I make the point that this as the first Macworld | iWorld because that is actually important. A lot of the commentary, both positive and negative, has underestimated the impact of that fact. While it has a rich history in the form of Macworld Conference & Expo, the radical shifts in the technology market in recent years have necessitated that Macworld | iWorld forge new ground.

The first, and most obvious change is the name itself. I know that many people in the Apple blogosphere dislike the name. The truth is that I’m not certain how I feel about the name. What I do know is this, with more than half of Apple’s revenue being generated by non-Mac devices, expecting the show to remain simply “Macworld” is foolish. Like it or not, iOS is part of the Apple ecosphere now and ignoring it is a recipe for disaster. A the same time, abandoning the Macworld name is also a non starter. I don’t envy the folks at IDG the challenge of coming up with a name that properly encompasses the evolving nature of the community. I know that I couldn’t have done any better.

The second major change this year was separating the former MacIT “track” into essentially its own conference, MacIT. I didn’t really pay much attention to the MacIT portion of the conference as the material is generally irrelevant to my work but the presenters and vendors that I did speak with seemed to be in agreement that moving the more IT focused products off the main Expo floor allowed them to focus on their enterprise customers instead of having to repeatedly explain to confused customers what their products are for.

On the “user conference” side of the house, the major changes were the addition of a Midway featuring music and art exhibitions and the changes in pricing for the Tech Talks.

The Midway was a fun, and very welcome addition to the show. The “user” portion of past shows has consisted basically of roaming the show floor and the formal conference presentations. The Midway was a pleasant way to sample some of the amazing things being done in the visual and musical arts using Mac and iOS devices without someone hawking a product at you or sitting through a 90 minute lecture.

Likewise, the changes in pricing for the Tech Talks was extremely welcome. At past shows, the User Conference content could run as much as $300 for the full conference or $100 for a single day. This year access to all the Tech Talk content was available for a mere $125 dollars, with even more in-depth training available for an additional fee. The Tech Talks that I attended were of the same high quality as presentations that I’ve seen at Macworld in years past.

There has been much noise this year over attendance figures for the show. IDG will release numbers today which will do exactly fuck-all to change anyone’s opinion. Those that have clambered aboard the Macworld is doomed bandwagon will either view the numbers as proof of their assertions or as unreliable and to be dismissed. All I know is that every time I toured the floor, from the opening minutes on Thursday to the end of the day on Saturday the floor traffic was consistently steady. Also, the vendors I spoke with were all very pleased with the amount of traffic they were getting at their booths.

In the end, my position hasn’t changed since I first wrote about this before attending my first expo three years ago. IDG is not a charity. If and when the day comes that IDG is no longer making money from the show the show will be canceled. People attempting to expose IDG’s deep dark secret of flagging attendance numbers are more pointless than a fucking sphere.

All that said, was Macworld | iWorld perfect? Of course not. To give an example that struck close to home, the inclusion of podcasts in the general Tech Talks curricula and locating us in the same presentation rooms tended to suck the energy out of the shows. This is something that a few of us have brought up with IDG and are working on improving for next year.

The bottom line is this: in my opinion IDG did a wonderful job with Macworld | iWorld, but there is always room for improvement. As I told Paul Kent, General Manager of Macworld, when we spoke on the crowded show floor Saturday afternoon; the first two years following Apple’s withdrawal from Macworld Expo were an inevitable transition period. This year it really felt as if Macworld | iWorld was hitting its stride and is poised for great things to come. I’m glad to be along for the ride.

One emerging theme annoys me in particular: the idea that Apple is exerting Draconian control over how you can sell content produced with iBooks Author.

The story goes like this. When you attempt to export your work from iBooks Author a dialog appears stating:

Note: Books can only be sold through the iBookstore. To publish your book on the iBookstore, choose File > Publish.

This is reinforced by language within the end-user license agreement (EULA) that reads:

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you charge a fee for any book or other work you generate using this software (a “Work”), you may only sell or distribute such Work through Apple (e.g., through the iBookstore) and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple.

This, of course has raised the hackles of the punditocracy. The restriction is being called “unprecedented”, “audacious” and DRACONIAN. John Gruber even goes so far as to call it “…Apple at it’s worst.” People are shouting, “How dare Apple tell me what I can and can’t do with software I bought¹? No one else does this.”

The thing is, I’m fairly certain that those people didn’t see the same announcement that I did.

I’m going back over the live-blogs of the event, and looking on Apple’s iBooks Author product page and for the life of me I can’t find where Apple is positioning this product as a generic ePub editor. In fact, from what I gather from people who have done the research, the iBookstore format, while based on ePub, diverges pretty strongly from the standard.

The bottom line is, the answer is in the name — iBooks Author, not ePub Author, or Pages 2012. As much as people would like to think that iBooks Author is a general purpose book publishing tool, Apple clearly thinks otherwise.

I can sympathise with the frustration. I’ve been noodling on an article with the thesis that Apple needs to step up and provide both a professional level ePub authoring tool as well as a professional grade application for producing better Newsstand apps. But iBooks Author is obviously not that particular hippogriff. I honestly don’t find it unreasonable for Apple to expect that paid content produced within it’s free tool (designed and marketed as a tool to work with one specific storefront) should be sold via official channels. Hell, I’m actually amazed that Apple is putting no restrictions on unpaid content. You can export ibooks format files and scatter them to the four winds for all they care. Just as long as you don’t get any dosh for them.

Once again, the tech press and pundits would do much better if they would actually pay attention to what Apple announces instead of the announcement that they make up in their heads.

Which leads us to today’s unfortunately titled post from John Martellaro at the Mac Observer titled The Operational Details of the Apple HDTV.

To be fair to John, and to simultaneously condemn him to the deepest pits of Tartarus, the content of his post is not actually a statement of what he “knows” the unicorn to be like the above-mentioned claims. Instead the post is entry 2,753,916 in the category “Gee Whiz Wouldn’t It Be Wonderful if Apple Did This…” John begins:

A lot has been written about the viability of an Apple branded HDTV and how it must fail in the market. But most of that analysis is based on the idea that Apple’s offerings would be no better than any off the shelf equivalents from the current manufacturers. What if Apple’s HDTV worked differently?

No John, those of us arguing that an Apple HDTV is a stupid idea aren’t doing so because we think that Apple’s mythical offering would be “no better than any off the shelf equivalents from the current manufacturers.” We’re arguing that it’s a stupid idea because: a) the thing that needs “fixing” in the TV experience isn’t the thing pumping the photons into our eye holes and b) to date no one has offered a compelling argument why whatever magical shit they’re asking for can’t be accomplished via Apple’s existing $99 Apple TV.

I don’t want to waste precious drinking time disassembling John’s entire Christmas list but one item in particular jumped out at me. John is predicting (speculating, wishing — at this point I have no idea what purpose these kinds of articles serve) that the mythical Apple HDTV will sport a higher resolution than existing sets.

Currently, makers of HDTVs try to minimize cost by making the resolution exactly the same as the HDTV standard: 1920h x 1080v. There’s a vast industry that cranks out panels of exactly that size. What if Apple were to go to, say, Sharp, and ask for special panels, say, 2200 x 1200? Because Apple would expect sales to be modest for starters, such an offbeat display would be expensive to make and pricey, but Apple customers are accustomed to that. Moreover, Sharp wouldn’t mind because the low volume, high profit display wouldn’t compete with their own offerings — at the start.

Ugh. No John, the HDTV makers don’t make screens with a resolution of 1920x1080¹ in order to “minimize cost.” They do it because that’s the fucking specification. If manufactures didn’t use a resolution that matches the spec. we’d be stuck in the wonderful world of scaling and all the suck that entails².

So, having said that, what does John propose the Apple HDTV do with all those extra pixels?

What would this achieve? The high definition video section would then be in a window of the larger display. Now we’re beginning to think like a Mac user. What doors would open?

Additional information could be displayed around the outside. Alerts, weather information, or even the corresponding data drawn from the IMDB. After all, from my reading, I’m not the only person who watches TV and movies with the IMDB page open on the iPad in my lap.

In a multi-tasking, social world, that extra space outside the high definition TV window is golden.

Oh fuck me.

There is so much wrong with this concept that it’s giving me indigestion.

First, as I’ve repeated until I’m blue in the face, real people buy television sets in different sizes for reasons that have fuck all to do with the way the average techie thinks. Sure, “bigger is better”, except when it’s not. Here’s a personal example. A few months ago I bought two HDTVs for my house, a 37 inch model and 42 inch model. Both sets cost essentially the same amount of money. Given that, why didn’t I buy two of the 42″ sets? Simple, they were going different places. The 37″ unit is in my office. A bigger screen would simply not fit there. The 42″ set is in the living room where there is more room.

With John’s mythical Apple HDTV I would be faced with the dilemma of either trying to cram a larger set into my office in order to maintain the same physical content size — or accepting an effective downgrade in picture size as a trade-off for some of that ol’ timey Apple Magic.

The second bit of lunacy here is the idea of using the extra space for widgets.

MOTHER FUCKING WIDGETS

This here is precisely why I say that the punditards pontificating about how Apple needs to “fix” television have no fucking clue how the other 99% actually use the fucking thing. The last thing most people want when sitting down to watch the boob tube is a bunch of googaws shitting up the sides of the screen and distracting from the content. Most people are unhappy with the crap the networks already litter the screen with. Fuck, imagine trying to watch a game on ESPN on one of these monstrosities. It would be like a Russian Nesting Doll of pointless shit surrounding the action. Fuck, if you want a secondary screen to pull info up on while you’re watching shit, Apple’s got you covered hombre.

These sort of articles really only do two things: serve as wish-fulfillment fantasy for nerds and demonstrate that the blogoratti have no fucking clue how average people use technology.

Woah there hippy…slow down…read past the headline…this post isn’t quite what you think it is. You see, I’m pretty much in agreement with the Occupy movement. Unfortunately there is a dark, insidious, and frankly evil thing that has come out of the Occupy movement that needs to be squashed like the fucking cockroach it is. I’m referring to the sudden fetish of shit-bag “journalists” and lame-ass “hacktivists” to slap the word “occupy” in front of every gods damned thing that happens to annoy them.

Case in point, two recent “movements” Occupy Flash and Occupy HTML (links both courtesy of Daring Fireball). Look, I don’t care what your position is on Flash or HTML “purity” (hint, Flash sucks crusty hobo dick). Something that all right-thinking people can agree on is that neither one of them needs to be fucking “occupied”.

Come on people, we lost the war over “-gate”. Now we have to endure shitty headline after shitty headline about “Glassgate” and “Antennagate” and “My-Chalupa-Didn’t-Have-Enough-Fucking-Meat-In-It-Fucking-Gate”. It’s time we said enough is enough. Let’s take a stand and let these shit-birds know that we’re not going to take this lazy bullshit anymore!

What do we want? Creative thinking!

When do we want it? Last fucking week!

We’re introducing a method that lets you opt out of having your wireless access point included in the Google Location Server. To opt out, visit your access point’s settings and change the wireless network name (or SSID) so that it ends with “_nomap.” For example, if your SSID is “Network,” you‘d need to change it to “Network_nomap.”

That’s right, in order to protect the privacy of our personal networks Google wants us to modify the network name to conform to their arbitrary standards. I think that tonight I’ll be changing my network’s SSID to “Fuck you Google you arrogant assholes”.

Why not the same thing for TV sized displays? Imagine watching a baseball game on a TV where ESPN is a smart app, not a dumb channel. When you’re watching a game, you could tell the TV to show you the career statistics for the current batter. You could ask the HBO app which other movies this actress has been in. Point is: it’d be better for both viewers and the networks if a TV “channel” were an interactive app rather than a mere single stream of video.

Ok take that as a given, but it still doesn’t answer my question about the supposed Apple HDTV: How does Apple producing and marketing a HDTV meet that goal, as well as the needs of the majority of Apple’s customers, in any way that is demonstrably better than the existing AppleTV product? Keep in mind that I will only accept answers to that question that take into account the issues regarding additional content types I enumerated previously.

This is my whole problem with the growing chorus of people claiming that Apple will, nay must produce an HDTV. Every time I ask what the rationale behind such a device I get nothing back but wild-eyed speculation of all the cool shit Apple could do with a television; backed by people constantly chanting “DISRUPTION” like some sort of TechCrunch obsessed Dalek.

I get it, “television” sucks. The problem is that “television” isn’t some neatly packaged product like “personal digital media player” or “smartphone” or “tablet shaped personal computing device whose market we’re essentially inventing from whole cloth.”

“Television” is a vast, amorphous entity consisting of channel based programing streams, pre-packaged standalone media entities, gaming and personal content display to name just a few things. “Television” is also a market that has, in one form or another, existed for half a century.

Compounding this, the television itself is merely the endpoint of all this content, and arguably the component least responsible for the current state of affairs. Arguing that replacing the television addresses the problems with “television” makes as much sense as saying that the answer to my congested morning commute is to replace my truck.

All that said, there is one thing I want to make clear. Now that we’re getting to the point where the claim chowder will be served I want to explain that I am not arguing that Apple won’t attempt to produce this thing. It is not the place of mortal drunkard to know the mind of Tim Cook. For the record, my claim is this: If Apple does produce an Apple HDTV that is anything like what the current spate of rumors has suggested, it will not succeed in the market in the long run.

There, put that in your chowder pots and simmer it.

If you’ve visited the site or looked at the RSS feed during the last twenty-four hours there’s a good chance that you saw one of a menagerie of errors. Sorry about that. This post will try to explain what the hell was going on as well as point out some changes to the way the site works.

Tuesday, prompted by a question from Chad Olson I decided to revamp how my “linked list” functioned.

Up until today, my linked list was implemented such that there were no links to my commentary on the linked item. For a while that was not a problem, but as I’ve increased the amount of list items that I’m posting that limitation has posed some problems. Yesterday I decided to correct that.

Bad fucking idea.

The plugin that I chose to implement a more “Daring Fireball-esque” linked list requires manually modifying my WordPress theme. Unfortunately the theme that I use here is vastly more complicated that the default WordPress theme that the plugin’s instructions were based on. Also, my PHP skills are abysmal at best. Several hours — and several hundred PHP errors — later I had managed to hack the theme files to put the linked list shit where I wanted it.

At this point it occurred to me that the mobile version of the site (served up by the WPTouch Pro plugin) uses its own template. So back to BBEdit I went. Fortunately the code for the mobile template is much more straightforward, so that part went quickly.

Once these changes were made I noticed that the linked list items in my RSS feed were corrupt. Whether it is the plugin, my theme or some conflict between the two linked list items were being presented in the RSS feed with extraneous data that caused the XML parsing to fail. Another hour in BBedit and the plugin was hacked to remove the extra crap.

Lastly, when I got into the office today and pulled the site up on my shit-box Windows XP laptop I discovered that, of course, the glyph-based linkage that I had set up failed to render in any browser other than Safari. “Fuck it,” I says, and ten minutes later everything has been made text based. It’s not like everything in the Mac blogosphere has to ape Daring Fireball.

The upshot is, going forward all “linked list” items will have a permalink back to this site at the bottom labeled “DrunkLink.” Huzzah!

now where’s the whiskey?

It pisses me the fuck off. Whenever there is the slightest chance for an actual populist movement to arise in this country and have a hope in hell of connecting with the masses the bastions of “liberal” ideological purity rear up and do their fucking best to drive people away from it. Case in point, this idiotic piece of drivel from Greg Laden.

For those who don’t know him, Laden is “…an anthropologist and science communicator who can never decide which is more important: nuance or context.” Greg is also a fucking ignoramus who is fundamentally incapable of admitting when he is wrong. In the afore-linked post on Laden’s blog, hosted on freethoughtblogs.com Laden takes exception at a photo of a woman attending one of the OccupyINSERTCITYHERE events. I can’t find any attribution information on the picture on Laden’s blog so I’m not going to re-post it here — but the picture (which, in the interests of nuance, Laden has titled “fuckedupwhitelady.jpg”) depicts a woman of indeterminate age and means, holding an infant and a sign. The sign reads:

• Not a hippy
• Not a freak
• Not an anarchist
• Not a mob
• Not a punk
• Not vague
• Not a left-wing nutjob

Just a mom here for a better world for my kids

Now, most rational people would read that and see it for what it almost certainly is — a rebuke of the assholes in the mainstream media who have done everything in their power to dismiss the Occupy/99% movement as nothing more than the vague wining of a mob of left-wing hippy anarchist punk freaks. But Laden, oh mighty communicator of science, sees though this devil-woman’s ruse. The asshat writeth:

The sign indicates that you are complaining about the world you made, presumptive middle class straight white lady with the presumably genderonormative hat on her baby. And you seen to openly disdain all those who have been telling you this all along (and thus by the exclusionary list you’ve given me I’m guessing as to whom you are). I’m glad if you’ve suddenly decided to become aware and enlightened. But judging just from this sign, you still need to get a clue.

Mon Dieu what amazing powers of intuition Laden has. To discern all that from a simple photo. Of course, Laden claims that he can make such bold claims based on the few insignificant things that the woman claims not to be. I’ve just tried about a dozen ways of writing exactly how stupid and exclusionary that claim is but my fingers cramp every time I attempt it.

What really infuriates me about this piece of shit though is not Laden’s woeful attempt at mentalism, nor is it the way that he and his army of sycophants refuse to even consider the possibility that they’re mistaken. No, what sends me into a boiling rage is Laden and company’s presumption to dictate the proper membership of the Occupy/99% movement.

Let’s be generous and assume for a moment that Laden is absolutely correct in his assumptions. Let’s go with this woman being the very picture of so-called middle-America. She’s an SUV driving, Wal-Mart shopping, faggot hating, Midwesterner. Fuck, let’s even say she’s a Mormon.

So the fuck what?

Last time I checked, the ethos of the 99% movement was contained in its fucking name. It’s the 99% of us being crushed under the boot-heel of the 1% that control our financial system. It’s not the 99%-as-long-as-you-conform-to-our-oh-so-liberal-criteria. As much as I personally dislike the hypothetical woman I made up in the previous paragraph, I would welcome her with open arms into the 99% movement if it could help her see that the real enemy isn’t the fags, darkies and godless but the assholes hoarding the money.

So I’m sorry Greg, you don’t get to set the criteria here. You can take your offense at someone choosing to participate who doesn’t self-identify in the way that you want her to and shove it up your fucking ass. You’re a pox on liberalism and a wretched moron to boot.

In the post the Macalope tears into three shit-bags seeking to either capitalize on Steve Jobs’ death or to antagonize people, presumably for page-views: David Srere — shittiest “brand expert” ever, Hamiton Nolan — from the tabloid shit-rag Gawker and everyone’s favorite fundamentalist asshole Fred Phelps.

Writeth the horned one:

It is a sad fact of life that there are inveterate jerks who will take the death of a man (however flawed) like Steve Jobs, and try to use it for personal gain, or just as a self-righteous and hate-filled attack on the values of those who cared about him.

Well said my mythical brother-from-another-species, well said. And with that we have the last I’m going to say — in this forum — about the shit smears trolling a man’s death. Fuck the lot of ‘em.

What I did share with Steve was a vision. It’s the vision that lies at the heart of every Apple product that Steve had a hand in — that technology should serve to empower people to do and create the things they love. That vision is what drew me to my first Macintosh computer and it ultimately secured me as a life-long Apple customer. I try, every day to incorporate that vision into the things I do.

For that vision, and for the drive to carry it out Steve Jobs will always have my thanks and respect.

– Created on my iPad