On Hiatus

Over the past several years, this blog has gone from something that a few patient friends read to something with farther reach than I ever hoped or intended. This has been, alternately, flattering, infuriating, exhilarating, and terrifying.

I write for myself. Always have, always will. Writing helps me structure my ideas. I sit down to write when I’ve had something kicking around in my head that just won’t quit nagging at me. By the time I’m done, I can put that idea to rest and move on. Unfinished thoughts structured via writing yield catharsis. Ideally, this is how the process works for me.

Lately, I’ve found the cathartic returns from blog-format writing to be diminishing. The ideas I’m trying to express never really get put to rest in my head when I write, now. Instead, they spark whole conversations that I never intended to start in the first place, conversations that leech precious time and energy while contributing precious little back. Negative responses I can slough off, but the sense that I’m not really crystalizing my unset thoughts by writing here is what bothers me.

So. It’s time for me to take a break from blogging for a while.

What Might Have Been

This is a hard decision. Right now, I have a number of posts queued up:

• One about how developer platforms are communities first and products second, and about how healthy platforms grow and mature organically.
• One about the creative possibilities of the iPad, as a sort of counterweight to my criticisms of the device’s closed design.
• One about how Objective-C has been successful despite being a fairly limited programming language, and what other language and API designers can learn from that unlikely success.
• One about the necessity of treating the creative process behind technology as if you were performing magic, and the worth of opening your mind to unorthodox methodologies and approaches.

When I think about not publishing these things, I’m a little heartbroken. I enjoy sharing ideas, even when my ideas are shot down. I try to get better at communicating, at arguing, at persuading. But lately, I’ve been caught in a rut. I feel as if my writing isn’t really improving thanks to blogging, certainly not to the degree that bloggers I admire like Mark Pilgrim have improved in the time I’ve been reading them. I feel as if I stumble from one unintentionally inflammatory post to the next without gaining any particular insight.

A feedback loop of positive emails and tweets has kept me blogging despite my frustrations, but I find I’m no happier after I finish a post than when I started. If anything, blogging leaves me stressed out, disappointed, or just stuck with the sense that I’ve wasted my time. That’s why I need to take a public step back from writing here for a good long stretch.

What May Yet Be

I want to focus my creative energies outside of work on something more substantial than blogging. Co-authoring Programming Scala was deeply rewarding in a way that few other things in my life have ever been. I have another book project in the works, and I’d like to embark on that in the near future. It’s big project, though; daunting. I’ve been using blogging as a way of putting it off while still satisfying my itch to write.

I’ve also been a lax open source citizen. My coworkers at Twitter are cranking out great open source code. I’m not pulling my weight in this respect – only one of those great projects on Twitter’s open source page has my avatar next to it. I have at least as many open source projects queued up as I do potential blog posts, and those projects may be a better illustration of how I view the craft of programming. Code can speak louder than words.

I’ll still contribute to Graceless Failures, the group blog of Scala tips and tricks I started in 2008. I’ll probably write for the Twitter Engineering Blog on occasion. I may yet find another outlet for my writing on programming, particularly as it pertains to the study of programming languages; a simple and frictionless format like Reg Braithwaite’s homoiconic is appealing. In the past, I’ve found it useful to have a dedicated place to dive deep into a particular topic of interest. This particular blog has always been too “general interest” to get highly technical.

Of course, I’ll be tweeting away. Over time, I’m coming to realize what sort of messages I can communicate effectively via Twitter, and what sort I can’t. Twitter works least well for me when I try to cram big arguments down to 140 characters. Every medium has its particular sweet spot for a writer, and I’ve found that a combination of geeky humor, technical information-sharing, musical recommendations, and tidbits about my travels, drinking, and dining seem to make for the happiest followers on Twitter.

The Next Few Months

There are still friends who read this blog to hear about what’s going on in my life.

In about two weeks, I’m getting married to a sweet, funny, smart, beautiful woman that I met while living here in the Bay Area thanks to OkCupid. When we started dating, marriage was the furthest thing from my mind. True love will sneak up on you. Let it.

We’ll be wed at San Francisco City Hall on Friday, March 12th. That night, we’ll celebrate over cocktails at a local restaurant with our friends and family. A couple of days later we get on a plane for Saint Lucia, where we’ll spend a week in quiet paradise.

In May, my then-wife and I will be moving to Portland, Oregon, where I’ll continue to work for Twitter. Portland and the Pacific Northwest captured my heart and imagination in the time I’ve spent there, and I’m eager to get involved in the local community (tech and otherwise).

After all that, who knows. Maybe by later this year I’ll be ready to write here again. Maybe I’ll be in midst of researching my next book, too heads-down to come back to blogging. I’m not sure. But I thank you for having read this far, and I hope you’ll be generous enough with your time to read again, someday.

—Mar 02, 2010

Good Things: Ubuntu and Android

This is the second in a series of posts about good, nice things that I’m enjoying in the world of technology. The first post in the series was about Lenovo’s ThinkPad X301 laptop, a solid alternative to the MacBook Air for those that don’t mind running an alternative operating system.

This post is all about running the Ubuntu Linux distribution on a laptop and using an Android phone. It’s an experiment I did because:

1. I can. I was in the market for a personal laptop, and I had the opportunity to borrow a couple of Android phones.
2. I’ve been interested in seeing what’s on the other side of the fence from Apple territory for a while.
3. I’m irritated at Apple’s insistence on shipping closed products, and I wanted to see if I could live with open (albeit not completely open) alternatives to those products.

Conclusion First

When it comes to touchy religious subjects like operating systems, I like to put my conclusion first so there’s no confusion about the point I’m trying to make.

This time around, my point is this: if you don’t like Apple’s aesthetic, or if you’re indifferent to it, there has never been a better time to try Linux on your desktop or laptop and Android on your mobile device. Ubuntu has taken Linux into the realm of real-world usability for laptops while offering myriad benefits for developers. Similarly, Android is growing by leaps and bounds, and if you last checked out an Android phone even six months ago, it’s time to look again. I’ve poked fun in the past, but the world of Linux-powered mobile devices is no joke today.

However, if you’re a longtime Apple user like me, you’ll probably want to stay where you are. I’ve tried this experiment, but I’m sticking with an Apple setup at work and at home. Both Android and Ubuntu have features that the iPhone OS and Mac OS X lack, respectively, but to a certain degree it’s that willingness to cut features out that makes me comfortable with Apple products. To each his own.

Essentially, what’s Good about all this is that there’s real competition and real alternatives in the non-mainstream OS space for both laptops and smart phones for the first time in a long time. As a consumer or a developer, you’re free to pick from some really great platforms. That’s awesome.

Having concluded, let’s begin. Telling this story requires a bit of background.

My Misspent Youth

Though I have a reputation for being a Mac guy, I’ve actually spent a lot of time with Linux. Like, a ton of time. A terrifying amount of time.

I cut my teeth on a Performa 575. It wasn’t the first computer I had ever used or programmed, but it was the first that lived in my room. I made that computer do things it probably never should have and learned a ton in the process. The Performa 575 was one of the very last Motorola 68k machines Apple made before it moved over to the PowerPC architecture. Just as PPC machines have been left out in the cold after Apple’s recent transition to Intel chips, so too were 68k machines like the Performa quickly obsoleted.

As a broke teenager faced with the prospect of shelling out for a pricey new PPC Mac during Apple’s dark ages between Mac OS 7 and Mac OS X 10.2, I sought alternatives. Around that time I had become friends with an irascible Polish kid who ran a MUD out of his basement. Said kid’s older brother was going to school for computer science, and had passed along an early version of the Slackware Linux distribution to his equally geek-inclined sibling. My friend showed me just enough of the peculiar world of UNIX to get my bearings, and I was hooked.

I got my hands on a cheap PC and stumbled my way through a Slackware install off of dozens of floppy disks. Then came RedHat, Debian, Gentoo, SuSE, and all the rest. I learned all the eccentricities and discrepancies of Linux in its many flavors. For all the frustration it brought, I found Linux captivating, even empowering. It felt like I was not only connecting with my computer, but with people all over the world who were crazy or foolish enough to use this rapidly evolving, cobbled-together operating system day-to-day.

I was lucky enough to attend one of a very few high schools in the country that could claim its own Linux User Group (LUG). Spurred on by my friend Andrew, we participated in installfests, lobbied for an open source alternative to the Windows and Mac computer labs at our school, and generally made impossibly dorky trouble for ourselves and anyone who would listen. It was a brilliant experience.

I owe a lot of who I am today to that time, and I’ve never forgotten it. I continued to participate in a LUG at the university I briefly attended, and I’ve since donated my time to an installfest benefiting California schools at a recent LinuxWorld conference here in San Francisco. All told, I’ve done literally hundreds of Linux installs in my life.

All this is to say that when I talk about Linux, it’s not from an outsider’s perspective. Though I’ve cracked jokes about Linux and its warts in the past, I have a great affection for that community, their accomplishments, and their values. That’s probably why I get the periodic urge to go back to that world.

Ubuntu Today

When I got my ThinkPad X301, I installed Ubuntu without hesitation. It’s the distribution that’s pushing desktop and laptop Linux forward most aggressively.

In the past, running Linux on a laptop as your primary computer essentially meant kissing your time, sanity, and productivity goodbye. Today, it’s so easy that it’s almost disappointing for someone with an itch to dink around on the computer. The only thing that didn’t work out of the box on my X301 was the built-in Verizon WWAN, and that’s largely because the module’s vendor doesn’t (yet) provide an open driver. Still, there’s a community solution that’s easy enough for a geek to install in about ten minutes. Once set up, the WWAN link is available from the same widget you use to manage wi-fi connections. Sensible.

Other than that relatively new bit of hardware, everything else worked. Everything. Volume and brightness controls, wi-fi, Bluetooth, every little button and feature and gizmo. Once you’re past the hardware setup, getting all the software you need is a few apt-get installs away, or use the handy Synaptic GUI to see what’s available. If there’s an app that seems like it should have been packaged up, it’s probably in a Personal Package Archive somewhere.

I put together an equivalency table for the Mac apps I use. There was a Ubuntu-friendly Linux counterpart for each and every one. Do those apps necessarily have the visual appeal of their Mac brethren? In most cases, no. But they’re free and functional, and in some cases offered a more robust or compellingly alternative set of features. Things like persistent network volume mounts that are all but impossible in OS X are trivial on Linux today, and plenty reliable even on a laptop. There’s a lot of power there, and it no longer requires the over-investment of time that it once did.

Ubuntu is a damn impressive project. In contrast to Apple’s institutional secrecy, Ubuntu operates completely in the open. Want to see everything they’re planning for their next release? It’s all online. Want a weekly newsletter of everything the Ubuntu team and community is doing? It’s right here, and may even be available in your local language thanks to volunteer translators. Ubuntu is transparent, friendly, and it works. What’s more, they make it easy to get involved even if you don’t have a lot of time to commit.

This is, on the whole, a pretty rosy picture. The only dark cloud is that all this advancement in Linux on the desktop has arrived just as desktop computing is heading towards the exit. Fortunately, the Linux community has embraced netbooks something fierce, and is using that platform to explore alternative interfaces and computing models.

Then, of course, there’s the dominant Linux “distribution” for the mobile world: Android.

Android

I was able to borrow both an HTC Hero and a Nexus One during my experiment with non-Apple portables. This lent a good perspective on the differences between Android devices, something that’s both a strength and a weakness for the platform.

The Hero, at this stage, is a bit like a first-generation iPhone in the Android world: a good bit slower than the latest devices, but still kicking. I found the Hero surprisingly usable, but its cramped form factor and odd back-button placement quickly wore thin. The phone strains a bit under the weight of multitasking, and I found myself killing apps daily via a third-party process monitoring app to get back some semblance of performance.

The Nexus One, by contrast, is a sleek, smartly-designed, reasonably ergonomic phone that’s competitive with the iPhone in build quality, non-unibody design aside. It is blazingly fast; the software responds quickly even when multitasking. And yes, the screen is as bright and brilliant as everyone says. The Nexus One is not the sort of plasticky embarrassment that most non-iPhone devices have become over the past several years.

Then, there’s the software. The difference between Android 1.x and 2.x is noticeable. The Hero hasn’t yet been updated, something that seems to be done if and when carriers and device manufacturers get around to it, to the great frustration of the Android user and developer community. To circumvent this delay, dozens of forums offer various remixes and mods of Android firmware, stitched together from various device/manufacturer distributions of the Android OS and sprinkled with the efforts of open source projects to offer the best blend of features, hardware support, widgets, and so forth. It makes the iPhone jailbreak community look staid and organized by comparison.

The Nexus One, as Google’s flagship device for the platform they’re pushing forward, of course runs the latest and greatest version of the Android OS. What’s interesting about the Nexus One is how little it does out of the box, clearly taking a cue from the iPhone (as it does in many areas of the user experience). Unlike the Hero, which is loaded up with HTC’s Sense interface and associated widgets and apps, the Nexus One has an unspoken but clear message for new users: head to the Android Market.

If it’s been a while since you used an Android phone, you’ll be surprised at just how much is available in the Market. It’s no App Store by the numbers, but you’ll find Android versions of most of the apps offered up by household name brands and services like Yelp, Bank of America, and OpenTable. As I did when exploring Ubuntu, I put together an equivalency table of iPhone apps and their Android counterparts. I was pleasantly surprised at how many of the apps I use on the iPhone had Android ports. Where I couldn’t find a port, there were reasonable alternatives, save in the area of creative applications like Bloom. Developers on iPhone seem to spend more time on visual polish, but Android developers seem to like packing in the features. It’s all about community norms, and of course there are exceptions to those norms.

Android, at this juncture, is every bit as capable and robust a platform as the iPhone. As I said above, if you don’t like Apple’s aesthetic or approach, now’s the time to jump ship. However, I’m a big fan of Apple’s aesthetic, and what I found while using the Hero and the Nexus One is that the Android workflow just doesn’t jive with me. I found the multitasking and notification mechanisms distracting, and I prefer the iPhone’s lack of any input other than multitouch. It’s what the iPhone doesn’t have that I find compelling, but that’s just one perspective. If you’re less than thrilled with your iPhone, give an Android device a shot.

While I don’t anticipate carrying an Android device around, I’m still interested in writing software for it. Android’s JVM-alike software platform means that it’s possible to develop in a host of different languages that have JVM implementations, languages like JRuby, Clojure, and my personal favorite, Scala. Tentatively, I’ll be contributing to an Android implementation of a popular iPhone app, and hopefully in Scala. That’s nice, and presently impossible on iPhone, where it’s pretty much all Objective-C all the time (barring some clever hacks, workarounds, and outright duping of the App Store reviewers).

Good Times

Having already concluded above, I’ll simply say that it’s an exciting time to be interested in portable and mobile computing. There are options for all sorts of users and developers, and those options are increasingly robust and competitive. As I’m getting ready to publish this, even Microsoft is making a respectable play for mobile hearts, minds, and wallets.

In short, there’s no reason to feel trapped by your current platform. Go out and explore. You may find that you like where you’re at, but you’ll definitely learn something about the creativity and diversity of the tech landscape if you look around.

—Feb 15, 2010

Good Things: the Lenovo ThinkPad X301

This is the first in a series of posts on good, nice things I’ve come across lately in the world of tech. I’m thinking of these posts as curmudgeon offsets.

Background

Late last year, I took a long multi-city trip to Australia. As always, I hauled along the mid-2009 fifteen-inch MacBook Pro that work provides for me, my sole machine for the past while. By the end of the trip, I was pretty burnt out on lugging around the 5.5 pound beast, and finally ready to violate one of my longstanding unwritten rules for computing happiness: don’t try to maintain multiple computers. The prospect of having a lightweight machine, one completely divorced from my work machine and the responsibilities it entails, was deeply appealing.

The Failed Dell Mini 10v Experiment

My first attempt at a travel-friendly personal machine was a Dell Mini 10v. I had seen recommendation after recommendation for this particular machine, apparently the little netbook that could. Friends boasted of their success with hackintoshing the machine to run Mac OS X, or how well it ran various netbook-optimized Linux distributions.

I ordered my Mini 10v for a great price from the Dell Outlet, a painless process. Upgrading its memory was not so painless, but half an hour later I had what I hoped would be the perfect ultraportable. Unfortunately, simple ergonomics doomed my Mini 10v. The keyboard and touchpad were just undersized and awkwardly-located enough to make the machine all but unusable for me. I simply couldn’t use the thing for more than ten minutes without my hands cramping up and my eyes straining from the bitty screen.

So went the machine to a friend-of-a-friend bitten by the netbook bug. Plenty of people have made the Mini 10v work for them, and I hope it’s working out well for him.

The MacBook Air

In short order, I replaced the Mini 10v with a MacBook Air. Having tried the cheaper “DIY” solution, the Air seemed like the obvious choice: pay a premium for a nice machine that Apple designed to be as travel-friendly as possible.

Reviews of the Air really are true: it’s an executive computer, for better and for worse. The Air shines when dashing out emails or documents on a cross-country flight. For anything much more intensive than that, it simply doesn’t cut it. The screen is a bit too dim and unevenly backlit for graphics work. The 2GB RAM limit makes memory-intensive software development tasks difficult. The paper-thin body leaves little room for fans, so the Air will overheat if, say, you have it resting on a comforter while trying to watch Hulu in bed.

Combine those issues with my increasing wariness of Apple’s politics, and after a couple of months I was left thinking that the Air just wasn’t the right fit for me. Politics aside, the rest of Apple’s portable lineup only gets heavier and bulkier after the Air. Even the 13" MacBook Pro is 4.5 pounds, a heifer once you’re used the Air’s feather-light weight. Where else to look for a light but reasonably powerful machine that will run something other than Windows reliably? There are plenty of MacBook Air competitors out there, but how many of them are worth it?

The ThinkPad X301

A friend encouraged me to look once again at Lenovo’s ThinkPad lineup. While Lenovo’s IdeaPad line is looking progressively and pleasantly more like MacBooks, they largely lack the power of their ThinkPad counterparts. Said friend loves his ThinkPad X200, but I can’t work comfortably on anything less than a 13" display.

Enter the ThinkPad X301, Lenovo’s MacBook Air competitor. A bit pricey direct from the manufacturer, albeit comparable to the Air. I found one new on eBay for about $1400. The model I got lacks an optical drive, but then so did the Air; nothing lost there. It still has a 13" screen, still has an SSD, still gets good (4-ish hours) battery life under real-world load, and adds in a built-in Verizon WWAN card.

In no way is the X301 as cleanly or elegantly designed as the MacBook Air. But that tradeoff has its advantages: the X301 has more ports, more choices for input (the usual TrackPoint “eraser” in addition to a multi-touch touchpad), and even a rather handy built-in light (I’m not a big fan of Apple’s light-up keyboards). The X301 also makes up for being slower in clock speed than the Air by taking twice as much RAM. The X301 feels faster than the Air even though it shouldn’t. This could be due to the extra RAM, or it could be a matter of the software/OS.

The screen isn’t appreciably better than the Air’s in terms of brightness, although it does look more consistent. The display isn’t in a widescreen layout, though I’ve found this to be preferable for some tasks. I’m enjoying the ThinkPad’s keyboard greatly, which has a wonderful tactility and finger-accommodating groove that Apple’s current generation of “chicklet” keyboards lack. Never having to worry about whether or not I can get on wi-fi or if I remembered a WWAN dongle/card is a joy as well. All that with just slightly more weight than an Air, still light enough that I can forget it’s on my shoulder.

I’m certainly not ready to say that I’ll never get another Mac portable. But for my particular set of needs/preferences in a travel-friendly laptop, the X301 seems ideal. It’s a nice thing to have a viable alternative to the hegemony of Apple laptops, one that doesn’t feel like a major compromise.

Coming Up Next

In my next post in this series, I’ll talk about the OS and the software I’m running on the X301, which has been a pleasant surprise.

—Feb 10, 2010

Good Things

If you only started reading my blog in the last year or so, you might get the impression that I’m pretty down on the tech industry. In that time, most of my popular posts have been complaints or criticisms on one topic or another: lousy tech journalism, the lack of reason in technical discussions on the Internet, issues with living and working in San Francisco, and most recently, questioning the politics of the iPad.

While friends probably wouldn’t describe my personality as “sunny” or “effervescent”, I’m actually not as doom-and-gloom as one might think given my posts here. I attribute this somewhat to the Yelp effect: you’re most inclined to write a few impassioned paragraphs when you’re pissed off. Everyone loves a good rant, after all, so those critical, argumentative posts tend to get linked to and passed around more than my usual output.

Though it’s nice to have a readership, I worry about being known as a curmudgeon. So, over the next two months, I’m only going to be writing about good techie things. Things I like. Things I’m excited about. Because honestly, there’s so much more in this industry that I’m excited about than not, and I don’t spend enough time sharing those things with an audience larger than my friends and coworkers. It’s time to fix that.

This series of positive posts will start this week, when I talk about some good things I came across while looking outside of the Apple computing landscape.

C’mon, get happy, nerds.

—Feb 08, 2010

On the iPad

For years, me and thousands of other techies have been wondering what comes after the Personal Computer as we’ve known it. Yesterday, in Apple’s iPad, we caught a glimpse. If I had to pick one predominant emotion in reaction, it would be “disturbed”.

The iPad is an attractive, thoughtfully designed, deeply cynical thing. It is a digital consumption machine. As Tim Bray and Peter Kirn have pointed out, it’s a device that does little to enable creativity. As just one component of several in a person’s digital life, perhaps that’s acceptable. It seems clear, though, that the ambitions for the iPad are far greater than being a full-color Kindle.

The tragedy of the iPad is that it truly seems to offer a better model of computing for many people – perhaps the majority of people. Gone are the confusing concepts and metaphors of the last thirty years of computing. Gone is the ability to endlessly tweak and twiddle towards no particular gain. The iPad is simple, straightforward, maintenance-free; everything that’s been proven with the success of the iPhone, but more so.

From iPhone to iPad

The iPhone can, to some extent, be forgiven its closed nature. The mobile industry has not historically been comfortable with openness, and Apple didn’t rock that boat when it released the iPhone. The iPhone was no more or less open than devices that preceded it, devices like those from Danger that required jumping similar bureaucratic hurdles to develop for.

That the iPad is a closed system is harder to forgive. One of the foremost complaints about the iPhone has been Apple’s iron fist when it comes to applications and the development direction of the platform. The iPad demonstrates that if Apple is listening to these complaints, they simply don’t care. This is why I say that the iPad is a cynical thing: Apple can’t – or won’t – conceive of a future for personal computing that is both elegant and open, usable and free.

The iPad was pitched by Steve Jobs yesterday as a response to netbooks. It is not a mobile device, per se. Rather, the iPad is competing with full-fledged (if small and ugly) computers capable of running arbitrary programs and operating systems. Play all the category games you want, but the iPad is a personal computer. Apple has decided that openness is not a quality that’s necessary in a personal computer. That’s disturbing.

Tinkerer’s Sunset

The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. I wouldn’t have been able to fire up ResEdit and edit out the Mac startup sound so I could tinker on the computer at all hours without waking my parents. The iPad may be a boon to traditional eduction, insofar as it allows for multimedia textbooks and such, but in its current form, it’s a detriment to the sort of hacker culture that has propelled the digital economy.

Perhaps the iPad signals an end to the “hacker era” of digital history. Now that consumers and traditional media understand the digital world, maybe there’s proportionally less need for freewheeling technological experimentation and platforms that allow for the same. Maybe the hypothetical mom doesn’t need a real computer. As long as real computers stick around for people who do need them, maybe there’s no harm in that.

Wherever we stand in digital history, the iPad leaves me with the feeling that Apple’s interests and values going forward are deeply divergent from my own. There’s nothing wrong with that; people make consumer decisions every day based on their values. If I don’t like the product that the iPad turns out to be once released, I’m free to simply not buy it. These things have a way of evolving, and I won’t preclude the possibility that Apple eventually addresses concerns about the openness of the device.

For now, though, I remain disturbed. The future of personal computing that the iPad shows us is both seductive and dystopian. It’s not a future I want to bring into my home.

Postscript, January 29

Having had a day to think this post over and receive some very thoughtful feedback, there are several things I’d like to add while it’s still relevant.

First off, my remark about not learning to program if I had an iPad wasn’t intended to be a blanket statement about any child not learning to program on the device. There are plenty of kids out there who are way smarter and more motivated than I was in my formative years, and I’m sure they’ll tinker no matter what obstacles are put in their way. The iPad could actually be a great platform for teaching kids to program if Apple decides to remove the artificial restrictions on running interpreted code on the iPad/iPhone OS.

Which brings me to the point I was really trying to make: Apple’s decision to make the iPad a closed device is an artificial one. It’s been several years since I worked in security, but as best I understand, there’s no practical technical reason why the iPad must be its particular flavor of closed in order to be usable and reliable. It’s still possible to enforce sandboxing and resource limitations in an open system; it simply requires a different approach. As Christian Neukirchen said on Twitter:

“There is no reason why Apple couldn’t allow enabling unapproved apps with a flag somewhere… except for their greed and will to power.”

Or, as Adam Pash of Lifehacker put it yesterday:

“To say that ‘either a device is user friendly or it’s open’ is a false dichotomy.”

Honestly, as simple a step as Apple making iPhone/iPad SDK access free – along with its ability to install apps on the Apple devices you paid for – would be an acceptable first step towards openness. Let’s do some clumsy math on this point. According to Wikipedia, there are currently around 140,000 apps in the App Store. Let’s round up and say that each app is made by a different developer. So, at $99 per year per developer, that’s $13,860,000 per year that Apple is making selling SDK access. For a company that just posted a net quarterly profit of $3.38 billion, I think it’s safe to call the SDK money a drop in the bucket.

Further, the argument that Apple has invested in the “Open Web” as an alternative free platform for their devices simply doesn’t ring true to me. Talk to any non-geek iPhone user and you’ll quickly realize that they have no idea that web apps can, for example, be saved to the home screen like regular apps. The general attitude, once they get used to the phone, is that if there isn’t an app for it, it’s not worth doing on the device. And why wouldn’t they have this impression? Apple’s ad campaign isn’t “there’s an app for that, and also the entire open web”. For now, the web is an afterthought on these devices.

I’ll close with this: if I didn’t think the iPad was an important device, I wouldn’t be bothering to criticize its politics. Like Steven Frank, I think this a new world, a new era, and I’m not interested in hanging on to the past. Like Joe Hewitt, I’m excited to develop for the iPad, and to use what others develop for it as well.

As I said at the top of this post, I’ve been waiting for years for what comes after the PC, and I truly believe that Apple has shown it to us. That’s why it matters so crucially that this next leg of the computer revolution gets off on the right path, one that embraces openness rather than abhors it. We have the technology and the incentive to build the future of computing in an open way. The only reason not to is greed, laziness, and hubris.

—Jan 28, 2010