UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

I’m a joke maker

Did you hear the one about the guy who bought a Kindle on the day the iPad was released? Of course you didn’t, because no one is buying a Kindle today!

Well, I’m sure someone’s buying a Kindle. I’m not sure why.

Waiting for the second generation

I can understand why some people wouldn’t want an iPad. I’m not buying one today. I didn’t buy an iPhone until 9 months after it was released. I probably will own an iPad eventually. I would definitely wait until the 3G models are out; I would probably wait until a future version is available with a built-in camera, and after prices come down so at least 32 GB of storage is available for the same price as 16 GB today.

Common complaints

Most of the critics (including Walt Mossberg and David Carr on last night’s episode of Charlie Rose), while generally lavishing high praise on the device, cite a common (small) set of complaints: lack of a camera for video chat, the awkwardness of holding it for long periods, and no support for Flash tend to be at the top of the list.

I can certainly agree on the first two points: a camera (or two — one on each side) seems like such an obviously necessary feature that I can’t believe it won’t be added to the second generation model; and although I’ve yet to touch an iPad, much less hold one, I can already imagine that I would quickly tire of propping it up and that two-handed typing while balancing it on my lap would be frustrating. But it comes with a nice case with a built-in prop (as demonstrated by David Carr last night on Charlie Rose), and more accessories will certainly be coming soon from third-party manufacturers.

There was an inadvertent demonstration of the potential physical awkwardness of the device last night on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon when the host and Joshua Topolsky attempted to play a game of air hockey with the iPad placed flat on Jimmy’s desk: with its curved aluminum back, the iPad was prone to skating around on the desk as the two slid their virtual paddles around on-screen.

Click here to see the video from Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. I’m so mad at NBC for their stupid embed code just embedding an SNL promo instead of the proper video clip that I’ve actually resorted to using the phrase “click here.” So, spare me further agony and just… click here.

Flash? We don’t need no stinkin’ Flash!

But the complaint about the iPad that is most divisive is its lack of Flash support. I’ve already made my feelings on the matter known (1, 2). I think there are a very limited number of circumstances where Flash is useful (or at least grudgingly necessary), but it has been an overused crutch for far too long, and the more the iPad/iPhone ecosystem promotes movement away from Flash and to web standards, both well-established (CSS, JavaScript) and emerging (HTML5, H.264 video), the better. I know different people use the web in different ways: I rarely never play Flash-based games online; major video sites like YouTube and Vimeo are moving to supporting H.264 alternatives to Flash video (and I can live without the ones that aren’t). But I would challenge just about any user of the Internet to make the case that their experience, overall, is improved by these positive uses of Flash more than it is hindered by obnoxious Flash-based advertisements and non-standard Flash-based website UI.

Game changer

Charlie Rose loves the iPad. He called it a “game changer” at least 3 or 4 times last night. There’s been some dispute over the iPad’s potential impact, but I think those who are criticizing it on its technical specifics — the lack of whatever they deem it to be lacking — are completely missing the point. I read something recently (which I’ll link to if I manage to track it down again) that was talking about how the upcoming Windows Phone 7 interface would have been just as revolutionary if it had come sooner; the implication being that the major factor in Apple’s success was timing. To me, this so profoundly misses the mark that it’s hard to even take seriously. As much as I hate to use the word “paradigm,” Apple changed the paradigm with the iPhone interface. There wouldn’t be a Windows Phone 7 without the iPhone, nor a Droid, nor any of the other major advancements we’ve seen in “smartphones” since the iPhone was released in the summer of 2007. Yes, there were smartphones before the iPhone and they did a lot of the same things. Yes, Android was being developed for a number of years before the iPhone was released. But the iPhone changed both the perception and the reality of what a smartphone can do.

This is what the iPad will do, for a market — netbooks, or whatever fills the void between phones and laptops — that is even more anemic than the cellphone market was a few years ago. The hardware physically fills that niche perfectly, but the UI is what’s really revolutionary, creating a whole new, far more intuitive, natural, and fun way for people to interact with a technology device, with an underlying system that is more stable and worry-free — it just works — than any computer before it. And just think about the amazing things the 150,000-plus iPhone apps can do today: not even Apple envisioned all of the ways the iPhone would so quickly come to be used by people of all ages, for just about everything. This is what the iPad will do.

I didn’t want one, until I did

Most people see the iPad primarily as a device for consuming media, and to a large extent that’s true. The most strident complaints about its limitations seem to be coming from those who create media, and I can understand where they’re coming from… to an extent. But the iPhone has become a powerful tool for creating media, with its camera and photo manipulation apps; with creative drawing tools (good enough to have produced several New Yorker covers to date); and with a vast array of music creation apps, turning the pocket device… the freaking cell phone into both a musical instrument and a recording studio. Just imagine what the same kinds of innovative thinking can do with a more powerful processor and a much larger screen. You might never find Adobe Creative Suite or Pro Tools on the iPad, but that’s old world thinking. If you let go of the familiar (and far less intuitive to non-techies) trappings of mice and windows, of plugging in peripherals and navigating hierarchical file systems, and embrace the potential of a new way of interacting with a computer, a new world will open up to you.

Over the past several years, I’ve read numerous articles lamenting the fact that for all of the advances in computer hardware technology we’ve witnessed in the last quarter century, the basic GUI concepts have not evolved one bit from the first Macintosh Apple unleashed on the world in 1984 — and its concepts were largely the same as those developed experimentally at Xerox PARC in the late 1960s. When will we finally have a new way of interacting with computers? And where will it come from? It’s not much of a surprise that it came from Apple, and it’s here today.

“Just now?” you may be saying in mock surprise. To you I say, “Shut up!” in my jerkiest voice, which I have just now realized is more seriously jerky than I had previously assumed.

What did I do that was so jerky? Well, nothing, really. That’s just it. I did nothing because I am a jerk. Instead of doing something that any reasonably non-jerky person would have done, I did nothing, and then I thought so much about how I didn’t do anything that I became overcome with guilt for my inaction and felt compelled to seek penance in the confessional of my blog.

As I do about once a week or so, I spent much of the day today at Coffman Memorial Union at the University of Minnesota. Never mind the fact that I am neither student, nor faculty, nor staff, nor alumnus. (Nor do I know whether or not it’s grammatically correct to use “neither” with that many “nors,” although I suspect it is not.) SLP is on the faculty, and my frequent visits correspond to our weekly-ish lunch dates.

Anyway… at one point in the day I was in the B-level men’s room, and I noticed an abandoned Droid on a sink basin. No, no no, no. I didn’t take it. I didn’t take it to keep (which I shouldn’t, and wouldn’t do; I’m a jerk, not a thief). I also didn’t take it to the lost and found (which… well). I just left it there.

Several hours later I was back in that men’s room, and before leaving I wanted to check and see if the Droid was still there, this time intending to do the right thing and take it to the lost and found. But for the entire time I was in the men’s room, there was some other guy standing at the sink right next to the sink the Droid had been left on. God knows what he was doing that he needed to spend that much time at the sink, but it was too far away from the urinal I was using for me to go over to it without seeming weird, and going over there after I had washed my hands at a different sink would seem even more weird, and besides, I was just getting pissed at that guy for taking so damn long at the sink!

People who take forever doing whatever they’re doing in public restrooms always bug me, perhaps because it prevents me from taking forever myself without feeling self-conscious about it. Perhaps I’m just resentful of guys who are so indifferent to what jerks like me think about them, that they can happily go about whatever it is they want to do without worrying. Because I worry a lot, about things both important and irrelevant.

Obviously.

In the end, I never did find out what happened to the Droid, nor did I figure out why that guy needed to spend so long at the sink. Come to think of it, I didn’t really learn anything from this whole experience. If anything I’m even more bitter and worried than I was before. What a jerk.

There were two huge news events yesterday, both of which made me more hopeful about the future of our nation, for drastically different reasons.

First, health care reform. I’ve been a big supporter of this since the beginning. The promise of reform of our woefully dysfunctional health insurance system was a key issue of President Obama’s campaign, and I am impressed that he stuck to it against considerable odds. Charting a course both idealistic and pragmatic, he achieved something other presidents have tried, unsuccessfully, for decades.

Is it a flawed and perhaps inadequate reform? Yes. But it’s a start. We’ve known we were on the wrong road, a dead-end road, for decades. We’re not back on the right road yet, but at least we’ve finally turned around and are heading in the right direction.

I’ll save the particulars for another discussion, and I’ll refrain from my usual complaints about the likes of Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin et al. I believe this is a profoundly good thing for America, and I believe in the coming months it will get better. By election day, the true value of what has been achieved will have started to become apparent. We’ll still be plugging our ears over the screeches from the far right, but in the end it won’t matter, because the Democrats in Congress, despite themselves, managed to get something, something really big, done. For more on what this reform bill means, there are some excellent articles at the New York Times.

The other big news, less essential to most Americans’ day-to-day lives, but great for Minnesota Twins fans, and really for anyone who appreciates the role baseball plays in America’s cultural life, is that the Twins signed Joe Mauer to an 8-year contract. And not just any 8-year contract, but a New York Yankees-sized 8-year contract. The amount of money involved may seem obscene to many, and I’m sure there will be complaints that if the team can afford that kind of salary for one player, they could have afforded to chip in more of the cost of Target Field. (I’d have to admit, there’s some credence to that argument, considering that this 8-year contract for Joe Mauer — $184 million — is more than the Twins’ share of stadium construction costs — $167.4 million.)

But that doesn’t matter. The fact is, Joe Mauer is unequivocally a superstar of Major League Baseball. And this is the scale of MLB superstar salaries. If Mauer had gone to free agency at the end of this season, he would have been signed by the Yankees, or the Red Sox, or another “large market” team on the East or West Coast, and if anything, he would have been paid more. I’m proud of the Twins for sticking it out, keeping the hometown boy at home, and giving him the kind of salary his stature in the league warrants.

Considering that less than a decade ago the Twins were being considered for contraction, the fact that they have become a perennial contender, and are now beginning a new era in a first-class ballpark with an MVP catcher, this contract is a decisive statement that mid-market teams do count, and that Major League Baseball really does happen outside of the Bronx. For more thoughts on the Mauer contract, check out this article from ESPN.com.

I just had an email exchange with an old friend and fellow web developer (and WordPress user) regarding some techniques for CSS trickery on home pages in WordPress themes. Up until this week, I had been running a version of my theme that just featured brief excerpts of articles on the home page. I was doing this by brute force in PHP, truncating the post text with the substr() function, and then cleaning things up using the strip_tags() function, which removes all HTML tags from a string.

It got the job done, but as he and I were discussing, it wasn’t pretty: it stripped out the “dangerous” stuff — that is, unclosed HTML tags (cut off during truncation) that would have screwed up the formatting of the rest of the page. But it also stripped out desirable styling (bold, italics, links) and paragraph breaks.

The ideal situation would be to have a way to show just the first two paragraphs of each post, retaining all of their original formatting. Of course, WordPress has a feature to handle this: if you put a <!--more--> comment tag in your post, your page template can truncate the post at that point, with a link to the single-post page to display the rest of the content. But I’ve never liked having to put that <!--more--> into my posts. I want a completely automated solution.

And then it hit me… this could be done with CSS. It took a little trial and error, but I came up with the following:

#content .entry p,
#content .entry h3
{
display: none;
}

#content .entry h2:first-child,
#content .entry h2:first-child + p,
#content .entry h2:first-child + p + p
{
display: block;
}

A few things to note:

• This assumes that your entire loop is wrapped inside <div id="content">...</div>. You may need to come up with a specific ID to use just for this block in your index page, and be sure not to use that in your single-post page, or your posts will never appear in their entirety.
• This also assumes that you’re using the WordPress convention of wrapping your posts in a pair of <div> tags with the attributes class="post" and class="entry" (though technically, class="entry" is the only one that matters here).
• Your post title should be in an <h2> tag, immediately following <div class="entry">.
• The first definition may need to be extended to include other HTML tags you want to hide on your index page. In this example, it’s only hiding content that is inside <p> or <h3> tags.
• If you want to hide every HTML tag except the ones you explicitly specify, you could change the first block to #content .entry *, but keep in mind that will also remove styling like bold and italics, and it will remove links. Probably not what you want.

The specifics may vary depending upon how your WordPress theme is set up; I just know that with the way mine is set up, which pretty closely follows standard convention, this CSS worked to get the index page to list the posts and only show the first two paragraphs of each. (It also retained the images that I embed at the start of each post, and also retains any embedded video from YouTube or Vimeo, since — at least the way I insert them — those are not wrapped in <p> tags.

Note that all of the HTML content for each post is still loaded by the browser — we’re just using CSS to tell the browser not to show it on the page. This is not going to help with performance; it’s strictly aesthetic.

Today, according to banner ads and discussions from the likes of Neven Mrgan and Gizmodo, Microsoft is “all in.” All in “the Cloud,” that is, though the poker metaphor of betting the company on an all-or-nothing strategy seems apt.

Reading some of Steve Ballmer’s vacuous corporate speak surrounding this campaign (including the following PowerPoint-ready bullet points), I am not overwhelmed with enthusiasm for the endeavor:

– The cloud creates opportunities and responsibilities
– The cloud learns and helps you learn, decide and take action
– The cloud enhances your social and professional interactions
– The cloud wants smarter devices
– The cloud drives server advances that drive the cloud

My perspective on this kind of “communication” (such as it is) has evolved over time. When I was 25, it intimidated me, because I didn’t understand it. When I was 30, it annoyed me, because I realized there was nothing to understand, and it was just wasting my time. Now, at 35, it worries me, because I realize that this is how the people who are running things — important things like Microsoft, for crying out loud — actually think. They write nonsense like this and think it’s meaningful.

I wouldn’t bet on that.

Update: In Ballmer’s defense, the full presentation provided a lot more details than this bullet list, but it’s still a lot of not really very much.