jr conlin's ink stained banana

Right, so tonight i drove over to Milpitas to pick up a new iPod Touch 4. Partly because i was curious what the improvements were and partly because i'm still a gadget freak.

i am staggeringly unimpressed.

Yes, i may be a little down on Apple from time to time, but i will grant that they do make pretty art projects they would like you to believe are computers, but the latest iTouch seems, well, kind of a step backwards. Let's compare against the iTouch 3 shall we?

The Other Buttons
Yes, we all know about the one, magical Button. The magical single square box in a rounded hole that brings the joy of fingery swipery goodness to life. That, thankfully, stayed the same. The other buttons, well, not so much. The problem there is that Apple moved the buttons from being on the edges of the device to being on the back of the device. That makes them harder to find since you can no longer just grab the damn thing and figure out what to push to fix the volume. You have to feel around for where the controls might be. What's more, since they're now on the back, there's a chance that the device could slip out since you're pushing it away from your grip.

i'm sure some folks might think that's niggling, but so is arguing about font faces and the number of pixels in an offset. Crap like that matters.

Backup Lies
Ok, this isn't really a 4g thing, but i so desperately wish that Apple would stop calling their sync operation a "backup". It's not. It's a very slow copy of a few select files. If your device craps out, or you want to replace it, doing a Restore is not going to help you. You'll still need to reinstall all your apps, podcasts, music files, and whatever other crap you had on your last device.

i'll note that this is GREATLY ASSISTED by plugging your old device into an Ubuntu box and using something like iFuse to mount the old iPod as a drive. Then you can either copy the contents of ./iTunes_Control/Music to a shared drive, or export the directory as an SMB mount point and drag all the old music onto your new device via iTunes. Because that's fantastically efficient.

Oh yeah, and good luck copying over playlists. ಠ_ಠ

You're not going blind
And finally, the "real retina" display or whatever. Yeah, it may be a lot more pixels in that display, but when you boot the little bugger, holy crap is it dark. Sitting in a moderately well lit living room the display is definitely darker than the 3g. Apparently the photons are also a lot smaller. That, or guess how they managed to squeeze a few more minutes out of the battery for the new doo-hickey? i had to boost it to about 3/4 brightness to get it to the same approximate luminance that the 3g had on medium. The Droid has both flat out beat in mid to low light conditions.

Yes, these are all first world problems and i'm quite sure that there's a village in Pakistan that could really use the awesome computing power of this pocket device, but again, i look at this as what it's supposed to be. This is supposed to entice me to go get an iPhone or iPad. It's supposed to be a gateway drug for all things Apple. Right now, this is less crack like, and more like those discount aspirin packs you find in the medicine cabinet at work.

(oh boy! Now it's apparently fallen off my home network! Yay!)

Web 1.0 was about getting stuff on the web.

Web 2.0 was about opening up your site and letting folks play with the data.

Web 3.0 appears to be realizing that was a dumb idea and crapping on your developers.

Understand that Your Company will have a few rather interesting experiences should you decide to have an API:

1. APIs aren't easy. In fact, they can be a right pain in the butt. Things are even harder if you decide to retroactively fit an API onto your internal data system because you'll have to segment how things work and who gets access to what. Compounding ontop of that mess is the fact that if you have a reasonably complex back end, you have to realize that said back end will no longer be quite as flexible and subject to arbitrary changes as it once was. (This, by the way, is a good thing.)

2. The biggest user of your external API will be yourself. Why? Unlike the bulk of your confusing mess of a back-end, the API will be consistent, documented, and generally thought out. Developers will no longer have to hunt through undocumented libraries wondering if the call they just made is deprecated or not or if it will break in a month when someone injects a new argument or changes the return class, or Kernigan only knows what else. The API may do less, and it may be limited in what it will return, but it works.

3. Your API will not get you laid. Those news articles on Mashable or maybe even TechCrunch will look sexy. You may even point out the dozens of reTweets talking about the news, but ultimately, unless you've got something worth using, you're still going to be sitting by the phone in a few months.

A lot of companies are coming to that last realization as of late. Twitter's focusing a lot more on their own website than the fact that they were the web's alternate Transport layer. They pretty much bitch slapped their developers by releasing free apps that either did more than the available pay apps, and otherwise told their API users "Hey, thanks for all you did! That was great! Don't let the screen door hit you."

There are a lot of sane, rational, business reasons to do that, and i hold no animosity toward Twitter for doing so. They are very kindly keeping their transport protocol open since they're also using it. i could also make the same argument regarding Facebook, however i have always held that Facebook had more of a one-way / black hole type API than Twitter.

There are some companies that started out clearly understanding the problem and addressed it elegantly. A prime example of this is Flickr. They have an API that they use for darn near everything. It's the same API you can use. They exposed it partly because they could and partly because the couldn't help but expose it. As a side note, Flickr is insanely easy to connect to and you never have to worry about functional disparity. There are also a handful of other companies that also managed to follow that example, but don't have the sort of business model or market niche that really pays.

i expect a lot more companies will probably follow Twitter and re-privatize their public APIs. There will still be a public API, but frankly, they could care less whether or not you or anyone else use it, since you weren't really that profitable anyway. Sadly, i also expect a few will just abandon their APIs completely for much the same reason.

Is there anything you could do to stop or influence it? i'm not really sure. You never owned the data to begin with (even if it's content you loaded up). That was kind of glossed over when everyone was talking about how wonderful 2.0 was going to be, but basically, it's true. Unless you own the storage, you don't and someone else can always take that away from you. It's just that if you're planning on raking in hundreds of FutureBucks off of a given API, you ought to realize said API may not allways be there, when the proverbial chickens come home to roost, or when someone decides to take a weedeater to those 100 flowers.

The stark reality is that companies are in business to make money (with very few exceptions). If they offer something that doesn't meet that end goal, don't expect them to continue to offer it if they don't need to. It's a bit like yelling at the guy at the bus stop who decides to no longer offer free foot rubs.

Still, makes me damn sad when i see it happen.

In spite of rumors to the otherwise, RSS is not dead. For that matter, neither is the web, but that's beside the point.

What's dead is the idea that you can make money out of offering things for free, which is kind of a stupid idea anyway. That's why Bloglines shut down, yet Google Reader still lives on.

Bloglines shut down since they couldn't make enough money to support the service. Google uses your reading habits and metrics to sell you crap. RSS is still a mighty fine way to distribute information, including information that i don't really expect my friends or associates to filter for me. (Although i think that Matt's write up is pretty much on mark for the future.)

The problem is that it's hard to be the middleman in this sort of operation. i don't charge people anything to read my blog. While it's conceivable that i might have such massive traffic that i might not be able to serve up all 3K at a reasonable rate should the population of China suddenly take an immediate interest in my scribblings, but then there's protocols like PubSubHubBub to deal with that sort of thing.

The funny/sad thing about all of this is the fact that these are nothing more than tools. Getting back to Matt's post, that's really what all of this is. Right now, we're all in love with digital belt sanders. We're arguing the dangers of variable speed drills.

Truth is, the tool doesn't matter. It's more a question of what we decide to do with them.

First off, i blame myself for the hassle.

i had rooted my phone initially because i wanted to set a custom hosts file to point to some machines in my local network. Unfortunately, said rooting proved to be an insane headache when Froyo was released, nearly bricking the phone as it went into a constant loop of trying to reboot and display "Sorry, Process system is not responding" messages.

The solution was to install the original boot image, which then picked up the new update. Of course, i lost all the info on the phone, and will have to reinstall most of the apps i had (there were a few that i don't use).

rassa-frassin' bragga-frappin'