it won’t permanently remove the Sort by Message Header column. It reappears every time I go out of then back into the Inbox. Apparently a known problem – not a “bug”, of course. And worse: my Category column is text when the Header column is there, color when it isn’t. Yargh. Since my Flag column disappeared altogether and I had to redo the rules so that my Category would match my Flag…

And yes, I know I can switch off of cached mode – but then Zombie messages started showing up – mysterious new unread deleted messages and something in my Outbox that I never put there (it wasn’t even FROM me…)

So I live with these annoyances, lose productivity, and am generally less than delighted.

I want things to get better – as defined by me. No, I don’t need to go into a DOS command line and type in the Edit app, but I don’t want my old experiences broken, either. Or new problems to show up.

Things that will DELIGHT a user will get lost in all of those little things that used to work… but are now broken. It’s fun to put something brand new out there. It’s hard to innovate on a version 12. I get that. Unfortunately, I also have to live, and work, and struggle with it every day, too.

So this post might not have much to do with Intuit Labs, or Intuit, or work… but the ideas related here did come in the context of my work. I recently took an Enneagram, a test that can reveal your psychological profile – or at least categorize you within 1 of 3 groups (and 1 of 3 subgroups) based on your answers to a battery of questions. A great personal coach at Metis Consulting is working with me in the area of work relationships.

The concept is that the types are related, and your main body type will typically revert to another one in times of stress and a third one in times of relaxation. The three main groups are Body, Mental and Feeling.

As Jack and I began to discuss the enneagram, I began to see how it applied to my son, who was diagnosed with autism when he was 2. He’s high functioning, although not as high as Asperger’s.

Anyway, in observing him, and other autistic children in various groups that he’s in, and in knowning my own behavior, I realized that he is primarily a 1 – Reformer/Perfectionist. Autistic children often become highly stressed when things don’t go their way – when a rule is broken, for instance. They have a rigid way of defining the rules. I am also a 1.

When a 1 is stressed, he moves to a 4 – Individualist/Internal Creation. And that’s what both my son and I do. He goes into his own world, not listening to others or interacting well, humming or playing or spinning or other self-stimulating activities. I tend to avoid contact with others, working on my own projects – usually very productive, but not social.

When a 1 is relaxed, he moves to a 7 – Adventurer. That’s partly true with me: but rarely at work. Rather I move to a 6 at work: a questioner, seeking to understand issues and problems. My son is a solid 7 though, he’s fun, likes puns and idioms, likes to swing, explore the woods, try new games.

It came to me that in trying to help my son when he’s at his worst: either a bad 1 or a bad 4, we usually give him “adventurous” choices: play this or that game. I’ve also advised my older daughter, who was helping a severely autistic child in a special soccer group, to engage her by just rolling the ball back and forth with her father. She was in her own world at first, but came to participate in this activity.

So in my experience, the enneagram map could be very useful for helping parents, educators and service providers help their autistic children and charges. For instance, simply recognizing when your child is in a certain mindset: rigid perfectionist, for instance, that a way to help with that is to get them to be adventurous. Redirecting the self-stimulating activities into a more balanced “4″ is by helping them to be more self-aware: something that educators are taught today.

If you have a view on this, I’d like to know it.

I was recently asked about whether or not the code from a market test Alpha should continue on into the offering. I don’t know the answer, but here’s my thoughts.

Intuit doesn’t have a doctrine that I know of, just some history. Prototype code is almost never used in a commercial launch, but Alpha versions and such have gone on to be full products. Quicken and QuickBooks were retooled after about the third version.

My own general view is that if the code is reasonably well done, there’s no reason you can’t continue with it, using an emergent architecture method. Too many offerings have been sidelined by trying to get the architecture “right” the first time.

But if the code seems untenable now, it might be a good idea to start afresh on it. My prototype version of Keyword Search would never have worked in a real product, so it was tossed before I even started on a publishable version.

Echominder was a prototype that turned into a launch, and we started down the retooling path after a few months. It probably would have been a better product if we had started over on it before launch.

Engineer “excitement” can also be a factor – if a group is excited about a recoding, you can get a much more engaged team, and better results – that’s what happened with Intuit Labs – the innovation.intuit.com codebase was tossed out, and it’s a better product, with faster iteration potential, than it would have been otherwise.

So… use your instincts, don’t over-architect, and take the time if it’s necessary. Don’t take the time if it isn’t.

I recently posted up a fix to the QuickBase Appointment Creator application – it allows you to download appointment-type records that have been setup in QuickBase and create an appointment in Outlook. An Intuit network change caused the app to begin failing, and a problem with IntuitLabs.com kept me from seeing the customer feedback that was coming in.

Once the feedback problem was solved, I quickly discovered the network change bug and fixed it.

And that’s when the real feedback and iteration began. At least 5, or was it 6, engaged users who were either needing a new feature or still having problems began both commenting on the app page or using the “Talk To Us” link to directly send a comment.

That made a few perfect storm factors come together to enable the rapid iteration:

First, the add in, which I hadn’t modified for, well, a really long time, was “on the mind”. As a developer, it takes extra time to shift the focus and mind off of one problem and onto something different. I’ve been developing Linux-based web apps for a long time now, and switching back to Windows is a bit jarring. But this was a real problem, people were interested, and I quickly discovered an easy fix.

Second, there were people interested and communicating with me RIGHT NOW. They were downloading, testing, giving me quick feedback.

Finally, there were some things that I was waiting for from other folks, and they were (are) sort of holding up some other work that I need to get done… meaning I couldn’t do that work… I knew that the new feature would be a quick and easy one, so I did that instead, then spent some time debugging and, hopefully, fixing some final issues that I could easily do.

Building innovative solutions that solve real problems is a lot of fun when you have the right situation in place.

I’ve been heavily involved in creating the developer hosting resources at Intuit, primarily the prototype/unstructured time/whitespace time project needs of our employees. With the financial information our data centers handle, they end up being tied down just like a bank’s computers, often making it difficult to get experimental stuff into the mix.

And to make matters more complex, that experimental stuff sometimes needs to access the financial information, and it needs to comply with Intuit’s strong privacy and data security policies.

A few years ago, Intuit put a team in place that began work on providing virtual machine hosting – our own internal cloud computing farm. When I began looking to support teams that needed hosting, I ran into that team and we began to work together to deliver the goods. Their cloud delivery application is great – easier to use than Amazon’s EC2, but capable of delivering both internal and EC2 virtual environments.

Together, we now have a solution for teams needing to develop against our enterprise applications and offerings as well as new and creative things. So it was with a smile that I read an internal blog post by Bill Laaser in our Technology Innovation Group. He attended the recent Under The Radar conference, where one of the hot topics was cloud computing.

It looks like we’re doing it right at Intuit. We have our own internal cloud computing resources, we’re extending secure computing into the public cloud as well as experimenting with the existing basic public cloud computing resources. It’s an exciting time in the world of hosting – the traditional models of big data centers and big hosting providers is being challenged, and it’ll be all the better for the users of these systems.

- Matt H

The QuickBase Appointment Creator looked like an abandoned application there for a while, but it was just a glitch in Intuit Labs that prevented me from being notified of new comments.

There was a recent change in the QuickBase infrastructure that prevented the tool from authenticating a login attempt, and it was throwing an error. That’s been fixed.

Note that there’s another change in QuickBase that forces tools to use an “Application Token”. If you’ve pressed the button in QuickBase that says “enable enhanced security”, then you’ve probably enabled Application Tokens. (You can check this by looking at Customize, Application, Advanced Settings, Require Application Tokens.) This tool is not currently compatible with QuickBase applications that require the tokens, so that option needs to be un-checked. Since the tool requires a login to your QuickBase, the application token isn’t necessary, and all your data is secure.

So if you’ve tried to use the QuickBase Appointment Creator but encountered problems, I want to encourage you to download and try out the latest version.

Regards,
- Matt H

I used to write shareware, including a Netware chat/messaging client (along with Mike B and Doug T), a Windows 3.1 dashboard/navigator (with Mike B), an app installer, the popular X-Wing TSRs (remap, tieremap, and XCD), and a MICR check designer. I had varying degrees of success with those.

My most popular shareware app was Super Conversions. It managed to get onto the WUGNET Top 10 Shareware list, published online and in their magazine. Downloads spiked high and I ended up with something like 2,000 registered users, including the US Department of Defense, many environmentalist organizations, and even that guy who drives the original Bigfoot 4×4.

Along the way, I developed some ideas on how to write good shareware apps. I thought about that today as I tried to find an application that could convert some animated GIFs created by Vlad for an internal application. I’m writing what I hope will be a companion app to his, so I wanted to make mine look similar. That means grabbing his graphics, mostly GIFs, used in his .Net app and then using them in my Flex 3 app.

He has some very nice animated GIFs, but Flex doesn’t natively support them – they have to be converted to SWF format first. So I hit Google up for some programs, and it dutifully returned plenty of results. The first one I tried didn’t work – it distorted the image. One of them didn’t even save the converted file – so I couldn’t check if it worked. 2 of them added some kind of watermark – the first totally obscuring the results, the second wouldn’t loop the image along with the not-quite-so-badly obscuring watermark.

These applications were reasonably priced – about $20. I don’t mind paying that much – I’ve bought plenty of good shareware in my time: Goldwave, GIF Construction Set, CuteFTP, IconEdit, Popup Filter, and many more. But… I’m definitely NOT going to buy anything unless I’m confident it will work for me.

I finally found the Animated GIF Converter from ConvexSoft. It gave me good control over the animation elements and let me save a converted file that had half of the frames of the GIF. That gave me enough confidence to purchase it.

4 other potential shareware makers lost out on my $20 – if any one of them would have worked, I would have bought it.

All that to lead into what I believe are the characteristics of good shareware. Please leave a comment if you have something else to add to the list:

1. It works! Seems simple enough, but so much shareware is disabled to the point where it actually doesn’t do what it says it will do. I’m not going to trust your word on it – I want to see that it works. Some of the things these GIF to SWF converters could have done was be really annoying with popups everywhere, slow start or slow conversion process, half frames (like Convexsoft), super slow animations, limited number of conversions.

2. Simple, Clean User Interface If you have no clue how to make a decent UI, and you can’t even copy existing clean UI standards, then I’ll probably suspect you can’t really write decent code, either.

3. It’s Cheap! I won’t pay more than about $30 for shareware – any more and I’ll start to expect real support or refunds or whatnot. I did sell some shareware for more than that, but it required more support, and I had a nice bound manual that went with it, etc…

Don’t worry about the people who will steal it – doesn’t matter if you charged $500 – they’ll still figure out how to crack it and steal it.

People will buy what you’re selling – if it works, looks good, and doesn’t cost much.