Why Doctorow Not Buying An iPad ... Is Not News

Oh wow, Cory Doctorow doesn't like the iPad - let me go and get my face of complete lack of surprise.

Of course Doctorow doesn't like the iPad. Of course he isn't going to buy one. The man, for one thing, hates iTunes. Anyone who hates iTunes is not going to buy an iPad. Here is a post from Cory back in 2006 about the evils of iTunes, and don't neglect to forget to read the comments as many point out some of the basic factual problems with Cory's argument. This is very, very common with Cory. Cory claims he "was a CD-ROM programmer at the start of my tech career" - but we need to be specific here: Cory often has a very tenuous understanding of technology. Remember that Little Brother has a main plot point where Microsoft gives away a new version of the Xbox for free, only to have it used to play freeware MMO's when kids aren't running around playing ARG's.

Or when he railed on iTunes because it sold Bob Dylans Modern Times with the music videos encrypted so that you couldn't burn the audio off them ... even though they were music video extras of older songs.

Or of course, my personal favorite - when he announced on Boing Boing that the PlayStation 3 would not play Blu-Ray movies. Let's take a step back on that one, folks. Sony had put serious bank on Blu-Ray as a format for the PS3. They had risked a higher price point on the console against two serious competitors. They were trying to drive a market not just for their new format, but to increase sales of their HD line of televisions as well.

Of course the god damned thing was going to play Blu-Ray movies. That was like ... the whole point. A better argument is that the device was better suited for movies when first released. You have to be completely blinded by your own argument to even begin to type such a post. This is a post that defies a basic understanding of both technology and how the technology industry operates.

So let's take one bit out of Cory's current complaint:

So what does Marvel do to "enhance" its comics? They take away the right to give, sell or loan your comics. What an improvement. Way to take the joyous, marvellous sharing and bonding experience of comic reading and turn it into a passive, lonely undertaking that isolates, rather than unites. Nice one, Misney.

-- Why I won't buy an iPad (and think you shouldn't, either)

So firstly, my brother and I bought many, many, many comics as kids - and we never really got into any kind of mass sharing commune like Cory describes. Yet we still loved them. This is another fine example of Doctorow manufacturing what he believes to be the order of things. Story? Artwork? Fun? No, no, these aren't nearly as important as being able to give away what you bought. Cory also neatly avoids the fact that his argument is true of the entire eBook industry or that market data about the amount people are willing to consume on the products pretty much pulls the carpet out from underneath him. Real consumers don't share Cory's desire for sharing everything. Real consumers weigh the benefits of being able to download a comic in a few seconds and have an entire library at your fingertips versus the cost of storing many years of collecting comics in your mom's garage.

Benefit outweighs costs. Marvel 1. Doctorow 0.

Doctorow continues to moan about how you can't take the thing apart (I've been taking computers apart and putting them back together again for something like fifteen years - trust me ... you aren't missing much), how Apple is Wal-Mart, and yada freaking yada. Let's jump to the end.

If you want to live in the creative universe where anyone with a cool idea can make it and give it to you to run on your hardware, the iPad isn't for you.

There's only a partial truth here. Firstly, the barrier of entry to developing an iPad app isn't nearly as bad as one might think. Get a low end Macbook. XCode is free. Cost into the developer program is $99 a year. It's not cheap - but it isn't as expensive as many other forms of development. Cory is, once again, willfully neglecting to tell you the whole story. Sure, when computers could only do 4-bit graphics and had 640K of memory, it was a lot easier to be a garage hacker and come up with neat application. These days the gap between the "person with the cool idea" and the "one who can make it" is vast. And sure, if you have managed to get past that very practical truth - you have to get past the App Store Review. But while the review is chaotic ... many, many, many apps make their way online.

And (another point Cory forgets) if you're developer, you can always use Ad Hoc distribution. Here's the description, right from Apple:

Share your application with up to 100 other iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch users with Ad Hoc distribution. Share your application through email, or by posting it to a web site or server.

And (yet another point Cory forgets) if you really want to start coding something interesting and don't want to bother with any of that - make a cool web application. Mobile Safari is a very sophisticated web browser, capable of many of the application design concepts with HTML 5 and the iPad neatly solves the biggest issue - dealing with the iPhone's tiny screen. You can do that with nearly any PC running Safari, and deliver it for free to the entire Internet. This is, for the record, my current development plan for anything not work related.

Doctorow does this every day. He has Boing Boing, he has his stories which are freely available online. There are even apps for his comics which you can get on your iPhone and iPad. So Doctorow disproves his own argument. He has cool ideas. He makes them. He shares them with all those poor iPad users.

And his closing statement:

If you want to write code for a platform where the only thing that determines whether you're going to succeed with it is whether your audience loves it, the iPad isn't for you.

Sadly, fair readers - that platform simply doesn't exist. There will always be hurdles between you and your audience, and even if every single one of them loves it ... you'll encounter those hurdles.

However, if you want to code (or write, or draw comics, or whatever) for a large and voracious audience - the iPad probably is for you. It arrived on Saturday and there have been one million apps downloaded by Monday. There were 250,000 eBooks sold.

The iPad is not going to change the world. But it does provide a very interesting market.

App Store Hijinks

Personally I think the App Store is only just shy of completely brilliant. One of those times that philosophy that drives Apple really shines and pulls together something which quite honestly changes the conversation as well as the game.

But I did say just shy. There's some pretty glaring faults to be had here. Nothing which is odd or surprising considering what's going on - but they still exist. There's no good way to deliver trial software - which has lead several developers to start distributing "lite" and "full" versions of their software to accommodate. Juggling the apps I've downloaded from my phone, from iTunes, kept, deleted, etc. onto the phone itself is a bit of a mess and I keep forgetting to update the sync settings prior to actually syncing.

The other half of the App Store problems involve, well, the apps themselves. The now much blogged $999 "I Am Rich" app is probably the epitome of the controversy - but much of this is also due to a much inflated sense of what Apple would allow and disallow from the store in general. And much of that was a complete lack of messaging on Apple's part on what they would allow and disallow. It was, and probably pretty much is, roughly designed as "what we want". Some people took that to mean that if you didn't follow Apple's much touted design concepts, you wouldn't get through the door.

Honestly I was always skeptical of that and somewhat expected to be ... well, pretty much what it is. There's been a lot of comments about Apple allowing an app like "I Am Rich" onto the store as well as for Apple removing such an app. My suspicion was always that Apple would be more like a bouncer than a fashionista at a party - it's in Apple best interests to have the widest range of apps on the store and a high volume. They pretty much can't lose here, a lot of free apps mean that there is more incentive for people to own an iPhone and a lot of pay apps means more to their bottom line.

The key phrase there being - a lot of apps in general.

The real problem, I think, goes back to the concept of trialware. The real problem is that there isn't a decent mechanism for determining what's truly crap and what is not. Something like "I Am Rich" is probably pretty easy to discern for most rational people but I could see where Apple might pull it just to avoid dealing with an angry customer. "I Am Rich" is really a non-issue, a humorous footnote in what will be the history of the App Store, but the real problem for Apple would be a glut of $9.99 and $19.99 apps which completely suck. If people pay up front for apps that don't pay off, they'll be less likely to try them out in the future.

Which defeats the whole "have a lot of apps" angle in the first place.

App Store Open: Meet Expense2GO

Apple's App Store for iTunes is open, although if you haven't had access to the beta OS I don't think you'll be able to do much with it just yet. The app we at work have been pounding is called Expense2GO. It's a receipt manager for Salesforce.com users which allows you to organize receipts by report, take pictures and upload them to your org.

We're looking for people interested in continuing to test the app if you should actually be reading this and fall into the above category.

There is an extremely healthy number of apps launching with a decent amount of diversity. I'm not sure if a platform launch has been quite as successful at mobilizing a developer base before. Just the list of free apps is fairly impressive ( thanks Kottke ).

In a few hours I would expect the 2.0 OS to be available and after that you should be able to download apps and give them a whirl. For those of us already on the latest beta of the iPhone OS, it seems to work OK.

Days Of WWDC 2008, End of Day Five

Technically the day isn't quite over. I'm at one of the hardware connect stations here at Moscone taking advantage of the sweet ethernet speeds here. Both the new iPhone OS and SDK hitting the hard drive in like three minutes.

Took advantage of the labs this morning and had an Interface Builder engineer give me the guided tour. Less shaky about it now (she called it the fear of the NIB) but I don't think I'm breaking any real NDA by saying that there will be some pretty decent enhancements to IB as the App Store goes live. Since then I've been compiling some notes and playing around with the sample apps. Still a little too conference weary to finish any serious code.

Humorously the kindly engineer was also trying to "trick" me into developing for OS X by starting off with some CoreData examples. Apple is at this weird crossroads. They have this extremely mature, extremely powerful dev platform in OS X which is playing bridesmaid to belle of the ball iPhone. iPhone on the other hand, is still young and growing and a large number of questions at the end of sessions end with "file a feature request."

Apple is listening, and they would love to build the mountain for Mohammed and all, but mountain building takes time. I'm glad for the July 11th release date as it will give the OS more time in the cooker, but honestly I'm more excited for July 2009. Everyone wants to write the first killer app for the platform - but somewhere in the frenzy a level of community will still have to arise.

And I would totally write for OS X if my desktop attention wasn't already driven by AIR in the first place.

Anyway, I've got my files and all my hardware is charged and full. My iPhone is down to a paltry 750MB of space as I jammed it full of video for the long flight home. I'm about to head over to ThirstyBear for some final San Fran microbrew, and then a quick swing by the Wharf before heading home.

See you in like many hours, Chicago.

More iPhone Development

Sorry it's been a few days - things have been insane in general. I've been completely jammed at work and out nearly every night this week for one reason or another. Exhaustion would be settling in if I didn't have bizarre compile errors to distract me.

First, the good news - the latest iPhone SDK and OS beta update includes a few interesting goodies, like OpenGL on the simulator and enhanced lookahead in XCode. The iTunes app has reappeared and there's more indications that the AppStore is getting ready.

In order to see all of this, I did end up bricking my phone for all of Thursday morning as apparently there's a bug with restoring your iPhone if you have weird things like another USB device plugged in ... go figure. After much, much panic - I managed to get it working again. Friday morning seemed to be make up for all this as I started getting my SOAP requests bringing back SOAP responses. I even went so far as to brag on this fact ... until I tried to compile for the actual device instead of the simulator. Then everything with XML in its name died a miserable death.

It seems the NSXML stuff hasn't been moved over yet. There's an ounce of common wisdom out there that its "too slow for the phone" - which I find fairly hard to believe after watching, you know, a Monkey Ball demo on the thing. I don't care how slow it is - it can't be more processor intensive than rendering a 3D world.

No, I'm guessing there's something more esoteric at hand. The working XML example off the Apple demos uses a kind of SAX design to pull items into an object. I'm hoping it will be an alternative, but it accomplishes less in three full classes over about twenty lines of code. With the NSXML, you've got XPATH and other handy tools. Some comments in the code make me thing the NSXML absence is a bug - but with our deadline I probably won't be able to assume it will be fixed.

The game I'm doing as a side project is working pretty well. I'm moving into the realm of interfaces with it now, something I'm hoping to keep as minimal as possible.

After Some Cursing: A Native iPhone App

Yesterday my acceptance as a Standard Developer popped into my inbox. I wasn't entirely sure what to do with it and it's already been a long week, so I waited until tonight to play around with it.

To say that the legit method of getting a native iPhone app running on your iPhone is a bit obtuse barely cuts the surface. You'll end up signing certs, uploading certs, downloading certs, playing with the Developer Connection interface for a while and then wondering why the hell OS 2.0 doesn't exist anywhere only to realize that once again the iPhone Dev Center can't quite figure out how to update itself and hence forgot to add the link to download it in the first place only to finally install it which only ends up making it seem like iTunes might have accidentally crashed your phone only to have it simply wipe all your data and then ask nicely to restore only to then tell you some of that data might not work on the new OS...

*gasp*

Oh, and apparently at some point in the future Apple might brick this phone as the OS2.0 beta expires until I can get a new one.

But hey - I actually installed a native app and with a button click ... it launched on the phone and not in the simulator. Which is pretty darn snazzy. Granted it's currently just four blue squares which spawn another one and then move a bit when you tap the screen .... but it's a start.

Apparently the SDK agreement also restricts you from broadcasting screens from the simulator (which makes my April Fools joke simply risque). Not sure about the phone itself (a la the Quake 3 demo). So when I give updates on the apps and tell you how awesome they are ... you might just have to believe me.

More Sunday: Quake 3 iPhone

While this is pretty darn cool and clearly some amazingly clever C to Obj-C hacking - I wonder how well the actual experience will translate. Considering Quake style deathmatches entail a lot of circle strafing, divebombing, rocket jumping and other keyboard-mouse moves that I just don't see working here ... I'm not sure that this isn't much more than an extremely impressive tech demo.

Still, it proves that you could do a 3D FPS on the hardware and with the right gesture commands, make something that would be hella fun.

Halo 1 For iPhone Being Homebrewed

Some eagle-eyed readers picked this up from the iDev forums. Looks like some industrious hackers are defying the iPhone SDK, copyright issues and the grand task of bridging DirectX to OpenGL and are trying to bring the original Halo to the popular iPhone.

Good luck to them, and keep an eye on your calendars for a release.

My iPhone Ate My Xcode!

Sure, I finally feel well enough to look at code for more than 10 minutes and so I go to load up Xcode (OS X's development environment).

Except it's not there. I try Spotlight to search for it and all I can find is references to project files I can no longer open. It seems the iPhone SDK uninstalled it without telling me, possibly to add the new Interface Builder ... although I don't quite see how it can *add* something to something which is *no longer there*.

Update ... doh, nevermind. I found the rascal. The SDK update had locked the process while asking nicely if I would quit Xcode ... except it was hidden on some other screen while doing so. Course it also currently says it will be done in 258 hours? WTF?

Sigh. Also, this SDK apparently updates a few object names which should be a big flag to anyone hitting the ground running with the iPhone that it is in some pretty serious flux. Changing class names can wreck havok on existing projects.

Double sigh. Guess I'll go play with some Flex.

Sometimes, the iPhone Dev Center Just Closes Down...

This has actually happened to me a few times. I'll have a page open to some Apple documentation or the like and when I try to click around, I get kicked to the registration page. I try to login again with my dev account and I ... get kicked to the registration page.

I get that Apple must be just swamped - but not being able to maintain a login?

Some iPhone SDK Disappointments

The simulator not supporting Open GL is definitely a bit of a downer, but the Core graphics set is pretty decent for a lot of uses (although obviously not for rotating a 3D teapot, for instance).

I didn't realize, though, that the SDK does not seem to support accessing the iTunes library for playback. This really seems like a fairly strong handed restriction - I could see restrictions on manipulating the library itself but removing access completely shuts out a large portion of the functionality. So no new visualizers, music based games, podcasting, or mix software for you. I can't see where there's a DRM issue here, it's not like you'll be burning CD's off the thing ... so it really feels more like a stranglehold on the iTunes experience.

Also the SDK's dev site has a bit to be desired. There's no real search functionality, Getting beyond the surface topics and basic tutorials are difficult at best and OS X topics are interwoven with the iPhone ones with the occasional "has not been reviewed for accuracy" on the latter note. For instance, I can't even find a page that overviews the above and if you google "iPhone SDK restrictions", two full pages of result don't include any information from Apple.com itself.

I was going to take some time today and try and port my old visualizer code over to the iPhone ... but apparently that's out...