inconsequence

Seriously, this is the best icon Apple could come up with?

iTunes 10 is out with “Ping”. The one good thing I can immediately say about Ping is that it’s not “one more useless account” (sadly, uselessaccount.com seems to be defunct). But that’s only because it hangs off of your AppleID (if you have one). Why is Apple entering the social media game? Pumping up their stock price would seem to be a dumb reason. Then again, Apple also got into the search portal game at one point (and I believe that was after Jobs’s second coming). Bear in mind that this was when search portals all sucked in different ways. Seriously — people would actually recommend altavista to their friends back then…

The usual reason Apple does things is that it thinks it can do them better than anyone else. Certainly, the way “following” works in Ping is intelligent, and the basic idea (form a circle of friends and share recommendations, vs. randomly “friend” people for no good reason) seems sound. In the end, MySpace and Facebook both started out as being primarily about music and became privacy invading quagmires. We’ll see. Right now I can find two Paul Simons and two Bjorks, but not the Paul Simon and the Bjork I’m interested in. (And seriously, they couldn’t get Bjork to sign on? Maybe she’s just too 1998.)

Ars Technica rightly pointed out that what we don’t need from iTunes is new features. What we need is better reliability and performance. Oddly enough, while Jobs made no mention of under-the-hood improvements, iTunes seems significantly more spritely.

I think I’m even willing to forgive this:

OK it's annoying, but it is consistent with the minified window.

Shoe Icon (created in Art Studio on the iPad, from a pencil sketch photographed using my iPhone)

For a while now I’ve been using a simple PHP script to publish my working notes for the stuff I do at the University of Alabama. Essentially, I have a folder full of text files (using markdown syntax) and it simply lists what’s there, uses markdown.php to render it, and voila. I imagine it’s not dissimilar conceptually from the way Gruber manages daringfireball, but I’m sure his setup is much more sophisticated and does caching, etc. Since I have about five users, there’s no need to get more elaborate.

Anyway, I submitted Manta to the App Store in the wee hours of Monday morning and thought I’d better put some kind of website up for the game at the URLs I provided as part of the submission process. You know, the reviewer might actually check. I threw some stuff on the server and then quickly realized that making something that looked good on all the target platforms I cared about (i.e. Mac, Windows, iPhone, and iPad) might be pretty tricky in a short timeframe. After all, my main website has been kind of sucking on the iPhone for some time.

I figured I’d use a “simple toy” to get a site up real quick, and worry about proper content-management, etc., later. (In other words, probably never.) My first stop was WordPress. Surely there are some awesome themes out there that look good on everything. I love WordPress for managing simple sites and this was going to be pretty darn simple.

Well, if there’s such a theme, I couldn’t find it. The one theme I found that claimed to be iPad-friendly (a) wasn’t, and (b) was decidedly not free.

My next stop was Rapidweaver. I licensed Sandvox a long, long time ago back when I needed to get a different website up-and-running fast. I’ve followed Sandvox for a long time and it continues to suck in almost every way I care about but — at the time — I preferred it over Rapidweaver because it was kind of WYSIWYG and had some power-user features I thought might be useful (but really weren’t). Rapidweaver had themes that were claimed to be iPhone- and iPad-friendly (but weren’t — in fact even the demo sites were badly borked) and managed to produce pages with videos that couldn’t play and other embarrassing glitches (e.g. failing to correctly update the site after changing a page name, and pretty much broken SFTP support). Good grief.

OK, in desperation I tried Sandvox. Oddly enough, even though Sandvox seems very clunky beside Rapidweaver, and even though Karelia seems to go out of its way to ignore third-party theme developers (e.g. there are no links to them on its website), there are some very nice third-party themes for Sandvox (I didn’t buy them, but they looked pretty nice in my browser). Even so, Sandbox infuriates me and also produced broken pages.

I even tried iWeb ’09. Actually, of the three, iWeb seemed to produce the least dysfunctional site, but its pages are heavy, it didn’t do a good job with videos (they did play, at least), and it has a terrible collection of themes and very little third-party support (I think it’s safe to say iWeb is a total failure as a product). It certainly makes no effort to produce iOS-friendly pages, which says a good deal. And producing a simple gallery page is a chore unless you set up the gallery in iPhoto first. No thank you.

Back to Coda.

So, here’s the solution I came up with. I took the basic idea of my markdown-driven “work blog” site and combined it with some ideas I have been using for a very long time here and there, which essentially involve using file-naming and directory structures to connote relationships between content. A little bit of glue code in PHP, two PHP library files I use for all kinds of things, one CSS file, jQuery.js and markdown.php, and a simple .htaccess hack, and voila: instant website. Just shove files in the right format using a simple naming convention in a pretty pattern on a server and it all just works. It’s very much a work in progress, and there are some obvious refinements I can add, but it’s shaping up to be a simpler and more flexible way to quickly build an attractive (and highly customizable) website than Rapidweaver, Sandvox, or iWeb. And with some kind of Web App for online management it might even be simpler than WordPress or Tumblr.

Afterthought

The one “super simple” solution I didn’t try was mobileme. Of course the idea of paying Apple $99/year in perpetuity for a tiny amount of cloud storage on a server that won’t let me run my favorite scripting languages somehow doesn’t appeal to me.

As I approach six months of living with the iPad, it seems a good time to think about how it could be better. After all, we’re about to see a deluge of cheaper (or perhaps less obviously expensive) knock offs, and it’s worth reminding myself just how good this “1.0″ product is.

I was not an iPhone early adopter. I didn’t have the bandwidth to learn to develop software for it, and while it was a very impressive device, I was working from home and don’t use the phone very often. Most importantly, however, we were in the middle of a two year verizon contract. I think it’s safe to say that was the clincher, and it says a good deal about the anti-competitive nature of the US cellphone market.

The iPad doesn’t require a contract (even for the 3G version, which is something Apple hasn’t done a great job of communicating), which is one reason for its instant success.

Anyway, what’s wrong with the iPad?

Well, it’s going to need more memory. A lot of very nice iPad apps are clearly limited by available memory (e.g. the various excellent image apps, such as Sketchbook Pro and Art Studio have fairly harsh layer limits) and I often crash my browser (iCab) by having too many tabs going.

It’s going to need a camera — preferably two. Facetime is seriously awesome on the iPhone 4, but even mordant useful for me is the ability to use it’s camera as a rather high quality scanner. This lets me sketch something, photograph it, email it to myself, and then work on it with my iPad. But it would be nice to reduce this convoluted workflow to, e.g., “new layer from camera” right inside Art Studio, say.

I can understand Apple’s reluctance to put an SD card slot in the iPhone — e.g. one major source of problems in the iPhone is pocket lint being forced into the works of the iPhone through the earphone socket (seriously), and an SD card slot is going to make this problem much worse (although a plastic blank that can fill the slot when not in use would help). But, iPads don’t live in pockets, and the advantages of being able to work with images straight out of a camera would be huge.

Autocorrection needs a lot of love. To begin with, the widgets are just too small. It’s hard to press the “x” or the word precisely, and why can’t we have more than one suggestion? It’s also high time the correction code recognized things like “e.g.” and stopped trying to start new sentences.

While we’re on the topic, I think that the keyboard could probably use some tweaking. I wouldn’t mind a landscape keyboard with smaller keys and more of them (I have no problems typing on the portrait keyboard, so use keys that size and give me punctuation and numbers instead of bigger keys).

Standardized hard game controls are something Apple needs to start thinking about now, across all it’s products (including “iTV” if the rumors are true). I get that Apple is cleaning the rest of the game industry’s clock now despite having no capable middleware and treating game developers like second class citizens, but gaming made DOS and Windows successful and eventually folks will catch up close enough to Apple that not having a decent joystick is going to matter.

Heck, don’t build the damn things in, but just bless some kind of standard. Please.

The industrial design of the iPad is very much the ultimate expression of the iPhone design language. It’s nicer than any iPhone prior to the iPhone 4 (about even with the super slim iPod Touch) but next to the iPhone 4 it just looks old. I’d love to see the iPad redone in the new design language.

And that’s about it. Obviously doubling screen resolution (a la the iPhone 4) would be great when the cost benefit makes sense and we can always use more of everything, but really the iPad is pretty darn close to perfect. At 1.0.

Salient features of the new Sony pellicle cameras

So, as the rumor mills asserted, Sony has released four new interchangeable lens cameras with DX sensors, two of them DSLRs and the other two pellicle cameras designed to look like DSLRs. The new DSLRs are essentially very similar to Sony’s previous generation DSLRs (with the weird hybrid focusing trick for live view) while the pellicle cameras are actually very interesting. The new SLTA55 is already reviewed in depth at dpreview, so check that out. (The reviewers were unable to process the RAW images as of writing this so we won’t know just how good the low light/high ISO performance is with RAW, but just based on the JPEGs it looks like Sony has finally shaken off its IQ issues (i.e. the excellent performance of the NEX cameras was not a fluke).

Sony’s new pellicle cameras offer continuous live view (because the sensor is always getting 70% of the incoming light) and continuous phase-shift autofocus (i.e. DSLR-quality/speed autofocus) because the autofocus sensors are always getting 30% of the incoming light. It also means you don’t get an optical viewfinder, but instead get a 1.4MP EVF (which is better in some ways than an optical finder, and worse in others). If the new cameras have one significant weakness, it is that their continuous shooting seems somewhat compromised (essentially the live view — which is the only view — seizes up during 6fps or 10fps continuous shooting, and in 10fps mode you have no control over exposure).

And I should add that Sony has managed to seriously reduce the new cameras’ dimensions without significantly impacting usability. (Indeed, the Sony bodies are barely larger and heavier than the Panasonic G2, which is remarkable given the design constraints.)

So, to summarize, these cameras clean the Panasonic G/GH series clocks (especially since they have sensor-shift image stabilization), and give conventional DSLRs a run for their money as still cameras. If it weren’t for the new cameras’ continuous shooting compromises I would find them almost irresistible.

And the Nikon D3100‘s reign as the only DSLR-class camera capable of shooting 1080p video while continuing to autofocus was not only very short-lived (i.e. about two days) but pretty much thoroughly outclassed (given how much better phase-shift autofocus tends to be than contrast-detect).

Addendum

The a33 (pellicle) and a560 (relatively conventional DSLR) side-by-side size comparison

I took two photos from dpreview and scaled them so their lens mounts matched and here’s the result. The a33 is markedly smaller than the a560, despite sharing the same sensor and image-processing pipeline (and being announced on the same day) so this is the immediate size-saving Sony obtained by ditching the conventional SLR mirror. That’s pretty amazing.

Note that the new “conventional” DSLRs from Sony offer better continuous shooting (7fps with an optical viewfinder) but lack the focus-while-filming video (they still offer 1080p). If you recall, Sony’s “conventional” DSLRs are already pretty radical, having a bunch of wacky design tradeoffs (a smaller, dimmer optical viewfinder) in exchange for faster phase-change autofocus in live view. I’d have liked to see more differentiation between the new pellicle cameras (which I see as compromising still shooting in favor of video) and the “conventional” DSLRs, but perhaps we’ll be seeing a refresh of the a850 along those lines (and, after all, at $1950 the existing a850 is a serious bargain, assuming you’re willing to hunt for second-hand lenses or wait and hope for Sony to release more).

Even More

Interesting criticism of the a55 (et al) here, mostly along the lines that video capabilities (1080i, low bitrate, and no manual controls) in the new cameras is seriously (and intentionally) crippled. Steadishot makes the camera overheat after 9 minutes. The AF only works when the aperture is wide-open, video bitrates are no better than compacts. I have to say I find interlaced HD video to be actively offensive (it’s a holdover from analog and has no place in a modern pipeline).

And more technical criticisms here, along the lines that marketing futzed with the specs, the onboard computer hardware is laggy in general and specifically the way the camera seizes up after shooting (if image review is switched on) is a major bummer. These are finicky, but not minor criticisms, since one of the two main reasons for using DSLRs over compacts is handling.

There’s also some discussion as to “ghosting” caused by internal reflections in the mirror (which are unavoidable). This kind of thing could be post-processed out of the image (in-camera) since the effect is very consistent but it’s another drawback of the fundamental design. (And it’s quite noticeable in some of the examples in the thread.)

Manta screenshot from Unity dev environment

I’m finally getting close to releasing Manta and one thing that has somewhat surprised me is what a fabulous gaming device the iPad is. For example, while I’ve never been happy with any “glass joystick” games on the iPhone, I’ve found several on the iPad work just fine — including Manta.

One of the things I was determined to do with Manta’s touch controls was make them “relative”, and this is something the games I’ve liked have in common. In other words, the point you start touching the screen becomes your origin. Most “glass joystick” games on the iPhone combine (a) absolute controls and (b) no central visual feedback. The first means (a) it’s critically important that you put down your thumb in exactly the right spot or you’ll do something weird and (b) you can’t immediately tell by looking at what’s going on in the game where you’ve actually put your finger down — this proves a fatal combination, even for otherwise very polished games such as Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars.

With Manta, your “ship” quickly (not instantly) snaps to a heading based on your thumb position, and your initial point of contact is always the origin. It certainly works well for me (and no complaints from my testers) but we’ll see what the reviews are like when and if it appears in the App Store.