kickingbear

I am thrilled to have been invited to speak at NSNorth at the end of April. Many of my fellow speakers are good friends and others I hold in high regard for their work. The organizers aren’t half bad either.

The number of tickets available is very limited so if you’d like to attend please sign up soon.

I’m a fan of these smaller independent conferences. I believe in the value of interacting with the community in more personable groups. When I call someone an abject and unapproachable asshole it makes a lot more sense when they’re standing next to me and laughing.

Gus will be speaking. I hear he makes pizza.

I hope to see you there.

I’ve left these pages fallow.

My intention here has been to inject what were hopefully interesting and novel ideas. Regardless of their particular merit.

Originally the subtitle of these pages was “Stupid Cocoa Tricks”. My friends have out done me in that regard. I then moved on to a generalized critique of (Apple-ish) Things That Were Stupid. Turns out that people either got a lot less stupid, got far better coverage of their stupidity or, in the case of Our Macalope, showed me the horns. (His Glisten. With blood!) Also, people tend to find pieces written by authors who employ “fallow” as a verb particularly assaulting. Annoying. Irritating. Uninteresting. Right. Whatever. Fuck you two.

So, I’ve got a new thing now. I talk with people. Sometimes they’re quite smart. To their credit not one of them will right to express their disapproval of that assessment. Though 100% of them cringed at that last joke.

Please join us and listen in on my new podcast with Rene Richie called, “Debug”. We’ve recorded five episodes so far and we’re proud of each of them.

“Debug” is a recording of the conversations I wish I’d had the time to have with developers I respect.

Rene is good enough to filter out the dirty bits. Like, “Who the fuck uses fallow in a sentence!?”

It takes balls to strap yourself into the nose cone of a rocket that’s aimed at the Moon. Even more so when you’re the first to do it. Who the fuck would volunteer to be part of that insane plan?

Neil Armstrong did.

A man from Wapakoneta Ohio was the first human to put his foot down somewhere other than Earth.

Neil Armstrong passed away yesterday. Which is to say he is now dead. We shot this guy at the Moon and he survived and came back.

He took one small step for a man that was a giant leap for mankind.

How trite is that? An obvious and unremarkable commentary. Three people were bundled up and fired at the Moon. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins. What I’ve always loved about the moon landing is that Neil fucked up his line. “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” A man. It’s one small step for a man, moron.

But you know what? Neil was standing on the fucking Moon! Have you seen the Moon? It’s huge and really far away and Neil stood there and blew his line.

It’s always been inspiring to me. Even when we achieve our greatest ambitions our heroes can be imperfect.

Rest in peace Neil Armstrong. You didn’t just give us the Moon, you gave us a mirror.

I didn’t like John Gruber. I’d come to the Mac by way of an avid interest in NeXT and it’s related technologies. I bought my first Mac when Rhapsody was announced. Apple said they’d have something shipping within six months. They didn’t and I ended up using the classic Mac OS for a lot longer than I’d have liked. I was coming from OS/2 and Windows NT and the idea that dragging a scroll bar would stop a download felt positively Palaeolithic. Gruber, I felt, was an apologist for the antiquated Mac OS and too harsh a critic of the far more modern and forward looking Mac OS X. Did window resizing performance stink? Yes, sure, but having fully buffered windows and the Quartz compositing model was The Right Thing To Do. And his lack of appropriate reverence for the Cocoa APIs and tools was infuriating. Stupid Gruber. I rage read Daring Fireball voraciously.

Happy tenth, John. Your writing has changed the way I think about products, design and quality. Or I’ve had a stroke from getting so steamed.

This week Apple withdrew its products from the EPEAT registry. Apple said that “their design direction was no longer consistent with the EPEAT requirements” (cnet)

I’m using the Cnet link because it came to me in an email today from a friend asking me to comment on the matter. What do I possibly have to say about that? How would I know what’s going on?

Could be the new direction debuted with the Retina MacBook Pro isn’t compliant with the rules that EPEAT has adopted yet is still possible to recycle. The battery is glued into the case. Maybe Apple has some system to dissolve the glue and recycle the battery and the case independently that hasn’t yet been accepted by EPEAT as an effective methodology. Perhaps Apple just doesn’t give a fuck and they’re going to dump all the returned equipment into an incinerator.

Who knows?

This is a pretty big change of policy for Apple. It’s not huge from a consumer perspective but from the perspective of a dedicated company watcher it seems like something that’d light up the radar.

Daring Fireball didn’t mention it. Loop Insight didn’t mention it. Marco Arment didn’t mention it. (To be fair, Marco has been busting open the corrupt App Store downloads story this week.)

A couple of weeks ago I was on The Talk Show and I made fun of this recycling issue as being a non-problem. Now Apple has resigned itself from a major initiative to make this stuff work. Surely, it’s worth some commentary and investigation.

Unless the idea is to wait until someone else writes a really stupid and uninformed piece and then pounce upon them for being so dumb and out of touch.

That’s not the plan, is it?

Gruber and I discussed the Microsoft Surface announcement on this week’s episode of The Talk Show. John Siracusa complained on this week’s episode of Hypercritical that Microsoft should’ve just picked a price point for their announcements.

There’s many pieces arguing that Microsoft hurt themselves by not specifying things like screen size (in pixels and DPI), battery life, and price point.

They’re all missing the point of the announcement.

Microsoft introduced the Surface this week, hastily, in order to dodge anything Apple may have announced and to frame the discussion of whatever Google is going to announce at I/O next week.

Google is expected to announce a tablet next week at Google I/O. In the mainstream press whatever they announce is now going to be mentioned along side the Microsoft Surface.

That Microsoft didn’t release specifics about battery life, screen size or price point insn’t a mistake — it’s the entire point.

Every number Microsoft reveals becomes a metric that can be measured against the competition. By not revealing any of the specifics Microsoft gets to be part of the conversation but doesn’t have to participate in any sort of bang-for-the-buck analysis.

And that’s how the Frame Game works. When your company thinks, “we’ve got to get in front of this” and you’re not sure you’ve got a better product, well, the best thing you can aim for is to be part of the conversation.

I think that’s what Google tried to do with their 3D Maps announcement a week ahead of WWDC and I think that’s what Microsoft was trying to do with their short-notice Surface announcement this week.

To me it’s no surprise that Microsoft didn’t release details of their battery life or price point — the goal wasn’t to pitch a product. The goal was to be part of the conversation.

I think they’ll succeed there. Not in the circles that are likely to read this piece, but with the larger and less tuned in audience. The people who buy a lot of things and read CNN and the BBC.

I have been watching the high-lights coming out of this year’s 10th All Things D conference, a get together for the notables of various technology firms and firms that intersect the field.

One thing that strikes me is that many of the guests who speak about larger issues than their own company’s immediate concerns downplay the relevance of the technologies themselves. They speak of the ability of the technology to enable the creativity of others. A personal hero of mine, Ed Catmull, one of the fathers of 3D computer graphics and a founder of Pixar (among other achievements) speaks very directly and plainly about how this is the case.

I write software for a living. I’ve worked in the games industry for years. One of the most rewarding aspects of what I’ve done has been creating systems that have allowed people who are creative in different ways than I am to make something great. My greatest thrills have come when creative people have taken the tools I’ve designed for them and have made something that I didn’t believe was possible.

All Things D has made available all of the Steve Jobs’ appearances at the conference. Watch them. If you can watch them back to back and realize how Jobs sticks to the message year after year, even using the same jokes and shtick. But my favourite line is where he’s talking about Pixar and it’s success and saying they still do things the way Walt Disney did. “Sure, they’ve got the most powerful pencils in the world”.

Making pencils is cool.

I believe that many Apple observers have been too invested in picking off the low hanging fruit of obviously out-of-touch commentators, columnists, and analysts. Apple is winning. It’s fun to pick on the idiots, and we do tune in for the affirmation that engenders, but that’s not insight. It’s a tag team wedgie patrol. It takes a clever intellect to dismantle bullshit but, ultimately, it often just ends up with pantsing the dumb guy. Rather than doing that let’s aim to pants the A-grade quarterback.

Here are the top three problems I believe Apple faces in the near term.

Content Management

That’s not even a thing. Fix that. If I watched the first season of Community via Netflix streaming and now want to rewatch it on my TV as fed from an Apple TV? Make it work. I don’t care how. If you want to pop up a dialog thats asks if you’ll charge me $4.99 to $9.99 for the privilege, I’d pay. Let me pick what I want to watch, regardless of the source, and let me watch it. I have very little allegiance to the network that funded the show — I want the content. Figure out how to make that work.

If you can’t figure out how to make that direct connection to the creatives then you’ll always be stuck with a middleman that doesn’t have to be there. If there’s a syndication avenue you can explore then do so.

Fans want to watch their shows. They’ll pay to make that happen. Everything else is mired in entrenched interests. Find a way to make that happen and we’ll all agree that Firefly jumped the shark during its seventh season.

For Apple the risk here is that someone manages to come along and come up with a more simple and direct method of dealing with media content in the mobile space. I don’t mean a better iTunes, I mean a better way of servicing what the users actually want.

iTunes

iTunes is dead. But it’s still the big play. Microsoft became trapped in the Windows legacy and now, it appears, that Apple is becoming trapped into the iTunes legacy. How is it possible to make a radical transformation, with regards to media management, on the majority of iOS devices without addressing the the train-wreck that is iTunes?

iCloud is a start. But it can’t yet carry all the water.

There are indications that iTunes as the hub is losing favour. As it should be. iTunes was a terrific app ten years ago, but today, it has absorbed too much functionality that there has to be a rethink.

What’s been holding the development of iTunes at bay has been that the majority platform has been Windows. Having the hub on Windows (and the Mac) has, so far, served Apple well. With the number of iOS devices shipping and the move to iCloud style media-management that will change.

Slowly. Right now I’m still juggling a bunch of bullshit that I really shouldn’t need to. Basically, I’ll pay you money if you provide me content I’d like to enjoy. There’s so many weird and random restrictions on that simple deal that I still don’t know how it’ll ultimately play out. (And note its not that I’ll pay money for content I have enjoyed — I’ll pay money for content I hope to enjoy.)

For Apple the risk here is that someone else figures out the formula and the deals to appeal to the majority of content consumers. Once someone locks that up then translating that to favour another platform becomes relatively easy.

If the launch of the iPod and the iTunes Store taught Apple a lesson I hope that it’s that the incumbents are willing to do trials with the minority market-holders.

People

The team that worked on the original iPhone were granted stocks back in 2005-2006. The people who joined them to make iOS 2.0 what it was were granted stock back in 2007-2008. Look at the progression of iOS devices since then and consider the people behind it. Then consider the remuneration schemes based on how much of their personal time they invested versus the benefit to the company. iOS was launched back in 2007. It’s been five years since the original team were granted stock options. It’s been maybe three years since the team that has defined what we now know as iOS were granted options. Look at the share price then and look at the share price now.

Ultimately, the retention of talent will be Apple’s Achilles’ heel.

The smartest people will always want to be working on the smartest thing. Sometimes that comes together in one amazing project. iOS has been that project for this decade.

If there’s a problem for Apple it’s that they’ve already invented the future. It’s a done deal. The best and brightest engineers and product managers may move on to other ventures. Less likely to succeed, of course, but that’s less of an issue for them given the rainfall of AAPL gains. We’ll have to see what happens.

Us

People who understand how Apple works and who comment upon it regularly should apply themselves to understanding the problems Apple faces. It’s good sport to shoot down the loons, that’s for sure. That’s easy. It’s time to criticize the champ.

Let’s quit handing out wedgies and let’s start pointing out faults.

• Guy

What’s the worst that could happen? Everything that Microsoft hopes for with Windows 8 on tablets comes true and it becomes the new Windows PC for the new dominant form factor. The iPad takes the position of the Mac in the PC space. Guess who’s still laughing all the way to the bank?

“Does it run Office?”

“Yes, it’s on the App Store.”

And if Windows 8 for tablets isn’t everything that Microsoft hopes it will be? Well, we start to see Windows as a platform that’s on the way out and iOS as the platform that can carry Microsoft’s Office customers into the future. A future where Microsoft focuses on enterprise components and their lucrative Office suite. And that too may fade, in time. That’s the way things go.

That’s an Apple centric perspective. A Microsoft perspective may well be:

Microsoft is a software company who’s roots lie in delivering tools to personal computer users so they can make the most of their hardware. It started with MS Basic, then MS DOS, then Windows, then Office and then on an on: Visual Basic. Visual Studio. Exchange. Outlook. IIS. ASP. IE. (Well, ok, sometimes we totally overstepped and were really sort of greedy and boring for a decade but, still, we were still trying to be true to that tools for users thing. Or so we told ourselves.)

“Microsoft is thrilled to explore the new avenues of interaction that the burgeoning tablet market has opened to us. We were the first advocate of the tablet as the next vital form-factor and we’re excited to be here today to present our software running on the first popular tablet: iPad.”

That’s a fair pitch. If I’d heard that from a Microsoft representative anywhere I’d think that’s as good a take, and as fair a spin, as they deserve. No lies, direct and grasping at the credibility they talked about but didn’t cement by shipping something great. In all: fair play.

Here’s a quote:

“Apple lives in an ecosystem. And it needs help from other partners. It needs to help other partners. And relationships that are destructive don’t help anybody in this industry as it is today.”

Steve Jobs, 1997

It’s possible that long time Apple watchers focus too much on the part about Apple needing help from its partners. And, to be sure, reducing that risk is a driving concern for the company. But the bit about Apple wanting to help other partners? That seems to go unnoticed. Didn’t Apple try to help other partners when the original iPhone relied so heavily on Google backend services? I’d argue they did — the introduction presentation of the iPhone has a good few minutes just showing off the Google Maps integration. Hell, Steve even prank called a Starbucks just to make the point.

But let’s focus on the key issue of this quotation, and let’s remember that this is just before Bill Gates shows up on a giant screen to “save Apple with a massive investment”:

“relationships that are destructive don’t help anybody”

Apple:

“Microsoft, if you want to invest in porting Office to the iPad then we really appreciate how much trouble that is for you. Tell you what — we’ll bump the Super Monkey-Ball guys, and the rhythm game guys, and the hack-and-slash sword guys and, you know what? We’ll do it old school. You and us? We’re going to bold the shit out of some text. On stage. Live.”

iBooks Author is a tool designed to enable authors of instructional, and other interactive content, to format their work specifically for distribution on iPad devices. In time these parameters may change but, for now, this is the purpose that iBooks Author serves.

If you are authoring your content directly in iBooks Author then I suggest to you that you’re doing it wrong. Create your work as you would have previously and then approach the idea of publishing it on the iBookstore as an opportunity to spruce up your presentation with interactive elements.

iBooks Author is a tool that allows you to leverage specific advantages of the iPad and iBooks 2. It is, categorically, not a tool for creating cross-platform “electronic books”. If you’d like to create those then Apple will be happy to provide a first-class experience for them. If you’d like to do something above and beyond that then consider iBooks Author.

Why the hell they opted for a restrictive EULA when they have such a terrific pitch is beyond me.