Insert Credits

Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Fred von Lohmann has put together asnarky analysis of Apple’s iPhone developer licensing agreement. Needless to say the agreement isn’t pretty for the developers. The EFF got their hands on the agreement through a Freedom of Information Act request after NASA signed the agreement while putting together their NASA App.

People are getting up in arms about this, but is anyone really surprised at this point? That old 1984 superbowl ad is getting more ironic with each passing year as Apple’s success allows them to pull all of their products into lockdown. Remember that this is a company that nearly ran themselves out of business in the mid ’90s due in large part to their proprietary format and had to take a hefty bailout from Microsoft to keep things going. If they’re willing to ride proprietary practices all the way to the edge of bankruptcy then what makes the Internet think that success will suddenly turn them into benevolent benefactors of everything computing?

The example of the Apple II is always brought up when people bemoan Apple’s modern closed-door policies. But the Apple II was nearly three decades and several business models removed from the Apple we know and love to hate today. Apple hardware has been in lockdown since the first Mac debuted. Show me someone who disagrees with that assertion and I’ll show you someone who has that free Apple bumper sticker that comes with every iPod and iPhone proudly affixed to their car’s back window.

When you buy an Apple product you are buying a lifestyle choice, not a piece of technology. You have to ask yourself if you’re willing to put up with a little bit of corporate crazy on their part for the convenience built into their products. I’ll freely admit that I’m willing to make this trade with iTunes and the iPhone because of the ease that iTunes offers and the large development base that the iPhone boasts.

But I bought my iPod and iPhone fully aware that Apple has been, and always shall be, just a little on the nutty side. Maybe they should start handing out pamphlets detailing their corporate history back to the mid-’80s so that no one else is taken by surprise the next time a story of an Apple lockdown burns through the geek world?

Share This:

Note: If you’re coming to this page looking for information about the performance of the G72 in World of Warcraft then this second post dealing with that in particular might be of interest.

It is with a heavy heart that I must announce the passing of my old Dell Inspiron laptop that I purchased back in 2007 to get me through grad school. The little guy still works fine for the most part aside from taking a little longer to load now than he did back when he was new, but the old adage of “Groves giveth and Gates taketh away” continues to affect the computer market.

The main problem was the graphics card. The little 128MB workhorse that came with my Inspiron was more than enough to play World of Warcraft, the only game I was playing at the time, but in the two and a half intervening years I’ve gone from being able to run WoW on maximum settings to barely ticking by with everything turned down. I’ve also been wanting to try out Star Trek Online and the graphics card was the one weak link when I ran a stress test to see if my old computer could handle it.

After a bit of searching and consulting with my brother (who spends far more time researching graphics cards than I would ever care to) I decided on an Asus G72 from Best Buy. The price was just right at $999. The G72 only has a dual core processor, but it’s a high end dual core with a screaming clock speed. Right now it seems that few games and programs are designed to utilize dual core let alone quad core, and I think that at this point it’s still a better choice to get a faster clock speed on a dual core than to saddle yourself with a slower clock speed and smaller front side bus on an equivalent quad.

And the graphics card, the GX260M, is a kickass little card for what I paid for the system. I could go on about onboard memory, clock speed, and all that technical stuff, but at the end of the day I’m able to run Warcraft and Star Trek Online at 1600×900 resolution with all of the settings turned up to the maximum and a steady 50-60FPS in heavily populated areas and battlegrounds.

Being able to see Dalaran from atop Icecrown Citadel is something I was never able to do on my old machine, and looking to the other side of Arathi Basin and seeing the fighting clearly on that side isn’t something that I’ve seen since my old desktop gaming machine went belly up a couple years back.

So now that I have a laptop capable of handline Star Trek Online you can expect some coverage of that game to go along with the World of Warcraft coverage that you already enjoy. But more on that in another post dedicated to the game.

And in the meantime, if you’re looking for a decent gaming laptop for the price then the G72 is a nice little deal right now. I get the impression that Best Buy might be lowering the price to clear it out and make way for a new quad-core model, but I haven’t found anything concrete on that. Either way, it’s still an excellent little gaming machine for that price.

Share This:

Final Fantasies 1 and 2 are now available for download in the app store for the steep price (for iPod/iPhone, at least) of $8.99. That’s not $8.99 for a package deal either. You’re going to pay close to $20 after tax if you want to enjoy both games from the convenience of your phone.

The games are a port of the PSP versions of the game. Except that it’s more choppy on the iPhone/iPod if the reviews are any indication. And Square-Enix cut out all of the cutscenes that provided a little value-added for gamers who bought the PSP version. And the controls aren’t nearly as intuitive since they’ve had to graft a touch screen interface onto games that were originally designed for a blocky NES controller.

And you have to ask yourself a simple question: “Do I really need another port of the original Final Fantasies?” I can see some of the excitement when Final Fantasy 2 finally came to the U.S. (legally) for the first time, but at this point these games have been repackaged and re-released so many times that I wouldn’t be surprised to find there’s a version available for my toaster that utilizes revolutionary new crumb processing to generate the graphics and convection current manipulation to move the characters.

Final Fantasy has 4.5 stars so far while Final Fantasy 2 has surpassed that to sit at a solid 5 stars after a few dozen reviews apiece, but don’t let that fool you. Most of the reviews boil down to “Wow! Final Fantasy on my iPhone! I’m so desperate for anything approaching a recognizable video game at this point that I will grasp and inflate the rating of anything that comes close to replicating the experience of a real portable gaming system!”

I’m paraphrasing. Slightly. But sheer amazement that a particular game is available on a platform is not a good reason to go out and spend your hard-earned money on said game.  Don’t be that guy or girl. If you absolutely must buy Final Fantasies 1 and 2 then there are far better versions out there.

Share This:

Wordpress 2.2 for iPhone has been more stable than its predecessors so far, but I have come across a minor bug that could potentially turn into a major annoyance depending on how often you save.

The app has a “feature” that kicks you out of whatever you’re working on when you hit the save button. This is annoying enough in and of itself, necessitating thumbing back into whatever you were working on each time you save, but the 2.2 release has added another helpful save feature that occasionally deletes whatever you worked on between your last two saves.

So if you tend to save every few sentences it’s not a huge issue. But it can really suck when you forget about the bug after writing a long post and lose everything you’ve been thumbing out for the past hour.

There’s a simple workaround for the problem. Just Select All and Copy whatever you’re working on before saving and then go back into the article and make sure that everything saved properly. If it didn’t then you just have to Paste, save, and repeat until the app decides to cooperate.

Share This:

There’s another great introductory programming ebook available for the bargain price of $9.99 with a special code at checkout.

Today’s offering is Learning Perl: 5th Edition. Its not the best book if you’re totally new to programming, but anyone with even a minimal amount of coding knowledge will be writing in Perl in no time. I’ve gone through this book before and loved it.

The code at checkout is DDPER and, again, is only for the PDF ebook version. Incidentally, if you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch there is also an app version of this book available at the even lower price of $5.99 in the app store.

Share This:

The techblogging world has been on fire this past week because of a decision handed down from on high at Apple banning all apps with sexual content. When I first heard the story I figured that meant a ban on most of the lame bikini and nipple pasty apps out there clogging the app store, and good riddance.

Except now a new story over at Tech Crunch claims that the ban is far larger than originally thought. Click through to the Tech Crunch article for a full list of content being deleted, but it looks as though anything remotely sexy is being pulled. Sexy includes anything that shows skin, skating pants, and a host of other ridiculous restrictions.

Keep in mind that this is an unconfirmed report base on a blog post from one of the allegedly affected app developers. There’s been no official word from Apple about the great softcore app store purge yet. But this is also Apple, so it’s entirely likely that there will never be any official word. Steve Jobs seems to have taken all of his public relations cues from a dog-eared old copy of Orwell’s 1984, and mysteriously pulling apps that offend the great and powerful Jobs without any acknowledgment is right up Apple’s alley.

If this is the case then a few things come to mind:

1. This is a terrible message for current and potential app developers. Sure Apple is going after content that’s an acceptable target in our puritanically self-righteous culture, but arbitrarily banning and removing once acceptable apps on a whim here means that they could do it again for equally capricious reasons. I don’t think this is going to stop people from developing for the iPhone, there’s too much money to be made from Apple’s mammoth install base for people to abandon it entirely, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if this had a chilling effect on some developers
2. This shows just how far Apple has gone on the sliding scale from open to insular. This is the company that made its initial fortune with the Apple II hardware thanks to a third party spreadsheet program they didn’t even know existed and only discovered after doing a bit of market research to see why their hardware was selling so far above initial expectations. Open development would probably be a boon for Apple at this point, but I doubt it’ll happen as long as the cult of Jobs reigns supreme.
3. Finally, does anyone else appreciate the irony of Apple closing off access to racy content on an Internet enabled device? Anyone who has access to Safari has access to the biggest and most hardcore porn app ever invented: the Internet. So by their standards Apple should probably remotely disable Safari on everyone’s phone until they can issue a content filter patch to save everyone from themselves.

If I were a particularly wily advertising executive at one of Apple’s handheld competitors then I’d be putting together a diabolical parody of their infamous 1984 Superbowl ad right now. The tagline writes itself in light of recent events: “Apple, see how we’re making 2010 exactly like 1984.”

Share This:

Back in March of 2008 I decided to buy myself an early birthday present in the form of a widescreen compatible Wacom Intuos3 graphics tablet.  The thing wasn’t cheap, but at the time I had myself convinced that the piss poor Questionable Content knockoff webcomic that lived at this domain was worth a little splurging on a larger tablet.

The comic wasn’t really worth the investment, but I love the tablet nonetheless and never use Photoshop without it.

I just had one little problem with the table that was shipped to me.  The stylus would lose signal every once in awhile and either stop working or jump across the screen.  When it stopped working I had to reboot the computer, and when it jumped I had to go back and redo whatever line I’d been working on.  Either way it was a major annoyance.  Luckily at the time I had another Wacom stylus from my smaller Intuos3 that worked just fine, so I tossed the new stylus in a drawer and didn’t think anything of it for the next year.

continue reading…

Share This:

The reaction to Steve Jobs’ iPad announcement in the social circles I run in was an overwhelming “Meh.”  Even I found the burgeoning fanboy credit that Apple had earned with the iPhone quickly burning away as I wondered what the hell they thought they were doing rolling out this product that’s really nothing more than an oversized iPod Touch or iPhone as though it was the second coming of the FSM himself.

But the more that I thought about it, the more I realized that the months of leaking information to a starving media and the flashy unveiling yesterday are exactly why the iPad is probably going to succeed despite the fact that it brings absolutely nothing new to the mobile computing market.

continue reading…

Share This:

1. Purchase price.

I only have so much money I can justify spending on gadgets. Dropping upwards of $300 on a high tech device that has the same functionality as a paperback I can buy for $0.50 at a used book store doesn’t sound appealing.

2. Resilience.

If I drop a book then the worst that can happen is a little scuffing and maybe a stain or a few bent pages. If I drop an Ebook Reader then I’m out $300. They’ll be much more attractive when they’re cheap enough that I’m not potentially dropping a week’s wages onto a hard floor along with the device.

3. Theft.

I can bring a book out in public and not worry about someone trying to steal it. An eReader, on the other hand, is a high dollar piece of shiny computer tech that’s irresistable for opportunistic thieves in a way that a ratty paperback will never be. Plus the book will cost far less to replace should I happen across a thief with a literary bent.

4. I already own one.

I have an ebook reader that I carry with me at all times that fits easily into my pocket and lets me flip through pages with the swipe of a thumb. I can also use my iPhone to surf the Internet, easily download free public domain books, write blog entries (like this one, incidentally), and perform any other of a myriad of tasks that an eReader can’t handle at a higher pricetag.

5. Digital rights management.

Remember all those free public domain books I just mentioned? I like those because the idea of Digital Rights Management on a book gives me the screaming heebie jeebies in a way that it never has with music. I think it mostly stems from a lifetime of borrowing, lending, buying, and reselling books at secondhand stores and garage sales. I never had that connection with music which probably accounts for why I’m fine with iTunes but wary of the Kindle.

6. No standard format.

While we’re on the subject of DRM and the Kindle format I have a question. What happens to early adopters who buy the eventual loser in the format wars? A single file standard accepted by all readers (PDF anyone?) would go a long way towards convincing me to try one of the tablet readers.

7. No telling who will win the reader wars.

Right now there are a lot of people jumping into the ereader market and doing their best to make sure that everyone else entering the market is jumping to their death. Until the dust settles from this little game of eReader highlander I plan on holding back to avoid buying the potential Betamax or HD-DVD of the current eReader hardware wars.

8. There are other things I could I could drop $300 on.

I’ve already pointed out that I have the functionality of an eReader in cheaper or more convenient forms like a book or my iPhone. So on the rare occasions when I have a spare few hundred bucks to throw around an eReader tends to go to the bottom of the purchase priority list.

9. Book prices aren’t yet substantially lower on readers.

A lot of people like to use the price of a new book as the metric by which all eReader economics should be measured. This is bullshit. I can count the number of books I bought brand new last year on one hand and they all had Brandon Sanderson’s name attached to them because he’s a relatively new author who’s difficult to find on the used market because of that newness and who I want to support because he’s the most awesome thing to hit the fantasy genre since Tolkien invented it and Jordan explored it.

But I digress.

I read in bulk. This means that I refuse to pay retail since the publishing industry has take to price gouging as a solution to shrinking market share. Which means that I get most of my books at steep discounts from used bookstores or for free from manybooks.net if they’re in the public domain. $5-$10 per book stops looking economical when compared to $2ish or free.

Share This:

It looks like Apple might be starting off the new year with some welcome changes for iPhone app developers. The Next Web is reporting that the turnaround on app approvals has mysteriously gone from a couple of weeks to a couple of hours in some cases. None of this has been confirmed by Apple, of course, but that’s hardly surprising considering how tight lipped Apple is about its internal workings.

If this is the case then it will be a welcome change. I can think of a few cases where firmware updates or API changes broke apps that I’d come to rely on only to discover that working updates had been submitted to the app store but were stuck in the approval pipeline.

Share This: