waffle

Ladies and gentlemen, word reaches me that Microsoft are being asses again.

This time, they’re holding up the W3C process by suddenly bringing up patent issues. The HTML5 spec is rapidly changing, and if Microsoft are going to stick with reviewing for patents instead of fully committing to the standard, saying “okay, we’re going to support this and license whatever patents we need to”, that’s their decision to make.

But what’s holding Microsoft back now is the <canvas> element, which has been in the spec for a while, which is reliably implemented in three browsers on all major platforms, which is probably the most stable part of the spec (on account of being widely implemented). And which was reviewed in the previous patent review when the charter was first accepted.

Thanks to Shawn Medero (working group member and personal friend) for alerting me again to their suspect practices. With luck, he’ll write something up with novelties like sourcing and shit.

Update: Shawn posted a detailed comment to this post which consist of his distilled thoughts, rather than my reactionary thoughts to his immediate reactions to an ongoing chat. As usual, I’m “calling things like I sees ‘em”, but you’ll probably find Shawn’s comment to be the more sober material.

ZFS department at Mac OS Forge.

I guess I should just let this out. In the middle of October, with the help of esteemed friend and partner-in-crime Shawn Medero, I concocted a plan. I sent Shawn some money, he purchased an iPhone and USPS took care of the details of flinging it across the globe. I faux-activated, jailbreaked and unlocked the device using the 1.1.1 firmware, and it’s been working spendidly ever since.

There is a long list of things it doesn’t do - sending or receiving MMS messages, any form of Bluetooth incantation that doesn’t involve getting the audio to a headset or a car, the revered 3G network (UMTS), officially support other carriers or applications. And you know what?

I don’t care.

That’s not an “I don’t care because the rest of the experience is so neat”, it’s just an “I don’t care”. Honestly - I don’t. Any iPhone review that doesn’t detail the incredible dynamics of the iPhone is not a review of the iPhone, it is a pissing contest of the iPhone’s technical capabilities.

Because, you see, the iPhone’s UI flows. Empirical evidence suggests that complete and utter delight and awe is the reasonable reply from a normal human holding the iPhone for the first time, exploring its menus, using the device. People who are normally technically unimpressed, incapable or gloriously old-school have all responded the same way. You just can’t help being smitten.

The iPhone strikes the perfect balance between being showy and being useful. Amputees have been known to be able to count the number of animations that are entirely without function on their fingers. The list rubber-banding. The tilting. The instant feedback. Everything is there for a reason, and the reason also happens to be the same everywhere: if this happened to be a physical, well-designed object, what would it do?

Another point may be the iPhone’s biggest legacy of all: the finger as a designing unit in the interface instead of the stylus. Using a stylus affords you precision to do pinpointing. However, a stylus is an acquired taste and an acquired skill. When you use a stylus phone or PDA without a stylus, you can sometimes get by using your fingernails, but it is a frustrating experience. The model assumes precision.

Why do we need precision anyway? Well, turns out, we have a lot of choices, so we have to stuff them all somewhere. And if you want a small device, you’ll want a small screen, thus a small resolution, thus a small tap area, thus styluses.

Well, screw that. iPhone delivers a UI founded on those infamous words - “who wants a stylus?” - and when I say delivers, I do mean it. Your fingers never feel like they get in the way, you almost never have trouble tapping anything (notable exceptions are small links in Safari, but you can zoom in) and it feels way more natural. Yes, the screen gets dirty. Suck it up. It is worth it, by a mile.

(Sidebar: In late June, I had a conversation with John Gruber about how he was going to stomach touching a screen to navigate a device. Said John: “Well, you just have to bite the bullet. Maybe just buy a cheeseburger and smear it all over the screen to start with, just to break the seal.” If Gruber can convert, anyone can do it.)

All this talk about the user interface may make some people think I’m covering up functionality. Not so. The phone is the best phone I’ve ever used. Favorites are a double-Home-button-press away, the call management is marvelous and the SMS app does to text messaging what Gmail did to webmail.

The general consensus seems to be that half of the rest of the applications are great; the weird thing is just that a different half is mentioned each time. Mail is okay, as are Stocks, Calendar (although a Week view is needed), Calculator and Clock. Weather consistently shows temperatures about 18°C too low, which is curious - and no, it’s not a case of a Fahrenheit setting (whatever data I’m handed when using Fahrenheit shows as the °C converted) and it’s reproducible all the time in all cities. iTunes is infectious (I’ve bought three songs, all iTunes Plus, natch). Photos is a small miracle, and YouTube is still pretty oddball, even if it’s fun.

Google Maps deserves its own paragraph. I’ve long been a fan of Google Maps in any setting, and I too have gasped at Jeff Han twisting and turning the Californian coastline. Navigation of a 2D space and quickly moving to the right zoom level is exactly what multi-touch is good at, and applying these concepts to a map is sort of a perfect storm. Google Maps delivers, and after seeing friends play with the phone for a few moments, I am convinced that the static, rustling dead tree edition is going to be looking for a new gig within twenty years.

Safari is wonderful. I am sure that there’s an algorithm at work somewhere, but somehow certain text is scaled bigger than other text, which works wonders most of the time, and zooming and tilting does it for you the rest of the time. That tabs are afforded at all is respectable, and the rendering has no problem giving the various Opera versions I’ve tried a run for their money - this really is the full WebKit at work, even though it’s not also the full Adobe Flash and so on.

Because this is a phone, I’ve also been able to really come to terms with carrying a music library around me. I own an iPod, but its usage requires packing another thing, including headphones, which has precluded its more frequent excursions. Driving, on the other hand, with the iPhone blaring, say, Supreme from the safe confines of the nearest dashboard alcove is a perfectly reasonable experience. I’m not a great audiophile, and I don’t like high volumes, but the quality can certainly be said to be good enough.

Basically, I’m stoked. The iPhone is wonderful. It’s not perfect, but it is wonderful. I’ve had it since October 24th, and while the “it’s new so I have to constantly use it” sheen has worn off, few cracks have appeared in the façade.

The closest to a serious software bug I’ve had was earlier today when it figured, I think, that it was in headphone mode and would only sound off in speaker mode when on a call. Plugging in and unplugging the bundled headset fixed it.

The battery life is perfectly acceptable for something that can do all this; regular usage takes me through about three days until you get the 20% battery warning, and I once tried to use it constantly after this, and it took all evening to completely drain the battery. Music playback is engineered to use a different, more power-efficient chip and hardly sips battery juice at all - a wise choice by Apple, and a must for any music player that still has to be a phone.

Scratches? The chrome frame isn’t pristine, but no scuff marks on the glass, and nothing on the back that can’t be wiped off or solved by improved personal hygiene or reduced sawdust acquaintance.

Overall score? A perfect ten? No. Parts of the experience attain perfect ten status, but not all of it - 9 will have to do.

At the end of the day, it’s clear that Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and friends have to rethink their products. It’s not that Apple wins by looks. There are more aesthetically pleasing phones in smaller form factors. The problem is simply that of phones working a certain way. Applications on a phone have been a case of scrolling lists and accepting downloading certificates; Apple brings this around a whole new way. The main screen is the menu screen. All that you can use is laid bare, the easy dial is obviously marked and favorites are an appreciated idea.

It’s obvious that your Sony Ericsson T610 or Z800i, or your Nokia 3330 or 6210 (or any of the repackaged, marginally updated models offered by all makers) doesn’t work like an iPhone. What may not be readily apparent is that not even something newer like an HTC Touch works like an iPhone. What’s most beautiful about the iPhone is not its surface or the look of its UI, but the way you get around it, and that’s something that could change everything.

People may not understand why I rag on Java. I ultimately like the idea, but as I’ve said, there’s a lot going wrong in its execution. I’ve covered some parts before, but in short: Java is a word that covers several concepts (and I’m not the first to make that observation), Java is a language that half-assedly implements new stuff favoring backward bytecode compatibility, Java is a platform unto itself instead of a platform-independent API and my recent favorite: Java doesn’t really try to aspire to a lot of things.

Which leads me to two other, connected, observations.

a) Java doesn’t seem to have a great community as much as a large community. Certainly, there’s no end to the Java ecosystem. Endless libraries (many named J-something), different languages (even though, I’m sorry Nathan, it looks too much like Python for me to be comfortable with it). And certainly there are users from hackers to big banks to cell phones. But it’s missing an epicenter. Don’t get me wrong - everything’s obviously pivoting on Sun. But there seems to be very little call for change to Java within the Java community. Transitioning nicely into…

b) Java doesn’t seem to aspire to greatness or Java doesn’t seem to be run by a secret cabal. This is the same point. C# has never stopped making advances, and even if the snottier of you will point out that that’s because it wasn’t all that great when it first appeared, I will ask you to point out an alternate undertaking on the level of LINQ, or an alternate effort to bring deferred typing into an established statically typed language. Perl 6 may continue to be something of a laughing stock, but which other language has dared redefine regular expressions to enter the language grammar itself? (Or really, which other language is better meant to redefine regular expressions?)

Things like these usually don’t happen because someone wrote something cool over the weekend. Pushing a language forward takes effort, deep knowledge of the language and the new area and certainly passion as well. Languages whose core team want it to evolve are often rewarded richly regularly (or, in the case of Perl 6…).

This, perhaps more than anything else, explains my disdain for C++, too. It’s not about change for change’s sake, it’s about constantly trying to redefine the language. If you don’t think languages need to be redefined, think about the demands on higher and higher levels of programming, wherein you specify in less detail how something is to be done. Think about new and relatively sudden shifts in technology, like that from one fast CPU to several slower but parallel cores.