A story NOT about iBooks.app
Some fellow perfects the bound book. He threatens to have drawn and quartered anyone who tries to make a similarly improved book. Then he says to the writers, “If I like what you write, I’ll bind it as one of my books and give you most of the profits.”
Some experienced writers say, “Silly books, clay tablets are so much better at knocking sense into people. Part ye from my paddock, fellow!”
But this man’s books are very well made. And so long as you don’t write a sequel to one of his own stories, or speak against his friend the mayor, you can make a good bit of money writing bound books. Most writers respond, “Books are clearly the future, and look how good they are for the readers!”
But there’s this other crowd. They’re not really writers, because they spend most of their time patting themselves on the back and talking about politics and how the future isn’t clay tablets or bound books, because papyrus scales so much better. Some of them are stitching their scrolls together so they can be read kind of like books. These scroll-books are a bit awkward to page through, but you can read them in any library branch and even sign some of them out for a few weeks.
Now the interesting part of this story is that scrolls and, by extension, scroll-books can actually be used on clay tablets and between any sort of book cover, including our book-binding fellow’s. The analogy is falling apart now, so I’ll finish explaining my previous post more directly.
No cheap, flimsy Chrome OS netbook will have more necessary features or be more pleasant to use than the iPad. I am also sure that native, platform-specific applications will always be superior to web-apps. What I am saying is this: until we can develop native iPhone/iPod/iPad/iPony applications with our First Amendment rights intact, making “native Chrome OS applications” (i.e., web apps) is the only way to publish independent software for Apple’s newest and best devices.
The iPad depresses me, because it’s the first Apple thing in twenty years I’ve actively rejected as a consumer. (Rejecting the iPhone as a developer was a smaller matter.) With the App Store, Apple is pushing me away. If, as I suspect is the intention, the iPad comes to dominate Apple’s consumer computer offerings, it may push me as far as Linux.
A couple of times, I’ve half-jokingly suggested a Cocotron OS. Linux people are fundamentally incapable of producing a good UI, the sort to look at the iPad and say it’s “just” a big iPod touch, like the Venus de Milo is “just” a lump of rock with bits chipped off. Microsoft is full of people who could, but the organization will always get in the way. A romantic part of me dreams that if Apple pisses of enough Mac developers, they/we could do it, but back here in real life… well, let’s see how Letters.app goes. Perhaps, in the grim future of Hello Kitty, there is only web.
Comment by Jens Ayton — January 29, 2010 @ 11:30 am
I’ve wondered how practical an open source project (with benevolent tastemaker and taskmaster) aimed at replacing just the software half of the iPhone/iPad. Might actually be harder than starting from scratch, but could be interesting.
The trouble I see is in the second sentence: lawyers. If an equally usable alternative were successful, it would have to be well endowed in the legal department to survive the ensuing wrath. Granted, it does seem that you’d need to be even more successful than Palm’s WebOS or Google’s Android to be worth the PR risks to Apple.
Comment by natevw — February 1, 2010 @ 5:45 pm