We are iPad. Resistance is (not) futile

Apple may have closed the iPad, but you don't need permission to open it.

The rules beg to be broken.

Bear with me; anecdotes are required.

1990:

Twenty years ago, I was 13, and my father was not. He owned a 286, or perhaps a 386; I very much did not. For him, his computer was a functional employee. It did what he told it to do, slightly faster than a mathematical child prodigy, and he cared very little for what that manilla box chose to do when he was not around.

I, on the other hand, was far more interested in how that slab behaved, and the psychosis of that behavior. I wanted inside. And while I was forbidden to play with the computer, I was not forbidden to open an unlocked toolbox, find a Phillips-head screwdriver, and put it to work.

At some point, my unscrewing of the eyeless computer definitely became play for me. I opened the closed system, and have been working in, with, and around computers every since. I was yelled at soundly that evening -- leaving the various parts scattered around the room and then going to a church youth function without reassembling those parts might have contributed to the problem -- but it changed me.

Rules? Sure. I learn best when there are rules, because they beg me to break them and see what happens.

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Games & Entertaiment account for half of all iPad apps

98% of apps in the U.S. iTunes app store label themselves as "iPad compatible", but most were written for iPhones or iPods. One week into its launch there are about 2,300 apps^† that run only on iPads. Measured in terms of number of unique apps, Games and Entertainment account for about half of all the iPad apps:

The number of iPhone apps in the Book category is inflated because many individual ebooks are counted as apps. In comparison, iBooks and other ebook readers are used to manage individual ebooks on an iPad so there are fewer (iPad-only) Book apps.

Unlike the iPhone and Android app ecosystems, the majority of Top 100 apps aren't Games. At least for now, other categories are much more represented in the Top 100 charts:

As expected, popular iPad apps are priced higher than popular iPhone apps. As an example, popular Productivity apps sell for over $10 on average; popular Games sell for $7. The chart below shows the average^†† price of the Top 100 iPad apps:

(†) This post is limited to apps that run ONLY on iPads. Some apps are classified in several categories, so some double-counting occurs in the percentages shown in the charts.
(††) Just like the iPhone, there are three Top 100 Charts for the iPad: Top 100 Free, Paid, and Grossing. I took all the apps that appeared in the Top 100 Paid/Grossing charts and grouped them by category, then calculated the mean.

Four short links: 9 April 2010

ACTA, Librarianship, HTML Magic, and Understanding Data

1. PublicACTA -- conference to critique the ACTA draft and offer better principles for the negotiators. It will be streamed online, and you'll be able to watch Michael Geist, Kim Weatherall, and other speakers as well as follow the issues and drafting process. Raw notes and drafts will be on the web site throughout the day. I'm MCing.
2. The Library is the Machine -- article about the relationship of libraries to catalogues, errors, authoritative information, and the lessons for this new world of data we're building. (via staplegun on Twitter)
3. Parchment -- all-Javascript z-code interpreter. Z-code is the basis of Infocom-style text adventures ("interactive fiction" to aficionados). Impressive for the decoding, interpretation, and speed. The web still surprises me with what it can do and how well it does it. If only it had an app store *cough*.
4. Fixing the Budget -- the Economist polled Americans on the budget deficit. Overwhelmingly they want to cut spending and not raise taxes. When asked where to cut spending, the only agreement was on topics responsible for a few percent of the overall budget. This is why Budget Hero is so important: we need more SimCity-like exploration tools that let you say "what if we did (my favourite policy)?" and see what it does to not just next year's deficit but those that our children will inherit.

Brian Aker on post-Oracle MySQL

A deep look at Oracle's motivations and MySQL's future

Brian Aker parted ways with the mainstream MySQL release, and with Sun Microsystems, when Sun was acquired by Oracle. These days, Aker is working on Drizzle, one of several MySQL offshoot projects. In time for next week's MySQL Conference & Expo, Aker discussed a number of topics with us, including Oracle's motivations for buying Sun and the rise of NoSQL.

The key to the Sun acquisition? Hardware:

Brian Aker: I have my opinions, and they're based on what I see happening in the market. IBM has been moving their P Series systems into datacenter after datacenter, replacing Sun-based hardware. I believe that Oracle saw this and asked themselves "What is the next thing that IBM is going to do?" That's easy. IBM is going to start pushing DB2 and the rest of their software stack into those environments. Now whether or not they'll be successful, I don't know. I suspect once Oracle reflected on their own need for hardware to scale up on, they saw a need to dive into the hardware business. I'm betting that they looked at Apple's margins on hardware, and saw potential in doing the same with Sun's hardware business. I'm sure everything else Sun owned looked nice and scrumptious, but Oracle bought Sun for the hardware.

The relationship between Oracle and the MySQL Community:

BA: I think Oracle is still figuring things out as far as what they've acquired and who they've got. All of the interfacing I've done with them so far has been pretty friendly. In the world of Drizzle, we still make use of the Innodb plugin, though we are transitioning to the embedded version. Everything there has gone just along swimmingly well. In the MySQL ecosystem you have MariaDB and the other distributions. They're doing the same things that Ubuntu did for Debian, which is that they're taking something that's there and creating a different sort of product around it. Essentially though, it's still exactly the same product. I think some patches are flowing from MariaDB back into MySQL, or at least I've seen some notice of that. So for the moment it looks like everything's as friendly as it is going to be.

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Who is the iPad for?

iPad adoption carries mixed messages and open questions

Many have written about how the iPad heralds a new paradigm in computers. Computers today are too complex. The iPad is the device that our parents will use so they don't have to worry about the dark, scary underbelly of the file system.

During a recent panel at Mobile Portland, both the audience and the panelists discussed the shortcomings of the iPad as being obstacles for themselves, but that these problems wouldn't slow the iPad because the tech-savvy audience wasn't the target demographic for the iPad.

Despite the fact that everyone believes the iPad is targeted at those who need a simpler computer, Apple itself has never made that argument.

You cannot use an iPad without a computer. The iPad cannot:

• Install operating system updates without connecting to a computer.
• Back up data and software without connecting to a computer.
• Print documents without somehow emailing or sharing the document to a computer.

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Four short links: 8 April 2010

0Day BLINK, Code Review, Business Models, and Cognitive Visualization

1. BLINK Tag Security Advisory -- sounds April 1sty, but WebKit had an executable code vulnerability related to use of the BLINK tag. (via followr on Twitter)
2. Gerrit -- a web based code review system, facilitating online code reviews for projects using the Git version control system. (via mattb on Delicious)
3. Open Source Business Models (PDF) -- presentation by Matt Aslett of The 451 Group, giving a framework for understanding how license, community, development model, and business model interact. Was a talk at OSBC. (via Stephen Wall)
4. Graphical Perception: Learn the Fundamentals First (Flowing Data) -- a list of visual cues ordered by how well people perceive them, and examples of how they're used in visualizations. Visualization isn't just art, there's science behind it and just as great artists know the science behind their medium, great data artists understand the cognitive science behind their techniques.

Stop fishing and start feasting: How citable public documents will change your life

Putting government documents and data online is a great step towards making our government process more transparent to the people it serves, but in many ways simply making the material available is like serving someone dinner by giving them a pond full of fish. The pond is huge and the poor dinner guest doesn't have any tools. Worse, they're only looking for one particular bass, and every time someone sends them to where they last saw the fish it's long gone.

The recent healthcare bill was more than 1,000 pages long. The budget can often be half again that big. Commenting on these types of documents as they are currently implemented is extremely challenging. Pointing a finger at that big pond and telling someone that you swear you saw a fish isn't very effective. It's even worse when someone swears they saw a fish that isn't really there and it is effective because no one is willing to refute them. No one has time to wade around themselves and so they take it on faith. The recent "killing grandma" scare is an excellent example.

Citations, first, are a way of pointing at the fish. A simple paragraph level of granularity for references should be enough. This promotes ease of implementation and use and provides a tight enough zoom to bring someone right to the material being discussed.

The next problem is that fish move. If you're trying to point out a moving fish, and show it to someone later, you need to have a photograph with a timestamp. That line in the budget about forcing our children to manufacture chemical weapons might have moved to page three the next day, or a wily senator may have changed the wording and put it under a different heading. Proper citability requires an archived snapshot of the online material that maintains the integrity of any reference links.

Lastly, for someone to believe you about this fish, you need to have a way of pointing out where you saw it at the specified time. They'll want to know it was the same pond.

Making it possible to create timestamped permalinks at a paragraph level of granularity would be a huge leap forward in increasing government transparency through its online documents. The same principles apply when producing citable government data. When recovery.org decided to display visual representations of the data coming in about recovery money around the nation, it quickly became clear that some amount of data was erroneous. When the errors were reported and the data was later modified, there wasn't any way to go back and compare the two versions to see what changes had taken place. A blogger, reporter, statistician or scientist should be able to run a query against any specific collection of government data, as it was published, for a given version or moment in time.

WHAT WE'RE DOING

The nonprofit, nonpartisan League of Technical Voters has proposed a simple, easy to build and implement citability solution. Open source software development is underway and a wide range of government institutions are already on board. If you would like to help with this effort, consider being part of our upcoming codeathon or create your own codeathon.

The iPad and computing's middle ground

How much computing happens between the phone and the laptop? We'll see.

It's been quite a while now that cafes have been filled with laptops and people fighting over power outlets. More recently, those same coffee shops have added a crowd of people waiting for their drinks, nearly all hunched over their iPhones. Mobile devices take computing to new places.

I have to wonder where we'll see iPads a few months or years from now. I bet some of the places they'll show up aren't yet obvious.

One simple example: Phil Schiller's demo of the iWork spreadsheet app, Numbers, in the iPad launch keynote (iTunes link) showed a spreadsheet tracking a local soccer team. It's a great demo. Would you carry a laptop around a soccer field? Would you want to track game stats on an iPhone while shouting encouragement to the players? Neither of those quite work, but the iPad, replacing the coach's old clipboard, could easily make that environment a better one for computing. It's a middle ground where the phone is too small and the laptop too big.

I've long loved Don Norman's book, "The Invisible Computer," which talks about computing as an embedded aspect of everyday devices. The iPad isn't that; it does, though, move the ways we can use computers and networks closer to activities that so far have been difficult to reach. The computer is still visible, but it is also much more everyday than it was.

I'm excited about the iPad and what people might create for it. Apple does a fantastic job -- better than anyone -- at providing development kits that make developers' work look beautiful. They model the best experiences in the apps they ship, and provide tools that allow any motivated developer to make similarly beautiful experiences for their own apps. The form of the iPad is one big change, but the examples Apple is setting, in iBooks and iWork and the rest, invite people to create,. I love that.

The uproar around the iPhone and iPad restrictions and patent enforcement issues is real and I sympathize with both positions. But to get to the future we have to imagine it, we have to see it made real. How many tech companies and entrepreneurs talked endlessly and nearly fruitlessly (no pun intended) about the mobile web and tablet computing before the iPhone and the iPad came along? Apple is great at giving up just enough freedom to settle complaints (witness the evolution of DRM in iTunes), and I suspect that will happen again here. Regardless of how it plays out, I think we're seeing an expansion of the way we use and think about computing.

Four short links: 7 April 2010

HTML5 Widgets, RDF and Unix, Movie Piracy, and Online Complaints

1. SproutCore -- open-source HTML5 application framework (i.e., lots of Javascript goodness) that'll work with any backend. To code for this, you put most of the logic in the front-end and leave the back-end much simpler.
2. RDF for Intrepid Unix Hackers -- an interesting series, showing how to use common Unix tools to manipulate RDF data from the commandline. (via Edd Dumbill)
3. How to Thrive Among Pirates (Kevin Kelly) -- a look at how indigenous movie-makers make money in countries like China, India, and Nigeria where piracy is rampant. In short, they make cheap movies, sell near the price of inferior-quality knockoffs, and take advantage of unique experiences that movie theaters offer (e.g., air-conditioning).
4. On Complaints (PublicStrategist) -- a very good analysis of complaints departments and expectations of people who complain. But there is also a vital question of what the organisation thinks the purpose of a complaints process is. If it is a safety valve, a means of finding and correcting the most egregious failures or a means of channelling immediate anger and dissatisfaction into a swamp of unresponsiveness, then it can’t provide any broader value. That’s where the Patient Opinion model starts to look really attractive. It is deliberately and carefully constructed to elicit feedback, not just complaints. More than half the stories it gets told are positive, even some of the most harrowing, and it therefore creates a picture which is as clear about what is valued as it is about what is seen as in need of improvement.

DC Circuit court rules in Comcast case, leaves the FCC a job to do

Today's ruling in Comcast v. FCC will certainly change the terms of debate over network neutrality, but the win for Comcast is not as far-reaching as headlines make it appear. The DC Circuit court didn't say, "You folks at the Federal Communications Commission have no right to tell any Internet provider what to do without Congressional approval." It said, rather, "You folks at the FCC didn't make good arguments to prove that your rights extend to stopping Comcast's particular behavior."

I am not a lawyer, but to say what happens next will take less of a lawyer than a fortune-teller. I wouldn't presume to say whether the FCC can fight Comcast again over the BitTorrent issue. But the court left it open for the FCC to try other actions to enforce rules on Internet operators. Ultimately, I think the FCC should take a hint from the court and stop trying to regulate the actions of telephone and cable companies at the IP layer. The hint is to regulate them at the level where the FCC has more authority--on the physical level, where telephone companies are regulated as common carriers and cable companies have requirements to the public as well.

The court noted (on pages 30 through 34 of its order) that the FCC missed out on the chance to make certain arguments that the court might have looked on more favorably. Personally and amateurly, I think those arguments would be weak anyway. For instance, the FCC has the right to regulate activities that affect rates. VoIP can affect phone rates and video downloads over the Internet can affect cable charges for movies. So the FCC could try to find an excuse to regulate the Internet. But I wouldn't be the one to make that excuse.

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What's the secret to submitting a great conference proposal?

You may know that we hold Web 2.0 Expo NY in the fall. But here's something that may surprise you: the drop-dead deadline for submitting a proposal is next Monday (April 12). In the past, we've extended the deadline a week, but we don't have time for that this year. For a lot of people, that means a big scramble on Monday to get in your submission. As far as we're concerned, that's no problem.

But as far as you're concerned, there is potential snag. For this CFP, we're requiring video of the proposed speaker or panel moderator. If you don't have a clip handy, you have to make one. While we don't expect that to take more than 30 mins or an hour, you could have a hairy evening if you're working on your submission at 11:45p.

We want the submission process to be smooth, even fun, for you. So we held a webcast with tips on submitting, and I've written up the Q&A;, below, which includes full detail on the video requirement. Don't miss the webcast--which has more info on what we look for. The webcast itself is posted on YouTube. The slides from the webcast are posted on SlideShare.

We look forward to reading and watching your proposals.

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Four short links: 6 April 2010

Copytheft, Digg UI, HIV Detection, and Facebook Sueage

1. Thinking Further About Copyright (Confused of Calcutta) -- several nice illustrations of the "copying is not theft" distinction. Copying per se is not stealing. After Michael Jackson did his moonwalk, children the world over copied him. They were not stealing. Digital forms of music, film, book and newspapers are cheap to copy and to distribute, because of the internet. The internet is a commons, specifically designed for doing this. For copying and distributing. Throwing that away just to protect the “rightsholders” is questionable in the extreme. Digital assets are nonrival goods, shareable without affecting the rights of anyone else to enjoy the same thing.
2. DUI: Digg User Library -- Javascript UI library from the folks at Digg.
3. Building a Handheld HIV Detector -- gadget the size of an iPod, that detects the T-cells that HIV kills. Prototype cost $250 to make, orders of magnitude less than the typical medical instrument. This is just one of many approaches to the problem, including disposable test kits funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. (via @parc)
4. How I Got Sued by Facebook (Pete Warden) -- he'd previously reported security holes to Facebook's security team, and that apparently saved him from a full-on lawsuit. Their contention was robots.txt had no legal force and they could sue anyone for accessing their site even if they scrupulously obeyed the instructions it contained. The only legal way to access any web site with a crawler was to obtain prior written permission. Obviously this isn't the way the web has worked for the last 16 years since robots.txt was introduced, but my lawyer advised me that it had never been tested in court, and the legal costs alone of being a test case would bankrupt me.

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