Man Knows Mac

Translating Fraser Speirs on iPad

2010-02-01T15:39:00.009-08:00

Giving you the likely thinking behind this post by Fraser Speirs, quoted in its entirety [and translated] below...

I'll have more to say on the iPad later but one can't help being struck by the volume and vehemence of apparently technologically sophisticated people inveighing against the iPad.

[Many who normally love everything Apple and defend their products at length have a serious problem with this product. These traitors must be dealt with.]

Some are trying to dismiss these ravings by comparing them to certain comments made after the launch of the iPod in 2001: "No wireless. Les space than a Nomad. Lame.". I fear this January-26th thinking misses the point.

[I fear the missed point may not have been made grandly enough.]

What you're seeing in the industry's reaction to the iPad is nothing less than future shock.

[I've borrowed this fantastically melodramatic way of describing people who don't like how things are turning out, because it sounds like a syndrome rather than an opinion.]

For years we've all held to the belief that computing had to be made simpler for the 'average person'. I find it difficult to come to any conclusion other than that we have totally failed in this effort.

[Characterising every other thing in the universe as worthless is probably the only way I'm going to be able to make paying to live in a policed computer gulag seem like a good deal.]

Secretly, I suspect, we technologists quite liked the idea that Normals would be dependent on us for our technological shamanism.

[I'd much rather you doubt my opponents' motives than listen to their arguments.]

Those incantations that only we can perform to heal their computers, those oracular proclamations that we make over the future and the blessings we bestow on purchasing choices.

[I want you to see iPad doubters as a religion because religions are crap.]

Ask yourself this: in what other walk of life do grown adults depend on other people to help them buy something? Women often turn to men to help them purchase a car but that's because of the obnoxious misogyny of car dealers, not because ladies worry that the car they buy won't work on their local roads. (Sorry computer/car analogy. My bad.)

[Sexism is crappier than religion. Is there some product that is sold that I can use as an analogy that can also be linked to sexism?]

I'm often saddened by the infantilising effect of high technology on adults.

[I probably have the word 'infantilising' in my head because I'm so intent on doing it to 'technologists' in this post.]

From being in control of their world, they're thrust back to a childish, mediaeval world in which gremlins appear to torment them and disappear at will and against which magic, spells, and the local witch doctor are their only refuges.

[The scarier it sounds out there, the more you will feel like giving up almost anything for Apple's guiding hand.]

With the iPhone OS as incarnated in the iPad, Apple proposes to do something about this, and I mean really do something about it instead of just talking about doing something about it, and the world is going mental.

[I don't need to claim anymore that Apple did anything good, before. Nothing was ever good before the iPad. Repeat after me.]

Not the entire world, though. The people whose backs have been broken under the weight of technological complexity and failure immediately understand what's happening here. Those of us who patiently, day after day, explain to a child or colleague that the reason there's no Print item in the File menu is because, although the Pages document is filling the screen, Finder is actually the frontmost application and it doesn't have any windows open, understand what's happening here.

[Think of the children!]

The visigoths are at the gate of the city. They're demanding access to software. they're demanding to be in control of their own experience of information. They may not like our high art and culture, they may be really into OpenGL boob-jiggling apps and they may not always share our sense of aesthetics, but they are the people we have claimed to serve for 30 years whilst screwing them over in innumerable ways. There are also many, many more of them than us.

[The iPad doubters have been sounding way too much like freedom fighters. Maybe if I characterise them as Romans, everyone will think *Apple* are the freedom fighters. Yay, porn!]

People talk about Steve Jobs' reality distortion field, and I don't disagree that the man has a quasi-hypnotic ability to convince. There's another reality distortion field at work, though, and everyone that makes a living from the tech industry is within its tractor-beam. That RDF tells us that computers are awesome, they work great and only those too stupid to live can't work them.

[All Apple fans who believe in Steve Jobs should feel personally insulted by those who doubt the wisdom of the iPad.]

The tech industry will be in paroxysms of future shock for some time to come. Many will cling to their January-26th notions of what it takes to get "real work" done; cling to the idea that the computer-based part of it is the "real work".

[I have to make it seem like my opponents have already accused someone else of not doing "real work", because I am about to do the same to them.]

It's not. The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS. The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table's order, designing the house and organising the party.

[All of these super good, ordinary things you should associate with, and think of as having been made possible by, the iPad.]

Think of the millions of hours of human effort spent on preventing and recovering from the problems caused by completely open computer systems. Think of the lengths that people have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthogonal to their core interests and their job, just so they can get their job done.

[I changed my mind. You aren't dependent on the high priests of technology like helpless, probably sexually abused children, anymore. No, now I need to describe you as *too* independent with the actual skills to do your job, so that I can point out all that time wasted learning to do things yourself that you should now depend for on Apple. Let's just forget that part about about not wanting to be dependent and not wanting to be infantilised. I'm over it.]

If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people's perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn't a price worth paying to have a computer that isn't frightening anymore.

[In conclusion, I'm going to abandon the whole 'future shock' thing. There is no larger story here. The doubters basically just don't like the lack of 'background processing'. You don't even know what that is. Move along.]

In the meantime, Adobe and Microsoft will continue to stamp their feet and whine.

[Oh yes! The one evil thing I haven't linked to doubters is large corporations. My bad.]

[To sum up: the iPad doubters are probably a huge monolithic corporation of misogynistic cultists who are only saying what they say to keep you in emotional thrall to their complicated so-called 'free' advice. Apple, however, is entirely altruistic, and has only the best interests at heart of the children, nurses, doctors, and firemen when it charges you for its locked-down products.]

> Completely ignore the new Apple iPad

2010-01-27T18:19:00.003-08:00

Those of you waiting for me to find something praiseworthy to say about the next stage of Apple's plan to push their ironfisted App Store model up the computing ladder? You know, the model where you aren't allowed to 'ridicule public figures'?

Keep waiting.

> Break Mac apps by copying them with Snow Leopard to a Windows file share

2010-01-03T05:33:00.015-08:00

Those who have set up a Mac for use in the business world have more than a few horror stories under our belts regarding connectivity of Macs to folders shared with Windows (usually using the Samba or SMB protocol). It's one of those desperate, hanging bridges spanning the edifices of two technological giants (Apple and Microsoft), that neither of them seems particular concerned with upgrading or fiixing the planks on.

OS X Tiger was probably the high-water mark for SMB connectivity. Before that it was still too flaky — as of Tiger, connecting via SMB had begun to get vaguely useful, at times. But then, with Leopard, it suddenly took a turn for the unconscionably slow. Faced with hourslong+ copy times, I just bought a bigger USB key.

Now, beginning with OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Apple appears to have innovated yet another new way of rendering SMB shares useless to the Mac community: sudden, instant regression to the 1990s, when simply copying a Mac app or complex document to a foreign server would usually destroy it.

WORKAROUND: If you aren't sure whether a foreign file server will mangle your Mac files, you can always 'zip' them. If you haven't heard of Zip, it's an ancient little third party plugin that appears to be smarter than Windows and Snow Leopard, combined. It comes pre-installed — just rightclick a file, then select 'Compress', and then copy the zipped version, instead.

> Enjoy the bleeding edge on that 27" iMac!

2009-11-27T10:44:00.005-08:00

I try not to jump into the vanguard of the shock troops of consumerism to be mown down by experimental hardware designs. Just a general policy I have. Because 'bleeding' and 'edge' are two words that describe only hurt — is there really an upside to this concept? If there is, no one ever seems to just come out and nail it. Having the latest, most crappily engineered and untested thing is a luxury which, however questionable, appears to just go without saying on this world.

So, I've advised against buying the new 27" iMac, which simultaneously violates two of my cardinal rules of Earthly computer hardware purchase: Never buy the first available prototype of a new enclosure; and, Never buy the first available installation of a next-generation CPU in an old enclosure. Manufacturers, including Apple (some might even say especially Apple) hew pretty close to the heat tolerances of these components they use, in the rush to achieve their latest avant-garde design. Apple cuts engineering corners, and it affects first-generation product reliability, as we've seen with the capacitor problem in early, large white iMacs, and now the cracked or DOA Intel Core i7-based 27" iMacs.

Lest anyone think this is a new development, I should point that the very first Macintosh ever invented didn't even have an internal fan, despite being offered in an almost unprecedently small, and thus hot, enclosure (for 1984). Unsurprisingly, the first generations of Macs had a habit of frying their own power supplies after a few years, and then burning up the replacements, a few years after that. The 'novel' idea of fan-based cooling wasn't welcomed to the Macintosh until 1987, with the Macintosh SE.

> Unzip iWork documents

2009-11-09T12:08:00.002-08:00

Exactly as it reads above — if you want to poke around inside an iWork document and examine its structure (which is XML-based), all you have to do it unzip it.

> Check apps for Snow Leopard compatibility

2009-11-09T12:05:00.003-08:00

The Unofficial Apple Weblog pointed me to SnowChecker, which will detect all of your apps and compare them with an online compatibility database. It doesn't really detect them all — it didn't pick up on any Adobe apps, for example — but for a cautious upgrade-shy fellow like myself it's a good indicator of the current state of things.

My verdict: this cat is not ready for primetime yet. Which means it isn't ready for my Mac.

> Get info for multiple files in one window

2009-10-31T04:51:00.003-07:00

This is mostly useful for finding out how much disk space is taken up by several different files, without putting them in a folder together or moving them around.

Select the files in the Finder, then, instead of Command-I (Get Info), use Control-Command-I (Get Summary Info).

> Fail to use the new iMac as a TV

2009-10-31T04:44:00.003-07:00

In case you heard about the fact that Apple's new 27" iMac can also double as an external monitor, and you were getting excited about all the different kinds of devices you can attach to this thing — don't. The iMac will only accept DisplayPort input. This 'feature' is designed not for your convenience, but to promote an Apple-favoured standard with little prior presence in the marketplace. DisplayPort might eventually achieve wide adoption, but by the time this feature becomes generally useful, your iMac will almost certainly be obsolete.

> Avoid guest accounts on Snow Leopard

2009-10-15T06:16:00.005-07:00

Using guest accounts on Snow Leopard could cause your entire main account to be wiped. That's right — wiped. Still feel comfortable out there on the bleeding edge?

> Bank on Apple's nonexistent credibility

2009-10-02T08:10:00.002-07:00

Erm. Something tells me that Apple — a company whose name is becoming increasingly synonymous with corporate censorship and interference with interoperability for user control — is unlikely to win any kind of widespread consumer support for its new universal connection standard. Rather, the best survival chance for any new interoperability protocol would be if it weren't mentioned in the same breath with the name of the most notoriously willful foe of interoperability of the 21st Century.

> Prolong lithium-based battery life

2009-09-26T06:50:00.004-07:00

Lithium-ion and lithium-polymer batteries have a few key differences, according to this Battery University guide, but the main danger to laptop battery remains the same.

With the nickel-cadmium or nickel-metal-hydride batteries common in the 90s, you would need to discharge fully quite frequently to avoid the 'memory effect', which should be called the 'forgetfulness effect', because it happens when batteries forget that yes, they actually do have more power left, and quit prematurely, thinking they're out of power. That's an act of forgetting if I've ever seen one, but with lithium-ion and lithium-polymer, you don't have to worry about it; frequent shallow charges are not only safe but less stressful and healthier for the battery. You only have to discharge fully maybe once a month and that's only to give the software gauge a chance to recalibrate to the size of a full charge.

However, this is all scribbling in the margins of battery life. Charge or discharge frequency were never really the main thing killing laptop batteries. From what I have witnessed, people have just been killing their batteries by leaving the mains adapter plugged in way too long, sometimes for days. I've seen some random internetling claims that lithium batteries can be safely left docked indefinitely, but the Battery Guide article says nuts to that: forcing a battery to remain in a state of full charge with constant heat applied for an indefinite period is just a great way to age your battery chemistry at a far accelerated rate — even lithium.

Bottom line: you can read that whole article, or you can just not work with your laptop plugged in unless your battery actually needs charging. This single factor explains most of the differences I have observed between the battery life of different laptops in different environments.

> List what's been removed from Snow Leopard

2009-09-21T02:38:00.007-07:00

An informal list has formed at Waffle [via Daring Fireball]. The knifing of PowerPC support was widely expected, but the dropped creator code adherence is going to spark a bunch of people to falsely believe that their system can no longer open their oldest files anymore, when the truth is that it has merely forgotton how to figure out which app to open them with.

I can understand clearing out the cruft, but adhering to creator codes made the system more intelligent about how to open your legacy files, so that really wasn't cruft at all, was it?

[ UPDATE: Looks like I'm not the only one who was shocked at the braindeadness of the creator code move: see more details and complaints about this issue here and here. ]

> Solve Exchange/iPhone bug by turning off security

2009-09-18T13:42:00.006-07:00

Nope. Not kidding. That really is Apple's official, recommended solution to the recently reported 'surprise policy enforcement' that results in a broken Exchange functionality for any iPhone that is upgraded to firmware 3.1.

Apple doesn't let you downgrade your phone, so if you leapt early, you got burned — big-time.

> Fiddle endlessly with Photoshop CS4

2009-09-18T12:22:00.005-07:00

If you're feeling incredibly obsessive about small gains, take a look at this beyond-comprehensive list of ways to use Photoshop CS4 at its very, absolutely fastest. [via Daring Fireball]

The simplest tip on that list is more likely to make a perceptible difference for the average user than all of the others, combined:

"Photoshop requires at least 2 GB of free hard-disk space, but more is recommended. The OS volume should contain at least 20 GB of free space to ensure that the virtual memory system has plenty of available hard disk space."

> Launch any app from the keyboard in Snow Leopard

2009-09-18T11:08:00.004-07:00

Never have looked too kindly on increasing my third-party background app load (a very risky category), just to get more keyboard shortcuts in OS X. So, I'm very much looking forward to assigning keyboard shortcuts to launch apps, natively in 10.6 (via macosxhints.com); at least, whenever I eventually, cautiously, pull the trigger and actually switch to Snow Leopard!

Which is something I definitely recommend you avoid, until at least the third 'point update'. Rather than jump into bed immediately with all four big Apple cats (Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, and Leopard), I hung back, watched and waited, until versions 10.2.3, 10.3.4, 10.4.4, and 10.5.3, respectively, to finally do the deeds.

You can ascribe my caution to the ridiculous-but-undeniable fact that it takes this planet at least three attempts to get any new computer engineering to work in such a manner that nobody will need to pay a huge upgrade tax in the time and energy spent identifying mysterious new bugs.

Refusal to participate directly in the bleeding edge treadmill is definitely the way to go. If you have trouble letting go of the immediacy of it all, repeat after me:

"An operating system is a serious piece of engineering. Not a fashion accessory. An operating system is a serious piece of engineering. Not a fash—"

etc.

Restore SMS history from one phone to another

2009-06-26T11:27:00.001-07:00

I haven't upgraded my iPhone yet to 3.0. I suppose when I do, I'll have to decide whether to attempt to save my SMS history.

(I really must find a quicker, easier way to post links to this blog, probably involving removing this mandatory 'Read on' custome code I appear to have added at some point.)

iPhone 3.0 Push Destroys Battery Life?

2009-06-22T14:10:00.003-07:00

Yes, according to french news site Hardmac.com: "Some users have been complaining that the battery life of their iPhone 3G was dramatically reduced following installation of iPhone OS 3.0. It seems that the firmware is draining more resources when the Push option is activated." Although, according to the Apple Discussion Forums, all that may be needed is a reboot and possibly recreating your push email accounts, and your former battery life can be recovered.

(Drain the battery at least once fully, too.)

Real Far Away From an Arcade in 1970s Japan

2009-05-07T13:30:00.000-07:00

In an early sign of where things started to go wrong on this planet, some '70s and '80s arcade games acquired a habit of opening with a copyright prayer, by which I mean, an appeal to an entity that could never realistically intervene in the situation. It's a lot like writing a disclaimer on your forehead that your hairstyle is not to ever be seen outside the immediate environs of your skull. You'll run into this kind of magical thinking all the time on this world. These games hail from an era when such absurd lightning-in-a-bottle claims had less legal bite than they do today. But even now, controlling copyright is still as empty a prayer as controlling perception itself. I'm doing all this, for example, on one of the most locked-up software platforms in history. And still, I can have my way with it. And my way, in this review of the third row of my Cydia apps for a Time Walker's iPhone series, is to rescue the relevance to this planet of early video game history, by aiming you at the emulators of interfaces from the dawn of man/machine.

mame4iphone

By this point in history, the 'rainbow' from Apple's crest, has fallen. MAME beams a broad spectrum of decades-old arcade games through nearly every type of computer or handheld you can name, except the iPhone. In fact, you could fill encyclopedias with the gaming knowledge that is excluded from this device by Apple's prohibition on emulators. There is certainly no performance argument for it. The 1983 vector game above, for example, plays great, and had me torquing my body in sync. (But the standard mame4iphone controls are not ideal for this one; it seems to have been coded with some sort of flightstick in mind.) So I used Cydia to install MAME to my jailbroken iPhone, then the Cydia version of 'Discover' to transfer my zipped ROMs to

/var/mobile/Media/ROMs/MAME/roms/

on the iPhone. Then start mame4iphone, and play! If you don't have any ROMs, 'Googling' MAME v3.07 Beta 5 ROMs should turn some compatible collections up.

From M-4 to Space Invaders

Another fascinating game that you can play with mame4iphone, M-4 is essentially Space Invaders, only released a year earlier, in 1977, by Midway, before Taito turned it 90 degrees and replaced the mirror-image opponent with the now-famous drone armada. Even with a one-year head start and the same basic toolset, M-4 faded into obscurity, while Space Invaders seems to have inspired the first arcade gold-rush. Why? M-4 was, after all, a pretty smart machine for entertaining the human brain, presenting a single opponent that not only targets you through a reactive (i.e. player-destructible) shield, but evades your fire. Space Invaders dispensed with the evasion, instead borrowing Breakout's deep, if abstract, player-reactivity to graft onto its own, more concrete world of eroding shields and fungible enemy formations. In Space Invaders you are pitted consistently against the consequences of your own actions, rather than against just a half-competent AI. As it turns out, that's an even smarter way for a machine to attempt to entertain a human brain, as demonstrated by all the copycat hits that followed, from Asteroids and Missile Command, to Space Panic, Pac-Man, and even, Tetris.

snes4iphone

In features, if not in proximity to the most seminal moments in game history, the Super Nintendo (SNES) emulator for the iPhone is more advanced. You can play in portrait mode, with a layout similar to MAME's, but also in landscape with the controller keys overlaid transparently (as above). I prefer landscape, though I wish they had positioned the game screen a little higher and the keys a tad lower. (It's not as hard as it looks to play with your thumbs covering a part of the screen, but considering the overall use of screen real estate, it just doesn't seem necessary.) The SNES emulator also has an array of options, most having to do with sacrificing stuff to make it faster. As with MAME, I found that turning off the sound produces the greatest uptick into playability. And also as with MAME, you can transfer your Googled SNES ROMs to your iPhone at

/var/mobile/Media/ROMs/SNES/

Super Mario World

Super Mario World is the crowning glory of an alternate branch of games — which I call 'clockworks' — and which developed alongside the whole reactive branch rooted in Space Invaders. In a clockworks game, it's as if the 'periodically rotating' aspect of M-4's innovative shield undergoes runaway evolution, whereas the 'player-editable' aspect of it that was cultivated in Space Invaders, instead becomes vestigial, or even disappears, altogether. Player absorption is achieved by presenting a series of decisions made spatiotemporally complex by the cyclic movements of dangerous screen elements, like turtles that bounce to and fro, and platforms that raise and lower to different metronomes. Navigating clockwork was prefigured somewhat with Pac-Man's ghosts (though they are an attempt to seem intelligent so anticipating their routes feels like cheating), and then debuted as a distinct, unapologetic style in 1981 with Frogger and Donkey Kong, evolving into the Super Mario series to great acclaim, pitting humans all the while primarily against the undisguised gears of the machine. Kind of obvious now why this lineage succeeded best when paired with a radical concentration of 'cutesy' graphics. More than other interactive methods, a clockworks needs be humanised.

psx4iphone

The one emulation test that didn't reward me with a fun and interesting experience was psx4iphone. The PlayStation is a much more advanced console than SNES, and a decade beyond most of my MAME ROMs. I ransacked my inherited collection and managed to turn up two PlayStation games: Tenchu, and Bushido Blade 2 (pictured). So after ripping them to .bin/.cue files with Toast for the Mac and transferring them to my iPhone at

/var/mobile/Media/ROMs/PSX/

I discovered that Tenchu didn't work (no video), and that Bushido Blade 2 worked but could not be made to play at an acceptable frame rate, with or without the music. Basically, this is a FAIL but I kept psx4iphone on my phone, and on this list, because both Tenchu and Bushido Blade 2 are fairly sophisticated 3D games, and I don't yet have any sidescrolling, PSX games in my possession on which to perform the test in 2D. If you have managed to make a PSX game play acceptably on the iPhone, which game was it? There is little reason not to venture into arcade (MAME) or console (SNES) history on the iPhone, but you'll likely not get much playability on the PSX front.

NEXT: FOURTH ROW - CoverFlow for your contacts,
and the best iPhone RSS reader.

Posted via Pixelpipe.

[Published originally at The Laroquod Experiment.]

Cydia Apps for a Time Walker's iPhone - SECOND ROW

2009-05-02T13:19:00.000-07:00

This iPhone screenshot is from an episode of a TV show called Flashpoint, which I discovered on my hard drive, and with which I discovered that the most common video container in the world (anything ending in .AVI), is unplayable on this 'iPhone' handset! It took a little bit of screwing with to get right, but there is an MPlayer app on Cydia you can use to watch this forbidden format. With a few skips and jumps, and provided you don't sic it on anything too hi-rez, it works. But MPlayer expects you to upload its data to an oddly placed folder. I recommend setting this up not as a folder, but as an alias pointing somewhere inside the standard Media folder (just so it doesn't become too difficult to back up all your media at once). Here's how.

iFile to /var/mobile/Media

Use iFile to navigate to your /Media folder so that what you see is pretty similar to the above. (You may not yet have as many folders in there as I do.) This folder is where most of your jailbroken iPhone apps will look for files. You can get to it by various routes (because of preinstalled aliases, which display in iFile in blue), and they are, starting from the top: (1) /private/var/mobile/Media, (2) /var/mobile/Media, (3) /User/Media, and (4) ~/Media — all of those paths lead to the same /Media folder. Once you get there in iFile, tap 'Edit' in the top right corner, then tap the big '+' to create a new folder inside your /Media folder.

Create /MPlayer folder

Fill out the first two fields as shown above. (Case matters.) 'Directory' is a contemporary synonym for a Mac-style folder. The rest of the fields should default to what you see. Tap 'Create'.

iFile to /var

Tap the top left button a couple of times to navigate iFile back to the /var folder, and then tap 'Edit' and then '+' again.

Create /media alias

MPlayer ignores your /Media folder and instead looks for its files in /var/media. Fill out the screen as above to create an alias instead of a folder at /var/media and to point that alias toward the /User/Media/MPlayer folder that was just created two screenshots ago. Now tap 'Create' and exit iFile, and your MPlayer is set up. Just use Discover to transfer your AVIs to your /Media/MPlayer folder, and start MPlayer!

Start MPlayer

If you've done the setup and transfer right, your vids should show on MPlayer's list, like Flashpoint appears on this one.

MPlayer

Rather than rotating itself breathlessly with every jerk of your hand like a mental cat chasing a laser pointer, MPlayer opts to simply mix and match orientations in one view, and I have to say, I don't mind the result. It does everything it needs to do without much of a mode switch, which is actually superior to the built-in player. (Apple's screen reorientation acts like its got all the CPU power in the world, but the reality is it gets easily confused and stuck for long moments at forty-odd degree angles.) Run MemTest (that's fourth row, I'll be posting more on it soon) to clean your memory right before playing your video: it can help performance.

Cycorder

The most featured Cydia app is Cycorder, and for good reason: it does for creative video output what MPlayer does for input. You see, one of the video creators to whom access to the iPhone is officially denied is you, because Apple thinks the iPhone hardware's video capabilities are too poor for your tastes! Personally I find the results produce a visual feel that can be quite involving, and sometimes even a little eerie. (Both those links were, like the entirety of this article, written and captured entirely with this handset, and uploaded with Pixelpipe, which you can find in the App Store. And the 'PPVideoEnabler' app that patches Pixelpipe to read your Cycorder vids is available on Cydia.)

iComic

So, you're watching AVIs without conversion on the iPhone. It's not perfect but it basically works for most 350MB-or-below TV episodes. And you're lifestreaming video like you're a roving eye out of Max Headroom. Why not bust out of the same format prison, in sequential art? What you call, comic books. Pictured is just a smattering of comic book files discovered on my hard drive, and then, 'Discovered', via wifi, to my iPhone's /Media/Comic folder, where iComic (also on Cydia) looks for them.

iComic options

Select a .CBZ file. (Unfortunately, iComic doesn't do .CBRs yet, but the conversion process is fairly trivial.) Note that you have the option to skip to your last position, or pick pages from a list.

iComic portrait

In portrait mode, iComic just got completely out of my way like a movie player and immediately filled my screen with pure comic. Which transmogrified into pure frustration, when nothing I tapped or swiped appeared to turn the page, or even exit. I was stuck on page one! Turns out the controls are very simple, if not iPhone-intuitive. Tap bottom corners to page forward and back. Tap top left corner to return to the list. It's a bit picky about accuracy, which seems unnecessary. Anyway it looks great, and in landscape mode, you can even read it...

iComic landscape

Not too shabby. And you can pinch and squeeze to your heart's content. The actual comic book pictured, by the way, would likely not be accepted to the App Store, due to mature themes that appear to have bounced out this artist, and this one, and this one. So odious to me is the news of such barrings that I don't plan to submit Hypothesis to Apple at all, and will instead be looking into how to assimilate iComic and codistribute via the free culture the way these artists have done.

textReader

On free culture: there are hundreds of thousands of free eBook files out there in various formats, and though you aren't wholly prevented from accessing most of them without jailbreaking, you are still placed at an annoyingly far remove from whatever personal collection of .TXTs or .RTFs or .PDBs you already have. Besides, THEY ARE JUST TEXT. This really should not be that complicated: have a file, read a file. You can get back to that ideal by installing this Cydia app textReader, and then transferring your eBooks to the iPhone's /Media/textReader folder.

textReader portrait

Fonts are adjustable, and the app will do landscape, if you swing that way! But it does not read all formats. I seem to have inherited a lot of TomeRaider files, for example, and have yet to find a way to read them on this phone. 8(

NEXT: THIRD ROW - Google Reader, Classic Gaming

Posted via Pixelpipe.

[Published originally at The Laroquod Experiment.]

Cydia Apps for a Time Walker's iPhone: FIRST ROW

2009-04-29T13:13:00.002-07:00

You are looking at an impossible screen. This game Planetfall is under something called 'copyright', and is no longer sold on this world in a modern form. It could easily be converted, but this 'modern' iPhone is under lock and key, and refuses to open its filesystem to the kind of view that will allow you to make that decision. I know it's going to sound like a grim fairy tale of a dystopian grotto zone, but the iPhone indeed protects by default the commercial viability of millions of commercially *dead* works, blocking them from your view, wherever possible. Protecting zero sales isn't logical: even a supercomputer couldn't do it. This is a serious flaw: not because it isn't important to behave legally, but because the law of this land is functionally insane. Thus, a device that forces you into compliance with it, is also functionally insane, and so is using it.

To my kind, it all sounds very much like publishing a dictionary from which has been struck all words containing the letter S. Because somebody claimed to 'own' that letter 30 years ago and then *disappeared*. And yes, there really is an elaborate system out there keeping track of it all. Massive resources are expended by globespanning 'corporations' attempting to control the uncontrollable, I shit you not! (If telepaths ever do develop on this rock, it will probably become necessary to lobotomise them.)

With jailbroken file browsers like iFile and Discover (available via Cydia), you can get off Apple's meds and free your iPhone's mind by opening a portal into its filing system and transferring whatever you want, whenever you want, sans velvet handcuffs. Both iFile and Discover can transfer files to and from any iPhone's folder by connecting wirelessly to a standard web browser. I definitely recommend this over installing more complex and thus less secure filesharing like Netatalk. Don't do it! It's unnecessary. iFile is the best file browser I have seen for this device. Screen space is used efficiently. Files can be created and moved with ease, even alias pointers created. It feels like a full mobile Finder! But iFile invariably chokes when transferring large files (if it's >30MB I don't bother trying), so I've taken to using the Discover app for wireless transfers (which it has a habit of always performing flawlessly), and then iFile for the actual browsing. BTW if you see an app called Discover in the App Store, that's not it! What I mean is the Cydia version that is not only free but also unconfined to a tiny windowless cell in your filedungeon.

Training you in how to interpret every file you will see under the hood is beyond this post, but my rules of thumb are: (1) Don't copy anything to a location you don't understand; (2) Don't let free space get below 100MB; (3) Try to keep all your data in '/var/mobile' (it's the iPhone's user data area, also referred to as '/private/var/mobile'); and (4) Don't manually delete or rename anything you didn't put there manually. In this way I have begun copying any media I discover that is effectively outlawed, to this phone.

We need to engage with these abandoned works, because in such a suffocating intellectual polity, the best solutions are left aside simply out of fear of breaking rules. I would also advise installing Backgrounder, and using it to enable background processing (the blocking of which is yet another abuse of Apple's power) for Discover, so that you can transfer files while checking email, &c. Backgrounder is so useful and liberating that it turns even some App Store apps like IM+ Lite (the instant message app that couldn't notify you of instant messages), formerly crippled by Apple's nonsensical regime, into useful programs at last.

NEXT: SECOND ROW - Upgrading an iPhone into a full media citizen
with video recording and playback/upload of well-known video formats.

Posted via Pixelpipe.

[Published originally at The Laroquod Experiment.]

Cydia Apps for a Time Walker's iPhone - INTRO

2009-04-28T13:04:00.006-07:00

I feel like I am already familiar with certain apps on this iPhone device, although I've never used them before. If your brains were to spontaneously explode, for example, over a square kilometre, your memories would lie disconnected on the ground in an amplified map of their former positions inside your head. Tiny differences in cranial coordinates would translate to much larger differences over a square kilometre. Someone - maybe even the next 'someone' to squat in your now-empty skull - could even decode that map.

Well, okay, so the analogy isn't perfect. But in crosstemporal terms, it all makes sense and this is roughly what has happened to me, and why I keep stumbling over stray sense memories connected to things, like the App Store apps on the iPhone. An iPhone which, according to the first clear memory I do have, I discovered lying beside me on the pavement, and then conveniently used to upload my experiences here, in case I again lose even this tenuous grip on chronology.

So this is really for my own future reference, more than anyone else's. If you too are from another planet, then maybe you'll find some use in this, because there are 18 apps (pictured above) on this iPhone that I have no inkling of, whatsoever. Further research over the last 24 hours has uncovered that they all have one source in common: 'Cydia', a grey market app store that can only be installed on what they call a jailbroken phone. Reading back in the blog and putting two-and-two together, I suspect that Cydia was left incompletely explored by my predecessor, and so I'll be opening all the icons on that cavern wall, one row at a time, and posting the results of my explorations here. Perhaps then continuity can be restored.

NEXT UP: FIRST ROW - Opening up the filesystem and background tasks on the iPhone.

Posted via Pixelpipe.

[Published originally at The Laroquod Experiment.]

What is the Apple IIGS?

2008-12-17T13:00:00.000-08:00

It's the hybrid 8-bit/16-bit twenty year old computer I used (in emulation) to produce most of screenshots I have visually quoted in Hypothesis, as the protagonist played the games. And I am very happy to see Alex Lee reworking and revitalising his website on everything IIGS (pronounced 2-G-S); it's chockful of utilities and software, and though it's always been a good database, he's now added News, Blog, and Forums sections that I'm excited about. Alex was the very first person I contacted about KEGSlotDroppers and he received the first beta copy. It takes some very careful reading (most people don't pick up on it right away the way Alex did), but you can follow the story of the creation of KEGSlotDroppers here.

[Published originally at The Laroquod Experiment.]

Wall Street Journal Welcomes the iPhone Overlords

2008-10-29T17:00:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal has raised the spectre of smartphones replacing laptops, not even realising, it seems, that it is a spectre. Apple's "cutting-edge" iPhone is held up throughout the article, without a hint of irony, as the prime example of the sort of device that the author sees one day bumping your main mobile computer into a Sarlacc Pit. No mention at all is made of the completely closed and capriciously-controlled nature of application development through the iPhone's App Store (practical unofficial alternatives to which, in a 180-degree turn from its tolerance of MP3s on an iPod, Apple specifically blocks or limits from its playground).

Apparently, the Journal finds perfectly agreeable the prospect of herds of formerly free-range computer users being corralled into an unholy pen where they will not be permitted to download any new form of software without Apple's express, case-by-case approval; in fact, the financial rag breathlessly anticipates that the old regime (which happens to safeguard our increasingly unfashionable ability to choose what we can run on our devices) will be willingly relinquished. Perhaps they'd like to volunteer to close and lock the gates when the deed is done?

Now, here's the part of this Wes Craven nightmare where self-satire turns to horror...

The Journal's prediction — while ethically tone-deaf — might be right. Apple has already blown right past its widely ridiculed '10 million phones' target for 2008, and shows no signs of letting up. So, if you are feeling at all 'no-big-deal'-ey about this, before you retire to a remote forest cabin to have sex with other clueless teenagers, be forewarned: this rough beast indeed slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.

Advocating a boycott of the iPhone at this point (or of any companies that try to emulate its obviously successful business model: and they will, cf. Zune) is probably a lost cause. By all means, if you feel like doing something, look into Google's much-talked-about, freedom-loving G1 — or even a Windows Mobile phone would fit the open-platform bill.

But this won't be enough. It's the independent application developers themselves who are going to have to bust out their Obi Wan Kenobis here; they're our only hope. And there are some signs that there may be significant resistance among them to the idea of signing up as complicit contractors aboard Apple's anti-rebel-coder mobile death star. Not only have some well-regarded formerly iPhone-friendly developers refused on principle to submit their code to Apple's casual disregard, but a highly touted developers' conference called 'iPhone Boot Camp' in New York simply failed to happen due to lack of interest, and another conference, called 'iPhone Live', was cancelled as a "necessary business decision" — a euphemism that Ars Technica interprets as, 'We built it but they didn't come.'

That's exactly what developers (and bloggers: yes, this means you) need to be saying about the iPhone; yeah, they built it, but we won't come. Not until Apple gets its head on straight, or sticks a pin in it, or whatever it is it has to do to stop Vadering out and start rediscovering the Anakin within. Then we'll all be able to enjoy the iPhone and its inevitable emulators in the smartphone space, without tattooing Lando Calrissian on our asses and handing the rebels among us over to some traffic-directing, techno-earmuff-wearing dude from the Wall Street Journal.

To be clear, this is my message to Apple: Quit with the ominous mouth-breathing. Open up the App Store to all comers, and institute a store-wide ratings system through which to indulge your elitist tastes. Either that, or allow developers to distribute their creations, independently of the Store, without limit. Most preferably, both.

If you do this, I'll be the first in line thereafter to sell my stuff for your phone, and I will trumpet your Jedi-like mastery of the touch interface, far and wide. But until that day, my sympathies are squarely with the younglings. They are the future, and for them your smartphone virtuosity may come at a terrible, dark price.

[Published originally at The Laroquod Experiment.]

Apple Beset by Criticism From Leading Mac Bloggers

2008-09-14T23:00:00.002-07:00

When lodestar users like Harry McCracken, Dave Winer, and even John Gruber are gunning for you online, you know your mobile platform has a real problem on its hands.

Thus, is Apple reaping what it has sowed with its increasingly pathological obsession with control.

These aren't just some PC World geeks with permanent chips on their shoulders putting the most negative possible spin on Apple. These are Apple-friendly guys (well, let's just call Winer Apple-compatible), and they are extremely influential writers in the world where Apple's customers swim. They can't and won't be ignored. This chain reaction is well past critical mass, and the smart money is on Apple to respond formally in the very near future — maybe even this week.

But make no mistake, here: all these bloggers have been asleep at the switch, and are only waking up now to what rgbFILTER and I have been talking about for weeks.

The first unmistakeable warning sign was Apple's breezy willingness to extend their technological control into the silencing of artistic expression — this was the clear evidence that they do not feel any responsibility to carry the principles of democracy forward into their spanking new media space, and that there is really no limit to the control they are willing to exert upon their users.

Don't believe it? You will. Because with the recent news that they are now banning software that competes with them from the App Store, Apple has finally made the mistake that will spark that collective 'duh' moment among those who didn't see the problem with electronics mavens claiming this kind of control, before.

Let's all hope that Apple takes the biggest possible bath over this, and that other companies who are by no means innocent in this regard (I'm looking at those who forged the shackles worn by console artists), will sit up and take note that their days of controlling user culture are numbered.

[Published originally at The Laroquod Experiment.]

Jobs and Woz, in Manga, for Kids!

2008-09-05T20:00:00.000-07:00

By way of Boingboing.net, my attention has been drawn to an '80s manga by Mitsuru Sugaya about the birth of Apple. Not speaking Japanese, I managed to get some gist of the artist's commentary (though not the comic dialogue itself) from the Babelfish version. I particularly enjoyed their rendition of Mitsuru's descriptions of one of Woz's teen pranks. (See if you can guess what it does...)

Concerning interest and [itazura] to electronics construction of this, the experience of the writer is projected. However the writer made, it was something where the primary coil and the secondary coil the hand it does to wind the electric shock surprise box, with the nail of the iron as a core, with intermittence of the buzzer false interchange makes and transforms. When the box of the chocolate is pulled out, [butsu] and sound doing, [biritsu] it is to have the [itazura] toy which becomes numb, but that handmade it is something which is done.

The artist also has this to (sort of) say about what he was trying to accomplish, which I loosely and probably inaccurately perceive as meaning that he wanted to make kids feel what it was like in the early heyday of Silicon Valley in their guts:

Concerning venture business you had known, but as for viewing the word, venture capital and the venture capitalist to, this time was unprecedented. This article becoming opportunity, interest grows even in the mechanism and economy of stocks, that eventually, means to be connected to drawing business information cartoon. When also you go out to Silicon Valley in 1983, wants to try feeling the atmosphere of actual place of such a venture business with the body.

I can't tell if he succeeded, but it was awfully fun to check out. If anyone comes across a translation of the comic itself, post it here!

[Published originally at The Laroquod Experiment.]

Apple vs. Art, part 2: Apple vs. Fart

2008-09-04T15:00:00.001-07:00

I have to say, when I wrote my first post on Apple's attempts to soup-nazi new media spaces, I had no idea a sequel would be so soon in the offing. In this week's episode, we have an actual App Store rejection letter from Apple, which is so galling in its casual application of censorship to a harmless fart joke app, that even in the unlikely event that it would be a good idea to let any one posse of techno-dudes carry the keys to the new media kingdom, it's as clear as day the people at Apple are not those dudes.

The rejection letter was emailed to MacRumors by the developer, who also posted a full demo of the app to YouTube. The text of the letter follows:

Hello Developer,

We've reviewed your application Pull My Finger. We have determined that this application is of limited utility to the broad iPhone and iPod touch user community, and will not be published to the App Store.

It may be very appropriate to share with friends and family, and we recommend you review the Ad Hoc method on the Distribution tab of the iPhone Developer Portal for details on distributing this application among a small group of people of your choosing.

Regards,

Victor Wang
Worldwide Developer Relations
Apple, Inc.

So, in other words, Apple controls the entire software market for this new medium (every effort having been taken to lock things down otherwise), which it will now fill capriciously according to its taste! And if you don't like it, you are free to use a method they have provided you to share your app with a 'small group of people of your choosing'? Why small? Isn't that a lot like saying you are free to sing in the shower — but they own everywhere else? Imagine if Apple had invented the microphone...

Essentially, Apple is trying to appoint itself the cultural gatekeepers as well as the technicians of a new public square, blocking you from it without their prior approval — a responsibility, by the way, that they appear to approach about as democratically as picking a T-shirt.

I defy anyone in the 'iPhone and iPod touch user community' to watch this video, and not want to install this thing and run it, at least once...

[Published originally at The Laroquod Experiment.]

So This Is How It's Done

2008-08-30T13:00:00.000-07:00

I am beginning to understand how things work in this universe:

Government commissions study in the service of the people. Study doesn't support the arguments of the Copyright Pharaohs. Government concludes '<'there was no need for external expertise''. Tries to hide it ever existed. Continues the plot to extract from us the essence of cultural freedom which the Pharaohs have been consuming, and need to consume to extend their decrepitly long legacies for yet another 50 years.

This appears to be the mechanism by which the arterial media of this world have become clogged with the sticky legal deposits created by the circulation of these massive conglomerates.

More Star Wars, anyone? Just be sure that the part of your brain you are storing that in, is not a part from which you are ever planning to create anything in your entire lifetime (or even in your children's lifetimes, should you pass the 'copyrighted' plots and characters, fable-like, on to them).

And most of all — woe betide you online if George Lucas should ever use your name.

[Published originally at The Laroquod Experiment.]

Apple vs. Art, Part 1

2008-08-26T13:00:00.002-07:00

It took the appalling spectacle of Apple trying to deny iPhone distribution to these artists at Murderdrome to draw my attention to Infurious Comics and their neat little enterprise.

My willingness to try to distribute Hypothesis through the iPhone's App Store will hinge on how Apple responds to criticisms like this one. I could be comfortable with an App Store-wide rating system that treats all media equally, but it would depend on whether it's just a cloak for more censorship. (After all, nothing about having a rating system dictates that all or even a vast majority of entries will therefore be accepted.)

Don't enterprises that venture first into new media spaces that may hold the keys to the future of this planet (if their rhetoric is to be believed) have a special responsibility not to bar the way to others based on matters of taste? If not, perhaps they should.

[Published originally at The Laroquod Experiment.]

KEGSlotDroppers 0.4

2008-08-26T07:00:00.003-07:00

The latest iteration of the energetics I 'coded' to slightly speed-launch classic games in Hypothesis 0.3. KEGSlotDroppers are a set of AppleScript droplets which can be used to automate the tedious manual editing of slot assignments that is required to change which disk images to load into the KEGS Apple IIgs emulator on Mac OS X.

System Requirements:
Mac OS X 10.3 or later. (10.1 or 10.2 might also serve, but I have not tested them.) Also, you need a working installation of KEGS. I recommend KEGS-OSX from casaGS. Then you need to make sure you have Apple II games in disk image format. These can be found at a variety of sources online.

DOWNLOAD KEGSlotDroppers 0.4
(316K)
[Published originally at The Laroquod Experiment.]

Installation Issue with Carbon Copy Cloner 3.1

2008-03-25T10:26:00.014-07:00

For those of you eying Time Machine but still not ready to fully commit to OS X Leopard — sure, 10.5.2 is a big improvement, but I'm still waiting for that third time charm — I recommend Carbon Copy Cloner, which has just been updated to version 3.1.

CCC is free software. It can make scheduled backups to an external drive behind the scenes while you work. Your backup can even be bootable. But there is a minor installation hurdle for users of previous versions.

Despite being only a point release, Carbon Copy Cloner 3.1 sports some big improvements in capability over 3.0, most notably a much finer set of controls for both backup item lists and scheduling. I have also noticed that it is significantly faster, completing my backups in as little as two-thirds the time (even when copying the same amount of data).

In classic Mac fashion, upgrading CCC is theoretically as easy as dragging the application from the installer window to your Applications folder. But when I attempted to do just that, my Mac had this to say:

The above-referenced 'ccc_helper' is the background daemon that handles scheduled tasks, which I use liberally (one for duping my basic OS X installation once a month, and another twice a week for all my data). Alarmingly, this failed copy operation rendered my previous copy of CCC non-functional, and there was no warning at all about it in the accompanying ReadMe.

Luckily it wasn't fatal. Simply dragging the original to the trash first (an old Mac trick) enabled the subsequent copy to occur. And upon launch, the new version instantly detected the obsolete backup schedules and replaced those, too. The developer seems to have anticipated this issue and covered all the bases except for actual installation — which one might easily think of as home plate. This may seem odd, but it's human for a coder to take the download package for granted in testing, much as you might dress up perfectly for a night out and then forget your keys. It's the simple stuff that gets you. Unfortunately, the last step for the coder is the first step for the user, so this kind of oversight can exact a heavy toll in frustration if you don't immediately discover the workaround.

Once you've got it installed, however, CCC performs with the reliability, transparency, and simplicity I have come to expect from Mike Bombich.

UPDATE: The headline was changed from 'Installation Bug' to 'Installation Issue' in response to mike's comment below.

Why No Background Scheduling in the iPhone SDK?

2008-03-17T08:05:00.012-07:00

What is the real reason? Craig Hockenberry claims, in an otherwise very insightful article about why third-party background apps are a Very Bad Thing for your battery life, that the natural solution — letting the iPhone OS schedule access to the network and then giving apps the greenlight to connect in a single cooperative burst instead of activating the antenna piecemeal — was a little beyond Apple's capability for the beta Software Developer's Kit. He writes

Do I expect such a sophisticated system to be available in a beta of version 1.0? Hell no. And neither should you.

Maybe it's just me, but this system really does not sound all that sophisticated, not compared to the enormous piece of engineering that is already the iPhone SDK. In fact, it's downright simple. A scheduler/notifier that maintains a queue with a few new API calls — what's so damn difficult?

Not that I am advocating everybody whine some more about this issue. But nonsense is nonsense. As I see it, this is not rocket science.

It's far more likely that the reason for omitting this capability for now is that Apple doesn't want iPhone developers to use it as a crutch, or as a backdoor into executing non-network-related background tasks. They want you to learn to do without. When the consensus becomes that background processing is not nearly as necessary as everyone believed — then we'll have our network scheduler.

The Embarrassing State of Web Authoring

2008-03-10T20:45:00.016-07:00

If the read path of a document on my computer is

file://root/manwhoknows/posts/embarrassing-web-authoring.txt

then it's very easy to deduce the write path for this same document. Because the two paths are identical.

But what if they weren't? What if every document had two separate paths, one for reading and one for writing, either of which could be arbitrarily chosen? Nobody would be able to deduce the write path of a document from its read path! Updating anything on your computer would become a complex endeavour in which each application would make its own decisions about how to structure the write paths of its documents, and those write paths would be undiscoverable outside of that application. It would be like iTunes went insane and stole all write functionality away from your operating system. If this sounds to you like a hellish hypothetical, consider that it isn't hypothetical at all. You are already living in this world, online.

The read path for a web document might be

http://manwhoknows.blogspot.com/embarrassing-web-authoring.html

From this, what we can deduce about the write path for this document is nothing at all. We can assume that the top and sub domains would be the same, but we would not be right all the time. Not without host-specific contextual knowledge. There is just no standard way for your computer to figure out how to update what you're reading online. At this point you might be tempted to say 'FTP', but there is not even a standard way to construct the proper FTP upload path for a given URL. The only correct single answer is, it depends. (And figure it out for yourself, or else no update for you!)

What I'm trying to tell you is that if you have ever found authoring files on the web to be an unholy mess, most of which no one has been able to automate effectively — this is why.

All that needs be done is to define a standard discoverable write path for all web documents (probably via password-protected FTP). Once we have that, we will be able to build truly instantaneous intraspecies publishing into our technology at a basic system level. Until we have it, web authoring will continue to be a quasi-penetrable codex for communicating with a planet of charmingly ineffective bureaucrats.

Let's not be the laughing stock of the Milky Way — not again.

Planet Chooses Blu-ray, Beats Us Why!

2008-02-18T15:25:00.017-08:00

I find it fascinating the way everybody just decided, almost literally overnight, in an amazing demonstration of human flock behaviour, that HD-DVD is dead. Sometime after the birth of 2008, when Warner Bros. decided to support Blu-ray exclusively, a chain reaction started that has resulted not only in HD-DVD market share being decimated, but in almost everybody I know — via Bell Telephone, Gmail, Facebook Posted Item, and Personal Face-to-Face Audio Exchange — relaying to me the same message: 'Blu-ray wins.'

I've heard this message before. Back in August of last year, when, conversely, Paramount decided to support HD-DVD exclusively, every HD-DVD owner was saying, of course ... 'HD-DVD wins!'

This time was different. This time, every tech-savvy individual I know, whatever their former allegiance (except Toshiba itself), was towing the same line. The war was over. Happy about it or not, Blu-ray shall reign. But here's the weird part. If you ask them, they've all got different reasons, and yet they all seem to have made the decision at the same time.

For some it was the Warner Bros. defection. For others, the change in sales figures (which followed immediately upon news of the defection). Later on, even better reasons became available, like Netflix and Wal-Mart dropping HD-DVD (which followed upon the sales figures). Finally, the widespread rumours of Toshiba's throwing in the towel have come swooping in to pick over the retail-ravaged bones.

For no particularly great technological reason, seemingly inconclusive evidence (let's call it The Warner Event) has sent a whole lot of free individuals all careening in the same direction, largely as a result of cues they gave each other. And this virally replicated speculation of where the centre of gravity should be, became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Maybe Reuters captured it best with their short synopsis of the Netflix reasoning:

Four out of six major Hollywood studios have recently decided to publish high-definition DVDs only using Blu-ray. Netflix said that with such a clear signal from the industry, it will only buy Blu-ray discs going forward and will phase out stock of HD DVD by about the end of the year.

Four out of six. A 'clear signal'. Flock much?

UPDATE 08/02/19: Toshiba has confirmed the rumours: they are abandoning their own format. I consider this a side issue to this article, which is not about whether HD-DVD will die, but about why.

Pogue Declares Leopard Ready as of 10.5.2

2008-02-14T21:49:00.008-08:00

It is now, in his words, "the sharp and snappy cat it should have been all along". However, there are some issues with the update itself. This is to be expected. The first update addresses mostly bugs that were known at the time the product was released; the second is actually the first to fix the bulk of issues discovered by actual end users; the third (and maybe a 'security' update in between) catches any troubles created by the first two massive updates themselves. This is why I normally recommend waiting until version x.3 of any new major operating system release from Apple before taking taking the leap onboard.

Copyright Pharoahs Lobby For Immortality

2008-02-14T20:38:00.014-08:00

I have to say I don't understand this 95 year music monopoly proposed by EU Internal Market Commissioner Charlie McCreevy. Fifty years was bad enough. But judging by the length of the standard human reproductive cycle, 95 years will see the coming of age of five generations of new artists, all of whom will be denied the right to directly reimagine or reuse today's work without fear of retribution. Am I the only mind boggled by this?

Am I the only one who perceives, common-sense-wise — you do have that on this planet, I've been told — that artists only have a valid claim to preventing 'ripoffs' or the too-close-for-comfort homage among their contemporaries, and that unfettered quoting of their work among the very next generation (not to mention their great-great-great-grandchildren), is not only ethical, but healthy and necessary for the culture itself to continue to vitally reproduce?

Hopefully, in Canada at least, the answer is no, although there is still a significant gap between the stance outlined by the 'Business Coalition for Balanced Copyright' — consumer-friendly as it may seem in this new dynasty we have built of authorial pharaohs aspiring to legal immortality — and the most obvious reasonable course for a society of media-enriched brains. That is, if we are to avoid accidentally enslaving those brains by putting their entire store of cultural memory under lock and key.

[Published originally at The Laroquod Experiment.]

Who Accounts For the iPod touch Accountants?

2008-02-09T15:25:00.004-08:00

The story goes that Apple has to charge for its recent software upgrade (1.1.3) for the iPod touch, despite the same upgrade (1.1.3) being free for all iPhone users, because the iPhone is accounted for on a subscription basis whereas the iPod touch is not, and according to accounting requirements in the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, without accounting for hardware products on a subscription basis, Apple can't upgrade them with new features unless it charges something for that upgrade.

Despite being complete bunk, this logic seems to have been largely accepted, even by its yes-but detractors, like Dan Moren of MacUser, who argued recently, 'Yes, but why did Apple have to charge a whole $20?' Or the Macalope, who, having disarmed the critics with his customary aplomb, set hoof on looser ground by arbitrarily deciding that "it all devolves into communism" — at exactly the moment the word 'iPod' is encountered.

But joking aside, precisely somewhere along the slippery slope of Apple's chiclet-coloured electronic devices, lies the answer to the real question raised by all of this regulatory handwaving. Where in its product line does Apple place the dividing line between 'subscribed' upgrades and pay-as-you-go, and why? I've read the thoughtless lumping in of the touch with the 'iPods', but common sense tells you when you look at this device that it is a gelded iPhone more than anything else. So, 'because it's an iPod' won't fly — and neither will, 'because of AT&T's subscription plan': the Apple TV, with no subscription plans but subscribed accounting, stands inconveniently in the way of that escape. (And it has nearly the same media sources and capabilities as the touch, to boot.)

There is just no contemplating these choices without perceiving how arbitrary they are. The question isn't, why did Apple comply with Sarbanes-Oxley? The question is why didn't they comply with it the same way they did the last two times (with the iPhone and the Apple TV)? Apple chose to charge us $20 because they chose to charge us $20. Because they clearly already knew what the implications of their accounting would be. Because they had already altered it in the past to avoid this very situation. And yet, here we are. Why?

UPDATE 08/02/14: Apparently, Apple is not comfortable giving some of its users the same arbitrary choice of whether to accept or refuse the upgrade. (Thought you weren't tied to a subscription plan with the iPod touch? Behold the the nag screen and think again.) Hopefully, these tales of woe are just unintentional glitches, because if they aren't; well, the word 'extortion' comes to mind.

Nine Ways Yahoo! Has Already Eviscerated Itself Better Than Microsoft Ever Could

2008-02-06T23:32:00.001-08:00

1. Previewing a next generation beta mail interface that looks and moves like 300 lb. ass. Google walked an artful line with its first iteration of Gmail, introducing responsive AJAX code without sacrificing too much time in preload. It's a line that Yahoo! blundered right over as if it were never even there. Google saw what Yahoo! didn't — just because new tools give us the ability to recreate a desktop application within a browser, doesn't necessarily mean we should. There is a way to make smart choices about how much widgetry the web page loading experience can withstand. And then there's the Yahoo! way, which is more like backing up a dump truck to Outlook's output tray.

2. Allowing persistent lapses of server performance in a time of unprecedented competition. For the final couple of years I was a regular Yahoo! webmail user, successfully viewing my inbox was always a gamble, with failure annoyingly resistant to the repeated refresh. I have had other Yahoo! users complain to me about the same thing on different operating systems and ISPs, often when everything else on the web was working fine for them. Yahoo!'s one advantage over Gmail, at least in pre-beta form, was that it used to load more quickly and more reliably than Gmail — an efficiency gap that has since been thoughtlessly squandered ... in pursuit of what?

3. Sticking to the bloated old-school landing page. And not just sticking to it, but pushing it to improbable new weights, despite the obvious success of contrary trends...

1997!

1999!

2001!!

2002!!

2006!!!

2007!!!!!

2008.

4. Punting ad quality control. First, there was a flirtation with spyware pop-ups, which one could argue might be overlooked at any large advertiser, were it not for the inconvenient example of Google, where such things don't seem to happen. Then I hear from a client that he can't click new messages anymore in his Yahoo! mail. I tell him to try a different browser, to no avail. I have to turn off my ad-blocker to discover the annoying Rogers ad that drop-animates a mobile phone down over your browser window, and then disappears, leaving a large unclickable slab right over the top half of your incoming mail. Yahoo's advertising had rendered its own service inaccessible. Cue comical sound effect.

5. Hiding key features behind a subscription wall. Especially when the competition offers those same features for free. Gmail For Your Domain gives away what you as a small business need to set up a complete personalised email address and contact-sharing environment, something you'll pay a minimum of $35 a year to achieve with Yahoo. And then there are all the Google Apps to play with that come along for the ride — also free. Instead of taking these market-shifting challenges seriously, Yahoo! just attempted to worry more meat from its pre-existing userbase.

6. Retracting previously free features. Since the days of its very first 'look' (the look before the look that Yahoo! is now calling 'Classic'), Yahoo! Mail has offered free POP3 access (so that you can download your email with Outlook or Apple Mail, for example). That is, it has until the last few years, when they've been phasing it out behind the paywall. But only in some countries. Not in others. At best, it's confusing, and the marketplace routes around confusion. At worst, it's just insulting and unfair.

7. Ratting out Chinese dissidents. Twice.

8. Breaking Jumpcut. Jumpcut was a great video sharing site. It still looks great. The design is very clean and tasteful, in contrast to the standard YouTube-inspired 'Computer Shopper' vibe. It has interesting remix features implemented in surprisingly snappy Flash. It also has a good creative community, and at the time I chose my video host (things appear to have changed since), it allowed more reposting freedom (such as on a blog) than YouTube. Then Yahoo! came along and bigfished Jumpcut. Their first executive decision was to immediately force my Yahoo! and Jumpcut IDs into a shotgun marriage. And now some of my movies that previously played, don't anymore — on any browser, Mac or PC, and I find myself contemplating the even-biggerfishing that may be to come, and mentally adding up the time it will take me to move my whole library of videos to another service.

9. Exhibiting general cluelessness. It's not just that Yahoo! stumbles, it's the way they stumble. Except for their early fortuitous (but as it turned out, not sufficiently deep) concentration on search, they have consistently played follow-up and missed the point of new trends in such a way that they often bob left when they should be weaving right. It's an excruciating thought-process to watch: They want Web 2.0, do they? We'll give 'em Web 2.0! We'll give 'em whatever they want! I don't wanna hear about throwing more resources after speed and efficiency on the old system, cuz 2.0's where it's at! Okay wait, revenue's down? Just add more link spam to the home page. We need to be cross-promoting these assholes up the yin-yang. And if they want the good shit, let 'em pay. And get more ad revenue, too, I don't care what you have to do. We got a hole in the budget a mile wide from all the AJAX programmers we're burning through. What do you mean China's on the phone? We're running a business here! Just give 'em whatever they want!

About Me

2007-12-07T21:28:00.003-08:00

Slideshow by iPhoto, visual effects by Photoshop, and captioning by Comic Life, with a musical assist from a GarageBand loop called 'Glide'.