In the fall of 2010, I began working “full time” for ContactMonkey, a Toronto-based startup focusing on making it easy to give people your contact details. At the same time, I’ve continued to run Innoveghtive, my own web development shop. I don’t do a ton of client work these days, farming it out to one or more trusted hombres.

This is a rather odd position for me to be in. On the one hand, I have my natural experience as a development agency, serving at the whim of clients who pay for my effort. On the other hand now, I am working for a company developing and refining a product. I get paid a regular salary; unlike for Innoveghtive, there’s no direct connection between the work I do and the money I get paid.

At first, I brushed off that distinction as an implementation detail. I accepted the job because I was frankly having a hard time making enough on my own (The work was — and is — out there, but clients’ willingness to pay their bills? Not as much.). But lately I’ve been coming to realize that there’s a fundamental difference between these modes, and to my thinking, they are largely incompatible.

That difference came to light last week. I have been developing a stats panel to help us figure out how people are using the ContactMonkey service. It was the result of a couple months’ work, doing needs assessment, design mockups, approvals, and the implementation. I had worked hard, learned new things about myself, uttered many curse words and been kept up late at night thinking about the problems tied to this project. So when I finally rolled it out and demonstrated it for the boss, it was with the feeling of a completed project, and this is where the accolades roll in.

But no.

Instead, what I received was a set of change requests a mile long, some of them quite involved. This project wasn’t done; it was just getting started.

And I was really pissed off. This was going to add a lot more time to the project. How was I going to fit this in with the work I was planning to do then? Time equals money, so now we have to drop back and talk about extra funds…

Wait a sec. That’s agency thinking. In a product scenario, most of those pressures don’t exist. In an agency scenario, I’m wrestling with the pressure to get jobs done as quickly as possible, so I can move on to the next one. If there are enhancements or scope changes during the job, that’s a big problem, and something that needs to be dealt with quickly, because it takes us out of the discussion about work, and back to where we talk about money.

The result of that agency focus is that jobs get done more efficiently. But they also don’t get done as well. The incentive isn’t there; the very structure of the business works against it. If you want more, you have to cough up more cash. Dollars equals work.

But product focus turns that on its head. The money question has been (or should have been) taken care of. I’m working on just one thing now, and instead of getting ‘er done and moving on, I’m iterating over and over again. There’s a refinement to ContactMonkey that I’ve never brought to any of the applications I’ve developed for agency clients. When a feature we implement doesn’t work out, we shrug and excise it. When we try something small, we see if it works and then invest more time in it.

The product focus is a state any agency might aspire to, but I see it as a stark contrast. If your web-based (or mobile-based, or Mac-based) product is a core part of your business, you’re a damn fool if you outsource it. The people working on it couldn’t possibly care as much as internal staff. The agency is looking to invest as little work as they can for the budget. The product person is there with a sole focus on the results.

So in that way, it’s compelling to have a product focus. But I have to shed my preconceptions about working in that environment. I’ll lose a lot of negativity, and quite possibly produce my best work.

Photo Credit: Random Sarah

The Mac is the computer that doesn’t get in my way. I have shit to do, and the Mac lets me do it. It gets bonus points for letting me do it in style.

I’ve been a Mac user for more than 20 years, and despite the headline of this column, that’s very unlikely to change. But since I’ve upgraded to Lion, I’ve heard mutterings out there. A couple weeks ago I was listening to Build and Analyze, wherein Marco discussed his frustrations with Lion. It made me remember all of mine, and so I started a list.

This list is not exhaustive. These are the issues that actively bug me every single day. There are other issues that bite only occasionally — after all, an operating system is a big thing. Without further ado, I present my biggest Lion pet peeves.

Mail

The built-in email client, Mail.app, is one of Lion’s top features. It includes a new threaded view, has a delightful full-screen mode, and supposedly operates better with Gmail accounts. I’m an all-in Google Apps user, with four email accounts powered by the service. From an interface and interaction perspective, Mail is totally brimming with win.

In practice, I became inordinately frustrated with Mail’s performance. It’s just one problem: while composing a message, almost certainly during an auto-save cycle, the app would hang for a few seconds, then crash. Depending on how madly I’d been typing, I might lose anywhere from a sentence to a paragraph, which I could recover from the Drafts folder on restart. It’s absolutely maddening to deal with, especially as I am a high-volume emailer, and became enraged as a crash would ruin my flow.

Fortunately, Sparrow is an excellent alternative that has also received some welcome enhancements in recent months. It works brilliantly with Gmail, and suffers none of the instability.

But that is a big black mark against Lion.

Battery Life

I have a 2010 MacBook Air. When I first got it, I marvelled at the battery life: a good seven hours under normal conditions. For all practical use, that kind of battery life means I don’t have to pack a charger unless I’m going away for a trip; any intra-day foray is fine on battery alone. That means I can travel faster and lighter, and that was one of the Air’s selling points to me (and no doubt, to many others).

That all changed when I upgraded to Lion. I would guess my average battery life is down to about four hours now. I have no idea why, but I’ve heard it from too many other Lion users to believe it’s just me. Apple sure as hell didn’t advertise a 40% decline in battery life when Lion debuted! I imagined that Apple would have received enough reports of this problem to issue a fix, but here we are, two point releases into Lion, and nothing’s changed.

Of all the problems I’m having with Lion, this is the one that has me seriously considering a downgrade to Snow Leopard.

Wifi wake from sleep problem

Dan Benjamin has spent considerable air time talking about this issue. In a nut: open the lid of your MacBook, and there’s no wireless connection. Under normal, pre-Lion circumstances, the network is re-connected before you have a chance to start using the computer. And on many occasions, this is still the case. But very often, waking from sleep leaves you with no network connection. You then need to go to the Airport menu, sometimes wait for your router to reappear (I’m using an Airport Extreme base station), then select it again.

This is the kind of stuff that shouldn’t be happening in 2011.

Spaces and App Switching

I was never a fan of Spaces in Snow Leopard; the behaviour was strange and unpredictable. The new Mission Control and related Spaces behaviour makes a lot more sense; combined with full screen applications, and you’ve got yourself a terrific solution for working with a lot of open documents and applications. In fact, the new Mission Control and full screen mode is the biggest feature keeping me on Lion right now. With my built-in trackpad or my Magic Trackpad (when using my Air docked with a Cinema Display), I’m a huge fan of gestures, and I’m not eager to walk away from that.

But here’s the problem: say I’m working in Coda on Space 2, and I Command-Tab to switch to Safari, running on Space 1. Very often, the screen will move to Space 1, but instead of showing Safari, the window will appear beneath that of another running app. Safari is the active application, and I sometimes will whack Command-R to refresh the window. But I can’t see the view because TextMate is sitting on top of it.

A Command-~ will bring the window forward, but it’s a clear and nasty bug. Again, Apple’s had two point releases to fix something like this.

Address Book and iCal

I’m not going to go into depth on these two. As Apple’s interfaces have tended towards open skeuomorphism, I’ve been less offended than most. But they seem to belong better to iOS devices; on the Mac they seem tawdry and inappropriate. Address Book, formerly a much-loved and -used application on my Mac, is now a destination I try to avoid. iCal, thank Christ, has been 100 percent replaced by Fantastical. Both of these apps are abominations that look worse than their predecessors and provide poorer access to their features.

Hope

Like I said at the outset, I’m not going away. Despite my complaints, the Mac is still light years ahead of Windows 7 in terms of usability, and my brain is too old and wired to fit the way things work here.

But I think something has become clear. While Apple hasn’t abandoned the Mac, I fear they haven’t put their best people on it, either. The kinds of bugs that I’m seeing here are wide-ranging in their impact, consistent in their appearance, and persistent given how long Lion has been with us. I’d love to see these issues fixed, and I remain hopeful that they will.

But there’s nothing like a little bitching to make me feel better about it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.