EGOPOLY

Paul Graham’s recent essay, Apple’s Mistake is a very clear, and I think, fair description of what’s gone totally wrong with the App Store and the associated review process.

The absurdly reductionist summary is: “unless Apple pays attention to what programmers think, the iPhone as a platform will wither and die.” How I hope Apple takes that argument to heart! But the bitter, cranky realist in me says it’s probably not going to happen. Nor do I think Apple will suffer much (noticeably) if they continue on their current path.

I’ve had an iPhone since the second day you could buy them. I love the device, as I have not loved any other gadget. And this is what I believe breaks Paul’s argument: the device, without any apps at all, is so much better than anything else out there, I would not seriously consider switching to some other phone. I suspect a lot of people, most people in fact, who care not a whit of the pain and suffering of programmers to labor to get their wares into Apple’s store, who like the simplicity and elegance of the iPhone would behave the same way.

I actually have two phones. I’ve been carrying a Motorola Droid for about two weeks. There are some things about it that are quite cool: GMail is the best email I’ve ever used on a mobile device, better than Blackberry and several million times better than email on the iPhone. I love that I can use my Google voice number for all calls, automatically.

Aside from that, though, it feels very, um, Linuxy. And nerdy. And clunky. (I won’t even get into how ugly it is next to the iPhone. Some people care about design, and many don’t.)

Linux is great, of course. But UI’s built on top of Linux tend to be oddly inconsistent, patchwork and fussy. The Android UI, at least the one that Motorola has put together for Droid, feels a lot more like a computer UI than it does a seamless mobile UI. Apple managed to take what a phone UI was like and extend it to do things you wouldn’t think you could do with a tiny screen and fat fingers. Android seems much more to have been taken from a computer UI and hammered down to a way you can touch that UI on a tiny screen.

It’s hard to describe exactly what things make it seem that way. But probably it comes to things like: too many nested menus; two ways of navigating apps; no direct manipulation to delete an app; and too much awareness that there is a ‘file system.’ To install music on the Droid, you have to find a special menu, enable and mount the phone as a drive, and then copy mp3 files from your computer to the droid. How many normal people are going to even know what the heck “mount” means?

So, the problem with Paul’s warning scenario actually affecting Apple is this: the iPhone is so much better as a device, hardware and software, out of the box, that millions and millions of people will prefer it to other devices. And there’s no close second: you have the crappy phones from Samsung and LG, and the meh phones from Nokia, and the almost-good-but-too-geeky phones from Motorola. And they all have different quirks and sizes and input methods. So where will most developers put their time? The ones who actually want to make some money? On the one phone where ALL the screen sizes are the same, and all the APIs are the same.

I wish it weren’t so. I wish Apple would think something like “Gee, we are just crushing everybody on industrial design, simple interfaces and marketing. Let’s also crush them on making the developers love us too.” But they don’t seem inclined to care, and I don’t really think it will impact their bottom line if they don’t.

Motorola: if you want to beat Apple, make one phone. One single phone that is the expression of all the very best your industrial designers can put together, and one UI on top of Android that is the most carefully researched and tested that your UX experts can come up with. Or Samsung or LG, or Nokia. Make one single phone, and make it better every year until it beats the iPhone. Then people will buy it. Then the developers will come. And you can treat them like crap, or not, it doesn’t matter.

Every now and then, I re-evaluate and switch up the emacs version that I use. Often this is driven by a major OS upgrade, like Panther->Tiger or Tiger->Leopard. Sometimes it’s just because it’s been a while, or something that has been bugging me, and I’ve reached the breaking point. Or I want to avoid real work for an hour.

In the version of Carbon Emacs I used for Tiger (which I had built myself from GNU sources), I had some emacs lisp that would set the default font on startup. The built in default font was too big for my tastes, and it was consequently anti-aliased. I really don’t like anti-aliased fonts in my editors and terminals.

For some reason, this lisp no longer worked in the Carbon Emacs I had to start using for Leopard. In fact the little dialog box that you could pop up a standard Mac font selector window didn’t even work, so I couldn’t change the font from the default Monaco 12-point anti-aliased font. I’ve been suffering this cruelty for over 6 months.

Today I tried a number of recipes for getting a newer emacs (I wanted to try 22.2), but they failed. I ended up using this hack:

First, download emacs 22.2 sources from GNU.


cd emacs-22.2
sudo cp -R mac/Emacs.app /Applications/Emacs.app
sudo cp /usr/bin/emacs /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS


My old lisp still didn’t work the way it used to, but part of it did:

(global-set-key "\C-x\C-t" 'mac-font-panel-mode)

This allows me to bring up the little Mac font selector window. Then some apropos work turned up “set-default-font.” Mac fonts on Emacs have seriously inscrutable names. But if you interactive run M-x set-default-font and then hit ? when it asks which font, you get a nice listing of ALL the crazy Emacs-ized mac font names.

The font I wanted was:


(set-default-font "-apple-monaco-medium-r-normal--10-90-72-72-m-90-mac-roman")


That’s Monaco 10 point. So I just stuff that in my emacs lisp initialization file along with:


(global-font-lock-mode 1)
(set-frame-width (selected-frame) 90)
(set-frame-height (selected-frame) 80)
(set-frame-position (selected-frame) 1 6)


And my Emacs is ready to use when it starts up. Just like back in 1991 on my SPARCstation 2.

I’m a computer geek, and I mostly hang around other computer geeks. So my views of what is really popular in terms of information technology are very skewed. I’m very aware of this bias, because at work we are trying really hard to make our software easy to use and popular with norms. That’s normal people, not computer dorks.

A vast portion of the technology arguments we have, I fully realize, are irrelevant to the norms. They don’t give shit about Unix, or Macs or Vista. They know that there are computers, and there’s the internet (or Google, which is, for a lot of people, the internet). People just want something simple that works, and all the other bullshit that we Valleywag readers care about doesn’t even register on their personal radar.

That’s what I thought as of a few days ago, anyway. I had jury duty the other morning, that great democratic cocktail shaker that stuffs a couple hundred citizens from all the American castes in one room for 4-5 hours. Mostly I just kept my head down and read my sci-fi novel. But I couldn’t help overhearing a conversation of three norms sitting nearby. One guy, maybe was in his late 50s, seemed like he owned a small business of some kind. Sounded like a good guy, I think maybe with a Woburn accent, probably not a college type. Definitely a norm. There was a college-age woman or maybe a little older: she seemed like a typical Gen Y-er, but not technical. And there was a kid, maybe 21, a semi-goth maybe. A video game junkie, probably. Also not a tech person.

I heard bits and pieces of stuff and then started listening. They were having the Mac vs. PC discussion. It wasn’t the religious thing. Nobody in the conversation was saying PCs were better. The older guy and the woman were basically spouting the party line benefits of Apple and Mac, getting some of the ideas a little wrong or garbled, but mostly getting it right. The younger guy was the PC user and he was playing the role of “I have this old PC and I need a new one, but I don’t really know about how to use Macs.” The other two were right on this, talking him through how it wasn’t a big deal, it just takes a little getting used to, and everything works so much better.

I was floored. I didn’t think it would be possible to dislodge Windows from it’s preeminent position on the desktop. No matter how bad Vista sucked, or how great OS X was. Now I’m not so sure.

I continue to be astounded by Twitter. It’s very cool, quite addictive. What blows my mind is that it can continue to exist as a very popular web site with absolutely no visible means of support. How deep are those pockets? What happens to my tweets when the cookie jar runs out?

Steve Yegge has written up some great stuff about how to get hired. In particular, he’s talking about how to get hired by at Google, and probably when he is interviewing you. But I think the advice would work at a lot of places, including where I work.

We’ve been interviewing a lot of candidates recently, so I’ll offer my little bit of advice to the job seeker: cut your resume down to one page. I don’t care who you are, or how much you’ve accomplished in your life. If you can’t express your life’s work in a one-page summary, you either:

1. Have an overinflated opinion of yourself and what you’ve done.

2. Have no idea how distinguish the important from the trivial.

Either way, I won’t want to work with you, for you, or have you work for me.

I was ranting about this today, holding up as an example a nice, clean 1-page resume of a college intern. “This is brilliant. One page. Everybody should have a one-page resume.”

Paul said, “what if you’re Steve Jobs?”

I don’t care who you are. In fact, if you are Steve Jobs, this is your resume.

I’m Steve Jobs.

If you want to get all wordy, you could probably get away with:

I invented the Macintosh, the iPod, the iPhone, brought the music industry weeping to me at my feet, and am in the middle of taking over Disney. Who am I?

Back in reality, you might be saying, but I did all these things and I learned all this stuff. Guess what? You’ve either had a lot of jobs, and you’ve done one or two really interesting/difficult/awesome things at them, or you’ve had a few jobs, and you’ve done slightly more interesting/difficult/awesome things.

You should be able to summarize each interesting thing you’ve done in one sentence. Furthermore, I claim that you can’t really do much more than 1 interesting thing per year. If you claim that you can, I think you and I have very different ideas about what “interesting” means. This summary sentence should be like a newspaper headline, something that will make me think “Gosh, that sounds really interesting, I must ask them more about it.” Then we’ll be able to talk about all the details about what made that thing hard or fun or really terrific. Your resume is bait, to get me on the hook.

I read about Deutsche Grammophon‘s music download site on Gizmodo. They said it was a good store with high-quality downloads and no annoying DRM. I love DG recordings, so I browsed over their to check it out. Within a minute I found a Beethoven piano concerto to buy.

The purchase process was a little clumsy; I had to link out to another shopping cart site, and it was hard to find the shopping cart link. Then I got sent into this extra level of MasterCard security where I had to choose a new online security code for my card. Fine. But I finished all that and got dumped back into the checkout process. Fine, so I go through the credit card entry again, and this time I *use* that security code i had made. But then I get dumped back into the checkout process again. Now I’m worried. Did I just buy that album twice? What’s going on? I guess there are bugs in their checkout system. I decided I’d just log a support case and see what happened.

But, guess what? There’s no way to send a help request. There are some stupid FAQ pages about how to download music once you’ve bought it, but there is no feedback or purchase problem help link. At least not that I can find after looking for 10 minutes. Are you kidding?

Where I work, we don’t sell anything; we make all our money through tiny bits of ad revenue. Our average revenue per visitor from ads is way less than $1. But we have feedback links ALL OVER THE PLACE. So if users need help, we give it to them, usually within a few hours, sometimes within minutes. So here’s a web store (DG) that is selling stuff that probably has a gross margin of 90%, where they average purchase is probably $5 or $10, and some people are probably spending a lot more. And you can’t even get help so you can give them money.

It’s sad. This stuff really isn’t that hard to figure out.

(Of course, this prompted me to go to Amazon.com, where I found the album in their MP3 download store. And it was $3 less, and I could buy it with one click.)

When I heard Amazon was launching a re-launching a music store, I thought it would suck, like unbox and all the other digital media download stores Amazon has ever made.

But it doesn’t suck. It’s totally awesome.

1. you get normal DRM-free MP3 files for only $0.99 (sometimes $0.89).

2. Albums seem to be $7 – $9.

3. They have a download manager for Mac. It’s actually a really nice, simple, clean piece of software.

Hopefully this will trigger a price war with iTunes and we’ll see music prices drop to what they should be. I think that means $0.05-0.10 for crappy songs and $0.50 for popular/good tracks. Albums should be $5.

I recently tried out amazon unbox on my Tivo. The basic idea is that you can rent movies from your Tivo. The setup process was reasonably painless, except I had to remember my Tivo account password, which I never use.

So I ordered a movie that I thought I would like. It was $4, but it said that it stayed on your Tivo for 30 days. It probably said more than that, but I didn’t read all the fine print.

First buzzkill: you can’t start watching the movie until it is completely downloaded. So I basically couldn’t start it until very late at night, or the next day. So much for instant gratification.

A few days later, I decided to go back and start watching the movie. So this notice pops up, and says that the movie will be deleted 24 hours after I start watching it. So if I want to watch half of it tonight, and half tomorrow night when I start to fall asleep, sorry, no dice. And that is $4? WTF?

If I get a Netflix movie, it costs me on average about $3. I can watch it in pieces over the course of a week, or I can watch it four or fourteen times while I have it. Not only that, it shows up in about 1-2 days, effectively just as fast as the Amazon unbox movie.

How stupid are these people? Why can’t they simply create a service that people would LOVE? Hey, here’s the formula, hollywood dipshits: let me download a movie for $1, let me watch it as much as I want for a week. I’ll download a movie every day. With your current formula, yay, you’ve got my $4, and that’s all you’ll ever get. Gah.

This is a very interesting post by Jeff Atwood about Facebook as a walled garden.

What is the open and public equivalent of social networks? It seems like it’s some kind of future where everybody has their own “site,” or network address or place that comprises blog, photos, email, IM and (most important) identity and relationship to other’s identities. It would be purely peer-to-peer, and not branded by any one company, though it would certainly be hosted by a few big companies.

In a way, we have a lot of that today, but it’s limited to the real geeks (like me), and the authenticated connections just really aren’t there. Very few people I know have OpenID, and I most of the people I know are big time geeks like me.

It’s clear to me that the walled gardens are necessary to launch new ideas, like social networking, since the complexity of creating the end game open system is too much for the norms to handle. But it’s not clear if a relatively open walled garden, with a good dose of humility, can be easily dislodged. Look at AOL; they are still around, still generating a lot of cash, still serving millions of people. Facebook is at the very early stage of hegemony, will have quite a long reign.

This seems like such an obviously, stupendously bad idea, that there must be something more to it. Redmond must have some insight that spins it around to a pure genius move.

The big sticking point for me is this: Yahoo is built on all open source: LAMP, etc. (Though I believe they are BSD rather than Linux, but that might be old. Same diff.) All Microsoft’s web services are (natch) IIS, .NET, ASP, etc. When then have to do new projects, or major new initiatives, or integrations, what do they do? I would expect any Yahoo! worth his or her salary to flatly refuse to work with Microsoft server tech. Do they just move on, leaving stuff that was historically LAMP as LAMP, and stuff that was MSFT as MSFT? And whatever team thinks up new stuff, they pick? Sounds like a complete nightmare.

Of course, to me, working in a company with more than 75 employees is a complete nightmare anyway.