ARTS & FARCES internet

I tend to run our hardware until it drops dead, so I’m fairly used to catastrophic failures, but they usually come one at a time. This week it came in pairs.

First my University of Minnesota MacBook Pro (3,1 Intel 2.4 GHz “Memrom”) started to flake out and had to be reimaged. But it seems to be working as good as new now. So, whew. It most likely was a software failure of some kind, not a hardware failure, but still.

Then my Time Machine drive (a Seagate 1 TB) connected to my own MacBook Pro failed. It wouldn’t mount and it never went to sleep—ever—so I’m pretty sure it overheated and the cheap power supply crapped out.

I remember when Seagate drives were well made, had beefy power supplies and howled like the wind. But they were bullet-proof. I’ve always had good luck with them until now but I’ll never buy another one until they return to their old standards. These consumer drives are encased in plastic, with no ventilation and wimpy power supplies.

I replaced the Seagate with a G-RAID 2 TB (Hitachi SATA II mechanism, 7200 rpm, 32 MB buffer, with eSATA, Firewire 400/800, USB 2.0 interfaces). This thing is built like a tank—aluminium case, presumably hefty power supply (at least it uses a real power cable), and a fan. It’s quiet and I’m going to reconfigure it as two separate drives instead of a RAID 0. A RAID 0, to my way of thinking is worse than useless. It’s multiple drives that are written to simultaneously for greater throughput. There’s no redundancy (like with a RAID 1) and no error-correcting. If there’s an error or one of the drives fail, you’ve lost everything. But I wanted that fan, damnit.

As Dave Winer notes, marketeers have been selling us this particular bill of goods—that anyone can program software by writing English sentences or dragging icons around—since the days of Cobol. Now comes Google with the same promise, updated for mobile devices, with its Android App Inventor. That its web page fails to render properly in Safari is not a good sign.

Dan Gillmor writes, “but from what I can see this is going to be a seriously big deal if it works as advertised.” The problem is, these things have never worked as advertised. Nonetheless, Gillmor writes he’s “going to start working on an app for the journalism marketplace, a project I’ve wanted to do but couldn’t get going with because of the cost.” Godspeed, Dan, but I’ve seen this movie before. Anyone remember the name of Danny Goodman’s personal information manager HyperCard stack? Gillmor notes that App Inventor is built on Scratch, a programming language for kids developed at MIT. Apple, predictably, rejected Scratch for iOS.

Steve Lohr, writing for the New York Times, reports that App Inventor “has been under development for a year” led by Hal Abelson (one of my heroes) and has been tested with “sixth graders, high school girls, nursing students, and university undergraduates who are not computer science majors.”

The fruits of the initial users can at best be seen as minimally useful applets. A program that sends a text message every 15 minutes informing a list of friends of the sender’s current location. A program that auto-replies to text messages. And a program that’s the software equivalent of the “help I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” gizmo.

If you follow me on Twitter you know I’ve said some pretty snarky things about the iPad today. But honestly, I don’t see any empty clothes on the streets of Saint Paul.

To be clear: I think the iPad will be wildly successful, commercially. But that’s not the point. It hasn’t moved computing forward like the Apple acolytes would have you believe. The iPad has moved media consumption forward, but not enough to save the incumbent media corporations that still don’t get it. I mean, really, US$207.48 for an annual iPad subscription to the Wall Street Journal when an annual print subscription is just a little more than half as much. Rupert, here’s a clue: Stick a fork in your old monopolistic media model; it’s done. It’s not coming back.

The iPad has actually moved computing back, it’s just that we don’t yet know how far. Here’s why: All the cool kids will be developing for the iPad instead of the Mac. The Omni Group has already announced it’s tabling development efforts on its Mac software in order to focus on iPad development. Indeed, the one app that turned my head on the iPad was OmniGraffle, and sure enough, it shipped.

Cory Doctorow explains nicely why he won’t buy an iPad, citing the Maker Manifesto: “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it. Screws not glue.” Doctorow reminisces that Apple’s first products, up through the Apple ][+ “came with schematics for the circuit boards, and birthed a generation of hardware and software hackers who upended the world for the better.” And—wait for it—invokes William Gibson’s description of a consumer:

“Something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth… no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote.”

Joel Johnson has an excellent counterpoint to one of Doctorow’s points on Gizmodo.com.

But Johnson fails to address the walled garden and sole provider nature of the iTunes store. iPad users can load whatever they like on their shiny new devices; as long as whatever they like has been approved by Apple. Dan Gillmor has queried the New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal as to “whether Apple can unilaterally remove their apps if it doesn’t like their content.” Gillmor hasn’t received any responses. The answer may be different for these corporate publications, but the answer for the rest of us is clear: Of course it can.

So, is this how it ends? A war between the makers and the consumers?

Either Steve Jobs has so finely tuned his infamous reality distortion field (RDF) that it’s now capable of delayed affect or one of the most important pieces of Apple’s iPad introduction completely evaded me. Either way, I’ve come to partially rethink my position on the iPad.

Late yesterday I learned that Seattle-based Omni Group—the company that makes three pieces of software I live in every day: OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, and OmniPlan—has intentions to make iPad versions of its software. Most importantly, company chief executive Ken Case wrote that Omni has already started work on an iPad adaptation of OmniGraffle and is putting its work on OmniGraffle 6 for the Mac on hold. I’m not real happy about the Mac version being put on hold, but I learned a long time ago to try to ride the horse in the direction it’s going.

The importance that the bulk of Omni’s team came out of the University of Washington—an institution with one of the historically best human interface labs on the planet—can’t be understated.

In the single most underwhelming product announcement in either of Steve Jobs’ tenure at Apple, the company today announced its iPad tablet computer. Available in April 2010 and ranging in price from US$400 for 16GB of flash storage to US$699 for 64GB (3G wireless networking costs an additional US$130), the iPad is literally a 9.7-inch, 1024x768 iPod Touch.

Jobs declared that Apple had negotiated a “breakthrough” US$30 per month unlimited data plan deal with AT&T. That’d be the same AT&T that already can’t support the network demands of iPhone users. And breakthrough? Well, not so much; I had an unlimited mobile data plan from Qwest for US$25 per month several years ago, on a network with actual capacity.

Existing iPhone/iTouch software will work on the new device in either a pixel-for-pixel rendering in the center of the display, or in what has to be an extremely ugly “pixel double” full-screen mode. How many developers will be willing to make iPad-specific versions of their iPhone software? If the process is the least bit resource-intensive, my bet is not many. Before dismissing this as curmudgeonly carping, remember that Apple solely—and heavy-handedly—controls the only distribution channel and that Apple has set the price ceiling for serious apps at US$10.

Forget about using the iPad while standing up. The iPad’s keyboard is the same software keyboard used in the iPhone/iTouch, taking up half the screen when deployed. While seemingly almost useable while sitting (an optional dock with physical keyboard will be available), how fast can you type with one hand? Bet good money that somebody right now, in his basement, is developing the iBib—some sort of strap contraption that lets you suspend the iPad from around your neck in order to type with both hands while standing or walking around.

Other complaints: The same walled garden ecosystem as the iPhone/iTouch, no camera(s), no Flash support in the browser, no multitasking, limited video codec support, no DisplayPort, and a weird aspect ratio (it appears to be close to 4:3). Most of these can be fixed.

The one feature of the iPad that I find extremely interesting is the processor: a 1GHz Apple A4, high-performance, low-power system-on-a-chip. Apple’s now in the chip design business and it’s only a matter of time until this approach migrates up (or down, depending on your perspective) the company’s mobile product line.

Update: Thursday, 28 January 2010, 07:39AM CST: After mulling on my intense subliminal distaste for the iPad, I think I now understand it: The device is targeted solely at consuming media, not creating it. (Also added material to third graf about Apple’s ham-fisted control of only distribution channel and setting price ceiling for serious apps at US$10.)