Exploded Clown

Gruber point to an article that tracks down pundits who thought the iPhone would fail, and asks them what they think now.

One guy was surprised by the success. Translation: everyone else wrote that the iPhone wasn’t worth it, but fully expected it to succeed. This says something about their Jeremiah-like journalism or their complete cynicism for page views. Probably a little of both, but I’m leaning toward the latter.

It’s not until page three that someone mentions Android, Google’s big phone play. Then Enderle does, too, which is a pretty good indication that Android will fail.

Also this, from Enderle:

Apple could probably sell refrigerators to Eskimos

Well, yes, but that’s because Eskimos already buy refrigerators. They use them to keep food from freezing.

Jeff Atwood thinks that iTunes is Anti-Web:

Is it so unreasonable to expect links in your browser to resolve to, oh, I don’t know, web pages containing information about the thing you just clicked on? Is there anything more anti-web than demanding users install custom software to display information that could have just as easily been delivered through the browser?

Jeff– whom I met at WWDC last month at a party and had a blast talking with– is just wrong here, because iTunes falls into a breed of application between Web Applications and Desktop Applications, which I have taken to calling Network Applications: they live in the desktop and inhabit that world, but some large part of their functionality– sometimes but not always all– is based on having a network connection. Your feed reader is a Network Application. So is your Email client. So is MarsEdit, which is the application I’m writing this blog post in.

But Network Applications live in a continuum measured by how much they do with the network. Email and Feeds are useful offline when you’re reading the stuff you’ve stored, but needs the network to get new stuff. MarsEdit is useful for writing and revising, but needs the network to post. Most networked games have a fully playable single-player mode that works without the network. Etc.

What distinguishes iTunes is that it’s a Network Application for only one part of its functionality– the iTunes Store– but that is a tiny part of the whole application. Moreover, it’s a function that a lot of competitors built on the open web. But iTunes builds the store into the application so that it can offer a more seamless experience for downloading. Should they replicate the entire store online for people who want to browse, but then force people to open the app if they want to buy? That thing we just tripped on was a seam in the downloading process.

Now a more reasonable suggestion comes later in the article:

At the very least, I might want some basic information about the media I just clicked on. Right here in my browser where I already am. Information like what the heck it is, some artwork, maybe some audio clips, how much it costs — sweet talk me. Make me want to buy it through the Apple Store. Dazzle me with your simplicity and ease of use. Beguile me with your wares!

In the case where iTunes can’t be found, this would absolutely be the right way to go. But it should be pretty minimal because you don’t want it to become a backdoor way of browsing. It should show the song or album that was linked to, and that should be it. And they should keep that big fat “Download iTunes” button that would let you see more.

Good Idea

Setting up a family tree on Geni. It’s like a little Facebook for your relatives. You click and add your siblings, your parents, their siblings, etc. Then you can post what’s new, share photos, plan events, and all that fun stuff.

Bad Idea

Doing this when you’re my coworker from Hungary, whose wife is the youngest of thirteen children, and whose three brothers are also married to women with twelve siblings each (a bizarre coincidence, he claims). His tree is now over 400 people, and its growth is now self perpetuating. Eventually it will consume us all.

The Get Out Clause is (apparently; I’d never heard of them before) a band in Manchester. They have no contract, and no money to put together a music video. But what they do have is time and a pretty good song. So they sung their song in front of lots of CCTVs and then requested the footage via the Data Protection Act (or maybe the Freedom of Information Act; reports vary). I’m sure it ate up a lot of time in the playing and the requesting and the editing, but it got all kinds of publicity, including getting me–half way around the globe– to write this about them, so I think that counts as a pay off.

¡Viva Obama!:

Personally, there are some things about silly season that I like.

How is it that this is so awesome and this and this are so terrible?

The lack of cheesy 90s graphics is a definite difference, but the music is the deciding factor. The Obama video is fast and happy and loud, the Clinton video is cloying and saccharine, the Huckabee video is like a bad 80s sitcom opening or a lounge act. But that describes the campaigns, too.

kitten vs. frontrow:

(Via Tim Bray.)

I have lost files doing very similar things.

TED Talks: Ron Eglash:

I’ve always been fascinated by fractals, even though the math is far beyond me. But here’s a guy who not only is finding fractals all over, but puts up all these little applets to play with them!

JavaScript is the new Smalltalk:

Regular readers are quite tired of me pointing to this video, Alan Kay: The Computer Revolution hasn’t happend yet. Keynote OOPSLA 1997, but I think it’s quite fundamental to understand that Alan Kay had a vision for the web, and though his understanding of the role of HTML in the world of 1996 was flawed, it seems the collective web has spent the last ten years building exactly what he described, with HTML/SVG being the display substrate and JavaScript being the code to drive that display.

(Via BitWorking.)

I admire Alan Kay for a lot of the things he did, but this video is one of the slowest, most meandering talks I’ve ever listened to. He is talking about incredibly important things that I’m genuinely interested in, but it’s really hard to plow through.

He is very obviously whip-smart and well-read. He cites academic papers and historical incidents with ease. He uses things like cystic fibrosis as metaphors. It all makes perfect sense, but the pacing and the delivery are so deadpan that my attention is wandering.

It does have some kickin’ quotes in it, though:

• I made up the term object-oriented, and I can tell you that I did not have C++ in mind.
• There is no idea so simple and powerfule that you can’t get zillions of people to misunderstand it.
• At the very least, every object should have a URL.
• It’s very easy to grow a baby six inches. They do it a couple dozen times in their life and you never have to take them down for maintenance.
• One of the reasons why this meta stuff is going to be important… is this whole question of how do we really interop over the internet five and ten years from now?
• Let’s not do it in Smalltalk; that’s too slow. Well let me tell you something: there’s nothing more inefficient than spending ten years on an Operating System that never works.

All told, it is a strong argument against “Worse is Better.” His point is similar to extreme programming, whereby you build a small thing (Smalltalk) that works, then use that to bootstrap the system and slingshot yourself forward. But he comes at it from a classic “MIT approach” of figuring out a good design for the bootstrap, and then using incremental development from there. That all sounds perfectly great– and indeed it seems to be what the web has ended up as (as Joe Gregorio was pointing out)– but it sure as heck didn’t work for the things Mr. Kay was trying to do it with. Why is that?

Superfriends meets Friends:

(Via Boing Boing, via Laughing Squid)

One of the best scenes from Friends, dubbed into one of the worst shows ever. Classic.

So there’s this “cleaning tool” for the Mac that’s actually a scam and/or trojan horse. It always reports that you have something awry on your system, and offers to fix it if you cough up some dough.

This kind of stuff has been all the rage in the Windows world for years, now, but I can’t see this one taking off, because the app itself is ugly as sin and we Mac folk just don’t take too kindly to that.

(Via Slashdot.)

Help the world’s hungry out and expand your vocabulary at the same time: Free Rice.

For every word you get right, they donate 20 grains of rice. For every one you get wrong, they tell you what it really was. No pressure; just donate some time and they’ll donate some rice.

I keep hearing about the Semantic Web, and it occurs to me that I still don’t undersand. Isn’t this just REST?

In the semantic web, you put up a document and name some parts of it, using RDF. Those parts are the “things they’re about,” which is what’s important. Then you link different things together with OWL, throw it at your Syllogism Engine, and you know that Clay Shirky speaks with a Brooklyn accent.

Contrariwise, in a RESTful Architecture, you put up a document and give it a URI. That document is the thing you’re talkng about, and it’s what’s important. Next, you link documents together with hyperlinks (with, of course, proper rel and rev attributes), throw it at your client, and you know that Mt. Rushmore is in North Dakota.

Yes, the technologies you use are different, but the end goal is the same, right? We define objects and links, and we let the computer navigate through them all. There’s a few others thinking along the same lines.

The question then becomes: why go to all the trouble of using OWL, when what we have now, properly done, will do just fine?

Sometime in the last few weeks Slashdot did an update that puts an ugly gray box around the first comment in a story, and moves the ugly to whatever other comment you click on. I finally got tired of it and figured out how to add a rule to my userContent.css file to make it go away.

.currcomment {
	border: none !important;
}

This is one of the most awesome things I have ever seen.

There’s a flight simulator hidden in Google Earth, and it’s a lot of fun. I just spent the better part of an hour flying from my place to my parents’ place to Sonja’s parents place and then attempting (unsuccessfully) to land at John Wayne Airport. I think I came in too fast (200mph seems a bit much).

Note that before I managed to do all that, I was crashing every few minutes, because I was using the keyboard controls. My flights consisted of moving in a straight line, then trying to turn, then getting into a tailspin and crashing. Over and over. But the mouse controls are nice; just hold the mouse button down near the center of the screen, and move the position to shift in the various directions, keeping in mind that it’s a joystick and you move the opposite direction that you want to go.