No bricks, please.
Tuesday, September 25th, 2007
You know, I’ve really enjoyed the tiny pocket-sized chunk’o’ user interface magic that I’ve been toting around the past couple of weeks…as much because I can connect to it and its UNIX-y file system via standard tools like ssh, grab screenshots thanks to enterprising third-party developers, and install programs that can do, well, darn near anything.
The iPhone is a wonderful, thoughtful, game-changing piece of design. My fingers are crossed that Apple won’t screw that up by screwing down the pathways that access all of its internal delights. The best UI in the world won’t succeed in the marketplace if the experience of the users is that they have to work in the shadows to use the device to a fraction of its full potential.
I read somewhere that the overwhelming majority of iPhone users within Apple (every employee got one, you know) have unlocked the phone (which is, by the way, not the same as cracking it so that it can be used with every carrier.)
How could they not? It’s too much fun.
Will greed or bad deals (with the likes of AT&T) take that fun away? Hard to say. But on a day where Amazon pushed out a fine, promising DRM-free competitor to iTunes, the answers are likely to become more and more interesting. I’m hoping Apple again will choose the paths of openness…there’s way-plenty of revenue to be gleaned there, from a universe of happy users.
The problem with print.
Friday, September 21st, 2007
I still remember the smell of oily, non-soy-based ink and huge rolls of newsprint down by the loading docks at The Columbus Dispatch. When I first got to see the presses roll, with semi-cylindrical plates poured as liquid metal into forms cast from linotype-set chases, well, that was magic.
It felt like the news was this unstoppable force, like a freight train, loud, powerful, smelly, indomitable. Get the heck out of the way, here comes the news.
And in their own way, television news opens of the 1970s imitated that “unstoppable force” effect with thundering news opens, dramatic cuts of video, and galloping symphonies. Out of the way, here comes television news.
Barry Diller interviewed by Lloyd Grove, via Romanesko:
“I don’t think there are easy solutions [for newspapers]. It’s hard when you use the word newspaper. If you mean news-gathering, or just news, take the paper off, then I’m very hopeful. …The problem for print is print. I mean, it’s paper, its current distribution, and it’s going to be supplanted by other paths. So I’m optimistic about the paths but you certainly can’t be optimistic if you’re running a newspaper.”
The best image I can come up with now is the absolutely silent cascade of flickering lights on an internet router. LEDs in red, gold, and green, blink-a-blink-blink. Maybe a soft clatter of a keyboard here or there, or the sounds of two thumbs texting.
Here comes news on little cats’ feet.
I guess I got over my romance with newsprint after driving through Canadian forest-land being stripped to feed those thundering presses.
Jeeves and Jobs.
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007
Does this gentleman (at left) look familiar? How about if I said he was a “gentleman’s gentleman”? Well, I might be confusing the point, because he’s in fact one of Britain’s acting treasures…holding his latest tech treasure.
Turns out Mr. Fry is a long, long, long-time Mac user, and a first-time iCaller. He has seemingly tried out, used up, discarded, or simply mocked more personal portable devices than I will ever see, let alone own, and in his first blog post he manages to lead us through a thoughtful, clever summary of them all, and how we (all) got from a 2-bit smiling Mac icon to the OS X-based pixel glory that is, well, my first phone.
My favorite paragraph is perhaps one of the most parenthetical, where he says he’s “never had fewer than ten working Macs on the go since the late 80s,” and bought the second Macintosh to be sold in the UK…care to guess who snagged the first?
He manages to roll through the promise of device after device, ending in disappointments galore, and then funnels all of that into exactly how the iPhone meets his deepest wants and desires—and how it doesn’t. His thoughtful analysis will, I hope, reach CEO Steve’s bespectacled eyes at some point, if not because of Fry’s celebrity, then because of his alacrity. And besides, Mr. Jobs is hopscotching Europe right now, right?
I’m stunned, shocked, pleased, and hoping for more. Do click over, as perhaps the UK folk would say.
iPhonography, the beginning.
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007
We got a new camera when we were up in Michigan…and then, of course we got another “new camera” when we bought the iPhone. I’ve been shooting some pictures, with varied results, and hope to keep adding to this small collection. It’s kinda ‘ehh’ now, but, well, we’ll see.
The phone’s most intriguing and redeeming photo feature (besides the fact that it’s always there) is, of course, that it’s a fixed-focal-length shot…no zooming in for a composition.
Additionally, the inherent verticalism that the iPhone UI brings to the party is an interesting counterbalance to my natural tendency to shoot horizontals, because of course, in the land of television, everything is horizontal.
Bad night in the tape room.
Friday, September 14th, 2007
Tonight, WPBA aired three parts of the American Masters series completely out of order. Baffled viewers saw part two of Edward R. Murrow, part 1 of Murrow, and then one on Walter Cronkite, which was supposed to air first.
Maybe it was just baffled viewer, singular. Maybe I was the only one watching.
I called master control. (They seemed surprised an ordinary viewer could get through their phone tree.) “Tape problem,” they said. “We had to do it.”
I was about to launch into a diatribe that would begin “how could a modern station let this happen,” but then I remembered WPBA is barely a station at all, held together with duct tape, and misspent school board money, and anyway, uh, there was that time in the early eighties where WTCG master control (that would be me and two others) aired the reels (yes, film reels) of Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” out of order.
So, instead, I said, “Good luck, and good night.”
Shades of Brown.
Sunday, August 26th, 2007
After a morning (or the latter part of it) outside on the ladder, I came inside and poured Starbucks coffee carefully into the McDonalds cup I picked up the other day in Newberry. What kind of retro brand chic is this? Fancy coffee in an unfancy cup (because the Starbucks venti cups—I brought two up north with me—are too biodegradable to hold up in constant use. Two to three fill-ups per day, over nearly a month, and those saying-embossed pieces of marketing are stained with the rich brown of whatever coffee I’ve been pouring into them. Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, and yes, Maxwell House French Roast.
The ‘McCafé’ cup (interesting…absolutely no golden arches branding on these at all) are more styrofoamy…they’re actually some sort of styrofoam/cardboard hybrid…it’s been holding up well for a couple of weeks now. I look down at my shirt and hands, and there, spattered down my front are the other shades of brown that have been the theme of this Upper Peninsula visit.
Most of you know that Sammy’s family’s famed Green Cottage hasn’t been, in fact, green since about 1990…it’s a redwood-stained brownish color, with a faded trim that has become a light chocolate. And as Sammy has been hard at work this month redoing the considerable trim around the window-filled porch…scraping and sanding down past faded brown to 1950s green to some sort of grey leadish dust, carefully filling and layering bright white primer, I’ve been restaining the siding with this redwood-tinted stuff (made in Ohio!) that looks like melted milk chocolate in the five gallon can. The new trim paint Sammy adds as the final coat(s) is a bit darker…it looks like melted Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate in the can. Or maybe UPS brown (what can brown trim paint do for you?)
So, most days here, I’ve been clambering up on an aluminum extension ladder, first with a broom to blast away layer after layer of spiderwebs (you can’t do this in advance…those damn spiders rebuild ’em nightly) then, often, with a damp rag to finish the job and to generally clean the windowsills of crap. Then, I load up a roller and spatter great swaths of milk chocolate on the siding, which absorbs it hungrily. And finally (did I mention I descend from the ladder and walk around and squint at my handiwork for a few minutes between each of these steps) I take a two-inch stain brush and dollop the milk chocolate up and down in the seams (gutters? troughs? The jargon eludes me) between the siding runs and more or less the job is done.
And as a lovely side benefit, I’ve given myself, my hair, my shirt, and the ladder a fine spatter of stain that makes it look like I’ve been sloppily into the Hershey’s syrup.
Oh, one more ‘brown’ that has been a part of this August at the Green Cottage…Connie’s general store, down the road in Helmer, has been carrying a brand of root beer from my childhood…Frostop, which was the name of a handful of root beer stands in Ohio, has been reincarnated by someone called ‘C-B Beverage Corp’ of Hopkins, MN. Go figure, but it’s tasty and more or less as I remember it.
Lock ’em up.
Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007
We were having a nice glass of wine with Sammy’s cousin Susan and her husband, and Susan added another data point to a disturbing trend: almost everyone we know with 12 inch Powerbooks have had them fail, and the diagnosis, by experts or amateurs, is that it’s dead for good.
The power supply to the logic board expires, or some other ailment causes the machine to “lock up hard,” and most folks take it as a sign that it’s time to get a new laptop.
Adding Susan to our list, we have more than 7 people we know to whom this has happened; ironically our own 12 inch (‘El Libreto’) had a different problem within the first year of its life—the DVD drive went out—and because the Apple store in Atlanta had trouble finding a replacement (or so they said), the nice folks there offered us a new black MacBook in replacement.
It’s interesting that this convenient size (writers in particular seem to love it) has not migrated to the land of Intel-powered MacBooks…it’s more interesting still that those who hung on to the ‘old technology’ are being forced to jump ship.
Burnt to a Crisp Point.
Sunday, August 12th, 2007
One of the side dramas (for us) since coming up north to the fine Upper Peninsula of Michigan is that a big chunk of the north end of the county we’re in—Luce County—is, uh, on fire.
We’re on the south end, so that’s somewhat reassuring, but the consequence has been much like in Atlanta earlier this year when forest fires ravaged the swamplands of south Georgia—the smell of fire is often in the air. Sometimes, at night, the wind will shift and, whoosh!…we’re sleeping inside a campfire. Five minutes later, the air is fresh again.
Like South Georgia, this part of the U.P. is basically swampland, but swampland in a drought is a lot closer to tinder than fire retardent.
* * * * *
In other news, we’re working hard on renewing the Green Cottage so it can withstand the harsh winters, and as a result a big part of it is actually green again…
* * * * *
And this sunday’s NY Times magazine has caught up with my excitement (if that is the right word) about the fine, fine new typeface making its way onto freeway signs across the country…and particularly up here in Michigan.
When you have no piston rings…
Wednesday, July 18th, 2007
…you can’t make new cars. One reason I’m glad we got our Prius when we did:
Quake Forces Toyota to Halt Production
TOKYO (AP) — Japanese automakers, including Toyota Motor Corp., called production halts Wednesday at factories in Japan because of quake damage at a major parts supplier.
The temporary closure of auto parts maker Riken Corp.’s plant at Kashiwazaki city, near the epicenter of Monday’s magnitude 6.8 quake, has forced Toyota, Nissan Motor Co. Mitsubishi Motors Corp. and Fuji Heavy Industries to scale back production.
Toyota, Japan’s No. 1 automaker, will stop production lines at a dozen factories centered in central Aichi prefecture Thursday afternoon and all day Friday, said Toyota spokesman Paul Nolasco.
The company will assess the situation at Riken, supplier of key transmission and engine parts to Toyota, before deciding whether to resume production on Monday, he said.
Linked Wednesday.
Wednesday, July 18th, 2007
Me, I always loved how the town of Derby Line, Vermont thrived in a happy world where “our neighbor to the north” is indeed treated as the best, most open, most intertwined of neighbors.
A bunch of people are building an ambitious library of the world’s books online, more or less how you’ve always expected a web-based library would manifest itself…with a catalog we all edit. The number of books that exist online now in full-text is really quite amazing. So, a grafting of Wikipedia concepts onto a really, really big card catalog, linked to full-text or where you can buy, borrow, or just read the book. Hey, now we’re all librarians! Sssh!
I miss comic book covers where the villains would, in dialogue, laboriously explain the entire convoluted story: “I’ve got this game rigged so that every time Flash makes a move, a member of the Justice League disappears from the face of the Earth.” Behold, a site with easily-searchable comic book covers…thousands and thousands of them!
There’s a compelling five part blog posting (start here and move forward in time) from one of the inventors of the Chumby about getting an assembly line for his product set up in China, more or less next door to where gazillions of iPhones and iPods are being expertly, rapidly, and obscenely cheaply cobbled together. Culture! Technology! Food! The terrors of globalism! It’s all here.
There’s now a Mac app that allows you to create your own subliminal messages that are flashed oh-so-momentarily on your screen. Don’t eat pizza! Buy Tab! So you…uh…hypnotize yourself? Dangerous, I suppose, if you can get your hands on someone else’s machine.
What the heck is electronic mail? I like to think this guy’s expression depicts the horror of the very first recipient of spam.
Meanwhile, Wired writes about how Google maps is changing the way we see our world. Boy, I’ll say. Google Maps (and Earth) find their way into all sorts of aspects of Sammy’s and my lives, both professional and not. Once your start overlaying your data on their imagery, it’s hard to stop.
But I’ll stop here.
Wisdom to know the difference.
Thursday, July 12th, 2007
This is one of those weeks where I’ve started to post about eight times, about burbling demi-thoughts ranging from the technological to the political to the societal. Unlike others who can effortlessly sit down and summon the blog muses (a distinctly less powerful and magical set of inspirers than, you know, book or movie muses), I have to kind of wait for sufficient haze of quiet inside and outside of my brain to settle in and dampen, sharpen, soften.
So here we are. Big surprise that it’s ’round midnight and I’ve made sure Sammy is tucked in and sleeping comfortably and I’ve talked long-distance (as we used to say, as if that were a big deal) with my longtime friend on the eve of her first chemo session about many things that seemed to ultimately add up to the power of serenity. I hung up confident that she had done her inevitable homework, reaffirmed the love of family and friends, developed ways to be at spiritual peace with the challenges ahead and now just basically needs to get up tomorrow after a good night’s sleep and do the day.
I think we face the daily prospect of ‘doing the day’, with infinite variations, mostly overlaid with anxiety and fear and the clutter of the insignificant, and it’s much easier when you can get to a self-realized quiet place and tap into the power that comes from that kind of serenity. (Not to be confused, of course, with Serenity, but a big ol’ fictional spaceship brings its own power, solace, and peace-of-mind.)
That’s as crunchy granola as I’ll get. It’s been raining a bit more this month here, and this afternoon the moisture made it smell somehow sweet like an office park built atop an old orange grove in Sunnyvale, California. I looked out at our front yard, a tiny bit less shabby after Sammy’s herculean weed-pulling and my grass cutting. The house is clean, one of the side benefits of having company. The new car sits outside, bravely defying any roving criminal element. The maps are almost done.
This would be something like my serenity of home.
iPhixation.
Wednesday, June 27th, 2007
If it doesn’t moderate the weather or advance criminal indictments against Dick Cheney, what possible use could it be?
—from ‘Redneck’ on the Textdrive user forum.
Well, exactly. Maybe it’s because it’s so hot. Maybe it’s because we’re having to deal with insurance junk on our old car and add-on games with our new one. But to somehow go through all of this during the apparent extended national holiday known as iPhone week just kinda makes life for me all the more bizarre.
To quickly sum up: yeah, I love the design…it’s easily the most spectacular breakthrough in UI design since the Mac in 1984. The downsides can absolutely be attached to the deal with the devil now known as AT&T that Jobs struck. Charge em up the wazoo for SMS? Sure. Slow cell data speeds? Sure. Stuff like that keeps me away from joining the rest of the world: I think I’ll remain mobile-less a bit longer.
I’d buy a phone-less (and therefore AT&T-less) iPhone in a New York minute, however.
In the meantime, it’s fun to read blogs that discuss the various pluses and minuses of the überdevice, and of course I read all the early reviews, and very much enjoyed, in spite of myself, NYTer David Pogue’s satiric look at the cloak of secrecy Apple drapes over their new baby in the wild—and the video-review manages to get the main points out there as well. It’s, dare I say it, almost Daily Show-ish. Yes, play the video! Sit through the ad!
I just hope we’re not going through one of those silly summers again where our national attention (such as it is) is captivated by something trivial only to to be struck, hard by a fresh, cold, jolt of reality in the fall. You know, like in September of 2001.
Truth is, all those horrors are still out there in the world, happening now, happening daily. D’ja read the four part article on Cheney in the Washington Post? Well, call that up on your iPhone Safari browser and a startlingly cool breeze might just whistle through the halls of whatever branch(es) of government the veep thinks he’s in these days. There? See? iPhone useful.
UPDATE 4:30 PM eastern:
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the White House and Vice President Dick Cheney’s office Wednesday for documents relating to President Bush’s controversial eavesdropping program that operated warrant-free for five years.
Did I mention that Senator Pat Leahy of Vermont, the committee chairman, my senator for a brief moment in the mid-70s, a guy I interviewed in my first newspaper job…did I mention that I’m so proud of how he’s standing up to the Bush administration? Well, give that man an iPhone.
Ms. K, floating on airwaves.
Monday, June 25th, 2007
I’m so heartened to hear Kevyn back on the air this morning, talking about her experiences of the past month, about the change in her life that now adds “breast cancer survivor” to her lengthy collection of accomplishments.
“There are going to be days when this [her radio program] will be the high point of my day,” she told her listeners this morning. She’s looking toward her first days of chemotherapy with something like steely nerve: “This poison will be like golden honey dripping into my veins.” That both gives me chills and a small smile because her resolve—to get through this, to see it through to the other side—is what I’ve witnessed firsthand in Ms. K in the many years she’s been my friend.
The folks at her radio station have made downloadable versions of her last show pre-surgery and the one today available on their website. Hefty downloads, but worth it to hear something way more than a ‘podcast’. Kevyn’s show, at its best, is a testament to the power of radio as a discrete form of communication…a person speaks into a microphone in a tiny room and, nearly simultaneously, people all over hear that voice as if in one-on-one conversation. It’s a personal, intimate, amazing experience when done well…I believe they once called it broadcasting.
…not the kinda sorta jcbD.
Friday, June 22nd, 2007
Well, I can see I have some work to do to capture the eyeballs of all those people walking around looking for design firms near 30306.
Pinch me when all the hoopla is over.
Worldwide developments.
Wednesday, June 13th, 2007
Greetings from a quite non-humid, beautiful, sunny San Francisco, quite a contrast from the heat-plus-humidity of (positively) Atlanta. I’ve said I wanted to do this once and so I have: I’m at the Apple WWDC, that would be the Worldwide Developers Conference, and here I am, arguably not a developer.
However, this kinda works because Apple has said they want to expand the definition of ‘developer’ to include (embrace, even) content developers alongside those who write boxcarloads of lines of text like:[jcbView setFrame:thatFrame];Content developers. That would be the people who write and create podcasts and, on a more professional level, work in the creative arts to create what is unfortunately called these days, product.Most of these folks, the actual code developers, are laboring to create new generations of the tools that make the tools, and so mixing them with tool users might be a little awkward. Do they have much to say to each other?I am amidst a polyglot group, wearing a staggering variety of t-shirts festooned with logos of Apple Developer Conferences past and companies present, struggling with laptop-laden bookbags and waiting for the next session or meal (cocoa or pizza?)I’m also in a strange parallel world where every laptop is an Apple laptop, where every computer screen displays the beautiful OS X (Tiger or Leopard) interface, and thus Apple’s marketshare is 100%.
This is, of course, quite unreal.Here’s one more unreal thing. A guy wrote the blogging app I’m using. Another guy owns it now and is making the most of it. They’re both here, in this very room, as I type. The code they slaved over is making these words flow from me to you.This is also a world (maybe this part is quite real) where a group of people can sit in a circle, MacBooks out in every lap, and have a “social” gathering where the sociality is all directed into and out of the screen.
Even at the sessions, there are the “edge sitters,” folks who grab the seats by the aisles so they can stretch power cords over to wall outlets and run their machines for hours without draining their batteries. On their screens are almost-ubiquitous chat windows and web browsers, calling up sites and documents mentioned by the speaker, or, as frequently, working on their own code, only glancing up when the speaker cracks a joke or perhaps, performs a song (this was a great treat to see in person, by the way. That probably says more about me than about the musicianship.)
So I’m here, Odwalla juice in hand, wandering off on day three of this experience, learning a bit, but mostly observing a world that I usually only visit online.
