The Tao of Mac

Android

Rui Carmo — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:28:18 GMT

This is an update to an item originally published on Saturday, 17 November 2007.

The mobile platform sponsored by Google as part of the Open Mobile Alliance, evolved from their 2005 acquisition of the company with the same name.

The following is a link dump regarding both the platform and those devices more closely associated with it:

Resources:

Date	Link	Notes
2010
Feb 08	Google reduces its Nexus One termination fee	Interesting.
Feb 03	Nexus One gets a software update, enables multitouch	Will it change anything?
Jan 26	Google: Nexus One 3G issues result of poor coverage, bugs; patch possibly within a week	Wouldn’t be surprised if it was a baseband upgrade.
Jan 21	Google’s Nexus One is no iPhone – and that’s OK	A more balanced review.
Jan 14	Nexus One Phone	Hilarious video review.
Jan 13	In the First Week, Google May Have Sold 20,000 Nexus One Phones	Comparing 20K against 1.6 million iPhones on the first week is a bit unfair considering the way it’s sold.
Jan 13	Google Charges ETF For Nexus One On Top of Carrier’s	Interesting. More here and here.
Jan 12	Google at the crossroads: a review of the Nexus One	Pretty detailed and comprehensive review, as always.
	T-Mobile gives reps troubleshooting tips for Nexus One’s 3G issues	Looks like a baseband issue alright.
	Google learning that users want real support for Nexus One	Learning can be painful.
	On-duty with the Nexus One: form factor, battery, Android	An odd review.
	Android 2.1 SDK	About time.
	T-Mobile makes mention of 3G issues with Nexus One, hopes to have ‘more information’ soon	Here’s to some heroic debugging.
	Nexus One: $174 Cost to Build	About the same estimated production cost than a 3GS, except that Apple has likely done a better bulk deal on parts… Also, nice comparative tables.
Jan 06	Vodafone promises Nexus One ‘in a few short weeks’	And this is probably where I stop keeping track of this particular device…
	Google’s biggest announcement was not a phone, but a URL	I find it amazing that they’d write this much about ordering a phone online on a third-party store, but that’s the US mobile market for you.
	Google Isn’t Targeting iPhone Users; It’s Targeting Everyone Else	Much ado about nothing in particular, basically.
	Nexus One teardown reveals 802.11n WiFi and FM transmitter	This teardown mania is somewhat fun, but one wonders how long it will take until people realise that only a very small minority of what is “unearthed” is news…
	State of the Art – Google Shakes but Doesn’t Upend the Cellphone Market – NYTimes.com	Pogue doesn’t seem terribly impressed.
Jan 05	Google Phone Unveiled Today	A coherent list of specs, although there are plenty of meaningless stats bolted on to beef up the article.
Jan 05	Google’s Nexus One is official	$529 unlocked, shipping to the US, UK, Singapore and Hong Kong, or with a two year T-Mobile US contract for $179. There go a lot of pipedreams about it being sold direct to the public at “astonishingly low” prices.
Jan 04	Nexus One review	not much in terms of review, actually.
Jan 03	Exclusive: Google Nexus One hands-on, video, and first impressions	Not an iPhone killer. Hardly capable of killing a fly, apparently.
2009
Nov 30	Droid Doesn’t: It’s Not Ready For Prime Time · Alsop Louie Partners	A month later, reality calls.
Nov 23	Stats show Motorola Droid is the new elephant in the Android room	I’m still wary of stats (local copy of PDF), but I hear it’s selling pretty well indeed.
Nov 11	Motorola Droid torn down despite desperate cries of ‘no disassemble’	Worth looking at.
	Droid Does… only have 256MB of storage for apps	Now that’s gotta be… Useful.
	Analyst estimates 100,000 DROID smartphones sold in first weekend	It isn’t the RAZR, but it’s a decent figure.
Nov 05	“Andy Ihnatko on Verizon Droid “iDon’t ads: baloney	Yep.
Nov 05	Personal Droid Data Plan Will Cost $30 Per Month, Even With Exchange	I honestly don’t get why they are trying to charge it this way.
Nov 03	Exchange Access for Droid: $15 Extra Per Month	Wow.
Oct 30	Android Phones Get Free Turn-By-Turn Directions	Best overview yet
	Google adds free turn-by-turn navigation, car dock UI to Android 2.0	The quip about an Apple version is not to be missed.
	Google Navigation video hands-on: you want this	Looks nice indeed, but let’s wait to see how well map caching works.
Oct 29	The Droid Has Landed…Unboxed! Plus a Few Facts	Nothing to worry about except that it’s the start of a trend.
Oct 28	Droid Launches Nov. 6 Priced To Match iPhone	The price matching approach is interesting, but then again in the US handset prices don’t work quite the same way as in Europe…
	Motorola DROID first hands-on!	I can’t figure out why these people keep wasting space in hardware keyboards.
	Verizon Droid Phone: Nov 6th, $199	A pretty decent feature set overview.
	Google Releases Android 2.0 SDK	But the UI guidelines are still a bit on the loose side.
Oct 27	Android 2.0 Highlights	The e-mail client looks nice, but I’m curious as to usability.
	Android 2.0 is Official — Quick Contacts Look Nice	This is just what I think is needed in oh, so many other places.
	Droid to be Verizon’s Android Product Line — Not a Single Phone	Now this is a clever move.
Oct 24	Verizon’s Droid is a series, not just a phone; Droid Eris coming from HTC	Let’s see how this pans out. I’m quite curious, actually, to see if Verizon can pull this off in the sense of generating genuine buzz around an operator-specific set of Android devices.
Oct 20	Android thoughts two years later	Well worth reading through, and mirrors my own views. One to re-visit a few years from now indeed.
Oct 7	Android, not iPhone, is Bigger Symbian Challenger Says Gartner	Not rocket science, but a bit exaggerated, since nobody can really look that far into the future in this industry. Still, here’s the chart:
Sep 23	Cyanogen	Modified firmware for some devices. Just had to happen.
Sep 15	Android 1.6 SDK is here	Well, at least compatibility is assured.
Sep 10	A nice summary table of devices
Sep 3	Some News from Android Market	It took them this long to add screenshots to apps.
Aug 17	The Android Opportunity (addenda)	Mostly agree, although this is too US-centric for it to be considered the whole truth.
Jun 24	HTC Hero running Android and Sense UI leaks from HTC‘s own website	Flash turns out to not be that exciting. Or useful. Plus the phone is plain ugly, and a lot thicker than what the first shot makes it look.
	HTC Hero hands-on: Flash, keyboard and ruminations
	Adobe demos Flash on the HTC Hero
Apr 29	Vodafone suggests future Android phones could have less Google	People keep confusing the platform with the services.
Apr 27
Loads of fun for various reasons.
Apr 20	Introducing home screen widgets and the AppWidget framework	An interesting technote on how Android handles home screen widgets.
Apr 2	Some Fun Facts About The Google Phone	Interesting stats about usage patterns.
Mar 5	HTC black Magic (Sapphire) hands-on: a Vodafone exclusive	Very few decent shots
Feb 25	Google blocks paid apps for unlocked G1 users	Interesting hint of fragmentation.
Feb 17	HTC Magic is official, bringing Android to Vodafone sans keyboard	And after adding these links, this page now merits a direct, obvious, reference to my Disclaimer
	HTC Magic in-depth hands-on, with video!
	HTC Magic first eyes-on!
	Photos: Hands-on with the HTC Magic Android phone
	HTC Magic – The new Google Android mobile phone from Vodafone
Feb 13	Android Market update: support for priced applications	Using Google Checkout, of course.
Feb 13	Android Market: Open for Business	A very nice (if shallow) analysis that bunches together some interesting tidbits of info.
Feb 12	TeleNav Does Turn-By-Turn on Android	Apparently US-only, which is a pity.
Jan 1	Android netbooks on their way, likely by 2010	Dubious in both title and subject matter (we’ve known that Android could be made to run on PCs for a good while now.
2008
Dec 28	AD IV: Programming Newbie	Tim Bray lists a few interesting resources for new developers
Dec 17	Huawei powers up its Android plans	For Q3’09. Let’s see what they come up with.
Dec 9	Open Handset Alliance announces 14 new members	including Sony Ericsson and Vodafone. Most people missed this last bit, which is fun.
Dec 8	Unlocked Android: $399	Development samples, available for purchase.
Nov 7	Worst. Bug. Ever.	Although this was fixed fairly quickly, it is the perfect example of why mobile phones aren’t exactly trivial to “improve upon” using today’s technology.
Oct 31	iPhone vs T-Mobile G1	A short comparison.
Oct 24	Android Phone Teardown	How weird is it that this is in Japan?
Oct 22	HTC Dream T-Mobile G1 (black) Smartphone review
Oct 21	Android is now Open Source	Let’s see if someone will port this to Intel and get it running on a netbook…
Oct 16	Almost Human: a review of Google’s Android G1 phone	Good reading – a thorough appraisal.
	State of the Art – A Look at Google’s First Phone	Pogue weighs in.
	T-Mobile G1 review
	T-Mobile G1 Google Android Phone Review
Oct 15	Review: Over 260 images and 5 videos of the T-Mobile G1 Google Android device	A tad overkill, but interesting nonetheless.
	What Android Can Learn From the iPhone: It’s the Software, Stupid.	Brilliant title.
	The Google Phone Review: What I Love & Hate About T-Mobile G-1	Om weighs in.
	Google answers the iPhone	Walt Mossberg’s take.
	T-Mobile G1 review	Engadget’s lenghty two-part article, covering hardware and software (loads of imagery).
	T-Mobile G1, a hands-on introduction to the first Android phone	Some interesting videos
	Review of the T-Mobile G1 Google phone	Pretty comprehensive gallery.
Oct 9	First T-Mobile G1 user review	Not particularly gushing.
Sep 23	Video: Android walkthrough on T-Mobile G1	A few demos
Sep 16	Google shows off masked Android handset	About a year later, one of the first sightings of actual hardware (but running over Wi-Fi). I don’t get the “masked” bit, though – the hardware’s pretty obvious.
2007
Nov 11	Wikipedia	Background info
Nov 12	Android SDK	Includes plenty of links to videos and reference information

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Book Stack

Rui Carmo — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:00:57 GMT

Given that whatever limited time I have for entertainment (and then some) is now completely taken over by kid-related logistics, of course I went and got as many books as I could beforehand. As usual, here are the last three I went through, with some cursory notes:

Transition	Jumper	Saturn’s Children


Transition is an enthralling book, not just by its depiction of multiple universes, but also by the way the story slowly coalesces in your mind as you move through each chapter. Although interleaving story threads is a common enough style device, the way Iain Banks makes use of it flows smoothly with the plot to hold your attention until they all come together – there’s closure, but there’s also ample opportunity for a sequel.	Jumper is a more straightforward book, set in our world and recently turned into a movie I haven’t seen yet and probably never will, since the movie plot apparently has no relationship to the story whatsoever. Speaking of plot, unlikely plot twists sort of put me off, since the clichés didn’t quite compensate for the ingenious bits. It was entertaining enough to while away the time, but somehow it felt too… light.	Saturn’s Children is another affair entirely – a strange tale of the post-human, set against a backdrop where “normal” humans have been extinct for barely long enough to their re-creation being a topic of dissent. Certainly in line with Stross’ other writing in terms of scope and imagination, it adds a little character depth beyond what one would expect and makes your imagination work overtime to keep up – which is kind of the whole point of reading Sci-Fi. Recommended.

☯ (comments allowed)

Demotivators

Rui Carmo — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:46:43 GMT

This is an update to an item originally published on Sunday, 15 November 2009.

I’ve always found Despair Inc.‘s motivational posters nothing short of brilliant, and ever since they put up a DIY page I’ve been having a go at making some myself – the gallery below contains some of the latest ones:

Except for a few who are part of miscellaneous promotional materials and others courtesy of Pedro Pinheiro, the vast majority of the images used were fished willy-nilly off the net completely at random, and I’ll give due credit (or remove them) according to their rights’ owners wishes.

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"Demotivators" was written by Rui Carmo for The Tao of Mac and was originally posted on Sunday, 15 November 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Rui Carmo and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.

Data Underload #8 – Unsolicited

Rui Carmo — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:20:36 GMT

Brilliant timeline. I’ve seen so many of these e-mail threads over the years that most of the entries made me chuckle (local copy).

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Nokia offering free turn-by-turn navigation on smartphones globally

Rui Carmo — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 21:29:56 GMT

This is an update to an item originally published on Thursday, 21 January 2010.

I’ve been telling people this was going to happen for the better part of a year. Update: A week or so later, Nokia announced 1.4 million downloads, which is interesting especially since (as the article points out) it hints at a conversion rate of 7% (five to ten times the usual rate for complex mobile services that aren’t pre-loaded on handsets), so I have to wonder at the models and markets being considered for these figures…

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Bringing more administrative controls to Google Apps for mobile

Rui Carmo — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 21:26:08 GMT

Corporate-grade security policy support (including remote wipe) for several kinds of devices. No word on pricing (I can’t – yet? – see that option in my Google Apps for Your Domain account), but Google’s use of Exchange protocols to provide a cloud-based alternative to Microsoft’s traditional deployment model is… interesting.

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Movist

Rui Carmo — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 21:17:30 GMT

Movist is an open-source Mac media player that seems to be particularly good at playing MKV files.

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iPad

Rui Carmo — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 21:12:34 GMT

This is an update to an item originally published on Saturday, 30 January 2010.

The iPad is Apple’s entry into an entirely new product category, launched January 27th, 2010. The picture below portrays a generic model (the 3G one has an antenna strip across the top):

This page will be mostly a link dump of reviews and opinion pieces regarding it, updated on an irregular basis.

Date	Link	Notes
Feb 09	Does the iPhone OS Need Multitasking?	Some people’s fixation with multitasking never ceases to amaze me.
Feb 08	Apple Management: iPad Prices Could Change	On other news, the weather could, too.
Feb 08	Survey tries quantifying iPad hype, suggests interest waning	Ah, the utter meaninglessness of statistics. Still, the chart is interesting enough to keep around to compare with actual sales later on:
Feb 05	How to compete with iPad	The ironic bit is that if any of the competitors actually read this and get it, then the iPad will still have won.
Feb 01	Is the iPad a Kindle Killer?	A decent point-per-point comparison with the Kindle.
Jan 30	Hands-on with the Apple iPad – it does make sense	Andy’s view – apparently he isn’t aware of the new shared app data feature in the SDK, but he does have a point: if you can’t handle mail attachments in iWork apps, you can’t really interact with other people work-wise.
Jan 28	iPad About	Stephen Fry writes down his take on the launch event.
Jan 27	Editorial: Engadget on the Apple iPad	A grab-bag of mixed opinions.

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iTunes

Rui Carmo — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 20:23:46 GMT

This is an update to an item originally published on Wednesday, 13 September 2006.

iTunes is Apple’s all-in-one music ripper/library/player/shop front, and should require no further explanation.

Resources:

Date	Item	Notes
2010
Jan 07	Show only exact duplicate tracks in iTunes	Holding down the option key changes the menu to “Show Exact Duplicates”
Older	syncOTunes	merges libraries across machines. Hasn’t been updated in a while, redundant with Home Sharing
	Fetch Art	a scripting add-on that looks up Amazon cover art (also outdated)
	Dragging files to the library with the `Option` key held down will add (but not copy) them to the library	useful for managing things on network drives.
	iTunes Not Quite Latin-1	When (re-)tagging MP3 files with Western European accented characters on a Linux system for use with iTunes, make sure you use ISO-8859–1 encoding (`$ export LANG=en_US.ISO-8859–1; easytag &`)
	Oriental (Japanese or Chinese) tagging using BIG5 or Shift-JIS are another problem entirely	Not even UTF-8 (which should be the uniform representation by now) seems to work.

Bugs:

Radar	Date	Notes
#4225479	Sep 2007	When adding album cover art by selecting multiple items and using “Get Info”, iTunes will not add cover art to any files it happens to be processing for determining volume levels. Other ID3 fields, however, will be filled correctly.

Trivia:

Here are the different icons across versions (up to 7.0):

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Hachette Book Group also pulls away from Amazon

Rui Carmo — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 11:11:44 GMT

Interesting. Of course, the real-life consequences (like the price of ebooks) are likely to take a couple of years to coalesce.

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Minor Adjustments

Rui Carmo — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 18:53:45 GMT

Probably due to sleep deprivation, my long(ish) piece on the iPad landed in an entirely different folder, making it seem like it was published on… March 8th. This year.

Talk about writing about the future, huh?

I’ve fixed the URL (apologies for any dupes on your feeds), but simply don’t have the energy to move the comments across right now. There’s only so much you can do with an iPhone and an SSH client (having a text editor in the Dropbox iPhone app would have made moving things around a lot easier, too…).

Anyway, I might not be posting anything that big for a while – with two kids there’s a whole new domestic routine to get used to, so I have a feeling most of my current drafts will be in limbo for a while yet.

If you’re interested in more iPad opinion pieces, Gruber has been posting links to a few, and the comment threads for both Tim Bray’s short piece and Mark Pilgrim’s musings still seem to be simmering with both off-the-cuff responses and some rather thoughtful ones.

And nobody on those actually used the device yet – fascinating…

☯ (comments allowed)

"Minor Adjustments" was written by Rui Carmo for The Tao of Mac and was originally posted on Thursday, 4 February 2010. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Rui Carmo and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.

Symbian Operating System, Now Open Source and Free

Rui Carmo — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:26:22 GMT

Actually, if you take the time to wade through the hideously designed, Flash-ridden site and manage to dig through to the actual statement, it reads that the source code will be 100% available “mid-2010”, so it seems they’re ahead of schedule. Any which way, it’s a good move (except for the hideous web design), since it makes Symbian more attractive at the bottom of its value curve (i.e., enough money has been thrown at the platform already and it’s definitely time for Nokia to recoup it via other means and move on). There is, of course, the risk of their running afoul of Android-like fragmentation, but the most likely outcome is deeper penetration at the low end of the handset market, increasing the potential for selling Ovi services.

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Will The Recording Industry Pay For ISP Monitoring In The UK?

Rui Carmo — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 08:38:12 GMT

I’ve been following this one from afar (thanks to my friends in the UK) and just love the conundrum the BPI has gotten itself into. My view? You either provide a credible and affordable distribution channel (like iTunes), or you’re just wasting the taxpayers’ money (and the ISP‘s) on things that will never possibly work and only reflect badly upon the recording industry.

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On iPad Punditry and Curmudgeons

Rui Carmo — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 18:23:05 GMT

I’ve been otherwise occupied (the reasons for that will be apparent soon), but I’ve also been sneaking a peek at all the arguments about what the iPad means (or rather, what a bunch of pundits would like to think it might mean) for a nebulous something called “the future of computing”.

I hate to break it to you, guys, but there is hardly any “future” left in the word “computing” as far as the mass market is concerned.

And that’s simply because the very definition of computing has been constantly evolving, and fast going the way of the appliance – it’s just that most of the people complaining about that have been involved in it far too deep and for far too long to pay attention to the outside of it.

Which is one of the reasons I completely agree with Fraser Speirs when he puts forward the notion that the industry is suffering from future shock.

People who buy computers don’t want computers, they want solutions, mostly in the same way that people who buy mobile phones don’t want phones, they want to communicate – and, of course, there are a lot more ways to these days to communicate besides talking, but that’s not my point.

Knee-Fu

But since I brought up the mobile angle… A great example of future shock on the mobile side that I personally found pretty funny is that Nokia, the very company that touted their N-series devices as “multimedia computers”, has had such a knee-jerk reaction – focusing on their bulk but quite handily omitting the fact that the vast majority of their handsets (in terms of volume sold) are nowhere near “smart”.

Nokia are still the largest logistics company in the industry, but personally I’d have stayed put and not written anything, regardless how much Steve irked me – especially if I was in charge of social media, where Ovi isn’t exactly making bundles of cash (last time I checked they clocked in at between 1–2% of Nokia’s overall revenue, and that was way before they started giving stuff away for free).

And yeah, I know some folk at Nokia think of me as an Apple fanboy. I don’t think they even realize what I actually do for a living or how much their top tier line-up is unsatisfactory to customers… but that is the sort of discussion that warrants both another post¹ and another reference to my disclaimer.

Tinker Toys

Anyway, there’s another kind of narrow-mindedness making the rounds – the one that points to the iPad as the end of tinkering or as limiting creativity.

Out of respect for a bunch of people, I’m going to avoid the “this is not for creative persons” meme here – I first became aware of it here at Tim Bray’s and watched bemusedly as it was brayed (sorry, re-blogged and re-posted) by the usual “me too” folk, and rate it as much of a knee-jerk reaction as Nokia’s.

So I’ll just pick up Mark Pilgrim’s brilliant and passionate piece as a way of introducing the tinkering topic and start out by saying that having spent most of my working life straddling the computing and mobile industries, I have my own particular view on the whole thing, and to explain it to you I have to tell you a story of sorts.

The Really, Really Hard Stuff

My father was a diamond cutter – the whole story’s probably worth a book in and by itself, but the short of it is that he worked as a jeweler, displayed a knack for gems, and eventually retired at the peak of his profession (to the point of turning down an offer to work for De Beers), all the while always joking about how cut diamonds are just “pretty rocks” – he literally didn’t care about the value of them, but rather about the problem of turning them into the best possible gemstones.

His job was of the kind that required as much art as maths if it was to be done properly, not just because diamonds don’t shard themselves into nice faceted little rocks but because there were always two key metrics associated with cutting a stone:

how much of the material you kept after removing all the impurities (i.e., weight)
the quality you got out of the final shape (i.e., the amount of light the stone refracted and reflected internally to look shiny)

My father happened to be good at designing ways to do both by painstakingly working out with a slide ruler the maths and steps required to cut the stones into a particular shape (or rather, a style, but a documented and repeatable one), as well as finding ways to better classify the raw stock and increasing the probability that you’d actually be able to get a good yield out of any given batch of stones².

It was the actual hit-and-miss process of turning them from raw, uncut material into actual jewels that he honed to a smooth precision, and in a business of minutiae, he not just found an edge but also carved his own niche out of it³.

And he kept up with it – as my father’s slide rule and painstakingly calligraphed tables slowly mutated into Excel spreadsheets (he’s still a whiz at it) and the copper disks impregnated with diamond dust were replaced with cutting lasers, he kept polishing that edge.

And all the while he busied himself at home with carpentry and hobby electronics to a point where you’d be very hard pressed not to call him a “hacker” in the straight sense of the word – even if it wouldn’t ordinarily make sense to apply that term to building furniture (yes, folks, IKEA hasn’t been around for ever) and fixing or building all sorts of gadgetry.

To put things into perspective, I remember his tinkering as far back as when a “power” transistor was the size of a key fob and hardly smaller than vacuum tubes, and by the time I was able to read properly there were folk discussing integrated circuits and loop counters in copious amounts of English and Spanish electronics magazines and books that he had amassed up to that point.

I remember when the Z80 was the hot new thing, for it was sitting at home after school and poring over those books and magazines that steered my own predisposition to tinker with things towards computing.

But the key bit, so to speak, is that technology moved on in such a way that there were new things to tinker with when I started scratching that particular itch.

Going Soft

Looking back, I think that the moment when that was most apparent was when he bought our first computer (the Sinclair ZX81, then available in kit form). That was when things clicked for me – it made a lot more sense for me to fiddle with the software than with the hardware, for I was too brash and impatient for working out circuit diagrams and etching PCBs.

I eventually came to actually do some design work on hardware and silicon, but the point here is that somewhere near the early 90s, the stuff that I had grown up with was not the most interesting to tinker with – the raw electronics that were inside the VAX crates or the Macs used to login remotely via a funky terminal server were pretty much closed systems from a hardware perspective⁴.

But those “closed” portions never stopped me from learning or tinkering with what I wanted to – it just made it even more interesting to tinker with the software constraints that the hardware imposed, because it became a mind game – and all tinkering, regardless of physical dependencies, is essentially a mind game – you have to understand the puzzles to put things in the right places.

Padded Rooms

Now, my take on the people who think the iPad and the degree Apple’s closed it down to work like it actually should (i.e., as a personal computing appliance) is somehow going to perform mass lobotomy on the next generation of tinkerers is pretty simple:

Those people are, quite simply, too over the hill and set in their ways to think outside their little boxes.

Moreover, they don’t realize that there will never be any shortage of ways for people who are prone to tinkering to pulling things apart and figuring it out for themselves – it’s just human nature. We’re monkeys. We like to prod things (even if only metaphorically) and get into all sorts of trouble (not just metaphorically).

If anything, there will be more and different things to explore, and as a second-time parent (which is, incidentally, why I’ve been otherwise occupied, with a healthy dose of dejá vu), I look forward to watching my kids pick whatever little niche or edge they want to explore and hone it to perfection, be it in whatever passes for computers in a decade or in something else that we cannot fathom at all.

Still, I find it fascinating that Mark wants to use the same computer for 20 years. I get his view – I focused on the data side of things myself, and I do want to have a sense of continuity in my computing experience, but like my father before me, I’m willing to keep learning and upgrade my tools to use whatever is right for the task at hand.

When All You Have Is Not a Hammer

And since the kinds of tasks I’ve had tossed into my lap have been shifting wildly over the years, I tend to be very pragmatic – I think of stuff like the iPad as a lever.

A simpler, better one, to rid me of the cruftiness of traditional computing and (if it delivers, something yet to be proven over the years) improve my ability to do all the other stuff I now need to do that isn’t about computers.

Considering that Archimedes only needed a place to stand to move the world. I think that the people ranting on about how the iPad is unsuitable for whatever arcane use case they think they want it to fit (and bearing in mind that 99.999% of them have no experience whatsoever with the device) just need to figure out where to stand to use this particular kind of mental lever.

My guess is that they’ll come around – if not to this device, then to the avalanche of clones that is sure to follow.

The Equalizer

It bears mentioning, as a sort of escape clause, that I’ve been wrong before – only last year I wrote:

And no, I don’t think there will be an Apple webpad springing forth from the iPhone platform, or a cheaper Air (what would they call it – MacBook Vacuum?). Apple’s not really into managing roadmaps for multiple form factors.

Guess what, they are – by simply making them all the same platform, which is the next logical step being debated as I type this – and, for the record, I happen to think that is OK.

(cue desperate wailing from the folk who fear for the future of Mac OS X on the desktop)

Any which way it rolls… Welcome to the future, folks. It’s one hell of a ride.

—

¹ I never really updated this one, but it gives you the gist of things. ↩

² Buying stones is in itself a key part of the work – it’s not like in the movies, where two impeccably dressed men with monocles will casually toss over a bunch of pretty shards of glass atop a black velvet table and haggle. If you think of it that way, you literally don’t have a clue, but, again, it would all be a pretty long story to tell here. ↩

³ I find it funny that his career was not completely dissimilar from my own so far, in the sense that going off into tangents seems to be a family trait of sorts… ↩

⁴ Well, at least I had very little inclination to pop them open at the time, although I did pull some stunts like assembling a working SE/30 out of dead machines – I did learn how to solder, after all… ↩

☯ (comments allowed)

"On iPad Punditry and Curmudgeons" was written by Rui Carmo for The Tao of Mac and was originally posted on Wednesday, 3 February 2010. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Rui Carmo and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.

The Decade Ahead In Jobs

Rui Carmo — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:51:27 GMT

Now here’s something seriously worth looking into (even though the data comes from the U.S. Bureau of Statistics, the overall trends might apply to my neck of the woods). Oh, and it uses Flash, but is probably the fifth thing in months of ClickToFlash usage that I’ve actually clicked on.

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Miep Gies

Rui Carmo — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 14:18:21 GMT

This matters. This story. Her boss’s daughter’s story, and all it stands for.

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The Apple TV has not failed…

Rui Carmo — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 23:32:39 GMT

Chuq Von Rospach has an interesting take on things. I wouldn’t be surprised to see another version of it come out in a few months to ride a new wave of content deals.

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Sigil

Rui Carmo — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 18:24:25 GMT

Sigil is a multi-platform WYSIWYG ebook editor, designed to edit books in EPUB format.

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Future Shock

Rui Carmo — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 09:54:25 GMT

Fraser nails it, as far as I’m concerned – the bulk of the computing industry has spent so much time up its own navel rigging up baroquely obtuse self-perpetuating lists of features that it can’t deal with making things usable. I’d add that that’s one of the fundamental differences between mainstream computing and mobile – in the mobile world, companies spend a lot of time considering how people will interact with the products and services (the results aren’t always perfect, but at least we’re long past the point where you just take a phone off the box and simply start using it…). Less, as always, is more. More work shaving off unnecessary bits, but also more in terms of usability.

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Citrix will have an iPad app to run Windows 7 sessions

Rui Carmo — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 14:04:17 GMT

And thus it begins – with this, I will never, ever have to take my work laptop with me anywhere.

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