inconsequence

An iPhone can do things with its pictures no dedicated camera can hope to compete with

A really interesting article on the future of photography from a pro photographer with a very analytical mind (Thom Hogan). I’ve added his site to my permanent links, I like it so much.

Hogan raises many interesting issues, notably that tech-obsessed early adopters have ceased to dominate demand for digital cameras (because cameras are “good enough”), that cell phones are eating out the point-and-shoot market from below (certainly our iPhone 4s have made our Panasonic TZ5 redundant), that mirrorless interchangeable-lens cameras (i.e. Micro 4/3 et al) are eating out the DSLR market from below (I’d like to see some actual figures on that), and many of today’s camera buyers value convenience over absolute technical quality. Today’s DSLR is an image capture device without a lens which needs to dock to a computer to be really useful. To jump to the ultimate conclusion, Hogan argued earlier that serious cameras need to be computing platforms capable of running third party software.

While I very much appreciate his take, I’m not sure I agree with his conclusions. I think what a camera needs to be is an image capture device without a lens or a computer (or with a simple computer that can be ignored or bypassed or swapped out). In the short term this means becoming an iPhone (or similar device) accessory, while in the longer term this means being a cloud device.

Now, Nikon (et al) could essentially build a proper touch-based computer with a real operating system (Android, say) into their cameras and then allow third parties to provide extra software for their “platform”, but I think it’s pretty optimistic to expect that Nikon (or Canon or Sony) would able to produce as good an Android device as, say, a phone handset maker. Heck, most of the camera companies seem to have quite a bit of trouble creating decent menu systems for their cameras. Even if Nikon could manage this feat, how can they expect to attract third-party developers to such a niche market? The iPad, which has no built-in camera and no convenient mechanism for docking with cameras has a positive embarrassment of riches in terms of photo editing tools (e.g. Filterstorm is currently $2.99).

Imagine, on the other hand, that Nikon (or some other DSLR maker) were the first to offer a DLSR which could simply dock an iPhone 4 (say) and use it as its back-end (including live view, image editing, and so forth). They could include their own “back” for the camera (and in fact they could simply make different “docks” accessories). They could provide (free or otherwise) their own software to go with it. Such a camera would instantly gain caché just for being iPhone/Android friendly, gain immediate access to an existing, vibrant third-party software market, and immediately gain access to the “digital hub” and “the cloud”, social networking, and all the other buzzwords.

Let’s suppose two big camera companies decide to take differing approaches: one decides to turn its DSLRs into iPhone accessories (they probably would phrase it slightly differently) while the other decides to build some kind of proper OS into its high end cameras and try to build up a third-party developer community around them. Which one do you think has a non-zero chance of shipping something in less than a year? How is the other one going to look when its product comes out second? It seems clear to me that the “iPhone accessory approach” is not only more likely to get to market first, it would succeed even if it got to market second.

Back in 2001 there were quite a few companies making their money as hi-fi vendors. Most of these are now extinct, much smaller, or glorified iPod dock vendors. OK, it’s pretty ignominious to become a glorifed iPod dock vendor, but it’s worse to go out of business.

Sony has released the NEX-3 and NEX-5 series cameras which represent Sony’s first DSLR-quality offerings with decent low-light performance (not-quite-up-there with the Nikon D300/D90/D5000 but close). The sad thing is these cameras are getting panned because, basically, they’re too small (or rather, their bodies are too small). Sony made them so small that the camera body was smaller than the lens barrel (which is plainly ridiculous) which in turn led to a lack of real estate for hard controls, which in turn led to menu-driven controls, which led to lousy ergonomics.

I wonder if Sony can find the guy who designed the PSX controller and have him sort out their camera division. Well, it doesn’t matter because this particular product category is stupid.

The basic problem for me with this entire category is that if you can’t stick it in your pocket, then why bother? The only way any of these cameras is “pocketable” is with a pancake lens, which means you’re stuck at 35-40mm equivalent. You can get a superb high-end fast zoom lens camera (such as the Panasonic LX-3 or the Canon G-11) for far less money and that sucker might actually fit in a pocket. If you’re going to carry around a bunch of lenses why not simply get a cheap DSLR? It seems to me that the “non-reflex interchangeable lens small digital” category might make sense if they picked a sensor size based on being able to mount a versatile lens and remain pocketable (which might mean a considerably smaller than 4/3 sensor).

In the long run, 35mm film dominated because it was the largest film you could put in the smallest camera that was still reasonably pleasant to use. It follows that if you don’t need a film winding mechanism with two spools that in the end full-frame 35mm sensors or something slightly larger will eventually “win” the format race. Anything “slightly” smaller simply gets you lousy ergonomics (if you do it to shrink the camera) or poorer image quality (since smaller sensors equal inferior image quality).

Leica has figured this out, but their camera costs about as much as a pretty nice car. (And just in case you think that what Leica does is irrelevant to the overall camera market, who do you think popularized the 35mm standard?)

So it seems to me that there are going to be two successful mass market formats in the long run:

• Serious cameras will be dominated by full-frame 35mm (or slightly larger) sensors with interchangeable lenses.
• Mainstream cameras will be dominated by fixed lens cameras (including cell phones) with the best sensors that can be made for pretty much nothing (underwater, pro-pocket, etc.). It’s worth noting that the way the fab business works, eventually full-frame 35mm sensors will cost just about nothing, so eventually expect to see some seriously awesome IQ even in this segment (just as you eventually got ridiculously good, dirt cheap 35mm cameras). Someone like Olympus might succeed with an interchangeable lens camera with a smaller-than-35mm sensor, but it needs to get you a useful pocketable camera, not a pocket-size body with a gigantic lens. That’s just stupid.

Personally, I’m waiting for Nikon’s D700 replacement.

There have been two successful OS transformations on the desktop. One was Mac OS Classic to Mac OS X, which was implemented using virtualization. The other was DOS to Windows, which was a slightly weirder affair (initially, Windows was a DOS application, then Windows NT ran DOS under virtualization). You might argue Windows was a horrible kludge, but its more elegant step-sibling (OS/2) handled DOS compatibility by virtualization and failed miserably in the marketplace.

It seems pretty clear, especially given the power of current hardware, that virtualization is the way to handle an OS transformation. Indeed, many commentators have suggested that Microsoft should replace Windows with a brand new modern, lightweight OS, and manage compatibility by virtualization.

Right now, iPhone OS runs under Mac OS X via virtualization. Multitouch is not well-supported (for obvious reasons), but that’s simply a hardware issue (Macs don’t have touchscreens).

Of Apple’s two operating systems, one of generates over two-thirds of its revenue, and an even larger proportion of its profits. And that OS isn’t Mac OS X. Apple is notorious (I might say famous, but chose not to) for doing a lot with a little — there are probably fewer people working on Mac OS X right now than on Microsoft Word. But we haven’t even heard a whisper about Mac OS X 10.7.

So, the question is, whither Mac OS X?

Merging it with iPhone OS is impractical for numerous reasons, not least of which is that iPhone OS runs very lean and mean and Mac OS X conspicuously does not. A virtualization solution would allow iPhone OS to continue working beautifully on low-powered devices (by not providing the compatibility box) while allowing higher-powered devices to offer full backwards compatibility.

Of course, Apple already has an iPhone virtualization box for Mac OS X, so a “unification OS” could be released tomorrow if Apple wanted to make Mac OS X that OS, but I think a Tablet computer that boots instantly into iPhone OS and lets you run Mac OS X in a virtual box as needed is far more desirable than a Tablet computer that boots in 30s into Mac OS X and lets you run iPhone OS in a virtual box. Either would be pretty compelling, though.

The other question is, what benefits are there to keeping the two platforms separate? I would argue there are none. iPhone OS devices with a Mac compatibility box would, in essence, answer all the “closed platform” criticisms — the Mac platform is rich and open, and running it on a virtual machine would sandbox it from the managed world of iPhone. Indeed, virtualization affords Apple the option of opening iPhone OS devices without adding risk for users who don’t want it. The only real reason not to go down this route right now is hardware.

There’s your Mac App Store, by the way. It’s the App Store, and iPhone OS running on your Mac.

So, I predict that iPhone OS will subsume Mac OS X within three years. Obviously, it will long since have ceased being iPhone OS, of course. Hence, the title of this post.

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.

I read that Netflix is coming to the iPad. Given that Adobe already has a widget for turning Flash applets into iPhone apps, there’s no reason not to expect Hulu et al to be able to provide iPad apps for their content as well.

So, given that we’ll almost certainly have Netflix, and most likely Hulu working on the iPad, and that many newspaper sites will simply switch to HTML5 / H264 — what’s missing? Nothing of note, it seems.

The interesting thing is that by allowing Adobe Flash apps in via the App Store but not via the web, Apple makes it easier for developers — of casual games for example — to monetize their products while improving the user experience. Unless you like being deluged with butt ugly ads while playing online games.

It looks like the iPad may be a very complete media consumption device pretty much on day one. What I’d really like to see for the iPad are:

1. A clamshell case that effectively turns the iPad into a laptop with keyboard. The ideal design would probably have a pass-through dock connector, stereo speakers, USB slot, SD slot, and extra battery power.
2. A paint program — I know Brushes was demoed on stage at the launch (I own the iPhone version), but despite its high-profile user, I find it pretty poorly designed and would love to see major improvements in its UI or some real competition.
3. A image editor (i.e. Photoshop-like program). The obvious candidate here would be a port of Acorn since the program is already 100% cocoa, and the UI is almost iPad ready. (Then again, the Pixelmator team has been really quiet for a long time, notwithstanding vacations.)
4. A 3d sketch modeler (like Teddy or Curvy). The iPad would be perfect for this kind of 3d “sketching”. (I’m actually tempted to have a shot at writing such a tool.)
5. Coda or something similar — i.e. a combination programmers’ editor and FTP client (ideally with some kind of simple image editing functionality so you don’t need to perform acrobatics to crop or scale images, etc.) — but then projects like Bespin would allow you to integrate basic editing tools into your websites.