I can't has cheezburger

Make no mistake. My advice to you is that you unequivocally should be upgrading to Lion if you haven’t already.  Almost all apps that were working fine on Snow Leopard are working just fine in Lion (unless the developer of your software is enough of an asshole to not get with the program and support Lion.  From the nerdiest changes to polish in the user experience and UI overall, most everything is a huge step up.

There are a few exceptions, though.

No, it isn’t the change in default scrolling direction.  Yeah, yeah, it’s tinkering with years of muscle memory, but if you’ve been using it more than a few days and still are bitching about it, you really should verify that your cognitive function is up to snuff.

But my biggest complaint is about color. Like in the Finder. Where did it go?

My sidebar is this monochrome wasteland of icons with poor contrast. Hoping it was just a poor selection of icons, I quickly looked in CandyBar to see about replacing these icons pronto with some nice colorized ones, only to find that the icon files themselves have color, meaning that the Finder is putting a mask over these to eliminate color (there are also specific b&w sidebar icons if you dig in the /System folder, but even if you replace these, the mask remains).

If that wasn’t enough, Finder also helpfully replaces my folders’ unique icons (which I give them for easier identifiability) with the same icon for each folder, leaving me with no visual cue for which folder is which, besides name and position. Great.

Now, some people who know UI are jumping to Apple’s defense on this decision, saying that it’s about de-emphasizing the UI and emphasizing content. But it’s the freaking Finder! Files and folders ARE the content!  The option to have color icons in the sidebar will be a welcome (restored) feature for an OS X update, but I’m not holding my breath on this one, even though usability really took one for the team.

There are definitely some bugs here, too.  These will for sure be fixed in due time but in the meantime, they are a pain.  The biggest bug I’m experiencing is one in which the cursor will move to a far edge of your multi-monitor setup if you make a sudden fast motion with the mouse after it has sat still for a bit. It sounds like a small annoyance but in a day it gets impressively annoying. Safari 5.1′s new separate web rendering process (which was supposed to let you interact with a page as it renders but I’ve yet to see that happening) leaks memory like you wouldn’t believe. And the now all-Cocoa iTunes still manages to suck just as much as its part-Carbon predecessor. It astoundingly puts background audio encoding in a single thread when syncing, and scrolling through stuff is jerky when the app is busy. But at least the app is 64 bit now (so it’s welcome to consume more than four gigs of RAM as a single process, otherwise we don’t gain much from that).  Some aspects of performance are a bit better, but I was really hoping for more to be gained from the Cocoa-ification of iTunes. Multithreading an app like iTunes is a monumentally difficult task, though. Despite the great tools provided in Snow Leopard like Grand Central Dispatch, the issue still remains that the things you need to accomplish in a GUI app are really really difficult to split up into multiple smaller tasks that can be run simultaneously when they are all touching the same set of data. We’ll get there someday (I hope).

Now that I think of it, I really don’t have many bad things to say about Lion. I hate the lack of colors, and there are a few bugs.  That’s not so bad for a major OS release, I guess!

A new next-gen file system would have been really nice for Lion. It’s long, long overdue.  HFS+ is doing a great job with the insane demands I put on it, but it still has its issues.

I’m tired of hearing people quibble over who’s getting unjustly taxed. Here’s a simple system for calculating one’s tax burden. This will cause the budget to always be balanced and unambiguously make sure everyone is paying their fair share of taxes. Best of all, it ensures that even when there is a wealth gap, our government will not engage in deficit spending because the taxes aren’t properly collected.

Suppose you are rich and you earned 1% of the total amount of money earned in the US this year. As such, you are going to pay 1% of the US’s total tax burden. If you earned 0.00001% of the nation’s wealth this year, you pay 0.00001% of the total taxes.  How much are total taxes? Simple. Total taxes are whatever our budget is.  Done!

But hey, what about our debt? Simple enough. Let’s decide how much time we want to spend paying this debt down.  I propose we pick something longer, like 100 years (we don’t need to make it a 30 year thing like a mortgage, the US is going to live a lot longer than a human will, and can thus hold debt for longer).  We simply take the total amount that we are going to pay off each year and divvy that up the same way and append it to tax burden and it will get paid in this same proportional way.

The biggest question at this point deals with what things you can deduct from the amount of earned income that is taxable. Truth be told, I’m not sure how to handle this, but I think we’d be best starting off with a clean slate and allowing absolutely no deductions. That prevents people (and businesses) from shifting the tax burdens away from themselves and it keeps our tax code clean and simple (also difficult to corrupt).

People LOVE to notice new behavior in Apple hardware and software and liken it to an Orwellian future in which Apple is harshly dictating what you may and may not do with your computer. Maybe you have looked at a new Mac machine with less IO than before and cringed, or you saw that documents are auto saved in Lion and you worry that the experience is being dumbed down for you. If so, you failed to grasp just what the Orwellian future of PCs looked like sans Mac.

Apple was referring not only to IBM, but also the notion that the computer was a complex device that used arcane keyboard commands to accomplish things. These early computers required that you have more knowledge about the inner workings of it than you may really perhaps need. To save a file back then, for instance, you needed to know the full name of a file path, and possibly also the names of some commands. But with the GUI, this was no longer needed. You could traverse something that you could recognize as a human and put your file in this sort of metaphysical location. You didn’t need to know the name of a file path.

The concept of auto save is similar here. Truthfully, the computer is very much capable of tracking your changes and saving them off. In fact, it’s less likely to forget about doing it than you are, you easily distracted buffoon! By handling the saving of files for you, you are freed from the burden of thinking about managing your own file and now you can focus more on the task at hand. You are no longer enslaved by the dogma of having to save frequently that you once had. Is some flexibility lost here? Yes, but it’s useless flexibility.

Whenever there is a push for increased regulation on industries in the US, we always seem to hold ourselves back due to the threat that we’re biting the hand that feeds us.

It’s profoundly troubling to me that we have given ourselves this mindset that Americans’ jobs and livelihoods are merely a byproduct of companies thriving.

What happened to the free market? I feel that we can work hard to create regulations requiring companies to provide better working conditions. If we push companies out of the US, let another company that’s willing to handle our high standards step in. If the company that left the US tries cheating the system by employing mostly people outside of the US while trying to cater to US customers, let’s make that more difficult for them.

I want the US to become a place where being able to do business here is a privilege, not being able to earn a meager paycheck is a privilege. China and India have already proven that they’re willing to play in a race to the bottom on wages. That isn’t what the US is about.

Though my very favorite part of new OS X releases is invariably John Siracusa’s review of it on Ars Technica, it’s a bit… esoteric for the average reader and perhaps for most of my friends (few of whom actually read my blog, but I digress), so I have decided to share a few thoughts on Lion.  Unlike Gizmodo, I decided to wait until Lion’s release date to post my review, though I am still using what I assume may be a prerelease seed of OS X (it’s allegedly a GM but I think there might be one more build yet before it really goes gold).

First of all, I want to reiterate the kinds of improvements you can expect from an OS X release.  I have never seen one that was revolutionary in terms of features compared to the previous version. Apple started with a very solid foundation in OS X 10.0 (the inappropriately named Cheetah), an OS that was quite usable (in fact, I used it as the main OS on my clamshell iBook for some time) but many beloved features of OS 9 hadn’t quite made it over yet, and no software was yet written specifically for it, so the experience left a lot to be desired.  But through a series of releases, OS X has matured into a fantastic desktop OS (I would say the best).  All of Apple’s OS X releases have been evolutionary, not revolutionary, and this one will be no different

OS X hasn’t gotten a huge amount of attention from Apple in the past few years, leading some to believe that OS X is dead.  This rumor was initially fueled by Apple focusing primarily on iOS at last year’s WWDC and given Apple’s track record with killing off things it deems to be legacy technologies, people began worrying that OS X was next.  The truth is, OS X is a mature product. It hasn’t needed the rapid development cycle that iOS has commanded over the past years because it isn’t in its infancy anymore. OS X was based on a mature software platform (NeXTStep) from day one and only became more mature since then.  No tech journalists lament about features that OS X is “missing.”

That being said, now that iOS has made such strides in making tech devices usable in a way personal computers have never quite been able to do, quirks about OS X that we’ve long put up with were starting to look awkward.  Some of the UI elements are starting to look dated.  Parts of the user experience are just getting a bit long in the tooth.  Apple’s theme with Lion has clearly been about polishing up the user experience.  Let’s talk about that a bit.

The Install Experience

Apple surprised many when it opted to not ship Lion on discs. Instead, the only way you can upgrade to it is by downloading it from the Mac App Store. Though there’s a collective grumble of people mentioning what-ifs (what if I don’t have a broadband connection? what if my hard drive crashes?) Apple is killing optical discs in much the same way that it killed off the floppy and the modem. Yes, it’s going to affect a few people, but it wouldn’t have been worth holding back progress just because of a few people. It’s a compromise Microsoft perhaps wouldn’t make (I owe you guys a newer example than this, but you could install Windows 95 from a few dozen floppy disks).  If you do fall into any of the edge cases where App Store installation isn’t an option for you, fear not. The installer app contains a disc image which can be used to make a bootable disc (or disk) to install Lion just as you would have a previous copy of OS X.

The installer for Lion builds a bit on some tools Apple built for Boot Camp back in the 10.4 days. The app makes a tiny recovery partition on your hard drive (which gives you access to similar utilities to what you’d find on a system disc) and reboots from it, allowing the installer to run and upgrade your computer to Lion (technically as of Snow Leopard it’s an archive and install but now I’m just getting pedantic).

I’ve run both fresh installs and an upgrade with success.  I hope this success rate is approaching 100% because if this installer app messes up (particularly with the on-the-fly repartitioning part), you’re effed.

The GUI

The GUI elements are not necessarily considered part of the user experience, but they are elements of it that you are constnatly interacting with. The UI in Lion has gotten a welcome face lift (mind you, we haven’t seen any substantial UI changes since the Tiger -> Leopard transition).  The pinstripes that have gradually been fading from release to release are completely gone now.  Buttons are now square and they look better than ever. Progress bars look smooth as butter and the blue color is a bit brighter.

Not all of the UI changes are positive. I’m just going to leave this here:

Yes, it was brought over from the iPad, and yes, it’s beautiful, but this book UI adds absolutely nothing to the user experience, and I am surprised Apple would make such a change. It does make the window larger without adding utility, though. And it isn’t like this is something we added to help make users familiar with a real-world object; when’s the last time you used a real address book?  And not to be outdone, iCal gave itself a gratuitous face lift as well:

Mail was spared from having its UI made into an atrocity, and it is gorgeous:

(more on Mail later)

I can absolutely deal with the UI changes of Address book and iCal, though, because on the whole, the UI is more beautiful than it’s ever been in OS X.

Not just look, but feel

Apple made some other significant UI changes that will affect your daily usage of OS X.  They rid themselves of scrollbars, instead opting for iOS style ones, in which they are absent until you start scrolling.  If you want to do some quick scrolling, you can then grab onto the scrollbar and drag it. Apple really invested a lot of time into making the subtleties of this right: The scrollbar will disappear after a couple of seconds but if you are moving your mouse toward it, it will stay visible so that you can reach it. Getting little things like that right enable Apple to make such a change that might seem relatively major but get away with it.  Note that if your app uses scrollbars in a custom fashion (for instance, XCode puts marks in the scrollbar area to indicate where your compiler errors are), the app can opt to keep the scrollbar visible at all times, though it does always display in the new style (without the arrow buttons, mind you).

Another new feature that longtime Windows users will appreciate is that you can now resize an OS X window from any edge, not just the remarkably difficult to grab bottom right corner of the window.

Apple started getting gesture happy with Magic Mouse, multitouch trackpad and Magic Trackpad, but they really stepped it up in Lion. Most of Lion’s new window management techniques are able to be done by some multi-finger swipes which work great on trackpads, but not so much with the Magic Mouse (i dearly hope that improves; it’s quite bad).  Safari in Lion added a nice new touch, allowing you to use a swipe to flip back and forth between pages, like a book.  It feels really slick when you use it with a trackpad but is abysmal to use with the Magic Mouse.  It works best with static web pages but can handle ones that have real-time updating (like Facebook) but there’s a bit of a delay after you flip back while it gets its footing.

Finally, one of the first (and most jarring) things you may notice about Lion is that when you scroll, the content you’re scrolling moves in the direction you’re moving your fingers.  It breaks a really old habit, and it was for sure annoying at first for me, but it’s absolutely a logical step forward, it reduces the cognitive overhead, and it makes your desktop behave more consistently with your iOS device.  This can be turned off, but definitely do yourself a favor and don’t.  You’ll get used to it after about 20 minutes.  After an hour, you’ll become doubly confused going back to a system that does scrolling the old way.

Ready to Launch

One element that Apple has brought over from iOS is the concept of the Springboard, and it lives in Lion under the name of an app called Launchpad.  Gizmodo complained about Launchpad because they didn’t like the fact that you had to open it, then choose to open your app.  They then explained that it (somehow) would be less effort to just go open the app in the Finder.  I don’t think a Gizmodo editor was Apple’s target audience with this app, though; it’s really aimed more at the new Mac users who don’t want to be bothered with understanding where their app is located; they just want to open it. For these users, it is a chore to browse to the /Applications folder and dig through that cruft and find the app.  Now, they can just click on this one icon and they see all of the apps they own.  It’s like a simple, focused Start menu.  It’s not something I would ever use (I love Alfred far too much) but it’s something I would definitely see friends and relatives using.   And it looks just gorgeous.

Now, Giz complained that Apple didn’t just replace the desktop with this.  I agree that having the desktop as a place where you can keep files is a concept that needs to die (and soon), but doing what Giz suggested would have introduced a host of new concerns.  First off, Desktop is still a very valid location where users may keep their files. Moving them on the users is going to be a tricky transition.  Secondly, what would you do with the Launchpad when you have other apps open? How would you invoke it when you had other stuff open?  Perhaps it might make sense for OS X to launch into Launchpad as a startup app, but even that no longer makes sense now that you can reboot your Mac and have all your programs and windows right as you left them. So Launchpad lives (quite appropriately, IMHO) as an app.

Houston, We Have Misson Control

I’ve always lauded OS X for its sophisticated tools for managing the excessive number of windows I keep open (and CAN safely keep open because OS X’s multitasking is so sophisticated).  Exposé has saved me from countless headaches.  The Dashboard has saved me from having to keep a bunch of one-use apps open on my main screen for me to see information.  And Spaces allowed me to keep groups of windows in different workspaces for easier management (I admit I don’t use that feature a lot; multiple monitors does the trick a lot better). But these multiple window management techniques are surely a bit confusing to some users (many of whom are probably surprised on reading this paragraph to learn that these even exist).  When I heard Mission Control being introduced last year I groaned, “oh, yipee, ANOTHER way to manage windows in OS X.”  But when I actually tried it out (confession: I wasn’t paying close attention to its initial demo), I realized just what it was: a brilliant unification of three different OS X window management features (and it manages fullscreen apps as well, which I’ll get to).

Gone is the giant mess of now illegible window thumbnails scattered about.  I wasn’t initially crazy about the individual app windows being stacked, but it makes for better use of space, and you can easily Quick Look a window to get a peek at it by hovering the mouse over it and pressing the spacebar.  On the top you see a view of Spaces (I only have one) as well as Dashboard.  In Lion, all of the full screen apps are treated as their own spaces as well, and you can easily use a four-finger gesture on your trackpad to swipe left and right between these spaces.  Naturally, you can command+tab between apps and the space will seamlessly change as appropriate.

The gestures to invoke these features are very straightforward and easy to get used to (though they are a bit customizable so I won’t post them here).

Full Screen

When it was announced initially I thought it was kind of a lame feature. I mean, full screen apps are hardly anything new, right? Games have been doing them for years. WriteRoom was written a few years ago to feed on the sudden new trend the kids were having of using only full screen apps to enhance focus.  As someone who thrives on OS X’s ability for apps to seamlessly work with each other and ultimately allow me to do greater things because of this synergy (god, i can’t believe I just used that word), I dismissed full screen apps as a silly fad and an unnecessary attempt to bring an attribute of iOS apps to OS X (an attribute that was only there, mind you, because of iOS’s unique challenges).

The reality is that they’re kind of nice to have, especially on a smaller laptop screen. Apple has made it simple enough to switch between different apps when in fullscreen mode that I don’t really feel like I’m missing out on much of anything (though I will go into windowed mode if I need to read off of two windows at once).  Many native Cocoa apps support going into full screen mode right out of the box unchanged (I think it depends on how the developer defined the positioning of UI elements in the .nib files; if they were defined as relative to the edge of the window, then it’s easy to determine how to make it work full screen). And some of the apps just plain look cool in full screen mode, like the Terminal app:

You can still do almost everything when in fullscreen mode, too.  For instance, I was able to drag and drop an image from one full screen app to this one by both dragging and using the four finger gestures to navigate from app to app.  It was pretty cool.  And you have access to the Dock and menu bar in fullscreen mode as well; just move your mouse to the bottom or top of the screen and they appear.

As my memory serves me, having multiple monitors doesn’t play well with full screen mode in the one time I tried it, but your 11″ MacBook Air is going to feel a hell of a lot more useful with Lion.

Keyboard

This is one of the things I noticed randomly while using Lion, but Apple has brought over iOS’s keyboard behvior to Lion.  You can now type accented characters using the same procedure you do it with in iOS (press and hold the base character, and a menu of accented characters will appear for you to choose).  This might be annoying for those who depended on being able to press and hold the “u” key to get “uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu” but given the amount of time it took me to discover this new feature by accident, I’ll say it’s probably welcome.

In addition, iOS style AutoCorrect is now available in OS X, and it works just the same way it does in iOS (except it’s far less invasive than its mobile counterpart).

Mail

Perhaps the app that changed the most in the Lion release, Mail sports an all new look and feel (though not deviated too much from version 4). It now sports a three-column view optimized for wide screens, iPad-esque display of the message list, beautiful conversation views (a la Gmail) and the ability to archive messages with a single toolbar click (sadly Mail creates a separate Archived mailbox instead of doing the action that would, in Gmail, be the equivalent to archiving, which is moving the message to All Mail).

Conversations are finally here in desktop Mail and they’re wonderful:

And if that didn’t make me happy enough, Apple even fixed my pet peeve bug in Mail, and now if you have rules that change the color of a message in your mailbox, they actually get their color BEFORE you click on them instead of only afterwards. Search has also been improved.

As a side note, when you set up an account in Mail now, it’s not just a Mail account.  For instance, if I set up a Google account, Mail recognizes that and automatically configures iCal, Address Book, and iChat with these settings.  You’ll even be prompted in Safari to configure these accounts when you first go to Gmail and sign in in Lion (a really nice touch).

Performance

OS X has a reality-defying feature of consistently running faster on the same hardware than its previous version (though Leopard might be the lone exception there, though its performance was on par with 10.4). Lion is no exception.  Boot times are much shorter and the OS in general feels incredibly snappy, especially on computers with an SSD.  Adding to this performance increase (especially with boot) is the fact that OS X will now save the state of all the applications, so that as soon as you boot up, all of your documents and programs are just as you left them before.  As someone who puts off reboots for weeks because it’s such a pain to close all those apps (I know, first world problems) this feature is fantastic.  The saving of state also goes hand in hand with Lion’s new Versions feature which automatically saves documents as you work on them.  That’s one of those features that makes you really appreciate those app developers that bit the bullet and wrote (or rewrote) their apps in Cocoa. Apps like OmniGraffle were quickly updated to add support for Versions, largely because the apps were already using Cocoa’s rich document-saving functionality.  Though I save most of my important work in Dropbox and thus always have every revision saved, i’m really glad to see that it’s becoming a standard feature of the OS.

Errata

Lion has added a ton of new features in little nooks and crannies of the OS:

-iChat now uses a unified window instead of one window per account (by far my biggest complaint with it in the past).  It also allegedly has legit plugin support (really hoping to see real honest-to-goodness Mail plugin support at some point!)

-Finder has a new “All My Files” view that some find nifty.

-Lion adds AirDrop, which is a dead simple way to share files with other nearby people

-You can do full disk encryption instead of just encrypting your home folder.

-The Library folder is hidden now. Some consider it dumbing down, I consider it keeping things most users don’t care about out of the way.

-Quick Look bezels are no longer dark and translucent, but rather a light color. It’s rather nice.

-Lion is now a fully 64-bit OS; the early Core Duo Intel Macs need not apply.

-Java, like Rosetta, is omitted from the standard install of OS X.  It does get downloaded when it’s first needed, though (as does Rosetta, though expect this to be OS X’s last release with Rosetta support) (EDIT: Lion doesn’t have Rosetta support; I misspoke)

Most atheists you will encounter will assert their atheism on the basis that after hearing unfalsifiable assertions about God and religion and the sola fide approach believers take in their faith, the truth value of the existence of this so-called god came increasingly into question. That is to say, atheists became atheists after seeing a lack of falsifiable evidence for any particular religious system. But it’s a bit troubling to take this sort of leap of faith (or perhaps non-faith), isn’t it? After all, the lack of falsifiability of a given religious faith conversely creates a scenario in which a case for atheism can’t solidly be made.

Or can it?

I came across a fantastic video that explores some of these subjects in great detail (and I admit I’m pretty much ripping the ideas of this video off and TheraminTrees does a better job of it than I do) and my troubles were largely eased by presenting some pieces of logic that give atheism a lot more credibility and can indubitablly cause a person of faith to reevaluate their decisions.

When you think of a god, you are probably associating some omnis with that being.  Omnisience, omnipotence, perhaps also omnibenevolence (unless you’re the Westboro Baptist Church). However, these concepts are nothing more than abstract and cannot possibly exist as properties of an entity. Let’s take omnipotence, for starters.  Stoners the world over have surely pondered whether an omnipotent god could microwave a burrito so hot that even he couldn’t touch it. And pondering a situation like this immediately strikes a sizable hole in one’s perception of God. If we alter the meaning of omnipotence to mean “able to do anything that doesn’t interfere with its other properties” in an effort to shut up those smart asses who ask those strange questions, then I’m omnipotent because I can do anything that doesn’t interfere with my other properties. Creating a recursive definition of “able to do anything that doesn’t interfere with a being’s omnipotence” becomes meaningless because there doesn’t exist a base case and we end up with infinite recursion.  So we are left with a god that, at pest, isn’t omnipotent, because it’s not possible to be omnipotent.

Exploring the concept of omniscience, we are similarly left with conflicts, especially when you take biblical stories into account.  If a god is to be all-knowing, then the consequences of any actions the god takes are necessarily known beforehand. Thus, it is grossly unjust and illogical for a god to have made the design decisions that he did when creating the universe, especially if he was to also create conditions as to how his creations should behave. If we had an omniscient god, it wouldn’t have been necessary for him to make a bet with Satan in the book of Job about how he’d behave when God screwed him over; he would have known. God should have likewise known when creating the universe that it would lead to his dissatisfaction with creatures that would piss him off and cause him to willfully flood the earth (related note: how did Noah build an ark that could house animals living in all of the different biomes? Climate control back then seemed nonexistent.  Oh, and did we lose a lot of species on the ark from carnivorous creatures?).  We are left with either a god that is definitely not omnicient, or he is criminally insane and a danger to all of humankind.  And these punishments certainly put a strike in God’s omnibenevolence.

And is God immortal? If so, is he capable of killing himself? If so, he’s not immortal. If not, we’ve got another strike against omnipotence.

This brings me to the virtue of faith. God would presumably know what it takes to communicate with the humans he is responsible for creating. Humans who believe in him seek a relationship with him, and God would presumably likewise want this relationship.  Yet, God refuses to communicate with some humans in ways that make them sure and fully aware that God is communicating with them. Some may argue that if God were to show himself and it was perfectly obvious that he exists, then that would interfere with our own free will and we’d be unable to sin because it just wouldn’t make sense.  Yet Cain directly communicated with Jahweh and sinned nonetheless, so that argument holds less water. But ultimately here, in what way would God benefit from his subjects communicating with him in what is really a monologue because God is either unwilling or unable to make himself unambiguously known to humankind? It just doesn’t make sense.

Most devout believers will fire right back at me after my last sentence, proclaiming that God doesn’t have to operate within the confines of logic because that is a system he created himself and we are unable to comprehend it, because we’re imperfect (which also debunks the notion that God is perfect; how can imperfection stem from perfection?). If your mind lets itself wander there, we are left with gods that cannot exist. Even if you are convinced that a god or gods exist(s), you can surely see here that it is necessarily true that this(ese) god(s) is/are not perfect, are not necessarily immortal, are not omnipotent, are certainly not omnibenevolent, and are not omniscient. And when these properties of your god(s) are dissolved, what rationale remains for you to worship him? Fear of punishment? Perhaps a Stockholm Syndrome of sorts?

I choose here to look at reality and reach the conclusion that there probably are no gods. Because any would-be gods are no longer communicating in direct ways with people, I have received no retribution and have not been smited in any disproportionately large way. I make moral decisions for myself, and my moral compass is in constant calibration, but I feel liberated in that I don’t feel I must be obeying a pre-made set of rules. If misfortune falls upon me, I see it as the result of a complex series of interactions between everything that makes up the earth including my own actions and decisions, not as part of some other being’s plan for me. When good fortune falls upon me, I credit my own hard work as is due and being lucky. I work to be a good person to others and I seek to understand the world’s issues and how best to solve them.  It works for me. It’d probably work for others too.

When Twitter announced a few months ago something along the lines of “hey, I know that almost all innovation for new features for Twitter’s user experience have come from third party developers, and we wouldn’t even have our own native Twitter clients if it weren’t for an acquisition of third party clients, but now that we are making native Twitter apps, we’ve got this now, so, um, please stop doing it” I was a bit pissed because Twitter is ignoring obvious facts.  Despite the fact that 90% of its users using a native Twitter app were using Twitter’s own offerings, what Twitter failed ot mention is that that other 10% was responsible for something to the tune of half of Twitter activity (a.k.a. the most engaged Twitter users don’t use Twitter’s own apps).  I am okay with a company wanting great levels of control over its user experience (see my gigantic collection of Apple gear), but I’m certainly not okay with it if said company pretty much drops the ball every time it comes to making a good, integrated user experience.

But I’m not here to bitch about Twitter. Developers who develop on Twitter’s platform are doing that readily, and that’s who I’m here to bitch about.  I’m talking about the developers who were bitching about the fact that Twitter made changes to OAuth authentication in a way that required Twitter apps to get re-authenticated to keep functioning.  In this case, a third permission was added (access to DMs) because Twitter heard that users wanted more granular control over whether an app had access to such information.

This was a simple enough change, but developers were all up in arms about the fact that Twitter made them make this change and the change was told to them with only 13 days’ notice, which didn’t give them enough time to prepare their users for the transition.  I asked one developer who was bitching about a user bitching that his third party Twitter app was still broken as though it was the Twitter app’s fault, and I asked the guy, “what did your app actually do to inform users about the transition?” Mind you, not random things the dev posted on his personal Twitter account or even the Twitter Client’s official Twitter account, but how did information about the change get relayed to the user WITHIN the app?

His response? “Nothing.”

When I asked why not, he explained that there wasn’t a system in place to do that; it had been on the back burner for some time.

(warning: begin rant)

So, apparently developing a freaking system to check something as simple as an RSS feed of announcements on a developer’s web site occasionally to fucking TELL the user that changes might happen to Twitter’s API soon requiring changes to be made was not important enough to implement for months, but when it’s actually needed, suddenly it’s all Twitter’s fault that they didn’t give devs a few months’ notice to implement this system.

First off, if you rely on a third party API that can change at any time, you need to be as resilient as possible. You wrote your damn app, you have total control over it. If you’re a reputable OS X/iOS developer you should be bright enough to know that your users aren’t going to be happy with your app breaking without warning the user first, and there should absolutely be a system in place for letting the user know what’s going to happen from day one.  If you lacked the foresight to do this, that’s your problem, not Twitter’s.

Secondly, this is Twitter’s API, not yours. They put the work into making this API, and they put the work into making the plumbing that makes Twitter work (with or without the fail whale).  They can make changes whenever they want; it’s their API, motherfuckers. It’s entirely likely that at some point, there may be a critical security flaw discovered in Twitter’s OAuth that can only be fixed by revoking all access keys tomorrow and requiring Twitter clients to re-authenticate. You can’t reasonably expect Twitter to wait a month for you to develop a workflow to make this easy for your user, then get it approved in the App Store; they need to make that change ASAP.

Finally, this isn’t the first time you’ve dealt with a condition on Twitter that affected your client. Twitter was once known for having legandary amounts of downtime; sometimes daily.  Once Twitter implemented an API call limit to mitigate high demand. These are all conditions you want your app to tell you about before seeing a cryptic NSURLDomain error on your screen. If your user sees the latter, they’re inclined to believe something about your Twitter client is broken. If they saw a message beforehand mentioning that Twitter was experiencing downtime, then they know it’s all good.

Twitter may not have the best track record with developer relations, but developers, you need to STFU on this one.  Not a single Twitter app that I’m aware of properly made any in-app warnings to users about the changes coming to Twitter. Not one. But developers sure complained that Twitter’s official app didn’t have this disadvantage.  Yeah, no shit! There’s no reason to expect Twitter to add extra authentication to its own Twitter clients just because.

Developers: find something else to bitch about Twitter about! there are plenty of things.

Peace out. Namaste.

What I imagine networking to be:

“Oh, hey, Arun, this is Michael, from GreenGerms.  How’s it going? I remember last week when we were chatting at the Python meetup about how you were trying to figure out how best to get the schmeggle out of video files that get uploaded to the web.  I met up with my buddy Sven this week and he’s actually working on a master’s thesis that deals with the de-schmeggling of video content and he’d love to share the technology with you guys to see if it works for you.”

The reality of networking:

“Oh, hey, Peter, it’s Søren, how you doing?  So, remember three months ago when we were both at this conference that only I attended because my professor told me to get out and network?  I don’t remember what it was about; I was pretty hung over and really only there to kiss people’s asses.  Now do you remember me? No? I was the one pestering everyone and giving them my business card and somehow expecting that to pass as establishing meaningful relationships.  Yeah, that one. Now you remember? Oh, good.  Well, I was looking to apply for this position at your company and I was hoping you might be able to put in a good word for me, maybe pull some strings with HR, get me an interview?

Ashton Kuther’s little pissing match with Village Voice really sparked last night. It all started with Village Voice’s cover story which one would expect to be a five-page exposé on Kutcher being flat out wrong and getting oodles of facts flat out wrong.  Basically, they managed to make a five-page story about the fact that Ashton Kutcher got a single fact (extremely) wrong; in particular, his estimate that there are between 100,000 and 300,000 child sex slaves in the US.  And I’ll save you quite a bit of reading by telling you that his being way off on this single statistic is the basis for their entire article.  Every time they introduced some new piece of information into the story I was hoping there would be some other scandal like this being a publicity/moneymaking celebrity charity stunt on Kutcher’s part, but I was disappointed every time.  All we have is Ashton Kutcher continually reiterating a completely unsubstantiated fact.  Just one.  They also threw in a few jabs at the strangely light mood of the commercials.  You know, not because they had almost no material for this article to begin with, but becuase it was relevant.

Granted, that’s a fact that turns his entire crusade from “holy shit, we need to help as many as 300,000 child sex slaves” to “there really aren’t enough of them to warrant this kind of celebrity obsession”.  Of course, for there to exist any is a travesty, but when you’re overstating the number of victims by orders of magnitude, it really destroys your credibility.

Now, the Village Voice isn’t really doing much better here, because they’re going off repeating their own number, which is a much smaller number of child prostitution arrests made per year (which is 8-900 of them).  That alone would be damning evidence, but they couldn’t really leave well enough alone, and they made a shit ton of insinuations that this is the number of child sex slaves we have in the US.  Following their arrests=corresponding people logic, we could similarly conclude that there are no marijuana smokers in Santa Monica because no arrests have been made.

Instead of simply calling Village Voice on this obviously bunk math (and equal lack of a really solid number of child sex slaves), aplusk instead deflects, accusing Village Voice of facilitating child trafficking.  Classy move.  He also inadvertently makes an incrediblly solid case for legalizing prostitution (which he seems to be against) by pointing out the exploitation of (child) sex workers.

Here’s what i imagine a much more sane discourse between the two:

VV: Hey, aplusk, what’s with this 1-300K estimate of child sex slaves? This number seems way inaccurate and it discredits you.

AK: Yeah, guys, I guess you got me there. After all, it’s not like we go and count the child prostitutes by hand. Though we don’t know how many there are, I still think exploiting children for sex is a heinous enough crime that it’s worth investing vast resources into even if the number of victims is small.

VV: Fair enough point, but wouldn’t the money spent on these awareness campaigns be better spent actually helping these people rather than spreading awareness?

AK: I think seeking to ostracize the practice of buying sex slaves is a worthwhile investment of my money. Oh, and speaking of money, maybe you should take that money you earn from people taking out ads for “escort services” and use it to help my cause? After all, I have this suspicion you’re not doing age verification on those escorts, eh?

VV: An astute observation and a fair request. Let us go to the locker room and exchange chest bumps.