Right now I’m working on a project that has provided me another opportunity to work with a Usability Engineer. He’s pretty damn good at and it’s a lot of fun watching him work. Although his documentation makes mine look like crap in comparison. Jerk.

Anyway, I forget where I got the reference, but I just watch this documentary called Objectified. Three things I’d like to say about it. First, the documentary itself is well worth watching. It is an hour or so long, covers a lot and provides a bounty in food for thought. Second, Amazon’s Instant Video rocks. If you happen to subscribe to prime you can watch the movie for free right now. So subscribe to prime. Finally, it works great on the XOOM! Only complaint about the XOOM is that the speakers could be a lot better. Easily solved with a pair of headphones.

Anyway, if you’re a software developer and have to create UI’s give Objectified a watch.

The next thing I want is more material on Personas and Scenarios.

I really like my Zune, cracked screen and all. 120Gb of storage and the Zune subscription is pretty darn good. However, new toys mean it is time to move on. Move on to Android.

Yesterday, I bought a Motorola XOOM (Wi-Fi only) to go with my DROID X. The DROID has a 32Gb card which as it turns out is plenty of room for the music I listen to and a month’s worth of RMS podcasts. Only problem: playlists. The playlist feature on the droid sorta stinks. Not that the Zune player does all that well.

So at this point it looks like I’ll be leaving my Zune at home. The phone will take over it’s job.

Another win for me is that having bought the XOOM I broke down and rooted the droid so that I can run Wireless Tether. Previously I was using PDANet via a USB cable. Now – just start Wireless Tether and my laptop and tablet have internet access. Oorah!

Next little win: Evernote. I’m still learning my way around it, but it does a great job letting me take notes on my phone, table, laptop or workstation and then keeping them all in sync. That’s pretty sweet in my opinion. I still have a huge amount of information stored in OneNote and don’t really expect that Evernote will replace OneNote, but it will do nicely for letting me take notes in a meeting and them be able to review them later.

And still more cool stuff – I have a NookColor and a few Kindles….Well, both are available for Android so my XOOM tablet can download both libraries. The NookColor is going to get rooted and have HoneyComb installed as soon as it is available. I want the regular Android marketplace on my Nook, not the lame B&N marketplace. Sorry guys….but you’re still kicking M$FT’s ass – you at least have a marketplace.

Finally, a little project for this weekend is going to be seeing if I can get a simple WPF application running on my XOOM. Should be an interesting project.

Why? Why? Why doesn’t Microsoft have a marketplace for Windows? How friggin hard could it be? Those pointy toed shoe wearing dorks at Apple seems to have figured it out for their crummy phone. The morlocks at Google seem to be doing it pretty well for Android. Even that redheaded step child Windows Phone7 has a freaking marketplace.

Part of the success of Windows has always been developers and the huge number of applications available. What has really made the iPhone and Android phones successful is their marketplaces. The phones themselves are nice, but not really all that great. Until you can load apps, smart phones are pretty dumb.

For an entrepreneurial developer like myself I’m really attracted to the iPhone and Android platform because of their marketplaces. Those marketplaces represent an easily accessible distribution channel for my products. It means marketing is easier, meaning that the distance between my hard work and getting paid for it is that much shorter. I can tell prospective customers: go to the marketplace and buy my application.

However, I have mad skills on Windows. I can’t just tell the guy I meet at Starbucks to download my application from the Windows marketplace. I have to tell him to go to my web-site and get it there. You think he is going to remember my URL for more than 15 seconds? He’ll remember the Windows Marketplace. Not my URL. I don’t care if my URL was yomomma.com. He isn’t going to remember. He’ll remember Windows Marketplace or app store. End of story.

So what am I to do? Wish the Ballmer would just friggin retire, get BillG to quit screwing around and comeback to save his company. Or Microsoft needs to hire a technical person to run the show. Not another friggin MBA type. Somebody who has a vision that goes beyond the tip of his nose. And while they are at it: fire all those friggin directions and VPs from IBM that they have been hiring. They are killing it!

While I wait for that to happen: I’m going to start learning how to get .NET code to run on Android.