I don’t know enough about Microsoft’s advertising strategy to comment on it, because I very rarely give Microsoft any notice (Especially when you consider that I work in an office of Apple Lovers and spend my time following Open Source fanatics on Twitter), so whether these videos are just advertising techniques or not, I can’t say.

But the Courier is grabbing my attention, so rather than trawl the web everyday for new information I set off a Google Alerts Feed to let me know of new Courier info, and to be honest, I wish I hadn’t, because it get’s filled with utter rubbish.

So here’s my take on everything Microsoft is currently doing, what I think the Courier is (vaporware or not?) and finally what happens next.

Microsoft Where Have You Been All My Life

I make it no secret when writing these posts that I am not a fan of Microsoft, it’s nothing to do with their ethics or anything like that, I just found Mac OS X and Linux were more than suitable for ANY person to avoid Windows, so I just wrote off Microsoft in terms of OS, their old mobile devices are ugly and while Windows 7 Phones seem to have a lot nicer interface, I’ll have to see how I feel after I get time to use their SDK (Past experience has been pretty bad in terms of customisation and I am all about the aesthetics).

But recently I’m seeing them in a different light, sure I think Windows 7 is still pretty bad and I hate it when my other half calls me up with the first sentence “My laptops broken”, but Microsoft seems to fixed up their attitude to mobile devices “to a degree”.

They’ve looked at mobile devices (Phones, Tablets, Other), considered them and said to themselves, “They aren’t computers”.

One team point to Microsoft right there! Yeah I admit, they are computers, but the UI needs to be different, you can’t just put a UI that works on a nice big screen straight onto a tiny screen and hope it will work just as well. I am in 2 minds about this point though, Microsoft have sat back and come up with this great Courier concept and their Windows 7 Phones (even the new Kin phones), but what the hell happened with the HP Slate?

Apple iPhone – Came with a totally mew UI

Android – Came with a new UI (although alot of similarities to iPhone)

Apple iPad – New UI (Sure the front screen is the same, but the apps have opened up into that screen real estate nicely, and I bet Apple have given Developers a new set of UI elements to take advantage of)

Windows Phone (Old) – Well Windows have scroll bars on them, Start button goes in the corner, nice and small, and no one cares about silly UI pictures to make things pretty, grey is pretty right? *Designer cries in the corner

So this new UI spree that Microsoft have gone on is a great thing for their products, but how real is it? That’s gotta be your call, I think other parts of Microsoft have locked into this new approach, but the core of the company . . . maybe not so much.

When, Where, How Much . . . The Courier Ain’t Real Mate

Straight off . . . . Is the Courier Vaporware? . . . . answer: Maybe

Microsoft have old videos of “Courier like” devices, the UI looks old, ugly and not too user friendly, but it has some big similarities to the original videos.

You can see the UI is very different, but it’s a thought provoker, has this been in the works for a long time, or did they forget it a long time ago and now figured this is the time to launch it?

I get the impression they asked a design team to take the Codex concept (above) and turn it into a viable, attractive product. This team produced the first video below.

Then the Codex team who probably created the prototype, took a look at this and figured, we can do this this and this, but probably not this, but maybe like this. Right, said the design team, so now we need to show you what you want the new UI to be and how it’s going to work.

That’s is where we are up to, plenty of blog’s are going nuts over a video Microsoft released with regards to using a stylus and fingers on a touch screen the size of a table (Microsoft Surface). Yes the Courier uses a stylus, I see the link, but come on, a table size screen compared to a small notebook, they aren’t directly related, take away that they are trying to prove that stylus’s mustn’t be banned (Especially after the Steve Jobs quote declaring war on stylus), but they shouldn’t be doing this to prove the product is good, just let the product do that itself.

Vaporware – maybe, maybe not, anyone declaring yes or no, ssssshhhhh . . . . you don’t actually know anything [Neither do I].

What Happens Next – Well Microsoft Launch It Surely?

So this section is more of a discussion about whether or not it’s feasible to make a Courier type device, regardless of who does it.

The answer is obcourse, Computer’s are powerful beasts, so I reckon it’s easily done.

To start off with, the hand writing recognition (which I think is a pretty important part of the Courier), can be achieved with good accuracy. According to my colleague @mattcolliss (Twitter, look him up), who is doing a lot of work  in a different text recognition area, thinks text recognition of this kind is pretty much a done deal, it can be accomplished, and it can be accomplished well. I believe him, but if you dont, check out this video from Mark Cummins, a developer of Plink Art an image processing tool for photo’s, the accuracy is insane, so hand writing should be fine.

Then consider the actual task being performed. The first thing to notice is that each screen is essentially a different application. You could argue that it is a single application and by all means take that point of view, but I tell you what, designing a single app to perform the tasks that you want, would quickly become a pain to develop for. So from this point on, I’m going to take the view that they are 2 seperate applications running on each screen. Therefore the obvious is needed, multi-tasking. This never used to be a big deal, but iPhone changed it to be a big functionality. Phones don’t need it, the fact the iPad doesn’t have multitasking is a big shocker to me, but this thing will have to have it, but there are processors that can do this, and 2 screens means the casing could have the space to store and power the screens and applications that will run on them. (As a proof, think of your netbook running Linux, can run a browser and open office right?)

So multi-tasking is easy to get on this device (We assume). The applications can be developed independently (great for devs, or is it?) We see that nice flicking from one screen to another, this is great, but how does this actually happen from a developers point of view? The best way I can think of achieving this, is the platform (or OS to some), which the applications run on top of, must be able to take some image from the first application and performing the animation from one screen to the next (Taking the problem away from the individual application) then dropping the image back down in the second application.

This is something that you may take for granted, but I know that Ubuntu has a similar funcionality when you drag and drop an image from a folder into Gimp and it’s essentially the same functionality without the animation

But Courier is rumoured to run on Windows 7 Phone or Zune platform, now if they have added in a similar concept to Android’s Intents, then this should be perfect for the platform being able to take out and put in different images and data with a nice animation. If they don’t do this, then 3rd party applications don’t stand a chance because I can’t see how my application would take in an event of this image being dropped in my application and I REALLY wouldn’t want to have to handle the animation of the image once it reaches my animation.

In my mind, Android seems like a good idea to use for Courier, but I’m an Android Dev and I’m giving Microsoft the better of my doubt and assuming their new Windows 7 Phone is a vast improvement over the old Windows Phone SDK and therefore has a well thought out way to achieve this goal.

We’ve discussed Windows 7 Phone, Zune, Android, what about the rest?

iPad - I’m sorry but no go, the main reason for this, is that it would be a big pain to implement an app that would have a browser on one half of the screen and a note taking app on the other. Plus I don’t want to have to type in lots of text, I want to write it out, much more natural on this kind of scenario. Sure I could use a stylus, but will the screen work with it and be precise enough? Then let’s say you want to use the iPad Browser and a notepad application, you could probably do this, but the beauty of the Courier is taking the information (images, text, videos, pdf’s) from one source and editing, putting into new notes etc, so going in and out of different app’s will just become impractible. Don’t get me wrong, some awesome developer or team will produce some great utility apps and take ideas from the Courier but I doubt it would be as fluid.

Chrome OS - I’m not sure if this is a.) a good idea b.) possible

The reason I’m thinking it might be a bad idea is that you instantly limit it to HTML5, which is coming on leaps and bounds, but is it up to the stage of a customised UI with bells and whistles? It may well be and can do all this, but I just can’t help but think Android would be a better choice to better manage applications. I’m not convinced myself so this is a totally open ended question because I’m not convinced by Chrome OS but I’m also quite optimistic judging by some of the talks I’ve attended on the topic.

The reason I’m not sure it’s possible is after asking a Google engineer about whether HTML5 supported multi touch gestures, which is pretty essential to any touch screen device, the response was that it isn’t standard in HTML5, but it is in implemented in Webkit, so it’s probably working it’s way into Chrome and Chrome OS, but a long way to go to be as smooth as Android’s widget elements? (I have no idea just for the record)

(Finally) Linux - Yes, No, Maybe, Linux can do some great things, but it needs a lot of work to make applications that look as nice, work as nice and be as well integrated to work like the video’s shown above. Linux does support tablets, and we have seen other versions of the desktop Linux to work better on net-books, but will Linux be able to specialise a separate version of itself for these devices?

An open source project like this would need the money, time and attention, which is sometimes Linux’s biggest fall, and anyone considering doing this task has to ask whether a Linux implementation is better than opting for a custom Android version (I know Android is a platform on top of Linux, but in my mind they are targetted at different types of devices).

Conclusion

I’ve discussed a number of different topics, and mainly the result is, I still want one, I think Microsoft is toying with the idea of releasing and might be seriously considering it, I am certain it can be done, and if Microsoft don’t do it, someone else will.

Things that will kill this for me though, requiring me to use Microsoft Stuff, I don’t use hotmail, sorry no export to thunderbird and poor spam filtering killed that for me, I don’t want to use an online Microsoft Office, Google Docs is what I use at work, it’s what I use for personal projects and everything else has latex of Open Office and if Microsoft has an online sharing tool, that doesn’t fit into any of these categories, just please let it work, and please let it work well.

Microsoft phones and this have made me consider there is hope for Microsoft yet in terms of products, but it’s still way up in the air.

Take Away Point – Tablet, Netbook, Desktop Computer, Laptop, Courier are ALL different types of devices with different use cases. Treat them that way where-ever appropriate.

http://community.research.microsoft.com/blogs/alpineinker/archive/2008/10/01/microsoft-research-codex.aspx

But the Microsoft Courier is just damn nice, the UI “seems” to make sense in the videos, how it works on hardware I admit I’m a little dubious about because flicking an image from one screen to another with a plastic hinge in the middle might not work so well.

But I’ve been thinking about it and it’s probably the first Microsoft product I’ve ever wanted, sure I used to use Windows, but thats only due to me not knowing the alternatives.

There are plenty of posts out there saying, Apple will kill the Courier, the Courier will kill the iPad, drown drown drown, I don’t care what you people think!!! Anyone who claims a product will kill another product is going to be wrong, Android for instance, will it kill the iPhone? No, but will the iPhone kill Android? No, there is a market for different products for different people, it’s the same with the iPad and the courier.

iPad, along with the iPhone and iPod, is a media device, you can listen to your music, watch tv, read your books, look on the web, the kind of things you want to do for fun, in your spare time, it’s fun, and there are people who want exactly this. As soon as the iPad comes out I’m taking my mum out to get her one so she can watch twillight, read the twillight e-book, listen to the twillight soundtrack and then read the online twillight excert (Shes a bit obsessed with twillight at the moment). But if the courier was out, would I recommend it to her? Hell no, it’s not what she wants, me however, I want one, I want to be able to write out my ideas, draw sketches and organise myself quickly and easily without having to keep track of paper. So why the courier, why not the ipad? Because the courier has 2 screens, it can perform 2 application tasks at the same time, and that is exactly what you need for the sorts of thing you would want to use the courier for.

The ipad would need an app that could split the screen, create the applications within the app which the courier has to offer, implement text recognition (One thing I’m worried about with Courier I admit), then keep the UI nice and responsive. Can this be done? Obcourse, but the Courier is designed for it, and I can really see where it comes down to alot of UI changes and alot of hardware changes.

If Microsoft don’t bring this out, simple, I will go out, buy myself an MSI and start me up a lovely new linux distro, or have a go at putting Android on it to take full advantage of the intent structure Google has already built.

There are a few things that concern me though, the original video had some really nice graphics on the UI, but they have changed in the second (Latest) video to less attractive colour scheme. Not terrible, but not as good (in my opinion) they also added a shot of contacts in a cover flow effect. Apple did cover flow, I thought ooo this is fancy looking, but then I got bored, and never used it since, please don’t add this is, its a pain to go through, so just don’t do it.

Nice UI – Intelligent UI – Solid Implementation

p.s. I really would like to see a moleskin cover for the courier (Don’t know what I just like the moleskin look/branding)

So today I came across a tweet from Chris Coyier over at CSS-Tricks about this campaign site http://www.fixoutlook.org/ and I thought it was a good cause so I tweeted along with it and decided to give my 2 cents worth about why I think this situation has come about.

So say for a moment you are a programmer in Microsoft, a big huge company, lots of programs, lots of stuff going on. Now you’ll be put in a team to work on one product, makes sense yeah? Awesome so we are on the same wavelength so far .

Now lets say you are on the Office Product team, you work on outlook along side word, excel etc. (each application having a smaller team where each team keeps in constant and/or close contact). Now lets say I turn round to you (remember your working in the outlook team) and say hey can you add in HTML rendering support for e-mails. Now you have a couple of choices:

1. Write a completely new rendering engine for outlook
2. Use IE’s already built in rendering engine
3. Use the rendering engine, which you have team members near by, who built it, offer support and this is what you did last time

Starting to see where this is going yet?

So option 1, simple answer – No. Compared to the other 2 options, any programmer would weigh up the costs and say this is too expensive, the gain would be great (if written correctly obcourse) but the managers of the project would say the gains wouldn’t justify the cost.

Second option and third option (In my opinion this is the real debatable choice and I’m sure someone will completely disagree with me on this). Now you can ask the nice people over in the IE team to give you their rendering engine to use in your outlook application or you can use the in-house rendering engine built by your fellow Word team members. Now if IE team has little to no contact with the Office team then it’ll be hard to get changes made to the code to work with outlook if there’s some specific technical change required.

Realistically the project managers should be getting IE team to write the rendering engine to meet some specification written by the outlook team and then there be some cross over period where they both work on bringing the two together. However outlook have done this Word rendering engine before and perhaps the managers of the project didn’t view this as a problem and not a critical feature to support full HTML properly? That being said did the developers argue it out and say that the word rendering engine simply won’t cut it in the current state of web standards?

Anyway little rant over – all in all I think its a shame and it’ll get interesting when:

• Google release Wave (which I’m Google will use their Chrome rendering engine to cut down some of the work)
• Will Mozilla release a Thunderbird like client for Wave?
• Even more interestingly, will Microsoft ever give-in to Wave at any point and just put their hands up and say, we have to conform to this?
• Will wave just be a bit of a flop?? (Will all no it won’t but I gotta just put the option out there otherwise Im just MS bashing)

Let me know what you all think.