I loved the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs. It provides an even-keeled, unblinking account of a very complicated man. After reading this book, that’s the most concise word I can think of for Jobs: complicated. How else can anyone account for what he accomplished in his life?

People, from the so-called “Apple faithful”, to Wall Street analysts, to my own mom, wonder whether Apple will prosper in a post-Jobs era. They fear that the world will never see his like again. Hell, I worried about that myself.

The more I think about it, the more laughable that fear becomes. Never mind Apple, although I am certain they’ll be just fine for generations to come. We all gave Steve too little credit. It turns out that we all learned exactly what it takes to produce mind-blowing products, and we are surrounded by them.

Consider Steve’s first innovation: the original Macintosh. He brought an artist’s eye and laser-like focus to bear on a computer engineering problem for the first time. He taught us that technology has to be wrestled like an alligator before it will yield something truly human and usable. That you have to be unrelenting to convince some people to follow your lead. That if you get together a group of “A people” and point them at a common goal, they can produce something great.

Steve invented startup culture. After the Mac, after the stories got out, entrepreneurs everywhere took his lessons to heart, and have structured their businesses similarly. You can argue with the verbal abuse and 24×7 development cycles (and I certainly would), but you can’t argue with the success: from the 1990s on, we’ve seen startup after startup tread Steve’s path. Not all of them produce “insanely great” products. But like the pace of human invention in general, we’ve seen an exponential increase in the number of high-quality, well-loved products that have attempted to make a dent in the universe.

The Nest Thermostat. Quora. Delicious Library. Panic Software.

(No coincidence that many of them are closely tied to Apple; they had a front-row view of happened in Cupertino). I guess what they have in common is a strong core vision of what the product should be, and a driving ambition to make it real. I believe Steve is largely responsible for showing us how that’s done.

Apple, through Steve Jobs, was known as a secretive company. But they had no trouble sharing their secret sauce; it’s evident in the stories we’ve heard of Apple, and it’s plain as day in Isaacson’s book. They took brilliant engineers and married their work with the liberal arts — technology and humanity together in one product. And it’s true: Apple’s competitors have simply not taken those lessons to heart. Their products are cold, unfinished, uncaring pieces of garbage. Until RIM, Samsung, Google and others come alive to what Steve has said very clearly, they’ll continue to be irrelevant. Microsoft, amazingly enough, seems to the be only one stirring in this department.

But Steve showed us that anyone can live these values. From giant corporations to talented indies, we’re seeing a thousand Steves bloom. So it’s fair to say that while Apple will be his best-known legacy, he changed us all, and we carry a bit of his ethos within us as we create our next insanely great thing.

I’ll finish with my favourite line from the book, and oh yes, it is so very germane to this discussion. Upon Steve’s return to Apple in 1997, he confronted the staff, telling them what Apple’s problem was:

“Okay, tell me what’s wrong with this place,” he said. There were some murmurings, but Jobs cut them off. “It’s the products!” he answered. “So what’s wrong with the products?” Again there were a few attempts at an answer, until Jobs broke in to hand down the correct answer. “The products suck!” he shouted. “There’s no sex in them anymore!”

Now get back to work, and don’t leave out the sex.

When I was fifteen years old, I was introduced to the Macintosh for the first time. It was 1988, and before that moment I was almost completely ignorant about computers. But this strange, peppy little box with its monochrome 9-inch display ended up turning my life upside down.

Before that moment, I thought of myself as someone who would grow up to be a writer. Over the proceeding years, my ambitions changed: from writer, to publisher, to developer. Every step intwining me deeper into the Macintosh.

Fast forward to this evening. I’m sitting in a room at the library, talking to an older woman about OS X Lion. I help run our local Mac User Group, so I suppose it was appropriate that it was there that I glanced at my Twitter feed to see the news of Steve’s death. I stood and addressed the room, some thirty in all, letting them know the news. An awkward moment passed, and conversation resumed. I took my seat, and the woman continued talking about some technical issue, as if nothing had changed. A few moments later she stopped and asked, “would you like a moment?” I had stopped paying attention to her. I was wrapped up in my own thoughts. I was, in fact, struggling to maintain my composure.

It wasn’t until I returned home that it really caught up with me. Erin had already heard the news. She held me while I cried, me feeling as if I had lost a close relative.

Like perhaps all of you, I never knew Steve Jobs. I did see him in person once (at the keynote for Macworld New York in 1999, where the original clamshell iBook was launched), but his influence in my life clearly outstrips that personal connection.

It already seems trite to talk about how he’s responsible for the stuff that I use every day. If that were all Steve were responsible for, then his passing would be far more prosaic. He didn’t put things in my life: he quite literally changed my life. I keep coming back to the image of a neutron star: a small stellar object that itself is so small, but exerts massive gravitational power. Like that star, Steve orbited my life, exerting an incredible power by placing these inventions in my hand.

Apple products empowered me to write. They empowered me to become a publisher. They are empowering me to live an independent life as a developer, where I can make a real living, and maybe some day even more than a living, in the comfort and sanctuary of my own living room. And there would be no Apple today without Steve Jobs.

He isn’t just a shadowy figure lobbing technical artifacts into our lives. He has been a dramatic example of human aspects that we don’t normally comprehend as success-inducing. Impeccable taste. Relentless drive for perfection. Obsessive attention to detail. The ability to pull the best out of the people who surround him. I can’t overstate the impact he’s had on all of us, and of all the sentiments I see on Twitter tonight, my favourite is the one where we’re encouraged to get up tomorrow morning and make something great. Insanely great.

Tonight, my heart is broken, for fear that we’ll never see his like again. But I’ll hold out the hope that instead, Steve will have projected enough of himself onto the rest of us, that together we’ll make a million Steves. That we’ll take the ethos that is Apple, and continue working to stamp out the bland, the not-fully-considered, the good-enough. The double-talk. The not-quite-ready, the boring.

I’ll miss you Steve.

It’s with great relief that I stand on the other side of this Blitz Talk presentation for SecondConf 2011. I’ve done lots of presentations for larger groups, but nothing has been as challenging as those five minutes! There’s no margin for error if you have 15 seconds per slide, so I had to do a lot of practice.

The execution was marred with errors, but the worst part was that my slides were very dense with information, and most of the room wasn’t able to see them! So here is my slide deck with my speaking notes. Enjoy, and thanks for a warm reception.

Here are the slides for the presentation

When I was in my teens, I was a twig of a kid, tall and skinny. I think we all get our personal perception of our body type from how we were in high school. So I still have this picture in my head of myself as your average nerdy beanpole.

But the mirror tells a different story. In the last 15 years, I’ve put on a lot of weight. Years spent sitting at my desk for long hours, eating convenience foods rather than proper meals, have taken their toll: I’ve gone from an apparently normal 160 to a pear-shaped sub-200 pounds. And that, friends, is one barrier I don’t want to cross.

Exercise regimens have failed over the years, because there’s too much goddamn work to do, and I have a family to hang out with. So, about two years ago, I acquired a standing desk. It’s really nice and pro-looking, with a dark finish and a motor that lets me move from sitting to standing with the push of a button. I used the iPhone app Lose It! to record the modest calorie burning that I attained by standing all day (about 50 per hour), and for a time, I tried to take in fewer calories. But in the way of things, that didn’t work out either, and my weight remained the same.

Sitting is definitely bad, but standing alone is not enough. It was time to take the next step: walking while working.

I’ve seen a lot of advice written about walking while working, and I wasn’t particularly thrilled about it. The setups looked gimpy and messy. That’s because treadmills traditionally have handles and top-mounted consoles. People have found ingenious ways to strap keyboards and displays around that stuff, and I think my wife has the best setup that I’ve seen, but clearly that won’t work for my standing desk.

The answer came from an article by Lex Friedman for Macworld: the TreadDesk. It’s a simple flat walking deck with a tethered control panel. Including purchase, delivery, taxes and UPS Ground’s customs brokerage boning fee, it was about $1,200. The TreadDesk arrived about a month ago and I’ve used it every working day since.

I want to cover a few topics in this post: making a treadmill part of your office, some thoughts about the TreadDesk in particular, and the benefits I’ve seen from using it. Let’s dive in.

Fitting the TreadDesk into the Office

My office is the front living room in my house; it’s a pretty sweet setup that offers tons of natural light. However, my office was arranged in such a way that the treadmill didn’t fit. It’s a 5-foot-long piece of hardware that sits on the floor; finding a way to integrate it naturally into my working environment was decidedly non-trivial. Here’s a picture of my office when the treadmill first arrived:

TreadDesk actually sells flooring components that can sit around their treadmill. It makes a raised platform that turns the treadmill into a moving level surface, letting you sit and stand on the same ground, as it were. I didn’t opt for that solution, given the cost and the complexity of arranging it on my floor. So the first step was to move everything in my office to give the treadmill more space, but keep it out of the way when not in use.

The ultimate solution came about thanks to Erin’s clever use of paper cutouts to approximate the size and positioning of the various furniture items in my office. We could then readily determine the best way to arrange things. Here’s the layout of my office in its “before” state:

The new plan puts the treadmill and desk on the opposite wall, and gives me access to the full length of the main desk, so both treadmill and chair can sit side-by-side. My 24-inch Cinema Display is on an articulating arm, and is positioned to favour the standing/walking side of the desk, while it can swing to work with the sitting side as well. Here’s a picture of the new desk. The whole office feels like a more open environment, and I’m really happy with the way it turned out:

The take-home here is that if you’re getting a treadmill in your office, you have to find a way to get it against a wall — if it’s sitting in the middle of your floor space it’s going to look like shite, and you don’t want that.

TreadDesk: The Review

The treadmill itself came in a heavy-duty cardboard box, trussed up like Hannibal Lecter. There was very little installation; you simply pull it out of the box and connect the console.

The treadmill itself is the model of simplicity: it appears to be of pretty high quality, but it’s not as heavy-duty as treadmills you’d see in a gym: keep in mind it’s intended for walking only, and has a maximum speed of 4 miles per hour. To effectively work while walking, the fastest you could go is 1.5 mph, and I have it at an even 1.

The treadmill runs very quietly. Turn it on, set your speed and start walking; it’s that simple. In the four-plus weeks I’ve had it, I’ve found it easy to clean around as well: the back is easy to lift and get the vacuum cleaner through underneath.

As much as I’d like the treadmill to be a leave-it-and-forget-it proposition, it does require some amount of maintenance. Every month (assuming you use it every day, as I do), you need to re-lubricate the walking deck beneath the belt. There’s a provided tiny bottle of lubricating oil for this purpose, and it’s fairly simple to apply. I can see that I’ll have to hit the local Canadian Tire in a few weeks to get a larger supply, as it looks like I’m definitely not getting more than three applications’ worth.

There’s really only one complaint that I have about this TreadDesk: the console.

I included a can of Programmer Juice to give you a sense of scale. Holy crap, is it big! This is the sort of console that would be included with a Soviet-era treadmill desk. “In Soviet Russia, treadmill walks you!”

I have this fantasy of mastering electronics, putting together an Arduino playset, and hacking the signals to the treadmill to make a more elegant console. But in practice, this console, which sits on a very sturdy, heavy, pad-footed metal stand, works very well. However, the console tracks time, but its display is limited to 99 minutes and 99 seconds; once it trips over that amount, it goes back to zero. Of course, I’m walking for much longer than that, so I can’t get an accurate time for a day’s “travel” (of course, if I’m walking at 1mph, then I can calculate the time. But still!). But I’ve learned to care more about the distance (in miles, naturally) and calorie count.

Health Benefits

So I’ve laid down a small bag of cash, turned my office upside down, and changed the way I work. Is it worthwhile?

On the day my treadmill arrived, I weighed 198 lbs. This morning, five weeks later, I weighed in at 193 lbs.

I can feel it working. My legs are tired after a day of walking. After the first two days, I had to stop walking for a couple days so I could recover. You have to start slowly, even though walking 1mph feels absolutely silly. Start with a couple hours a day, and then gradually increase your time.

Even now, I still feel like I’m hitting my limits after walking 5 miles. Today I pushed myself a bit and walked over 6. Sitting down is bliss. In the early days, I found I was absolutely ravenous with hunger by mealtimes. Things seem to have settled down a bit there, fortunately.

The console calculator indicates that an hour of walking at 1mph equals about 80 calories. My six-plus mile walk today netted me 500 calories — a pretty serious dent on a day’s caloric intake! The Lose It! app tells me I get 1600 calories a day to eat with; calories burned in exercise give me more that I can use. So you can see how much of a difference even 400 calories (my average per day) can make on a diet plan.

To make a long story short, I do feel that the TreadDesk is going to help me lose weight.

Conclusions

I undertook the decision to setup a treadmill desk very seriously. The cost was extremely difficult to swallow, especially knowing that a lot of it was going to go into shipping and UPS! But now that it’s here, and now that I’m using it, and now that it’s proving to work, I couldn’t be more pleased.

As I work during the day, I see a lot of people jogging by my house; everyone trying their own exercise routines. The funny thing is, I don’t see the same people all the time. It’s a sure sign that I’m watching these people try to get into shape and ultimately failing.

The best part of the treadmill desk is that it integrates fitness into my workday. It’s a delicious hack that can have real benefits. I may not be able to change my over-stuffed schedule, prepare healthy home-cooked dinners every night, or get out for a run. But while I’m working, I’m losing weight. And that’s pretty satisfying.

About three months ago, I switched my Internet service from Rogers to TekSavvy. While the quality of my service with Rogers was just fine, it was an easy decision to make: TekSavvy leases Rogers’ cable lines, and offers dramatically higher monthly bandwidth (300GB vs 95), for a lower price.

The switchover to the new service took about five weeks, owing primarily to the fact that I owned my cable modem (Rogers required you to buy a modem for their “Extreme” service a few years back). Once the switch was complete, Rogers could take anywhere from 20 minutes to 48 hours to release their hold on my cable modem, and let TekSavvy assign me an IP address. Yes, of course it ended up being 48 hours, without Internet.

Last Tuesday, my Internet went down. I called TekSavvy and was told that Rogers’ local DHCP server for TekSavvy users was having a problem, and several other users in my area were also down. My ticket was filed, and I was told that Rogers could take up to 48 hours to respond. Two full days.

So I waited till Thursday before calling them back. Right away I was greeted with an automated response: cable service was down for Pickering, Ajax and Whitby. Most of Durham Region, for TekSavvy anyway, was without service.

As it happened, I was going away for the weekend to New York City. But while I was there, I continued to check on my network remotely. By my calculations, it didn’t come back online until sometime Sunday afternoon. A good six days without Internet.

Now, this may come off as sounding like the lead headline in First World Problems Magazine (featuring “OMG! I Broke a Nail!” and “They Ran Out Of Mayo And My Club Sandwich Sucks!), but as a work-and-live-at-home hermit, the Interwebz are important to me. So bear with me here.

My first question here is, who’s to blame?

TekSavvy called me today and asked if my Internet was okay. That was kind, and it was good to speak to someone, as I was planning to call them myself tomorrow for an explanation. The woman who called had no information other than what I’d already been told, and that it was essentially Rogers’ fault. Also, my account will be credited for the time I didn’t have the Internet.

But assuming we take them at their word (and I’ve no reason not to), am I satisfied to leave it at this? Apparently not. Because while this may be Rogers’ fault, there’s clearly something deeply broken here. In the ten-plus years I’ve been a Rogers customer, I can count my total downtime in hours, not days. And now, in the first months of my time with TekSavvy, I’m down for most of a week. It might be an unfortunate coincidence, but to date I’m not at all convinced that this won’t happen again.

Aside from a followup call from TekSavvy, I have no information from the company as to what happened, and what is being done to assure me that future incidents will not occur. They have no blog, no Twitter presence, in fact little to no outreach to their general customers at all, from what I can see.

All the nerds I know in the Toronto area are big TekSavvy fans. But when things go wrong, what can the company do about it? They seem to be at the mercy of Rogers. And I can’t help but think that Rogers is going to no effort to help us out.

I don’t know about the nature of Rogers’ agreement with TekSavvy, but it clearly doesn’t put support very high on the list. And while I would love to stay with TekSavvy, if this turns out to be the start of a trend, I’m going to have no choice but to return to Rogers, where having the Internet is more important than having meager bandwidth caps.

So if you’re out there, TekSavvy, this message is for you: figure out your problems with Rogers, yes. But also be more open to your customers about what’s going on. Internet isn’t a “nice to have”; it’s a utility that I rely on. Start acting like it, because I’m another outage away from switching back.

Late last week, HP announced that it was exiting the WebOS hardware business, little more than a month after the TouchPad tablet was launched. Since the operating system’s early days as a smartphone OS I have long admired its graphical style and adherence to quality. Of course, given the choice between iOS devices (the iPhone and iPad) and these admittedly high-quality imitators, there was no doubt as to where my dollars would go.

But as part of HP’s colossal failure to sell the TouchPad, they threw the biggest bone ever right into my doggy bowl: a $99 tablet computer, available immediately. I learned about this on Friday night via Twitter while helping my daughter with bedtime. Fifteen minutes later I was standing in an alarmingly growing crowd at my local Future Shop, and luckily was the first to claim one of the final four units they had in stock.

So while you may have read reviews of the TouchPad before, what you may not have read are reviews of this completely-new-and-not-at-all-like-the-original-TouchPad. Because at $99, the mechanics of your purchase decision are completely changed.

It reminds me of the Kindle at the time of the iPad’s arrival. At $479, it was a tough sell against the first-generation iPad, and we predicted its demise. We were right: the price has dropped under $200, and now it’s a completely different product. iPad owners are also Kindle owners.

Like any gadget-loving nerd would, I spent way too much time this past weekend playing with the TouchPad. And while I can see that it’s a deeply flawed product, I’m also a budding fan of WebOS, and have no choice but to root for HP (or some other company) to give it the love and watering it deserves.

Let’s start with the hardware.

The Top Twelve Problems

The Internet loves lists. I could put together a list of the Top Twelve Things That Are Wrong With The TouchPad, but let’s face it: the first ten items on that list would be performance. Performance, performance, performance! It just isn’t fast enough to run the damn operating system. Apps take too long to launch, but I’m not too exercised about that.

The worst part is the graphical responsiveness of the system. The iPad shines because a touch on the screen results in immediate and fluid feedback. The TouchPad judders and stalls when you swipe through text. It’s not terrible, pervasive and all-encompassing; sometimes web pages work well and performance is smooth. It just happens often enough that your eye and brain become accustomed to it.

At its core, the WebOS is aptly-named: the whole thing is a giant web browser, and the apps are web apps. Because HTML rendering and Javascript interpreting are high-level functions, there’s a lot of cruft under the hood to support it. Now, I’ve listened to folks like Marco Arment talk about its deficiencies as if they were incurable. I don’t believe that — I’ve seen the work Apple has done with JavascriptCore for iOS, so I know that it’s possible for web technologies to render smoothly on this level of hardware. To my mind, it’s just a question of the WebOS team getting the right engineering talent to optimize the shit out of the OS’s internals.

But I can’t help but think of what this WebOS engineer had to say about the decisions around the hardware. If his statements are true, HP decided upon the hardware inside the TouchPad even before they bought Palm. And that’s a damn crime, because we all know that improving hardware can compensate for the inefficiencies of the software. Did HP have the chance to put faster horses under the hood, and pass on it? I don’t know, but one thing’s for certain: this carriage needs faster horses.

Once we get past the top ten problems with the TouchPad, we get into two smaller issues I have with the case itself. The first is the weight: at over 1.5 pounds, it’s noticeably heavier than the iPad 2, though pretty close to the original. I find weight an important metric in tablets of course, owing to the fact that I’m holding it while reading. Especially when reclined, a 1.5-pound sliver of technology is going to dig into my stomach. And it’s also very thick, thicker even than the original iPad, while its high-gloss, rounded plastic finish (reminiscent of the iPhone 3G/S upon which it was no doubt based) feels unreliable in the hand, prone to slip.

And the home button. Like the iPad, there’s a single button on the face of the device. But it’s much smaller than the iPad, and not easily spotted; in other words, it’s hard to know which way the TouchPad is sitting with a quick glance.

Ultimately, I really feel like the hardware has let down this effort, because the software is such a brighter story.

The WebOS

There’s no sense building up to it: I really like WebOS. Back in the day I derided it as a cheap ripoff of iOS. But now it feels like one of the most genuinely original mobile operating systems out there (nota bene: I have not had hands-on experience with Windows Phone 7).

While WebOS couldn’t have existed without Apple, it’s clear they’ve made decisions that are refinements on Apple’s effort. This goes well beyond gunning for Apple’s weak spots like Flash support. It’s in the card metaphor, which lends itself so well to multitasking. And it’s also in its developer APIs (which I may write about separately later on), which are designed from the ground up to include as many developers as possible.

Aesthetically, WebOS challenges the simplicity of iOS. It has a consistency of design that delivers its message with confidence. It’s carefully-considered, understated and yet it’s very rich. This is not a thin veneer: the quality of the user experience permeates every layer of the operating system. The Window chrome, system-wide typeface choices and tasteful backgrounds are all a great start, but the quality of the interaction with applications (via a brilliant card interface) and a terrific notification interface leave you with the impression of a well-built and well-considered system design.

I also very much like the keyboard. Right off the bat, they integrated a fourth row for numbers and symbols, much more like a traditional keyboard. I found text entry easy to do — it’s clear a lot of thought went into mimicking the best parts of iOS in this department. Text autocorrections are very well-done, despite the lack of some obvious items like the two-spaces-inserts-a-period trick that I rely upon with my iPad.

The basic applications are well-implemented. The web browser is as good as you’d expect for being based on Apple’s WebKit, and it works very well. The email client is quite exceptional, working brilliantly with all my Google Apps email accounts, with one-tap support for various web-based email servers (including MobileMe). It uses the “sliding pane” paradigm popular in TouchPad interfaces to great effect. This view technique is WebOS’s answer to the iPad’s Split View, which has proven far more rigid and less appealing in portrait orientation. I really like WebOS’s implementation, which makes every app more like the official Twitter app for iPad. Which I like very much.

It comes with everything you would expect from a tablet computer: a calendar, notepad app (”Memos”), PDF reader, map application, address book, photo and video viewer (it supports the same video formats as iOS, though video performance suggests a lack of support from the on-board GPU), and even a Facebook app, if you’re into such frivolities.

Critics have gone to some lengths talking about the paucity of software for the TouchPad, but I don’t have those complaints. The HP App Catalog, to my mind, is a terrific app in its own right. It features a monthly magazine called Pivot, an actual editorial effort to feature recent and interesting apps with links to their product pages. It’s beautiful and well-designed. You can also navigate the store in traditional ways: I found the categories well-populated with titles, and search was straight-forward. Unlike the purported experience with the Android Market, apps are clearly shown to be designed for the TouchPad, and every category has several options. I was able to find decent apps for most of my traditional tablet functions: WeatherBug, WordPress, TuneIn Radio, TED, Simple Podcatcher, Paper Mache (Instapaper) and Spaz HD (Twitter). None of these apps would compare favourably to their iOS counterparts, but they’re quite good and with enough developer support could become much better.

One app that did stand out for me was Typewriter. It’s a Markdown editor that saves its documents to Dropbox. It’s in beta right now, but it features a unique preview method. You write in plain text using Markdown. But there’s a bar at the bottom of the screen; as you pull it up, it reveals the formatted text “underneath”. It’s very elegant, well-designed, and probably the most impressive third-party app I saw.

I can’t help but think that with more time, support from third parties could make this a very compelling mobile platform. Nobody knows today what’s going to happen with WebOS, but to my mind anything less than full-fledged support from a large company like HP would be criminal.

The software side is much brighter than the hardware side, but it’s not all perfect. I’ve already talked about performance. Performance! Performance! It’s the biggest problem with this device. But there’s also a couple spots where WebOS needs to focus.

First up is text selection. iOS didn’t have this really working on day one, demonstrating that it’s a non-trivial undertaking to do right. Sadly, WebOS still doesn’t have it figured out: I found the process frustrating and error-prone. It seems to be based on the same idea as iOS, in that you tap a word and pull at the markers to alter your selection. But the implementation simply falls over, with easy misses removing your selection, and juddery animation frustrating your selection.

Another problem is in scrolling text. iOS has a delightful attention to detail in this regard: if you start a motion in one axis, the scroll direction stays locked to that axis. By starting to scroll down on an article, for example, the scroll direction will continue vertical even if your finger drifts to the right or left. On WebOS, there’s no lock: the view moves wherever your finger goes. It’s a subtle effect, but makes a big difference in day-to-day use.

Conclusions

Those two issues are, frankly, not deal breakers for WebOS. If I compare WebOS’s foibles with Android (which I’ve used extensively on the phone side), it’s a dramatic improvement. Android is death by a thousand cuts, with software deficiencies at every turn. WebOS provides a very high-quality experience, marred only by its underpowered hardware.

How bad is it? Like so many digital experiences, it depends on where you’re coming from. Like so many of the folks in my Twitter stream, if you come from an iPad, the TouchPad is going to stand out for its poor hardware. This group has been, to put it politely, dismissive about the $99 TouchPad. But they’re a demanding bunch, and their advice should be taken with a grain of salt.

For the average computer user, the TouchPad is an incredibly beautiful and effective platform. Dramatically simpler than a PC, it still lets you do all the things you’d want out of a computer — web browsing, email, Facebook, Twitter and photo viewing. It makes a good electronic reader, it has good video support (YouTube is especially effective here, thanks to one of the better Flash implementations I’ve seen), and for the most part, it’s simple and elegant enough for less technical users to understand.

It feels like there’s been no small amount of gloating out there, particularly by iOS advocates, and that’s a damn shame. They are certainly correct that they still have the better platform, but we benefit from having a multiplicity of options in the market. If this truly is the end of WebOS, then we’ll have lost something very important.

So, in the final equation, is the $99 TouchPad a worthy buy? Holy shit, yes. As I remarked on Twitter when I come home with it, I feel like I’d donned a balaclava and taken up a blackjack, and robbed my local Future Shop blind. HP’s $100 million bath is the kind of opportunity that doesn’t come around very often, and while it spells a very uncertain future for WebOS, it remains that I now have a delightfully-designed 10-inch touchscreen device that can handle a broad variety of computing tasks. It’s a clear win.

If $99 is a bet on the future of WebOS, it’s one I feel comfortable taking. Having read the commentary and the (not entirely cogent) announcements from HP, I think there’s a better than even chance that WebOS will continue to survive. And now that a quarter million TouchPads are in peoples’ hands, it’s also possible that HP has seeded the market for future developers. I hope so.

Postscript: I also took some time to investigate the WebOS SDK. Given its basis on web technologies, it makes a pretty compelling platform to build for. If there’s interest from my readers, I may write about that experience as well.

I finally had an opportunity to play with a couple of the recent arrivals in the tablet space: the RIM Blackberry Playbook and the Motorola Xoom. Having read the reviews and evaluated the specs, I was looking to compare my Internet-provided conceptions with actual experience. The results were surprising.

Given the market superiority of the iPad, a potential competitor must carefully tailor their product offering to not merely match, but exceed the capabilities of the incumbent. And the well-established problems with these competitors is that, by the most important measures, these competitors have failed to match the iPad on two important vectors: features and price.

So it was with these thoughts in mind that I fondled a Playbook and Xoom at my local Future Shop this weekend. And while I have a ton of impressions about the hardware and the software offerings of each device, I found myself struck much more by the statements they made as physical artifacts. In other words, leaving aside what each tablet actually does when you get it home, how do they stack up against each other in the store? What impression does one get when these things sit side-by-side in a retail environment?

My impression is that RIM and Google have very consciously designed their primary interfaces to demo well.

The iPad is Boring There, I said it. I’m as big an Apple fanboy as you’re likely to find, but if you’re like me, you have to admit there was a tiny part of you that deflated when Steve unveiled the iPad. You were hoping the Springboard would have a little more in common with a traditional computer. But instead, we got iPhone-Plus:

It’s functionally identical to the iPhone UI. And while we have few complaints about how well it works, I think we can all agree it’s more Pravda than, say, Village Voice. But it gets the job done, dammit, and we’re there for the apps, not how it looks when you’re not actually using it.

Conversely, I think the Xoom and the Playbook are at their best when they’re not being used. Consider their standard interfaces:

There’s no denying it: these tablets look more interesting than the iPad. The Playbook in particular is a very sweet-looking OS, with lots of cool things going on. An application dock on the bottom, and a live preview of your running apps in the main view.

If you’ve seen the reviews of the Playbook, you’ll know one of its marquee features is its multitasking capability. The QNX real-time operating system at the heart of the Playbook can play multiple videos simultaneously and without dropping frames. So I tested this myself: I pulled up a gorgeous nature video featuring sharks and dolphins and grass blowing in the breeze. My 7-year-old daughter enjoyed the animals. But when I swiped into multitasking mode to play another video, she stopped me with “hey, I was watching that!”

Has nobody else asked why anyone would want to keep a video running while you go to another application? That strikes me as a cool feature to demo, but once you get the thing home, remains utterly unused.

The Xoom is similar in this regard. Its home screen features a giant clock, and its ability to embed so-called “widgets” on the home screen seem like a really great idea while you’re standing in the store. But overall, I found so many things going on with this device, it felt like a total mess: controls crammed in every corner, uncertain spatial positioning of individual screens of either widgets or apps, and that typical feeling of Android’s lack of polish, which ultimately hampers your interaction every time you pick it up.

But it looks cool!

Like a good movie, I think the iPad has succeeded based on the positive reviews of the first users. The Springboard is nothing to write home about, but the overall experience is so compelling that it doesn’t matter. But these new tablets may stand a chance when they sit beside the iPad. I think the ultimate test will be when those tablets get home and people have to live with them every day.

From what I’ve seen, I don’t like their chances.

You couldn’t say the warning signs weren’t there. But I doubt anyone would have guessed that the end would come so abruptly.

Twitter did it today: they killed my app.

It’s kind of a joke among developers to say that you’re working on a Twitter client. Let’s face it, there’s no shortage, right? Well now there’s probably gonna be. Go read the article for the details, but the nut is this: Twitter really only wants you using their apps to access the service. If you want to develop on their platform, it better be in a way that doesn’t interest them.

I wish them luck with that approach. But right now, it’s just put a bullet in the head of a project I’ve been working on for the past couple months. And since it’s dead now, there’s no harm in talking about it. I give you TweetStrip:

Click to see the full-sized image.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time discussing this. You can see that it’s radically different than the Tweeties, Echofons, Twitterifics and Hibaris of the world. I was so sick of that vertical list of tweets that I wanted to make something different. Something that took advantage of all those widescreen displays out there.

It’s almost entirely keyboard-driven. Use the arrows to move along the strip. But go up to reveal a minimized tweet strip, or down to pull out a larger detail on the currently-selected tweet.

I know I don’t have a chance to break the world with an app like this. It hasn’t been refined yet in the caring hands of a top-flight designer. But I felt that this app would have found a loving home on many a Mac desktop.

I guess that’s the point of this post. What Twitter has done today is ended the conversation on how Twitter should be used. As if we’ve all been coming up with new ideas, and mid-way through the debate, Daddy walked in, slammed down his whiskey glass, and bellowed “enough!”

It’ll be interesting to see what kind of kids we turn out to be. The kind that obediently scurry back to our rooms and play nice. Or the kind that get devious, and turn to other alternatives.

But for my part, I’m going to archive TweetStrip, and start working on something else. And my love of Twitter, once unblemished, now takes on a hint of resentment.

Revolutions don’t happen without spilling a lot of blood. And if I sound overly blasé about it, that’s because I’m holding a bag of popcorn rather than a gun.

Plenty of people are up in arms about Apple’s recent decision to charge 30% for all subscription- and content-based offerings on the iOS App Store. And they should be: for these people, Apple is literally taking away their profit margin, and sometimes even more. Prior to this change, large distributors could buy their wares at a lower price, put it on sale in their App Store storefront, and sell it for a higher price. Now Apple is taking a 30% piece of that sale price.

It’s the kind of move that will dismantle business models. Think of the kinds of companies that are currently operating on the App Store that will be affected:

• Book and magazine sellers, such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Zinio.
• Music subscription services, such as Pandora, LastFM.
• Video streaming services, such as Netflix.

There may be other services caught in this net as well (including some Software-as-a-Service offerings, like Readability), but I believe that Apple is really targeting these media services in particular.

The thing these categories have in common is that they are distributors of content. They are not the publishers, nor are they the creators. They are companies whose sole purpose is to take the creative output of one group, and deliver it to another.

There can be no doubt that Apple is declaring war on distributors. And why not? In Apple’s eye, they offer no value; in fact, they might just be vampires on the process. What purpose do they serve in a world where Apple has fielded over 100 million iOS devices? If Apple can offer the book store, or the music streaming service, then what purpose do these other companies serve?

But it goes even further than that. I believe Apple intends to not only remove the distributors but the publishers as well. Print publishing in particular is an industry ripe for tumult. At its core, print publishing is based on moving paper; its entire business model is fundamentally stuck in the Twentieth Century. In a world where companies like Apple provide a hundred million sets of eyeballs, what creator needs publishers to ensure their work gets promoted?

In this vision of the future, we’ll see authors and agents work with editors and designers to provide an ebook to platforms like iOS and Android. And instead of 10% of the sale price (at best!), authors will take 70%, and disburse payment to their assistants as they see fit. This vision puts publishers (as we know them today) in the dustbin of history along with their precious printing presses and forests of paper. And authors will take their place at the top of the money pyramid, right where they belong.

A lot of people will get hurt in this process. People will lose their jobs, companies will collapse, and some people will even cry. I really believe that the future is going in this direction, regardless of whether Apple pushes it. But Apple’s move is going to accelerate the process, providing that opening for ambitious and talented authors to slip in and show the rest of us how it’s done.

While Google is today playing the partner to existing publishers, Apple’s gravity will also provide the motivation for authors to appear on Android as well. The story of the Internet is about separating barriers between writers and readers. Once a critical mass is reached, Google will make a similar store available to authors, and everyone will gush about how awesome it is that we’ll finally have an “open” alternative to the “evil” Apple iBookstore.

And like a maple in autumn, the leaves of the publishing industry will shrink, fade, and flutter to the ground.

Short term pain A potentially big problem with this vision of the future is that it puts Apple at the centre of it. The company’s track record for bringing all media to the table is spotty, at best. They caught the music industry unawares, and the movie and book industries are skittish as cats in a dog pound.

So in practical terms, it may be neither quick nor desirable to have Apple acting as the vendor for all media. A lot of people will be pushing very hard against this eventuality, and I can’t entirely blame them. The result is likely to be that my iPad won’t be able to give me access to every book, every movie, every song out there. I think Apple is betting they’ll have enough, though, to keep building their user base.

Suffice to say, we’re entering a period of dramatic change in the publishing industry. You can say what you want about Apple and its motives, but they are bringing us something that we may not be able to say no to: more content, with lower prices. It should definitely be interesting.

I’m working on a new Mac app. At this stage in the game, I’m too embarrassed to tell you much about it. But in my long, agonizing quest to become a Cocoa Master, this is another stage in the journey, one I hope brings me measurably closer to my goal.

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to give that app my full attention. I took the lovely @erinlthomas for a writing retreat in the middle of winter-locked Prince Edward County, where we had nothing to do but focus on our projects. While she made brilliant progress, I found myself stuck, banging my head against Core Animation. Having read the documentation and poring over code samples, I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. And despite my relentless pushing against the documentation and Build & Run, I wasn’t getting anywhere. It was deeply frustrating, and forced me to question myself (again).

Fortunately, last night was also one of our quarterly Tacow (Toronto Area Cocoa and WebObjects) group meetings. There, I received many encouraging words from my fellow Cocoa-heads. David Leber reminded me again of a great quote from Aaron Hillegass:

"Yes, this is hard. No, you are not stupid."

So it’s time to take a deep breath, revisit my assumptions, and rush once more unto the breach. This project is back on.

It was with thoughts of last night, that I reacted to this tweet tonight:

Of course I nodded my head at that one right away, but I also immediately grasped why that is. Unlike so many other development environments, Cocoa is adopted by people who share a very common purpose. It’s not to become rich. It’s not because our employer made us. It’s not because it’ll get us laid (unless, I suppose, you’re Wil Shipley). It’s because we fell in love with the platform that we’re developing for. We fell in love with the Mac and with the iPhone, and now we want to contribute to that platform.

And it turns out that it’s really hard to do. You can’t take a night course to learn Cocoa, and no university’s computer science department (with rare exceptions) is going to spend much time on Objective-C. There’s nothing (yet) mainstream about Cocoa, compared to the enterprise dominance of, say, Java and Windows. And to my unending dismay, there’s only a couple places you can really get training (Big Nerd Ranch and Pragmatic Studio are the ones I’ve found).

Ultimately, the only way to learn this stuff is to teach yourself. And it’s really, really hard. For many people, even experienced developers have a devil of a time figuring out how to work this thing. There are paradigms at work that are unique to Apple’s development environment — good things, to be sure, but damned different. Learning Objective-C, while not a total cake-walk, was the easy part. Learning about design patterns, delegates, KVC, memory management, Core Data… the entire Cocoa framework. Not easy. Take it from someone who has been trying to learn for years.

But for those who have learned, there’s a common bond. These are the people who have demonstrated a remarkable mental acuity: an ability to stay motivated, and to stay on task. To ship. They’ve learned something because they wanted to, dammit. They felt it was the right thing to learn. They value elegance in both code and in interface design. They understand the beauty of computing, and they want to bring a small piece of it to life on their own computer.

So what Steve Streza is expressing, is this community of autodidactic, aesthetically-minded, highly driven people, who have something quite rare in common: this platform, this mountain that we’ve all been climbing. And without doubt, we help each other up that mountain, and that breeds a community that actually works, and that engenders mutual respect.

So that’s why. And now, in poor imitation of the best of those people, I will attempt to join them on that mountain, one misguided line of code at a time.