Although the fish my sister crafted from sculpey has lost its right pectoral fin due to gravity and perhaps a design defect, it soldiers on, purposefully swimming its defiant, clockwise circle.

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Ken says,”It’s a security measure. If anyone steals my bike they’ll get about a mile before the pedal falls off.”

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No joke.
 
I think this is my sister’s book club pick for this month.

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What I see when I power-up my iPhone. Below this should hopefully be an embedded QuickTime player set to play my Apple ][ disk drive ringtone.

A couple of weeks ago I met up with my friend Ben and we transferred a bunch of old apple II disks across a serial cable into a Linux box and saved them as disk images. Now I can once again run the programs I wrote in 3rd grade, in an emulator. While we transferred the disks, I was struck by the sound of the apple floppy drives and by the fantastic graphic design on the disk sleeves.

I snapped a photo of the disk sleeve and recorded the sounds of the disk drives with my iPhone. I took the disk drive noises and edited them into a ringtone, and set the disk sleeve image as my iPhone home screen background image.

The ringtone begins with the Apple II's boot sequence and then transitions to a repeating sequence of disk head recalibration sounds. If you ever had an Apple II, you'll recognize all of these noises. I installed the ringtone by double-clicking it (which loaded it into iTunes) and then syncing my iPhone to install the ringtone. It was then available in General Preferences > Sounds.

In case anyone else would also like to use this ringtone, I've added it to this post as an attachment. I have also attached the disk sleeve background image.

Download Apple ][ ringtone

Download Apple ][ disk sleeve image

Perhaps Christopher Nolan opened the floodgates by starting with creepy¹ arthouse thrillers (Following, Memento) and moving on to direct a couple of wildly successful films about a ordinary billionaire playboy who becomes a chiropterid-themed superhero during his bouts of dysphonia, but I’m shocked and delighted to read that director Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Some of the best music videos ever) is negotiating to direct² The Green Hornet. If you know who Michel Gondry is, or if like me you seek out every piece of his cinematic output, you know how wacky and possibly brilliant a choice he is for this project.

I was a little shocked and delighted previously when Hong Kong auteur Stephen Chow (Kung Fu Hustle, Shaolin Soccer) had been picked to direct, but as left-field a choice as Chow seemed, he at least is known for very slick and populist action films. Gondry’s work always has a playfulness, is steeped in a childlike sense of wonder, and generally has a more crafty than slick aesthetic.

I now expect Green Lantern to face his arch enemy “Ball of Yarn Man”. They’ll fight each other with cardboard weapons decorated in crayon while running down the up escalator. Anything hit by these weapons would grow or shrink 10x in size.³ All real skies will be replaced by ones made of blue construction paper with puffy cotton-ball clouds. All the camera-work will have a perfectly-simulated hand-held look.

And I’ll love it.

Here are a couple of Michel Gondry clips from youtube, to whet the appetite:

1. Creepy and awesome, I might add. Do yourself a favor and rent Following. [↩]
2. Why does everyone always write “…is in negotiations…”? Negotiating is not a passive activity. [↩]
3. The age-old blow-to-the-crotch gag could serve up more comic relief than usual given these circumstances, not that Gondry goes for cheap-shots. [↩]

“Shure I2C-MP Stereo Earphones / Headset (iPhone Compatible)” $19.99 at Amazon.com

Additional Note: These may be now be out of stock at Amazon. If so, the link will take you to the same item but likely at a different price, provided by a vendor other than Amazon. The different and likely higher price, and the lack of free shipping if your order hits $25, may be less enticing.

I bought a pair of these earbuds when they were marked down to $40 and have been using them for running. They’re very high-quality earbuds that are cheap enough that I don’t worry about destroying them with sweat or excessive wear and tear. These produce better audio than any earbud or headphone sold for under $50, probably better than any under $90 but I may have lost track of the market a little and am being conservative in my superlatives.

I wrote a little review of the i2c’s the last time they were on sale, gushing over what a great deal they were at double the current price. $19.99 is ridiculously low, I wonder if these have been discontinued? The previous review is worth a read if you’re considering this purchase.

If you do purchase these earbuds, I’d also recommend getting foam sleeves for them as it makes a huge difference in audio quality. The earbuds don’t ship with foam sleeves, but thin silicon sleeves that just hold the earbuds in the ear and provide negligible isolation from ambient sound. There’s also markedly more¹ bass when listening with foam sleeves.

Here are links to a few options for replacement foam sleeves:

• The Shure Black Olive sleeves work well, though it takes a little work to fit them onto the earbuds.².
• A slightly better sounding, but uglier and quicker to wear out set of foams are the Shure orange foam sleeves. They’d probably suck for running as they’d get saturated with sweat and are not easily washable.
• The fancy ‘comply’ viscoelastic foam tips might be the most expensive and highest quality option, I’ve never tried them.

I’ve linked only to the large sizes of all of these foam sleeve options, as I figure the larger they attempt to expand the better seal they’ll make in the ear canal, leading to more sound isolation and better sound. But if you’re not sure you’ll find the large foams comfortable, they’re all also available in medium and small sizes if you poke around those web sites.

1. but not excessive or muddy [↩]
2. The tubes in the black olive sleeves are slightly too narrow to fit, but can be momentarily stretched with a set of mini needlenose pliers just before installation on the earbuds. The tubes then shrink and hold the sleeves very tightly in place, which I think is a positive thing [↩]

I want to talk a bit about the upcoming and wildly anticipated smartphone from Palm, the “Palm Pre“. The Palm Pre is the latest in a long line of hyped iPhone killers. Tech journalists have declared,”The Palm Pre has it all, making the iPhone look almost like — dare we say it — a version 1.0 device” and that it is,”maybe the most important handset to be announced in two years”¹.

I think the Palm Pre is a very nice piece of hardware, with a set of supplied applications that look very nice, but this smartphone is massively overhyped and has a huge, gaping problem: The lack of an SDK that allows the compilation of native applications –incidentally this is the same problem that initially kept me from considering the purchase of an iPhone.

The iPhone was roundly criticized for the same defect, but the makers of the Palm Pre have been shockingly successful at that which Apple failed to do: to give a positive spin to this policy/design-defect. In the case of the iPhone, Apple was able to recant their initial position and fix the issue, leveraging technologies they had been developing for years². Palm will not be able to issue so seamless a fix, as the Palm Pre’s OS is brand new, and I doubt Palm has very robust development tools or frameworks they can prepare quickly and distribute to the eager developers who will gather as soon as Palm Pre users tire of applications that are glorified web sites and want to do things with their phones that simply can’t be done using javascript and html.

To gain a bit of perspective on the Palm Pre, I think it is necessary to take…

…A look back at developer response to the initial iPhone announcement

When Apple first announced the iPhone, they announced there would be no way for developers to compile native binaries that run on the device, but instead announced that developers could create wonderfabulous web 2.0 applications that would run on the phone:

Developers can create Web 2.0 applications which look and behave just like the applications built into iPhone, and which can seamlessly access iPhone’s services, including making a phone call, sending an email and displaying a location in Google Maps

The response from grateful, would-be iPhone app developers? Try this google search for “iPhone no SDK”. A couple of choice quotes from the results:

• “…no SDK == no access to iPhone’s cool frameworks == no revolutionary apps, no real new concepts coming from third-parties, no eye candy available for anyone but Apple…”
• “I became a Mac developer so I could program in Cocoa, not because I have some inherent love for objects with a big Apple on them. If I wanted to program in a crappy language just so I could get more customers, I’d switch to Windows, not stinking JavaScript.”

Apple took a ton of heat from developers and users for their initial decision, and eventually did release an SDK to allow developers to write native applications for the iPhone. The iPhone runs OS X as its operating system, and Apple has a long history of creating and distributing tools for OS X development as well as Frameworks to simplify the creation of rich applications³. Not only are these tools and frameworks feature-rich, mature, reasonably well-known, and stable, they are also the same tools and frameworks used by Apple to build the operating system and the applications they supply on the iPhone.

Most of the third-party apps I frequently run on my iPhone (most prominently: Beatmaker, Evernote, Fring, Brushes, and iTalk) would not be possible to create as web apps with Ajax and Javascript. Those that could possibly be programmed in javascript, such as the iPhone OmniFocus app, probably shouldn’t be. They’re complicated enough that it would be difficult to design them as web apps that have good performance⁴ and manageable code.

My final rant

As far as I can tell, there’s no native development environment for the Palm Pre, nor is there one that will be popping up soon. Would-be developers face the same silly web-app-only idea for which Apple was roundly criticized when they first launched the iPhone. It’s actually the same silly web-app-only idea which has probably contributed to the lack of applications for the Sony Mylo devices⁵.

Unless the built-in applications are spectacular and completely fill the needs of most smartphone consumers, real third-party applications will be necessary for the Palm Pre to make more than an initial blip in the smartphone market. I don’t expect there’ll be many interesting apps available for the Pre until they give developers a bunch of useful frameworks and the ability to compile binaries for the device. The iPhone has a huge advantage here in that iPhone developers get to develop and compile apps for a mature platform based on an OS and frameworks that have been around for years.

As a long-time Palm user and advocate, I’m glad they’re back in the game, and I look forward to being proven wrong on all counts.

Notably ommitted from this analysis because I tired of thinking and typing: Windows Mobile, Nokia⁶, Android, OpenMoko.

1. An endorsement that is simultaneously breathless AND wishy-washy. [↩]
2. Some of the OS X development technologies are approximately 20 years old, having been born at NeXT. [↩]
3. See previous footnote. [↩]
4. Web apps are slow enough when running in web browsers on multi-gigaherz multi-core computers, let alone puny 600Mhz power-saving mobile processors with limited ram. [↩]
5. And this lack of apps might be part of the reason nobody’s ever heard of the Mylo, which like the Palm Pre has decent hardware [↩]
6. Nokia sells way more smartphones than any other player, more than twice as many as Apple. It does seem odd sometimes that the question is “What’s to be the iPhone killer”. [↩]

I’m having coffee with former Apple coworkers Mark and Enrique over at Fred Segal before catching a film at the New Beverly. And I figured I’d use this as an opportunity to try the iPhone wordpress app.