Of shoes and chips and software hacks

Eviller and eviller

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 14:19:37 -0500

A few paragraphs from Bob Bowdon on Huffington Post: “Why Has Google Been Collecting Kids’ Social Security Numbers Under the Guise of an Art Contest?”

It turns out that the company sporting the motto “don’t be evil” has been asking parents nationwide to disclose their children’s personal information, including Social Security Numbers, and recruiting schools to help them do it — all under the guise of an art contest. It’s called, “Doodle-4-Google,” a rather catchy, kid-friendly name if I do say so myself. The company is even offering prize money to schools to enlist their help with the promotion. Doesn’t it sound like fun? Don’t you want your kid to enter too?

What could be wrong with filling out a few entry forms?

A national, commercial database of names and addresses of American children, especially one that includes their dates of birth and SSNs, would be worth many millions to marketing firms and retailers.

You see what Google knows and many parents don’t know is that a person’s city of birth and year of birth can be used to make a statistical guess about the first five digits of his/her social security number. Then, if you can somehow obtain those last four SSN digits explicitly — voila, you’ve unlocked countless troves of personal information from people who didn’t even understand that such a disclosure was happening.

So in closing, three simple ideas for you, gentle reader, to take away. (1) City of birth, when coupled with year of birth, can be correlated to social security numbers, so don’t give it out just because a box appears on a form. (2) No public contest should ask for any part of a social security number, especially involving kids. (3) For internet searches, have you tried Yahoo! or Bing lately? (They’re probably both improved since you last tried them.) You just might find what you’re looking for.

Um, wow. Just, wow.

BlackBerry PlayBook: The big sibling (as opposed to little)

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 14:39:00 -0400

So the BlackBerry tablet device — the PlayBook — bas been announced, here:

RIM introduces PlayBook — the BlackBerry tablet

(Engadget)

and rebutted here:

The BlackBerry PlayBook Doesn’t Exist

(Justice Gödel Condor)

And perhaps the second most interesting thing about the announcement is the music playing behind the ad:

Cut Copy — “Where I’m Going”

To me, the most interesting thing about it is the pairing. Well, after the question of whether or not it exists, of course. Anyway, I find this design philosophy really intriguing, because the design philosophy of an artifact often finds its way into many or most of the artifact’s details. And here, the pairing is arguably the most striking element of RIM’s design philosophy for the device, so it has the potential to lead the device in a lot of interesting directions.

Let’s compare this thing to the iPad: the PlayBook is the phone’s big sibling, whereas the iPad is the desktop’s little sibling.

It’s all about the pairing, in my opinion. The iPad is (currently) useless without an OSX-based machine to pair it to, at least at initialization. The big sibling to which you attach it provides backups and, at least initially, all of the authentication and personal information needed. This may change in the near future (evidently the device will soon get the ability to print documents, for example—woo!). But currently, it is a slave device. A really cool, easy-to-use, remarkably powerful slave device, but a slave nonetheless.

The PlayBook is paired to the phone: it is a big sibling. If RIM allows this philosophy to pervade their design decisions, then the device has serious potential to be powerful in ways that the iPad (currently) is not. The iPad is currently not designed to be a standalone computer, and I believe much of that is due to its little-sibling status. The PlayBook could potentially attract some market attention away from the iPad if the big-sibling status becomes their rallying point … make this device the functional equivalent of a laptop (in terms of capabilities), and you’ll make a lot of people very happy.

I have an iPad. I love using it, and my kids fight each other to use it. However, I have not yet purchased an iPad for my parents, because it is not the equivalent of a standalone laptop/desktop yet … you can’t print from it, you can’t Skype on it, you can’t backup its contents without tethering it to a host computer, etc. It will be interesting to see how many of these issues RIM addresses with the gen1 version … when/if it comes out.

The Googizon tablet?

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 15:33:00 -0400

So I went on vacation for a few weeks, and some of the most interesting stuff to hit our industry happened while I was away. Wow.

Skipping the somewhat-unsurprising news that Google has merged with Verizon and will eat our children (I may be paraphrasing just a bit), here’s the latest thing that strikes me as funny:

Google launching a Chrome OS tablet on Verizon, goes on sale November 26
Google is building a Chrome OS tablet. It’s real, and it’s being built by HTC … expect it to be every bit as geek-tastic as the Nexus One.

What I find particularly humorous is that the last little bit is not exactly the endorsement that the author intended. When invoking the moniker of Google’s most awesomest handset evar, let’s just first recall how well the Nexus One sold in its opening week (graph stolen from Wired.com):

When you subtract out the units that were given away as promos, I think over all Google sold around forty Nexus Ones over the product’s lifetime. So comparing the tablet’s future to that of the Nexus One may doom it.

Another thing I find humorous is the promo shot of the tablet:

It’s computer generated (self-admittedly, but still …). The tablet is expected to show up in stores in three months, and yet no photos of it exist? Words fail me. This thing is probably real, and it may turn out to be the best thing since sliced bread … but come on, guys.

Love it. Finally a bit of sense in the iPhone4 debacle.

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 11:53:36 -0400

Love it. Finally a bit of sense in the iPhone4 debacle.

Google can [and will] remove Android apps from your phone

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 16:11:43 -0400

Check this out, from “Exercising Our Remote Application Removal Feature” on android-developers.blogspot.com:

Every now and then, we remove applications from Android Market due to violations of our Android Market Developer Distribution Agreement or Content Policy. In cases where users may have installed a malicious application that poses a threat, we’ve also developed technologies and processes to remotely remove an installed application from devices. If an application is removed in this way, users will receive a notification on their phone.

… and this particular blog entry let the world know that they had just exercised that feature on every Android phone out there hosting a particular app. Let’s put this in perspective: Apple removes apps from the App Store (and is branded “evil” for doing so); Google removes apps from their version of an App Store (the Android Market), and also removes apps directly off of your personal phone.

The fact that they have done this is far less disturbing than the fact that they put in place the hooks to do it in the first place. They have a back door in every single Android phone out there … a back door that allows them to control your phone. They say that the reason is for your security:

The remote application removal feature is one of many security controls Android possesses to help protect users from malicious applications.

However, history shows that malicious things are often done in the name of increased security. Also, the “one of many” quote above is kinda ominous to me.

Anybody know if Apple has a similar feature in the iPhone?

On mass manufacturing and what it means to humanity

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 13:56:00 -0400

Previous post pointed to this installment of The Genius of Design:

The Genius of Design, episode 1: http://vimeo.com/12112900

The second episode can be found here:

The Genius of Design, episode 2: http://vimeo.com/12490724

Some great quotes and perspective from episode 1 follow.

The division of labor and the Designer

Toward the middle of the video, they venture into the creation of the Designer, which happened as a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution … the maker and the designer became two separate entities, with potentially bad side-effects for the maker.

Dieter Rams (designer from Braun & others):

My grandfather, he was a specialist for surfaces … I learned from him to polish by hand, and his thumb was like his tool … he was thinking not in mass[-manufactured] products, and that is what what we have to think today, too; we have to change mass[-manufactured] products into quality products.

This clearly points to the goal of the modern designer, the desired end-product: the modern designer should create something that is compatible with today’s manufacturing techniques and capabilities, but which emulates the hand-crafted nature of the individually created product.

Narrator voiceover, talking about the future of manufacturing, given Rams’s observation:

But controlling a multi-faceted manufacturing process is more challenging than throwing a pot on a wheel. Designing for industry is based on a bold premise: that the craftsman’s skills can be replicated by a mechanical system in which machines act like humans, and humans [act like] machines.

This introduces the unpleasant side of the divide between the maker and the designer. The maker becomes a cog in a machine.

Bob Casey, Historian at the Henry Ford Museum:

What happens in a mass-production system is that the craftsmanship is transferred from the people who are physically assembling the product back up the chain away from the mass who are doing the assembly. The labor historians have a word for it: they call it ‘de-skilling.’ It says we are going to take the skill away from the majority of people, and were going to invest it in a smaller group of people who are designing [the product].

The obvious difficulty is how to avoid things like sweatshops and working conditions in which workers routinely throw themselves off buildings [insert sidelong glance at Apple & Foxconn]. The Henry Ford approach seems the most obvious … odd that so few seem to have emulated it. Ford turned his employees into his customers by paying them wages high enough that they could afford to buy a car of their own.

The problem was seen back when the industrial revolution began. Fiona MacCarthy, WIlliam Morris Biographer (after narrator voiceover “For William Morris, the most celebrated and influential designer of the 19th century, machines were at best a threat; at worst a menace.”):

He wasn’t against machines per se, because he could see that machines could, if properly regulated, make life better for people. But he couldn’t bear the thought of this beauty being achieved at the expense of the people who were producing in these inhumane conditions.

A beautiful object really must be made in beautiful surroundings by people who are living reasonable lives, lives with some pleasure in them … not the kind of lives that a lot of people in Victorian England were being forced to live and work in.

To address what he saw as the problem, Morris learned all of the crafts & skills that the machines were taking away from people … he believed that these were skills required by the designer — necessary for the designer to do his job properly. Evidently, he never managed to address the problem … because his works had significant hand-crafted aspects to them, they cost more and were thus relegated to the wealthy who could afford them.

The unadorned beauty of the everyday

There is a great section on the marriage of form and function, of beauty and purpose.

Sam Hecht, designer:

Design can never be a pure activity, because it’s always connected with how things are bought, how things are sold, how things are used, how things are thrown away or recycled. All of these different aspects of how consumption operates need to be acknowledged, understood, and sometimes manipulated so that you can create beautiful, resolute, astounding pieces of work.

The video goes on to point out that Japan, despite its rapid and whole-hearted acceptance of modernization and mass manufacturing, nonetheless as a culture appreciates and, as a consumer society, pays for hand-crafted high quality work on everyday objects. Things like teapots and teacups … quality hand-made items are sought after, and the objects carry price tags high enough to enable the artist/craftsman to continue crafting the object for the future. This is a culture that appreciates, recognizes, and rewards quality, all in the face of mass manufacturing.

Naoto Fukusawa, designer:

The Japanese see beauty in the functionality of an item, like tools and other everyday items. We place great emphasis on harmony and being at one with the world … We want products to melt into the environment and become one with it. The goal for us is creating harmony.

The interesting question is how to instill this attitude outside of the Japanese culture. Europe seems to have an appreciation for quality, though I do not know the extent to which it mirrors that of Japan. America, on average, has an appreciation only for price … and we use it to distinguish all goods from food to medicine to clothing to house construction. Scary.

On the frequent mental divide between function and appeal, specifically targeting the automobile industry:

For designers, the chassis is the platform, which exists to support their designs.

For engineers, design is styling, sometimes pronounced “packaging.”

Pretty humorous; it mirrors the divide between hardware and software engineers that I wrote about for a business article a while back:

“Reward: How to foster a technology-innovation culture within a large organization (What you can learn from startup companies).” Bruce Jacob. Chapter in The Handbook of Technology Management. H. Bidgoli, Editor. John Wiley & Sons: Hoboken NJ. 2010.

Last but not least, a great quote from Steven Bayley, writer:

There are three great and significant 20th-century art forms, I think: the one is the movies; the second is rock music; the third is industrial design, of which the automobile is the paradigm.

The piece spends a bit of time talking about Ford and the demise of the Model T, brought down by its own success (Ford became less an automobile manufacturer and instead a Model-T manufacturer), and there are some great quotes from designers at the company today.

A single, perfect sphere

It is clear that the challenges are two-fold: first, designers must make pieces that, despite their production numbers and the techniques used to produce them, retain the same essence of humanity inherent in a hand-crafted object. Second, the manufacturing processes (or, perhaps more appropriately, the manufacturing environments) must not dehumanize the workers. We as consumers must insist on these via the decisions we make with our wallets. It certainly seems possible to achieve both; Ford’s example shows that it is possible to leave profit (sometimes significant profit) on the table and yet grow or at least sustain one’s company. Happy, healthy, well-paid workers do not equal the impending downfall of a company … but perhaps I am naive.

The solution is typically innovation … when a company can compete on nothing other than price, then exploitation of workers seems an inevitable endgame. On the other hand, when a company competes on innovation, then interesting things can happen. Neat example in the video is the Coalbrookdale bridge:

[Though] mass production complicated ideas of beauty, the [cast] iron bridge in Coalbrookdale is an early testament to the beauty of the machine-made and the truth of the mass-produced.

This is the picture at the top of the post. I love that, with its reflection in the water, the bridge makes a perfect circle.

Great point made in the video: around the time of the industrial...

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 11:00:14 -0400

Great point made in the video: around the time of the industrial revolution, The Design of Things became a separate concept, distinct from The Making of Things. Thus, today, the design of things is as important as was the making of things 200 years ago. Looks like it is a series—way cool.

WIRED for iPad ... I won't be buying issue #2

Fri, 28 May 2010 09:58:00 -0400

Okay, so I bought the WIRED edition for iPad, because it just looked too cool, and the page navigation seemed much more intuitive than that of Popular Science (which I still can’t figure out). I loved it for the first hour or so. Now I’m over it … this clearly is not the future of digital magazines. Here’s just one little aspect of what’s wrong:

Is This Really The Future of Magazines or Why Didn’t They Just Use HTML 5?

With the Wired app weighing in at a whopping 500 megabytes – just 100 shy of a full CD-ROM – how do they intend to maintain new editions of the magazine? 500 MB is too large for a 3G download (no help from AT&T’s less than spectacular network performance) and for those with iPad’s with the smaller storage, each issue will take a significant chunk of space on the device. […]

Why is the magazine so large? Being the intrepid hacker that I am (*wink*) I mounted my jail broken iPad via AppleTalk and quickly tore into the app itself to see how it was constructed. Similar to the PopSci+ magazine application, each Wired issue is actually a bunch of XML files that lay out a bunch of images. And by “a bunch of images” I mean 4,109 images weighing in at 397MB.

Each full page is a giant image – there are actually two images for each page: one for landscape and one for portrait mode. Yes, I’m laughing on the inside too. There is no text or HTML, just one gigantic image. The “interactive” pieces where you can slide your finger to animate it are just a series of JPG files. When you press play on the audio file and see the progress meter animate? A series of PNG files.

Something is wrong with this picture. Something wrong and something very lazy and/or desperate.

Consumers are definitely missing out when the digital version is simply a recreation of the print version. And, yes, 500MB equals 1/32 of my total iPad storage, an amount that I find completely unacceptable for a single object. Most of which constitutes ads, I should point out, that I paid for.

The guys over at iA do a great job discussing the layout of thing, an essay that transcends WIRED and applies to all content on the iPad:

WIRED on iPad: Just like a Paper Tiger…
Most of the problems that I pointed out (column width, font choices, ornaments, the paper metaphor) and many more (unable to copy paste or zoom) seem to be a result of using InDesign, a layout program optimized for paper designs.

Yeah, as I pointed out before, I think there is room for a lot more to be done on this platform.

More reasons to love Flash

Wed, 26 May 2010 10:02:13 -0400

Tputh.com pointed to the following site, which is now down:

http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/a-new-type-of-phishing-attack

You, can, of course, get Google’s cached version here:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Z4lufF2NUowJ:www.azarask.in/blog/post/a-new-type-of-phishing-attack/+http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/a-new-type-of-phishing-attack/&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari

Aza Raskin, Creative Lead of Firefox, describes a trojan horse attack whereby the scripts on an ostensibly innocuous site wait to see when you have started looking elsewhere (navigate to other tabs, other open windows, etc.), and when this is detected, the content on the site is replaced with a lookalike of a login window for gmail, facebook, online banking, whatever it detects that you use and currently have open. When you “log in” to the service, the site just forwards you to the real site, where you are still logged in as before, so it will appear that you have successfully re-logged in. But now the phishing site has your credentials, and you are none the wiser.

Here’s the money quote:

Every time you include a third-party script on your page, or a Flash widget, you leave yourself wide open for an evil doer to use your website as a staging ground for this kind of attack. If you are the evil doer, you can have this behavior only occur once in a while, and only if the user uses a targeted service. In other words, it could be hard to detect.

Yeah, the point is that your site doesn’t have to be the bad site … if you have a Flash script, say, from an advertiser that you don’t know well, that script could be the one to take over the session. Woo hoo! I agree with his conclusion:

… it’s time for the browser to take a more active role in being your smart user agent; one that knows who you are and keeps your identity, information, and credentials safe.

Or, you know, just disable Flash. Or buy an iPad.

Screw the majority

Fri, 07 May 2010 15:35:00 -0400

Walt Disney:

When I started on Disneyland, my wife used to say, ‘But why do you want to build an amusement park? They’re so dirty.’ I told her that was just the point; mine wouldn’t be.

I love that quote; it shows such depth of personality and drive. I think the attitude really exemplifies the American spirit — e.g., “screw everything, I’m going to do it RIGHT.” It is pretty much the American Grail, the cowboy in everyone. It is what allowed us to pull ourselves up by our collective bootstraps.

So this is clearly one of the main tenets of innovation: the ability to see something as it should be. Of course, doing so, by definition, seems abrasive to others and almost certainly ruffles feathers. Disney’s own wife was skeptical of his plans; think what other people’s reactions were. The computer-buying public nearly revolted when Apple ditched the floppy disk, and they’re now shaking their torches and pitchforks over Flash. Change sucks; radical change inspires revolutions.

What’s embedded in the sentiment, and what I think is at the root of the hostile reaction, is that what most people think is right isn’t always right. What the majority thinks is best sometimes turns out to be wrong. And so the cowboy has to stand up to the majority and tell them they’re wrong. That’s a tough scenario … no wonder it rarely happens.

It is interesting that, despite being infrequent, standing up to the majority seems to happen with regularity in America … in a place where the majority is always quite sure of itself (they choose the nation’s leader, after all, why shouldn’t they feel important?). One would figure it would be easier to stand up to a pliant majority … i.e., that innovation would be more easily accomplished elsewhere.

Or perhaps it is because the majority is so confident that it can produce such visionaries, people who believe in what they think is true, despite external pressure. I like that answer better.

So that’s a theory worth testing … do free societies, in which the populace is enabled and thus confident in its own abilities, innovate more frequently than repressed societies? Food for further thought.

[May 08 Edit: shortened title]

Jobs, homework, and shadow-boxing

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 11:54:45 -0400

The other day I ranted about today’s kids and their attitude toward employment.

A number of students have stopped me in the hall asking for explanations, clarifications, mostly centering on what prompted the rant. I think I have a good answer, finally. Well … at least a better one than I’ve been giving over the past few days.

Ever I started doing the “start-up 101” classes at Maryland, I’ve been trying to figure out how to teach good design. Which, to me, amounts to instilling in someone the desire to do good design. What good design requires is the burning internal need to do something right, the burning dissatisfaction with anything but correctness, a demand for rightness. This is what causes people in startup companies to forego eating, sleeping, dressing well, taking care of their health, etc. … all in the name of putting a product out. These people do not willingly undergo burnout just because someone gave them a paycheck; they do it for the same reason that an author writes, a painter paints. They do it because they have to.

What I realized the other day is that students have the same attitude toward jobs that they have toward their homework—namely, they do it because they are told to by someone in charge and not for themselves.

Problem: this attitude guarantees substandard results. Nobody will ever do a good job at something unless they want to do that particular something and are doing it for their own benefit.

I’m not interested in figuring out how to make students want to do homework (humorous though, that); rather I am interested in figuring out how to break the link between the two, how to show students that the two things are, in fact, very different. A job is very unlike homework, largely because it matters. Homework is shadow-boxing; a job is fighting for your life. Take ownership.

Otherwise, find a Steve Jobs and become his loyal servant

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 16:48:58 -0400

Just read a great opinion piece by Stanislav on Apple, creativity, and Jobs’ monopolies [on taste and usability]. The bulk of the article is about how Apple competitors have squandered opportunities to do good work, but I think a central message is about how great design comes about (e.g., not by committees, which is common practice in nearly all non-Apple companies):

Non-Apple’s Mistake

If you are creative, create. Otherwise, strive to find a strong-willed [Steve] Jobs figure gifted with good taste, and become his loyal servant. This is how we get quality products, everywhere from architecture to operating systems. There is no other way. Creativity requires a mind, and a herd has none.

Stanislav is no fanboy, by the way … many people miss his disclaimer at the bottom:

A number of people linking here seem to think that I like Apple or forgive its sins (as if Apple needs my forgiveness.) This is a mistake. I loathe Apple products, and chafe under the straightjacket of their aesthetic whenever I use one. I simply happen to despise their competition that much more. At least Apple has an aesthetic. Its works, however flawed, are the works of a person, rather than an amorphous blob.

Good design requires personality — something that committees and focus groups lack. Given that most companies’ designs are driven by committees and focus groups, this creates a wonderful opportunity.

Bottom line: there is plenty of room for good design. Go to.

It's called "service discovery" (ca. 1996)

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 19:49:00 -0400

Kills me when I see stuff like this.

Google Cloud Print Reveals the Future of Printing

To print out a document, you rely on your local operating system, which must have a driver installed for the printer you intend to use. Most of the time, it’s not an issue; at home, you probably have one printer and all of your PCs have the required drivers.

Things get a bit more complicated when you want to print something from a mobile device, like an iPad, or from a laptop based on Google’s Chrome OS, which relies entirely on web apps and services. This is whyGoogle is working on Google Cloud Print, a service that enables “any application (web, desktop, or mobile) on any device to print to any printer.”

I talked about this in 1996. Explained why the then-prevalent mechanism for making distributed systems (RPC) had an extremely limited lifetime. Nobody believed me. I decided to work on computer architecture instead.

[Update: forgot to mention — the example in the original paper is a print service, for crying out loud.]

Chickfight!

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 10:00:00 -0400

I just read some really awesome perspective on the tiff between Apple and Adobe. To begin, lest we forget that the iPhone was the first platform to truly open the world of mobile-app development, Kontra reminds us of whence we came:

Many of the App Store developers got into creating products for mobile devices precisely because for the very first time in history the iPhone allowed them to bypass the limits, cost and sheer operational lunacy imposed by telecom carriers. In less than a couple of years, Apple created an online distribution monster of 185,000 apps and 3.5 billion downloads. The fact that no other app store clone has been able to even approach that ought to tell developers something about the magnitude of the efficacy of the App Store. The grass isn’t greener elsewhere.

Inner Daemon reminds us that Adobe has been rooting for Apple to fail for years (my own personal story of woe and longing is the loss of FrameMaker):

In 1996 when Apple was seemingly on the ropes, Adobe made a crucial business decision and one that is coming back to bite them in the ass. They declared that their primary development platform would be Windows; subsequently, every new application or major revision of a product was introduced for Windows first and followed months later, sometimes never at all, by a Mac version.

After Steve Jobs took over and he was charting out a new course with OS X, Apple reached out many times to Abode to introduce a native version of their suite for the new OS. Adobe never committed – standing by its prediction that OS X would never gain momentum or share and it would ride the Windows ascendancy. Adobe thought that it had the dominant hand and displayed its arrogance in public.

[Now], Apple is clicking on all cylinders – it has not only reinforced its dominance in the creative graphics segment but also the web development platform, the mobile development platform and content delivery. Adobe’s not feeling too good about their dominance or that primary development platform choice any more. Are they?

Sorry, Adobe, you screwed yourself. You made a business decision in 1996 to screw Apple when it needed you most to gain credibility for its fledgling OS with the creative crowd. [And yet, s]omehow, Apple making a business decision to protect its customers from your shitty product is the most egregious ethical concern of our time.

Louis Gerbarg gives a whole lot of insight into Apple’s technical concerns:

What Apple does care about is their ability to control their own development cycles. iPhoneOS runs on extremely tight schedules, with a very high degree of secrecy, and at a pace completely controlled by Apple. I know it is popular to claim that maintaining binary compatibility is easy; that is the argument du jour made by people claiming Apple should just support developers using private APIs. Well, they are just wrong. Ask anyone who has been involved with a couple of releases of Mac OS or Windows about the amount of effort involved in keeping old apps working, especially those using private APIs. There is a reason why the majority of current and former framework engineers who comment on the issue come out really strongly against any use of private APIs.

This isn’t some perceived risk, I can think of incidents where Apple reverted OS changes, dumped new APIs, or was forced to committing massive engineering resources to something it did not want to do because a Must Not Break™ app vendor told them to. Apple does not want to give anyone that sort of influence over them. So ultimately, preventing Flash on the platform is about control, but is not control over the user experience of the Flash applications, or even the languages used. It is about the runtimes they bring on to the system, and Apple’s control over future releases of iPhone OS.

… and Adobe’s use of its developer base to try to push Apple around:

Personally, in this whole thing the most distasteful part is that Adobe used its userbase and their livelihood as a bargaining chip. These kinds of high stakes negotiations have happened in the past many times. They are much more common than people think, and until the last few years Apple was more likely to be on the weaker side of the negotiation. The story of MacBasic is a classic example, but I can think of other (not publicly disclosed) incidents involving Adobe and Macromedia (which was acquired by Adobe, and is where the Flash team comes from) applying extreme pressure to Apple. This is the only case where I feel an active user community was publicly jerked around like this in order for one side to try to gain leverage over the other. That is saying a lot, because I am not pleased with Apple’s actions either, but Adobe put Apple in a position where either Adobe got its way or Apple screwed developers.

Lastly, Kontra wraps it all up nicely:

Over the years, it must have been embarrassing for Steve Jobs to swallow his contempt every time he had to invite an executive from Microsoft or Adobe to the stage at a keynote event to explain why their Mac product was behind schedule and inferior to their Windows version.

However, 2010 is not like 1994. Apple has money, mindshare and the hottest platform to no longer having to beg. Today, Apple is more concerned about having to re-live its recent history — getting jerked around by Microsoft or held hostage by Adobe — than what it thinks would be manageable damage by a few developers that may leave its platform. Some may regard that as being arrogant. For Apple it’s the price of being in charge of its own destiny. To capitulate at the height of its newly found vigor would be suicidal. Suicidal Apple is no longer.

Apple's "pro" apps : iLife suite :: MacBook Pro : iPad

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 08:05:52 -0400

A lot of people are asking me what I think of the walled garden approach and whether I think Apple is evil and/or planning to put the iPhone OS on their laptops any time soon, or forcing all OSX apps to go through the App Store. For instance, I loved the BSD-based Pre, and I am a huge fan of open platforms and being able to tinker. This seems at odds with Apple’s latest series of moves (including the banning of intermediate representation layers), and so people who know me are confused that I’m still an Apple fan.

Unless I’ve missed something, I’m pretty sure Apple is just doing in hardware what they’ve done in software for years.

For years, we’ve had extremely powerful media applications provided for free with every Mac. The latest incarnation is the iLife suite, which allows you to futz around with digital photography, digital videography, audio recording & editing, web design, etc. These apps are very low cost: free with a machine, or $79 as a bundle if you buy them without a machine. They are also very powerful; with them, you can do pretty much anything you need to do and could very well put out professional videos, sound recordings, websites, and hardbound photo albums using nothing more than these apps.

However, there is a trade-off to be made when you try to put so much power into the hands of non-experts, and one thing Apple does is idiot-proof the apps to the greatest extent that they can. They restrict what you can and cannot do in these apps, so that novices can pick up the software and accomplish something at or near professional-grade quality, without much hassle, but also without much flexibility (you do it Apple’s way or else).

Because of this trade-off, there are always complaints from people. “It doesn’t do X. I can’t do Y. It won’t let me Z.” These are typically requests from power users who want truly professional tools to do their job, and to them the iLife suite is effectively a toy: cute, but ultimately unusable. For those people, Apple offers its “Pro” suite of tools, such as Logic for audio recording, Final Cut for video, Aperture for photography.

It is certainly an interesting philosophy, and, to me, it makes a great deal of sense: Apple is providing easy-to-use tools that produce amazingly sophisticated results to the 99% of the public who have no need whatsoever for professional grade tools with all the complexity of design they exhibit and sophistication of use that they demand … but who nonetheless would like great-looking movies, sophisticated audio tracks, edited photographs, and so forth.

I think the folks at Apple are now translating to hardware the successful formula that they have proven in software: provide simple, easy-to-use, guaranteed not to fail hardware for 99% of the masses — but with the trade-off of flexibility (you do it Apple’s way or else) … this would be the iPad, running the iPhone OS and apps downloaded from the App Store. For the power users who want to tinker with their hardware and write their own software and run whatever third-party apps their hearts desire, you guys can buy a MacBook and run OSX, downloading apps from whatever website you want.

I pointed to this video before, but it is well worth a revisit. 11 out of 12 people don’t know what a browser is. And you know what? They still get the job done perfectly well. 1 out of 12 people will tinker with their computing setup, and when the thing crashes, they will be irritated with themselves or the authors of the buggy software or firmware or hardware that caused the crash. The other 11 will buy a computer, will install almost nothing, and will get mad at Apple when the thing crashes. How do you satisfy those 11? You bring them a computer that works, all the time, flawlessly, simply. You place enormous restrictions on what they can and cannot do, because ultimately that will ensure they don’t run into problem areas like advanced bugs, viruses, incompatible drivers, UI weirdness, etc. I would argue that those are things most people should never experience and should never have to know about. The other 1 out of 12? Those guys live in that arena.

Apple is finally giving us the computer for the rest of us. I, for one, applaud.

But I’ll be mad as hell if they start putting iPhone OS on my MacBook Pro and take away Perl and my C compiler. :)

On employment [and selfishness]

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 21:49:00 -0400

I meet a lot of young kids in my job, so I see this a lot; it is the same attitude that I had years ago. People think of a job as a reward you get for being smart or doing well in school or acing the interview.

No: a job is not that.

A job is an opportunity, extended to you by someone, to help that someone make money.

That’s it. Someone out there is in the business of making money, and by offering you a job, they are inviting you to help them do it.

One of the problems in a highly specialized [capitalist] society is that there is so much abstract crap in the way we rarely see this picture. Instead, the notion is pervasive that a job (i.e., a salary) is a reward for a job well done. “Way to go on the entrance exams! Here’s $100,000 per year for the rest of your life! Woo!”

Yeah, no, it doesn’t work like that, and when you put it this way it’s kind of silly that anybody ever thinks of it differently, but I have to say that almost nobody I know thinks of a job as anything but a reward. And the problem with that is people tend to squander rewards, so the nationwide norm today is for people to maybe accomplish 2-3 hours of work in an 8-hour work day. And even that figure is maybe a bit high …

But this is one of the primary reasons the economy has tanked, people!

A job is an opportunity, extended to you by someone, to help that someone make money.

I know tons of people who work for the government, and because there is no bottom line, they think nothing of taking a day off for golf, leaving early to play with the kids, coming in late because they went out for a long breakfast with the spouse, taking extended lunches to go nap in the park. Really? Mind you, it is not restricted to the government sector; it’s just more widespread there. And today’s youth think that is what is expected of them — the salary is the lifetime reward.

People cry out that Obama is ushering in socialism. I’m sorry, but that is just too funny for words. People who spout this nonsense have obviously never talked to a 20-year-old in the last decade. 20-year-olds? Those people are socialists. Like I said, I was one when I was young and naive. Well, at least I’m no longer young.

A job is an opportunity, extended to you by someone, to help that someone make money.

If there’s one thing I want to get across to my students these days it is the following: guys, the future is in your hands. You can either work your ass off and make it great, or you can focus on yourself and waste it. The temptation towards selfishness is powerful, and “ME!” seems to be the banner I’ve seen flying overhead for the last few decades, but we have already recognized that selfishness is the cause of many of our present woes. It’s not about the individual anymore, and it is quite unfortunate that it ever was about the individual, because that notion has corrupted so many people that it continues to reverberate nearly everywhere. No, it’s not about you. Forget that. A job is about somebody else: the guy offering you the job. As Judge Judy used to say, “he’s the boss, applesauce!” I have no idea what that means, but it just works.

[12 April 2010: Added “and selfishness” to the title at the suggestion of one of my awesomer students.]

iPad interface design

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:42:55 -0400

Really awesome volley from brilliant writers on iPad UI conventions (focusing on realism/eye-candy).

Jon Bell: “Page Flips Are Better Than Infinite Scroll”

“Forcing a user to drag a finger to initiate a flip every time is unacceptable. I experienced this with early versions of the Kindle iPhone app and it was maddening. “

Marco Arment: “Overdoing the interface metaphor”

“DVD players don’t make fake whirring noises for five minutes before letting you eject a disc to simulate rewinding. Similarly, nobody should need to perform a full-width swipe gesture and wait two seconds for their fake page to turn in their fake book.”

Chris Clark: “Overdoing the interface metaphor” (commenting on Marco’s post)

“Forcing stupid interactions upon a user just to stay true to your visual metaphor is criminal, and Marco’s example of the Mac OS X Calculator is right on the money.”

Neven Mrgan: “How Real?”

“Remember Mac OS X v10.0? It was to be a significant departure from the flat, dull look of the OS’s of the time. It overdid that: the buttons cast comically large shadows; the pinstripe texture is crazy opaque; everything is far too shiny. Today, Mac OS X is flatter, with tasteful touches of depth and volume. To get here, they had to start there.

“Until books are completely re-imagined as objects (and I’m not holding my breath) people will expect them to look like facing pages, double-sided, picked from a shelf. Five hundred years of tradition mandates this. We start there, and we go more elaborate (as books add video, interactivity, etc.) and less so (as no-longer-necessary conventions get dropped.)”

Mrgan always has good perspective.

On walled gardens and information appliances

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:55:00 -0400

An old friend of mine sent me a link to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s “All your apps are belong to Apple” writeup that recently surfaced, and he asked what I thought. In the article they list a number of “troubling” (EFF’s term) points found in the iPhone developer license, among them:

A ban on public statements about the license
Apps can only be sold through the App Store
A ban on reverse-engineering Apple’s technology
A ban on tinkering with Apple’s technology (e.g. jailbreaking)
The right for Apple to kill your app at any time
A restitution limit of $50

Yeah, kinda seems “draconian” (the term used by The Huffington Post to describe the license) when listed like that. It is easy to look at this and declare Apple a bunch of control freaks who have thoroughly overstepped bounds of reason, which is how the media has responded.

However, details aside (e.g. the restitution limit is absurd), I can’t think of another, significantly better, way to solve the problem. The problem, as I see it, is a way to create an information appliance, a computing appliance. The iPhone, and now the iPad, represent a new class of device. This is the first time that the tech industry has even approached Jef Raskin’s vision of an appliance, as opposed to what we all know and love as a “computer” today. The theoretical device differs dramatically from existing computers in several important ways:

It must be extremely reliable.
It must be extremely reliable.
It must be extremely reliable.

And it has to be simple and intuitive to use. But, focusing on the reliability aspect, the question immediately begs answering: how do you make a computing platform that is reliable? You only have a handful of possibilities:

You code everything yourself. Not viable, because all previous examples demonstrate the customer wants lots of third-party application support.
You open the platform completely. No current platform with widespread developer support is both open and highly reliable. Unix systems probably come closest, but they are enthusiast devices, not targeting (or appropriate for) the computer novice, the demographic targeted by an information appliance. Even the Palm system, which had thousands of third-party apps for their mobile devices, was problematic: students of mine had Palm devices, and they tell me many of the apps brought their handsets crashing down. Not viable.
You open the platform to third-party developers, but you wall the garden. This is what Apple is doing. It seems to work—the iPhone and iTouch have third-party apps, the platforms are nonetheless reliable, everybody is happy.

If there is another model available, I don’t see it … I would love to hear ideas, but at the moment I think this approach is the only way to ensure reliability of the platform. You can argue about some of the iPhone SDK license details, because I agree they’re a tad one-sided. Yeah, a tad or so. But Apple went into relatively uncharted territory here, and so they are bound to start off over-cautious, over-anxious, and over-protective.

Ultimately, I think the appropriate measure is the strength of the platform. Namely, what is the user experience like? and are developers making money? Those two questions are really all that matters, because as soon as either fails the test, the whole platform dies.

Let's go beyond Print++

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:13:00 -0500

I just read “Books in the age of the iPad” by Craig Mod. It is a brief manifesto on how to think about targeting print as a medium as everything goes digital. I was struck by the following really provocative quote:

In printed books, the two-page spread was our canvas. It’s easy to think similarly about the iPad. Let’s not.

Brilliant writing, love the punch. Anyway, this dovetails with my call to budding entrepreneurs at the University of Maryland the other day — the iPad offers (at least) two paths for innovators:

application development
content development

The first wave of content created for the iPad is likely to imitate the two-page spreads of magazines, interspersed with video, audio, links to stories as sidebars, etc. The various mockups done for Sports Illustrated, WIRED, and (my favorite) the concept by Bonnier all follow this trend. It’s basically just print++ … i.e., a bigger better print experience, or print taken to the next level.

But what Craig Mod is pointing out is that this thinking is short-sighted. He doesn’t offer thoughts on what other forms are possible, but that doesn’t take away from his message, which is effectively hey, all of you story-tellers out there, here’s an opportunity to take story-telling somewhere it’s never been before.

The machinima wave I think is a precursor to what will happen. A CPU-based story-telling platform can offer much that is completely — completely — unavailable in any other medium including print, audio, video/movies, and even live multimedia. In particular, it offers a rich/multimedia, immersive, interactive (gesture-based on tablets), animated environment — the interactive part being the key. Machinima is what happens when you lower the barrier to entry for animated story telling … but it is still one-way content, i.e. the flow is from creator to consumer. Imagine what can happen when you put the consumer into the creative loop.

Already, we see that many first-person video games have effectively become stories, interactive movies. In addition, a significant number of game players are using the game medium for either communication (hanging out with friends in the virtual on-line space) or for simple exploration (the Myst titles and their offshoots, for example … people often just walked through the worlds without solving the puzzles). The implication is that not everyone wants a challenge; many just want the immersive environment. It is not a huge leap to see a market for what is effectively a game but which contains no game, just the story.

So, with that in mind, sharpen your pencils and OpenGL skills. There are stories to be told.

Apple vs. Goog\b\b\b\b HTC

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 23:50:00 -0500

Earlier today I read the Engadget article on Apple suing HTC, the handset manufacturer making Google’s Nexus One. I had no idea what an enormous crapstorm this thing would open up. Here’s just one place well worth checking out: a student at Maryland pointed me to a really well thought-out, intelligent discussion going on at Hacker News.

My thoughts …

Swiping to unlock and other similar patented items are all “obvious” design decisions. All great design is obvious because great design produces things that are appropriate. Moreover, because great design is so obvious, it must be easy to design great things; the world must be full of great designs.

Right?

Um, no. The truth is that great design is not easy, and it stands out so prominently because the world is not full of great designs. Things like swiping to unlock are “obvious” only in retrospect. All great design is obvious — in retrospect — because great design produces things that are appropriate. But it is hard to do (Paul Graham, instigator of the HN discussion linked above, has several essays on precisely this topic). Moreover, because it is hard to do, great designers are rewarded with some degree of protection for making the details of their innovations public (thus the legal terminology that patents “teach” a particular topic). I don’t see why we should expect great designers to give up control of their ideas, willingly or otherwise, simply because those ideas are particularly good. Much of the logic in the public backlash to Apple’s suit amounts to “the iPhone had such a marvelously simple UI that everyone copied it, and because it became pervasive (by virtue of the copying), we want it to remain pervasive (because, you know, then we’d have to buy an iPhone if we wanted that UI), via Apple giving up the right to protect their IP.”

I just don’t buy that. Just because something is good doesn’t mean it belongs to the public domain.

People are asking “why now? why not earlier?” According to Engadget, Gizmodo & other news sites, the brief is some 700 pages long. I’m sure Apple started working on this the day the Nexus One details started surfacing and it became clear it was effectively an iPhone clone. 700 pages of legalese takes a long time to pull together.

People are also asking “why aren’t they suing Google?” They can’t sue Google (Lord knows they want to: remember that Schmidt sat in Apple’s huddles for years, listening to the plays, learning the playbook by heart, soaking up all insider info he could) because Google is intentionally disabling contested technology in Android — they evidently know quite well what patent infringement means and are running the other way. Google is instead relying upon their handset manufacturer/s to enable the contested technology before shipping the product and thus take the bullet on Google’s behalf. I wonder why nobody is criticizing Google for using HTC as a “human” shield?

At any rate, the debate is clearly going to take on a life of its own.