Charlie Brooker: why I love video games, a brief guide for non-game players.
February 2, 2010
January 31, 2010
Ian Fitzpatrick is blogging his way through Make: Electronics, similar to Jim Kelly but with video.
January 30, 2010
January 29, 2010
And Mark Pilgrim adds an essay defending the right to tinker.
Steven's essay nags at me, though. Those of us who started with an own-able machine and became programmers are married to that experience, but I don't think that's enough evidence to say kids who grow up without similarly own-able devices won't find their own way to loving the act of creating technology. Long before this became a debate, I wondered on behalf of my own kids whether modern machines were un-ownable simply because they were so complicated. All born tinkerers wonder how things work, but it's no longer so easy to find out how they work just by touching them.
To a certain extent, the Arduino is the Commodore 64 of the modern era, with the realization that the device you're programming doesn't have to be the same device you use to write the program. It's entirely plausible to program an Arduino or a Lego Mindstorms NXT brick from an iPad, and in fact that's an awesome idea and not at all disallowed by Apple's App Store policies. Seriously, LabView or the Arduino IDE running on the iPad. How awesome would that be.
One thing Steven doesn't address is the fact that iPad isn't just closed to a particular layer of usability abstraction, it's closed to the whims of a single company. If I have something I need to do that Apple doesn't like, I don't get to do it. This is different from not being able to run Emacs on my refrigerator. Apple banished a Commodore 64 emulator from the App Store—twice—because it exposed the Commodore 64 BASIC environment, the same environment that supposedly "made me" the high-paid all-powerful software engineer I am today.
Nobody has said the word "appliance" yet, and it seems worth connecting this new discussion with that old one. We "old world" folks have been talking about computers that can't do everything for a while, and even begging for one to give to our "new world" family members. I think the "old world" reaction to the iPad being closed is mostly just disappointment at a lost opportunity in functionality that can't be fixed in the same way as with a more open device (installing a third-party operating system). But we'll probably see a competitor take up the slack, assuming another company can get pretty close with the hardware.
One point of Mark's remains: If computing appliances replace the general purpose computer as the mainstream household device, fewer people will have access to own-able computers, and fewer people will be discovering technology through serendipity, as we did.
[Meta-note: I just noticed my blockquotes haven't been showing up as such in feed readers. That's now fixed.]
stevenf.com - I need to talk to you about computers:
When I think about the age ranges of people who fall into the Old World of computing, it is roughly bell-curved with Generation X (hello) approximately in the center. That, to me, is fascinating — Old World users are sandwiched between New World users who are both younger and older than them.
Some elder family members of mine recently got New World cell phones. I watched as they loaded dozens of apps willy-nilly onto them which, on any other phone, would have turned it into a sluggish, crash-prone battery-vampire. But it didn't happen. I no longer get summoned for phone help, because it is self-evident how to use it, and things just generally don't go wrong like they used to on their Old World devices.
New Worlders have no reason to be gun-shy about loading up their device with apps. Why would that break anything? Old Worlders on the other hand have been browbeaten to the point of expecting such behavior to lead to problems. We're genuinely surprised when it doesn't.
But the New World scares the living hell out of a lot of the Old Worlders. Why is that?
January 28, 2010
On the iPad
The iPad is an attractive, thoughtfully designed, deeply cynical thing. It is a digital consumption machine. As Tim Bray and Peter Kirn have pointed out, it's a device that does little to enable creativity. As just one component of several in a person's digital life, perhaps that's acceptable. It seems clear, though, that the ambitions for the iPad are far greater than being a full-color Kindle.
The tragedy of the iPad is that it truly seems to offer a better model of computing for many people — perhaps the majority of people. Gone are the confusing concepts and metaphors of the last thirty years of computing. Gone is the ability to endlessly tweak and twiddle towards no particular gain. The iPad is simple, straightforward, maintenance-free; everything that's been proven with the success of the iPhone, but more so.
I had a really weird reaction to watching the creativity-oriented parts of the product demo. Brushes looked like tons of fun with the big canvas, and since you're expected to start from blank white, it is perhaps excusable that the only practical way to do something with a picture you created is to, uh, email it, I guess. And Schiller's iWork demo made it clear that you can get presentations, documents and spreadsheets to and from the device—through a synchronization feature built into the corresponding Mac applications, not a feature of the operating system. (I wonder how much the external video adapter for presentations will cost, and what connectors it will support, and if it'll play HD videos purchased on iTunes, and if it'll work at all.)
I got especially queasy watching Schiller manipulate a Keynote presentation. All at once, I thought this was a revolutionary new way to edit a visual document like a presentation, and a horrifying way to be expected to create one from scratch. A presentation especially is a document made up of dozens of other documents from other applications: pasted text, photos, videos. With iWork and the iPad, the only way to get these assets to the iPad is by bundling them into a presentation on my Mac and sync'ing it over. iWork for iPad may be an OK way to tweak an existing presentation the day before an event, but all that lovely touch screen potential is wasted if I'm actually trying to make something.
I seriously don't mind that the iPhone is a closed platform, if only because its place is as a supplement to an existing open computing environment. It's not as functional as it could be, but there are obvious tradeoffs that work out pretty well. I'm excited about possibly getting an iPad because I fully intend to keep my desktop and laptop computers. But each Apple product tells a story of how Apple sees everyday people using computers. The iPad and its successors have the potential to alienate the mainstream consumer from the ability to create. Making things is just not part of the story.
A possible saving grace: the Internet. Much like its Netbook and smart phone brethren, the iPad is a brilliant web access portal. The Internet has not yet reached its potential as a place to create things, ironically for some of the same reasons the iPad won't: you can't easily push data between applications or convert formats. But unlike the iPad, the potential is there. It might take us another decade, but the same developments that are making it easier to live without keeping our data on a computer's hard drive will make it easier to use closed devices like the iPad as general computing devices.
I have always thought Hans Christian Andersen should have written a companion piece to the Emperor's New Clothes, in which everyone points at the Emperor shouting, in a Nelson from the Simpson's voice, "Ha ha! He's naked." And then a lone child pipes up, 'No. He's actually wearing a really fine suit of clothes." And they all clap hands to their foreheads as they realise they have been duped into something worse than the confidence trick, they have fallen for what E. M. Forster called the lack of confidence trick. How much easier it is to distrust, to doubt, to fold the arms and say "Not impressed". I'm not advocating dumb gullibility, but it is has always amused me that those who instinctively dislike Apple for being apparently cool, trendy, design fixated and so on are the ones who are actually so damned cool and so damned sensitive to stylistic nuance that they can't bear to celebrate or recognise obvious class, beauty and desire. The fact is that Apple users like me are the uncoolest people on earth: we salivate, dribble, coo, sigh, grin and bubble with delight.
January 26, 2010
"app.itize.us is a painstakingly curated presentation of the best produced and designed iPhone applications that are available for download via the App Store."
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