Fire and Knowledge

Here’s an iPhone developer comparing the Nexus One and the iPhone after using the Nexus One for a while:

The Nexus One isn’t a bad phone by any stretch of the imagination. Had it come out three years ago, it would have been revolutionary. But you do have to train yourself to Android’s idiosyncrasies much more so than the iPhone. If you’ve never owned or used an iPhone, you’ll probably find the Nexus One to be a very adequate device and will assume that the minor annoyances are just part of owning a smart phone. If you’ve owned an iPhone for any length of time, you’ll likely feel, as I do, that it’s a rather half-baked device with some good ideas but generally weak execution. [...]

I would never willingly choose the Nexus One over my iPhone for daily use, nor would I recommend it to someone who didn’t explicitly state that avoiding AT&T or using an open platform was among their top priorities.

I wrote an essay a couple years ago about why I was no longer a young-earth creationist. I finally decided it was time to publish it, and it went up today on the First Things Evangel blog: “Why I’m Not a Creationist (Anymore).”

The future of magazines is coming soon. This look like a much better experience than browsing a magazine’s website:

This is really exciting from a design & reading standpoint. It will be the experience of reading a magazine, but with the interactivity of the web. It’s going to be a really fun decade.

I love books. From 2004 to 2009, I spent most of my evenings reading. We owned no TV to distract me. At first it was mostly theology… until I got a taste for novels. I read through most of the Dickens canon in a year. Next I dove into culture and came out a neo-Luddite. Then I got into history, economics, and science. I couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t spend their evenings reading — it was hard to imagine wanting to stare at a television instead.

I became a compulsive book buyer. Now I have 5 full bookcases, and that’s only because I gave away hundreds to Goodwill when I moved. During my years in Minneapolis, my Saturdays usually included stopping by a used book store.

For the last few years I’ve gotten most of my books from the library. That has two main disadvantages:

1. You’re not supposed to write in them
2. You only have them for a few weeks

Let me make a confession. I write in library books. I can’t stop myself. But don’t worry Mom, I always use pencil and I erase everything when I’m done. Why do it? Because I mark quotes. After I type them out I erase my markings.

I haven’t been able to get around the part about it only being a loaned book, however. I have become quick friends with the online renewal system, but it only lets me renew three times (they set limits because of people like me).

So the library doesn’t work for books I want to write in and have on hand for a very long time. So should I buy them?

I used to. But unless it’s a book I am extremely excited about, I’ve found myself not wanting to buy a paper version, even though I love paper books. Why? They’re expensive, they’re heavy in bulk, they’re easily ruined, and they take up a lot of space.

The truth is, I want a good e-reader and it’s only a matter of time before one exists. It doesn’t exist now. I owned a Kindle for a while, but sold it. The terrible interface and control mechanisms (a joystick and a noisy page turn button) ruined the experience. The iPad isn’t it either — the screen is backlit and there doesn’t seem to be a good way of marking books. However, it seems better than the Kindle.

I used to hate the idea of e-books. I thought paper was far superior and that it wouldn’t really catch on. That was naive of me. Eventually paper books will go the way of scrolls and stone tablets — of interest to collectors, but not to the rest of us. E-book readers (either as separate devices or integrated into mobile devices) will fit much better into our lifestyles and we’ll gradually move to them in the coming decades. I think most of us know this intuitively as we watch how the technology and culture is progressing. I don’t think this is a bad thing anymore; it’s just different. There will be advantages and disadvantages, just like any technological revolution, and it usually balances out.

All that rambling to say that I’m waiting on discovering my e-bookmate. My compulsive book buying has been put on hold until I can buy them digitally (non-DRM) and read them on a device that I feel is a worthy alternative to a paper book.

And in the meantime, I’ll be a loyal — if not ideal — visitor to my local library.

We’re paying for the inconvenience of quality control without the quality part. In fact, lots of software has lower quality because of the App Store process. Developers can’t easily get bug fixes out and they certainly don’t release new versions as often as they otherwise would. This harks back to the era where software was really cumbersome to release on CDs, so you did it much less frequently.

Contrast this with OS X and the web. Both platforms are much more open and on a mac you have very little trouble with stability or malware or even quality. In general, the market is pretty good at sorting this stuff out. If you make a crappy application, people don’t buy or recommend it. And OS X seems to be holding up well as a secure platform compared to, say, Windows, so malware isn’t much of a concern either.

What I think Apple should do instead is to reserve the power to nuke apps that prove troublesome. Have a “if you fuck it up, we’ll yank it” policy rather than a “we’ll review everything poorly and slowly and still not catch it all” policy. They’d be able to get by with a much smaller App Store clerk staff, developers would be thrilled to escape the needless gate keeping, and consumers would enjoy more applications updated more frequently.

What’s there to lose except for the feeling of powah?

—David Reeves, “The App Store: Quality control without the quality”

Contrary to popular belief, water is an awful choice [to try and land on when falling from a plane]. Like concrete, liquid doesn’t compress. Hitting the ocean is essentially the same as colliding with a sidewalk, Hamilton explains, except that pavement (perhaps unfortunately) won’t “open up and swallow your shattered body.”

—How to Fall 35,000 Feet—And Survive

Apple now owns and controls their own mobile CPUs. There aren’t many companies in the world that can say that. And from what I saw today, Apple doesn’t just own and control a mobile CPU, they own and control the hands-down best mobile CPU in the world.Software aside (which is a huge thing to put aside), it may well be that no other company could make a device today matching the price, size, and performance of the iPad.

They’re not getting into the CPU business for kicks, they’re getting into it to kick ass.

—John Gruber, “The iPad Big Picture”

Years ago a friend of mine forwarded an email to me from the editor of a popular magazine with this comment:

Isn’t it interesting that the editor—the head honcho!—of ______ would write like this!

This was the editor’s email he was referring to:

hi _____, thnx. we love Thomas too. if u want to pitch our literary editor on a review, he’s at __________…
best -tom

I remember being amused and thinking it was a symbol of our cultural and linguistic decline.

That was five years ago. Now I have a more practical perspective on his email — he was just a busy guy, trying to get as much done as possible.

I’ve been thinking about this because over the past year, and more so in the past six months, I’ve gotten very busy. Starting Rainsong Media was a big step for me professionally, and a few months later I also founded Beacon Ad Network with a partner. Add a few other projects on the side, and you have a recipe for busyness like I’d never experienced before.

So what do you do when you have a couple hundred emails to go through every few days? If you want to actually get things done, you have three options as I see it:

1. Hire someone to check and respond to your email
2. Let them pile up and only respond to emergencies
3. Write in shorthand

Most of us do not have time to respond to a couple hundred emails with a polished response — if we did, we’d never get anything else done. And even if we hire someone to handle our emails, there will still be many to respond to ourselves.

And that’s where shorthand comes in. Instead of taking 3-10 minutes to answer an email, you can answer it in 30 seconds.

Say you dedicate 2 hours a day to email. Look at the productivity differences:

• 24 emails at 5 minutes per email (average)
• 120 emails at 1 minute per email (average)

That’s a 500% productivity increase.

There will always be emails that need thoughtful, polished responses. But most of our emails don’t — they are simply information requests that can be answered quickly in shorthand.

So shorthand isn’t a symbol of cultural decline or of lesser intellect. Let’s drop our elitist attitudes. For many of us, it’s just a sign of busyness and a desire to get things done.