waffle

So, just before the iPhone had been out a full quarter, I finally got the chance to try one of the little bastards out. (I am not a hermit, I just live in Sweden. For some of you, that may seem like a contradiction.)

Yes, I kind of love it. The screen really is that good, and you really do have to try it for yourself.

I have had a number of holy shit experiences. One was getting my hands on Visual Basic (stop laughing and/or crying) many years ago and creating one’s own application. Two others were the moments Perl and regular expressions clicked for me, because neither did initially. A fourth was figuring out CSS (hey wait a minute, that Microsoft.com link is 11 pixels Arial and teal, not 10 or 12 pixels and blue and underlined). Nearly none have been about the UI (except for the task bar in Windows 95 and proxy icons in Mac OS X). But the iPhone UI is a perfectly qualified holy shit experience.

You touch the iPhone UI with your fingers. Your fingers. You don’t use a stylus, you just point. Google Maps on the iPhone may be unable of showing you a hybrid view or even focusing where you’re currently located, but all that just fades away when you can finally zoom in exactly how you’d like to. Google Maps and even Google Earth seem like half-witted substitutes on computers afterwards; commands like mere suggestions.

The iPhone UI is the first widely available UI of its kind, adapted precisely to the finger instead of the stylus. Instead of trying to fight off the downsides of not affording single-pixel precision, it embraces the constraints and creates a workable interface, and expands on it by offering precisely that which using ‘just a stylus’ can’t – multi-finger interaction. From hunting and pecking with your finger nail to check the 8 x 8 check box to controlling the zoom level on Google Maps or any photo or web page exactly. Think about that.

The iPhone is not perfect. A first for any phone this side of, oh, 2003?, it doesn’t have MMS at all, so you can’t send images or audio to other cell phones without being convinced the other cell phones have set up email clients. As we all have heard, 3G would really be better for data transfer speed. And about four to five of the bundled applications are crap – the specific group varies depending on who you ask, but it generally includes the Notes app. And what kind of PDA has a YouTube client but not copying and pasting, or the ability to view Excel Office Open XML documents but not an accessible file system?

I am telling you today to shut up for a few seconds and stay for the ride. It is pretty much impossible to make the kind of conclusions I make about the iPhone’s UI and its role in making this sort of thing available for the first time to ordinary people without also making the comparison to the original Macintosh. It was far from perfect when it came out, which led a lot of people to discredit it. Within three years almost all of the “but it doesn’t have/do X” concerns were gone, and within ten years it had swayed every other competitor. I believe something similar is going to happen. It’s not a coincidence that the iPhone owners are – AT&T handcuffs aside – generally satisfied.

Yesterday, Scott Stevenson and I had a discussion about the big deal about an iPhone SDK was. The big deal is this: almost every phone or PDA in existance that you’d want to develop for has an SDK. Most have two – J2ME MIDlets and the platform SDK. Regardless of what you think about the execution, the iPhone is extremely technically capable. Its screen is high resolution and it’s got all the communications support you might want, aside from maybe GPS.

And what does Apple offer you? They offer you HTML. Okay, that’s unfair, they offer you HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The point is that it’s meek. You can’t take advantage of anything interesting in the hardware using the HTML “SDK”. You can’t even get a button in the menu. To not offer an SDK is Apple’s call to make, though it may seem like a slap in the face. (But to call it a wonderful SDK is still blowing sunshine up our collective ass.) Here’s the best technical platform and you can display web pages – oh, I’m sorry, web “apps” – on it. It still stings.

What’s my point after all this? That there’s no doubt the iPhone’s gonna be huge. They will sell significantly more than 10 million next year. But also that, if Apple actually tries to reach out to developers, they can make the sucky parts suck less in no time and address the biggest software issues in one fell swoop.

Also, this touch-it-with-your-fingers thing? It has legs.

As Daniel Jalkut has, crankily, pointed out during previous comments, recent waffle stories are merely about issues that annoys me. I feel I should explain myself.

waffle as you all know isn’t necessarily about anything. There are recurring themes, if you will: HTML5 rules; Apple isn’t as bad as this guy says they are; Apple is even worse than this guy says they are; Apple is really quite good; Ruby is really bitchin’; I wrote something good in Ruby; here’s why Python sucks; oh goodness gracious, I can’t believe anyone would want to touch C++ with a twenty foot pole operated via satellite by a robot, itself operated by another robot actually probably programmed by someone in C++, but disregard that if you can; here’s a bad hack I just wrote; I just put out some new software; I am about to put out some new software; I know I said I was about to put out some software but then I didn’t and I’m sorry I didn’t; oh, no, I haven’t given up on that software, it’s still coming before Christmas… no, I don’t know which Christmas in particular; also, self-deprecation.

Recently, some things have been stewing mentally into some sort of primordial goo. I have a bunch of half-written drafts that may meld together; a bunch of them have no good conclusion at all and don’t actually go anywhere, which is a shame because if I could make them go anywhere that means I would have made some progress in that area. In the meantime, the more reactionary pieces have been easy to write, and it’s what’s been published. So, no, I don’t sit all day yelling at kids to get off the lawn.

Aaron Swartz, speaking via video conference to a room full of people at a technology conference in India:

In addition, online news sites started noticing that Reddit could send them vast amounts of traffic. They somehow thought they could encourage this by adding “reddit this” links to all of their articles. As far as I know, adding such links doesn’t actually improve your chances of being popular on Reddit (although it does make your site look more ugly), but it did give us lots of free advertising.

You’ve all seen them, right? The useless buttons to pimp your article on the link-pimping network of your choice. It’s been bullshit all along, and here is also former Reddit developer Aaron telling you it doesn’t work. Why doesn’t it work? It’s simple.

People pimp the links they like. People don’t pimp the links that are convenient to pimp. Some people might, and some sites might also consist entirely of contributors who do, but you’re likely to leave that site soon since you don’t want to read stuff that’s easy to link to, just stuff that’s good.

So remove the fucking buttons. It’s line noise. It also sends a very specific message:

“I want people to pimp my articles more badly than I want you to have an enjoyable experience reading them. In fact, the reason the button is even there is because I’m so confident my writing’s crappy, I think no one would pimp my article if I didn’t provide it. Wait, I wasn’t supposed to own up to that. What I really mean is that I’m a total ass and, convinced that I am that everyone is going to pimp my article regardless, I might as well assume that my readers’ pimpmobile bookmarklets are temporarily incapacitated and take pleasure in being able to provide a convenient service to those readers at the expense of wasted bandwidth, attention and valuable time of the rest of my readers.”

Or, shorter:

“I am a jerk.”

So, Photoshop Tennis is finally back, only now under the guise of Layer Tennis. Why so? Adobe’s sponsoring it, that’s why, and they are presumably mad about the verbification of Photoshop as well as the genericization of their trademark.

I don’t like the name change. Photoshop Tennis is the ancestral name of the game; like the real sport’s terminology like love for zero (deriving from the french l’oeuf, meaning ‘the egg’), so should this noble sport pay homage to its history.

Adobe’s sponsorship also brings in a well-done, but intrusive Flash ad on the right side of the screen. To promote its interactivity it jitters, teasing you with an animation for the first few seconds after you load the page, and since it is an element of the sport that you practically have to reload the page to see if there are any new volleys, you’ll see that a lot.

I get the whole point of Adobe being sponsors – whooop-de-doo, they invented Photoshop – but I don’t like it. There’s something about those ® marks following the product names throughout the web site that makes you itch, that could almost solely turn you anti-corporate, the sentiment being: “Why are they poking around in our community sport? We did just fine before your Registered Trademark signs showed up.”

I suppose it could be worse though. Frito-Layer Tennis, anyone?