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Almost Famous: Ben Zotto of Cocoa Box Design

Drake Martinet — Fri, 28 May 2010 19:05:56 +0000

This week, we coffee’d at Coupa Cafe on the Stanford University campus to interview Ben Zotto. He’s the mind behind Cocoa Box Design, the app company responsible for Penultimate, a sleeper hit at the iPad App Store.

Who: Ben Zotto, lead everything (it’s a one-man shop).

Ben was at Microsoft and worked for Xoopit, the email-enhancement start-up acquired by Yahoo (YHOO).

What: Ben’s Penultimate brings a Moleskine notebook-style user interface to the iPad. He just released an update that allows you to rest your palm on the screen while writing, the same way you might with a pad and paper.

Why: It has been in the top tier of the Apple (AAPL) App Store for weeks.

Where: cocoabox.com (Web site); @cocoabox (Twitter); San Francisco (analog place)

Who Else: Apps like PaperDesk and Idea Boards use the pen-and-surface interface. Penultimate does drawing a little differently, though. Ben says it’s about the ink.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile:

Worst Job: I’ve been pretty privileged. I was a short-term photocopy runner for the Junior World Ice Hockey Championships in Geneva when I was in my teens. It wasn’t bad, but I don’t suppose it played to all of my strengths.

School Days: I grew up in Boston, but we moved to Switzerland during my high school days. I left eighth grade in Massachusetts, maybe never before having left the state. And within a month of arriving in Geneva, we were on a history class trip to Florence. It was awesome.

Geek Crush: There are a lot of guys from my Microsoft (MSFT) days who are my programming heroes. Guys like Tracy Sharpe and Dinarte Morais. I’m also a big fan of Wil Shipley.

It’s something about his combination of making beautiful and functional software and being fiercely independent–you know, a coffee shop denizen–that I’m attracted to. I actually found the designer I worked with on Penultimate through him.

Gadget Freak: I don’t carry a lot of gadgets. I am pretty picky about my work set-up, though. I use an Apple extended keyboard from the 1980s with the heavy-duty key switches that I rescued off eBay (EBAY) and the Microsoft optical IntelliMouse, which is, for my money, the best mouse developed so far.

Early Internet Memory: Right after I moved to Switzerland, I had a friend back in Boston who would email me. It was probably 1992, so it wasn’t really email. He found some dial-up number at MIT that had an open gateway.

It wasn’t obvious then how you would send an email to an internal address where my dad worked. It was one of those early u-u gateway/bang-this/bang-that things. He finally figured out how to get it to work, and my dad’s secretary would print out these letters from my friend Micah back in Boston.

That was how I heard the news from Massachusetts for a little while. Micah is a recent recipient of a Ph.D in computer science from UPenn. Not a fool.

Bio in 140 Characters

Ben had an international childhood. He has worked at Microsoft, Xoopit and Yahoo. He writes software that he hopes is beautiful and useful.

The Five Questions

How long have you been developing Penultimate? Why is it a killer app when so many others don’t seem to be?

Originally, I developed an app called Handwriting for the iPhone. There was potential there, with the touchscreen, to give a personal touch to messages through handwriting that wasn’t there before. For that reason, I spent a lot of time working on the graphics math for the ink.

I wanted the input to really resemble the handwriting of the user. It turns out that getting digital ink to look real is a really subtle thing. I spent a lot of time getting it to move right, getting it to feel smooth and whatnot. I finally got it where I was happy with it.

I released the app and basically, nobody bought it.

People responded well, but I realized that anyone who used the app would only use the surface that they could see within the bounds of the iPhone screen, even though I made it so that you could scroll around easily to get a bigger surface for writing.

Size was clearly an issue.

The iPad coming out meant that all of a sudden something that was just more of a single tool like handwriting could be scaled up into an app with real uses, and all it took was more screen real estate.

Steve Jobs, in his iPad release presentation, said that if they’d added a stylus, they’d have gotten it wrong. Does the success of your app fly in the face of that vision?

It’s funny, I’d never heard that until now. I didn’t watch that speech.

When the iPad came out, I got this vision of doctors walking around making notes, and it looked like there would be lots of use cases where a keyboard just wasn’t ideal.

People would need to input info standing up, while moving and in portrait mode. From the pictures, it wasn’t clear the keyboard would be great for that.

I developed Handwriting and Penultimate to be used with your finger, and that’s how I use them most. And I think Apple has good reasons for not pushing that. They could have developed handwriting recognition, but for them, that draws away from what they are really trying to sell.

Handwriting recognition is really hard, and as soon as you do that and say you are going to do it with a finger, you have people saying, “Why doesn’t this thing recognize my handwriting better?”–instead of marveling at all the amazing things you can do with the platform.

Have you faced issues from Apple, developing a popular app that goes a little against the grain?

I’ve heard complaints about the App Store, but I’ve had a pretty good experience so far. It usually takes them about 48 hours to approve updates for my stuff. That said, there are some hardware things I’ve run into.

A big one is trying to get palm rejection in my app so that you can place your hand on the screen to write and not have it register as a touch.

On the iPad, Apple doesn’t expose those drivers to developers. On the MacBook, for instance, you can hook in the driver and get all the data–the width of the touch, rotation, everything.

All that is closed off for the iPad, so getting the natural handwriting position has been really challenging. I’m playing with that right now because it’s been one of the loudest requests.

You are embracing this use case that Apple seems to wish wasn’t there. What other requests are you getting from users who want to be able to write on their iPads?

I think form-filling is a big one. There are apps that do that, but their ink technology isn’t as good as mine, which is why I think I get those requests even though there are other apps in the field.

I got this great email from the head of a police department, who said that out in the field there are all these forms he has to fill, and he wants to take them with him and not have to bring paper.

There are all kinds. I got mail from a roofing contractor who wants to be able to snap his drawn lines to a grid to draw quick plans.

I’ve got friends who are doctors who think it’s a great idea, but say they could never use it because of HIPAA.

There seems to really be a lot of uses for being able to write by hand and make notes in this very natural way.

You worked in regular software before you did this. What is fundamentally different about developing for this platform? What are people missing about that?

I think a big difference today is that people expect updates much faster than before. It’s fundamentally different than shrink-wrapped software world, where you would spend lots of time making and refining a product, packaging it and shipping it out.

Today, people expect to see some kind of update or fix every couple of weeks and they expect them to be free. If you don’t issue an update for a while, people might begin to think you are dead.

Because the mobile platform apps are these single-use things, there is a perception that they are smaller or more simple and that therefore there is an entitlement to future updates. It’s great for users but really hard for developers.

There’s this ever-present question: “How much software is ‘three dollars worth’?”

The In Living Color Interview

[ See post to watch video ]

BoomTown Prediction: Chasing Away the Mice (And Keyboards Too)

Kara Swisher — Fri, 07 May 2010 17:30:33 +0000

The Washington Post, where I once toiled, asked me to do a short piece recently for a spring-cleaning feature in its Outlook section.

It was titled “Twelve Things the World Should Toss Out,” and the candidates nominated by others include: Harvard Law School’s Elizabeth Warren nixing fine print, feminist blogger Jessica Valenti dumping virginity, political whisperer Karl Rove hating exit polls and actor and activist Ed Begley Jr. giving the heave-ho to lawns.

BoomTown’s choice: The physical computer keyboard and its partner-in-carpal-tunnel-syndrome, the mouse.

You can vote here on which is the most useless of the suggestions.

Here’s the piece, which–before you go all technical on me–I wrote on an Apple (AAPL) iPad with a virtual keyboard and touchscreen.

And frankly, if I could have my blog posts downloaded directly from my noggin, it would be okay by me:

The prototype of the first computer mouse–which got its name because of the wire that trailed it–was invented by Doug Engelbart in 1963.

Yes, nearly 50 years ago.

But it’s only a toddler compared with the keyboard, which is a direct descendant–via punch-card and teletype technologies–of the typewriter, patented in 1868 by Christopher Latham Sholes.

In other words, it’s long past time for a change in the way we interact with the digital devices that have proliferated in our lives. While the keyboard and the mouse have introduced billions of people to the digital experience, they have become antiquated obstacles to the kind of computing that is now emerging.

This new computing is immersive, augmented and completely social. As sci-fi movies predicted, our digital devices are poised to become even more ubiquitous. They will surround us, responding to our expressions, emotions and gestures.

From wearable devices to sensors that will envelop our world to 3-D screens that will react to us, personal computing is about to get a lot more personal. Internet-based television now in development will recognize a viewer and deliver customized entertainment.

And it will do this without the trusty keyboard and mouse. We’re already phasing them out, thanks to the increasing popularity of touchscreens–including the patron saint of all this, the Apple iPhone, and a spate of copycat smartphones. All of these devices allow users to navigate without physical buttons or input devices.

Thus, with a flick of the finger, the era of the mouse and the keyboard will soon be over.

Yahoo Demos Cool Etch-a-Sketch Mobile Search App and New Search Dude Shashi

Kara Swisher — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 18:30:03 +0000

BoomTown will be hoofing it elsewhere today, so I am missing Yahoo’s search event, called SearchSpeak, at its Sunnyvale, Calif., campus this morning.

Thankfully, I was at the Silicon Valley Internet giant earlier this week, getting a grilling from CEO Carol Bartz, and was able to talk to both Prabhakar Raghavan, SVP of Yahoo Labs and Search Strategy, and new hire Shashi Seth, the company’s SVP of Search Products.

Seth came to Yahoo (YHOO) recently via a short stint at AOL (AOL), and before that, Cooliris and Google (GOOG).

Both talked about the items on today’s agenda–a six-months’ look back at Yahoo search innovations, its upcoming Olympics shortcut on the search page, and a new mobile search app that uses a kind of Etch-a-Sketch drawing technology–using fingers, not keywords–to help users find stuff.

While not quite ready for release, the app allows you to search by drawing a line or a circle around the area you want to search.

“There is still a lot of room for innovation inside of search and inside of these kinds of apps,” said Seth in an interview earlier this week in which he outlined again the recent Yahoo strategy that focuses more on context, location and relevant content than just search boxes.

Raghavan also noted that despite the pending outsourcing of search technology to Microsoft (MSFT) in the huge search and advertising deal Yahoo struck with the software giant, Yahoo could still compete in both user experience and relevance.

He had better be right, since new stats from comScore (SCOR) show continued declines for Yahoo in search, compared with gains for Microsoft’s Bing search service.

In any case, Yahoo presses on, and here is the blog Yahoo has posted about its progress in search, as well as a video on search:

Yahoo SearchSpeak from Yahoo Search on Vimeo.

Looking Back at Six Months of Yahoo! Search

The last six months have gone by in the blink of an eye for the Yahoo! Search team. Since the summer of 2009, we’ve launched an amazing amount of new improvements in Yahoo! Search to deliver a more personally relevant search experience. Now it’s even easier to find and explore what matters most to you. Here are some of the highlights:

All-new Yahoo! Search

On Sep 22, 2009, we launched a completely redesigned Yahoo! Search in multiple markets around the world. The new page design aligns the experience across our new Homepage, Mail, and the search results page. This dynamic and integrated experience better understands what you are looking for so you can get things done quickly on the Web.

By rebuilding much of the foundational code for the SRP (search results page) design and core functionality completely from scratch, we deliver a faster Search page with many exciting new features:

* SearchMonkey structured data: You can explore results from key sites and narrow results using different types of SearchMonkey structured data, making it easier to see richer results from an increasing number of sites.

* Search Scan, Safe Search, and Search Pad: You can quickly access search features that make people’s online lives safer and easier, including Search Scan/SafeSearch (which helps protect you from viruses, spyware, and spam while you search) and Search Pad, our note-taking and research application.

* Query assistance: We’ve extended our powerful query assistance into the left-hand column of the page to allow you to easily explore and discover concepts related to your query.

* Image and video search refiners: We also apply this same design framework to our Image and Video Search experiences, where the left-hand column provides powerful ways to explore the things you care about most; including travel destinations, music artists, movies, TV shows, and celebrities.

If you haven’t tried it yet, let us take you on our tour that explains all of the features we delivered with this new experience.

Structuring the Web

We launched Yahoo! SearchMonkey in May, 2008. Throughout 2009 we’ve continued to accelerate the adoption of structured data across the Web and empower developers to innovate in search. In May 2009, we shared with you the key milestones with Yahoo! Search BOSS and SearchMonkey; We have over 70 million enhanced SearchMonkey results viewed by users every day; we’ve also increased the adoption of RDFa structured data by 413 percent since October, 2008.

By August 2009, we had expanded our coverage for enhanced results to multiple structured object formats including Video, Documents, Games, Products, Local Businesses, Event, Discussions, and News.

Great Assistance across Yahoo!

In November 2009, we extended our Search Assist features from the Web search boxes to the search box at the top of nearly every property on Yahoo! The new features take you directly to the information you need, whether it is real-time stock quotes or movie trailers. This also includes enhanced search suggestions and ways to easily navigate to your Yahoo! property of choice.

Discover Breaking News on Yahoo!

Starting in November 2009, we began including relevant photos, videos, and tweets about a breaking news story within the Yahoo! News Shortcut on our Search results page.

Local Searches Made Easier

We’re focused on making it easier to search for local businesses. Starting in December 2009, we displayed more Yahoo! local business shortcuts when you search for a business, even if you don’t include your location in your query. We also began providing new functionality directly within the local shortcut to refine results by neighborhood or nearby city right on the search results page. This further enhances an already great shortcut that provides more of the information you care about most directly on the search results page, including ratings, reviews, photos, and directions.

Twitter in Web Search

In December 2009, we started integrating recent tweets from Twitter directly into our Web search results page when you search for buzzy topics. You can see tweets about newsy topics in the Yahoo! News shortcut. You can also see tweets about topics that may not be in news headlines on the bottom of the search results page.

Great Multimedia Search

Building on the great feedback we received, we added even more entertainment refiners within our Image and Video Search experiences. These new refiners help you explore your favorite TV shows and movies, celebrities, or the albums and songs from your favorites music artists.

By hooking into the “Web of Things,” we have created intelligent contextual refiners to narrow down your search intent intuitively.

Shashi Seth joins Yahoo! Search

Finally, a very exciting change for Yahoo! Search happened just last month when Shashi Seth joined us as the Senior Vice President for the Yahoo! Search Products team. We’re sure that Shashi will help us keep the ideas flowing as we continue to make Yahoo! Search better and incorporate Yahoo! Search into all Yahoo! products.

We’ve been working hard to help you find the information you want in one place when you use Yahoo! Search. We are focused on improving the Yahoo! Search experience, so check back often as we bring you more enhancements in the coming months.

Larry Cornett
Vice President, Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search

And here is a link to Yahoo’s blog on its Olympics search.

Even in Test Form, Windows 7 Leaves Vista in the Dust

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 02:02:03 +0000

This will be a big year for new operating systems. Apple (AAPL) plans a new version of its Macintosh operating system, to be called Snow Leopard. Palm (PALM) plans an all-new smart phone operating system called Palm WebOS. But the new release that will affect more users than any other will be Windows 7, the latest major edition of Microsoft‘s dominant platform.

Microsoft (MSFT) hasn’t announced an official release date for Windows 7, but I would be surprised if it wasn’t available to consumers by this fall. The company has just released the first public beta, or test, version of the software, and I’ve been trying it out on two laptops. One is a Lenovo ThinkPad lent me by Microsoft with Windows 7 already installed, and the other is my own Sony Vaio, which I upgraded to Windows 7 from Windows Vista.

[ See post to watch video ]

I won’t be doing a full, detailed review of Windows 7 until it is released in final form, but here’s a preview of some of the main features of this new operating system and some of my initial impressions.

In general, I have found Windows 7 a pleasure to use. There are a few drawbacks, but my preliminary verdict on Windows 7 is positive.

Even in beta form, with some features incomplete or imperfect, Windows 7 is, in my view, much better than Vista, whose sluggishness, annoying nag screens, and incompatibilities have caused many users to shun it. It’s also a serious competitor, in features and ease of use, for Apple’s current Leopard operating system. (I can’t say yet how it will compare with Apple’s planned new release, as I haven’t tried the latter.)

In many respects, Windows 7 isn’t a radical shift from Vista, but is more of an attempt to fix Vista’s main flaws. It shares the same underlying architecture, and retains graphical touches like translucent Window borders. But it introduces some key new navigation and ease-of-use features, plus scores of small usability and performance improvements — too many to list here.

The flashiest departure in Windows 7, and one that may eventually redefine how people use computers, is its multitouch screen navigation. Best known on Apple’s iPhone, this system allows you to use your fingers to directly reposition, resize, and flip through objects on a screen, such as windows and photos. It is smart enough to distinguish between various gestures and combinations of fingers. I haven’t been able to test this feature extensively yet, because it requires a new kind of touch-sensitive screen that my laptops lack.

But even if your current or future PC lacks a touch screen, Windows 7 will have plenty of other benefits. The most important may be speed. In my tests, even the beta version of Windows 7 was dramatically faster than Vista at such tasks as starting up the computer, waking it from sleep and launching programs.

And this speed boost wasn’t only apparent in the preconfigured machine from Microsoft, but on my own Sony (SNE), which had been a dog using Vista, even after I tried to streamline its software. Of course, these speed gains may be compromised by the computer makers, if they add lots of junky software to the machines. Windows 7 is also likely to run well on much more modest hardware configurations than Vista needed.

The familiar Windows taskbar is more customizable and useful in Windows 7. The program icons are larger, and can be “pinned” anywhere along the taskbar for easy, repeated use. There are also “jump lists” that pop out from the icons in the taskbar and start menu, showing frequently used or recent actions.

A screenshot shows several application windows on the desktop of the Beta version of the Microsoft Windows 7 software.

Windows 7 also cuts down on annoying warnings and nag screens. Microsoft notifications have been consolidated in a single icon at the right of the taskbar, and you can now decide under what circumstances Windows will warn you before taking certain actions.

Compatibility with hardware and software, which was a problem in Vista, seems far better in Windows 7 — even in the beta. I tried a wide variety of hardware, including printers, Web cams, external hard disks and cameras, and nearly all worked fine.

I also successfully installed and used popular programs from Microsoft’s rivals, such as Mozilla Firefox, Adobe Reader, Apple’s iTunes, and Google’s (GOOG) Picasa. All worked properly, even though none was designed for Windows 7.

But there are some downsides to Windows 7. First, you will only be able to directly upgrade Vista computers to the new version. People still using Windows XP will need to perform a more cumbersome multistep process. Microsoft is working on a method to help XP owners preserve all their data during this process.

Second, Windows 7 will eliminate some familiar bundled programs from Windows. Vista’s Mail, Calendar, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, and Address Book programs are being removed. To get similar basic, free, programs, you’ll have to download them from Microsoft’s Windows Live service, or use alternatives from other companies. Microsoft defends this move as supporting consumer choice and better coordination with Web services, but it does remove out-of-the-box functionality from Windows.

Still, even in its preliminary form, Windows 7 looks very promising, and could well help expunge the bad reputation of Vista.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.