Piling On: More Kibitzing about the iPad

What do I think about the new iPad? Glad you asked. What's that? You didn't, really – or not many of you did. But that's OK, really; at least two other writers argue that we're going from an era of "nearly universal literacy" to "nearly universal authorship", so here's my two rupiah worth.

John Gruber, the blogger behind Daring Fireball, is a justly respected voice on a variety of topics, notably all things Apple. Two of his posts on the iPad, The iPad Big Picture and Various and Assorted Thoughts... are a good starting point if you've somehow just managed to crawl out of a bubble that protected you from hearing anything about it for the past, oh, six months or so, or more crucially the last three days. I also enjoyed reading Stephen Fry's thoughts on the device.

But one bit I would recommend above all to anybody who is thinking about "what does this iPad thing/phenomenon really mean?", or anyone who just cares about free expression, open societies, and all the other progress that humanity has made these past few centuries, should seriously ponder Alex Payne's thoughts On the iPad. Al3x makes some very good, if deeply disturbing, points.

As many people have pointed out, the iPad differs in one critical respect from every personal computing device as computing device that Apple have ever built, from the Apple I on up to the iMac that I am typing this on. The iPad is a device, first, foremost and specifically, for the consumption of digital "content". As James Kendrick says, Apple just want us to push the 'Buy' button, in an endless, mindless Pavlovian dystopia.

"Hang on," you say, "it can't really be as bad as all that. You're just pushing histrionics!" I truly hope so. But consider: Apple has sold every Mac, as well as all their earlier models, on the basis of a small group of generally positive, empowering ideas:

• "It just works better."
• "The power to be your best."
• And, of course, "Think different".

One of the (many) things that make the Mac special is the fact that every single Mac sold comes with a copy of the full development toolset for Mac OS X, right in the box. Anybody who wants to invest the time and effort can become a Mac developer. (The money involved, of course, is in buying a Mac in the first place, but you were going to do that anyway, right?) You. The smart-aleck kid down the street. Your Aunt Tillie. Anyone. That has been one of the core strengths of the Apple Mac platform and product; the ability for anyone, without genuflecting before any sort of gatekeeper, to write anything they can conceive of, using some pretty great tools. And thousands, dozens of thousands have. You don't need to be a big corporation. You don't even need to ask Apple's permission, or use Apple's site to market your creation. All you need is an idea, some persistence, and the willingness to learn.

Apple made a radically different statement with the iPhone. If you want to write a "real" app for the iPhone, you need to submit your bits to the App Store, a process that is the seeming antithesis of open, collaborative or fair. As a practical matter, you need to join the iPhone Developer Program, and pay a fee. Doing so will subject you to various license agreements, limitations of what can be developed, and so on.

Apple justified this by saying "hey, the iPhone is a phone, an appliance. We have to keep some control over things, to make sure that our (non-technical) customers have the best possible experience — and incidentally to ensure that we continue to honor agreements we've made with carriers like AT&T." And the developer community grumbled and moaned, but large numbers went along. And the App Store, by almost any measure, is a raging success in the aggregate — even though most individual developers aren't making much at all.

Now comes the iPad, which has been widely, often dismissively, described as a "super-sized iPod Touch." Which, in several senses, it is. But whereas the "iTouch" is an accessory in one's life, being a combination PDA, music player, and (ostensibly) simple application platform, the iPad promises to be all that and more. Specifically, it's being pitched as this "magical" piece of technology which you'll "always" have at hand. Why? Well, you can listen to music on it, or watch videos, or run the same apps you ran on your iTouch or iPhone along with a new generation of "super-sized" apps. Oh, and Apple did announce that their office-software packages would be available on the iPad — so you can use it for "work stuff."

What about the kind of creative outlets that have been highlighted at each Mac introduction since the 1980s? Well, um, good luck with that. Because, even though this is a "real" computer, it's "really not"; it's an up-sized iPod Touch, which is (officially, mostly) a passive device.

The iPad is being pitched as a "magical", but inherently passive, device that consumers will use to buy (or, usually, rent) "content". There'll be "social media" like Facebook, Twitter and so on; the iPhone already supports those. Anything that can be done entirely over the Web, without the use of plugins like Java or Flash (like blogger.com, is kosher, too. But anything truly creative, "revolutionary", "game-changing", is going to have to survive the App Store gauntlet — which means that it's going to have to be consistent with Apple's view of how the iPad "should" be used. As a passive device which consumers use to buy access to content.

Think "57 Channels and Nothing On," a million times over. Perfect for the top-down, don't-make-me-think society. (I'm sure it will be very popular here in Singapore, for precisely that reason.)

Apple, you can do better. We know, because you've mostly done much better before, and encouraged us, developers and users, to do great things with what you've built for us. The iPad isn't so much a step in the wrong direction, it's a leap of faith worthy of Wile E. Coyote — but we know how far off the edge of the cliff we've gone. And the only way to go from here, is down.

( C/C++ != C) && (C/C++ != C++)

A thought which ran through my mind as I was browsing some job requirements recently... Why are recruiters still hung up on "C/C++", years after even Microsoft got around to shipping a reasonably compliant compiler (depending on your prejudices and code needs, anywhere from Visual Studio 6 in 1998 to VS.NET 2003)? "C/C++" started life (or zombiehood) as a Microsoft marketing term back in the late 1980s with the release of Version 7 of their C compiler, which included "some C++ features". MSC 7 wasn't a "real" C++ compiler, but companies such as Borland (now CodeGear), Watcom (now part of Sybase), IBM and others, were shipping compilers that implemented the bulk of the (then-) Draft Standard in a (largely) portable, consistent fashion, so Microsoft was able to muddy the waters by calling their product "C/C++", secure in the knowledge that many of their customers had too little C++ experience to see through the marketing. Incidentally, this (non-Microsoft) competitive innovation spurred numerous advances, such as Alexander Stepanov's (of AT&T, later at HP) Standard Template Library (STL). Microsoft, in response, introduced a "Container Class Library" which was in practice quite inferior (since it required contained objects to be derived from the Microsoft Foundation Class library's CObject class and (if memory serves) did not support either multiple inheritance or thread safety. Since Microsoft's compilers at the time did not properly support important Standard C++ features such as templates and runtime type information (RTTI) that were needed for the STL, the compiler defects created market opportunities for companies like Rogue Wave and Dinkumware to create products with similar but not identical function. Timewise, this was really when Microsoft was starting to really push developer lock-in - the practice of introducting non-standard and/or proprietary "features" which were made central to the development process. Despite the existence of numerous superior (in design, function and in productivity) class libraries such as Borland's ObjectWindows Library, Inmark's zApp library, the previously-mentioned Rogue Wave toolkits, and others, Microsoft's MFC carved out huge market share and mindshare, largely because:

• it was bundled with the Microsoft C ("C/C++") compiler;
• its limitations and defects mapped most closely to those of the underlying compiler;
• it came with a primitive but usable GUI builder, for "click-and-drool" development; and
• it was relentlessly praised by the Microsoft-beholden tech press of the day.

That last point should never be underestimated; publishers of less-than-laudatory articles, such as C Users Journal and Will Zachmann (when he was writing for PC Magazine) would find themselves cut off from Microsoft's press briefings, rumor mil and other means of "keeping up with the competition". This was meant as punitive, to "hurt" the "offenders"...who promptly wrote up the entire sordid affair, built a certain amount of loyal sympathy from the industry grass-roots, and survived quite well, thank you very much. Getting back to "C/C++"... the term was a marketing fix to a technical problem which rapidly gained "mindshare" with its intended audience: marginally to non-technical people (senior managers, HR people, etc.) who wanted or needed to sound technically knowledgeable. Microsoft was able to play on their lack of real language knowledge coupled with follow-the-herd instincts to help force adoption in enterprises, from the top down. While this helped to increase sales, and helped preserve Windows' market share and lock-in in the enterprise for nearly two decades, it seriously retarded the take-up of standard, portable C++ in the industry (as intended). It also gave companies like ParcPlace (with Smalltalk) and NeXT, later Apple (with Objective-C) incentives to use "alternative" languages, either to gain some "control over their own destiny" independent of a competitor, or simply because C++ at the time was not up to the tasks which they wanted to accomplish. In any event, by around 2000 (plus or minus a half-decade), Microsoft had caught up with where the rest of the industry had been for a decade or so (bringing serious, proprietary backward-compatibility baggage along with them). The marketing need for the 'C/C++' Newspeak was gone - but the corporate world that had learned the newfangled technical language back in the day was still in place, bound only by the Peter Principle (whose bar, thanks to the new technology throughout the enterprise, had been set depressingly high). Consequently, you still run across job ads with text like this (from the Singapore Straits Times of 13 August 2008):

C/C++ EMBEDDED SOFTWARE Engr. Contract. Call 6xxx7085

Truly informative about the needs; at first blush, seemingly written by a completely non-technical HR person. (I didn't follow up the advertisement to actually verify this, however). What's the point of this whole rambling rant? To try to impress upon you, my half-dozen Loyal Readers, a technical truism that has been around as long as there have been technical gadgets: "80% of what you know will be obsolete in n months; the other 20% will never be obsolete. Using that 80% beyond its shelf life just makes you look silly." Or, if not 'silly', then at least 'locked in to an out-of-date technology or idea.' And that, with very high likelihood, does not deliver a competitive advantage to your organization.