waffle

Jesper

what you’re saying is that your program won’t even give you the timeofday

Peter Hosey

It will, but not at Mach speed.

Jesper

I’d be ticked

Peter Hosey

I second that.

You know… At this point, it’s not even about whether the iPhone is going to sell like hotcakes. (It will.)

The reason the iPhone will work is not because of its features. There are phones with more features, and phones with some features better implemented. It’s not because it looks cool. It’s not even because it’s gimmicky. The iPhone is going to work (and by work I mean ’sell’ and ‘resonate with people’, not necessarily ’shut down Motorola’) because of two things.

The first is that it’s the best manifestation yet of the gadget of the future. Go back 10 years ago, or 20, or 30, or 40 years ago – when people predicted what kind of devices would be available to them, they have imagined thin flat screens on which everything just works somehow. Look at half of the phone prototypes from the mobile phone companies themselves a few years ago. The iPhone comes closer to this than anything else because it cuts away as much as possible, and because there really is a lot of stuff on it. (Again, some other phones have more, but they usually don’t look the part this way.) I’m not the first to posit this.

The second is that it’s supposedly a lot more humane. Look at your mobile phone right now. You’re either pushing buttons to do stuff or you’re holding a stylus. The iPhone is controlled directly by touch. You touch that interface directly; not the stylus, not the selection you’re controlling with that joystick or directional pad. You.

There’s a number of technical things that plays off of this, or that help enhance this – such as the fact that by necessity, if you’re touching with your finger, you have to be touching something big. Things have to get more obvious. For the thousands of people that just plain feel like the computer is working against them, not having to pinpoint a check box with a stylus can be a big deal.

Neither of my two reasons are technical per se. They are deeply psychological. There’s technology behind them, but the net effect is that, if you end up spelling it out, it can sound as if people want an iPhone not because of its capabilities, but because of mind games, of instincts, of some sort of deep animal gadget lust, no doubt triggered by a reality distortion field.

I think the worst thing the iPhone’s critics can do at this stage is play it off as a toy, or claim that it’s technically inferior through-and-through and only bought by desolute fanatics. There’s a reason why people are camping out to buy them today. There’s a reason why, even in a culture where the mobile phone is an eternal polarizer and subject of conversations and essays, thousands of people haven’t camped out for a mobile phone before.

If you’re following my free time software venture to any degree, you might have noticed that it’s been a calm spring. Starting in July I’ll be free from another heavy programming gig that’s been occupying me for the past few months. (I may choose to talk about it later on, but for now I’m going to leave it a secret. All I’m going to say is that it’s not exactly shrinkwrap software.)

What this means is that I’ll be taking on the entire waffle software lineup in a big way. Updates to every piece of software currently produced, and then some. I’ll be finishing off the shreds of functionality I’ve slipped out the door in the form of those unsavory betas. And hell, if Apple can get their stuff together regarding a consistent user experience, I’m certainly going to try myself – right now all apps use different methods of linking to the web site, checking for updates (those that can provide such a facility) and so on.

waffle software is still going to be a function of my available free time and motivation, and there are no plans to make everyone pay to “legitimately” use an app (like making it into shareware). I’m just saying that I desperately want a big mode change to writing my own software (or at least writing software that’s not the precise software I wrote during this spring’s gig), and I’m going to be putting some effort into that when I’m free to do so, along with relaxing on what’s after all my summer vacation, of course.

Help with translation, feature requests and bug reports are all as welcome as before. (Use the contact link on the bottom of each product’s page to route it correctly.) And if you feel like dropping a buck to say thanks, I’ll be appreciating that as well.

I have a prediction: Within two years, someone will solve the next big unsolved problem in computing – What the hell do we do about storage?

Laptop drives are tanking. Perpendicular recording helps a bit, but speeds are way down. There are standard 3.5″ terabyte hard drives now, two HD blue laser disc formats are about to become recordable. We’re filling up hard drives just like we did yesterday. I am assured that sizable drives will keep coming in volume (pun unintented), but there’s a problem that’s much more urgent than before.

You have a database-backed music library. (Shouldn’t be hard to postulate.) Thanks to the internet – legal, illegal, doesn’t matter – thanks to MP3 ripping from CDs, tapes and LPs and thanks to better quality, it’s exploding in size. You can no longer fit it on your internal drive. On a desktop computer, it’s no problem, but on a laptop you’ll want to stuff it on an external drive. How do you not completely cripple the rest of the database when part of the library is absent?

(Yes, yes, you can opt to not use a database for your music. At this point, the whole database vs tree of folders argument is irrelevant: the problem is symptomatic and appears in higher scales.)

This problem requires deep thought. It requires smart file systems, smart applications, smart hardware, smart standards and a very smart solution. It may not require all of them, but it’s going to have to be solved.