Day: January 24, 2012

Setting up an iPad in 2012

Setting up an iPad in 2012:

My mom says that all her friends who have iPads had to go to the Apple store to get them set up. I’m not surprised. I can’t imagine how it could be otherwise.

[Sadly, I think this is a question of market. My parents are constantly frustrated by not knowing how to do things on their iPad. But I wonder whether Apple cares. Well, no, I don’t wonder, I don’t think they care. I think they’ve written them off. But the real failure here (even if I’m right about Apple ignoring the grandparent demographic) is that it also applies to people who do not share the same experiences that leads to these things feeling easy. Apple shouldn’t need to help so many get going with their iPads. No?]

Source: Scripting News

The disneyfication of tech

The disneyfication of tech:

Twitter and Facebook are rich and getting richer. Either of them could easily buy a struggling but independent news organization. Then where would you be if you were dependent on them to distribute news? It would be like the Times depending on Murdoch to print their daily paper. Instead the Times invested in their own printing plant, presumably so they could have better control of the product, both from a creative and tactical standpoint. If Murdoch owned the presses and the trucks, who do you think would deliver the most timely news? They have to think about Twitter that way. At some point they will come to see themselves as a media company, if they don’t already.

[It’s such a mess right now, that I’m completely certain that the system will change for the better.]

Source: Scripting News

d: Personal events

For a long time now I’ve been interested in “eventing” systems. This system needs to tell another (or many) what’s going on (“Hey, I’m done processing that data”). It’s a a way of decoupling the systems so that one system isn’t “waiting” for another system.

Now think about twitter in its best case (from this perspective). A bunch of people listen to me. I send a message. And those folks can act on the message or not.

What if that sort of eventing were built into everything? What if we agreed about expected actions triggered by an event? (You event “go” and I event “where” every time I care to.)

Other folks are working on and thinking about this. I don’t always agree with the model because I think the basic interaction is far simpler. If I need a delivery service I don’t send out a bid, because it probably doesn’t matter enough to save a few cents on a single transaction. Most likely, simplicity (excellent delivery record, easy to drop off, and then reasonable cost are more likely, until I’m shipping many items.) But that’s a nit. And a lot of this can happens today, all that’s not the way the systems are thought about. And that changes everything.

Intent Doesn’t Matter

Intent Doesn’t Matter:

I don’t think Apple plans to restrict anything but its own .ibooks format. But that doesn’t matter because, as Mike Ash puts it, “Unless we’re friends, your intentions don’t matter to me at all, only your actions.” Apple isn’t anyone’s friend but Apple’s, and its actions so far are to reserve a broad swath of rights pertaining to everything iBooks Author is capable of “generating” (whatever that means).

Even if we’re right and Apple doesn’t care about PDFs or plain text files, that’s still the Apple of today. The Apple of 20 years from now might turn out to be a completely different company, and this EULA has no expiration date. That’s a dangerous situation for authors and publishers who care about long-term distribution rights. It would be best for Apple to clarify the terms now — and, I hope, loosen them — rather than prolong the uncertainty.

[Lawyers.]

Source: venomous porridge

If you don’t like my rules, don’t play.

How Apple is sabotaging an open standard for digital books:

So Apple, which claims to use the EPUB format exclusively, has now created an incompatible, proprietary version of that format. And with iBooks Author they’ve added licensing terms that restrict what an author can do with the generated content.

The designers of iBooks Author went to great lengths to make sure that the program will not work with “the industry-leading ePub digital book file type.”

[Nobody says you have to use Apple’s tools. Nobody says you have to publish an iBook. No one says that iBook == ePub. What’s the problem here? If you don’t like the format, if you have a vested interest in seeing ePub be the one and only true format then by all means don’t publish your stuff via Author and its currently greedy EULA. Don’t whine that you’ll be missing out on sales, if all this other stuff is important to you that’s a choice you get to make. Everyone runs into this situation growing up. One kid owns a ball. We gather to play a game. Kid is unhappy with the way the game is going (for them) and take their ball and go home. If you want to play in APple’s sandbox, it’s by their rules. If that doesn’t make you happy, don’t play. Feel feel to discourage others not to play.]