I’ve had a bunch of people ask me about the thin-server RSS syncing system I talked about yesterday.

The main question: what are the benefits?

First let’s define things a little. A thick-server RSS syncing system is something like Google Reader, NewsGator, Bloglines — where the server actually downloads the feeds, and client apps talk to the server rather than to the original sources.

There are lots of benefits to this kind of system. There’s every reason for this to be widely used — it’s the right choice for lots of people, probably for most.

A thin-server syncing system doesn’t read the feeds: it only knows about users, subscriptions lists, and the status of news items. No actual feed content. Loosely coupled to the actual RSS readers.

Here are some of the benefits to a hypothetical thin-server system (in no particular order):

No latency

The thick-server systems have to read millions of feeds. So they don’t usually get updates the moment they happen — they check a feed once an hour or whatever. (Maybe it’s every 15 minutes or whatever for popular feeds.)

This means that news gets to the client apps a little less quickly than it would otherwise.

With the thin-server, the clients read the feeds directly, so they get exactly what’s available at that time.

Security

Say you read a password-protected feed. A thick-server system would have to support that, and you’d have to send your credentials to that system. That system would have to store the content: it would treat it like any other feed it reads.

It’s not economical for thick-server systems to handle password-protected feeds, since each one can’t be re-used. It’s one copy per username/password pair.

With a thin-server system, you never transmit your username and password. It never sees the feed data, just the URL of the feed and IDs of news items. No problem syncing password-protected feeds.

Reachability

Say you read feeds from a local intranet that a thick-server can’t reach. You can’t sync these, since the thick server can’t read the feeds.

But, again, a thin server doesn’t care. All it sees are feed URLs and IDs of news items. No problem syncing intranet-only feeds.

(This also applies to things like script subscriptions. A thick server isn’t going to run an AppleScript, for example, but multiple clients might run the same script. The news items status would still be syncable.) (But not the script! No way would I want to sync executable code.)

Server downtime doesn’t prevent you from getting your feeds

If a thick-server system goes down, you can’t get your feeds. (Unless you turn off syncing.)

With a thin-server system, you still get your feeds. The clients wait to sync up.

Decentralized

So far, all the thick-server systems are on one big (conceptual) server. This means one point of failure for everyone who uses that system. Downtime is a big issue.

It’s conceivable that you could write a thick-server system that can run anywhere. Something open source, something easy to install. But it would use so much resources and bandwidth (reading the feeds every hour, returning entire feeds to client apps) that it would be prohibitive for many people. You couldn’t just install it on your account at your web provider and hope to get away with it. (Well, depending on lots of factors, of course. If it was just for you, and you didn’t have too many feeds, it’s probably okay.)

A thin-server system, on the other hand, would be easy to run. Minimal bandwidth, no content system where it downloads and stores feeds. It should be easier to set up and run than WordPress.

Easier to move from synced to non-synced and back

The thick-server systems rewrite the feeds, and usually substitute their own unique ID for whatever was in the feed. (Though, in the case of Google Reader, it also provides the original unique ID, if there was one.)

Because the feeds are rewritten, it can be very difficult to match up a non-synced item with its synced equivalent. This can make turning on or off syncing very rough, as you end up with duplicates.

Longer limits on news item status

This isn’t inherent, but it’s practical. Thick-server systems tend to serve a ton of people, so they have to have limits on the length of time news items status data will be stored.

For instance, NewsGator’s was two week or 200 items, whichever was first. (If I recall correctly.) Google Reader’s is, I believe, 30 days (with some special cases, like when you do a mark-all-read in Google Reader and when you first subscribe to a feed).

But a thin system can afford to keep news item status data longer. Make it six months or a year.

No data loss

Because thick-server systems rewrite the feeds, they’ll often toss out parts of the original feed that they don’t care about it.

Again, this doesn’t have to be inherent, but for practical reasons it’s often done this way.

With the thin server, you read the feeds directly, so you miss nothing.

Twitter and other feed-like things

This system would work for anything feed-like: it just needs a URL and individual item IDs.

Imagine pointing not just your RSS readers but also your Twitter clients at the server — your Twitter clients could know which items you’ve already read. Want that? I do. :)

Your data in your control

You could use someone else’s server, if they allowed it. Maybe there’d be inexpensive for-pay services.

But, at least conceptually, you could run it yourself, and control all your data yourself. The opportunity would be there, at any rate.

Anyway

That’s all I have in my head at the moment. There are more benefits, surely, but I think the above is plenty.

Apple released Aperture 3.0 today. I'll update this post after I have a chance to read through the full list of updates, watch some videos, and play with the demo (I've already ordered my license but that will arrive later - why can't they give me a license now?).

One thing that makes me somewhat concerned: that Apple seems to view Aperture as an upgrade from iPhoto and is actively trying to push people that way. Simplicity is good, but I also don't necessarily need a "dumber" Aperture, so I hope that's not what we've got.

I also don't see myself using Faces or Places very much at all. But that's me, and the types of things I shoot are limited, and I tend to organize and name the albums and photos fairly simply and to remember those names, too.

More tk. After dinner.

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I liked Google Buzz at first, for about 15 minutes.

But when I got to the API, I saw a big red X over its future.

They had to embrace the Twitter API to capitalize on the know-how in the developer community. Google is going it alone. Good luck with that. Maybe it will get uptake, but there's nothing here for me as a developer. I'm even more bored with Buzz after 15 minutes than I am with Twitter after three years.

This comment in yesterday's post sums it up: "Google is a big clunky Microsoft-like company with strategy taxes, and they don't trust the web or developers, or each other, and their internal politics drive most of the decisions they make. To compete with Twitter is an easy sell inside Google, but to actually have the will to be cut-throat about it, that's another thing. It'll probably have to pay homage to Google Wave (remember that?) and therefore will have some elements that are completely incomprehensible. Twitter likely won't get killed, because Google's product will likely fall far-short of what's needed to get us all to think they can be trusted."

I gotta say this -- they aren't even as smart as Microsoft was in its heyday.

PS: I am a Gmail user but I don't want Buzz. How do I get it out of the user interface of Gmail?

PPS: There's a command to turn off Buzz at the bottom of the Gmail UI.

Here’s Jens Alfke on RSS syncing with a couple interesting suggestions. (Jens has a lot of experience in this area.)

Okay this time they say there really is a snowstorm headed for NYC.

And I'm nestled in my West Village apartment, with almost no food in the fridge, thinking -- "What does this mean to me?"

Last time I was caught in a snowstorm was in Cambridge, MA. I was staying at the luxurious Charles Hotel, after participating in a conference about the future of news put on by Shorenstein Center. I didn't worry about food, I assumed the hotel would take care of it, and I wasn't disappointed. A group of delayed conference-goers ventured into the snow, across the street to the now-defunct Bombay Club restaurant, a favorite, and had a long snowy Indian lunch talking politics and press.

Today, my neighborhood is filled with 24-hour everything. Restaurants, book stores, coffee places. There's a subway station a couple of blocks away, a relatively easy trudge in even the stiffest wind. So I could go eat at the food court under Grand Central Station. No problemmo.

Or... Should I line up at D'Agostino's and fill my cupboards with comfort food?

I think I'll just go about my business and take my chances.

PS: I've decided I'm at my best when I'm a newbie.

PPS: Tasks for today: Get on the NYU network. Meet with Josh Young to talk about a NYC media-hacker roundtable.

Yesterday's piece started quite a discussion, and for the most part people agree that it's time for some new stuff in TwitterLand. That tells you that it's not only time, it's past time.

In the past, there would have been a lot of comments about how the limits of Twitter are what make it so perfect. If you still believe that, watch this NSFW puppet "interview" with "Walt Mossberg" and "Steve Jobs." It's hilarious, and shows how the tech industry falls for what puppet Steve calls "an obvious crock of shit."



Anyway...

There's more to producing a Twitter-killer than just adding features that Twitter doesn't have.

It has to be a Twitter clone. It has to look and feel like Twitter would, with some or all of these enhancements. Plus, it should also have the ability to post to Twitter and include Twitter content, in other words it should also be a Twitter client. At Microsoft they called this Embrace and Extend.

And one more thing. No Suggested Users List.

Google Reader is an RSS reader that can be used for RSS syncing. Bloglines used to have a very basic syncing API (maybe it still does). NewsGator had a syncing API. FeedSync is a way to use feeds to sync other stuff (as far as I can tell). Sync Services (MobileMe syncing API) is a generalized syncing system that might be able to do RSS, but works just between Macs.

WebDAV is cool. DropBox is super-amazingly-cool. But these are storage systems, not syncing systems for things like RSS.

Not one of the above is a really great system for just syncing RSS between apps.

(For people who remember NewsGator’s system with fondness: it had drawbacks too, including that it was limited to the past two weeks or 200 items for each feed.)

Now, that said, I think Google Reader is cool (both as app and API), and I’m very glad we can use it, and I totally appreciate the help we’ve had from Google. But I do also hear from NetNewsWire users who’d like an alternative.

With everything else I have to do, I don’t have time to create an alternative. But I could make NetNewsWire work with an alternative, if one existed and was worthwhile.

What is a worthwhile alternative?

There are a few criteria to meet, in no particular order:

1. It would have to be more like email servers — that is, not just one big server or cluster of servers somewhere, but the kind of thing people can run on any server. My web service provider might run one for me, the same way it runs an email server. (Or I might run one on my LAN. Or I might install it myself on my own website.)

2. It would have to be free and open source, so that it could be everywhere, so that it would be developed by people who just want to make RSS syncing work. (I’m a capitalist, totally, but there are times when free and open source makes sense.)

3. It would have to work over http and https. REST API.

4. It would have to not require that clients download the feeds themselves from the server. (This is the way Google Reader, NewsGator, Bloglines and others worked. Status info was added to the rewritten feeds. I’m saying this system should not work that way: clients would download feeds directly from their sources, just as they do when not syncing.)

5. The API should be as simple as possible and still get the job done. The job would be defined as syncing subscriptions lists and status of individual news items in RSS and Atom feeds. (And nothing else!)

6. It would have to be easy to configure an RSS reader to use a given server. No more than URL of server, username, and password should be required. (Less, if possible.)

7. It should not be limited to the last 14 or 30 days (like some systems) — it should have a much larger limit, like a year.

8. The server itself wouldn’t ever read any RSS feeds. It wouldn’t have to — it’s entirely just about syncing data between apps. It would only ever talk to client apps.

9. It should use as little bandwidth as possible, and be as fast as possible.

10. Authentication would use standard HTTP authentication. (Not cookies or anything else.)

11. There should probably a PHP + MySQL version, just so it can be deployed as widely as possible. (Though I know you’re thinking Rails.)

12. Despite its being open source, if someone did want to offer it as a for-pay service, they should be allowed to.

Notes about the API

There are some obvious things. Get subscriptions list as OPML-with-folders. (Feeds could live in multiple folders, which means folders are just like tags, so call them tags if you want to.)

API calls would support conditional GET, so getting a subscription list would usually result in a 304.

You’d probably add, delete, edit subscriptions by addressing into the tree. (That way you could delete one instance of a feed that appears multiple times. You could add/remove folders that way too.)

The other half is the status of news items. Most have a unique ID (always in the case of Atom) or a guid (usually, in the case of RSS). For items that don’t, an agreed-upon way of constructing a unique ID would have to be developed. (Pick things that don’t usually change but are enough to identify an item: pubDate in a specific format + link + feed URL, as a UTF-8 string, then MD5-hashed. Maybe. Something like that, something that would be largely reliable.)

You’d sync status incrementally: get all the status changes since a certain date (the last time you made the call). Status would probably be read, unread, deleted, starred, and saved. To set status, it would be great to address each item in individual calls, very RESTfully — but that would be a giant bandwidth waste. Better a single call that takes a structure of some kind (XML, JSON, whatever) with item IDs and status/value pairs, where you can update a bunch of items all at once.

As you can see, the server doesn’t have to do that much. It stores some small bits of data with timestamps. I don’t think it needs any cron jobs (at least not conceptually) — it just responds to requests. It doesn’t even have any idea what this data is about.

You probably have the database schema mapped out in your head already plus more specific ideas about the API.

(I don’t recall if I’ve said before, but a couple years ago we found that the average NetNewsWire user had 26 subscriptions. That should give you an idea of the storage requirements this would need. Obviously some people have hundreds or thousands, of course, but not most.)

Most of the time clients are just getting the subs list (usually getting a 304 back), and getting/setting news item status changes.

In other words, none of this sounds that hard. And it doesn’t sound like a taxing job for a server.

Invitation

If I had time, I would have written this years ago, offered it for free, made it open source, had NetNewsWire support it, and I’d have tried to get other RSS readers to support it too.

But I didn’t and don’t have time to write it.

However, if there are people who are interested in writing this, I can help. I have client apps, and I’ve been thinking about this for years, and I’ve written to several sync APIs.

If you’re seriously interested in writing some software that could end up deployed far and wide, and that would solve a real problem for real people, get in touch with me.

P.S. Here’s the business case

So you might want to make some money. That’s cool. Two business ideas:

1. Charge people money to use the service.

2. Collect information about popular feeds and popular news items. You could provide a real-time view into what people (in the aggregate) are reading. This might be interesting to sell, or it might be interesting as a website itself (where you could display ads). Given all the metadata in feeds, plus your user’s folders/tags, you might even be able to figure out categorization. You might even be able to provide trends, too. Certain topics are gaining/losing ground. Certain feeds are getting more or less popular. Etc. Don’t forget the pretty graphs! All of that stuff would be an add-on, of course, something you’d be able to build because you have the sync system underneath.

Compelling? I don’t know. Just what I thought of off the top of my head.

In October 2009, after 2.5 years of using Twitter every day, I wrote a piece that explained the limits of Twitter that we'll have to look past Twitter to see solved, because Twitter doesn't seem to be trying to solve them.

Tomorrow, we hear, Google will announce a product that aims to take on Twitter. If so, here's a list of features to look for. Any of these features would give Google a serious edge over Twitter. Maybe they thought of some things I don't have on my list. It's always nice to put your stake in the ground. I did it with the iPad with some hilarious results.

So here's the list of must-have features:

1. Reliability. Twitter still has trouble dealing with high-flow events like last night's SuperBowl. Lots of Fail Whales. So if Google is able to offer reliability, no matter how much of an advantage Twitter's installed base is, it won't matter. When Twitter goes down everyone will reassemble on Glitter.

2. Enclosures. Can you imagine if you couldn't enclose a picture or an MP3 with an email message? Why do we jump through so many hoops just to tweet a picture?

3. Open architecture metadata. Let developers throw any data onto a status message, giving it a name and a type, and let everyone else sort it out. It would result in an explosion of creativity.

4. Relationships with hardware vendors. I still want a one-click Twitter camera. If I can't have it from Twitter, I'll take it from Google.

5. No 140-character limit. I debated this one with myself. At first I compromised and said okay let's have a 250-character limit, or a 500-character limit. But I really don't want a limit. If I want to write short status messages, no problemmo. We've already made the cultural transition. We know how to do it. But sometimes a thought just can't be expressed in 140 characters. No one is wise enough to know what the limit is, so let's just not have one.

6. No URL-shorteners. I've explained this so many times. They're stupid and ugly and they hurt the web. I like it when developers take the time to craft their URLs so they make sense to users. That's all the shortening we really need and all we should have.

Those are some of my wish-list items. It seems likely Google will offer #1 and #2. Very unlikely they'll do #3 (they don't trust developers any more than Apple does). Probably not #4, though it would be easy to get some people from Kodak and Sony to come on stage with them. #5 would take a teeny bit of guts. It's a perfect way to throw some serious confusion at Twitter. I'd recommend going all the way, but if they can't, go to 500-characters. Get some editors and authors on stage to say how nice it would be. Because they're making a commitment to their own URL-shortener it seems unlikely they would outlaw them on their status network, but one can hope.

I usually don't subscribe to the idea that new products aimed at the user base of an established product are "killers" -- but it's been a long time since we've seen a product as ripe for killing as Twitter. (Lotus 1-2-3 was probably the last great example.)

The hubris of Twitter is the assumption that the product is unassailable because of the features they leave out. Sooner or later one of their competitors is going to test that theory, and I'm pretty sure it'll prove incorrect. And where they include horrendous features that a competitor might leave out (I'm thinking of URL-shortening) they don't seem to feel any pressure to take it out. Yet almost every user would enjoy a Twitter with real full URLs that didn't take up any of the 140-character space. Hard to imagine anyone objecting.

OTOH, Google is a big clunky Microsoft-like company with strategy taxes, and they don't trust the web or developers, or each other, and their internal politics drive most of the decisions they make. To compete with Twitter is an easy sell inside Google, but to actually have the will to be cut-throat about it, that's another thing. It'll probably have to pay homage to Google Wave (remember that?) and therefore will have some elements that are completely incomprehensible. Twitter likely won't get killed, because Google's product will likely fall far-short of what's needed to get us all to think they can be trusted.

The usual disclaimers apply. This is all tea-leave-reading, I have no actual information, and I'm usually way wrong with these prognostications, but it's still good to share the thought process.

Update #1: A commenter named Scott says: "If people were posting dissertations, I'd be much less likely to read." Tom Caswell says: "How about a 'more' button you could set in the preferences? I would set mine at 140 characters for old times sake." Even better, it could default to 140 for old times sake.

Update #2: Cesar Razuri: "also, make hashtags some sort of meta data in our tweets that doesn't add to character length" Good idea.

Update #3: Scoble weighs in. Even though Google's past efforts at social media have failed, he thinks this time they have a good chance of succeeding.

The clubhouse at Whispering Woods is in what might be called "rough blueprint" stage. It's sketched up, and by an architect, but things are still very much at play and there are a bunch of things to shift around.

The clubhouse will be 6500 square feet or so and will have a smallish Pro Shop, two indoor eating areas, a large outdoor eating area facing the 18th green. Downstairs golfers will find club storage, a small locker room with showers for men and women, and cart storage with separate entry/exit ramps.

I look forward to groundbreaking and the eventual opening of the clubhouse in 2011, and I know the people who work there are excited as well.

More details tk.

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A brief note of congratulations to the City that Care Forgot.

It's so wonderful that the Saints won the Super Bowl!

This will go down as one of the big moments of sports history, imho.

As the 1969 Mets undid the betrayal of NY fans by the Dodgers, the Saints give hope to a city that was betrayed in so many ways.

From what I know of New Orleans, this victory will be the stuff of legend for a long time to come. It's a city with a great sense of history, and destiny. And humor.

Until 2005 its destiny was to be devastated by a monster hurricane and the failure of the rest of the country to come to its aid.

But tonight begins a new beginning for the Crescent City. From now on this is the city of champions!

Laissez les bon temps rouler!

Carey and I watched the Super Bowl. It was on in the background while we did other things, but I was glad that Peyton choked like the girly man that he is. I think Indianapolis and Peyton (and Eli) and Tom Brady have gotten far more hype than they deserve, and frankly, I'm sick of Peyton Manning appearing in every other commercial on TV.

Peyton's got one whole Super Bowl win now. Whoopty doo.

Top five QBs in the league? Sure. Brady and Peyton belong there, but I'll still take Ben Roethlisberger every day of the week and twice on Sundays, as they say. But you had to know that… More on that here.

OK, I hadn't intended to post on QBs, so forget that. I think the commercials were - as usual - stupid again this year. Frankly, the funniest one to me might have been the Miller High Life commercial where four "local businesses" were given time.

Carey was rooting for the Saints because someone has been obnoxious - for months - about the Colts in a professional setting where they should just say nothing or keep it short. So she was delighted. She was happier than I was when Peyton threw that pick that sealed his fate.

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I spent my first full day living in NYC since 1977.

Lots of observations, but I only have time to share one.

In other cities, the places you drive to are places you walk to in Manhattan. There's every kind of restaurant within a block of my apartment. In Palo Alto, you can get it all (but the pizza isn't as good) but you have to drive everywhere unless you live off University Avenue. Same in Berkeley.

And the walking in Manhattan is amazing. It's huge and has so much variety. And everywhere you go the buildings reach the sky. In every other city I've lived in, they might have had a few buildings as tall as the average tall apartment building in NY. And that's even in neighborhoods which aren't known for big buildings.

I live two blocks from the West 4th St subway station. From there you can get to every part of Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn. One change gets you to everywhere in Queens.

But I spent five hours walking today. I'm wiped, but in a good way.

Now on to the SuperBowl. Of course as a Tulane alum I'm rooting for the Saints!

David Weinberger asks: "After press conferences, what?"

Imho: A hybrid of newsroom and press conference. And it must be open, unlike newsrooms and press conferences of the past.

A few years ago I wrote about an idea called Hypercamp, a way of distributing ideas and news that I felt would come into existence in what we now call the "rebooted news system."

The idea became real for me at a Microsoft press event at the Palace Hotel in 2005. Ray Ozzie introducing himself as the new CTO. After the event we all went upstairs to a small ballroom where there was all kinds of food and refreshment and a mix of bloggers, developers, reporters and Microsoft execs. The party went on for a couple of hours with people reporting live from the event out through their blogs.

The coolest thing was the collaborative writing that happened, that usually doesn't happen in the blogosphere because we all write holed up in isolated cubbies.

It dawned on me that this was a hybrid press conference and newsroom.

So imho what happens in the rebooted news system are open newsrooms. I'm not talking about virtual (online) newsrooms. A couple in SF, one for tech and another for biotech (different people, different issues). In NYC, you'd have an open newsroom for tech, and one for finance, fashion, perhaps sports. In every geographic center, you'd have one or more such facilities.

The idea developed -- let's put two podiums at either ends of the room with vendors paying to make presentations. There's an EIC for each open newsroom who can also give time to open source projects in all these fields (open source sports and fashion -- interesting).

Big high bandwidth pipes emanate from the room, all kinds of video flow in and out. It's a work place and an event space.

I called these open newsrooms Hypercamp and drew a diagram to illustrate.



I'd love to start one in NYC and/or SF. It has to be operated by someone other than me, I'm strictly editorial. Not good at the logistics involved in putting these things together.

In the age of realtime networked news this is the new CNN, video would flow out of these facilities 24 hours a day. If you have an event to host, you'd pay to put it in the appropriate Hypercamp.

Carey was talked into getting a "MyFrogz" case for her iPhone awhile back, and I liked it, so I picked up a yellow/black (Let's Go Pens!) recently as well. It does what I need - protects the back of the case from scratches and provides a bit of grip as well.

I used to have a leather DLO hip holster, but the leather wore through the metal belt clip and I didn't replace it because, most of the time, the iPhone was out of the case anyway and unprotected.

Carey and I also have an anti-glare plastic sticky thing (screen cover?) on our iPhones. It's a weird feeling at first, but it virtually eliminates glare AND fingerprints, and the feeling is better than sliding across the glass itself. They're only $12 or so for three, and I consider them a great buy.

What cases (and/or screen covers) have y'all bought for your iPhone?

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wilshipley: "Is there an iPhone app for adding your own subtitles to that famous Hitler scene on YouTube™, yet?"

Why it's the perfect tweet:

1. It's about a product from Apple.

2. It suggests an Apple slogan that's almost become a meme.

3. You know damned well there's no app for that.

4. But there totally should be.

5. We love Apple even though they turn us into couch potatoes and minions of Steve.

6. Consider it a feature request for Android.

7. It's about at the appropriate level of importance for the average tweet.

8. It's an application of Godwin's Law.

9. The Hitler videos are funny even thought Hitler himself was a monster.

10. You never know what Hitler is going to say next!

11. Think of all the new applications for Hitler.

Saw a link this evening in Danny Sullivan's feed to Bit.ly Pro. Not sure when this was announced, there are no references to the product in Google News.

Read over the FAQ. This is basically the service I wanted to create with Bit.ly when we started it up in the summer of 2008. But it's apparently missing one key component, the freedom to switch to a different service. Once you've chosen to map a domain to bit.ly, if you map it to another service, all the links you created with bit.ly break.

There is a way for them to provide the ability to switch, Joe Moreno at Adjix did it. Bit.ly could echo all your shortened URLs to an Amazon S3 bucket that you control (and pay for, btw). If you decide to switch, just change your CNAME to point to Amazon. Or give it to a competitive service that you like better. This protects your choice, and protects all of us if Bit.ly should fail.

8/19:09: How to Fix URL Shorteners.

Now I could be missing something, I hope I am. But I'd get the answer to the question before I bet my future on any URL-shortening service.

I'm in California, where it rains a lot but snow is pretty rare.

That's why a honkin winter storm is so interesting!

If you're getting dumped on in Washington or Baltimore or where ever, how's it going? Any accumulation? Pictures!

Goodness gracious. Or whatever that phrase is.

Spam is not a huge deal for me. I only get 50 or so a day (and most of those come through servers I don't control and thus don't have SpamAssassin on). Hundreds or thousands of emails are blocked and deleted at my server(s) every day.

But sometimes, for curiosity's sake, I hop into my Junk mail folder and look at some of the messages.

WHO CLICKS ON THIS SHIT?!?! STOP DOING IT!!!!

If nobody clicked on spam and bought Viagra or tried to make their penises larger or whatever people are selling these days, nobody would get spam anymore.

It's almost like a kid can stop another kid from bullying him: he either beats the crap out of the other kid or he doesn't react. The latter option works wonders - just ignore the spam, don't click it, and they'll go away.

What percentage of people out there click on these things? 10%? 50%? I'm curious, because whatever percent it is, they're really mucking it up for the rest of the world.

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This is a networking experiment to see if I can connect with people in NYU's Computer Science department through the readers of this weblog.

Me: I'm a visiting scholar in the Journalism Institute for the next year; working with my friend Jay Rosen and his students on several interesting projects. While I'm there it would be interesting for me to catch up on how Computer Science is taught these days, and perhaps talk with some students about how I got where I am and see if there's any interest in working on some projects while I'm in NY in 2010 and 2011.

Here's my CV. To get in touch, please send an email to dave dot winer at gmail dot com. Haven't got my NYU email address yet (next week, I hope).

Update: NYU Computer Science Students Make Awesome iPhone Apps.

The wife and I have decided that we'd like to buy a recliner. Currently, I sit on the couch and Carey sits on the love seat for reading. I'll slide down and sit on the floor to use my computer, or use the couch table lamps for reading. She'll do everything on the love seat.

We'd like to add a recliner. I imagine I'll be using it primarily and Carey will move over to the couch on occasion. We'd like something that's incredibly comfortable - particularly for reading.

I've read some articles (like this one and ).

Budget is $600 to $1000 (fairly firm at the top of course). The couch and love seat are a microfiber/faux suede, and neither of us are dead set on any particular fabric or finish except that we're pretty sure we don't want vinyl. The recliner won't go against a wall and there's room behind it, so we don't need a wall-saver type. A rocker type that spins might be nice, and I think we'll want a footrest included so we don't have an ottoman.

It'll be a little while before we really get into it, but if you have any opinions or insight, please share.

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I have the latest version of Adobe Photoshop. I have the latest version of Mac OS X. And yet I can't copy and paste an image with transparency into Photoshop.

I often come across this problem after I "copy image" from Safari or when I hold down the control key when taking a screenshot to put the image on the clipboard.

Pasting into Photoshop turns this image:

Into this pile of garbage:

The only way around this is to take an actual screenshot and open the actual PNG file in Photoshop.

This bug has existed for quite some time - perhaps since 10.6 - and unfortunately I've yet to see anyone talking about fixing it. Is Adobe even aware of the issue? They should be. Searches reveal plenty of others complaining about it.

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WIthout any fanfare as far as I can tell, Google has unveiled one of the most signficant, far-reaching and basically good features in its core search product.

Now, in addition to presenting the pages ranked in order of algorithmic importance, it also shows you what people you know have to say about the subject.

How does it know who you know? Based on some very simple information you may have entered into your Google profile. (I called this two-way search in July 2009.)

For example, in my profile, I told it that I have a blog, am on Twitter, FriendFeed, run opml.org, have Flickr, Identi.ca, Picasa and YouTube accounts and OpenID. From there, it presumably either crawls or makes API calls to find out who I'm connected to and what I care about. There's a wealth of information about me just in the links on scripting.com.

So, when I search for "Michael Clayton" it includes results from my social circle. In this case it has a hit from Cody Brown who it knows (so they tell me) I know because I follow him on Twitter.

It's good for the web because it puts all the social services on the same open playing field. If I want to add another service, I can put it in the list, and I can tell them how important it is to me by moving it up or down the list. It also makes sense for Google to throw its lot in with the web because they aren't Twitter or Facebook, and they got their start by indexing the open web. No matter what their motivations, that's for God to judge. Good is good. And good is not evil.

If you have an account on Google, you can edit your profile here.

At first the results aren't blowing me away, but I expect over time they will get better.

Peter Hosey: “Welcome, new Cocoa or Cocoa Touch programmer. Here are some things you will need to know.”

Eoghan McCabe:

Given the crappy copy and links in the message, after a quick scan, it’s not difficult to miss a key line or two and be left thinking you can hit reply and continue the conversation. After all, they originally asked me to e-mail them, they just replied to my mail, they ask me to “write back”, speak in the first person and they sign with a staff member’s name. I typed “Hi Scott, there must be some confusion. There is no another e-mail add—” before I noticed the “cannot accept incoming e-mail” line.

Lukas Mathis: “Eventually, you will find yourself in a position where your application contains features it should not. Even if you’ve been vigilant, this will happen.”

I can list all the conferences I'm not going to this year because I didn't get an invite. A friend who's going to TED this year for the first time (I've never been) says he's pissed at himself, ironically.

I've never personally faced a life-and-death struggle as intense as Dana Jennings describes in a piece at the NY Times. When I read it I think how small my problems are, I more or less have my health. I have to work at being unhappy or scared. This man has to work to find something to be happy about. And he does.

Dana Jennings: "I was hospitalized for six weeks in 1984 with an acute case of ulcerative colitis, an autoimmune disease that attacks the large intestine. Before my entire ravaged colon was removed, my doctors let me peer through the scope and take a look at it as it died."

I also like the piece because it's beautifully written and uncomplicated. It represents a point of view that no one can say is objective. Its subjectiveness, written from the point of view of someone whose body is conflicted about living or dying, is what makes it so powerful.

It's been pointed out elsewhere that President Obama's meeting with Republicans was one of the best press events ever. But the press just covered it, it played no role. And that's as it should be.

We do learn from conflict, but real conflict, not the made-up kind that we read in the news and hear on radio, and see on TV.

I want the collective press to be like a microphone, a very accurate one, that simply tells us what was said or done, without spin or savvy. If a cat got caught up a tree and the fire department came to get it down, I'd like to know that, and what the rescue people thought, and the spectators, and the cat.

I've enjoyed my first experiences with the NYU students. It's a great thing for me to get back to those particular roots. To enjoy, vicariously, the point of view of someone who doesn't know all that decades of life teach you, and is smart enough to know that. But also people who will live to know things I never will know. Hey, we're all here now, people who are at TED and people who are not. People who were alive in 1955, and people who will be alive in 2055. People whose bodies don't need radiation and chemotherapy to have a chance at survival, and those who will be dead next week. We're all here now, so let's dig the moment and do it together, with respect.

Your first dividend from my NYU experience. Please check out nyulocal.com. It's a student-run news site, completely unaffiliated with the university. The kids don't get credit for it, they do it for love. One student, reviewing the study-abroad program in Paris (she had just completed it) said she couldn't wait to get back to NY to keep writing for the site. That's the kind of writing I love to read, and if you like scripting.com, I bet you'll like nyulocal.com too.

The only reason the last choice even exists is so that I could choose it.

You see, I hadn't planned to buy an iPad because, frankly, I had absolutely no need for it. None. I'm quite content to use my iPhone, laptop, and desktop and don't feel inconvenienced or put out in doing so, so I won't "invent" a need.

But Brad's going to buy me an iPad because we're going to release Cyndicate 2.0 for the Mac with syncing support for an iPad version of Cyndicate. Reading feeds on the iPad would be nice.

And since a good portion of what I do at night is to read some web articles I couldn't read during the day and to cruise the forum, an iPad with Cyndicate, the built-in Safari, and Tapatalk, perhaps I'll find myself using the iPad for more than development, bug testing, and feature suggestions.

I still hope magazines comes out, though, and in a big way. I want to stop getting paper magazines in the mail.

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Victoria Wang:

At this time, I suspect the closed nature of the App Store is not as worrying as it should be because it only concerns our smart phones. We can still develop anything we want for Macs, the “real” machines. However, what if the iPad starts to replace the Mac to such a degree that it no longer becomes profitable to write apps for the Mac? It seems that to be a Cocoa developer will eventually mean to have one’s business chained to the App Store. To be chained to the App Store means Apple makes the final decision on whether your apps can be sold the way you like them, or at all.

Webdesigner Depot (via Cathy Shive):

On February 10th, 2010, Photoshop turns twenty. To mark this anniversary, we’ve come up with an article that takes you through the evolution of Photoshop from its modest beginnings as a bundled program sold with scanners to its current version.

For each version and major feature listed, we couldn’t help but think “did Photoshop ever exist without that feature?”.

Cocoia posts the good stuff, as always.

As I just said on mailing list: Magazines could be the "killer app" for the iPad. I'd buy one if that's all it did. I'm not buying one now.

Me, earlier today. But hey, I've been saying the same thing for a whole week now.

There's also this and my friend Don's take on it.

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The February issue of ATPM is out:

• Cover
• Sponsors
• Welcome
• E-Mail
• MacMuser: Frozen in Time Machine
• MacMuser: And the Winner Is…Who Cares?
• Next Actions: Master List, February 2010
• Segments: Slices from the Macintosh Life: Back to the Beginning
• Desktop Pictures: New England
• Out at Five
• Accessory Review: Element iPhone Stand
• Accessory Review: SolarCharger 906
• FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions

Macworld: “For Apple, it’s not about killing off tinkerers, but ensuring that not everybody who wants to use a computer has to be a tinkerer.”

Tyree Apps: “I’ve created a little view controller that lets a TapLynx app offer the user a quick way to snap a photo and then email it to someone without ever leaving the TapLynx based application.”

One of my favorite parts of TapLynx is that it’s extendable: you can create new views with new features. (Note to programmers: TapLynx is a static library. You still use Xcode to build apps, though TapLynx makes it so you write code only if you want to.)

My mother, who has a WordPress blog, keeps telling me about posts that I haven't seen. This was starting to irk me, so I looked into River2 to see what's going on. Yes, it is finding her posts, but it thinks they're pictures. Why? Because the feed says they're pictures. Oy.

Digging in a little deeper. WordPress has a neat feature that I don't fully understand, called "gravatars." If you have one, as my mother does, it attaches it to every post, as an image. I'm sure she has absolutely no idea what a gravatar is, and I'm equally sure that WordPress created one for her automatically.

So, I want to fix this, so her posts (and those of other WordPress authors) show up where they belong in River2. Other than looking at the URL of the image, I have no idea how to do it. I'm hoping one of the readers of this blog does.

Here's an example from the feed.

<media:content url="http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/ed80e40fc7fa8d76b88e3e5d1079f429?s=96&d=identicon&r=G" medium="image">

They use the media:content element to represent the gravatar. I have a strong feeling this is very wrong. It seems to me that a gravatar is a bit of metadata. Why should it be represented as an image, why not as a <gravatar> in a new namespace defined for the purpose of representing gravatars?

The media:content element came into being to help Flickr attach pictures to items in feeds. It probably was a mistake, in hindsight, to try to make a general namespace for this, because it gets us into jams like this. Probably would have worked better if they had come up with a <flickr:picture> element. That way we might not have had this conflict in semantics.

<media:content url="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2785/4317723874_9ac5cf85e5_o.jpg" type="image/jpeg" height="1880" width="2816" />

I'm pretty stuck here. I really need to separate pictures from non-picture items (I subscribe to some awesome picture feeds, and they would completely swamp my news-oriented feeds). It looks like I'm going to have to check if the image comes from gravatar.com. That's a terrible way to parse metadata.

I launched Adobe Photoshop and was told - for the umpteenth time in the past few weeks - that Adobe Updater wanted to update Adobe Reader.

Instead, I deleted everything with "adobe" and "reader" in the filename. Let's see what problems that causes…

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Interesting collaborative post betw Gruber and Scoble. I'd like to get into the mix with a 90-degree turn -- in the form of a question.

1. Okay, Apple seems to be forcing a question. Can they force web site producers to kill Flash?

2. It's kind of hard to defend Flash because it's a company-owned thing, not an open standard.

3. Now the question. What if Apple were trying to erase something that's not company-owned? Either a formal or defacto standard?

4. Further, what if their alternative were something that was locked-down and owned by a company? Further, what if the company was Apple?

This may be kind of a toe-dip. Apple tries this. If it works, they try sticking their whole foot in. The end result may well be a networking environment owned by one company. Or two or more incompatible networking environments.

Users and website developers are practical people. We don't care about Adobe, says Gruber, and that's probably right (I don't have a single Flash document on scripting.com). But I very much care about an open Internet.

Yes, that opens me to ridicule from users with little experience with the other kind of networking, one that has huge Do Not Enter signs everywhere. Their naivete is no excuse for throwing out the engine that's been driving innovation. The question of where and how we draw the line should be part of the public discussion.

BTW, how lovely are open standards? I'm writing this post from an American Airlines flight from NY to SF. Do you have any idea how many open standards were necessary to make this work? Makes the mind spin. And it all works exactly the same if I fly Virgin America or Air Egypt. In an Apple-designed world how much of this would work? Imho, not very much.

PS: Adobe might want to consider, right now, very quickly, giving Flash to the public domain. Disclaim all patents, open source all code, etc etc. That would throw the ball squarely back into Apple's court and would frame the question right now in its most stark terms.

One recurring theme in defense of the closedness of the iPad is that it gives you access to the web and that's the most open thing around. Maybe, but if I want the web there are much better and less expensive ways to get it that don't compromise on flexibility and the ability to run other software. In other words, if you want the web and only the web, iPad would be a poor choice.

Yet I am concerned that it will get a flow of great apps from people who are willing to compromise on their freedom and users' freedom. They may say they're not doing it, but I don't see it that way. I wouldn't want to do anything to discourage them from developing cool apps for iPad, as long as they're not pumping their creativity into a platform that can't be competed with because of patents. If that's the case, it's a very unhealthy situation. Not one a developer should support unless they know for sure that other platforms can challenge Apple. I suspect there's a problem because Google is not releasing their multi-touch technology very widely.It could be that it's not ready, I hope that's the reason. But it may also be that Apple has a patent.

Another question that comes up frequently is why worry about limitations in a platform from Apple when we haven't expressed similar concerns re those from Nintendo, Sony, etc. The answer is obvious -- we depend on the Macintosh being one of two or three serious and open development platforms. At some point Steve is going to get up on stage and tell us it's the end of the road for the Mac, because the iPad/iPhone OS has sucked all the energy from the Mac. That's something he and Apple could seriously influence. Sony and Nintendo don't make the Mac, therefore there's nothing to worry about. One way Apple could alleviate these concerns and, at the same time, blast a big hole in the side of Microsoft would be to fully open source Mac OS. At that point, I'd be very happy to keep working on it, and wouldn't give a whit about the iPad, knowing as long as there's demand we'd be supplied with new versions running on the latest hardware, by someone, if not Apple.

Re the need for simplification, I've watched a close relative struggle with the multiple layers of user interface on today's computers, I recognize the need for a fresh start. Current GUI technology is 40-plus years old. Mac and Windows are equally confusing messes. User interfaces can be vastly simplified. I thought Apple would have done much more in this area by now. It's already been three years since the iPhone's introduction. And I don't think Android has the same commitment to a fresh start, it's more of a hodgepodge. And while Google is a patent offender just like Apple, so has no moral advantage, at least there's no barrier to what developers can put on the Android platform, so Google doesn't have the ability to control what goes on Android as Apple does with the iPad. In the worst case, you can route around Google totally because Android is open source.

Another thought occurred to me -- iPad looks rushed. It seems possible that Apple pushed it out sooner because it got wind of a competitive product. Could it be that Google has a DroidPad in the pipe? One thing's for sure, Apple's competitors are not scared of iPad. Let's hope they make some decent offers to developers. If any of them want my help, I'm here and ready to roll up my sleeves. I want to be sure there are lots of choices, the sooner the better. I can help get developers to pay attention to what you're doing.

The stakes are much higher than with the iPhone. No one should underestimate the potential of iPad. That's why I said, ironically, there's no doubt I will buy one as soon as I can. For the same reason I bought an iPhone. You have to understand this product if you want to stay current. But we, as an industry, must have choice. Now is a crucial moment for that.

The Omni Mouth: “We want to bring all five of our productivity apps to iPad: OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, OmniPlan, OmniFocus, and OmniGraphSketcher.”

I’m especially a fan of OmniOutliner — and I want an outliner on iPad. This is great news.

Mike Ash: “Using a technique called method swizzling, you can replace an existing method from a category without the uncertainty of who ‘wins,’ and while preserving the ability to call through to the old method.”

This is interesting information that you should read and never use.

Fraser Speirs: “Those of us who patiently, day after day, explain to a child or colleague that the reason there’s no Print item in the File menu is because, although the Pages document is filling the screen, Finder is actually the frontmost application and it doesn’t have any windows open, understand what’s happening here.”

Macworld: “At the heart of the iPad lies a tiny sliver of silicon. A game changer within a game changer.”

Playing with Shapes: “I’m just as anxious as anyone else to start designing for the iPad. I always have to start with paper.”

UsabilityPost: “When you scroll, the content scrolls without any interruptions and lag — it’s very, very smooth. Why is this so important? It’s important because this level of responsiveness blends the borders between analog and digital media.”

Scripting News: “Is it possible to create an iPad-like platform that has none of the drawbacks of Apple’s offerings?”

Excellent question. I think that in ten years, most computers will be iPad-like.

I don’t know any developers that like the App Store review system. I don’t. But I’ve never seen even the barest hint that freedom of speech is otherwise limited. And I’m hyper-sensitive to that, completely allergic to anything that I think would hurt that freedom.

Joe Hewitt: “iPad is an incredible opportunity for developers to re-imagine every single category of desktop and web software there is. Seriously, if you’re a developer and you're not thinking about how your app could work better on the iPad and its descendants, you deserve to get left behind.”

chockenberry: “There’s an inherent benefit to only doing one thing at a time: the load of worrying about other tasks is lifted. Knowing that there isn’t anything else competing for your attention is quite liberating.”

Totally right on. It’s one of the reasons I could see myself using an iPad more than my laptop. (I use a desktop Mac for development.)

Mike Rundle: “Most people are not power users, they mainly consume content using their computer rather than produce it. When they produce content it’s more casual: posting to Twitter, updating Facebook, writing personal blog entries and notes, uploading photos.”

I have a MacBook Pro and an iPhone. Both are great, but—for me—I don’t feel as though there’s a gaping hole in the middle. It would probably be useful, though not essential, to have a digital reading device for light Web browsing, PDFs, and perhaps FogBugz. I’m less sure that the screen will tempt me from paper books.

I don’t want to speculate too much, since I haven’t used an iPad and it’s harder to judge something when you’re not really the target market. Nevertheless, I think the iPad is going to be a success and a big deal. For some people, devices like the iPad will make computing more accessible and traditional-style computers unnecessary. For techies, it signals that the “wild west” era of open, tinkerable computers for the masses may be on its way out.

Alex Payne:

The iPad was pitched by Steve Jobs yesterday as a response to netbooks. It is not a mobile device, per se. Rather, the iPad is competing with full-fledged (if small and ugly) computers capable of running arbitrary programs and operating systems. Play all the category games you want, but the iPad is a personal computer. Apple has decided that openness is not a quality that’s necessary in a personal computer. That’s disturbing.

John Gruber:

A car with an automatic transmission still shifts gears; the driver just doesn’t need to know about it. A computer running iPhone OS still has a hierarchical file system; the user just never sees it.

[…]

What I found interesting is that I’m very familiar with this resolution — for years I used PowerBooks and iBooks with 1024 × 768 displays running Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X. 1024 × 768 somehow seems very different on the iPad than on Mac OS — physically smaller but conceptually bigger. The full-screen concept, without Mac-style overlapping draggable windows, leaves the iPad free to use as many pixels as possible for display content rather than UI chrome.

Kevin Hoctor:

I’m a geek. I love this stuff. I even know all the keyboard shortcuts for switching apps and spaces and windows. I am a software developer with an engineer’s brain. I am not the person Apple was thinking about when they built the iPad.

William Van Hecke:

It’s easy to miss what the big deal is, especially if you’re the sort of person who already has an iPhone and a Mac and you are perfectly happy with the way they fit into your life. @benaar said that they should have just called it iPod Big, and on the face of it, he’s right. It is just a fricken huge iPod touch. But something subtly momentous happens when an iPod touch gets fricken huge.

Steven Frank:

Apple is calling the iPad a “third category” between phones and laptops. I am increasingly convinced that this is just to make it palatable to you while everything shifts to New World ideology over the next 10-20 years.

Fraser Speirs:

The people whose backs have been broken under the weight of technological complexity and failure immediately understand what’s happening here. Those of us who patiently, day after day, explain to a child or colleague that the reason there’s no Print item in the File menu is because, although the Pages document is filling the screen, Finder is actually the frontmost application and it doesn’t have any windows open, understand what’s happening here.

Right now, various constraints have kept software for the iPhone OS simple. There’s less to get in the way because it does less. It will be interesting to see what happens as devices like the iPad become more powerful, developers have more time to iterate their products, and users expect them to do more. Will things stay simple? Or will we slowly reinvent most of the features and problems that we currently see on the desktop?

Brent Simmons, Joe Hewitt and Miguel de Icaza all write that they look forward to developing on the iPad. I found their essays surprising, especially Joe's -- given his decision to stop developing for the iPhone because of the review process that Apple imposes on developers. I totally supported him in that, and since his decision (though not because of it) I have switched from the iPhone to Google's Android platform, as a user.

I don't develop for any of the new platforms because they don't run my software, though Google could. Apple would never approve anything remotely like the OPML Editor, and that makes it very unlikely that I'd develop for them, but also for some really important reasons, makes it equally unlikely that I'd use it. I found Joe's piece thought provoking (it provoked this piece). I hope he gives mine similar consideration.

First, after reading Joe's piece, I understood why developers find the iPad interesting. It's because while they liked creating apps for the iPhone, the tiny screen made some very difficult design choices necessary. While they could see the potential of the multi-touch interface and a fresh start (they don't have to live with a UI design that's 40 years old), the iPhone screen is so small, that they couldn't nearly deliver on the promise. All the while they're thinking "If only Apple would make one of these things that isn't so small." And that of course is exactly what the iPad is. I'm sure they can understand that we, as users, weren't having the same thoughts. Until I read Joe's piece I had not heard this idea in any of the flood of discourse on the iPad, pro or con. Since I don't develop for the platform I never had the thought myself.

So, if Brent, Joe and Miguel like it, it stands to reason that they will create software that users will like. So the success of the iPad is assured, in ways perhaps that the Asus isn't. Or perhaps even Android, because it doesn't have multi-touch enabled, just guessing that might have something to do with a patent. Which is a shame, because while Joe has the option to put some or most of the functionality that Apple won't allow on a Facebook-owned server, the user doesn't have any say in this choice. So the user's data will live where Facebook, or some other funded company, wants it to live.

While Joe et al have been thinking about great new user interface, I was too when I was their age, now I'm thinking about something else, that I believe is even more important -- keeping big tech companies from controlling what has become our primary means of expression and communication, computer networks.

When I was young, some of us envisioned the world we live in today, only we tended to think only of the upside of networked thinking, never the dangers. I guess that's human nature and the nature of youth. Won't it be great if everyone can access everyone else's ideas anywhere, we thought -- on any kind of device, all inter-connected and fast. Some believed, me included, that computers without networking interfaces were totally uninteresting. Everything I created was designed to communicate. I ached because early Macintoshes had such awful networking APIs. Eventually all that got sorted out when we got HTTP -- it was so simple, the big companies couldn't control what we did with it.

But ever since that watershed moment the big tech companies have been trying to get the genie back in the bottle. It's the nature of bigness and corporateness to do that. Facebook didn't exist when I started my work, but now they're here and they're huge, and they view the world the way a big company does.

The problem is this -- if Facebook goes away -- and it could, so does everything everyone created with it. Facebook investors and developers like Joe (who I respect enormously) probably aren't worrying about this, because necessarily everything they do is tied up in the success of Facebook. Now if Joe can show me, in his architecture based on the iPad, where all my work is mirrored in a service I pay for, like Amazon S3, in a simple format I and others can write software against, then I can relax and look forward to the future he, Brent and Miguel want to create. But if my work is tied up in their success, then the price is too high. I'll take the lower fidelity but open playing field of the netbook, and keep my own data on my own hard drives, and back it up as I see fit. And continue to exercise my First Amendment rights.

I know that "most users" aren't thinking like this, it's easy to be lulled into a false sense of confidence. But I don't trust these companies, and I especially don't trust Apple or Google with my writing work. I can see a day when what I write has to be approved by someone who works for Steve Jobs before it can be read publicly. That's a day when freedom is completely crushed.

All three of these men know that freedom is important. So what's the answer. You're all willing to give up some of your freedom to play in Apple's new ballpark. How much of our freedom should we be willing to give up, and is this the only way to get it? Is it possible to create an iPad-like platform that has none of the drawbacks of Apple's offerings? If not, why not?

Update: A must-read piece by Alex Payne. "If I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I'd never be a programmer today." Well put, even if it's not a sure thing. (I didn't have any kind of computer growing up and I'm a programmer.)

Steven Frank’s blog post will be on the syllabus. Critical reading, if you want to understand what happens next.

Cult of Mac: “I thought it would be interesting to find out what some Mac and iPhone developers make of the iPad.”

Say you’re Apple. It’s a few years ago. You make and sell computers.

You see the rise of web apps, and you notice people talking about how desktop apps are done. Desktop apps are done because, with web apps, people can login from anywhere, any machine, and get to their stuff. That’s cool, and you know it’s cool.

You make computers and operating systems, and you think to yourself: “How can I sell computers that are pretty much just web browsers? How is a Mac better than a Dell or a Sony in that case?”

I think the first thing you do is make sure you have a great browser. Faster and better than the competition. And keep at it, don’t let up.

Then you think to yourself: “What if people didn’t have to just use any machine they find? What if they have their computer with them all the time?”

I think you then work on making great laptops, so people actually can have their computer with them most of the time. You make the hardware and OS and software so great that people want these laptops.

Then you think to yourself, “People aren’t carrying their laptops to the grocery store! They don’t always have their computer with them.”

You decide to expand your definition of computer: you make iPhones. And then iPads. You make beautiful hardware and software — you create an experience so new and compelling that people lust for these things.

You open these up to developers, too, and hope a hundred thousand flowers bloom, since that makes these devices all the more valuable.

And it works!

You’ve avoided the bleak future where computers are nothing but web browsers, where user experience is struggling to hit 1995 levels of quality, where all you’re making is a dumb terminal that can show pictures and play video, where you’re back to being the “beleaguered” Apple, whose product is a commodity easily matched, or close enough, by other companies that charge less.

Instead you’re this Apple, the one that reports record sales and profits.

Good job, you!

I’m broken up with the news that Salinger has died.

Cocoa Is My Girlfriend: “...with Core Animation layers there is a simpler way to achieve the look you want without having to create an image.”

Hivelogic: “This chip is so important to Apple because it gives them greater control of the user experience … from the inside out, while allowing them to reach their goals — and more importantly — control their own destiny, by decreasing their dependency on outside, external companies.”

Red Sweater: “The error is in disregarding the many unmatchable attractions of ‘the desktop.’”

Adventures in Newfield (my Mom): “Most of the media reports don’t seem to get the new iPad — it’s not about how fast it is, or its lack of a camera or the flash to display video — it’s about using it just about anywhere and not needing a mouse!”

Mom wants one. Me too. :)

It may just be a temporary thing, hardware development pipelines are long, and Steve was out of commission getting a liver transplant while the iPad was being birthed at Apple. Presumably. Hopefully. If that's not true, and this is the result of a careful gestation, then Steve is no longer the master, he has lost his touch. This thing, the iPad, is a dog.

People who think it isn't comparable to a netbook are just plain wrong. It is, in every way because there are only so many points between an iPhone/Droid/Pre et al and laptops. As Adam Frucci in Gizmodo says so eloquently, where's the camera, where are the USB ports, where is the fracking keyboard? SD drive, removable battery, hard disk, etc etc.

When netbooks first came out they flirted with all-solid-state storage. This meant a $600 unit only had 20GB of persistent storage. Made it almost totally unusable. Then they put a 160GB hard drive in the things and the price came down to $350, and they hit the sweet spot and started flying off the shelves.

Okay the fanbois say this product is for marketing people, old people, one guy even said my parents would want it. My father isn't going to use it, no matter what, and we just bought my mom an Asus, which she thinks is cute and is having just a bit of trouble with even though she's a bit of a technophobe. What they're really saying is that it's the computer for idiots. I agree. Idiots with $500 burning a hole in their pocket. Like me. I'll almost certainly buy one. But unless I'm missing something, I'll still travel with the Asus that I'm typing this review on.

Now I was wrong about the iPhone, I bought one and used it for two years, saying goodbye to my Blackberry. But I ended up saying goodbye to the iPhone for the reasons I thought I would at its roll out. It should have been a Mac. Same with the iPad. They should have come out with a netbook-style product, price and feature-comparable to the Asus products but running the Mac OS and Mac apps. Because huff and puff all you want, this baby is going to have to look good compared to the netbooks, and now it looks like testimony to hubris. Finally, Apple went too far, and the emperor is totally naked for all of us to see. Ridiculous product. Absolutely completely ridiculous.

Apple hasn't added anything new to my repetoire of computer toys in a very long time. I bought a 13 inch MacBook Pro, but it's a battery hog running the same apps as my Asus, and unreliable. It stays home when I travel. I will probably move it to NY to be my main computer here. The iPhone also stayed home. My workhorse is the Droid, and I carry the Nexus One as the admiration platform. It has the SIM that used to be in the iPhone. Fred Wilson and I agreed (we had breakfast yesterday) that it's like carrying a girlfriend in your pocket. What could be better. This is an important point. Finally Google is presenting them with a serious competitor in the lust category. No, they aren't all the way there yet, but they don't have the prison mentality for users and developers. Continuing the girlfriend analogy, who wants an uptight control freak GF when you can have a.. okay I think you probably get the idea.

Also I don't care about the name. We get used to bad names. No one snickers anymore when you say Microsoft, but I remember when they did. I don't care that the name is a big gaffe. But I think the product itself is a gaffe, and that matters.

Finally, my prognostication piece missed wildly. I was way too ambitious on Apple's behalf. I figured it's been so long since they shipped something wonderful that they must really have something incredible and far-reaching in the lab, and here it comes. About the only thing I got right was #9. Steve still loves to delete ports. It would have been sort of cute if he had delivered on some of the potential in this category. But given the lack of imagination and execution in this product, it's a cruel joke that illustrates that all that remains of Apple's brilliance is Apple's arrogance. The art has to be there, following Doc Searls' famous 1997 analysis. This is just a jumbo Oreo cookie. The original classic model made sense. This bloated mess is just a bloated mess.

iPhone apps, and now iPad apps, have always reminded me of what I want Mac apps to be: focused, carefully-designed, with every feature carefully considered and usually thrown out instead of included.

Even more than the iPhone, the iPad will function as a laptop replacement. (Or, you may still have a laptop, but you’ll do more and more work on an iPad.)

I like what I’ve seen so far about iPad app design. It has the virtues of iPhone app design with just enough more space and new features to make doing real work possible. I think this is fantastic.

My concern, though, is that people may think that Mac apps should include every possible feature and preference. The reasoning would be like this: “It’s not an iPad or iPhone. It’s a computer. Therefore it’s for power users. Therefore it should be totally customizable and have every feature anybody might want.”

That would be a big mistake.

My hope, instead, is that Mac users and developers (all developers are users too, by the way) learn even better the virtues of focused, opinionated software that pays attention to experience more than to long feature lists and heavy preference windows. I hope we see even better Mac software.

You might think this is ironic — didn’t I just propose a Mac email app for power users and developers?

I did. But I actually picture an app that is simpler, in many ways, than Mail. No POP or Exchange support, no stationery, no to-dos, no notes. I’d like to see a programmable app, yes, with a design friendly to people who type for a living — but I also want a leaner app.

Here’s the thing about the power users and developers I know: they use a lot of apps. They manage a lot of complexity already. They often have a few powerful apps (Xcode, Photoshop, Final Cut, Excel, whatever) that they use to get their work done.

They’re not sitting around wishing for more complexity. Quite the opposite! But they do wish that some apps fit them better. And in many cases they wish for less complexity.

Too much complexity is for people who want to waste their own time. Who has time for that? Every day means a new world we have to create. Futzing and configuring and confusion — these things don’t help.