Love that movie. (Charade, Cary Grant & Audrey Hepburn)
Incompatible, it don’t matter though Is it possible Mr. Loveable Who doesn’t long for someone to hold Here we are again, circles never end Who doesn’t long for someone to hold If there’s a soulmate for everyone Most relationships seem so transitory Who doesn’t long for someone to hold Who doesn’t long for someone to hold
‘cos someone’s bound to hear my cry
Speak out if you do
You’re not easy to find
Is already in my life?
Right in front of me
Or maybe you’re in disguise
Who knows how to love you without being told
Somebody tell me why I’m on my own
If there’s a soulmate for everyone
How do I find the perfect fit
There’s enough for everyone
But I’m still waiting in line
Who knows how to love you without being told
Somebody tell me why I’m on my own
If there’s a soulmate for everyone
They’re all good but not the permanent one
Who knows how to love you without being told
Somebody tell me why I’m on my own
If there’s a soulmate for everyone
Who knows how to love you without being told
Somebody tell me why I’m on my own
If there’s a soulmate for everyone
If there’s a soulmate for everyone
— Natasha Bedingfield, “Soulmate”, Album “N.B.”
The official logo for DFW’s first Super Bowl was revealed today (larger). I’m willing to give the Super Bowl XLV logo a little more time before making final judgments— I would like to see it applied in different media first (the above photo is the only version I’ve seen so far, and it was unveiled just minutes ago).
That being said, I can still make early, initial judgments!
This is the first Super Bowl to integrate the host stadium into the logo (here are the other 44 logos). I’m torn on this decision. Dallas Cowboys Stadium is revolutionary and already iconic. It’s a big deal when it comes to stadiums. You can literally see it from miles away on I-30. I affectionately call it the Death Star. Let’s be blunt: the stadium is anything but subtle. I appreciate subtlety in design. I don’t think you can be subtle when you include a non-subtle stadium in a logo… but you will always remember Dallas Cowboys Stadium hosted Super Bowl XLV, which I suppose was the intent.
The logos have often drawn from local landmarks or cultural flavor, so let me be the first to say I’m glad the Super Bowl XLV logo doesn’t include a Texas flag, a cowboy hat, or boots. I am surprised it doesn’t include a star, though, which is a much more subtle way of integrating the city, state, and football team into the logo. Well, more subtle than including the actual stadium.
I’m not the biggest fan of gradients or making everything metallic. I’m glad there are no light flares and the logo isn’t sitting in a black room on a reflective surface, which seems to be all the rage thanks to Apple.
I have a question about the perspective employed in the logo. It appears my eyes are stationed somewhere along the ascender of the L. It looks like the XLV is popping out toward me. The bar reading Super Bowl does the same thing. Why aren’t the stadium and Lombardi Trophy coming out 3D style? Are they just resting on the Super Bowl bar? Are my eyes at a secret, second horizon?
How many light sources are affecting the logo? The light shines pretty heavily on the L, but then it exhibits opposite-than-expected behavior on the Super Bowl bar (light on top, dark on bottom). The white outlines in SUPER BOWL (look at the larger version) tell me I’m looking at the bar from a higher elevation, BUT WAIT! The 3D pop-out tells me I’m beneath the bar. There is also no left-to-right perspective on the letters in SUPER BOWL, while the XLV is clearly affected. Where am I? Where is the consistency? Let’s just agree that the light and perspective are arbitrary and the elements were assembled separately.
I don’t understand why the XLV has white outlines everywhere but pure horizontal stretches. This is fine if your letters are perpendicular, but when you use rounded edges, the white outlines taper down into the fill color. Instead of looking like an intentional decision, it looks like you accidentally cropped the document too high and cut off a few pixels from the bottom of your letters.
I know I’m critical, but these are things I take into account whenever I make something. I want to make sure everything is squared away so some snarky 20-something blogger can’t nitpick every minuscule detail. I’ll give the logo a few weeks before exercising final judgment.
Anyway. Super Bowl.
Soulmate Your love [Chorus:] Soulmate [Repeat Chorus:] Soulmate
Until the end of time
You’re my soulmate
I’ll love you till I get to heaven’s gate
And if I go first sweetheart
I’ll wait
‘Cause I know I’ll never find another
Soulmate
There’s no telling where I’d be
Without your love
Stumbling in the dark
Would be pretty rough
When I get down you’re the one
That lifts me up
I thank the Lord above
For your love
In this day and time
The right one is hard to find
Girl, that’s why I’m holding on to you
Each and every night
When we turn out the light
There’s no mistaking what we have is true
I hope that we grow old together
Solemate
In the good and bad
Even through the heartache
We’ve got a special bond
That’ll never break
‘Cause darling you and I are
Soulmates
Until the end of time
You’re my soulmate
I’ll love you till I get to
Heaven’s gate
We’ve got a special bond
That’ll never break
‘Cause darling you and I are
Soulmates
Yeah, I know I’ll never find another
Soulmate
— Artist: Turner Josh
Song: Soulmate
Album: Everything Is Fine
Old and new world. After the iPad comes the iMac.
I need to talk to you about computers. I’ve been on a veritable roller-coaster of “how I feel” about the iPad announcement, and trying not to write about it until I had at least an inkling of what was at the root of that.
Before we begin, a reminder: On this blog, I speak only for myself, not for my company or my co-workers.
The thing is, to talk about specific hardware (like the iPad or iPhone or Nexus One or Droid) is to miss entirely the point I’m about to try to make. This is more important than USB ports, GPS modules, or front-facing cameras. Gigabytes, gigahertz, megapixels, screen resolution, physical dimensions, form factors, in fact hardware in general — these are all irrelevant to the following discussion. So, I’m going to try to completely avoid talking about those sorts of things.
Let’s instead establish some new terminology: Old World and New World computing.
Introduction
Personal computing — having a computer in your house (or your pocket) — as a whole is young. As we know it today, it’s less than a half-century old. It’s younger than TV, younger than radio, younger than cars and airplanes, younger than quite a few living people in fact.
In that really incredibly short space of time we’ve gone from punchcards-and-printers to interactive terminals with command lines to window-and-mouse interfaces, each a paradigm shift unto themselves. A lot of thoughtful people, many of whom are bloggers, look at this history and say, “Look at this march of progress! Surely the desktop + windows + mouse interface can’t be the end of the road? What’s next?”
Then “next” arrived and it was so unrecognizable to most of them (myself included) that we looked at it said, “What in the shit is this?”
The Old World
In the Old World, computers are general purpose, do-it-all machines. They can do hundreds of thousands of different things, sometimes all at the same time. We buy them for pennies, load them up to the gills with whatever we feel like, and then we pay for it with instability, performance degradation, viruses, and steep learning curves. Old World computers can do pretty much anything, but carry the burden of 30 years of rapid, unplanned change. Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X based computers all fall into this category.
The New World
In the New World, computers are task-centric. We are reading email, browsing the web, playing a game, but not all at once. Applications are sandboxed, then moats dug around the sandboxes, and then barbed wire placed around the moats. As a direct result, New World computers do not need virus scanners, their batteries last longer, and they rarely crash, but their users have lost a degree of freedom. New World computers have unprecedented ease of use, and benefit from decades of research into human-computer interaction. They are immediately understandable, fast, stable, and laser-focused on the 80% of the famous 80/20 rule.
Is the New World better than the Old World? Nothing’s ever simply black or white.
Floppy Disks
An anecdote: When the iMac came out, Apple drew a line in the sand. They said: we are no longer going to ship a computer with a floppy disk drive. The entire industry shit its pants so loudly and forcefully that you probably could have heard it from outer space.
Are you insane? I spent all this money on a floppy drive! All my software is on floppy disks! You’ve committed brand suicide! Nobody will stand for this!
Fast-forward to today. I can’t think of a single useful thing to do with a floppy disk. I can go to the supermarket and buy a CD, DVD, or flash drive that is faster, smaller, and stores 1,000 times as much data for typically less than a box of floppies used to cost. Or better still, we can just toss things to each other over the network.
To get there, yes, we had to throw away some of our investment in hardware. We had to re-think how we did things. It required adjustment. A bit of sacrifice. The end result, I think we can all agree regardless of what platform we use, is orders of magnitude more convenient, easier to use, and in line with today’s storage requirements.
Staying with floppies would have spared us the inconvenience of that transition but at what long-term cost?
Nothing is ever simply black or white. There was a cost to making the transition. But there was a benefit to doing so.
To change was not all good. To stay put was not all bad. But there was a ratio of goodness-to-badness that, in the long run, was quite favorable for everyone involved. However in the short term it seemed so insurmountable, so ludicrous, that it beggared the belief of a large number of otherwise very intelligent people.
For a species so famous for being adaptable to its environment, we certainly abhor change. Especially a change that involves any amount of money being spent.
Cars
John Gruber used car transmissions for his analogy, and it’s apt. When I learned to drive, my dad insisted that I learn on a manual transmission so I would be able to drive any car. I think this was a wise and valuable thing to do.
But even having learned it, these days I drive an automatic. Nothing is black and white — I sacrifice maybe a tiny amount of fuel efficiency and a certain amount of control over my car in adverse situations that I generally never encounter. In exchange, my brain is freed up to focus on the the road ahead, getting where I’m going, and avoiding obstacles (strategy), not the minutiae of choosing the best possible gear ratio (tactics).
Is a stick shift better than an automatic? No. Is an automatic better than a stick? No. This misses the point. A better question: Is a road full of drivers not distracted by the arcane inner workings of their vehicle safer? It’s likely. And that has a value. Possibly a value that outweighs the value offered by a stick shift if we aggregate it across everyone in the world who drives.
Changing of the Guard
When I think about the age ranges of people who fall into the Old World of computing, it is roughly bell-curved with Generation X (hello) approximately in the center. That, to me, is fascinating — Old World users are sandwiched between New World users who are both younger and older than them.
Some elder family members of mine recently got New World cell phones. I watched as they loaded dozens of apps willy-nilly onto them which, on any other phone, would have turned it into a sluggish, crash-prone battery-vampire. But it didn’t happen. I no longer get summoned for phone help, because it is self-evident how to use it, and things just generally don’t go wrong like they used to on their Old World devices.
New Worlders have no reason to be gun-shy about loading up their device with apps. Why would that break anything? Old Worlders on the other hand have been browbeaten to the point of expecting such behavior to lead to problems. We’re genuinely surprised when it doesn’t.
But the New World scares the living hell out of a lot of the Old Worlders. Why is that?
The Needs of the Few
When the iPhone came out, I was immediately in love, but frustrated by the lack of an SDK. When an SDK came out, I was overjoyed, but frustrated by Apple’s process. As some high-profile problems began to pile up, I infamously railed against the whole idea right here on this very blog. I announced I was beginning a boycott of iPhone-based devices until changes were made, and I certainly, certainly was not going to buy any future iPhone-based products. I switched to various other devices that were a bit more friendly to Old Worlders.
It lasted all of a month.
For as frustrated as I was with the restrictions, those exact same restrictions made the New World device a high-performance, high-reliability, absolute workhorse of a machine that got out of my way and just let me get things accomplished.
Nothing is simply black or white.
Old Worlders are particularly sensitive to certain things that are simply non-issues to New Worlders. We learned about computers from the inside out. Many of us became interested in computers because they were hackable, open, and without restrictions. We worry that these New World devices are stifling the next generation of programmers. But can anyone point to evidence that that’s really happening? I don’t know about you, but I see more people carrying handheld computers than at any point in history. If even a small percentage of them are interested in “what makes this thing tick?” then we’ve got quite a few new programmers in the pipeline.
The reason I’m starting to think the Old World is ultimately doomed is because we are bracketed on both sides by the New World, and those people being born today, post-iPhone and post-iPad, will never know (and probably not care) about how things used to work. Just as nobody today cares about floppies, and nobody has to care about manual transmissions if they don’t want to.
If you total up everyone older than the beginning of the Old World, and every person yet to be born, you end up with a much greater number of people than there are in the Old World.
And to that dramatically greater number of people, what do you think is more important? An easy-to-use, crash-proof device? Or a massively complex tangle of toolbars, menus, and windows because that’s what props up an entrenched software oligarchy?
Fellow Old Worlders, I hate to tell you this: we are a minority. The question is not “will the desktop metaphor go away?” The question is “why has it taken this long for the desktop metaphor to go away?”
But, But I’m a Professional!
This is a great toy for newbies, but how am I supposed to get any SERIOUS work done with it? After all, I’m a PRO EXPERT MEGA USER! I MUST HAVE TOOLBARS, WINDOWS, AND…
OK, stop for a second.
First, I would put the birth of New World computing at 2007, with the introduction of the iPhone. You could even arguably stretch it a bit further back to the birth of “Web 2.0” applications in the early 2000s. But it’s brand new. If computers in general are young, New World computing is fresh out of the womb, covered in blood and screaming.
It’s got a bit of development to go.
I encourage you to look at this argument in terms of what you are really trying to achieve rather than the way you are used to going about it.
Let’s pick a ridiculous example and say I work in digital video, and I need to encode huge amounts of video data into some advanced format, and send that off to a server somewhere. I could never do that on an iPad! Right?
Well, no, today, probably not. But could you do it on a future New World computer in the general sense?
Remember, the hardware is a non-issue: Flash storage will grow to terabytes in size. CPUs will continue to multiply in power as they always have. Displays, batteries, everything will improve given enough time.
As I see it, many of these “BUT I’M AN EXPERT” situations can be resolved by making just a few key modifications:
A managed way of putting processes in the background. New Worlders are benefiting already from the improved performance and battery life provided by the inability to run a task in the background. Meanwhile, Old Worlders are tearing their hair out. I CAN’T MULTITASK, right? It seems like there has to be a reasonable middle ground. Maybe processes can petition the OS for background time. Maybe a user can “opt-in” to background processes. I don’t know. But it seems like there must be an in-between that doesn’t sacrifice what we’ve gained for some of the flexibility we’re used to.
A way of sharing data with other devices. New World devices are easy to learn and highly usable because they do not expose the filesystem to users and they are “data islands”. We are no longer working with “files” but we are still working with data blobs that it would be valuable to be able to exchange with each other. Perhaps the network wins here. Perhaps flash drives that we never see the contents of. The Newton was, to my knowledge, the first generally available device where you could just say “put this app and all data I’ve created with it on this removable card” without ever once seeing a file or a folder. Its sizable Achilles’ Heel was that only other Newtons understood the data format.
A way of sharing data between applications. Something like the clipboard, but bigger. This is not a filesystem, but a way of saying “bring this data object from this app to this app”. I’ve made this painting in my painting app, and now I want to bring it over here to crop it and apply filters.
By just addressing those three things (and I admit they are not simple feats), I think all but the absolutely most specialized of computer tasks become quite feasible on a New World device.
A Bet on the Future
Apple is calling the iPad a “third category” between phones and laptops. I am increasingly convinced that this is just to make it palatable to you while everything shifts to New World ideology over the next 10-20 years.
Just like with floppy disks, the rest of the industry is quite content to let Apple be the ones to stick their necks out on this. It’s a gamble to be sure. But if Apple wins the gamble (so far it’s going well), they are going to be years and years ahead of their competition. If Apple loses the gamble, well, they have no debt and are sitting on a Fort Knox-like pile of cash. It’s not going to sink them.
The bet is roughly that the future of computing:
- has a UI model based on direct manipulation of data objects
- completely hides the filesystem from the user
- favors ease of use and reduction of complexity over absolute flexibility
- favors benefit to the end-user rather than the developer or other vendors
- lives atop built-to-specific-purpose native applications and universally available web apps
All in all, it sounds like a pretty feasible outcome, and really not a bad one at that.
But we Old Worlders have to come to grips with the fact that a lot of things we are used to are going away. Maybe not for a while, but they are.
Will the whole industry move to New World computing? Not unless Apple is demonstrably successful with this approach. So I’d say you’re unlikely to see it universally applied to all computing devices within the next couple of decades.
But Wednesday’s keynote tells me this is where Apple is going. Plan accordingly.
How long will it take to complete this Old World to New World shift? My guess? The end is near when you can bootstrap a new iPad application on an iPad. When you can comfortably do that without pining for a traditional desktop, the days of Old World computing are officially numbered.
The iPad as a particular device is not necessarily the future of computing. But as an ideology, I think it just might be. In hindsight, I think arguments over “why would I buy this if I already have a phone and a laptop?” are going to seem as silly as “why would I buy an iPod if it has less space than a Nomad?”
Ich geh hier nicht weg Ich weiß es nicht mehr Nein - von hier geht´s nur nach Nirgendwo Du machst mich krank Wenn dein Mund mich dann fragt Ich weiß daß ich es will Aus Liebe wollt ich alles wissen Du machst mich krank Du machst mich krank Aus Liebe wollt ich alles wissen Du machst mich krank Du machst mich krank Nein - von hier geht´s nur nach Nirgendwo
Was soll ich auch woanders
Will es nicht riskiern
Mich noch mal zu verliern
War ich glücklich als ich lief
Ging ich durch´s goldne Tor
Oder stand ich davor
Vielleicht kommst du ja mit rüber
Menschen komm´ und gehen zu weit
Doch für Wut bleibt keine Zeit
Weil ich selber nur weiß
Du machst mich dumm
Die Liebe lacht mich aus
Holt mich doch niemals ab
Wirft mich ewig zurück
Ist mir immer voraus
Was er besser nicht sagt
Und dann löschst du das Licht
Weil es hell um dich ist
Ich will daß du es weißt
Daß im Mondlicht alles einfach ist
Daß es im Mondlicht viel zu einfach ist
Jetzt weiß ich leider nichts
Aus Liebe wollt ich´s besser wissen
Mein Wissen hilft mir nicht
Du machst mich dumm
Die Liebe lacht mich aus
Holt mich doch niemals ab
Wirft mich ewig zurück
Ist mir immer voraus
Du machst mich dumm
Die Liebe lacht mich aus
Holt mich doch niemals ab
Wirft mich ewig zurück
Ist mir immer voraus
Jetzt weiß ich leider nichts
Aus Liebe wollt ich´s besser wissen
Mein Wissen hilft mir nicht
Du machst mich dumm
Die Liebe lacht mich aus
Holt mich doch niemals ab
Wirft mich ewig zurück
Ist mir immer voraus
Du machst mich dumm
Die Liebe lacht mich aus
Holt mich doch niemals ab
Wirft mich ewig zurück
Ist mir immer voraus
Vielleicht kommst du ja mit rüber
— Rosenstolz, “Aus Liebe wollt ich alles wissen”
Hast du nur ein Wort zu sagen
nur ein Gedanken dann
lass es Liebe sein
Kannst du mir ein Bild beschreiben
mit deinen Farben dann
lass es Liebe sein
Wann du gehst
Wieder gehst
Schau mir noch mal ins Gesicht
sags mir oder sag es nicht
Dreh dich bitte nochmal um
und ich sehs in deinem Blick
Lass es Liebe sein lass es Liebe sein
Hast du nur noch einen Tag
nur eine Nacht dann
lass es Liebe sein
Hast du nur noch eine Frage
die ich nie zu fragen wage dann
lass es Liebe sein
Wann du gehst
Wieder gehst
Schau mir noch mal ins Gesicht
sags mir oder sag es nicht
Dreh dich bitte nochmal um
und ich sehs in deinem Blick
Lass es Liebe sein lass es Liebe sein
Das ist alles was wir brauchen
noch viel mehr als große Worte
Lass das alles hinter dir
fang nochmal von vorne an
Denn
Liebe ist alles
Liebe ist alles
Liebe ist alles
Alles was wir brauchen
3x Liebe ist alles
Alles was wir brauchen
Lass es Liebe sein
Das ist alles was wir brauchen
noch viel mehr als große Worte
Lass das alles hinter dir
fang nochmal von vorne an
Denn
3x Liebe ist alles
Alles was wir brauchen
2xLass es Liebe sein
— Rosenstolz, “Liebe ist alles”
