By The Angry Drunk
Ok, this is the one and (hopefully) only post that I’m going to make regarding Google Buzz. Google Buzz will succeed if, and only if, it can steal a large majority of mainstream users from Twitter/Facebook. Note that, by “mainstream users” I don’t mean New Media Douchebags like Scoble, Arrington, Winer, et al. I mean your parents, the barflies at my pub, and the vapid tarts in the local sorority.
No amount of whiz-bang technology, or “mind-share,” or the adoption of so-called influentials will mean fuck-all unless Google can engage the masses. My money is that they can’t.
That said, in the interests of seeing how this all pans out, my profile is http://www.google.com/profiles/dlines13.
By The Angry Drunk
Hidey Ho kids. In a little more than 12 hours I’ll be hopping on a plain to San Francisco to attend the 2010 Macworld Conference and Expo. If you’re there, and want to meet up, drop me a line. Probably the easiest way of contacting me will be to direct message me on Twitter (Angry_Drunk). But an email will work too.
By The Angry Drunk
You may have noticed a certain lack of Angry Drunkenness for the last several hours. The bottom line is that a combination of my database corrupting for no obvious reason and an unknown issue preventing me from accessing my webhost to restore from a backup left the site in fucksville. Things look ok for now, but the last two posts were lost. I restored them from a redundant backup, but the link to Disqus was broken. Hopefully that can be fixed eventually.
By The Angry Drunk
Add Mike Monteiro to the list of people who actually understand the iPad. The money quote:
The people don’t want “tablet computers” with Ubuntu and OpenID (worst name ever for a product attempting broad acceptance). They could honestly give a shit whether it’s a closed or open system. And, let’s be really honest, they probably care as much about DRM as they do about baseball players juicing; by which I mean not very much at all. They want things to work most of the time, and be easy to fix when they don’t. And if the process by which it happens is “magic” they are totally cool with that.
They want the thing in the movies.
This is a concept that’s been banging around in my head for a while now. Ask most geeks if, given the opportunity, they would want a device like the PADD from Star Trek. Hell, ask them if they would want the whole Star Trek computing experience (“Computer, download all available pornography with the keywords, ‘asian,’ ‘big titties’ and ‘lesbian’”). I think most would say yes. But, when confronted with what well may be the genesis of that model, they run screaming back to 1992. It’s weird.
By The Angry Drunk
Fraser Speirs nails it yet again with a blog post titled iPad Fallacy #1: “It’s not for content creation”. In the post he poses the question:
I keep hearing this thing on the web that the iPad is “a consumption device, not a creation device”. I don’t know why people keep saying that. It’s fast enough, it has enough storage and it has some seriously powerful applications. If that’s your opinion, please enlighten me in the comments.
Fraser continues on to completely debunk this fallacy by showing screenshots from Apple’s iWork demonstrations during the introductory event. To me though, the really interesting thing is answering the question that Fraser poses: “Why do people keep saying that?” I think that, in many cases, the reason people keep making that claim is actually an off-shoot of the same “Future Shock” that Fraser himself described before. Or, to pimp my own work, I think that statements that the iPad is “just for content consumption” are further examples of nerd myopia.
Like most things in the real world, responses to the iPad are not a simple binary “love it” or “hate it” proposition. In between the people who dismiss the iPad as a “big iPod Touch” and those of us who see it as a potential revolution in consumer computing there is a middle ground of people who almost see the potential of the iPad, but still feel the need to dismiss it in some way. The two most common forms in which I’ve seen that sentiment expressed can be summed up as:
“The iPad will be the perfect device for media consumption.”
and
“The iPad will be the perfect device for my parents/children/retards/any group perceived as less ‘savvy’ than the person making the statement.”
The thing is, both statements are perfectly accurate, but by limiting the iPad’s potential to just being a “dumbed down” computer, they miss the point. It’s obvious that Apple intends the iPad to be the first in a new class of computing devices. Looking at the iPad and dismissing it as just a toy for certain less savvy users is as short-sighted as the people who dismissed the original Macintosh as a toy for graphic designers. Of course, seeing as I still hear people making that claim, 26 years later, I don’t hold out any hope that the iPad dismissers will stop any time soon.
By The Angry Drunk
Yay, more crap in the Angry Mac Bastards Cafe Press store. Ladies, you know you want me on your chests. Admit it!
By The Angry Drunk
As anyone reading this blog is almost certainly aware, Apple announced the long-awaited iPad last week; and the tech world collectively lost their fucking minds. As I’ve already opined, I think that Fraser Speirs has written the best analysis of the collective pants-shitting and I would highly recommend reading Fraser’s article if you haven’t already. Flying somewhat under the radar during all this babble was another phenomenon which I think provides an interesting parallel to some of the ideas that Fraser articulates so well.
If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed references to something called “Letters.app.” For those unaware, here is some background. Earlier this month developer Brent Simmons put out a call-to-arms for the development of a new email client to fit the needs of “developers and power-users.” The argument being that all extant instances of email clients (specifically for the Mac OS, but presumably for all platforms) are lacking in some way that makes them unsuitable for “developers and power-users.” The goal of the project, soon dubbed Letters.app was to harness the skills and creativity of the indie Mac development community to build the perfect beast. Shortly afterwards, the project completely and very publicly imploded.
At this point I need to take an aside and clarify what I mean by “imploded,” as my asshole-sense can already detect the prepping of a thousand responses telling me that I am wrong. First of all, it is true that the Letters.app project is still under active development. Project president John Gruber (Daring Fireball) and project lead Gus Mueller (Flying Meat Software) continue to make progress and I eagerly anticipate seeing the fruits of their labors. I consider myself an email power-user and hope that Letters.app might fit my needs.
However, I maintain that a read of the archives of the (now closed) public discussion email list proves my assertion. The mailing list discussion is rife with contention, rigid-thinking, straw-man arguments and an overwhelming dismissal of the needs and requirements of anyone who disagrees with a given poster. In almost every case those dismissals are phrased something like this: “Letters must/must not do X because it is meant only for ‘developers and power-users’ and you don’t apply.” What is constantly missed, even in the face of it being pointed out, is that there are many people who are “power-users” of email who have never seen a line of code and who can barely reboot their computer. In one particularly ironic twist, at several points the proverbial “non-power-user” is described as a “bored secretary.” This, more than anything, demonstrates the myopia of some of the “indie developer” camp on the list. Having been a long-term denizen of the corporate world I can tell you, “secretaries,” or “Administrative Assistants” as we call them in the enlightened post-1960’s are almost always the largest consumer /producer of email in an organization, and have the most need for power features.
So, the question is: “What does this have to do with the iPad?”
I would argue that the same myopic dismissal of anyone who isn’t a developer, and IT person or a technology wonk as a “non-power-user” is as much responsible for the “future shock” that Fraser describes as it was the never-ending argument on the Letters.app list. It is easy for us, and I include myself in this class on two of the three counts mentioned before, to dismiss the needs of non-technical power users. I’ve even seen some of this attitude in iPad defenders when they extol the virtue of the iPad as a device for their kids, or parents, or anyone who is presumably “not good with computers.” Fortunately Apple isn’t so myopic.
Assuredly, the iPad will be a good fit for those users. I contend it will also be a good fit for corporate users who already have a primary desktop system and need a basic communication and content creation tool for limited travel. I contend that, with the proper third party applications, the iPad will be a good tool for many artists who work in the field. My Angry Mac Bastards co-host Peter Cohen is excited about the possibility of an “Aperture Touch” product in conjunction with the iPad Camera Connection kit. I myself and excited about the possibility of taking my writing on the road without the overhead of a full Mac OS laptop. People I know in the education segment, from K-12 all the way though higher education have expressed excitement over how the iPad may be integrated into their workflows. Not to mention the plethora of vertical market opportunities.
What the tech media tends to miss is that all of the user classes I’ve just mentioned contain “power users.” They’re just not necessarily power users of computer development and administration tools. As Fraser points out, people want to do “Real Work.” And for the vast majority of the world “Real Work” is not maintaining computers. Apple computers and operating systems have always been about enabling “the rest of us.” The iPad is just the next step towards that goal. I choose to embrace that future. The iPad may not be the device for you, but to deny that there is a vast market for it is to show the same myopia that led to inane suggestions for Letters.app such as requiring the user to run a mail server on their desktop just to enable local storage of email; something even most power-users would agree is just retarded.
By The Angry Drunk
I’m going to jump in on the bandwagon and heap praise on Fraser Speirs’ brilliant analysis of the iPad and the tech world’s reaction to it. I pretty much am in complete agreement, and I wish I had written this.
By The Angry Drunk
Good! The jury did the absolutely right thing here. There should be no debate, no deliberation, no contemplation. If you kill people, any people, just because your sky-daddy tells you to, you are a murderer. Now, because I actually have consistent and logical moral beliefs, I hope that this cock-sucker is sentenced to life in prison. Because state-sanctioned murder is just as reprehensible as sky-daddy sanctioned murder.
By The Angry Drunk
Inevitably, amongst the rest of the inane wailing about the iPad in the last 48 hours, the old “closed system” meme has reared its tired head. The particular form of that meme that I want to focus on is a particularly annoying variant and one that is best expressed by Alex Payne in his blog post On the iPad. In yonder post Alex makes the assertion:
The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. I wouldn’t have been able to fire up ResEdit and edit out the Mac startup sound so I could tinker on the computer at all hours without waking my parents. The iPad may be a boon to traditional eduction, insofar as it allows for multimedia textbooks and such, but in its current form, it’s a detriment to the sort of hacker culture that has propelled the digital economy.
Perhaps, but let me counter with a bit of my own history. My first computer was a Mac Plus. The Mac Plus was as closed a box as the iPad ever will be. At that time there were no freely available development tools like Xcode (you know, the tool that let’s you develop for the horribly closed iPad). Development tools cost hundreds of dollars. There was no Apple Developer Connection website, fuck Alex, there was no web. This idea that Apple has morphed from some hippy-dippy hacker-friendly love-fest into a dystopian corporate juggernaut is plain wrong. Continuing, Alex writes:
Wherever we stand in digital history, the iPad leaves me with the feeling that Apple’s interests and values going forward are deeply divergent with my own. There’s nothing wrong with that; people make consumer decisions every day based on their values. If I don’t like the product that the iPad turns out to be once released, I’m free to simply not buy it. These things have a way of evolving, and I won’t preclude the possibility that Apple eventually addresses concerns about the openness of the device.
For now, though, I remain disturbed. The future of personal computing that the iPad shows us is both seductive and dystopian. It’s not a future I want to bring into my home.
This is the dilemma that Alex presents us with. Moving forward we can either have a world of hacker-friendly general purpose computers, or a dystopian nightmare of “closed” products. I would argue that this is a false dilemma. The first way in which Alex’s argument fails is that he confuses the iPad, as well as the iPhone and iPod Touch with general purpose computers, and then attempts to draw conclusions about the future of computing in general from how Apple treats them. It is true that these devices are in essence computers. Hell, the first generation iPhone had specifications that, in every way, are superior to that of my old Mac Plus. However, Apple obviously doesn’t see them in that way. To try and discern Apple’s motives in regards to the very future of computing based on the iGadgets is foolish.
The other way in which Alex misses the boat is the time-honored new media generation Y standard of ignoring all of recorded history prior to the year 2000. Here’s a hint for those unaware: “hackers” are not some mystical new phenomenon of the computer age. They didn’t spring, Athena-like, from the forehead of Zeus with the introduction of the personal computer. There have always been tinkerers, “hackers” if you will, and they always manage to work around whatever road-blocks the purveyors of their particular hobby put in their path.
It’s considered bad form to use car analogies in reference to computing, but this is a case where I think an exception can be made. Once upon a time the internal combustion engine was simplicity itself. Mainly mechanical parts, with a smattering of electrical (not electronic, there is a difference) components. Anyone with the time and inclination could disassemble and tinker with the engine in their vehicle. One might say that they could even “hack” them. Shade-tree mechanics were legion, and many the youth learned the skills that would lead them to careers in mechanical engineering. Does any of this sound familiar?
Over time, though, the nature of the automotive industry changed. Automobiles became more and more complicated and “closed.” Pundits bemoaned the death of the shade-tree mechanic. And yet, tinkerer’s still exist. Communities of enthusiasts who share their knowledge and love of the IC engine still exist. The world didn’t end, it merely changed.
A far more rational take on this situation, but one that I still have some disagreements with was posted by Steven Frank. Steven sees the iPad as an example of the difference between what he dubs “Old World” and “New World” computing. I think that this is a fascinating idea and I largely agree with it. My dissention is with Steven’s belief that the “New World” will necessarily supplant the “Old World.” I don’t see that as a foregone conclusion. I think that both models of computing can coexist, just as consumer friendly automobiles coexist with “hacker” friendly customs.
In either case, the iPad is hardly the herald of our new dystopian future…that’s Skynet, get it straight.
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Brother, can you spare a dime?
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