Dumbland

It was going to be grand. Well not so much grand, but it was going to be something. Having failed miserably at NaNoWriMo I was going to end the year with a few pieces on things I have enjoyed this year. The things that have stood out as being in some way outstanding. Like SRS and Black Mirror). A Song of Ice and Fire. The iPad (look it up). And the not so much outstanding as very interesting The Old Republic.

But really who can write about good things when companies actually manufacture and sell ridiculous television sets that inexplicably will not output audio through the AV outputs when I’m using an HDMI source? Does it mention this in the manual? No. Is there any support for the product online? No of course not, it’s a generic badged piece of consumer electronics that barely even exists.

There’s not even a giant rant here about meaning and petty semantics. I could ask why things never ever simply work, or why the idea that things should simply work is so frowned upon. Why there’s this attitude that unless you really put in the effort you shouldn’t have the good things in life. The decadent things, like a functioning PC or audio to go with your video.

You don’t deserve it, you fucking pleb.

Golly I’m tired.

Hooray. I get to use the word “queuetopia”.

Star Wars: The Old Republic has been released. They’ll try to tell you it hasn’t. That it doesn’t get released until the 20th. Do not let them shape reality. The final version is out there, people are playing it, I was playing it this morning. At best I’ll allow them to call it a limited release. However saying that the game “is not even released yet” is a lie. Don’t lie.

This isn’t one of those rants though. This is just a minor discussion of a feature I want to see a game use. Perhaps there even is a game that uses it. If there is, it’s probably Eve Online. That game seems to have a lot of features. If only they’d add fun at some point. (Boom)

Prior to release the hive mind decided on a couple of servers for Oceanic players to use, since we’re not getting servers on launch (and probably not any time soon). So I jumped on one, started my character and got him up to the last part of the first major quest chain. Then I had to jump off for unrelated reasons. Coming back, I’ve been sitting in a queue for an hour now. Still got a while to go.

Why does this still happen? It happened at the launch of World of Warcraft, and again each time an expansion launched. As happened there, I’m sure it will go away in time as servers are upgraded, code is optimised, and players spread out or drift away. In the meantime however I’m faced with waiting at least an hour to play the game, or starting again elsewhere and re-playing stuff I’ve already done.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Why can’t I just grab my character and go play on a server that isn’t full? Why can’t everybody do this? A server is full, well fine I’ll go find one that isn’t, and not be penalised with wasted time or (even more) repetitive tasks.

(Of course it’s one thing to ask why this isn’t so, and it’s another to engineer the systems required to make it so. I’ll stick with the former thanks.)

SW:TOR shamelessly takes a lot from WoW, and adds its own progression to the genre, effectively mapping a single player RPG onto an MMO framework. That’s great, and will hopefully raise expectations for any future MMO. But I wish Bioware or somebody else would address some of these other annoyances that seem to just be assumed as “part of the MMO experience”. It seems ludicrous that not playing the game should be considered part of the experience.

Back when I was more involved in World of Warcraft I would occasionally give in to a certain degree of self-loathing, and visit their community forums. I’m just going to make an unqualified statement here, which in general is a bad and lazy thing to do, but I’m confident in the sturdiness of this limb I’m marching out on here: The worst thing about every massively multiplayer game is the community.

There is something even worse than this however, and let me now explain how this works - how something can be worse than the worst thing. Simple! What I’m referring to are people who are leaving or have left the game. They’re no longer a part of the game, so my reference now makes perfect sense, and isn’t just a horrid abuse of language.

There was and is a horrible habit of people to quit the game and want to tell people about it. Fond farewells these are not. They have zero investment in the game now, zero interest in the community. Typically their only goal now is to lash out at the people in and around the game. Perhaps they’re trying to quell their own dissatisfaction with themselves for having spent a fair amount of money on their subscription, even if they were indeed enjoying the game at the time. What they desperately need to explain now is why anybody still enjoying the game is wrong.

This is my post telling everyone I’m quitting World of Warcraft.

Again.

I’ll start at the beginning, why not? I wasn’t paying much attention to WoW leading up to its release. MMOs in general were not something I was interested in, almost entirely because of the monthly subscription fee. I remember expressing some disappointment that I was probably never going to play Star Wars Galaxies due to this. This ended up being true, though I believe now that my disappointment was misplaced. There were two things that turned me around on this. The first is a perfectly rational reason. The second is not.

Some time close to WoW’s late 2004 release, Guild Wars held a beta event. While technically GW is not an MMORPG, mechanically the game plays a lot like one, and this was my first exposure to the style. Turned out I liked it a lot. Running around in a somewhat open world hitting things had its appeal, and this was perhaps also the first time I’d experienced a sympathetic online gaming experience. That is to say, I was not constantly punished for not having the sort of fine motor skills and reflexes required in games like QWTF or CounterStrike. It was a space where I could play cooperatively or by myself, and just have a lot of fun doing so.

Guild Wars got me interested in the genre, but it was a ridiculous little detail that led to me heading way too far out of my way to pick up a copy of WoW a week after release. At some point I discovered players could send mail between each other. I can’t clearly explain what it is I like about these little features in games, but I dig them. Loved it in Tribes 2 as well, setting up a clan and sending out messages from the built-in browser and messenger. And now in addition to running around punching orcs, I could send messages to players within the game. I was sold.

My first day in game, I rolled a Night Elf Warrior named Mortigi, on the Gilneas-US realm. Warrior because I liked to hit things. Night Elf because they were tall. Gilneas because that’s where it told me to go. I’d played a Warrior/Monk in Guild Wars, and later concluded that I’d have been better off rolling a Paladin, but that’s where I was. I got in a few good hours and got my character to about level 8 before discovering that hey, Tuesday nights are maintenance nights you Australian fool.

The first few weeks/months were indeed quite a mess, though every major outage I can remember was compensated with free game time. It was frustrating when the game was unavailable, and perhaps more so when several hours of play were erased by a server rollback. However when the game was up, it was incredibly fun.

That first run I made it to about 51, it was February 2005, and I was running through the barren sands of Tanaris when my Gmail notification bubble popped up. Why I remember that particular moment is a story for another time (perhaps 5 minutes after the heat death of the universe) but it marked a period of losing interest in the game. This would happen often, I’d get into the game, play heavily for some time, and then lose interest. Sometimes it was for good reason, such as when in late February 2005 I was starting a new course at Uni, but just as often it was because I was just burnt out on the game.

It’s odd now to look back at my time in the game and think about how little of it was spent with any real understanding of what on Earth I was doing. I’ll try to recall now my major characters:

• Night Elf Warrior
• Human Warrior
• Dwarf Hunter
• Orc Hunter
• Blood Elf Paladin
• Blood Elf Death Knight

Towards the end there were a few more characters as I tried to fill out my roster. Nearly all the characters I’d stuck with were consolidated on the one realm and faction (Saurfang-US, Horde). I’d race-change, faction-change, realm-change. It wasn’t until I played the Dwarf Hunter that I really started to pay some attention to how to actually play the game though. I’d soloed my way through everything, very rarely even getting into dungeon groups. None of my local friends played the game, and only a few of my online friends gave it a go, with even fewer sticking with it. (A hello here to Jason and Erica from Canada, to Mycah from SLC, and to Frankie and Gareth from the UK whom I believe I spoke to for the first time in WoW)

It wasn’t until the second expansion and the introduction of Death Knights that I found a class I genuinely enjoyed. It was at this point that I discovered that while I’d had fun with the game before then, I hadn’t really liked playing any of the characters. Even the Hunter I had achieved some success with was loaded up with shot rotation macros that took me away from the more boring aspects of playing the class. Sure I knew a few more things about the game such as trap chaining and later the incredibly fun use of the Gorilladin, but that was really it. Once I got my hands on a Death Knight, I actually started enjoying hitting the buttons as well.

The second expansion was when I finally got into some raiding as well, something that would not have happened had Blizzard not introduced 10-player raids. People raged against it, but I loved it. There wasn’t an overwhelming cacophony of voices in the group, and the intimacy suited me well. I found myself in a decent guild. Not the greatest progression-wise, but filled with people who didn’t drive me nuts with casually racist, sexist, immature banter whenever I logged in. An island in a shitstorm. It’s ridiculous now to think of the hours we put in playing Icecrown Citadel, but when the game is fun and I’m surrounded by people I get along with, what else would I rather be doing?

Seriously, if I can spend drink breaks piping Stephen Fry’s reading of Harry Potter down the voice chat line and people get a kick out of it, I think I’m in a pretty good place.

To make a brief and mildly unpleasant story even briefer, this didn’t last. The new expansion came along, we raced to be ready for the new raid content, quickly hit a wall and the guild started to crumble. Despite my still thinking the people left in the guild were fine, I found myself very disinterested in loading up the game.

It was an odd situation to find myself in. The game was as fun as it had ever been. There were two new races I was eager to try out, classes had been refreshed and I was enjoying trying out classes I’d never considered before like Druids and Shaman. Leveling heirlooms and the dungeon finder tool made progressing while being an unsociable git easier than ever. I should have been enjoying myself, but I was not. I happily let work take over most of my time, and soon enough in about March 2011 my subscription lapsed.

Fast forward to November 2011, I’m attempting to participate in NaNoWriMo, and desperately looking for ways to procrastinate. I figure $15 is too much to throw away on an attempt at fun, and I buy another month in WoW. Surely it’s been enough time away. By now I know that the people I’d left behind in the guild had moved to a different realm. It was an expensive and unlikely possibility for me to follow them.

I logged in and went about setting up my interface addons again. Then I set up my glyph-selling character, Gringott. The scourge of the Saurfang-US Horde glyph market. I still had a ton of unsold glyphs that I’d stockpiled before my break, so I put them back up. Then I jumped onto my Death Knight. Said hi to one of my old guildmates, who had just recently re-upped as well. There was a new quest zone available, so I took a look at it.

If I sound at all dispassionate here, it’s because I’m kind of boring myself. The game hadn’t changed, which wasn’t a terrible thing. It was still fun. Running around casting Howling Blast on jerks and generally slicing them up to feed my character’s crippling addiction to death and suffering was as fun as that kind of thing always is. I just didn’t feel like doing it with all these people around. I had zero investment in the community. I was there, but I wasn’t really a part of the game anymore.

Blizzard had announced their next expansion, Mists of Pandaria. The game was finally getting Pandaren, with a new class of martial arts masters, the Monks. There was even to be a Pokemon-style minigame. For all the predictable ire from people, this honestly sounded great to me. I’d love to play that, and for a while I considered taking Blizzard up on their annual pass offer. As fun and appealing as that all sounds though, I don’t think this disillusionment with the community is going to go away between now and then.

It’s tiring logging in to the game and seeing the constant racist, sexist, everything-under-the-sun-ist nonsense going back and forth in the global chat channels. There’s a point at which what people say stops being ironic, stops being sarcastic, and starts being simply the hate speech it looks like. I can ignore them, either personally or technically, but at some point it gets to me that this is a massively multiplayer game, and these people are a core feature of that. They’re part of what I’m paying for, part of the experience, and I can’t stand even the thought of them. It’s hopeless to even begin to imagine that the developers could do something about this without crippling the positive social features of the game, so it becomes a situation where the best solution is simply to leave and find something else to do.

So that’s where I am now. This is my fond farewell to the World of Warcraft. Not a permanent one, I’m sure. No doubt the kung-fu Pandas will pull me back in for a few months at some point. But never again am I going to spend three hours a night, three nights a week, chatting and screwing around and generally enjoying myself with a bunch of people I never encounter outside the game. Genuinely giving a crap about some of the most ridiculously cliched characters and plots in the history of mass entertainment. Laughing at the inept attempts at insults by the unsocialised. Actually enjoying multiplayer gaming for once.

It’s disappointing that it’s over but I figured that while some of the positive memories are still somewhat fresh in my mind I should take the chance to recall them. And since I’m preparing to have my heart broken all over again, perhaps it will help to lend me a little perspective the next time my chat window fills up with unimaginable anonymous dreck.

So as I mentioned at the tailing end of my last rant about rapidly changing platforms, Google has been working on their imaginatively titled “Google Music” platform for some time now, and they’ve now taken it out of beta and unleashed it upon the world. And by “the world”, I mean the USA. And by “taken it out of beta”, I mean they’ve taken the “beta” label off the web pages. Mostly.

The first issue here, that it is currently confined to the USA, just goes to show how little these new services are about solving technological problems, and are instead about solving licensing issues. Again it’s interesting the spectrum that is represented by these systems. Amazon launched first by completely ignoring the record companies, taking the position that it is merely acting as remote storage for a user’s files. Apple secured wide-ranging support from the record companies, even going so far as to secure a very customer-friendly feature in iTunes Match. Google’s offering lands somewhere in the middle, with limited (but surely growing) industry support, and an Amazon-style remote storage solution for users.

That’s the boring part of it all though. I hope Amazon sticks to their guns with their stance, because it makes a lot of sense to me. Media companies, music companies in particular, seem to have this weird sense of entitlement. Like when they took the position that Apple should be giving them money for each iPod, because it was “their product” that was making the iPod so popular. What an absurd stance.

(Aside: Not that I think a feature like iTunes Match could legally work in any customer-friendly way without industry support. But for simple remote storage of files users have already paid the record companies for? Fuck off with your double dipping, guys.)

What I actually wanted to note here was how average Google Music feels at the moment.

I installed the Music Manager app on my Mac, which adds a system preferences panel and an icon in the system tray. The purpose of this is to keep an eye on my iTunes library, uploading any songs not in my GM library. It looks decently configurable, though for some reason it refuses to transfer some of my non-protected M4A (AAC) files. There is a considerable setup period to start with where the music needs to be uploaded to Google’s servers. Not much Google can do about crappy upload speeds though.

The desktop web interface is not as good as iTunes, which is quite the anti-achievement. Simple options like playing a complete album are hidden behind mouse-over events or inside menus, depending upon where in the interface you are. As far as I can tell the player still requires Flash as well, or at least will complain if it isn’t present. I only point this out as an oddity because the mobile web app version plays music on my iOS devices where Flash is obviously not present. I’m curious what’s stopping them from using a similar solution where available.

The mobile web app is impressive in that it exists at all. Upon first launching it on my iPhone I was asked to allow Google Music to set up a larger database on my device. No problem there. And the interface is nice apart from some niggling issues. It adopts the Ice Cream Sandwich look, which seems to take a bit more from Windows Phone 7’s swiping panels than iOS’s hierarchical pages. It’s easy enough to navigate through the various lists of Albums, Artists, Playlists and the like.

The first problem is the inconsistent scrolling experience. Presumably in order to enable their swiping behaviour, the web app is overriding the default system scrolling. Therefore scrolling up or down varies depending on where the finger starts scrolling. Get it in the right spot, and the list will correctly scroll up and down. Get it in the wrong spot, and the entire page will scroll up and down. Not exactly ideal.

The web app also lacks some useful navigation. When I first used it there seemed to be no way to get back to the currently playing track without hunting it down in the lists again (this seems fixed now). It also seems like it relies too heavily on browser navigation buttons rather than providing its own, which is a problem if you’re doing what it seems like you should be doing, and adding Google Music as a web app on the iPhone’s homescreen. It becomes too easy to get stuck on a page with no way back.

Problems with poor and inconsistent layout aside, my last issue with the web app is that it doesn’t seem to update the library very often, if at all. I’ve read some reports of it taking about a week for the mobile web app to show new tracks. I didn’t wait that long, and had to delete the site’s database from my iPhone in order to update the library. Not particularly user friendly. I don’t know if this is an isolated issue or something Google have to work on to provide a better solution to.

It has problems. I’d rather be giving Apple US$25 and be using iTunes Match than putting up with these problems for free. It seems like a decent base to be building on though, and it goes a long way to making media management on Android devices not the issue it was before.

That’s it. I have no clever conclusion to recite.

I got an email from EB Games Australia:

Dave Raftery, you’re awesome!

What prompted this ebullient outpouring of admiration? I pre-ordered a game. Based on that fact alone, the company judges that I’m awesome. I could torture animals in my spare time, or harass small children. I could be the sort of person who defaces currency, or I could even be a German political leader from the 1930’s. But because I’ve put down a deposit on a video game, all my past sins are forgiven. $30 buys absolution for the murder of millions, according to EB Games.

So I could be overreacting. Actually, one might say, they’re just saying this to make me feel better. Some consultant somewhere took $30,000 to tell them to treat their customers like big-boobed, big-dicked superstars (not all at the same time, that might alienate folk). They don’t really mean to issue a blanket statement, “You’re awesome!”

Except that’s what they said. If they didn’t mean it, why say it?

In response to my rant about Virgin Mobile Australia (a wholly owned subsidiary of Optus) I received this mention on Twitter from Virgin Mobile USA:

@djr we appreciate your feedback. If you would like assistance from Virgin Mobile, just send us a tweet. ^PL

Judging from this account’s stream, I assume the “^PL” a the end indicates which customer service rep responded to this. The implication being that an actual human wrote this, and not just a bot programmed to respond to any mention of Virgin Mobile. My issue is, if one were to actually read what I wrote they’d notice that I was talking about VM Australia, a completely unrelated company.

A quick instance of confusion is no bother. Your job is to scan Twitter for mentions of Virgin Mobile and manage them. Except that this person, no doubt thanks to some $60,000 consultant, has to say that they “appreciate” my feedback. They “appreciate” it so much that they clearly didn’t read it. They don’t appreciate it at all of course. It’s just that that word has been chosen as the most adept at placating whoever they’re talking to.

They don’t mean it. They’re just saying it. I could say horrible things about their family, and they’d claim to appreciate it. Because that’s their job, and words are just words. They don’t really mean anything.

(Aside: Not that I blame ^PL, or the poor code jockey who had to script the automailer to tell me how awesome I am. I hold them as responsible as I hold people working in call centers.)

After years of bouncing from one free wireless access point to another, I finally picked up a smartphone with a data plan recently. Then I got rid of that crappy smartphone and got an iPhone. It’s nice having Internet access mostly everywhere. It’s less nice dealing with the mobile phone company.

I’ll set aside my problems with Virgin’s “image”, because they’re irrelevant here. What’s bothering me today is their billing scheme. And I’m not even talking about the massive industry-wide rort that is “value”, as in “$300 value for only $30 a month!” which if it were true would mean the company would go out of business in a second. No, let me describe the situation that has me cranky today:

I pay $19 a month on Virgin’s Your Cap pre-paid plan. Sorry, $19 per 28 days. This $19 nets me:

• 19 Virgin Mobile Fun Bucks, to be spent on their ludicrous call and text costs.
• 31 Bonus Virgin Mobile Fun Bucks, to also be spent on their ludicrous call and text costs.
• 1001MB of mobile data. Leftover data rolls over if I top up within 28 days, up to a maximum of 5005MB.

My first problem is that the system doesn’t do a very good job of telling me when I need to top up, such that this morning I lost all my leftover credit and had to start over because I was waiting for the last day of my current cycle to top up. Fair enough, my bad, I should have topped up earlier.

Except, as I have been told (will test it myself next time), if I topped up early then my next 28 day cycle would start from that day, instead of adding on to the end of my existing cycle.

So in order to not get a little bit ripped off, I need to jump online as late as possible and hit the “Recharge” button. If only there were some sort of auto-recharge function. Oh look, there is!

Except, the only options available are to recharge when my credit reaches a certain threshold, or on a specified day each month. I use maybe $20 of my Virgin Mobile Fun Bucks a month, tops, so the first option is no use to me. As for the second, my prepaid plan operates on 28 day cycles, not monthly. So if I set it to auto-recharge on the first of each month, I’m going to be without mobile access for a couple of days each month.

So their systems are actively customer-hostile. But I’m not going to leave, because they’re cheap enough, so whatever. This has all been meaningless.

But seriously, fuck you Virgin Mobile.

Betteridge’s Law states that if a headline ends with a question mark, you can usually answer ‘No’. You can then typically ignore the article.

In the spirit of that, here are a couple of other shortcuts:

If you begin a question with “Am I the only one who…” the answer is no. There are 7 billion people on the planet. I’m sure you’re nice and all, but nobody is particularly unique. Especially when you’re asking stupid things like “Am I the only one who doesn’t like Justin Bieber?” Internet superhero, you.

If you ask “Am I an old fart, or has there been nothing of value created since I was a young person” the answer is that you’re an old fart. Even if you’re not an old fart, you’re being an old fart. So the books and films and music being produced these days don’t interest you. They seem to interest a lot of other people. Get over it, enjoy the old stuff that is so good to you, and quit shitting on other peoples enjoyment.

Am I overreacting to what are basically rhetorical questions? Sure. But they’re stupid, self-serving rhetorical questions, and people shouldn’t use them. There are better ways to start equivalent discussion without painting yourself as some lone cultural hero.

There’s only one mobile platform that isn’t a real bore to talk about. Its name is Legion.

My apologies then for wasting a couple paragraphs of precious written language on a couple of contemporary operating systems for (among other things) smartphone devices: Apple’s iOS, and Google’s Android. If the universe truly is a finite phenomenon and one day all life and all matter is extinguished into a warm hum, I’m going to feel even more guilty for spending a little of my brief speck of time contributing to this vast universe on such a dull, pointless topic. I’m sorry to me, and since you’re reading this I’m especially sorry to you.

I’m so sorry.

Apple’s iOS grew from iPhoneOS, which was basically a custom version of the OS X system that runs on desktop Macs. The original iPhone was a phone mashed together with an iPod, and the operating system was built accordingly. The relevant point for this discussion is that like the iPod, the iPhone was designed to be tethered to a PC for the purpose of shifting media on and off the device. This was one of the features that made the iPods so gosh-darned popular in the first place, so it was no surprise that Apple wanted to keep this feature in their new device. So despite the iPhone in essence being a regular old computer running a regular old OS, the system was designed to work differently.

The Open Handset Alliance’s Android, formerly Android Inc’s Android, but really Google’s Android, essentially came out of nowhere. Unlike iPhoneOS it was not the continuation of a previous product line, but rather a chance for some industry veterans to start again and build the system they wanted to build. So while it certainly had antecedents, it was not tied to any particular model and was free to come up with its own. As such, since its release on publicly available phones it has been a comparitively standalone system, not requiring a PC to tether to for backups, restores, and the like. Much of the personal information (contacts, calendars, etc) was maintained by syncing over the Internet to Google’s servers. Media syncing (songs, videos, etc.) was not handled at all, and was left up to second or third-party solutions.

Two different approaches, each with their positives and negatives. iPhones were much easier to maintain media collections on, with an integrated and automatically sorted media library, and built-in high quality playback software. But in order to maintain the phone, you needed to plug it into a PC. Android phones did not require plugging into a PC to run software updates, and personal profiles could be backed up and restored over the Internet quite easily. But maintaining a media collection was at best a chore when compared to the iPhone, with uneven software selection and often manual media management required.

One of the reasons that these sorts of discussions are as boring (even more so, I’m sorry) as I made out at the start is that partisans will often look at the state of the feature-set now as some sort of constant, and then backfill some grand philosophy about why we’re now in a state of perfection. The iPhone doesn’t need wireless updating, that would just kill battery life and anyway it works fine as it is. Android doesn’t need uniform media management, because freedom.

And then there’s the gloating on either side. Even more dull.

Platforms are not static however, and people who argue with the underlying assumption that they are do so at their peril. With the version 5 release of iOS, Apple has re-engineered their mobile platform to work independently of a host PC. The split that I described above is now altered, such that the iPhone now has superior media management capabilities, as well as catching up to Android as an independent platform.

This came up on Twitter as Apple released its first Over-The-Air update, iOS 5.0.1. iOS users were delighted at the ease of the process, Android partisans were quick to point out that the feature is old hat on their platform, as if fighting the old fight were somehow still relevant.

So what’s my point? I’m an iPhone user and have been and iOS user for longer still. I had an Android phone briefly and was not a fan, but I know several people who have no problem with it, and I’ve no reason to believe they’re not acting rationally. I’m not aiming to point out why iOS is superior to Android in general, but merely point out this one narrow set of features, how many of the arguments that spring from it are foolish, and hopefully hint at why the larger argument, ongoing in so many corners of the web, is such a waste of time.

Also, I want to use a lot of commas.

(Aside: As I said, the platforms are constantly shifting: Google seems to be making an attempt to address Android’s media management shortcomings with their Music service now in beta. Whether it succeeds or not, the attempt is a positive move. Once both platforms have succeeded in implementing these features, they can focus on innovating in new areas. Everybody wins.)

Let’s see if I can bring together a few strands here.

Penn Jillette is a huge asshole. I hope he wouldn’t disagree with me. I’m only a few chapters into his new book God, No! and this seems to be a recurring theme. Penn Jillette is a huge asshole, but as assholes go he’s a great one to have around. I respect the hell out of the guy, as much as I may disagree with some of his libertarian stances. It’s like Johnny Cash’s Christianity. I’m probably never going to agree with it, but take it away and they would not be the huge personality I enjoy so much.

In his book, Penn describes his experience when fellow Vegas entertainer Roy Horn (of Siegfried and Roy) was critically injured by one of the tigers in his act. Amidst all the prayers was Penn Jillette, staunch atheist. You can’t ask a guy like Penn to stop being a guy like Penn.

So what’s this got to do with anything, aside from that it was a passage I read yesterday, and now I’m writing something about news from today? Well, a few things I suppose.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.

It doesn’t feel like six years since Steve Jobs said that in a commencement speech to students at Stanford, but it is, and now he’s dead. Pancreatic cancer is a bitch.

According to his book, Penn responded to Roy’s accident by buying some leather pants. The connection is clearer in the book, but basically he learned something about himself, about how he wanted to behave, and about how he wanted to treat other people. At least that’s what I took away from that.

The Internet is going to be filled with words and videos and whatever media my stodgey old brain can’t quite grasp, eulogising and condemning Steve Jobs. For his part in the creation of Apple and the evolution of the modern personal computing movement. For his part in Pixar, one of the greatest movie production companies ever. And for the way in which Apple and Disney, like many rich Western corporations, exploited workers in developing countries in the interest of greater profits. Also, if the many stories are to be believed, the guy was a bit of an asshole.

What I’m writing here is no more valid or interesting than any of that. It’s simply what I have to say. I was on a bus when I read the news, firing up Reeder on my iPad, and there it was from Daring Fireball, The Loop and 512 Pixels. I love these sites. It’s easy enough to call them Apple blogs. They certainly do report on developments in Apple products. But to me, calling them that is really limiting. To me, Apple blogs are dreck like 9to5Mac, Cult of Mac, or AppleInsider. Sites whose entire existence is about driving up ad impressions by talking about Apple 24/7, even when there is absolutely nothing to say. When Stephen Hackett at 520 Pixels has nothing to say about Apple, he’ll post about the shameful Internet sex trade, because it’s something he thinks is worth knowing about. And he won’t load it up with SEO keywords, because he’s not a douche. Gruber talks about baseball and Kubrick, and Jim Dalrymple and Peter Cohen post about music I may never listen to, but fuck it if it doesn’t give The Loop its style. I refer the reader back to what I said about Johnny Cash.

You may ask again, in slightly more polite phrasing, what the fuck does any of this have to do with anything? Penn loves to live large. Jim loves his music and shitting on RIM from a great height. Gruber thinks (correctly) that 2001 is the greatest movie ever. And fuck what boring tech pundits spout about walled gardens, device lock-in, and decidedly first-world notions of “freedom”, Steve Jobs wanted computing to be so damned simple that everyone could take part.

Here, watch this video where Steve Jobs explains why he wanted to call the Macintosh the Bicycle. Kudos to every hero who got in the way of that idea.

Heroes are a tough thing to have, because on some degree everyone is full of shit. Richard Dawkins is a great man and I look up to him still, but the handling of “Elevatorgate” was just embarrassing. There’s no describing the impact David Lynch’s work has had on how I view the world, but mention his stance on Transcendental Meditation and 9/11 to me and you’re going to see one grumpy bastard. Bill Hicks and the Kennedy assassination. Heroes all, and so fucking human. And now Steve Jobs, of the Macintosh, of NeXT, of Pixar, of the iPhone and the iPad, and the Mac G4 Cube, of overworked and underpaid Chinese workers, of generally being a hippy, of cheating Woz out of some cash, of all the good and the bad, is dead. And what does that have to do with me?

I have some friends I’ve been speaking to for longer than I care to think about now. That’s the odd thing about socialising via these little boxes of wires we all have now. The box is just there, and the people are just there, and before you know it you’ve been talking to the same people for a few years and there’s now rational difference between friends you meet in person and those you only talk to online.

To be perfectly honest, I never expected I’d meet any of these people in person. They’re scattered across all corners of the (oblate spheroid) Earth, and I am the least motivated person I know. I barely get out of the house, not feeling comfortable in such bizarre spaces as pubs, clubs, or other “-ubs” filled with people I’ve never met dancing to music I’ve never heard. After a brief affair with alcohol, I don’t drink any of that now. I’m actively the least interesting person you’re ever likely to meet.

Then some things happened. Well, two things happened. Two very distinctly Important Things. Two things that even some of my more special friends who liked to convince me that nothing really mattered could possibly sway me about. First, a very awesome friend of mine died. We weren’t especially close, but he was the best friend of a very good friend, and as I said, he was awesome. I am a fan of truth and cliche makes me cringe, so I very rarely describe people this way, but few people have been as genuinely and consistently nice to me as he was. Life did a hell of a thing when it took him away.

The second thing that gave me a swift kick in the arse was finding out about a year and a bit later that due to an odd defect, my poor kidneys were slowly being shredded to the point of uselessness. One day I’ll probably need a transplant, but at best that will just be a reset button and the process will start over again. I spent a week telling my family about the situation, and generally feeling like it was the end of the world. Like it was a bad dream I couldn’t wake up from.

And then in a couple of weeks I felt better. Not that I was better, that’s not going to happen. But my mind was wrapped around this new reality now. I’m sick, yes, but I’m still here for now, and I’m probably not going anywhere any time soon. But eventually I would be, so maybe I should get a handle on what I’d like to do in the meantime.

Were I any other person, this would probably be the point where I wrote my novel, travelled the world, met interesting people and settled down somewhere. I’m not that person, so I’ve mainly sat around feeling distain for the world. But now I’m doing that, having at least carried out two of those things. I went to America, and I finally met some of these awesome people in person. It cost me money and anxiety, and any illusion that travel isn’t one of the most ridiculous things a person can do, but even I’m not so unmotivated as to think it wouldn’t be worth it.

It was three weeks, and probably the best three weeks I’ve spent in decades.

What does this have to do with Steve Jobs? Fuck all, this is about me. How could it be about anything but me? The death of Steve Jobs leaves me to again question when I’m going to do the things I want to do before my time is up. I can’t imagine the sort of sadness he’d have felt, knowing he wasn’t going to see all his kids grow up and live their own lives. But in the time that he was able, it’s hard to imagine the man would have felt disappointed in his efforts.

He knew who he was. He knew what he wanted. He went after it. He left a dent in the universe. We should all be so fucking driven.

And as a godless atheist who is still sad he never got to meet one of his friends, who is going to miss a guy who sold great toys, and who wants even the multitude of assholes who have wronged him to love long and healthy lives, if you get sick, please see your doctor. Don’t visit a psychic. Don’t call some asshole on the radio. See your fucking doctor.

My final goal is to be able to post updates here using any plain text editor on my PC, laptop, phone, iPod Touch or iPad. I’ve still got a few more steps to get there.

After a day and a bit of strapping various pre-written libraries together as well as a bit of my own logic, I’ve got something that does almost enough. I can create a Markdown-formatted text file in a chosen folder using only a couple of basic rules. The entry title must be on the first line of the file, the content starts on the fourth line, and there’s a block of metadata at the foot of the page. So three rules.

From this, the script can scan the folder, populate a MySQL database with details on each of the files, update the details on any files that have changed since the last scan, and publish the files that are marked to be published. And it can build an index listing each of the articles, blog-style. Since adding the metadata block, I can also mark different files to be formatted differently, so I can have a linked list like I’ve been doing lately.

I’m using PHP Markdown Extra to handle the conversion (I’ll want to use footnotes eventually), and Savvy for templating. It’s all ugly as sin so far but should look better once I’ve found a template I like. I think I’m tired of building layouts from scratch.

My biggest hurdle now is how to actually get this system online. Ideally I could point the script at a Dropbox folder, since all my devices can edit text files there. However my cheap hosting limits my options there. I can’t even rsync a folder from an always-on PC. So right now this is all academic, but I’m hoping to find a solution there.

I posted a small gripe over on Twitter. Of course, the business involved scans for all mentions of their name, and they responded. I’m now involved in a back-slappy back and forth which passes for customer service. I wish I’d never said anything.

Since Google+ opened up I’ve been posting all around the place. I wasn’t happy with G+ so I reopened a Tumblr account with the thinking that it would be less friction to post to that site using their iOS client than it would be to this site while I was on holiday in the USA. That never became an issue however, as I didn’t blog about anything on my trip, and all photos were uploaded to G+ anyway.

On the plane home I finally got myself to watch The Social Network. When I wasn’t spotting all the reused music in the soundtrack, I was growing more and more weary of the whole idea of Facebook. I signed up for it years and years ago, when it was still restricted to “.edu” addresses. There were maybe 5 other Flinders students I could find. It was nicely laid out, it was blue and white, and it seemed like a decent place to keep a profile. That’s about the extent of thought I put into it.

It wasn’t the scummy behaviour by Zuckerberg and Parker as portrayed in the film that tempted me to finally delete my account (that would be ludicrous, since a dramatic film is hardly a reliable source of character), but the greater discussion and portrayal of what Facebook is meant to be. Facebook wants to be everything. I don’t want my everything to be on Facebook. I don’t want it to be on Google. Or on Apple’s iCloud.

I don’t begrudge people their willingness to relinquish some of their privacy in order to gain the convenience of socialising on these services. They’re comfortable with that, and that’s fine. I’m not comfortable with that. So why the hell am I still posting anything to Google+?

I was going to hold off on rebuilding Dumbland until Marco Arment released Second Crack, and build it off that. He’s still taking his time getting it to a point he’s happy with. I’m considering trying to build something similar myself in the meantime. It’s been too long since I’ve exercised my meagre coding skills, and while I have a general idea of what’s involved there are a few points which should be suitably challenging to keep my brain ticking over.

So this has been rambling. Oh well.

The Line

Two Fridays ago I had finished the edit for the day and was heading home at around 4 o’clock. Got in to the city at about 4.30 and since I tend to have little sense, I decided to find the nearest line of people in which to stand, wait, and hope that we might be granted the opportunity to fork over a nice wad of cash for a piece of consumer electronics.

I was at Next Byte Adelaide, where the line was something approaching reasonable. I had gone past the JB HiFi, where the line was abysmal. In the line with me were a whole lot of strangers, but as the clock ticked towards the 5pm release I spoke to a couple of them. There was a woman in line who kept vacillating between a 3G and a WiFi model. I was decided. I’ve been without a 3G connection for years now, no need to change that now. There was a man in line who, showing far more sense and preparation than I possess, had already ordered and paid for his and was just waiting to pick it up. I noted it several times - he clearly was not one of us.

A photographer and someone else from the Advertiser were there taking photos, and asking inane questions in the hope of receiving inane answers. Nobody was disappointed. At worst, my shoe might have appeared in the Saturday edition of a Murdoch paper. No matter. 

It was perhaps 5.30 when the bad news came through the line. The store was running out of stock for some models, and were certain that they would not have enough even to cover the preorders. Ouch. Fortunately nobody seemed to be a jerk about it. Despite the hissy fits that one plague all discussion threads about the subject, people seemed cool about it, and the staff were handling things well. I put my name down and bolted. Well perhaps not that quickly, but I did have a hilariously poor fashion show to avoid, as well as all those jerks with iPads.

I tried a few more places in the next couple of days. The local Target was one of the few to carry the new models. They did not carry them for long. Nor did the local JB. And the Whirlpoolers and the Mactalkers were reporting growing waiting times. Next Byte had said on the night that they were hoping for more stock on the next Wednesday or Thursday. Then people were reporting two to three weeks. Then three to four. The iPad is hardly a necessity, but it would have been disappointing to wait a month and potentially longer just so I could walk around the house feeling like Captain Picard. I resigned myself to waiting for Next Byte to call.

Which they did. On April 1st, the next Friday. While I was sleeping. So somehow I managed to sleep through my phone blaring Murray Gold’s 2010 rendition of the Doctor Who theme right next to my lousy head. I’m sure it was good sleep. A round bus trip to the city later - with a brief stop for some sushi from Genki Roll - and I had a gorgeous glass panel to smear my greasy mitts all over.

Smart Cover

Maybe I’ll come to regret it, but I picked up a black leather Smart Cover while I was picking up the iPad. The cover itself feels great. It sits perfectly over the screen while it’s closed, and the magnetic grip is so damned sturdy that the cover feels like it’s a part of the iPad. 

While holding the iPad in portrait view (e.g. when reading a book), the cover can fold in half and provides a nice grip on the back. Folding it into a triangle to use as a stand is interesting to say the least. The sturdiest method is to fold it up as done in the Smart Cover ad Apple produced, however this means exposing the micro fiber panels that ordinarily are held against the iPad’s screen. Dirty. The alternative is to fold it the other way, with the leather facing out. This works (I am doing it right now) but the grip is noticeably weaker. It is fine for propping the iPad up for typing, but often too weak for holding the iPad up vertically to watch a movie. 

The other downside is that it offers no protection for the back of the iPad, and at the moment it seems exceedingly difficult to find a case that leaves space for the Smart Cover to operate. Rather, it seems that case makers would prefer to create their own magnetic covers. Their own ugly magnetic covers. With puffy leather and the like.

I like my Smart Cover, and I hope I can keep using it. The back of the iPad certainly feels less in need of protection when compared to the silly glossy back of my iPod Touch, but I’d still prefer to have something there. I’ll need to sell this thing one day of course.

The Damn Thing Itself

Even after using the device for a week, it still feels delightfully small. I handled a first generation iPad a few times and one of my few complaints about the feel of the device is that it felt just a smidgeon too heavy. Not a problem for sitting in the lap, but just a touch too heavy to carry around in one hand while ordering an ornery Klingon to fire on those bastard Borg with the other. The second generation iPad shaves off a bit of weight, and it upscales the nicely tapered rear of the 4th generation iPod Touch, and damn this thing is nice to hold. 

Of course the first thing that really stands out to me when I power it on and start flicking through the screens is that damn, I really love the Retina display. The iPad 2 doesn’t have one of course, and for damn good technical reasons, but a man can dream. This is wish #1 for the next iteration of the device. That’s not to say that the display is not lovely. Nice and bright when I want it to be, and very readable even when I turn the brightness right down. The colour looks superb. It’s only when I go back to my iPod Touch that I notice the relatively poor pixel density. 

The cameras are shit, there’s really no dancing about it. Give them enough light and they’ll give you something satisfactory at best. I’ve yet to try a FaceTime call - I’ll note, the only thing I could really imagine using either camera for anyway - but just in Photo Booth the front-facing VGA camera produces a blocky, blurry image. Looks worse than a 2x blown up iPhone app, and they look pretty bad.

I’m one of the people who can see little reason aside from video conferencing for a tablet to have cameras. Certainly however, that’s no reason not to include them as someone is bound to come up with some amazing new app which will make them indispensable. I’ve seen the ARG apps people have put together. I don’t think they’re worth it. And anyone holding up their iPad to take pictures is a fucking dingus. All that said, if they’re going to put cameras in I’d rather they reached a certain level of quality, which the iPad’s cameras do not. 

Those niggles aside, the machine feels great in the hand, and is incredibly responsive in use. I am also finding the keyboard to be quite nice. In portrait mode I can use my giant gumby thumbs to reach over and hit most keys without effort. In landscape mode I can type and type. I’m even typing every last word of this big dumb post on the iPad right now, so any stupid spelling mistakes I will blame on the iPad, since my spelling is brilliant and I am never wrong.

Apps

iOS devices are app consoles, in the way that the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 are game consoles. This rightly makes some people shit their pants. I still love my Mac, I still cheat on my Mac from time to time with my PC, but damn if I don’t get tired of maintaining them. While iOS and Android and WebOS are not yet to the point where they can completely replace a PC for most people, as far as I am concerned the sooner they get there the better.

I have the benefit of coming to the platform a year after launch, and already with a swag of apps on my iPod Touch. Only one of these - the excellent Reeder - required repurchase on the iPad. No big deal. $12 in total for an app I’ve used daily for over a year is a damn good deal. Outside of games, universal apps seem fairly common. And delightfully, Chair’s Infinity Blade is a universal app, has been updated for the iPad, and is damn brilliant. The Monkey Island games which would no doubt be right at home on the larger screen, sadly are not universal.

Though I bought Reeder again I am surprised that I do not use it as often as I did on the iPod. Instead I find myself quite taken by Flipboard and Zite, two apps that take your own feeds and do a remarkably good job of turning them in to newspapers. Flipboard looks better, Zite has better customization of feeds, but between them I often find little reason to return to an RSS reader, or even a Twitter client.

These two apps also make me even more disinterested in Murdoch’s new venture, The Daily. I do want journalism to find its way to profitability, and I do think good news sources should be supported, even if that means with actual cash and not just eyeballs. And I get that not being a proud American (so anti-American in fact that I had the audacity to be born and spend my entire life in a different country altogether) this isn’t really pitched at me, but good god how can anyone be interested in this banal shit. When I can have my own newspaper produced for me using the sources I’ve chosen, as well as curated feeds from sources all over the world, why would I bother with such small minded trite as The Daily? Thanks Verizon ever so much for the two week trial, but I can’t say I’ll be sticking around. 

PlainText, which I am using to type up this post, is even better on the iPad which its larger keyboard. Hooked up to Dropbox, I have a universal note taking system. For a lazy bastard like me, this is brilliant. I picked up GarageBand if only to remind myself of just how little musical talent I have. It’s a really fun app to fart around in, however. And since the iPad is loud as he’ll you can really piss off your drunken neighbors.

The ABC’s iView app is even better than their website, and makes me wonder out loud right here why all the free to air stations aren’t getting on this streaming television thing to my damn iPad right now. To go off on a bit of a tangent here, I wonder if ABC is going to bother coding up a native Android iView app, or make them use the Flash site. Given how damn well the iPad app runs, and how well Flash still doesn’t run on brand new Android devices, I do wonder.

Finally, there are the pure reading apps. The book readers. iBooks, Stanza, Kindle, etc. Can’t be bothered, quite good, really good in limited circumstances, respectively. iBooks is gorgeous, but I don’t really enjoy reading in it. It bothers me that the stacked pages on the side are a dumb graphic rather than any actual representation of my progress through the book. Stanza eschews a bit of the fanciness for functionality, and most importantly lets me read PDFs without much hassle. It also ties in well to Calibre on the desktop, if I ever have the energy to deal with that ugly ugly piece of very useful software. 

If I could run everything I wanted through the Kindle app I’d be really happy. My one complaint about it is that I need to tap the screen to get a marker of my progress through the book. I wish there were some permanent display of it. But that’s it. Everything else feels great. As long as it is set to Basic Reading Mode of course. Turn that off and the app puts on airs, throwing in silly animations all over the place. Forget that noise. Any time I have a .MOBI ebook, I read it in the Kindle app. It helps that the background image on my library is so damned charming.

In Summary

I have very little insightful to say about the iPad, and anyway that’s not what I’m aiming for here. This is me gushing. Gushing over Apple doing such an excellent job on their end, if we ignore entirely the horrible cameras. But even more gushing over the great apps that third party developers have put together, so often producing things that just would not feel right on a PC or even a laptop. I’m an Apple person certainly, but I’m excited to see how WebOS and Android and their respective developer communities contribute to this new approach to the form factor. They’re going to make tablets better, and in the process they’re going to make PCs, laptops, and all of computing better.

And now I’ll stop being a lofty idealistic shit.

I’m listening to an episode of SETI’s Are We Alone podcast, specifically a very interesting interview with Sean Carroll, author of Remarkable Creatures. I’m hearing a fascinating account of Alfred Wallace, the other man who discovered natural selection. I’d love to read more, but I go to the Amazon Store and there is no version of the text available for Kindle.

Some friends of mine are in the process of optioning a novel they want to adapt into a feature film. The novel sounds really interesting. So I go to the Amazon Store and there’s a Kindle version there. I can’t buy it however, because I’m an Australian and I live in Australia. So I hunt around at local stores but no electronic version is available to me.

I want to read these books. I want to buy these books and support the authors and even the publishing apparatus that supports them. But I want them in the form I want to read them. Clearly there is a problem here.

I wasn’t much a fan of Death at a Funeral, but I did find Peter Dinklage pretty damn funny. Now I hear he’s playing Tyrion Lannister in the HBO’s forthcoming A Game of Thrones series, which sounds just damn perfect. Any time I’ve heard Dinklage mentioned, The Station Agent has invariably been mentioned along with it, and since I’m supposed to be a film fan I figured I should take a look.

Dinklage plays Fin, a rail fan who loses a friend and gains a disused depot in remote Newfoundland, New Jersey. He’s a quiet and isolated guy, clearly many years past peoples taunts and sympathies, and Dinklage manages to make this silence and constraint compelling. Of course he gets pulled out of his shell, but thankfully not by the typical ‘homeliness’ of small-town America. Rather, it’s a handful of similarly isolated individuals who play off Fin. Patricia Clarkson’s Olivia is a woman who has lost her family, while Bobby Cannavale’s Joe seems to have lost his social life while caring for his ill father.

It’s a low-key film which relies on its performances, and to the credit of all involved, they work extremely well.

I’m living several hours into the future 1 so in all likelihood I’ll be sitting up early Thursday morning, not considering sleep as ‘something better to do’, and hitting refresh on somebody’s liveblog of Apple’s iPad 2 event. When it was first announced back in January 2010, I was impressed but not exactly aching to get one. On the one hand, it was undoubtedly cool. A flashy portable reading device reminiscent of a PADD from Star Trek rather than the clunky OneNote terminals that Microsoft and its partners had been pushing for some time to little general interest. On the other, depressingly practical hand, I had no use for one. While browsing on the iPod touch’s smaller screen is not ideal, with the aid of Reeder and Instapaper it is quite sufficient. For more serious tasks, I somehow think the iPad is not quite up to cutting video as well as for instance my MacBook Pro.

Picking one up and using it however, it’s not hard to come to like it very quickly.

Cameras

It seems a given that the new model will at the very least have a front-facing camera in order to support FaceTime, and I’m going to add to that that I hope they make it one of the new HD-capable cameras included in the latest round of MacBook Pros.

The rear camera is a more unusual beast to me. While I should never underestimate the willingness for people to look positively goofy, I can’t get past the visual of people holding up their 10” slates to take a picture of something. Or waving them around to take advantage of some silly new augmented reality app.

Of course, my own lack of imagination and my hyperactive self-awareness should not stand in the way of others great ideas, so I wouldn’t be shocked to see a rear-facing camera in there as well. Of course it would be amusing if someone stood up on stage and said “No, it doesn’t have a rear camera. That’s a stupid idea.”

Weight

Finally picking one of these bastards up recently, the first thing I noticed was that it was slightly heavier than I’d imagined. As nice as the latest models look I’ve never quite connected with Apple’s desire to get the MacBook Airs as thin and light as possible (to the sacrifice of other features). I imagine their desire with the iPad is to get it as close as possible to simply feeling like a display, and that’s something I can certainly understand.

Gruber suggests they might switch to carbon fiber for the case. I have no clue on all these fancy materials, but it sounds fair enough. I’m at least somewhat confident that Apple won’t sacrifice the sturdy and reliable feel of the device (particularly the glass on the display).

I’m sure whoever Apple pushes up on stage will tout the reductions in thickness and weight in healthy disproportion to how important the tech blog writers find these properties. Of all the hardware advances on offer however, this is probably the one I’m most interested in.

That Damn Button

I’ve gone through two iPods, and two iPod touches and the only problem I’ve ever had with the buttons is that after five years, the center button on my iPod 5.5 is a bit stiff. Still, since they’ve gone and increased the load on the poor little mechanical device by overloading it (in the programming sense) with additional functions, I worry about it. I double click it to access the multitasking bar. I triple-click it to invert the screen (an accessibility feature I love). And I’ve heard of the button breaking on a friend’s iPhone, and the button on the iPad that I used felt uncomfortably loose.

Firmly in to “I don’t think it will happen, but it would be interesting” territory here, I’d like to see them drop the front home button, either shifting it to the side of the device or replacing it with a touch/gesture-based equivalent. A few things here:

1. Palm’s use of a gesture area on the Pre was interesting, but seemed a bit unintuitive. Apple would need to deal with that.

2. My brother has a Samsung Galaxy S which has one physical button and a few touch buttons. The touch buttons are incredibly frustrating, and very unfortunately placed for a game such as Solipskier. Apple would need to solve the problem of accidental clicks.

3. My very young niece and nephew like to play with an iPod touch, but what they typically end up doing is clicking the home button over and over. This is understandable, since it’s the only thing on the face of the device that offers some tactile feedback. Also, repeatedly clicking the button results in nice fancy animation on the screen as it slides back and forth between the first page of apps and the search screen. This is such an obscure use-case, but I’d love to see some sort of solution to this, to make it a little harder to get out of an app.

I can’t think of any good simple way to solve these problems, but fortunately I’m just some dork with a website, and my job does not rely on coming up with these solutions. So good luck Apple.

Software

The iPad is in a weird position at the moment. The iPhone seems to be the flagship iOS device, regularly launching with the new version of the operating system in the middle of the year. The iPad instead gets the last gasping updates of the cycle. To that end I’d be curious to see how much Apple wants to go into their favourite new features of iOS 5, since they undoubtedly will not be available on the iPad 2 at launch.

But ignore that. What I really want to see in iOS 5 is an overhauled notification system. I want to see them come up with something better and more intuitive than Android’s swipe-able title bar, and the absence of inspiration I’d be happy with them just ripping it off. The only thing I miss about my jailbroken iPod touch is quick access to Airplane mode and other settings via SBSettings. Adding the orientation lock, player and volume controls to the multitasking bar was a nice addition, but that feature seems to be stretched as far as it can reasonably go now.

On that note I’d also like to see them overhaul the app switching feature, adopting something similar to Exposé or Mission Control as they’ve previewed it for OS X Lion.

I’m not sure if there’s anything notable to expect software-wise from the iPad 2 that we don’t already know about from the extensive iOS 4.3 beta.

Conclusion

My wishlist for the iPad 2 is pretty conservative. A pixel-doubled display would be fantastic, but stinks of being unrealistic. More onboard storage is always a plus, but I never fill my 32GB iPod Touch unless I fill it with music I’m never going to listen to. Any sort of stereoscopic 3D features (á la Nintendo’s 3DS) can fuck right off. Of course I want a faster processor, more memory, and better battery life, but that goes so much without saying that I’m going to stop saying it now.

In all honesty I’d be very tempted to pick up an iPad today if the new model weren’t just around the corner. Since they don’t have an ExpressCard slot they can remove from the iPad, I’m struggling to think of ways they could make the new device somehow less desirable.

1. Unfortunately we still lack hoverboards and flying cars, despite a surfeit of films with delusions of stereoscopy. Back