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Keynote Bingo!

Today Steve is going to announce the "iPhone@home." It's an ultra-portable tablet running a thin-client version of Leopard (like the iPhone), syncing through an iPod dock connector (the only port on the device) to a 30GB "NAND drive" which shares documents over wifi using Apple's new Google-backed .Mac service and sports a multi-touch 10" screen as it's primary interface. This rumor is objectively perfect, the superset of all Apple rumors ever. And it's a Newton! We'll see this, and also the network-focused Finder that Apple blogger Anil Dash anticipated in August 2002:

The dock could easily be represented with a touch-sensitive panel that could be detached from the keyboard and clipped alongside a pretty LCD. In an OS that used to be, and is slowly returning to being, focused on direct manipulation, it doesn't get more intuitive than touching an icon to activate it. .... Even something as simple as minimizing, maximizing, or closing a window has no single-key equivalent. It's been almost twenty years since these things went mainstream, people!

Major Redux Redux

There's quite a kerfuffle brewing around the Apple's "inspiration" for the iPhone commercial.

We've covered this ground before, repeatedly. I'm looking forward to surveying blogistan when all is said and done to compare results and opinions.

Meanwhile - do kerfuffles brew? If not, what do they do?

Ruminations on the iPhone

Like many warm-blooded geeks, I've been thinking about the iPhone for the past week since Apple announced it. I'm kind of cool on it (more on the that later) but I'm happy people are thinking and talking about mobile, since I am obsessed with the mobile application space and I'm always happy to sit in the corner add my kibitz to the chatter.

Right now phone apps are written in Java and C libraries which differ on nearly every single make and model of phone shipped today, this makes development testing and deployment a nightmare. This why phones today do not offer a good user experience, and this is also why enterprising curious souls are attracted to the web before they are attracted to phones. I'm extremely skeptical that the iPhone runs any kind of Objective C, even Objective C 2.0 with garbage collection, as has been speculated. The overhead involved in this development makes phones feel sluggish, and it would be way too hard to support and debug over the family of processors that will run not just the iPhone family, but also the new iPods and long-rumored tablet Mac (maclet?). Javascript, CSS and XHTML all run the same on webkit, and porting webkit is easier than porting Objective-C.

There is a lot of negative buzz surrounding developers not being allowed to install applications on the iPhone, which I believe is a red herring. Developers won't be allowed to install applications, but they will be allowed to install widgets, which is just as good. Hit F12 - that's what your iPhone "dock" will look like. I've got stocks, a nice Flickr slideshow, a Vox widget, Magnolia bookmarks, package and flight tracking, and much more. It's far more useful (and beautiful) than the applications shipped with any phone today. Webkit runs greeat right now on my Nokia N73¹, and since it's the same webkit², I'm sure it will run great on the iPhone.

I'll probably hold off on the iPhone for a while, since unlike Matt Haughey, I love my phone. Actually I should say "phones," since I have two: a "home" mobile (the aforementioned N73) and a "work" mobile, a Treo 700p. I love them both. The Nokia N73 has a 3+ megapixel camera, and I basically use it as a Vox appliance. Since the Vox mobile application sits at such a low level on the phone, it certainly won't work on the iPhone, which will certainly feature similarly deep iLife and .Mac integration (as it should). The Treo is basically a voice, email and calendaring appliance, and it's nearly perfect for that. Plus, it runs on Sprint's 3G network, which is lightning fast in the city.

Having said that, syncing is still the great unsolved problem for phones. It's very telling that Apple is using iTunes to sync instead of iSync, and what that basically says to me is that iSync is actually never going to get better. The Missing Sync is actually really good at syncing photos (pictures go right from the treo to iPhoto). For PC users, Lifeblog is very good at syncing pictures and text messages into a nice timeline, but it doesn't work under OS X. If Apple really, really nails this, and unifies the address book, voicemail, text messaging, picture messaging and email into a single stream that is nicely indexable and sortable, that will be a product worth looking at. But I doubt Apple will get this right, because iSync is still terrible.

¹ Disclaimer: I have done some work for Nokia in the past, specifically on the Lifeblog project, and I had a wee bit of input on the way this stuff works. If not real input, at least an influence of an occasional thought by people who have real input.

² Why is that relevant, you ask? It's the same browser, see Infoworld, Engadget, and Surfin' Safari. (Who says Apple doesn't blog?)

Tattered Sneakers

Jeff Chang writes:

From Jails, Hospitals, and Hip-Hop, my man Danny Hoch and the back story on "Seinfeld", Seinfeld, Kramer and race--with a diversion into Tarantinoland.

Danny Hoch recounts meeting with the Seinfeld cast and encountering the "everyday" sort of racism that pervades our culture. In this context, Michael Richard's recent meltdown is revealed as a hair's breadth away from a much bolder sort of racism. Anil notes that the incident was a perfect storm of racial tension and disconnected cultures⁰.

I saw the World Premier of Jails, Hospitals and Hip-Hop on my first weekend in living in New York. At the time, I was convinced the movie I saw was going to change the world. The movie I saw never made the light of day - Rawkus, originally a co-producer on the film, pulled the music rights which forced a major re-edit of the film and (in my opinion) softened it's impact. Hoch's career (see youtube¹), still impressive, was never quite the same.

⁰: I want to call this a "miasma," but I can't quite get the sentence right.

¹: Dembot - "YouTube fills the role of that place to get prerecorded video in the same way CNN fills the role of live news... Google² knows the value of this entry point really well, proven again by their acquisition of YouTube."

²: Tricia Wang on how Google reveals stereotypes - "I performed the original google image search just on "Asian women," "American women," and "Asian American women" for a presentation on stereotypes and identities of Asian American Youth. I want to demonstrate the pervasive stereotypes of Asian women – just how hyper-hyper sexualized they are. And it’s interesting to show that when you Google image search – there is no hierarchies of approval that the images have to go through like for traditional media (newspapers, TV shows and etc, where images usually become racialized in the approval process."

Unrelated: Google Launches transit maps in Southern California.

WC Fields Wins

I never voted for anybody. I always voted against.

If you see Q-bert in Holland, now you know why.

Amy's Robot's RummyPool has a winner! "Danielle" guessed the date precisely, almost seven months in advance. Her prize is a thong.

Nerd Fight

Ze Frank's discussion of rocketbooming, the practice of inflating stats, is interesting on a lot of levels. There's still very little analysis (anywhere) of the quality of the audience, just the quantity. It's not hard to figure out why - in Ze's own words, "Given the current state of web metrics, talking about eyeballs seems to create more risk than value... "

Stock Advice from Microsoft's CEO

Steve Ballmer on Google's domination of on-line advertising:

Somebody better break through or you can short all media stocks right now.

This assumes, of course, that Google is a technology company, not a media company, and that it's growth will slow down. The problem with this logic is that every market share and revenue curve is pointing the exact opposite direction. Google's been beaten exactly twice. Once with Blogger (hello, Typepad) which is no longer the preeminent tool for personal publishing. But if you think of Google's blogging tools as including not just Blogger but also Adsense, Blogsearch and Reader, than you have a completely different equation. The second loss in Google's ledger is on Youtube's resumé, but that problem is past tense.

"Covergence" as a buzz word has lived and died through many false starts, but the convergence of media and technology is undeniable. Try convincing Fox/MySpace, NBC/iVillage, Time Warner/AOL, CondeNast/Wired or even Bloomberg otherwise. Oh yeah, and what's that other company... Orange? Grape? Nevermind.

Ballmer's marching order are clear and true: short all media stocks right now.

Blog All Open Tabs, Part III

I am clearing out my Marsedit "draft" posts. Incoherence follows. As Chris says:

Away from my keyboard, I "write" exemplary posts to my mind's blog. It occurs to me that a shunt for the mentally unpublished would be nicer software for me to help build.

Hey Six Apart, get on that!

From The New Yorker:

"Superman" doesn't have enough conviction or courage to be solidly square and dumb; it keeps pushing smarmy big emotions at us, but half-heartedly. It has a sour, scared undertone. And you can't help being aware that this is the sort of movie that increases the cynicism and sense of futility among actors. In order to sell the film as star-studded, a great many famous performers were signed up and then stuck in among the plastic bric-a-brac of Krypton; performers who get solo screen credits, with the full blast of trumpets and timpani, turn out to have walk-ons. Susannah York is up there as the infant Superman's mother, but, though Krypton is very advanced, this mother seems to have no part in the decision to send her baby to Earth. York has no part of any kind; she stares at the camera and moves her mouth as if she'd got a bit of food stuck in a back tooth. Of all the actors gathered here—all acting in different styles—she, maybe, by her placid distaste, communicates with us most directly.

Pauline Kael's review of Superman could have been written about nearly any blockbuster between then and now, and indeed she wrote this message into her reviews and reviews over and over. Today Kael looks like a literary giant next to the numbskulls currently reviewing films for the The New Yorker, but here she is simply dead wrong. The original Superman is a masterpiece. (Via kottke.)

Neither your friend nor your boss will be impressed when you quote [Oscar] Wilde. Yet he has yet another one-liner to describe this process: “Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.” Asking students to draw the line was my lesson plan.

From a nice post by my Mom about a presentation she gave to other English teachers this month.

Nicolas Nova's essay "Guy Debord and how IT renews the urban experience" is an uneven but worthy read.

Rebecca has been compiling summer reading lists. They're all worthy, but the Interaction Design summer reading list caught my attention.

KRS One has a myspace page.

Bill "Spaceman" Lee, on when he hurt his elbow once and was given drugs by the Red Sox:

They're going, 'Here, take this, take this, take this.' Afterwards, I've got sterazolidin, butazolidin, Clenerol, Indicin. I've got everything in me. I can pitch in the American League, but I couldn't run in the Kentucky Derby. Holy cow, I'm glowing in the dark. Now all of a sudden (current players) are doing it on their own and now it's a crime?!

That's a quote from the Baseball Prospectus' 5000th article, a landmark worthy of note from the best sports site on the Internet. Bill Lee also said:

The other day they asked me about mandatory drug testing. I said I believed in drug testing a long time ago. All through the sixties I tested everything.

This should give you an idea of how dramatically the discussion around drugs in Baseball has shifted.

Finally, ramps pizza at Otto's.

Apple G6

The Apple fan community (mob?) is whipped into a tizzy over this bootleg "G6" being sold with a pirated version of OS X for Intel. I don't get the animosity. This thing looks pretty cool to me. This is probably exactly what a low-end Mac would look like if Steve Jobs hadn't put the kibosh (kibbosh?) on clones when he came back to Apple.

I'm still waiting for the "Google OS" to to emerge in a similar manner, which could simply be a nice Ubuntu box with the Google bookmarks and APIs baked into Gnome.

Can I Still Call Google 狗狗 Doggy?

Tricia posted a fantastic meditation on Google's new name in China: Gu-Ge, which literally means "Harvest Song."

Jin talks about how Google probably interprets 谷歌 as a romantic name that highlights the "fruitful and productive search experience, in a poetic Chinese way." But Jin says it just as equally conjures up images of "slow and remote agricultural scenes."

I don't have much to add. If you know Adriana, you can ask her how this ties into her translation studies sometime. Otherwise, just hope she posts about it.