The iPhone 3G

I love my iPod. I love Mac OS X. For all the debatable reasons of why these Apple products are "superior", I think we can all agree that it's really hard not to fall in love with them. But I haven't been so sure about the iPhone. Some reasons are more concrete, like not being able to afford one right now, but for the most part, it has been a more subtle thing. The answers to the question of "why I would want one" hasn't been so convincing. But this post by John Gruber is my tipping point. From the Daring Fireball:

If I could travel back 20 years and show my then 15-year-old self just one thing from the future of today, it would be the iPhone. It is our flying cars. Star Trek-style wireless long-distance voice communicator. The content of every major newspaper and magazine in the world. An encyclopedia. Video games. TV. Etc.

It goes in depth, but to the point.

"Microsoft’s new ads emphasize the same message as Apple’s: that the Mac is the one and only brand-name computer in the world."

Go read the whole thing; Gruber does good work.

The above quote is from 37Signals "I liked Microsoft better when they were assholes" post which I couldn't agree with more. After the flop of the Seinfeld and Bill Gates ads and now the "I'm a PC" ads I am curious what Microsoft will do next and if it will alienate them more . Daring Fireball's commentary referenced in the 37Signals post expands on the Microsoft dilemma, "There’s Nothing There".

Back when film ruled supreme (the T-Rex of photography media, if you will), everyone could understand how cameras worked. Anyone who's ever made a pinhole camera or bought a disposable camera only to open it up and ruin your film understands how a film camera takes its photos.

But how does a DSLR take a photo? We know there's a mirror involved somehow, right?
Curious to see how the Nikon D3 actually snaps a photo? Check out the supercool low-tech animation that Jeffrey Friedl created showing how a DSLR snaps a photo at 1/63. Very fascinating to think that it's doing it at 22 MPH -- in your hand!

found via Daring Fireball

*Daring Fireball: Apple uber-expert John Gruber thinks that Steve Jobs has EXTREME DIARRHEA!!!!

*Tapes and Tapes: OK, just days after a story on how cassette tapes are totally killing in the prison system comes out, we are holding a funeral for the cassette (based on audio book publishers' dropping them). What happened in just the last few days? (They were shanked?) [mediaeater]

*Also dead: According to the Times, liner notes are going the way of the cassette tape, as well. I'd like to thank the internet. (Get it? Like a liner note! I made that up just now!!!!!11 Ugh.)

*Lists: Metafilter compiles a list of music lists that includes the 100 Greatest Songs of 1967, the 50 Greatest Classical Tone Poems and the Greatest Frontmen of Rock. A list of reasons this is not a sign of the coming apocalypse:
1) It's a lot of lists.
2) They're in one place.
3) They are a fast, orderly way to consume and/or simply sort information.
4) Why would I decry as fatuous a fast, orderly way of consuming information? Can I not just take it at face value and look for other kinds of information in other kinds of places? Hello!? Hello!

While my mystery game is designed from the ground up with touch and accelerometer controls as critical components it's a bit trickier in traditional games. 

To come up to speed on Objective-C and the iPhone SDK as I build my game and the base frameworks I need I am buiding a more traditional game similiar to one I enjoyed from my Amiga days.  I am finding choosing the right control metaphor is a very tricky and obviously important task. First off it has to work in such a way that does not adversely effect game play and secondly just using the features because they are there makes no sense at all.

I think this is going to be one of those things that is only going to be solved by solid play testing which will help us build genre specific "input patterns" that can be used over and over again.  This is good for developers but even better for players as we don't want them trying to figure out a new control scheme for every game they play within a genre.  Now sure there will be some differences in each game but I think we must surface some base patterns that can be used by the community at large.

[Note: I am not a fan of multiple game controls like we see in Ms. Pac-Man...  These may be ok in the start but are not overly effiecient from a user interaction point of view.]

A good blog post on controls on the iPhone can be found at touchArcade. Others like John Gruber over ta Daring Fireball also touch on the issue. 

And as far as the Ms. Pac-Man analysis goes I agree with them, swipe seems to work best but is not perfect.

I have searched for blogging tips and advice. I admit that too. One high ranked site that appears in search results is Problogger. It is a really great site with many tips and advice on blogging. From Blogging Tips for Beginners to How to Write your "About Me" Page. Definitely very helpful and a good resource to bookmark.

One advice that pops up on a lot blogging tips sites, is the ever holy advice of finding a niche. The reasons for this makes sense. If you find that thing out there that nobody is doing, which I seriously doubt that you ever will, you'll rank high on search results. Another reason for this is that if your not about a specific topic or theme, readers will get confused. This comes from the premise that people like better to receive what they expect. But I don't think that's a good advice.

Sites like Boing Boing, Kottke.org and Daring Fireball are not actually sites that you can call niches. I don't know their numbers, but you can bet they're pretty popular. There are core themes on the sites, i.e. Kottke deals a lot with photography, Daring Fireball talks about Apple and Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow hates DRM, but there are many other topics and themes and I don't think their readers have run away. They mostly link though. Maybe their niche is "web curating".

Right now, the theory of The Long Tail is being contested and has stirred up the blogosphere. I don't know much about the Long Tail and all I know is that it's about the rise of niche markets, but I get the basic idea. I think we gotten to analytical, trusting graphs and data and forgotten to use our guts and instincts.

*Building a greener guitar: Flaxwood guitars don't use hardwoods from the Amazon, hence are more eco-friendly. [alternative consumer]

*Bob Dylan's paintings are now being shown in a London gallery in the Drawn Blank Series. [huffpo]

*Second Life co-founder Cory Ondrejka gets a job with EMI. There are jokes about nobody going to Second Life and nobody buying music, but you didn't hear them here. Because there's nobody here. Huh?

*Sufjan Stevens reviews Cryptacize's new album: "Sometimes I worry that the ever-increasing trend toward excessive innovation has pushed the art and music world into a slapstick exhibition of dog breeding, generating increasingly newer, more contemporary fashions: gothic folk, for one. Or Afro-beat Ivy League pop." I hate you for your confusing linking style, Pitchfork. And I will never stop hating you. [p-fork]

*Britney Spears drives a tiny car. It must be seen. It must be seen, readers.

*Signal Patterns: A Web 2.0 beta thingy that plays you a bunch of music then tells you your worth as a person. Tagline: "Discover the real me."

*AC/DC signs on to deliver its next album exclusively through Wal-mart. Who's got the biggest balls of them all? And by "balls" I mean retail clout.

*Does the new 3G iPhone suck? Data plan = +$10/month. (Kidding. Kinda. I pretty much owned Wordpress' "iPhone Sucks" tag back in the day. Yep. Ugh.)

*Band: an iPhone app that lets you compose music on the go. Read what Daring Fireball says about it here. [listening post]

Clay Shirky, autor do livro "Here Comes Everybody" e especialista na relação inevitável entre progresso tecnológico e social, faz no seu artigo "Gin, Television and Social Surplus" uma análise acutilante a uma situação que sempre despertou uma série de inquietações, umas mais optimistas e outras menos: Cada vez passamos mais tempo "agarrados" (uns mais do que outros ;) ) ao computador, mais especificamente conectados à internet.

De acordo com o autor, o qual aponta estatísticas nesse sentido, os utilizadores da internet que a ela vivem "agarrados" não têm agora nem mais nem menos tempo livre do que tinham anteriormente; esse é um bem que se tem mantido relativamente inalterado, sendo que o que mudou foi a gestão do mesmo. Assim, começamos agora a investir o nosso tempo na criação de conteúdos próprios em detrimento do consumo acrítico dos produtos propostos pelos media convencionais, nomeadamente a televisão.

Menciona alguns exemplos, entre os quais a extremamente popular Wikipedia (Inglês, Português), como sendo os grandes beneficiários desse investimento e anunciadores da mudança de paradigma que se avizinha. De súbito, os meios de comunicação de massas passam a ser, em certa medida, acessíveis às próprias massas, o que simultaneamente agiliza o processo de recolha e transmissão da informação, assim como aumenta a resistência da mesma face a potenciais manipulações por parte de determinados interesses instituídos.

Não posso deixar de concordar com o autor quando considera que certas actividades aparentemente fúteis como frequentar, quer como consumidor quer como contribuidor, páginas (hilariantes, por sinal :D ) como os Lolcats pode ser mais útil que ficar sentado à frente de um ecrã de televisão; digo-o por experiência própria, visto que "a cavalo" de uma actividade maioritariamente lúdica (mesmo sem entrar sequer em considerações sobre a utilidade vital do sentido de humor na vida de uma pessoa) descobri algumas informações inquietantes sobre a indústria da comida para animais, nos fóruns do mesmo site...

Mais: situações como a que se passou recentemente no nosso país, em que um vídeo de uma agressão de uma aluna a uma professora colocado no YouTube acabou nos jornais televisivos e gerou um aceso debate de ideias, repetir-se-ão. E, não tenho grandes dúvidas, algumas delas serão provocadas de uma forma muito mais premeditada e consciente, fruto de inquietações pessoais de cidadãos anónimos que tentam, com maior ou menor sucesso, agitar a consciência colectiva da sociedade.

Obviamente que um optimismo excessivo, além de ingénuo, pode ter efeitos perniciosos; Temos um longo caminho a percorrer e a responsabilidade de educar e estimular as novas gerações (que apesar de tudo têm em relação a nós a vantagem de terem nascido praticamente durante a presente revolução informática e mediática - são aqueles que dependem do rato e, nas palavras do autor, por ele procuram) a criarem um sentido crítico que lhes permita aproveitar o enorme potencial comunicacional (linda rima :P ) e de conhecimento de que dispõem.

Ainda assim, desculpem-me o discurso algo retrógrado ou pessimista mas a verdade é que tenho sérias dúvidas em relação a que jovens como os que publicaram o vídeo da agressão à professora por parte da colega estejam muito preocupados com os problemas da sociedade actual. Talvez acordem para a vida e o façam quando chegarem ao mercado de trabalho e se depararem com dificuldades reais? Por agora, possíveis falácias aparte, parece-me que estão mais ocupados a ver os Morangos com Açúcar e, talvez um pouco devido a estes, a desperdiçar as horas que passam na internet (apesar de, de uma forma algo irónica, contribuírem ingenuamente para essa enorme piscina de conhecimento, pelo simples facto de nela se mostrarem em todo o seu esplendor)... Se acabarão por largar os media convencionais e aprender com o conhecimento acumulado entretanto pela sociedade da informação, isso só se saberá no futuro. ;)

Ainda assim, independentemente de o fazerem ou não (e é aqui que entramos na parte elitista do meu post, preparem-se), segundo o autor, mesmo os poucos (em termos estritamente estatísticos) que aproveitarem este novo meio poderão aspirar a uma influência considerável, capaz de rivalizar com os actuais detentores do poder na sociedade, servindo porventura como fiel da balança. Se se conseguir, contra ventos e marés (sem querer ser demasiado alarmista, já há prenúncios preocupantes, dos quais ainda falarei neste blog, de uma evolução no sentido inverso :| ), manter a internet como um bastião da liberdade de expressão, poderemos, seguramente, contar com essa mudança no equilíbrio de forças do Poder, tão necessária nos dias de hoje. Podem esperar, da minha parte, algumas contribuições próprias caso encontre pretextos e a difusão de trabalhos relevantes nesse âmbito. :)

Johnny

Adiante. No meu caso concreto, ter a vida preenchida não é desculpa, ainda para mais quando uma boa parte do meu tempo livre é passada aqui, e logo a ler artigos extremamente interessantes (bem sei que a noção de "interessante" não é universal, mas tenho a noção de que há um conjunto de temas mais englobantes, e de outros particularmente direccionados para nerds tipógrafos como eu que sejam atraídos pelo nome sugestivo do blog ;) ) que bem podiam ser aqui referenciados e a partir dos quais eu (ou outros) poderia criar ideias novas e originais.

Dito isso, a minha estratégia vai ser um pouco uma cópia descarada e de inferior qualidade da do magnífico, soberbo, supremo John Gruber (autor do reconhecido Daring Fireball, blog que recomendo vivamente e que praticamente justifica aprender a dominar o inglês para aqueles que não consigam já); aliás, tenciono fazer referências em segunda mão à "linked list" dele, alguns comentários a esses artigos, e inclusivamente aos dele (obviamente que o sr. Gruber não é a minha única referência nem será a minha única fonte, dei apenas o exemplo dele por me parecer ser o mais paradigmático). Da mesma forma, vou tentar fazer o bonito uma vez por outra e publicar também algum material próprio. Sejamos realistas: dá muito menos trabalho gerir um blog assim... Posso manter o interesse dos leitores e das leitoras e partilhar as minhas démarches pelas avenidas, vielas e becos da Internet (não sou muito de andar em auto-estradas, como quem me conhece saberá bem e quem não me conhece ficará a saber ;) ).

Daí o meu "aviso à navegação" (vulgo "disclaimer", palavra que utilizo com uma frequência pouco saudável): não, o blog não está morto, mas a sua "vida" não tem necessariamente que ser estar hibernado e receber um post de proporções épicas a cada seis meses, nem que a alternativa passe por funcionar como um agregador de "cenas", qual katamari pessoal aqui do je. :P

Espero que gostem do novo formato, e boas guinadas por aí! :)

Johnny

Mass Effect and Spore are confirmed to have some shiny, new value-added DRM that uh... well... It phones home the first time you install (the games) and then every 10 days after that. If you attempt to install or play Mass Effect (a single-player game) on a computer without an internet connection:

Customer: Are you saying I'm not going to be able to play my perfectly legitimate purchased copy of the game, even the retail version, until I get permission?"

Bioware rep: That is correct.

The Slashdot comments on the Spore and Mass Effect DRM are pretty much par for the course as far as this sort of thing is concerned. Most of them tend to reflect a few simple truths:

DRM is always about access control, not copy protection. CSS exists to prevent you from playing a movie in a region not approved by the studio, or from skipping past commercials. It does nothing to stop you from making a copy. The DRM in this game essentially forces the player to ask permission every time he wants to play the game he purchased.

"Software-as-a-service," a/k/a/ "software rental model"... translation: you never own anything - you pay and pay and pay and pay and pay, and if you stop paying, they turn off your rig. This is the holy grail for companies that don't really feel like developing new software, or in updating their software with appealing new features that you might actually buy. They'll just sell you the same thing for eternity.

...increasingly, a hacked version turns out to be better than the genuine deal. They just work, anytime, anywhere, no questions asked. More than once, I've found myself downloading a hacked executable to run software that I bought and legitimately own, even in ways that wholly comply with the original license - e.g., because the activation server for some defunct app had been taken offline.

Personally, I'm not quite sure if the copy protection on Spore is anything to get up in arms about, given that the appeal of connecting to Spore's servers sort of insures a lot of legal sales anyway. However, down the line, when we've got phones capable of running the full DirectX 10 version of Spore and I'm rockin' my jetpack, I imagine that the DRM then could theoretically suck, given that I seriously doubt EA is going to keep up Spore's official servers forever. I say theoretically, because it's clear that this DRM is going to be cracked the day of, or potentially, in the weeks before the official release, like every other DRM scheme in recent memory.

Meanwhile, in the same vein, I caught wind of this article via Daring Fireball detailing why Apple is more expensive than Amazon.

Again, here it all comes down to control. Apple has it and the labels don't, leading to a situation that is strangely reminiscent of our democratic primary...

The only—I repeat only—reason the labels allow competing stores to have DRM-free tracks is that it’s the only way to get music onto an iPod. Think about that for a moment: Apple’s dominance of the music player business is the actual reason you can buy a DRM-free track from Amazon. If anybody else had a substantial chunk of the player market, the labels would be busy trying to make the other player’s DRM the standard.

To wrap up the discussion, we have NBC Universal's president of digital distribution Mr. J. B. Perrette reminding us of the benefits of DRM over at this New York Times article about Microsoft's deal with NBC to try and build "filtering technology that allows for playback of legitimately purchased content versus non-legitimately purchased content" into their media devices.

Mr. Perrette said NBC understands the potential resistance. “In the short term, this will not win us a lot of friends,” he said. “In the long term, the consumer wants there to be quality premium-produced content, and in order for that to continue to be a viable business, there needs to be significant protection around it.”

Apparently Microsoft is a little wary of adding "features that consumers don’t like to its Zune products," but is willing to take one for the team for the sake of... uh, who or what exactly? Poor little NBC?

As a counterpoint to all this, there are a few people out there who get it. Trent Reznor, for one.

Trent Reznor introduce[d] his latest album, The Slip, with a note that reads, "Thank you for your continued and loyal support over the years -- this one's on me."

Go pick up The Slip (completely and utterly free) if you get a chance. It sounds great in Apple Lossless.

8. Use of Your Content. Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed.

• March 18th: Leander Kahney, news editor of Wired Magazine posted his coverstory for this month's issue of the magazine entitled How Apple Got Everything Right by Doing Everything Wrong.
• Highlights from the article include quotes such as this, "...by Google's definition, Apple is irredeemably evil, behaving more like an old-fashioned industrial titan than a different-thinking business of the future. Apple operates with a level of secrecy that makes Thomas Pynchon look like Paris Hilton. It locks consumers into a proprietary ecosystem." And this one, "... Apple takes a different approach to its public relations. Call it radical opacity. Apple's relationship with the press is dismissive at best, adversarial at worst; Jobs himself speaks only to a handpicked batch of reporters, and only when he deems it necessary. (He declined to talk to Wired for this article.)"
• March 20th: John Gruber, author of the uber-popular Tech blog Daring Fireball, and overall badass in the web community wrote his gem of a response, yes that's the actual title of the article. I really can't post highlights, you'll have to take that one in for yourselves to do it justice.
• As would be expected Gruber's response provoked a hell of a flamewar with arguments on the merits of each side's points being discussed here, here, here, here, here, and just about anywhere else related to tech news on the net.

So, now that we're all caught up I'll insert my 2 cents. I read Gruber's blog on a pretty much daily basis. His analysis is pretty much always concise, acurate, and best of all fact based and cited, and you can always expect a funny, witty, or thought provoking (not mutually exclusive) post from him. I also subscribe to Wired, almost out of habit these days rather than for the actual content of the magazine. Don't get me wrong, Wired is by no means the worst of the tech periodicals. However, their quality has definitely slipped again during the last year or so. As far as Gruber's response goes, it's clear that this Kaney's article annoyed him, his response had little to none of the witty sarcasm he often uses to dispense lies and inaccuracies in other's writings.

My take. Wired is jumping on bandwagons. Back in 1997 when Apple was in the doledrums Wired ridiculed Apple when they published this article, 101 Ways to Save Apple, number one was, "Admit it. You're out of the hardware game." Now that Apple seems to be doing well again, Wired has declared Apple "evil". Nowadays everyone has realized that if you lead with an Apple story people will pay attention, hell even my local TV news anchor stumbles her way through pieces lifted straight from the rumour sites on a daily basis. She, obviously has no idea what since yesterday she informed me that Apple was planning on a subscription service so I could, "...access the iTunes library from anywhere on my iTouch" (wha?). Seems like this time I can lump Wired in with my local news for feeding me Apple flavoured Spam in the form of articles with no substance, regardless of whether or not they are well sourced or not.

Story Crisis
Via DaringFireball. This is part of a longer interview Steve Jobs gave earlier to Fortune magazine. He says:

At Pixar when we were making Toy Story, there came a time when we were forced to admit that the story wasn't great. It just wasn't great. We stopped production for five months.... We paid them all to twiddle their thumbs while the team perfected the story into what became Toy Story. And if they hadn't had the courage to stop, there would have never been a Toy Story the way it is, and there probably would have never been a Pixar. We called that the 'story crisis,' and we never expected to have another one. But you know what? There's been one on every film.

He goes on to explain that this also applies to every product ever designed at Apple. You have to be very confident to admit that something took many rewrites. Most people would rather everyone believe that every single idea they have is golden and comes “ready to go”. This is part of what makes Steve Jobs great: he knows he’s right because he’s done his homework.

The myth of the “strike of genius”
The first thing you learn at design school is that your first idea is almost never the final one. The “strike of genius” type idea is just a myth. It looks good in a TV movie of the week, but it almost never occurs in real life. Great work requires constant redesign. The same applies to songwriting, screenwriting, industrial design, architecture, research, etc.

I once met a budding music producer who encouraged all artists to experiment in the studio instead of preparing their work. “It gotta flow naturally” he used to say. “This is how Bowie does it”, he asserted. Well, the only thing that flowed was the money between the artist’s pocket and his own. His sessions were quite lucrative and he used the artists’ ego to his advantage. Who doesn’t want to be compared to David Bowie?

Rewrites in Xsong
For this reason, I have worked to include rewrite support in Xsong. It’s implemented a bit like the loop play-list feature in ProTools, where for a given song section (verse, chorus, etc.) you can save up to 12 “rewrites”. Rewrites can include lyrics, chords, melodies and can be used to adapt a song for a different gender or key. Yet another use is to adapt for a foreign language translation. As a songwriter, this means that you can keep everything at the same place and not have to save separate documents for each rewrite. Obviously, once in a while you have to clean up the rewrite stack and focus on one final version, but it's quite handy while you're getting there.

John Gruber: A Mix of the Technical, the Artful, the Thoughtful, and the Absurd