Demoscene and mathematics

 "Noted mathematician, Marston Morse once said “Mathematics are the result of mysterious powers which no one understands, and which the unconscious recognition of beauty must play an important part. Out of an infinity of designs a mathematician chooses one pattern for beauty’s sake and pulls it down to earth.”"...

Thus begins an interesting post over at the spillspace.com , a blog on life and art that might be worth browsing through if you're interested in that sort of thing. The quote captures perfectly the very essence of mathematics that attracts people and sometimes captivates them to such a degree that they give their lives to uncover more of the infinite secrets of mathematics. I've always had a very complex relationship with mathematics, a weird mixture of constant hate and obsession that held a significant part in forming the human being I today recognize as my self. Mathematics might as well be the closest thing to a link that connects the separated realms of arts and sciences, the mind and the body...

I don't know what to call mathematics, I can only describe bits and pieces of it in fractured and stuttering words since my heart and my mind lacks the experience and wisdom to fully describe it's promises and truths. 

The task of describing mathematics become even more labyrinthine when we consider the single most curious trait of the mathematics so far. People in the business of academic studies frequently refer to it as the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences. This mysterious trait of mathematics as a whole is the single most important factor behind the perceived difference of humanity from other common life forms. Indeed, it won't be too much of a stretch to say that this is about the only difference between human beings and other animals of similar genus, making this in effect the heart of the spirit of humanity next to the mysterious mechanism behind the constant urge of living things to create... And both the primary questions of my life, one of the things that constantly haunts my mind and my heart through every waking moment.

So a guy I know introduced me to the computing cub-culture demoscene before. I was aware of their activities even before that but the quality of their works way surpassed my expectations. Demoscene in modern era is basically a form of computer art derived from first generation personal computers of old like Commodore and Apple ][, and in many ways continues the tradition through strict adherence to economic memory management and other programming techniques which sets it somewhat apart from other programming oriented computer arts based on processing language and such. (and no, who those who have no idea what processing is, it's not a computer graphics package. It's Java based programming language used for algorithm based arts, and there is no 'drawing' involved in it) 

From what I'm seeing the demoscene is a little dead, probably due to the difficulty of asm based program optimization (though I must say, even those people don't code strictly in asm anymore. They run optimization programs on a program completed using more conventional programming language like C). And then there's also fact that there are more powerful and easier computer art programming languages out there such as processing (and others I can't remember at the moment). 

I'm beginning to consider the possibilities of applying the algorithms for simulating complex multidimensional mathematical shapes within computer to demoscene toolsets.... Seeing how so many of the computer based algorithm arts projects in demoscene and elsewhere lacks stylistic creativity, application of advanced techniques of computer aided mathematics and sciences simulation will be able to bring a breadth of fresh air this fascinating field of hackerdom and art.

Imagine science film festival fundraiser

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Mahou Sensei Negima

It was a rather cloudy morning when she came to visit that day. I was still a little zoned out from prior night's outing with bunch of friends which only ended around 3am. The doorbell rang and I found her standing outside the door with bags and manga books in tow. I guess it's that time of the year again. My cousin came to visit me in New York. 

Time to time my cousin comes to visit me, or vice versa. She, her brother and I practically grew up together when we were young, and we feel like siblings all in but the name. We always have so much fun when we are together, and our last meeting culminating in cross-national journey spanning remote forests of Korea to the Metropolitan center of Osaka and temple of Kyoto. We had so much sushi back then. And of course, sake. Lots and lots of sake. Oh god I miss all those food. 

Her brother is in New Zealand right now, finishing up his studies though. And she should be busy prepping for college in Asian cramschool hell (where school day for average student not particularly diligent starts at 5 am and ends at 12 am) so I was a little lost to see her here. I guess she's thinking about attending NYU or something if her testing doesn't work out? 

I was still a little woozy at the time she showed up so I went back to bed after letting her in, at which point she began jumping up and down the bed and such, the usual for her... Apparently she's only staying in the states for two days (well, at least in NYC, she still needs to stop by San Francisco) since she can't take a break from her studies for too long. It's a shame really, I was secretly looking forward to seeing the guys before the summer's over. And with the pace at the internship I can't really take a break until the summer's over. I guess life is catching up with everyone having fun. 

She brought some of her NT novels and mangas along (yes, even for a few day trip). And she introduced me to a series titled 'Mahou Sensei Negima.' I wasn't really interested in the manga at first, especially since the manga was written by the guy who made that harem manga with guy and lots of girls in love with that guy for some inexplicable reason (can't remember the title). But then I read through a few chapters (I was forced I tell you) and I was captivated by a single location/plot device within the manga. 

They call it the library island. The physical design of the library island is lifted off a real world location of the island of Venice.

It's an island within the school Negima works as a teacher. The island itself is a huge library that goe back hundreds of years and it seems no one is really aware of the full layout and content of the library. It's apparently of such complexity that there is a separate department and clubs within the school that are devoted to exploring the library and all it's secrets. Who cares about the creepy setting filled with crazy pedophiles and incredibly dense (yet certainly likable this time, unlike that other previous work I can't remenber the name of) elementary school student who has magical powers with such an awesome library as one of the primary settings? 

I don't know why but there's something about the idea of a magical library that really makes me feel giddy. What mysteries and hidden truths of the world await? It's a real shame that our civilization at this time does not seem to have enough understanding of the universe to be able to build such a library... Perhaps the coming of the self-aware web would be the first step in putting together the disparate informations of the human world together into a cohesive form, a singular library where the collective spirit of the humanity lies. 

Anyway, it's about time to take my cousin out to something delicious. I'm thinking Max Brenner's with either sushi or bbq. 

Excerpt from a book

"The intellectual power, honesty, lucidity, courage, and disinterested love of the truth of the most gifted thinkers of the eighteenth century remain to this day without parallel. Their age is one of the best and most hopeful episodes in the life of mankind." - Isaiah Berlin
 
There is a book titled 'Consilience: the unity of knowledge' by E.O.Wilson. Buy it, and read it. It's worth more than a hundred iPhones, unless the said iPhones have copies of the Consilience on it.

The book had such profound impact on me when I was growing up, I really think I should do a review/post on the book and some of its themes one of these days. It came out years ago yet the prescient insight of E.O. Wilson rings true to this very day in many fields of human endeavor. I had the chance to listen to his talk live in the closing event during the wonderful World Science Festival in NYC, and I should say he still seem to retain that certain edge even after all these years. I guess that's what we Koreans call No-Ik-Jang for you.

 

pretty pictures.

I make a pretty good use of a lot of web 2.0-ish services out there. Although I haven't had much chance to use it lately due to my schedule, I'm (or at least used to be) a pretty heavy user of tumblr as well, linked to my friendfeed and google reader syndication.

Today's been one of those remarkably free/lazy day for me, waiting for a pending application of sorts that I need to confirm before my life can continue its ever ambitious spiral toward freedom. So I spent some time browsing through the aggregated content from my contacts in tumblr and thought I might as well share some interesting pictures I came across, no doubt influenced by the habit of my acquaintance (I suspect that he uses picture posting when there isn't much to write about).

Here's one I found first. As those of you who know me are already well aware of, I'm something of a gadget geek. I love things I can tinker with, whether they be molecular systems or robots, or even something entirely trivial like desktop computers. I also happen to like classical sculptures (though I guess you can't really call a Rodin classical sculpture), so the well known pose of the vehicle-robot was something that instantly caught my attention. For some reason I thought of German cars after I saw that robot, but then the logo is that of Honda, the eponymous Japanese car maker.

It's one of my secret lifelong ambition to be able to create a thinking system that is not based on human anatomy. I've been doing quite a bit of research on the subject (which is itself inspired by the dreams and methodology of Juergen Schmidhuber, the genius scientist in pursuit of an artificial scientist) and I'm beginning to suspect that there's something fishy about how every single thinking system in the observed universe are built on top of complex biological systems. Am I going to far in assuming that there might be a fundamental correlation between the two traits on a very physical basis?

Here's a beautiful picture of Tokyo skyline. Well, not really a skyline, more of a single building with interesting composition of colors.  I used to travel to the Asian region almost every summer for the past ten years or so. I have relatives living all over the place so it became something of a fun thing to do when I couldn't think of anything more fun. Now that I look back on it I lived a pretty luxurious life. Not everyone travels across two continents and four countries almost every summer 'just for fun.' I've even been invited to Cannes and Florence (for those of you who don't know, France and Italy). If it's not luxurious on a student budget, I don't know what is.

Now that the summer's come again, I'm starting to get that yearning. Whenever I see pictures like this I get caught up in such nostalgia. When you travel like me, you begin to notice the differences of minutiae, like subtle change in smell of the air for example. I love Japanese air. Oh, and the colors. The colors forming the cities and towns, even natural flora and fauna are all different in each countries. It's like there's a different aesthetic theme that composes different societies across the world, with different emphasis on different colors.

Although I'd love to pack up and leave right now, I can't. At the rate my internship is going I'm under the impression that it would be much better for my future to stick around until the very end. Since I plan on making my living doing odd bits of research I can't afford to go off on a tangent at this point in life. Although, I am seriously looking into stopping by Seattle before the summer's over, with the pax happening there. I might even arrange to visit local chapter of diybio while I'm there. I also need to stop by Boston later, but that's all the way in October, so I'm not going to worry about it for now. 

An idea

I should definitely do a post about the impending second Renaissance on the global scale. I can always use the significant emphasis being placed on visualization and simulation of complex systems that stands at the boundaries of arts and sciences as a supporting reference. In most cases, I find that scientific art tend to be the most profound one of them all. And I also find that most of the masterpieces of modern and classical era to be scientific in their approach and practice. The currently perceived 'divide' between arts and sciences might even stem from the behavior of the artists refusing to do anything other than what they've been doing for hundreds of years. You might not want to learn vector calculus for the sake of your art, but that doesn't make it right.
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Architect and Architecture

Those of you in the know are probably aware of my fixation with computer games. I haven't been able to play like before though, with real world jobs and school works getting more intense by the day. Yet I still like it enough to manage to play some whenever I can afford to do so, and I'm certainly guilty of some recent sleepless nights spent on playing the Nameless Mod for the pc game Deus Ex (I'm still so impressed by the one gigabyte modification that I plan to do a full-ish review on my blog at certain point in the future, barring any major catastrophe).

Although I should say, my relationship with games doesn't seem to resemble experiences a lot of my contemporaries seem to share with the medium. It's not really that I enjoy the normal leveling or the adrenalin rush that comes as part of the experience. I certainly enjoy the experience when occasion arises, but thrill of playing computer games isn't enough to keep me up at night. If it was just about dodging bullets and jumping over ravines I would have all but completely given up the hobby entirely (or rather, I would never have gotten acquainted with the medium in the first place). As such, I can't understand the degree of fixation some people seem to have toward what we now refer to as 'arcade' games, the kind of classics that came with the very beginning of the art of making video games itself synonymous with long-dead titans like Atari and Spectra ZX. Maybe Alfred Hitchcock was right in obsessing over the obsessive nature of human beings as the primary vehicle in lot of his works. Maybe Pascal was wrong in concluding pleasure as the primary vehicle of human endeavor. Maybe it's all about satisfying that life's constant unspoken problem that comes as part of being a conscious being.

I play games for their immersion. I love some of the stories in the games. They needn't even be complex. I'm not looking for Nobel-worthy wordsmithing in games. Even simplest plots, when used honestly and effectively in conjunction with variety of other elements like characterization, visual effects and beautiful sound, bring the world alive... I play games because good games have the tendency to bring its own world alive through most marvelous means available to the medium, which tend to be some complex juxtaposition of light, sound, and audience participation. I guess you can say that I like games for the same reason I like to read stories. There's something about such experiences that stirs the heart and makes me feel like a human being, not just another animal that happens to walk on the face of this planet. As such, the kind of games I like are not usually the most popular of the games, though interestingly all masterfully crafted games young and old tend to share the quality I just described regardless of their genre and play mechanism. Immersion through any medium isn't just about exploring and looking at pretty things however. Good engines of immersion offer something more than that, a certain feeling of almost spiritual stability and yearning.

As I play around with games, I've come to discover something about the experience that I found interesting enough to warrant some quick note for future reference (and fleshing out?). I've come to consider computer gaming as an exercise in recreational architecture. Sometimes it's more like a stage design rather than full-on architecture, but from what I'm seeing the gap between theoretical/recreational architecture design and in-game world design is narrowing, and I believe they will merge to something new in the near future as the computer technology that forms the backbone of the artistic design of computer games become more powerful and flexible through the evolution of developer oriented SDKs and growing divide between a game creator and computer programmer. Indeed, we are looking at a growing number of computer/video game directors who are only proficient in ethos of computer programming, as compared to the hacker geniuses that gave birth to the likes of Id software and first generation of truly mass-market consumer friendly gaming experiences.

Aside from treating the virtual medium as tool of architecture, architectures present in game worlds themselves always fascinated me. They were the pinnacle of the manifestation of the impossible, their impact magnified many-fold by the nature of the computer game as a virtual reality. Escher could always draw twisted dimensions on a flat sheet of paper and people would wander through it using their eyes and imagination. If Echer was alive today he would be crafting such worlds using the computerized medium, and the audience would sit in front of a screen and literally walk through the ever recursive halls of the creator's imagination, as long as they aren't caught by some clipping bug that so frequently haunts complex geometries of the virtual world. A popular example would be the Combine Citadel in the eponymous game, Half Life 2 from valve software. The very ominous presence of the building that you see in the beginning of the game sets the mood of the entire game universe throughout, it's design and enormous scale impacting the user as a continuous source of psychological burden and morbid fascination. Other examples would be most larger scale 3D mmorpgs out there. Games like lineage 2 frequently placed heavy emphasis on elaborate and grand architecture within their landscapes, perhaps to compensate for the relatively lackluster content on other ends of the medium like the story and characterization (both of them issues that haunt most if not all mmorpgs today). I used to play mmorpg called Ragnarok Online a few years ago. I've played it so much that I've practically been to every single map on the game server, and there was this particular location I would always 'hang out' in the game world when I'm not off to some labyrinthine corridor killing undead monsters (which still is the best way to level fast in that game btw, the priests trump over most other classes in face-to-face combat over there). It was a library located in a floating magical city called Juno. The city of Juno would always be enveloped in perpetual autumn due to its altitude. At the edge of the city was a huge library of multiple levels at the center of which was a huge book one must read if he/she was to transcend, which is a method used in that game to let characters of maximum level ascend to more advanced classes. Me and some people I know within the game would frequently go out on a monthly field trip of sorts to the most architecturally significant yet dangerous areas within the game universe, series of trips that became ever more life-threatening due to the fact that monsters in mmorpgs like to invade and inhabit the most elaborate architectures imaginable.

I'm probably not the only one who have fond memories of such experiences. Kids in Korea and Japan frequently meet up in some game world on holidays and visit interesting locales, as one would sometimes visit six flags or Disney Land on holidays. The effect on the children seem to be more or less similar, except for the severe lack of exercise reliance on such outing would have on the children. There is a lesson here, and it's not that game designers should take architecture classes. I'm more of the opinion that architects need to learn from some of the game/level designers out there in developing real world or even theoretical architecture. Architecture being the crossroad of applied sciences and art, its practitioners are frequently constrained by the imaginary need to forcibly insert some socially relevant message into their works. Such behavior is dangerous in practice of any discipline, as it is simply another version of the teenager too busy to follow the trends of the 'popular kids' to get anything real done. Architecture needs to be artistic in the sense that it imparts aesthetic pleasure on the people and the creator. There is a slowly emerging genre of writing that is referred to as 'architecture fiction.' It's born of the awareness that an architecture is in the end nonlinear narrative of the people living inside of it or at least interacting with it at some level. It's something good game designers had been aware of for ages. As long as there is a good level of interactivity and exploration between the user and the game world it inevitably tells a story, sometimes even the ones it's original creator never intended to tell. And by subjugating architecture to the limits of the 'reality,' the architects of the world are risking telling the same story over and over, disguising their lack of creative talent to the fallacies of the world like so many other failed artists of mediums. By taking the architecture out of the hands of the real world needs and placing them in the virtual medium, where the architecture's only job is to tell a compelling tale in a suspended world with flexible laws of physics, architects will be able to tell the most compelling stories ever written in the history of humanity, something that doesn't even need words to compel the audience's hearts.

I am ranting on as usual, and I'm not sure how coherent all the things written above are... I guess leisure free-write has its share of faults.

All I'm saying is, architecture is the story medium of the modern age, and will continue to evolve towards that path aided by advancement of virtual and real technologies that makes architecture manifest. And in such a world, what better way to tell a beautiful tale then building an architecture of the worlds of imagination?
 

Night

It's 2 am. I just got back from the diybio nyc meeting, tired and hungry as usual. While having a high rate of metabolism helps me stay in shape even when I'm wolfing down whole plates of sushi and pizza, it also means I get hungry rather quickly. Beats being worn out every few hours though, I guess.
 
I felt that I should be writing a post on the experience at the wsf, but then my tired neurons don't seem to agree with me on that, so I think I'll just jot down some stuff that randomly pops into my mind.
 
The diybio meeting itself was a planning session among close associates, discussing stuff on future direction of the group and its immediate priorities. Some healthy discussion on the viability of bioart ensued among some of our members and I was a little lost for a while, debating whether I should step in and force the immediate issue down everybody's throat or let people talk out their opinions first, since this might as well be the beginning of series of discussions.
 
What the group need at this point is simple. We need a space. The disposables and the lab equipments we can manage more or less. The space in nyc is rather hard to find without some financial backing. We might apply for grants, but we'd need a project to apply for a grant, and we would need a space if we're to have a decent project. Things are moving at a slower pace than I would have liked, but this is still better than what we had before, especially that the diybio nyc is officially incorporated now.
 
As the things stand right now, we need backing, and some sort of legal representation. I plan on contacting nyc resistor for some help on bylaws and questions regarding their early days. I'm also thinking of contacting some of the other art spaces in the city, see the prices and the utilities I can expect from such places. Another member is looking into getting a biotech incubator space to help us out for the time being.... Dan also suggested that we do a bit of volunteer work for middle schools through a program called citizen schools. It sounds promising but none of us have any experience with kids so that might be an issue... One of the reason for tonight's meeting was that we need immediate and specific goals and plans for the group. The long term goals we can all picture and more or less agree upon. However we just can't seem to be able to figure out how we would get there. Hmm... Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

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World science festival

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Visiting livejournal

1.Check out my new profile pic. Did I mention how I think Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan/Doktor Sleepless series are awesome?
2.I haven't visited my own journal page on livejournal for so long I forgot how awesome the night sky skin was.

Despite my rather semi-persistent presence at the livejournal blog, this is probably the first time in months since I've actually visited the livejournal website and used the built-in blogging service. As you might have guessed from the tags that plagued my recent blogs all of my recent posts were composed on my blackberry and sent off via the posterous email service.

Part of the blame goes to the fact that I've been a little busy, with settling into  the new apartment (with roommates no less), the mess I have to resolve for my parents I won't go into here and etc etc, the usual requisites of living a normal, healthy life. Being able to post a thought or two while int he subway or waiting for my coffee is an invaluable perk that I need to make full use of. Yet that's not all. Most of my research/work/study at present time makes heavy use of my computer and I've been lugging around my trusty thinkpad everywhere, so if I was inclined to do some blogging at all costs I should have been able to manage it.  

When I'm writing something on the livejournal blog I'm usually doing it to vent off some steam and have fun while doing it. It's only that most people vent off steam by talking trash about their friends/families and I do it by talking about fiction/art/architecture/futurism and whatever that happens to require some cerebral function instead of the basest level of nausea-inducing rant that seem to permeate the personal blogosphere these days. It means the primary purpose of writing on the livejournal blog is to write, keeping my brain and fingers busy for any given length of time. It also means that I don't need to cite sources or link to other stuff on the net, post pictures of videos unless they are straight from my own blackberry (and yes, I can post them, I just choose not to. Maybe I should remedy that, given the cool events and things I've been seeing lately).  

On the other hand, my main blog over at wordpress had hardly been updated in nearly a month, and I'm still wrecking my head on how to convert the two lab sessions I had with the DIYbio NYC into blog posts, along with a plethora of half-finished drafts on and off the net that goes on to talk about all sorts of topics. The posts on that blog usually takes a bit more effort compared to the stuff I put on the livejournal blog, meaning I try to research the topic, gather some graphics and links, may some videos, all in all the stuff that most people expect in any proper blog posts that's over 500 words. I get about four to five hundred hits per month on that blog and it's been going steadily down for a while now due to lack of new content. Whenever I sit down to write down a proper blog post (using notepad++ and jdarkroom, both essential writing tools for anyone thinking of writing something at length without distraction-the choices were inspired by my good friend dracova) I run into a nasty writer's block. If I should somehow manage to drag myself to the tortuous process of writing blindly through the writer's block by using plans and outlines the product reads like a painfully dry, and worse yet terribly written lab report, something I'm not too eager to post on a casual blog with some technical/scientific bent.

Writing on the livejournal blog is usually easy. I more or less think something and let my fingers run, like playing a rhapsody on a musical keyboard. The end products are usually readable, and sometimes they even maintain a coherent theme throughout the rant. It's almost as if the generally low quality of the writing is covered by the fluid connection of the low-quality parts themselves.

With the 'real blog post' becoming increasingly harder to do and most of blog posts becoming something of an exercise out of boredom/collecting my mind before writing something really important, the need for me to be present before an actual computer terminal for writing blog posts falls drastically. Why bother myself with a large, clunky interfaces on a computer already burdened with running multiple simulation programs that pays my bills when I can simply type up simple text based blog posts on my handset without much difficulty, like playing a portable video game except that this is actually good for me on some level with something to show for it? Just tap tap tap, write down whatever that comes to my mind at the moment, and I have an instant blog post that can double as some sort of field report on interesting things that are happening right at that moment around me, like my experience at the NYU ITP summer show that demonstrated quite a bit of interesting art-technology constructs. 

And apparently I'm not alone in this lifestyle choice. According to the mobile-oriented news sites majority of the personal blogs being run in Japan are now written on mobile handsets (distribution rate of computers in Japan is surprisingly low, especially considering the level of consumer technology. Mobile handsets with advanced features however, permeate through almost every facet of their society with unlimited data services for cells being the norm in Japan and Korea for a long time now), with mobile-based video and picture edition softwares and location aware services being rolled out now. Some people would question the wisdom of typing up a blog post on handsets and their T9 input systems, but then those people probably aren't proficient in handling handsets anyway so their argument is moot. If the user simply wants to post a blog with simple video/picture captures around them with some words explaining what they are/formatting contexts, even the lowliest modern cellphone has plenty enough capabilities. And with most modern cellphones capable of playing internet videos, for casual users of computers (people who don't need top of the line workstations with dedicated GPUs and 8 gigabytes of RAM, which turns out to be most of them) mobiles are more than enough. The mobile-based computing in U.S. had been slow to take off only because of the aging infrastructure rather than capabilities of the machines themselves, combined with near-monopoly some corporations have over the telecommunications market (corporations stifling an entire generation so they can squeeze more money off of the population with outdated infrastructure is the reality, it's difficult to support pure libertarian ideals when corporations are this corrupt and incompetent, to the extent that they are beginning to make government regulators look good).

United States is still a very computer-based society, so I doubt we'll move on to the Japanese like mobile-centric society ever. there's also the fact that it is hard to create real content on handsets, at least not yet (though it will change very soon. Current generation smartphones already ship with video/photoediting capabilities/programming toolkits). Technology-wise, I think we are in a very odd stage where U.S. actually has a choice on where to go from here. Whether to take lead of the neglected parts of the market through reforms and innovation, or to squeeze out more dollars off of already struggling population for services that are barely 'good enough.' Yes, it is a choice, and yes, we didn't have it before.   

Palm Pre

Before I begin, I spent some time recently checking out the new mod for the original Deus Ex named 'the nameless mod'-google it-. Full seven years in the making with complete voice-overs and over 30 hours of playtime, I've seen commercial games released this year that's not as good as this. If you are interested in the Deus Ex franchise at all (and no, for the last time you're not supposed to play it like unreal! The game's not FPS) you should really check it out. The whole file clocks in at about one gigabyte, so I suggest you use the torrent available on the official site. This mod's so amazing I think I might even do a full review once I find the time to finish the darned thing... Which will be something of a challenge if it weren't for the fact that I've been dragging my thinkpad everywhere with me... Some of the cool things in the game so far include awesome voice acting (by the mod community members no less, some of them sound better than so-called professionals in some other commercial games), built in IRC client within the computers in game levels, the cool computer hacking minigame of sorts at the elevator out of DXI, and whole host of other things I can't write here since this isn't a gaming post :) Granted, I haven't had this much fun in playing a computer game in long time.
 
So, Palm Pre. As is usual with me I'm down with any interesting new gadget that comes along. I and the other millions who are following the industry trends really expected Palm to die out sometime in the year 2004, and they probably will if this new Pre device doesn't work out. I've been something of an off-and-on palm user for a while now. While I've never used their Treo line of smartphones I certainly went through some of their PDAs, using them as small digital note-takers and e-readers using the plucker utility. The old palm certainly had (have?) a loyal userbase. Some of the applications on the classic palm OS are of such utility and imagination that I still can't find the equivalent app on any other platform. The old Palm Tungsten that I used to carry around doubled as a programming environment of sorts as well, capable of interpreting the scheme/lisp and brain#uck language through add-on applications developed by users. I'd say the wealth of amount and variety of applications available for Palm predates that of Apple by a large margin, the only (but significant) innovation on part of Apple being introduction of app store and over the air delivery of chosen applications.
 
While I do admire what Palm had done, I was significantly disappointed with the Palm corporate's steady decline into obscurity mostly due to lack of innovation, and I moved on after the whole Foleo fiasco. Well, the history is going the way of spiral this time, and people are holding their breath to see if the once-mighty Palm can get its act together this time with introduction of a new handset and new (and improved, though not compatible) operating system.
 
I've had the pleasure of seeing one of the handsets up close by the virtue of mooching of one of my friends. And I must say, the design and general build quality of the device is gorgeous. It's very zen-like, looking like one of those small-ish, round stones you can see in Buddhist ponds in Japan and elsewhere. It's both cute and classy at the same time, and the device as a whole feels solid in my hands, which was surprising given my bad experiences with sliders before. I actually prefer this design over the standard iPhone design that seem to revolve around slab of glass/aluminum mantra (while I love their operating system I'm not too hot with their design, especially the back that feels a little cheap for some reason). The keyboard isn't as comfortable to type on as my blackberry (I'm writing this one on my blackberry) given the small-ish form factor, but then it's something you can get used to. I've read reports of people getting decent wordcount on those keyboards only after hours of use, decent in this case meaning about ~30 wpm, which is better than what some people get with full sized keyboards on desktops (I'm talking about people who aren't technically oriented of course). And no. Please don't compare wpm on handheld device keyboard to how much you can do in front of your 3+ years old desktops, unless the said desktops fit snugly in your pocket and is capable of ubiquitous internet connection.
 
Of course, in this day age the physical shell of a device don't count for much on it's own. We're all about operating systems here. Without a good operating system the smartphones on the market would be glorified texting devices without much real world utility. A good smartphone operating system would be composed of two things.
 
1:Good interface so users can get things done without straining their eyes/fingers or flipping through ten pull up menus to get anything done.
2:The guts of the operating system itself, how well it's organized and how easy it is to program new apps for the operating system. They both go hand-in-hand with each other, as it turns out.
 
I'll give Palm pre a huge thumbs up for the category one. I loved their operating system interface. Sure, there were a few kinks to be ironed out later like the not-so-universal universal search and the delay when starting applications but they are both things that can be improved with future patch. The touch based gestures felt natural to me, and on the whole the experience felt pleasurable to both my hands and my eyes.
 
I'm not sure what to say about the second category though. The Palm Pre just came out so there aren't a whole lot of applications for use. I don't think there's even a dedicated twitter client for the Pre yet, though people will be quick to remedy that :)
The extensibility of the operating system (webOS) at the moment remains to be seen. From what I hear the webOS is designed to be heavily dependent on the web-based programming languages and interfaces, using CSS to construct the basic interface for the apps and etc. Will such an approach be enough for people to develop emulators and lisp compilers for the device? Average users might not be interested in such applications, but those types of obscure applications usually do better to push the capability of the hardware and software better than any twitter client or pull my finger apps. Granted I'll be keeping a close eye on how this thing works out.
 
The web browsing experience on this device is on par with that of iPhone. And throughout my brief time with the device I was under constant impression that I could see more in the same page compared to iPhones browser, despite the smaller screen. Triumph of interface design? I didn't have enough time to uncover the specific reason for that. With the whole multitasking capabilities of the operating system itself I can see this becoming a very useful research aid for our pubmed browsing medschool friends.
 
One thing I'm noticing with the newer generation of mobile operating systems is how they seem to ship with built in web browsers that might or might not follow the web standards. This will definitely work to kill the market for third party web browser manufacturers like the Opera, unless they can get their act together and find some sort of solution.
 
The mobile operating system market is about to heat up even more (hopefully) with the introduction of the webOS into the marketplace. And unlike how it turned out with the desktop operating systems market, I don't think any single flavor of operating system will gain a decisive and nigh-permanent control of the market like MS does with their 90~% hold on the desktop OS world...
 
Am I the only one beginning to see some need for interoperability within the mobile operating systems market?
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