iSuck

Monolith of consumer excessMan, there’s been a nauseating level of hype around the iPhone today. (I didn’t include a link; if you want to read more about the iPhone, just check the entire internet). And all for what?

It’s version 1.0 of an Apple device, which means that in around six months there’ll be the next “next big thing” that makes the previous version look like Soviet-era technology. It uses last year’s cellular technology, and by even the most glowing accounts has painfully slow internet access.

There’s no support for third-party development on it; Apple wants to squeeze every last penny it can get out of customers via the iTunes store, and they chose to insult developers by calling their lack of development support “sweet.”

It doesn’t have GPS like other mobile devices do. The camera has no video and no zoom, both of which are supported on my years-old RAZR phone.

I use my phone maybe three times a week, max. Most days I even forget to bring it with me. I don’t have any need for a new one.

Plus Apple’s craftsmanship has been going downhill for a while; broken latches and recalled batteries on the laptops, scratches and battery problems on the iPods, and an OS that seems to be getting less stable as time goes by. My iPod, which is only a few years old (which means there’ve been at least 8 newer versions since I got it) is already giving up the ghost — the battery runs out quickly and at times it refuses to boot up.

Apple’s products are status symbols for a segment of society obsessed with excessive consumerism, a demographic that’s become more and more repulsive the farther we get from the late 1990s. It’s the territory of four-eyed, goateed dorks who think they’re hipsters, driving Volkswagens and listening to the Dave Matthews Band and Jack Johnson and Sheryl Crow on their iPods while still denying they’re yuppies.

All that, not to mention the fact that it’s ridiculous to pay six hundred dollars for a damn cell phone.

Which is why I got the 4GB version instead of the 8GB.

Seriously, you’ve got to see the screen on this thing. You know when they have demo models of PDAs and phones in electronics stores, how they have those printed mock-ups of the real display pasted on the front? The iPhone’s real screen looks like that. I picked one up in the store just to get an idea of the size of it, and was actually surprised when the image on the screen moved.

During my dinner break at work, I stopped by the nearest AT&T store in San Rafael, thinking that few people knew it was even there, so it wouldn’t be crowded. When I got there, there were already around 60 people in line. I joined in for about an hour, and the people were friendly, and the weather was perfect, and I could finally understand why there’s so much hype about waiting in line for the new cell phone or videogame console or Harry Potter book — it’s not even about the product so much about the “event.”

Anyway, that turned out to be a bust, as they sold out after I’d been in line for a little over an hour. I figured I’d had a small taste of the big Day 1 Excitement, so I went back to work and said I’d order one online.

I’m not sure who was driving to the Apple store after I left work; it sure wasn’t me. But the creepily friendly staff standing outside the doors welcomed me and assured me that there were still 4GB models left, and I jumped all over it like Michael Moore on a corndog. I don’t have kids, so it’s not like I need to carry a ton of pictures around with me. And I can’t even think of 1000 songs I’d want to listen to at a moment’s notice. So this, plus the fact that there’s going to be at least a dozen better models released before my contract even runs out, I actually saved money!

And the gadget bloodlust is finally quiet. But for how long?

A big-ass table

This video from SarcasticGamer.com has already made the rounds in the real blogs, but it’s just too well-done not to pass on:

You don’t have to have seen the original promotional video to be able to tell that they got the music and the intonation of the voice exactly right. Brilliant.

And to prove this blog’s total lack of bias (in addition to its total lack of content), here’s my other favorite parody of the moment:

Boom

Stacks and spinApple’s Worldwide Developer Conference is going on this week, with Steve Jobs’ keynote this morning. Nothing particularly earth-shattering was announced, but the stuff they did show was cool enough.

I was surprised by my own reaction to the new desktop demo. There’s nothing particularly compelling there, and the transparent menubar is unpleasantly Vista-like, but seeing the demo of the new “Stacks” inexplicably filled me with glee. I’ve been looking for something that does exactly that, and the Apple version is plenty slick. Buying OS X upgrades is mandatory in the Spectre Collie household, so I wasn’t looking for anything to convince me to buy Leopard; I was only looking for stuff that made me look forward to it slightly more.

Releasing Safari for Windows was a really welcome announcement. I tried it on my work machine and was amazed that it renders pages exactly the same as it does in OS X. I’d always just assumed ugly font handling was built into Windows and there was no escaping it, but there it is, running in XP and actually looking like I’m using a computer in 2007. The biggest selling point, of course, is that now the entire internet can see Spectre Collie exactly how it was intended to be seen, and the computer world’s long waking nightmare is at last over.

(And yeah, it’s petty, but his whole “Standard Version,” “Ultimate Version” spiel was pretty damn funny. Especially for those of us who’ve been spending time in the Vista trenches).

What’s not cool, though, is the unprecedented level of spin when it comes to the damn iPhone. Sure, Jobs is known across the internets for his “reality distortion field,” but it’s always been in the realm of good-natured criticism. Apple traditionally does a pretty good job with slick new releases that perform pretty well, and then Jobs comes in and then oversells them just a notch. A feature that would’ve just earned a “huh, that’s kind of cool” suddenly gets upgraded to “OMG THAT’S AWESOME WE LOVE YOU STEVE!!!!!!”

But even the reality distortion field can’t turn a turd into a diamond. It’s pretty insulting that they’d even try to. They’ve been roundly criticized for making the iPhone a closed system; it’s simply not a complete smart phone unless third parties can develop applications for it. Jobs held off mentioning the iPhone until the climax of his keynote, and then made the big dramatic announcement: the iPhone has a web browser!

They would’ve been a lot better off not mentioning it at all, because the end result just makes them look silly at best, intentionally deceptive at worst. “No SDK Required” the slide says. “Sweet.” “You can start building your apps today.” “You can run your applications on Safari until the hardware is released.” “An awesome way to write apps for iPhone.” Bull.

Requiring apps to run on a remote server makes distribution simple, they claim. What it does is makes it so you can’t run third-party apps without a network connection. So you’d better be near a WiFi hotspot, or be ready to pay AT&T’s likely exhorbitant data rates (which haven’t been announced yet, as far as I’ve seen). And forget running anything useful while you’re stuck on a plane flight.

Having no access to the local data store gives excellent security, they claim. What it means is that your apps can’t access anything that would be useful to have on a mobile device, like your To-Do list, calendar, notes, tracks on your iPod, or photos. Unless you want to keep them on a remote server and only have access to them when you’re connected to the internet.

They’ve been struggling to figure out how to support outside development without compromising security or network integrity, they claim. Which is total bullshit; they’ve been struggling to figure out how to avoid giving up any of Apple’s opportunities to sell stuff through the iTunes Store, and AT&T’s opportunities to charge users for as much data access as possible.

All for a device that’s already six hundred dollars plus a two-year contract.

I always thought Apple and I had an agreement. I would keep giving them more and more of my money, and they would provide me with fancy stuff that worked well, and not lie about it. That keynote really hurt. Now I just have to see if I can survive my birthday at the end of the month, two days before the release of the iPhone. When they release a new gadget that every rational part of my brain finds repulsive and a ludicrous waste of money, while the rest of me is drawn like a Visa card-carrying moth to flame. Hopefully there’ll be a run on them, and it’ll be impossible to get one, or else I’m going to enter July feeling really, really stupid.

Please wait while Windows calculates how it can suck even more.

The Ultimate in SuckIt should come as no surprise to anyone that I lasted about a nanosecond before I broke down and bought a new computer (cat does not come standard). (Actually, cat does not come, period). It’s way more computer than I need — it’s way more computer than most shuttle launches need — and it was way too expensive, but somehow those facts don’t make it any less awesome. Just looking at it, I get a tingling in my extremity.

Keeping up the theme of needless excess, I bought a copy of Windows Vista to install on it. Mac OS X, Vista under Boot Camp, with a Parallels installation to get access without rebooting — it was going to be sheer operating system perfection. Remember that this was before I knew I was going to be working full time at a videogame company, back when I was actually going to have the time and desire to play videogames.

The thing about Vista is that it kinda sucks. I kept hearing how it was supposedly a rip-off of OS X, but I don’t really see it. It’s more like if Donald Trump got a hold of Windows XP. “We’re gonna make it very classy. Get a load of those transparent window borders and tell me that doesn’t make for the finest computing experience there is.”

Back when I was working on an Xbox game, the joke was that Microsoft kept demanding more flair: gameplay was secondary; what mattered was just cramming as many visual effects as you could into the game. It looks like Microsoft extended that same philosophy to their new OS. The fact that you can’t even tell which is the active window is irrelevant; it’s far more important that it looks like glass!

Normally I wouldn’t bitch about gratuitous visual effects; OS X basically pioneered that field (and I still spend minutes dropping widgets onto the dashboard just to see the ripple effect). But even when they’re not actually getting in the way of UI usability — like the active window thing — they’re really all that’s apparent to the user in the upgrade. It just feels like you’ve broken compatibility with most of your existing apps just for the sake of a billion new notification messages and windows that you can see through.

And they still can’t make a standards-compliant web browser. Seriously, how long is it going to take for them to just give up and go with every other browser available?

So it’s kind of garish and ugly, but mostly usable, so it shouldn’t matter all that much since I only use it for games and the occasional work-related task, right? Well, as it turns out, I completely missed the news that you need to buy the most expensive version of Vista in order to run it under virtualization software like Parallels. XP has no such limitation. And, Parallels doesn’t let you boot from your Vista boot camp partition, so if you want to have Boot Camp and Parallels, you have to do another install, which requires another Windows activation. Which I can’t do, because it violates the EULA.

Luckily, Microsoft is there for me: thanks to their innovative Windows BendOverAnywhere program, I can upgrade my copy of Vista to the ULTIMATE MEGAWEAPON version for the low, low price of $158. Which means the secondary just-for-games OS would end up adding over 200 bucks to the cost of the computer. But at least I’d be able to run it under Parallels… or would I? Paying that cost just gets you a download, because you’re only allowed to do it on one machine. And the Parallels VM counts as a separate machine. So installing it there gets me my virtualization-unfriendly version of Vista. Which won’t activate, because it thinks I’m trying to install it on a new computer. (Who knows what would happen if I needed to do a clean re-install of the OS. I’m guessing I’d need another $150 every time I wipe my hard drive?)

(Meanwhile, Parallels is sending me e-mails asking me to send them 40 bucks to upgrade to their newest version, which may or may not solve my problem. Does it let you run off the Boot Camp partition instead of requiring a separate install? No one will say definitively. You can try asking them for support… if you can find their secret forum that isn’t linked from their main page, only from Google searches. And no representatives are on hand there to answer questions. But at least I know that the new version can indeed run Quake 4, so that’s a relief.)

It’d be nice to ask somebody at Microsoft whether the software they’re charging me a couple hundred bucks for will actually run on my machine in the configuration I want. After going through ten pages on their customer support site, I finally get to a page that says it will let me e-mail somebody. As long as I enter my product key, and they determine that the key is valid for support; otherwise it’s $60 per “incident.” I enter the product key, out of pure optimism, and it takes me to a Microsoft SQL Server error page.

So as it stands now, I’m somewhat screwed. I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop, so I can determine exactly how much money I’ve wasted. It’s either going to be the cost of Parallels and its upgrade, or the cost of Vista and its upgrade. Until then, it means rebooting the machine every time I want to play a game, at which point it hardly seems worth the effort. Maybe I’m supposed to be spending even more money on the Mac-native versions of these games? Or maybe finding a cheaper and more worthwhile hobby?

I should make it clear that I’m not enough of an Apple fanboy to say that they don’t suck. They do, but in a slightly different way. I’ve complained about the $125 they charge for every yearly OS upgrade, but at this point, all of that seems quaint. As Jon Gruber pointed out in an insightful post on his Daring Fireball blog, Apple is primarily a hardware company, not a software company. And as such, where they truly suck is in the hardware.

It’s all beautifully designed, of course, even the cheese grater. But there’s that deviously-planned obsolescence built right into every one, from the iPod batteries with the lifespans of mayflies, to the exploding laptop batteries, to the laptop latches.

Almost one month to the day after the warranty on my Mac laptop ran out, the latch broke (from what I read on the internet, it’s a very common problem, partly because the latch is ridiculously over-engineered). I put off getting it repaired until now, because I knew that phone support would be useless — the second you connect with a real human, they ask for your credit card number or try to sell you AppleCare. So I finally made an appointment to talk to a Genius. Forty-five minutes after my appointment time, said genius looked at my machine’s serial number, typed it into a database, and told me that it’d be $326 to get fixed. She referred me to a place across town that could probably do it for cheaper. When I got there, they said that they usually ship those repairs directly to Apple and that it’d cost me $426 including parts and labor.

And still, the Apple aura is so persuasive that I sit here typing on a ridiculously over-priced machine that could very well explode at any moment (or more likely, will explode exactly on April 19, 2008), and the only thing I can think of is bitching about Windows.

Update: Man, what’s the computer world coming to when a guy can’t make an over-long, whiny post bitching about cost and incompatiblities anymore? The day after I wrote this, Parallels released the new version of their software. Hidden among the new features is what I think is the most valuable one — being able to use your BootCamp Vista partition. Meaning no additional activation, no copying software over, just the ability to use your Vista stuff within OSX without rebooting. I’ve installed it with no problems, and so far it works mostly like I wanted. (Direct3D isn’t working for me at the moment, but it could very well just be a configuration thing I missed).

Having a piece of software work as advertised, and provide greater compatibility between rival operating systems with a minimum of hassle (if not a minimum of cost)? That sets a very bad precedent for the industry.

Consumer breakdown

It beckons.(WARNING: Yuppie-in-denial complaining follows. If you’re the type who’s offended by the petulant whining of the over-privileged, you’ll want to skip this post. And a couple of the next posts, too. For that matter, you probably want to skip this whole blog.)

These past few months have been kind of a test of will power for me. I’ve had this irrational jones to get a new computer, one that I haven’t been quite able to justify. I’ve got a behemoth of a Windows PC that I hardly ever use anymore, and it’s just taking up desk space. And because it’s one of those flashy black Alienware cases, it feels like it’s mocking me for not using it — it’s like having a pimped-out motorcycle in the garage that you don’t really need anymore because you actually just prefer driving the minivan.

So I want to get rid of it, and get a Mac desktop instead. Even though my laptop does everything I need, it makes me uncomfortable at an OCD-level using it as my one and only computer, for reasons that only years of therapy would be able to explain.

But I’ve been able to keep it under control, all this time. I figured I’d wait until it was time to get a new monitor, and upgrade everything at once. Then I found a deal on exactly the monitor I wanted, at almost $200 less than it normally sells for, so I picked one up.

Then I said I’d wait until Christmas-season unemployment situation worked out, and I started getting income again. Almost immediately, I got a check from a contracting job, which was almost exactly the cost of a new machine (after taxes).

Then I said I’d wait until Apple updated its desktop Mac line, to get in at the beginning of a product cycle instead of at the end, like I usually do. And literally the day after I said this, they announced their overkill model, which has way more processors than I’d need at a price there’s no way in hell I’d ever pay for a machine. So that was a wash.

Then I figured I’d wait until they released the new version of OS X, so at least I’d get that included in the price. It was coming out “in Spring,” most likely early June, so it was only a couple of months to wait and see if the feeling subsided. Tonight they announced that the next version of OS X has been delayed until October.

There’s no way I can hold out until October. I’m really tempted to just buy the damn thing now and be done with it. And reading the comments in response to that post on ars technica, a few other people are saying the same thing: “At least now I don’t have to wait to buy a new Mac.”

Now, that’s kind of creepy. The whole “Mac users are a cult” concept is tired and played out, but I’m kind of alarmed. They announce a delay in the release of their OS, and my first impulse was to punish them by giving them a lot of money for a new computer? And I’m not the only one! I really want to get a pair of those They Live glasses to see if my computer is projecting brainwashing images at me while I work and sleep.

And seriously: if anybody out there is still a Windows fan and would like a still-reasonably-capable (AMD Athlon 64 2.66 GHz, ATI Radeon X800 XT Platinum w/256MB VRAM) PC for a reasonable price ($800 or best offer), send me an e-mail at my name at this domain. Friends don’t let friends use ebay.

Idiot Box

Uh, I don't get it.Back when I was writing columns for SFist, one of the things I kept harping on was that Apple should make a DVR. If they could do for television what they did for the iPod, that’d be huge, right? An interface for TV as slick as OS X, without as many of the weird limitations that the cable and sattelite companies build into their machines, and with the ability to use the video you record on your computer. It seemed like a no-brainer.

Of course, what they came out with instead was the Apple TV. I was completely unimpressed with the announcement, I was more blown away at the concept of Apple’s releasing a product that I didn’t want to buy. The Apple TV isn’t a DVR; it’s just a way to watch and listen to stuff from iTunes (and iPhoto) on a big screen TV. That’s it. I could barely see the point, and it seemed like a step backwards instead of an innovation.

Now that it’s been out for a while, I just read this review of the Apple TV on arstechnica.com. And I still would never even think of buying one of the things. But after seeing in detail how the thing works and which audience it’s targeted at, I think I finally understand it. And I’m more than a little disturbed.

I’m disturbed because of this: the reason I didn’t understand the thing is because I can’t conceive of a world without television.

It’s kind of embarrassing. It’s not like Apple has been subtle with their whole strategy — they want you to buy stuff off iTunes. But even though I’ve got several friends who don’t have cable or satellite, and I’ve got friends who even watch shows off iTunes and have told me about the process, I just couldn’t understand how the process would work. How can Chuck watch TV if Chuck no can hook satellite to computer? Chuck confused and angry!

Am I just too short-sighted and old to understand new media? Or have I been living for so long with a coaxial cable from Comcast or DirecTV that I see it as an umbilical cord, and can’t imagine life without it? I don’t even watch nearly as much TV as I used to, but still the thought of going without it altogether just never occurred to me. As a thought experiment, I decided to go through and find out what it would take to do the unthinkable, and live without a live TV feed coming into my home.

Microsoft has a new Video Marketplace you can access over the Xbox 360 (and I’m guessing Vista), but a) it doesn’t have a lot of TV content yet, and b) they don’t as far as I can tell let you download entire seasons. So until that matures, the only other option is iTunes.

And yes, I am aware that with the internet, you can get all the TV you want in high definition for free. But at present, the majority of my income comes from a major multinational media company, so I can’t really condone that with a clear conscience. And still, that stuff is hard to find, takes forever to download, and just has a “ethical gray area” feel to it. So I’m not considering that.

So for this test, I’ll take the shows that I watch regularly. I’ll pretend that their seasons all overlap, and that a season is about 9 months.

Now, I pay an obscene amount for my satellite TV connection. It’s almost as much as I pay for real necessities, like cigarettes. If I think about how much better it would be for me to take that money and donate it to charity or something, it just gets depressing and strikes me as vaguely un-American, so I’ll just leave that idea alone. What I will do, though, is cut ten bucks a month off the bill, because that’s what I pay for the HD package (which is mostly worthless, but the rare shows that are broadcast in HD are sweet), and iTunes doesn’t support HD yet.

So for DirecTV the total is: 9 months at $50 a month = $450 per season.
Downsides: Commercials, being stuck with DirecTV’s lousy DVR.

Looking on the iTunes store, here’s the cost of season passes of shows I’ve watched with any regularity in the past year:

  1. 30 Rock: $34.99
  2. Heroes: $42.99
  3. Lost: $34.99
  4. Monk: $29.99
  5. Battlestar Galactica: $34.99
  6. Doctor Who: not available
  7. The Venture Brothers: $19.99
  8. Mythbusters: $25.87
  9. Passport to Europe: $22.99
  10. Saturday Night Live: $29.99
  11. The Sarah Silverman Program: $9.99
  12. Kim Possible: $37.99
  13. Legion of Super-Heroes: not available

So for iTunes the total is: $324.77 per season.
Downsides: waiting for downloads; the day delay between broadcast and iTunes availability; the lack of local programming, CNN and just lazy channel-surfing; knowing that I paid $43 for a show that I hate but am hooked on anyway (“Heroes”); no “Doctor Who;” no cheesy anime on adult swim. Plus, missing out on the stuff I watch sporadically but would never go out of my way to pay for — Discovery Channel documentaries, cheesy movies on the Sci Fi channel, and just about everything on the Food network.

I’d never seen a break-down like that before, and the result really surprised me. First, obviously, because it comes out cheaper to buy entire seasons online than it does to pay for a monthly satellite bill. Second, that there are shows available I never would’ve expected to be, like “Mythbusters” and “Passport to Europe.” And third, that browsing around the iTunes store works as well for TV shows as it does for music or watching stuff on a DVR. Especially since you can buy individual episodes to try them out. So I’ve gone from thinking that the iTunes video store was worthless, to realizing that unless you watch a lot more television than I do, it actually makes more sense to get stuff online than pay a regular monthly cable or satellite bill.

I’m not going to cut the cord anytime soon, since live and semi-live TV has gotten to be a habit. And there’s still a mental block with the pricing — even though it actually comes out cheaper, it’s easier for me to rationalize paying a bill and considering it a “utility”, than it would be to pay thirty or forty bucks for a series I feel somewhat guilty for watching anyway (like, for instance, the Disney Channel animated series aimed at teenage girls).

But after seeing it actually broken down, I feel like I finally understand why everybody’s making such a big fuss about TV over IP. If they can get semi-reformed TV junkies like me to make the switch, there’s a ton of potential and even more money to be made there; I wonder why they don’t make more of an effort to demonstrate how it’s cheaper.

And in case you’ve read all this, and your response is, “or you could, well, read a book,” then you just don’t get it, man.

Forbidden Desire

How could something so white feel so wrong?Man, I want to get a 24″ iMac so bad I can taste it. The problem is I don’t, strictly speaking, need one.

I’m a master at convincing myself to blow too much money on excess stuff, and my skill only increases when Apple’s involved. But I’m hitting a brick wall here.

At the moment, I’ve got a PC that’s a little over two years old, and a MacBook Pro that I got last spring. I use the laptop for about 99.9% of everything. The PC is now my ghetto machine, for work stuff that only runs in Windows, for games (and it’s already showing its age on that front), and for “private web browsing” of stuff I don’t want anybody to know I look at and don’t want in my main machine’s browser history (like this).

So really, it all comes down to the fact that I want a bigger monitor (somewhat valid), and it bugs me that I’m using a laptop as my desktop computer (totally irrational). And, I guess, I want to get more room on my desk. I could ditch the PC, and the only thing I’d be missing out on — apart from the wad of cash I spent on it a couple of years ago — is the ability to play a videogame full-screen while checking my e-mail. I suspect I’d find some way to manage.

Part of me says that as long as I’m jonesing for a computer, I should be all excited about the Mac Pro. It’d be better at running both OS X and Windows stuff (if you believe some people, it runs Vista better than it does OS X), and it’d be more expandable. Which is to say, expandable at all.

Every instinct I have says it’s a bad idea to buy a machine on which you can’t swap out video cards and hard drives, but then I’ve got to look back at my track record and the mass-market, preconfigured computer industry as a whole. These things just ain’t as upgradeable as they used to be. Apple’s most guilty of it, granted, but across the board, it seems like the planned obsolescence lifespan of computers and electronics has shrunk to just over two years.

But, much like James Bond and my car, they just won’t die, is the problem. They linger. They stay just functional enough that they’re perfectly adequate for most of what you want to do, but constantly give you reminders that they’re old. That top-of-the-line videocard you shelled out for now wheezes when it tries to display a Flash movie. That monitor that seemed more than big enough a couple of years ago, now seems cramped and confining. That 1GB of memory that at the time was so excessive you started to reminisce about how your first computer didn’t even have a quarter of that in hard drive space, now is just a minimum requirement. And sure, you could upgrade, but it’s like putting bionic parts on your high school sweetheart, when you really want to run off with the new secretary/trophy wife.

Which all leads me to realize that this thing that Apple marketing and product design does, is more insidious than I ever even suspected. There’s just something about the iMac that works on the nerve endings at the base of my spine, even though it’s irrational. Sure the Mac Pro is an overall more powerful computer, but then I’d have to buy a new monitor! (Yeah, I know that logic makes no sense, but I already said it was irrational). The iMac is a whole, complete package, like the perfect answer to a question. And that question is, “What can I waste a ton of money on this year?”

I should be safe for a few months, anyway. The rationalization that’s still firmly in place is that I only buy a new computer when the new version of the OS is available. See, that way I save over $100, instead of having to buy the OS separately. (That’s how you stick it to The Man, by spending a couple thousand bucks every OS upgrade!)

Still, don’t be surprised if around spring, you see me trying to sell a PC and a couple of flat panel monitors. (Note: readers of this blog, as always get, deep discounts).

Can’t stop complainin’

This year I plan to bitch about the iPhone one day every day until its release. This article on Ars Technica’s Infinite Loop journal links to confirmation that the iPhone will be closed to independent developers, because Steve Jobs wants it that way.

That article makes plenty of good points, but the best was raised in the forum discussion. One poster mentions CoverFlow. That’s the feature that Apple’s making a big deal about in regards to the iPhone. Turn the thing on its side, and you get to flick through all your album cover art with an incredible interface that the geniuses at Apple invented.

Except, wait, they didn’t. It was made by an independent developer and released as freeware until Apple bought up the IP to incorporate into iTunes 7. What could be better proof that independent developers come up with good ideas? And how can you get off demanding total control over a platform and still insisting that you’re leading in innovation?

Macworld

iPhone DemonstrationMaybe it’s just because I’ve been reading too many Apple-related blogs, but I think they really over-sold the whole Macworld expo this year. No doubt it’s a bigger deal if you aren’t stuck with just the exhibits-only pass, and you can see some of the conferences. But I was pretty underwhelmed.

After watching two sessions of Apple reps telling me stuff about Leopard and the iPhone that I already knew, I just wandered around booth after crowded booth of third-party developers who basically all had the same story: more information is available on our website. I got the distinct impression that you’re better off just staying home and looking at everything over the internets.

Even the people-watching wasn’t that interesting; I’m assuming that’s because all the Hitler Youth-style post-keynote fervor had died down since yesterday. There were still hordes of people crowding around the little iPhone altars (myself included), and that was somewhat comical. But apart from that you’re just left with a bunch of middle-aged hairy guys shambling through a convention hall looking for free stuff.

And in transit to and from the show, I realized I’m already feeling buyer’s remorse for something I won’t be able to get for another six months. The iPhone looks to be just as cool in real life as it was presented in the keynote. All seeing it “in person” gets you is confirmation that it wasn’t just some hard-coded demonstration, and a look at the actual screen of the device. (And it is a really nice screen; I can totally imagine watching a movie on it).

But there are some pretty big issues that are going to hit early adopters hard. Exclusivity with Cingular is still the big one. Especially since it’s so expensive and it requires the two-year contract. Anybody who tells you that $600 for a phone is “cheap” or even “reasonable” is just plain lying, but you do have to admit that the price is in line with the cost of most other first-version gadgets that do the same thing.

My biggest complaint of the moment, though, is that it’s a closed system. When I saw the “Widgets” icon in the demo, I guess I just imagined that you’d be able to develop your own little apps for the thing. The new version of OS X is going to include Dashcode for making widgets, so it just seems like it would be a natural. But Apple reps confirmed that it won’t be open to third-party development, just like the iPod isn’t. And it’s unlikely that this will change, because it’s definitely not in Cingular’s interest, and it’s not even in Apple’s interest — they want you to buy everything through iTunes. The only reason Apple would open it up would be out of altruism, and I think it’s pretty clear that’s just not what they’re about.

I never actually wrote an app for the Treo, but it was nice to know I could have. And I definitely downloaded a ton of stuff to run on the Treo. A lot of Treo users will tell you that their favorite apps are third-party ones. On the iPhone, it’s mitigated somewhat by the fact that it includes a fully-functional web browser, so you could conceivably set up a web app to do whatever you want — as long as you don’t mind paying the data-transfer fees every time you run the app, and you don’t mind having something that can’t access any of the data on your phone like address book entries or photos.

There are other issues that affect other people more than they would me; I don’t really care if it’s a 3G phone or not, for instance. Plus, there’s just the practical concerns: if you’re paying that much money for something you’re going to have in a pocket or thrown into a bag, you want it to be a lot more durable than Apple’s products are usually known for.

I’m sure that there will be a lot of improvements in version 2. I’m equally sure that I won’t be able to wait until version 2. Maybe that’s why Macworld didn’t impress me; pretty much everything there is something I’ve already seen and I’m already fated to buy. (Except for the iTV, which is something I was wanting to see for so long that by the time it was finally announced I’d already gotten tired of it. It seems kind of lame, actually).

Apple Whore, Nothing More

Touch it! TOUCH IT!It’d be cool if I could claim that I was completely unmoved by the Apple iPhone announcement. But I think we all know that’d be a lie, so I’m not even going to bother.

From the looks of it, they got everything right. It’s everything I was hoping to hear when they first started leaking rumors about the iPhone. In fact, it’s everything I imagined the Treo to be when I first heard about that, before it failed to deliver. I can still remember the first time I saw a Palm Pilot in operation, and I imagined all the “Star Trek” type stuff that would be possible with it — the demonstration videos trump even that.

Now, it really sucks that they’ve tied it to Cingular. It sucks a lot. The cell companies have had a stranglehold for too long, and they keep subsidizing crippled phones. As it happens, I already use Cingular, so the best I can do is protest the decision now, and then of course be the first in line to buy one the second they’re available.

And I guarantee that there’s going to be a host of complaints about the thing, just like with every first-version Apple product. Battery issues, screen issues, scratches, too-frequent upgrades, etc. But if there were ever any consumer gadget that cried out for me to be an early adopter, it’s this one.

So from now until June, I guess I’ll keep watching the demo movies on Apple’s site over and over again, as if it were the Zapruder film. (My favorite part is when they use Google technology to prank call a Starbuck’s). And point and laugh at my POS RAZR phone, which might as well have a tiny wireless Grim Reaper standing over it.

The Treachery of NSImages

Incisor IconThanks to my recent bout of unemployment, I’ve finally been able to finish one of the projects I always said I’d do when I got free time. This one is to write a complete app for Mac OS X, from start to release.

The app is called Incisor, and it’s a lightweight image editor. I’m always finding pictures I want to use in blog posts on websites, or Flickr, or from my own iPhoto library. But getting them in a usable format means having to crop and resize them in Photoshop or iPhoto, both of which are overkill for doing something as simple as sizing an image.

It’s such a common task I’m surprised it isn’t being done already, but I haven’t found an app that works exactly like I want — in particular, being able to see a real-time preview of the edit, and being able to drag it directly into another program without saving it as an interim file. (Of course, now that I’ve put it on the internets, I’ll probably hear of a dozen programs that already do that. But what the hell; I wanted to learn how to write a Cocoa app anyway).

The thing about programming for Cocoa, at least from my limited experience, is that it’s crazy powerful, but it takes a lot of work to get your foot in the door. There are plenty of excellent tutorials out there, but they either start out too high for the beginner, assuming that you already know the basics; or they are so tailored to a specific task that you’re screwed if you try to do something different. I wrote the “Currency Converter” app about four times, each time ending up with a complete program but never understanding how all the pieces fit together.

I’ve read in more than one tutorial that the mantra of Cocoa programming is, “If it’s hard, you’re doing it the wrong way.” And it’s mostly true; the problem is finding out the right way to do it. Several times I would spend hours writing a bunch of functions to do something, only to have to delete it all once I discovered it was all covered automatically by one call to the system frameworks. For example, everything complicated about image manipulation is handled automatically by the Cocoa libraries — the effort in writing this app was half connecting the UI, and half digging through tutorials and documentation to find out what was covered and what I’d have to write myself.

And I’m just finding out now that at least half the UI code I’ve written could be scrapped if I’d used a different method. I guess I’ll know better next time.

I’m not sure if it’s just my experience, but developing something for OS X at the moment seems like a lot of super-powerful pieces without enough to tie them all together. It’s almost ludicrously easy to get a full-featured app out of the built-in frameworks and tools they give you for free; you can write a functioning web browser with just one line of code, for example.

Still, there’s not really anything guiding you through the process. For a while, after seeing how powerful InterfaceBuilder and Xcode are, and how deeply-integrated AppleScript is into everything, I was starting to think that development had gotten to the point where something like HyperCard wasn’t necessary anymore. But now, after finishing an app (albeit a very simple one) and looking back on where my time was spent, I’m convinced that the system really needs something that casual programmers and even non-programmers can use to get results not built into the stock iLife apps. Bring back HyperCard!

P.S. The app has some of the ugliest icons possible. If anyone wants to volunteer to make new ones, let me know.

To the Moon!

Not only is the honeymoon over, but I think a trial separation is in order. The fan on my MacBook Pro is making grinding and clicking noises that get gradually louder, culminating in an ear-splitting crescendo about 20 minutes after boot-up.

The thing has run ungodly hot ever since I got it, but what with all the reports of Apple logos burned into users’ thighs, I just assumed that was standard operating procedure for the MacBook. Now I have to wonder, Fox News-style, Could Improper Ventilation Be Putting My Data at Risk?

Now I’ve got to limit my computer access to 5 or 10 minutes at a stretch until I can get the thing back to California and back everything up. Then take it to the Apple Store and have one of their geniuses inflict their attitude on me.

Apple sucks.

Maybe I should get a new iMac.