UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

I’m not sure how I feel about Domino’s Pizza. It would be easy to say I hate it, but then, if I really hated it so much, why do I keep getting pizza there?

Domino’s made waves a few months ago with a risky ad campaign promoting their completely revamped pizza recipe. Publicly acknowledging that your old crust tasted like “cardboard” and your old sauce like “ketchup” and your old cheese like… well… I’m not sure what, but it wasn’t cheese, that’s a big risk for a major chain like Domino’s. Millions of dollars in revenue were at stake. And if you’re willing to acknowledge that you’ve been delivering a decidedly sub-par product to your customers for decades, why should we trust you to make it better?

And yet, I still order Domino’s. It’s not like my pizza palate lacks sophistication: there’s an excellent local pizza joint (in the vaguely New York style that dominates most of the country) just a couple blocks farther from my house than the nearest Domino’s (which is close enough that I shouldn’t be able to justify not walking to pick up my pizza); I’ve relished the authentic Neapolitan-style pizzas from Pizza Biga and Punch; and I enjoy the contemporary American reinterpretation of what pizza can be (albeit in a homogenized, chain restaurant fashion) from California Pizza Kitchen. And then of course there’s Davanni’s.

And yet, even after all of that, I still order Domino’s.

I think it has more than a little to do with the fact that I hate ordering pizza over the phone. I don’t like having to have the person on the other end rattle off the specials; I feel like I’m missing something. I like ordering online, because I’m a web geek, it feels like a video game, and more practically, because it lays out all of my options before me, and I can experiment at my leisure until I have exactly what I want, at the best price available. If my neighborhood pizza place had online ordering, I would never get pizza anywhere else. But as it is, my choices are Domino’s (bad) or Pizza Hut (worse). So, Domino’s it is.

Last night we ordered a pair of medium Domino’s pizzas, trying both the new thin crust and the new hand-tossed crust. The pizzas were not great. Visually they were fine, and structurally they were OK — the crusts were actually pretty good. But the flavors were so intense, so recklessly assembled, that the overall impression was just a pure taste assault. Unfortunately, that pure taste assault has been carefully tweaked and optimized to trigger all of the proper pleasure centers in the human brain (or at least the American human brain), so even though I didn’t really enjoy the pizza — it was something to devour, not to savor — I just couldn’t stop myself from eating more and more and more.

Why?

Domino’s Pizza isn’t food; it’s a drug. And I think I’m hooked.

Note: I originally wrote this as a comment on my previous entry, but it seemed substantial enough to warrant its own post.

I admit it. Much to SLP’s chagrin, I’m not a huge reader of books. In the past I typically read 10-15 books per year, although more recently, with the lifestyle changes that have come with young kids and new technology (iPhone, Nintendo DS), my book reading has really fallen off. I’m not sure I’ve read an entire book cover-to-cover since I polished off the Harry Potter series in late 2007.

Anyway… the reason I mention that is to say that I have never been interested in a dedicated e-book reader like the Kindle, partly because I’m just not reading that many books these days. But I’m also not impressed by them technologically. The e-ink displays are cool (in a limited way), but beyond that they’re very unimpressive. I dislike single-function devices on principle. (And remember, the Kindle DX is only ten dollars cheaper than the entry-level iPad.)

Which brings me to iBooks, the e-book reader app for the iPad. I think I could embrace the idea of e-books on a device that also does a lot of other cool stuff, and even though the iPad has certain characteristics that are arguably inferior to the Kindle for the purpose of reading books — namely, a lower-resolution, backlit display, which can be harder on the eyes than the Kindle’s display, and that also doesn’t work so well in bright sunlight — arguments can also certainly be made in favor of the iPad as a superior e-book reader: you don’t need to have a light on to use it (meaning you can read it in bed without disturbing your partner), and the full-color touchscreen display is much more responsive, allowing for not just brilliant color images, but video and other interactive features.

And then there’s the iBooks interface: in particular, the way you turn pages. On the Kindle, you press buttons on the sides of the device, which “turn” the page in the form of a 3-second redraw. On the iPad, you really turn the page with a swipe of your finger, which causes the corner of the on-screen page to curl up and follow your finger movement as you lay it down on the other side of the “book.” It’s a cool effect, and it works incredibly well, but it wasn’t until I used it myself that I realized it wasn’t just a gimmick: you can stop partway through the turn and hold the page there, allowing you to see part of the page before/after the one you’re on. You can move it back and forth.

And that’s when it hit me that I do that a lot when I’m reading a “real” book. I will often be reading a passage and want to refer back to something I just saw on the previous page. On the iPad, you can do that, in exactly the same way that you do it with a physical book. And to me, that goes a much longer way towards making reading a book on the iPad feel like reading a book instead of reading dark gray letters on a light gray screen, and pushing flimsy plastic buttons to move to the next gray screen’s worth of text.

It is this kind of attention to the finer details of the user experience that sets Apple’s product (hardware and software) designs apart from the rest. In my experience no one innovates user experience like Apple. Eventually others catch on, but Apple has consistently led the way, for over a quarter century. And I don’t see that changing anytime soon (regardless of the continued presence of Steve Jobs).

Side note: iBook vs. iBooks. Apple let the iBook moniker for its consumer-level laptops die when it switched to Intel processors a few years ago. Now the name has a whole new meaning. I have yet to see anyone else make note of this, but I’m sure I’m not alone in this observation.

Tonight I visited the Apple Store at Mall of America (and, while I was at it, the Best Buy at Mall of America), and here are some things I observed or thought about during the experience:

I expected the Apple Store to have maybe 3 or 4 iPads on display. In fact there were at least a 16, and there were still crowds gathered around them waiting for a turn. The Best Buy had 3 of them, and a proportionately smaller crowd of waiters.

It’s simultaneously smaller and bigger than I expected. The physical form is maybe 80% of the size I envisioned, but the screen seems bigger, and the bezel is less… erm… excessive than it seems in photos.

The screen is just… wow. It’s a thing of beauty. Even though the ppi is lower than on the iPhone, it seems higher. The extra screen real estate makes an incredible difference. I played a round of my favorite iPhone game, Plants vs. Zombies, and was totally amazed at the difference visually.

This is how a touchscreen interface should be. The iPhone was just a warm-up.

When I first lifted it, I was surprised at how light it was, but before long it started to feel heavy. If I were to use one regularly, I’d definitely want to prop it up in some way.

iPhone apps look surprisingly good in double resolution. They’re intelligently anti-aliased in a way that reminds me of the DVD “upconvert” process on a Blu-Ray player.

Both the Apple Store and Best Buy had the demo units displayed on clear, angled, cylindrical acrylic blocks with a white rubberized ring on top. It put the iPad at a perfect angle for viewing at demo stations, and the rubber kept it in place while still allowing it to be lifted easily. They should sell these.

Apple might be singlehandedly responsible for another H1N1 outbreak. Just think about how many hands are touching these things. They should’ve had Purell dispensers at the front door.

This feels like a new beginning. Sure, the iPad has flaws. But this is the first of something new, and I think it’s an order of magnitude bigger than either the iPod or iPhone. (And not just in terms of the physical dimensions.)

I know it’s too early for me to get one — I want a camera, or at the very least 3G (the latter of which is actually coming, in a few weeks). I also don’t want to pay $829 for a 64 GB, 3G model. But I know by now that eventually… eventually… I will own (or have owned) multiple iPads. I can see buying the $499 entry-level model now, and then buying a higher-end model in a year or two, when the features I want are available at a better price, and keeping the old one around the house too. I bought an original iPhone 9 months after it came out, which I passed on to SLP a little over a year later when I upgraded to a 3GS. I can see the iPad following a similar path — but one slightly less painful, since I paid $200 more for the original iPhone than for the 3GS, and I don’t see the iPad following the same rapid price reduction path.

I cannot put into words just how much it pains me that I walked out of Best Buy, not with an iPad under my arm, but with DVDs of High School Musical 3: Senior Year and Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel along with two reams of printer paper. These are the sacrifices we make as parents. (Granted, if I were really being a good parent I’d refuse to let them watch this tripe — the Chipmunks movie, anyway; I have to admit I actually kind of like the HSM trilogy — but… well, OK, I won’t try to justify it.)

More to come…

Lately I’ve been realizing that my body of recordings has grown large enough that I could start producing the modern equivalent of mixtapes: MP3 playlists.

And so I have. Last fall I remixed and remastered my “greatest hits,” so to speak, from the past couple of years, and released the results on both CD and MP3 as Notated Scorns. I don’t plan to go that far with every future “mixtape,” but there’s still tremendous potential in 10 years’ worth of recordings to produce interesting new rearrangements of tracks without all the mucky-muck of remastering and having CDs manufactured.

Today I am announcing the immediate (and, of course, free) availability of the first of these new compilations: The Ambient Collection: 2001–2008. This collection includes 7 ambient tracks produced, surprisingly enough, between 2001 and 2008, in their original forms, along with some fresh new cover art. Enjoy!

Back in early 2008, I set up an iPhone-optimized Pokédex web app. I pulled information from some of the usual suspects in the online world of Pokémon compendia.

A few people have asked me why I didn’t build it as a native app I could then sell in the App Store for boatloads of cash (because, you know, there’s a huge untapped market for… this).

Well, that’s a good question. A few answers:

1. The App Store didn’t exist at the time I created it, and I had no interest in either jailbreaking my iPhone nor in supporting the jailbreak “community.”
2. I didn’t (and so far, still don’t) have a developer account with Apple, and I didn’t (and so far, still don’t) know how to build a native iPhone app. Web apps, though, are second nature to me.
3. It seemed clear to me that Apple wouldn’t (or, more accurately, shouldn’t) approve such an app. The entire contents of the app would be in violation of copyright, and there’s no way (that I could see) that Nintendo would license the content under the circumstances.

As far as I was concerned, that was pretty much it. The only way a Pokédex could live on the iPhone was as a web app. I’ve since learned that, whatever criteria they do employ in approving apps, copyrighted content does not appear to be a “dealbreaker” for Apple. I think it’s safe to say that Apple wouldn’t approve an unauthorized Pokémon game for the iPhone, but there are currently four Pokédex apps in the App Store.

Anyway… my iPokédex web app lives on. I just finished some updates: mostly some minor bug fixes, but also some visual refinements. Overall the improvements are slight, but I’m still pretty pleased with how well it works and how useful it is, especially considering that I essentially created it in an evening.

If you haven’t checked it out (ever, or lately), take a look now… especially on an iPhone!

http://pokemon.room34.com