Tag: Apple

Android’s day-one advantages: how many are left?

When I chose my first Android device over an iPhone in 2009, each platform had exactly one device available and the decision of which platform was for me was clear.

Even back then, to those who had been paying attention to the smartphone world, the iPhone arrived as something that wasn’t quite a smartphone. It had an advanced web browser and slick Google Maps app that were both better than anything else available, but lacked a lot of features that existed in previous smartphones—the biggest omission being third-party app development. But the world very quickly forgot how anti-app Steve Jobs’ Apple was at launch, and how the ‘no, you can’t develop for iPhone’ attitude led to web app monstrosities skinned with brushed metal and pinstripes, which people quickly cooked up to look “iPhone native” in the early days.

Of course, the early days didn’t last long. An SDK and the App Store showed up a year later, but for a long time iPhone remained on my “still wouldn’t even consider” list because it was still missing things I considered basic functionality, things that Android got right, right from the start.

But it’s not 2009 anymore! So where are we now? Let’s take a look back and see how many of these Android advantages are still applicable today, 12 years later.

    • Devices available from multiple manufacturers
    • Outside-of-app-store apps available (not a walled-garden)
    • Almost entirely open-source OS
    • Third-party development possible
    • Multitasking
    • Custom input methods/software keyboards
    • Selection of devices with hardware keyboards
    • Cut and paste
    • Extensible, systemwide ‘share’ functionality
    • Not AT&T-exclusive
    • SIM-unlocking actually allowed
    • No desktop client needed for setup
    • Filesystem
    • Casually swappable battery

Things aren’t looking good! Apple (and Google themselves!) has chipped away at Android advantages over the years, though the two that remain on my list remain huge.

But I sometimes gaze jealously at the iOS world and its devices with competent support and five years of updates and wonder if the principles that led me to choose Android are still worth anything.

On wishing for boredom

This is not a post about Steve Jobs. I read enough of them in the days and weeks after his death. I read in these a lot of what I already knew and learned some new stuff for sure, but one Steve quote stood out to me in Wired’s obituary:

I’m a big believer in boredom,” he told me. Boredom allows one to indulge in curiosity, he explained, and “out of curiosity comes everything.”

I’m not sure if I’d head this quote from him before, but it put into words something that has been troubling me for some time: I haven’t been bored in years.

The first time I noticed this was in the mid-2000s, and  I only realized part of it, and I saw it through the lens of my Internet usage, particularly RSS. Even today, as the cool kids have moved on to following Twitter feeds (really, talk about a step backwards) of websites and blogs they find interesting, I’m still a huge fan of the no-bullshit, user-in-control, decentralized power of RSS.1

What occurred to me back then was that having posts pushed to me daily gave me more reading material than I needed. And since I could never get all the way through the unread glut of posts from blogs I’d subscribed to, my need to ever go foraging for interesting things to read basically disappeared. RSS gave me tons of serendipity (thank you, linkblogs!)… and at the same time, practically none at all. I miss the old days — some would say the bad old days — when I’d get my online entertainment and random bits of enlightenment by browsing aimlessly from link to link, being personally pointed to interesting things by friends on AIM, following latest links posted to proto-blogs like Pixelsurgeon, and… I don’t know, however else we found cool shit back then.

The second time I felt this effect of this was at some point over the last few years, but this time in a more general sense. This time it was bigger than RSS; this time it was about everything in my life.

I realized I have far too many options for entertainment. There are two reasons for this: massive digital storage devices and the fact that, being employed gives me an actual entertainment budget for purchasing paid media and fancy devices on which to experience it. Between a pile of unread books and bunch of e-books; more unwatched movies, seasons of old TV shows and anime series than I can name; and games galore that I’ll never finish (thank you Nintendo Wii and DS, Android phone and a still-kickin’ Atari 2600), I’m pretty much set for… forever.2 Even if I don’t seek out anything new, it’ll be years and years before I get through all of this. And it’s not like I can just ignore new releases and stuff I become aware of in the meantime!

I might be able to enjoy this world o’ plenty, if I could forget about what life was like when I was growing up, before we had the computing power, storage and network capacity to experience all the digital riches of more entertainment than we’ll ever need. I spent so much time being bored growing up, aimlessly thinking and daydreaming and such. This was before my first computer; I had tons of books and had probably read almost all of them, made good use of the public library, played with toys, action figures and stuff a whole lot and still found time to be bored and daydream because it seemed like I had run out of things to do.

If you live a similarly full, media-rich and employed first-world life, and can still ever find yourself so luxuriously bored, how do you manage? And can you teach me?

  1. Google Reader, please don’t die.[↩]
  2. I didn’t mention music here, because the way I consume music is a little different. I still clearly have more than I “need,” but I don’t feel the same sort of pressure to get through it all, thanks to shuffle mode.[↩]

Steve Jobs on unintended uses of tools

A choice quote from an all-around interesting interview:

The point is that tools are always going to be used for certain things we don’t find personally pleasing. And it’s ultimately the wisdom of people, not the tools themselves, that is going to determine whether or not these things are used in positive, productive ways.

–Steve Jobs, 1985

goatse mobile

I had a strange moment of serendipity earlier this evening.

I was reading some RSS feeds and I saw there was a new post to the Flickr tag “firstgoatse.” (If the term goatse is new to you, I’m not sure what to say except: don’t blame me when you look it up… now. The above link is safe to view, by the way.)

I felt like I hadn’t seen a ‘firstgoatse’ in a while, so I checked it out. The photo itself was unremarkable, but I was viewing it on my Nexus S phone and happened to glance away from the screen, at the phone itself. Something clicked in my head, and I thought of a way to breathe new life into the age-old pastime of showing your friends disgusting images and capturing their horrified reaction for sharing on the Internet.

HOLY SHIT YOU GUYS WE ALL HAVE SMARTPHONES WITH FRONT-FACING CAMERAS!! (It must be the future!) These tiny pocket devices are cornucopias of giving: lulz for us, lulz for the Internet, and horrific, can-ever-forget memories for our friends!

Basically, what the best app ever would do is display a horrific image of your choice… self-supplied of course, in case your poison is more tubgirl, or whatever kids these days show other kids these days. It would also capture the reaction of the person holding the phone via the front-facing camera, at the very moment of exposure.

A series of photos leading up to the moment would work nicely too. Heck, what about capturing a video of the entire reaction? For all I know, kids these days are showing each other the video equivalent of that guy bending over and… ugh. For bonus points, it might even combine the original and reaction videos into one, side-by-side, not that anyone would want to ever view that.

I’m ready to believe that a mobile app like this already exists. It clearly, however, can’t exist for iPhone, because Apple doesn’t allow that brand of awesome, and I can’t be bothered to check the Android Market (aside from, okay, my quick search for “goatse,” which turned up nothing), but this is clearly the kind of app that the wold today could use.

Well, there’s a Mac app, but who can fit that in their pocket?

Hey world — somebody make this!

“Real artists ship”

I’m by no means an Apple fan, and don’t own any Apple products (though I’ve always wanted to play with a Newton!), but to a geek, it’s pretty hard to ignore the effects that Apple has had on the world around us.

This probably wouldn’t make it to the average list of Apple’s contributions, but my personal favorite is a Steve Jobs saying:

“Real artists ship.”

I take this to mean that you can keep polishing the product until it’s perfect, but it doesn’t matter how great it is unless it makes it out the door while it’s still relevant. (No, it didn’t take a lot of reading deeply into the phrase for me to come up with that, Mr. Hypothetical Snarky Commenter. An alternate meaning could be an explanation for pushing a product out the door when it contains bugs that may give others pause.)

I sometimes find myself spending more time than I should on something, in pursuit of getting it unimpeachably perfect. It’s a flaw of mine. I need to do something about that, but I’m not sure what… and giving up on quality isn’t an option. Consider this bug #1 in my public bug tracker, powered by WordPress. ;-)

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to ship this post so I can go ship that e-mail I’ve been crafting so I can finally ship myself some Zs.

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