In a moment of weakness (also known as a visit to the Apple Store) last week, I found myself parting with more money than I can easily justify for a shiny new iPhone. What followed was somewhat painful; canceling T-Mobile this soon after I had come back to them hurt, just not as much as the early termination bill soon to arrive in my mailbox.

I’ll get the obvious cheers and jeers out out of the way (I don’t expect that you, dear reader, will have missed them in any of the other thousand iPhone reviews, so feel free to skip the following lists)

Cheers

• The User Interface is amazing - I can’t imagine going back to my once loved PEBL (loved until last Tuesday)
• Apple did some amazing bargaining with AT&T over cost of the plans - I can’t imagine how much this would have cost on any other carrier right now
• I actually seem to like the keyboard

Jeers

• EDGE can be slow - I mean, a couple of minutes to download a text email slow
• The battery life is a bit low - I’m not one of those guys who plays chicken with my cell phone, but at the tail end of a normal day, I look at the battery indicator and wonder how this thing is going to die. It hasn’t yet, but it generally gets a bit too close for my comfort.
• Text selection - I find it interesting that the company famous for bringing GUI concepts like cut and paste to the masses seemed to forget to add that functionality to the iPhone
• Including the YouTube app was a mistake - now I lose so much time just killing my battery whenever I have free moments. I could take some personal responsibility, but blaming Jobs is so much easier
• Ear buds - why couldn’t Apple released at least their in-ear headphones with the push button microphone?

Now that we have the major items out of the way, I would like to discuss how this device changes things for me.

I no longer carry around a creased and bled index card full of notes to myself (the exact title of the book you are looking for is x, it is also found by other name of y). Instead, I put a note into Ta Da Lists and if I need more information, search Google (or Amazon or IMDB). This is handy.

I now understand the usefulness of Twitter and its ilk. I couldn’t understand dealing with it via SMS or just a computer, but with the iPhone it helps keep me sane (like when I spend two hours to see if certain contact lens work (they didn’t and then did) with my poor eyes).

I’m no longer dependent on restaurants (take out or otherwise) that I am familiar and/or have a menu for. Instead, I select my apartment bookmark in Google Maps (or wherever I am) and type in the type of food I am looking for. Minor annoyance, sometimes the most obvious (and closest) place doesn’t seem to make the grade (a direct search does work in those cases). The benefit of being able to call directly from Google Maps has been wonderful.

All in all, there are a number of features that don’t always make sense (why you can only edit contacts from specific screens, why a missed call and a voicemail look the same on the home screen, etc.), but ultimately, the iPhone shows a different perspective in how a cell phone should work. For me, it has ultimately been an extremely positive experience, and I truly can’t imagine going back to any other phone. Nothing even approaches the iPhone with regards to the pleasant experience (even if I cannot stand ear buds - I am not using them, by the way) you simply cannot avoid.

Thank you, Apple. Now, go and finish 10.5 and make me some in-ear headphones so that I may lay even more capital upon your retail alter.

I don’t how many people even remember the olden days of web development. I’m talking about the time when under construction GIFs were accepted, even if a site had been “under construction” for over a year. It was during this era that what has been known as the “browser wars.” We pretty much all took a side, and our pages advertised quite obviously what side we chose. These ubiquitous banners saying “This Site Designed For…” inhabit some dark and painful corner of our minds. When the wars were over, it stopped mattering if you were a Netscape supporter or a Microsoft supporter. You survived and that was all that mattered.

People talk about the war; they say that Firefox started it up again. I don’t think I believe that. Microsoft and Netscape worked very hard at pushing the differences. These days, all of the major players (even Microsoft) work towards a standard. This makes all of our lives easier. I wake up and realize that one day in the future I won’t have to worry about whether or not my design works in both browsers.

Don’t misunderstand; it already has gotten much better, and we are continuing on that path, even if our progress isn’t always in the direction I would hope. But then I see something like this(theregister.co.uk), and I lose much of that faith. For even a small manufacturer to say that the standards are “too hard” or able to be compromised is a statement of arrogance. For it to come out of one of the major players is unforgivable. As a developer and designer, I want to know that by working with one set of rules I can reach the most people. As I have a number of Mac users in this audience (a member am I), as well as an important minority at my full time gig, I can assure you that any solution for me will address them. That solution has historically been the standards.

Reading this article, I find myself imagining a new series of website badges proliferating. It is this vision that shows that, despite all talk towards progress, we still feel the need to homogenize. Microsoft has made some unique strides as of late, and the corporate dialog is one of working together. They have sat on a broken html renderer for the better part of a decade. If Trident cannot be expected to handle web content correctly, it is past time to replace it. And if there are sites that get broken by this fact, it is time they were made to uphold the standards we have all agreed upon years ago.

Bandying around the term “backwards compatibility” is a disingenuous way to say that you are above the standards the community has set.

You are not.

Emily Nussbaum has an interesting article in New York Magazine (Link) in which she discusses the extreme generation gap specifically with regards to how people raised with technology and computer networks view privacy.

One part that I thoroughly enjoyed was a quote from Clay Shirky (a brilliant man who seems to have given up on his website - http://www.shirky.com):

Shirky describes this generational shift in terms of pidgin versus Creole. “Do you know that distinction? Pidgin is what gets spoken when people patch things together from different languages, so it serves well enough to communicate. But Creole is what the children speak, the children of pidgin speakers. They impose rules and structure, which makes the Creole language completely coherent and expressive, on par with any language. What we are witnessing is the Creolization of media.”

That’s a cool metaphor, I respond. “I actually don’t think it’s a metaphor,” he says. “I think there may actually be real neurological changes involved.”

If I am very honest with myself, I cannot place myself in either camp. I spend too much time online and treat in much the same way my younger cousins do, but ultimately there is always a discomfort that perhaps I’ve said too much…

It is amazing to me how much things have changed and how different my experience with the internet is compared to both my father and one of my younger cousins. In many ways, I live the internet: I work as a web developer, I have two different blogs, I’ve been instant messaging for almost a decade. My father also works in the internet, but his experience is much more unnatural, kind of. He makes purchases, researches various conundrums, and communicates via email and IM. My cousin has a livejournal, a myspace, a facebook. To her, the internet is a place to treat as if it was another physical location.

I find the different levels interesting. Dad’s usage makes it a knowledge platform first and foremost. When it comes to communication, he treats in a one to one or one to few manner. The internet for him is a text-based cellphone and light-weight encyclopedia.

My cousin uses it like it is the physical world. She didn’t seem uncomfortable when I mentioned finding her livejournal and was amused by my attempts to make her feel so. It wasn’t that she had anything really bad on it; I just view a mixing of my offline world and inline world (especially when family is involved) as ultimately a situation to avoid. To her, it is a natural thing, because they are the same thing. I would bet that she doesn’t make a distinction between an online discussion and a discussion in the “real world.”

My usage is similar to hers except that I spend a lot of time thinking about what I want to share and what should remain to myself. A few times on other online forums, the two worlds have collided. The result was usually painless externally, but it would take a good deal of time to let the discomfort fade before I felt free enough to post what I actually wanted to stay.

In many ways, I suspect that my cousin’s attitude might actually be better than mine. I generally don’t shy away from controversial subjects, and the only result of my online discussions have been positive. I’ve met (online) people that I never would have gotten to know otherwise. I’ve gotten job offers because of material I’ve written. Even the noise that can come with playing in such a public forum has constructive value. Aside from a few uncomfortable discussions with my parents, who just don’t understand why I do what I do, I have never suffered from what I love to do.

In the end, the world has and is changing. It will change us, but not as much as we think. I’d imagine that I will pretty much stay the same way I am: a participant in internet culture, but always feeling like I’m missing part of the message. My cousin will probably always be a willing participant that doesn’t understand why people like me “hold back.” And, i doubt I will ever see my father blogging; I’m sure he doesn’t see the value in it.

My first online forum experience was in high school and it was before I heard about this thing called the internet (I dialed into a BBS). It was probably too little too late for me to ever be entirely comfortable with the wide world of the world wide web. I am glad that I have the comfort I do, for I cannot imagine not having this wonderful forum to share my ideals.

The article did a good job of not judging the practice; it was almost anthropological in a sense. In honor of that, I think it must be mentioned explicitly: I don’t think the generation gap referred in the article is one of shifting values, although that is always happening, but one of how our relationship with technology is shaped by our exposure. As in most cases, the change is not good or bad; it is change, pure and simple. And it is inevitable.

It’s good to see that my website does handle IE7 fine.  Aside from that, I should post a bit of an update.  In the past two months, I got a new job and moved up to Boston.  i will be strating everything back up again soon, in case you are still waiting patiently.  (If so, thanks)

In my new job, I am blessed (HA) with a Windows development box.  This has been awhile for me.  I thinks that it has been five years since I have done web development on a Windows machine.  The world has changed a bit since I left; I’m just trying to figure out how.

For development, I have been working with Dreamweaver (pretty much the same as five years ago, except that I now strictly use code view).  Photoshop is the same throughout. 

In a month, I have lost at least two days of total time to Windows Update and AV updates.  The OS is still slow and feels cludgy (more so than Linux even).  I come home at night and enjoy simple acts of checking mail and surfing the web on the Mac.

Being on the OS does allow me to try out some of the new toys (reviews of which are forth coming).  I am actually writing this on Windows Live Writer and it actually seems to be fairly intuitive.  Here’s to a brave new world.

Well, Sploid is gone. Judging from the lack of comment from most of the blogosphere, this is a loss that will be felt dearly by many. I for one will truly miss it, the joyful lack of respect made for a good deal of laughs in an otherwise horrible news day.

Sploid, you shall be missed.

I suspect that I have had a career change, or at the very least a career refocusing. I’ve come to this conclusion quite suddenly, although it could have something to do with the complete lack of sleep I have had as of late. I have been a web developer in one form or another for quite some time. I suppose the change began during my senior year in college.

It started with my thesis for my Writing minor, “Conversations: Social Computing and Collaboration in Online Writing Labs.” All of a sudden, I was pulling Web 2.0 (of course, before the term was created and trademarked) content into an academic environment. My professor was rather impressed and I had no problem getting a nice strong grade in the class. I thought that was the end of my social computing forays, but I was wrong.

Aside from this site, which is in its third incarnation, I have had a number of blogs (some before the name was common) beginning in ‘99. Again, having a personal presence on the internet has been something I’ve been proud of (despite a strong desire to change some of my early opinions), but I always kept that stuff out of my professional work.

My web development work has an interesting subtext; I left the field just when table-based design was beginning to catch on and returned as standards-based design was taking off. My return to the industry had me reading Zeldman, Hicks, and others. They also had blogs, so I learned that this personal soapbox of mine could be used for more professional ends (it took me awhile to figure out a strong implementation - hence, 3rd incarnation). It still didn’t make it into my work, but some concepts started creeping in.

I created the building manager log where I worked. It was a blog without many features, but pretty much had all the standard features (minus commenting). Today, I went back to help after the webserver had crashed. The database would need to be rebuilt and a couple of files were not in any production-level shape. We installed WordPress. It’s a bit much, but it does what is needed.

This is a situation I have found myself in time and again as of late. A problem is presented, and I modify WP to fit the need. At my current job, I built a WP-powered internal CMS just a couple of weeks ago. Thinking on all of this has led me to one question: did I accidentally become a Blog Designer/Developer?

In a democracy, if a significant minority, not even a majority of the population does something, then it is immoral to legislate against it. If that something is theft, then perhaps instead of legislating a significant minority into felons, a better system should be implemented.

The internet is interesting due in no small part to the international communications it enables. For example, I know that I have readers from all over the world (including places that if you had asked me, I would have said they didn’t even have electricity let alone internet access). I and many others like me believe that this cross-cultural discussion battles ignorance and xenophobia.

If during discussions (active or otherwise), a television show or music artist is mentioned or recommended, I want to experience what is being spoken of. While the United States is probably the single biggest producer of media content, we are far from the only producer of such content. In fact, an unfortunate side effect of our massive production is that there is a great degree of inertia regarding other counry’s content, an issue most apparent in television.

It is through the internet that I discovered a number of clever foreign television programs: The I.T. Crowd from the UK and ReGenesis from Canada. Out of desire to view these wonderful programs, I was forced into using a now siezed bittorrent tracker site, known as ThePirateBay. I tried to find other avenues in both cases, but there weren’t even DVDs sold in the native countries (although I would be breaking other laws by viewing those DVDs).

It’s not that I want to deprive the actors, producers, and crews of these television shows. It is that I wanted to experience exactly what they had to offer and bask in the experience. I enjoy movies, TV, and music. I spend a great deal of money on all three (about half of my income). It is not that I begrudge them really anything, except that I do find myself thinking about the repercussions of my purchases more and more. Can I ethically support and finance organizations that work to remove
and hamper my cross-cultural experiences.

I have purchased all of the software I use (that can be purchased). I have spent (as of this publishing) over $40 on media this week. And, yes, I am a pirate. But, to be fair, I was forced into the position.