This old gem is from back in the days when I was passionate enough about stuff to care enough to write blog posts explaining why OS X is the best OS.

I’ve grown up a bit and am now lazy enough that if someone truly believes that their non-OS X operating system is better, then my best retaliation is to let them wallow in their shitty OS.  But let’s have a look at my original Facebook note on this (which garnered a pretty sizable flame war between myself and a die hard Linux fan):

For all those Mac haters out there

February 20, 2007 at 1:04 am

It’s no secret that I am avid user of the Macintosh computer. It’s also no secret that people who use Apple products are extremely loyal to their brand and will often defend it to the death. All cult followings aside, I hear, at least on a weekly basis, people talking about how much Macs suck. This often happens because I bash Windows a lot. Although I will generally be reserved and not say much to that, if I had a lot of time on my hands, here is a general idea of my response:

1. Do you know anything about computers? Are you proficient in using either Mac OS X or Windows? If not, do me a favor and STFU (to those who aren’t 1337 enough to know what that stands for, it stands for ‘shut the fuck up.’ And if you don’t know what 1337 stands for, tough shit). Don’t take a stance [Ed.] on something you don’t know jack shit about. Yes, you may be a CS/MIS major, but I know plenty of CS majors who know nothing about computers, and I see the textbook crap that MIS people learn about computers, and it makes me laugh. If you want to go and learn about the operating system/platform that you are bashing, please feel free to do so. But please, the Mac vs. PC war is for the big boys only. 

2. What is your level of experience with Macs? What’s that you say? None at all? Just a little bit? Well, then how the hell are you in a position to say that Windows is better? Oh, you think that because over 90% of desktop computers run Windows, that automatically makes it better? Well, it doesn’t. That just means that Microsoft is making a hell of a profit, and I respect them for that. The fact still remains that Windows is a really poorly designed operating system. But back to my original point. If you don’t really use a Mac on a daily basis, I’m not sure how you expect to actually get a good sense of whether it’s inferior or not. I use Windows and Mac OS every day, and I was a Windows user for years. Being proficient in both, I can safely say that Mac OS does a better job of pretty much whatever you throw at it. 

A lot of people also like to throw the gaming card at me, thinking that will stop even the most die hard Mac fan (please spare me the word fanboy or fanboi, as it will make me want to shoot either you or myself) dead in their tracks. But again, we go back to the fact that marketshare is not really a feature. Mac OS X is arguably a better operating system for a game developer to write a game on. OS X has the frameworks and technologies that would make game development much easier on it, such as Core Image/Core Animation, OpenGL support, etc. Windows has DirectX, and if a game is going to use a particular version of DirectX, you need to make sure your video card drivers support that same version of DirectX, and even then it’s not a total guarantee that it’s going to be flawless. Then game developers have the whole portability issue, because there is no OS X or Linux port of DirectX (Wine doesn’t count). And now that Macs use Intel chips, you can boot into Windows and play that game if you need to. As time goes on, the variety of games available for OS X will improve as well. But please don’t make the ignorant statement that the Windows operating system is a better gaming platform, because it really isn’t. It just happens that a greater number of games are written for Windows. 

Now, to tie up any loose ends that might be around if you really are a Windows lover. OS X handles multitasking more smoothly than does Windows XP (I have no conclusions with Vista yet, although it is improved. Kudos for that, MS). If I have a mess of windows open, a seasoned user of OS X will have an easier time getting to that window that was open an hour ago than will an equally seasoned Windows user, expecially if they must use the taskbar/Dock to do so. OS X apps are generally a hell of a lot nicer and more fun to use than Windows apps, and they can work together really well. OS X is a technically superior operating system to Windows. There is not one virus that targets OS X and is successfully able to propagate without user interaction. Spyware for the Mac is all but nonexistent. OS X is inherently more secure than Windows, because Apple didn’t create some stupid shit like ActiveX and then turn around and hard wire it into the operating system so much that there were more holes in it than lace. And just to clear this up, Macs aren’t without viruses because ‘nobody uses them and it would be useless to write a virus for the Mac.’ That’s just stupid talk, because there are millions of Macs out there, hundreds of thousands of smug Mac users like myself bragging Macs up. What hacker wouldn’t want to write a nasty little virus to shut them up? Yet nobody has. We don’t even have our market share’s worth of viruses (there should be at least a couple thousand out there to have a few percent of the virus market share). 

Now, to prove that I’m not unfairly biased towards Macs, here are a few of my Mac complaints, because I have some. 
-Macs have a blue screen of death equivalent, and it does happen from time to time.
-Macs are also plagued with a ‘beach ball of death’ which I find quite annoying, but I would probably experience it less often if I was running, say, fewer than 15 programs at any given time
-After a few weeks of uptime, I find that I still have documents open from weeks ago that I forgot to close. 
-Consumer level Mac hardware is often of poor quality, which necessitates AppleCare (especially for portable machines)
-Apple is now using integrated graphics in a few of their machines, which sucks a lot
-When I drag an icon to the Dock, the icons to the left and right scoot away so that there is room for the new icon. But when I am trying to drag an icon to Trash (as I often do), it’s like I’m playing tag with the trash can, and I get mad
-If I forget to unmount a server, and I close my laptop’s lid and open it somewhere else and it has to reconnect to the wireless network, the Finder just sits there clueless and after awhile, I am about to scream at it, it finally decides to ask me if I’d like to disconnect the servers (this, however, is not nearly as annoying as how, when adding a network place in Windows, the dialog goes unresponsive for awhile)

See? Macs have their shortcomings, but they’re often just little things that will either get fixed later or I can deal with.

I’m periodically filling my blog up with old posts from the days when I was doing Facebook notes. Since the iPad was introduced a year ago this week, I thought I’d take a stroll back to the nostalgic time when I reviewed my iPad.

iPad: the new face of computing

April 6, 2010 at 9:35 pm

When Verizon announced the Verizon iPhone, they said that data plan pricing would be announced at a later time.  When that was said, I was expecting the worst, figuring that they were going to put the axe on unlimited 3G data plans and didn’t want to leave a bad taste in would-be customers’ mouths on the day of the announcement.

I was pleasantly surprised today to find that Verizon has announced that they will be offering unlimited 3G data for the iPhone 4 for $30 a month, consistent with their other smartphones.  Furthermore, they are offering tethering for $20 a month extra for a separate 2 GB pool of data to be used for tethering, which is also consistent with the pricing for the same feature on Android phones.

Although a Verizon rep said that this pricing won’t stick around forever, I’m still thrilled to know that I won’t have to lose my grandfathered-in unlimited data plan with AT&T (a plan which I can’t add tethering to).  Of course, this is strategically smart, too, because a lot of people who otherwise might have held off until the next iPhone to buy a Verizon iPhone might just grab an iPhone 4 now so that they can get locked into an unlimited data plan.  Well played, Verizon.

From the commenters I saw in Engadget’s article about this announcement, a lot of people seemed to be surprised and upset that the personal hotspot feature was going to cost extra.  Now, I can understand being pissed to have to shell out an extra $20/month for AT&T for tethering when they don’t give you any more than that pathetic 2 GB, but the $20 a month price is consistent with what Verizon was charging prior to this, and I think it’s fair to assume that a user will only consume more data if given the option to tether.

Now, if and when Verizon does go to metered data plans (and it’s only a matter of time before that does happen), it’ll be a whole different story. If they were to still charge for tethering then, they better still be giving you extra data to consume just for tethering.

Peace out.

I have traditionally held a relatively high level of respect for iFixit, a web site dedicated to the repair of your iProducts, providing parts and manuals for just about every Apple product made this side of the year 2000.  I gained even more respect for them about a month ago, when they announced their quest to publish a repair manual for everything out there.  Their goal here is to empower consumers and help to solve the problem of e-waste that is severely harmful to places in China.  You can read more about it in their blog.

When word broke out that Apple recently switched to using a new Pentalobe style screw for the iPhone 4, iFixit decided to seize this opportunity to get free PR and make Apple look like some sort of monstrous company trying to screw customers out of being able to unscrew their iPhones open.  iFixit hates to be the bearer of bad news, I’m sure, especially when it brings so much attention to their company and spins them as some sort of anti-Apple consumer advocate group, and they’re even being so altruistic about it that you can even buy a liberation kit (read: a screwdriver that gets the Pentalobe screws out, but mutilates them in the process and 2 #0 Phillips screws) to liberate your iPhone from the absolute tyranny of having different shaped screws.

I truly can’t believe that iFixit would stoop to such trolling to try to get some pageviews and exposure.  Having opened quite a few Apple devices in my day, I’ve had the displeasure of opening quite a few such devices that had previously been worked on by some amateur who didn’t see the importance in getting the right sized screwdriver to put the now-stripped Phillips screws back into place.  And Phillips screws are remarkably easy to strip, even with the correct sized screwdriver.  I’ve had better experiences with Torx screws and screwdrivers; they don’t seem to strip as easily.

Looking at the design of the Pentalobe screws, it seems pretty clear that these were designed to not strip as easily.

Apple’s very well known for trying out new things in their products.  They’re always looking at new materials, new manufacturing processes, and new hardware that becomes available.  This looks like they’re trying a new screw design.  Yes, it’s a screw type for which proper screwdrivers aren’t widely available, but it’s hardly Apple’s responsibility to distribute screwdrivers to customers all over the world just because it’s trying a new screw design in its devices. Someone’s going to develop and sell a proper Pentalobe screwdriver soon enough, and we’ll all be just fine (and maybe won’t have as many stripped screws).

If Apple’s motives were to keep people from servicing their own devices, there are better (and much more douchey) ways to go about it.

Furthermore, cries of Apple’s “planned obsolescence” of equipment are pretty spurious to me.  Used Apple devices go for premium prices, even the oldest of Apple devices.  The first generation iPhone (which, by the way, didn’t have any outside-accessible screws at all, but nobody complained about that) easily sells for $100 on eBay.  G4 Mac Minis are going for as much as $200 (note: these are at least six years old).  Apple devices are still sought after even once they’ve reached an age where their counterparts made by other companies are sitting in a pile of electronics being sorted through by an eight year old in China.  And Apple’s devices have come a really long way in the past few years in terms of their reliability.  Apple notebooks are now made using a lot fewer parts (thanks to the Unibody case design) which results in fewer, simpler repairs.  The computers are highly recyclable and Apple happily collects their own machines at the end of their lifecycle, free of charge.

Much love. Namaste.

I’ve known about Evernote since its early days, and after seeing it evolve quite a bit, I started using it myself back in 09.  In the almost two years I’ve been using it, I’d like to pay tribute to how it’s changed how I collect information and reflect a bit on the things it could do better on.  Let’s start with the positives, because I think you all know I’m better at bitching about stuff and I like to save that for later.

The Good Things

1. Evernote is everywhere.  If I’m at my computer, there’s a version of Evernote for the Mac and for the PC (and the latest Windows version is vastly better than the previous one in terms of performance and its interface).  At any given desktop web browser, chances are there’s an Evernote web clipper.  If I’m not at my own computer, I can easily log right into the Evernote web site (which is really nice, by the way) to see my notes. iPhone app? Check. iPad app? Check. Blackberry? Check. WebOS? Check.  Android? Check.  The Evernote team has been phenomenal in making versions of its app for every platform, so I feel very comfortable putting my data in Evernote.

2. Evernote is my brain.  Looking through my Evernote notebooks, I can see that Evernote has quickly become the place that I dump little snippets of information that I might need later.  Whether it’s a memorable quote, funny images from the internet, or whole web pages, it all goes in there.

3. Evernote adds great metadata.  I love data.  But what I love even more is data with context.  Evernote gives me that.  If I make an Evernote note with my iPhone, Evernote will store the location I made the note from.  If I clip something from the web, Evernote embeds the URL automatically.  Those things all add a nice touch, and you can use powerful searching based on attributes which can include these metadata as their fields.

4. Evernote is great for pack rats.  If your’e a little anal about keeping all your receipts and papers you get, Evernote will add order to your life.  Buy yourself a Doxie scanner, and whenever you receive something paper, just scan it into Evernote, recycle the paper thing and forget about it (until perhaps you need it again).  Evernote has OCR searching (which is reasonably accurate) so chances are you’ll have a better time finding that receipt in Evernote later on than you would looking through pants pockets.  It’s also great if you get someone’s business card, or some other piece of info you want to remember photographically (a sign on a building, perhaps? You could even combine that with location feature to find a business).

5. Evernote will let you dump just about anything into it.  You can e-mail it to Evernote or just stick it right in there, but you can embed just about anything into your notebooks, which is great if you happen to have a document in a nonstandard format that you’d like to store unchanged (Dropbox is also great for this, but sometimes it’s nice to add a note to it too).

6. You can make Evernote data actionable.  Just add a check box to a note in Evernote and you’ve got yourself a to-do item, which you can quickly and easily identify.  And when doing that, the to do is sitting right there with the pertinent information.  Great for you GTD people.

Those are great things.  But still, there’s stuff I can’t stand about Evernote.

1. Limited ways to make notes.  If you want to take notes that are simple rich text and maybe some graphics, you’re golden.  But as soon as you want to do something fancy, like add a diagram or maybe a hyperlink to another Evernote note, you are absolutely fucked.  Your only recourse is to make the diagram in another app, save that off as a PDF or image and put that into Evernote.  Ew.  I never thought I’d say this, but Evernote, look at how Microsoft did OneNote.  Evernote should be like that.  Except for the diagramming stuff.  Look at what OmniGraffle does for inspiration there.

Waiting for that to get implemented is probably not worthwhile, because Evernote’s prolific existence on all platforms puts their developers in a bit of a pickle when it comes time to add a user facing feature to how you take notes (read: no consistency for you).  The mobile versions of Evernote can basically take plain text notes, whereas the desktop versions can do richly formatted stuff (but not quite the same depending on what version your’e using).

2. Can you take notes? Sure! Can you do recordings? Sure! Can you take notes combined with recordings?  Nope.  What would seem like a really freaking logical next step for note taking is apparently too mind blowing for Evernote to handle.  There are a few programs out there that let you record and take notes, and they have the added benefit of letting you go specifically to a particular part of your notes and listening to the corresponding audio, which is great if you zone out during classes and stuff sometimes when you should be taking notes.

3. Search is great, until you want to search for something that isn’t alphanumeric.  That makes Evernote relatively useless if you want to use it to save code snippets to search later.  Or if you want to do any sort of source code related note taking.  When I reached out to support to see why they have this limitation in place, I was told it was for performance reasons.  But if you can’t make search that includes more than just 36 characters perform well, you’re a goddamn idiot and shouldn’t be developing software.

4. Views could be better.  It would be nice if you could get a view where you just saw all the images of your notebooks (this is particularly useful for me because I use Evernote as a storage cache for images I find funny and want to use later).  I just feel like overall the way I’m presented my notes could be a little more elegant and fun.  I don’t know what I want to see, but I’m sure someone creative could make a view of my notebook data that’s more flattering.

5. Dragging images out of Evernote is an exercise in futility.  If you have an image in Evernote and want to use it in a document or blog post or whatever, it tends to require the intermediate step of dragging the image into the Finder and using the newly created image file to put in my target document.  Fuck off, Evernote. Give me proper drag and drop!

6. Give me site annotations, please! In the summer you announced a feature called site memory that would let you see other notes clipped from a particular site while you visited it.  The Evernote people seemed to think this would change you you surfed the web.  I’m not totally seeing that, but seeing how you have that technology, it would be doubly amazing if you allowed me to add notes and annotations to web pages inline and have that saved to Evernote.  Then, when I came back to look at those pages, my notes would be right in context.  In fact, let me do that to all sorts of things!

7. To-dos have so much more untapped potential.  Evernote may not have initially thought of itself as a to-do manager, but as long as it’s considering itself to be an external brain, managing things I have to do is a natural part of that.  It’d be nice to add contexts and due dates and other information to my to-dos, while at the same time allowing them to live inside the original notes for context (if they’re created there).

Evernote’s a tool that brings me great excitement because it already has changed the way I work in many ways, but it also brings me a lot of frustration because of what it can do but doesn’t.  And while I like to be an optimist, it doesn’t seem Evernote developers have much interest in changing Evernote’s user facing feature set. Instead, they hoped that third party developers would fill that gap via the Trunk, which doesn’t seem like that great of a solution.

Evernote people, I know you’re listening. Give these features some consideration!

Just got done reading Jason Biggs’s Verizon iPhone related predictions (this is assuming that there even is a Verizon iPhone; I’m not totally convinced it’ll happen before 2012), and he’s predicting a very AT&T-sympathetic picture of what it will be like when Verizon gets the iPhone.  I really disagree:

First, expect iPhone sales to surpass Droid sales for a brief period and then level off.

Yeah, no.  For sure there’s some pent-up Verizon iPhone demand from the past few years and that’s for sure going to cause an explosion of iPhone sales, but Droid sales have been what they have been because they’re really as close as you can get to having an iPhone experience on a decent network in the US.  And the Droid experience falls short of the iPhone experience by a long shot.  There aren’t really any killer features that iPhone has, though (things like “good design,” “a smooth UI” and “a much healthier app store ecosystem” aren’t really features per se); in fact, Droid devices have a few really nice features that iPhone doesn’t have and may never have, like mobile hotspot, centralized notifications, and apps get permission to load and run in the background.  But none of those are killer features.  A good user experience (something iPhone does offer) trumps that. You will definitely start to expect iPhone to start eating more into Droid’s sales, and as a result, Google’s going to have to up the ante quite a bit.  They’ll no longer have the advantage of being the only decent smartphone option on Verizon’s network, and so they’re going to have to address a few issues.  The user interface is going to need more polish.  There will need to be a music syncing solution that is an order of magnitude better than the current solution on Android.  Google needs to work more aggressively with phone manufacturers and carriers to make sure users promptly get firmware updates, and that they get many of them (many complain about Apple leaving older iPhones behind too quickly, but the truth is you get more major iOS updates on your iPhone than you ever would on another phone).  Once iPhone is on Verizon, it can compete with Droid on a much more level playing field, and it’s going to kick ass.

Second, expect nothing to change in terms of iPhone development over the next few years.

What the fuck is that even supposed to mean?  Apple’s consistently been about constant iteration of their products, which I obviously wouldn’t expect to change now that there’s a Verizon iPhone. Naturally, it’s far too early to expect an LTE model of iPhone (I don’t expect one till 2012) so this will be a CDMA model. And Biggs is correct, in that Apple probably isn’t going to start giving one radio technology a better iPhone than the other; they’ll be releasing new models side by side (maybe a slight delay for the CDMA model at first, but that’ll even out gradually).

Next, expect a banner year for Verizon.

No shit, Sherlock. Pretty sure he just stuck this reason in there so that he could have five.

Fourth, expect Apple make this announcement quietly and without fanfare.

This is probably the case. I don’t think it’s going to be so low key that Steve won’t make an appearance.  After all, it is a very sought after phone/network, and Apple did have to re-engineer a new version of the iPhone to work on this network.  It isn’t too unexpected that Apple is letting Verizon hold the press event, because there probably won’t be many new Apple-y features to announce (it’s really just a new network).

Now, for the bad news. The Verizon iPhone won’t be much better than the AT&T iPhone when it comes to reception and data transmission – at least not yet.

Couldn’t be more wrong.  For one thing, Verizon’s entire network is EVDO.  That means that as long as you have coverage, you more than likely have 3G (sometimes you have a 1xRTT signal in certain scenarios).  That’s already beating the hell out of AT&T, whose 3G network (which they’re now just going to call 4G) only reaches large metropolitan areas and is just beginning to reach out beyond those metro areas, but usually only into areas between two large metro areas (for instance, I can now drive from Madison to Milwaukee and have 3G pretty much the whole way).  And AT&T has shown minimal initiative in getting 3G out to the rest of their network which is puttering along on EDGE.  Instead, they just kind of pretend that EDGE network doesn’t exist.  Meanwhile, Verizon just went ahead and lit up their LTE network last month, which is now already of a pretty impressive size, and by the end of the year, it’s going to be just about as large as AT&T’s 3G network (the one they’ve been building out for the last four years, mind you).  AT&T isn’t even expected to start its LTE network until next year, but is making the outrageous claim that their whole network will be LTE 2 years after that (doubtful).

Consider this: I can watch a Netflix movie at my parents’ farm using Verizon’s 3G network. On my iPhone, I can’t even make a phone call, because AT&T doesn’t have a tower within 30 miles of the place, and their roaming partner doesn’t have service there either.  I am much more confident in the reach of Verizon’s network than AT&T’s, because they actually try.  In big cities it could end up being a toss up because it’s more of a capacity issue than a coverage issue, but even so, Verizon has shown me that they try harder.

People like Biggs have also been saying that when Verizon gets a popular data-hungry phone like iPhone that their network is going to come crashing down.  That would be an insightful prediction, except for the fact that Verizon users already use more data than AT&T users, and Verizon’s network hasn’t suffered for it (at the very least, the public’s gut feeling of Verizon isn’t one of dropped calls and data sessions).  Verizon’s network also has an overwhelming tendency to give me the full data speeds in more places (it’s more than just having more bars in more places, AT&T), whereas AT&T (who keep claiming that they have the fastest 3G network despite T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network being a shit ton faster) usually can’t keep up.  In fact, it’s pretty rare that I get more than a megabit per second on AT&T’s 3G network.  Sad. (I just tested it now, and it was around 60 KiB/s for most of the time, then jumped to 130 at the end; a far cry from the 7.2 Mbps it’s supposed to almost be).

To be totally fair, AT&T’s 3G network got a very rude awakening when the iPhone 3G came out, whereas Verizon’s data usage growth has been a little more spread out, but AT&T has still had a very long time to improve coverage in cities (and there are many ways to do this; they just cost some money) and people still aren’t happy.  Furthermore, for any AT&T customers who find themselves needing to be out of big cities for some period of time, they’re probably going to jump ship for Verizon the first chance they get, because AT&T just doesn’t seem interested in building out their 3G network (or even patching some of the myriad holes in their EDGE network).

I’m personally rather torn right now as to whether I should get a Verizon iPhone. I live in the LA area now, so I’m pretty much blanketed in 3G (it’s not always that fast or functional, but it’s there), but it would be nice to have decent coverage when I’m visiting the Midwest. I’ll probably switch at some point, just because I hate AT&T so goddamn much.

A couple of months ago, I was really shocked to see that an app called CineXPlayer had been approved to be in the App Store.  This surprised me because CineXPlayer was an app that played video that was in formats that were not QuickTime and/or H.264.  Before Apple started becoming more transparent about their policies, it was understood that apps that played non-native video formats weren’t legit and wouldn’t be approved.  But this app was approved, and it dawned a new era, one in which we could finally play our DivX videos that we no doubt got from legit sources.

It was with great glee that I later saw a version of the VLC app for iPad announced.  VLC has long been a staple on any machine I use, because it will play any video format without complaining about codecs, and it will also play DVDs without forcing the user to watch all the stupid crap that comes with them.

Then, Rémi Denis-Courmont (one of the original VLC developers) got sand in his vagina and decided that this just wouldn’t do.  He apparently has some sort of personal vendetta against the App Store, so he sent Apple a copyright infringement notice.  His claim is that because apps that you buy through the App Store can’t be freely distributed, that this means that Apple violates the GPL.

No, it doesn’t, you fucktard.  The App Store is just a means to install the binary onto the user’s system. The GPL doesn’t make any restrictions on how the binary gets installed; it just stipulates that the developer has to provide the source code to users. They can even charge to do so.  And the developers of VLC for iOS have made the source code available on their website.

From the GPL:

We protect your rights with two steps: (1) copyright the software, and (2) offer you this license which gives you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify the software.

First off, Apple’s totally in the clear to wrap the binary in DRM, because you’re allowed to modify the software (actually, that’s not modifying the software; that’s putting a wrapper around the binary, which is different).

Secondly, Apple is totally in the clear to distribute the software.

But here’s the part that Rémi probably had his panties up in a bunch about:

3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:

a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,

b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,

c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)

Easy workaround.  VLC could easily have done (b) by including a link to source code in the app description.  That’s truly all there is to it.  There isn’t a stipulation that the binary has to be freely copyable to anyone. Furthermore, it doesn’t (well, it didn’t) matter that you weren’t personally able to take the copy on your machine and copy it to your friend’s iOS device; your friend could easily download the app from the App Store himself.  And if said friend couldn’t be troubled to go to the App Store and download himself, he’s always free to download source code and build it.

Rémi Denis-Courmont, you’re a grade A douchebag.  There was an easy solution to this issue (put a link to source code in app description or in app itself), and you knew this would make the app totally GPL compliant, but instead, you wanted to be an attention whore, so you wrote Apple and acted like you’re going on some sort of freedom crusade to save the world from the App Store (note that this is the same App Store without which we probably wouldn’t have mobile app stores because before iPhone there was no hope whatsoever of your average Joe developer getting an app on a mobile phone platform).  And you didn’t just quietly and respectfully write a letter to Apple, you had to tell the fucking world about it.  And of course, you didn’t tell them that the app would be quite compliant with the GPL by sticking a link in the description, you told them that they’d have to re-engineer their app distribution model so that the small portion of apps that are GPL’ed could be freely copied by the user (despite the fact that it’s already fucking trivial for other people to install their apps because Apple made it dead fucking simple).

So you know what I’m going to do, Rémi?  I’m going to fucking fork VLC for iOS.  I’m going to fork it because I have a right to (provided that my fork is GPL’ed, which it will be), and I’m going to submit it to the App Store.  And I’m going to include a link to the source code, and in the source code, it’s going to say “Fuck off, Rémi Denis-Courmont, what are you going to do, sue me? Oh yeah, you won’t be doing that because you don’t have any fucking money to sue me, you freetard!” in comments in every module file.

Peace out.

I have to say that I feel like the gay rights movement has come a long ways when the so-called “most hated family in America” is the Phelps clan of Topeka, Kansas.  For those unfamiliar, they’re these guys:

What’s remarkable about this family is that they take gay hating so far, that nobody will even go so far as to say “well, I hate gay people, but this crosses the line.” People truly hate this family with a passion, and it’s one of the few pro-gay stances that pretty much all of America will come together on.  It’s for that reason that the Phelps family has probably done more for the gay rights movement than any rainbow-studded parade will ever be able to do.  The Phelps family is considered to be so despicable that people are turned off to homophobia because they don’t want to come off like these guys.

I read this story on Huffington Post about a teenager who has drafted a bill hoping that Congress will pass it.  Laws have previously been passed regarding this, but they were later ruled unconstitutional, leaving Fox News in a real pickle about how they would spin this (in one article they avoided this cognitive dissonance by simply not mentioning that the Westboro Baptist Church is homophobic).

But the truth is, Westboro Baptist Church is right here.  The government doesn’t have the right to create laws which inhibit their free speech (though they’re morons for trying to explain that “God” has something to do with their defense).  And I would truly feel some concern if we passed this law and/or found such laws constitutional.

The Constitution imposes these restrictions on the government expressly to prevent populist laws from getting created.  That’s because such laws have potential to really oppress minority groups, and we’d probably have ended up with laws entitling all men to steaks and blow jobs every day (pre-women’s suffrage) and enforced five hour work weeks.

We have a Constitution because our founding fathers were intelligent enough to realize that although democracy is probably a good route, putting everything up to a majority-rules vote won’t create a just society.  Look at 2008′s Prop 8 here in California after gay marriage bans were ruled unconstitutional by California’s supreme court.  I certainly don’t like the fact that the Phelps family is doing what they’re doing, but I also recognize that trying to create laws to keep them from doing things I don’t like undermines the very protections that allow me to do things that other people don’t like (like being gay).

The price of your freedom is that you have to let others have it and use it.

“Oh no he di’n't!”

I was having a civil conversation with some guy who was trying to explain to me how Apple would do much better business if they made cheaper computers (apparently in his universe Dell was kicking Apple’s ass in revenues, profit margins, and total cash on hand) and then he went and said that 2011 was going to be the year of the tablet and he insinuated that iPad was going to be knocked off of its throne as leader of the tablet market.

If for some reason you truly believe that, let’s think about a few things:

1. Tablets have been around for many years.  All of the technologies that are in iPad weren’t anything revolutionarily new.  The reason none of the tablet manufacturers pre-iPad made it big was because their tablets sucked and nobody wanted them. If they have any greater degree of success now in a post-iPad world, it’s probably going to be because they finally had a decent implementation to rip off.  Does that sound familiar?  It should.  Look at phones pre-iPhone and phones designed about 6 months after iPhone came out.  iPhone still absolutely fucking dominates, though.  Despite the existence of a shit ton of Android phones on a shit ton of providers made by a shit ton of manufacturers (not to mention having a shit ton of variations on the stock OS), Android keeps up with iPhone.

2. Apple has hardware advantages that no other tablet manufacturer can even come close to.  They are heavily involved with their hardware design. They rarely use cheap off-the-shelf parts; they always take extra effort to design things themselves (even things like cables and chargers, which are always pretty lousy on competitors’ devices).  They’ve worked closely with hardware partners to have high quality parts at a great price.  Take the LCD screen on iPad, for instance.  It’s a full 9 inches, which is something other tablet manufacturers can’t achieve, and even if they can, they aren’t putting in a great IPS display; it’s often some cheapo LCD display.  Apple is the world’s #1 buyer of NAND flash memory, giving them a lot of negotiating leverage. By having such great control over the entire manufacturing process, the iPad can be a $500 device when a competitor couldn’t produce one of the same quality for that price at all.

3. Apple also has a pretty great software advantage.  In fact, iOS really is the iPad (after all, the whole device is just a screen), and Apple has made that fantastic.  It’s built on OS X, which was already a secure, fast and rock solid stable OS, and that also gives iPad fluid graphics, 3D acceleration, and good APIs for developers to make great apps with.  As a result, iPad has a solid apps ecosystem already, and it keeps growing daily.  Anyone else who wants to come onto the scene now has to either be walking out the door with that polish and awesomeness (which is the result of years of constant iteration on Apple’s part) or a new tablet would have to somehow introduce this revolutionary new feature to the scene which changes everything, then build off of that.  Given that most of the groundbreaking revolutions in the mobile space have been coming from Cupertino, I don’t really see that trend changing.  A lot of competitors have tried gaining traction against iPhone by yelling that they can do things iPhone cant, saying things like “removable battery and storage!”  (really, who gives a fuck?)  ”Physical keyboard!” “Flash support!” “Multitasking!”  Usually those features don’t work all that well, or they’re features people keep saying they really want, but don’t really need or end up using.  Most importantly, these phones failed to get right what iPhone did so well, which amounted to simple things like a fluid feeling with inertial scrolling, good music and media syncing with iTunes, etc.

Apple has created a pretty interesting situation, because iPad basically introduced itself as its own class of device, and it the only one of its kind.  I don’t see a bunch of competitors coming and filling the space up to the point where you start saying “tablet;” I’m pretty sure it’s just going to be an iPad world.  Is that good or bad?  I’m not sure, but I get the instinct that it’s going to be good, because the iPad seems to surround itself with higher quality stuff, whether that stuff is apps, accessories, or whatever.

In closing, I suppose this might be considered the “year of the tablet” in that a bunch of people are going to try to strike it rich selling various models of them, but I think that the tablet is going to continue to be the iPad.

Peace out.

The Mac App Store is launching tomorrow, and it’s arguably the most exciting thing to have happened to Mac developers since XCode.  If you’re a tech enthusiast, it may be difficult to get excited about what is ultimately just a newly developed distribution system for the Mac apps we’ve known and loved for the past decade or so.  And it’s true that tomorrow we enthusiasts probably won’t see too many things beyond maybe the launch of a couple new exciting apps (iWork ’11 and Twitter are two top contenders).

The Mac App Store is exciting to me because earlier this year, a lot of people in the blogosphere were looking at iPad and iOS as nails in OS X’s coffin.  WWDC this year was primarily focused on iOS stuff, and Mac stuff hadn’t really been touched all that much.  It kind of looked like OS X was becoming Apple’s bastard child.  And numbers could (kind of) back it.  iOS’s market share has grown explosively.  iOS is the dominant player in the mobile phone market (with Android a very close second) and it’s the clear frontrunner in the tablet space, which is huge because other people have been at it for years trying to make tablets into a viable platform and Apple just stepped in and obliterated them.  Hell, Apple obliterated them before they even had publicly announced that iPad even existed.

With iOS’s blinding success, it would seem to start getting harder and harder to justify continuing to put development resources into the Mac, especially as iOS keeps getting more sophisticated and its feature set approaches that of desktop Macs.  Apple’s iOS devices are incredibly streamlined, with Apple having designed pretty much the whole thing from the ground up, which not only gives Apple a great price advantage, but it also makes repairs of the devices simple–repairing an iOS device is simply a matter of going to an Apple store and swapping it out for a new one, at which point in time the Apple store recycles the old one and you sync your new one with iTunes/MobileMe and you’re back in business.  iOS devices are a goddamn profit machine.  Though I justified the change in focus (OS X is a mature platform and doesn’t need as much attention as the toddler iOS), even I was starting to get nervous that Apple would exercise some of its über-willingness to part ways with the old to make way for the new on the Macintosh platform, and I was doubly nervous that they’d do it before I was ready (they have a tendency to let go of the past a couple years earlier than others).

When Apple announced OS X 10.7 in the fall, Mac aficionados all breathed a heavy sigh of relief, because Apple decided to start the Mac App Store.  On the surface, it looks a little underwhelming at best (this is the revolutionary new Mac feature?) but really this is a perfect move.  The iOS App Store wasn’t the first of its kind, but its superior integration and overall ease of use made it scarily simple to blow money on apps for your iPhone.  Any developer with a Mac and $100 could crank out iPhone apps and sell them (or give them away) on the App Store (that might sound like a steep barrier of entry, but look at the barriers of entry to any mobile platform before iOS).  These were the perfect conditions for explosive App Store growth and sales, and though there was a bit of a bubble of crappy apps for awhile, I’ve found that there’s a very good supply of very high quality apps at reasonable prices.  The App Store has made iOS into a platform I love and have little desire to leave (despite some of the Android features that entice me so).

Mac apps have never really been hard to buy and install, but there’s certainly nothing quite as straightforward as having an app store to open up, browse and buy.  The apps even get updated automatically for you, and they are even installed on all of your Macs!  The licensing scheme is always the same no matter what app you’re buying, and only Apple has your credit card information.  Plus, buying the app is as simple as a click and a typing of your password.  No OS X indie developer has ever been able to make the app purchasing process quite that simple.  There has always been a pretty good deal of friction when buying an app.  This may not be enough friction to deter a savvy computer user from buying a quality program, but what about your mother?  Your grandmother?  Surely they will find the process daunting, even if they like the program and want to buy it.

Purchasing difficulties aside, there’s also never really been a super easy way to install OS X apps.  They’re always distributed as either a .dmg file, which is difficult to explain to a beginner, a .zip file, which can result in apps not being put where they belong, or it’s distributed in an installer package.  I wouldn’t say any of those installation methods are particularly hard, but again, think of grandmas trying to install apps.

With the Mac App Store, it’s no longer difficult to purchase or download Mac apps.  This is going to result in a shit ton more sales, which is great for indie developers.  Having all the apps live in a central place creates a relatively level playing field, which saves developers from having to worry about marketing (though they’re still free to do their own if they want to).  Now, developers can spend more time focusing on making good apps, and with a more sure and steady stream of income, they will be able to spend even more time on development, which is going to result in some kick ass indie apps being created.  And that, my friends, is a truly exciting part of the Mac App Store.

In 2010, Mac users have gone from being worried whether their Macs have a future, to potentially opening up a brand new era for the Mac; one that will no doubt result in a better platform for everybody.  It’s a win no matter how you look at it!