I’ve been using Twitterrific, and its iPad version really is great, but it was understood between the both of us that I’d be jumping ship as soon as Atebits released its app. Tweetie basically defined what features a desktop Twitter client should have, then did it again on the iPhone version, and now once again on the iPad. There’s a reason Twitter bought it as its official client — not necessarily because it’s the best one, but because it’s the best one for what Twitter wants the service to be.

I’m not interested in writing a review, because there are already dozens of reviews out there (a lot of us were waiting, apparently), and because the app is free. If you’ve got an iPad and use Twitter, there’s no reason not to download it. My review is just that “hey, it’s great.” What’s interesting to me is how much thought went into the design of the app, and even more importantly, how significantly the design of one app can change how I perceive the entire device.

A lot of people seem to be dismissing the new approach as “nice UI touches” (or alternatively, “annoying gimmicks”). And the gesture stuff — pinching and two-finger dragging — is pretty gratuitous. But the big change isn’t just a new, slick, presentation. The change is the notion that absolutely everything in the app has context.

Everything you tap on causes a new panel to slide out with more information. There’s no new information here that you couldn’t get via the older clients, but the app is constantly making predictions about what you’ll want to see based on the content of the tweet — single tweets open the user’s profile, replies display the entire conversation, tweets with a photo link open the picture, tweets with a hashtag do a search on all the other tweets with that hashtag. Since none of the information is all that new, it may not seem like that big a deal. What formerly took two or three clicks now just takes one tap. But in practice, it feels like a leap from mid 80s text-chat technology to the bridge of the Enterprise.

I’m still not sure anyone really gets what Twitter is, exactly — even Twitter doesn’t or they wouldn’t be asking “How do you use it?” A lot of people, myself included, have always seen it as just instant messaging for lonely narcissists. I’ve got lots of interesting things to say about the state of my beard and bowel movements that are far too boring to tell a single real-life friend, but are just perfect for sharing with hundreds of strangers. As a result, Twitter clients have always tended to look like IM clients. That’s why I believe if you think of Twitter as global public IM, Twitterrific is still the best client for that.

But lots of other people, who are every bit as boring as I am but a billion times more famous, are using it for advertising or self-promotion. That’s where any hope of monetizing the service comes in, and that’s (I’m assuming) why the official Twitter app emphasizes the external content in tweets instead of just the text itself. When you first start the iPad version, the main timeline (what used to be the focus in older clients) looks awkwardly small on the screen. As soon as you start scrolling and tapping, though, you can see what the designers want the Twitter service to be: a stream — or, I suppose, firehose — of information.

The only feature from Twitterrific that I miss is that there’s no quick and easy way to look at a person’s profile and find out if they’re following you. I can imagine that’s intentional, too — they’re not pushing individual conversations as much as individually tailored public streams of news and links. Part of the appeal of twitter is that contacts are asynchronous and not fake “friends”; if someone’s saying stuff you want to hear, it shouldn’t really matter whether or not they want to hear what you have to say. But that’s about the only place so far where Twitter’s enforced idea of how I should be using their service has been an annoyance.

The rest of the time, I’m just impressed by how dense the average Twitter feed is, all the stuff streaming by that I never bothered to click on before. And impressed by how the iPad app just seems to know what I want to look at. Presenting relevant information automatically instead of making you look for it seems like just a convenience (or annoyance, depending on how slow your internet connection is). But the more I use the iPad Twitter app, the more I get the sense that this is exactly the kind of presentation that will make tablet computers come into their own.

Plus it hits all the right notes. It’s nearly impossible to find writing this sharp — especially comedy writing, which hardly anyone in comics can get right — or artwork this polished in the “big three” publishers, much less from a semi-obscure smaller house. The guys behind the comic published their manifesto a couple of years ago, and it proves that they didn’t just stumble onto a good comic, they know what they’re doing. It’s clear that they’ve put a lot of thought and effort into making something that’s smart, goofy fun.

But as much as I like it, I can all but guarantee it never would’ve caught my attention if not for the Comics app from Comixology. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure I have one of the Atomic Robo Free Comic Book Day issues in print lying around somewhere, but I didn’t pay much attention to it (assuming I read it at all). It’s a perfect example of the long-promised potential of digital distribution, but it actually worked for once.

At a retailer, a new comic is a pretty significant investment — not just in money, but time and attention. Smaller publishing houses get overwhelmed by the “big two” (I’d include Dark Horse and call it the “big three”), which dominate the space with long-running established characters and the sheer volume of stuff they release. If I’m only going into a shop once a month at the most, then I’m going to be most interested in catching up on the few series I already follow, and I won’t stray too far out of my comfort zone. And even when the issues are cheaper or even free, I’m reluctant to pick them up, because I’ve already got so much competing for my attention: I know that when I get home, I’m not going to be able to devote more than an hour or two to reading a bunch of comic books.

That’s how DC & Marvel continue to dominate, even when their ratio of great to mediocre is depressingly low: I’m more likely to buy a poorly-written X-Men or Justice League spin-off than a well-written comic featuring a character I’ve never heard of. Even if it’s by a known talent whose work I’ve liked elsewhere. I’ve railed against this in videogames, where there’s this increasing insistence on sequels, licenses, and spin-offs instead of original IP, but I’m just as guilty of it. In comics, I am the dreaded but desirable Casual Audience.

But the iPad levels the playing field. (At least, somewhat, and we’ll see how long it lasts). The “flagship” Comics.app puts stuff from the indies right alongside the bigger publishers in the new releases, giving everything equal cover space and making everything searchable. You can easily see why Marvel and DC demanded their own reskinned and branded versions of the Comics app (and DC demanded its own button in the flagship app), because it’s the only way to keep exploiting the brand dominance they spent decades building. They’ve spent so long milking everything they can out of their long-running characters, their main advantage at this point is familiarity, not (necessarily) quality.

It’s still very unsettling to me that I can turn on my Magic Tablet of Privilege, launch an app, and buy an issue of Hellboy, Batman, or maybe one of the original Lee/Kirby issues Fantastic Four, whenever I feel like it. That was one of the main reasons I bought the thing in the first place, but I never actually expected it to happen. It took a year from the release of the first iPhone before Apple put out the SDK, so I expected a similar delay before the potential of the iPad was realized. But here we are just a few months after release, and all of the major comics publishers have something — not nearly enough yet, but something — available. When I was in my hotel room in Florida a couple of weeks ago, I read the last couple of issues of Chew and a couple issues of Grant Morrison’s run on Batman in 2006, none of which I would’ve bothered with if I’d had to get individual issues or even trade paperbacks. It was more like being in the future than anything in Tomorrowland or Future World.

Not everything’s perfect, of course:

• Recent issues: The smaller publishers are pretty good about staying current, and DC and Marvel have a smattering of recent issues available, but for the most part, everything you can get (legally) for the iPad is at least a year old. That’s fine for casual types like me, who are still in the process of getting caught up. But I’m going to catch up pretty soon, and I’ve pretty much sworn off individual issues at this point. They just seem like a waste of money, time, and space. It’s digital distribution or no sale for me.
• Availability: Even among the older material, there are still big holes in the libraries. It’s great that Dark Horse is finally in, but as of right now they’ve only got the first volume of Hellboy and a couple of smaller series that don’t interest me. Where’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the B.P.R.D.? DC and Marvel have a lot more, but they’re still being fairly tentative and keeping the releases to their major series, cross-overs, and movie tie-ins. It’s fantastic that DC has Batman: Year One online, but I’ve already bought that mini-series. Three times, even. Instead of just re-releasing the stuff that’s already made money several times over, it seems like the biggest potential of digital distribution is in releasing semi-obscure stuff that doesn’t warrant a full reprint. Release the J.M. DeMatteis and Shawn McManus issues of Dr. Fate from the late 80s, for instance, and I’ll buy every one (again).
• Organization: It seems odd to follow a complaint that there’s not enough stuff available with a complaint that stuff is too hard to find, but there you go. Comixology’s UI design, which seemed great while everyone was still getting used to the idea of digital comics and were still waiting for the big publishers to join in, has already gotten overwhelmed by the amount of content available. They’ve effectively managed to duplicate the problems of a physical comic book store (and comic book collection) on a device with infinite capacity. In the store, the cover flow view is fixed and takes up a big chunk of screen real estate. Browsing is limited to lists of text, there’s no easy way to browse through everything from a certain publisher or in an individual series, for instance. And in the “My Comics” section, I have to scroll through a half-screen-sized list of every issue I’ve bought, when I’d much rather just ditch the cover flow view and instead get drill-downs or “folders” based on series. Plus, they don’t put dates on anything, possibly at the publisher’s request. For a medium that’s so heavy on monthly releases and continuity, you need to know when stuff originally came out.
• Pricing: You can’t have anything delivering content to the over-privileged without hearing complaints about the price, and comics are no exception. I’m actually completely fine with their charging $1.99 for individual issues — print issues run around $2.99 these days, with ads. Plus the argument that “there’s no printing cost!” is pretty disingenuous; I don’t know the actual numbers, of course, but I would almost guarantee that the cost of talent, editorial, marketing, licensing, and advertising dwarfs printing costs by a wide margin. Not to mention Apple’s 30% cut of everything. No, my problem with the pricing is that everything’s treated as single issues, kind of like if the iTunes Store only sold singles and didn’t allow you to buy the whole album. Since they’re putting out mostly old material anyway, why not offer more collected volumes? I bought Hellboy: Seed of Destruction for the iPad, even though I already own it in both hardback and paperback. I wouldn’t have done that if I’d had to buy the individual issues.

And again, this is all something that Atomic Robo (and, I’m assuming, publisher Red 5 Comics) gets right, while the big names are still floundering. The first issue of Atomic Robo is free, as are the two Free Comic Book Day issues. The series are arranged in volumes of five or six issues each (there are three out right now), and you can choose to buy the individual issues or the collected volume. Individual issues are only 99 cents, and the volumes are four bucks, a dollar less than you’d pay for getting them individually. It’s all exactly the way it should be handled, and I rewarded them by buying in bulk. I’m coming to the series late, and it looks like individual issues of Volume 4 are already out, while they’re not yet available digitally; I’ll be interested to see if they come out once the TPB of Volume 4 is released later this year.

Until then, if you want to try Atomic Robo and you’ve got an iPad or iPhone: get the Comics app, and then download the free “Atomic Robo: FCBD Edition”. The second story, “Why Atomic Robo Hates Dr. Dinosaur,” is my favorite of anything in the series, and actually one of my favorite comics I’ve read since The Amazing Screw-On Head.

I’ve read explanations for all the publisher-imposed limitations with digital comics, and they’re the same as for music, traditional books, and videogames. But instead of learning from what’s come before, it seems like every medium is going to have to learn the same lessons as it makes the crossover into digital.

The first worry is that digital sales will cannibalize print sales. But with comics, it’s the same as with traditional books: the disposable stuff will go digital, the good stuff will always have a home in print. Single issues and “lesser” series, like paperback books and pop singles, are disposable. Collections and trades are permanent. I mentioned that I bought Hellboy: Seed of Destruction for the iPad, but there’s no way that I’m ever giving up my paperback or hardback copies. And I’d never give the digital version as a gift.

The second worry is that digital sales will hurt comics retailers, and that’s the one that I have a little bit more sympathy for, but not much. Comixology has stressed that they see themselves as a supplement to comic shops, not a replacement. They’ve made good on this by including “buy in print” links all over the store with everything you can get digitally. Plus, they’ve still got their other app, which coordinates comic book pull lists with retailers. And again, what’s going to happen is that the businesses that deserve to stay alive will stay alive; the ones that don’t add anything to the experience will become defunct. The store that just has a bunch of long boxes and a surly dude at the counter to sneer at you while you pay three bucks for a 20-page comic? They can go, and good riddance. But the stores that get it right don’t have much to worry about.

Isotope Comics in San Francisco gets it right, and they should have nothing to fear from digital distribution. They’re not just a middleman to keep your pull list for you as you make your obligatory visit whenever new comics come in. Frankly, if you’re looking for the stuff you expect to find from a comic book store — everything new and tons of long boxes filled with back issues — you’re going to be disappointed. Because that’s not the point of the store; James and the people working there didn’t make a comic book store but a comic book lounge. It’s social. They promote the stuff they like. You get recommendations on comics, both the big releases and stuff you’d never have heard of otherwise. There are regular events with artists and writers, and the feel is more like a nightclub than any comic book store you’ve ever been to. Even when nothing’s going on, and you are just stopping in to pick up whatever’s on your pull list, you can get a good conversation about whatever geek topic is making waves at the moment. That kind of social atmosphere is something you’ll never be able to get from an iPad app, and it’s the model that more places should be following instead of just complaining that their business is being taken away.

I already get trade paperbacks from Isotope instead of going through Amazon, just because I want to keep supporting the store. I don’t see that changing anytime soon; I just get to avoid having to buy single issues. Maybe someday I’ll be able to head down to Isotope, pick up the latest volume of Fables in print, and get a couple of recommendations on cool new stuff coming out. I can then fire up the Comics app on my iPad, go to the Isotope section, and download the recommendations, giving the store a cut much like with Amazon’s sponsored links. When we get to that point, I’ll know we’re really in the future.

The game is Helsing’s Fire by developer Ratloop, published by Chillingo. It’s a puzzle game in which you destroy creatures of “The Shadow Blight” with a combination of Professor Helsing’s torch and his assistant Raffton’s tonics. The puzzle is positioning the torch so that your target creatures (and only your target creatures) are hit by the light of the torch, and then using the matching-colored tonic against them. It’s a simple, clever, and surprisingly engaging mechanic that I’ve never seen in a game before.

It’s a good thing the mechanic is so novel, because the puzzles themselves take a long time to get interesting. The entire first screen of the game is no challenge at all, and it takes a while for the game to start throwing new complications at you. In effect, the first 20 or so puzzles play more like a “software toy” than a puzzle game. But the puzzles are generated randomly, so you’re free to keep experimenting.

That sense of experimentation is the most interesting thing about the game, since it’s so rare for puzzle games. Typically in a puzzle-based game, you’re expected to think of a solution first, and then start interacting with the game to put the solution in motion. In Tetris, you find where the piece fits, then move it into place. In Bejeweled, you find the match, then click or tap on the screen to make the swap. And in an adventure game, you stop and think about what item works with what object, then try the combination to see if it works. It results in the player “switch modes” throughout, alternating between passive and active, and it can be a turn-off. On the other end of the scale, you’ve got physics-based games, where the developer just sets up a condition and lets you do whatever you can think of to hit on the right solution. That has its own set of problems, since to me it always feels like I’ve just interacted with a simulation, instead of interacting with the developer — there’s too much randomness involved to make me feel like I’ve accomplished anything.

I think that the torch in Helsing’s Fire does a great job of splitting the difference: you’re constantly moving the torch around, seeing how the light interacts with obstacles, actually playing the game. Not just staring at a screen waiting for inspiration to hit.

And even taking all of that into account, the puzzles aren’t even the best thing about Helsing’s Fire. The presentation is fantastic — you can tell that the developer’s a fan of Mike Mignola’s work on Hellboy (and Edward Grey: Witchfinder), which earns it double plus extra points with me. It’s not just in the artwork, either, but in the tone of the whole game. It doesn’t take itself seriously, but isn’t filled with desperate attempts at humor, either. The dialogue’s clever and used sparingly, and the music carries the tone throughout, blending a contemporary-sounding track for the puzzles with a title-screen track that reminds me of a 16-bit Castlevania game.

And best of all: the victory screen for each puzzle has Helsing and Raffton giving each other a fist bump or high five, one of those completely gratuitous touches that can send a good game over the top.

According to the credits, only two people worked on the game, but you wouldn’t know from playing it. It’s got a professional level of polish to it while still feeling weird and novel enough to be an indie project. And it’s only a dollar, so there’s absolutely no reason not to recommend it. Even if you breeze through all the puzzles, you’ll be entertained while doing it.

One of the most important things I was looking for in the iPad was a way to make the whole feed-reading ritual more enjoyable and less like work. Instead of getting up in the morning and immediately sitting in front of the computer to pore over news articles like a less effective Winston Smith, I could lean back on the couch like they show in the Apple ads, and develop some kind of “morning paper”-esque ritual that would make me feel more like a bonafide grown-up.

The iPad version of NetNewsWire was released at launch (or maybe soon after), and I’ve been using it since then. It’s fast and efficient, but it just didn’t flow as well as it does on the desktop. It understandably stays very close to Apple’s established UI for iPad apps, which is part of the problem: I don’t like the standards Apple’s put into place. They claim that “it doesn’t matter” how you hold the iPad, but their own system of pop-ups and full page views ends up giving every app two modes: an orientation that’s efficient (usually landscape), and one that’s enjoyable to use (usually portrait). With NetNewsWire, it meant a lot of flipping the device around — landscape to get through lots of posts quickly, portrait to read in depth — and forwarding the ones I wanted to read in greater detail to Marco Arment’s outstanding Instapaper app.

There’s a separate app called Early Edition that compiles newspaper-style page views from your available RSS feeds, but it wasn’t quite what I wanted, either. It was kind of the opposite extreme to NetNewsWire: nice-looking, but not as efficient. What I really wanted was something that would split the difference: good for reading single posts in detail, efficient for scanning through blogs that could have hundreds of entries, and a seamless way to switch between the two modes.

Reeder for iPad by Silvio Rizzi is exactly that. I’d already been a fan of the iPhone version of Reeder, but reading lots of text on a cell phone is never going to be ideal. The iPad version, though, gets just about everything right. I started gushing about it as soon as I tried it, but it’s really not an exaggeration to say that it’s turned the iPad from an overpriced novelty to a genuinely useful computer.

Here’s why I like it, with pictures. I really do believe that the interface is worth studying; anybody who’s considering making an iPad app should look at how Reeder does things and why they’re usually a good idea.

The Folder Browser

This is the main view of the app. It looks the same in portrait or landscape orientation, so flipping the device around isn’t a “mode switch;” it doesn’t significantly change how you’re interacting with what you see.

The toolbar stays on the left in every mode. Again, no matter how you hold it, the top-level interface remains constant. And you want it on the left, because that’s where your thumb is. (Kindle gets this right with its hardware buttons, but iPad designers keep wanting to make you swipe or use “hidden” buttons). And the locations and functions of the buttons stay constant for as long as they’re relevant: the “Back” button always means go back a level, the “Sync/reload” button always means sync, etc.

In my Google Reader account, I’ve got everything arranged in folders. Each of the folders is represented by a stack of papers, and you can just tap on the stack to get a list of all the posts for every feed in that folder. (And at any point, you can switch between starred, unread, and all posts).

Pinch to Expand

Instead of tapping a folder stack to get a list of all the posts inside, you can read just the posts from individual feeds. To do that, you pinch on a stack and expand outwards, which gives you a browser view like this one. Each page here is an individual feed, with its favicon if the blog has a full-size one available. You can tap on any one to see a list of just the posts for that feed. Or, you can pinch-and-expand on an individual feed to get a preview of all the post titles in that feed. The reverse gesture “compresses” everything into one stack. The gestures always work the same way, no matter the view: pinch and expand takes you down the hierarchy (with preview), pinch and compress takes you back up.

I complained about swiping and page-turning gestures in other apps, and the pinch-to-expand/contract gesture in Reeder may seem even more counter-intuitive. (It’s probably something I would’ve stumbled on eventually). The key difference here is: most common functions are done with clearly-marked buttons, less common functions are done with gestures. The page-curl transition in iBooks makes for a neat demo, but when you’re reading, you just want to tap the sides of the screen. You can do that in iBooks, but it’s not visible. In Reeder, the thing you do most often — advance to the next or previous post in a feed — is clearly marked with a button on the toolbar on the left, which never changes position. The pinching gestures are a neat effect, but they’re not essential to using the app — you could use Reeder effectively without ever knowing about them, but you couldn’t use iBooks (or Kindle) without knowing how to turn the page.

Also, once you’re taught how to do this, it’s a great way to navigate hierarchies on a touch-based device. I hope this eventually turns into some kind of standard for the iPhone OS, since it feels more natural than toolbars with “back” or “containing folder” buttons.

The Feed List

This is the list view that shows up when you tap on a folder or an individual feed. Again, the starred/unread/all buttons work here to filter the view. If you’re looking at the contents of a folder, you can also sort by date or by individual feed.

The most obvious neat thing here is the graphic design, which looks a lot like the iPhone version’s. It’s fairly low-contrast and easy to read, and you get exactly the information you want to see.

The less obvious neat thing is the use of gestures. Swiping any item to the left marks it as starred. Swiping to the right marks it as read (just like swiping to the right marks an item for deletion in the standard apps). This makes it easy to scan through a blog with a lot of items in it, marking some as read and choosing others to read in more detail. Tapping on any post item will open up the single item view.

The Single Item View

The view for a single post looks great and is easy to read, much like Instapaper’s. (And Reeder can send posts to Instapaper, as well as working with a dozen different apps and online services via the “forward” button in the upper right). UI elements are repeated in multiple views, such as the buttons to star a post or mark it read: you can quickly do it with gestures in the list view, or just tap the visible buttons in the single post view.

The toolbar on the left has up-down buttons to go to the next or previous post without leaving the single item view. This recognizes the fact that some blogs have tons of posts, of which you may only want to read a few in detail (e.g. Engadget); and others have few posts but you want to read every one (e.g. this fine blog you’re reading right now).

There are more gestures here, too: you can swipe left or right to make the single post view slide away and reveal the list again. (This is my only complaint about the app: the left-to-right swiping is too sensitive, so you can inadvertently trigger it while trying to scroll up and down). And like Tweetie, you can scroll past the bottom or the top of a post; in this case, it takes you to the next or previous post. Functionality is duplicated by visible buttons and by learned gestures.

And one thing you may have noticed from the screenshots: I never have to go into landscape view. I can, and in some modes I’ll get the standard split-view, with a list on one half and the single post view on the other. But it really is designed so that there’s no one “right” way to hold it; I can do everything I want in portrait mode, without feeling like I’m sacrificing any efficiency or functionality.

Magical and Revolutionary

So basically what I’m saying is that I love this app. I’d been considering writing an RSS feed reader app for a while, to get one that does exactly what I want, but Reeder just blew that whole idea out of the water. (Who knows, I may still try it, but more as a novelty. I can’t imagine anything will be able to top all the stuff that Reeder gets exactly right).

And it’s one of the few apps — the Comixology apps, Instapaper, and Plants vs. Zombies are the only others that come to mind — that feel as if putting them on a tablet computer makes them better than anywhere else, instead of something that’s been scaled back and loaded down with concessions just so that you can touch it.

So let’s see how my initial wish list for the iPad is coming along:

• Sketching/Drawing: SketchBook Pro is as nice as you’re going to get, but a touch screen will probably never be 100% ideal for drawing
• Comic Book reader: Comixology’s apps are great, we just need to get Dark Horse and DC involved, and to get all the companies to release current stuff at a reasonable price
• RSS Feed Reader: Reeder is about perfect
• E-book reader: I’m very happy so far with iBooks and Kindle
• Video: Netflix and ABC are great, syncing with iTunes fills the rest so far
• Blogging Client: Still nothing

Not bad, so far. Plus any of the ten billion things I never would’ve wanted the iPad to do until somebody makes a great app for it, and it becomes essential.

(And yeah, I’m going to avoid calling it “iOS” for as long as I can because I think that’s a dumb name).

Maybe it’s just because I assumed video conferencing was something that all other non-iPhones could already do, but Apple exceeded my tolerance for marketing with this whole push. To hear them tell it, they make it sound like the polio vaccine and the discovery of fire were baby steps on the way to a backside illumination sensor. (Great for both a band name and a sex act).

Sure, all the Apple reps talked about the iPad as if at any moment they were about to put a hand up over the camera and ask for a moment to recompose themselves. But that’s understandable — the iPad is kind of a tough sell. Unlike the iPad, everybody knows what an iPhone does, and this is a better one.

And I think that’s ultimately what my issue is: the new version is basically a no-brainer of an upgrade. Based on Engadget.com’s recap and hands-on, it’s got just about every single thing that’s been missing from my current 3G model: the iPad’s processor, a better display, a better camera, a forward-facing camera, video recording, thinner form factor, less plastic-feeling build, Wireless N.

I usually go through my ritual of denial-acceptance-preorder-purchase-guilt whenever Apple releases a new iThingToBuy, but there’s none of that here. I’m going to get one, it’s going to replace both my phone and my point-and-shoot camera, and I’m going to get a lot of use out of it. It would’ve been a completely stress- and guilt-free first world purchasing experience, but then they had to trot out the video. And that just makes me understand why so many people roll their eyes at the sight of an Apple logo and accuse people who like their products of being “cultish.”

I said “just about every thing,” because it’s still missing compact flash storage, and it’s still tied to AT&T. I understand why they don’t do the compact flash — so the price difference between the 16GB and 32GB models will go to Apple instead of SanDisk.

But I’d sort of hoped that after years of profiting from flash memory markup on the iPhones and iPods, Apple had collected enough money to buy its way out of AT&T exclusivity. Like just about everyone else with an iPhone in San Francisco, I’d love to drop AT&T, and their reneging on the unlimited data plans just makes me want to even more. But Apple may have saved them once again, by putting out a phone that’s appealing enough to make up for being lousy as an actual phone.

So I put up a Tumblr log, called Recommended by Spectre Collie, which I’ll eventually expand on and possibly incorporate on this site, depending how ambitious I get and if I ever get more free time. For now it’s only got a few iPhone games, but eventually it could be a repository for anything I’d like people to buy, read, or watch, and then come back and thank me for pointing it out to them. The RSS Feed is here for people who swing that way.

Incidentally, if you weren’t aware, and you’re interested, there’s already another Tumblelog called SpectreCollie Annex that links to my favorite stuff from YouTube, Flickr, and random websites (when that works).

All the angles on the issue have been covered extensively on tech blogs, in particular Daring Fireball, so you won’t see any particularly novel insight here. But I haven’t yet seen them all gathered in one place. Apple has gotten a lot of criticism across the internet — much of it entirely deserved — for its App Store approval policies and the closed system approach it’s taking with the iPhone OS. And it bugs me to see Adobe employees — whether representing the company as with Chambers’s post, or not as with Brimelow’s — getting so much traction by taking advantage of that ill will, when Adobe doesn’t have a leg to stand on.

After citing various stories about Apple’s rejection policies and an even-handed piece on Slate called Apple Wants to Own You, Chambers goes on to say that Adobe will be shifting its focus with Flash CS5 onto the Android platform. Here are a few helpful tips for Adobe that might make this next choice of platform go more smoothly:

1. Don’t promise something to your customers unless you’re sure you can deliver.

Adobe’s claiming that Apple suddenly introduced a new clause to the developer program license that blew all their hard work out of the water. How could they possibly have predicted that Apple would so cruelly impose a last-minute ban of Flash on the iPhone suddenly out of nowhere? I mean, sure, the iPhone has been out for three years now and it’s never allowed a Flash player, but with Apple’s draconian secrecy, who knows why that is? Okay, fine, the CEO of the company has repeatedly said that it’s for performance reasons and battery life, but that’s just spin. Adobe had no way of predicting that the company that’s refused to allow Flash on their devices would suddenly decide not to allow a program that runs Flash. It’s all Apple’s fault!

2. Have a chat with Google and Motorola first.

There’s no way that a small start-up like Adobe could’ve communicated with industry giant Apple, either. Who even knows those guys’ email addresses? Plus, they’re scary: Gizmodo made a whole post about the guy whose book-reading app was rejected for containing adult material. Who’s to say that the exact same thing wouldn’t happen to a multinational corporation proposing to create a new development environment for the platform? Unlike Apple, Motorola and Google are pledged to complete openness, and they won’t have any qualms about performance or security on their branded Android OS devices. You probably don’t even need to ask first.

3. Try running your software on the device in question.

Apple’s reasons for refusing Flash are so arcane and mysterious that nobody can figure them out. Even though it’s been said repeatedly from multiple sources both inside and outside Apple that Flash is a hit on performance on battery life, that’s just idle speculation. Better to try to sneak something in instead of actually trying to find the problems with interpreted code and non-standard video playback and getting it to run acceptably.

4. Don’t use a Mac for development.

Because if you want to get anything done, you’ll have to use Adobe software, since Adobe has near-total market dominance in every area of production. And Adobe software runs like shit on a Mac. Mr. Brimelow, I suggest that your talk about the long relationship Apple and Adobe have had with each other would be more convincing if you had a dramatic backdrop, or a YouTube video playing in the background. For the backdrop, you’ll want to use Photoshop CS4, the first version that supports a 64-bit OS, which came out a year and a half after OS X converted to 64-bit. And for the YouTube video, be sure you speak up loud, because playing anything with the Flash video player on a Mac will cause your computer’s fan to kick into overdrive from the increased processor load.

5. Consider what “cross-platform” means for a platform built entirely around its unique identity.

If the blog posts from employees weren’t enough to convince you that Adobe’s committed to cross-platform development, then running any piece of Adobe software — especially any AIR app — should do the trick. Using PhotoShop or Flash on a Mac means that you get to give up everything that made you choose the Mac OS in the first place. The closest they’ll come to “Mac look and feel” is begrudgingly including a “Use OS Dialog” button on their file dialog boxes. But the iPhone, even more than the Mac, is specifically branded as a device that wins not on features, but on the OS.

Chambers makes a point of saying “While it appears that Apple may selectively enforce the terms, it is our belief that Apple will enforce those terms as they apply to content created with Flash CS5.” Or in other words, Apple will allow Unity, .NET, et. al., but is singling out Flash/Adobe to screw them over specifically. Adobe’s complaining about Apple not giving them fair treatment is a lot like a polygamist accusing one of his wives of cheating.

6. Have someone define “closed system” to you.

Apple already covered this one beautifully with its terse and awesome response to Chambers’s post:

“Someone has it backwards–it is HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, and H.264 (all supported by the iPhone and iPad) that are open and standard, while Adobe’s Flash is closed and proprietary,” said spokeswoman Trudy Muller in a statement.

This is the most galling part of the whole thing, to me: Adobe’s desperately grabbing on to Cory Doctorow’s coat tails and waving the flag of intellectual freedom, while simultaneously suggesting that the iPhone OS is gimped because Flash has something like 98% market saturation with internet video.

The best explanation I’ve seen is from Louis Gerbarg on his blog: allowing Flash, or even iPhone-targeted Flash, onto the iPhone would mean Apple effectively turning its OS development cycles over to Adobe’s engineers. It’s the same reason they’re so uptight about developers using private frameworks: if they change something with an OS update, the app breaks, and customers complain to Apple. Not the developers.

Adobe’s essentially going into a store, handing the owner a big black box, refusing to let the owner see what’s inside, and then complaining about freedom and openness when the owner refuses to sell it.

7. Learn to appreciate the monopoly you’ve already got.

It’s not particularly insightful to point out that the environment Apple’s created with the iPhone OS is very similar to the environment that game developers have had to deal with for years. Game console manufacturers have very tight restrictions on what they will and won’t allow to run on their devices — if you think that Apple’s approval process is complicated and draconian, you should go through Nintendo’s technical certification process sometime. (Note that this isn’t a complaint: the certification process means it’s much, much harder to find a buggy game that crashes your system or runs poorly on your particular console configuration).

And the lesson in game development is that content is more of an investment than code. (At least, code written in a particular language. And that’s partly my programmer bias showing through, where it’s a point of pride that once you’ve learned how to do something in one development environment, it’s much easier to do the same thing in a different one). Art assets will port from platform to platform, even if the code base doesn’t. [More on this in point number 10.] I have yet to see a game company that didn’t use Photoshop to generate art assets, and most also use a combination of Illustrator or AfterEffects or any number of other Adobe products.

8. Come out and acknowledge who multi-platform development benefits, exactly.

There is an ease-of-use and familiarity benefit to using Flash. But Adobe reps hardly ever mention that. (As someone who’s developed games using Flash and using Cocoa, I can kind of understand why Adobe wouldn’t push the “ease-of-use” or “predictability” claims where Flash is concerned). Instead they talk about cross-platform capability. An independent developer might be drawn to Flash for, say, making a game because it’s an environment he already knows. A publisher would be drawn to Flash for being able to make the same game for the iPhone, Android, Web, and anything else.

And this makes it a little bit like trying to explain to poor people why they shouldn’t vote Republican: they don’t care about you. Adobe isn’t going to make such a big stink, or for that matter build a campaign around a new feature in one of their flagship products, for the indie developer who’s going to blow a thousand bucks on the new Creative Suite. Adobe wants to get publishers to buy site licenses. And publishers want to make something once and then get it onto as many platforms as possible, because for a publisher, development time is more expensive than hardware purchases, testing, and customer support. Smaller developers will quickly reach the point where having their product on multiple platforms is costing more than the revenue it’s generating.

So when Chambers says:

The cool web game that you build can easily be targeted and deployed to multiple platforms and devices. However, this is the exact opposite of what Apple wants. They want to tie developers down to their platform, and restrict their options to make it difficult for developers to target other platforms.

what he means is: Apple includes a free development environment on their machines, to encourage people to buy their hardware. It comes complete with documentation, visual design tools, and built-in animation and layering libraries that make it relatively easy to achieve Flash-like results using native code. However, this is the exact opposite of what Adobe wants. They want to tie developers to Flash, to ensure that they have a proprietary development environment that’s most appealing to larger publishers, and restrict their options to optimize the runtime to target any particular platform, guaranteeing that it runs equally bad everywhere.

The “cool web game” bit is there to make it sound like the guy sitting in his bedroom who’s just finished his cool Bejeweled clone-with-RPG-elements can just hit a button in Flash CS5 and suddenly be rolling in heaps of money from App Store sales. And to the smaller, independent developers who would like to try releasing their games for multiple platforms: learn Objective C. It’s not that difficult, and you’ll have developed another skill. That to me seems more valuable than getting upset that a game designed for a mouse and keyboard on the internet won’t port to a touch-based cell phone without your intervention and a little bit of effort.

9. Make a genuine attempt at an open system.

If Adobe really is all about content creation, and if they’re going to insist on jumping on the anti-Apple “closed system” bandwagon, why do it for an inherently closed system? They’ve got one development kit that requires a plug-in and forces all its content into a window on a webpage, and they’ve got another development kit that works with HTML and PHP but nobody uses it. Why not put their content creation software expertise to work creating stuff that’s genuinely based on open standards?

There are tons of great HTML 5 demos getting passed around the internet, and they’re all done with a text editor. (And, most likely, Photoshop). Why not take the Flash front-end, since people like it for whatever reason, and let it spit out HTML 5, CSS, and JavaScript? ActionScript is already a bastardized sub/superset of JavaScript. HTML 5 has a canvas element and layering. There’s a browser war going on, where everyone’s trying to come up with the fastest JavaScript interpreter; only Adobe can make Flash Player plugins run faster, and they don’t have a great track record at that. Flash that doesn’t require Flash Player would be huge. No doubt Flash has some power-user features I’m not familiar with, and of course Flash Video is a whole different topic, but I’ve never done anything with Flash that couldn’t be done according to the HTML 5 spec and some clever JavaScript.

10. Stop the damn whining already.

Brimelow closed comments to his post to avoid “the Cupertino Spam bots,” and Chambers warned that non-constructive comments such as “Flash SUXXORS!” would be deleted. Because, as everyone on the internet knows, anyone who defends Apple for any reason, ever, is automatically a drooling Apple fanboy who believes Steve Jobs can do no wrong.

Which means, I guess, that everyone in the tech industry is 12 years old.

What these guys need to understand is that complaining about Adobe’s closed, proprietary system doesn’t automatically make Apple’s good, and vice versa. (Although it’s a big point in Apple’s favor that they don’t try to claim that their system isn’t closed). There are definitely problems with iPhone development.

The restriction on interpreted code does indeed suck, and is the biggest problem that Apple needs to find a solution for. When I mentioned that game developers have spent years learning how to port games to different consoles, I didn’t mention that the key to that is often a scripting language, like Lua. That allows a big chunk of code to be included in the portable game “content:” tailor the engine specifically to each console, but let the game logic stay fixed. (In theory, anyway). If Apple would just have a set of approved scripting languages — instead of just JavaScript via WebKit — and include them with the OS, it would open up a huge number of possibilities. The appeal of Lua on a mobile phone is even more evident than on a PC: it’s tiny, relatively efficient, and too simple and general-purpose to cause many problems when the underlying OS gets updated.

(I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention again that an iPad-native equivalent of HyperCard would be sweet. It could even use the Keynote front-end and run everything with WebKit. If you need a consultant on the project, Apple, let me know).

The other problem is the lack of transparency in the approval process. I mentioned that the certification requirements for consoles are a lot more complicated than those for the App Store; the advantage, though, is that they’re very explicit. You can and will still get surprised by a rejection, but a lot of the more obscure problems are solved when there is a huge list of requirements and developers are forced to test everything.

As for the other objections that are so often brought up, they seem reasonable enough to me. Yes, the state of file management on the iPad is really terrible right now, but I’m confident it’ll improve. Sure, Apple can reject an app for “duplicating functionality” of one of its built-in apps, but that situation is fluctuating (witness their support for VOIP apps like Skype, and browsers like Opera Mini) and the core apps are functional enough anyway. (Rejecting an app for the “pinch to preview a stack of pictures” functionality is pure bullshit, though).

And Apple can and does reject apps based on content alone. But as John Gruber pointed out, Apple’s still selling a brand as much as a platform. That’s the fundamental philosophical difference between the Android model (and Adobe’s whining) and the iPhone model: Android is selling you on the idea that you can run anything, Apple is selling you on the idea that you can run anything good. That’s why it’s a good thing that both platforms are available to both developers and customers. If you want a general-purpose phone that can run anything you throw at it, including ports of web games, then get an Android. If you want only the stuff that’s been specifically tailored to run well under the iPhone OS, then get the iPhone.

One of the things that gets my nostalgia fired up like no other is HyperCard, which I consider to be one of the greatest pieces of software ever made for a personal computer. No exaggeration. Neck-and-neck with PhotoShop in terms of significance, as far as I’m concerned, and definitely more mind-altering in terms of thinking about how computers work and what they can do.

I can and will go on at great length about how great HyperCard was, at any opportunity, but the design firm smackerel.net has put together a terrific retrospective called “When Multimedia was Black and White” that can do a better job than I could.

Ever since I made the switch back to Macs, I’ve been looking for a HyperCard successor. There’ve been several pretenders to the throne: SuperCard was the highest-profile, but it tried so hard to be a superset of HyperCard that it lost most of what made the original so cool. I keep checking in on Bento every time they announce a new release, but it’s becoming clear that a simple development environment just isn’t the market they’re after. Runtime Revolution, has been trying for years to be a direct successor, but I’ve never been happy with it — it seems like an attempt to recapture the multimedia authoring platform that HyperCard turned into, instead of consumer-level software.

There are still pockets of loyal HyperCard fanatics out there, still holding on to floppies full of HC stacks like mattresses stuffed with Confederate money. But over the past few weeks, I’ve been hearing HyperCard mentioned more and more often, even by sane people. For instance John Gruber on his Daring Fireball site about entry-level development environments, and in speculation about what the future of authoring multimedia content is going to be like.

What’s re-sparked interest in HyperCard is, of course, the iPad.

Why The Time To Act Is Now

Any fit of HyperCard nostalgia gets shut down pretty quickly when you look at it in a modern context and are forced to realize that it died for a reason. Bill Atkinson himself has acknowledged that its biggest flaw was focusing on local storage instead of taking advantage of networking. Most of what it could do was superseded by the World Wide Web. Later, Director and then Flash came in to take over the rest and become dominant.

But back then, there was little reason to believe (unless you were particularly prescient) that networking would become so huge outside of business settings. Personal computers were still very application-focused. Like the iPad is.

On OS X, a replacement HyperCard seems less necessary once you realize how many HyperCard remnants are scattered throughout the system. Much of HyperTalk remains in the AppleScript language. The rest of HyperCard’s coolest features live on in Xcode. Using Interface Builder, you can drag-and-drop interface elements, draw connections, and create a fully functional (if basic) UI without having to write any code. Databases are handled by the Core Data library, again without any code. But Xcode doesn’t (and definitely shouldn’t) exist on the iPad.

On the iPad, there’s no way to get apps except through the App Store, no way to develop them except through Xcode, and there are restrictions on what Apple will allow developers to do, for fear of interrupting a cellular network, or fear of ruining a user’s end experience (and by extension, as Gruber points out, their brand). A controlled development environment could “fix” much of that, giving Apple the control they want while allowing developers to make things more powerful than web apps but with less investment than the iPhone OS SDK.

Flash turned into the dominant platform for multimedia authoring, and even it got corrupted into a glorified interface for delivering streaming video. But — and I don’t know if anyone’s mentioned this yet — the iPad doesn’t support Flash.

The excuse that Apple’s defenders are using for the lack of Flash support is that open standards like HTML 5 are preferable to a proprietary format owned by Adobe. Streaming video support is a whole other issue, but what about “basic” Flash: games, presentations, or even banner ads? We keep seeing demos that show what can be done using only HTML 5, CSS, WebGL and the like, but there’s still no consumer-level authoring platform that’s as straightforward to use as Flash. (Which might sound odd to anyone who’s used Flash, but dragging and dropping keyframes on a timeline is still more accessible than writing code in a text editor). If they want the content to take off, then there needs to be a better tool for people to create that content.

People need something like HyperCard; it’ll sell more iPads. There’s a glut of special-purpose apps on the App Store for stuff like keeping wine lists or golf scores or, of course, making fart noises. That may help with the 150,000 available apps claim, but it doesn’t make the device itself seem more useful. Especially if you have to pay one or two dollars a pop instead of just making a simple app yourself. And Bento just isn’t cutting it; it tells you up-front exactly everything you can do with it, and if your application doesn’t fit right into that narrow selection of templates, then no sale.

And it’s more of a minor point, but it’s possibly the most important and least “selfish” reason to do it: it would help keep the iPad from being perceived as purely a device for consuming media, and let Apple reassert itself as the company that makes things for creative people. HyperCard was uniquely Apple, and it fit so perfectly into the Apple philosophy: giving you only the complexity you needed and only when you needed it, and making the act of creating things feel like fun instead of like work.

What’s more, people will get it now. Back in 1988, much of HyperCard was devoted to trying to explain what it was, exactly, and what kind of stuff you could do with it. In 2010, people just naturally understand hyperlinks and pages and multimedia.

How Apple Should Do It

I do believe that if an iPhone OS-centric successor to HyperCard were to happen, it would have to come from Apple. And that’s not because of my devotion to Apple or some naive or high-minded philosophy, but for very practical reasons:

• It has to be ubiquitous. A huge part of HyperCard’s influence was due to the fact that it was included on every Mac. If you have to go looking for it, then you’re probably not going to bother. Especially if it’s not clear to you what it does, exactly.
• It has to run interpreted code. It’d be a lot better if Apple just relaxed its rule against letting apps run interpreted code, so that there could be all kinds of rapid application development available. But until they do, any attempt at a HyperCard replacement would be hopelessly gimped and over-simplified.
• It would compete with the App Store. Being able to create your own stacks (or whatever the new metaphor is) would be of little use unless you could distribute them. Even back before the internet took off, people traded stacks on floppies at User Group meetings and over BBSs. If Apple allowed that kind of distribution for one third-party developer, they’d have to do it for all of them, and I see that as being highly unlikely.
• It’d probably have to use private frameworks. Any app that ran these stacks would have to be doing runtime configuration that I just don’t believe is possible with the public frameworks. (Or I just haven’t dug deep enough into them).
• Apple is already so close to having a finished version.

That last point is what got me excited about the potential for HyperCard on the iPad. It began with the “Getting Started” document that’s the first thing you see when you start up Pages for the iPad.

The Pages tutorial is, in a word, totally sweet. You can move images around and see the text flow around them, insert graphs and charts and edit them in place, and assign borders and other effects using simplified pop-up windows. Using Pages on a desktop or laptop, and you get the sense I’m using a simplified entry-level word processor. Using it with your fingers on an iPad, and you think this is how all page layout software is supposed to work.

Now, one of the iLife applications that seemed to have a ton of potential, but just kind of fizzled out, was iWeb. (I don’t know its actual success, of course, just that I’ve never actually seen a website that was created with it). It makes one hell of a first impression, but after using it for a while, you quickly run into its limitations. And you realize that it’s not the best way to make a dynamic website.

It would, however, be a fantastic way to make a HyperCard stack, or an iPad app. You can drag all of the page elements around and edit their properties in place. You can set up connections between buttons and other elements on the site. There’s already a notion of static content (e.g. a blog page) vs. dynamic content (e.g. individual posts). It’s got a media browser, as well as several built-in widgets.

iWeb has to do all kinds of tricks to get the pages you make with its editor to look as nice when they’re rendered in a browser. (The most obvious is how it has to generate big, web-unfriendly images when you rotate them or add borders and drop shadows). But it wouldn’t have to if they weren’t targeted for a browser, but were intended to be viewed in the app itself. Or even if it were targeted for Safari and WebKit only, instead of any browser.

And again, while using iWeb-type controls to resize, rotate, and add effects to pictures is pretty cool with a mouse, it’s really cool when you’re dragging and pinching stuff directly.

For the kind of fairly simple databases that a HyperCard stack would require, the Core Data system should be plenty sufficient. Core Animation already has all kinds of fancy transitions that can just drop into multiple contexts.

For assigning functionality to the visual elements, Apple’s already got a library of candidates. Dragging links between elements in InterfaceBuilder is a natural. There’s also QuartzComposer, which lets you sequence effects by drawing lines between boxes. And there’s the Automator app, which puts a visual front end on AppleScript. On a desktop, visual programming environments, including Automator, invariably seem clunky and limited. It almost always seems faster just to type it out in a text editor. But on the iPad, dragging and dropping is much more natural than typing. Eliminating typing altogether would just make the whole thing useless, another Bento that relies too much on templates without allowing enough configuration and customization. But minimizing the typing makes more sense on the iPad than it would on a desktop or laptop.

I dunno, maybe the idea is completely counter to what Apple’s trying to do. But it seems like it makes so much sense, and it would address so many concerns, and it just fits in with everything they’ve built up to now. All the iWork and iLife apps feel to me like HyperCard is lurking there in the background, waiting to come out. On the iPad they’ve finally got a good reason to let it loose.

Not that they gave a compelling answer, but it was still nice of him to ask. And he didn’t really need to, anyway, because Fry covered that himself. The best part of the article is when he describes his and Douglas Adams’s excitement over the original Mac:

Goodbye, glowing green command line; hello, mouse, icons and graphical desktop with white screen, closable windows and menus that dropped down like roller blinds.
[...] I would pant excitedly. Douglas’ wife Jane would point with resigned amusement to the stairs, and I would hurl myself up them to swap files and play. We were like children with toy train sets. And that was part of the problem. It was such fun. Computing was not supposed to be fun.

Douglas Adams’s enthusiasm for the Mac was pernicious and infectious. It’s been about 20 years (!) since I read the Dirk Gently books, but I can still remember the frontispiece of each one explaining how it was written on a Mac, listing the software used. And I can vaguely remember a long passage in one of the books describing a character using a Mac, written to make it sound as wondrous as any of the more fantastic elements of the book.

So Long, and Thanks For All the PICTs

I don’t know for sure whether reading those books is what set me on the course to Mac fanaticism, but whatever started it, I was hooked. I would buy issues of MacUser — just for the pictures. Everything seemed so much cooler on a Mac; the control panel had a picture of a rabbit and a turtle to set your keyboard speed, and even the error messages had pictures!

When I finally got a Mac Plus as a graduation present (that my parents couldn’t quite afford, but knew how much I wanted it, presumably because I wouldn’t shut up about it), I loved it. Doing even the simplest things was more fun, and I saw nothing but limitless potential in the computer because it was so enjoyable to use.

It didn’t quite “exceed my capacity to understand it,” and it definitely didn’t “just work.” The Mac OS had already outpaced my system’s memory, so it was constantly spitting out disks and asking me to insert a new one. (The sound of the Mac ejecting a disk probably haunted my college roommates for years). Even my Commodore 128 had color, but the Mac was still low-resolutely black and white. Back then, the Outsiders would make complaints that sound hauntingly familiar today: “You can’t open it.” “It’s a toy computer.” “There’s not enough software for it.” “You could get a much more powerful machine at that price.” I eventually fell for that, and “upgraded” to a machine that I liked just fine. But I never loved a computer like that one.

UIDejaView

And nostalgia couldn’t possibly be driving all of the hype around the iPad, but I do believe that the idea of the first Macintosh is a huge part of it, even for people who never owned one. And I believe the iPad is the closest Apple has come to realizing that philosophy since the first Mac.

After all, Windows may have copied the “look and feel” of the Mac, but it never quite got its soul. It wasn’t even until Windows 95 that they managed to get a consistent, unified personality at all. But you can’t blame Microsoft too much, since Apple lost it as well. As the personal computer got to be more ubiquitous and more general-purpose, it somehow got less personal. It got more functional, but less fun.

Using an iPad, I don’t just feel like I’m in the future, as I expected to. The part in that Time article that resonated the most with me was when Fry laments that Adams never got to see his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy made real. Every new “mobile device” I’ve tried out, back to the original PalmPilot, I’ve subjected to the Hitchhiker’s Guide test. The iPad comes closer than any I’ve seen, it’d probably be even more uncanny if I’d gotten the 3G model. But more than that, I’m reminded of using my first Mac.

The iPad is obviously a direct descendent of the iPhone and the iPad, and it’s being described by tech writers and by Apple both as being a reaction to netbooks. But I believe you can trace the idea behind it all the way back to the Mac Plus.

The form factor is that of a magazine, sure, but it has a hint of the original Mac in there as well: just the screen when held horizontally, and the whole thing when in portrait mode. You can’t open it, but it doesn’t even seem like something you’d want to open: it feels like any time you’d spend configuring it is time that’d be better spent using it.

It’s got a few of the standby apps already installed and ready to go. MacWrite is no longer free, and it’s called Pages now, but it’s there if you need it. MacPaint has been made obsolete by digital photography, apparently, and the spreadsheet in AppleWorks now goes by the name Numbers. The desktop is still the realm of powerhouse applications with tons of features, but the iPad can comfortably support powerful apps that are simpler, more accessible, and more fun to use.

Blank Slate

And that simplicity really seems to piss people off. You can kind of see where the “revolutionary” marketing claim is coming from when you see so many people getting up in arms over the iPad’s mere existence. It’s been walled off and dumbed down by a control freak tyrant with a pathological hatred of buttons. At best, Apple is overstepping its bounds by trying to protect you from yourself; at worst, they’re profiting off of your gullibility.

Except that the simplicity is part of the appeal of the thing. I don’t want the stuff that it doesn’t do; I want the stuff that it does. Or even better, the stuff that it will do.

When somebody complains about the lack of USB ports, or a keyboard, or even a camera, they’re looking at the screen. When somebody complains about the scaled-down apps, or the use of a mobile OS instead of a laptop OS, they’re looking at what’s on the screen. But when somebody says that the iPad could start to change how we use computers — for better or for worse — they’re looking at what could be on the screen.

Even the first version of the iPhone was a big step up from anything I’d used before. It was a phone that let me browse the web and check my e-mail — the Treo did that too, but not as well. Apple’s always been about the unified experience, from hardware to system software to application software, and doing the same stuff on the iPhone was just more enjoyable.

A year later, when the SDK was released and the apps started rolling in, it was like getting a whole new device. Suddenly the phone became useful — essential, actually — for all kinds of things I’d never imagined doing with a phone.

You don’t have to be particularly prescient to see the same thing happening with the iPad, but on a larger scale. As it stands on release, it’s an excellent web browser, book reader, and media player. (And, as it turns out, the best possible platform for Plants vs. Zombies). There’s a very nice painting program (SketchBook Pro), and a capable word processor (Pages, which I’m using right now), but it’s still best at consuming media, as a lot of people — including me — predicted.

Where it goes in the future is nearly impossible to predict, and that’s the best part of it. And we probably won’t have to wait a year to start seeing the killer apps roll in this time.

Sub-Laptop of Luxury

As it stands now, it’s definitely a version 1.0, as expected. Some of the improvements, like a camera, are obvious, while the others will reveal themselves over time. I’m very anxious to hear what changes they’ve got in store with the iPhone OS 4 announcement this week, because it could have a huge impact on how useful the iPad is.

I can’t imagine anyone actually needing one of these things, except in very special cases, or for development. The closest you could come to justifying the device is that it replaces a lot of other devices — it’s excellent at playing video, it’s a good portable game machine, it’s a fine e-book reader, good mobile web browser, and phenomenal for reading comic books.

Video: I was just watching this week’s episode of “Castle” on my TV, and brought it up on the ABC app as well, just for kicks. I kept getting drawn to the version playing on the iPad, because the picture was sharper. The Netflix app also has almost-too-good-to-be-streaming video quality, which makes up for the fact that the rest of the interface is just a web browser pointed to Netflix’s standard queue interface.

Screen: it’s every bit as good as the initial reports. And the only place I’ve used a touch screen that was as well implemented and responsive was on the iPhone. I’ll be looking at the reports of the HP Slate and other competing tablets, but I’m highly skeptical that they’re going to deliver a touchscreen as good as the iPad’s for a similar price point. (At least, if the TouchSmart tm2′s performance was any indication).

Operating System: I’m still in the iPhone OS camp, and I think that the simplicity of a mobile device OS, instead of a desktop or laptop OS shoehorned onto under-powered equipment, was the way to go. But I’ve already run into frustrations. The file handling in particular needs to be reworked. There needs to be a better way to share documents between apps, and to get them to and from the desktop.

Drawing: I picked up a Pogo Sketch stylus, and it actually works better than I thought it would. The iPad version of SketchBook Pro is very, very good even if you’re finger-painting; the stylus feels even more natural. This is still a screen designed for touch, though, so there’s not enough precision to do detailed drawing, and it’s a little difficult to get multiple strokes to line up exactly. It’s definitely not a Wacom tablet, and real artists would likely get frustrated with it more quickly than I did. For sketching, though, it’s more capable than I ever expected.

Cases: I got Apple’s overpriced case, and I’m already regretting it. I wanted it more as a prop than as protection, and I think I would’ve been better off spending that money on a dock. Or, you know, a couple of books or a piece of wood to prop it up.

Reading: Both Apple’s iBooks app and the Amazon Kindle app are excellent. I’d expected to clearly like one or the other, but there’s no clear winner. (Except for you, the consumer). iBooks has little flourishes like the page turn animation, and yes, the little flourishes are important because they’re part of what defines the personality of the machine. Kindle’s front-end is also great, and while buying a Kindle book launches the amazon web page instead of including a slick store UI, it’s important to remember that Amazon knows exactly how to design a web page for retail. The biggest difference is that Kindle books you can read on just about any device, but books bought with iBooks are currently restricted to just the iPad.

Web Pages: Safari has never been my browser of choice, so readjusting to it on the iPad feels a little clumsy and limiting. Doing an import of all my auto-fill data, passwords, and bookmarks into Safari before synching the iPad would probably have been a better idea. Plus, while the iPhone OS is designed for touch input, most web pages still aren’t. It feels a little clumsy having to scale pages up just so that you can tap on smaller links. (And for the record, I have yet to run into anything that required Flash).

Web Apps: That said, I predict that the bar for apps on the iPad will be set much higher than for the iPhone. On the iPhone, anybody with a web page felt obliged to put out an app. On the iPad, most of those will feel superfluous. I haven’t missed the lack of a Facebook client at all, for example; I can just go to the website if I feel like it, for some reason.

Annoyances, Keyboard version: My biggest annoyance so far is that the iPad refuses to bring up the on-screen keyboard if you’re using a wireless keyboard. Sometimes you just want to enter a single word, or type a single letter, and having to tap the screen, go back to the keyboard, and tap the screen again just makes you wish you could go back to having a mouse.

Annoyances, File version: I mentioned it earlier, but the file system is one of the things I really hope they address with the new OS. Document handling within an app is done well and feels natural, but there needs to be a better way to share documents between apps and also between the iPad and the “home” computer.

Replacement Laptop: The iPad is clearly not intended to replace your existing computer, but to be an extension of it. You can’t even start using it without synching it with iTunes first. It makes all the complaints about discouraging kids from learning to program, or about the iPad ushering in a dark new age of computing, seem even more silly. You’re still going to have to own a computer on which you can program and you can install whatever you want.

It’s still odd to me that I’m no longer as much of an aberration, that many people own multiple computers, enough that there’s a whole market for a device that extends your existing setup instead of replacing it. We’re going back to the days of terminals, apparently: even in the home, there’ll be a central server, and everyone will have a magic screen that holds a subset of the stuff on that server.

Finally: I’m really impressed with the iPad, and I’ve been surprised by it more than a few times. I’m more enamored with the potential of it than the current reality, though — for now, it’s very, very nice at what it does, but by no means essential. Anybody on the fence, I’d definitely recommend waiting for version 2.0 (and checking out the competition from Lenovo, HP, and eventually, Google) before buying one.

And if you’re on the fence, I’d definitely recommend you avoid getting a hands-on demo from a friend or at the Apple Store. Because it makes one hell of a first impression, and you might find yourself paying for one before you’ve figured out what it is, exactly, you need it for.

I was pretty skeptical of Apple’s marketing at first; I thought the claim that it was “magical and revolutionary” was a bunch of flowery nonsense. But now I’m convinced. Somehow, even before its release, the iPad has taken what was once a disparate group of strangers with internet access and magically turned them into thousands of experts, better able to tell me how I should spend my money than I’d be able to by myself. And it’s going to bring about a revolution (which won’t be televised in widescreen format, apparently) in which everyone suddenly finds himself unable to think for himself or create anything of value.

All across the web are the brave souls documenting the downfall of society. It’s been a little bit disheartening watching Nilay Patel of Engadget make the transition from his initial guarded optimism to having to mention the lack of printing and the App store’s rating system in only tangentially-related posts. I actually can’t tell if he’s being serious, or if he’s just been worn down by the thousands of commenters just plain losing their shit over the idea that a gadget blog would cover a new piece of consumer technology. Stay strong!

It’s a little easier with Marc Bernardin’s post on io9, a sarcastic but pleasant enough little piece about the ability to read comic books on the iPad that gives an overview of what apps are going to be available and what it means for distribution and oh my god we’re all gonna die where the hell did that come from all of a sudden?

With Ownership of Media Comes Great Responsibility

But the best of all is Cory Doctorow’s manifesto on Boing Boing, helpfully entitled “Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either).” It’s certainly no surprise that the guy who’s appointed himself lead internet spokesperson against the evils of digital rights management would choose to write a tirade against Apple; the only surprising thing is that he waited this long. John Gruber wrote a response that was more even-tempered than I could be. And, frankly, more even-tempered than Doctorow’s post deserves.

I should make it clear that I don’t have anything personal against Doctorow; for all I know he’s a fine person, albeit one I’d probably hate getting stuck talking to at a party. But it seems that the iPad (and its media coverage) has magically turned him from an amusingly passionate and occasionally irritating anti-DRM evangelist, into full-on sputtering douchenozzle. On the plus side, his post makes Annalee Newitz’s rant on io9 (which tried to say exactly the same thing, a month earlier) seem reasoned and thoughtful by comparison. On the negative side: everything else.

First he rails against the assault on comic books:

I mean, look at that Marvel app (just look at it). I was a comic-book kid, and I’m a comic-book grownup, and the thing that made comics for me was sharing them. If there was ever a medium that relied on kids swapping their purchases around to build an audience, it was comics. And the used market for comics! It was — and is — huge, and vital. I can’t even count how many times I’ve gone spelunking in the used comic-bins at a great and musty store to find back issues that I’d missed, or sample new titles on the cheap.
[...]
So what does Marvel do to “enhance” its comics? They take away the right to give, sell or loan your comics. What an improvement. Way to take the joyous, marvellous sharing and bonding experience of comic reading and turn it into a passive, lonely undertaking that isolates, rather than unites. Nice one, Misney.

Haha, way to stick it to The Man, C-Doc! Because as we all know, Disney is a pure representation of Evil Multinational Corporation that stifles creativity, since it’s still 1994 and all of us had our emotional and intellectual maturation stopped when we were sophomores in college. Also, MEAT IS MURDER! Ever since tiny upstart mom-and-pop operation Marvel Comics got bought by their new corporate overlords, they’ve stopped publishing single issues. Even worse, they’re stifling kids’ enjoyment of comics by making them available on every single digital platform in existence.

I, too, am a comic-book grownup. And as a grownup I would prefer to have hundreds of comic books on a one pound, half-inch high device instead of in the boxes and stacks that are overflowing my closet, bookshelves, romantic-encounter-inhibiting stack beside my bed, and my parents’ basement. If I want to share them, then holy shit they’re now on a device that’s the same size as a comic book! I can hand somebody else the iPad, and it’ll even flip over to let them read it! Also the last time I shared a single issue of a comic book with anyone was when I was 18!

The comic book thing is just the first sign that Doctorow has become the worst kind of Old Guard: the Old Guard who believes he’s still cutting-edge counter-culture. The kind who believes that putting a picture of Steve Jobs upside down or using epithets like “Misney” is anything more than a lazy substitute for bonafide insight. What he’s done here is conflate two things: his pet cause of “ownership” of media, and the joyous magic of sharing. It’s selfishness disguised as generosity. If I start buying comics on an iPad, then I’m every bit as free to go “spelunking” through the online catalog for back issues — I could buy, right now, the first 10 issues of X-Men and read them immediately and individually; they’re not to the best of my knowledge in print as single issues. I could share my collection with anyone by sharing my iPad.

What I can’t do is take someone else’s work and sell it. That is not, however, “sharing.”

Sainted Mothers and Tricked-Out Alarm Clocks

Next Doctorow really gets amped up over the shocking — shocking — insight that Apple has made a computer that you can’t open.

Then there’s the device itself: clearly there’s a lot of thoughtfulness and smarts that went into the design. But there’s also a palpable contempt for the owner. I believe — really believe — in the stirring words of the Maker Manifesto: if you can’t open it, you don’t own it. [...] But with the iPad, it seems like Apple’s model customer is that same stupid stereotype of a technophobic, timid, scatterbrained mother as appears in a billion renditions of “that’s too complicated for my mom” (listen to the pundits extol the virtues of the iPad and time how long it takes for them to explain that here, finally, is something that isn’t too complicated for their poor old mothers).

He goes on (and on), but the whole passage just shows a palpable contempt for anyone who sees a computer as a tool. He paints himself as the defender of those whose intelligence is being insulted by a Nanny Corporation. What he’s really doing is insulting those of us who want to embrace the 21st century and create new stuff, instead of being burdened by the unnecessary hassles of an outmoded philosophy of technology.

The whole business about defending moms is pure bullshit — if the strawman he’s arguing against is using the “it’s for moms to send photos” defense, then he’s set himself up against some lazy, lazy people. In my case, for instance: my mother has, literally, been using computers for as long as I have, since we each got a Commodore 64 on the same day. I went on to get a CS degree and go into programming professionally, and she went on to use a computer for everything from writing to communication to entertainment. And of the two of us, she has no interest in the iPad (it doesn’t do enough to set it apart from her iMac), and I’m going to pick one up on day one.

It’s not that I can’t figure out how to do all the esoteric BS that the Apple II and C-64 and every DOS machine in existence made you go through. It’s that I don’t want to. I vividly remember having to edit startup batch files and change interrupt request settings and go into the BIOS just to get a game to run. And I’m thankful that I don’t have to do that ever again. For that matter, I’ve never overclocked my microwave or hacked into my television. (I’m pretty sure I still “own” them, though, thanks).

You should only have to deal with the shit that you want to. When I was in college, I learned how to wire logic gates and I learned how to make a compiler. And with good reason: knowing how a logic board worked and how a compiler turned text into machine code were useful for making more efficient code. (Which is all hopelessly outdated, of course). But I never had to wire up a logic board to turn on my Mac and browse the web, and I never had to write a compiler to write programs for the iPhone. To suggest that that’s in any way ignorant or complacent is just insulting. It’s not that I can’t do this stuff, it’s that I don’t want to.

And I hate to break it to Mr. Doctorow, but he’s not the first to come to the insight that Apple is deliberately trying to sell people on a device where the hardware itself is de-emphasized. That was revealed in this shocking expose revealing Apple’s sinister plan. That insider video drops the bombshell that what Apple is really aiming for is a computing experience where you don’t even think about the hardware, but instead are distracted by all the flashing lights on the screen. But of course, Apple tries to spin it by calling it “the stuff you want to do with a computer in the first place.”

There’s nothing noble or intelligent about having to re-invent the wheel every time you want to accomplish something. That’s not progress; it’s retardation, literally. Doctorow is a science fiction writer whose best known works are a novel set in Disney World, and one whose title is an allusion to George Orwell’s 1984. He rose to fame writing for a website that highlights other people’s work. Those aren’t intended as a dig at Doctorow, but as simple observations: of all people, he should appreciate the value of derivative work. In his most blatantly insulting condemnation of the “consumers” who want an iPad, he quotes William Gibson.

But how did you read that book to be able to quote it, Mr. Doctorow? How were you able to use it to make your own blog post, instead of starting with a colorful and insulting description from your own imagination? How is your reading a book in its pristine hardbound form any less offensive than reading it in electronic form? (Except, of course, for the distinction that you can make a few bucks back once you’ve discarded it). Chastising other people for wanting an easier and more convenient way to read books, watch movies, and browse the web is the height of hypocrisy. And I’ll bet you anything your copy of the book didn’t have a built-in word processor.

The way you improve your iPad isn’t to figure out how it works and making it better. The way you improve the iPad is to buy iApps. Buying an iPad for your kids isn’t a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it’s a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.

One way to improve your iPad is to buy apps. Another is to design a webpage. Or write a web app. Or write a book. Or make a (finger) painting. Or make a piece of music.

Another way to improve your iPad is to write an app. Suggesting that because you can’t make iPad apps on the iPad, you can’t make them at all, is just plain idiotic. Gruber gave the perfect analogy for this: many of us first became exposed to “computers” via the Atari 2600. Those of us who wanted to play games, kept playing them. Those of us who wanted to make games could ask for a C-64, or Amiga, or Apple II, etc.

Saying that using the iPad will keep people from wanting to develop for the iPad, is every bit as stupid as saying that buying an iPod stifles any desire to make music.

A Low Blow

Dale Dougherty’s piece on Hypercard and its influence on a generation of young hackers is a must-read on this. I got my start as a Hypercard programmer, and it was Hypercard’s gentle and intuitive introduction to the idea of remaking the world that made me consider a career in computers.

I have an unabashed and borderline unhealthy love for HyperCard, and I still do consider it one of the Top 10 greatest pieces of consumer software ever created. I’d be afraid that I was starting to agree with Doctorow, but of course he’s just quoting the genuine insight of Dale Dougherty. (Which is indeed a must-read. (On, say, your iPad)).

Using HyperCard wasn’t my first exposure to programming. It was, however, the first time I loved programming. And a HyperCard experience on the iPad — assuming it got it right where several attempts to recapture the original have failed — would be awesome. Every time Bento gets updated, I take another look to see if they’ve radically changed their philosophy and turned it into a HyperCard successor; every time, I go away disappointed.

It’s tough, because on the iPhone and now on the iPad, Apple has forbidden apps from using interpreted code (user-generated interpreted code, to be specific). That forces everything to be based on predefined templates and limits any app from turning into a real development environment. If any App store restriction were lifted, that would be the one I’d vote for.

But you know, the world has changed a little bit since 1988, when I had my first Mac. HyperCard’s main appeal was that it had a visual development environment where you could drag-and-drop interface elements and even data structures, putting together a completely functional interface, writing code only for the parts that you needed to have special functionality. And it all came for free with your Mac. It’s too bad nothing exists like that today. But if you want to write apps for your own device, that costs you $99 a year: half as much as the 1988 cost of MS BASIC and a third as much as the Pascal compiler. Better get to selling those comic books!

If you don’t want to pay at all, then your options are limited. You’re stuck with only Javascript, Python, Ruby, Lua, PHP, or about a billion other freely-available languages to choose from.

More of the Same

In case you didn’t notice, Mr. Doctorow is not a supporter of digital rights management:

The iStore lock-in doesn’t make life better for Apple’s customers or Apple’s developers. As an adult, I want to be able to choose whose stuff I buy and whom I trust to evaluate that stuff. I don’t want my universe of apps constrained to the stuff that the Cupertino Politburo decides to allow for its platform. And as a copyright holder and creator, I don’t want a single, Wal-Mart-like channel that controls access to my audience and dictates what is and is not acceptable material for me to create. The last time I posted about this, we got a string of apologies for Apple’s abusive contractual terms for developers, but the best one was, “Did you think that access to a platform where you can make a fortune would come without strings attached?” I read it in Don Corleone’s voice and it sounded just right. Of course I believe in a market where competition can take place without bending my knee to a company that has erected a drawbridge between me and my customers!

As a copyright holder and creator, I don’t want people taking advantage of my stuff without compensating me for it. I also don’t want to have to deal with keeping secure track of people’s payment information, or pay for outside marketing. I want to do what I’m good at — creating content — and let the people who are really good at attracting customers, handling secure transactions, and accounting for everything afterwards, do their jobs and take their share.

I wonder where I could buy a copy of Doctorow’s book if I love science fiction and irony. (I can only assume that Doctorow vehemently objects to his books being sold through Walmart, and some other nefarious evil corporate entity is to blame). Walmart, like any other retailer, is free to choose what it will and won’t sell in its store. As far as I’m aware, they don’t sell porn, and as far as I’m aware, that corporate decision hasn’t been labeled “abusive.” Walmart, like any other retailer, takes a cut of the sales. Walmart, like other retailers, serves as a centralized location where a person looking for your product can find it and buy it. Replace “Walmart” with the name of any other paid distribution channel — preferably one that a lazy person on a tirade can’t use as lazy shorthand for everything that’s wrong with America — and you’ll see the same thing. And you probably won’t see clumsy comparisons to the mafia.

“But wait,” you might argue, “WalMart isn’t the only place you can buy his books! Because he is awesome and practices what he preaches, you can also download them for free!”

And that’s fine for him, and it’s also no different from the options available to any iPhone developer. Apple makes no demands on exclusivity: you can and will often find the same app on iPhones, Android phones, iPads, Mac OS X, Windows, and sometimes free on the web. Where Doctorow’s attempt at an argument goes off the rails is saying “channel that [...] dictates what is and is not acceptable material for me to create.” No one is setting limits on what you can or can’t create. Apple is setting limits on what you can sell in their store. You can’t write an iPhone app and then have it run on an Android phone, obviously, but them’s the breaks. Computers are different, and plenty of people have devised countless ways to separate content from technology to make their content cross-platform. Windows and OS X are both “open” development environments, but you still have to port from one platform to the other.

“But Apple doesn’t just set limits on what you can sell, they set limits on what you can run on the device at all!” Not true. You can develop an app and run it on your own device with no intervention from Apple. You can even set it up to let other people run your app on their device. It’s not free of cost, but it is free of interference.

We all live in a market where competition can take place. The App Store is part of that market; it’s not the whole thing. If someone genuinely finds Apple’s policies “abusive,” he can and will take his content elsewhere.

But that’s for developers. What about the claim that it doesn’t make life better for Apple’s customers? Well, despite Apple’s best efforts to keep me from being able to enjoy my iPhone, there are (by their claim) 150,000 apps available for the thing. That is more than I will ever be able to use in my lifetime. In the three years that I’ve owned the device, I have only once wanted an app that wasn’t available on the store — and in that case, it was removed not by Apple’s policies, but by Amazon’s. Not only do I have a surfeit of fart apps to choose from, but multiple e-book readers, news feed readers, games, Twitter clients, dictionaries, remote controls, comic book readers, databases, blogging clients, and apps that I didn’t even know I wanted before I used them.

I can put any MP3 I can find on the device, whether I buy it from Apple or not. (I get almost all of my MP3s from Amazon, because they’re cheaper).

I can download any of hundreds of TV shows and movies, either entire seasons or individual episodes. If they’re not available from Apple, I can buy the DVDs and convert them to a format that can be watched on the iPhone or iPad, or my TV. (If Doctorow wants to argue that DVD ripping for personal use should be legal, I’ll be right behind him waving a flag of support). If I don’t want to watch something more than once, I can use apps from Netflix or ABC, or go to CBS’s website.

I can buy some books from Apple, or others from Amazon’s Kindle store. Stanza offers thousands more for free from Project Gutenberg. For comics I could buy them directly from any one of several comic-book reading apps, or I could find them on the web and then read them via those same apps.

If I wanted to read Doctorow’s books, I could download the book in PDF or ePub format for free from his website, and then read them using Apple’s own book reader or a third-party one. What I can’t do is then sell that PDF to someone else, because Doctorow is a mafioso-like control freak who wants to make demands on what I can and can’t do with something that I own.

We Know What’s Best For You

Where Doctorow’s post crosses the line from reasonable opinion about the philosophy of media ownership, and goes straight into flatulating asshole territory, is with the insulting and condescending arrogance of the post.

I listed all of the things that I’d be able to do with an iPad, and I said that there has never been an app that I’ve wanted that I couldn’t find. That means that the device will almost definitely work well for me. I would never be so arrogant as to claim that what works or doesn’t work for me would not work for anyone else. If you want Google Voice, don’t get an iPad. If you want to play Flash games, don’t get an iPad. If you want to watch videos from Hulu, or directly from NBC or Fox, don’t get an iPad. There are devices that will probably work better for you, and sane people realize that.

But “and I think you shouldn’t either” is not only obnoxious, but downright hypocritical in a manifesto that rails on Apple for deciding what you should and shouldn’t want. Doctorow screams about “that same stupid stereotype of a technophobic, timid, scatterbrained mother,” and then proceeds to make the shallowest, laziest accusations, passing them off as genuine insight that none of us would have been able to come to on our own. He knows what we want better than we do, apparently.

And like the laziest of shrill internet opinion overseers, he dismisses objections to his ranting as “a string of apologies,” implying that we’re all bloated consumers blinded by the appeal of a shiny new object, unable to make decisions for ourselves.

If I want to spend a wad of my discretionary income on a computer that’s about the size of a trade paperback, turns on in less than a second and lets me immediately browse the web, watch movies, play games, or read any of thousands of books, without having to deal with any of a million bullshit hindrances of the “open internet,” without having to search through dozens of different sources to find the most up-to-date version of a piece of software, and without having to diagnose random crashes or slowdowns: maybe that’s exactly what I want. If enough people want that, they’ll buy it, and the product will succeed. If they don’t, they won’t, and it will fail.

Somebody who spends so much time ranting about free markets should take a second to think about the basics of how they actually work.