FOSS Patents on Apple vs Samsung →

FOSS Patents has a great post about the Apple vs Samsung verdict, summarizing:

Samsung has issued a statement that claims this jury verdict is a loss for consumers. But things are more complex than that. There can be no reasonable doubt that Samsung and Google have engaged, and continue to engage, in "copytition" (competing through copying) rather than wholly-independent creation. Somewhere the courts have to draw the line and afford some degree of protection to innovators. I don't always agree with Apple's claims, and I don't like all of Apple's patents, but the kind of disregard for other companies' intellectual property that Samsung and Google effectively propose is certainly not the answer.

Most People Look Like Idiots

A post in The Verge's forums recently went after Apple's retina displays, proclaiming that not only did Apple squander the retina display by simply providing too many pixels, thus draining the battery unnecessarily, but the Surface Pro was better and blah blah blah.

It's a thorough analysis in all but one small detail, namely the distance at which people use their mobile devices. Not only does he assert at what distance he assumes people use these devices (15-22"/38-55cm), he asserts that if you do anything else, "you look like an idiot".

Let me count the ways in which I look like an idiot:

  1. When I'm in bed, with the iPad resting on my chest, just around my nipples at less than 10", I look like an idiot.
  2. When I'm sitting at my desk, head in my hand with my iPad flat on the desktop, at about 12", I look like an idiot.
  3. When the iPad is in its dock on the kitchen counter and I'm leaning in to read a recipe, I look like an idiot.
  4. When I sit in my couch, with a pillow in my lap and the iPad on top of it, I look like an idiot.
  5. When I'm talking to my wife on FaceTime, and I pull the iPad closer because I miss her, I look like an idiot.

And so on…

Maybe I'm just an idiot who doesn't know how to use his iPad. On the other hand, maybe RobbCab should worry less about equations and more about real world usage?

Bollony

Since the retraction hit, I thankfully haven't seen anyone come to Mike Daisey's defense (apart from himself). Yet he still seems quite incapable of seeing not only how damaging his lies have been to the cause he so vehemently claims to stand for — to the point that I wonder if he really thinks that he is the only one who cares? — but he also is apparently without regret for having misled his audience. He'll apologize to Ira Glass and This American Life, perhaps mostly because he was found out, yet he honestly believes that his audience was in on the joke. That when they paid him money, and sat down to listen to his monologue, it was understood that it was in fact a 'show'-show, and not a 'true story'-show, despite the fact that it was presented like it in every way shape or form. Despite the fact that the monologue presents itself as an actual travelogue; as truth. As fact.

That because he believes there is something to be outraged about, whatever it takes to get other people outraged is fair game, including misleading people, handing off things he never experienced as his own experiences, and being indignant when confronted with the fact that perhaps the rest of the world does not live in his bubble of 'theater reality'.

Let it be no secret that I can't stand Daisey's affected intonation, and 'I am outraged!' diatribe, I haven't liked him since I read his Amazon book in fact, but listening to his Georgetown talk from yesterday made me actually furious.

Nevermind that the man can't even talk straight about his mistake, without putting on another goddamn show; without giving it a reading that would need toning down if it were Shakespeare; one that makes Michael Moore blush. But to hear him defend his work, of which he is unwaveringly proud, despite the fact that it was made up, is unbelievable. You created a story. Guess what? You're not the first person to do so. You piggybacked your cause on the back of Apple's success and the perception of the defenseless chinese worker, and yeah there might in fact be something to be outraged about, but what you did is called drama. Melodrama. What is there to be proud of, when you manipulated the truth, to create a more compelling version of it?

And nevermind that Daisey continually presents himself as a knight in shining armor, a sole defender of the weak and oppressed, the single voice of reason in an uncaring world. He is outraged I tell you!... Well... As should be abundandly clear, except I don't think it is to Mike Daisey, that does not give him the license to mislead his audience.

I guess the lesson is that, if you can hang it on a cause, anything goes.

Except it doesn't.

Hollywood's Setting Sun

In the wake of the SOPA/PIPA overthrow (good riddance) to much ado and flag-waving in the last day or so, Y Combinator announced their looking to fund startups that will “Kill Hollywood”.

Hollywood appears to have peaked. If it were an ordinary industry (film cameras, say, or typewriters), it could look forward to a couple decades of peaceful decline. But this is not an ordinary industry. The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise. #

Which reminded me of this excerpt, which wonderfully describes how Hollywood has come to look in the past decade or two:

Is Hollywood’s famous sun really setting? There is certainly a hint of twilight in the smog and, lately, over the old movie capital there has fallen a grey-flannel shadow. Television is moving inexorably westward. Emptying the movie theatres across the land, it fills the movie studios. Another industry is building quite another town; and already, rising out of the gaudy ruins of screenland, we behold a new, drab, curiously solemn brand of the old foolishness.

There must always be a strong element of the absurd in the operation of a dream factory, but now there’s less to laugh at and even less to like. The feverish gaiety has gone, a certain brassy vitality drained away. TV, after all, is a branch of the advertising business, and Hollywood behaves increasingly like an annex of Madison Avenue. #

That’s Orson Welles, in his Twilight in the Smog, Esquire, March, 1959. 50 years ago. And lest we forget, the Hollywood of which Orson Welles was writing, was the Hollywood of the 50s blacklisting. You think SOPA/PIPA is corrupt and contemptible? It’s merely ignorant and silly in comparison to the insidiousness of the blacklist. Is the sun just taking it’s sweet time? If that’s the case, we have a long night ahead of us.

Today it isn’t so much television that’s moving inexorably westward (peak TV anyone?), even if the best competing content is still TV-based, yet the view of the dying giant, the dusk over tinsel town, is much the same it seems.

What ended up happening in the years following Welles’s twilight was in fact not a slow death, but a rejuvenation of the ailing studio system—New Hollywood—which rather than setting the sun on Hollywood, was an explosion of light, re-inventing it instead. For a time, in the late 60s, up through the 70s, it seemed like a true transformation had taken place; that the lunatics had taken over the asylum, as the allegory goes. Movies were arguably more personal, more honest and more innovative than they had ever been before! Hollywood had fallen out of touch with the audiences, and survived by becoming simply a channel for creative new filmmakers, who were in touch with the audience.

“Kill Hollywood” makes for a great slogan—can’t you just see it spray-painted on the sides of buildings, or on the cover of Wired?—but it makes for a futile strategy against an industry that has proven so thoroughly in the past (albeit forcefully stubborn and greedy, but of which industry is that not true?) nothing if not adaptable. New Hollywood did rejuvenate Hollywood, but only for a time. The pendulum swings both ways; and at the end of the day, while being an ‘arts business’, film is still first and foremost business.

The failed coup of New Hollywood, is read by some as a failed attempt at killing off Old Hollywood, though it seems that it was less about killing Hollywood, and more about transforming it. About infusing it with a renewed energy and focusing its strengths and power into something meaningful. In the end, the failure of the coup, however noble, wasn’t a failure to kill Old Hollywood, but a failure to blend the two cultures. The radicals creatives, and the suited businessmen. The light, and the darkness.

The pendulum swung back, business won out, and Orson Welles seems as prescient today, as he ever did.

So Y Combinator’s revolutionary cry can be faulted for being too black and white in what the end-game in this should be, but what’s worse is that although referred to simply as “Hollywood”, there is no such single entity, even if it’s (supposedly) guarded by branch organizations like the MPAA. What does “Kill Hollywood” even mean, when Hollywood is everything and anything related to films, from writing through production to marketing and distribution? This idea that Hollywood needs to be killed because it is ‘evil’, based off of the actions of this supposed monolithic entity, is as ignorant as the blacklisting of supposed reds in the 50s; if not as harmful.

I certainly applaud any attempt to further the entertainment industry and to educate the ignorants behind, and supporters of, such foolish measures as SOPA/PIPA. But with Y Combinator located in Mountain View, they should know and understand the tech industry, if nothing else, and what has been the biggest revolution in technology in the past 15 years? Apple. And how did Apple become the behemoth it is today?

By making great products, and smart decisions.

Sure you can position the establishment as the enemy fortress to be invaded; but there is a marked difference between wanting to ‘kill the enemy’ and ‘spread democracy’. One is the rhetoric of hatred, the other of love.

And hey, it’s not like the tech industry hasn’t found itself in similar binds; in fact while this legislation became linked to Hollywood, they’re just as applicable to software, or even hardware! Hell, the DMCA, that horrible forerunner for SOPA, has been used by companies like Microsoft to protect the Xbox against nosey hackers for years; so should we kill Silicon Valley too?

Lasting change rarely comes at the end of a knife, but over the course of education and understanding, but “Kill Hollywood” is a better battle-cry than “Teach Hollywood why making great products, breaking down barriers and understanding the zeitgeist is better than stubbornly wielding their political power for their own gains,” or perhaps the even more apt “Upend the Washington that allowed lobbyists to convince apparently ignorant politicians of an agenda that serves only the industries for which the lobbyists work, and not the people.”

"Ahh, the stench has a name [...]"

[The] Premier of Taiwan was ordering an investigation into Apple’s Slide-to-Unlock” patent. I thought there was more to this story because getting the Premier of Taiwan to investigate a patent and making it so public in such a short time after the patent was granted, stunk. We later found out that Google’s Eric Schmidt was coming to Taiwan and was working with the government on a new project. Ahh, the stench has a name and it’s Google; in particular, Eric Schmidt. Schmidt made it clear that it was war on Apple’s products and they promised Android OEMs that they could use any of Google’s patents to wage war against Apple in court. #

Wake Up and Ship!

Not to start that whole thing again, but where Apple has had a knack for bringing progressive products to the consumer market, Microsoft has always had a knack for creating videos about the kinds of products it would like to be able to bring to market… but never does.

The latest is the Productivity Future Vision from the Office division, which like all their videos, looks great (and probably would interact horrible in a real-world scenario):

I suspect these videos are made not only by outside agencies (if you know different, let me know), but entirely by graphic designers who dream about interaction design, but never had to realize their ideas in the real world.

It’s a bit like having a great print-only designer design a website; it looks great, until it has to actually live inside a browser.

Dreams are for sleeping; it’s time to wake up.

Real artists ship.

"To Steve"

We were in a restaurant when I got the news on my iPhone. Unable to digest the finality, we simply toasted his legacy. The couple next to us promptly raised their glasses to ours, “To Steve”.

To you, Steve. Thank you for everything.

Prior Art? Really?

Samsung cited the viewscreen used in a scene in Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey as prior art in the lawsuit filed against them by Apple over the likeness of the Galaxy Tab vs. the iPad, claiming that:

In a clip from that film lasting about one minute, two astronauts are eating and at the same time using personal tablet computers. The clip can be downloaded (sic) online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ8pQVDyaLo. As with the design claimed by the D’889 Patent, the tablet disclosed in the clip has an overall rectangular shape with a dominant display screen, narrow borders, a predominately flat front surface, a flat back surface (which is evident because the tablets are lying flat on the table’s surface), and a thin form factor. (Source)

Setting aside the fact that there can’t be any question in the minds of rationally thinking people, that the Galaxy Tabs treads in the footsteps of the iPad, albeit drunkenly and without much conviction, there’s the small issue that despite Samsung’s claims, the iPad shares almost no properties with the viewscreens in 2001.

  1. It is about twice the size of the iPad.
  2. It’s edges are flush with the screen, except at the bottom.
  3. It has ten physical push-buttons, numbered 1 through 10 at the bottom.
  4. There is no interaction with the device, aside from Bowman turning it on to view a video signal.

Samsung’s claim misleads by using the term ‘personal tablet computers’, when in fact there is nothing to indicate them as such. The claim also links to a YouTube video which specifically uses the words “Apple iPad” in its title.

There’s only one problem; the viewscreen in 2001 are not computers, they are, flat, battery-powered TVs. They look and and operate exactly how you would extrapolate a TV if you were looking to make a film taking place some 30 years in the future. Smaller and portable. And vertical, for the same reasons that hallways in science fiction films are never simply square. And they display no interactive properties beyond that, nor do they share such crucial properties with the iPad as its grapping bezel, or compact size. Not to mention the ability to function as something other than a TV.

It is no more prior art to the design of the iPad, than a TV set is prior art to the design of the Mac.

Read also: Joen and I follow up.

Update: Justice is served in Germany.

The Blackberry Playbook and Our Natural Predators

We’re pretty simple. If something sudden happens, we react. We flinch. We stop. We divert all of our attention, unwillingly, to whatever it is that could potentially be posing as a danger to our well being. We will interrupt whatever we’re doing at loud noises or when catching something out of the corner of our eye. It’s our fight or flight instinct. We can’t help it.

Now watch this, and pay particular attention to the animations:

Now if I say: “hunting tiger”?

The animation curves on the Blackberry Playbooks UI are those of a predator, just as it pounces its prey; slooow and then fast!. It’s incredibly disconcerting, causing our lizard brain to subconciously analyze the motions of something as harmless as windows on a screen for signs of danger.

This recalls Apple’s ‘Breathing Status LED Indicator’ (and Dell’s hopeless imitation), though I should mention, just for good measure, that Apple isn’t above reproach; try bringing up your dashboard, and dismiss it. Notice how the widgets fly into your face!, say like a tiger, rather than simply fade away?

Interaction design should for the most part be all but transparent to the user, so here’s my pro tip of the day: try not to emulate our natural predators.

Update: Oddly, the animation curves used for all the marketing material aren’t the ones used in this practical demo:

Google, Apple and Bob Dylan

I had a short discussion on Twitter this morning — I’d link to it, if Twitter had thread permalinks — sparked by Danielle’s tweet, in which she calls bullshit on Gawker’s article on the new Google Instant commercial, in which Ryan Tate (who has had a brush with Jobs earlier this year, and with whom I don’t agree in the slightest with regards to the iPad) asserts that regardless its intentions, this is one ad Steve Jobs will hate:

I’m with Ryan Tate on this. Not only is this ad unusual for Google, which even when it gets imaginative, is obviously an engineers club, not a poets society (with exceptions). And while the Google Instant commercial still sacrifices actual charm and humanity for a factual message — contrary to Think Different — since both companies operate in the tech industry, the very use of Dylan, intentionally or not, is absolutely comparable.

Think Different was a major milestone for Apple. Aside from building Apple’s current image, it marked Steve Jobs’ return and in many ways the start of what we now know as Apple. It was a campaign that was not only tremendously important to Apple as a company, but it was very personal to Steve Jobs:

But his well-known relationship with Bob Dylan goes way back, to well before his return to Apple. Here in the 2003 Rolling Stone interview:

Steve Wozniak turned me on to [Bob Dylan]. I was probably … oh … maybe 13, 14. We ended up meeting this guy who had every bootleg tape in the world. He was a guy that actually put out a newsletter on Bob Dylan. He was really into it — his whole life was about Bob Dylan. But he had the best bootlegs — even better stuff than you can get today that’s been released. He had amazing stuff. And so we had our room full of tapes of Bob Dylan that we copied. #

In fact, I think Steve Jobs probably sees a lot of himself in Dylan:

He was a very clear thinker, and he was a poet.

Or maybe that’s just me projecting… Either way, here’s the opening of the 1984 shareholders meeting where he first revealed the Macintosh:

Here’s Bob Dylan in an iPod commercial:

And the list goes on.

This isn’t about Dylan, and whether or not he’s willing to do commercials or not (Danielle brought up Victoria’s Secret and Pepsi as examples), this is about the iconography that he brings with him, when used in specific contexts.

Google’s commercials have most often been about the product. Whether it’s fast, secure, easy to use and so on. Google is a very fact-centric company, by heart. I love Google, but they have for a long time been an image-challenged company, and have only in recent years started to do commercials at all, let alone ones that convey more than facts.

Apple on the other hand is a counter-cultural company; radical in a way. For a long time that’s been the defining trait of Apple’s brand and the way Steve Jobs saw himself and his products in relation to the rest of the tech industry. And few companies, in particular a company like Google, are driven so much by the personality of the CEO as Apple has been.

And that’s why it tastes a little bit funny when another tech giant, in direct competition with Apple, puts out a — for them — atypical commercial using imagery, which filtered through a post-Think Different world, will always be associated with Apple and Steve Jobs (the two being virtually inseparable).

Whether the radical counter-cultural underdog image is still sticking to Apple these days, is another discussion entirely, but to put it in context, Google using black and white Bob Dylan imagery is a little like 1980’s Coke using Michael Jackson.

It would be a lot of things. A coincidence wouldn’t be one of them.

Writing on the iPad: A Story of Love, Heartache & Infuriating Bugs

Even when I close any notifiers and twitter-/chat clients, I’m just too easily distracted to get writing done in proper on my Mac. I blame Command-TAB, however I guess I’ll have to take full responsibility myself…

Then I bought a keyboard dock for the iPad, because it hit me: The iPad is single-tasking (in terms of its interface-regime). It doesn’t have menubar items. It doesn’t have Command+TAB or a dock (in the traditional sense). In fact, one of the things I love the most about it is exactly the fact that it becomes the very app you have open at any given time, to the exclusion of almost everything else.

I keep the keyboard dock tucked away in the kitchen, ready to go. Drop the iPad in and it’s off to the races. The kitchen gets me in a completely different mindset than the living room or bedroom (where my normal setup sits). It’s about as ergonomically wrong as it gets, but something in the mixture of the location, the distraction-free interface and the free-form nature of the iPad itself… It changes the nature of the beast, and I can concentrate on writing.

This setup works well, and with the exception of catching a glimpse of a ‘new mail’ badge as I bounce off of the home screen to get a link or reference from Safari, and getting distracted, I so get more writing done this way than I’ve done on my Mac for a long time.

There is a snake in paradise however. Pages. No, I could care less that the buttons are leather, or whatever it’s currently trendy to be upset about. My concern is that the QA department apparently never bothered testing the damned thing thoroughly with real keyboards!

Editing

The on-screen keyboard, if angled right in landscape mode, is actually quite the little trooper. But editing is a hassle. Selecting with the finger is imprecise and has a built-in delay, and writing longer pieces is practical only if a keyboard isn’t an option.

On the iPad, as on OS X, option+delete removes the word preceding the cursor position. Quite useful when the otherwise quite good auto-correction gets something wrong.

On OS X, it only deletes the preceding word, but crucially, leaves the space preceding said word. So if you had: “Steve Ballmer scares me|“ (the orange line after “me” representing the cursor), and you hit opt+del, you’d end up with “Steve Ballmer scares |“. This is immensely practical of course, because the most often usecase for opt+del is to remove a just mistyped word.

On the iPad however, you’d get “Steve Ballmer scares|“.

Other than breaking usage patterns, which is in itself a large enough problem, it also only makes sense to do this if the most often use of opt+del was to follow up with punctuation of some sort. But that is obviously not the case.

Then there’s the fact that if you opt+del in this situation on the iPad: “Steve Ballmer scares |children”, it actually does the right thing, and you end up with “Steve Ballmer |children”.

Huh?

It’s not until you try this for a few minutes you find out just how often you opt+del your mistakes. And of course after you’ve retrained yourself to correct for this behavior on the iPad (opt+del and space), you’ll carry that over into OS X, and you’re even worse off…

That, ladies and gentlemen, is a lose-lose situation.

But it doesn’t end there. Oh, if only.

Limbo, Inception and Oh My!

Another thing fundamental to how we work in text on OS X, is pressing ‘down’ at the end of a document, when the cursor can’t actually go any further down, which sends it to the end of the line. Without this behavior, the cursor would have to be manually moved to the end of the line, which can take a little while (using ‘right’ with a keyboard, or having to touch the screen on the iPad).

On the iPad however, this is not the case. Not, at all.

The cursor can do one of several things. If the line is empty, the cursor will do nothing. If however, the line contains text, the first keypress will leave the cursor in-place, but send its state into a limbo state. Yes, you heard me. The physical manifestation of the cursor remains, but its state is now caught in-between places. Pressing ‘up’ from here will bring the cursor back from limbo, which will leave it in the same place, however it otherwise reacts as you would expect, which means that another ‘up’ command will move it up to the next line.

But, and this the kicker, when the cursor is in limbo, one further ‘down’ command, will send it whirling through a wormhole, to the second line of the document! Not the first; the second. Furthermore, if you pull off this trick, inverse of course, pressing ‘up’, at the top of document, you’ve entered some sort of Inception-like universe behind the scenes of Pages, where you can fill up a buffer with ‘up’ commands without moving the cursor, and only when you’ve emptied it again in the opposite direction using ‘down’ commands, will the cursor once again get the kick and regain consciousness.

Whether time slows down for the cursor in these other dream worlds is unknown.

An Overextended Apple

These are obviously simply bugs. It happens. But I can’t help but feel that when issues like these, caught within 5 minutes of using Pages with a keyboard for the first time, end up shipping, something’s amiss. Even Apple can run out of resources, but given that Pages is meant to prove the iPad as a semi-serious productivity platform, it seems quite odd that these slipped through the QA net.

And yes, as a sidenote, this behavior is only present in Pages. Everywhere else, the behavior is as you would expect it, coming from OS X.

The Home Key Escapes. The Escape Key Saves.

There’s another problem entirely in the decision of replacing the Escape key with the Home key. Surely someone thought the two did kind of the same thing, and that’s a fair mistake to make, though it is certainly not the case, which again, given an hour or two with an iPad and a keyboard, your muscle memory will remind you of quite bluntly.

This is particularly a problem until we get iOS 4.2 where the individual apps states are maintained when you leave them. That isn’t the case with 3.2, which means that when I’m writing a mail to my brother in Danish, a dictionary not included in the iPad, and word suggestions keep popping up, inevitably (I’ve just done it three times in a row), I will try to dismiss the popups with the Escape key and find myself back on the home screen, my draft lost as Gmail reloads the next time I open it.

Auto-correction replacements, document drop downs, selected word bubbles. Whenever one of them pops up unexpectedly I’ll hit Home in less than a second. Boom. Home screen.

This happens more often than you’d think. Escape has become a universal “Get lost kid, you bother me!”-key. A way of getting out of unforeseen trouble without consequences. In fact it’s common for dialogs be dismissible using the Escape key only if that can be done without data loss.

At least on OS X, I have no idea what kind of a clown car Windows is driving these days.

Contrusion

I love my keyboard dock. I love pages. Please fix it Apple, thanks.

XOXO.

Romancing the User

dConstruct 2010 was above and beyond expectations, and it was, as always, pleasant putting real-world faces and mannerisms to Twitter streams. Others will do much better play-by-plays than I could hope for (the talks will be podcast, and I’ll be sure to curate my favorites then). For now, a couple of the highlights that stuck with me:

Confidently opening the day, Marty Neumeier spoke about making products not just good, but different. Really, different. Good points throughout, but a single side-remark, regarding a long forgotten coffee product experiment, an abysmal failure, stuck with me (here paraphrased from memory).

I suppose it’s some sort of coffee you store in your fridge and then heat in a cup in the microwave. Horrible idea. Miserable failure. Where’s the romance in that?

Romance. It’s amazing how the right word can describe an already known set of ideas in such a way that they become clearer. To me, romance is one of the things ho-hum run-of-the-mill products most commonly oversee.

Ridiculous as it may sound, I only just started drinking coffee in the last half year, so perhaps the romance of the coffee brewing process still carries more weight with me than with hardcore caffeine junkies, but I think most people, even non-coffee drinkers (and even Nescafé addicts), know exactly what Neumeier means by that.

Coffee brewing happens to come with romance built into the ritual of preparing the coffee (doubly so if you, like me, are a french press user), but romance isn’t restricted to stuff that smells nice or beans supported by millions of dollars of marketing narrative on their packages.

Mystery, playfulness, trust, courtship and sexuality are all a part of romance.

To me, the way that dock icons bounce eagerly to get my attention. That’s a little bit of romance; it breathes a little bit of life and playfulness into what is an otherwise entirely boring event; a file has finished downloading, or an application needs attention. Had the animation not been given just the right ease-in and -out curves, it would have been inanimate. Boring.

Another, recently much talked about, flourish Apple got right many years ago, is the sleep indicator on their laptops. As if the laptop is at ease. A lover, sleeping soundly in your presence.

The unlocking mechanism on the iPad, perfectly executed, is perhaps closer to the kind of ‘ritual’ brewing coffee requires (computer doing what they can to eschew rituals, being as they are often easily automated). I only set a security code on my iOS devices when I travel, specifically because punching in a code ruins the ritual of bringing my iPad or iPhone to life.

Though it’s been much maligned by some, as being either too unresponsive, or simply too simulationist, I think critics – the same ones bothered with Pages’ leather toolbars – much underestimate the romance of iBooks’ page-flipping animation. Its novelty, while powerful, soon wears off, but I hold that even after that, iBooks sustains a ‘bookness’, which makes it a warmer, kinder experience than that of the Kindle app.

My analytical self, my inner optimizer and minimalist (two of my strongest inhabitants I might add) would have ended up with a design akin to the Kindle app, no doubt. Something to fit the steel and glass look of the iPad. But in my heart, I would have wanted to end much closer to iBooks or Pages, something to complement your journey on the Orient Express, circa the late 1800s. Something with a little romance in it.

Apple isn’t the only company capable of endowing their products with romantic flourishes of course, but they are by far the most consistent (and I would argue, best) in the computer industry. Outside, companies such as Starbucks (obviously), Audi or Mercedes, Kitchen Aid, Dyson (to some odd extent) and others, do equally fantastic jobs at engaging their customers with their products not merely in a functional manner, but in a humane and romantic one.

There’s a fine line between touches that bring that little extra magic into the equation, and overcompensation. I’ve gone too far myself a few times, and I inevitably regret it. It’s what happens when you’ve got some snazzy framework at your fingers and everything starts to look like a nail (luckily I don’t think Apple goes entirely free of a little overindulgence from time to time, which I’ll gladly use as a crutch).

I guess my point, or rather Marty Neumeier’s point, is to remember that yes, it needs to be good, and different to make it out in the great wide world, but whatever you’re building, you’re building for people; and people need a little romance.

Hey Apple, Whatever Happened to Sacred Data?

It pains me to bring this up, as it’ll no doubt bring about scorn from the Android liga on Twitter, but seriously Apple? In what world and under what kind of a regime is this alright? Never mind that I can’t even stretch my imagination far enough to think up a technical reason, but my music is my user data. User data is sacred. The first time this dialog popped up I just pressed enter without reading it, because that’s what users do!

Boom. All my music gone. Not so magic. Not so revolutionary.

Don’t ever do that again please.

Charles Stross on Apple

Insightful commentary Apple’s strategy:

Apple are trying desperately to force the growth of a new ecosystem — one that rivals the 26-year-old Macintosh environment — to maturity in five years flat. That’s the time scale in which they expect the cloud computing revolution to flatten the existing PC industry. Unless they can turn themselves into an entirely different kind of corporation by 2015 Apple is doomed to the same irrelevance as the rest of the PC industry — interchangable suppliers of commodity equipment assembled on a shoestring budget with negligable profit. #

Appease Eyjafjallajökull, Sacrifice Gizmodo

Because I so enjoy the showmanship that Apple seems to have a market monopoly on these days, I’m always disappointed when upcoming products are ‘spoiled’ ahead of time. It’s part of the image that Apple has built for themselves; their secrecy isn’t merely a matter of protecting their ideas before they can act on them, it’s just as much a marketing tool and a narrative device.

But where spoiling the surprise is annoying and the spoiler acting like a retard about it, is regrettable. Wrecking a mans life on your propensity for more pageviews? That’s somewhere in the outer regions between ignorant, selfish, disingenuous and plain ol’, straight-up, head-on, praise-Satan, Temple-of-Doom-Kali-Ma, Evil.

The fact that that particular ‘article’, if you want to call it that, had all the hallmarks of wanting to walk in the shoes of the kinds of ‘in the moment’ pieces that more established and honorable publications carry with grace, only made it so much worse. What sickening tripe.

I hope Apple steps up and buries Gizmodo in more legal trouble than they ever dreamed of.

‘Journalistic integrity’, spell it bitch! I said spell it!

No Flash on the iPad? Who Gives a Crap?

No Flash on iPad

The irony of me lauding how a closed proprietary device is helping oust a proprietary technology is thick, but honestly I couldn’t be happier that Flash seemingly isn’t supported by the iPad. Gruber has written much about Flash and Apple, and he’s a clever guy, so if you haven’t read his stuff yet, you should do yourself a favor and consume his site start to finish, but here’s my take.

I’m not a fanatic when it comes to open vs. proprietary, which should be evident, my Apple fetish taken into account, but in my mind Flash has no home on the net of the future, and I’m happy to see Apple inching it out bit by bit. Yes, it crashes a lot for me, but that’s not the reason I don’t like it, I just want to see the internet of the future absolutely open, and Flash simply won’t allow that. Furthermore, we’re slowly reaching a point where modern web technologies will overlap Flash’s unique functionality.

So why are people vying for Flash on the Apples devices? What is it that Flash delivers that people want so bad? I was tweeting with Matt Brett, who said he’d buy one for his daughter if it had had Flash, for casual games; but I just don’t see what it is that Flash can deliver as a browser plugin, that can’t otherwise be delivered in much more superior ways as apps, be they compiled Flash applications or not.

Besides whatever technical or economical reasons Apple has for not wanting to include Flash on their closed devices, there’s another major issue I never see anyone address, which is very applicable for those pesky flash games.

How do you click-drag on a multi-touch device? Yes, you can concoct some inane scheme (double-click, but hold on the last click and then drag… or something), but that’s exactly what the iPhone and iPad aren’t about. There’s no elegant way to bring over those games to that user interface, you have to build them for it because it straight-up simply is not the same as keyboard and mouse.

Furthermore, and this is really important, for everyone involved, the app store is a working marketplace, which the web isn’t. It’s proven insanely hard to get people to pay for content on the web, but for various reasons people don’t mind dropping gold for apps on the app store. As a smalltime game developer, despite whatever approval process problems the app store has had, this is a much better deal on almost all accounts. It’s easier to develop for, being as it is almost console-like, and it’s a working, proven marketplace.

In fact, hey, it pretty much is a console experience.

So what is it that people want with Flash? What is this coveted thing that Flash does that people can’t live without?

I just don’t get it.

TomTom. Apple. I Want My Money Back

Before we ventured out on our roadtrip, I bought TomTom’s US/Canada and Nordic apps for the iPhone for an awful lot of money. Hey, I thought, always having a navigation system in my pocket is a pretty nifty tool for traveling around a foreign country. Gee, golly.

Off we went, got the car, fired up the TomTom app aaaaand… FAIL.

What TomTom forgot to write on their incredibly self-conglatuatory app description (‘has been very well received’, my ass) is that the app is literally only half the product, as it is on its own, incapable of keeping track of your location while driving.

Oh, for that to work properly, you need the TomTom cradle.

I would have bought the cradle in the blink of an eye actually. Except, it wasn’t available. And still isn’t by the way, with ‘Coming Soon’ having been the message on the website for about two months now.

So I bought half a product. Twice. I’m stupid that way.

So the same day we drove to a Target and bought a real TomTom unit. Worked flawlessly and practically saved our trip several times.

I mailed TomTom, asking for my money back on the iPhone apps, reasoning that they had sold me a product which fails to live up to what it promised (and promises still) to do. They told me they couldn’t give me back my money, I would have to take that up with Apple.

Of course, despite in theory having the ability to remotely turn off apps, Apple of course holds the policy of flat out no refunds on iTunes Store purchases.

So… TomTom creates an app which in itself does not do what it promises (and which is expensive, the US & Canada version currently goes for $100), but they unfortunately can’t refund my money. And Apple, renowed for their approval process, which ostensibly is supposed to shield me from bad apps, chose to approve TomTom’s app and gladly took my money despite the app not working?

What is wrong with this picture? What happened to my rights as a consumer? They product may be virtual, but my money isn’t…