Wednesday, May 30, 2001

Tomorrow at about 5:30 p.m. I’ll haul a backpack and a video camera onto a jumbo jet bound for Paris, France. My stomach has that curiously empty feeling I get when I’m truly nervous. I’m not hungry, though, which is good. I almost always get ravenous when I’m nervous.

Today was pleasantly productive at work. I had a number of last-minute jobs to take care of, but had plenty of time in which to complete them. I ended up leaving a little early.

One of the things I did during down-time today was finish reading all of Joel‘s articles on Joel on Software. It’s made me think about AtheOS and its status as a niche OS. How do you bring new users to a niche OS? Eliminate barriers to entry. Make it easy for them to get the same work that they do in Windows done on AtheOS.

This means that (1) native AtheOS apps should make it easy for people to come over to AtheOS (want to import to Word? Cool! Want to export to Word? No problem!), and (2) it should be easy to port apps from other operating systems.

Which means that maybe I should put Clio aside and instead concentrate on a BeOS-to-AtheOS code converter (which wouldn’t be perfect, but would eliminate a lot of the hassle involved in porting), or a Visual Basic clone.

Maybe.