waffle

You know, I read this –

Whenever someone tries to reach you, the call rings through on every Mac you own even if FaceTime isn’t running.

– and actually thought, just for a few seconds, “wow, how do they do that?”

Then I remembered. Mac OS X is from the time Apple trusted developers not to screw things up. We can still make plugins (like color panels and I don’t even know what to label this), we can still make things that run in the background all the time, we can still make services that are available from anywhere, we can even have everything talk to everything else. And it doesn’t fall apart into a million pieces, wreck havoc on every other app or poison your system.

There’s a hopeful angle to look at today’s announcements. The original Macintosh didn’t do plugins or concurrent applications either. Maybe the history of the Mac is of further sophistication, and the iOS devices will follow the same path as soon as a good, secure and modern design for isolation is achieved.

I’m withholding judgement on the Mac App Store until I see the details. On paper, it’s interesting because it’s precisely what I’d like to see on iOS; an opt-in, value-added App Store as one of a choice of sources, without being the single gatekeeper. Apple should be able to set their own standards higher and actually do curation instead of sanitation.

“Finally”, I thought, “Sonic the Hedgehog 4″.

Volumes have been written inquiring as to what the hell possessed Sega to make Sonic games that centered around people that weren’t Sonic and that didn’t revolve around the simple formula that made the series a success to begin with. (The appendices of those volumes generally target questions like “who decided Sonic should be voiced?” and “are the people who keep giving the 3D Sonic series new tries with ridiculous, unplayable gimmicks each time the same Antichrist-like Illuminati as those who keep Uwe Boll fed, dressed, paid and in a position that involves talentless cinematic excursions?”)

The obvious comparisons fall down. Sonic never made sense in 3D; Super Mario 64 broke new ground in 3D platforming while the 3D Sonic titles — title? — that fell on the respectable end of the scale have been tepid, anonymous affairs. Sonic is about the free road, running through vast, beautiful areas; crack for your senses, with just enough difficulty to keep you on the edge of your seat. If you thought that Sega and Sonic Team had unlearned that lesson as a casualty of the “Sega Saturn is our only next-gen console” mindwipe, you’ll be forgiven.

Sonic 4 is in the same vein as New Super Mario Bros, and I’m a big fan of that game and that general idea. Instead of putting out nonsensical spinoffs, why not just make more of what people actually like? I think that Sega should have gone for a more Mega Man 9/10 sort of approach and made Sonic 4 closer to the constraints of the original series.

Sonic 4 makes a habit of disappointing you slightly. The physics, the handling of Sonic himself, are markedly different from any 2D title. He grinds to a halt as soon as you let go, as if the air resistance was increased dramatically. It’s close to impossible to maintain the spinning posture over longer stretches (as used to be a personal favorite in the original series). What you have to do instead is run, and Sonic takes off much faster when doing so. I thought that these things were unfortunate accidents of the iOS version, so I waited for today’s WiiWare release, which features the same handling even with a D-pad Wiimote.

You may feign interest in my mental condition if I wonder about the internal logic of a game with a blue, fast hedgehog killing robots possessing benign animals, but I don’t like that line of reasoning. A game has to be immersive, and it has to be internally consistent to work that way. The 3D Sonic doesn’t look like the 2D Sonic and he doesn’t move like him. If all you do is look at him and move him around, and people buy it because it’s like the old 2D games, that’s a big deal.

I like the targeting in-air dash, and it brings fond memories of the magnetic shield from Sonic 3. But it seems to be overused, reused for every purpose as if to excuse the poor controls. I also don’t like the random access zones; once you pass the first act of the Green Hill Zone equivalent, you may go to any act in any zone, except for each zone’s boss act, which you have to unlock.

It’s still Sonic and it’s still good enough to be enjoyable, and those words have waited a long time for a justified use. Sonic Team will gauge the public interest to see what to do about Sonic 4, Episode 2 (Sonic the Hedgehog 4 is actually just Episode 1), which will give them a good reason to stop and polish what they’ve already got without being owed a new game engine or game-enabling parlor trick. I would recommend Sonic 4 to anyone who doubts that Sonic Team still knows what Sonic is about, but not to anyone looking for an amazing platformer or a Sonic 2D game on par with the worst parts of the original series. It’s a good effort and parts can be salvaged, but it’s not entirely there yet.

Sonic has passed Act 4. Barely.

Windows Mobile 6.5 was a half-assed OS that had aged long past its prime. Windows Phone 7 is a better designed, better conceived and better implemented OS.

The only problem is that Microsoft aren’t the only ones publishing Windows Phone 7 phones. They all look almost the same in terms of the home screen, and after staring at the initial raft of ten models, I can’t imagine anyone working up the enthusiasm to compare the phones on hardware, which is what it comes down to. I can’t even call out HTC’s three models by the screenshots except by looking at the brand on the bezel. For a company whose reputation was made on that trademark flip clock and a consistently tweaked user experience, that’s gotta be troublesome.

Microsoft should be happy to be able to focus on something else than Windows Mobile “Classic” — the industry’s largest millstone — for a change, but they’ve gone from gating innovation by not being good enough to gating innovation by… gating innovation. I like the gist of the Metro UI language, but it’s not like people are encouraged to design for it. Even with toggle switches and lists, there are still check boxes and radio buttons. That’s not starting from scratch, and it’s a cop-out that will fragment the feel of the phone.

It’s not hard to tell apart two different Android phones because almost all of them have customized experiences. It’s not hard to tell apart two different iPhones because one is last year’s model. But it is hard to tell apart two Windows Phone 7 phones, because Microsoft made it so they could control everything, and then did what they usually do: act like their partners could control everything.

Update: Just to illustrate the problem, here’s an example. Even though Microsoft put all these restrictions in place, I quote page 17 of the Windows Phone 7 UI Design and Interaction Guide (July 2010 Version 2.0):

All Windows Phone 7 phones will have WVGA screens at 800 x 480 pixel resolution, no matter the screen size. Most of the measurement units in this guide are expressed in pixels but in certain cases, usually around touch target size, measurements may be expressed in millimeters.

Since these units are not directly convertible without knowing the pixels per millimeter of a given screen, designers and developers who require fine-grained millimeter positioning or sizing of elements for a given screen size will need to refer to original equipment manufacturers display specifications as there is no method to determine this programmatically.

So, in other words: “Because we can’t be assed to expose one API call and have everyone fill out the pixels / millimeter ratio per model — which they could totally do, this is one number which they are uniquely qualified to fill out for best precision — you have to keep track of this by hand for every single phone model. Also, you device motherfuckers, don’t you dare attempting a finer pixel pitch. We said pixels, not ‘points’. Good luck, and tough shit.”

I have no idea which of you have been reading Waffle since the beginning. I don’t even know how many people read Waffle at all, but I don’t think that many of you have been along for the ride.

When Waffle started, it was in the early days of the web standards movement. (I used to have a series of interviews which often happened to center on such characters.) The Al Pacino of the bunch was Jeffrey Zeldman, who wrote the impassioned plea in A List Apart that helped kick-start the movement. The movement itself was the product of the dedication of many people before and after Zeldman, including many who had never heard of him and just did the right thing all on their own. Nevertheless, he was a tireless vessel of the message, helping deliver a swift kick in the Web’s future and for that I remain grateful.

Before that even started, Zeldman wrote The Daily Report on zeldman.com. It was a place of silent contemplation, thrust headlong into the web standards debate, where it became one of a handful of weblogs to shape my concept of a weblog. (I used to believe, for the longest time, that weblogs were genres unto their own; not merely set in chronologically published articles, but in talking about themselves and the web, with sidebars and “blogrolls” and calendars and comments.)

Zeldman hand-coded every update, including generating archive copies by hand. As we may see a monk manually copying scripture, so was Zeldman, manually uploading, updating and maintaining his weblog. He eventually introduced a hand-written RSS feed, and by a few years back had switched to WordPress at the insistence of, and by the hand of, his readers.

You know what this article is heading towards, but I never much noticed a quality drop in the writing. When he chooses to write, he wrote well then and he writes well now. Instead, my enthusiasm was cut short by two events, just two.

The first was when he cried out for a way for web site authors to block “smart tags” in 2005. Be that it may that Google’s or Microsoft’s smart tag implementations of any era leaves something to be desired, but this clarified how Zeldman saw web sites. Pieces of art, for the browser to dutifully render without funny business. Sometimes, funny business is good — and always, the opportunity to do funny business is necessary. Greasemonkey user scripts, data detectors, extensions, yes, even IE8+ accelerators — your artistic control stops when your web server hands over the bits. From there on out, I may do with them as I see fit. The extent to which this is enforceable or even up for debate is narrowing.

The second was the recent introduction of attention-seeking bum fluff: I can now tweet, digg and reddit my delici-cide at the facebookies underneath and above even the writings of a man who’d personally wash the elephants and rake his manège by hand every morning back in the day, all thanks to a series of convenient links.

I don’t think Zeldman changed much at all. His priorities did. He’s now out actually building standards-based sites that would make his 2001-era counterpart salivate, free from the yoke of IE5/Mac and NN4, instead of just fantasizing about such a day. If that meant that he’d neglect his personal web site, I think I’d be okay with that. But it’s not that: it’s flourishing. It’s just that I realize that I don’t necessarily agree with the way he organizes his web site, or the let’s say backwards-compatible view of what a web site is.

It was a wonderful decade for web standards, and the future’s looking even better. Beyond a cuddly nostalgic doll, I realize that I don’t derive any more enjoyment from reading The Daily Report than any other random web site. Looks like it’s time for me to let go.