waffle

February 2011 already? Normally when Valve puts down a year, they intend the last day of quarter, oh, five. Not that I’m complaining.

New trailer. Mind re-blown at 6:37. I’m not so sure I’m going to have much of one left when this game comes out.

According to Wired, Apple VP and head of App Store process Phillip Shoemaker sells his own fart apps, including a pee app, and why wouldn’t he? It’s a perfectly legitimate product. For some reason, he chose to sever the links that made this revelation possible shortly after the Wired piece, which seems a bit more odd. Apple PR issued a statement, which I will attempt to de-PR-speak in situ.

Phillip’s apps were written, submitted and approved before he became an Apple employee.

At Apple, we don’t pee on our hands.

His experience and perspective as a developer is one of the valuable things he brings to Apple’s developer relations team.

Yeah, Phil’s our token fart guy.

Apple’s policy allows for employees to have apps on the App Store if they’re developed and published prior to their start at Apple.

Our platform is so open and our approval process so fair and transparent, we don’t even need to use it.

Seriously, though; what? Even if you subscribe to the idea of curation as the ultimate avenue, where’s the need to block people? If objectivity played any part, self-serving motives would be void. Unless it doesn’t, and writing the rules down and following them blindly would expose your thirst for control at the cost of actual utility and usefulness.

Or unless the whole concept is morally bankrupt and doesn’t actually fly anyway; it just happens to work acceptably because success hides problems, and because you can continue to hire Ministry of Truth personell until the problem seems to go away because now everyone’s complaining in unison instead of one and one on queue, which seems like a bigger story.

Oh, I see, it’s because of the Android App Market and its one lack of oversight. That’s why we can’t have shiny things, by which I mean adult treatment. Also, I heard someone stuffed a ballot once. This democracy thing obviously doesn’t work, wanna go via feudalism or straight to a totalitarian military state?

It grates.

Every once in a while, something happens.

• Deborah Adler remade pill bottles from the ground up, stripping it down to the important information in a bottle that’s easier to read, handle and manage. The US Target chain bought the concept hook, line and sinker, and implemented it as ClearRX.
• Another US chain, Best Buy, tossed the idea of working hours and implemented ROWE — the Results Only Work Environment. Jody Thompson and Cali Ressler developed and managed the scheme from experiment that no one wanted to end to division-by-division rollout to breakout ROWE implementation startup. Their book is called Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It and you don’t need to accept its angle for it to turn your idea of work, shame and effort on its head.
• Ricardo Semler did the same thing in his family company Semco more than a decade prior and has since gone far further. Profit sharing abounds; you set your own salary; everyone can, and are encouraged, to read and understand the finances, and their hiring process is open. He, too, writes books, like The Seven-Day Weekend.
• The Spanish bank BBVA together with the IDEO design firm spent two years redesigning the ATM from the bottom up to look nice, make sense and cater to how people would like services to work, not machinery to look. Pilots have commenced.

It’s not that every single concept like this will succeed. It’s not that even those achingly few who do matter and who do get the chance will succeed universally, or work perfectly. It’s that if it wasn’t done at all, we’d be lost.

Yeah, the ATM imagined is probably less user-friendly to a blind user than a current generic ATM — mostly because of the “giant touch screen” deal. But it will eventually get there, and in the meantime, nearly everyone else draws the benefits of the new approach. Yeah, adapting to a new way of working is going to take effort and determination as well as concerted effort to keep tabs on your progress and avoid stranding your co-workers. But if you do it right, knowing the status of the current project goes from being cheaply available by interrupting someone else (assuming they’re there physically) to in the hands of everyone, all the time, and you won’t have to worry about work being an obstacle for your life.

There are times when the bumps in the roads outweigh the progress being made. But it is foolish to assume that that’s every time, and to avoid trying.

Sony PSP ad targets iPhone gaming.

When the target is the Sony PSP, hasn’t basically everything else already won?