You’re The Decider

I’m in D.C. now. Some pictures along the way after the jump.

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Now this is what I call San Francisco values:

Proud to be a constituent.

on the national day of service?

I mean, it’s for a good cause. Reddit readers want a W memorial flavor. I suppose that’s one thing that brings us together as a country. Bidding our current president adieu.

{h/t metafilter, Daring Fireball}

Obama should torture high level people in the outgoing administration to see who put them up to the gross negligence/sabotage of US economy and military.

Wow. Swift would be proud. I’ve often wondered about allowing US manufacturing to collapse and sending creation of military munitions and such overseas… seems like opportunity for sabotage.

I’m inviting folks in my extended circle who are going to the inauguration to post here. And if they want to, to continue sharing political thoughts after the event. I’ve not been so excited about an event in a long time. It’s going to be something we can tell grandkids about (I hope). I’d like to have a nice record and account of who I shared the moment with. Just wish I had an iPhone cuz you can upload to your blog right from it. Sigh. AT&T better have a few more cell towers near the mall!

I’m impressed with everything that is up in the air being directed at the same time:

• Inaugural festivities including parade, train ride, lincoln memorial, security, metro, parties
• Policies including health, stimulus, and green economy. I love that President Elect Hopey has people calling his plan not bold enough. I’d also imagine that you can’t get anything through the Senate without it being increased 50%. I hope that gets fixed by 2012. It’d be nice if instead of tax cuts for middle class, tax credits were given for doing things that are good for a greener world.
• Thoughtfulness on past egregiousness. It seems to me that Obama is signaling that perhaps the high-level decision makers should be held accountable to rule of law, but that low-level implementers shouldn’t be. But it also seems to me that you can’t move forward without looking backwards. If you don’t know where you came from, you might be stepping on quicksand, or blindsided by events that were put in motion 5 years ago. You have to bear witness to the full truth of the past, or you’ll be doomed to repeat it.

Things I’d also keep an eye on are “unseasonable weather” and “taser incident.” Both seem to be on the rise.

Now that my candidate is on his way to being sworn in and doing something about all our huge problems, I find my mind turning to other topics that once held its attention more fully. Like Apple developers for instance. I once worked in developer relations, I’m not an engineer, but I can speak geek well enough to get myself in trouble. I’ve already commented on one thread running through the Mac community, another has to do with iPhone development. Specifically the topic of private APIs.

To which my short reaction is: remember Mac OS 9? Remember how Apple couldn’t do anything, introduce any new feature, without breaking some application that was VERY IMPORTANT TO THE PLATFORM because that application had figured out how to make something work that wasn’t documented. (And was generally Photoshop, Word, or some utility.) Apple prefers it if stuff doesn’t break. *I* prefer it if stuff doesn’t break. It doesn’t make anyone look good. Ultimately it never makes for a great user experience. So doing no harm is a good thing. It is probably a little easier to break consumer workflows than business workflow. So, with iPhone, Apple may be more willing to break applications that use private APIs in order to fix things. But most people don’t like to. If you can get away with adding most of a new feature, and still let something else work, that’s the choice you might make, if you were an Apple engineer working on new stuff. And that leads to the situation that Apple faced with Mac OS 9.

It may very well be that OS X is far more superiorly architected than Mac OS 9 ever was, and all the whizzy NeXT things would prevent such a thing from ever happening. Obviously there aren’t as many fragile extensions in Mac OS X, and mostly, those can’t exist on iPhone. So maybe it’s not as big an issue, but to developers I’d say follow the golden rule: if you don’t like things breaking, don’t do something that’ll eventually break.

And if instead you are going to use a private API, because you’re so effing clever, perhaps you could let customers of your product know - say something like “Program XX works with this version of iPhone software. I’ll/company will do my/its best to keep it functional for 2 future iPhone software releases. Major updates to iPhone software may require a paid update to Program XX.” Own the problem, don’t make it Apple’s. Keep the iPhone experience great.

Another thread running through the developing world is a discussion of iPhone app store quality vs. quantity. Who judges quality? I think Apple is a poor judge. That is, Apple is a fine judge of its own app quality, but may not be impartial enough to rate others, design awards notwithstanding. If I were Apple, I would give select reporters, such as Walt Mossberg, David Pogue, Andy I, Jason Snell, Rik M. TidBits, and some freaking women. Why is it that most high profile tech writers are male, anyway? And iPhone select and premier developers, and high profile iPhone blog authors, I’d give them 12 “badges” that they could tag apps with per year. They’d get a profile page in the app store. Developers could not tag their own apps (and would sign agreement to reduce conflict of interest). Then you could see that an app had been tagged by someone. Someone with taste.

Reason #647 that I resigned my awesome job with Apple was that I could see this quality/quantity problem. I didn’t really want to be in the business of marketing Britney Spears or whatever the latest boy/girl band was. It’s not *my* taste. Apple would have had to pay me a LOT more to do a great job with that. Same thing with the app store. They kind of need to accept everything. It’s the difference between being the underdog, and the market leader. Once you are market leader, you can’t have as many opinions, or you’ll offend somebody, somewhere.

Curated editorial, however, might work. That is, Apple could have opinions about who has taste, and let them be the judge. Also, the Apple corporate machine moves way too slowly to have opinions about whizzy new apps. Why not let the market move nimbly.

She gave me tickets to the inauguration. Wow! I’m so excited. I will take pictures. How awesome to be one of 240,000 very close to his speech. I will not mind trading a lot of my personal liberty in this instance for security. I hope it’s really good.

These people, however, are a little over the top. I suppose someone had to go and call it Lincoln 2.0. But the O in Obama as the zero…that’s a bit over the top for me. Maybe in four years if he’s done stuff. But anticipating he will be as great as Lincoln? I’d like him to be, but don’t want to jinx it. Also, the ones and zeros are just, well. um. Nice blue though.

I suppose I should really rename this blog or something if I start talking about the tech industry. But didn’t have anywhere else to post. Many people are speculating about Steve Jobs not at Macworld this year.

Aside from all the speculation about his health, and the health of the show, why not just think about it. Even if I had the next iPhone or a super exciting Mac available, or an iPod that did your laundry, I would not announce it at this year’s Macworld. Who in their right minds would release a product now? We’re between administrations. The economy sucks. No banks are making loans. Maybe you’d want to put it on credit and can’t. If something were so awesome, and tanked because of macroeconomic conditions, the company would still be blamed.

Kindof like the unions and the auto industry. But at any rate. I wouldn’t announce anything. Let Obama have a few weeks in office. Maybe wait for the spring equinox. Let a stimulus start working. And if that’s the decision, then don’t have Steve up there announcing nothing. And if that kills the tradeshow, so be it. As a former employee, working on Macworld materials, I have to say that it really sucked to not be able to look forward to Christmas and New Years because you were working so hard. Maybe Steve decided to be humane to his employees.

And for the tech industry to really just not even think about the rest of the economy and its ability to pay for new gadgetry shows a lack of awareness about the world at large.

The least we can do.

Now just keep quiet for four weeks so they don’t pardon anyone.