Kingmaker

Apparently there is this thing called “popular music”. Yeah I know I’m shocked too. I know I know, Led Zeppelin IV was the epitome of rock and roll and nothing else even remotely good has come out since the greatest song in the world hit in late 1971. I can’t say there was a last time I was even aware of a song cracking the top anything of any music chart, I just listen to my favorite radio station or what others recommend to me and that is that. Then of course there is the music used in advertising. Quite frankly Apple hasn’t had an iPod commercial that I paid any attention to since they got rid of those goddamned annoying silhouette dancers. Their newer ad campaigns are entertaining, easy on the eyes and, have some catchy tunes attached to them. While I’m still of the opinion that the finest ads that Apple as a company have produced are a three-way heat between the flaming bunnies, (Anyone else noticed how Intel has pretty much stopped advertising on TV?) the first line of “Think Different”, and the current “Get A Mac” advertisements.

Still the iPod ads do what they are supposed to, and if any product should be using music it’s an iPod. Or an ultra-thin laptop. I was unaware of Yael Naim or of the recent sucess that she had been afforded by a certain commercial. Artists like Feist and Jet have also realized significant benefits from having their songs on Apple products. Given the simplistic and straightforward methods that Apple uses for advertising, there are plenty of songs, classic rock ones even, that would be fantastic for creating the image of a music player that the average TV watching public would be interested in buying.

It’s not as if Apple is exactly new at having critically acclaimed commercials to advertise their products. In fact they are often sited as having an influence in creating the “Greatest Commercial in History”. What is new about this wave of marketing is the existence of a new media and a connectivity that has never been there before. If there is a commercial with a catchy tune that you like, all you have to do is head over to your computer and fire up your favorite search engine and punch in some search terms. In a few minutes you’ll probably have the artist, name of the song, and a detailed biography of the lead singer if you want it. Taking it one step further, in Apple’s ads when you watch them on the internet, there is a link at the bottom of the ad where you can click and launch the iTunes Store to buy that song right then and there. So the bottom line is if you see a song that has an ad that you like, you’re only a few clicks away from having that song.

Take this into account as well. Note the increased traffic that artists like Fiest have gotten on their music video posts on YouTube. Like I blogged about last week, it’s all about increasing mindshare. The beautiful thing about something as viral as an ad campaign with catchy tunes, is that not only is a company selling their product in a way more likely to ring with the demographic they have been trying to sell to, but they get a good word in edgewise for the artist that they used for the ad. Just a week before the airing of the “New Soul” ad Yael Naïm’s song had just been played a handful of times on radio stations across the United States; afterwords she was a bona fide success, with most of those sales coming through the iTunes conduit.

There is no reason not to call iTunes a kingmaker. Like its historical predecessor, Apple has been choosing artists that then go on to have incredible successes with their music. While it may be more like the Wars of the Roses, in that one family never held sway for long, it is undeniable that the short-term success can be crucially hinged upon the link between Apple and its products.

Sideways

The days of head-to-head competition in the personal computing marketplace are over. In the arena of personal computing it’s clear that Wintel won a long time ago, it would be foolish for a company with as miniscule a marketshare as Apple to try to compete straight on with the Microsoft behemoth. So, rather brilliantly, they went at it sideways. Sentiments have changed both on the level of the PC geek and that of Apple’s corporate face. Even from the mouth of the big Apple themselves, there seems to be less animosity concerning the competition, at least in the rhetoric. Instead of complaining that they only have five to ten percent of the consumer PC market-share, they are doing something about it.

That’s not to say that Apple and Microsoft have a rosy, touchy-feely kind of relationship, but there is less ick factor when working with the other guys. The recent licensing of Exchange to make the iPhone a viable solution for enterprises is something that smacks of “I don’t want to use your technology if I don’t have to, but I will sacrifice to make my product better.” Before I delve too far into my main argument, I would just like to point out that Exchange support is both, something that I never really thought would happen, and something that apparently had to happen to make iPhone a serious contender for big businesses and their corporate IT infrastructure. I had naively thought that maybe IT personnel would embrace more open standards like IMAP, but then I realized that IT departments don’t change, we flex and bend to their will.

However, this illustrates the main point of this article quite excellently; sideways strategy. Apple is succeeding in creating markets that exist on the same platform as Macintosh development, but are running parallel to the main business model. Apple chooses either an undefined market or one that has little strong competition and embraces it to create insanely great products for that market, which then often go on to dominate it. Then it exploits the resources garnered from one arena to further development. It is quite simply a brilliant strategy that I think follows from a sideways application of the “defeat in detail” policy in military tactics. Clearly Apple’s goal is to outlast their competitors and make more money than them, however the head-to-head competition of days gone by in markets gone by is long dead. Only a fool would try to fight a battle on the enemy’s terms. iPhone is a conduit to get people who wouldn’t normally develop for Macs on to the platform.

Consider these; the iPhone dev kit is Mac only, the moment that Unca Steve unveiled iPhone in January of 2007 the first thing that many people said was “Gimme,” the second was “I want to write software for this.” The iPhone SDK uses nearly the same API’s that Mac developers use (this is a twofold argument) Cocoa, Core Audio, etc. So in order for a developer to write software for the iPhone, he essentially has to learn how to program for Mac OS X. This gives existing Mac developers first throw at the dev dartboard to try out ideas that they may have already used on the Macintosh. However, they like everyone else are going to have to relearn the idea of a completely different idea of user interface and ways of interacting with items on the screen. As was witnessed by last month’s iPhone SDK announcements, there were several companies that had never really worked with Mac development before that were all over the development of native iPhone software, AOL being the most prominent. If the AOL programmers were so willing to work in the iPhone OS, which is essentially a toned down version of Mac OS X, without ever having worked in a Mac environment before then it is quite reasonable to expect that other companies would be willing to work with iPhone APIs. The point there is that the iPhone APIs are the same as the Mac ones; software developers who are writing for iPhone are writing for Macs as well and they just don’t know it yet.

While I’m very excited about the kinds of very cool software that could be heading to Mobile OS X (iPod touch owner here), I think that the potential for new and great software from makers who wouldn’t normally touch the Macintosh platform with a ten meter science pole. Not that I’m really expecting a portable version of The Orange Box, but more and more developers will be exposed to things like Objective-C and thus there may be some impetus for cool things to come to the Mac. The other thing that really excited me about the iPhone SDK and the potential effects that it might have on the Mac platform is games. As you may know gentle reader, there are a few things that I do with my Macintosh. Like most people I browse the internet, manage a music/movie collection, manage email accounts, try to bring some semblance of order to my digital and meat life, process photos, manage some miscellaneous projects including this writing thing, and play games. Unlike many a naysayer, I don’t feel that Mac gaming is dead. It has never really been that popular even in the heyday, but I refuse to declare it dead. I like to play games, both what one would call casual, Peggle has fast become a vice of mine, and the “real” games like Command and Conquer 3 and Civilization 4. For the longest time I was consigned to the fact that Mac gaming would never be as popular as it was on the PC side of things. The dominance of DirectX and Windows APIs made this a fact. The idea that I would have to put up with buggy ports from overburdened port-houses, offensive as it was, being treated as a second-class computing citizen was also expected.

The fact that of the five demos at the iPhone SDK, two of them were game demos. And not just Solitaire or BackGammon, they were “real” games. If PC game developers get excited about delivering games to the iPhone OS then it would stand to follow that they might consider going the extra few feet and make it Mac compatible as well. While I never really expect people like the folks at Valve to be behind iPhone games, at least not with the powerful first person shooters that they are known for, but if we get them peripherally involved with a smaller more casual game, then they might make that extra effort to hit it on to the desktop market. The same resources are used to create an iPhone game that would be used to create a Mac OS X game; OpenGL, Open AL, etc. The potential is just staggering when you think about it.

Not only does this allow a sideways entry for games into the Mac market (an arena that many were calling dead and that would take an act of Steve to revive), but there are other interesting possibilities as well. Taking into account the mindshare aspect, we start to look at the enterprise features and getting iPhones and thus the iPhone OS into big businesses that wouldn’t even dream of including Macs in their infrastructure. It’s like a Trojan horse and it worked the same way with iPods, although iPhone is much more potent. Not only do more people own mobile phones than portable music players, but iPhones are much more interactive than iPods in terms of what you can do with them. Add to the fact that you need to have a Mac to write software we have an insidious plan by the powers that be to insert Apple into the mindshare of not only the unwashed masses, but the corporate elite, and the technorati that influence the course of the high tech industry and eventually exert pressure on the direction of the whole sphere.

The Steve Giveth, the Steve Taketh Away

So that grand little annual get together for Mac nerds has come and gone with some great little upgrades, a hella cool laptop, and some new things that you can do with your movies. While speculation is abound for what was the coolest and most interesting gadget to all, I would contend that the $20 dollar paid update for the iPod touch is worth more than it’s weight in gold.

Well, what does twenty dollars get you? Basically, an iPhone without the phone. Mail, Stocks, Weather, Notes, and Maps are all added to your iPod when you download the update and all of those goodies are added to the home screen. I have heard it already. “It’s a slap in the face of the early adopters.” Sure if you want to look at it that way you could, but it’s more nuanced than that. I would take some time and disassemble that raving post, but someone has already been kind enough to take care of that for me. In the many Apple related websites that I peruse on a regular basis (hey what do you want, I’m a geek), I have noticed a general malaise about the January Software Upgrade. Not surprisingly they have almost universally stated that if you want all of the features of an iPhone, just get a bloody iPhone. Normally I would be right on with this kind of supposition, but I happen to be one of the members of the target audience for the iPod touch. I know that I said in the past that the current iteration of the iPod touch is not one that I would be first in line at the store to purchase, but I miscalculated on a few points. One, that Apple would want to put out a mega-Pod replacement that would have the same amount of storage as the then current mid-range models, and two that the reason for said reluctance would be the transition from the hard-drive versions to the all flash lineup.

My initial internal speculations had what came to be known as the iPod touch as a hard-drive based model (they are pretty durable), sans wireless connectivity, and the now famous iPhone touchscreen interface. Clearly I was off on a few points and even made some grand gesticulations about the reasons that Apple shouldn’t do the things that they ended up doing (they mostly had to do with the aesthetic and the design choices behind the device). Obviously, this decision has worked to a certain extent, though one could argue the fact that Apple offered the upgrade to the iPod touch was due to disappointing sales numbers on that device and this was an effort to boost them. Since Apple isn’t kind enough to break down the sales numbers on their digital music players, we can only guess as to the reason. I would venture to say that it was more a combination of the fact that they saw a market for the phone-less iPhone or that there was a scramble to get in the most requested apps on the iPod before the Software Development Kit rolls out later this week. In the later respect, it is a case of “Well we know that someone is going to do it, we might as well show them how it’s done.” This is most especially true of the Maps application, which in addition to being ported over to the iPod, got a substantial upgrade.

Thus it whirls back to the crux of the argument that the phone-less iPhone is an item that anybody in the right mind would rationally desire. Those who are making this grand proclamation are making a whole series of incorrect assumptions:

All persons desiring a mobile phone with the functionality of the iPhone are willing to switch to AT&T.

Along that same vein, AT&T service is super-happy-fun-time in all places in the United States (or abroad)

Everybody can switch service providers (contracts through jobs etc.)

Everyone who wants all of the features that an iPhone will grant you, wants a cell phone.

Everyone lives in, America, Germany, France, and Great Britain*

Now I may be an old fashioned chicken who was just hatched yesterday, but there are a hell of a lot of people who don’t fit into that system of assumptions. Then there is a whole mess of people who don’t want an iPhone for some reason, but might be interest in the most advanced portable media player out there. I know that for me the cost of $20 was more than worth it for MobileMail alone. Everything else was just gravy. Not that I don’t like gravy, but when I was buying an iPod back in September, I wanted a portable music and video player, and I got was I think is the best portable video player on the market and aside from some initial trepidations about the size of the hard-drive, the best portable music player on the market and so did many. many other people.

*Not that Apple isn’t trying to break into other markets, like China and Japan, but hey it ain’t there quite yet.

Happy Xmas (War is Over)

The King is Dead! Long live the king!

OK, maybe not so much with that, but the war is over ladies and gentlemen, and the world at large probably doesn’t care that much. Late last week Warner Bros. decided that it was dropping HD-DVD support from their studios. If we look at this highly scientifical pie-type chart, we can clearly see that with Warner’s departure from the HD-DVD scene, there appears to be little to stop the onslaught of the Blu-Ray. So perhaps the definitive battle in the high definition war was fought, then it appears the war was over just as soon as that. Paramount is about to drop support (registration required). Bam! And just like that the war is over.

The real question though is: Did any one care about the high-def battle? Many, many people have pointed to the Betamax and VHS battle in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s as an analogue for this struggle between formats. I’m not sure that I buy that argument. Home video-recording was a game changer in those days. It was allowing people to do something that they had never done before, watch movies in their homes and more importantly record things off of television. Even though it took a court case to ensure that consumers had the right to use this technology for whatever (legal) purposes they wanted, this was still an enormous leap forward in the viewing of televised media. Clearly the movie studios caught on and began to market movies, TV shows, and other things to the VHS market. This was the first jump into the living room that movie makers made.

So how is the high-def battle and format war any different? We have two competing consortiums marketing two competing technologies to the public how could it not be the same as the VHS and Betamax struggle of yore? For one thing high-def is too early and still too expensive. Most people are happy with their CRT TV’s that bring them American Idol and NFL football. They just want to see it happen they don’t care overmuch what it looks like. Next, we have the fact that nothing fundamental is changing about the distribution scheme. DVD was a replacement for VHS and it offered advantages such as size and increased quality. It was much like the jump from cassette tapes to CD’s. Most people don’t nostalgically search for cassette tapes as they do with vinyl records. VHS was just the first format, not the best. Though it was better than such “innovations” like Laserdisc and VCD. It still beat out these improvements because nothing could match it’s portability and ease of use at least until DVD became the creature it is today.

Regardless, my point remains the same. Take a DVD that was made in the last five years, put it into a standard DVD player and hook said DVD player up to an HD television. Unless you sit less than 6 feet away from the HD TV, you will almost certainly not notice the difference. It usually took someone point out the differences in HD movies and discs for me to notice. Broadcast television is another animal though. For whatever reason, most probably the amount of editing and post-production that movies go through to clean them up as compared with television shows, the difference between standard definition and high definition broadcast television is much more noticeable.

So we have a situation where new movies look pretty damned good on even HD TV’s and a situation where the HD players and discs are still pretty expensive and there is little wonder why the standing Meh of home video entertainment has yet to reach a head. Plus add to the fact that in the next five years a digital distribution model of some kind will likely obsolete optical discs and you have a group of movie studios who are eager to end the “HD war” and bring consumers a standard. Still as far as wars goes this one was pretty tame and it didn’t really effect the outcome as far as I was concerned. As much as I and many other techies despise Sony and the other members of Blu-Ray, I have to admit they did a pretty bang-up job with this new format.

I still have issues with Blu-Ray, mostly which have to do with the digital rights management scheme, which seems to be about the most restrictive thing that I have seen in a while. However, the Blu-Ray is here to stay and I for one welcome our new high definition masters.

The Way Things Used To Be

The way that things used to be for many invokes images of the “good ole days”; those times gone by of an era when things we simpler and of course better. Start a conversation with an older person about an issue and more often than not you’ll here a “in my day” or a “those were the days”. Not to go all Edith and Archie Bunker on you, but there was a time when the world was simpler. I don’t necessarily mean to imply that it was better that way, but much simpler. A simpler world before you learned about some things. Like that you can’t drive the same way you would in a heavy snowstorm that you would on a bright day with dry payment, if you don’t pay a parking ticket they will tow your car, and if you say something stupid on the internet you will be ridiculed.

The stupidity of that particular German politician and Europe in general about the Nazis at the expense of free speech and expression is just stupefying at the very least and profoundly disturbing at the worst. Perhaps it is just that I’m an American and I don’t have to deal with the cultural and political ramifications of Nazism. Wait I don’t think that’s it… Ever hear of Skinheads and the Aryan Brotherhood? Home-brewed right here in the United States. Sure the cultural consequences of not having any European Jews might have detrimental effects on the overall gestalt of any chance there would be a politically unified Europe, but to ignore the rise of Nazism and the other Fascist movements by suppressing the usage of symbols will only give them a mystique to generations present who are curious and will find out anyway.

The absurdity of the claim lies within the exceptions to the German anti-Facsist laws and anti-race crime laws namely those of education, documentation, and artistic expression. One would assume that the purpose of an encyclopedia would be self-evident, namely documentation (preservation for posterity) and education. Still Schubert pressed on claiming that Nazi symbols could be downloaded and modified by youth for “illegal purposes”. Link; careful it’s in German. The hardest part of the whole story to wrap one’s mind about is the fact that the display of Nazi symbols, as well of that of other Fascist organizations, as well as Holocaust denial is a criminal act. It totally blew my mind when I first found out about these laws and their subsequent criminality. One shouldn’t be surprised given my past feelings about the matter of free speech. It boggles my mind that people can, and apparently are, spending time in prison for making statements that could be very easily construed as political. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that someone waving a Nazi flag would be trying to make a political point.

This has always just added more fire to the fact that I don’t considered parliamentary governments legitimate in the same way that republican democracies are. It’s much easier for the minority parties, and often the fringe minority, to gain coalition power and enact changes in the system that are add on the burdens of the citizens. Not to say that the drafters of the anti-Nazi paraphernalia law didn’t have the best of intentions and clearly the period of de-Nazifacation that Germany underwent following the end of the second world war was a good, but the inclusion of democracy means hearing all of the voices. The power of the republican democracy is listening to the opinions of the factions that wield majority. The factioning in republican democracies works as a broad good in that in order for their voices to be heard, they must join a larger group which will moderate the extreme and bring the whole system into balance. The problem with the German laws is that they go against all of the principles of free speech that the American soldiers who died liberating and defeating that evil empire of Nazi Germany died to protect. The story deserves to be told and people need to know. There is a rather disheartening problem in reality in the way that the post-World War I period is handled by the German public and the educational system of that country. They gloss over the details and fail to explain the causes of problems that plagued their country, hoping desperately to avoid mentioning the subject of Nazis and the Holocaust with the desire that the next generation will not be enthralled by the ideals of a dead monster.

If there is one thing that the United States has learned about the suppression of ideas, is that the more forbidden, the more taboo, a subject the more those deprived crave that knowledge, if only for the reasons that we say that they can’t have it. This is precisely why the denial of these rights to German citizens is just so damn depressing. Think of the irony! The banning of Nazi propaganda, by a government that means to not repeat the mistakes of the past. Free speech is one of the best safety devices that people and citizens of free countries can have. It keeps governments honest, prevents the pushing of agendas, and allows for the creation of a commons that clearly and truly represents itself in rule.

That’s the best part about a global communications system that we have in the internet. A bevy of ideas can swirl about and it doesn’t take much to voice an opinion here. This is truly the public commons of the 21st century, which allows for the free dissemination of ideas to an audience that is willing and waiting for new ideas to hit the press. No matter how restrictive the government and even the Great Firewall of China can’t stop the signal.

To Build a Fire

Many years ago I saw a short film based on the Jack London short story To Build a Fire. As it was shown in an educational capacity, clearly it was filmed for an educational audience. The general gist of the story is that an adventurer in the Klondike leaves camp in the bitter cold winds of winter against the advice of the long-time inhabitants of the region. He is sure that his technology (a package of sulphur matches) will keep him warm in the howling winds and relentless chill of the Klondike. He travels with a dog, who every time the traveler stops to light a fire yearns to stay near it and revel in its warmth. Often considered one of London’s classic Man v. Nature stories, where the prevailing attitude of the main character is that he can defeat nature with the latest and greatest of technologies, I think that the lesson learned from To Build a Fire is often forgotten by the gadget world in the race for the latest and greatest in the world.

Everything from portable GPS units to e-book readers often over-looks the fact that people have serviceable substitutes for these items that do not require the effort, batteries, and the adaption to the lifestyle of use that their modern replacements want from you. Take a GPS unit for example and it’s early day counter part the road map. GPS does have several advantages from the maps of yore. It can tell you exactly where you are, it can give you turn-by-turn instructions which can be invaluable for someone who is traveling in an area that they have never been to before. But consider this: Whenever I drive somewhere that I have never been before, I make it a point to look at a map before I go and to commit the details to memory. Then it merely becomes an exercise in remembering which direction you are going. Only when I lose where I am on my internal map do things become a little dicey, but then all I have to do is pull over and get my road map out, which does not rely on batteries to run, and find where I am and where I need to go. I will admit that there are some times that I want the flexibility of a GPS system; in order to have a really good mental system I would need to have maps of every city that I’m going to ever head into in the car as well as doing some research before I left the house. Part of the problem is that having GPS has taken some of the onus off of the driver or the navigator of the vehicle and puts it on the device. Overall I think that it discourages the planning that I believe is necessary for every trip that someone makes in a car. When you have to think about where you are going you have to think about how to get there. You can remember that such and such a street is under construction, that you would have to make a left turn across a busy highway without the benefit of a left-turn arrow, that you must be in the left lane to make a turn or to avoid a back-up. In the end you would end up thinking about where you need to be and have the ability to plan ahead and can avoid most of that split second decision-making that annoys other drivers and can be dangerous.

So technology can’t make a person a better driver, but can it build a better book? The written word has been around for about 6,000 years and since the first bits of cuneiform were transcribed upon clay tablets in Sumeria, people have been looking for a way to collect lots of text into a format that can be accessed again in the future. Scrolls, codices, books, volumes all have been ideas that have been passed along. The scrolls weakness was its longevity. Large numbers of scrolls have been collecting for centuries, but the flimsy papryus or vellum that they were written on did not survive the march of the elements. Ancient scrolls are notoriously difficult to unroll (just ask the historians in charge of unraveling the Dead Sea Scrolls) and the passage of time, particularly the weight placed upon them and their susceptibility to fire and humidity made them less than advantageous for the storage of the written word. The codex was slightly better, the hard-cover and the binding made it much easier to open and read old works and the choice of vellum in a flat format is a key factor in the fact that hundreds of years later we can still quite easily read things such as the illuminated Bibles for Medieval Europe and old copies of La Morte D’Arthur. With the invention of the Gutenburg printing press and the acquisition of cheap paper-making from the Arab countries in the 1500s that the current revolution in the written word took off: the book.

And in case you weren’t paying attention, Amazon released an e-book reader earlier this week that claims it will blow away the paper book and change the way that people see the e-book. Clearly Jeff Bezos hasn’t heard others trying this. This is not to say that just because someone has tried and tried again that you shouldn’t put your ass on the line to find a better way to do things, the question should be “Is this the better way?” And I don’t know if Kindle is or it isn’t, but there are several things that I don’t like about Kindle up front.

The first is the attempt to multitask. Kindle has been (incorrectly) listed as the iPod of books. While there are many reasons why this is an inept comparison, the biggest is that when the original iPod debuted back in 2001 it did one thing and it did it well, it allowed you to take all or a sizable portion of that music with you in your daily life. Kindle tries to be an e-book reader, an audio-book device, and a wireless mobile platform. Somehow I have the feeling that Kindle may suffer from the “biting off more that you can chew” problem. Why o why does the Kindle feel it needs to have a keyboard? Are you expected to buy your books from the store right there and then? Apparently you can get content through Whispernet to your Kindle to access newspapers, e-books, the font of all human knowledge Wikipedia without a monthly charge. Kindle also suffers from the problem of the early smartphones. “Let’s only concentrate on a few areas that will let our customers only access a portion of the world wide web.” Just as the dumbed down mobile web was destined to fail, so is this portion of the Kindle. If you are going to offer access to the internet, let everyone have all of it. I have feeling that there were similar discussions with about the recently released iPod Touch. It has wireless and access to the cool new feature of the iTunes store on your mobile device. If TouchPod hadn’t offered access to the full-fledged web, I wouldn’t have bought one. It would have been silly to be able to buy songs and not be able to access the general web. Kindle has the same issues, but they are worse because unlike the hypothetically crippled iPod Touch, Kindle does let you reach more portions of the web, newspapers, Wikipedia, blogs, and so forth, but not the whole thing. But a bigger issue is that while the theoretical TouchPod had the same screen as the iPhone, but no access to the web the Kindle doesn’t support many of the websites that exist in the great wide web. Even some of the blogs, which was one of the much ballyhooed features of Kindle won’t really render quite so well on Kindle. Only smart web designers like Daring Fireball’s John Gruber are able to deal with this kind of challenge. It’s not that others aren’t capable, it’s just that who would want to do this, what possible incentive could there be?

That brings me to another point. The blogger pay off. Let me start off with some points before I dive in.

1. There is no good reason why a weblogger shouldn’t be able to make a living or at least some money writing on a blog. I don’t know if this is something that I would want to do, but hey it’s called capitalism for a reason.
2. Everyone is entitled to a fair opinion of a product.
3. I have not used or even played with a Kindle.
4. I love the idea of something like Kindle. The ability to browse online find books and then read them is just one of those things that I think could be a killer app for an existing device *cough iPhone cough*

According to reports to access an RSS feed on Kindle you may have to pay upwards of $.99 to read an RSS feed. So basically you can have access to the entirety of the web (such as it would be on the Kindle’s web browser), but you have to pay to have the blog fed to you in a simplistic fashion. Then an item I hadn’t even thought of until Scott Bourne brought it up on this weeks Mac Break Weekly, astroturfing. Bloggers far and wide are singing the praises of Kindle, but because of a per usage fee that is required every time you use the service, a portion of which goes to the blogger, can we really trust what several prominent technology bloggers are writing about Kindle? Their pockets will be lined with the dollars that they have earned, but by plugging an item that they have a vested interest in without disclosing their relationship with it in a monetary sense to their readers feels downright dishonest. It may be that the money has little to no effect on a quality of review or the push that they make of a product, but without an upfront disclosure at the very least what are the readers of their sites going to think? It is in human nature to make the very worst assumption right off the bat and I can’t say that I blame them.

There are other problems with Kindle. The fact that it can’t read anything but .txt and .azw – the later of which is Amazon’s proprietary book format. That’s right folks it can’t even read the .pdf format that has become the gold standard for not only e-books but the exchange of documents. Then there is Kindle’s form factor. It has the all the visual appeal of the LC II, with none of the features. The size seems about right at least in a “I can hold it and read it easily”, but the fact that you could advance or reverse pages by sneezing on it seems to be a poor choice from an interface guideline. The text does look gorgeous as it should, but I worry that it won’t be able to compare to the resolution of a book and it certianly doesn’t seem to be able to have the portability that a book would have. For instance would you be comfortable reading it on the john? Or in the bathtub? If you can’t answer yes to the these items then the item that you’re using is not a book replacement.

Not only is Kindle not the “iPod of books”, but it probably doesn’t work the way that book would in many instances. I only need point to Mark Pilgrim’s excellent point-counterpoint of the ins and outs of the Kindle license and the words of Jeff Bezos concerning Amazon’s intentions with book sellers and the reality of the situation. Of these things I have no doubt, Amazon’s Kindle will sell well, it will be relatively easy to use, and it will be a great product for many people, but it is not the item that is needed to push the revolution of the e-book to the forefront. The potential is there possibly for Kindle 2.0 or more likely 3.0 for a killer product, however I’m sure that I’m not alone in supposing that an e-book reader for iPhone would just about slay Kindle in it’s tracks. In the Jack-of-all-trades category iPhone already has the Kindle beat in form factor and interface, add to that the ability to have books that would be nigh-on-impossible for Kindle to read, like a book about Monet for example and we have a winner.

In closing I would like to point out to all those wonderful and creative people out there who are rapidly defining the way that people deal with such ancient concepts as written words and music, don’t always think that you have to reinvent a concept to get your idea out the door. Find out what the old medium did best and try to preserve it for another generation. Search for what the old medium did poorly and fix it and integrate that fix into your product without dealing the deathblow to the things that we love. You may end up changing the way that we interact with items, but keep the concepts the same. And since it is rather chilly in my neck of the woods, I hope you all learn the lesson from To Build a Fire don’t fight nature and stay warm.

Confessions of a Recovering World of Warcraft Addict or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Gold Farmer…

“Hi my name is Trasken and I have played World of Warcraft.” Yes, I like the rest of the freakin’ world have played Blizzards substitute for crack. I’ve played and loved it. The world was rich with places to explore and many a wolf-pelt to collect. WoW was fun and engaging in a very specific way and this synergy has yet to have been matched by any game I have yet played. But this massively multi-player aspect of the game continues to be World of Warcraft’s greatest strength and its’ most pronounced weakness.

I have been a rabid consumer of Blizzard’s games since almost since they started making them. While I may have missed out on some Lost Vikings action, I can proudly say that I have owned every single Blizzard game that has made its way onto the Macintosh platform. I started in the winter of 1996 with Warcraft II: The Tides of Darkness. Now as a child, and a boy-child at that, who doesn’t look at a game with the sub-heading “Tides of Darkness” and just go “I must have this game.” Just say that name out loud. It just oozes cool. There were other aspects of the game that made it enjoyable, but if Blizzard went back to naming the games like they used at least some of the shortcomings would be overlooked. TIDES OF DARKNESS!!! Erm… Sorry, just a little bit of nostalgia overload. The larger point of this, if there ever was one, is that Blizzard games used to be about great story. No there wasn’t necessarily a lot there, but it was good and captivating and entertaining. There was something around the vicinity of seventy pages in the Warcraft II manual and a good half of that was dedicated to the story of Orcs and Humans.

Despite reaching its pinnacle in Warcraft III, there was a strong motif of betrayal carried through the entirety of the game. It wasn’t quite as fun as the previous game, but that is mostly because of the nuance allowed to the characters in WC III. Many people find that the story of Warcraft III was when Blizzard came off the rails and started to introduce too many different angles and reference too many different aspects of previous ideas, from Tolkien to Dungeons and Dragons. However, Warcraft III had the distinct advantage of playability and the introduction of role-playing elements into the real-time-strategy universe of Warcraft played rather well. This was all well and good considering that World of Warcraft was due out in two years after the release of the Frozen Throne expansion pack and had been under development for several years. I, and as I suspect many players, were not initially interested in the whole MMORPG concept. We had played Diablo and its’ wonderful sequel, but the prospect of always having the be online and reading about what a mess that EverQuest was in, was not terribly excited that Blizzard’s next foray into gaming was through the venue of the MMORPG.

So I was convinced that I would never buy World of Warcraft. Then several things happened in relatively short succession. Firstly, I acquired a new computer. A G4 PowerBook 12 incher. A sweet machine in its day and still kicking around doing light duty work here and there. Secondly, I moved to an establishment with a dedicated broadband connection. I will admit that the prospect of playing a game where you would have to be connected to the internet the whole time on flaky dialup did not appeal. I have since played the game on said flaky dialup and it’s really not that bad. Finally, I tried out the World of Warcraft Stress Test. For those of you who don’t remember it lasted about the last week of November of 2004 and allowed anyone who dounloaded the demo to create a character in the world of Azeroth. I was hooked in about three hours of play. In short order I had convinced I needed this game and when the Stress Test beta expired I drove out to the local Best Buy and collected a copy. It was off from there.

The experience was overwhelming and exciting at the same time. I can remember my first visit to Stormwind. So many of the little details that many players now overlook struck me as fantastic. The clock tower sounding the hour (which was correct amazing times that we live in), the hammering on the anvils in the Dwarven Quarter, hidden warlock coven in the Slaughtered Lamb, and the magnificent Stormwind Keep. Leveling and running quests was fun at first because the gathering of wolf-pelts was actually bringing clear and obvious character advancement. This is still the major strength of World of Warcraft. It is ridiculously for new players to start and have that little fuzzy feeling that they could run up the ladder quite quickly and see all of the world. Slowly the engulfing feeling of the first few zones and levels was out and the heroic player character is falling into the grind.

Still I persevered with the help of a friendly guild, but soon good story arcs and challenging, yet not impossible quest items were few and far between. The story which had so attracted me to the Warcraft universe in the first place was falling prey to repetition and the traps of many successful franchises. Blizzard didn’t know where they were coming from or often where they were going with any given story element. Thus become the grievous and often very avoidable storyline fuck-ups that only serve to aggravate the loyal and shall I say very OCD fan-base of many MMORPGs. Not to say there weren’t good stories there, but therein lies the second problem that I have with World of Warcraft; the lack of good easy to access story content.

There is no way in the Seven Hells that anyone could collect all of the particular story elements for any one of the massive quests that frame the end-game material in World of Warcraft. The dilemma then becomes, as someone who is interested in that portion of the game, how does one enjoy it? Most guilds are not going to let you lollygag around in a hard instance reading all of the books in the library or the plaques in the statuary. They want loot and at the very least to escape with minimal repair costs. Thus the only real way to experience the good story is to try to brave it solo or to find guild willing to cater to your desires. Having searched far and wide and not finding a solution that I wanted I am pretty much ready to deem this a near impossibility at this point. Even getting to see the end-game content requires more that just a successive period hammering at a mission to beat it, it requires time and effort the likes of which have never been seen before in an electronic format. To acquire keys and potions, there are an elaborate number of steps to follow and traveling half-way across the world to collect these items becomes quickly irritating. Now one could argue that there would be little point to a powerful dungeon and thus a great reward without a little bit of the epic quality to a quest that people have come to expect from Hollywood, but I say that if the main motivation for the characters is clearly not the plot then why should the game designers make the plot choose so many of its’ settings for them? Why should the key need all of these ingredients from far flung places if the only reason to do so is to further a plot which no one cares about?

And therein lies the biggest challenge for the World of Warcraft. You can’t beat the game. There is no end to it. And eventually I lose interest in even the most compelling game, even if there are new things to do and more time to waste. I say that Blizzard is fortunate that I played World of Warcraft for almost 12 months straight, that has seriously eclipsed the amount of time that I have ever spent upon any game of theirs combined. But that begs the question of what made me stop playing? The answer is trifold: Repetition, Repetition, Repetition. The dull and repetitive nature of World of Warcraft wears very thin very quickly and makes the game almost unplayable at points. Everything from quests to the crafting requires so much time upkeep that it it really is absurd the amount of time that can be easily wasted doing this. Add to this a game environment that is frozen in realtime and there really are some very unpleasant aspects to World of Warcraft.

World of Warcraft is exciting and fun to play, to a point. I wholeheartedly agree with the way that Blizzard implemented the character system for early players. It encourages newbies to become a part of the game rather quickly and the interface has really simplified the actions of the new player. Based upon reports and other personal experience I believe that World of Warcraft has the best early game of any other MMORPG. But I realized that the late-game problems of the quest for the best sword and not really for the challenge of beating the best monster or coming up with a new and different way to accomplish things, leaves me waiting for Diablo III or the next off-line hack-and-slash RPG. This realization lead World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade to be the first Blizzard game that did not grace my game rack. I hope it and its’ companion to be the last such instances.

The Cat is Out of the Bag

I’m sure that I won’t be the first to use that turn of phrase, but it’s October and we all know what that means. No it’s not that Major League Baseball is heading into the playoffs, nor is it that the National Hockey League has started its’ season with several excellent games, The Big Cat is on it’s way at the end of the month. Woot, the cat has finally arrived. OS 10.5 offers what seem to be a number of startling and excellent improvements in the way that we Mac users interact with our machines. From where I sit Leopard has some very big shoes to fill. Tiger (OS 10.4) is perhaps the most stable and one of the more intuitive operating systems that I have had the opportunity to use. The mere fact that Tiger has been around for almost two years signifies two things:

1. Apple has not seen the need to push along an update to fix some key issue with the OS (alá 10.1 in September of 2001 just six months after initial OS X release).
2. Something big must be coming along in the next iteration.

So what are we getting with Leopard? That is a great question. Apparently there are some fantastic developer tools shipping with Leopard. Support for 64-bit applications is a big deal (I waited to buy a new Mac until there was again a processor that was 64-bit) ZFS, which I think is about the greatest thing since sliced bread, will make it in to 10.5 at some point. It is quite a feat for people to get excited about ZFS, mostly because it involves getting animated about file system which seems almost oxymoronic in its complexity. More additions to the Core frameworks are also good news for devs, as is garbage collection though I’m not quite sure what the hell it is, but if Siracusa is excited about it so should we all be. All in all the feeling that one gets from the knowledgeable about Leopard is that it will be a huge developer release but will not feature all that much to call home about at the end of the day. I will have to be unreasonable and go against the popular sentiment and say that Leopard is perhaps the most interesting release of the OS since the first one.

Apple is slowly revolutionizing the way that we interact with our computers. Many many years ago computers used to just be considered type-writers, in fact I remember reading a book by Robin Williams and though her point was on how to get good typography from a Mac it still works as a glib truism. Even today there are many people who consider computers as big expensive and complicated pieces of technology that are good only for outputting documents and spreadsheets. If you follow this philosophy, which clearly many in the Mac community do not, you are bound to end up with thousands upon thousands of files and documents. Hell even a few semesters at any good university and you’ll probably end up with a dozen papers all labeled “Paper 1″. This is where I think that the more important end-user features of Leopard will shine through and make this more of a requirement than an upgrade that can be skipped.

From what I have heard through reputable sources and through the little I have experienced there will be five killer features of 10.5. Quick Look, Time Machine, Stacks, Spaces, and screen sharing in both Finder and iChat. These are implementations of concepts that have been floating around for many years and implemented in typical Apple fashion; relatively easy to use and integrated across the board. Take Quick Look for example. As his Steveness pointed out in the WWDC keynote, Quick Look is a great way to page through thousands of documents, PDFs, photos, and even videos with live previews. Not sure what presentation that is? Just tap a key and you get a preview that accurately reflects the item that you’re viewing. How fucking cool is that? Not sure which episode of Dexter you’re looking, just press a key and you can watch five minutes or even the whole thing at full screen size. Possibly the best thing about Quick Look is that it works in other applications as well as in the Finder. This just enhances its’ usability and its’ power as a tool. Use it with another one of the killer features Time Machine to find that one photo of the dog that you accidentally threw away, but keep the rest of that roll in electronic purgatory. Just that simple and just that cool. No caveats that I can see this looks to be an amazing feature that will become like second nature to many Mac users, much like the Quicksilver shortcuts have to me.

Time Machine. What else is there to say that hasn’t already been said? It would be nice if it worked with ZFS snapshots, but that was pretty much pie-in-the-sky thinking by Mac nerds anyway. It provides the Apple solution to one of the most important problems of the digital age. When one uses their Mac to create all that great media, like home movies, photos, and webpages, what do we do when we lose it? There are two ways that data loss happens environmental and accidental and Time Machine covers the both of them. First it creates a backup of your drive and then does incremental backups based upon what other applications have done for years like Dantz Retrospect and SuperDuper. The most interesting part though is the actually putting a user-interfact on the front of the file management in such a way that they mythical computer-illterate family member can retrieve those precious photos of Rover that accidentally ended up in the dustbin. Never before has a the metaphor “searching through the dump” felt germane to to a conversation about data recovery, but I do believe that this is the first time that Aunt Flo can drive up to the dump in her F-150 and look herself. It used to require someone with a bit more technical knowledge and training to pull o the data recovery.

Who will this help? Steve Jobs had the numbers. He talked about them. Anecdotally I’m sure there are many people out there without adequate backup solutions and I’m one of them. I have been considering purchasing a large hard-drive for other reasons and I will definitely keep a backup of the boot drive of my iMac on it in case there is failure of the regular drive. The only downside that I can find in this whole approach for Apple is that a good part of the great features and security coming from Time Machine comes from requiring that external hard drive. Now while most Mac, and indeed computer, people will have little trouble finding a cheap and reliable hard drive, I feel the impact may be missed on John Q. Mousepad. The only thing I wish Apple would do is to sell Apple branded hard drives, call ‘em Time Capsules for all I care, and offer them with new Macs at a discounted price. Something relatively large and it must be reliable; also make it work with the Time Machine software. Bring up Time Machine every time the hard drive is plugged in to make the process even more streamlined.

Stacks: a wonderful idea to replace the screamings for spring-loaded Dock folders with something original and clever. Just mouse over it and boom there is all the stuff that you must have at a finger tip. The only thing I’m not sure about is the usability when the Dock is in the side position. I started using Dock on the left side of my screen when I had an old Beige G3 running 10.2 and quite frankly I never liked the dock at the bottom on the other computers I have used. Aside from the Leopard Dock Problem the other concern for me is Stacks and side Dock. I like the way that Stacks run in a curve because it fits with the way the human hand moves a mouse from the bottom of a computer screen to the top of one, but I don’t quite see how that translates into being useful in side Dock position.

Spaces is VirtueDesktop 11.0. A hundred times more useful than any other virtual desktop manager ever created for the simple reasons that it can be activated and navigated any way that the user wants it to be. Add to that the ability to create many more virtual workspaces and anyone who has had to work on a paper where they need to look at the notes that they took in class, an online article, and to manage working music will be drooling at the thought.

Speaking of managing projects screen sharing is one item that people with parents who have computers should be on their knees begging for with all due humility. Aside from the obvious ability to fix Ma’s computer with a few mouse-clicks, screen sharing could have numerous uses for working on collaborative projects like photo editing. Think of it like a more productive, though much less entertaining, version of Layer Tennis. Oh the possibilities!

The Big Cat will have a big impact on the Mac scene for many reasons; and be you a dev or be you a member of the great unwashed, you should be excited. If Leopard is anything like the last few revisions of OS X, it should be at the very least faster and better performing, as well as introducing the joy of OS X upgrades to thousands of switchers whose only experience with the word “Upgrade” tends to rather negatively associate with the words “re-format”, “De-fragment”, and “Data loss”. Even if for that reason, we can be excited about the new cat in town.

American Idiot

With all that has happened in this modern America, one would think that people would be just a tad more observant about themselves and what they do in public. It goes all the way back to 1963 with the Kennedy assassination, then the race riots of the late 1960’s, then the high profile bombings and downing of several passenger aircraft in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Then there was Oklahoma City in 1995, Unabomber throughout that era and the Olympic Park bombings by Eric Rudolph. The culmination comes in 2001 when the World Trade Center fell during the attacks of 9/11 and the anthrax attacks shortly thereafter. What do all of these incidents have in common? They all broke Americans out of a feeling of relative peace, security, naiveté, and innocence about certain aspects of American life. The Kennedy assassination proved the security around the president could never be too tight and in the decades following there have been hundreds of reports of the United States Secret Service doing their jobs by investigating all threats against the president. That’s why if I were to type “I will kill the Queen” erm… I mean “I will kill George Bush.”, I could expect some kind of contact from the Secret Service. Not that they are fascists crushing every aspect of a free-society, no they are doing their jobs. The Secret Service takes its job very seriously as well they should.

That’s why people like Star Simpson bother me. Here is a bright kid. She’s in MIT, working on several group-think projects and teams there, and is generally liked by people who know her. So it baffles the mind how she can walk into Logan Airport with some blinking circuitry attached to her torso and not expect to be shot in the head. Now I understand that this is part of the MIT culture with electronics and the display thereof and it’s a part of fee-expression; that’s cool, just don’t be a moron about it. Not only was the Massachusetts State Police action warranted, but Ms. Simpson is very lucky to be alive. You don’t have to be in an airplane to kill lots of people at an airport as the unfortunates in Edinburgh learned earlier this year. Today’s airports are not places of free-expression especially when said free-expression could be easily mistaken for an explosive device.

That said, I don’t want Star Simpson thrown in federal prison for the rest of her life. Just a simple ticket and a fine for disorderly conduct and an from her apology for not thinking clearly and scaring the ever-loving-fuck our of many airline passengers. I respect the fact that MIT students do weird things and that often we should reward the odd ones, because they are the ones who think up the next supercomputers or the next teflon-coated must-have item. Still, even since the mid-1970’s walking into an airport with flashing circuitry probably wasn’t the smartest thing that one could have done.

Of course during this entire debacle the incident with the Mooninites was brought up. In case you’re unfamiliar in January of this year two young men were charged with the rather ridiculous “possessing a hoax device” charge as a result. Now lets assume that the Boston PD aren’t retarded and haven’t actually seen the device close up. It’s still pretty obvious to those who pay half of a lick of attention that what is essentially a glorified LiteBrite is not going to explode. One might call shenanigans especially considering the stance that I took with Star Simpson. There are several key differences.

Firstly, is the way that the other cities in the viral ad campaign reacted. In Chicago, New York, Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco there were virtually no complaints and police departments did not respond. These things only really came to a head when the ruckus in Boston hit the newswire and other cities started examining the situation. Police did not consider them a threat. The biggest confirmation of this was this quotation from Seattle Police Department spokesman John Urquart, “To us, they’re so obviously not suspicious … We don’t consider them dangerous. In this day and age, whenever anything remotely suspicious shows up, people get concerned – and that’s good. However, people don’t need to be concerned about this. These are cartoon characters giving the finger.” Only Beantown went apeshit over a few blinking lights. I can hear it now… “How,” you say, “is that any different than running into an airport with blinking lights and not expecting to get shot at?” The difference, as it so often is, is context. In the context of blinking lights on a highway overpass and a pizza restaurant is fair sight less concerning than wearing blinking lights in a crowded airport lobby. Yes, it was quite possible that the Mooninites were bombs or intended to be bombs and it was quite a shame that Boston PD wasted many millions in dollars on this mis-interpreted threat, but all in all a few moments of analysis warranted a shrug and a laugh rather than shut down the entirety of the central highway system in Boston

Clearly some more thought could have gone into the placement of these Mooninites. Putting them on an overpass is not the brightest idea in the world, but still if one cop can recognize them as a cartoon giving the world the finger then why can’t the good folks of Boston? I like to think that Boston and Massachusetts have learned from this whole debacle. Overreactions, as silly as they can be, are much better than underreacting to a possible threat and getting people killed. Finally one would like to think that with all that has happened in the last 30 years regarding homeland security that walking into a crowded airport with electronics strapped to your person would not be the first option in anyone’s playbook. Even if it was “art day” at MIT.

Cheater, Cheater…

Oh what a wonderful moment to be living in the wonderful world of sports! O.J. arrested, Bill Belichick and his Patriots steal signals, Floyd Landis is penalized with the 06 Tour Title, and a graphic designer wonders what to do with #756. Certainly not a way to usher in the new and exciting season of professional sports. The NFL has started it’s season, the NBA and NHL are just around the corner; MLB enters the most exciting time in baseball, and the news is littered with cheaters, law-breakers, and then there is Michael Vick. A young man with a rough childhood makes it big with a dream that I would say that 90% of American boys have; quarterback in the National Football League. I never really had much experience with Mike Vick as a person until this whole dogfighting fiasco broke, but I did see him play against college and professional teams alike. He was quick, very mobile on his feet, and easily able to carve up many a defense with his powerful throwing arm. It’s kind of a shame to see such talented young man slip off into the perverse world of animal fighting.

Vick isn’t the big story in sports recently, it s Bill Belichick and his New England Patriots. Many, many a sports pundit has gone on for lengths and lengths about how this is wrong. moral indecent and a danger to the way competitive sports will be ruined. Insofar as I understand it the biggest problem that most people have, including the NFL, is that there was the use of technology was the deciding factor. If it is alright for coaches and players to look at the defensive signals of the opponents and decipher them, then I ask what is the harm in videotaping the signals to decipher them later? Some will, and many did, that this is cheating. Bah! In a day when every second of every football game in the world is videotaped for posterity, examination by coaches, and commented on by dozens of sports talking heads from ESPN to major networks, adding one more layer of observation can’t be that big of a deal.

It’s not like Belichick was watching the teams in their locker rooms changing and deciding upon the plays and such that they would be using the second half. And if the allegations of interception of radio signals going between the coaches and the players is true, then I say nail their asses to the wall (since that would be actually violating Federal Law as well as several state laws). Until then, all Belichick did was break the rule about videotaping game footage for coaching purposes being done (or not done in this case) from an enclosed area. The only rule that I can find him violating is unauthorized video. Some call it cheating, I call it being smarter and more savvy than others. And besides if you, as a defensive coach, can’t be bothered to change your signals every time then you deserve to have your code broken. History is filled with dozens of cases where cryptographers and codebreakers squared off. All it takes is someone to build a better mousetrap and then the mouse will get smarter.

I know this was a much shorter post than normal and it has been a long time since I posted last, but in my defense, I don’t like you all that much and posting in this blog takes much to much time away from the consumption of many a brain-destroying toxin. Also, I’m working on a story about that moron in Boston who walked into an airport lobby with blinking electronics strapped to her sweatshirt and was then terribly surprised when the Massachusetts State Police almost blew her (apparently empty) head off. I am also working on bit, which will be integrated into the former post about how this has nothing to do with the Mooninites that BPD over-reacted to in February.