“Love is… like freedom: only a starting point. Then many more choices have to be made.”
-Theodore Zeldin
Steve Jobs’ fifth revolution
I think one of the most significant announcements at Apple’s media event today was that the iPod touch now has over 50% market share in the worldwide portable gaming industry — the iPod touch outsells the portable game consoles from Nintendo, Sony, and all other manufacturers, combined. Steve Jobs also said over 1.5 billion games have been downloaded so far to iPod touches alone. “It has become by far the most popular game player in the world.”
It’s widely recognized that Jobs has already revolutionized four industries: personal computers (Mac), digital music (iPod and iTunes), animated films (Pixar), and smartphones (iPhone). I think it’s now safe to add a fifth to that list: portable gaming.
His impact is a revolution both in terms of the new multi-touch user interface for gaming and the App Store platform for game distribution and payment. The major products involved are not just the iPod touch but also the iPhone and iPad.
So what will be number six?
Apple is making some progress on movies and TV shows. However, the studios and cable companies have all the power, and they are terrified about what happened to the music industry. It’s hard to find a path that transitions the industry from cable TV “channels” to browsing and paying for individual shows.
Another possibility for revolution is in textbooks and online education, where iTunes already carries recorded lectures and the iPad has started to inspire a new class of interactive educational content.
7″ iPad
I continue to see rumors that Apple will release a 7-inch iPad. The idea is that it would be closer in size to a paperback or Kindle; lighter and less expensive than the current iPad; and easier to fit in a purse.
I’m a bit scared of this vision because it means all of our apps would have to be redesigned for yet another screen size. iPhone apps already do run on the iPad, but they are awkward to use. Scaled-down iPad apps are not really an option because the touch targets would be too small. Apple could use a screen with the same number of pixels as the iPhone 4 (but bigger in size); that way, all retina-display-compatible apps would fit pixel-by-pixel on the device. Still, graphics would look too big and some interactions would still be awkward. In short, redesigning our apps would be necessary for a good user experience.
This redesign will be a lot easier than porting apps from the Mac to the iPad. Still, for the sake of my own sanity, I hope Apple waits a while before introducing the next screen size.
Update: On the other hand, most of our existing Mac apps have to be designed to work well at any screen resolution between the 13″ MacBook and the 30″ Cinema Display. From this point of view, having to support just two discrete iPad sizes should be comparatively easy.
Update 2: Steve Jobs just criticized the 7-inch form factor.
Conversation
“Conversation… is one of the most important ways of establishing equality.”
-Theodore Zeldin
Favorite time of day
This is a pretty awesome statistical graphic that plots the attractiveness of people in photos against the position of the sun when the photo was taken. (Notice the peaks just after sunrise and before sunset!)
Criticizing religion
“Keeping religion immune from criticism is both unwarranted and dangerous.”
-Lawrence M. Krauss
Humanizing math
I used to think that math was the perfect subject to teach via computer software (instead of lectures). My rationale was that computers are already good at math; and software-driven customization for each student is most useful for topics that require a solid knowledge of previous topics (e.g. algebra builds on multiplication and fractions).
This TED talk by Dan Meyer challenges those assumptions. He suggests that good math education starts with good discussions. It uses open-ended questions whose answers may be as unpredictable as responses to works of literature. It emphasizes how math relates to intuition and the real world, and deemphasizes arithmetic and equation solving. In other words, it humanizes math, a notion which makes a lot of sense in a world where computers not only compute sums but can easily solve, graph, and symbolically manipulate indefinite integrals. (On a cell phone. For free.)
Indeed, a lot (most?) of cutting-edge science today involves calculations so complicated that it would never even occur to the scientists to complete the math by hand.
So why bother teaching students in detail how to do the things that computers will always be better at? Meyer’s approach focuses on the human side — understanding when and why to apply mathematical tools. It’s not immediately clear how computers themselves will figure into this educational mission.
Instinct
“Instinct… is largely memory in disguise. It works quite well when it is trained, and poorly otherwise.”
-Robert Bringhurst (The Elements of Typographic Style)
Form Follows Fiasco
We can always use a reminder to keep it simple. This one comes from the thoughtful and amusing textbook Form Follows Fiasco by Peter Blake, published in 1977. (A friend recommended the book, which was not in the public library holdings but was available used on Amazon for about $4.) In this passage, he is discussing one of the problems with construction via prefabricated modules.
Many wonderfully inventive designers spent decades, if not lifetimes, trying to perfect the absolutely perfect, universal joint — the magic mechanical device that would join their modular panels together in wedlock (yet leaving open the possibility of some future disengagement, for the sake of greater post-marital flexibility).
But it was all in vain. The universal joints, the seams, the gaskets, the unbelievably ingenious interlocking connectors — many of them leaked, wracked, delaminated, or experienced some sort of material fatigue. Yet jointitis — a disease increasingly prevalent among theorists in prefabrication — continued to spread. One of prefabrication’s most illustrious pioneers designed a joint to connect two or more wooden panels; it was a miracle of ingenuity, and required little more from the on-site joiners than a doctorate in Chinese puzzling. The pioneer, it seemed, had never been told of an earlier and less sophisticated joint used in wood-framing, known as the nail.
My take on the overarching theme of the book is that there’s something to be said for a little messiness. The straight, clean, orderly, centrally planned structures of Modernist architecture and Modernist urban planning sound good in theory. But in practice, they are expensive to keep straight and pure, so before long they become ugly (stained cement walls). They are also bland and boring because they are so simple (high-rise apartments and suburbia). And they are inefficient because they artificially standardize (modular approaches that are ok for many uses but not great at anything) and require connecting artificially separated functions (rush hour in heavily zoned cities, and the “universal joints” discussed in the above passage).
The alternative is to turn to more practical, locally and organically designed, human-centric (not technology-centric), financially sustainable structures. He points to examples of old wood-and-brick buildings that have been completely repurposed but still work great; vibrant urban centers like SoHo, which was designed organically by new residents violating the zoning laws; and structures such as Grand Central Station which hide all of the technology (trains, subways, electricity, plumbing) to make a welcoming, functional, human-centric space.
As always, there is a balance to be found between order and disorder, predictability and randomness. The Modernist movement was in many ways a reaction against the disorder and uncleanliness of previous eras. Form Follows Fiasco and more recent trends swing back from the extremely sculpted order of Modernist plans to reintroduce what they hope is a healthy dose of messiness.
Signal Strength and Leaks
The extreme publicity over the iPhone 4 signal strength issue reminds me of the similarly overblown media coverage regarding leaks in the Frank Gehry-designed MIT Stata Center.
In both cases, the affected products are gorgeous, highly-acclaimed, innovative masterpieces. They’re already famous in their own right. They’re sufficiently innovative that some unforeseen problems are bound to crop up. And apparently, people love to find those flaws.
“That’s what you deserve for spending too much money on that product [which I secretly want and now feel better about not having].”
Of course, these reports leave for the last paragraph the fact that “the iPhone 4 enjoys better reception than any of its earlier models.” The same goes for quotes from Stata Center occupants, who maintain that “it is a joy to work in this building.”