System iNetwork

December 10, 2007

Our System i Wish List for 2007

Being in the thick of the holiday season (and at least for some of us, budgeting season) and with most of us probably having some children somewhere in our lives (even if it's merely our very own selves), the end of the year seems like an ideal time for wish lists. After all, we're looking forward to a new year, and how better to make us anticipate even more that new date on our bank statements than a list of new toys to play with. (Even if, for boys and girls of a certain age, that toy list is pretty much confined to some new technology we wish we had or wish our companies would buy for us to use at work.) As we say goodbye to 2007, perhaps this is a good time for us to build such a list for the System i.

Let's impose one rule. I think we should wish for things we can't get just yet. Maybe you would desperately like to have something like a programmer productivity tool package or a document-management solution or maybe even an ERP application. All these kinds of products are already available in the System i market, so you could have had them already, except that money's lacking in the IT budget. Unless you have a friendly grandma with a bottomless wallet, (in which case what are you hanging out with the likes of the rest of us for?) let's not simply wish for more money. Let's wish for what we'd like to be able to buy someday without having to change platforms. What should we put on our list? I have a few ideas to get the ball rolling.

First let me say that you're probably not aware of a fact that I, as a journalist, must deal with every day. That's the sad situation that many public relations firms seem to be populated by dolts. "Your publication exclusively covers the System i?" they say in effect to me, "Well, then, you must be interested in our client company's software, which runs only on . . . " and here you can take your choice of Windows PCs, z/OS, Digital Equipment Corporation platforms, Hewlett-Packard machines, Xbox 350, Sunbeam waffle irons, or what have you: Basically anything but i5/OS. (This is, of course, after I've explained carefully what i5/OS is.) This would be tiresome except for one redeeming truth, which is that occasionally, some of those products that run on platforms other than the System i are actually rather intriguing. In fact, some of them seem quite useful.

So I'll start our wish list with a few of those. And let's all think of our wish list being directed not at fluffy-bearded Santa but instead at the vendors, and would-be vendors, of solutions in the System i community. We'll call this list, "Hey Mom and Dad, kids on the other platforms get to play with this stuff, why can't we?" (And, I have to admit, I didn't learn about all of them from clueless PR people.)

Language barriers are the pits. It's bad enough that humanity is fragmented into speakers of so many national, regional, and ethnic languages, but sometimes we can't even understand people speaking our native tongue (the apocryphal example being the developer and even one end user who can agree on the meaning of the word "intuitive"). There are at least two off-platform companies trying to tackle this conundrum. Language Weaver addresses the first case. It's software that automates translations of human languages based on statistical probabilities. Borrowing cryptographic techniques, it uses learning algorithms to pair up any two languages, even unlikely seeming ones such as Czech and Hindi, analyzes millions of words in specially prepared texts, and figures out from that how to translate from one language to the other. The second case is handled by a company called Linguistic Agents with its Streaming Logic service, which enables computers to act on natural language queries and commands. It can take an English sentence and convert it into computer language while retaining the sentence's original meaning, and as a service, be incorporated into a wide range of other applications and application-development projects.

Some of us have been itching for stuff like this since the original "Star Trek," but Streaming Logic isn't the only recent innovation in handling the human/machine interface. Conceptual Speech Technologies' Speech Vibe can perform every operation in the MS Windows 2000 or XP operating systems via exclusive use of voice. Designed primarily to help users who, due to carpel tunnel or other difficulties, have trouble using a mouse, Speech Vibe can also be incorporated into other applications and can operate Internet Explorer.

Another product reaching beyond the mouse is Gentle Computing's Gentle Mouse, which replaces standard physical clicking, pressing, and scrolling actions via mouse buttons with a transparent "trigger window" that performs these functions by letting the user move the mouse's pointer to a menu of these actions. The window appears whenever the mouse pointer pauses and offers subwindows that represent every possible mouse action. Although designed to help users suffering from repetitive-motion injuries and arthritis, it's conceivable that this could make some able-bodied users even faster at what they do and makes me confident that by the time age would perhaps otherwise curtail my computer activity, there will be some readily available remedies.

"Ambiguous keyboards" is another area of interesting input-related development. This technology is based on the telephone keypad, combining three letters each on nine large keys, then providing "disambiguation algorithms" that automatically determine which letter was actually meant when a user strikes a key. These algorithms take advantage of the fact that 92 percent of words in a 24,500-word dictionary in the technology's initial testing each had a unique combination of keystrokes. Although this is dependent on the layout of letters on the keys and there's still disagreement about the optimal arrangement, Research in Motion, maker of the ubiquitous Blackberry and other wireless devices, signed an agreement in October with Eatoni Ergonomics to work together on the next generation of predictive-text technologies to support ambiguous keyboards. That could mean the miniaturization limit imposed on wireless devices by the need to have input keys that our fat little fingers can press individually might be going away in the not-too-distant future.

These products are all examples of innovative ideas on which no platform will have a monopoly in the long run. But good ideas come from wish lists like this, even if they're only informal lists people carry around in their minds with them.

How about you? What kind of software (or hardware) products for the System i would make your life better? What would you put on your wish list if budgets and availability weren't obstacles? Please offer a post and let us all know.

Posted by at December 10, 2007 2:20 PM