waffle

Channel 9′s Charles Torre talks to Gilad Bracha, the man behind Newspeak and far, far behind Java. Recorded at Emerging Languages camp at OSCON.

As much as I hate Channel 9 when it’s just marketing-driven puff pieces with scripted Q-n-A for whichever Silverlight acronym is hot today, I like it when it’s just Charles, or someone else, going head to head with another programmer, talking about programming. I haven’t even downloaded this yet, but these two have a track record of interesting conversations.

You know what the one thing everyone I’ve met agree with me on regarding the iPad? That they would be nice for magazines; a perfect alternative to those piles of back-issues.

I think iBooks is certainly close to good enough for books, but the collective effort for magazines on iPad is remarkably underwhelming. The best ones so far are either gimmicky (Mag+) or heavyweight (Wired) and none are convenient.

Follow me here: Okay, I understand that the allure of magazines may lie in a big fucking photo. But when you’re slinging around text boxes on an interactive canvas, you can also afford to temporarily push them aside and expand the text column to 30 characters wide, fit for, you know, reading.

Or, yes, I understand that you care about your precious content. But do you care enough that I shouldn’t be able to select some text and quote your marvelous articles? Send them to a friend, perhaps? I can’t even highlight something. No, sorry, I should’ve known that that feature could only ever be used to juice the text out of the latest issue and paste it into a text file for upload to some illicit FTP site, or worse yet, some sort of bay. You’re completely right to deny me functionality; anything for Rupert. I suggest you call it “nightmare-driven development”. If you burn and die, it won’t be because of those text files, whether they exist or not, it’ll be because you did this to yourselves, you fuckers.

I stand by my original idea. A sea of articles on a scroll going left to right, along with the selective ability to pull or zoom into content. That would be taking advantage of the medium, it would be familiar (every magazine has columns), it would easily adopt paging, which I’ve begun to take to, and it would be an improvement over what’s there. Why not dynamic permalinks? (“Read this passage.”) Why not marker highlights? Why not searchable notes and personal tags?

A lack of vision, that’s why. Come on, people, let’s leave the crayons behind; let’s stop just porting dead tree fibers (or, worse yet, PDFs). You should have prototyped past this stage ages ago.

Rakudo Star — the first semi-acceptable-sorta-supported-for-early-adopters build of a Perl 6 implementation effort ever — ships.

There was a pause while Murray wrote this down.

“Good enough for me, Arthur, good enough for Ethel and me and the chickens. Fits in with the general weirdness of the week. Week of the Weirdos, we’re thinking of calling it. Good, eh?”

Magic Trackpad. Like a multi-touch trackpad, only not attached to a MacBook of some variety. Hell yes. Ordered.

I keep up a habit of asking my co-workers every time they get a new laptop if it has two-finger scrolling. According to this highly unscientific continuous study, the current state of the art is that, apparently, you can start scrolling in the “track” along the right edge and then continue the motion out into the trackpad proper. I think it’s now been a full five years since the first PowerBook got two-finger scrolling.

Let’s not forget about the slippery surfaces, weird bezels and buggy palm rejection schemes. Every other laptop or trackpad manufacturer is still a bunch of complete customer-hating loons.