waffle

I said I was going to stop writing Waffle for a while by the end of the year, but I have postponed this until on or around Waffle’s 9th anniversary on February 14th, which date you may recognize for entirely different reasons. I mentioned that I came to this decision because of being preoccupied with other things; those other things now also keep me from producing or finishing the final few posts I would want to leave on, should Waffle as such not return.

Since the question has been asked, my plans for what I’ll do afterwards in the long haul are still unclear, but I do want to take a long break from the responsibility, such as it ever was one; this is not just the first step to start a new, off-label weblog called “pancake” about the same subjects ten days later (Topolsky-style, if you will), at least not intentionally.

stmts, and its current pressure-free “write when something’s interesting enough” schedule, will continue indefinitely and will not change scope. The deplorable velocity of waffle software will in all likelihood remain deplorable, especially since when I think I’ll have more time, I’ve always turned out to have had less time.

Matt Gemmell writes well on the topic of copying. I think the MacBook Pro vs HP Envy case is much stronger than the iPhone vs Samsung Galaxy case. But more importantly, he brings up other angles: why copies exist and why the people who copy are boxing themselves in.

It may be the case that this is the last I post on Waffle about the Pirate Party, and if that’s the case it’s a suitable ending.

The Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge has spent some time sorting out six years of discussions with thousands of people and mapped out his view of principles, conclusions and policies into a “pirate wheel”, a map of how all these things relate, are the basis of something and cause something else. He highlights that many political programs are just the current set of hot topics that may be replaced, subdued, forgotten or changed over time and where the argumentation and assumptions are often missing.

The Swedish Pirate Party is now headed by the capable Anna Troberg (and recently gained a second member of European Parliament in Amelia Andersdotter) and these documents are not official policies, but I have agreed with what I read so far. They present a good summary of the world shifting beneath our feet and its possible consequences, and they underline that the fundamental driving force between the Pirate Party is human rights, and not the price of a song.

I mainly agree with James Higgs when he posted about skeumorphism, but I think he goes off the deep end in trying to sew it all together like so many Find My Friends UI elements:

These designs are not the only evidence of an infantile aesthetic at Apple. Jobs mentioned “emotion” when launching iAd (he meant “sentimentality”), and Apple’s own advertising regularly features sickly-sweet “stories” containing grandparents talking long-distance to their grandchildren on their iPhones and so forth. I understand: many people like these things, they like emotion, however fake (these are adverts they’re scripted and acted; they are the opposite of authentic; the emotion is false, corrupt, a lie) and they help to shift vast numbers of devices.

The locus of the infantilist aesthetic seemed to be Steve Jobs himself, if his pronouncements at keynote presentations were an accurate representation. The default book in iBooks? Winnie the Pooh. The trailers he used to demonstrate the video capabilities of the device? Pixar movies. The music choices? Resolutely mainstream, conservative and sentimental. At his recent memorial service on the Apple campus, Coldplay and Norah Jones played. Can you imagine these artists playing at a Dieter Rams memorial?

Sure Steve Jobs was sentimental (although he wasn’t nostalgic). And sure every ad is scripted. But are you going to tell me that people don’t use video chatting to have those sorts of moments? When you just represent the way the product is being used accurately, you can do anything you want with an ad, even fake the way those things won’t happen spontaneously on camera and on set during the making of the ad.

His weirdly strong enthusiasm for iAds bothered me at the time and still does because he was more excited about people making ads than he’s ever been (publicly) about people making apps. For a guy that always professes to hold the interest of the customers to heart, that’s a strange position. It’s hard to square this particular circle, but you could certainly guess that his motivation was more about most ads sucking and being able to prevent that than it was about raking in the big dough from advertisements; they haven’t from ads and they already did from lots of other things at the time.

There’s evidence in his biography that he personally enjoyed Coldplay and the artists that played at the events, like Norah Jones. I hope James isn’t making a cheap point of them playing at what was effectively his second funeral, but it sure sounds like it. I can’t imagine these artists playing at a Dieter Rams memorial, but that’s because I don’t know what kind of music he likes at all. It’s a peculiar comparison and a strange metric; Apple’s lead designer is Jony Ive and not Steve Jobs, even though I’m told he also likes Coldplay “despite” being far less into skeuomorphism.