aaron.vegh.caadventures in cocoa

This time was going to be different.

I knew that going out. For too long, we Canadians have traveled to the US, and essentially shut our phones off before crossing the border. And while I have a great time in cities like New York, Chicago and (most recently) Boston, there’s a great degree of handicap attached to being in a foreign land without that great security blanket. Having ubiquitous Internet is arguably even more important while traveling; so it’s ironic that traveling is the time you can get it the least.

But not this time. For this weekend trip to Boston, I took along my iPhone, and a little plan: to get myself an AT&T account, and get my iPhone 4 running domestically while I’m in the US. Turns out it’s fully possible, but it ain’t nearly as easy as it ought to be.

A Word About The Ethics of the Carrier Lock

The very first hurdle is one I crossed while still at home, and it’s by far the most contentious for anyone looking to accomplish this feat. When you buy an iPhone in most countries, the device is locked to a particular carrier. In the US and Canada, an iPhone 4 bought for $199 is subsidized, and is therefore tied to work only on that carrier’s network. This is standard industry practice, and as far as I can tell, its only purpose is to protect the carrier’s investment in the phone subsidy, forcing you to remain with that network long enough to repay the balance of what’s owed on the phone. This is why you should be within your rights to ask your carrier to “unlock” your phone at the end of your contract term.

But let’s be realistic. In my case, at least, I’m not looking to leave my carrier. They are still getting my money every month. But for three days, I want to get reasonable voice and data rates. So while I’m still paying Fido (my carrier in Canada), I think there is no moral dilemma in breaking the carrier lock to get it to work in another country. After all, that’s the whole point of the GSM/GPRS system: trans-national compatibility! The Europeans have been enjoying this for many years, and by gum, I want to join the party.

This whole conversation would be moot if my carrier made me a decent offer to use my plan in the US. But that’s of course not the case. My carrier does offer a “travel pack”, but to take advantage of it would break that “reasonable” rule from the last paragraph. Here’s what Fido has to offer (I believe that Rogers has an identical plan):

You can see the whole page here. That’s a lot of money for very little data.

Picking the US Plan

Conversely, AT&T offers Pay As You Go plans for their customers, under a brand called “GoPhone”. In their perfect world, you can walk off the street, buy one of their dedicated “GoPhones”, and pay to refill it with voice minutes and data as needed. You can buy a refill card for prices starting at $25, which gives you a certain amount of voice calling. You can also buy a block of 100 MB of data for $20. This isn’t exactly stellar, but it’s way better than what Fido has on offer.

But it’s not an easy proposition. First off, that carrier lock needs unlocking. Then, you have to talk AT&T into giving you a SIM card for their network (and remember it needs to be a micro-SIM if you’ve got an iPhone 4). Then you have to activate the SIM, which gives you a phone number and allows you to add minutes and data.

Unfortunately, much of your success in this will rely on your luck in finding a cooperative AT&T store clerk. In my case, I was able to acquire a micro-SIM from one AT&T store, but he wouldn’t activate it for me, insisting that it wouldn’t work in an iPhone (he’s right, by the way, but there’s a very simple workaround which I’ll get to momentarily). Fortunately, there was another store just up the street where the guy was willing to just do his freaking job and give me what I was asking for.

Okay, that was a lot of narrative to get to a step-by-step process. Here’s exactly what you need to do to go from locked Canadian iPhone to unlocked, American, Pay As You Go:

1. Jailbreak your iPhone. Oh, don’t roll your eyes. Jailbreaking is awesome, and everyone should do it (Reason number one is the brilliant, $20 MyWi, which creates a wireless network using your 3G connection). If you are running iOS 4.0, go to http://jailbreakme.com and it’ll be done in a heartbeat. Otherwise, downgrade to 4.0.

2. Install Ultrasn0w. This is the free tool that unlocks your iPhone. You can find it in the Cydia app store that gets installed with the jailbreak. If you can’t find it, check these instructions.

3. In the US, visit a local AT&T store. Tell them you are visiting from another country, and would like to activate a SIM for your phone. If they ask what phone you’ve got, cough and mutter it under your breath. Don’t meet their eyes. Say it’s for a friend. But above all else, be insistent that it’s cool, you know what you’re doing, and if they could just do what you ask and stop injecting their brain-melting ignorance, then your feelings of stabby-ness will blissfully subside. Tell them you want to use their GoPhone plans. The SIM card should cost you nothing; it’s the gateway to paying them to be on their network. If they have a SIM card to give you, you should be able to get at least that. (In my case, I had to get that on one trip, and visit a different store to activate it.)

4. During activation, choose your options. They have a number of options in their GoPhone portfolio. I chose a $3/day unlimited calling plan, which gets activated automatically whenever you make a call. I also got the $20 100MB data package. Be wary about this one, though: it automatically gets renewed every month unless you cancel it, which you can easily do from their web site. I got plenty of warning about this, but just keep an eye.

5. Change your APN (Access Point Name). This is the trick to making it all work. The first AT&T guy I visited said the iPhone wouldn’t work, and it’s because of the APN. But it turns out you can change it very easily, and it doesn’t require a jailbreak (although let’s face it, you probably had to do it already to get here). Just visit http://unlockit.nz, and follow the instructions to have a profile created and installed for the AT&T network. Essentially, this profile just tells your phone the name of its network, and the server to look to for getting online. When you return to your home country, you can easily remove the profile by going to Settings > General > Profile.

6. Pop in the new SIM card. There is no step 7.

From that point on, it was like I was an American using my iPhone in my own damn country.

Of course, I reset the data usage counter so I could keep an eye on my progress against the 100MB that I purchased (Settings > Usage > Reset Statistics). Turns out that you really can burn through that pretty quick, especially if you tether to your MacBook! And even as I write this on the evening of an unexpected extra night in Boston (damn you, rain!), I just tripped over 100MB, shutting down the wireless party. Ah well. To refresh another 100MB, just dial *611 on your phone and follow the instructions.

I only have one more comment to make before I wrap this up. American iPhone users have been complaining about AT&T’s quality of service since the launch back in 2007. As a Canadian spoiled by the delicious Rogers/Fido network, I very quickly learned how right they are. Of course I can’t speak for anywhere else in the US, but the reliability of my service in Boston was absolutely terrible. In Fenway Park, for example, I spent most of the time on Edge networking, and even that was next to useless. In other parts of the city, I’d show four or five bars, but still not get a connection to the network. It was appalling compared to what I’m used to at home.

But the good news is, having gone through this pain, I now have a SIM card that I can swap into my phone anytime I visit the States, charge it up with data and minutes, and move on with my life. It’s a pretty sweet feeling.

Okay, pop quiz: what’s going to be on the next iPad’s feature list?

You’d probably say one thing right away: the same Retina Display that has made the iPhone 4 such a treat. After all, one look at the precision and crispness of that display, its indistinguishability from paper, its placement directly beneath the glass such that you feel like you’re manipulating the pixels directly, and it’s clear this technology will be propagating everywhere Apple needs to show stuff.

Some developers I follow on Twitter talk about the Retina Display like it’s a sine qua non; without it, the iPad (which lacks it) is a greatly diminished experience. Apple must love to hear that.

This hasn’t been my opinion. Since acquiring the iPhone 4 last Friday, I’ve marvelled at the quality of the display, but I noted that it hasn’t changed the rules for how and to what extent you present information to the user. In other words, while the pixels have gotten smaller, your finger is stubbornly the same size.

But that’s not to say I won’t be excited by the Retina Display-enabled iPad when it arrives. And that’s the nut here: Apple is the expert at this technique of predictive marketing, and they’ve been doing it for a very long time.

For a company that has a track record for introducing “totally new” products (the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad), there’s always a thread, a technology story, that users can trace from what already exists to the new device. The Retina Display is just the latest example. Go back one step: before the iPhone 4 came out, we had the iPad with its super-fast Apple A4 chip. The company went to great pain to tell us all about it. And the early press, along with direct experience, showed us that the A4 was indeed blindingly fast.

Gee, wouldn’t it be great if that chip were in the next iPhone? So when that did happen, we already knew what we were getting, so to speak. No matter what else the iPhone 4 featured, we knew it would run apps like nobody’s business.

Other examples abound, where the company has introduced features on one platform, and rolled it out to successive generations of product. On the Mac side, recall Apple’s introduction of (what I like to think of as) their next-generation power management system, on the 17-inch MacBook Pro. For the first time, they offered a ten-hour battery life, owing to a significantly larger battery and vastly improved electronics for managing it. I had just bought the previous-generation 15-inch MacBook Pro, so I was stuck with my measly 2.5-hour battery life.

Over the past two years, that technology has trickled down into all of Apple’s laptops, even the white polycarbonate MacBook. And I couldn’t be more excited: I know what I’m getting when I get my next laptop, and that improved, well-understood benefit will ensure that I upgrade.

The ignorant people talk about Apple as if they’re all about surface appeal. We know better: many companies — including Apple — nail that on the first iteration of a product. But the company continually hones its offerings, adding new improvements that are so clearly superior to what they had before, that users feel compelled to upgrade. Hence the lines on iOS device launch days.

No other company is in a position to so successfully work their customers in the same way. I dismiss Microsoft and its PC hegemony out of hand — they are more interested in preserving their lead and stopped innovating years ago. Google with Android comes close, but its hardware ecosystem is so complicated that we need a scorecard to tell the difference between identical hardware from the same vendor (Samsung, I’m looking at you).

How the hell are users supposed to connect one innovation with the next-generation’s offering? In short, they can’t. And that means a customer isn’t going to have a particular loyalty to the brand. That customer will buy whatever phone the guy at the store recommends that year, and they’ll probably come in again two years later and do the same thing.

An Apple customer, on the other hand, will actively seek out the next iPhone when their contract is up, and they’ll know exactly what they’re getting: something already great, but even better. Apple has spoiled us for the next model, and every launch is not just an ad for that product, but for the next iteration of the other products.

Ever get the feeling that this company is an unstoppable juggernaut?

I took a call today from a potential new client. As with many such interactions, there’s always an underlying tension. They want to know, “can I afford this guy?”, while I want to know, “can they afford to pay what I’m worth?” Unfortunately, one of the chief struggles in my business is separating one kind from the other.

I’d spoken with this client last December. The general site had been outlined, and she needed to get her ducks in a row before moving any further. A promise to call back “in a week or two” turned into almost seven months! When she called out of the blue today, I didn’t feel bad asking her to bring me back up to speed on who she was.

We spent a good half hour talking about her site and the scale of the job. We were doing the dance. I was aching to get to the part where I could gauge her spending tolerances, while she was just trying to sort out whether I was able to accomplish what she needed to do.

At last, we came to the deciding issue. One part of the job called for an email marketing system. I advised that she look into a solution such as Campaign Monitor or MailChimp, two services that provide brilliant marketing tools, and are dramatically affordable (to say they make it up on volume would be an understatement!) — not to mention, easily integrated into a web app using their APIs.

“I have looked at MailChimp,” she said, “but I didn’t want to spend that much.”

That sound you heard around 2:30 pm today was my heart sinking into the depths of my black, black soul.

In the subsequent clarification, I told her that what we were talking about constituted about $3500 – $5000 worth of work. Turns out she had a budget of about $500. I politely suggested that if she decides to reconsider her budget, I’d be happy to help her out, but until then she might want to consider other options.

After hanging up and taking a moment to utter a curse or two for the wasted time away from a tight deadline, I was left with a sense of powerlessness. On the one hand, there’s no doubt that I was dealing with someone who simply didn’t understand the scope of the work she was asking for. On the other hand, it’s perfectly understandable that these kinds of misunderstandings occur. After all, application development is a non-trivial undertaking, and it’s a black box to those who don’t practice this particular dark art. I get the feeling that clients assume I simply configure a few check boxes, and boom! the site is live.

But that is entirely not the case. As I’ve been learning more and more of late, developing web sites is almost never a simple matter. As soon as you go beyond a simple, static five page site, you’re in a land where you need professional help. This client knew Dreamweaver, but was of course completely helpless considering server-side functionality, e-commerce and email marketing integration. That stuff takes specialized expertise, a great deal of time spent educating, working with third-party vendors, developing, testing and deploying. And then, after those months pass, and the invoice is submitted, there are the requisite months of waiting to get paid!

It’s a difficult business, and I feel quite strongly that clients don’t understand it. So if today’s experience has taught me anything, it’s that perhaps we should be looking for ways to educate our clients on the realities of this kind of work. It’s not an easy job, but i think it would go a long way towards avoiding uncomfortable phone calls.

In the 2000 movie High Fidelity, there’s a scene where Barry (Jack Black) receives a response for a poster he’s put up in the store. The poster is a wanted ad looking for “hip young gunslingers”; a guitarist who is “into” four particular bands. Although the scene isn’t foreshadowed, we come to understand that the poster has been up for a very long time, and that this is the first response Barry’s had for it.

It is in that spirit that I write this post; it is my own standing offer looking for the right partner.

After three years of working as a solo web developer, I’ve come to realize that I will never achieve greatness alone. I’m certainly getting by, to be sure, but I now understand that true success can only come with the contribution of a complementary skill set.

I’m a big fan of the podcasts done by Dan Benjamin. His show, The Pipeline, is my favourite, wherein he interviews fascinating, successful people in the web, Mac and general tech sector. As I listened, these people explained their success as a matter of having the right product, or working hard, or meeting the right people. But what they didn’t dwell on was something they all seemed to have in common: a partner who helped them drive the work forward, who did what they could not, who shared their vision to deliver something worthwhile.

To me the equation is pretty simple: solo developers achieve modestly. Partners can take on the world.

Which is why I am looking for the right partner. Someone who will bring the same enthusiasm as I have to the development of something truly great. And by “something”, I’m referring to developing something for the Mac and/or iPhone.

Let’s start making lists. Here’s what I would bring to a partnership:

* A bunch of (cheap) ideas
* Junior-to-intermediate coding experience for Mac and iPhone (I have one app in the App Store)
* A great deal of web programming experience (PHP/MySQL, Ruby on Rails)
* Design experience, including award-winning logo design
* User interface design accreditation
* A persnickety eye for detail
* Great knowledge of the indie Mac developer community

And what would you bring? I don’t want to be absolutist about this, but here are some things I have in mind:

* Intermediate-to-advanced coding experience for Mac/iPhone
* Energy and optimism
* A love of technology
* A desire to make something great
* A nagging notion that a partner would help realize your dreams

Just as Barry’s gunslinger respondent  had to be “into” some particular bands, you should probably admire these companies:

1. Panic
2. OmniGroup
3. Rogue Amoeba

These are guys who stand for terrific, leading products, developed with care and an eye for detail. That’s what I want to do as well.

As I said at the top, this is a standing offer. I don’t expect the right person to jump out right away. I just want to put the word out. If this isn’t you, take a second to think who it might be, and please forward this along. From time to time, I’ll tweet the link to this post again, and see if anyone’s circumstances have changed.

Who knows? One day, out of the blue, this poster will be torn off the wall and placed in front of me. I’m looking forward to that day.

Want to talk? Email me: aaron AT vegh DOT ca.

Much digital ink has been spilled over the economic and social ramifications of Apple’s App Store. On the face of it, the App Store is a revolutionary platform connecting the users with its developers, doing so with an unprecedented degree of closeness. And while many developers have chafed (to put it mildly) against the fact that a capricious Apple stands part-way between these two parties, there can be no doubt that the vast majority have not suffered for it.

I am one such developer. Around this time last year, I decided that I would, once and for all, start and finish an iPhone app. My goals were modest — learn enough Objective-C and Cocoa Touch to get a useful, working app on the store. I picked an idea that was equally modest: a source code viewer to help patch a deficiency of Apple’s Mobile Safari browser.

While the initial proof-of-concept — pulling source code from a web page and displaying it in an iPhone app — proved trivial, building a useful, working app around it ended up taking many months, punctuated by several periods of self-loathing, frustration, re-reading of documentation, commiserating with fellow developers, or working on my book.

But I finally did it. As of late April 2010, Code is now available on the App Store. And insofar as I wanted to meet a particular set of goals, I would have to say that I succeeded brilliantly. I now grok iPhone programming, to an extent that I am confident that I could learn the bits of the API that I haven’t used yet. When the iPad was imminent, I had the confidence to delay my launch for a couple weeks so I could prep the iPad version, and the code for that platform was cleaner than the iPhone version.

Having done all this, there have been unexpected lessons from my experience on the App Store, and it’s these that I want to share today.

As you know, most apps on the store are set at bargain-basement prices: mostly 99 cents. The iPad lifted the trend to a small extent, but anything over $5 appears to be reserved for apps with near-desktop-like functionality. Consequently, I priced Code at $1.99. I was originally planning to go with the herd at a buck, but with my app available as a universal binary (it works both on the iPhone and iPad), I figured the extra cost was justifiable.

With over a month’s worth of sales under my belt, I realize how laughable my concern over pricing has been. There’s really only one way to adequately express how little money a developer can make, and that’s to show the numbers. I don’t know of anyone else who’s done this, but as you’ll see, I gain little from keeping it a secret. Here, for your education and amusement, are my sales for the month of May (which hasn’t ended yet, but hey, you get the idea):

The great power and promise of the App Store is that it exposes you to the many millions of iPhone users. The allure for the users is that they get access to “The Long Tail”. Well, one thing they never talk about is how being a creator supplying the Long Tail is a thankless, poverty-inducing task.

While the media and Twitterati focus on the smash hits of the iPhone world, where indeed, you could make millions, it’s equally clear that the vast majority of developers could never make more than an hour’s wages in a month. And be told that their app is too expensive, to boot!

I want to be clear right now: I’m not bitter. Honest! I never planned to become independently wealthy off Code. But seeing these numbers makes it clear that developers need to do some hard, honest math when they consider pricing their apps.

When you price low, you need to sell more. While it’s easy to tell yourself that pricing with the average will help people buy your app, it’s harder to face the reality that most people are simply not going to see your app to make the decision anyway. After Code launched, I went through the motions, sending promo codes to every review site and blogger I could dig up. I ran the gamut of blogs, seeding any relevant forum with a mention of my app. I have Google search notifications and Twitter notifications, letting me know when anyone is wondering about viewing source code on the iPhone, so I can jump in with a helpful hint.

The fact is, there are too many others doing the same thing; consequently, my app hasn’t been reviewed, and likely won’t be. And given the numbers, yours probably won’t be reviewed either, nor mentioned by some influential blogger.

So, you’ve priced your app so you make a buck a sale. That means you need to sell at least 500 a month if you want to make it worth doing (your tolerances will be different, of course, but I’m just throwing out a number here). As you can see, I’m nowhere near 500 sales a month. We’re orders of magnitude away from that.

Moving on

Is that it? Abandoning the iPhone as the failure it so clearly is? Naw. There are certainly planned features that I may not have the time to implement for Code — as you can see, the economics make it hard to justify doing more than bug fixes at this point — but I’m not ready to say that the App Store isn’t worth it.

I’m not seeking limitless riches on the App Store, but I do want to prove that with intelligence (and the right idea) one could make a good living.

As I began by saying, much digital ink has been spilled over the App Store. One of my favourite opinions on the App Store was written a long time ago now, so long that I can’t remember who said it (hopefully you can help in the comments!). The essential point was that the economics of the App Store favour only two kinds of app: the “fart app” class of apps, that provide a very quick feature, and is quickly discarded as the useless trash it is. And the productivity app, which provides real depth, a set of features that will be useful in the long term. Only the latter apps, of course, can justify a higher price.

Code certainly belongs more to the latter category than the former. But when moving on to the next project, I have two goals in mind:

• Quality and utility first
• Priced to reflect the cost to make it

There is no step three!  I’ll be talking more about this project soon. Stay tuned.

When I mention to most people that I’m a big fan of Twitter, the reaction I usually get is along the lines of “what is it good for?”. And I think anyone who uses Twitter knows that the answer is “it depends”.

To me, Twitter is where I go to listen to people who matter to me. As my friend @publicfarley repeated just yesterday:

(And yes, I deleted my Facebook account a couple weeks ago. What does that tell you?)

But my use of Twitter is different from others’ use. To illustrate the differences, let me show you the profiles of three users:

The important bits here are the Follower and Following counts. As you can see, these are three very different Twitter users, and they will clearly use and think about Twitter differently.

As your average nobody on the Internets, I have a fairly even ratio of Followers and people that I follow. Then you could step up to the level of @danielpunkass, Daniel Jalkut. He’s a software developer who’s made a name for himself out there, and has a follower count that’s nothing to sneeze at. And then you have folks like @om, Om Malik, who are real big names, cracking a million followers.

I bring these examples up because there’s a fundamental change in the way you should use Twitter if you have anything over a certain number of followers. You go from someone who interacts with your co-Twitterers, to someone who’s broadcasting. I’m not sure exactly where that line is, but I think it’s safe to say that @om has crossed it.

For these broadcasters, I imagine Twitter must be a very challenging medium. Every tweet must bring hundreds of @replies. Every minute, people are probably mentioning your name, and these are pouring into you timeline. It would probably be enough to make me hire someone to take care of it!

But that wasn’t the case yesterday.

MarsEdit 3.0 is Daniel Jalkut’s software for writing for, and interacting with, blog systems on the Internet. (Full disclosure: I’m writing this blog post in MarsEdit 3 right now). He just came out with the new version last week, and most people seem to be happy with it. So I’m not going to spend my time here defending MarsEdit, or Dan Jalkut.

Twitter is full of profound remarks like this one. Most of the time I am more than happy to shrug, think “well, that’s your opinion…” and move on. But not this time.

Remember @om’s follower count? 1.2 million. One million, two hundred and fifty-four thousand, three hundred and forty-nine. It may just look like a big number, but trust me friends, that is a big fucking number. So big that I need to use the “f” word to describe it.

So that tweet went from an off-hand comment to a pronouncement to over a million people. And suddenly there are a million people who have now heard of MarsEdit (that’s good), but who simultaneously have been told it’s “a piece of crap” (that’s bad).

Let’s put this in perspective. Daniel Jalkut is a good guy. I’ve met him in person; hell, I had the pleasure of having dinner with him at Chicago Midway airport while a group of nerds awaited their planes after last September’s C4 conference. So while I hold him in pretty high esteem, the fact remains that he’s just a small business owner. He’s no millionaire (far as I know), and he’s not breaking the world like Om Malik is. To my mind, I can’t imagine a more clear-cut case of an asymmetrical relationship. And what does the giant do? He stomps all over the little guy.

Someone like Om Malik should understand the power he wields. As a human, he is going to throw out off-hand comments. But when that off-hand comment completely slams something without further explanation, then you’ve done a disservice, both to the target of your criticism (such as it is), and the followers who are listening.

So Mr Malik, you owe it to your followers to not just say something sucks, even if you do believe it, and even if you’re right. Your duty to your followers is to say some words about why you feel that way.

And to remember most of all, that there are real people attached to those products.

This morning, Apple made the iPad available for pre-order in Canada. At the same time, Rogers announced their data plans for the 3G version of the device. While they made an effort to match AT&T in terms of pricing (many details are still unclear), they added a third option that, for me, reveals the extent of their anti-consumer behaviour.

First, let’s see these plans:

250MB – $15
5GB – $35

These are monthly plans. Compare to the AT&T offering, which offers the same 250MB for $15, and “unlimited” for $30. Here, I can see that Rogers has made an effort to be comparable to what Canadians have seen happen in the US. At this point, I don’t have official word that these plans are being offered on a contract-free, a la carte basis, as they are in the US. In that model, you can change or cancel your plan at any time without penalty; you simply pay the maximum amount that you signed up for in a given month. Unofficially, however, I’ve heard that this is the case with Rogers’ plans as well. (Update: It’s now confirmed.)

In the UK and Europe, I’m hearing that there’s a 2-Euro / 2-Pound daily tariff plan available, which is surprisingly accessible. But we all know that Europe and UK are a different world when it comes to wireless data, so it’s not fair to bring them into the conversation.

Let’s look at that third data plan from Rogers:

Add to existing plan – $20

Hmm. “Add to existing plan”. So if you already have, say, an iPhone, you can spend $20 and have the iPad added to your existing plan.

Now, think about this carefully. If you look at those numbers, it should become very clear that Rogers has gone completely off the hook in terms of their data pricing, revealing without doubt that it’s an arbitrary, cash-grabbing machine. There’s a fundamental feeling of unfairness when considering the way cell companies charge for data, and this new multiple-device era we’re living in today has exacerbated it immensely.

Right now, I have one of Rogers’ 6GB data plans, for which I’m paying $30/month. This was a special offer made available at the iPhone’s launch, and I was (and still am) delighted to be paying it. But the reality is that I’m not coming anywhere near that amount of data. Here, for evidence, is my data usage for the past four months:

April 2010: 519MB
March 2010: n/a 
Feb 2010: 1.01GB
Jan 2010: 728MB
Dec 2009: 61MB

I’m all over the map here, but I’m clearly nowhere near 6 gigabytes.

And this includes tethering. Rogers graciously allows us to tether our iPhones to our computers, so when I’m oot and aboot, I can sip from the sweet sweet Internets while I’m sipping my tea.

So let’s add it all up.

Fact 1: I’m paying Rogers $30/month for the provisioning of up to 6 gigabytes of data.
Fact 2: I’m allowed to tether my iPhone to another computer to share that data.
Fact 3: Even with two devices using the plan, Rogers is still making a killing off me, as I’m coming nowhere near that limit.
Fact 4: For some reason, the iPad doesn’t count as an allowed device to tether to.

Does all this sound arbitrary to you? Further, to whose benefit is it to enact these arbitrary rules? Is it arbitrary in favour of us, the customer? Or to Rogers, who made the arbitrary rules? Hmm.

Now here’s where it gets “off the hook”. Leaving aside the aforementioned inability to tether, let’s look at the pricing. I’ll just repeat the two plans that matter here:

250MB – $15
Add to existing plan – $20

As consumers, we have a basic need that must be met when deciding to pay for something. It is, simply, the question of whether the price being asked is related to the cost of providing it. To my mind, these prices reflect a total disconnect between cost and price. The 250MB plan suggests that Rogers’ cost for delivering up to 250MB of data per month is $15 minus some profit margin. But what are we to make of the $20 plan? After all, I’m already paying for a 500MB/1GB/2GB/6GB plan. Given the range of data plans, it’s clear that Rogers isn’t accounting for the amount of data that’s passing through its wireless pipes. Instead, it’s obviously  a charge for pushing any single data plan to two SIM cards.

Think about that: $20/month to push a single data plan to two SIM cards. $20 for the equivalent of a train track routing switch, a $240-per-year maintenance headache whose sole purpose is to know a) what device is asking for data, and b) checking with the records to assure that device is registered to a particular customer.

I call bullshit.  This plan is completely disconnected with the cost of their business, it’s a cash grab, and I’m not going for it.

Now if, for whatever reason, you don’t have an Internet phone of any kind, then these iPad data plans may seem like a good deal. Perhaps they are. But for those of us on existing plans, I think the notion that we should pay for individual device-locked plans is outrageous.

I can’t honestly see why more people aren’t making noise about this, because if you swallow this pill, there are many more to come. What happens when Apple comes out with a MacBook 3G? You gonna get a data plan for that too? Huh? Are ya?

So thanks Rogers, but no thanks. I’ve gone for a different option: Spirit Jailbreak and MyWi. Now my iPhone broadcasts a wireless LAN, and my iPad is on whenever I need it to be.

Update

So it turns out that Rogers made a mistake about the $20 data plan — it doesn’t exist. That’s definitely for the best, given the vitriol I spewed above.

I love news. I have always been keenly interested in staying on top of current events, especially in the technology sector. But I get my kicks out of reading everything from the state of foreign economies to the heroic efforts of a dog to save the life of a child.

For most of my life, the news has come in the form of ink-on-paper. The newspaper is that daily device which packaged the latest news into a convenient format. But even the name is deceptive, confusing its form with its function. “Newspaper” is the cheap wood pulp smeared with vegetable dye. The news is the information that it delivers.

So when people wring their hands over the fate of newspapers, it seems they are worried more for the pulp than for what’s written on it. That, of course, is patently ridiculous. Both because of the fact that writers will write on, and because newsprint, done a certain way, is clearly alive and well.

A Small Aside, Wherein I Establish My Credibility

I’ve been watching the developments in the print publishing business with keen interest. When I was in school, my ambition was to be a writer. In university, I modified that aim: I would be in publishing. I worked for the school paper, and eventually became the Editor of same. I came to understand the privilege and thrill of connecting a community of readers with the events that matter. In my time there, I dealt first-hand with matters both banal and terrifying: from awareness campaigns featuring people dressed as gorillas, to being just around the corner from a tragic shooting death.

What those events have in common is in the way they tell the story of the community. Do it for long enough, and you put together a reasonably clear picture of what it means to live in that place. Newspapers, in this way, exhibit a localizing effect on its readers.

The Dark Side of Newspapers

But that communication comes at a steep price. Printing is expensive, and there’s only one formula for paying those bills: advertising. At my university paper, the advertising department was a completely separate entity, and we kept a strong barrier between editorial and advertising. Why? Because the ever-present fear was that advertisers’ interests would invade the news. You might imagine a local restaurant wanting to place a full-page ad, and expecting a positive review in the paper as well.

If there were any hint of that level of collusion, the paper’s bond of trust with their reader would be broken. And for those of us idealists who worked in the paper, “editorial autonomy” was an oft-repeated phrase, and we resisted the siren call of higher revenues in exchange for some plum puff piece.

Nowadays, there is widespread fear that newspapers, as an industry, will vanish. Readers are migrating to the Web for their news; as readership drops, so too do the ad rates. Papers thought that they could run ads on their Web sites and get the same money; that hasn’t panned out at all.

This has inevitably led to the closure of some long-standing newspapers, particularly in the US. What will happen in those communities? To my mind, they have lost a bit of the glue that holds their community together: the stories of who they are, and what happens where they live, will no longer be told in those pages. It’ll be interesting to see if anyone can tell the difference five years from now.

For my part, I see a real shift coming in the way newspapers choose to survive in this market, and they fall into two broad categories. Because really, there are two kinds of newspaper, aren’t there? The kind you think of when you hear the word “newspaper”, and the other kind.

To the former, perhaps the best example is the New York Times. If you’re in Canada, it would be the Globe and Mail (or by circulation figures alone, the Toronto Star). None of these papers are as big as they used to be, but they’re no slouches either. They are massive operations with millions of readers, both in print and online. With their resources they have attained a high degree of editorial quality, which means that people want to read their stuff. They do the hard work of reporting the world: international, national and local news, often in different markets. And in the short term, at least, I don’t think they’re going anywhere.

Now let’s talk about the other kind of paper. In fact, I have a couple examples sitting on my desk right now.

Where I live, we are “blessed” with two newspapers. Whitby This Week is the hyper-local edition of the Metroland Group’s empire (tell me that Web site doesn’t look like a domain squatter!). Snap Whitby is also a hyper-local edition of a broad chain of similar newspapers distributed around the world (though mostly in Ontario). I can’t begin to give sufficient vent to the amount of contempt I’d like to heap on these publications.

But I’ll try.

Whitby This Week is perhaps the most disappointing, chiefly owing to the deception that it promulgates: namely, that it is a real newspaper, and not a thin envelope in which is stuffed an outrageous amount of advertising. They put on a brave show, scraping the bottom of the barrel to find just one news article to plaster on that front page. This is a pretty good one for them: but are they seriously thinking that we care whether one homeowner is upset about a funeral home going up across the street? Oh god, what of the children?

It goes downhill from there. The next three pages constitutes the “news” section, larded with ads, and a tiny bit of editorial in the corner, of such banal consequence that I should sooner hang myself than let another event-less week go by.

Then, the muscular Op/Ed section, wherein the editors opine on the leading story — yes! more talk about the front page story I don’t care about! — and then some opinion columns by a few locals who have fascinating opinions on botany… and… uh…

Oh, what? Sorry, I glazed over there. Well, Whitby This Week’s content is far from engaging. But you know, it reflects the community, right? Not in that sense. I can’t believe that a community of half a million souls could generate such lack of pith. For example, here are some issues that get little attention in our so-called local paper:

• In-depth analysis of municipal politics, especially regarding the allocation of budgets;

• The state of business in our region, which competes with Toronto and often loses;

• Exposure of the strains of life in a bedroom community, with commuting parents and at-school children.

These are parts of the reality that make up this community, and this paper doesn’t do enough to bring them to the reader. But the reasons are clear when you flip through the paper: editorial costs money, baby! Advertising makes money. So within the editorial pages of the Friday paper, there is approximately an 80:20 ratio of ads to editorial — a revolting percentage. But it’s even worse when you throw in the flyers. It’s a veritable shit-bomb of paper sandwiched in there. Look at that picture above: looks pretty thick, eh? Indeed, the stack of paper is about 1.5 inches thick, and it’s all ads.

If that doesn’t convince you, consider their publication schedule. They used to publish on Sunday, Wednesday and Friday: nice, even intervals to ensure a smooth flow of news. No more: now it’s Thursday, Friday and Sunday. Huh? That’s right: advertisers win again by getting their ads in front of people on the weekend, when they’re likeliest to take advantage of deals.

It’s gotten bad enough that I don’t know anyone who actually reads the paper (unless — full disclosure — you happen to appear in the paper); instead, they get the paper for the Canadian Tire flyer. It’s an embarrassment.

Snap!

Snap is a fairly recent phenomenon with a very simple premise: take as many pictures of people as possible, and then put ads beside them. Every month, you’ll find the pages jammed with pictures of groups of people, at local events, smiling into the camera. I’m serious.

Why? Because those people call up everyone they know and yell, “I’m in the paper! Go get a copy!” And then, of course, they do. And look at the ads. It’s a mind-gamin’, money-makin’ machine, and it’s doing so well that they’re selling franchises — hop on now!

It makes me want to puke. But you have to admire their skill at manipulating the gears to make some cash.

It makes sense

So in the final analysis, it looks like newspapers are doing fine — as long as you’re a major paper, or as long as you’re an advertiser’s bitch. Everyone else is going down in flames.

For a long time, I was hung up on the form of the newspaper rather than its function: paper vs words. But as we’ve learned since the introduction of the Internet, that’s the completely wrong attitude. We probably shouldn’t care about whether newspaper lives or dies, but we should care about knowing where we get our editorial content from.

And I think the answer is pretty evident: from everywhere, depending on what you’re interested in.

News is a crucial instrument in the makeup of any community. It brings a group of people together, telling their shared story. My fellow Mac nerds and I are united, in a sense, through the news that we share. We may get the same facts, but our commonality helps us share the same opinion on those facts, through side channels like Twitter, or even (gasp!) face to face.

So too, everyone will choose their sources to make up their own “newspapers” — Facebook status updates, Twitter feeds, technology blogs, newspaper RSS feeds. Taken together, we’ll be fully informed more than any broadsheet could back in the Twentieth Century.

Now someone just has to invent a business model to take advantage of that.

Canadian technology and privacy watchdog Michael Geist reported today that the Prime Minister has asked for a US-style DMCA bill to be delivered in six weeks. This sudden turnaround in policy is an alarming development, given the current fair regime we enjoy today. I was moved to write a letter to my MP, who happens to be the Finance Minister. I’m including this letter below with the invitation to my fellow Canadians to crib as necessary in crafting your own letters to your MP.

As Michael Geist suggests in his piece, I’ll be printing and mailing this letter to Flaherty, Heritage Minister Moore, Industry Minister Clement, Harper and Michael Ignatieff, leader of the opposition. I encourage all like-minded Canadians to do the same.

Jim Flaherty
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A6

Meeting your goals is hard. If they are real goals, then achieving them is the result of long hours, lots of mistakes, and plenty of lost sleep.

Over the past year I had two long range goals: to complete and publish a large technical book, and to start selling an iPhone app on the App store.

And what do you know: I succeeded. After all the labour, I now have a new book on store shelves, and a cute little app in the store.

Mighty achievements, both. But after the initial accomplishment, life has gone on. I can’t speak for my book, but the app is a very minor thing, selling one or two copies a day; the book about the same if I’m lucky! It’s left me with a particularly odd feeling: while I’ve done what i set out to do, and while the goals were certainly difficult and worthy, their accomplishment has ultimately meant little.

Well, that’s depressing, isn’t it? Perhaps not, though. For while many do get published, and while many do get on the App Store, it’s clear that getting to both places is just a first step. A tough step, a rare step, but still just the first.

What matters to me now is whether we take that second step. And it’s clear to me that while I’ve taken two steps with my double goals, they are coming together in a single direction that may, at long last, provide some direction to my scattershot life.

Yes, I have a new project. It’s big and ambitious, but if done right, its success could really mean something.

Done wrong, of course, and I consign myself once more to oblivion.

See you soon.