the onda

In the past two months there have been a bunch of articles about how touch is the future of all computing, and how the launch of the iPad has given the rest of the industry the blueprint to follow. As much as I might want a new Macbook Air to ship, it would seem that Apple is only interested in single surface devices. Even pokey HP is betting a billion dollars on Palm as its option for the future.

Despite this, I don't know that I agree that I want to poke everything with my fat finger instead of using a pixel-accurate pointing device. More importantly, I am not sure that I'm ready to say goodbye to overlapping windows, perhaps the single most productive feature of the GUI. Multitasking is nice (and I suspect it will eventually come to all of these new devices in a good form), but so is the ability to keep several windows open on the screen at the same time. Browser, text editor, shell, IM client, etc.

Am I the only one who thinks that doing away with this in favor of the single canvas application is a mistake? Even for the mainstream user?

I agree with this: in the era of the Google box and multiple devices, files and folders rooted in a local spindle have got to go. I'm just not sure that it makes sense to throw the rest of it away. Hell, even in Minority Report, the MIT Media Lab inspired interface of the future had multiple overlaid contexts up on one screen.

Despite months of seemingly random iPhone policy decisions on the part of Apple, it was the decision to kick AdMob out of the AppStore this week that finally put me over the edge on the ability to suspend disbelief about Apple actually caring about users and not "control points," market dominance, and other corporate strategy bullshit that can often get misaligned with doing what is right for the user (and note that this is despite the fact that I abhor any kind of in-app advertising).

As such, I've decided that I'm done listening to Steve and team on how I should use their devices. I'm done with his vision of curated computing and I'm starting by importing real multitasking into my iPad through the Spirit jailbreak (at least until I can buy a decent Android tablet, as I've actually gotten to like the form factor quite a bit).

It's by far the easiest jailbreak you will ever do— it is non-destructive to your existing applications, your use of the AppStore, etc.— just about everything except for your iPad warranty. In short, I think it is highly worth it.

In the past I've jailbroken iPhones and iPod Touches but that has always felt like much more of a science project than an actual useful improvement. Tethering, the main advantage of a jailbroken iPhone, actually burns the crap out of the battery, and since lasting the full day is already the Achilles heel of the device, it just wasn't worth it.

Not so with the iPad: in my experience, the apps I used the most on it are Kindle, Instapaper, Evernote, Newsrack, and iSSH— all of which benefit tremendously from being able to run in the background (mostly to sync content from the cloud or keep connections to servers open).

The one slight disappointment thus far is that a lot of these apps have been explicitly written for the iPhone app lifecycle model, syncing mainly on application initialization and a few other explicit actions (return to homescreen, or worse still, actually pressing the sync button). While this makes total sense in today's controlled environment, I would love to do see developers detecting the use of popular jailbreaks and supporting true multitasking, especially for sync operations.

This is a pipe dream of course— most of these apps being supported by small teams makes it cost prohibitive to support unofficial environments like jailbreaks. But one can dream. And in the meanwhile, I think I'll say goodbye to the curated environment. Turns out I'm probably better at knowing what is good for me than the guys fighting the Great War of the Platforms in 2010.

The NY Times has a scary piece today on the way interrupt-driven life works for the modern family with everyone checking a raft of bleeping gadgets channeling the torrent of messages and interruptions that the digital age spawns. It is particularly poignant because most people will recognize some part of themselves in it, whether it is the multitasking of media consumption, or the complete inability to linearly perform tasks without self-imposed interruptions.

The piece comes on the heels of Nick Carr's latest book, "The Shallows" (which I am actually looking forward to reading in an uninterrupted manner), a treatise about how our brains are literally being rewired by the new type of stimuli provided by the connected age. In my own case, I've definitely noticed this trend: as Twitter, Facebook and their ilk have gained steam over the last few years, I've found myself taking up all of the white space in my life "catching up" with the duplicate streams of links, updates, and other meaningless junk. I thought at first I picked up this bad habit during my tenure at the world's largest tech supermarket, but I've come to realize that it has just as much to do with the combination of the smartphone and the new constantly updating web services whose primary metaphor is "the stream."

As much as I may worry about it in my case, I worry about it much more in the case of my kids whose brains are just being wired to learn now. While it is possible that this constantly shrinking attention span will lead to new modalities for learning and generally coping with the world, it's too early to tell, and what is more, deep thinking provides advantages we've got a few millennia of evidence for.

Lest people think this is becoming a television review blog, I promise that this is the last post to do with any series finale. It just so happened that the only two television shows I've watched as of late ended at the same time: Lost and 24.

I've already talked about Lost so here I will only say that I was sad to see 24 go, but happy that it did so with a fantastic series ender that harkened back to what made the show so great in season one.

Basically (for anyone that hasn't ever seen it) 24 is Tintin for adults. Federal agent Jack Bauer plays the moral CTU (read: FBI) agent who always has right on his side and needs to take the system on again and again to prove just how virtuous he really is. He is clever, has a geektastic crowd of friends that help him every step of the way, and best of all, has never run across odds he could not beat through sheer brains, balls, and just knowing that he was right.

The show writers's right-wing politics notwithstanding, Jack took us on eight years of rollicking edge-of-your-seat drama with comic book gamut. And no matter how ridiculous the predicaments became, or overt the messages (or product placement) were, I always found myself rooting for Jack, part MacGyver and part Dick Marcinko to pull through for one more adventure.

It's interesting to think that season one started right around September 11th 2001, and for nine years CTU and Jack have carried us through multiple invasions and thwarted terrorist plots, all the while remaining optimistic about the effect that a few folks who believe there is true black and white when it comes to right and wrong can have on large bureaucratic systems that can sometimes forget it.

Most of all though, I'll miss the high jinx and tech tomfoolery of Jack and Chloe (remember when they played back the AOL modem tones in season one?) and the inevitable man-against-the-world dilemmas that he somehow always managed to escape.

If you haven't seen it, you've got 192 hours of plain unadulterated fun waiting for you!

Lost ended last night in what will no doubt go down as the most talked about television event since Tony Soprano fuzzed out of existence a few years ago. It's too early for me to tell whether I really liked it, or simply really enjoyed the production values of the last few episodes. One is clear though: from JJ Abrams on down, everyone involved with the show showed an amazing command of their particular craft.

I remember writing about Lost five years ago on this blog right after the beginning of my last startup. Lost became company culture from the days when there were only 3 of us (and it was good to see that thanks to the rapid infusion technology known as 12 hours in front of a DVD boxset, even the laggards eventually got religion). The craftsmanship behind every facet of the show was something we all admired intensely (the other topic we'd talk about endlessly was Apple's product roadmap) as was the work that was put into slowly developing a really compelling story that wrapped itself around the particular talents of the actors. As I tried to so ineloquently express all those years ago, there is a really good parallel to the early days of a startup here.

[ For those that liked the show, or story-telling in general, there was a fantastic piece by JJ Abrams in Wired last year about the process and the "magic of mystery."]