| Mark Damon Hughes | Topic: News |
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As I said in "Apple, Java, and Chicken Little": "Oracle may make an official JVM … almost certain": Oracle and Apple Announce OpenJDK Project for Mac OS X Not only is Apple contributing their implementation of Java to OpenJDK, but Oracle will develop it, and be responsible for shipping Java 7. It's nice to see clarification that the legacy Java 6 will continue to ship on Mac OS X Lion, so existing tools won't just die. Can everyone stop freaking out now?
Yet another fancy iPad app launches for an old-media news empire: The Washington Post, home of Woodward & Bernstein. Now, I love the Washington Post, it's one of the only political news sources I halfway respect. They actually report on real news and do research. When the stories are about something I know about already, they seem pretty accurate; most newspaper "reporting" is at least half lies and bullshit. TV "news" isn't even that good, it's outright slander and fantasy and advertising. They certainly put work into the app. They even made a nice video ad with Bob Woodward. So what I'm about to say is a little disappointing. The app is terrible. The ad was pretty accurate, and Bob and everyone else will be confused by this unnavigable mess. 
Layout: Here's the front page. The masthead has no useful information except the very tiny date and two small buttons, but wastes 66 pixels of height for two buttons. The giant ad for Exxon "we're not as evil as BP, but we try! You're not still mad about the Exxon Valdez, are you?" takes up another 90 at the bottom, and the CNN-like "live topics" area another 122; that means 278 pixels are wasted instead of the standard 44 for a toolbar; 31% of the available height. It's not quite so egregious in portrait, but it still cuts off before you can read anything, and portrait doesn't have the "related articles/media" sidebar, which is one of the few good bits of the app. There's no location-awareness. They waste space showing the weather for DC, even if you're not local. It is trivial in iOS to query location and get a city, or even ask for it in setup. Back to what was confusing Bob Woodward. The page scrolls down only a little ways. Maybe they don't have it hooked up to any back content? But I think it only shows recent stories. Then you can pull down and release to refresh the page; this was a clever but hard-to-discover trick in Tweetie, but it makes no sense in a newspaper. To move to another section, you can go through the menu, or swipe left and right. But there's no indication that you can go left and right, or what's off in that direction. After Politics is Opinion, Local, Sports, National, World, Business, Lifestyle, Entertainment, Multimedia. Does that make any sense? Politics first, yes. But not National, World, then the others? And why are multimedia bits off in their own ghetto at the end, instead of just being articles? It's like a dead-trees newspaper with a DVD taped in at the back. The "Live Topics" thing at the bottom pulls up random comments from Facebook and Twitter which may or may not be related, but are of typical comment quality. The "Read Later" saves a copy of an article to the app for reading offline… But everyone already has Instapaper, right? If you don't use Instapaper, you're not using your iOS devices to their full power. I use Instapaper constantly to move links from Twitter on iPhone or iPad, and read them later on iPad or Mac. So why would I want to silo an article in one device and app? That makes no sense. When you're reading an article, if you can get there through this jumbled maze of pages and tiny article boxes, you get a scrolling plain text area. You can make it bigger or smaller, but you can't change the font. If the article is too long, there's no bookmarking or paging feature. The related article/media sidebar is nice. That's about it. And the app crashes kind of often. Reading a simple newspaper, it crashes. There are other papers on the iPad. The NY Times app is limited, and also wastes valuable article and reading space, though there's nothing so terrible as the WaPost comment bar. I used to make a lot more use of the NY Times Crossword app, but it doesn't work currently, probably since I run an iOS 4.2 beta on my iPad. 
USA Today is the McDonald's of newspapers, but their app is simple, clean, and easy to navigate. When you can go left or right, there's a pager visible to tell you so. The temperature is local. The crossword puzzle isn't especially challenging, but nicely integrated into the app. Almost every pixel is used for content or pleasant separation of sections, no giant areas wasted on bad UI widgets. The USA Today logo is a section switcher, not useless decoration. While I have little respect for USA Today as a news organization, I still read it sometimes because the app is pleasant to use. 
Perhaps the best app isn't a newspaper at all, though. Flipboard is an aggregator for items from Twitter accounts and lists, your own or various public ones. Since many blog writers now tweet about every new entry, they all show up in Flipboard. Navigation is trivially easy and obvious, and little space is wasted on anything but information. I'm not entirely pleased by how it shows articles, though: You see the first few paragraphs, then a link to the original site, so they can collect their ad revenue. While I sympathize with the need for ads, I just want everything collected. However, it does have a "Read Later" action which sends an article to Instapaper, the ONLY one of these newspaper apps which does. Still, I think this is pretty close to the ideal for a newspaper. If it had RSS support, and a clearer separation of old from new content, I'd be happy to junk all of the "newspapers" and RSS readers I use.
My original MacBook Air, "Nanite", has been my constant companion since Feb 2008. It was light and beautiful and fun and was surprisingly useful despite its performance limits. But 2 months ago, the HDD crashed. Apple Store was able to restore it to life, and I got my stuff back on it, but clearly it was dying. 2 weeks ago, it crashed again, and I didn't have it painfully revived. Fortunately, the next week Apple announced an ALL NEW 13" MacBook Air, which perfectly replaces it, and then some. I'm actually quite sad about the loss of Nanite, and it didn't come at the best time for me financially, but now I have Relto, and I love it. It's like a very good old dog dies, and you feel sad, and then you get an awesome new puppy. "Life is a succession of Lots of people have reviewed the Air, so I won't do it in detail. But there are a few points some people are missing.
I love my iPad, too, but it's a kiosk machine for running iOS apps, reading Twitter and books, and sometimes watching TV on the bus. The new MacBook Air is a really great Mac, no real compromises, and if you're not absolutely tied to big desktop storage device, you can easily use it as your only computer.
Buried in the release notes for the 10.6.3 update, Apple made a rather startling announcement: Java Deprecation:
Steve Jobs responded to feedback about this with:
Well, that's a fair point: The JVM on Mac has lagged, sometimes very badly when security problems come up, and people have constantly whined about it. And now many of the same short-attention-span people whine that Apple won't have an "official" JVM at all. There are three use cases for Java:
I think it's extremely unfortunate to lose one of the Mac's built-in application environments. Currently, you can bang together some Java and hand it to any Mac user and it'll just run. If Apple doesn't ship any JVM at all, users who want to run desktop or applet Java will have to visit Java.com and download the official Oracle/Sun JVM. But that's what Windows and Linux users have to do already, and the sky hasn't fallen on them. Developers won't have any problem getting a new JVM. There are two obvious sources for a new JVM for the Mac: OpenJDK/SoyLatte, which was developed and used widely during the 32-bit to 64-bit Intel transition, but has been on life support since; or Oracle may make an official JVM. The former is certain to come out, but may not gain much traction. The latter is almost certain, given that Larry Ellison is Steve Jobs' drinking buddy, and that Oracle likes developer mindshare. On Windows, Sun made money from Java by installing viral browser plugins for payola (yes, Sun was a shitty company without ethics, and their death is unmourned in my household). I don't know how Oracle will deal with this, but they may be more reasonable. [Update: Oracle does in fact now support Mac Java.]
The mobile phone world never ceases to amuse me. On Friday, Microsoft "released to manufacturing" (shipped the supposedly ready first version) of Windows 7 Phone 7 Series 7 Phone(TM). In other companies, this would be accompanied by a small internal party, cake and trepidation in equal balance. But Microsoft is sure they're a winner this time, so they had a parade! (These are real, no shit, no Photoshop): By "burying" iPhone and BlackBerry, are they seriously claiming that they're going to sell more than either… in, what, a year? Two years? Two years is a phone contract cycle, so if you haven't won by then, you've lost. It's obviously not going to happen. Even if Windows 7 Phone 7 Series 7 Phone(TM) doesn't completely suck (possible, though implausible) and sells better than expected (also possible, though implausible), they're going to be fourth place at best, under Android (the new featurephone standard), iPhone, BlackBerry, and perhaps HP/Palm. The only company Microsoft can realistically bury is Nokia, and that's more a case of outrunning a leper whose parts are falling off. It doesn't make you a winner. I've made fun of Nokia's "Meego" development environment, which as of 3Q 2010 (a quarter late) is still only available for netbooks, not any actual phones. Jean-Louis Gassée, the best ex-"President of Apple Products Division" they ever had, knows the same truth as Batman: Mobile device manufacturers are a superstitious, cowardly lot. So back in February, he mocked their Intel partnership:
In June, he pointed out what any adult who'd ever tried to get or use a Nokia device knew, with his Science Fiction Sketch. And today, he just lays out how they will fail.
As soon as I saw the new iPod nano, I thought: This would be a great watch. I don't normally wear a watch; my phone keeps my calendar and tells me when I have to be somewhere. Watches are semi-functional jewelry now. I have a nice (digital, but artistic) watch from Diesel, but a new one is neat. A cloth/velcro Timex watch strap cost $8 at a drug store. The strap has a loop up top which the nano's clip fits through, so it doesn't chafe against my arm. But I'd prefer leather, and I'll be looking around for a nicer one soon. It looks pretty awesome: 
Apple's made the best watch yet. There's room for improvement, but it's gorgeous, and I'm going to keep wearing it.
Python's string formatting tools annoy me. And what annoys me, eventually gets fixed, even if it's with an evil hack. In Perl (and originally in Bourne Shell), you can write:
print "It is ${foo}!";
to show the value of local variable foo. Simple, clear, and terse.
In Python up to 2.4, you would write: print "It is %s!" % (foo,) But that makes you match up positional arguments, which sucks. So there's this:
print "It is %(foo)s!" % {"foo":foo}
In Python 2.5 and later, there's a new formatter:
print "It is {foo}!".format(foo=foo)
In Python 3.0 and later, it's now:
print("It is {foo}!".format(foo=foo))
There's also Template, but it's even longer and uglier.
This is a mess. You can't even find the message in all that line noise, and the name is repeated 2 extra times. Printing several values is unmaintainable. Hack #1: Use vars() to hide the redundant name assignment.
print("It is {foo}!".format(**vars()))
# **aDict expands the dict as keyword args
Or:
print("It is %(foo)s!" % vars())
Still a lot of noise, but foo is just pulled from local scope. Maybe I can hide that vars() assignment? Hack #2:
print(fmt("It is {foo}!"))
Sweet! How did I do that? It is magic! But it's black, vile, corrupt magic, and it's about 120x slower than the ugly one (though still unnoticeably fast on modern hardware).
""">>>import inspect
>>>x=2
>>>fmt("{0} {x} {y}", 1, y=3)
'1 2 3'
"""
def fmt(s, *args, **kwargs):
c_frame = inspect.getouterframes(inspect.currentframe(), 1)[1][0]
c_args, c_varargs, c_varkw, c_locals = inspect.getargvalues(c_frame)
d = dict(c_locals)
if kwargs: d.update(kwargs)
return s.format(*args, **d)
In 2007, I wrote Amazon's Kindling, or, "Burn Before Reading" and Throw More Kindling on the Fire, where I ripped on the Kindle's terrible aesthetics, reading experience, and lock-in to Amazon's store. But at the time, it had no real competition (apart from Sony's apathetic marketing of the E-Reader), and it did reasonably well. The aesthetics and user interface improved marginally, though it's still pretty awful to use, still unreadable in dim light, still gray-on-gray, still tied to Amazon only. Now that the iPad is available, the Kindle and all other e-ink readers (Sony's E-Reader, Barnes & Noble's "Nook", Border's "Kobo") are doomed. The iPad has a bright high-contrast display, color, better fonts, and has iTunes, movies, and the App Store if you get bored of reading. The iPad's iBooks app does page flips instantly (well, half a second animation; wish I could turn that off) instead of several seconds like Kindle, has a tappable dictionary, notes, and highlighting (instead of trying to use the Kindle paddle control), illustrations, and a gorgeous user interface. It's not "as good as a paper book", it's better in every way (people with a fetish for rotting wood pulp feel & smell can turn one into a case). If you have a bunch of Kindle ebooks, they can be read in the iPad Kindle app, making the Kindle device irrelevant. The first release of iBooks was a little underwhelming, given the very limited store, but Apple is backfilling it fast. I have 8 purchased books on it now, and a bunch of "free samples" I use as bookmarks to buy when I'm done with these. I've bought two new release hardcovers (not in iBooks store) since iPad was released, but no more paperbacks, and maybe I never will again. In other countries, the iBooks store is probably going to lag a while; every publisher has different publishing deals in every country, so Apple can't just turn on books everywhere, they have to wait for the publisher to work out the rights. It may take a few months or years to untangle the legal mess of long centuries of print publishing. On the con side, an iPad costs $500 base, Kindle costs $189; iPad weighs 0.68 kg, like a hardcover, Kindle weighs 0.28kg, like a thick paperback. But you can only use the Kindle for one thing, and it does it poorly. You have space in a satchel or purse for one book-sized object. If you KNOW you're going to read in a brightly-lit area and do nothing else, the Kindle alone is sufficient; if you have any possibility of doing anything else, you'll take the iPad and leave the Kindle gathering dust. [Update: @girasquid points out that the iPad brightness may be too high for some to read on, but the brightness and sepiatone controls in iBooks give you a lot of control over your comfort level.] [Update 17:13: See ZDNet's iPad vs. Kindle vs. Sony E-Reader reading comparison, where iPad did poorly outdoors, but was better for indoors and night. I've had better outdoors experiences with it, but I live in Seattle where "the Sun don't shine".]
Scott Sigler's Ancestor was originally released as a podcast and PDF several years ago, but finally in print (just as print is dying, go figure). It's a fast-paced science fiction horror story in the vein of Michael Crichton, Robin Cook, etc., with a medical company genetically engineering a common ancestor of all mammals to use as a universal organ transplant source. Of course, everything goes wrong, horrible monsters are produced, many cows die, and then many people die on a tiny island in Canada. So. It's a fun read, and I really like some of the characters, old man Clayton and crazy geneticist Jian in particular. However, there's a bunch of problems that kept knocking out my suspension of disbelief. The über-badass Canadian Special Forces psycho killer, Magnus. Canada's Airborne Regiment had the "Somalia Affair", but that's far short of what Magnus seems to have done in his career. Disbelief isn't a strong enough term for this. The plan. Making a universal organ donor is a great idea. But a common mammalian ancestor won't do that, because it'll still be recognized as foreign material and be rejected. I can halfway give them a pass, since they're actively optimizing for non-reactive, but I don't see how it's possible. And there's something Jian does, which… isn't clear how much that affects the outcome. Still, I'm dubious. The "ancestors". These things are basically Thrinaxodon, the earliest, most primitive mammals, and were small burrowing carnivores, somewhat equivalent to a badger. Even if you massively increase their size, they're just not getting that much tougher. There's no way they were great hunters, certainly not the ravening pack shown. There is no creature that can gestate and be born that ready to fight, and in any case, Thrinaxodon was egg-laying (yes, they can still be mammals; the Platypus still lays eggs). It has spines from Dimetrodon, a distant more-reptilian cousin of Thrinaxodon; where would Jian get the genes for that? Augh. And it's smart, maybe as smart as an angry Chimpanzee, which is about 240 million years anachronistic for tiny-brained Thrinaxodon. Almost nothing about this thing makes sense. The heroes are obviously immortal. There's no way that certain people are ever going to die, and you can see it right off. I don't mind a happy ending where it makes sense, but the last few chapters go from "scrappy hero escapes tough situation" to "plot immunity". By the time the last character is saved, I was almost resigned, like I was on a crashing train, nothing to do but watch it crash. Yeah, of course [SPOILER] will win that fight and be okay in the icy water and everyone is safe. Ha ha ha. I loved Sigler's Infected and Contagious, and I'm looking forward to Pandemic. But I may be passing on Descendent, the sequel to Ancestor, or at least waiting for cheap paperback or ebook.
I'm not at WWDC this year. By the time they announced it late, and with an increased price, I had to stop and think hard about that money… and then it was sold out 8 days later, making my lack of decision easier. I'll get the videos later, I guess. But for now, I'm watching the video from the Apple Keynote podcast. The tone of this piece is pretty angry. There's some serious problems in Apple Land, videogames, and tech "journalism", and all three were showcased heavily in the keynote. I'm not anti-Apple, and I'm not quitting iOS dev to eat nuts and berries and code on Android and hope someone puts a few pennies in my begging cup. Let's not be stupid here. But there are problems, and I'm angry at them. Apple have changed their minds in response to anger before, so maybe it'll happen again. OH, GREAT SPIRITS, HEAR MY ANGRY BLOGGING. Should I sacrifice a goat, too? I dunno where to get a goat around here. Steve Jobs Lies About Rejections.First, I have no problem with HTML5 as an "unrestricted" SDK. I've written "HTML5" apps (more precisely, "HTML/CSS/JavaScript/AJAX + web server", which just ROLLS off the tongue). I like working with those, if they're green-field new apps which only run on Safari. Legacy JavaScript and cross-browser web dev is horrible. HTML5 performance is not as good as native, but it's as good as or better than Flash now. So really, can't complain too much. I also have no problem with a "curated" store for software that works as advertised. However. 95% approval in the App Store? That's 750 rejections per week. Many are NOT for crashing, private APIs, or misrepresentation. Those may be the "top 3", I'm going to assume Steve isn't lying blatantly here, just by omission, but he is lying. The big additional reasons for rejection are:
You Are Cattle. You Are Being Farmed.The Farmville app demo looks like shit. They have an art budget, right? It sure doesn't look like it. It scrolls like crap; I like turn & grid games, but this is not even doing that right. People pay money for this? People pay money to keep playing this? Mark Pincus of Zynga is an unapologetic drug pusher, he even acts like some hopped-up midwestern meth-head pimp with a junkie wife, nothing more. I wasn't anti-Zynga before, but seeing this prick praising junkies for waking at 2am or neglecting their jobs to "farm"… Fuck that guy. If you're playing Farmville, you are being farmed by this shithead. He is using you, and taking your money for NOTHING. It's not even a good game. Animal Crossing is one of the greatest games ever made, or Harvest Moon for the slightly more hardcore, and are the same idea done pleasantly, fairly to the players, with beautiful art and music and cool surprises, and you only pay once. Air Guitar Is Not An Instrument.The Activision pretend-you're-playing-music demo is fine, except it's still a game where you pretend you're playing music instead of actually playing music. How about you make a game where you play music on a real instrument, and the game judges your quality and trains you? Wouldn't that be awesome? You could actually learn something WHILE having fun! Yeah, I know, it's Activision, where fun has gone to die for over 20 years, but still. I remember and miss Pitfall. The Tragedy Of The Common WiFi User.So, the wifi problem in the demo. 570 people were broadcasting wifi access points. WWDC has wifi, last year they had 3 networks: One secured for Apple, one public for MacBooks, one public for iPhones. This worked quite well. There are 11 standard "channels" in wifi. If you have more than about 11 broadcasting in a close area, nobody can connect to any of them reliably, and all of them slow down to uselessness. This is an example of the Tragedy of the Commons. Each blogger/"journalist" wanted their own access, JUST IN CASE Apple shut the public one down or it overloaded. Each blogger operating their own access point is polluting the public space just a bit. If only a few of them did it, there would be no problem. When all of them do, the entire area is poisoned, and Apple can't give the demo which is the purpose of their keynote. Now obviously, nobody can expect journalists to be rational creatures; even the ones I like are at best remoras, and the worst are parasitic ticks. Still, the entire day after that keynote, all the journalists were bragging about how they hid their "MyFis" under their fat asses, or just blatantly ignored Steve's request. The arrogance and ignorance on display is stunning. They didn't comprehend at all that they were at fault, or that they should do anything except more of what they were doing. I expect that next year Apple will have security search the aisles and evict violators. You can't reason with a "journalist" who thinks his story justifies any offense, you can only drag him into a back alley and beat him into a coma. Bing Goes The Internet.This is so stupid. Because of Google's little lover's tiff with Apple, Apple's now making out with ugly, hairy Bing, and putting it "as an option" in the search fields of Safari on desktop and iOS. The problem is, Bing search results are naïve, they have no "similar" suggestions. They spend a lot of effort adding wizards for travel, etc., but it's not a viable alternative to Google. Read Us "Winnie The Pooh" Again, Papa Steve!Great Eeyore, does Steve read any other book than Winnie the Pooh? iBooks on iPhone is nice. And it has left justified text now, instead of the harder-to-read fully-justified previously! Syncing notes, place, bookmarks between devices, all very nice stuff copied from Kindle. Not that I like Kindle, I'll happily switch to iBooks when the store has more content, but these are not new features, just Apple playing catch-up with their prettier but less functional app. PDFs included in iBooks is a small but much-appreciated improvement. Yes, I already have GoodReader. But they belong in iBooks. Dick Tracy, Or Tracy's Dick.Videophones, AKA "FaceTime". Okay, first, Star Trek communicators were voice only. Kirk would flip it open, turn the little knob to tune in, and bark out "MORE POWER OR WE'RE ALL DEAD, MISTER SCOTT!" Both Star Trek and Jetsons showed video chat on large fixed screens, and we already have that, iChat AV. It works fine, it was a nice demo on Mac OS X some years ago, including those silly background replacements. Turns out most people don't want videophones, because you can't lie as easily, you have to put on pants, etc. Text is best, voice is second, video is a distant third. Worse, it doesn't work over 3G networking. It only works over wifi. Which you would probably have at home, where your desktop computer with iChat is. If you're out, where you might want to facial, er, "FaceTime" someone, that would likely be on 3G, and you can't use it. The people who will get some benefit from this are parents calling kids, if the spoiled brats have an iPhone 4G. And sexting now becomes live porn chat with your S.O., or with a sexy phone line operator. THAT is pretty cool. Of course, I did think of a good use for it. If you've been bad, I mean really bad, so bad you earn a spot in one of my diatribes, you may receive a FaceTime call. It will be a pale, hairy blob, with a pit of eternal darkness in the middle. This will be my most profound way of calling you an asshole. TOTALLY not related to that, does anyone have Steve's phone number? ;)
I got my DODOcase for iPad today, a mere 5 weeks after ordering (for something hand-crafted... not bad!). The traditional unboxing photos after the break: It really looks and feels like a big Moleskine. With the cover folded back and rubber-banded in place, the spine is just big enough to grip in portrait, and provides a shallow but usable slope for typing in landscape. I might, maybe, prefer if the cover could fold flat, but it's pretty good as it is. The foam corner grips are serious business. It's difficult — not impossible, but requires force and strong fingers — to remove the iPad from the grips. It's unlikely to shake out. I'll see how that lasts in the months and years to come, but for now I'm very pleased with the solution. All of the ports are accessible. It doesn't fit in the dock, but the cables go in and I can reach the switches. If I have one complaint, it's that it doesn't have an interior pocket like a real Moleskine. I may glue one into the front cover interior. All in all, an excellent iPad case, that really solves my problems of safety and landscape support.
So, I'm not inherently the most productive monkey on the planet. I am, in fact, near-amnesiac, easily OOH SHINY distracted, and have no willpower against fun (say, making that "shiny" joke which was funny once a hundred years ago). Out of desperation is born solutions. I track what I've done and what I'm doing in two complementary ways:
Old games never die, they are periodically reanimated to stagger forth, frighten townsfolk, throw small girls into wells, and finally exact bloody revenge on their creators for abandoning them to a cruel world. Myst Online: Uru Live (MOUL, or Uru) is just such an old, cranky Frankenstein's monster of a game. It was first designed and beta tested by Cyan Worlds in 2003. In 2004, publisher Ubisoft killed the online game and released a single-player version. In 2006, Cyan released a sort of samizdat version called "Until Uru", where fans ran unofficial shards of the online game. In 2007, GameTap hosted Uru, and let it run on minimal budget for another year, then cancelled it in 2008. Here in 2010, Cyan is hosting it themselves, for free, and collecting donations to keep the servers running. Their plan is to eventually release the system and building tools as open source, but run an official server. I first played Uru in the GameTap era, since that was the first Mac client. On the positive side, it had beautiful graphics, sound, and world design, a few great puzzle Ages, and a ton of Myst story. The multiplayer design wasn't bad, though the population was very small and not very communicative. The private island home, Relto, can be customized with a bunch of new features (see my screenshots below). On the disappointing side, it had very few puzzle Ages, a small and reclusive player population, and a general air of neglect and abandonment. Lag in any public area with 20+ players was (and is) a serious problem. The non-game UI and cursors are hideous, sub-Linux, jarring badly with the lovely, detailed game world. During the beta of 2003 and again in the GameTap era of 2007, Cyan ran a few in-character "events" to drive the storyline. Unfortunately, they did this in the worst way imaginable: Staff logged in as their avatars, found random online players, and played out the events with them and whoever happened to be on. Everyone else heard about it second-hand or read chat logs. In the new release, I'm somewhat more optimistic. There are 3 "new" (built in the time at GameTap) puzzle Ages, a multiplayer toy Age, and several sight-seeing ages online, which pretty much doubles the amount of gameplay, to the point where it would be a commercially-acceptable game. The revived player base is currently fairly active, and higher quality than what I saw during the GameTap era. It's all hard-core Myst fans, because nobody else really knows it exists. There is no sign there will be a repeat of the cheesy events, though more out of lack of time/finances than because they've seen reason. The tools for the fan-created Ages aren't usable yet, but there's a high likelihood they will be this year. THAT will make all the difference. Uru right now is still a short game with nothing to do except chat after you're "done". With fan-created Ages, not only will you have an unlimited-ish amount of content, you can make your own if you're competent with 3D modelling and Python programming. You can find it at Myst Online, though Mac users have to jump through a few hoops to get the old Cider wrapper updated to run it. If you're in-cavern, send KI-mail to mdhughes / KI 05422418. I'm still checking in at least once a week, just to see if anyone needs a hand, to chase my Great Zero marker times down to something tolerable, or on specific event dates. As fan material makes its way in, I'll be in more often. There's a ton of information, hints if you really get stuck, occasional news and special events, and support for technical problems at various forums: A few of my screenshots (all 1280x800, open in a new window)
So there was Steve, laying out the strategy for the next decade. An iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad is just "software in a box". There's almost nothing to them but software, one home button, which I expect to go away next. Why is Apple so obsessive about excluding Flash, or using the Safari "WebKit" engine they control instead of Firefox's "Gecko" engine, or not incorporating every random media codec (WMA, OGG, etc.) in iTunes, or controlling what native apps are carried on the App Store? "We'll get slammed if we don't." Later he gets in an argument with Walt about playing WMA in iTunes, and states they spend their energy on things they control. And I laughed out loud at this:
Andrew Sullivan asks: "If I may intrude, and ask a questoin I do not mean to be loaded, just curious: I wonder what Kevin thinks happens to him when he dies? And how does he feel about that - not just emotionally but existentially?" A reasonable atheist simply doesn't fear death. We weren't unhappy before birth. We get a life; however good or bad it is, at least it's life. We won't be unhappy after death. It's only made-up stories of immortality and eternal torment that make people fear death. I'll try to stay alive as long as I can, but there's no reason to fear it ending someday, because I certainly won't care afterwards.
Immigration in the U.S. is a giant problem for only one group of people: Racists. The U.S. is built on illegal immigration. Pre-Columbian North America was inhabited by millions of people. They were at a stone age technology level, but it was still their country. The Spanish, French, and English arrived and waged war, sometimes made treaties, sometimes kept those treaties and often didn't, and got "lucky" that their diseases (e.g., smallpox) were deadlier than the Native Americans' diseases (e.g., syphilis). This was not legitimate immigration. Later, nativists fought to prevent the Irish (especially during the Potato Famine), Jews, Italians, and Chinese from immigrating or becoming legal citizens once here. Fortunately, the nativists lost, the U.S. got a large work force, and they're now "just Americans". For the last century, Mexico and the U.S. have had an intertwined economy, as we hire their workers for our cheapest labor, and those workers send much of their money home, propping up Mexico's economy. There are exploitative elements to this system, but it's voluntary and benefits both sides of the border. If we made immigration easier, the exploitative elements might ease up and we might make more income tax off of the immigrants. Making immigration harder hurts everyone. Yet, determined to always be on the wrong side of history, the Republicans and the state of Arizona are opposing immigration. Arizona has seriously passed a law straight out of the law books of Nazi Germany, that anyone (who isn't white enough) has to present papers showing that they're citizens, or be deported. If this was the plot in a dystopian novel, I would find it implausible. And yet here we are, with crazy people running Arizona. So. I have a better plan for U.S. citizenship & immigration:
This would allow Mexican laborers to get citizenship, pay income tax, and participate legally in our society. This would allow us to "brain drain" the best, brightest, and most adventurous people from around the world to make America better. And it would fulfil the best principles of our country, and reject fear-mongering, hate, and isolationism.
I've done a bit of writing on the iPad in Pages ($9.99 on the App Store) now. Propping the iPad up on my lap like a paper notebook is entirely possible, and typing on it in landscape mode is quite pleasant. I can't type as fast as with a hardware keyboard (with caffeine and typing from copy, I do 90 wpm), but I'm getting 40-50 wpm with very few errors unless my fingers get off by one, in which case I'm Pages is almost functional for writing, but there are some blocking issues. You can only do formatting from portrait mode. This is my most serious complaint. You can type in landscape, but then have to rotate the device to do any formatting. DRIVES. ME. INSANE. If it just had a style selector, I'd be happy with this view. [Update: Pages 1.1 added the formatting ruler to landscape. Pages is now useful all the time.] Creating a numbered list is easy: Type 1. whatever [return]:
Creating a bulleted list is not obvious or easy: Type [.?123][hold down -, choose optional char •] whatever [return]
On Pages/Mac, and almost every word processor I've ever used, you can just use * whatever to start a bulleted list. I do this many many times whenever I write, I think in lists, so this is deeply frustrating. On Pages/Mac, when you select a header style, type a line, and hit return, it switches to Body style, because you would almost never type multiple headers in a row. On Pages/iPad, styles stay locked in until you manually switch, which is a total pain in the ass. Basically I've been reduced to leaving text notes h1. Some Header, then I go back and style it up later. So I'm thinking perhaps tomorrow I'll hit the Apple Store, get an Apple wireless keyboard, maybe a dock, so I can prop the iPad up in portrait mode and still type. Yes, I could instead use my MacBook Air just like I'm doing now. But for non-programming writing, Pages/iPad is close to usable, and so much more portable, and the battery lasts for days of serious use, so maybe I don't always need the laptop & power supply, if I'm just going to go out and sit in a park or café and write. Apple should get some professional writers to work with Pages/iPad for a while, and address their needs. This is so close to being a laptop killer… The Import/Export BusinessYou can get documents from Pages/Mac to Pages/iPad in four ways:
I've been using iWork.com. iWork.com is still in beta, and I'm desperately hoping Apple just makes it part of MobileMe, but this works quite well. It isn't a "sync" or revision control, it's just copying the document from Mac to iWork, and iWork to iPad, and reverse. If you make changes on the iPad, and different changes on the Mac, it won't resolve them for you. If you're working solo, this is fine. In a team environment, it's probably not fine. The mail solution works well enough, but it's an extra step in the way, and litters your mailbox. I don't like litter. If iWeb was just a little bit smarter and had the ability to edit templates, I might well use it for my own web sites, and for casual users it's a fantastic way to make a simple web site and blog. But there appears to be no (easy) way to give a Pages document a new page that isn't a blog post. I could use Cyberduck to upload the document to my public folder on MobileMe, then paste a link from that into iWeb… Which defeats the whole point of iWeb, not dealing with all that crap. The other problem for import/export is that Pages/iPad has a limited subset of formatting, and does not understand a lot of advanced word processing features. So if you dump a formatted document onto iPad, work on it, and send it back to Mac, it will have stripped out most of your formatting. Use Pages/iPad for word processing, NOT for layout, not for change tracking, not for gigantic shared business documents. [Update: 2010-04-21: Mea culpa, I confused the import process for iWork.com and manual earlier.]
There is a significant missing feature in Mobile Safari on iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad: View Source. Drag the javascript link below to your browser address bar, and sync your bookmarks to your iThings. When you "visit" the bookmark, the visible page will be replaced with a source view! Click on the link at the top or hit back to revisit the site.
The iPad is lovely, but it's still a giant sheet of glass with a slick metal back. I don't feel safe without some protection. The Apple iPad case is appalling. It's fuzzy & tacky on all surfaces, so it's almost impossible to slide the iPad in and out, and it collects dust & lint on every surface, including the closed flap, so your screen gets dirty. I can barely stand to touch it after it's been out in the world for a few hours, it's so grimy. The design is okay, but the surface is vile. What I want is: A case that stays on the iPad, has a flap to cover the screen, but can be folded back around so I have something to grip. Two options look good:
In lieu of either, I bought a Belkin Grip Sleeve for iPad, and I'll just be careful when holding the iPad outside the case. It's a bit of a girly man-purse, but fits nicely in my satchel's outer pocket.
The iPad's "killer feature" is, in many ways, just as an electronic book. I hear you say, "$500 or more to replace a simple $25 hardcover? Crazy!", but when you consider that it can (in theory) hold EVERY book you EVER bought, an entire library in your hands, it makes a lot more sense. It's not one book, it's all books. And with that realization, it goes from "expensive toy" to "you'll take my iPad from my cold dead hands which'll be wrapped around your throat cuz you were trying to take my books". Apple's iBooks app is, as seen in the iBooks Guided Tour, very pretty, and the store has a decent interface for searching and browsing through sections of books, though they all seem to be recent best-sellers. If you can find what you want there, or if the free copy of Winnie the Pooh is all you need (me, I would've gone with The Wind in the Willows or Alice in Wonderland), iBooks is gorgeous, and an excellent reading interface. It would be nice to have more font options, and ragged right edges instead of justified text, but it's fine for long stretches of reading. Naturally, I wanted one of my favorite books, the most appropriate book possible for an electronic book reader, that wholly remarkable book by Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. However, the iBooks Store is very, very new, and very, very empty, like the deep, endless emptiness of space. It does not have the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or indeed any Douglas Adams. In fact, it has somewhere between "Bugger" and "All" in the way of books. It has books in much the same way as the Monty Python Cheese Shop has cheese. Sigh. So I went over to Amazon.com (you can't shop from within the app, it opens a web browser to buy the book), got a Kindle book, and read it on the Kindle app for iPad. The good part about the Kindle app is that it has the Kindle store on Amazon, and a ton of books, and they all sync between Kindle readers (ugh), the iPhone app (too tiny), the Mac desktop app (too ugly, because they used fucking C++/Qt to develop it), and now the iPad app. The iPad Kindle app is spartan. It has a nice title screen, but beyond that it does its level best to make the iPad look as dull and drab and boring and featureless as the Kindle reader. For variation in reading options, there is one serif font with 5 sizes, and three choices of color, and that's all. It is also very sloppy about positioning. Spatial memory and keeping page breaks consistent is important when reading, but Kindle has no concept of this. It's really more of a web browser with page breaks than a "book reader", except that a web browser has better reading amenities. Footnotes are an especially bad case:
Sigh. At some point, either iBooks will have a decent selection to go with the great reading experience, or the Kindle app's reading experience will be improved to the point where I don't care, or the Vogon constructor fleet will arrive and destroy the Earth. No bets on which comes first.
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