inconsequence

…or more flattering anyway.

It’s getting tedious dealing with spam comments on this site (I moderate all comments — as many as three a day) and I’m finding it increasingly annoying. The latest spam is generally literate, which means I often need to actually read it before hitting the spam button. It’s also a little disappointing to start reading what seems to be an enthusiastic comment only to realize that it’s content-free and linked to a pharmacy site. So I’m experimenting with linking Google Buzz instead of having local comments, although local comments remain active. The downside, of course, is that with built-in comments, the comments become part of the site content itself.

So for some reason John Gruber has been spending a lot of time thinking about the whole Gizmodo-buying-a-probably-stolen-prototype-iPhone thing. While I agree with pretty much everything he’s said (or think I do, given I haven’t been interested enough to read any of his longer posts or numerous linked articles), the basic question remains: who the frack cares?

First of all, Gizmodo’s cell phone was remote bricked — so they can’t tell us anything about its most interesting features beyond stuff Gruber had already leaked: it has a ridiculously sharp screen. Thanks.

Second, Gizmodo is kind of a dumb website. I cite as evidence the amount of excitement over Windows Phone 7 Series. The first words in this “article” are:

I’m sorry, Cupertino, but Microsoft has nailed it. Windows Phone 7 feels like an iPhone from the future. The UI has the simplicity and elegance of Apple’s industrial design, while the iPhone’s UI still feels like a colorized Palm Pilot.

Gizmodo is worse than a fanboy site, it’s a site run by people who aspire to be fanboys. To the extent that I am an Apple “fanboy” I both cringe at the label and try to second-guess myself. Gizmodo is a website for people with no life, no sense of priorities, and no ability to think beyond, “ooooh, shiny”. The thinking person’s ten second reaction to Windows Phone 7 is “wow, cool”. But after thirty seconds it becomes “how the frack is it supposed to work?” As Edward Tufte puts it:

The WP7S screens look as if they were designed for a slide presentation or for a video demo (to be read from a distance) and not for a handheld interface (read from 20 inches). …

… The titling typography does not serve user needs or activities. Instead it is about its designer self, and looks like signage on the walls of a fashionable building. Good screen design for information/communication devices is all about the user and should be endlessly self-effacing.

Indeed, he speculates that the design was optimized to look good in internal PowerPoint presentations rather than based on actual use of a life-sized device. Ouch.

I won’t dwell on this, the Gizmodo article is almost pathetically adoring of the Windows Phone 7 interface. My favorite bit is how rather than merely being user-centric, the interface is data-centric. As if this is a Good Thing. The Thing beyond user-centric, I guess. But how can it be? If the user needs data-centredness, then being data-centric is being user-centric. If not, not.

Argh, the whole damn website is so stupid it’s not worth criticizing. And that’s my point. But hey, they may be idiots, but at least they have some ethics… Oh, wait.

Nerves

Judging from Unity’s two corporate blog entries on the whole 3.3.1 thing, I get the feeling that they’re feeling less confident as of Wednesday than they were on Friday (it’s dated Sunday but it was posted on Friday).

The fact that PhoneGap has been given Apple’s stamp of approval is certainly a sign that platform abstraction layers can be OK, but bear in mind that PhoneGap is completely open source and lives on JavaScript…

JavaScript

You may recall that JavaScript is not mentioned in the scariest subclause of 3.3.1 — JavaScript apps run on top of Webkit, and thus don’t need to worry about how they access APIs, don’t represent a portability issue, and don’t represent any additional backwards compatibility burden over the rest of the web.

(By the way, I don’t see how you can reconcile PhoneGap’s approval with the “Apple just wants people to write real iPhone apps” view.)

Virtual Machines & Scripting Languages

But if you’re writing pedal-to-the-metal game software, chances are you’re going to need to compile your code to binary and call the OS APIs from inside it (even if it’s not much more than “hey, gimme a graphics context to vomit OpenGL commands at”). It strikes me that Unity3d could take the approach of opening the source code that interacts with the OS to deal with the first clause.

As to the second, forcing Unity to ditch internal scripting languages and the associated runtime is pretty rough (and it’s going to hurt all serious game developers — I don’t know of any game developers who don’t use some kind of script engine and virtual machine somewhere — Prince of Destruction, released in 1994 (admittedly, it was ahead of its time in many respects) had three internal script languages, one of which ran on our own VM, and it was a truly native Mac game, running on AppleTalk and using Macintalk). Of course, maybe the ban will only affect virtual machines Apple can identify really easily (such as Mono or Flash).

Life Cycle: One Day, You’ll Be Grown Up

Apple’s current restrictions don’t make any sense in the long term (even accepting they make sense right now). Inevitably, the iPad (and its successors) are going to need apps like Excel or Word (both scriptable). I may want to touch my data, but I’m still going to want to automate common operations. Whatever Apple is doing now is part of the lifecycle of its platform — what Apple is doing now while it builds its platform is not necessarily what it will do when the platform is more mature.

It follows that Apple needs to bear in mind the “feelings” of third party developers who are merely doing today something Apple doesn’t want for tactical reasons today but will want in the future. (One might argue that Adobe should have considered the “feelings” of Apple and Mac users when it gave us crappy products for the last ten years, but if you’ve used CS4 under Windows you’ll see that Adobe is fully capable of giving crap products to everyone with no malice intended. Basically, Mac users got a halfway decent UI with a crappy back end, and Windows users got a crappy UI with a crappy back end — but it’s 64-bit. Woo! And it’s not like Flash isn’t a horrible CPU hog and battery drain under Windows, it’s just not quite as terrible as on the Mac.)

So the important message for Apple is that while it needs to worry about building its platform now, it also needs to worry about the number of enemies it creates in the process. Software developers are smart and have long memories.

One of the few reviews worth the name — from one of the few websites that takes reviewing products seriously.

I am writing this post on my iPad — one of two we got this morning around 9am. According to the delivery guy each of six drivers in Tuscaloosa had about fifteen. If that’s a good sample — which it almost certainly isn’t — then about 0.1% of the US population took delivery of an iPad this morning.

I am touch typing (two fingered) on the glass keyboard. It’s just fine — but I did hit one snag. Safari didn’t recognize the standard word press editor as a text entry field, so I’m having to enter HTML directly.

More impressions later.

Battery Life

Aside: typing HTML with the iPad’s glass keyboard is an exercise in frustration — you need to switch between three keyboards four times to enter a single open heading. (Further aside: I am now going back through my iPad postings and fixing the paragraphs.)

I’ve been using my iPad solidly since it arrived, so around 3.5h, a lot of it in fairly demanding apps, and the battery is at 60% — having started at around 90% and refusing to charge when docked.

Edit: after being used much of the day and getting about 15 minutes of charger time (the iPad can only be charged via syncing to a “high power” USB slot, which seems not to include any USB slot I’ve tried) the iPad eventually got down to 30%. This morning I read for about 30 minutes using 3%.

Apps

I immediately bought Pages and Keynote. I’ll probably buy Numbers eventually, but I can think of no use for it right now. (I’d get Bento if it had export options to something other than the desktop bento for which I have zero use.)

Both are what you expect although perhaps missing a cherished feature or two. What I’m really missing on the iPad right now is some kind of file system — as I’ll discuss below.

I also got Alias Autodesk Sketchbook Pro which is based on a program originally written for tablet PCs. Brushes on the iPhone was painful to use — I never produced a single picture with it of which I was especially proud. My first two attempts with Sketchbook were decent, and I tried to upload one to this blog entry — so far no dice. (I’ve since bought a $0.99 app called Art Studio which is technically inferior to Autodesk’s product, but better thought out UI-wise.)

Similarly I can’t download PDFs — although they do render beautifully in Safari.

Of the built in apps — I’ll include iBooks in this category — Mail is a joy (although I understand gmail on the iPad is wonderful too), iBooks is great, although many of the Gutenberg titles are a mess until you get past the cruft at the beginning, and the others are ok.

The photos app and origami slideshow option are simply breathtaking. This is pretty much the best way to look at photographs.

On the down side, I find calendar’s inability to create events when I tap in a particular date/time to be infuriating. Lots of room for tweaking.

There are several Dr Seuss books in the app store — I bought two, and the only down side is they seem to chew through batteries super fast… Flash? Or just poorly coded?

Ergonomics

I’ve already discussed the keyboard quite a bit. The only real issue with the glass keyboard — in either orientation — for me is the business of getting to special characters. If I were typing a novel, say, it wouldn’t be a big deal (especially with the smart correction handling most apostrophes, etc), but typing email addresses and HTML tags is a serious nuisance.
(Once you have one heading or whatever typed, copy and paste mostly solves the problem. Also, last night I discovered that ?123-Z is the Undo key (“?123″ is a very cumbersome name for a modifier key, and somewhat misleading when the “?” is available via “shift-.”)

As a book reader, and I haven’t tried reading anything serious yet, it weighs less than a hardcover novel and can be held at angles a book cannot owing to not having pages to worry about. E.g. I find reading lying down with the iPad propped on my chest very comfortable, but could never read a book like this because I’d have to hold the pages still.

Just as I was getting used to drawing with my fingers, I encountered an Apple store employee using a capacitative stylus which seemed to work pretty well. Maybe I’ll try one for drawing.