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Apple Event – My Live (to tape) Blog

A frame grab from Apple's livestream. I was watching it on my iPad, via AT&T's 3G connection.

The session starts with a reminder that Skype is a piece of crap. I was supposed to be joining Leo and Alex in a special MacBreak talking about the presentation as it happens. I even had a special MacBook and iPad setup with a camera and a mic. But Skype said no ****ing way.

And Skype’s screwup cost me about $30. I paid for a day’s worth of hotel broadband solely for the Skypecast. And then when I realized that I’d need two sets of headphones (one to listen to the event on my iPad, one so I could listen to the TWiT studio on my Macbook) I ran to the corner Walgreens and bought a cheap pair of Sonys.

I repeat: Skype is just a total misery. It frustrates the hell out of me that I need to use it but can’t count on it in any way.

Anyway. So here I am in my hotel room with the MacBook on one side, with this blog post open. And the iPad is next to it, streaming the show live via AT&T.

Steve takes the stage and starts by showing off the glam new Paris Apple Store, and the new Shanghai Apple Store. New York gets a big glass cube; Shanghai gets a big glass cylinder. Coca-Cola is now in negotiations to fill it with 178,000 gallons of beverage on special occasions.

I’m not “liveblogging” this because there’s an actual livestream that people should probably watch instead. This blog post is intended for the contemplation and illumination of future generations.

Very good video quality…it ranges from “webcast” quality to “netflix streaming app” quality…depending on how much the video is moving around. Video is _slightly_ choppy…I’m guessing that I’m seeing less than a full 30 frames per second.

Interesting statistic: Apple Stores are seeing one million visitors per day. Yes, on a good day, but that’s still an interesting figure; Steve compares it to the days when Macworld Expo would be happy to see 30,000 people.

iOS is the next topic.

iOS 4.1:Bugs fixed — The wonky proximity sensor on the iPhone, Bluetooth, and iPhone 3G bugs.

New feature: HDR photos! Very cool.

HD video upload over WiFi.

TV show rentals. One rumor confirmed.

Game Center.

HDR Photography. Tap a button on the camera app and it’ll bracket the exposures and combine them into an HDR image. So instead of black shadows and blown out skies, there’ll be plenty of detail in the whole image. The Camera app writes both the “normal” and the HDR version to your photo library so you can pick the one you like.

I love HDR and use it all the time…if this works well, then the iPhone will kick the ass of many real cameras, let alone cameraphones. I wonder if they’re doing “real” HDR or doing a “smart sampling” technique to combine separate exposures? Some consumer apps do that instead of using the real HDR algorithms.

Game Center. Here’s the aggressive sell of the iPad and iPhone (and, um, iTV? [edit to add later: no, as it turns out] as a gaming platform. They’ve always had success there but this is the one where they say really put it out there.

Mike Capps from Epic Games demos new games that take advantage of Game Center. “Project Sword.”

The name seems to indicate that it should be followed by “: The Leverage Of Barjed-Sijnjen Chapter 4, ‘The Re-Brobnoning’.”

Good demo of head to head combat over GameCenter. Also showing that gameplay can be recorded as video. I wonder about latency; are they playing via WiFi or 3G?

Game will be out soon on iPhone and iPad. Looks neat.

[Edit: demo is available as a free download.]

iOS 4.1 available next week for iPhone and iPod Touch; free download via iTunes.

Sneak peek at iOS 4.2. “It’s all about iPad.”

Brings “Everything to iPad”

Wireless Printing – brings long sustained applause. Also something called “AirPlay.” I bet this is a WiFi video sending scheme. [Edit later to say: yes, it is.]

Now there’s a “Print” tool in Pages. Select a printer, number of copies, etc. A new “Print Center” app appears in the multitasking area when a print job is in progress. You can see jobs and cancel them.

AirPlay: it’s the new name for AirTunes. You’ll be able to stream audio, video and photos, which means they need a new, vaguer name for it.

Live demo on an iPad. Steve launches Pandora. He’s got it streaming in the background as he does mail and Safari. We see the exact same multitasking interface as on the iPhone: screen slides up to reveal icons of running apps. You can switch apps and kill them.

Folders: works the exact same way on the iPad as on the iPhone. This is a reminder that “iOS” was a necessary rebranding: if you own an iPhone, you have a mini iPad; if you have an iPad, you have a big iPhone. It’s the same thing; it’s feature-identical and they all work the same on both hardware.

iOS 4.2 will be out in November for iPhone iPad and Touch.

Onward to the iPods. This is, indeed, the annual Holiday Music Event. This is what we’re expecting.

275 million iPods sold. See? This is why we wonder why Amazon hasn’t said how many Kindles they’ve sold. Also why Apple hasn’t said how many AppleTV’s they’ve sold. If you’re happy with the sales, you don’t keep them secret.

All-new designs for every model. Even the Classic? (As in “We’ve redesigned it: it’s now invisible in our product line.”)

[Edit: iPod Classic is absent from mention. So Apple officially is done with hard drive-based iPods?]

iPod Shuffle. Interesting to see how (if?) it’s important today. “People clearly missed the buttons” from the last edition (the “aluminum stick of Trident gum” design). New one has the familiar “button ring”…looks more like a slightly smaller version of the 2008 version.

It includes VoiceOver, just like the Trident model…so you can do playlists and hear names of albums and tracks Can you control it via voice as well? Must ask.

15 hours of battery life. Retail package looks like an ice cube.

$49 price! Nice. They needed to sell this CHEAP to compete with Sandisk’s cheap and excellent music/video players. Lowest iPod price ever, I think.

iPod Nano. Another one that maybe has identity problems, in light of the iPod Touch and how close it is in price.

Eliminated the clickwheel: it’s now a multitouch device. It’s a tiny square with a color screen. “Wearable” via a clip. It’s large enough for four app buttons. 46% smaller, 42% lighter. Hardware volume buttons. FM radio, Nike+ and pedometer. Works in 29 languages. Battery life of 24 hours.

Does it run apps? Other than the built-in features? It does looks like an iPod Touch crammed into a screen that can only hold a 2×2 square icon panel. [Edit to add: nope, no mention of third-party iOS apps. Must ask later.]

Nice clock app…looks like it’d make a nice watch when clipped onto an armband. Albeit a watch that only runs for X hours before you need to recharge it and probably doesn’t tell you the time until you “wake” it.

Hmm. I’m really going to need to play with this. I don’t know how useful a touch interface will be on a screen this small; your finger is covering up so much of the screen. Especially when you’re doing particularly clever things like trying to “scroll” through the alphabet and find a specific album. Even Steve appears to be operating the new Nano cautiously. On the plus side, when you and I use it, the results won’t be on a huge HD auditorium screen for the world to see,

(I’m nerdly impressed that they’ve got a hack via the dock connector that has the output from this dinky little device projected right onto that huge projector in the auditorium. No, this won’t show up in the consumer device. But I love the idea of this dinky thing being used as a video source.)

Screen rotates via touch (apparently not automatically via sensors).

Comes in seven colors including Graphite and “Product RED” editions.

What’s the capacity? $149 for 8 gigs, $179 for 16 gig version.

Still has a bit of an ID crisis. Why not pay a little extra for an iPod Touch, when it does so much more? I guess for some people, the smaller size really is that important. [Edit: I forgot how much more expensive the iPod Touch is, too.]

iPod Touch. — …Steve hears my comment here in the hotel room and acknowledges that the iPod Touch is the best-selling iPod.

More rah-rah about Apple mobile gaming: “outsells Nintendo and Sony portable players, combined.” I believe that number…but at PAX Expo it seems as though everyone had Nintendo DS systems, not iPods. I need to think about that.

The new iPod Touch. It’s even thinner. Same basic lines as the older model (not squared edges like the iPhone 4).

As expected: it has the same Retina Display as the iPhone 4 (24 bit color, 326 ppi). Same A4 chip as the iPhone 4 and iPad. Also has the 3-axis gyro.

And Facetime via a front-facing camera. New rear-facing HD camera. No light on the camera (apparently). iPhone’s iMovie app works on the iPod Touch, too.

40 hours of music playback.

8 gigs for $229, 32 gigs for $299, 64 gigs for $399. OK, so there’s the difference between the Nano. I should also remember that someone who wants a consumer music player sees a MUCH bigger difference between the extra dough than someone shopping for (say) a laptop or an ebook reader might.

All iPods will ship next week. Pre-order starts today.

Ads for the new iPods. Apple spokespeople are still trapped in The Matrix, as they’ve been for the past ten years or so. Someday the company will be doing well enough to afford a background scrim or something. Like, one of them peaceful waterfall scenes you get with your school picture or at the boudoir-photography store over at the mall.

iTunes. And now, Apple releases version 10 of the iTunes app. Time for a new app icon! The kids today don’t know what a CD even is any more. Now just musical note over a blue background.

(Please, audience: you’re applauding an icon. Do let’s preserve the Dignity of the Press, wot?)

Added a new “hybrid” view in track listings: if it senses there are bunchs of tracks from an album in a row, it’ll use extra white space to show album art. Nice little flourish; seems like something that a member of the team does for fun, and then it impresses everyone else enough to make it into the actual app.

Quick peek at the iTunes Store. I wonder if they put up a special Katy Perry album art banner so that the keynote didn’t show the “bare-assed on a cloud” art that’s been plastered on iTunes’ front page all week.

New feature for social networking of music: they’re calling it “Ping.” “A social network for music.” It’s built into iTunes. Follow favorite artists and friends to discover the music they’re talking about, listening to, and downloading.

Ping is now in the sidebar, almost like a Device. You can see what your friends are posting and discussing. The idea is that you can click in there and check out music.

Ping will create a custom Top 10 chart of the music your friends are following.

An artist page. recent posts from Lady Gaga, her favorite songs, and concerts she’s appearing in. Click a button to Follow.

Uh-oh…for the first time, the video feed is stuttering a little. screen blacks for a quarter-second three or four times in a row. Must have been the mention of Lady Gaga. Her fans are rabid. Think about what would have happened if the stream got Biebered.

You can control your Followers: let everybody follow you, let people only follow you if you approve each person. Create “circle of friends” So it seems as though they thought hard about privacy controls.

Over 17,000 concert listings. “Ping is open to over 160,000,000 iTunes users in 23 countries immediately. We’re starting with a very large base.”

(Can you buy tickets? Must check.)

Live demo of Ping. You see a Facebook-style aggregate feed of all of the people your’e following. Shows an artist who seems to have posted a bunch of tour photos. You can leave a comment.

I wonder how useful this will be. I generally don’t care what a million fans of an artist have to say. I only care about what my friends are thinking, or a handful of critics/commentators whom I like.

You have a profile page with a photo and description, with your favorite tracks and albums. Does this work with affiliate listings? Do I get a kickback if people buy tracks based on my recommendation? iTunes does have an affiliate program. Must ask.

Oh my god: the video stuttered again…and once again it only happened WHILE LADY GAGA WAS ON THE SCREEN. Fear the Gaga! Gaga “posted a backstage video” to her own Ping stream.

People can see that you’ve purchased a song. Hmm. Do I have control on a song-by-song basis? I wouldn’t want to just automatically publish my whole buying history. “I only bought that ABBA song because I wanted to make fun of it in a blog post…I swear!”

Ping also is on the iPhone. Checking activity and making posts, etc.

iTunes 10 available today. I immediately check Apple.com but they’ve still got the iTunes 9 download link up.

One More Thing…

One more Hobby, Steve says, getting applause. Yes, it’s time for AppleTV or iTV.

Introduced 2006 and not a big hit. “Users love them,” but Apple has never said how many they’ve sold.

Apple asked users what they want. They want hollywood movies and TV shows whenever they want. “They don’t want Amateur Hour.” And they want HD. And lower prices for content.

They don’t want a computer on their TV…

Did Steve just mention Lady Gaga again? Now the stream has frozen completely: static screen. Had to restart it.

Back a few minutes later.

All HD, All rentals, no purchases. No storage because you don’t store anything on the device. Rental prices are so cheap that it’s still less expensive than buying, even with multiple views.

No syncing required. Seems like he’s saying that Apple’s done a better job, solving problems by making it more like a Roku box than a “hotplate Mac.”

$4.99 first-run HD movies, rented the day and date that the DVD is released. And they get cheaper after first-run.

Renting an HD TV show is now 99 cents. And it’s commercial-free.

They’ve got ABC and Fox on board; “we think the rest of the studios will see the light and get on board with us.”

Awesome: you can also stream Netflix. That immediately makes it relevant.

Also support for YouTube, Flickr, and MobileMe, all in HD. And stream music photos and video from Mac or PC.

UI is simple, looks like the last-generation AppleTV (the “infinite corridor” of scrolling movie posters). Also includes the TomatoMeter! RottenTomatoes.com is unquestionably a powerhouse of the online film community.

What the hell? Now the theater is empty. The stream jump-cut to…what? Is it people entering, or people having left?

Refresh the stream again. Stream picks up roughly whee it dropped. Steve is now renting a movie. I’s skipping around a bit. I think it’s speeding things up to get me caught up to the “live” end of the movie. Iron Man 2, btw.

TV. Nice twist: it keeps track of your favorite shows and tells you about shows you’ve missed. So I could check and see that last week’s “Simpsons” was a new ep, not a repeat, and watch it for 99 cents.

Netflix. It seems to have the same features as what you’d see on a Roku (queue, suggestions, New Arrivals, searches, genres).

Finds your iTunes and photo libraries. I mnight have missed something: dunno if it finds it just on the local net or anywhere in the world via MobileMe. I bet it just works on your local network.

Slideshow looks a little like an Apple commercial. Yes, your kids and wife are in The Matrix again. Very pretty, though.

“Now let me show you something else that’s really cool.”

Yes, you can stream content from an iOS device to an AppleTV. Streaming “Up” from iPad to TV. Tap a button in the iOS 4.2 video player app to choose where you want to stream it to. Will stream it to the TV via WiFi.

(Makes me wonder what they did this time to “clean” the room and make sure that other WiFi signals wouldn’t screw up the demo hardware’s connection!)

(It also forces me to reflect upon the fact that if you buy a copy of “Up” from the iTunes Store, you can connect your iPad to your HDTV and watch it via a special network box and a WiFi network, but not via a $29 cable that Apple sells to connect the iPad to an external monitor. This is thanks to the DRM embedded in video purchases.)

AppleTV used to be $229 — another stumbling block to its success. New price is just $99.

Another huge step forward: $99 is the consumers’ “Sure, what the hell?” price. AppleTV available in 4 weeks.

“We started doing this music stuff for simple reason: we really love music.” Oboy! There’s going to be some live music!

“This group has had four albums so far…” OK, so it’s not Ringo and Paul. It’s U2. I mean, Coldplay.

Chris Martin, ladies and gentlemen…Chris Martin.

Is he going to play the special custom guitar with the Apple soundhole?

“I wish the rest of the band were here…but they’re too lazy,” he said, sitting at the piano.

Here the stream stops and then stops again, after a restart. I leave it alone.

31 Comments

Categories: apple, yellowtext.

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By Ihnatko
— September 1, 2010 at 2:46 pm

Reminder: I’ll be speaking in Chicago Wednesday night

…And of course, the main topic will be all of the news Apple saw fit to cram into their big media event earlier that day. This meeting of the Chicago Apple User Group is open to everybody so do come on by. 7 PM at 25 West Hubbard.

Details are on the group’s website.

4 Comments

Categories: yellowtext.

By Ihnatko
— August 31, 2010 at 7:15 am

Weekend TV Double-Alert: Peter O’Toole and Bad Piloting

I’m going to suggest that you watch two things on TV this weekend. One of these recommendations is in your best interests and the other one is in mine. Does that sound fair?

Good.

Photo of Peter O'Toole from "The Stunt Man"

Turner Classic Movies is showing Peter O’Toole movies all day today. I’m confident that no further explanation is necessary and that you’ve already broken the news to your 18-year-old daughter that she’ll have to find somebody else to drive her to college this weekend. There isn’t a bad movie in the whole day’s schedule, which is to say: no, they aren’t showing “Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage.”

Which is a real movie:

But I’m singling out “The Stunt Man,” which airs at midnight. It’s far and away my favorite Peter O’Toole performance and the movie itself is always a contender for my personal top ten favorite films.

It also presents me with a problem, each and every time I try to get someone to see it: I won’t tell you anything about this movie.

“The Stunt Man” is best seen cold. If I describe the plot, if I describe Peter O’Toole’s character, if I even give you the genre of this movie ahead of time, I think I’ll diminish the your experience. It’s a brilliantly manipulative screenplay. Richard Rush has a keen awareness of how an audience watches a movie.

Read nothing about it. Tune in to TCM just a minute or two before midnight and leave the sound off, just in case Robert Osborne is wandering through his little fake library saying something unhelpful, such as the whole plot of the film.

Portrait of Phil PlaitOnward to the selfish recommendation.

My buddy Phil Plait shot a three-episode pilot for The Discovery Channel and the first show airs Sunday night at 10 PM. “Phil Plait’s Bad Universe” is an astronomy-oriented science show with the usual Discovery Channel spin: “if at all possible, shoot some video of the host in a blast shelter cautiously pushing a very serious-looking button.”

It’s all part of the very laudable goal of making science programming watchable. Real science is a lousy spectator sport. Even the most earth-shattering discoveries usually involve a graph with a spike right in the place where the math predicted it would be. If your mission is to communicate the significance of that spike to a lay audience, you might have to do some literal shattering of the earth. You need to blow some stuff up.

Phil’s science blogging has always been eminently readable and I whenever I finish one of his Bad Astronomy posts, I feel a little less dumb than I was before. Judging from the teaser, his TV show will be just as successful. The pilot episode talks about all the stuff in space that could collide with Earth, and the things we can do to prevent it.

(My suggestion: a series of local referenda banning asteroid strikes in individual communities. Look at Berkeley, California. They  haven’t been struck by a nuclear warhead even once in the years since they passed a resolution banning them from city limits.)

Watch the show and write your local congressperson.

I do want my friend to succeed, of course. But I’m also aware that if his show gets greenlit for a full-season order, I’ll also be one step closer to getting invited to a Discovery Channel Christmas party. Assuming that his wife can’t make it and he needs a new Plus One.

4 Comments

Categories: yellowtext.

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By Ihnatko
— August 28, 2010 at 4:32 pm

Heigh-ho the derry-o, the TARDIS on the Dome

The TARDIS at MIT

It’s easy for Boston-area geeks to get a little bit blasé about the sudden appearances of improbable objects atop the Great and Not-So-Great domes atop Building 10 and Building 7 in the center of the MIT campus. If it’s your first time at the ballpark, a spinning no-look over-the-shoulder catch that robs the visiting team of two guaranteed RBIs is a heartstopping thrill. Meanwhile, the experienced season ticketholders are nattering to each other that  if the centerfielder had been paying attention to the shortstop, he wouldn’t have been playing so wildly out of position in the first place. Same deal here.

Tonight I attended a dinner salon of local geeks. Of course, conversation turned to the subject of today’s TARDIS appearance. Inevitably, we compared it to previous dome hacks.

“The phone booth was better,” someone said. “It was a working phone booth.”

“How do you know that isn’t a working TARDIS?” someone else asked, rather pointedly.

And all around the table, there was agreement that any final judgement would need to be postponed.

18 Comments

Categories: yellowtext.

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By Ihnatko
— August 27, 2010 at 12:18 am

Apple Event on September 1 – The theme is “Oh, God-dammit!”

Artwork from Apple invitation. Acoustic guitar with an Apple logo-shaped soundhole.

The artwork from next week's Apple event invitation.

Sometimes, it just doesn’t pay to check your email!

Not 24 hours after I was on MacBreak saying “If Apple were to hold a special event to show off the holiday-season iPods and stuff, we wouldn’t get more than a week’s notice”…I got an invite to an Apple event being held in San Francisco a week from today. Behold the artwork, which surely will be scrutinized as carefully as Obama’s birth certificate, and with the same sort of wild-arsed conclusions.

Well.

My week just got more interesting.

I’m scheduled to talk at the Chicago Apple User Group that night. San Francisco to Chicago in one afternoon is a bit of a bumpy commute and it’s probably a bit much to ask all of its members to just sort of fly out to California and hold the meeting at a food court near the event site.

And I don’t even have the freedom to think up a Cunning Plan…the Kindle 3 arrived this morning and I’m crunching to finish a review that can run in the Sun-Times tomorrow.

You know, what’s the harm in just asking the user group to fly out to San Francisco? It’s a lovely city. I’m sure they’d really enjoy it. Maybe I’m just worrying over nothing, here…

39 Comments

Categories: apple.

By Ihnatko
— August 25, 2010 at 2:22 pm

Come see me in Chicago on September 1!

Shrewd self-promoter that I am, I often forget to tell people where I’m going until I’ve already been there.

Well! Not this time! I’m coming to Chicago next week to speak at the Chicago Apple User Group on Wednesday, September 1. The event is open to the public and kicks off at 7 PM, at the group’s usual meeting space (25 West Hubbard, on the second floor).


View Larger Map

I haven’t seen the space yet but I’m hoping there’s a wall of chicken wire between the stage and the rest of the room. Nothing seems to unite an audience and increase the energy level of the room than the knowledge that beer bottles can be thrown without any risk of an assault charge.

More information is up on the group’s site.

What will I be talking about? Chiefly, I’m going to be presenting the iPad with its six-month report card, and talking about Apple’s new iOS/MacOS universe. But I’m hoping that I’ll save time at the end for Q&A about any topic folks are keen to discuss.

I’m hoping to do some sort of Tweetup afterward. As you can tell by the map, there’s no shortage of nearby spots where a small group of people could drink and kibitz. Alas, I still need to solve for two variables, in the form of Local Friends Whom I Want To See, but Who Haven’t Yet Gotten Back To Me Regarding The Days And Times That Will Work For Them. So stay tuned.

9 Comments

Categories: Events, announce.

By Ihnatko
— August 24, 2010 at 6:18 pm

Darwinist Consumerism: What’s the most ethical way to buy books?

Street performer dressed as an angel poses in Harvard Square in front of two hipsters dressed in black.

An Angel of Death (or perhaps just an Angel of Street Performance) hovers near Wordsworth Books in Harvard Square. Photo by me.

WESTHAMPTON BEACH, N.Y. — Ever since Books & Books opened its doors on Main Street here last month, it has missed out on some of the adulation usually reserved for new independent bookstores in the age of Amazon.

Terry Lucas founded Open Book in 1999. The new location now has less foot traffic.Several storeowners nearby have ordered their staffs not to shop there. Indignant older women have marched inside the bookstore to yell at employees. And someone, or perhaps several someones, may have sneakily placed used chewing gum between the pages of new books.

The animosity seems to have stemmed from the fact that Books & Books moved in when there was already an independent bookstore, the Open Book, around the corner. And as some people saw it, there was no room for another one.

via Books and Books Arrives and Sides Are Taken – NYTimes.com.

Actually, I originally followed a link via Fark.com. But that’s beside the point. I thought this was an interesting article. It demonstrates that it’s possible to be a Darwinist consumer — to feel very strongly that you’re doing the right thing both as an individual and as a logically-minded citizen — and to still feel like a jerk.

I’m sure there’s a proper academic economics term for this idea. What I mean is that when I patronize a business, it’s solely because of the level of service that they provide. Every transaction is a selfish one. I don’t buy things to make a political statement or to support A Way Of Life. I love bookstores. I just don’t particularly care if any given shop survives or not.

And yet, I love books and I love independent, locally-owned businesses. What can I say? It’s a complex world.

When the first Barnes & Noble opened up in my old neighborhood, I was thrilled. But local, independent bookstores were up in arms, crying about how this was another tragic case of Huge Corporations putting the screws to honest, decent, local businesses. They were vocal and active, trying to draft other businesses and community organizations into forming a grassroots movement of some kind. All I can say is that they certainly put way more time and effort into getting articles into the local papers than they ever did in courting me as a customer of their shops.

Before the Barnes & Noble opened up, there were only two or three bookstores within a short drive of my house. Two sold nothing but sappy romance novels and other books solely of interest to Ladies Who Sew Little Outfits For Their Pets. I distinctly remember walking into one of these shops and getting a glance that communicated “We have less than $20 in the register” the moment I wandered within range of the owner’s trifocals.

The third seemed to be little more than a storage area for the owner’s book collection. It was a secondhand shop — I love secondhand bookstores — without any organization to it whatsoever. During the colder months, I believe that one or two area homeless people would build a little igloo of books and live there, warm and unnoticed among the other shapeless heaps of great literature.

I walked into this new Barnes & Noble for the first time. And here I saw thousands and thousands of books covering nearly every topic. Multiple clerks would help you find whatever you were looking for. The wide, well-lit aisles were dotted with comfortable club chairs and you were welcome to just sit and read for a couple of hours if that’s what you wished. “This ain’t a library, kid!” was articulated solely through the sentiment “…none of your tax dollars are paying for this.”

Inevitably, those three locally-owned bookstores went out of business. It was (I hope) the only time I had an actual, practical demonstration of a favorite phrase I had once come across:

“I could watch this die and feel nothing.”

I wasn’t pleased. I wasn’t unhappy. These stores had absolutely no relevance to me.

I should draw a distinct line between the awful stores in the suburbs and the fantastic ones in downtown Boston and Cambridge. As a kid, I used to make regular excursions (involving a bus and two different subway lines) to Harvard Square. First, I’d hit Wordsworth. Then, I’d rummage through the two or three used bookstores along Church Street. Finally, I’d wander around in the Harvard Bookstore and get lunch at The Greenhouse while I read my new treasures.

My book-buying habits smoothly transitioned over to Amazon.com when the time came. But I still kept brick-and-mortar bookstores in the loop. Amazon’s automated recommendations are often uncanny and the discounts can be the difference between being able to afford an art book and having to let it go. But no online retailer can replicate the experience of wandering through aisles in search of a book that you don’t know exists, but which will become your consuming focus after reading just the first twelve pages.

So I still relied upon traditional bookstores for “discovery.” I’m a sucker for that pair of bookcases that display “Staff Picks.” If I found it in a brick-and-mortar bookstore, I bought it in a brick-and-mortar bookstore, dammit. It would have been gauche to jot down the title and then go home and save four dollars and thirty cents by ordering it online.

I’m satisfied with the logical reasons that define my book shopping. Nonetheless, I felt a pang of complicit guilt when I hit Harvard Square one winter day after a long absence and found that the enormous Wordsworth store — which had occupied the entire crescent of that block and defined the Square for me since the first day I got off at the Harvard stop on the Red Line — was vacant. They’d gone out of business a few months earlier, after two unprofitable years and an inability to compete with Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Borders.

I absolved myself by noting that (1) I stopped going to that store because I rarely had an excuse to be in Harvard Square; (2) As much as I liked the idea of this bookstore, my book-buying needs were being better served by Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com…on a personal level, it was simple Consumer Darwinism.

…And finally (3) Oh, for God’s sake, you stinkin’ hippie…there was a Barnes & Noble in Harvard Square as early as 1962!

My basic book-buying scheme remained in place. Amazon.com was for search-and-purchase missions. Brick-and-mortar stores were for “discoveries.”

Great. And then I got a Kindle, and it left me with a big, big quandary.

I just don’t buy physical books any more. If a book is in print, it’s probably available via the Kindle store. If it isn’t, I can wait until it shows up in the catalogue, and I’ll almost certainly find a different ebook that I’ll like just as well. And if the book I want is out of print, it’s far easier to locate a used copy on Amazon.com than in a secondhand bookstore. Even if the store in question isn’t studded with street people living in forts made from Jackie Collins novels like my late and unlamented old neighborhood used bookstore.

And when I buy secondhand books through Amazon I am indeed purchasing them from local, independent sellers. They’re just not local relative to me, that’s all.

Where does that leave my local bookstores? I still drop by to browse. But my old system has stopped working. If I discover a great book at the store and I buy a digital edition for my iPad, it feels a little bit like shoplifting. And yet I know I can’t pay $23 for a physical book that will do nothing but remind me to buy the $9.99 Kindle edition when I get home.

Fortunately, my favorite stores still sell magazines, and cards, and other things that spin in the close orbit of hardcovers and paperbacks. I’ll happily spend $15 in other departments; I feel as though I’m paying the store their “finder’s fee” while still getting items of useful value.

I have to be honest and say that I’ve no idea where this is all going. I’ll be terribly, terribly sad if my favorite regular bookstores close their doors…but I don’t know what I can do to stop that. They no longer sell a product that I use on a regular basis. As a kid, I couldn’t imagine a future in which I’d describe a book that way. But I also couldn’t imagine a device which weighs little more than a single hardcover but represents a reading library of…

(hang on, I’ll actually count them out)

…eighteen books, close to a hundred comic books, and dozens of feature-length articles. To say nothing of all of the movies and music I’ve got on this thing.

Back to the New York Times article. I confess that I can’t see what all the fuss is about. A new bookshop opened up “about a dozen storefronts away” from another bookstore, and that’s gotten a lot of people upset. If it happened in my neighborhood, I certainly wouldn’t be yelling at the new shop owner, or sticking used gum in the pages of his merchandise.

I’d just shop at the better store. I enthusiastically believe in charity for people…but not for businesses.

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Categories: yellowtext.

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By Ihnatko
— August 18, 2010 at 4:34 pm

Geek alarm clocks: the statistics

Well, you just never know who’s out there reading your blog. A mid-level official at a three-letter government agency read my previous post about an idea for a geeky new kind of alarm clock. He sent me an email which included some interesting data about alarm clock usage among geeks.

Apparently, they track these things on a month-by-month basis. I’ve boiled down his 117-page draft report into an illuminating pair of pie charts:

Pie chart, showing six different nerdy ways of waking up.

Pie chart showing that after "Inception" premiered, all geeks switched to an alarm clock that plays the Judith Piaf song.

And yes, it’s an awesome way to start the day. I’ve used that song twice and both times, I awoke with a sense of destiny and purpose. I felt as though incredible things were afoot, and that I was a key player in a complicated and important plan.

And then I pulled my MacBook into bed, and started reading comic strips.

This is the best version of the song, on Amazon MP3: Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien

(Hey, cool: I just noticed that the whole album is just five bucks! The Voice Of the Sparrow / The Very Best Of Edith Piaf (Domestic Only))

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Categories: yellowtext.

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By Ihnatko
— August 8, 2010 at 1:30 am

Wake to Scorsese

Promo photo from "The Apartment" with Shirley McLane and Jack Lemmon.

It disappoints me that the computers that are embedded in common household devices keep getting more and more powerful and yet it’s rare when a new toaster oven does something that surprises and delights you.

Okay, bad example. But you know what I mean. There was a happy accident this morning: I happened to wake up about five minutes before “The Apartment” started on cable. It got me thinking about my cable box. These days a cable box is a real computer with a real OS and a real developers’ kit, with a full network connection and everything.

And yet what does it really do, beyond changing channels and displaying an onscreen programming guide? I’d pay ten bucks for an app that let me tell the box “If there’s a Billy Wilder/Jack Lemmon movie starting up between 7 and 10 AM, then turn on the TV, tune it to that channel, display the title of the movie on the screen, and play an alarm clock sound ten minutes before the movie begins.”

Actually, I’d even pay five bucks per month for it as a service. There’s be a whole list of things Worth Waking Me Up For; I’d keep adding stuff to it as I go. Over the years I’ve tried and failed to find a surefire alarm clock. I even wrote an app that wouldn’t turn off the alarm until I keyed in the square root of the number on the screen, to short circuit the “reach over and slap the ‘snooze’ button” gambit but I got around it via the simple expediency of sleeping through the noise.

But would I go back to sleep knowing that I was going to miss “Goodfellas”? The “Two Cathedrals” episode of “West Wing” or a “Reno, 911″ marathon? No, no.

Let’s see. We need to refine this a little so that the cable box doesn’t wake me up unless it’s nearly time for me to wake up anyway. I bet the computer could get a good idea of my waking and sleeping hours from the remote activity; during late hours of the day, it can reasonably guess that if the cable box is asleep, then so am I.

So: the “wake me for a good show” window opens six hours after there’s no activity on the cable box. And the window closes at 11, when I’m out of bed anyway.

(Probably out of bed.)

I suspect that this feature would be a big hit with freelancers who make their own daily schedules and college students who never had any intention of attending their 8:30 AM English Lit classes in the first place.

The important thing with ideas like this one is to know when to stop developing it. If the cable box is keeping an eye on my sleep rhythms, all kinds of things are possible…including “Mom” modes in which you try to watch something at 2 AM on a Tuesday and it throws up a curt notice reading “On a school night?”

If the thing you’re trying to watch is on Cinemax, it adds the line “…and you should really find yourself a girlfriend.”

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Categories: yellowtext.

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By Ihnatko
— August 6, 2010 at 9:28 am

Photoshop Disasters: The Home Game ANSWER!

The line “…I wonder if you can spot it, too” in Saturday’s post was a spontaneous thing but boy, did I enjoy all of the responses. Here’s the original photo again:

A lovely photo of Boston's Public Garden, with two swans sliding into a calm lagoon and a 140-year-old iron footbridge in the background.

I’ll show you the original, untouched imagery. But first, let’s roll through some of the guesses:

  • “The debris in the water looks like dust on the bed of a scanner.” Nope…this was shot digitally. I did momentarily consider erasing all of those little bits, but that would have been overkill.
  • “Is it the unexplained circle of water ripples?” Oddly enough…nope. I myself have been trying to think of why the ripples look a little out-of-place. Maybe the swan entered the water at one angle, and then changed course? Midway through the edit, I thought “Damn…I must have made a clumsy, square selection at some point.” This is why I sometimes find myself returning to the original image to make sure I’m not “fixing” something that’s actually a natural feature.
  • “Oversharpening of the trees?” Nope. Or at least I didn’t give the trees any special attention. I don’t think I applied any sharpening to this image. I might have done it to the whole thing by reflex.
  • “A little quaint for my taste.” Point taken. I think it’s more photographic and stylish than hotel room art, but the image would still be alarmingly appropriate for the title screen of a wedding video. The main focus of my attention was the bridge, which I think is one of the prettiest public structures in Boston. Other shots of the bridge in this series use angles that are more dynamic. I liked that I caught one of the swans just as she was about to jump into the water.
  • “It has to be the light on the left. It looks like it is behind the tree at its base, but the post and light are in front of the tree.” Nope, I didn’t do anything to the trees or the lights on the bridge. I think the trees behind and in front of the light are just sort of compressed together in the image. But yeah, I see what you mean.
  • “My untrained eye keeps coming back to the lights on the bridge. They appear to be lit, even though daylight has arrived.” This was shot at about 6:30 AM. The sun was up but the timer on the lights hadn’t tripped yet. I’m grateful that there’s a little color and texture in the lights.
  • “the bit of sky in the top right hand corner. I keep looking over there and there is nothing to see.” Interesting. That wasn’t the “mistake” I was thinking of but maybe I’ll just see what it looks like with some cloned foliage filling the gap.
  • “Ok, I’ll go with ‘Something seems wrong with the water in the extreme lower left corner, just to the left on the standing bird’s reflection.’ Hard to tell at iPad screen resolution, but the ripple and reflection patterns look like they’ve been modified.” OooOOoooh…very close. I had to look carefully and compare the source to the final photo to check. No, but you’re verrrry close.
  • “Maybe too much cloned tree by the rightmost lamp.” Nope, I didn’t clone any trees.

Nobody got it. One of you would have won the $30 Outback Steak House Gift Card (had I offered one as a prize) for coming closest: Jay Horsley sensed that there was…something…going on with the reflection of one of the two swans.

I actually did two different major edits to this piece. It’s a composite of not one, but three photos.

Firstly, there are two swans in the Public Garden but only one of them is represented in this photo. The other one was minding the nest on the opposite shore of the lagoon. I shot a multiple-image sequence of the swan jumping into the water and paddling off. After Photoshop automatically aligned the two shots I’d selected, it was easy to “paint in” the swan on the shore.

I used the “swan in the water” shot as my main image; it saved me the trouble of removing the woman from the bridge.

Jay’s comment encouraged me to examine the Before and After images side-by-side and see if I should have painted more of the “shore” swan’s reflection into the water. The only thing missing is its head; I think it should be obscured by the ripples of the water. But maybe I’ll play with it some more.

That edit was easy. The tricky one was cleaning up the bridge abutment. “It’s a focal point of the photo and it’s covered in bird s***,” an art critic might say.

I thought that’s what it was, too. But actually, it’s just lime scale seeping through the cracks in the mortar.

“Uh-huh. But it still looks like it’s streaked with gallons and gallons of bird s***.”

Critics!

There was just way, way too much of this stuff to “fix” the stones via the usual Photoshop tricks. So on a later visit to the Public Garden, I shot a closeup of the opposite abutment, which (praise Tarim) was much, much cleaner:

Photo of bridge abutment.

Damn and blast, I didn’t have a copy of the photo with me at the time. I had to guess at the right angle and I wasn’t even close. But it’s a tiny part of the final image so I suppose it doesn’t really matter. I mashed and distorted it until it was the same shape and size as the one covered in bi…in lime scale. Then I used a mask to knock a hole in the master image and lined up the replacement abutment under the hole, flipping between the “Before” and “After” to make sure that the blocks matched the original.

But look what I forgot to do:

Detail of image, showing the "fixed" abutment of the bridge, with the original "messed up" abutment still reflected in the water.

Yup…I forgot to fix the reflection of the original streaked-up abutment.

I was pretty proud of the replacement job (though I think I’ll fine-tune the edges a little) and I stopped working without thinking about how The Thing Wot I Changed had influenced other things in the image. That’s a common mistake. You see it all the time on the “Photoshop Disasters” site. You might have done a great job fixing the whatsit. But before you move on, you need to look back at the original image. Is the whatsit reflected in something else? Does it cast a shadow? Is it supposed to be reflecting light on something else? If so…what color is that light? Do any of these things need to be updated?

Thanks for your comments about the photo. I wasn’t actually fishing for reassurance but hey, who doesn’t like reassurance and encouragement?

Some people like to unwind with a game. I tend to sublimate that kind of adventuring into creativity apps. When I run into a problem, it rarely really frustrates me; I actually enjoy trying to figure out how to get the Babel Fish. I keep getting killed on the “replace the background without leaving a color halo around the foreground figures” level. But I keep at it, or I buy a cheat guide, and I figure out how to beat it. Hoo-rah!

…And then I start getting killed on the “intensify a specific color without compressing the image’s dynamic range” level instead.

Speaking of cheat guides: my pal Lesa Snyder has a new edition of her fab book, “Photoshop CS5: The Missing Manual” It was within reach throughout most of this little job.

I really do use it as a cheat guide. The table of contents doesn’t actually read

  1. Man, Andy…you’re such a dumbass about layer blending
  2. I guess you owe that print service an apology…you’ve had the color management settings set wrong all this time
  3. How on earth did you get through several decades on this planet without ever knowing how the Histogram tool works?
  4. …Or you could fix that sky in about three seconds by doing it the right way, but what the hell do I know, I’m just a Photoshop book

…but it might as well. I have a problem, I open the book, I find the solution.

10 Comments

Categories: Photography.

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By Ihnatko
— August 2, 2010 at 2:33 am

Photoshop Disasters: The Home Game

A lovely photo of Boston's Public Garden, with two swans sliding into a calm lagoon and a 140-year-old iron footbridge in the background.

A nice little shot of Boston's Public Garden. The Public Garden is a much more quiet and peaceful place before the tourists and bridal parties descend.

I’m a big fan of the Public Garden (the oldest public horticultural garden in the USA) and a few weeks ago I decided to make a special early-AM trip out there to do some Serious Photography.

I got some nice shots. But I haven’t really posted anything on Flickr yet. Why?

Yes, of course: I’ve become a Button Freak. Like Oskar Schindler at the end of the movie, who wandered in a daze, paralyzed by the thoughts of everything else he could have done, I keep looking at these shots and thinking “But there must be a way I can restore the blown-out highlights in that sky.”

(So when do I get my adoring biopic? Well, okay: Schindler had to wait 50 years for his. Plus, he did save a whole lot of people’s lives. I guess I’ll just have to wait my turn.)

There comes a point at which Photoshop, Aperture, and The Ambition To Produce A Lovely Pick-cher become handicaps to the amateur photographer. This shot of the swans — a lovely lesbian couple; you should meet them sometime — is probably my favorite of the series and a case in point. I can’t stop tweaking it. I went from “I like it; I’m going to include it among the 20 I’ll post to Flickr” to “I like it; I’m going to export it from Aperture and edit in Photoshop, for more control” to “I really like it; I think I’ll make an 11×17 print of this”…which ultimately landed me at “If I’m going to be staring at this on my wall for years to come, then this ought to be perfect.”

Next stop: bedlam. Now’s a good time to start stowing any personal electronics because we should be landing there shortly.

I thought I was done working on this photo, honestly. But then I spotted a problem…a mistake I made in editing. I wonder if you can spot it, too.

Over-doing Photoshop is like over-doing plastic surgery: you don’t know you’ve gone too far until you’ve gone too far. But unlike Joan Rivers, I can undo the damage I’ve inflicted upon what God created by simply hiding a few adjustment layers.

29 Comments

Categories: Photography, photo.

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By Ihnatko
— July 31, 2010 at 4:11 pm

Apple’s Magic Trackpad – Just the start of the magic trick?

Apple press photo of the Magic Trackpad input device. A small aluminum pad next to a Bluetooth keyboard, with a hand on the pad.

Apple's new Magic Trackpad makes me wonder what it's really meant to connect with.

Photos of Apple’s new Magic Trackpad leaked a while ago. If it were any other company’s product, it’d have been a slam-dunk sneak peek. But this is Apple; nothing’s released until it’s released. Or at least officially announced.

Compare and contrast this with PC makers who indiscriminately spray new products into crowds of terrified consumers, or (God help us all) Microsoft. I sometimes wonder if Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is Tyler Durden from “Fight Club.” Tyler takes to the stage once or twice a year to show off “Exciting! Revolutionary! GAME-CHANGING!!!” new Microsoft software and hardware. He’s energetic! Aggressive! Confident! He has a PLAN!!!!!!!

…And then a month later, meek, rudderless Steve Ballmer watches the video in shock. I…I said that?!? It’s insane! I must be stopped! Lo and behold, nearly everything that Interesting Steve announced in the 2010 CES keynote has been scrapped.

Not Apple. Unless you want to counter-argue that maybe Steve Jobs’ Tyler Durden personality completely took over while he was in high school and never let go. If so, cool; let’s order a pitcher of drinks because we’ve hit upon a good topic for group discussion.

So: Magic Trackpad. It was released this morning, along with updates to the iMac line and a new Cinema Display. And, surprisingly, a new Apple AA battery charger whose main feature seems to be that after your batteries have been topped off, it draws 10% of the power of other AA chargers.

On its own, the Magic Trackpad is sort of an ordinary release. It’s a big notebook-style trackpad, built as a separate Bluetooth input device so that it can be used with desktops. Nice idea. I’ve had Wacom’s Bamboo tablet for a while now and I love it. Resting your hand on part of your desk and just tickling a surface is a quick and natural way to control the cursor, and you can set up the Bamboo with multitouch gestures for launching and switching apps, selecting tools…pretty much anything that a sane man could want.

A little trackpad like this is also a handy compromise for folks who sort of want a tablet input but can’t justify the expense. I use the Bamboo to sign documents and it’s also lets me “fingerpaint” edits to photos and artwork, either via my fingertips or a precision stylus.

Neat. The Magic Trackpad goes a little further in that it natively supports MacOS touch gestures. It’s not a “special” input device powered by unique drivers; it just is, so to speak.

Nope, I don’t have one yet but I expect I’ll have one shortly. So a hands-on review will have to wait until I get my hands on one.

Still, the existence of this device invites me to strap on the long, salt-and-pepper fake beard that I keep on a special peg next to the desk for just these sort of beard-stroking opportunities.

I think this device articulates their faith in multitouch interfaces. Across the board.

  1. It’s a “bridge” device that enables every MacOS device to have a multitouch input. If Apple were to develop more aggressive multitouch support for MacOS 10.7, they’d need to have this sort of device on the price list and out in the field. I don’t think that a multitouch revolution is necessarily appropriate for a desktop OS, but building a big, standalone trackpad gives MacOS engineers a certain amount of liberty to be bold.
  2. Bluetooth means that it’ll work with anything Apple’s got going. The fundamental connection between a human being and an iPad will always be “fingers on a screen.” But a Bluetooth multitouch surface expands the reach of the iPad by at least making it possible to (for example) tether your iPad to a conference room projector but control it via a pocketable $69 device. It also makes it easier to use the iPad as a home audio or video component.
  3. AppleTV just got realllllllllly interesting. Existing AppleTVs — the one Apple product you’ve forgotten about, the one that sits at the back of the class and never raises its hand — are MacOS devices. They’re controlled via IR remotes and thus they require line-of-site between the device and the operator. With the Magic Trackpad in the product lineup, Apple could completely reinvent the AppleTV as a device that hides somewhere behind your TV, runs a new flavor of iOS, and ships with a Magic Trackpad instead of a clickybutton remote.

Mind you, I’m not speculating about a new AppleTV that looks and feels like a TV/HDMI version of the iPad. I’m imagining something with a UI built for a TV screen, to be viewed and interacted with from ten feet away.

Even if we leave aside any changes to the AppleTV’s inputs or UI, the big benefit of moving AppleTV to iOS would be that it’d instantly allow the device to take advantage of the huge iOS development ecosystem. The work that iOS developers have put into iPhone and iPad apps could go into AppleTV apps as well. The biggest problem with the AppleTV has always been the tame and provincial nature of its feature set. Two months after Apple releases iOS dev tools for it, those problems would disappear.

And what’s the point of designing a brand-new, iOS-optimized, fast but power-saving A4 CPU if you’re not going to stick one inside everything you’ve got going?

It’s all speculation (which is why this is on my blog instead of Someplace Reputable). And the calmer, more rational line of thought is that Apple could transition AppleTV to iOS and the A4 processor without a new multitouch wireless input device. Still, the Magic Trackpad does inspire one to dream, doesn’t it?

28 Comments

Categories: apple.

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By Ihnatko
— July 27, 2010 at 11:12 am

Testing, testing…not much to see here.

Kitchen counter with a pizzelle maker and fresh-cooked cookies.

I seem to make pizzelles every time I have a half-dozen eggs that need to be used before their expiration date.

Here’s where my workday gets bogged down. I’m preparing my review of Flipboard, the iPad news/Twitter/Facebook/magazine app which has caused much excitement since its release a few days ago. I’ve seen the next “Billboard” rankings and I can now announce that Flipboard has knocked “Come On Eileen” by Dexy’s Midnight Runners from its #1 position after six weeks at the top of the chart.

“But does the app follow every embedded link in the designated Twitter stream,” I wondered, “or just a few specifically-supported kinds?”

I’m in communication with Flipboard Central but as I prepared to ask that very question via email I thought “…Or I could just post a series of tweets with various kinds of links to the same page, and see what happens.”

(Or, I could do both.)

Thus requiring A Page Wot To Link To, and thus Content For That Page Wot I’m Linking To.

Viz: this.

Sorry to have troubled you. There really wasn’t much to this post, was there? Hang on, perhaps a bit of snark will make this whole enterprise worthwhile?

Box of Kashi "Good Friends" cereal. Two women are smiling on the box, looking very phony.

Your box of seething hate.

This was so ghastly that I had to take a photo. Kashi: this is 2010, not 1947. We all know that your company image is just a marketing angle. I see a box like this and I picture an alcoholic marketing executive barking at his team.

“The fiber cereal…the name ‘Two Friends’ got the best response with the focus group. Put two faces, you know, friends, on the front of the box. What? No, not guys, you ****ing moron!!! Broads. If it’s two guys people will think it’s a gay cereal or something. And make ‘em different races. The hippies will eat that s*** up. I don’t give a **** which race. Whatever. Just make sure one of them’s white. But I want to see the polaroids first to make sure you idiots don’t go ****ing crazy and use a fat chick or something.”

I mean, honestly. You can air as many commercials you want with chirpy, enthusiastic Kashi Food Researchers traveling far and wide and respecting local cultures and it just reinforces the image of a company run by men who keep trying to see if they can get the company to sponsor a Kashi Spokesmodel Bikini Team.

(Not for promotional purposes. Just for the office.)

Advertisers hope that their ad will cause me to make an irrational, emotion-driven purchasing decision. But every single time they succeed, my decision is “never give this company any of my business.”

20 Comments

Categories: yellowtext.

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By Ihnatko
— July 24, 2010 at 1:56 pm

Mr. 10,000 (Tweets)

The Andy Ihnatko 10,000th Tweet Live Video Spectacular from Andy Ihnatko on Vimeo.

After three years, 10,000 Tweets, and being followed by more than 35,000 people, I still don’t have a good answer to the question “But what’s the point of Twitter?” I’ve come up with two responses that work.

Apparently, Twitter is either a boat or a sliver of soap, depending on who’s asking me and who’s listening.

If my audience sincerely and earnestly wants to understand Twitter, I tell them “It’s like a boat. Anybody can use a Twitter account just for fun. A much smaller percentage are leading the kind of lives in which it’s actually useful. And a tiny, tiny fraction are making money with the thing.” If it’s a conversational kind of request, I say “Think of that sliver of soap left in the dish. That’s a single Tweet. All by itself, it’s worthless. Squeeze lots of them together, and you’ll eventually have something with weight and substance.”

But I guess Twitter is like my iPhone 4. Sometimes the best endorsement you can make — and the only endorsement that really matters — is the simple fact that you use the hell out of this thing, and that your week would be very, very different without it.

I got a taste of that over the past few days. For the past couple of weeks, I’d been aware that I was nearing my 10,000th Tweet. I knew I wanted to do something a little bit special for #10,000. Eventually I got to #9998, which meant that I had just enough shots left to announce what I was going to do and then to do it…which also meant that I couldn’t Tweet anything at all until I figured out what those things were going to be.

Behold, The Answer: I did my 10,000th Tweet on Ustream. Click away, but I should warn you that there’s an Anthony Newley impression coming.

“What should my 10,000th Tweet be?” I wondered. I came up with a halfway decent “140-character novel.” Naw. I thought about just being sincere and sweet and thanking the folks who’ve supported my work in various ways. Mmm…naah. When the right idea came, I instantly recognized that there could be no more appropriate way to crystallize my previous 9,999 Tweets.

But yes, these Big Plans meant that I had to stop Twittering for a few days, to preserve the #10,000 slot. Going without Twitter for 72 hours served to remind me about the things I most enjoy about the service.

I missed the ongoing communication with the people who read my columns and listen to my podcasts. There’s an immediacy and a conversational tone to the Twitter timeline that doesn’t exist in any other medium. I like responding to questions and I also like hearing good and bad reactions. Either way, comments are usually to the point, and valuable.

I missed those little moments of time with my friends. If I could afford to send each of my friends one of those baskets of fresh fruit cut into flowery shapes a few times a week, I could. Commenting on a particularly cool of interesting tweet of theirs is close enough, though it really does next to nothing to combat the spread of scurvy and The Ghost Disease among the geek populace.

Not Tweeting has been a little like watching milk go bad in my fridge. Little things pop into my head and maybe they’re of no use to anybody, but they’re fun little strings of words. Twitter is the only place where I can post them, really, and if I try to “save them up” for a later date, they go completely stale after sitting in my head for so long. “I was acting on impulse” isn’t a great explanation for why you did something stupid, but it’s still a hell of a lot better than having to admit that yes, you thought about it for two or three days and it still seemed like a solid idea. This admission is often the precursor to a fiancee maintaining her composure just long enough to twist the engagement ring from her finger and fling it at you with enough force that you’re going to want to apply a little Bactine to the wound.

I don’t feel like I’ve done all I can for something I’ve just written and published until I’ve Tweeted a link. And here we get to the Business end of Twitter. I was looking through my Flickr feed the other day, specifically looking for “orphan” photos that haven’t been organized into any existing photoset before. It’s not hard to figure out why some of these have received just four or five hundred views over the course of a year and another one got 2,000 in just a week: I Tweeted a link to one of them.

I create and publish things for many different reasons and they vary from item to item but yes, somewhere in the back of my mind “I’d like people to see this” is always on the list. I can come up with what I think is an interesting idea, research and write it well, edit it carefully, and publish it. But I’ve got this list of 35,000 people who at some point clicked a button to indicate that they’re somewhat interested in the stuff I post. Until I’ve posted a link to Twitter, I feel like the job is only partially-complete. If it fails to catch on, it fails to catch on…but just like sending a kid off to school with a good, hot breakfast in his or her belly, I feel as though I gave this piece every reasonable advantage.

And Twitter just keeps getting more and more important. Yesterday, I downloaded the sort of app that gets all of my Nerd Parts tingling. Within the first ten minutes of using Flipboard and linking it to my Twitter account, it seemed as though writing a review of it became the most important thing that I would ever do. Phrases like “From now on, instead of vaguely talking about the future of magazines and newspapers, we should just point to Flipboard and then break into discussion groups” and “This free app will justify at least $150 of the money you spend for your iPad” came straight to mind.

(When I feel this exuberant about something…yeah, I quickly realize that I need to calm down and see how I feel after a few more days.)

Screenshot of iPad app Flipboard, showing a collection of articles from various sources.

Flipboard: it really feels like the way I'll be getting 80% of my news from now on.

Still! What a brilliant idea. I follow about 250 people on Twitter. This is, exclusively, a list of people and institutions whose opinions matter to me (actual friends, and writers or publications who regularly write things that I want to read). Their Tweets are of interest to me. These people also often Tweet links to articles and other content that they think is valuable.

Flipboard strip-mines your Twitter follows for content and links, and assembles it all into a beautiful digital magazine of fresh content. I’d say it’s almost “suspiciously” beautiful. Like the Mechanical Turk, it’s hard to imagine that this on-the-fly design and layout is the result of an automaton working without human intervention.

It’s not a Twitter client, really. But yes, you can reply to Tweets and Star the original posts and whatnot.

The app was just released a day ago, so details are still a little sketchy. In addition to linking to Twitter and Facebook, there are “curated” channels whose sources are managed by the Flipboard team…and other social-media sources are coming soon. I almost wore out some of the glass on my iPad tapping and searching for a way to add my Flickr feeds to FlipBoard; a “National Geographic”-style viewer for all of my friends’ photos is going to be a killer feature.

When I first tried Twitter (let’s see: “March 22, 2007″ — oh, my…were we ever that young?) I dismissed it as just a useless micro-trend. Then my friends started to join, and it became entertaining. Then, it somehow became important. I truly value the Twitter infrastructure. I’ve never been interested in playing the Numbers Game; having a certain number of Followers doesn’t motivate me. It’s the connections represented by the 282 people whom I follow and the 35,589 people who follow me that I rely upon. It’s not something that can be engineered. It has to be grown over time.

I had an awareness of the value of the unique shape of this thing called “my peculiar use of Twitter” before Flipboard was released. Flipboard is just the first app that makes that value so tangible.

Well, then. The next milestone, I think, will be 50,000 Twitter followers. I have at least a couple of years to think about how I’m going to mark that occasion. I hope to do something big but even so: expect a cash bar.

15 Comments

Categories: Twitter, video, yellowtext.

Tags: , ,

By Ihnatko
— July 22, 2010 at 12:14 pm

iPhone 4 Press Conference – The Post-Game Wrapup

Man seated inside a really weird blue antenna test chamber, holding a phone.

One of Apple's anechoic test chambers.

Okay, let’s start off with a roundup of links:

I think I said nearly everything I had to say in my Sun-Times piece. But my main goal was to get something useful online within the next hour or so, and my secondary goal was to beat my career high score for grammatically-correct sentences (28%). So maybe I can still add a few bits and pieces.

First, let’s see how well I did with my predictions this morning. I definitely got the broad strokes right. The prepared presentation was short. There was no product recall; Apple defended the iPhone, chiefly by offering hard numbers that indicate that the antenna problem — whatever it is — is being talked about far more than it’s actually being experienced by real users.

I didn’t think Apple would offer free bumper cases. I also thought Apple would give some airtime to all of the iPhone’s spiffy new features, making the point that the iPhone 4 is way more than just a radical new antenna design. But nope, they stayed on the message of the antenna.

I score myself a B+.

On the whole, I think Apple did great. I can’t get myself worked up about the antenna issue. I’m simply not seeing the widespread user complaints that I normally associate with a functional defect in a product. Nobody understands if it’s a design problem, a firmware issue, or just the same articulation of the old problem that all iPhones experience with AT&T coverage in spotty areas. I certainly don’t think it’s a big enough issue to forego all of the iPhone 4′s advantages. I don’t experience the issue when I hold it normally. Plus, when you slap it in any kind of case, the problem disappears entirely.

I do fault Apple for pressing the “all phones have this problem” button so hard. They showed video of several other phones losing signal when gorilla-gripped. Fine, but I experienced this issue with the iPhone 4 moments after unboxing it and I couldn’t reproduce it with other phones. It probably would have been smarter for Apple to simply note that all phones have “dead” spots, and then move on. Though I appreciate that it suits Apple’s purposes to have actual video of other phones losing signal

To Apple’s credit, they did acknowledge that the iPhone 4′s dropped-call percentage is higher than the iPhone 3GS’s, citing statistics they got from AT&T a few days ago. It seems like a marginal difference (it’s worse by one call in a hundred, according to Apple), but it’s definitely there. And if you live in a poor coverage area, the iPhone 4 can be the difference between a phone that rarely drops a call and one which does it frequently.

I’d also say that in retrospect, the post-presentation Q&A was a mistake. They should have deliverred their message, ended the show, and then sent everyone outside for complimentary coffee and danish. During the Q&A, Apple said a lot of things that seemed defensive. Nobody likes it when the prom queen complains that everyone hates her because she’s so very pretty and popular.

Jobs also complained about how the press has handled this story. He did make some valid points, though, and with fresh memories of the head of BP complaining that he “just wanted to get his life back,” I think it has to be kept in perspective.

(Steve did haul his ass away from a Hawaii vacation. Hell, he could have FaceTimed this one in.)

It was…interesting…that he described the publication of his emails to customers as “rude.” I suppose that could be true, on the basis that these people have been sharing his personal emails. But did he honestly expect people not to brag about getting a personal response from the CEO?

Onward:

Steve Jobs didn’t fall to his knees, rend his garment, clasp his hands together, and beg for forgiveness from users and stockholders.

This has upset many people.

These people are idiots.

Consumer Reports, for their part, hasn’t changed their position on the iPhone. They’re still “not recommending” the iPhone 4. I don’t think they’re idiots. But I do think they’re wrong. They’re pointing to antenna tests in which they can cause the iPhone 4′s signal to drop to zero bars by bridging the famous gap between the antennas.

Swell. That fact needs to be reported. But is that the whole story?

Questions:

  1. Does Consumer Reports understand the nature of the problem? They claim to have tested the antenna scientifically but haven’t (as far as I can tell) broken any new ground beyond “If you bridge the gap, you lose bars.” Is it a hardware issue? A software issue? A mere ergonomic issue?
  2. It’s a repeatable, reliable demo. But are iPhone users likely to encounter an actual problem? I did a 20-minute phone interview with PBS this afternoon and I did it on an uncased iPhone 4. I didn’t even think twice about it.
  3. Assuming that a specific consumer regarded the antenna problem as a dealbreaker: if there were a way around the problem, would the iPhone then be worthwhile? I say yes, absolutely. Take away “there’s a slightly greater chance that it might drop a call” and you’re left with a phone with a huge laundry list of advantages over every previous iPhone and most other phones. Including, might I point out, better reception than the iPhone 3GS.
  4. Is there a way around the problem? Yes. Put it in a case, which is something lots of people (myself included) were going to do anyway.

On that basis, I think Consumer Reports’ stance is extreme. Though in their defense, there’s a difference between “we’re not recommending it” and “we’re recommending that people not buy it.”

Reading their followup coverage, it appears that they can’t evaluate how well “iPhone with a case” works until they develop a separate test protocol; their standard test policy is to test the phone as-shipped by the manufacturer.

This is why I have occasional problems with Consumer Reports reviews. I think this is another instance in which the magazine is showing more loyalty to their standardized test procedures than to their readers.

Okay. So that’s another thousand words I’ve written about this thing today…on top of about 90 minutes of talking about it. I’ve done it.

And when I say “I’ve done it” I don’t mean “I’ve produced complete and thorough coverage of this interesting tech news story.” I mean “I am finally sick of hearing my own comments about the iPhone 4.” I hope I got there about 400 words ahead of the rest of you.

119 Comments

Categories: apple, iphone.

Tags: , ,

By Ihnatko
— July 16, 2010 at 10:31 pm