waffle

Okay, I get that we all like to get away from content-panel-of-the-week–stuffed sidebars from here to Antarctica, and I appreciate the sentiment in reducing Computer Administrative Debris. Really, I do. But right now, I am in fact using a computer, and making navigation pop up only when you hover something is in fact one of the litmus tests of mystery meat navigation: “user interfaces (especially in websites) in which it is inordinately difficult for users to discern the destinations of navigational hyperlinks—or, in severe cases, even to determine where the hyperlinks are”.

I expected better from Dean Allen. I certainly expected someone else to call him on it.

I don’t even like Coldplay, but this iTunes ad is so beautifully done it’s not even funny. The bar for convincing chroma key effects was just raised the height of, approximately, K2.

Before the year is over, the iPhone will be available in all regularly populated continents, and it’s been announced by carriers to be available shortly in an astonishing number of countries. Some of these country announcements overlap, with several carriers set to deliver iPhones. This doesn’t tell you a lot by itself, but you can extract information from it.

Obviously, having two carriers means that, at the very worst, Apple will have expanded its strategy from establishing iPhone monopolies to also establishing iPhone oligopolies. At the other end of the spectrum, there’s the possibility of some decidedly less oppressive “entirely unlocked” concept. I am guessing that the truth will fall within those boundaries (shocking!); specifically, I am guessing that the part of the new countries list that has a functioning mobile phone market and lacks complete pushovers for carriers will end up with an “open” approach, whereas the rest will end up with the same closed approach we’ve seen to date from Apple, maybe dilated a bit for good measure, once (say) AT&T customers realize just how reamed they got in comparison with the rest of the world.

The “open” approach either entails carriers selling phones with an exclusivity period, or entirely exclusive but with an option to unlock the phone, or sold at a significant discount (and locked) through the carrier compared to other avenues. It’s hard to be specific since the carrier and consumer chutzpah varies wildly across the expectant iPhonezone, but these are the options on the table. I think I’d be most okay with the “significant carrier discount” — it allows an out-of-the-box officially-supported unlocked iPhone, unheard of outside of France and a few days in Germany.

There’s another angle to this, too: What would Apple do? Apple would definitely try to keep the closed model as far as possible, due to greed and being convinced that it’d help them “make the whole banana” for the iPhone too (it won’t, but they’d think so). However, Apple would also try to keep the number of concurrent business models to an absolute minimum. And finally, the Apple of today would definitely go for market share… which means, come hell or high water, that being in all those other countries would be really alluring.

There’s more to speculate on regarding the new iPhone.

It’s now been almost two months since I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 and it broke my (woefully out of date and seemingly abandoned but otherwise quite wonderful, to the extent that “kosher” WordPress OpenID plugins are wonderful) OpenID plugin. This leaves me in a state of not having comments on this site, in a time where people seem to be shutting down their comments sections just to be hip, or in no small part at least because the newly established social acceptance of closing down comments without seeming self-important or unable to deal with criticism has made their long-lingering thoughts of shutting down comments realizable without coming off as a complete prick.

I told myself I’d establish a replacement weblog engine (in one way or another) with OpenID comments before I’d continue writing. It turns out, though, that my free time is spent not working on this weblog engine (mainly not writing nor actually beating an existing such example into submission) but on dicking around, which of course is what free time is for, and on worrying about not being able to write, which of course I can’t do until I’ve set up that new engine during time which I’m currently spending not doing so.

This is confusing and highly unproductive.

In an attempt to break this deadlock, I’ll keep writing parallel to setting the new stuff up. This means a small lapse in being able to comment, but it also means being able to read stuff on which you’d actually want (or not, if history is any judge) to comment.