August 17, 2010

The Web's Not Dead, It's RESTing

Oh, man. Where to start with Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff's dreadful "The Web Is Dead"? With the hilarious self-congratulatory tone, which treats a misguided 1997 article on push technology (by the equally-clueless Kevin Kelly) as some kind of hidden triumph? With the gimmicky, print-mimicking two-column layout? How about the eye-burning, white-on-red text treatment? Or should we begin with the obvious carnival-barker pitch: the fact that Anderson, who just launched a Wired iPad application that mimics his print publication, and who (according to the NY Times and former employees) has a bit of an ongoing feud with Wired.com, really wants you to stop thinking of the browser as a destination.

Yes, Anderson has an agenda. That doesn't make him automatically wrong. But it's going to take a lot more than this weaksauce article to make him right. As I noted in my long, exhausting look at Anderson's Free, his MO is to make a bold, headline-grabbing statement, then backpedal from it almost immediately. He does not abandon that strategy here, as this section from the end of the piece shows:

...what is actually emerging is not quite the bleak future of the Internet that Zittrain envisioned. It is only the future of the commercial content side of the digital economy. Ecommerce continues to thrive on the Web, and no company is going to shut its Web site as an information resource. More important, the great virtue of today's Web is that so much of it is noncommercial. The wide-open Web of peer production, the so-called generative Web where everyone is free to create what they want, continues to thrive, driven by the nonmonetary incentives of expression, attention, reputation, and the like. But the notion of the Web as the ultimate marketplace for digital delivery is now in doubt.

Right: so the web's not actually dead. It's just that you can't directly make money off of it, except for all the people who do. Pause for a second, if you will, to enjoy the irony: the man who wrote an entire book about how the web's economies of "attention, reputation, and the like" would pay for an entire real-world economy of free products is now bemoaning the lack of a direct payment option for web content.

Wolff's half of the article (it's the part in the glaring red column), meanwhile, is a protracted slap-fight with a straw man: it turns out that the web didn't change everything, and people will use it to sell traditional media in new ways, like streaming music and movies! Wolff doesn't mention anyone who actually claimed that the web would have "transformative effects," or how streaming is not in and of itself fairly transformative, or what those other transformative effects would be--probably because the hyperbole he's trying to counter was encouraged in no small part by (where else?) Wired magazine. It's a silly argument, and I don't see any reason to spend much time on it.

But let's take a moment to address Anderson's main point, such as it is: that the open web is being absorbed into a collection of "apps" and APIs which are, apparently, not open. This being Chris Anderson, he's rolled a lot of extraneous material into this argument (quality of service, voice over IP, an incredibly misleading graph of bandwidth usage, railroad monopolies), but they're padding at best (and disingenuous at worst: why, for example, are "e-mail" and VPNs grouped with closed, proprietary networks?). At the heart of his argument, however, is an artificial distinction between "the Web" and "the Internet."

At the application layer, the open Internet has always been a fiction. It was only because we confused the Web with the Net that we didn't see it. The rise of machine-to-machine communications - iPhone apps talking to Twitter APIs - is all about control. Every API comes with terms of service, and Twitter, Amazon.com, Google, or any other company can control the use as they will. We are choosing a new form of QoS: custom applications that just work, thanks to cached content and local code. Every time you pick an iPhone app instead of a Web site, you are voting with your finger: A better experience is worth paying for, either in cash or in implicit acceptance of a non-Web standard.

"We" confused the two? Who's this "we," Kemosabe? Anderson seems to think that the web never had Terms of Service, when they've been around on sites like Yahoo and Flickr for ages. He seems to think that the only APIs in existence are the commercial ones from Twitter or Amazon. And, strangest of all, he seems to be ignoring the foundation on which those APIs are built--the HTTP/JSON standards that came from (and continue to exist because of) the web browser. There's a reason, after all, that Twitter clients are not only built on the desktop, but through web portals like Seesmic and Brizzly--because they all speak the language of the web. The resurgence of native applications is not the death of the web app: it's part of a re-balancing process, as we learn what works in a browser, and what doesn't.

Ultimately, Anderson doesn't present a clear picture of what he thinks the "web" is, or why it's different from the Internet. It's not user content, because he admits that blogging and Facebook are doing just fine. He presents little evidence that browser apps are dying, or that the HTTP-based APIs used by mobile apps are somehow incompatible with them. He ignores the fact that many of those mobile apps are actually based around standard, open web services. And he seems to have utterly dismissed the real revolution in mobile operating systems like iPhone and Android: the inclusion of a serious, desktop-class browser. Oh, right--the browser, that program that launches when you click on a link from your Twitter application, or from your Facebook feed, or via Google Reader. How can the web be dead when it's interconnected with everything?

You can watch Anderson try to dodge around this in his debate with Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle. "It's all Internet," O'Reilly rightly says. "Advertising business models have always only been a small part of the picture, and have always gotten way too much attention." Generously, O'Reilly doesn't take the obvious jab: that one of the loudest voices pitching advertising as an industry savior has been Chris Anderson himself. Apparently, it didn't work out so well.

Is the web really a separate layer from the way we use the Internet? Is it really dead? No, far from it: we have more power than ever to collect and leverage the resources that the web makes available to us, whether in a browser, on a server, or via a native client. The most interesting development of "Web 2.0" has been to duplicate at the machine level what people did at the social level with static sites, webrings, and blogs: learn to interoperate, interlink, and synthesize from each other. That's how you end up with modern web services that can combine Google Maps, Twitter, and personal data into useful mashups like Ushahidi, Seesmic, and any number of one-off journalism projects. No, the web's not dead. Sadly, we can't say the same about Chris Anderson's writing career.

June 8, 2010

Page Up

Last week, at the Gov 2.0 conference in Washington, D.C., I sat through a session on mobile application design by an aspiring middleware provider. Like most "cross-platform" mobile SDKs these days, it consisted of a thin native wrapper around an on-device web page, scripted in some language (Ruby, in this case), with hooks into some of the native services. As usual with this kind of approach, performance was awful and the look-and-feel was crude at best, but those can be fixed. What struck me about the presentation, as always, was the simple question: if I already have to code my application in Ruby/HTML/JavaScript, with all their attendant headaches, why don't I just write a web service? Why bother with a "native" application, except for the buzzword compliance?

This is not just snark, but an honest query. Because to be honest, the fervor around "apps" is wearing me out--in no small part, because it's been the new Product X panacea for journalists for a while now, and I'm tired of hearing about it. More importantly, it drives me crazy, as someone who works hard to present journalism in the most appropriate format (whatever that may be), that we've taken the rich array of documents and media available to us and reduced it to "there's an app for that." This is not the way you build a solid, future-proof media system, people.

For one thing, it's a giant kludge that misses the point of general-purpose computing in the first place, which is that we can separate code from its data. Imagine if you were sent text wrapped in individual .exe files (or their platform equivalent). You'd think the author was insane--why on earth didn't they send it as a standard document that you could open in your favorite editor/reader? And yet that's exactly what the "app" fad has companies doing. Sure, this was originally due to sandboxing restrictions on some mobile platforms, but that's no excuse for solving the problem the wrong way in the first place--the Web didn't vanish overnight.

Worse, people have the nerve to applaud this proliferation of single-purpose app clutter! Wired predictably oversells a "digital magazine" that's essentially a collection of loosely-exported JPG files, and Boing Boing talks about 'a dazzling, living book' for something that's a glorified periodic table with some pretty movies added. It's a ridiculous level of hyperbole for something that sets interactive content presentation back by a good decade, both in terms of how we consume it and the time required to create it. Indeed, it's a good way to spend a fortune every few years rewriting your presentation framework from scratch when a new hardware iteration rolls around.

The content app is spiritual child of Encarta. Plenty of people have noticed that creating native, proprietary applications to present basic hypertext is a lot like the bad old days of multimedia CD-ROMs. Remember that? My family got a copy of Encarta with our 486-era Gateway, and like most people I spent fifteen minutes listening to sound clips, watched some grainy film clips, and then never touched it again. Cue these new publication apps: to my eye, they have the same dull sheen of presentation--one that's rigid, hard to update, and doesn't interoperate with anything else--and possibly the same usage pattern. I'm not a real Web 2.0 partisan, and I generally dislike HTML/CSS, but you have to admit that it got one thing right: a flexible, extensible document format for combining text with images, audio, and video on a range of platforms (not to mention a diverse range of users). And the connectivity of a browser also means that it has the potential to surprise: where does that link go? What's new with this story? You can, given time, run out of encyclopedia, but you never run out of Internet.

That's perhaps the part that grated most about the middleware presentation at Gov 2.0. A substantial chunk of it was devoted to a synchronization framework, allowing developers to update their application from the server. Seriously? I have to write a web page and then update it manually? Thing is, if I write an actual web application, I can update it for everyone automatically. I can even cache information locally, using HTML5, for times when there's no connectivity. Building "native" applications from HTML is making life more complicated than it needs to be, by using the worst possible tools for UI and then taking away the platform's one advantage.

I'm not arguing that there's no place for native applications--far from it. There are lots of reasons to write something in native code: access to platform-specific APIs, speed, or certain UI paradigms, maybe. But it all comes back to choosing appropriate technology and appropriate tools. For a great many content providers, and particularly many news organizations, the right tool is HTML/CSS: it's cheaper, easier, and widely supported. It's easily translated into AJAX, sent in response to thin client requests, or parsed into other formats when a new platform emerges in the market. Most importantly, it leaves you at the mercy of no-one but yourself. No, it doesn't get you a clever advertising tagline or a spot at a device manufacturer keynote, and you won't feel that keen neo-hipster glow at industry events. But as a sustainable, future-proof business approach? Ditch the apps. Go back to the browser, where your content truly belongs.

May 5, 2010

As A Courtesy

Dear Valued Customer,

We hope you are enjoying your Smartphone! We appreciate and value your business and want to be sure you are aware of a change we've made to your account to ensure you have the best possible experience with unlimited data usage in the United States.

Smartphones are made for data consumption-surfing the web, social networking, email and more. That's why we require a Smartphone data plan in conjunction with our Smartphones. This ensures that customers with data intensive devices are not unpleasantly surprised with high data pay-per-use charges-just one low, predictable, flat rate for unlimited use each month.

For whatever reason, our records indicate your Smartphone does not have the correct data plan. As a courtesy, we've added the minimum Smartphone data plan for you.

Thank you for being an AT&T customer. We look forward to continuing to provide you with a great Smartphone experience.

Sincerely,
AT&T

Dear AT&T,

Thank you for your charming explanation of "Smartphones" and their associated data usage (I don't think the capital S is AP style, though--mind if I drop it?). Despite your carefully-worded letter, I must admit to some confusion: after all, use of my current smartphone has not resulted in any substantial data charges (that would be odd, considering I was on an "unlimited" data plan). Nor has the change from a Nokia phone to a touchscreen Android device resulted in a noticeable increase in data use--your own web site consistently placed my bandwidth consumption at around 100MB/month.

Which is why it surprised me to see that you had "upgraded" me from said "Unlimited" plan to a new "Smartphone" plan, which does not seem to offer any actual advantages to me over the old plan, unless you count the ability to pay you an additional $15 per month (perhaps you do). As a courtesy, I have moved myself to another carrier. I hope you are enjoying the carefree sensation of having one fewer customer!

Can we speak frankly, AT&T? I've been meaning to do this for a while anyway. After you complied in warrantless wiretapping of American citizens ("As a courtesy, we are secretly recording your phone calls, traitor...") it was difficult to justify doing business with you. But the organization of the American wireless industry, even after number porting legislation, is powerfully aligned with keeping customers right where they are, both technologically and contractually.

Consider: in this country, we have two incompatible radio standards (CDMA and GSM) split between four major carriers, each using a largely incompatible portion of the radio spectrum. Even on the GSM carriers, where the technology allows people to separate their number from a specific phone without your "help," the frequency differences mean they'll lose 3G service if they switch. The result is that moving carriers, for most people, also means buying a completely new phone for no good reason. Why, it's almost as though you all have conspired to limit our choices on purpose! ("As a courtesy, we have created an elaborate and wasteful system of hidden surcharges for switching service...")

And your industry's business models--well, I don't think you're even pretending those are customer-friendly, do you? Charging customers with unlocked phones the same premium as people with subsidized hardware? Long contracts and costly early termination fees? Text-messaging plans? This business with your capital-S-Smartphone plans is simply the latest effort from a wireless industry fighting desperately to be more than just a data-pipe provider, just like the ISPs. It's AOL all over again, AT&T, and it's inevitable. I can see why you're trying to squeeze your customers while you can, but it doesn't mean I have to be a part of it.

I mean, I'm not endorsing anyone, but there is at least one carrier who's starting to get it. They're offering month-to-month plans with no contract, and discounts for people who bring their own phones (or, more accurately, they're not charging for unsubsidized hardware). They're GSM, so subscribers can buy phones from anywhere--you know, like the rest of the world. And hey, they sold me an unlimited data plan (with unlimited text messages included, no less!) for the same price I was paying you before you "corrected" my data plan. It's still not perfect--it's the cell industry, after all, and frankly I'd socialize the lot of you in a heartbeat--but it's a damn sight closer to sanity.

In any case, I don't want to sound bitter. Thanks for letting me know about the change you've made to my ex-account. Good luck with that.

Sincerely,
Thomas

April 15, 2010

Android Essentials

My love for Locale aside, what else is good on Android? Inquiring minds want to know.

• K-9: I am, apparently, a total weirdo in that I don't use G-Mail. I have an account, of course, because it comes with the whole Android developer thing, but I pretty much only use it when Google requires it. Unfortunately, the POP/IMAP client that ships with devices--even up to and including version 2.1--is awful. It forgets which messages I've read, doesn't easily allow batch operations, and decides randomly not to connect. K-9 started as a fork of that client, but it's reached the point where it's the only reasonable choice for handling non-Gmail on Android. There are still some things I'd like to see added (text-selection, recover from trash), but it also has touches of brilliance (check out the swipe-to-multi-select list mechanic).
• Touiteur: There are lots of Twitter clients on Android, and for the most part it's a matter of personal preference which you use. Seesmic is great, but it keeps asking me which account I want to use even though I've only got the one. Lately I've been using Touiteur instead, for a few reasons: I dig the pull-down windowshade for updates, the UI for jumping out to links is better, and it's super-speedy. Also, the name cracks me up. Like all Android clients, of course, Touiteur gracefully handles checking for messages and mentions in the background via the notification bar, and it makes itself available to the "share" menu for URL-shortening right from the browser.
• Ringdroid: One of the main goals for Android is that it's not tied down to a computer. Everything's either in the cloud, or it's meant to be self-sufficient. Sometimes this can be frustrating (I'd love to have Outlook sync included), but for the most part it's liberating. Take Ringdroid, for example: it's a basic WAV/MP3 editor that you can use to edit and set system sounds directly on the device. I don't use it often, but if I decide to nerd out on the bus and set my notification tone to a Star Trek communicator clip I found online, Ringdroid makes it possible (and yet no less shameful).
• Text Edit: Every platform needs a Notepad.exe equivalent. Unfortunately, most of the note-taking programs for Android keep their data siloed in a private database, which defeats the point of having that SD card filesystem available. Text Edit actually opens and saves files, which makes it tremendously helpful for someone like me who'd actually like to get some work done in a standard format every now and then.
• Smart Keyboard Pro: You can replace almost anything on an Android phone if you don't like the default, and I don't much care for the built-in soft keyboard. Specifically, I hate the way it keeps all the good punctuation hidden away from me. Smart Keyboard offers good foreign language support, swipe gestures (one of the better bits from Windows Mobile), multiple skins, and Blackberry-like autotext shortcuts. But most importantly, it puts all the punctuation on the keyboard as a long-press of individual letters, so I don't have to hunt for question marks or semi-colons anymore.
• Replica Island: There aren't a lot of great games on Android, but Replica Island (which started as a tech demo for the platform) is a well-done little platformer, and it's free.

The interesting thing about making a list like this is, for me, was that I realized how little use most of the native software on the device actually sees. 95% of my time on a smartphone is spent in three places: e-mail, Twitter, and the browser. That's not to say that I don't use other applications--that I don't find them phenomenally helpful, or that I wouldn't miss them if they were gone--only to say that as a matter of routine, those three are what matter most. Everything else is gravy.

(Well, almost everything. When people ask me about whether they should get a smartphone, the first thing I tell them is that Maps will change. Their. Lives. Because it absolutely does. I spend relatively little time in Maps, but it's probably the most valuable application on the phone.)

April 5, 2010

Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release

The iPad will not save journalism. Beyond that, I can't really bring myself to care about it. It's tempting to be worried about the trend it represents--the triumph of walled-garden content consumption instead of creative computing--but I already sound enough like a cackling lunatic on a regular basis. And at this point, nothing I say or do is going to make much of a difference anyway, right?

But in no small part I'd also rather not get upset because I feel like it would put me in the same class of lunatic as Gizmodo's Joel Johnson, who responds to critics of Apple's device with what appears to be a complete mental breakdown:

The old guard has The Fear. They see the iPad and the excitement it has engendered and realize that they've made themselves inessential--or at least invisible. ... It all just kills me. It literally makes me sick to my stomach.

Uh, yeah, okay there, Sparky. When Cory Doctorow's consumer choices make you physically unwell, it's probably time to step back from the brand identification and stop taking pulls from the crazy juice--although I suspect Johnson is "literally" ill because he's a terrible writer, and not because he's actually nauseous.

Here's a tip for keeping your sanity, kids: maybe the whole argument is a sideshow. Maybe the real trend here is something different. Maybe what we're looking at isn't the Tinkerer's Sunset, but the computing equivalent of the Casio VL-1.

The VL-1, for those who aren't avid readers of electronic music blogs, is an incredibly crappy little keyboard from the 80s. It's two and a half octaves of kitsch, essentially: a cheap, mass-produced synthesizer with a built-in speaker and an LCD that doubled as a calculator. The sound engine was based on the Walsh function, which is a fancy name for what is essentially a square-wave generator. The VL-1 was a toy, although it did find some modest success a few decades later as a sound effect for people who wanted a specific kind of annoying beep.

Casio's little white box didn't just represent the sound of trendy underground electronica bands. It's also a symbol of the time when synthesis--thanks to the wonders of transistors and Turing machines--took two paths. On the one side, the expensive and finicky studio synthesizers with their complicated FM math operators, oscillators, MIDI ports, and modular bays. On the other, throwaway consumer gadgets that are technically synthesizers, but don't offer the kind of patching or playability that a serious instrument does. It's the difference, in other words, between consumer- and professional-grade equipment.

This is largely how I've started to think about the whole walled-garden computing model. It's the VL-1 of information technology. When you look at it that way, why get bother to get upset? Its success won't mean the death of open machines, any more than the Casiotone synths killed off low-end synth hardware. Just as with the VL-1, some creative work will be done on closed systems (see: the famed New Yorker covers) because an artist likes the quirkiness or the feel of it, but serious creatives in any field are still going to need--and can probably buy, for less money--a full-fledged computer.

Likewise, predictions that such simple devices are the "future of computing" are self-evidently ridiculous--like saying that the VL-1 swept in a new musical future via Hallmark's tinny audio greeting cards. Indeed, if you look at the music production landscape today, the state of traditional synthesizers is ridiculously strong, even though they share many of the same "pitfalls" as a desktop OS: complicated user interfaces, intimidating technical specifications, and hackable hardware, to name just a few. The development of pre-programmed, "appliance" synthesis only added to the prestige of modular synths. I think it's not just possible, but even probable that the same will be true for the open computing model that's most common today.

Maybe this is just a way of stroking my own ego ("I'm kind of a big deal. I have many leather-bound books and my apartment smells of low frequency oscillators and shell scripting."), but the more I think about it the more it rings true. In the end, standard open systems tend to win out, both because they're desired by pros (or those who aspire to professionalism) and because closed systems are more expensive to design and maintain over time (after all, we wouldn't have netbooks if not for commodity parts). So let's not hysterically overreact in either direction, but especially let's not make claims for a utopian paradigm shift. There's room for both open and closed devices right now, and if the fate of the post-VL-1 synth is any indication, this is nowhere near the death knell of the computer as we know it. Far from it, in fact.

March 31, 2010

Ticket to Ride

Here's what I've learned from releasing Underground to the Android Market:

• Mobile software is like blogging. Both have a direct relationship between good will and update frequency. People love updates. Every time I upload a new version, there's a spike of new downloads and positive comments, probably because it kicks Underground back up to the top of the Market listings where people can find it. If I were doing this for money, the lesson would be clear: update often with small tweaks. Indeed, Android's no-approval update process makes this a lot more feasible.
• Code for yourself, it'll find an audience. Not a large audience, but one that's remarkably vocal. It's self-selecting, sure, but the comments for Underground in the Market have been largely positive, with several glowing reviews and people who like it enough to e-mail me. Some, in fact, who maybe feel they should e-mail me a little too much. In no small part, this is just a factor of scale: centralized distribution has its downsides, but the sheer reach of it is impressive.
• Java is exactly as annoying as I remember. When I was in high school, I learned a little bit of Java--enough to think that it was a language designed by uptight Computer Science professors to make even small tasks many times more complicated than they needed to be. Years later and with a bit more experience, my opinion hasn't changed noticeably. Checked exceptions (those that require a try/catch block) may be the most annoying innovation of the last twenty years, but if you're used to dynamic languages (and what web worker isn't?), it'll be the ridiculous InterfaceListener abstract classes, lack of first-class functions, and overzealous static typing that'll really drive you nuts. I can be productive in Java, but I never stop feeling like I'm typing three times as much as I would in PHP or ActionScript.
• Open source means education. Underground isn't incredibly complicated, but it has a couple of neat tricks up its sleeve--mostly in the code for capturing the home button and querying the package manager. It's unlikely I would have been able to figure these out if I hadn't had most of the Android source tree available to me, including the built-in launcher. And in turn, while nobody else has submitted any patches to Underground's code repository, I've had several people write to say that they appreciated being able to read through my code and learn from it. With that in mind, I spent about an hour last commit adding extensive comments. From my perspective, open source is only partly about getting outside input. It's more about leaving the process out there, encouraging transparency, and lowering the barrier of entry--increasing generativity, in other words.
• Seriously, people, e-mailing me once is flattering. Ten times starts to get a little creepy.
• The Android UI toolkit is relatively painless. I did almost no work to transition Underground to high-dpi devices, and it scaled beautifully (the use of device-independent pixels for layout is highly recommended). Being able to build a custom dialog box using the same tools as everything else, then just inflating it and throwing it into the AlertDialog Builder, is pretty cool. For a while, I had some builds that incorporated much more complex UI ideas--some fancy designs submitted by a user that added some graphical touches, including a frame around the main list. I was impressed by how simple it was--particularly the PreferenceScreen built-in class, which handles both preference getting/setting and look-and-feel for you. And while I'm not a huge fan of XML files, using them for layout also means that when you shelve large chunks of the design (as I eventually did), you can just comment those sections out. In a lot of ways (as with the rest of Android's design), it reminds me of the best parts of web programming translated onto a native platform.

Overall, I've really enjoyed learning the platform and joining the community. I did some other hobby work on Android the other week (wrote a Locale plug-in for detecting headphones and started a utility/plug-in for launching arbitrary custom Intents), and I think it's lived up to my initial impressions of a smart, interesting API design. That said, now that Underground's in decent shape (most of the requested features have been added), I'm taking a break from Android coding for a while to give my hands a rest and concentrate on other hobbies. When I get the urge again, I'm thinking about contributing to the official NPR client--it's not a particularly good citizen on Android, and I think it'd be a good way to get involved with other digital journalists.

January 28, 2010

Denied

Yesterday I did something that I arguably should have done a long time ago: I redirected pretty much every tech blog in existence to localhost on my work laptop, effectively blocking them completely. Previously, I'd done something similar using the BlockSite plugin for Firefox, but it'd been too tempting to route around it in Chrome or IE. Not good enough: I needed them gone completely. Nuke their domains from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.

I took this step in part because I agree with Anil Dash: I want to believe that I'm better than a consumer for a constant drumbeat of materialism. It's ironic that the digital computer--an infinitely-adaptable, do-anything Turing machine--has spawned an entire subculture primarily concerned with packaging those machines into an infinite array of disposable, plastic packages. Maybe I can't always resist buying more crap, but that doesn't mean I should spend my waking hours planning the next splurge.

It's also in no small measure because tech bloggers are, generally, incredibly silly people. (I know: "this food is terrible. And such small portions!" But stick with me.) I've complained here for a long time about the low quality of games journalism. As I started reading more gadget news sites a couple of years ago, gradually it dawned on me that the lack of good material in that one area was just symptomatic of a sector-wide lack of perspective. The whole thing's rotten: the completely interchangeable writers that substitute "snark" for "opinion," the rumormongering, the wafer-thin technical expertise leading to "analysis" that isn't, the constant churn through the hype machine. For me, the result is a kind of low-grade irritation, and I hear that happy people live longer.

My worst nightmare, actually, is that one day mainstream journalism--in its increasingly desparate grope for cash and readers--will model itself on Gizmodo: high turnover of largely forgettable, badly-written posts cadged from press release wire services. I like to call that the "no self-respect or job security" future, personally.

(Which reminds me--Dear mainstream journalism: we need to talk. I know it's hard, enduring this rough patch of reasonable profit margins, compared to the ridiculously exorbitant profits you enjoyed back in Ye Olde 1990s. But whenever some new tech gizmo comes out, every two-bit visionary and "innovation editor" on earth shrieks to the high heavens, insisting that this time Product X will "save the industry" from extinction at the hands of the blogging hordes. It's funny: I could have sworn we already had a way of digitally distributing news to readers on a wide range of technological platforms, including video and interactive graphics and audio clips of elected officials sniping at each other, but I can't seem to find it now. Maybe it's buried under all these browser windows that I've got lying around, left over from Twitbooking and Facetorrenting and all that other stuff the kids are into these days.)

But the sad truth of it is that the tech news deluge works. It's strangely addicting, this gossipy flood of trivia. Indeed, that's the psychological quirk that powers the entire Gawker network--pump out as much content as possible, crank up the volume, and people will find it oddly compelling. I do, at least, to the point where I wasn't very good at stepping away from it. But when I reflected on what I was actually getting out pounding the refresh button, I felt a bit like a rat at the opium feeder bar--mangy, irritable, and poorly-nourished. Prone to metaphor abuse, too, apparently.

So I'm cutting myself off. And with the time I'll gain, I hope to pick up a new hobby, or rekindle an old one. Maybe I'll finally code that pocket synthesizer I've always wanted, or get back into the online bass scene. Maybe I'll finally get past the first chapter of the book I keep starting. Or even get some actual work done! These are strange new times indeed.

January 21, 2010

Location^3

As an example of what Android's doing right, it's hard to top Locale.

1. It's approachably awesome: You don't have to be a nerd to see the value of automatically putting the phone on vibrate whenever you get near your office. Ditto for the ability to change ringtones based on time of day, or turn down the screen brightness when your battery gets low. This isn't some overhyped toy like augmented reality, it's a useful improvement that an average person can appreciate.
2. It rewards creativity: Want to silence the phone by flipping it over? Turn on Bluetooth only when at home during certain hours? Lower the in-call volume when specific contacts with loud voices call you? Locale can do that (out of the box, no less).
3. It's extensible the Android way: Locale leverages one of Android's most unsung features: the Intent message-passing mechanism. That makes writing a Locale add-on as easy as exposing a couple of preset Intent filters in your package manifest. Thanks to that kind of extensibility (a key part of the Android experience), you can get plugins that send SMS and Twitter messages, react to headphone or docking events, turn your computer on via wake-on-LAN, or hook into your to-do list for location-based reminders ("Buy milk when near the grocery store").
4. It reaffirms the value of multitasking: Locale is only effective because it's always running, even when you're doing something else. You can't fake this functionality with a hack like push notifications. And despite the conventional wisdom about multitasking and battery life, Locale uses very little juice. In Android's battery usage stats, it's typically the bottom of the list, dwarfed by the demands of the screen and wireless radios. That's partly smart scheduling (Locale requests its updates in ~10 minute intervals batched with other programs, and evaluates low-power conditions like time before more expensive options like GPS), but also simply because the energy consumption of multitasking systems has been grossly overstated.

When I first started using the ADP1, Locale was one of the programs I tried and uninstalled, thinking that it was nice but overkill for my needs. As time went by, my alternatives for settings automation succumbed to either developer neglect or ridiculous feature creep (nonsense like task killers or banner ads), and had to be removed. So when Two Forty Four AM, Locale's developer team, recently released a for-pay 1.0 version, I gave it another shot, and was pleasantly surprised. During the past year, they've refined it into a polished, sharply-focused utility that's well worth the $10 asking price.

Reviews of Android phones often fault the platform for missing some single application that the reviewer has decided they can't live without--a specific Twitter client, for example, which says a lot about the priorities of tech bloggers compared to normal people. In my opinion, though, Locale really does provide the sort of functionality that ought to be a deal-breaker for other platforms, and it's a must-have for Android users. After all, isn't this sort of automation kind of the point of a "smart" phone?

December 17, 2009

Chill Touch

It's officially too cold for words in DC this morning, which means that as of yesterday anything I own with a touchscreen just became utterly useless. Consider this a triumph of frostbite over functionality, brought to you by product designers who live in eternally balmy climates instead of the real world.

At least the Android Dev Phone is usable, if clumsy, thanks to the trackball. People scoffed at the trackball, the menu button, and the chin they rode in on, but those people have to take their gloves off to check their e-mail. Which is not to say that it's any fun using the trackball through a pair of gloves (it's way too small), but it's possible. Gloved typing on the physical keyboard also works surprisingly well. And by surprisingly well, I mean "badly."

The Zune HD, on the other hand, is basically just taunting me. See, it's got a button on the side, the express purpose of which is to directly trigger a screen overlay for controlling playback and volume. I guess it would have been too much to ask for actual buttons to control those things, particularly the commonly-used song skip functions. Of course, these days, even players with physical controls probably run them on capacitive technology anyway, so you still can't use them. I'm pretty sure that's just spiteful.

And then there's the Kindle, which doesn't use a touchscreen at all. Great! Someone gets it! I can read with gloves on, just like an actual book! Here's what they don't tell you about the Kindle, or any e-ink reader: cold temperatures slow the already-slow refresh rate. It goes from being subliminal to seriously annoying as the temperature gets down below freezing. What's that? Paper? What am I, a neanderthal?

At this point, my options are to either go Amish, or move to a place with a milder winter and a functioning public transit system. Frankly, it's a tough call.

December 16, 2009

Signal and Noise

When I was doing research for the Audiofile articles, one of the surprisingly discoveries I made was the degree of overlap between audio sampling and other kinds of scientific sensors. In retrospect, it's obvious that the theory behind accurately measuring an audio signal thousands of times a second would be much the same as taking a measurement from something like a temperature, voltage, or orientation sensor. But it takes a moment's thought to make the transition from audio-as-sound to audio-as-voltage (or audio-as-binary-stream), which is the paradigm shift that makes it possible. It's not just a microphone or a speaker--it's an I/O port.

Audio inputs and outputs are everywhere, but they've fallen out of style for digital interconnection, which is why it's so cool when someone uses them in unconventional ways. One of my favorite examples is the re-release of Bangai-O for DS, which lets users trade custom levels through audio files (they sound a bit like picking up the phone on an old modem). That's really clever--particularly since it takes nerve to ignore the console's built-in wireless connection (a good thing, given the way Nintendo has reliably squandered it). Sharing MP3 files over the Internet is cheaper, easier, and longer-lived than any centralized, developer-provided solution could have been. It even degrades gracefully (you could send creations by mail via cassette tape).

Another great use of audio hacking showed up on Make recently, with a point-of-sale system that plugs into a smartphone's microphone jack. You see something like this and you think "well, of course!" It reminds me of the old IR blasters that were available for PalmOS back in the day--plug a stubby, square rectangle into the headphone jack, load up some .wav files, and suddenly you've got a universal remote control. Both inventions play on the realization that almost every device has a high-quality digital sensor with a sampling API and a standard pin configuration, as long as you stop thinking of the headphone jack as "for music only."

Tricks like these are not only fun for digital audio nerds like me, they're also a reminder that audio is a big part of our software heritage. After all, the original sytem hackers were audio people: phone phreaks who exploited flaws in the network signaling to get free long-distance calls. It's been a long time since those days, and since you had to physically place a handset onto an acoustic coupler to go online (that was even before my time, actually), but audio remains a powerful (and evocative) tool for storing, transmitting, and even hiding information. I can't wait to see what people will invent (or revive) next.

Future - Present - Past