@Blue Bottle Mint Plaza
Because of the whole crazy medical ordeal and my mother's car accident recently (she got rear-ended on her way to visit me at the hospital one night and her spinal cord's unfortunately a bit out of alignment as a result), our family's been feeling a lot of financial strain lately. As a coping strategy, since I can't work at my part-time job anymore, I've been applying for scholarships like crazy during this winter break. As long as they allow international students and I qualify otherwise, I'm pretty much entering.
One of the scholarships I've entered is the Brickfish "Show Us a Smile campaign". Basically, you submit an original photo of you (or a friend) smiling and hope that you're ranked high enough or popular enough to win. Normally, I avoid these type of things like the plague, as self-promotion makes me uncomfortable, but since I'm not exactly in the best situation right now, I'll swallow my pride for the sake of possibly easing a bit of our monetary troubles. This is where you all may be able to help, if you wish. My photo can be seen and voted for here. Contest goes from tonight until February 12, 2008, and you're allowed to vote once every 24 hours, so there'll be plenty of time for you to visit if you can't now. Thanks in advance; it's much appreciated!
One of the hardest things for me as a blogging Apple employee always had to be watching the public misapprehend the company's intentions while remaining prudently silent. Apple is slowly opening the lines of communication to its stakeholders these days (witness the recent series of letters from Steve to Apple customers--a veritable deluge of communication by Apple standards!), but in general I think it has traditionally done a far worse job of managing its relationship with its loyalists than many ostensibly less enlightened companies. As a result its reputation has often suffered unnecessarily.
The latest example I've seen of this is the consternation over Apple's failure to seed the Leopard GM build to developers. A lot of the negative reaction toward this that I saw on Twitter was probably, at its root, based on an assumption that is frequently fed by Apple's poor standards of communication: that Apple as a whole disdains (or at least disregards) third party developers, and therefore as a matter of policy the company had decided to deny developers the GM (perhaps to extract more money from them?).
Well, I may not work there now, but I did work in the OS division of Apple for several years (I even briefly worked as the liason to a major third party developer, Adobe), I'm pretty familiar with how things work there, and I'm still in touch with a lot of people who worked on Leopard. And I don't believe for a minute that this was true. I'm convinced that the key fallacy behind this, and a lot of other mistaken ideas about Apple, is the idea that the company always operates as a homogenous entity, and that everything it does is as a result of some company-wide, top-down animus. The reality is usually a lot more mundane.
I have known this to be true in cases where people give Apple too much credit as well as not enough. One of my favorite examples was a post of Dave Winer's some time ago in which he saw Apple's addition of a certain feature to a certain Apple app as evidence of a brilliant, fully-meditated stratagem of Apple's to dominate a certain market. I had been privy to some of the discussions about adding the feature in question, and my perception was very different. Rather than coming from on high as part of some master plan, the initial feature request Radar had originated with an enthusiastic low-level employee from an entirely different team, and it was initially denied because the right people didn't see the value in it. It wasn't that Apple as a whole decided that it wanted to dominate a new market--it was, at least initially, the idea of just one person operating independently.
By the same token, on the negative side, I suspect that the explanation for the missing seed (pure speculation on my part, to be fair) has nothing to do with any malicious or greedy organizational intent (or even plain old indifference) on the part of Apple, but rather with the fact that the time between the GM build and the Leopard ship date was likely too short to make an advance seed practical. I would guess that the OS people were quite motivated to get the product in the hands of the consumer as quickly as possible (and meet the difficult October deadline) without introducing any unnecessary delays. If the particular Apple employees in charge of seeding were out of line in this situation, I would guess it was only in the sense that they understimated the importance of such a seed in many developers' minds in their hurry to get an already delayed release out the door.
My point in all of this, I suppose, is that when it comes to interpreting Apple's actions, Ockham's razor is usually the best guide: the simplest explanation is to be preferred. Apple, like any company, is composed of a large number of pragmatic individuals, most of whom don't have any sort of agenda beyond trying to do their job and meet what are usually pretty demanding project deadlines. The scary Japanese guy who thinks AppleScript engineer Chris Nebel has an anti-Japanese agenda and is trying to sabotage AppleScript localization would be better off assuming that any perceived sins on Chris' part are sins of omission. And the people who were haranguing Apple over its disdain for developers would be more fair not to ascribe malice to something that could be easily explained by ignorance.
Of
course, this wouldn't be as much of a problem if Apple could just get better
at communicating with its customers and developers. Here's hoping that
things like Steve's DRM letter and iPhone refund are the start of a
move away from Cupertino's obsession with total secrecy, and that
misunderstandings like this can be resolved or avoided altogether
through reasonable dialogue in the future.
At the end of one of my last days working for Apple, some co-workers and I met for drinks at Santana Row, in San Jose. By this time, everyone knew I was leaving, so of course everyone was asking what I was going to do next. I made some unenthusiastic noises about possibly working for a San Francisco startup that was trying very hard to recruit me, but I'm sure I didn't sound too convinced, because it wasn't too long before my friend Mike chimed in with "I know what I'd do if I were you." When I asked what, he said: "I'd buy a Canon 5D, the 50mm 1.4 lens, and hit the road!"
Around the same time, I was IMing with my friend Sarah about my uncertain future plans, and, completely unprompted, she echoed Mike's sentiment that I should get some distance from San Francisco for awhile. I think she felt (rightly) that it was the best way for me to get some perspective on my situation.
Now, both of these friends know me pretty well, and I'm sure they both knew that deep down, hitting the road was precisely what I wanted to do. I had felt so constrained by my job for so long that by the time I quit, my spirit was, to paraphrase Led Zeppelin, crying for leaving. Combine that with my lingering sense of personal and professional disillusionment toward the Bay Area, and a good, long break and change of scenery was pretty much the only way I was going to get my enthusiasm back.
So I told the starup I wouldn't be working for them (with the help of a little just-in-time confidence boost from my friends Mai and Courtney), bought the camera gear, and did exactly what Mike suggested. Living mostly off income from my shareware app, PodWorks, I've since traveled extensively in California, Colorado, New Mexico, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Chicago, and Spain. As anyone who has been following my Flickr stream has seen, I've had a pretty amazing run. Among the highlights:
- I hiked on spring snow with my Dad in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado.
- I scaled the Great Sand Dunes in Southern Colorado.
- I followed in Ansel Adams, Georgia O'Keefe, and Paul Strand's footsteps by taking sunset photographs of Mission San Francisco de Asis outside Taos, New Mexico.
- I had my first kiss with a long-distance crush (now my girlfriend) by lamplight in Central Park, then spent a magical weekend in the art deco, Central Park West apartment of my dreams (all of which is such a good story that it merits a post of its own!).
- I drank in some of the best bars New York City (and therefore the world) has to offer (including probably my all-time favorite, Milk & Honey).
- I got excited about being an indie Mac developer again at Wolf Rentzsch's already-legendary C4 conference in Chicago, while enjoying the company of my brother Bobby and good friend Sarah.
- I took my East Coast girlfriend on a tour of my favorite part of the West Coast--in a ridiculously souped-up Shelby Mustang convertible, no less.
- I celebrated my 30th birthday in Barcelona and at a beautiful Mediterranean villa with two of my best friends. We drank Estrella Damm by the pool and ate at some ridiculous restaurants.
- I spent a week with my sweetie in one of the vanishing landmarks of New York Bohemian cool, the Chelsea Hotel, before the forces of gentrification could take it over completely.
In total, I've spent probably 100 out of the 180 days since I've left Apple on the road. And, while I've finally grown a bit travel weary of late and I've started thinking about where and how to settle down again, I've finally come home with a renewed enthusiasm and entreprenurialism, and a realization that I've been priveleged to enjoy the kind of freedom in my travels that most people only dream of. I may slow down for awhile, but you can bet I won't stay put for long.
One of the fun things about no longer being an Apple employee is that I'm now much more at liberty to speak my mind about Apple's products. Apple may have a reputation for being a bit of a cult, but in my experience, most insiders are only too willing to call a spade a spade when the company's products fall short, and it's nice to finally be able to do so publicly again without worrying about violating the PR code. And, of course, the opportunity to speak freely came just in time, seeing as the first new hardware product released after I left was a highly significant (but in many ways, still unrefined) one: the long-anticipated iPhone.
I was among the faithful who bought an iPhone the day it was released, salivating at the prospect of finally having a phone built by people who get it--and by "it" I mean UI/VI design and industrial engineering. Where I had become accustomed to years of death by a thousand paper cuts the moment I started trying to use my previous mobiles as anything more than a phone, I knew that the iPhone would be different. And, thanks to Apple's characteristic thoughtfulness, it mostly is. Among the things that make the iPhone such a pleasure to use:
The Keyboard
In many ways, the virtual keyboard is the single most gutsy risk Apple took with the iPhone--the essential design decision that shaped the rest of the device. While many--including myself--were skeptical about how well the lack of tactile feedback would work for them, I'm proud to report that after only a week of use I'm a faster typist than I ever was with T9. The on-the-fly auto-correction works admirably (it's right more often than it's wrong and it seems to catch most of my common errors), and the typing interaction design (when was the last time anyone spent much time thinking about that) is wonderfully well thought out--from the way the key set shifts from punctuation back to alpha when you press space, to the completeness of the character set, to the way the space bar disappears and a special ".com" button appears in its place while you're typing URLs. In my estimation, no single feature does more to make the iPhone a less frictionless experience than any other phone on the market than its keyboard.
The Maps App
If any app on the iPhone could be considered "killer," in the sense that its very existence justifies the device's purchase, it's the Maps app. I've spent the last week wandering around a strange and daunting city (New York), and the iPhone's maps app has helped me enormously (I've even been able to give directions to tourists on the street without actually knowing where I'm going myself). Back when I had various Sony Ericsson phones, I was an avid fan of the mobile Java Google Maps app, but the iPhone's large, high resolution display and multitouch interface makes wayfinding a far more natural experience than the typical mobile phone "joystick" experience.
The Web Browser
The iPhone commercials don't lie--having a "real," undilluted web browser on a phone is a breath of fresh air. The page rendering is flawless, the support for web technologies is, with the noteable exceptions of Flash and Java, fairly comprehensive (at least compared to most phone browsers), and the multitouch panning/zooming interface is probably about the best reconciliation of the small screen/full page dilemma I've seen.
The iPod Experience
Steve Jobs billed the iPhone as "the best iPod we've ever made,"
and I think that's true in many ways: it has the widescreen
form factor the iPod has always needed to make video compelling, the Coverflow interface is stunning, the song list navigation (with the alphabet down the side for quick jumps) is clever, the "Now Playing" screen (with its giant album covers) is beautiful, and
its On-the-Go Playlist functionality is easier to use than on
traditional iPods.
The Physical Buttons
I haven't heard many people mention this (and it seems like such a simple thing), but I think Apple got things just right with the physical buttons on the iPhone (with a few exceptions I'll mention below). The fact that I can lock the phone with a single button press (as opposed to most non-flip phones, which require multiple key presses for locking) solves a longtime, head slap-level annoyance for me. The fact that I can take the phone in and out of silent mode with a single physical switch (as opposed to some deeply buried virtual preference) also strikes me as an eminently sane decision.
Visual Voicemail
No single thing more poignantly symbolizes to me what I've always hated about phones and phone carriers than traditional voicemail--possibly only fax machines piss me off more. Thankfully, the iPhone turns this disaster into a relatively pleasant experience in the most obvious way possible: by giving me random, GUI-based access to voicemail messages without requiring me to remember arcane numeric shortcuts. I almost hesitate to trumpet this as a feature because it seems ridiculous that it's taken us until 2007 to get such simple (and, obviously, in light of the fact that Apple was able to pull them off, do-able) improvements, but as of now, it remains a major coup of the iPhone.
The Display
The iPhone's display is simply gorgeous. I think it's probably the nicest--in terms of resolution, brightness, and color rendition--that I've ever seen on a mobile device. The photos I've synced to the phone from Aperture look amazing--better than on my computer's display. The inclusion of a light sensor that controls the screen brightness is also a thoughtful touch.
All of that said, the iPhone is still very much a 1.0 device from a newcomer to the mobile space, and, as such, it's likely to have some shortcomings. Among the ones I've noticed:
The Headphone Jack
One of the first things I noticed about the iPhone's case is that I couldn't plug my Bose headphones into it on flights, because its headphone jack is deeply recessed in a very narrow hole. Even the headphones packaged with most iPods don't fit it. Belkin does make an adapter to solve the problem, but it's rather inordinately long and awkward to use.
The Absence of Traditional Mobile Features
This probably isn't something that will bother everyone, but I think I tend to be a bit more of an "advanced" mobile user than the average American, and the iPhone's inability to send an SMS to more than one recipient, or (in particular) to send MMS messages at all, has put it a step behind even some of my clunkier old phones in certain ways. For example, without MMS, in the absence of web browser file uploads (disabled in mobile Safari), and in light of the fact that iPhone email isn't an option for me right now (see below), I have effectively no way to upload images to Flickr. The iPhone, despite its supposedly advanced nature, is the first cameraphone I've ever had where this has been a problem.
The Absence of Traditional iPod Features
As I said, I do think the iPhone is the best iPod Apple's ever made in many ways, but there definitely are some things about it that make me miss my "traditional" iPod. Foremost among them is that I would prefer the iPod aspect of the device to be less compartmentalized--that is, I'd prefer playback (at least play/pause and back forward) controls to be available no matter what part of the device I happen to be in, as they would be on a "real" iPod. It would also be nice to have disk mode back, although I admit my primary motivation there would be so that I could use PodWorks with it. It also seems to me that the volume increments are too large (and the little on screen volume control is too difficult to use precisely).
The Camera
I hate to say it, but my last cameraphone, the Sony Ericsson w810i, kicked the iPhone's ass in both performance and usability. The quality was good enough to almost rival many point-and-shoot digicams, and I loved the fact that you could actually use it like a "real" camera by turning it on its side and pressing a shutter button on the top. The iPhone's camera is barely capable of producing a non-blurry photo in broad daylight; it exhibits the sickly, blue-green-ish color shift that seems to be the hallmark of crappy cameraphone CCDs; and its shutter is triggered by an ergonomically awkward virtual camera button on the phone's screen (which makes holding the thing steady very difficult).
The Email Experience
I ditched Apple Mail in favor of Gmail not long after OS X 10.4 came out, and, except for the fact that I had to use T9 on a phone keypad to type into it, I was very happy using Google's Java Gmail app to get my mail on the go. On the iPhone, of course, that's not an option, and Gmail users are left with two choices: embrace the iPhone's Mail app and access Gmail using POP, or use web-based Gmail through MobileSafari. The first option doesn't work for me because using Gmail through POP, frankly, sucks--it ignores whatever filters you have set up on the web (even messages that completely skip Inbox on the web show up in POP), and it quite unhelpfully puts a copy of every message you send in your POP Inbox. The second option isn't much of a solution because the Gmail site brings MobileSafari to its knees (I'm guessing because Gmail is one of the more Javascript-intense web apps out there, and MobileSafari's Javascript performance could use some work), and even when it doesn't, the packed, full-page Gmail UI requires too much panning, zooming, and clicking on tiny buttons and links to be efficiently usable on the iPhone.
The Web Browser's Performance
So far there seem to be two problems at work here: AT&T's EDGE network appears to be painfully slow when brought to bear on "real" websites (at least it seems to be in New York City, the primary place I've had occasion to use it thus far), and (as I mentioned above) the iPhone's Javascript performance seems to be a bit lacking. Whatever the cause, I find myself beating by head against the wall a lot when trying to use the MobileSafari on both Wi-Fi and EDGE (not to mention the fact that I rather pointedly lost a "look it up on Wikipedia" contest to a Blackberry user last night).
Scrolling Anxiety
Since touching both "clicks" and ends a "rolling" scroll (e.g. when you flick your finger upward to start the iPod songlist scrolling and then touch again to stop it), I often find scrolling a nerve wracking experience. What happens quite frequently is that I'll accidentally register a click and start a song playing or something when I simply mean to stop the scroll. Maybe I'm unique in this concern, and maybe there's a good way around it (using two fingers to stop the scroll perhaps?), but I find this annoying and it frequently makes me miss my iPod's scroll wheel.
Apparent Lack of Vision
Like most other Mac developers, I was very excited to discover that the iPhone, unlike Apple's previous mobile devices (i.e. iPods) was going to be an honest-to-God "handheld Mac" running a form of OS X. As I told Merlin Mann at MacWorld, I was excited about this because a) it had the potential to greatly expand the market for Cocoa apps beyond the Mac market and into, essentially, the iPod market and b) it could foster the creation of mobile social software applications that could go far beyond things like Dodgeball and Twitter (applications I was very eager to develop myself).
Unfortunately, as many others have already pointed out, Apple's actual offerings to would-be iPhone developers have been very disappointing. Most of us were looking forward to developing groundbreaking mobile Cocoa applications that would take full advantage of the iPhone's impressive array of gadgetry (orientation sensor, light sensor, camera, multitouch display), but Apple has told us we should make due with...Javascript. No offense to web developers (unlike Will Shipley, I have a lot of respect for Javascript), but I find it hard to imagine anyone creating a killer, breakthrough app that could only be done on the iPhone using only web technologies.
As for the social software part, I've had the sense for years that Apple (or at least the higher echelon of Apple) doesn't really "get it," and the iPhone continues Apple's streak of missing the boat on social apps. As Peter Magnusson points out (though I think a lot of his suggestions are a bit Web 2.0 wanky), the iPhone could have been a bold forary into the kinds of social networking applications--particularly location-based services and "lifeblogging"--that it's young, hip user base will embrace. Instead, with the exception of the iPod and the YouTube app, it's stuck in Blackberry mode with mostly prosaic, productivity oriented offerings (and, unlike the Mac, it offers no way for third party developers to bring in the fun).
All of that said, the current iPhone is still only the very beginning of what is essentially a new platform, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple address all of the above issues (most of which can be corrected in software) over time. Even the lack of an API is something I suspect (or at least hope) is more the result of time constraints than a dearth of goodwill on Apple's part. I look forward to the future of what I think will, in the long term, be a fantastic mobile platform.
I've always been one to jump on the latest and greatest social networking sites (my home/status page is testament to this). I like to try out these sites out of my own curiosity, although every time I join a new site, I hesitate for a moment and ask myself, "Why?"
Ever since Six Degrees [now defunct] in the late nineties, I was compelled to make connections with the people I knew, through the magic of the internet. The world wide web made our own worlds smaller, and we were enchanted with the idea of connecting and reconnecting with people from near and far. With Friendster, we saw people get obsessed with collecting friends... some even likened it to Pokémon (Gotta catch 'em all!), which was rising in popularity at the same time. Friendster forever changed the definition of the word "Friend".
MySpace brought social networking to a younger (read: mainstream) audience and made itself a part of the vernacular. From then on, it got ridiculous. Social networking sites sprung up faster than anyone could count, and to this day, invitations to join someone's network litter our inboxes, and people foam at the mouth for invitations to the beta version of the newest networking site.
I feel that part of the appeal of social networks is in the ability for those of the introverted persuasion (e.g., geeks and nerds) to be able to connect to many like-minded people. We became social networking junkies, binging on forming online friendships. Why not? It's so easy... we can be friends with someone by simply clicking a button!
Yesterday, I found myself purging my social networks of people I feel little or no connection with. It was still hard for me to delete/remove/de-friend some people from these lists, so I let some of them be. What if they found out I didn't have them in my Friend List anymore? What would I say? How would I explain it? Is it easier to keep them on my Friend List to avoid confrontation? Would this confrontation even exist?
And why the heck am I so worried about this?
Every once in awhile I come across a song so wonderfully ingenious and exciting that I go around telling people breathlessly that I can't believe it was written by human beings. I then proceed to listen to it almost continually for days on end, soaking up its every nuance. "Second Hand News," the opening track on Fleetwood Mac's Rumours is just such a song.
I first came to appreciate this classic Lindsey Buckingham composition this year at SXSW. As it happened, I had come to Austin right on the heels of a terrible bout of mononucleosis, for which my doctor had prescribed a course of a powerful anti-inflammatory steroid called prednisone. Unfortunately, while the drug relieved both the terrifying throat swelling and crippling fatigue I had been experiencing, it also had the unfortunate side effect of MAKING IT SO THAT I NEVER SLEPT. Early one morning after staring at the ceiling of my room at the Stephen F. Austin all night, I decided to just throw in the towel and take a sunrise walk from downtown Austin to Barton Springs. What better accompaniment to a morning of drug-addled insomnia, I thought, than a selection from Fleetwood Mac's "California cocaine trilogy." And I was right: its air of weariness and bitter resignation fit the moment perfectly.
As "Second Hand News" became a major part of my personal soundtrack for the next few weeks, I also began to appreciate it as a wonderful example of musical sprezzatura (the Italian word for the art of making the difficult look easy). The chord structure is basically just a simple riff of A, D, and E (I-IV-V)--the sort of simple ditty you'd find in a Mel Bay beginner guitar book. But Buckingham has three tricks up his sleeve that make his arrangement exciting. First, his rhythm guitar feel lends the track an infectious energy; second, his escalating, choir-like outro ("I'm just second hand news, I'm just second hand news") gives the whole affair a euphoric climax; and third, his use of an open D guitar tuning on the second guitar, combined with the simple chord progression, allows him to add harmonic interest through the use of unusual harmonic guitar fills. All of this just goes to show you that compelling rock songs can be built out of the simplest of materials.
Credit to Foofy @ FooBuilder
What is (or would be) your DJ name?
DJ IslandBoy.
I've used this name when I used to DJ at my university's radio station.
What's a saying or phrase that's never made sense to you?
Same Difference.
