It's ironic what kinds of nonsense will kick loose the blogging writer's block; I've made no progress on a post on iPhone user interface for months, then a "gem" from Twitter gave me the hook:

"There are 100,000 applications on the App Store? There were also 100,000 pages on geocities." -- @azaaza at #sxsw
(as reported by @avibryant on 2010-03-13)

Actually, the number for the App Store is over 150,000, according to Apple, and continues growing. The number of pages on GeoCities was 38 MILLION.

Aza clearly meant that comparison insultingly, but he has half a point despite his hostility and innumeracy.

VERY roughly, 50,000 iPhone apps are copies of Project Gutenberg books; another 50,000 are fart/light/rss feed/tip calc apps; the 5,000 or so boobs apps are now gone; but that still leaves 50,000 real apps, creative works by people who wanted to make something.

Many of those apps, 90% if you trust Sturgeon's Law, are "crap", but they're someone's hard work and creativity. Even 10% quality out of the useful 1/3 = 5,000 good apps. Two years ago, there weren't 5,000 good apps for the Mac. There will never be 5,000, or even 50, good apps for Linux or Windows.

The iPhone's limited environment makes you focus LASER-sharp on one concept, and do nothing else. To do a mix of tasks, you usually need multiple apps, but the benefit is that each app is perfectly suited to each task and your personal preferences.

GeoCities was for many people their first web hosting, and the non-HTML page editor, unsophisticated as it was, let non-technical people make web sites about things they cared about. Sometimes you got sparkly unicorns, cheesy MIDI music, and eye-bleeding color combinations. Other times you got really cool information and ideas.

Yahoo! shutting down GeoCities last year was insane. They threw away one of the best things ever created for personal expression, and 38 million individual creative works. There are other solutions now, much better ones, but why be a dick, Y!?

So. Personal preferences, creative outlets, and laser focus on a single concept. Sometimes cheesy, sometimes great. Those aren't bad traits to have, and have been successful at releasing personal creativity on an unheard-of scale.

Who is this Aza guy, anyway? @azaaza is Aza Raskin. His Twitter bio says he's: "Head of UX for Mozilla Labs. Lead for Ubiquity for Firefox."

At first, this surprised me enormously. Mozilla have User Experience? Mozilla have designers? If so, why does Firefox suck so much?

Then I remembered what Ubiquity was. In case you missed its 15 seconds of web-fame, it was a sort of command line interface for Firefox. It's a total hardcore nerd tool that even I, übernerd, don't find useful, largely because Google search features and Wolfram|Alpha handle natural language requests better. Mozilla shut the project down last year.

Then the third shoe dropped, as I recognized the name: Son of Jef Raskin. Oh. Jef Raskin started a next-gen computer project at Apple in 1979 called "Macintosh", though it had nothing in common with the released Macintosh (see Folklore.org's "The Father of the Macintosh"). Jef quit/was fired from Apple when Steve Jobs took it over and reversed course in every way.

Jef's design was keyboard-driven, modeless, technical, very much about memorizing a million little commands & switches. Jef later elaborated his ideas in an unusably complex product for Canon called the "Cat", and later in his book and Archy vaporware. I tried a mockup demo for THE (predecessor to Archy) with a zoomable UI. It was… interesting… but more as a challenge to try to control than as something you could use. MUCH too unfocused, like a hurricane had struck your documents folder and scattered them around your room, and every key was mapped to something unexpected.

So it's not too surprising to read of Aza Raskin ragging on the iPhone. In almost every way, the iPhone is the polar opposite of Jef Raskin's design and the thing Aza's been raised in a Skinner Box to finish, and the iPhone is the latest work of his father's "arch-nemesis", Steve Jobs.

The iPhone OS is inherently modal, one app doing one thing at one time, your attention focused on it. All available actions are immediately visible, either with direct manipulation, or widgets next to the item you're manipulating, not hidden under a keyboard key or menu item far off from the action. On the iPhone, it's better to have five screens with one function per screen, than one screen with five functions.

If apps can quit & restart seamlessly, and there's a clipboard and other tools for content sharing (photos, email, iDisk, Instapaper, etc.), you don't need complex kitchen-sink interfaces. The iPhone OS is inherently non-technical, non-keyboard-focused, child-like without being childish. This is what Mac apps were supposed to be like, before they became complex mazes of keys and modes.

I have an unnatural techno-lust for BBEdit; for hardcore techie writing like this with lots of links, nothing works better, and in that tiny little niche, Jef Raskin was at least partly right. But BBEdit's defaults are overwhelming, so I disable many menu items, and unmap a lot of keys, because I like a simpler interface. If I'm doing creative writing, even my stripped-down BBEdit is the death of me, and I use WriteRoom or Ommwriter, which is the most beautiful and focused writing tool I've ever seen.

With the iPad likely to set the course of computing in the future, that's the last nail in the coffin of the command-line and keyboard-driven "hidden interaction" models. No more kitchen-kink apps. Just do one thing, gracefully and well.

I've been catching up on my book stacks:

Orbus, by Neal Asher

Excellent finale (?) to the Spatterjay series, last seen in Voyage of the Sable Keech. Mad Captain Orbus is slowly getting his marbles together (though his still-crazy first mate Drooble isn't helping), the drone Sniper is back being sarcastic and sociopathic as usual, mutant Prador Vrell is confident he can conquer the Prador Kingdom, starting with this one ship he's stowed away on… And then they find multiple threats that scare even Prador.

As usual for Asher, lots of messy future bio-/nano-tech, great action scenes, weird world-building, parasitic life forms, and violence knocking some sense into people. Especially impressive in giving the Prador individual personalities, without them becoming whiny humans.

It's increasingly clear in Asher's books that baseline humans are the weakest, squishiest, dumbest, most useless "intelligent" life ever, complete evolutionary dead-ends. If there's going to be "humans" in any further books, they should either get infected with the Spatterjay virus (though there are downsides to that), or uploaded into a combat-ready Golem robot body.

Emissaries From the Dead, by Adam-Troy Castro

A new writer of the kind of space opera I like: Gritty, weird setting, tough investigator. The heroine, Andrea Cort, is seriously damaged goods, hated by half the species in the galaxy, and used as police/judge/jury/executioner by what passes for human civilization. A murder has been committed on a very weird orbital habitat run by AIs, inhabited by genetically-engineered "natives" who are like sloths… I won't spoil how, but their behavior makes perfect sense if you think from their perspective.

It's not deep, but the world creation is good stuff, and I'm enthused enough to read the sequel…

The Third Claw of God, by Adam-Troy Castro

Second of the Andrea Cort books. Events in the first book have left Andrea a little less broken and hateful, better informed, and with allies. That's good, because now there are people trying to assassinate her with the really horrific titular weapon as she's travelling to a meeting with the worst criminal scum in the galaxy: Arms dealers.

As a portrayal of what unspeakably wealthy moral voids can do in that setting, and indeed why Castro's galaxy is such a shithole, it's fine. I found myself bored with a lot of it, though. There's a closed-room murder that takes half the book to resolve, and the action scenes are more tedious than exciting or clever.

Enthusiasm for a third book is low…

Trouble in Paradise, by Robert B. Parker

I somehow missed this early Jesse Stone book the first time around; the events in it are referred to by Stranger in Paradise, so I had to find this one and read it first.

A truly great crime plot, and plenty of action. The criminal mastermind, his girlfriend, and the Indian assassin Crow are interesting characters, and given a lot of personality. This is early in Jesse Stone's recovery from alcohol and his clingy ex-wife, so there's heavy character story there, too. Sadly, almost everyone else in it is a wisp of vapor and a few lines. They mostly exist to be fucked or killed by Jesse.

How do you compete with the iPhone? Very badly, it seems.

On January 9, 2007, at Macworld Expo, Apple announced the iPhone. If you're feeling nostalgic, watch the video or read the coverage from Engadget.

"Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything." —Steve Jobs, Macworld Expo 2007

Apple showed a complete working device, completely integrated, already useful. It shipped just 5 months later, on June 29, 2007, and worked as shown.

So now it's 2010, three years later. The iPhone rules the world. Today, Microsoft finally announced (but did not ship!) their response to the iPhone: the ZunePhone. No, "Windows Mobile 7". No, wait, "Windows Phone 7 Series". Even for Microsoft, that's a terrible product name, but totally to be expected. I'm going to call it "ZunePhone" here, for brevity.

The interface is… horrible is too kind. It's Zunetastic! See the slideshow on Engadget. The big areas are the "hub" UI, basically a desktop-sized area that you scroll a teeny little phone viewport into. Every task will involve scrolling, scrolling, scrolling around.

It's a stark contrast to an iPhone UI, which is laser-focused on the minimal content necessary for each step, then presenting another panel for more detail. The iPhone UI is the epitome of Chris Crawford's "tunnel bored through solid rock".

Like the Zune, the ZunePhone uses a wafer-thin white font on black or picture backgrounds, causing eyestrain. Colorful icons & pictures look good on black backgrounds, but text you should focus on does not. White text on black slips into background; that's why it's used in games for notifications, but not usually for readable dialog! Text is completely unreadable in any color over a photographic background. Reading a contact list over a background picture is crazy!

It's "normal" on the Zune and ZunePhone to cut off text. Their own promo image shows "Februar", not February!

Apple announced the iPhone with no games, no 3rd-party apps, only web apps, but quickly got the message that Mac developers wanted access, and got the iPhone SDK out. But that's Apple, which is somewhat developer-hostile; surely Microsoft, who loves 3rd-party developers, will do better? Nope. No 3rd-party apps, no games. There was a demo of Xbox Live stats checking, but nothing about playing games. Nothing about writing games.

There is a Zune HD SDK, and maybe it or something similar will work on the ZunePhone; but nobody has developed anything serious for the Zune HD, and Microsoft's "app store" apparently doesn't pay developers, so I doubt if anyone will bother. The development environment for Zune HD is C#, XNA, and Visual Studio crap, so making attractive apps will continue to be impossible. Can nobody take a single hint from Xcode and Interface Builder, or HyperCard back in the '80s, and make a good GUI design tool? Apparently not.

I can go on, but this is just an accumulation of incompetence. Microsoft tried to innovate with the Zune HD interface, I will give them credit for that, but it was a bad design, and they're just making it worse on the ZunePhone.

The punchline to the whole affair is, this is a demo only. There's no shippable phone yet, Microsoft still has to get mobile carriers to make phones using it, and ship them, and doesn't plan to do this until "Holiday 2010", which in Microsoft scheduling means spring 2011. THREE AND A HALF YEARS after the iPhone shipped, MS may have shipping ZunePhones which are ugly, but functionally equivalent to those first iPhones.

But the iPhone hasn't stood still since then. In the years since release, the iPhone OS has gone from a simple launcher for a handful of Apple apps to a very powerful and easy-to-use environment for 3rd party apps. The interface has been refined, and expanded into the iPad's much larger screen. Programming for the iPhone is years, decades ahead of programming for any other mobile device.

Microsoft aimed squarely at the past, and hit it. That's just not good enough anymore.

The other mobile phone failures today are from Nokia and Intel.

Nokia's merging their Maemo OS with Intel's Moblin, and calling the result "MeeGo". Gibberish names, for gibberish ideas.

The "MeeGo" OS is still programmed with Qt/C++, just like any other crappy, ugly Linux & KDE app. Manual widget layout, menus with keyboard shortcuts, manually placing "Hello MeeGo!!" on the screen! It's like it's still 1995. There's 6 lines of code to make a menu with a button that does something, and another 6 to place a label. In the iPhone SDK, both can be done in Interface Builder with 0 lines of code.

You do need to write code for more complex behavior, but even there it'll be 10% as much as in C++, because Cocoa does the tedious wiring for you, and you trace out connections in IB, you only do actual logic in Xcode.

Anyway, this doesn't really matter, since MeeGo won't ship until "second quarter of 2010" according to their FAQ, and that probably means a usable version in Q3 2010.

Nokia also has Symbian^3, which is their old shitty phone OS with ugly, complicated C++/Qt apps on top. Apparently failing to compete with just one OS isn't enough failure for Nokia, they want to fail to compete on multiple fronts.

Google's Android is marginally better technology, but not particularly good, and the apps are just as ugly as any Linux app. As a market, Android is a shithole, already splintered into dozens of incompatible hardware designs, OS versions, and carrier-specific app stores. Every time a new Android phone comes out, e.g. Google Nexus One, Motorola Droid, HTC Hero, and so on, their platform is balkanized just a bit more, so nothing works.

Palm's WebOS is the one exception, the only company that actually made something artistic and creative and NEW, that competes with the iPhone by attacking its weaknesses instead of me-too-ing its features, badly. The Pre has the best multitasking design of any portable device, the notification system is awesome, the devices look and feel great. The original Pre & Pixi were on Sprint, and I'll never give those sons-of-bitches my money again, but I may pick up a Pre Plus for development.

The quote below is about the iPad, but applies just as much to the iPhone, the iPod (only Microsoft is so stupid as to continue competing with the iPod, so badly as the Zune), and the Mac:

It's got to be so annoying to compete with Apple, at anything really, because it's not like they're doing something fucking crazy. Everybody's had these ideas before. The difference, and this is grim if you are a competitor, but the difference is that everyone else spends a lot of time (and often, money) determining why those things aren't possible. And then it comes out, for real, only you didn't make it. Some other guys did. And when you come out with what is (on paper) a better version of the same thing, maybe even multiple times over, it's too late.

You made a "product" to compete with their "product," tastefully arranging your regiment, only to discover that they hadn't made a product at all - they made a narrative. A statement about how technology should interface with a life.

I'm not saying this to be mean, or get my kicks, or to engage in psychic vampirism. Competing with these fucking people must be a genuinely harrowing state of affairs.

—Tycho, Penny Arcade, 2010 Jan 22

Another casualty of the iPad's release is Flash.

Adobe's Flash Evangelist Lee Brimelow posted a bunch of sites (tackily including porn site Bang Bros) as examples of how the iPad won't work without Flash.

Except, in typical incompetent Adobe fashion, he's wrong about most of the sites!

• FLASH. Farmville: Requires Flash, but publisher Zynga has iPhone games including Mafia Wars, so Farmville may not be far off.
• ???. Hulu: Requires Flash today, but not for long: "Mobile is a monster – we are very bullish. We will embrace any device."
• IPHONE. CNN: Has a mobile site, and video does play. There is also a $1.99 CNN iPhone app with video.
• IPHONE. Bang Bros Network (porn site, NSFW): Has a mobile site, and the videos work on the iPhone.
• FLASH. FWA and AddictingGames: Flash-specific game sites. There are tens of thousands of games on the iPhone app store, and the worst of them are as good as most Flash games.
• IPHONE. Google Finance: "Ubercool"[sic] interactive charts don't work on iPhone, but the rest of the site does. And irony is pointing at anything on Google; they've gone out of their way to make HTML5 the standard.
• FLASH. Aviary: Requires Flash. But there are hundreds of photo-manipulation and drawing apps on the iPhone.
• IPHONE. Disney: Has an iPhone-optimized page, and just watched a bit of "Mickey & the Beanstalk" off their site. Also has an iPhone app with a bunch of kids games & activities in it. (Actually, a bunch of apps for specific shows, too).
• IPHONE. Spongebob: Seems to load fine in iPhone, plays videos and some web-based games; I'm sure there's more Flash games, but it should keep the average 5-year-old or Adobe employee entertained.

So of the 10 sites he listed, 5 are already optimized for iPhone (and iPad in 2 months), and one or two more should be by then. It would be funny, if Adobe weren't so angry and bad at everything they do (just kidding, it's hilarious!)

[Update: Lee has now removed Bang Bros: "My apologies if it offended anyone". But more importantly, his apologies for being so incompetent that he didn't check it on iPhone first!]

This is a story about software development in The Future. But first, some ancient history (AKA my youth):

I've had videogame consoles since I was 5 or so; this is back when Pong was high-tech. They weren't just locked down, the games were hard-wired, burned into ROM. You had to buy cartridges with new chips & circuits to get a new game!

When I was 9, I got to use a real computer for the first time, a TRS-80 Model I. I pretty much instantly knew what I was going to do with my life: Write software and games. That summer, my parents sent me to a beginning programming class (in BASIC! On TRS-80 Model I and Apple ][).

Every other interest became a very minor hobby compared to programming.

I didn't get my own computer until 1983, though, because they were really expensive. I had computer access at schools, and would write programs on paper, think them out, "play computer" (trace through the program, changing variable values on scrap paper), to test my code, then type it in and run it during the limited computer time I had. If the computer I had access to didn't have a cassette drive, I'd just retype from listing or memory, then print it out or even update my paper listing by hand.

I'M DEADLY SERIOUS. UPHILL THROUGH THE SNOW BOTH WAYS.

I know a lot of other geeks with similar stories. To kids who are born programmers, it's like we're born with a heroin addiction, and finally get the stuff in our veins. You couldn't stop us with bullets.

There's a second group of programmers, who don't learn about it until college or later, and do it as a job. They can vary from incompetent to competent workers, but will never be as passionate or intuitive as those who grew up with computing in their brains.

So, let's consider the distant future, circa 2012. The Apple iPad has replaced all mainstream computers. Only programmers, system adminstrators, and a few weirdos ever use a "real computer". Everyone else carries their iPad, hooks it to a Dock to recharge, uses Time Capsule for backup & media storage.

The iPad only runs apps purchased from the App Store, or webapps (either in Safari or saved to home screen). Suppose Apple continues to block user-accessible interpreters from the App Store. There's nothing they can or will do about the web.

A born programmer who starts with an iPad in the house is going to see games and other apps and want to make their own. It'll be a burning internal need. If you're not an addict, you'll never quite understand it. They'll deal, wheedle, and complain until their parents can send them to a programming class or camp, or buy them a development computer, or they'll use one at school, or they'll sneak in somewhere. You can't stop a programming junkie.

A Mac and developer tools are relatively cheap: a $600 Mac Mini (plus keyboard, mouse, & monitor from a junk heap) or a $1000 MacBook plus a $99 developer license.

Even if they somehow have ZERO access to any other computer, cheap or free hosting like Google App Engine lets you write Python, PHP, etc. back-end and HTML/JavaScript/AJAX front-end. They can write and instantly distribute webapps for free. That's certainly better than the BASIC, 6502 assembly, and Z-80 assembly I started with.

A workman programmer will be content to wait for college, take computer science, and learn that way. Nothing new there.

Either way, Alex Payne's "tragedy of the iPad" seems very silly. The iPhone and iPad don't let you screw around with their internals from the surface interface, but they're perfectly good inspiration to a born programmer, and there will always be development tools for them. The App Store has, what, 150,000 apps now? Apple's aware they need 3rd-party developers to put content on their shiny boxes.

The iPad has no visible filesystem. Neither does the iPhone.

To old-timey computer people like me, the filesystem is truth, we lived in a world consisting entirely of files, input/output streams, and programs (not "Apps", damn it, but programs, made up of algorithms like Edsger Dijkstra would have written!). And when writing software, that's still the case.

Now consider how an iPhone app stores and presents information. Consider a note-taking app, with a series of notes, each of which has text and a modified timestamp. In a desktop note-taking application, like my old ThoughtPad, you'd at least have a filename, it's a very thin tool on top of a directory full of files. My documents directory has hundreds of thousands of files, each meticulously named and organized.

Notes.app is nothing like that. It presents note items in a fixed order of most recently modified, with the first line of text as a title. Is it using a database, or files? Who knows or cares? Certainly there are no user-visible filenames. It doesn't matter, because the ONLY way you ever interact with these notes is through Notes.app; you can email them, delete them, search through them (with Spotlight or if you pull down the source list to expose the search box).

Every iPhone app is like this; the few exceptions are those that deal with network filesystems like iDisk, DropBox, and GoodReader. Those are legacy apps, in a sense, because they deal with archaic "filenames", rather than higher-level documents.

Even more complex apps are going this way. iPhoto on the Mac is a sealed box; I've complained before that if you mess with files it "owns", it will get very confused. You can export from iPhoto, but internally, it's a black box.

iTunes isn't quite as defensive, and provides a Library.xml so you can match up files and data from the filesystem, but moving files around will just confuse iTunes and lose them.

In the distant future of 2010, filesystems are a developer-only feature, just like code. There are no user-serviceable parts inside.

So after the Apple's "magical and revolutionary" iPad announcement, how did I do on my predictions?

You know, this is the first time anything has been magical AND revolutionary. Usually magic is used in support of entrenched monarchies.

Name

+0.5

I thought "iPad" was a terrible, bad, no-good name, vulnerable to bad jokes, and too similar to "iPod", but Apple went ahead with it anyway. I'm sure people will get used to it, but what a stinker.

But I'm giving myself half a point since the "iBooks" book reader application is close to "iBook". And speaking of which, it looks a LOT like Classics app for iPhone, which looked a lot like Delicious Library.

Size

+0.75

9.7-inch diagonal screen, LED, 1024x768. 130 DPI is higher than MacBook Air, but lower than iPhone. Really surprised by the old-school 4:3 aspect ratio rather than the 3:2 aspect ratio of the iPhone. Primary use seems to be portrait (docked at the bottom, it stands upright like a book), but there's a lot of landscape apps, too. Exactly 1/2 inch thick.

Networking

+0.75

Wifi-only model in 60 days, 3G model in 90 days, but with a cheap prepaid plan instead of an expensive AT&T contract, which is a nice change. No tethering. Supports Bluetooth keyboard; I'm surprised and pleased by that.

Ports & Peripherals

+1

It has an iPod dock connector and headphone jack. No USB.

All the other connectors are separate pieces working on the iPad Dock dongle, either with or without a wired keyboard (I would just get the base Dock, and use a Bluetooth Apple keyboard). There's a 6' extension cord USB power adaptor. There's a USB camera adaptor. There's an SD card reader (only for pictures? Remains to be seen if other apps can read it). Just as I currently have an Ethernet-USB adaptor, video out adaptor, and SD card reader for my MacBook Air…

Storage

+1

Only surprise so far is that there was a low-end 16GB model for $499, and no 128GB model (but that was a long shot). Nothing specifically said about how MobileMe integrates, but I'm confident Apple will continue the iDisk strategy.

Software

+0.75

Nailed that it "just" runs iPhone apps. Non-resolution-aware apps run 1x size or 2x scaled up, iPad-specific apps run full-screen, and they use the iPhone OS and look great. I can't talk about the NDA'd features of the SDK.

I jumped the gun, assuming that multitasking would be in this release, which is only iPhone OS 3.2. I guess we still have to wait for iPhone OS 4.0 for that. I'm sure multitasking will be in fairly soon, maybe this summer at WWDC.

So, I got 4.75 out of 6, or 79.16%. I think the lesson here is I went too extravagent in a couple of places, and started wishing for a magic unicorn instead of a more realistic (but still very nice) pony.

And, of course, I'm getting one on release day. Probably the $599 32GB model, since my 16GB iPhone is at least half-full, and I don't keep a lot of documents or photos on it.

With less than a day to go, the mythical Apple tablet device is looking more real, and like everyone I'm succombing to the hype. So I'm going to show off how little I know of the future by predicting what it'll be like.

Name

As I noted in Apple non-descriptive product naming, "Applet Tablet" is unlikely. Plus, it's boring, and collides with crappy Windows "tablet PC"s over the years.

I'm betting on "iBook", which recalls the hypothetical DynaBook, old Apple iBook, and Apple PowerBook lines.

Terrible, bad, no-good names: "iSlate" = "is late". "iPad" = "i Maxi-Pad", and is visually too close to "iPod". Apple's been pursuing the iPad trademark, but I really hope it's just to kill market confusion over "iPod".

Weird possibilities: "iGuide". I kinda like it, but I think it's obscure, ugly, and hard to write.

Awesome but dead on arrival: "iNavigator" or "iNav", named for the Knowledge Navigator promoted by Steve Jobs' arch-nemesis John Sculley. Not everything Sculley did was wrong, but Steve won't let that stop him.

Not in a million years: "Newton".

[Update:] Names full of nihilistic despair: "Canvas". Sounds very blank and empty. Apple's more rock-and-roll. A book is full of stuff. "Come see our latest creation"? A canvas is a raw material before anything's created. I get writer's block just thinking about this giant empty space I'm supposed to fill up. Terrifying. More like an "iCan't-vas". Though this Apple Canvas ad is very convincing.

Size

It is almost certainly a 10" screen, probably a 5.5"x8.5" form, half a sheet of letter-size paper, the size of a trade paperback book. Thickness? Apple likes thin, so 1/2" or less. At the iPhone resolution of 160 DPI, the screen should have 880x1360 resolution, but it may be lower DPI for cost reasons. The MacBook Air has a 1280x800 13.3" screen at 113 DPI.

Like the iPhone and most PDAs, the tablet will be mainly used portrait, like a book, not landscape like a TV set or old-fashioned "desktop" computer. Only movies and some games will play in landscape.

Networking

It will support wifi only. There might be a model with 3G on AT&T, but I wouldn't expect it. Apple may be able to strong-arm AT&T into finally supporting tethering, thereby giving you a reason to have an iPhone and a tablet device.

Bluetooth will remain limited to headsets. I think dreams of BT keyboards and mice are unlikely to be realized.

Ports & Peripherals

It will have an iPod dock connector, headphone jack, and maybe a magsafe power connector (probably the MacBook Air sideways jack). SD cards are a maybe, since they're on new iMacs and MacBook Pros as well, but I call it unlikely. USB is almost certainly out.

Storage

Internally it'll have 32GB, 64GB, or maybe 128GB flash drive, like a big iPod touch. Most of your files will be stored on MobileMe, or transferred through iTunes.

MobileMe and iWork.com work fairly well after a rocky start, and are Apple's preferred way of syncing documents across devices. I expect Apple to make an iWork app, to go along with its iDisk and MobileMe Gallery iPhone apps.

My dream is that iDisk would support a system-wide cache on the device, so you can grab a few files in the iDisk app, wait for them to come down, then open them from another app instantly, even though they're theoretically "in the cloud". That's how the desktop Mac OS X works now, and it makes iDisk pretty sweet, if not the fastest solution.

Software

iPhone apps will run unmodified on the tablet. Either scaled up (ugly, but maybe necessary for games/media), in a window, or full-screen. Interesting problem: What happens when a windowed iPhone app is in the background? Does it pause, like when you take a phone call now? Does it still receive accelerometer events?

Tablet-specific apps will be iPhone apps that support higher resolution, and that's it.

iTunes Connect currently has an option for developers to select which devices an app works on: iPhone 3GS, iPhone, iPod touch, etc. I expect the tablet to be another checkbox. I'm confident that properly-written apps will only need minor modifications to make them work on the tablet, but you could also make a specialized app for the tablet.

I expect the home screen of the tablet to be more like a Mac desktop than an iPhone, with running and non-running apps kept in a Dock, inactive apps kept in pop-up folders like the Mac Dock's grid view. Running apps will have a window, maybe more like Dashboard than a Mac window manager.

So, tomorrow, after the near religious experience of an Apple keynote presentation fades and I wake up sticky and confused, I'll post a review of how much I got wrong.

Apple has a special event on January 27, widely believed to be the release date of the mythical Apple tablet device. At this point, if there's no tablet, there will be nerd riots in the streets (if you click that, keep clicking "Next" through the story). So even as skeptical as I normally am, as everyone should be, about unannounced and unseen Apple products, I give the tablet a 90% chance of being announced in 6 days.

Whatever else the Apple tablet is or does, it will almost certainly kill the Amazon Kindle stone dead: Apple's fast color multitouch screen vs. Amazon's SLOW (1-2 seconds per page!) non-touch-sensitive grayscale e-ink display is like a hungry grizzly bear vs. a toddler. Later generations may find one of Amazon's discarded, bloody shoes, nothing else.

So Amazon's response to this is… to put apps on the slow, awful Kindle interface. Because that'll teach Apple!

The Amazon app store terms are:

1. Revenue Share

   User revenue will be split 70% to the developer and 30% to Amazon net of delivery fees of $0.15 / MB. Remember that unlike smart phones, the Kindle user does not pay a monthly wireless fee or enter into an annual wireless contract. Kindle active content must be priced to cover the costs of downloads and on-going usage.

2. Pricing Options

   Active content will be available to customers in the Kindle Store later this year. Your active content can be priced three ways:

3. Free

   Active content applications that are smaller than 1MB and use less than 100KB/user/month of wireless data may be offered at no charge to customers. Amazon will pay the wireless costs associated with delivery and maintenance.

4. One-time Purchase

   Customers will be charged once when purchasing active content. Content must have nominal (less than 100KB/user/month) ongoing wireless usage.

5. Monthly Subscription

   Customers will be charged once per month for active content.

6. Active content applications have an upper size limit of 100MB. Applications larger than 10MB will not be delivered wirelessly but can be downloaded from the Kindle Store to a computer and transferred to the user's Kindle via USB.
7. Developer Guidelines

   Voice over IP functionality, advertising, offensive materials, collection of customer information without express customer knowledge and consent, or usage of the Amazon or Kindle brand in any way are not allowed. In addition, active content must meet all Amazon technical requirements, not be a generic reader, and not contain malicious code.

We will work to refine the above guidelines throughout the beta.

My thoughts on these terms:

1. Revenue Share: Offering the same 70 to you/30 to AMZN split as Apple is a very good move, much better than Kindle's original blog republishing terms of 30 to you/70 to AMZN, and of course massively better than traditional publishing where you get your advance, 90% never get anything more, 10% get a few percent royalty after the advance earns out. So as a publishing deal, it's okay.

   But note those delivery fees. On a 1MB or smaller app, $0.15 out of your pocket isn't much. On a 10MB illustrated app, $1.50 definitely pushes your prices up, no $0.99 giveaways here. Apple has no delivery fees, iPods touch just use your (unlimited free) wifi, and iPhones on AT&T have unlimited data (this can vary in 3rd-world countries).

   This is a massive mistake. Amazon starts at a disadvantage: Crappier device. Now they offer a worse deal to the developers.

2. "Later this year" means Amazon don't have the infrastructure set up, they're just blue-skying something that doesn't work yet. Since we know Apple's App Store works (despite some problems, it's the most successful distribution model ever), we can presume it'll work perfectly on release day of the Apple tablet.

3. Free: 100KB/user/month limit is basically "no network use". You could maybe check an RSS feed once a day; any more than that would go over the limit. Forget about ad-supported free apps, you can't afford to check the ad server.

4. One-time purchase: Same crippled data limit as free.

5. Monthly subscription: So here you can start to make something interesting… but how many customers will pay $5 a month for online chess? A Twitter client could easily use >100MB per month, which is $15 for fees alone, out of your 70%, so you'd need to charge $22 per month to break even.

6. The upper size limit is somewhat broken. On Apple's App Store, anything over 10MB requires wifi to download, not 3G, but there's no upper limit. But the Kindle doesn't have wifi… Terrible device design leads to these kinds of problems.

7. Developer Restrictions: VOIP would cost an arm and a leg, anyway, but it's such an obvious thing you might want: There's a phone connection inside the Kindle. But you can't use it.

   No advertising means you can't get paid back outside of Amazon, killing a lot of business models. They will always take their 30%+bandwidth. Greedy.

   "Not be a generic reader" means you can't make a better book reader than Amazon and work around their design flaws. There is no escape.

So in summary, in every single point, they're worse than the Apple App Store.

To have any chance of competing, of even surviving January 27th, Amazon needed to be better than Apple, MUCH better.

Instead, it's like someone running in front of a steamroller, tripping, and rather than get up, they just inch away screaming.

SPLAT.

There are a handful of films I've seen over and over, say a hundred times, that are burned into my brain so deeply they make up the basic wiring for my mind. Often I just put these on as background activity; I don't really need to pay attention, but it's comforting to see them yet again.

Star Wars (1977)

I think I liked farmboy the first time (dude, I was 7!), but every time after, I identified with Darth Vader (snappy dresser, bad temper, best at what he does) and Han Solo (loner, wiseass, and free man).

Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Star Wars is the juvenile heroic story, a rag-tag band of kids beat the giant Empire's war machine, yay. Empire is the adult story, what really happens, the consequences of your bad decisions all piling up on you. The "heroes" deserve everything that happens to them, and they get it good and hard. It doesn't hurt that it was written by pulp author Leigh Brackett.

Blade Runner (1982)

If you haven't read Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the movie's pretty nonsensical, and yet it contradicts the book in important ways. But I still love the sets, I love the vision of the decayed but lived-in future. Ridley Scott's a tedious director, but he's a great set decorator.

MASH (1970)

Death, sex, and gallows humor; way darker than the TV show, but funnier, too.

Real Genius (1985)

"If you're smart, people need you, you can use your mind creatively." Lasers, nerd sex, and great music, too.

Appleseed (1988)

Anime based on Masamune Shirow's cyberpunk manga. Humans try to live in utopia, and fail. So do you break the utopia, or change humanity?
(This is the first anime version, which was focused on the story, not the prettier but dumber combat-oriented remake).

Dominion Tank Police (1992)

Another of Masamune Shirow's manga adaptations, Dominion is a black comedy about overreaction to crime and terrorism, how we just dig our environmental & political messes deeper. In the end, we deserve the shit-up planet we've made for ourselves.

Pi (1998)

Mathematics, computing, madness, and industrial music.

Fifth Element (1997)

Milla Jovovich nearly naked, Bruce Willis being a badass, ancient astronaut secret history, and a setting blatantly copied from Alejandro Jodorowsky's comics.

Versus (2000)

Low-budget, but awesome constant gun and sword fights between yakuza and zombies.

Runners-up with dozens but not 100+ viewings: Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, Monty Python & the Holy Grail, Alien, Aliens, Terminator, Batman (1989), The Killer.

What? Massachusetts elected a Republican instead of a Democrat?! OMG, people! The Republicans have a slightly larger minority in Senate! America is doomed! Earth is doomed! Better dead than slightly red!

The overreaction to this tempest in a tea party is pathetic, and shows just how screwed up American politics are (not that others are better; humans are stupid everywhere). The Democrats still have a 59 to 41 majority. They're just too stupid, cowardly, corrupt, and weak to use it and get rid of the filibuster problem. They're useless parasites, and they deserve to fail. Fuck 'em.

Not that the other side is better. Republicans are psychotic, ignorant, fetal alcohol syndrome, racist religious zealots. Republicans think it's okay to cheat on their wives, because JEEEZUS forgives them, but gay marriage is a lethal threat to their marriages. Republicans think it's okay to murder doctors who dare to scrape a growth out of a uterus. Republicans think sending bibles to Haiti is better than sending evil science-based medicine, because saving souls is more important than saving lives. Republicans think whatever their corporate masters stick a hand up their ass and puppet out of their mouths, because they are nothing but venal, corrupt, bribed vermin. Fuck them, too.

Used to be the libertarians weren't too bad, but then the Republicans infested that party, so they're the exact same, now. Ron Paul's a standard-issue Christian supremacist, young Earth creationist, anti-choice, homophobic, racist Republican, who just uses "libertarian" as a label.

Fuck 'em all.

I'm done with all of you retarded monkeys and your retarded monkey politics. I don't support Dems or Reps. I support Cthulhu, killer robots, zombies, and ant men. I, for one, welcome our alien overlords and devourers. I'm in the Human Extinction Party.

NO MORE YEARS!

Our Party Manifesto: The Call of Cthulhu

Apple names are non-descriptive, so the mythical Apple tablet thingy will not be called "Apple Tablet":

• "Apple TV" does not contain a TV. (@mdhughes)
• "MacBook" is not a book. (@mdhughes)
• "Newton" couldn't accelerate a kilogram to 1 meter/second. (@mdhughes)
• "Pippin" was not a tasty dessert apple. (@mdhughes)
• "iPod" does not contain peas. (@pilky)
• "Macintosh" does not contain an apple or a rain coat. (@mralex)
• "Magic Mouse" does not contain either magic or a mouse. (@SteveStreza)
• "iPhone" is not a...wait, never mind. :P (@isharan)
• "QuickTake" wasn't quick, and (ultimately) didn't take either. (@tewha, @brlittle)
• "Apple II" contained zero apples. (@brlittle)
• "Mac Classic" was ahead of its time. (@photar)
• "Apple Cinema Display" does not come with velvet seats OR a popcorn maker. (@qrunchmonkey)
• "Time Machine" cannot travel faster than the speed of light, nor can it create an Einstein-Rosen Bridge. ... however, if it does hit 88 miles per hour, you _may_ see some serious shit. (@GordonHughes)

Oh, how nice. Adobe's Flash Platform Evangelist has a New Year's message for everyone. But it's written in Adobe's internal language, so I'll translate it:

I wanted to make a New Year's post to get the year started off right.

"Like all Adobe marketing people, I hate customers, and want you all to perish in flames."

To the Flash community

"Everyone who sucks our dicks, we like you. Everyone who doesn't, die in a fire."

To unnamed company 1 (Microsoft)

"Silverlight works reasonably well on Linux and Mac OS X, unlike Flash, but we will still bury you!"

To unnamed company 2 (Apple)

"You're mean and won't let us fuck up the browser on the iPhone with our poorly-performing, crash-prone Flash plugin! Arrogant people always lose. Just look at us: We're arrogant, and we're determined to lose!"

To open-source and standards zealots

"Flash IS TOO IS TOO IS TOO a standard! Just because there's no specification, or full independent implementations, doesn't mean it's not standard! Besides, where are you gonna go? HTML 5 and JavaScript? Those are only the basis of the World Wide Web, they don't matter."

To all the complainers

"People who suck our dicks can say we aren't perfect, and we won't beat them senseless for it. But if you don't suck our dicks, we will hate you FOREVER."

To Latin America

"I'm too stupid to realize that Portuguese is the language of Brazil, not Spanish."

I can't wait to spend 2010 with you all!

"As long as you suck our dicks."

The flying car is still in development, but otherwise, what did Santa put in our stockings over the last decade?

Hardware

iPod

The first good mass-storage audio player. The original 5GB model was just big enough to be useful, the UI was actually usable for more than play/pause/next. All of the imitators forget that, in trying to put in more irrelevant features, or flashier UI, the point is to play music. Which is why nobody else has taken this market back from Apple.

Smartphones

The Treo, BlackBerry, and iPhone aren't just "nice phones". They put all of your communications into a single device. Voice, email, SMS, web, and applications make something more than just a phone, it's more like radio-telepathy. It makes you part of the Internet hivemind.

Flash Memory

In the 1990s, even the early 2000s, you had 3 choices for data storage: CD, Hard Disk Drive, or teeny little amounts of very expensive flash memory (measured in KB or MB!). DVDs had a very short run for storage. HDDs get smaller and hold more, but are still unreliable, fragile junk. But flash memory went from a toy to everywhere, from low-capacity to high-capacity. iPods (mostly), media players, videogames, smartphones, high-end laptops all use flash memory for mass storage. They're incredibly faster and more reliable. It's like the change from prop planes to jets.

Electric/Hybrid Cars

Despite "Who killed the electric car?"-type whining about the '90s, electric cars at the time couldn't provide the range people wanted (telling people they don't "need" long range never works!). New battery tech and hybrid approaches finally got the range up, and electric or hybrid cars are now working and on the streets. Gas-burning cars are doomed, just in time to crush the economies of the terrorist states of the Middle East, and hopefully slow down global warming.

Military Drones

A "toy" airplane with a camera may seem harmless enough, but as a spotter, or filled with explosive, it becomes a hunter-killer run by a pilot safely nestled in a base far away. Current security issues aside, these are changing war utterly, just as much as artillery, tanks, and aircraft did.

Mars Robots

Spirit and Opportunity, and the Mars Phoenix mission, are letting us physically explore Mars through the same kind of remote operation as a military drone, but with enough self-determination to make up for the 16+ minute radio round-trip. These little guys are by far the best thing NASA's done since Apollo.

Private Spaceships

And on the human spaceflight side, the X-Prize has done more for human spaceflight than anything NASA's done in 40 years. We have multiple, separately developed, commercially viable private space programs. Virgin Galactic will be doing tourism in space with this technology. A similar prize is creating multiple privately-developed lunar landers, from Armadillo Aerospace (id Software's John Carmack's company!) and others. This is the "no shit, real private spaceships" future of Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke.

Software

Mac OS X

If you'd come back to me in 1999 and said "Desktop UNIX will be fun and easy to use, and it'll be based on NeXTstep, and made by Apple", I'd have beaten you senseless and taken your time machine away. And yet, here it is. UNIX isn't new, but a UNIX desktop that doesn't suck is. My initial expectation of Mac OS X was that it'd have the stability of classic Mac OS with the UI of UNIX. Instead they got it the right way around…

Embedded/Mobile Linux

The "Year of the Linux Desktop", on the other hand, didn't just fail, but turned into a 15-year-long joke. Linux desktops, even "easy" ones like Suse and Ubuntu, are still shit. But where Linux did win was inside smaller devices. Almost every handheld device except the iPhone is Linux-based. Sometimes the UIs are ugly Linux-like crap, sometimes they're a little better, but at least there's a halfway decent core OS underneath. JavaME and WinCE are both dead and rotting, and good riddance.

RSS

Getting notifications when something updates is, to use a technical term, non-trivial. Push notifications and peer-to-peer networking both require the user's endpoint to always be on to be useful; email is vulnerable to spam, and automating it is hard. In contrast, RSS is the dumbest thing that could possibly work: Poll a server every so often for a list of items. If they have enclosures, download them. From that simplistic basis, we get news readers, podcasts, and every little thing that updates.

iTunes

iTunes isn't just a media organizer/player or syncing tool for iPods. It's a store, the first digital music (and now movies, TV shows, and smartphone applications) store that didn't suck. So some of us actually started buying music, instead of stealing it. The music industry, being composed entirely of thieves, parasites, and fucking vampires, was confused by this and tried repeatedly to kill it, but failed. The movie industry has seen a little more sense. TV show producers are starting to realize that distribution doesn't just meant broadcast & cable. Tivo got people out of the habit of tuning in at a certain time, but it's inferior to just downloading shows from the iTunes Store. iTunes is killing CDs, DVDs, and TV networks, all at once.

Google

Google made search usable (remember Altavista? Yeah, that was shit.), but then expanded into everything on the Internet: Email, chat, collaborative documents, and now a couple of operating systems. They're trying hard to own the entire Internet infrastructure. And since they don't suck at it, they may well succeed.

3D MMORPGs

There were multiplayer RPGs in the '90s, even graphical ones like Ultima Online and Meridian 59. But it was EverQuest and then World of Warcraft that nailed the model of a 3D world, "Kill 10 Rats" quests, organized raids, and guilds. Much of the way we look at gaming now, or any kind of online social activity, is through the lens of MMORPGs.

Social Networks

MySpace and LinkedIn launched in 2003. Facebook in 2004. Twitter in 2006. Each aimed at a different social group, but managed to do what other attempts hadn't: Provide a compelling reason to keep coming back, keep updating your status, keep talking to your "friends". They're the missing piece in communications on the Internet: How do you find & keep in touch with the people you know?

AJAX

JavaScript "worked" in the '90s, but it didn't, really; you couldn't rely on anything cross-browser, and you couldn't easily talk to a server, only use whatever was on the page. Google and then others started using AJAX in 2004-5, creating true Web Applications, full near-desktop-quality apps that just need a browser. Frameworks like JQuery made building webapps fun and easy; you don't need Java applets or Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight, if you can just make a web page that does the same things. You don't need an operating system, even, if the browser does everything you need, which is the idea behind Google's "Chrome OS".

You’re probably wondering what the point of all this ugly rambling bullshit is.
It’s this:
The future is inherently a good thing.
And we move into it one winter at a time.
Things get better one winter at a time.
So if you’re going to celebrate something, then have a drink on this:
The world is generally and on balance, a better place to live this year than it was last year.
For instance: I didn’t have this gun last year…

-"Next Winters", Transmetropolitan, by Warren Ellis

Dave Winer, once upon a time the author of a scripting system called Frontier, posted We need: A programmable Twitter client.

Well, interesting idea. Except we already have multiple programmable Twitter solutions.

Twitterrific can call AppleScript on new tweets (and comes with a demo script), and you can use AppleScript to control it, at least as far as posting tweets.

I'm not suggesting that AppleScript is perfect. The core AppleScript language is easy to pick up, but every app you try to control is like learning a new language, and the core language isn't very powerful, so you end up using other apps as helpers. I spend days fighting AppleScript and swearing a lot every time I have to deal with it, and I do this for a living.

But AppleScript is the standard scripting tool on Mac, and it's well-suited to simple cases. If Twitterrific (or another client) had more scripting commands, you wouldn't need anything else.

The more advanced solution is Python-twitter, which provides Twitter API access from Python. Python is easy to learn (Learning Python or Python for Software Design are both fantastic tutorials), and Python-twitter seems to be a pretty complete and easy wrapper around the API.

So this brings me to my real point: Apps with custom scripting interfaces are obsolete. Unix shell scripts, DOS batch files, Lotus 1-2-3, Emacs-lisp, these are all ancient and archaic systems. For Unix scripting, last year I quit using bash after 20+ years because Python's easier to get right (esp. with filenames containing spaces).

Dave wants an "unfollow-with-timeout". Fine, write one. Make a tiny Python script that calls the Twitter API to unfollow someone and adds them to a list with the timestamp. Write a second script that runs daily (add it to cron or launchd; there are GUI clients to edit both) to scan that list, find people past their 24-hour unfollow, refollow them, and remove them from the list. It probably took me longer to write this blog post than it would to write those scripts.

Five YouTube videos, in which a common theme is revealed:

• Microsoft Store
• Steve
• Haruhi
• Kim
• Adolf

I have a love/hate relationship with Apple & the iTunes Store. Like a battered wife, I can't stay away. I'm sure they can change... But will they? Until then, I put up with it.

I love iPhone dev when it's like coding for the Mac, but better, with a GUI not encumbered by 25 years of legacy NeXTstep/OpenStep/Mac Carbon/Cocoa compatibility. What would the Mac look like if it was designed today? It'd look like an iPhone, apps sleek and directed and perfectly functional.

I hate iPhone dev when APIs are incomplete. The fucking Address Book and Keychain are so appalling I go mad dealing with them. The most basic functionality is missing. Audio is finally caught up, and I need to rewrite the audio stack of Perilar (and put one into Castles!), now that it doesn't suck. But plenty of new stuff I'm doing is entirely broken, and I'll have to fix it when Apple fixes the API.

I hate iTunes Connect more than anything ever. MORE THAN ANYTHING. It is seriously the most painful, awful, slow, malicious piece of malware ever written. I cannot imagine how people thought that passed muster. If Steve Jobs saw iTunes Connect, you'd need buckets and high-pressure hoses to remove the corpses of those responsible from One Infinite Loop.

I hate the Apple approval process. As of last week, they claim it's at 75% approval within 2 weeks; I know several people--SEVERAL--who've been waiting for 3 months or more. My own apps sometimes got bounced back to me a couple times, but were mostly approved in less than 2 weeks... but rarely much less. As we head into the Silly Season, it'll drop even further. Apple can't approve things quickly, and makes terrible mistakes about what's "offensive" and what isn't; Baby-Shaker was okay, but political parodies aren't? That's MADNESS.

The worst part of the approvals is when you have to remove a cool thing, or never even add it, because you know Apple won't allow it. I want to put a couple of programmable toys and an adventure game engine up. I can't, they use interpreters with downloadable code, which is forbidden. It's preemptive censorship, like trying to be an artist in the USSR.

The iTunes Store itself is a disaster area. A giant pile of everything, good and bad, like a sci-fi junkyard. You might find some sweet loot, or you might find radioactive waste. The approval process has done nothing to improve on that, if anything it's made it far worse.

I love the payments: 70% royalty on gross from a publisher is sweet. Really sweet. Typical publisher royalties are 10-20%, often from wholesale or "net" (which is always nothing). I wasn't making enough to live on, but I still get some solid pocket money even with no real advertising or new apps (and those will happen as soon as possible, but doubtful before New Year, with the holiday approval slowdown).

So the end result is I hate the App Store system. But I'm still in it, sort of. I'm VERY disappointed by Apple's handling of all this, but I don't believe it'll get better anytime soon, and I still like making iPhone apps more than anything else.

[The Torment of Tantalus, in Greek mythology]

[Update 2009-11-13: From Christopher Lloyd, the stories of Watson and WebObjects. Apple sometimes beats up indie developers and takes our lunch money. They do what's best for them, sometimes with apologies, but never with mercy. ]

For me, the most iconic, most-used tool on the Palm Pilot 1000 through the Palm Treo was the To Do app. Since getting the iPhone, I’ve been trying to find a halfway usable replacement. I may have it now.

The Importance of Making Lists

Everything I do is longer and more complicated than I can keep track of with my limited short-term memory and easily (OOH, SHINY! Wait, what?) distracted attention span[1].

day in and day out,
while I work,
or while I do anything else,

And that’s exactly (and all) the Palm To Do app did. It was as close to perfect yet complete minimalism as a piece of software can get. It was an abacus for keeping track of urgent, soon, later, someday tasks.

Nobody else has ever seemed to get the concept. Mac OS X hides its To Do list inside iCal (and you can only edit them with a shitty pop-up dialog box; BusyCal shows them in an info editor on the side, but it’s still crammed into a calendar app where it doesn’t really fit, not a simple To Do editor.

On the iPhone, the situation was even worse. I could make a calendar entry, which meant my calendar was full of junk to-do items that couldn’t be searched on the iPhone, and were hard to find even on desktop. I could make a Notes entry, but Notes has no organization ability, and still doesn’t sync very well.

It got so bad I went back to pen-and-paper, keeping my TODO list in a Field Notes in my pocket, with a short keyword on the right side. No search, just flipping through paper, but at least it was always with me.

I tried quite a few To Do apps, none of which really worked the way I needed. In particular, they were all flat-category, no way to search by keyword, no priority levels. Few of them synced at all, and those mostly rely on a cloud service (i.e., watch all your data vanish when they go out of business or have a Microsoft/Danger-type meltdown in a year or two) rather than your own computer or MobileMe.

Things

The closest yet is Cultured Code’s Things. It’s still more complex than I really want or need, too much organization and not enough raw data piles, and there are some UI flaws that drive me crazy, but it’s good at what it does, and doesn’t force its anal-retentive GTD[2] roots on me.

The main screen shows several top-level lists: Inbox, Today, Next, Scheduled, Someday, Projects, and Logbook, and a [+] button to add a new item to any list.

Inbox is a normal list containing items. Today is a smart list of items on any other list which have been marked to be done today. Next is a smart list of all items, sorted by overdue, due, today, and then everything else. Scheduled is a smart list of items with a due date, sorted by date. Someday is a normal list of stuff you’re putting off (the icon is a cardboard box…) Logbook is a record of everything you’ve checked off as completed. Projects is a container for multiple lists, used essentially like Palm’s categories.

In each list, the bottom toolbar has buttons to [+] Add items, [★] Star items to be done today (while the icon here is a star, and a star is shown on Today’s smart list, the item’s checkbox just goes yellow, which is unintuitive), or [→] Move items to another list. The top toolbar has an [Edit] button to rearrange or delete. There is no ability to re-sort the items of a list, which is a pretty serious omission if you have more than a dozen items.

In Projects, but NOT anywhere else, you can tap the (>) disclosure button on a list to get a view screen where you can edit the list info, Show (all items in the list) in Today, Move (all items in the list) to another list, or Send (all items in the list) as Email.

In Projects and in all sublists of it, you can hit a [Tags] toolbar button to show all contained items with a single tag, or items with no tags assigned. However, it only finds immediate children, it does not search the contents of sublists. Say I have Notes, Shopping, and Perilar lists in Projects; Shopping and Notes are not tagged, but Perilar is tagged Code. The only thing I can filter at Projects is “Code”. If I go into the Shopping list, I can filter on all the tags I’ve used, like “Movies”.

The closest thing to app-wide tag search is in Next, but the big-bucket-o-stuff isn't always what I want. There is no text search, and items don’t show up in system Spotlight. That’s why I’m currently sticking with very broad category lists in Projects, even though I’d like to have much tighter ones; Things’ pathetic excuse for search just doesn’t support it.

When adding an item, you just get an editable title field, and a Create In button to change the location (default is the list you were currently viewing, usually correct). To set more fields, you have to hit a “Show Details” button, then you can pick tags, enter notes, or enter a due date.

“Show Details”, trivial as it may seem, is almost a deal-breaker. I need all the fields visible on note creation, because I almost always (90%) want to add a tag, and often (50%) some note text or due date (50%). A short title and broad category is not enough context. It’s only one button and an animated form transition, but it takes 3 seconds (I timed it repeatedly with my stopwatch) instead of half a second and not having to remember this annoyance, find the button, and wait. Oh, and it hides the keyboard, so I can either remember to do it after entering the title, or have to tap on the title again, losing more time. Frustration is born of such UI missteps.

To view a note, you tap on its name (but not the checkbox), and get a view screen. Now “Show in Today” and “Move” are list buttons, not bottom toolbar buttons, which is inconsistent and confusing.

When you check off an item, on your next restart of the app it’ll be moved to Logbook. Also at restart, the icon badge gets updated; unfortunately, this is exactly the wrong time, IMO, it should update the badge when exiting, but with the limited time to clean up on iPhone, that may not be practical.

There’s no priority system. You either do stuff today, or later. There are High, Medium, Low priority tags in the default tag set, but they don’t seem to do anything, they don’t make items float higher or lower in the Next smart list, though you can search by tag in the Next list. I find this pretty disappointing. Some tasks are more important than other tasks, and Things has no way to express that.

Syncing requires the desktop Mac app. If the desktop app is running, and the iPhone has wifi enabled, it’ll automatically sync. I found this to work reasonably well, though it once got stuck and wouldn’t see any new items from the phone until I unsynced and resynced.

A trick I use for visually identifying items is to put an emoji icon in front of list and tag names:
Code
This works great on the iPhone, but at present emoji are not supported on computers, so there I just see an 💻 error box instead of a cute little computer icon. There are proposals to add emoji to Unicode, so perhaps soon this will work on the desktop as well.

The Things iPhone app is $10, and despite the flaws, it’s a reasonable tool until something more like the Palm Pilot’s circa 1997 To Do app comes along. The Mac app is $50, which is extortionate for such a small app that does nothing more than the iPhone does. If you’re ONLY going to sync from iPhone and just want a desktop backup, it’ll keep working after the trial period in read-only mode with a nag screen.

Now I just need to deal with my notepad situation. More on that in a later blog post.

[0]

The post title is a reference to Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead, which is a song by my favorite dead musician Warren Zevon (iTunes link), and a grim but entertaining crime movie.

[1]

I’m not as bad as the protagonist of the “Memento Mori” short story by Jonathan Nolan, which the movie Memento was based on, but my inattention has similar results. If you use external memory, you can accomplish a lot anyway.

[2]

Just in case I hadn’t offended “Getting Things Done™” users enough: I think GTD methodology is the equivalent of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, or Arnold Judas Rimmer on Red Dwarf spending all semester color-coding his study materials but never studying. It’s the appearance of organization without any real productivity.

Today I picked up a shiny new PSP Go. And I like it.

$249 gets you a tiny device the size of two stacked iPhones, though somewhat lighter. The original PSP-1000 was 6.7"x2.9"x.9", weighed 280g. The Go is 5"x2.7"x.64", weighs 158g; about half the volume and weight, which takes it from a thing I leave at home, to a thing I can tuck in a pocket.

It's small, but not quite so small I can't hold it stably. When playing Wipeout, with the shoulder pads and constant button mashing, it was fine. When the top is slid closed, it shows an analog clock (?!?) or calendar, or the media playing. I suppose if there was a dock, you could stick it on and have a decent clock/radio thing; you could even use Internet radio, which it supports.

There's black and white models, but GameStop only had the sparkly white-and-chrome. I'll probably find a set of skins for it later. Even for the "girly" model, it still looks pretty classy. FAR better industrial design than, say, a Kindle. It remains true that the only three electronics companies with any design sense and aesthetics are Apple, Nintendo, and Sony.

The Go has 16 GB of internal storage, unlike the 32 MB in the PSP-1000, or 64 MB in the current PSP-3000; 250 times the storage space (like everyone now, they seem to use metric storage space numbers, so "16 GB" = "15.25 GiB" in binary terms). For comparison, an iPod touch with 8 GB costs $199, and with 32 GB costs $299, so it seems like fair pricing. With the old system, any claim that it was a "portable media device" was just insulting, since a few MB isn't enough for anything, and even a 2GB memory stick wasn't much. 16 GB, you could fit a small music library and a few movies on.

The screen is 3.8" diagonal, unlike the 4.3" diagonal of the older models, but it's the same 480x272 resolution, and it shows; Go looks considerably brighter and sharper. The speakers are front-facing and louder and sound better than the old models; headphones are still better, but it no longer sounds like tiny, tinny mouse screams.

It comes with some kind of software, but it's for Windows, so I threw it out. On the Mac, I know of three PSP data managers: iPSP, PSPWare, and Missing Sync for PSP.

The power/USB cable is full-size USB to proprietary plug, just like an iPhone adaptor. It also comes with a power brick with USB output, but I expect mostly it'll be charged on my computer, not the brick. This is sort of a regression from the USB-to-mini-USB adaptors they'd been using, but not an especially big deal. The Go only has headphone out, but does have bluetooth headphone pairing. [Update 2009-Oct-26:] There is a cable sold separately with video output. However, the idea of playing video off a portable device onto TV never made sense to me—it was part of Sony's UMD media campaign, which was an abject, humiliating failure.

So. The UMD. The "Universal Media Disc". It's gone. No more UMD games on the device, and it looks like they're being phased out for the PSP-3000, too. No more UMD movies, but that was the worst idea ever conceived (a disc nobody else supports! With no full-size player! Only playable on PSP! Uh, no.)

The best part: No more battery-draining, 30- to 60-second UMD game loads. Dungeon Siege: Throne of Agony was a great game for the PSP, except opening the map took 60 seconds with the UMD. An in-memory version should open nigh-instantly. With the UMD running, the PSP-1000 gets about 1-3 hours play, at BEST. Apparently when running games from memory, both PSP-3000 and PSP Go get 3-6 hours, despite the much smaller size (and presumably smaller battery) of the Go.

The OS/menu system is a slightly updated version from what's on the PSP-1000, with support now for "pausing" (hibernating) games, and better media/network tools. I only spent time in the menu to get to games or network, but it's a pleasant console menu, second only to the Wii.

The games. Oh, yeah, remember this is a game machine? Well, you get games for it by downloading them. At present, only from Sony's Playstation store, unless you wait for the next firmware crack and install some homebrew stuff made by Linux dweebs. I'll stick with Sony for a while, see how they do.

The PlayStation Store on the device is… really slick. Better, in many ways, than the iTunes App Store. It's easy to find games I'm interested in, almost too easy, and even the cheaper indie games look good. There's also free themes and wallpapers on the store, and paid themes. Most of the paid themes are kind of shameful: Big-breasted anime chicks. There's a section with ~45 anime boob themes, each $0.99 or $1.99. Kids, can you please stop embarassing us adult gamers?

Most of the titles are $10-$20, sometimes up to $30. Compare that to UMD games at GameStop, which are $15-30 for used, $20-$40 for new. This is likely to be the last Sony product I ever buy at a GameStop. I just don't need them anymore, I get better games cheaper online. Wii, PS3, Xbox 360, and now PSP all have digital downloads. It's just a short step to ONLY having downloaded games, and putting a bullet in GameStop's head. I won't really miss it, it was just the least bad of several buying options.

First PSP Go game was an easy one: Wipeout Pulse, $20, for the latest and best of the best racing game series.

And, get this: Final Fantasy VII, $10. One of the greatest CRPGs of all time, not available on UMD, one of the only reasons I kept my PSX around for 10 years… Now just a cheap download. I need to go blow up Sector 1 Mako Reactor now. I'll see you in a few weeks when I'm done…

The argument over App Store upgrades is still going on, on Twitter and blogs.

And more and more, even normally sane people are latching onto the mantra "IT'S ONLY THREE DOLLARS!", which completely misses the entire point. So much so that it's like watching a blind person chase a squirrel. Funny, but sad and pathetic.

See the monotone "It's $3!" from Jim Dalrymple or Jeff Lamarche, and many others who are being less civil and sane. These are not normally crazy people (well, Jim's a little weird). But they're acting in a profoundly crazy and short-sighted way about this.

None of this is about the money. IT IS NOT ABOUT THE MONEY.

It's about customer service for existing customers, and about keeping existing customers in your app.

The really key point is that most, 90-99%, of Tweetie 1 users are not going to switch to Tweetie 2. They're going to see the app never get new features, and break under them when Twitter changes, and then go to another app that is being updated. Think the sales process through: "Huh, my Tweetie app broke. GUESS I'LL BUY ANOTHER COPY OF TWEETIE." It's ludicrous.

If you give a customer the opportunity to switch, they will. If you burn a customer that way, they're lost for good, and will badmouth you forever. "Bad publicity" only works when it's not about bad quality or bad pricing.

Devs whining "But it's only $3!" are just showing they have zero clue about customer service, and zero clue about what the problem is.

Now, is in-app purchase a perfect solution? No. But Apple's not going to add upgrade pricing anytime soon, if ever.

A short-term discount won't help, because early sales are important, Tweetie 1 users won't know to go get it, and if they did, they'd go buy something else.

Loren Brichter (@atebits), the author of Tweetie, has good intentions: To get paid a reasonable amount for continued improvements to an app for his customers. Apple's App Store policies make that hard to do that. But the specific plan is one of the worst business and customer service ideas I've ever heard in my life.

Update: Patrick Burleson (@pbur) has filed a Radar ticket with Apple for proper upgrade pricing, rdar://7265066 (for those inside Apple), or on OpenRadar. Go hit up Radar and file a dup!