My Clippings on NewsGator Online

Emerging

Michael Abbott — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 21:18:39 GMT

I'm devoting this post to Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor, but I need to lay a little groundwork first. I hope you'll stick with me.

We often call video games an emerging medium, but what does that really mean? Nearly 40 years after they first appeared, can we still justifiably describe games as "in their infancy?" If so, when will they finally grow up? And when they do, how will we know?

Some say the critics will tell us. A game will arrive and be universally hailed as a landmark achievement demonstrating the power of the medium as an interactive art form. You know, the Citizen Kane argument.

Others say the market will tell us. When video games achieve the kind of penetration books, television, and movies enjoy, then we'll know they've truly arrived. Mario has appeared in over 200 games in 28 years, but his total sales are less than half of Harry Potter's, accrued in only 12 years over 7 books. On the other hand, a recent NPD report says 63% of Americans have played a video game in the past six months, compared to 53% who report going out to the movies.

Yet video games remain on the cultural periphery. Film studies programs proliferate at colleges and universities while many of us continue to plead the case for teaching even a single course devoted to video games. And as popular culture fetes go, well, there's the Oscars and the Golden Globes; the Grammys and the Pulitzers...and there's the Spike TV Video Game Awards.

I say these cultural barometers are mostly irrelevant. They measure and reward factors with few analogs in games, and they rely on formulaic ways of knowing that increasingly seem irrelevant to understanding games. Aristotle's Poetics - still the blueprint for framing our understanding of literature, drama, film, and television - has served us well for 2300 years, but dramatic theory cannot adequately account for the structural or experiential nature of games. Roger Ebert may be the elder statesman of American film critics, but applying film theory to games is an effort that fails before it begins. Even market validation is problematic. It's easy to count how many people buy movie movie tickets, but unit sales don't always paint an accurate picture for games, especially for social titles shared by friends and family over months and even years.

We who love games wait and wonder, but what are we waiting for? To be taken seriously? To be highly regarded? To have our place at the table? I'm not suggesting we're wasting our time making the case for games. I spend an inordinate amount of time doing just that with my academic colleagues. But if the door to cultural affirmation suddenly opened, what would we gain by walking through it? How would our efforts to evolve and grow change? Might we, upon reflection, decide that an "emerging medium" is actually quite a fine thing to be?

The best case for video games as an emerging medium comes from the people who make them. One might assume gifted designers like Harvey Smith, Brenda Brathwaite, Jenova Chen, and Soren Johnson (to name only a few) would position themselves on the front lines, demanding respect and acknowledgment for a medium and industry they're working hard to build. Instead, they spend most of their time looking inward, challenging themselves and their peers to push the artificial boundaries of games and re-examine self-limiting assumptions. I've seen this conversation occur at GDC , and I've written about it here many times. But something happened this week that highlighted just how intensive and illuminating this process can be.

A few days ago I wrote about Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor and praised its elegance and simplicity. I promised to return in another post to discuss the game's unique hook: a surprisingly vivid and disturbing story that emerges for the player willing to construct it by paying careful attention to the game's environments.

In the ongoing search for interactive storytelling language, the game takes a fascinating step forward by trusting the player, whose avatar is a spider, to do what spiders do (move from place to place spinning webs and eating insects) and thereby uncover a deeply human story. No amnesiacs. No aliens. No supernatural events or save-the-world imperatives. Just a simple, but startlingly poignant family tragedy revealed via the game's environments, photos, heirlooms, and small bits of evidence left behind.

Your growing curiosity compels you to explore, but the limitations of being a tiny spider both limit and free you. As a result, your actions and decisions seamlessly weave gameplay with storytelling (and a bit of puzzle-solving), and your experience is refracted through an intriguing split persona with tension between the two. You're eager to know more about the wedding ring in the sink pipe, but you're running low on web juice, so you need to find a tasty bug soon.

I love Spider because it points the way to a kind of storytelling unique to games, and it does so on a device that developers have only begun to exploit. It's a lovely game with delicate visuals and music - and you simply must feel for yourself what it's like to flick your finger across the screen and send your spider flying gracefully from one object to another.

But Spider isn't good enough for its creator. In a post-mortem published in this month's Edge Magazine, Randy Smith calls the game an "elegant dodge," and explains why, in his view, the game falls short of his vision for narrative games. As he puts it, "Spider is a game that strives to have an elegant awareness of the interactive media but doesn’t try hard to open up its frontiers." "This is a dead story, one you cannot change but only discover through exploration."

I might quibble with Smith's contention that authored narratives are "dead," but what most intrigues me about Smith's response to Spider is his unyielding sense of where he believes games must go and his willingness to share his ideas and reflections, even when they highlight his own shortcomings.

Smith has appeared in the vigorous discussion of Spider at Touch Arcade, offering a few helpful hints as players attempt to decipher the game's many clues; and he has stopped by here too, encouraging me to read the Edge column I had already scoured after completing the game. :-) More importantly, Smith has delivered some of the most thoughtful and pioneering talks at GDC, challenging other designers to think purposefully and self-critically about interactivity and its relationship to narrative. With Spider, Randy Smith walks the walk.

If this is what an emerging medium looks like, I hope we never stop emerging.

★ The Android Opportunity

John Gruber — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 15:42:44 GMT

In just the past few weeks Steven Frank, Alex Payne, and Andre Torrez all tried switching from the iPhone to Android. All three are smart, open-minded, and eloquent regarding their reasons for trying Android. All three are developers who care about the quality and design of software and hardware.

All three found Android significantly lacking.

No doubt some iPhone owners look upon this with glee, much like sports fans watching a rival team flail. I look upon it with glum disappointment. I’ve said it before and will say it again, the best thing that could happen for Apple and iPhone owners would be for at least one strong rival to appear. Two would be even better. A monoculture benefits no one in the long run, because it’s competition that drives innovation.

I know there are new Android phones on the horizon. I know there have been some nice Android OS updates. But from my vantage point, the Android state-of-the-art is today further behind the iPhone state-of-the-art than it was when the G1 debuted last October.

Here are a few paragraphs of a piece I wrote 14 months ago regarding why I’m rooting for Android:

Google’s dependence on hardware and carrier partners puts the final product out of their control — and into the control of companies whose histories have shown them to be incompetent at design and hostile to users.

I’d be happy to be proven wrong, but my hunch is that the only way we’ll see an iPhone-caliber Android phone is if Google does what they’ve said they’re not going to do, which is to design and ship their own reference model “gPhone”. That doesn’t mean Android won’t still be successful in some sense if it remains on its current course, but that I don’t expect it to be successful in the “holy shit is this awesome!” sense that the iPhone is.

So far, alas, that seems prescient.

But so if Google isn’t going to stand up and produce the ideal Android phone, someone else needs to.

There’s a theme currently brewing in the tech press that iPhone owners are up in arms regarding Apple’s handling of the App Store. The truth is, it is a summer of discontent for the iPhone, but not for all iPhone users, not most, not even many. Most, in fact, are oblivious to the App Store controversy and complaints. Those who are upset are developers and genuine technology wonks. Those are the people who either want to switch or whose minds have at least been opened to the idea that they might want to switch. But what they want to switch to is not a middle of the road phone. They want a high end phone.

They don’t want to downgrade from the iPhone. The want to upgrade from the iPhone.

There’s a huge opportunity here for Android phone makers.¹ No one is going to just suddenly catch up to Apple in terms of total sales. The iPhone has grown fast, but even so, it has taken two years of growth to get where it is today. Catching up to the iPhone in an instant — or even within a year or two — is not a feasible goal. So forget that. But there are ambitious goals that are feasible. Here’s my advice.

Start by copying what Apple has done right. Release one new phone per year, every year. Split that one phone into separate models by storage size, keeping all other specs the same. Apple has shown you can make a lot of money by charging an extra $100 for less than $100 worth of flash memory. One single phone gives developers a single device to target, and makes it easier on consumers. It also gives the press a single device to focus its attention on. (I’m looking at you, Motorola.)

You’re not going to start by taking away existing iPhone users. Not the normal ones. Normal iPhone owners have the good common sense to hang on to an expensive new phone for a few years (which I say with the self-awareness that I personally have no common sense regarding the consumption of gadgetry).

The goal should be to make a phone that is better than the iPhone. Better. Even if that means more expensive (although you should do what you can, including eat into your profit margins, to match or come close to the iPhone’s price). Remember, the original iPhone launched with a sale price of $599 and people lined up hundreds deep to get one.

As the iPhone goes mass market, it’s creating a vacuum at the high end of the market for a high-quality exclusive phone. Remember when the iPhone was new and novel? Now it’s common.

Don’t aim for the middle of the market. That seems to be what all the other Android manufacturers are doing and it’s the road to NobodyCaresAboutYourPhoneVille. So instead of trying to sell half a million phones to anyone, try to sell half a million phones to a specific target: people in the market for the latest and greatest phone in the world.

This is a story line the press will love. The press is itching to write “iPhone No Longer King of the Hill” headlines.

The phone needs to be as good as the iPhone in every possible way, including hardware build quality. Web browsing needs to be iPhone quality, not “almost iPhone quality”.

Carefully select a handful of areas where you can beat the iPhone, and then promote the hell out of these features. Over-the-air calendar, contact, and email syncing through Google services should beat MobileMe hands down, if only because MobileMe costs $100 a year and Google’s services are free.

Emphasize that Android apps are background-capable, and that there is no centralized App Store under one company’s ironclad control. There are no tales of rejected Android apps because there are no rejected Android apps.

Consider trade-offs that Apple is unlikely to make, like, say, device thickness. Beef your phone up with a bigger (and, yes, slightly thicker) battery than the iPhone’s and then make battery life a major selling point. Something along the lines of, “The iPhone’s battery life is fine for casual users, but serious users need more than just a few hours.” (You should copy Apple and seal the battery into the case, however — replaceable batteries lead to creaky, squeaky cases.)

The branding must be excellent. No logos on the front of the phone. No carrier logos anywhere on the device. If Apple can do it, so can you.

If your goal is to sell more smartphones than Apple, you’re going to fail. If your hope is to gain a strong foothold in the market with a sub-par device, you are mistaken. So aim high, and set your goals such that you can smugly claim victory with just a fraction of Apple’s unit sales. If Apple is BMW, you can be Porsche.

Or perhaps better said, Android device makers, because I’m still hoping someone soon ships a good Android-based non-phone, like the iPod Touch. I’d love to have an Android device to play with, but without any contract or monthly fees. ↩

★ Zune Apps

John Gruber — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:53:10 GMT

In my brief comments yesterday on the new touchscreen Zune HD that is set to debut September 15, I noted:

Clearly, the Zune HD is going to be compared to the iPod Touch. Its biggest shortcoming is that it’s just a media player and web browser; no apps, no games.

I mean, why not? The software platform has quickly become a major driving force behind the sales growth of the iPhone and iPod Touch. Microsoft is a software platform company. “Developers developers developers”, right?.

Well, it ends up third-party apps are on Microsoft’s agenda for the Zune HD, and they’re attempting to court at least some successful indie iPhone developers to port their apps to the Zune.

After my post, I got an email from the developer of an iPhone Twitter client. He was contacted by Microsoft a few months ago, with an offer to port his app to the Zune in exchange for “a bucket of money”. He turned them down, but assumes, as I do, that Microsoft reached out to the developers of multiple popular iPhone apps.

My source is certain the offer was for the Zune, but because he turned it down early on, he doesn’t know the details regarding the OS or SDK. If any other iPhone developers have gotten a similar pitch from Microsoft, I’d love to hear about it.

Rock Band University

Michael Abbott — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 17:59:49 GMT

Few games have the staying power of Rock Band. With a steady stream of DLC, hugely addictive "I know I can do better than that, dammit" gameplay; fabulous co-op play ideal for parties; perfectly scaled levels of difficulty; and the easy imaginative leap it enables from 'guy with plastic guitar in living room' to 'mega rock star in arena' - it may be the most perfectly designed and executed game of this generation.

But as the years pass I'm finding another less obvious attraction in Rock Band: it's an amazingly effective teacher. I don't simply mean that it contains a solid tutorial or that it encourages you to improve your skills as a player. It does those things, of course, and its methods are worth considering for those of us who teach for a living.

What draws me lately to Rock Band's is its facility for teaching music appreciation and even basic music theory. I can't begin to describe how much I've grown in my understanding of what's going on musically behind a talented musician's performance. Clearly, a gap exists between what a real guitarist is doing on strings and what I'm doing pressing buttons; but that gap narrows a bit when you're singing or playing bass, and it nearly closes when you're playing drums. With cymbals attached and freestyle mode enabled, playing drums in Rock Band 2 gets you very close to the real thing. In fact, maybe it is the real thing.

If you're genuinely interested to learn what Keith Moon was all about as a drummer, a very good start would be downloading all The Who tracks for Rock Band and studying his parts. It's one thing to opine that Moon was a master of the fill; it's quite another to analyze his technique on screen, slow it down, practice it, and compare what he's doing to other drummers. Rock Band can't show you how he played, but it's very good at showing you what he played and encouraging you to learn by doing, not just observing.

It's quite possible (and, no small feat, fun) to learn basic elements of music theory like rhythm, harmony, melody, and structure in Rock Band. This 'learning' occurs mostly through osmosis, with the player unaware it's even happening - which many of us would suggest is the very best kind of learning. I'm not suggesting we're breeding the next generation of great composers via Rock Band, but at a certain level, the game insists on a kind of technical mastery that plugs into some useful knowledge of music.

I recently put this theory to the test with a music teacher colleague of mine who's not a gamer and had never played Rock Band or Guitar Hero. We isolated one musical characteristic: syncopation. I loaded up Steely Dan's "Bodhisattva," and put him on bass while I played guitar. I asked him if it was possible for a student to learn something meaningful about syncopation by studying and playing this song. I chose "Bodhisattva because it's all about syncopation...and I'm a Steely Dan freak.

After a few minutes of learning the buttons (musicians learn this stuff fast), his eyes lit up and a big grin emerged on his face. "Can it be harder? Can I play what I'm hearing?" I had underestimated his ability, and he was disturbed by the disconnect between what he was playing and what he was hearing, so I bumped the difficulty up to Hard. "Oh! OK. I can't handle this! But I see what's happening. Very clever. Very clever."

Afterward we discussed what the game was doing in terms of presentation, and he was especially taken by the scrolling fretboard and the clear horizontal lines indicating the beats. Here it was possible to see the syncopation and compare what's happening on bass to what's happening on lead guitar. He loved the idea that a student could feel, see, and hear the syncopation occurring in context with other supporting parts. He also liked that the game gave him feedback when he made mistakes, and he appreciated being able to hear the song without bass if he stopped playing (we used No Fail mode). My bottom line question: is anything pedagogically useful happening here? His answer: "Absolutely."

I'm scratching the surface here, and I'm sure many other teacher-types have already exploited Rock Band and Guitar Hero's possibilities for teaching and learning. What I find more interesting at the moment is how this game has enhanced my own understanding and appreciation of music, almost without me realizing it. And this makes me wonder about other people's experiences.

Beating "Painkiller" on Expert is a cool accomplishment (and impossible for some of us), but have you actually learned anything useful by playing these games? If so, I'd love to hear about it.

★ Phil Schiller Responds Regarding Ninjawords and the App Store

John Gruber — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 17:00:26 GMT

Tuesday’s piece on Ninjawords was really about two stories. The small story is that of a clever $2 iPhone dictionary app, the developers of which removed “objectionable” words from its dictionary so as to get it published in the App Store. The big story is about the App Store itself, and whether Apple’s management is attempting to correct its course.

Yesterday afternoon I received a thoughtful email from Apple senior vice president Phil Schiller regarding Ninjawords and the App Store, and I think it bodes well for both stories. With Schiller’s permission, I’m reprinting the salient portions of it here:

When I read your column last night about the Ninjawords dictionary application I immediately investigated it with our App Store review team to learn the facts of what happened.

Let me start with the most important points - Apple did not censor the content in this developer’s application and Apple did not reject this developer’s application for including references to common swear words. You accused Apple of both in your story and the fact is that we did neither.

Ninjawords is an application which uses content from the Wiktionary.org online wiki-based dictionary to provide a nice fast dictionary application on the web and on the iPhone. Contrary to what you reported, the Ninjawords application was not rejected in the App Store review process for including common “swear” words. In fact anyone can easily see that Apple has previously approved other dictionary applications in the App Store that include all of the “swear” words that you gave as examples in your story.

The issue that the App Store reviewers did find with the Ninjawords application is that it provided access to other more vulgar terms than those found in traditional and common dictionaries, words that many reasonable people might find upsetting or objectionable. A quick search on Wiktionary.org easily turns up a number of offensive “urban slang” terms that you won’t find in popular dictionaries such as one that you referenced, the New Oxford American Dictionary included in Mac OS X. Apple rejected the initial submission of Ninjawords for this reason, provided the Ninjawords developer with information about some of the vulgar terms, and suggested to the developer that they resubmit the application for approval once parental controls were implemented on the iPhone.

The Ninjawords developer then decided to filter some offensive terms in the Ninjawords application and resubmit it for approval for distribution in the App Store before parental controls were implemented. Apple did not ask the developer to censor any content in Ninjawords, the developer decided to do that themselves in order to get to market faster. Even though the developer chose to censor some terms, there still remained enough vulgar terms that it required a parental control rating of 17+.

You are correct that the Ninjawords application should not have needed to be censored while also receiving a 17+ rating, but that was a result of the developers’ actions, not Apple’s. I believe that the Apple app review team’s original recommendation to the developer to submit the Ninjawords application, without censoring it, to the App Store once parental controls was implemented would have been the best course of action for all; Wiktionary.org is an open, ever-changing resource and filtering the content does not seem reasonable or necessary.

After going back to Ninjawords’s developers and conferring with some trusted sources within Apple, I believe what Schiller says here is genuinely the case — that what the App Store reviewers wanted for Ninjawords was a 17+ rating, not for Matchstick Software to filter its dictionary listings.

In particular, it seems like it really came down to bad timing around the launch of parental controls. Matchstick Software initially submitted the app on May 13. The response from the App Store was that Apple wouldn’t publish it with those words without a 17+ parental control rating. But parental controls — the preferences that specify the age rating limits for apps — debuted in iPhone OS 3.0, which was not released until June 17. And, it’s worth noting, the June 17 release date wasn’t announced until the WWDC keynote address on June 8. Back in May, Matchstick Software knew only that OS 3.0 was coming in the near future.

What Matchstick could have done was wait for iPhone OS 3.0 and publish the app with a 17+ rating. What they wanted to do, though, was ship their app as soon as possible. Hence Matchstick’s decision to begin filtering out the words which the App Store reviewers found objectionable. As Matchstick’s Phil Crosby told me via email last night, “17+ ratings were not available when we launched, which means at that time, it was simply not possible for our dictionary to be on the App Store without being censored. Given the options of censoring or sitting on the side lines while our competitors ate our lunch, we chose to launch.”

It is certainly arguable whether Wiktionary’s English dictionary content should be rated 17+. I personally disagree with that. But what I — and, judging from reaction around the web yesterday, many others — found outrageous was the idea that Apple insisted that Ninjawords both filter its dictionary and still carry the 17+ rating.

That is not the case, and that is good.

Consistency, Fairness, Common Sense

On the one hand, the 17+ rating for Ninjawords may not seem completely out of line, given that Apple is currently requiring the 17+ rating for many apps simply on the grounds that they display “unfiltered Internet content”. But Ninjawords does not display the live contents of Wiktionary — it contains a snapshot of the database. Unfiltered updates to Wiktionary do not make their way into Ninjawords over the air.

But more importantly, other dictionary apps in the App Store have innocuous age ratings, and yet contain all of the words that App Store reviewers objected to in Ninjawords (shit, fuck, and cunt, specifically). For example, American Heritage Dictionary ($30) is rated 9+; “Dictionary.com” is available from the App Store for free and is rated 4+.

(iPhone developers set their own ratings when they submit their applications to the App Store, but, as was the case with Ninjawords, the App Store reviewers will occasionally insist upon a certain minimum rating.)

Regarding this discrepancy between the ratings for dictionaries, Crosby said to me, “Apple may slap a 17+ rating on our app and wash their hands, saying ‘you’re not required to censor your app’, but at the same time, they’re putting a great deal of pressure on us to do so. Who wants to be the only illicit dictionary on the App Store? That may work for Urban Dictionary, but not us. I think that applying parental ratings inconsistently is tightly related to censorship in our case, and will be true for other apps as well.”

On the other hand, mDictionary — which, like Ninjawords, uses Wiktionary as its dictionary data source — is rated 17+. Nihongo, an English-to-Japanese dictionary app, is also rated 17+. Qingwen, a Chinese dictionary, is currently rated 4+, but its developer wrote a weblog entry about having been flagged by the App Store reviewers because the app contained Chinese translations for the words fuck, cock, and penis:

As is clear from the screenshots, Qingwen doesn’t bombard you with words like “cock” and “penis” the moment you start it up. No, the Apple employee who took those screenshots specifically searched for those words. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the same thing as opening a website that contains swear words (like the page you’re reading, for instance) on the iPhone. If they don’t want Qingwen on the iPhone because it can show you “objectionable material”, then why allow Safari, Mail, YouTube and pretty much any other app, which can easily show you all sorts of even more “objectionable material”?

So clearly Ninjawords is not alone in its treatment regarding profanity from App Store reviewers. I bought a copy of Qingwen to try the current version, and a query for “fuck”, the example flagged by the App Store reviewers, no longer generates any results. “Shit”, however, does.

Now, it’s possible that the Wiktionary database contains certain “urban slang” (to use Schiller’s term) that warrants a different rating from other English dictionaries, but the feedback Matchstick software received from the App Store reviewers was very specific. They were flagged for the words cunt, fuck, and shit. Those three words are in other dictionaries, rated as low as 4+. If there are other terms in the unfiltered Ninjawords dictionary that Apple considers more objectionable, why weren’t those terms pointed out?

I believe Phil Schiller that Apple’s policy is not to reject App Store dictionaries for containing swear words. However, it’s clear this policy has not been consistently enforced by the App Store review team. The problem, as I see it, is not that one or more App Store reviewers were unaware that it is acceptable for dictionaries to contain words that are not acceptable in other contexts. Mistakes are inevitable. The problem is that there’s no good recourse for developers to appeal such a mistake. It should have been enough for Matchstick Software to point out that the words flagged as objectionable in their initial rejection are in fact present in several other dictionaries already in the store.

Here’s how Schiller closed his email to me:

Apple’s goals remain aligned with customers and developers — to create an innovative applications platform on the iPhone and iPod touch and to assist many developers in making as much great software as possible for the iPhone App Store. While we may not always be perfect in our execution of that goal, our efforts are always made with the best intentions, and if we err we intend to learn and quickly improve.

This is music to my ears. That Schiller was willing to respond in such detail and length, on the record, is the first proof I’ve seen that Apple’s leadership is trying to make the course correction that many of us see as necessary for the long-term success of the platform. The improvement I consider most important is a significant focus on fairness, consistency, and common sense in the App Store review process.

★ Ninjawords: iPhone Dictionary, Censored by Apple

John Gruber — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:50:58 GMT

Two years ago I linked to a web site called Ninjawords — a fast, simple online dictionary backed by a good data source (Wiktionary).

The developers behind Ninjawords, Matchstick Software, have released an iPhone version, currently available from the App Store for just $2. Here’s how they describe it:

Ninjas are three things:

They’re smart

They’re quick

They’re deadly accurate

Ninjawords is a dictionary for the iPhone built on these principles. We made it because we saw that the low-cost dictionaries on the App Store are slow, cluttered, and all use the same bad data source (WordNet) for their definitions.

Ninjawords takes a different approach. We use awesome, fresh, high quality data with more words and synonyms than you can throw a ninja star at. And best of all, when you look up your words, they all stay on the page. No need to flip back and forth between different pages as you look up multiple words.

It’s a terrific app — pretty much exactly what I’ve always wanted in an iPhone dictionary, and, yes, with both a better user experience and better dictionary content than the other low-cost dictionaries in the App Store.

But Ninjawords for iPhone suffers one humiliating flaw: it omits all the words deemed “objectionable” by Apple’s App Store reviewers, despite the fact that Ninjawords carries a 17+ rating.

Apple censored an English dictionary.

A dictionary. A reference book. For words contained in all reasonable dictionaries. For words contained in dictionaries that are used every day in elementary school libraries and classrooms.

Amazon, of course, does not restrict the sale of English dictionaries, either in print or for the Kindle. The Kindle, in fact, ships from the factory with a built-in dictionary, The New Oxford American Dictionary — the very same dictionary used by Mac OS X’s built-in Dictionary app. Like any good dictionary, it contains listing for all of the words deemed “objectionable” in Ninjawords by the App Store reviewers.

Even Walmart, notorious for its censorship of “objectionable” music and movies, neither restricts nor places warning labels on dictionaries. Apple’s App Store review team makes Walmart seem liberal by comparison.

I interviewed Phil Crosby, one of Ninjawords’s developers, via email.

The App Store approval process for Ninjawords took two months. Matchstick submitted the first build on May 13; it was rejected two days later. Says Crosby, “Our app was crashing on the latest beta of iPhone OS 3.0. We quickly fixed this issue and resubmitted.”

Matchstick did not hear back from Apple until May 30. Then, says Crosby: “We were rejected for objectionable content. They provided screenshots of the words ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’ showing up in our dictionary’s search results. What’s interesting is that we spent a good deal of time making it so that you must type vulgar words in their entirety, and only then will we show you suggestions in the search results. For instance, if you type ‘fuc’, you will not see ‘fuck’ as a suggestion. This is in contrast to all other dictionaries we’re aware of on the App Store (including Dictionary.com’s application), which will show you ‘fuck’ in the search results for ‘fuc’, ‘motherfucker’ for ‘mother’, etc.

In other words, the App Store reviewer(s) explicitly searched for curse words they already knew, and found them. (Reminiscent of the reviewer who rejected the e-book reader Eucalyptus after searching for, and finding, the Gutenberg edition of The Kama Sutra.)

This is the rejection email Matchstick Software received from Apple:

Thank you for submitting Ninjawords to the App Store. We’ve reviewed Ninjawords and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store at this time because it contains objectionable content which is in violation of Section 3.3.12 from the iPhone SDK Agreement which states:

“Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.”

Parental Controls have been announced for iPhone OS 3.0. It would be appropriate to resubmit your application for review once this feature is available.

Regards,

iPhone Developer Program

On July 1, the app was rejected for the third time. Crosby says, “Someone from Apple called Dave [Crosby’s Matchstick Software colleague] to tell him that we were being rejected again for illicit content (he provided the single example ‘cunt’, which we had indeed missed in our filters), and no matter what we did to our dictionary, it will have to be 17+ to make it to the App Store.”

In other words, not only must the dictionary be censored — a dictionary — but even after being purged of “objectionable” words it would only be considered with a 17+ rating. Even after agreeing to these terms, it took another two weeks for Ninjawords to appear in the App Store. According to Crosby, “We gave in and said fine, hoping that we could get on the App Store immediately since the solution to their rejection was a simple metadata change. However, the App Store reviewer would have none of that. We would have to resubmit an entirely new binary and get to the back of the queue before they would look at it again.”

Ninjawords appeared in the App Store on July 13.

The list of omitted words includes some which have utterly non-objectionable senses: ass, snatch, pussy, cock, and even screw. (Ass and cock appear throughout the King James Bible.)

Every time I think I’ve seen the most outrageous App Store rejection, I’m soon proven wrong. I can’t imagine what it will take to top this one.

Apple requires you to be 17 years or older to purchase a censored dictionary that omits half the words Steve Jobs uses every day.

Apple adds queue time, contact info to iPhone developer pages

Michael Rose — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 18:15:00 GMT

Filed under: Developer, iPhone, App Store

Small steps: reports from several iPhone developers indicate that Apple has showcased two key features on the Dev Center website that may improve the mood and attitude of anxious app submitters.

Feature #1 is a queue status graphic (seen here), letting everyone know how long the approval wait should be -- like the line signs at Walt Disney World, only far geekier.

Feature #2 is the presence of a new 'all issues' escalation email address, so developers with urgent bug fixes that need to be prioritized can get their questions answered -- something that the Iconfactory's Craig Hockenberry specifically asked for in his wrapup of the 1st-anniversary state of the store. This email channel has apparently been open for a week or two, but is now being publicized on the front page.

Several other tips & suggestions posts have also been updated in the past 24 hours, including notes on the keywording/tagging options and walkthroughs on changing your app name and assigning/adjusting the app's rating. If you're a registered developer, swing over to the Dev Center and take a look.

[via the delightful Nik Fletcher]

TUAW Apple adds queue time, contact info to iPhone developer pages originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 01 Aug 2009 13:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

★ Microsoft’s Long, Slow Decline

John Gruber — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 23:37:34 GMT

There were two interesting Windows-related news stories last week. First, Joe Wilcox’s story on a report from NPD claiming that 91 percent of $1,000-and-higher retail computer sales now go to Apple. Second, Microsoft’s quarterly financial results, in which revenue fell $1 billion short of projections and declined 17 percent year-over-year.

To be clear, Microsoft remains a very profitable company. However, they have never before reported year-over-year declines like this, nor fallen so short of projected earnings. Something is awry.

What is particularly alarming about Microsoft’s numbers is that revenue from its Windows PC division suffered an even greater year-over-year revenue decline than the company as a whole: 29 percent. One explanation for that is that Windows 7, a major new update, goes on sale in October, and so it’s expected, somehow, that Windows revenue would decline in the months preceding its release.

But Microsoft’s operating system business is not new, and it has never been particularly cyclical. Windows revenue, prior to this just-completed quarter, has only ever gone in one direction: up.

Windows is at the core of everything Microsoft does that makes money. They sell Windows, then they sell software that runs on Windows. As Windows goes, so goes Microsoft, and right now Windows is heading south.

One argument is that the fault lies with the global economy, not Microsoft itself. (This seems to be the argument Microsoft’s executives are making.) But not every tech company is suffering. Google is doing just fine, and Apple reported record non-holiday-quarter numbers for its just-ended quarter.

Apple operates in the same economy Microsoft does, and Mac sales are up. And the numbers from the aforementioned report by NPD are simply astounding. It’s worth noting, though, that NPD’s report is specifically about retail computer purchases; Wilcox’s story doesn’t make that clear. But that they don’t represent all computer purchases doesn’t mean they aren’t astounding figures. Things have not always been like this. NPD conducted the same survey at the beginning of 2008, and at that point Apple’s share of the $1,000+ retail computer market was only 66 percent. Repeat: Apple’s share of this segment has grown from 66 to 91 percent in a year and a half.

Apple has always only competed in the middle-to-high range of the computer market. But it was never the case, historically, that Apple sold a majority of middle-to-high-end computers. Even given that NPD’s numbers represent only retail sales, is there any reasonable doubt that Apple’s share of the non-retail market for $1,000+ computers is also growing?

Apple’s strong growth in this segment is a sign that the market is turning against Windows. If for no other reason than that Apple has never entered the low-cost computer market, it’s always been the case that the most budget-conscious computer buyers were Windows users. But the converse wasn’t true — not all Windows users were cheapies.

Today, though, Microsoft is increasingly left only with customers whose priority is price.

A Simple Pointed Question

During the late-’90s dot-com boom, it was standard operating procedure at many companies for professional web developers and designers to have two computers on their desks: one Windows, one Mac. One for primary development, one for testing in browsers on the “other” OS. (Virtualization wasn’t yet practical.)

But which to choose as the primary platform? Many chose one, many chose the other. But it was an interesting test group, because they were exposed to both platforms. These web developers were not like the people who, in a form of tribalism, claim to despise one or other other platform without having actually used it. Web developers had to know both the Mac and Windows, at least with passing familiarity, and the truth is that many, if not most, preferred Windows.

Today that is simply no longer the case. Microsoft has lost all but a sliver of this entire market. People who love computers overwhelming prefer to use a Mac today. Microsoft’s core problem is that they have lost the hearts of computer enthusiasts. Regular people don’t think about their choice of computer platform in detail and with passion like nerds do because, duh, they are not nerds. But nerds are leading indicators.

This is true in many markets with broad appeal, not just computers. Microsoft is looking ever more so like the digital equivalent of General Motors. Car enthusiasts lost interest in GM’s cars long before regular people did; the same is happening with Windows.

Or consider cameras. Companies like Canon and Nikon make most of their money from consumer-level point-and-shoot cameras. But they are intensely competitive at the high end of the market, too. Enthusiasts are valuable customers not just because they themselves buy expensive products, but because they, as enthusiasts, tend to recommend products in their area of expertise to others. The photo nerd who’s delighted with their $2,500 Canon SLR is likely to recommend a lot of $250 Canon point-and-shoots to friends and family.

Vista was a disaster for Microsoft. Windows 7 is, supposedly, the light at the end of the tunnel. But the best consensus about Windows 7 is only that it’s not going to be a complete and total clusterfuck like Vista. That it’s something XP users will actually want to upgrade to. Something that, when it comes pre-installed on a new machine, will not prompt questions about how to downgrade to XP.

But no one seems to be arguing that Windows 7 is something that will tempt Mac users to switch, or to tempt even recent Mac converts to switch back. It doesn’t even seem to be in the realm of debate. But if Windows 7 is actually any good, why wouldn’t it tempt at least some segment of Mac users to switch? Windows 95, 98, and XP did.

Microsoft seems to have conceded that the enthusiasts who’ve switched to the Mac in recent years are gone for good. Their apparent goal for Windows 7 was merely to make something better than Windows Vista. If Microsoft were a healthy, functional, competitive company willing and able to honestly assess its own shortcomings — like the Microsoft of the ’90s that conquered the entire industry — their goal would have been to make something not just better than Vista, but better than anything else on the market, including Mac OS X.

Some Joke

The evidence is staring Microsoft’s leadership in the face that they have lost the most lucrative segment of the market, but, judged by their actions and public remarks, they seem to think it’s all a big joke. They should be sweating this but they’re laughing it off.

Two weeks ago Microsoft held its annual Worldwide Partners Conference. There was a much-reported bit from the remarks of Kevin Turner, a former Wal-Mart executive who is now Microsoft’s COO. What caught people’s attention were Turner’s comments regarding having gotten a phone call from a lawyer at Apple regarding Microsoft’s “Laptop Hunter” ads. From Microsoft’s transcript:

And so we’ve been running these PC value ads. Just giving people saying, hey, what are you looking to spend? “Oh, I’m looking to spend less than $1,000.” Well we’ll give you $1,000. Go in and look and see what you can buy. And they come out and they just show them. Those are completely unscripted commercials.

And you know why I know they’re working? Because two weeks ago we got a call from the Apple legal department saying, hey — this is a true story — saying, “Hey, you need to stop running those ads, we lowered our prices.” They took like $100 off or something. It was the greatest single phone call in the history that I’ve ever taken in business. (Applause.)

I did cartwheels down the hallway. At first I said, “Is this a joke? Who are you?” Not understanding what an opportunity. And so we’re just going to keep running them and running them and running them.

That’s interesting insofar as it proves that Apple has an eye on Microsoft’s ads. But I’ve always imagined that this is pretty much what corporate attorneys do all the time when a competitor runs an ad that claims things which are not true. This is why you don’t often see direct price comparisons in TV commercials — prices change. And, in fact, a week later, Microsoft changed the ads to remove specific mentions of Mac prices. That silly lawyer.

But the really interesting part of Turner’s remarks from the conference is what he said immediately preceding the above, when he first broached the topic of Apple:

Now let’s talk about Apple. What are you going to do about those Apple ads? That was a year ago. Gosh, when I went home for the holidays, brothers, sisters, cousins — hey, hope you don’t have anything to do with marketing over there at Microsoft. What are you guys going to do about those Apple ads?

Stay tuned, stay tuned, stay tuned. Wow. Did we punch right back? The PC Hunter ads, the PC Rookie ads clearly have been winners in the marketplace.

Such winners in the marketplace that Apple’s laptop sales went up last quarter, and the rest of the industry’s declined. (Perhaps Microsoft would do better to measure the efficacy of their ads by their effect on sales, rather than by the number of phone calls they prompt from Apple lawyers.)

Then comes the real insight into Microsoft’s thinking:

I pulled this out of my Sunday newspaper. I have an old habit because I came from retail looking at the Sunday tabs and circulars that are in newspapers. This is straight out of my paper last Sunday. This is a comparison out of a leading electronics retailer that you can get a 13.3-inch Macbook for US$1199 from that retailer. Guess what. That same retailer, you can get the same PC with more RAM, a bigger hard drive, and almost a three-inch bigger screen for US$649. What an incredible opportunity.

And so Microsoft’s official stance regarding Apple’s growing domination of the $1,000+ market is that Apple is charging hundreds of extra dollars in pure margin — $500 in the case Turner cited in his prepared remarks. The computers that Microsoft chooses to brag about on stage at a major conference are the $650 17-inch laptops advertised in Best Buy Sunday circulars.

There’s no question that retailers sell tens of millions of cheap Windows laptops every year. But no one with a pair of eyes thinks such machines are of comparable quality to Apple MacBooks. Even without turning the machines on, anyone can see the difference in design and build quality. In fact, you don’t even need eyes — just pick them up and see which one squeaks. Apple is selling more MacBooks every quarter. Microsoft thinks it is sitting pretty because Best Buy has a 17-inch Dell for $650.

Turner is not alone. Back in April, when the new PC Hunter ad campaign started, David Webster, general manager for brand marketing at Microsoft, said the following in an interview with Newsweek’s Dan Lyons:

He says the idea was to turn Apple’s “I’m a Mac” campaign to Microsoft’s advantage. “We associate real people with being PCs, [but then Apple] ends up looking pretty mean-spirited, the way they go after customers,” he says. “It’s clear that’s who they are insulting.” At the same time he can’t resist taking a crack at the preciousness of some Mac users. “Not everyone wants a machine that’s been washed with unicorn tears,” he says.

Quoting the above, I wrote:

It seems clear that Microsoft’s stance on the Mac’s sales growth is that there’s nothing wrong with Windows or right with the Mac, but rather that there’s something wrong with Mac users.

Microsoft is no longer ignoring Apple’s market share gains and successful “Get a Mac” ad campaign. But the crux of these ads from Apple is that Macs are better; Microsoft’s response is a message that everyone already knows — that Windows PCs are cheaper. Their marketing and retail executives publicly espouse the opinion that, now that everyone sees Apple computers as cool, Microsoft has Apple right where they want them.

They’re a software company whose primary platform no longer appeals to people who like computers the most. Their executives are either in denial of, or do not perceive, that there has emerged a consensus — not just among nerds but among a growing number of regular just-plain users — that Windows PCs are second-rate. They still dominate in terms of unit-sale market share, yes, but not because people don’t recognize Windows as second-rate, but because they don’t care, in the same way millions of people buy metric tons of second-rate products from Wal-Mart every hour of every day.

That’s the business Wal-Mart wants to be in — selling a zillion cheap low-margin items and turning a profit on volume. That’s not the business Microsoft is in.

And in mobile software, the fastest-growing segment of the computer industry, Microsoft’s platform is both inferior and unpopular. Their plan to address this is to change its name.

I’m not arguing that Microsoft will collapse. They’re too big, too established for that to happen. I simply think that their results this quarter were not an aberration, but rather the first fiscal evidence of a long, slow decline that began several years ago.

'Space Invaders Infinity Gene' - Wow!

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 08:39:34 GMT

Taito's Space Invaders Inifinity Gene [$4.99] was finally unleashed into the App Store tonight, and our reaction is simply "Wow!". The iPhone version of the game is an expanded version of the Japanese mobile version and walks you down an evolutionary path of shooters starting with a brief glimpse ...

Institutional Longevity

Charlie Stross — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 11:25:43 GMT

(I'm back — been away for a weekend at local SF convention Satellite 2 in Glasgow.)

Over on Hacker News, GraffitiTim points out something interesting: "The first civilization started in Mesopotamia around 5000 BCE (more or less), which is 7,000 years ago. If you live until age 80, that's more than 1% of the history of civilization." So you can expect to live for more than 1% of the life span of human civilization to this date.

Of course, human permanent settlements have existed for at least 9,500 years. Evidence for human cultural activities appears around 75,000 to 80,000 years ago in the archaeological record; our species of hominid appears to have originated around 200,000 years ago. So the "1% of the history of civilization" idea depends intimately on the assumption that civilization is the only interesting thing about humanity.

But it has me thinking about permanence. We are very bad at building institutions that outlive us. A few have lasted for over a millenium — the Catholic church, Japanese royal family, Roman empire, Pharaonic system in Egypt ... probably a handful of banks, businesses, and universities. But I feel reasonably confident in saying that there's no direct continuity between early Mesopotamian civilization and our contemporary cultures, other than the most abstract idea of a rule of law, hierarchical authority structures, society based on class divisions, and government abstracted from the individual by bureacratic institutions.

Now: what happens if, in the next 50 years, we learn how to control the human aging process so that we can live long, healthy lives? What sort of institutions are required for a society with indefinite prolongation of physical (possibly also mental) youth?

Senescence is a ghastly illness which, even in the absence of secondary ailments (such as coronary heart disease or cancer) amounts to a sentence of death by torture over a 30-50 year period. Interestingly, it doesn't appear to have one single cause; rather, it's the emergent consequence of a bunch of metabolic malfunctions that emerge slowly, only after the carrier has passed reproductive age (and presumably passed the faulty genes on down the line to subsequent generations).

I'll note in passing that control of the bunch of biological malfunctions collectively known as "aging" doesn't imply immortality; accidents, violence, and suicide suggest that a median life expectancy of around 600 years would emerge, and that presupposes that other processes don't kill us first. (For example, we have no idea how human cognitive processes would change if life was prolonged beyond the current extreme of around 125 years.)

But consider this: democratic societies are made tolerable by the generational change of political incumbents — even without term limits, sooner or later the old guard bows out, to be replaced by fresh blood. So too are unelected institutions; public intellectuals, tenured professors, and judges all eventually retire from the public sphere.

Some people believe (or appear to believe) that the abolition of ageing would be an unalloyed blight on the human condition; I disagree strongly. However, it's very clear that our social and political structures aren't suited to life on a longer time-span.Try to imagine any cultural activity you are indifferent or hostile to but which is unaccountably popular, persisting deathless down the centuries because its supporters are also long-lived.

What is to be done?

Obligatory background reading: Back to Methuselah by George Bernard Shaw.

★ Pay Walls

John Gruber — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 01:29:13 GMT

David Simon — former crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun, now best known as the creator of The Wire — lays out the argument in favor of newspapers charging for access to their web sites in this detailed essay for Columbia Journalism Review. His plan, in a nut, is that The New York Times and The Washington Post should, in concert, turn off free access to their web sites:

You must act. Together. On a specific date in the near future — let’s say September 1 for the sheer immediacy of it — both news organizations must inform readers that their Web sites will be free to subscribers only, and that while subscription fees can be a fraction of the price of having wood pulp flung on doorsteps, it is nonetheless a requirement for acquiring the contents of the news organizations that spend millions to properly acquire, edit, and present that work.

No half-measures, either. No TimesSelect program that charges for a handful of items and offers the rest for free, no limited availability of certain teaser articles, no bartering with aggregators for a few more crumbs of revenue through microbilling or pennies-on-the-dollar fees. Either you believe that what The New York Times and The Washington Post bring to the table every day has value, or you don’t.

The fundamental problem facing the news industry is simple: As the shift from print to the web accelerates, their revenues are no longer covering the cost of their operations. It’s not that they aren’t making money online, it’s that they aren’t making enough to cover their operations.

The potential solutions are, at a fundamental level, obvious: (a) generate more revenue from the web; (b) cut operating costs; or (c) both. Small measures will not do the job. And things are getting worse as more readers shift from print to the web. E.g., The Boston Globe (owned by The New York Times Company) lost $50 million last year, and will lose $85 million this year.

So the core problem is not in dispute: newspapers aren’t generating enough revenue online to support their operations. Simon’s solution is to get the money from readers. Simon’s heart is in the right place; he loves and values newspapers, not merely out of nostalgia, but for the important role they play as civic institutions. He investigated and wrote a terrific piece earlier this year about the almost complete decline in press coverage of the police in his home city of Baltimore.

But I say he’s very much wrong that charging readers for access to news is a credible solution. It would just make things worse. If the Times and/or Post were to erect a pay wall, I see things playing out as follows: they lose most of their readers; ad revenue declines accordingly; the revenue they make from readers who do pay won’t even make up for the lost ad revenue; and so by switching from free to paid access they’d actually sink further into the red.

The consumer psychology of web subscriptions for news just doesn’t work out. It’s right there in the language we use to talk about newsstand prices for print periodicals: per copy. A dollar for a newspaper or a few bucks for a glossy magazine feels like a fair price for a copy. Trees have been cut, presses have been rolled, trucks have been driven to get that copy into your hands. Even subscription pricing for printed newspapers and magazines is always stated in the context of how much you can save compared to per-copy prices at the newsstand.

What feels like a fair price for a copy of a web page, on the other hand, is nothing. They’re just ones and zeroes.

Newsstand and subscription prices have never been the main source of revenue for newspapers anyway — advertising is. But they can’t make as much money from web advertising as from print for several reasons. Pre-Internet, newspapers had inordinate control over the supply of news, and therefore over the supply of advertising, and they grew fat on the profits.

The web has leveled the playing field for advertising. The supply of news, and of corresponding advertising venues, has increased dramatically and permanently. Newspapers will never make as much money from online advertising as they did from print because they will never again exert so much control over the supply of news.

Classified ads in particular were a source of obscene profits for daily newspapers. They’ve lost the market to Craigslist, which does a better job and lists most of them for free.

Yes, pay-for-access web subscriptions seem to be working for the Wall Street Journal and other niche publications like the Financial Times. But business news is a niche. They are the exception, not the norm, serving a market where it has long been considered normal to pay for immediate access to information.

Simon, arguing for pay walls, makes the comparison to TV:

For the first thirty years of its existence as America’s primary entertainment medium, television was — after the initial purchase of the set itself—provided at no cost to viewers, instead subsidized by lucrative ad revenues. The notion of Americans in 1975 being asked to pay a monthly bill for their television consumption would have seemed farcical. Yet in the ensuing thirty years, we have become a nation that shells out $60, $70, or $120 in monthly cable fees; indeed, whole vistas of programming exist free of advertising revenue, subsidized entirely by subscriptions.

He is right that with TV, most people now choose to pay for what was once free. But any comparison to newspapers is fundamentally flawed in numerous ways.

With cable TV, you pay one monthly fee for all channels, not for each channel separately. And in return, you get a vastly improved service. I remember from my childhood when my family switched from free over-the-air TV to cable. Over-the-air we got 11 channels, many of them full of static. With cable we got dozens of channels, all of them crystal clear. My parents seemed happy to pay in exchange for what we got in return. With newspaper web access, Simon is proposing that readers start paying for the same thing they now get for free.

There’s also HBO (and similar premium channels like Showtime) which viewers do pay for specifically. But HBO offers exclusive premium content, and has always presented that content without commercial interruptions. You can’t get shows like HBO shows on regular TV channels. News doesn’t work like that.

And unlike HBO, newspapers can’t possibly forgo advertising in exchange for subscription fees. (Not to mention that, as annoying as many online ads are, nothing on the web compares to the intrusive nature of commercial interruptions on TV, especially back in the pre-DVR era.)

I’m not pretending to be an expert on the details of exactly how newspaper companies should adapt. But you don’t have to be an expert to notice the obvious. Newspapers are losing millions of dollars. New, online-only publications, on the other hand, are operating at a profit. And there is a stark difference between the two: new online publications are lean and mean. They are small, flat organizations where most of the employees are producing actual content.

The primary problem with newspaper companies isn’t their revenue. It’s the size and scope of their operations. Again I say: mammals and dinosaurs. Simon, along with everyone else who thinks online subscription fees can save the newspaper industry, is effectively arguing that the world will change to support newspapers. The truth is that newspapers must change to adapt to the world. Just because the extinction of newspapers would be a tragic loss doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

Why Amazon went Big Brother on some Kindle e-books

caesar@arstechnica.com (Ken Fisher) — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 00:59:21 GMT

Amazon.com shocked customers yesterday when it reached out to hundreds, if not thousands of Kindles and simply deleted texts that users had not only purchased, but had started to read. A literary coitus interruptus, Amazon spoiled the readers' descent into Orwellian masochism with nary a warning or apology.

Sometime on Thursday, users had an eerie feeling that they were being watched, receiving emails stating that their purchases were being refunded. When they connected to the Kindle's WhisperNet, the purchases in question were automatically deleted. Some could only wonder: how often could this happen? Perhaps the Thought Police Amazon Customer Service team could cut off your books whenever they wanted to.

With Amazon's tramping on the works of Orwell, customers felt their utopian world of tree-saving e-book consumption trampled upon. They lamented their un-e-books, finding themselves feeling hollow. With what could their hearts be filled to restore the escape they crave?

Click here to read the rest of this article

iPhone Developer Craig Hunter on Palm’s WebOS SDK

John Gruber — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:14:07 GMT

Craig Hunter:

While the webOS SDK allows access to raw accelerometer data, it’s limited to a 4 Hz sampling rate (that’s four samples per second). Applications like gMeter and greenMeter need 50-100 Hz to even be practical, and most games need at least 20 Hz for smooth inputs that won’t lag too far behind typical graphics framerates. A low rate of 4Hz is not usable for dynamic motion where high fidelity is desired. Accelerometer support in the webOS is suitable for detecting basic movement of the phone for interface rotation, but that’s about it.

★

Game Review: Automobile

Patrick Korner (pkorner@gmail.com) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 06:30:00 GMT

By Patrick Korner
July 16, 2009

Designer: Martin Wallace
Publisher: Warfrog Games (Treefrog Line)
Players: 3-5
Ages: 13+
Playing Time: 120 minutes
Rules Language: English
Links:

Martin Wallace is a designer who certainly needs no introduction these days – and yet given that I’m writing this review, I’m going to give him one anyways. Martin Wallace is one of the top designers of heavy strategy games active today, and his recent resume is littered with hits: Brass, Steam (and of course its legendary predecessor, Age of Steam) and Tinners’ Trail, to name just a few. Since becoming a full-time designer, Wallace has branched out from the traditional Warfrog publishing model (larger print runs, cardboard counters) and introduced the Treefrog Line: Games with all-wood components (save the board), published in signed and numbered print runs of 1,500 copies. Thus far, all Treefrog titles have been unqualified hits: all of the early games have sold out, several are either rumoured or confirmed to be getting larger-label reprints, and all feature quintessential Wallace-style gameplay and mechanisms.

And now, the Treefrog line grows by one more: Automobile, a game that lets players return to the dawn of the “Age of the Automobile,” producing and selling cars for fame and profit. But is the game solid? Is it a worthy addition to the Wallace stable?

The first time you sit down to play Automobile, the first thing that will strike you is the board. It’s quite large, and nearly every square inch is used up by some part of the game. As such, there’s not much room for artwork, which is why it’s so nice to have the very excellent illustrations of various early cars on the spaces ringing the board. According to Wallace, these illustrations were a large part of the game’s inspiration, so it’s great to see them in the finished product as well.

Including the car spaces (which serve as spaces for players to build factories on), there is a distributor section (for players to sell cars via distribution networks), a set of character boxes (characters, all of whom are real-life individuals from the era in question, afford the player who chooses them unique benefits for that round), a round progression track (to make sure all of the various pieces of each round take place), loan spaces, a demand chart (to help players remember which kinds of cars are going to be in demand that round), a production chart that reminds players of how many cars their factories are allowed to produce, and finally a set of car sales boxes (where the cars you sell each round go to keep track of total quantities sold).

The game lasts four rounds, with each round split into several phases:

• Draw Demand Tiles
The game includes 16 wooden tiles, numbered from 2 to 5, to represent the public demand for cars that round. Demand tiles are hidden – they don’t get flipped up until a later phase. This is kind of crucial, since it keeps the game from bogging down too much while the more analytically-minded players churn through all the min-max math that open demand tiles would introduce. Knowing only a small percentage of the total demand for certain is also quite thematic, since it is a rare car company indeed that knows exactly what the public wants all the time.

• Choose Character
In turn order (randomly determined to start the game, later determined by passing order), each player gets to choose a character. Each character can be chosen only once, and the choice of character does two things: it gives you a special ability and sets your turn order for the rest of the round. Ford, for example, lets you add a factory to a space you already have a factory on (thus upping production and modelling quite nicely Ford’s effect on the industry). Ford is also the first character in line, which means that choosing him lets you go first for the rest of the round.

Several of the characters also give you R&D cubes. These are important because without them, you can’t build much in the way of factories – more on that in a bit.

• Perform Actions
This is the heart of the game and allows each player, in turn order, to carry out three actions. Since the game lasts only four rounds, you get to do only twelve things all game, so best to make them count, then. You have five choices here:

Take R&D cubes: Take 2 cubes from the supply. That’s it. Research is time-consuming, you see.
Build factories: You can build 1 to 2 factories in a single car space – only one player per space, of course. Each space has two key pieces of information: the car class (black border for economy cars, gold border for midrange cars and blue border for luxury cars) and the production cost (which starts at a cheap $200 and goes up from there). Each factory you build costs whatever the space dictates; you also have a single brown “parts factory” that costs you $500 no matter where you put it. The regular factories affect production ability; the parts factory makes each car you produce on that space $30 cheaper (but doesn’t let you up production). Money goes to the bank, where one hopes it doesn’t get sucked into some kind of high-risk venture…

Factories have an additional cost over and above the cash – R&D cubes. If you want to build on the first empty space beyond the most modern factory (of any type and owned by any player), you must pay 1 R&D cube. To jump a space and build 2 spaces ahead will cost you 3 R&D cubes. Jumping 3 spaces will cost you 6 cubes, etc. If, on the other hand, you want to build behind the “technology leader,” you don’t have to pay any R&D cubes. Jumping ahead can be nice (by keeping your factory at the cutting edge and thus making it less likely to attract losses), but the side effect is that you allow your opponents to save R&D cubes, potentially giving them more options down the road. (I promised myself I’d get through this without a single car pun but there you are, another promise broken.)
Produce cars: You can produce cars at all of your factories at once. Each factory has a minimum and maximum number of cars it can produce (as per the production table on the board). Economy cars cost $50, midrange cars cost $70 and luxury cars cost $100. Remember, of course, that your parts factory makes the cars you produce (on that one space) cheaper. Once you pay the bank your money, you get to place your little wooden cars onto the car space – they will wait here, patiently, until they get sold (or not sold, which is rather a less happy situation).
Place distributors: You can add between 1 and 3 distributors to the distributor boxes. There are three boxes – one for each of the three car classes. There’s no limit to how many distributors you can have in the boxes (apart from your bits limit of 8, that is), but since the number of distributor spaces (i.e. those spaces that actually allow distributors to sell a car) is limited, you may want to temper your enthusiasm as unsuccessful distributors will still cost you.
Close factory: Progress marches ever onward, which means that eventually, many of those early-model cars will no longer make sense to keep around. Since newer car models get sold before older ones, you run the risk of getting stuck with unsellable inventory. And the older your factory is, the more loss cubes you get. (More on these later, but for now just remember that loss cubes = money penalty.) Thus, you can remove all of your factories from the space and replace them with a single black factory to show that the space was built on (since built-on spaces affect loss cubes, regardless of whether they’re still in operation or closed down). You also get a refund from the bank of whatever you paid for the space, less $100 per factory (or parts factory). Finally, you get to return half of your loss cubes (rounded up) to the bank.

One important thing to note about the actions is that the player going last in the round will likely be the last to produce cars (since players will often wait until the end of the round to produce). This gives that player a bit of a leg up, as she can survey the cars that the other players have built (and hopefully glean from the quantities produced a little info about the other players’ demand tiles). Presumably, this information can then lead to producing the “right” number of cars.

• Sell via Howard
Howard is one of the characters available to you, and choosing him gives you a unique special ability: the ability to sell two cars, no questions asked, before anyone else gets to sell anything. A fitting ability for arguably the most famous salesman in automotive history, and one that is often chosen early in the character selection phase.

Selling a car means taking a car from a car space and moving it to one of the car selling boxes. Each car class sells for a different amount: Economy cars for $100 (profit of $50), midrange cars for $150 (profit of $80) and luxury cars for $200 (profit of $100). Money, as usual, comes from the bank. Sweet, sweet money. Money, in addition to making the world go round, is how you win the game, so more is definitely better. Once you get your cash, the cars you sold go back into your supply.

• Sell via Distributors
In turn order, each player gets to move one distributor from the distributor box it’s in (there are three on top of each other – one box per car class) to an empty space on the left. The number of empty spaces varies depending on the round – the early rounds have few spaces, the later rounds more. When you move your distributor, you can either move him directly across (i.e. sell a car of the same class) or move him up or down one level (i.e. sell a car that is one grade higher or lower than the box the distributor started the phase in). When you move a distributor into a space, you also take the appropriate car from one of your factories and put it into appropriate the car selling box – hooray for sales!

Once all available spaces are full, any distributors that went empty get canned (i.e. they go back to your supply). However, going empty doesn’t mean going hungry – you still have to feed those ex-employees, after all. Thus, each distributor sent home will net you one loss cube.

Each player then gets paid for the cars their distributors sold and the cars are returned to their supplies. The distributors which did the selling get shifted back to the right – i.e. they end up in the distributor box of the car class they sold this round. Round over round, then, the car classes your distributors can sell will change around, giving you something else to think about.

• Executive Decisions
Before the Great Unveiling Of The Demand Tiles (okay, it’s not called that in the rules but it should be), players have one more phase to take care of. Executive Decisions let players do one of three things: close a factory (only one player gets to do this), increase the number of cars sold in a space (in one of two ways: discounting – which costs no R&D cubes but reduces the cars’ selling price – or marketing, which keeps the price high but costs R&D cubes), or pass. Passing is actually of interest because the first player to pass gets first choice of characters next round.

Closing a factory is carried out just like it is when you use an action to close one – you get money back, loss cubes removed, etc.

Marketing and discounting are represented by little white and grey wooden cylinders. The first white cylinder to be chosen costs 2 R&D cubes; the other two cost only 1 each. There are two single grey cylinders along with a double stack (which must be added to a single car space), all of which are free to take. However, once you’ve added a cylinder to a space, you can only add the other colour – no doubling up on white, for example.

Once all players have passed, the phase ends.

• Sell via Demand Tiles
At this point, all players flip over their demand tiles. The number of tiles varies with the round (1 tile in the first round, 2 tiles thereafter). The demand chart tells you which demand tiles correspond to which car class – for example, in the second round the higher of your two demand tiles affects midrange demand while the lower one affects economy demand. Additionally, there are some single demand tiles that get pulled in the third and fourth rounds: one for luxury cars and one extra tile for economy (in the last round only). All demand tiles, once revealed, get added to the appropriate car selling boxes.

Then, the selling begins. For each car class, the total demand is added up. Then, starting with the newest (i.e. most expensive and furthest along the car / factory track) factories, each space sells one car. Factories with grey / white cylinders get to sell one extra car per cylinder. Cars, when sold, get added to the appropriate car selling boxes (taking care to put those being sold at a discount into the discounted boxes). If you get to the end of the track and there is still demand left over, you start at the top and work your way down again. Eventually, one of two things happens: you run out of cars or you run out of demand. Excess demand is ignored, but any unsold cars get returned to your supply – bringing a loss cube with each of them. This is a double penalty – while excess distributors didn’t cost you anything (apart from the action), excess cars will not only incur the loss cube penalty, they already cost you money to produce in the first place.

Finally, each player gets paid for the cars they sold, then returns the sold cars to their respective supplies.

• Losses
During this phase, losses are totalled and the penalties paid. But before you can pay for the losses your excess distributors and cars got you, you have to see whether your factories will also cost you. For each car class, the most modern factory gets 0 loss cubes. Moving down the track, each subsequent factory in that class gets 1 more loss cube than the one before it. Closed factories count, making those factories that come after them even more expensive. Cubes then get added to each player’s total.

Now, two characters’ special abilities come into play. Sloan lets you get rid of half your loss cubes, rounded up, while Chrysler lets you get rid of loss cubes equal to the round number (i.e. 1 in round 1, 2 in round 2, etc.).

Finally, each player pays for their remaining loss cubes. Each cube costs $10 in round 1, $20 in round 2, $30 in round 3 and $40 in round 4. Losses in the early rounds aren’t overly punishing, but late-game losses can be irritating indeed.

I haven’t mentioned loans yet, mostly because they’re quite simple. If you want a loan, you take one: $500 per loan and you can take at most two during the game. During each losses phase, you must pay $50 to the bank per loan.

• End Of Turn
Finally, the last phase of the round is a “clean-up” phase where the various Executive Decisions bits are returned to their respective places, and the characters are reset to their game start state (i.e. any wooden bits – R&D cubes, reminder cylinders – get added to them again). The round marker is moved forward one space and the next round then begins.

At the end of the fourth round, the game ends. Now, players get money for their factories on the board – each factory is worth full value (as opposed to the $100 loss when closing one in-game). Players with loans must then pay them back as well at $600 per loan. The player with the most money wins.

In reading the summary above, one thing becomes abundantly clear: Automobile is a game that features a ton of interaction between players. From jockeying for player order to fighting for distributor spaces to maneuvering to sell the most cars, each key phase of the game forces the players to plan for the moves their opponents are most likely to make (not to mention keeping some flexibility in reserve should their own plans get skewed in the process). This level of engagement is common in Wallace games, and it is good to see Automobile maintain the tradition in fine form.

Another thing that I like about the game is that, again in the finest Wallace tradition, you are given three different resources to manage: money, R&D cubes and loss cubes. It would certainly have been possible to abstract all three into a single item (likely cash), but this would remove some of the balancing act the game forces players to perform. In this game, being cash-rich but R&D cube poor is a bad thing – you’re in good position this turn but without sufficient R&D cubes, your holdings are subject to being overtaken by newer, more modern cars that will then sell before yours. The gradual accumulation of loss cubes again forces players to balance their goals: When is the best time to close a factory? When is the best round to pick Sloan or Chrysler? Chrysler, being the last character in the row, lets you go last for sure, which is nice when producing cars – but quite annoying when placing distributors. Each round gives you a significant set of questions to answer, and how you go about answering them with the various resources you can bring to bear is a large part of the game’s appeal.

Thematically, Automobile is very tight – every action you carry out makes “sense” in that you can think of a real-world analogue for what you just did. Why get rid of loss cubes and recoup money when closing a factory? Well, because you sold things off for salvage, then sold the land again. Why does Durant (a character I haven’t yet mentioned) let you build a single factory on any open space you can afford, R&D-wise? Well, because Durant (of General Motors fame) bought lots of little companies and brought them into the GM fold. And so on. To me, this is one of the greatest things about Automobile.

Finally, the game gives you precious little room for mistakes – you get only twelve actions total, remember. Since you’ll always need to produce cars each round, you actually have only eight actions that aren’t already pre-set. Subtract again the (likely) situation where you’ll build factories in three of your four rounds and you’re down to five “elective” actions. This is not a lot to work with, so you’d better be sure you know what you’re doing.

Component-wise, there is little to complain about. The Treefrog games, with their wooden bits, all have significant appeal, and Automobile is no different here. Some may prefer sculpted plastic minis, but I much prefer the wooden bits – the cars look like little wooden cars, and the distributors look like little head-and-shoulders profiles. The board is a little busy, and those who dislike the use of fill patterns will not be impressed, but I find the board to be just fine. There is much information to convey, and the board does so without being overly artistic (and thus potentially obscuring important information).

The rules are much improved from early Warfrog games. So far, I’ve always been able to find the information I want in the rules without having to hunt too far – it helps that the game is slightly more linear in nature than, say, Brass, the rulebook for which had to contend with trying to explain a cyclical game in a linear manner. The designer notes at the end of the rulebook are, as always, interesting and entertaining to read. I quite like how Wallace has, with the Treefrog Line, given us a little window into his thought processes, how the game came to be, and (sometimes) a little hint on how to play it. This is something I wish other publishers would start doing as well.

Overall, Automobile is another winner from Wallace. I have played the game five times now (three times with 3, once with 4 and once with 5), and it has been very well received each time. According to Wallace, his favourite number of players for the game is 5 (more cutthroat that way), but I find it to be a very enjoyable experience with 3 and 4 as well. Three players might be slightly less interesting (as there are 3 car classes, and thus possibly a risk with new players that one player will be allowed to control one class all by themselves), but it’s probably the best way to learn the game.

Automobile is one of my favourite heavier games of 2009, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone who is a fan of economic and resource optimization games. Wallace will be hard pressed to maintain the impressive momentum he has built up over the past year, but I am confident he will – not to mention happy to go along for the ride. (Oh dear, I just couldn’t end this review without one last pun – sorry.)

Twitter, Even More Open Than We Wanted

Biz (noreply@blogger.com) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 18:15:00 GMT

About a month ago, an administrative employee here at Twitter was targeted and her personal email account was hacked. From the personal account, we believe the hacker was able to gain information which allowed access to this employee's Google Apps account which contained Docs, Calendars, and other Google Apps Twitter relies on for sharing notes, spreadsheets, ideas, financial details and more within the company. Since then, we have performed a security audit and reminded everyone of the importance of personal security guidelines.

This attack had nothing to do with any vulnerability in Google Apps which we continue to use. This is more about Twitter being in enough of a spotlight that folks who work here can become targets. In fact, around the same time, Evan's wife's personal email was hacked and from there, the hacker was able to gain access to some of Evan's personal accounts such as Amazon and PayPal but not email. This isn't about any flaw in web apps, it speaks to the importance of following good personal security guidelines such as choosing strong passwords.

Stolen Documents, Not Compromised Accounts

It's important to note that the stolen documents which were downloaded and offered to various blogs and publications are not Twitter user accounts nor were any user accounts compromised (except for a screenshot of one person's account and we contacted that person and recommended changing their password). This was not a hack on the Twitter service, it was a personal attack followed by the theft of private company documents.

We are in touch with our legal counsel about what this theft means for Twitter, the hacker, and anyone who accepts and subsequently shares or publishes these stolen documents. We're not sure yet exactly what the implications are for folks who choose to get involved at this point but when we learn more and are able to share more, we will.

The 'Underwear Drawer' Analogy

We have a culture of sharing and communication within Twitter and these stolen documents represent a fraction of what we produce on a regular basis. Obviously, these docs are not polished or ready for prime time and they're certainly not revealing some big, secret plan for taking over the world. As Peter Kafka put it, this is "akin to having your underwear drawer rifled: Embarrassing, but no one’s really going to be surprised about what’s in there." That is an apt analogy.

Nevertheless, as they were never meant for public communication, publishing these documents publicly could jeopardize relationships with Twitter's ongoing and potential partners. We're doing our best to reach out to these folks and talk over any questions and concerns. However, our goal remains focusing on the most important business at hand—creating value for users and building the best possible Twitter service.

A Ban on Imports (continued)

Gilad Bracha (noreply@blogger.com) — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:41:00 GMT

In my previous post, I characterized imports as evil, and promised to expand upon non-evil (yay verily, even good) alternatives. First, to recap:

Imports are used for linking modules together. Unfortunately, they are embedded within the modules they link instead of being external to them. This embedding makes the modules containing the imports dependent on the specific linkage configuration the imports represent.

Workarounds like dependency injection are just that: workarounds (e.g., see this post). They are complex, cumbersome, heavyweight. OSGi even more so. Above all, they are unnecessary - provided the language has adequate modularity constructs.

So, which languages have sufficient modularity support? I know of only two such languages: Newspeak and PLT Scheme. ML has a very elaborate module system, but ultimately it does not meet my requirements.

Modules and their definitions (these are two distinct things) should be first class and support mutual recursion. This isn’t the case in ML, though some dialects do support mutual recursion.

Tangent: The difficulty in ML, incidentally, is rooted in the type system. It is very hard to typecheck the kind of abstractions we are talking about. Worse, if you want to make your type declarations modular, your modules end up having types as members. This can lead you into deep water with types of types (making your type system undecidable). To avoid that trap, ML opts to stratify the system, so that modules (that contain types) are not values (that have types).

Not surprisingly then, progress on these issues comes from the dynamically typed world. Over a decade ago, the Schemers introduced Units.

The biggest difference between Newspeak modularity constructs and units is probably the treatment of inheritance. In Newspeak our module definitions are exactly top level classes, which reduces the number of concepts while allowing module definitions to benefit from inheritance.

There are strong arguments against inheritance of module definitions. For example, you cannot reliably add members to a module definition, because they might conflict with identically named members in the heirs of that definition. Specifying a superclass (or super module definition) looks like a hardwired dependency as well.

On the other hand, being able to reuse module definitions via inheritance is very attractive. Especially if you can mix them in freely.

Ultimately, we decided that the benefits of unifying classes and module definitions outweighed the costs.

Take the argument above regarding extending module definitions with new members. Newspeak was designed with an eye toward a completely networked world, where software is a service, not an artifact. In such a world, you can find all your heirs - just as if you were working on your own private application in your IDE. So if you need to add a member to a module definition, you should be able check who is mixing it in and what names they have added.

Tangent: This may still sound radical today, but this world is moving into place as we speak:
V8 gives the web browser the performance needed to be a platform for serious client software.
HTML 5, Gears etc. provide such software with persistent storage on the client
Chrome OS makes it obvious (as if it wasn’t clear enough before) that this in turn commoditizes the OS, and that the missing pieces will keep coming.

Likewise, in the absence of a global namespace, top level classes do not inherit from any specific superclass (and nested classes don’t either because all names are late bound) . Overall, the downside of allowing inheritance on module definitions doesn't apply in Newspeak.

The upside compared to conventional constructs is huge. It means you can easily take entire libraries, create multiple instances of them (each with its own configuration), mix them into new definitions, write polymorphic code that can work simultaneously with different instances or even different implementations of the API etc. You can store the libraries and their instances in variables, pass them as parameters, return them from computations, hold them in data structures, serialize them to disk or over the wire - all with the same mechanisms you use for ordinary classes and objects.

This economy of mechanism is important. It means you don’t have to learn a variety of specialized and complex tools to build modular systems. The same basic tools you use to implement basic CS101 examples will serve across the board. This will carry through to other areas like tooling: an object inspector can be used to inspect a “package”, for example. Altogether, your system can be much smaller - which makes it easier to learn, faster to load, likelier to fit on small devices etc. Simplicity is an advantage in itself.

As I explained in the first half of this series, the only need for a global namespace is for configuration: linking the pieces of an application together. There are several ways you can deal with the configuration/linkage issue. It’s a tooling issue. We use the IDE, as I described in an older post. So using the running example from part 1, we can write:

class SoundSystem usingPlatform: platform andPlayer: player = {

|

(* dependencies on platform might include things like the following: *)

List = platform Collections List. (* You can see how this replaces an import *)

mp3Player = player usingPlatform: platform withDock: self.

|
}{ ... }

class IPhone usingPlatform: platform withDock: dock = { 

|

(* dependencies on platform elided *)

myDock = dock.

|

}{ ... }

class Zune usingPlatform: platform withDock: dock = { 

|

(* dependencies on platform elided *)

theirDock = dock.

|

}{ ... }

and then create instances in the IDE (which provides us with a namespace where SoundSystem, iPhone(tm) and Zune(tm) are all bound to the classes defined above):

sys1:: SoundSystem usingPlatform: Platform new andPlayer: IPhone.

sys2:: SoundSystem usingPlatform: Platform new andPlayer: Zune.

tm: Did you know? iPhone is trademark of Apple; Zune is a trademark of Microsoft.

Variations on the above are possible; hopefully, you get the idea. If not - well, don’t worry, I probably won’t explain it again.

The absence of a global namespace has additional advantages of course: there’s no static state, and it’s good for security (but that is for another day).

Year two

Craig Hockenberry — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 18:53:11 GMT

As we approach the first anniversary of selling things on the iTunes App Store, I’d like to take the opportunity to look at where we’ve been and where we’d like to go. A lot of good things have happened since last July 11th, but there’s still much room for improvement.

Note: These words may be mine, but their origin is from conversations with hundreds of iPhone developers. Saying that there was a lot of discussion about the App Store in the bars around WWDC would be the understatement of the century. The length of this essay is proof.

There is hope

As developers, we have a tendency to look at things that are “wrong” and complain. It’s also important to look at what’s been improved in the past year: it gives me hope that we’ll eventually see some of the suggestions I make in this essay.

Here are things that have helped us sell more product:

Reviews only from people who have purchased the app.
Promotion codes.
Better categorization.
A nationwide ad campaign.

The root of the problem

Building the App Store using the iTunes infrastructure was a brilliant move on Apple’s part. It allowed them to sell software to millions of users with a minimal amount of development. Look at it this way: would you rather have lost the first 6 months of revenue while waiting for Apple to perfect the system used to deliver our applications?

But now iTunes presents problems for both Apple and third party developers because of this simple fact: software is not music. I believe this is the basic issue that both parties are coming to grips with:

Music and software differ greatly in the number of titles. Apple is currently touting 50,000 applications in the App Store. While an impressive number in this nascent category, it pales in comparison to 10 million songs.
As developers, we may be small fish in this sea of titles, but we’re more important to the health of the iPhone platform than musicians are to the health of iTunes. People like Walt Mossberg don’t talk about the importance of music when reviewing the competition.
iTunes customers do not have functional problems with songs. People don’t have to learn how to listen to music. Anyone who’s done customer support can tell you that’s not true for software.
There are never new versions of a song. Yes, there are remixes and other adaptations, but these are labeled, marketed and sold (via SKU) as unique products. Software, on the other hand, usually gets a new version every few months.
Music can’t damage the device. Malicious software can.
Music doesn’t depend on the network while its playing. Our software can break or change behavior because of this dependency on external data.
Many musicians sell their content through third parties (media companies), most developers do not.

Finally, the complexity of system with 10 million database rows backed by a worldwide content distribution mechanism is not lost on us. Changes to infrastructure of this scale won’t happen overnight.

Approvals

Apple needs to face the fact that the current review process is not scaling well. When the App Store launched, there were a thousand apps and reviews took less than a week.

Now, with 50,000 apps, we’re currently looking at three week lead times for reviews. When there are 100,000 apps are we going to be waiting a couple of months for approval? Or more?

And even with these long review periods, there is no shortage of applications being pulled from the App Store. Some developers wonder if approval is less about consumer protection than it is about protecting Apple’s interests.

This long review process has a serious impact for both developers and customers:

Maintenance releases aren’t viable

There are always bugs that pop up which can be fixed very easily. Twitterrific currently has a problem with marking tweets as a favorite (caused by a change at Twitter.) We could literally fix this bug in five minutes, but it would still take three weeks to get it onto a customer’s phone.

Patching an existing release and doing a quick update is something all developers have been able to do on other platforms (Mac or Windows, for example.) But after spending several weeks in a queue, your 1.0.1 release is likely to be out of date because in the interim you’ve been working on a 1.0.2 release. If you replace your 1.0.1 release with the new 1.0.2 release, you go to the end of the queue and start waiting again. You end up in a cycle where these small releases never see the light of day.

The net effect is that many developers are giving up on these maintenance releases. And that’s bad for customers.

Emergencies

No matter what some of us might think, developers are only human. Sometimes we do stupid things, and when we do, we need to resolve these issues with critical updates. In these cases, we need to jump to the front of the review queue. As someone who’s been the victim of stupidity more than once, I have no problem giving up my place in line for someone who’s suffering the consequences of a dumb mistake.

Solutions

There are a couple of things that could help with the review process. The first is to verify developers, not apps.

I am perfectly willing to be held accountable for my actions. So is every other developer I’ve talked to. If we do something evil, pull all our products off the App Store shelves. Start legal action. Shut down our business. Those of us who respect our customer base and value our relationship with Apple will not be affected.

We don’t mind waiting a few weeks for a major version release (e.g. a 2.0) because it’s likely something that has already taken many months to create. Use an initial or major release as a point to establish the trust between Apple and the developer. Then, incremental releases (e.g. a 2.0.1 or 2.1) can be approved quickly because of that trust. If a developer breaks that trust in a point release, penalize them.

As my company releases more products, I also have more incentive to maintain that trust level (pulling multiple products hurts more than pulling just one.) Knowing that, Apple could spend less time reviewing each new product from a existing developer.

With critical updates, we won’t need to jump to the front of the review queue often. The best thing would be to give each developer a limited number of “fast track tickets” and tell them to use them wisely (no exceptions for developers who need “just one more.”)

Upgrades

For readers who aren’t developers, let me explain the simple economics of our business: we sustain our efforts with upgrade revenue. Getting the initial sale is only the beginning of a long-term relationship with a customer.

Here’s how it works:

You know the number of total customers for your product. (Some developers call this the installed base.)
The percentage of users who upgrade a product is predictable. For most products, it’s normally around 40-60%.
You know how much the upgrade is going to cost.

Given this information, you have a very good idea of how much money the upgrade will generate. That, in turn, tells you how much money you should spend creating that software.

Unfortunately, the App Store doesn’t allow us to generate upgrade revenue. We either do free upgrades or charge for a completely new product (SKU.) The former is bad for developers because we don’t see any incremental revenue. The latter is bad for customers because they don’t get a price break.

Many developers who have been in the App Store since its inception are facing this problem now: we’re working on our 2.0 releases and struggling with how to make money with them. Even if your product is selling well, it’s difficult to justify adding new features if there’s no extra revenue to pay for them.

Free upgrades also mean that great products (with smaller customer bases) will eventually wither and die. “There’s an app for that” will only apply to products with a mainstream customer base. Niche and vertical markets will not be served well.

For game developers, this is less of an issue: each new version can be marketed as a unique entity. But if you apply that same approach to other apps, you end up with “Twitterrific: The Awakening”, “Twitterrific: The Second Coming”, “Twitterrific: The Return of the Tweet”, etc. This will only make the App Store more confusing for customers of those applications.

Finally, major updates can’t be released on a predictable date. If you try to set an application’s availability date to some time in the future, the current product in the App Store becomes unavailable (so customers can’t buy the product while it’s being reviewed.) Apple, more than anyone, should understand the benefits of controlling your product release. There’s a lot more to it than a row in iTunes’ database.

Solutions

Why can’t apps be upgraded just like music? If you look at version 1.0 being like a song with DRM, and version 2.0 being a song without DRM, you’ve solved most of the problem. The only difference is that we need to upgrade the song more than once.

The upgrade should also have its own release date: giving developers the ability to time press releases, website launches and other supporting activities.

Better rules

We need better rules for the types of applications that are allowed in the App Store: the wording in section 3.3 of the license agreement is just too vague.

It’s likely that Apple’s legal team prefers to handle marginal cases on an ad hoc basis. But that’s a system that won’t scale and whose cost will quickly outweigh the benefits. How many lawyers will be needed when there are a million applications in the App Store?

With so much left open to interpretation, it makes it easy for a developer to wave a flag and generate bad press for Apple. As more applications are added to the App Store, there has also been an increasing number of these sensational “app rejection” pieces in the tech media. It’s event starting to go mainstream at places like CNN.

The situation is exacerbated by developers who are starting to realize that this “app rejection” attention by the media is good for sales once the controversy is resolved.

A clear set of rules also lets developers feel confident that their efforts will be rewarded with placement in the App Store. At present, it’s a crap shoot. When you roll snake eyes, you have no other channel to sell your product and you’ve lost a lot of time and money.

We also realize that there’s one rule that’s hard to define: “offensive content.” It’s completely subjective.

When you look at the music industry, you’ll see they’ve had a similar problems since 1985. After several decades of input from thousands of individuals in public forums, there are still controversies surrounding the rating of music. From a social point-of-view, it’s an impossible problem to solve. The current “solution” is to let the record companies police themselves.

As iPhone developers, we have one company making these policy decisions: Apple. The lack of transparency in their decision making process makes it impossible for us to know what’s acceptable and what is not. For all we know, the rules are being made up (and changed) as we go along.

Solutions

A clear set of rules for reviewers and developers will make the process easier for everyone.

Apple should publish what can and cannot be developed for the App Store. Provide examples of what is OK and what is not. We have Human Interface Guidelines for how our applications behave, why don’t we have similar guidelines for the functions our applications perform?

For the situations that fall outside of these rules, provide developers with a means to get pre-approval for application ideas. If running our ideas by Apple’s legal department comes at an extra cost, that’s fine. The objective is to waste less money on app ideas that will never get published.

Better experience for customers

Both developers and Apple want the best possible experience for our customers. As the seller, Apple focuses on the sale. As developers, we focus on getting people to make the purchase in the first place.

So how can we make it better?

Product evaluations

As it now stands, customers are making their purchase decisions with a few screenshots and a short product description. This is often not enough to convey the benefits of our products: especially ones that are more complex (and have a higher cost.)

Imagine the problems music companies would have if you couldn’t preview songs on iTunes. They’d have a lot of unhappy customers who bought the wrong song. And if the workaround was for customers to go to the artist’s website to listen to a sample or see a video clip, they’d lose a lot of sales because it’s a hassle and an unpredictable experience.

The current situation akin to walking into a phone store and looking at a hardware mockup that has a sticker of a screenshot and no battery. Compare that to walking into the Apple Store and using a fully functional iPhone.

Solution

The best solution would be to allow a time limited version of the application to be downloaded for free. After evaluation, the customer could purchase the application. Developers could do this now if in-app purchases were allowed on free versions of applications. (There is even precedence for this approach: AT&T is doing with its Navigator app.)

Apple has stated that “free remains free.” I can see why they want to do that, it’s a way to avoid applications that try to use bait-and-switch schemes. (Although, one could argue that we’ll see the same problem with paid apps.)

So why not compromise on a solution? iTunes on the desktop and the App Store application on the device both have access to excellent multimedia capabilities. Why not use these facilities to allow a couple of minutes of video for each app? It’s not as good as using trying out the application, but it’s certainly better than five screenshots. Let developers upload a QuickTime movie with iTunes Connect and both they and customers will benefit.

Respond to reviews

Again, music is not software. Music is simple, you either like the song or you don’t.

For software, customers see the reviews pages not only as a place to comment on an application’s suitability, but also as a forum to voice their problems and concerns. As developers, it drives us crazy that we have no way to address those issues.

Solution

Give us a way to contact the customer. Ideally, we would be able to post a public response in iTunes so other users with similar issues could benefit.

Again, I can see this being too much to ask of the iTunes infrastructure. I also doubt that Apple wants to provide us with customer’s email addresses (which can be considered private data.)

So why not present a form for developers to fill out within iTunes? Our comments are entered into a text field and sent to the customer’s email address by Apple. We could provide our own contact information in that message for followup conversations.

Finding apps

Songs and games work in the current “top hits” ranking. Popularity for this type of content is ephemeral. This type of content is also easily identifiable by a brand name (“Death Cab for Cutie”, “Flight Control”, etc.)

The problem is finding applications that aren’t at the top of the charts. It’s incredibly hard to find the “that” in “there’s an app for that.” Between keyword spamming and the sheer volume of choices in each category, customers can’t find what they want.

Solution

The answer to this problem is organizing search by solutions, not titles or sales rank. During this summer season, customers are interested in applications that:

Entertain while traveling to/from their vacation destination.
Guide them around that destination.
Helps them relax during the break.

The only thing you’ll find if you search the App Store for “Paris” is that there are a lot of fricken’ icons with the Eiffel Tower on them.

Macworld, with its App Guide, has figured this out. Apple should look at the success of staff favorites and expand upon that within iTunes.

Charge us more money

The $99 developer fee is great for making the App Store all inclusive. But the needs of larger, full-time developers are much different than those of those doing it part-time or as a hobby.

Solution

Charge $999 for premium service. For professional developers, this cost is not prohibitive and would allow Apple to provide additional services such as:

Shorter review times. The trust level between Apple and the developer is higher when there’s more money on the table.
More “fast track tickets” as mentioned above. Larger development shops have more staff doing stupid things, so give us more freedom to deal with it.
Discounts for test devices. With each product release, it becomes more difficult for developers to support the new hardware. The primary factor here is that an AT&T contract is required to get the test device. Something similar to the Mac hardware discounts for ADC members would help significantly.
Background artwork for our products in iTunes. Getting a nice background means a lot to us: it makes our products more attractive to potential customers. Let us pay for the time it takes to put it up.
Approval of ideas prior to development. Developers have crazy ideas. Before spending months of development on that wacky thought, it would be nice to get pre-approval from Apple on the concept.
More devices in the Program Portal. The current limit of 100 devices is a joke for developers with multiple products: if you have 5 products, you can only have 20 devices per app. That, combined with multiple hardware releases in the 12 month period, means we’re effectively prevented from testing our applications until July 12th.
A contact in Apple Developer Relations. Sometimes we need to talk directly to someone at Apple.

Pricing

I’ve talked about pricing before, but not much has changed. The addition of in-app purchase is great for certain kinds of applications: our upcoming title, Ramp Champ, makes great use of it. But most apps cannot take advantage of this new feature and are left struggling at the ringtone price point.

These low prices are making decisions for us. If you gave an iPhone developer $50,000 to spend anyway they choose, they’re going to make 5 ringtone apps at $10,000 each instead of one killer app for $50,000. In a gold rush, it’s better to have five small claims than a single large one.

The problem is that the long-term success of the iPhone platform will be defined by killer apps, not throwaways that you replace on your home screen after a few months.

Unlike other sections in this essay, I don’t have specific suggestions to make. I do think that the solutions presented above will, in aggregate, help us get some upward movement in pricing. And that would be very good news for those of us making a living from the App Store.

Conclusion

There’s no denying it: the last year has been a good one for both Apple and third-party iPhone developers. That’s not to say there isn’t room for improvement, especially at the point-of-sale.

The suggestions I’ve presented above are intended to help us grow this business and keep the ecosystem healthy. Every developer’s fear is that Apple doesn’t want an open a dialog regarding the App Store. It scared the shit out of me when our questions weren’t answered at WWDC.

A successful partnership is one where both parties work to the benefit of the other. If our needs are ignored, it will only lead to disenchantment. Working with the developers that are driving this new platform is Apple’s best long-term business strategy.

iPhone 3.0 software has some new playlist and syncing tricks

iljitsch.vanbeijnum@arstechnica.com (Iljitsch van Beijnum) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:12:59 GMT

As per standard operating procedure, Apple made some undocumented changes to the iPhone OS 3.0 software. One of these is that an iPhone or iPod touch running 3.0 is now less dependent on iTunes on the computer to manage smart playlists: it can update a smart playlist itself in a larger number of cases. Another change is that after deleting a podcast episode from the iPhone, its pre-deletion status is still synced back to the iPhone. The first change can pose a challenge to avid podcast listeners; the second addresses this challenge (for the most part).

Click here to read the rest of this article

GE brings smart grids to life as appliances gain support

jtimmer@arstechnica.com (John Timmer) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 21:45:53 GMT

On Wednesday, manufacturing giant GE announced a partnership with Tendril, a company that provides smart grid software and services. The agreement will see see GE work to incorporate monitoring and reporting capabilities into its consumer appliances and ensure that they communicate properly with Tendril's software. Tendril will focus on ensuring that the data the devices provide is communicated back to utilities. The two companies will also cooperate in developing load management algorithms that can help utilities remotely adjust the appliance's performance based on demand and available electric resources.

The promise of a smart grid depends on the degree of sophistication of the hardware and software involved. In its simpler form, a smart meter can provide consumers with a basic outline of their electricity use, which can help identify activities that draw the most power. More sophisticated versions involve having individual pieces of consumer hardware participate in a local network, allowing fine-grained analysis of power use.

Click here to read the rest of this article

★ Putting What Little We Actually Know About Chrome OS Into Context

John Gruber — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 05:40:41 GMT

It has seemed obvious for some time that Google would someday release a PC OS. I became convinced after they released Android: if they’re creating and giving away a free OS for phones, why not PCs, too? But I expected that Google’s eventual PC OS was going to be an expanded meant-for-a-bigger-screen version of Android — sort of the inverse of what Apple did for the iPhone. Apple took a PC OS and whittled it down to a fundamental core, then built new handheld-specific UI libraries and APIs on top. The hypothetical PC version of Android I’m imagining would have entailed¹ taking the core of the mobile Android OS and creating new meant-for-a-PC libraries and APIs on top.

So it’s not weird that Chrome was announced. But what is weird is how it was announced. And, despite the title of the weblog post in which the announcement was made — “Introducing the Google Chrome OS” — nothing has actually been introduced. There aren’t even any screenshots, let alone a demo or any specific technical information. With an expected ship date of “the second half of 2010”, it’s a textbook example of vaporware.

I don’t get the timing. Why announce it now, when it clearly isn’t close to ready? Why not at I/O, Google’s developer conference six weeks ago? Or why not wait until it’s ready to release to developers? I like facts, demos, and best of all, shipping products. I don’t like vague promises.

Web Apps as Native Apps

It’s certainly interesting and ambitious to state that the entire application platform will consist of web apps. If anyone was going to build such an OS, it’d be Google. Much of the initial commentary regarding Chrome OS has been wholly positive, but one common note of skepticism has been with regard to the “web apps are the only apps” aspect, with the frequent point of comparison being the the 1.0 release of the iPhone OS. E.g., Nick Mediati at PC World:

Both users and app developers are still hungry for so-called “native” applications — that is, software designed for a particular operating system. A prime example? The iPhone. At the 2007 Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple discussed a “pretty sweet” way of developing apps for the iPhone: Web apps. While the Apple executives onstage spoke of the potential and power of Web apps, many developers and users groaned. They didn’t just want Web apps, they wanted real apps—apps that could take full advantage of the technology the iPhone offered.

(As an aside, in the 2007 WWDC keynote, Steve Jobs didn’t describe writing web apps as a “pretty sweet” solution for developers who wanted to write software for the iPhone; he described it as a “very sweet solution”. I described it as a “shit sandwich”.)

Mediati was right that not just developers but users wanted native third party apps for the iPhone. The difference from what Google is promising with Chrome, however, is that web apps will be the native apps on the system. Presumably all of the default applications from Google itself will themselves be the Google web apps we already know. It’s an eating-your-own-dog-food issue. What irked about Apple’s endorsement of iPhone-optimized web apps as a “really sweet solution” was that, of course, none of the iPhone’s built-in apps were web apps. They were all written in Objective-C with Cocoa Touch. Apple’s own iPhone apps set a high bar for user experience — a height that could not (and still can’t) be reached with web apps running in MobileSafari.

Chrome OS sounds a lot more like Palm’s WebOS than it does the iPhone. Palm isn’t just telling third-party developers to write apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, they’re doing it themselves with the WebOS’s built-in apps. In fact, considering how web-app centric Google is and always has been, Palm’s WebOS is fundamentally more Google-y than Android, a platform where native apps are written in Java.

One thing to note regarding WebOS, too, is that while a WebOS app is written with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and runs within a WebKit frame, it can do more than a regular “web app” running in a browser. The runtime exposes additional JavaScript APIs specific to the WebOS environment. Regular web apps — ones you “run” by telling a regular web browser to load via a URL — can’t do things like access the hardware camera or post one of those cool WebOS system-wide notifications at the bottom of the screen. Or, taking the flip side, you couldn’t just take a WebOS app and run it in a web browser on any other platform. There’s a big potential difference between “web apps” and “apps written using web technologies”. If you’re a programmer, I’m sure you understand that; if you’re not, I worry that it sounds like semantic hair-splitting. The best example I can think of are Mac OS X Dashboard widgets: they too are written using HTML, CSS, and JavaScipt, but they don’t work anywhere other than Mac OS X.

I presume that there will be similar Chrome OS-specific APIs for web apps optimized to run on Chrome. But who knows? From the description in the announcement, it sounds like Chrome OS “apps” really could just be web pages. Will it support things like importing photos and videos from a camera? Again, I presume so. But then what gets stored locally and what gets stored remotely, on Google-managed servers in the quote-unquote “cloud”? Something would have to be stored locally, because uploading video (and even just full-size photos) over the Internet can be slow and expensive.

The Driver Issue

Microsoft has to deal with a veritable mountain of device drivers because Windows has to run on every “Windows PC”. But Microsoft made this problem for themselves. It is Microsoft that decided Windows would run everywhere on everything. No one says Chrome OS is going to run on all, or even most PCs. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s only supported for use on new PCs that are specifically certified to work with it. Hence the hardware partner list in the otherwise almost information-less “Chrome OS FAQ” Google posted tonight.

Chrome Will Not Be a ‘Linux Distribution’

Renai LeMay’s “No Thanks Google, We’ve Got Ubuntu” captures another common reaction to Chrome:

In this context, Google’s decision to create its own Linux distribution and splinter the Linux community decisively once again can only be seen as foolhardy and self-obsessive.

Instead of treading its own path, Google should have sought to leverage the stellar work already carried out by Mark Shuttleworth and his band of merry coders and tied its horse to the Ubuntu cart.

“Linux” means different things to different people. At a precise technical level, Linux is not an operating system. It is a kernel that can serve as the core for an operating system. What most people mean by “Linux”, though, is an operating system built around the Linux kernel. For use as a desktop PC operating system, all the various “Linux distributions” are basically the same thing: variations of Gnome or KDE sitting atop the ancient X Window System.

Ubuntu is almost certainly the pinnacle of these distributions, but they’re all conceptually the same thing, and the only significant difference is the choice between Gnome and KDE, and even there you’re just choosing between two different environments that are conceptually modeled after Microsoft Windows. The entire X Windows/Gnome/KDE “desktop Linux” racket has never caught any traction with real people. Almost no one wanted it, wants it, or will want it.

My theory on this is rather simple. Early versions of Gnome and KDE were pretty much just clones of the Microsoft Windows UI. They’ve diverged since then, and I’d say Ubuntu’s default Gnome desktop is in most ways better from a design and usability standpoint than Windows Vista. But it’s still fundamentally a clone of Windows — menu bars within the window, minimize/maximize/close buttons at the top right of the window, the ugly single-character underlines in menu and button names. At a glance it looks like Windows with a different theme. The idea being that if you want Windows users to switch to Gnome or KDE, you’ve got to make it feel familiar. But that’s not how you get people to switch to a new product. People won’t switch to something that’s just a little bit better than what they’re used to. People switch when the see something that is way better, holy shit better, wow, this is like ten times better.²

So I think Gnome and KDE are stuck with a problem similar to the uncanny valley. By establishing a conceptual framework that mimicks Windows, they can never really be that much different than Windows, and if they’re not that much different, they can never be that much better. If you want to make something a lot better, you’ve got to make something a lot different.

Whatever Chrome OS turns out to be, it isn’t going to be that kind of “Linux”. They’re using the Linux kernel, yes, but they’re building something new and original on top of that. Linux is to Chrome OS what BSD is to Apple’s iPhone OS — which is to say something that users will never see, smell, or notice.

Everything from TiVo to Palm’s WebOS uses Linux as the kernel for their operating system — using the commodity underlying operating system (in the comp-sci sense of the term) and ignoring the commodity user interface systems. Here’s the telling line from Google’s announcement:

The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.

From a user-level perspective, Chrome isn’t going to look, act, or work anything like Windows. And that’s why Google has a chance to make something that might actually prove popular in a way that Ubuntu hasn’t.

An Odd Name

I’m sure what I’m about to suggest is anathema to Google employees, but in addition to the sky high vapor-to-bits ratio, there’s another aspect of the Chrome OS announcement that reminds me of Microsoft: the name. In the same way that Microsoft has used “Windows” to describe very different things — both a computer operating system and an online suite of web apps — Google is now using “Chrome” to describe two very different things.

A web browser is very different from an OS, even if the OS only runs the browser. Google themselves recently conducted a survey that suggests that most regular people do not understand at all what a “web browser” is. If regular people are confused about what a browser is, it’s a good bet they’re even more confused about what an “OS” is. Calling them both “Chrome” isn’t going to help clarify the matter. Install Chrome the browser on your PC and if you don’t like it, you can delete it and you’re right back where you were. Install Chrome the OS on your PC and if you don’t like it, you can delete it and you have a blank hard drive. I’m not predicting that people will mistakenly install one when they meant to install the other; I’m just saying that significantly different things should have significantly different names.

Client-Services, Not Client-Server

There have been numerous client-server systems throughout the history of the computer industry. Some popular; some not. The basic idea behind all of them is that you have many cheap client machines that users actually sit in front of, connected to a few expensive server machines that do most of the actual computing. The complexity is almost entirely on the server side, managed, presumably, by professional experts. A single client machine, unconnected to the network, is pretty much useless.

Chrome OS is in many ways a return to that model. Web apps largely consist of server-side code, with a relatively thin layer of JavaScript that runs on the client. Data, too, mostly resides on the network, not the client machine.

But there’s a big difference. The Chrome OS model isn’t about thin clients connecting to a server. It’s about thin clients connecting to many and any servers. One of the few sure things about Chrome OS is that it’s going to work well with Google’s own web apps, but the web is open, and Google is a strong proponent of open web standards. Everyone will have the opportunity to write web apps that run just as well in Chrome OS as Google’s own.

At an abstract level, there is much appeal to this concept. With all of your data and all of the software you use online, you have nothing to back up. Nothing to migrate when you buy a new computer — just log in from a different Chrome OS machine and there’s all your stuff.

But at a practical level, how well will this actually work? Is it feasible to use Chrome OS as your sole computer? If not, how big is the market for “secondary” computers, especially as (a) more and more people buy laptops to serve as their primary machine, and (b) more and more people buy iPhones and Pres and Android-based mobile phones? I say: not very big. In short, will Chrome OS pass the dog food test: is it something Google’s own engineers will want to use?

I’m skeptical about the prospects of any new system or product that isn’t intended for use by the people creating it. Gmail, for example, is the best web mail system because it was designed to be used not just by “typical” users but by expert users, including the engineers at Google who made it. The iPhone is simple enough to appeal to almost anyone, but guess which phone the people who created it use?

Make something intended not for your own use, but for use by dummies, and you’ll usually wind up creating something dumb. The future of computing probably is in the direction of thin clients connecting to network services for storage and software, but my hunch is that Chrome OS is too thin.

Or, perhaps, it will entail rather than would have entailed, as I’m not convinced that the existence of Chrome OS precludes Google from also releasing a PC version of Android. It sure would be odd for Google to produce two competing netbook-optimized OSes, but what little we do know about Chrome OS so far is, well, a little odd. And because they’re both open source, it could be that Android continues evolving into a credible PC OS through community effort alone. ↩
The group that’s the most enthusiastic about Gnome and KDE desktop Linux systems consists of those who care the most about the political and licensing aspects. With regard to the freedoms that stem from the software being open source, something like Ubuntu isn’t just, say, ten times better than Windows or Mac OS X, it is infinitely better. ↩