Live from Austin!

Joel Johnson, Gizmodo, 2010-02-03:

It’s taken me a couple of days for me to understand the wet sickness I felt in response to all the post-iPad whining, until it finally came up in a sputtering lump: disgust.

The iPad isn’t a threat to anything except the success of inferior products. [...]

This noxious attitude has permeated our tech culture for the last couple of decades, from a half-decade of open-source devotees crying about Microsoft on Slashdot, on toward the last few years of Apple ascendency. It’s childish. It’s defeatist. And it shows a simultaneous fear to actually innovate and improve while spilling gallons of capitulative semen to a fatuous, dystopian cuckold wank-mare. [...]

Apple is selling a product. They’ve chosen to keep it closed for demonstrably reasonable benefits. And—yes, okay!—several collateral benefits that come from controlling the marketplace that services their products.

Three weeks later, Joel Johnson, Gizmodo, 2010-02-23:

If you need another example of why the iTunes App Store’s walled garden is flawed, Apple has been only too happy to oblige, capriciously and arbitrarily removing an unknown number of “sexy” apps without warning. [...]

With a closed ecosystem comes a lot of responsibility. Apple has taken on the heavy mantle of arbiter, ostensibly to manage quality. I can forgive them for that, even if I don’t like it. But the only reason to ban blue apps is taste. And if these apps were a matter of taste, why were they approved in the first place? What will the next set of apps be that Apple decides are inappropriate long after people have spent hundreds of hours creating and marketing them? [...]

Apple has made a declaration: that sex and sexuality are shameful, even for adults. But only sometimes. And only when people complain.

Unfortunately, they’ve accomplished the opposite. The only thing I’m ashamed of is Apple.

Looks like Joel Johnson was fine when Apple was blocking things he didn’t care about, like open source software and apps he didn’t use; but when they started blocking stuff he cared about, like jiggling boobs, suddenly he started to have second thoughts.

He still doesn’t quite get it, though: He still likes having nanny tell him what he can run on his phone “to manage quality”; he just wants nanny to make only decisions that he agrees with. Good luck with that.

2007: Apple introduces OS X 10.5, with its new quarantine feature. Applications which are downloaded from the Internet now show a warning dialog if you try to run them. At the same time, support is added for code signing, and notes that the user is likely to be bothered with additional dialog boxes and prompts for unsigned code that they don’t see with signed code. Developers are advised that they should sign all code.

2008: Apple introduces the iPhone SDK, and explains that for security reasons, the iPhone will only run code signed with a public key and co-signed by Apple.

2010: At WWDC, Apple introduces new security features for OS X 10.7. Developers are told that unsigned code will produce a new more strongly worded warning dialog every time it is run. A bundle of SDK, code signing key/cert and some new tools is announced for $99. Fanboys point out that you can turn the dialog off, so what’s the problem?

2011: Mac OS X 10.7 is launched with the new Mac App Store as an icon in the dock that cannot be removed. Anyone can sell signed applications via the App Store, with Apple taking a 30% cut of the profits and handling fulfilment. A developer feeding frenzy ensues. Soon, the Mac App Store is the main way to sell Macintosh applications. The old free OS X SDK is quietly discontinued. Fanboys point out that there are still the GNU tools and scripting languages, so what’s the problem?

2012: Mac OS X 10.8 is announced. OS X Server is rebranded as OS X Professional, aimed at developers, and shipped with Pro grade machines (MacBook Pro and Mac Pro) and servers. The regular OS X 10.8 is shipped on MacBook and Mac Mini systems. Development is still possible on the basic OS X, if you pay $99 for the SDK and a code signing key. Fanboys point out that you can easily jailbreak OS X 10.8, so what’s the problem?

2013: Mac OS X 10.9 no longer runs unsigned code. For that, you need to buy Mac OS X Professional, or the developer SDK and a signing key. The Mac is now locked up the same way as the iPhone or iPad. Fanboys explain that this was necessary for security reasons. Besides, what are you going to do, switch to Linux?

Dear Apple,

I’ve been a Mac user since 1986 or so, and a Mac owner since 1990. I stuck with you through the bad years of the late 90s, when everyone thought you were doomed. I live in a multi-Mac multi-iPod household. I even have an AppleTV. Yet I don’t have an iPhone.

I like the design of the iPhone. You’ve fixed all the major functionality shortfalls, like lack of MMS and instant messaging. But your insistence on controlling what people are allowed to run on the device is slowly stifling it.

I write software for myself, and sometimes for other people. I would like to write software for whatever my next phone is. I also have a small Internet tablet I’d like to replace, a Nokia N800. The iPhone could be a contender, if you’d let it run whatever I want. (No, jailbreaking is not a solution. I don’t want to get into an adversarial relationship with you.)

You’ve got a big event coming up on January 27th. It’s probably going to be the launch of the iSlate tablet. It’s more than likely going to run iPhone OS 4. It’ll be your last chance to win me over.

Like many other people, I currently rate Google Android as the OS I’d most like to run on my next smart phone and my next Internet tablet.

See how the preference for the iPhone has dropped dramatically on that graph? See how the preference for Android has almost quadrupled? Sure, some of that is because of AT&T’s network, but a big chunk of it is the direct result of your user-hostile policies.
Even AT&T can see the writing on the wall.

Your iron grip on the iPhone is strangling the device. It’s time to free the iPhone, before Android takes over. You’ve still got the best UI, and you’ve got almost all the functionality–but that isn’t enough. You’re facing a multi-vendor OS anyone can develop for; you won’t beat that with a locked-down single-vendor appliance only you can approve software for.

By all means keep the iPhone lockable to a particular wireless provider. Keep the app store. Maybe even make people turn on “developer mode” or click through a warning to run unsigned software. But don’t keep trying to stop people from running the software they want to run on their iPhones. You’re driving away developers and driving away users.

If you won’t free the iPhone, at least free the tablet. I’ve wanted a Mac tablet for years–but that’s the point: I want a Mac-like tablet. A real computer that will run whatever software I want, not some locked-down piece of hardware that you control. If a giant iPod Touch is all you have to offer on the 27th, I’ll go with an Android tablet and Android phone, no matter how amazing your new UI is.

I have a confession to make: until this year, I didn’t have all my photos in a properly cataloged database. I’d tried various programs, but none of them quite satisfied me.

iView MediaPro seemed to have bugs in its ITPC handling. I e-mailed their support address reporting the problems, and got no reply at all. Then they were bought by Microsoft, so that was that.

QPict works well as a browser for large numbers of random files, but I don’t find it a very helpful tool for organizing them. This seems to have been reflected in the changes in the new version, which looks more like a Finder replacement for photos.

I got Adobe Bridge for free with Photoshop Elements, but I gather it’s pretty much the full deal as bundled with Photoshop CS3. It looks like it’s very powerful, with some kind of metadata templating system. However, it has a horrible interface for browsing large numbers of photos, and a horrible interface for entering metadata.

iPhoto was pretty ropey too. In particular, it insisted on moving all your photos into a set of folders named 2004/01/01, 2004/01/02, and so on. It also had no support for any of the industry standard metadata formats, such as ITPC and XMP. It’s as if iTunes had been built with no ID3 tag support and made to store all your music in folders according to how many minutes and seconds long each song is.

However, with iTunes 08, Apple finally delivered something usable; and with iTunes 09, I’m actually feeling enthusiastic about the program. I’ve now got everything in iPhoto, and I’m happy with it.

The new face recognition is far from perfect, but it’s good enough to be a time saver. It can also be a source of entertainment–I laughed when it got confused by some shadows, picked out a horse’s ass, and asked whose face it was.

The geotagging isn’t too useful as yet, but it’s a nice feature to have supported. I’ve discovered that if you’re using the dialog to manually assign geotags, it will use any existing metadata to help narrow down the options it presents to you. This means that if you start off by tagging a bunch of photos with an approximate location (e.g. London), and give the event a sensible title (e.g. England Trip 2001), searches for specific locations will apparently start from London, England and work outwards.

Browsing the tagged photos is less impressive. For now, there’s just a zoomable Google map with push pins on it. However, I’m sure people will start coming up with cool add-on visualizations.

Another nice feature of iPhoto is the built-in Flickr and Facebook support. Both systems work like add-on photo libraries; you can edit a Flickr-published photo album, and the changes automatically sync up in the background. Also, any faces tagged in iPhoto result in the appropriate person being tagged in Facebook.

Internally, the iPhoto Library now organizes your files by event. As in previous versions, the original files are kept untouched, and any changes you make result in new files. All of this is invisible to you, and you don’t need to care, but it does mean that you never lose quality by applying repeated edits to a JPEG, and you can revert to the original file at any point. The program manages to stay pretty snappy, even while juggling thousands of files.

iPhoto now supports the raw CR2 files from my Canon SLR, as well as JPEGs. It also has an option to reveal the original file in the Finder, or to fire up an external program (such as Photoshop or Canon Digital Photo Professional) to edit the raw file.

So overall, I now recommend iPhoto, even for fairly advanced photography enthusiasts. It won’t be enough for a pro studio photographer, but if your camera isn’t your career, it’s probably most of what you need.

As expected, MacWorld was a big disappointment. The MacBook Air was supposed to be the big “wow” item, but it’s more of a big “meh”. Apple clearly set out to make something comparable to the VAIOs Sony has been selling for years–which is a great idea, as I love small laptops, but in the quest to be thinner than anyone else they introduced a few too many design compromises.No optical drive built in is no big deal; I go weeks between using my Mac’s optical drive. More of a problem is the lack of any Firewire capability, the inability to upgrade the RAM, and the fact that there’s no ethernet unless you carry around a USB ethernet adaptor. And of course, that adaptor will use your only USB port, so better carry a hub too. And cables for your hub.

[Update: It's also no smaller than the regular MacBook; just thinner. So it's not an ultraportable, and no easier to carry around.]

Now, if they had done something like Fujitsu’s P1620 and made it possible to flip the keyboard under and use the device as a tablet, that would have rocked. But as it is, it’s just another laptop, albeit a very thin one; and it’s not really suitable as a primary machine.

So what’s the target market for the MacBook Air? People who want a status symbol, or people who travel an awful lot and need the absolute lightest Mac possible. They also need to be people who can afford a second Mac as a main machine, or people with very light needs. So I really can’t see the Air selling in great quantities. If I were choosing a Mac laptop today, I wouldn’t get one, even if price wasn’t a concern.

I was more interested in what they’re doing with AppleTV. I’ve been thinking for a while that dealing with scratched and scuffed Netflix DVDs is a pain, and I’d rather just rent movies via the Internet. AppleTV is going to offer this as an option. Add in the ability to buy TV shows a la carte, and it’s starting to look pretty tempting.

Of course, there are a couple of problems. The first is that a lot of content isn’t in MPEG-4 format. The iPod would never have been a success if it hadn’t been able to play MP3s and had only worked with MPEG-4 audio; and similarly, if Apple wants the AppleTV to be a success, they need to make it able to play more formats than just MPEG-4.

The second problem is selection. Right now, the movie and TV selection via iTunes doesn’t even come close to Netflix. But give it another year or two, and I think the cable TV and satellite companies are going to be in big trouble.

The economics are simple. I watch 2-3 hours of TV a week, on half a dozen channels. To get those channels, however, I have to buy a bundle of over a hundred channels that I literally never watch. I could buy the shows via iTunes instead, cancel the DirecTV subscription, and save $30 a month. But not this year, not until all the shows I want are available…

The big question will be whether the new AppleTV software can be easily hacked to enable installation of other codecs and playback of non-MPEG-4 content. If so, I may get one. If not, I’ll wait until the content is all available in MPEG-4–which may be a long wait.

I guess I wasn’t paying attention to the Leopard previews earlier in the year, because OS X just blew my mind.

I was editing an e-mail message, and decided to idly click on Time Machine to see what it was doing. Instead of the Finder going into Time Machine mode, my e-mail went into time machine mode. I clicked the back arrow a couple of times, and there was what my e-mail inbox looked like 2 days ago, complete with since deleted messages.

It’s the same with the Address Book. You can step back through how your address book looked at different moments in the past.

My general impression of Leopard is that it’s good. Proper multi-threading in Finder and Mail makes a big difference. But this Time Machine thing is the most amazing backup tool ever. I got a big hard disk at Costco at the weekend, and backing up is now totally painless, there isn’t even an application to run. You just have to make sure a suitable disk is plugged in for long enough to copy the changes over, once a day or so.

Backing up isn’t sexy and it isn’t fun, which is why most people don’t bother to do it. Now there’s no excuse to skip backing up. Or at least, not if you’re a Mac user.

I’m an iPhone skeptic. While I appreciate good UI design considerably more than the average person, a good UI alone is not enough to make me accept a crippled and overpriced product.

At WWDC today, Steve Jobs has announced that the third party SDK for the iPhone is…make all your applications web applications, and access them from the Safari browser. Which means the user has to pay network bandwidth charges to run the application, and can’t make or receive any calls while it’s running. And of course, no service means your applications all stop working.

So basically, the iPhone is a closed platform, a very pretty but underpowered cellphone. It’s not a smartphone. It lacks even the capabilities of many low-end handsets offered by GSM networks, but it’s going to be sold at a premium price.

Let’s see how it compares with my current 2-year-old phone, for example:

To me, that’s a hell of a tough sell.

You may point out that my tiny phone’s screen isn’t great for browsing the web, but that’s just tradeoff I made because I like a phone that’s truly pocketable. If you prefer a big screen, you can get a Blackberry or Treo for $150 or less. Right now, Cingular has refurb 8525 devices for $99.

I prefer the hybrid solution: pair a small phone with my Nokia N800, and browse the web at triple the resolution of the iPhone. You can get an N800 plus a small Bluetooth phone and you’ve still saved $200 over buying an iPhone.

In addition, most of today’s phones take SD cards for memory expansion. I can dump movies onto a 4GB SD card and stick it in the Nokia. If I need more space, I’ve got a couple of extra 1GB cards floating around. What happens when you use up all the memory in your iPhone? You’re stuck, there’s no expansion option.

If the iPhone was $99, or even $199 at the most, I might be interested. At $599, it ought to sell like the similarly-priced PlayStation 3. It’s the most overpriced Apple product since the Mac Cube. (Which I loved the design of, but didn’t buy because it was overpriced.) It’s the most overhyped since the first Newton.

Oh, I’m sure Apple will sell some. I mean, the Motorola RAZR sucked, but plenty of people had to have it because it looked so cool. But then, the RAZR wasn’t $600…

Today’s the big day. The iTunes Music Store has started actually selling DRM-free music. I decided to vote with my wallet and go find and buy something. I’m hoping that in a few weeks we’ll see a press release stating that EMI’s music sales tripled, or something like that, and the other labels will get that clue they’ve been missing.

Unfortunately, it seems as if everyone else has had the same idea, and Apple’s Internet connections anre buckling under the strain. In a way that’s a good thing, but it’s a bit frustrating.

I’ll keep this brief, as you’re a busy man.

You recently wrote that you would drop DRM from the iTunes music store “in a heartbeat” if you could.

Well, as you’ll see if you check the iTunes purchase logs, I bought quite a few tunes from the iTunes music store. You’ll notice that I stopped as soon as you fixed the flaw that allowed Hymn to remove the DRM. Since then I’ve bought music from places like bleep.com that sell DRM-free music. I still use the iTunes music store, but only as an easy way to preview tracks that I then buy elsewhere.

Clearly, there are plenty of music labels (such as most indie labels) that are willing to license their music DRM-free. Clearly there are people like me who won’t buy music if it has DRM they can’t remove. So, here’s a proposal:

Allow record companies and artists who elect to do so, to sell their music DRM-free on the iTunes music store. Indicate the DRM status with a small icon in the download views in iTunes, like you indicate explicit lyrics. I’ve put together a quick mock-up. As you can see, the padlock icon is very discreet and unobjectionable. I don’t think it would cause user confusion; the people who don’t care about DRM will probably never notice it.

Once you’ve offered DRM-free music on the iTunes store, you just sit back and watch. If I’m right, the non-DRM music sales will surge. Then you’ll have some real ammo with which to approach the major labels. Because frankly, they don’t listen to consumers like me. I know, because this year I wrote to EMI listing a bunch of CDs I didn’t buy because they had DRM warnings on the packaging. I didn’t even get a reply.

Yours sincerely,

mathew

I was kinda enthusiastic about the iPhone…then I found out from Macintouch that it’s a closed, locked down unit.

Forget about installing software to use it as an e-book reader, or reading Word documents or PDFs. You’re not going to be using it to give business presentations. Forget about downloading music via the WiFi connection. Forget about writing your own neat applications and running them. There’s no Xcode iPhone developer kit, and Apple apparently has no plans to produce one for public use.

So basically, it’s a phone that does exactly the same stuff my current phone does, but with a much prettier interface. I’m sure Apple will sell a boatload of them to the same people who bought the Motorola RAZR because it looked cool. But to me, it’s not that interesting unless it’s open.

The fact that you need to sign a 2 year contract with Cingular makes it even less attractive. Cingular’s SMS is flaky to the point of near uselessness, and their Internet connectivity is expensive compared to any other carrier. I’m sure their iPhone contract will require a monthly reaming that will make my current unpleasant cellphone bill look like a bargain.

If you like the idea of what the iPhone could have been, though, there are a couple of upcoming alternatives worth considering.

OpenMoko is a Linux-based phone with an iPhone-like touch interface. It’ll be about half the price of the iPhone, and not locked to Cingular. It’s also going to be open to developers.

The Greenphone is a more traditional phone design (i.e. one with buttons). Again, it runs Linux and is open to third party developers.

Also, since it seems it isn’t common knowledge: Apple didn’t invent the multitouch technology as Steve Jobs claimed. It was actually developed by a company called Fingerworks. Said company mysteriously shut down, and the owners refused to say who had purchased their operation, citing confidentiality agreements. However, one of the founders of the company was subsequently confirmed to be working for Apple.