Can Apple really see themselves competing, with a minuscule desktop market share and 25% of the smartphone sector? Steve Jobs has announced Apple’s intent to move into mobile gaming, but can you really see developers siding with the iPhone when Windows Phone 7 is just around the corner?

(Via Daring Fireball).

Yes, I really can see. You know what the killer feature of the App Store is? That shiny “Buy Now” button next to each app.

The App Store has its problems, and I certainly think that having some competition out there for it would do everyone loads of good. But Anthony seems to be suggesting in his piece that game makers will suddenly eschew an established, laser-focused platform with direct access to a solid chunk of the smartphone market. All because Microsoft is coming out with a new OS sometime this year—maybe—that no one has really used, and that no phones currently support?

Right.

The WPS7 or whatever looks cool, and I hope that it does well and motivates Apple to stop being so developer-hostile. But the fact is the the iPhone exists today, and you can develop for it today, and make money off of Apple’s existing customer base. If it were any other product, it’d be the same story: comparing shipping products to vaporware like this is just nonsense.

P.S. Googling around to check on the status of Windows Phone 7 Series (that name will never get easier to type) revealed a number of other extremely valuable, brilliantly insightful pieces of journalistic acumen, such as this bit by Nicholas Kolakowski at eWeek: Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 Series Could Draw Consumers, Says Analyst. Translation: People Might Buy This New Thing That Will Be Available For Purchase, Someone Says. (In fairness, Katherine Egbert, the analyst quoted in the article, does make a good point: Microsoft won’t give handset manufacturers much room to customize the OS’s look and feel, which will make the brand much stronger and and the platform more consistent for developers who want to target it. This is a good move on Microsoft’s part).

Meanwhile, the mysteries of price and profit are on everyone’s minds these days thanks to the Macmillan-Amazon spat, with commentators on both sides of the debate drawing parallels to the train wreck of a decade the recording industry just went through. Those rooting for Macmillan point to the way listeners allegedly abandoned their willingness to pay for music—even as a single retailer, Apple, gained near-total control over pricing and distribution. Those who take Amazon’s side point to the recording industry’s unwillingness to partner with innovative technology firms like Napster, which offered the RIAA a blank check in exchange for a license to continue operating. They also point to Apple’s simplified, 99 cent/track pricing as the breakthrough that listeners needed to start paying.

I think they’re both right. On one hand, Macmillan should be worried about losing control of its destiny, as Amazon, a single distributor, seeks to lock readers into its devices and services. But on the other hand, Amazon’s optimistic (or, some would say, cutthroat) pricing on the cream of the publishing industry’s profits—frontlist hardcovers—isn’t necessarily a loser for publishers, and it’s possible that the world’s largest online bookstore just might have some insight into purchasing patterns that publishers need to hear.

(Via Jeffrey Zeldman.)

Extreme Body Modification

Extreme Ironing

Extreme Sports

Motorola SURFboard eXtreme

Point being, Motorola, even if it supports DOCSIS 3.0, if it basically just sits in a corner and blinks fitfully, how extreme is it, really?

In fact, now that I’m thinking about it, I feel like there ought to be a word for the kind of productivity that is good and useful but totally ill-timed. Got any ideas? I haven’t enabled comments, and I’m not sure that I want to (which I guess means this isn’t a real blog), but my clever—if largely hypothetical—readers should be able to figure out how to contact me. Or better, write your own damn blog entry about it. If you link to me, I’ll see it.

Anyway, my real reason for sitting down to write this—the fact that I actually should be drafting a poster for the phonetics lab aside—was to document the various “alert levels” I typically experience in the process of finally trying to focus on the important tasks at hand. It is in fact an implicational hierarchy: if the conditions are met for a high alert level, you can count on the conditions having been met for all the lower levels too:

1. Low: Not a care in the world. This is my usual state.
2. Guarded: Have acknowledge my Internet-induced ADD is interfering with my work. Quit Tweetie.
3. Elevated: Even without the constant updates from Twitter ensuring that I can’t pursue a train of thought for more than five minutes at a time, I am altogether-too-frequently Command-Tabbing over to NetNewsWire to see if anyone I care about on the Internet has published anything in the last few minutes. Can’t be behind on the news, after all. Quit NetNewsWire.
4. High: I can still check Twitter and read blogs from the web. Plus, there is something out there for all tastes, moods and levels of abject boredom. And then there’s Wikipedia. Quit Safari.
5. Severe: At this point I feel like I need medication to keep myself on track. Damn you Internet! The more steps I have to take to look up a passing curious thought on Wikipedia, the more opportunities I have to ask myself, “do I really need to know about the history of term limit legislation in the United States Congress, when I’m supposed to be writing about Binding Theory?” The answer is usually “no.” Turn off my Internet connection.

For all of this, what’s interesting to me is not the thesis that the Internet has made me incapable of focusing on anything for more than five minutes at a time. I don’t think that’s true. It’s that the Internet has so lowered the barriers between my thinking “oh, hey, what about…” and my being able to learn more about whatever random thing, that I just naturally tend towards complete distraction. I wonder, is there a natural limit to this? Or does the pattern hold such that the day that I get a direct feed to the Internet implanted in my brain, I will cease to function altogether? I wonder if Wikipedia has anything to say about this…

(P.S. For bonus points, guess which alert level I’m at as I write this!).

One of my Things is that I lose track of people. My particular mode of operation in life is, essentially, “out of sight, out of mind”. This has unfortunate consequences when you move to a new city and people who are important to you stay behind, or go their own way, or what have you. As a college student who attended three different schools during my undergraduate career and recently started a grad program, you can imagine I’ve watched myself go through this process a few times. The fact is that, on a day-to-day basis, I am in a near-constant state of reacting to things and trying to keep up. Those things that don’t throw themselves in front of me often end up being relegated to that vague “I’ll get to it when I have a chance” corner of my mind. (If it is any consolation to those who may be currently stuck in that corner, you’re in very good company). Fortunately, in all the transitions I’ve made over the last few years, there have been a few people who just don’t take that kind of crap. More on them in a moment.

I have good friends from the town I grew up in. I have a very good friend from the year I spent in New Mexico. Most of all I have many good friends from the couple of years I spent at UC Davis. All these sets of people know a different slice of me; and of them, I believe the people I know from UC Davis got the clearest picture of who I actually am. These are the people I knew when I figured out that Linguistics was what I wanted to Do. These are the people that clarified my view of the kinds of friends I want to have, the kind of woman I want to love, and the kind of life that I want to lead. The friends that I have made in San Diego see what amounts to a finish product (in some sense) that these people helped shape.

I don’t mean to get all Wonder Years on you. But this stuff has been on my mind because one such friend, Jeff, the guy on the left with the incongruent mohawk in the photo above, is to my great fortune one of those people who doesn’t take my crap. We’ve been in touch recently, and after a bit of prodding on my part, he’s rebooted his blog too. Everything he says is true. He’s like my nerdy soulmate, a reminder that all this shit really, really matters. I count myself among the lucky ones, to be sure.

A complete waste of my time.

It’s a little bit of a bummer for me, actually, but after years and years of being “in the process” of creating my own blogging engine (since high school, really), I finally realized a couple of core truths:

1. I’m not in the blog-engine-writing business, so this should not be my focus; and
2. “Working on” the blogging engine was really just a way to avoid actually having to create something. After all, I clearly can’t build cool software or do interesting research without first having a publishing platform by which to document the effort, right?