Aquarionics

The story of Flash on the iPhone is interesting.

I don’t want flash on my iPhone, to be honest, and I don’t want it for all the reasons Steve Jobs said in his essay yesterday. Firefox is a lot more stable if you don’t install flash, so is Chrome. Apple say that Flash is the number one reason for crash reports in OS X.

However, I said in my last thoughts on the subject that the iPhone isn’t very ideologically sound. I cut out the paragraph explaining that, because it distracted from the main point, but it’s probably worthwhile anyway. One of the main complaints about the iPhone from both a metaphorical software point of you and a literal hardware perspective, is that that it lives in a hermatically sealed environment. Partly, this is a function a phone OS developed in the US mobile market, which has always been more closed than the European one. You can make less hermetically sealled by jailbreaking it, but the process of Jailbreaking an iPhone is basically a three-shell game with firmware revisions, and if this doesn’t go 100% smoothly you may end up with a phone that no longer has any concept of such things as “how to respond to the on switch”. Apple’s approach appears to be to make this three-shell game slightly more complicated – more out of due-diligence to the phone companies who say you can’t run custom software on a phone than because they hate us – but every so often do things like rewrite the entire bootloader to make it 30% faster, with the side effect that there are now *five* shells and two of them are made out of explosives.

All of this is because most of the US phone network is built of sticky-back plastic, string, hope and tangerines; and this has traditionally lead to the US phone networks making an absolute – and somewhat paranoid – ruling that nothing not personally signed off by the network could be executed on a phone , just in case it went ballywacky and managed to bring down the entire local phone network (GSM, the mobile phone network protocol we use in Europe and that is beginning to take hold in the states, has a couple more safeguards). This has existed since days of Java apps. The years before the iPhone, where people could grab java games and apps and put them on their phone? The US missed 90% of that, because building an app for java in the states meant submitting every new build (and a java app needs to have several different builds for each version, because no two phones have the same capabilities) though an expensive, arbitrary and somewhat brittle certification process *per network* whose phones you wanted to run on. This is why the iPhone was such a revelation to the US market, it was a phone that didn’t suck on a fundamental level (Most .eu phones – being GSM – didn’t make it to the states. The most popular phone up until the iPhone there was, I believe, the Motorola Razr, which is a device with a user interface that actively wishes you to THROW THE PHONE UPON THE FLOOR AND STAMP ON IT WITH MIGHTY BOOTS).

Anyway, the upshot of this was that the iPhone had no capability to add software on launch – it was scary enough as it was for AT&T, being a phone they didn’t have enough control over – but even when they added the App Store for revision 2 it had no hooks for it to take over any of the phone’s basic features. In fact, the App Store official policy states that you cannot post to the store any app that duplicates existing iPhone functionality, and even if you could, there simply aren’t the “hooks” in the system to say “When you get a phone call, run this app instead of Phone”, or even “Use this app instead of the email client”.

Most of the reason for that appears to be control-freakery. Apple’s primary selling point is simplicity of use, that you do not need to know how to work it to work it, and stopping an arbitary app you install from being able to modify what happens when you click on an email address in an SMS is part of it. There is a way that an iPhone works, and this is it, everything else is in its own little sandbox.

Recently, they’ve made steps towards building a climbing frame in the sandbox that things have to build upon. The idea of an app that works the same on Android as on Palm as on iPhone isn’t good for them, because it won’t follow the UI guidelines for iPhone applications in order that, by having used an iPhone application, you roughly know what this button on this other application is going to do. This is actually important to Apple, which is part of the reason they put the block on cross-compiling applications. I agree with this, for the most part. The easist route for an app *should* be the one that follows the UI guidelines for what they are releasing it on, and doesn’t look entirely out of place on the phone.

However, it should be a fence. A short fence, white picket, which can – if necessary – be stepped over. It should not be a wall. For example, Safari and iTunes for Windows both look exactly the same as their Apple counterparts. Partly because maintaining one lot of code is easier, partly because they’re adverts for how shiny a real mac would look. They both follow some guidelines – the window manipulation buttons aren’t arbitary trafic lights, the application closes when you press the close button (not just the window), iTunes even integrates with the taskbar to provide a mini-player when minimised, if you want it to. Microsoft didn’t block iTunes from Windows because it looks entirely out of place (Which is fortunate, otherwise they’d have had to block Steam, Xfire, Winamp, Sonique, and thousands of apps down the line, including Office 2010. Also IE8).

So, basically, it’s not your decision, Steve. It should be mine.

That’s why I’ve just ordered an HTC Desire. I may go back to the iPhone, but at least this way I can pick my own variety of battery drain for a while.

…[I]mmigration minister Meg Hillier tells voters in Dagenham, [...]. “We fingerprint anyone who comes in for over six months. Foreigners now have to carry special national identity cards.” [Guardian Opinion, Apr 26^th]

We treat immigrants like criminals, and then we are suprised when some of them act like criminals.

Soon we shall treat *everyone* like criminals!

Vote labour. Woo.

Is it me, or does the word “Foreigner” now automatically come with its own greasy mark when used in the press?

It’s a quarter to two.

My sleep pattern can take quite a beating if it has to, providing it averages out to more than six hours a night over a couple of weeks. In fact, I can stay awake for as long as necessary and still get up the next morning, so long as there are four hours between me and regaining my sense of the world. This regain has to happen tomorrow morning at six AM, because that will mean that the domino effect of my morning will finally see me at my desk at 8am ready for another week’s work.

This means that, without a fail, I need to fall asleep by 2am. Minimum.

However, somewhere in E5 there is a car alarm going off.

It’s not anywhere nearby. It’s on the edge of hearing, the quietest it could possibly be to still be entirely obvious. A shrill two tone trill, splitting the universe into two parts, the ones who are sleeping though it, and the ones who cannot sleep because of it.Fifteen minutes ago it was annoying. Now, it’s maddening.

It’s not intrusive, really. If I follow a train of thought, get distracted, consider butterflies or rainstorms or sheep or toasters, get distracted by my newest coding problem then the noise fades out of my forebrain and it stops being a bother, until I realise “hey!, the car alarm isn’t bothering me anymore!”

And there it is.

I put a pillow over my head, and the sound is muffled but present. I stick a finger in my ear. The sound is gone, but I cannot sleep like this.

The inevitable future dawns on me, and I spend a few more moments under the warm duvet, dreaming up increasingly elaborate Rube-Goldberg contraptions involving car alarms and their absent owners, now present.

I am not usually a single issue voter, but right now I could happily vote for the BNP if they had a policy on deporting people who don’t turn off their car alarms. Given that this is Hackney, one of the most richly multicultural places in the country, it’s entirely possible that -tangentially, and in this case – they do.

As I say, maddening.

A dramatic flourish sends my duvet into a far corner, fyr still snug under hers, and I attempt to find my headphones to block out the noise.

I pad around in the darkness.
It appears to be coming from the East. That is, if I go to the south facing kitchen window, I cannot hear it. Our room faces East, though.

The headphones are not where they are supposed to be.

Occasionally, I suffer from tinnitus, imaginary bells on the edge of my hearing in my case sounding like a sine wave in the back of my head. Somehow, the car alarm is worse. I know the tinnitus is temporary, imaginary, and I am experienced though many long years of blocking it out of myconscious mind. The car alarm’s constant and abiding trill begins to cut though my skull like a blunt sawblade.

The headphones are not where they shouldn’t be – but invariably almost always are – either.

It’s 2am.

I consider waking my PC up. Whining on twitter about the noise. Using the “Vote for the BNP” line above, probably. Hacking away at Piracy Inc for a little longer, maybe I can fix the bug with the suicidal ex-captains stabbing themselves in the head. Maybe I shouldn’t.

It’s gone.

For a moment I stand their, stock still in my dressing gown. I just got distracted again, did I filter it out? It should be… there.

It’s not. There is silence all around. I step out onto the balcony, away from the faint hum of the computer fans, and into the deep and well lit background of a London night where there is no noise but the wind in the trees far below me, the distinct flap of the flag hanging from the balcony below ours, and the sounds of a city that never sleeps,

doing its best to try.

“Good morning”

“Ah. Good morning, Fiscal responsibility. I was wondering if you’d be visiting me”.

“May I ask you a question in its simple, most basic form?”

“You may”.

“What in the name of currency is that?”

“It is a box. I can tell by some of the cardboard, and having seen a number of boxes in my time”.

“And this box, as you mention, this box with the cardboard that you recognise. Is it an expensive box?”

“Hmm. Not really, angel. I could imagine that some of the colour printing on the side isn’t cheap, but generally I would not expect this box to break the bank. of course, to a small creature, this could be some kind of home, and therefore the value of it could be as of all things. It’s kind of perspective dependant, oh angel of prudence.”

“We need new glasses. You remember the new glasses thing, yes?”

“The way we don’t want glasses that are slowly sandpapering the side of our head? I am well aware of that.”

“And we were not spending our money because we haven’t had a full month’s pay since we got made redundant, yes?”

“Alas, this is also true. woe betide the winds of fate that led us here.”

“And we paid back several due debts this month, and need to pay off credit cards. yes?”

“Your words contain the ring of truth with such a pure and just tone that full choirs of cherubim and seraphim flock to your every word”.

“So why is there a large box saying ‘ROCK BAND’ in the hallway?”

“Ah.”

“You may well say ‘Ah’, coder-boy.”

“They were on special offer?”

“NOT SPECIAL ENOUGH”

“Well… We were playing Guitar Hero, and it was great and everything, but the Wii version of GH3 doesn’t do downloadables, which is a bit crap, and Fyr likes playing the drums and it has a microphone and you can sing at it and its higherresandIdon’tusethe360enoughandandand…”

“and?”

“And I can’t buy an iPad yet.”

“So you bought an entire Rock Band kit. Which is a four foot long by foot square box of plastic instruments.”

“I tripped.”

“Tripped?”

“Tripped. Fell on my keyboard. Accidentally searched eBay, ordered the item, typed in my paypal password, waited for them to send me the SMS key for the transaction, typed that in, reentered my credit card details, confirmed it and the newer address, then finally confirmed the entire transaction.”

“….”

“I am quite productively accident prone.”

“And now?”

“and now I know the truth in it’s purest form.”

“which is?”

“That I still suck at drums in Rock Band.”

I have an iPhone.

I didn’t get a first version iPhone, partly because I wasn’t convinced. I got a 3G one once they came out, and it’s a thing I require now. I have gone somewhat beyond the first stage of iPhonicness, where there is no moment where you are sitting down and not playing with it. I still play, obviously, but I attempt to put it away occasionally.

Anyway, my contract on it ran out in January, so I’ve been thinking about an upgrade, and because I am a geek I’ve been looking at Android phones, and with the HTC Desire, I think I have found a winner for my next phone.

It’s an iPhone.

The Android phones are nice, in fact they’re pretty awesome. The UI is progressing in leaps and bounds, and the hardware is getting more and more impressive. That’s actually part of the problem, in fact. When I started thinking “I need to get a new phone, what can Android get me now?” it was the Droid – the Milestone, when it was eventually released here – and then as my contract expired, Google announced the Nexus one. I thougt originally that the release date of the Nexus One was a cool bit of timing, exactly 18 months after the release of the iPhone 3G, which was the standard contract length O2 were offering for it. I was ready to sign up, switch to T-Mobile, and go. But it didn’t release here, only in the US. It may have released here by now, but I no longer care, because the upgraded model, better in every respect, has launched in the form of the HTC Desire.

That, from the Droid to the Nexus One to the Desire, is three major leaps in Android hardware in nine months, and I will be really unsuprised if another one isn’t announced in June, around the same time the new iPhone is announced.

The iPhone isn’t perfect. I mean, physically it pretty much is, and technologically it’s awesome too, but it’s not ideologically sound. The closed in hardware and software model is not one I like, but to be entirely honest for a device that I will be quite literally using and relying on every single day, I care a great deal about the UI, and the joined-up-ness of the software, but I do also care about the openness. A bit.

I’m also literally invested in the Apple platform, having bought a number of Apps over the last 22 months.

In July, the new iPhone OS 4 will be released, and many of the new features won’t work with my phone. Importantly, Multitasking won’t, because it has half the processing power and memory of the current model iPhone (and probably a quarter of what the next model up will have). But for a year, it was the best model available and would run everything. One of the standard anti-mac-fanboy rants is that there’s an upgraded model out before you’ve bought the current one, but if I buy the new iPhone in June, I can be pretty sure it’ll be the best iPhone for at least a year, and a supported platform for another after that. If I bought an Android phone today, it’ll not be able to run the newest stuff in six months time – possibly including OS updates – and by the time an 18 month contract expires I’ll be eight revisions behind, assuming advancements at current rates.

But we shall see what the next announcement will bring.