The Blog of Frank W. Zammetti - The demented ravings of a software developer

Anyone who follows me on Twitter most certainly knows my feelings about what went down with HP and webOS this week.  It can be summed up in one word: anger, frustration, resignation, indifference, incredulousness (if that’s even a word, my spellchecker isn’t so sure!) and amazement.

It helps to understand where I’m coming from, where I’ve been, to understand my feelings now.  Nearly two years ago Apress asked me to write a book on (then) Palm’s new webOS platform, to which I promptly replied: “What the hell is a webOS??”  Fortunately, the editor I worked with put me in touch with Mitch Allen at Palm.  Within a few days Mitch very kindly sent me a free Palm Pre, then still brand-spanking new, a few chapters of his own as-yet to be released webOS book, and I got to have a very nice conversation with him talking about webOS, Palm’s vision for the future, etc.

I was stoked, to put it mildly.  It sounded like Palm had finally done what I and others certainly had always thought was a natural evolution: they’d basically taken a web browser and ran an operating system in it (yes, I’m oversimplifying quite a bit and leaving out a bunch more, but from the perspective of an application developer, which is what I am, that’s essentially what it is).  What I saw was extremely impressive.  All the adjectives frequently used to describe webOS applied: elegant, simple, logical, beautiful, etc.  I was excited and I got to work on the book, got it done, got it published and continued to be a part of the webOS community very happily.  I wrote two articles for the Palm Developer Network, a few independent articles for other publications and was was working on a number of my own webOS-based project.

I was a webOS fan.  No, more than that, I was a webOS EVANGELIST.  I got my wife to buy a Pre, her first smartphone… she was reluctant, but I’ll note she’s had some sort of smartphone ever since and if you ask her she’d never go back.  I credit webOS for giving her a gentle introduction.  I argued with people at work that webOS was the superior platform… my boss and I had some heated debates over the months on this topic   I’d tell anyone that would listen that webOS was great and they should give it a good, hard look if they were in the market.

Now, a bit over a year ago if I remember correctly, something happened… my Pre wasn’t behaving itself (as, it turns out, was all too typical of that device).  Eventually, my legendary temper got the best of me: I threw it against a wall.  No, not figuratively, and no, I didn’t just imagine doing it… a Pre, traveling at high speeds, impacted the brick wall in my kitchen, sending pieces flying everywhere.

Now, wanna hear something amazing?  IT STILL BASICALLY WORKED!!  Yes, it was all busted up, and yes, the keyboard was hanging from the rest of the phone by a ribbon cable… but it turned on, and I could still (more or less) use it!  So, for all the “Palm made crap hardware” comments you hear, let that be at least one counter-example for you

Now, clearly the condition of that phone wasn’t going to do any longer so it was time to get a new one.  Sprint, rightly so frankly, wouldn’t just outright replace it under my extended warranty.  They offered to give me a new Pre for $100.  Not a bad deal, but the fact is there was a brand-spanking new Samsung Epic 4G sitting on the shelf that I could get for just $200.  The screen sold me in a heartbeat, it was, and still is, a magnificent sight.  So, I made the reluctant leap to Android.

Now, this isn’t a post about Android, but I’ll tell you that I’ve been rather happy with that decision and I’ve long ago stopped looking back longingly on webOS.  And that right there is the first problem HP, as the new stewards of webOS, faced: the competition caught up.  I realize a lot of people reading this are diehard webOS fans and hate Android, hate its look, its UX, all of it.  But the fact is that most people, comparing the two, don’t see a world of difference… whichever you prefer, the difference is pretty minor nowadays.  Where webOS might have kicked everyone’s’ ass in UX a few years ago, that’s no longer the case.

Likewise, we have an Asus Transformer tablet in the house (ostensibly my wife’s, but you know how it REALLY works! LOL)… it’s not as good as an iPad frankly, but it’s pretty good… I’d still have an iPad today, but funny thing, they don’t like being thrown on the floor… but more on that in my upcoming blog post “It’s an inanimate object, how DARE it defy me?! (subtitled Violence Against Technology in the American Heartland)”.

Anyway, flash-forward to now… for probably six months, maybe more, I, like many others, have seen the writing on the wall for webOS.  HP was talking a fantastic game, but many of us weren’t buying into the hype.  For many of us it was a switch to Android (or iOS) that convinced us the advantages webOS once had were no longer there, or at least not there to a big enough extent to matter.  Oh sure, webOS still kills every other OS (aside from the PlayBook’s perhaps) in terms of multitasking, but ultimately that’s only one relatively small piece of the puzzle, it’s not a big enough differentiator.

Then, all of a sudden, less than a week ago, Armageddon.  Seemingly, out of the blue, HP decides that because the TouchPad, which was still the new webOS hotness, not being much more than a month old, was selling like an old, used diaper, and so they were out of the webOS device business as of RIGHT NOW.

That would have been shocking regardless of anything else… after all, we heard how they were “doubling down” on webOS, how the TouchPad would propel them strongly into the tablet market… they got Russell Brand and other kinda-sorta popular celebrities to push their wares on TV.  It seemed like they were at least serious about being in this market, seemed like they were at least going to give it time to see what happened.

Oh.  Oops, sorry, no.

Like I said, this would have been shocking on its own, but it was MORE shocking because I had bought a TouchPad just two weeks earlier!  I didn’t so much WANT one as I couldn’t pass up what I saw as a great deal: $317 out the door at Staples for the 16Gb model.  Saved a cool $200+.  Sure, that’s a good deal given what tablets are going for.

You know what’s a better price?  How about $99?  Or even $49 at Staples?  Assuming you can find stock (you can’t, don’t bother looking) that’s what they’re going for today.  Imagine suddenly finding you overpaid for something by roughly $250… wouldn’t be too happy, would you?

So, that was a big part of my anger: I felt personally screwed over by HP.  Now, as it turns out, Staples honored my return, even though I was technically beyond their return policy.  I got a full refund.  So in the end, that worked out.  Note that was after trying to sell the damned thing with at least three different deals falling through.

Guess they knew something I didn’t

Now, to HP’s credit, they’ve since done right by most people with refunds and whatnot.  So at this point it’s hard to think that anyone should feel screwed by HP… I mean, aside from those that believed the TouchPad was going to be a viable product for a long time to come.  It still may be viable, but only if you change what that term means.

It no longer means a product that will be fully supported.  You can no longer expect any sort of updates (you may get some still, but that’s an unknown at this point).  Will developers flock to the platform and supply you with a ton of new apps?  Well, more on that later, but the answer is more or less no.  But, on the other hand, it’s not like the TouchPad as it exists today, the apps that exist today, aren’t useful.  For whatever flaws it has (quite a few in my opinion) it’s still a perfectly useable tablet for many purposes.  For $49 it’s a no-brainer, even $99 it’s still within “toy” range.  Even $149 for the 32Gb version isn’t bad (not sure *I* would drop $149 on it, but it’s not crazy if you do).  It’s certainly a better tablet than many of the cheapo Android tablets you can get in that price range, no question about it.

But, on the other hand, it is what it is, today, nothing more, ever.

Now, I’ve been proclaiming webOS is dead based on HP’s actions this week.  And if you asked me to bet a years’ salary I’d bet on that being the case without hesitation.  Yes, you hear HP blowing smoke up our asses again about licensing it to good hardware manufacturers.  webOS is dead, long live webOS!  I don’t see how THIS smoke is different than the smoke they blew up our asses when they said they were in this game for the long-haul, but whatever, maybe there’s something to it.

Even if Samsung and HTC, as some rumors suggest, sign on, what will it matter?  Will developers suddenly flock to webOS and create all sorts of great new apps?  Will people feel they can trust HP going forward?  Will their words mean anything?  I bet no.

But…

There’s a few interesting possibilities that could make me wrong.  First, the licensing thing could work out.  They could get webOS on some great hardware, get rid of the flaws in the platform and suddenly have a fantastic story to tell.  I frankly doubt this because (a) I’m not at all sure the flaws can be fixed, certainly they’ve been unable to do it thus far, and (b) I’m not sure any company would take a chance on webOS now.  Even given that Google pissed off and scared a lot of Android makers with the Motorola deal, so you might think they’d want a backup, is webOS really it?  On this front the only thing anyone can say is we’ll see.

But, there’s another possibility… one that’s just so bizarre it might actually be true… and so crazy it just might work…

…MAYBE EVERYTHING IS GOING EXACTLY ACCORDING TO PLAN!

Follow the bouncing ball with me…

1. HP releases the TouchPad.  It sells like plague-infested blankets.

2. HP “decides” to “cut their losses” and announces they’re “out of the webOS device business”.  They say they’ll try to license webOS, mostly just to satisfy stockholders for a few days (gotta give ‘em hope!)

3. HP starts an incredible fire sale.  All of a sudden, the 200k units Staples had on hand but couldn’t move (a figure I got from a manager at my local Staples store) and the 200k units (roughly) that Best Buy had on hand but couldn’t sell (as reported last week) start moving like hotcakes.  You can’t find the damned things anywhere, there are stories of people lined up waiting for stores to open.  This is the case at other outlets like Walmart, Office Max, Amazon, etc. as well.

4. So, in the span of maybe 48 hours HP moves, what, a million units maybe?  More?  The market share shoots up all of a sudden.  Yes, HP takes tremendous losses on each device sold, but so what?  The customer base they couldn’t develop at the prices they were originally selling for begins to emerge.

It’s not the first time a company has taken tremendous losses on hardware to gain market share in short order.

Woah, is that it?  Was that the plan?  Well, if so, here’s what I’d expect… a press release, maybe a week or two from now, maybe less, saying something like “Wow, HP is amazed at the outpouring of attention to webOS.  Obviously, we were mistaken and there is a HUGE market for our devices.  Therefore, we are reversing our decision and will continue to provide webOS devices.”

And that, as they say, gets the balling rolling in a big way.  All of a sudden you’ve got a TON of new users on your platform.  So, a bunch of new developers decide to build apps for it… especially now that HP isn’t “abandoning” anything.  All of a sudden, HP and webOS go from being also-rans behind iOS and even Android to a more than viable competitor in the tablet space.

And it was all based on a bluff.  An expensive, risky, crazy-assed bluff.  But you know, history is full of such bluffs working out fantastically well.

Now, there’s of course a downside to this.  First, nobody will trust what HP says ever again.  At least, nobody that is savvy enough to realize what just happened.  The credibility of the company as a whole would take a hit.  But, if you really believe in webOS as a platform, maybe that’s a risk worth taking.  People will certainly forget a few years later, especially if all of a sudden you’re #1.

And if you think about it, what company other than HP could pull such a bluff off?  You need a boatload of money to find the losses acceptable.  Check (well, more or less).  You need a platform that, generally, is regarded as viable.  Check.  You need a crazy CEO to come up with it and have the testicular fortitude to execute the plan.  Check… maybe.

Do I think this is the case?  No, not really.  I wouldn’t bet my kids’ lives on it, but I wouldn’t be shocked to find it was the plan all along either.  Like I said, it’s just crazy enough to be true!

No, what I really suspect will be the case is HP *might* be able to convince one manufacturer to take a chance on webOS.  They’ll build a device or two, probably wind up being decent enough, but webOS will just wither and die over the course of maybe a year, two at the most, because no developer wants to take a chance on it.  The sudden influx of new users we have this weekend will convince a few, and there will be a few new apps, and you might even hear a success story or two from a developer here and there (developers with existing apps will see a decent bump in profits, if only for a brief moment in time)… but this will be a short-lived uptick for webOS, it won’t last.

But, if the wild-ass conspiracy theory turns out to be true… well, I won’t exactly die of shock either!  I could see it, I really could.

One last point I want to make here is this… if nothing else, HP has done one thing that ALL tablet manufacturers should be looking at today… for those that say “What the hell good is a tablet? That’s not a viable market!”, well, HP just proved you very wrong.  They proved, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that there IS a tablet market, an even larger one that Apple or Android has tapped thus far, waiting to be opened.  The key is pricing boys and girls.  The first company that gets a high-quality tablet on the market for under $200, I’d bet my left kidney, will make a SERIOUS dent in the iPad’s dominance.  People WANT tablets, and I mean mom and pop, not just us geeks and not just executives trying to impress their underlings… people just don’t want to pay what they see a ridiculous prices for them.  Now, $49 or even $99 probably isn’t right either… but $199?  Are you telling me that’s not doable?  I bet it is, by the right company.  Amazingly, HP was and still is probably in the best position to be that company.  Apple won’t drop their prices enough to get there, the Android makers might not have the scale and presence to do it.  But HP could I suspect.  Might we see a TouchPad 2 for $199 in six months?  Quite possibly.  Then you’ve got a million+ practically “built-in” customers overnight, and a lot more who will be more than willing to drop that kind of coin, recession be damned!  Especially when they want to keep up with the Joneses down the street who all have TouchPads (by then they’ll forget they got them for $49, or won’t care, they’ll just HAVE to have them then!)

If HP realizes all this, all they actually need to do is execute a crazy-ass plan right now to increase market share… hey, wait a minute…

—-

Addendum added 8/30…

Just as a quick follow-up, although its a bit tangential I think it plays into all of this… there’s one company here that I think has perhaps the best shot to unseat Apple in the tablet market… it’s not HP, it’s (most likely) not Google… It’s Amazon.  We all know at this point that they have a tablet coming out this fall.  We don’t know much about it but we assume its Android-based (and really, what else COULD it be anyway?).  I’d bet a large wager that the price point they come out with is $199 OR LESS.  And, I think it’ll be a very good tablet, comparable to an iPad or anything else.  I suspect they’ll take a loss on each one sold and that’ll be their strategy.  They’ll be playing the Sony game as they’ve always done with the Playstation: sell the hardware at a loss and make it up with content.

Amazon is ideally suited to making this strategy work in the tablet market.  They have hardware experience now from building Kindles.  They have content to sell in the form of eBooks, movies and music.  They could make the loss-leader strategy work in this market, and there’s probably nobody else aside from Apple that is capable of pulling that off.

Now, Amazon has its own problems… it pissed of developers with their handling of the Amazon App Store for Android.  They have some work to do to rebuild their reputation there.  They have to come up with a loss number that’s not TOO high, and that’s gonna be tough based on current teardown costs of various tablets… could they really do THAT much better in terms of cost than anyone else and yet STILL produce a really solid piece of hardware?  That’s a tall order for anyone, perhaps most of all a company that isn’t a hardware company to begin with.

Still, I have a strong sense that in a years’ time we’ll be looking at a two-horse race in the tablet market, the perennial Apple, and Amazon.  Will Windows 8 on a tablet be able to break through?  That’s at least a possibility, but I wouldn’t bet on it, at least not in the short-term (like < 3 years).  And even if HP revives the TouchPad, as the today’s rumors suggest they may (which, FYI, is perfectly in line with my theorized “secret master plan”!) I still don’t think they’re going to be anything better than third this time next year, and probably a fairly distant third at that (although they’ll be able to say the strategy worked, if my theory is correct, since they’ll at least be in the race, nominally anyway).

On Twitter I recently promised my list of the top 100 Commodore 64 games of all time, and here it is!

Anyone that knows me knows that I’m an old-timer C64  guy… I lived that life you read about and hear about from other old-timers.  I have a lot of fond memories, and some I’m not particularly proud of.  But the games, oh the games!

I’m not going to try and rank these, that would just be too damned hard!  But I will give a little comment on each.  I was going to put in screenshots too, and maybe I’ll come back at a little date and update this post to have them, but for now, that too is too much effort   At the end of the day, this is really for other people like me who remembers those days with fondness… it’s not like you kids with your X-Cases and PlayCenters or Nintendian PS’s or whatever the hell you kids have today are going to run out and try and find these…

…but hey, if you are so inclined, frodo.cebix.net and c64.com are pretty much the only two URLs you’d need to play nearly all of these games inside 5 minutes

I’ve tried to avoid games that were ported from arcade games, but a few snuck in.  I also tried to stick to games I only remember on the C64, but again, some of these certainly were on other platforms (and in fact, some of them were arguably better on others).

Ok, without further stalling and BS’ing, here goes, in plain old boring alphabetical order…

10th Frame
Just a great little bowling game, nothing revolutionary, but well done
1942
One of the all-time best top-down scrolling shooters of… err… all-time   Pilot your WWII fighter and kick some Axis ass!
Action Biker
You, a motorcycle and a fairly large world filled with ramps and other trickpark goodies where you could, more or less, free-roam.  This game was in a lot of ways ahead of its time in that regard.
Agent USA
Fuzzbombs, everywhere!  Pretty tough to describe this game but most people remember the trains coming into the stations the most.
Alternative Reality
One of those cool mindbender adventure games that were popular back then.  I can’t even tell you what it was about now, but I remember it was really cool.
Aztec Challenge
One of the games I still play to this day!  Lots of different mini-games combined to form a very fun whole.  Kind of an Indiana Jones vibe to it all.
Ballblazer
One of the few 3D games on this list, and really one of the few 3D games for a very long time on the C64.  You’re a ball on a 3-D track with holes all over the place to avoid.
Barbarian
Another of the ones I still play.  You’re a Conan-like barbarian forced to sword fight other barbarians while a wizard and his hot concubine watch from afar.  This game is well-remembered for the little green goblin guy that came out, laughed and dragged the body of your fallen foe away.  Even better: you could cut the other guys’ head off, and the green goblin dude would KICK THE HEAD, soccer-style, on the way out!
BC’s Quest For Tires
The BC comic strip brought to game form.  Ride your stone wheel all over the place avoiding many obstacles.
Beach Head
Without question one of the best C64 games ever.  Superb graphics, fantastic sound, lots of variety in the different mini-games that made up its war themed-structure.  Then again, I remember loading this off of cassette and it taking nearly 30 minutes… at least my friend Joe and I had time to have lunch while it loaded
Below The Root
More or less a Lord Of The Rings hobbits rip-off, but pretty well-done.
Blue Max
Another top-down scrolling airplane-themed shooter, but this one had a really nice 3-D-ish look to it.
Boulder Dash
This game has been released in a bunch of different updated forms in recent years and it still holds up well.  You’re a little… thing… that walks around getting diamonds and avoiding rocks that fall once you remove the dirt below them.  I know, sounds lame, but it’s not!
Break Dance
Yes, I used to be a breakdancer.  I was even kinda, sorta good for a short period of time.  I was always better at this game version of it though!
Break Street
Another breakdancing game.  I always felt Break Street was the better breakdancing-themed game, but they both deserve a spot because they were wildly different affairs.
Bruce Lee
You’re the all-time ass-kickingest martial artist in history doing battle with ninja, a big fat green master and navigating a world straight out of the mind of M.C. Escher.  Sweet!
Burnin’ Rubber
Very fun little game with a fantastic mellow soundtrack!  Race your little car that has the ability to jump hundreds of feet in the air and crush other cars on impact!
California Games
All sorts of west coast-themed mini-games, things like hackysack, halfpipe and surfing… the surfing was memorable because the water effect was actually quite good.
Chimera
A weird little game that is notable for having speech at the beginning… only a few games I remember having speech, this was the first I ever heard.
Chuck Norris
Anything with Chuck Norris is bound to be cool, and this was no exception.
Congo Bongo
Yep, pretty popular in the arcades and the C64 conversion wasn’t bad at all.
Crystal Castles
This was a nice isometric game that was also pretty popular in the arcades.
Defender Of The Crown
For a while this was pretty much the pinnacle of C64 graphics.  The medieval-themes game was pretty fun too.
Dino Eggs
You’re a time-traveler collecting dinosaur eggs.  Pretty tough but very fun.
Elite
One of the few true 3D games, but also one of the even fewer vector-type games.  A great space adventure with, at the time, pretty cutting-edge graphics.
Farmer’s Daughter
A text adventure game that was, shall we say, not suitable for children under the age of ANY??
Forbidden Forest
Shoot spiders and other beasties as they attack you in a forest… that you were forbidden to go into… or something.
Fort Apocalypse
Cool side-scrolling helicopter shooter that was way too hard but for some reason a game you wanted to keep playing.
Friday The 13th
Yep, a video game of the movie!
Gateway To Aphsai
A famous adventure game that was better than any screenshot you’ll ever see would have you believe.
Gauntlet
The arcade classic in your home!
Ghostbusters
One of the best video game adaptations of a movie ever.  Another game that had speech, and hearing “Ghostbusters!” exclaimed every time you bust a ghost is just awesome!
Ghosts And Goblins
Run around a graveyard killing the undead.  Err, wait, something doesn’t seem quite right about that statement.
GI Joe – A Real American Hero
Programmers especially remember this game, along with Hot Wheels, for the way it played music and showed animations perfectly smoothly during loading, which was a technical marvel until we all learned what an NMI was!
Goonies
Another great movie adaptation.  Yes, Chunk is in it!
Great American Cross-Country Road Race
One of the neater racing games ever.  This one wasn’t about speed as much as it was about endurance… would you run out of gas before making it to the next city?  Would you take too much damage to make it to the opposite coast?  This was a liberating experience before you got your real drivers’ license.
Gyruss
Another arcade classic brought to the home.
Hardball
My all-time favorite Baseball game, bar none.  I actually videotaped myself throwing a no-hitter one time, which was a very impressive achievement.  Trust me
Hot Wheels
This game was interesting, for the loading as previously mentioned, but also because it was another semi-open-world-type game.
Hover Bover
You’re mowing a lawn.  I know, sounds lame.  It SO is not!  Your mower can overheat, you can be attacked by a dog, you can male the dog sick your neighbor, who you stole the mower from!  You can run over flowers and have the owner come chase you… just great!  A great British sense of humor throughout.
Impossible Mission
This is one of those games that EVERYONE remembers.  You’re a spy infiltrating the lair of an evil guy and have to dodge killer robots who shoot lightning and navigate an insane and huge underground fortress while solving puzzle, hacking computer terminals and doing bad-ass gymnastics every chance you got.  If you were one of the few who finished it you no doubt remember the conclusion, which I won’t spoil for anyone that might be so inclined to give it a go.
Infiltrator
A World War II spy simulation… and yes, they literally ask for your papers in spots.
Jumpman Junior
You’re a guy that does a lot of jumping while avoiding bullets shot from unseen guns, climbing ropes and collecting… err, things.
Jungle Hunt
Swing on vines, swim underwater, knife sharks, all to rescue a princess from headhunters.
Karate Champ
One of my all-time favorite arcade games.  There’s a native iOS version available so if you don’t have it already, but it sight unseen, it’s great.
Karateka
Another Karate-themed game, this one more adventure-like.
Kung-Fu Master
And yet ANOTHER Karate-themed game (remember, The Karate Kid was out around this time).  This is the most action-packed one of the bunch.
Last Ninja
Yeah, ninjas too were big.
Last V8
Literally, you own the last 8-cylinder car in existence (after the cars rose up and the human race had to destroy them I suppose).  The music was awesome.
Law Of The West
A neat choose-your-own-adventure sort of game set in the old west.
Lazy Jones
A game I shamelessly ripped… err, I mean, paid homage to… when I developed K&G Arcade.  Tons of little mini-games, some extremely bizarre (shooting a fork at a turkey comes to mind) but extremely fun.
Little Computer People’s Reaearch Project
The predecessor to The Sims.  Best part was when you didn’t interact with your little people for a while they would stand there looking annoyed, tapping their feet, and then tap on the glass of your monitor!
Lode Runner
It’d be SO easy to make the obvious poop joke, but this game was not S**T at all
Mail Order Monsters
Exactly what the name says: you mail away for monsters, then fight them, gaining more money and buying more monsters.  Yes, it’s Pokemon, but without the lameness.
Master Of The Lamps
I was always a sucker for mini-game-oriented games, and this was another.  Best part was flying through the shimmering triangles on a magic carpet in space.  Obviously, scientific accuracy wasn’t a big theme back then.
Miner 2049er
One of the hardest games ever!  Only eight levels as I recall, but getting past the sixth was damned near impossible.  I pulled it off a few times, but man, what a nightmare… but somehow fun at the same time.
Montezuma’s Revenge
Run around a Aztec tomb collecting gold and whatnot.
Moon Patrol
Pilot your little moon buggy and defend the Earth’s closest heavenly neighbor from marauding UFOs and rocks on the lunar surface.
Mountain King
Uhh… you jump around… sometimes its pitch black.. there’s bats… hell, I just remember it was fun!
Nuclear Attack
A text-based game where you are the pilot of a nuclear bomber flying into Soviet airspace to do the deed.  If you got into this you got into it big-time… when a SAM site fired on you and you had to deploy countermeasures and hope they worked… then when you opened your target package and finally nuked those red bastards… hey, it was the early 80′s, this was the best way to cope with the thought of nuclear annihilation!
Oils Well
The single best take on Pac-Man ever done.  So fun!
One On One
Dr. J vs. Larry Bird.  Sweet!  Very accurate too: Dr. J could dunk, but Larry could sink them from downtown.
Parallax
3D, that’s all you need to know.
Pooyan
You’re the mother of some child pigs defending against wolves attempting to float down on balloons to eat your babies, so you have to shoot arrows at them in your little basket that can go up and down.  Weird, but extremely addicting.
Popeye
Eat your spinach, get the skinny ugly chick.
Predator
Awesome adaptation of the classic movie.
PSI 5 Trading Company
A space-based adventure that was more about commerce than blowing other ships up.
Raid Over Moscow
Basically this was Beach Head but with a more modern take of the U.S. vs. the USSR.
Rambo
This game had some of the best music ever.  It was one of the toughest games you could ever play, but if you made it far enough it was a fantastic accomplishment.
Rampage
You’re one of a handful of monsters rampaging across a city, eating people.  It’s still out there today in updated forms.
Realm Of Impossibility
Very nice 3D-ish adventure game.
Rescue On Fractalus
Oh, this game… there’s one part where you land your ship on a planet to rescue a crashed pilot… you’re looking out the window of your ship and you see a spacesuit-clad person running up… only, sometimes, it wasn’t a person, it was an alien, who promptly pops up and screams loudly at you!  You know those YouTube videos where you are tricked to watch something closely and then a monster pops up?  Yeah, was done in the early 80′s   This game was also one of the first to use fractal geometry to render its landscape, pretty cutting-edge stuff back then.
Roadrunner
You are literally the roadrunner trying to avoid the coyote.
Satan’s Hollow
You’re literally fighting Satan and his minions in a Galaxian-type shooter.
Serpentine
Imagine the simple game Snake if it was actually incredibly awesome.  That’s Serpentine!
Shamus
A great little top-down adventure game famous for all sorts of weird geometric-based enemies.
Skool Daze
You’re basically a bully tormenting geeks.  Perfect!
Space Taxi
Fly  your taxi picking up fairs and dropping them off.  Another of the ones I still play all the time.
Spelunker
Explore caves, avoid bats, use dynamite, have a blast (pun intended).
Spy Versus Spy
Haha, lots of fun planting traps for the other spy to get tripped up on.
Star Wars
Red 5 standing  by!
Strip Poker
One of the first pornographic games out there.  Was always fun to find there was another disk with another girl to get naked.
Summer Games
Gymnastics here was always my favorite, but other events were fun too.
Tag Team Wrestling
There were a few wrestling games, but this is the only one I remember having tag-team action.
Tapper
You’re the bartender tossing beers to patrons, picking up the empties before they fall on the ground, picking up tips and emptying the bar out.
Telengard
A lesser known adventure game that was absolutely massive, literally: the size of its dungeons was immense.
Temple Of Apshai Trilogy
Yet another adventure game, this one spread out over a couple of games that formed a coherent whole.
Time Pilot
This game should NOT have been fun: you were the pilot of a timeship that literally stayed anchored in the middle of the screen the whole time!  Seems like it would suck, but no, the mechanic worked perfectly.  As you progress through time you fight progressively more advanced and harder aircraft… the UFOs at the end were nearly impossible to beat.
Transformers
The movie in game form.
Trolls And Tribulations
This is actually a better version of Ghosts and Goblins basically.
Tron
Yep, the same one as in the arcade.  Still love lightcycles as much as anyone.
Ultima III – Exodus
The entire Ultima series is the stuff of legend, but really it’s Ultima III (and Ultima IV) that were the best.
Ultima IV – Quest Of The Avatar
Now, Ultima IV was better than Ultima III… and I actually have gotten my 11-year old son into playing this one   This was different than most such games because it wasn’t so much about battles as it was about doing the right thing  and being “virtuous”.  That was the whole point.  Very intricate game actually with lots of “this effects that” sorts of things.
Up ‘n Down
A cartoonish kind of game where you drive a little “love bug” kind of car that moves almost vertically on the roads.
Uridium
Another great top-down scrolling shooter.
Winter Games
This was always my favorite Olympic-themed game… the hot dog event was my favorite.
Xevius
In my opinion, THE definitive top-down scrolling shooter ever.
Yie Ar Kung Fu
This is the wackiest martial art game ever.  Kind of had the idea of wirework without knowing it
Zaxxon
A beautiful isometric scrolling shooter.  For a while this had some of the most advanced graphics going.
Zork I
One of the best, and certainly one of the most famous, text adventures of all time.

Ok, that’s it!  Kinda pointless I suppose, but fun to reminisce if nothing else.

Recently, I completed judging duties for Packt Publishing’s 2010 Open Source awards in the JavaScript libraries category.  The competitors where jQuery, Dojo, ExtJS, Rafael and MooTools, all very good libraries.  The winner was jQuery, based on a couple of judges’ opinions and the opinions of the voting public.  Congratulations to jQuery!

The judging experience was very fun for me, and was also the first time I had the opportunity to use Google Wave.  Let me just say about that technology that while I see how it could be rather useful, I can also understand why it’s no longer being developed.  I think we’re going to see something like that being quite popular down the road, and it’s a good bet it’ll come from Google, but it may have been a little ahead of its time in a sense.

My own judgment for the award was actually for ExtJS as I felt that when you compare it to the others, the only strong comparison is to Dojo… this is because jQuery, and to a lesser extent MooTools, out of the box don’t come with a widget set, where as Dojo and ExtJS do (and Rafael is a little more specifically-targeted, so isn’t really a fair comparison to the other more general-purpose libraries).  This to me makes ExtJS and Dojo automatically richer libraries than the others.  That being said, I completely understand why so many voted for jQuery… it’s a fantastic library that has served many people extremely well.  So, even though it wasn’t my #1 choice (I believe I had it as second runner-up after Dojo) this was in no way, shape or form an outcome I can really argue with.  jQuery has a ton going for it, and if you add in something like jQuery UI, it is very, very good in almost every way.

I also want to say that every library was represented by someone from its community… John Resig for jQuery, Michael Mullany for ExtJS, Dylan Schiemann for Dojo, Dmitry Baranovskiy for Rafael and David Walsh for MooTools.  I had interacted with John, Michael and Dylan before, but Dmitry and David were new people to me.  I just want to say that all of them are class acts and supremely talented individuals who represented their libraries and communities extremely well.  We judges had the opportunity to pepper them with questions via Wave, in a few instances somewhat pointed questions, and they were all answered extremely well… in fact, I can honestly say that I learned a thing or two in the process, so that was a nice added bonus!

So, thanks very much to Packt Publishing for inviting me to participate, thanks to everyone who represented their libraries so well and of course congratulations again to jQuery for the win and to all the competitors for being fantastic products… it’s to all of your credit that the decision was not an easy one for me, and I suspect for anyone that voted!

Here’s the press release, courtesy of Julian Copes from Packt, who did a fantastic job organizing this and making it a smooth, enjoyable experience.

——————–

FOR RELEASE ON NOVEMBER 18, 2010

Press Release

jQuery wins the 2010 Open Source JavaScript Libraries Award

Birmingham, UK. 18 November 2010

Packt Publishing is pleased to announce that jQuery has won the inaugural Open Source JavaScript Libraries Award category in the 2010 Open Source Awards. The Award is a new category introduced to the Open Source Awards this year, featuring libraries of pre-written JavaScript controls which allow for easier development of RIAs (Rich Internet Applications), visually enhanced applications or smoother server-side JavaScript functionalities.

“On behalf of the entire jQuery Team, let me first say thanks to Packt Publishing for this award. I’d also like to give a huge thanks to the community of designers and developers that use jQuery daily and felt the urge to vote for jQuery as their favorite JavaScript library.  We’ll use this prize to further the development of the jQuery Project.” Said Ralph Whitbeck, jQuery core team member.

“While jQuery hasn’t undergone any radical change in the past year, the project has continued to evolve at the same frenetic pace and the 1.4 release included a wide range of small but important improvements.” Added Michael Mahemoff, Google developer advocate, HTML5/JavaScript specialist and one of the judges for the 2010 Open Source JavaScript Libraries category. “jQuery covers all bases as its performance is high priority, it is easy to use, has a huge community, great documentation, and an excellent plugin ecosystem.”

While jQuery occupied the top spot in the 2010 Open Source JavaScript Libraries category, the other two extremely popular finalists Raphaël and Mootools tied and both projects will be awarded the first runner up position.

With this announcement, the 2010 Open Source Awards has two more categories left, including the Open Source CMS category, for which results will be announced November 19^th.

For detailed results on each category and more information about the Award, please visit: https://www.packtpub.com/open-source-awards-home.

—-ENDS—

Notes for Editors

Contacts

Julian Copes

Marketing Executive, Packt Publishing

julianc@packtpub.com | www.PacktPub.com

Tel: 0121 683 1170

About the Open Source Awards

The Open Source Awards is an annual online event held by Packt Publishing to distinguish excellence among Open Source projects. The Award, formerly known as the Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award, is designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward a wide range of Open Source projects.

About Packt Publishing

Packt is a modern, unique publishing company with a focus on producing cutting-edge books for communities of developers, administrators, and newbies alike.

Packt’s books and publications share the experiences of fellow IT professionals in adapting and customizing today’s systems, applications, and frameworks. Their solutions-based books give readers the knowledge and power to customize the software and technologies they’re using to get the job done.

For more information, please visit www.PacktPub.com

There was an interesting forum post in the private webOS dev forums that I saw today talking about the Google Map app and how lousy it was (paraphrasing a bit- LOL).  One of the biggest concerns, which I absolutely share, was around startup time.  We were all wondering why it seems to take a lot longer to start than we think it should and why it seems to hang frequently, or sometimes times out saying no network connection is available when one clearly is.

If you aren’t aware, the webOS Google Map downloads code from Google’s servers at startup.  Now, I haven’t dug into the code so I don’t know if it’s every time or what the logic is like if it fails, but one can kind of guess what it might be like.  Specifically, what happens if the server can’t be reached for whatever reason?  Do you think the code might fall through to a generic branch that says “network connectivity isn’t available” and not something more specific?  I’d bet money it does.  Whether that’s the case or not, it sure does seems like it’s doing a “dumb” load from the server every single time, based on my own experience, as well as what others in that forum thread were seeing.

To be clear, having portions of your app’s code “in the cloud”, even when we’re talking about a locally-running app, is a really nice idea.  For one thing, you can ensure the user is running the latest version of your code, so they automatically get all the bug fixes and nice new features you build without an explicit update (which we’ve seen a couple of times now with the Map app).  As long as it’s not disruptive, I think users like to be surprised with shiny new toys to play with all of a sudden  You could also use it as a copy protection scheme, assuming you built a proper infrastructure around it (it’s likely not going to be air-tight no matter what you do, but still).  You can also use it to collect usage statistics (I’m not a huge fan of such things frankly, but I’m not going to go nuts about it or anything).

But, being a good idea doesn’t mean there aren’t implications to it, as I believe the Map app demonstrates.  This all got me thinking about how I would implement something like that.  The pattern seems fairly obvious to me and I believe would avoid the startup issues seen with the Map app… although, admittedly I’m assuming I know what the startup delays are caused by with the Map app, and I frankly could be wrong… without digging into the code I’m only guessing… but be that as it may, I think this is probably the right way to do something like this regardless, so I thought I’d share..

So, your app is starting up.  There’s obviously some amount of “scaffolding” code, if you will, that’s on the device.  As part of this code you would load a much larger chunk of code from an on-device database and eval() it. You’re app is then fully in memory and you can go off and begin doing whatever it is that the app does.

At the same time, in the background, you kick off a call to your server to check for a new version of the code.  If one is found you update what’s in the database with the new version automatically and without the user even knowing it.  At this point, the user is going to get the new version at the next application run automatically, good to go.  You could also optionally pop an alert to the user asking if they want to restart immediately to get the changes.

If any problems occur, say your server is overloaded or the network is down somewhere, your user isn’t impacted by the failed update attempt.  They aren’t aware of the problem and they aren’t slowed down at all.

Now, what code you’re actually downloading could get interesting.  I’m not sure if you could have new webOS scenes for example… although, maybe. Would be an interesting thing to try (assistants probably wouldn’t be much trouble but how you’d deal with the view markup I’m not sure).  But what you certainly can have is core application logic, stuff that, by and large, probably isn’t webOS-specific anyway.  This is likely to be the kind of stuff you’d want to update frequently anyway, and that’s the real demarcation point.  If you’re adding a whole new scene it probably makes sense that there’s a regular application update involved, but tweaking existing functionality or extending functionality, that’s ripe for remote download.

The benefit here, by storing the code in the database, is twofold.  First, you don’t impact application startup much.  I’d say it’s likely to always be faster reading from the local DB and eval()’ing than it is to get the code from a remote server, and in some cases, depending on network conditions, it could be a lot faster.  It’s probably not going to be much slower than a regular application startup with the usual JS loads and evaluations and such that happen as a part of any application load either.  Second, you don’t require an Internet connection just to start your app.  If no connection is available the app can still start and run normally (assuming it doesn’t require a connection to run of course).  Since the update is a background task anyway there’s no impact either to startup or to the user- they’re none the wiser!

I suspect the Google Map app isn’t doing anything like this.  If it is then it’s absolutely baffling to me why the startup is so lousy and seems brittle.  This is the way I’d implement such a capability for sure.  It seems logical and frankly pretty simple while providing all the benefits of remotely-loaded code.

For anyone that follows me on Twitter or elsewhere you almost certainly know that I’m a huge fan of the progressive rock band Shadow Gallery (www.shadowgallery.com).  I have been for… jeez, about 15 years now, give or take!  I discovered them right around the time I got engaged to my wife, which means late ’94, maybe early ’95 (that I discovered them… we got engaged late ’94 for sure!)

In all that time, they’ve produced six studio albums (seven if you count the “greatest hits” album Prime Cuts) and have been a huge influence on my own musical ideas and an inspiration for my own writing.  They’ve always impressed me by not only being one of the most technically talented bands on the planet but at the same time one of the best song writing bands around.  The two are not always one and the same unfortunately, but Shadow Gallery is one of the few that pulls it off, and they do so better than most.  In fact, for quite a few years now I’ve considered them my favorite band, although I’ve often argued with myself whether it’s them or Dream Theater… frankly, each time one of them releases an album my opinion tends to change   But, Shadow Gallery is responsible for my single favorite album of all time, Room V, so the coin toss goes to them more times than not

Over the course of those 15 years, the one thing that has never happened is seeing Shadow Gallery play live.  This isn’t because I’ve missed the chance, it’s because they’ve in fact never played a live show.

That is, until September 5th, 2010.  This very evening, history was made… and I was there!!

I was jazzed!  Here was my favorite band, playing their very first show, and it was within easy driving distance!  Barley Creek Brewery in Tannersville, PA is only about 1.5 hours’ drive.  Not a hassle in the least!  And, it’s in the beautiful Pocono mountains region of the state, which is a destination I like anyway.  It’s a generally pleasant drive into a great area, so I was totally stoked.

What’s better is that my 10-year old son Andrew was going to make the pilgrimage with me.  Now, I’ve taken him to a number of concerts already, even at such a young age.  He’s seen Dream Theater twice, Iron Maiden, Queensryche, Fates Warning and Daughtry.  Shadow Gallery is special though because it was literally the first band I introduced him to, and he took a liking to them right away.  In fact, I have videos of him singing and playing along (on a toy guitar) to Comfort Me and The Andromeda Strain, two great Shadow Gallery songs, when he was maybe 5 or 6 years old, give or take.

Even better, Andrew is a fairly accomplished drummer already and continues to take lessons and improve, so the chance to see Joe Nevolo, one of the best drummers around in my opinion, live and in person made it even sweeter.

So, the stars most certainly aligned on this kinda chilly night in northeastern PA.  So, was it as great a spectacle as I had hoped?

In a word… almost entirely yes!

To be blunt, it was a fantastic show!  It was worth the money, worth the effort to get there and worth the wait, all 15 years of it!  Was it perfect in every respect?  No, and I’ll get to that.  Let’s start with the opening act though: Suspyre.

Suspyre in another progressive rock act hailing from New Jersey and to be very honest, I’d never heard of them before this week.  Well, that’s not exactly true: I’d heard of them because the singer, Clay Barton, did a guest spot on Shadow Gallery’s latest album Digital Ghosts.  To be more precise though,  I’d never heard Suspyre’s material before this week.  Leading up to the concert though I checked them out, and I have to say I liked what I heard.  Seeing them live was definitely a treat.  They are a very talented band to say the least!  Fantastic musicianship across all members of the band and most definitely a worthy opening act.  They did a good job not only warming up the crowd for the main event but also in getting the crowd over to their side.  I noticed when they started that not too many people were huddled in front of the stage listening, and those of us that were didn’t seem too excited overall.  By the end of their set however there was a large crowd of people headbanging along and cheering when they finished (in a good way I mean!)  So they really got people interested in what they were doing, not only in preparing for Shadow Gallery.  Interestingly too, my son was asking if we can buy the CDs when we get home.  Little does he know I already bought most of their tracks off Amazon a night or two ago   So, kudos to Suspyre, you did an excellent job and you have two new fans as a result!

Now, on to the main event!

At 9pm, Shadow Gallery took the stage… but not until after the crowd all sang along in unison to Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody played over the PA!  Now, I’ve never been a big Queen fan honestly, and that song never thrilled me… but it was fun singing along with everyone!  More importantly though, it got everyone in the right frame of mind for what was to come because being a Shadow Gallery fan, especially for their first show, felt a lot like being part of an extended family.

Shadow Gallery came out and opened with the first track off Room V, Manhunt.  Right away I was psyched because I had mentally mapped out the set I would like them to do, the set I would do if I was them, and Manhunt was my opening pick too!  It couldn’t have been a better choice: it’s a technical masterpiece but it also has a great atmosphere about it.  It instantly got the crowd going, although I think they could have played Old McDonald at that point and got the same effect!

Now, I’m not going to go into each and every song they played, mainly because I probably won’t remember everything quite right.  What I will tell you though is that they played what I’d consider a nearly perfect set.  They mentioned early on that they had picked most of their heavier songs, the ones that rock I believe is what they said, and I think they succeeded very well in that regard.  They covered every album they have, not a single one when unrepresented.  As I recall the songs the played, including Crystalline Dream, The Andromeda Strain, Strong, Deeper Than Life, Questions At Hand and Goldust, each and every one fits the bill perfectly in terms of heaviness (I think Ghost Of A Chance might have been the “lightest” song).  Not only that but they are some of the most well-known Shadow Gallery songs out there.  I can say for sure that there wasn’t a single one I had any problem with them choosing, not a single one did I thought  “ehh, wouldn’t mind if they hadn’t picked that one”

Where there any missing that I wanted to hear?  Actually, there’s only one that I missed, but unfortunately for me it was a big miss: Rain.  Rain is the penultimate song off the album Room V and it was the one song I REALLY wanted to hear.  Now, I kind of in my gut had a feeling I wouldn’t be hearing it, so I was sort of prepared.  Even still, I did miss Rain quite a bit.  But, that’s really my only complaint in terms of the set selection, and it’s rare that you go to any concert and here EVERY song you want to when its a band with a number of albums (I mean, Daughtry played every song off two albums when I saw them, but that’s only two albums’ worth… not to mention the fact that Shadow Gallery songs aren’t exactly short, we could easily have been there until 3am!)  Dream Theater failed to play Forsaken for me too, so they aren’t perfect either

So, if an excellent set selection is the basis for a good show, they were off to a great start.  What about the rest?  How did they sound?  In short, excellent!

One thing I really appreciated is that they didn’t feel the need to improvise and rearrange their material.  I know many people disagree with this, but I for one hate it when I see a band live and they totally butcher their songs.  People fall in love with songs, most of the time at least, as they are recorded.  To perform them live in some other way is annoying at best.  I don’t mind some minor tweaks here and there, extending a section and such, a slightly different vocal melody, that’s cool.  It seemed like Shadow Gallery got that, and I thank them for it!  There were certainly some mixed up pieces here and there, but like I said, a little bit is fun, a lot is annoying to me.  They got the balance right in this regard.

The band was just as tight as you’d expect such great musicians to be.  There’s no question that the members of Shadow Gallery are some of the best musicians around  when it comes to the “simple” art of actually playing their instruments.  But, since they’d never played live before there had to be some question as to whether they could actually do it outside of a studio.  I’m happy to say they most definitely can!  They can downright go!  I also appreciated the work the sound guys did.  The band was loud but not overly so, and there was very little time where the sound wasn’t clear.  Rarely can you make out the words so well at a live concert.  Great job guys!

In terms of individual performance, particularly worth mentioning… no, you know what?  You just can’t start a sentence like that when talking about this band!  You could say Gary Wehrkamp deserves special mention because he took a page from Getty Lee and then wrote another six chapters, constantly switching instruments with relative ease.  You could say Brendt Allman deserves special mention because he put on a display of guitar skill that is matched by few guitar players today (in fact, John Petrucci is the only one that comes to mind, and I’ll tell you, not by much!).  You could say Brian Ashland deserves special mention for fantastic lead vocals all night (even when his throat started to give him some problems) and then jumping to keyboard for parts and some serious shredding on guitar at other times.  You could say Joe Nevolo deserves special mention for one of the single best drum solos I’ve ever seen, and that includes the masterpieces I’ve seen by Mike Portnoy and Neil Peart.  You could say Carl Cadden-James deserves special mention for being more full of energy than any human  being has a right to be and of showing off some amazing bass chops all night.  No, they each put on a showcase worthy of special mention!  If you’re a musician there’s no way you weren’t impressed as hell tonight.

So, a great setlist played the right way and done very tightly.  That sounds like it was perfect, right?  Well, no, perfect it wasn’t if I’m being honest.  As much as I loved the show, I do see room for improvement and I do have some criticisms.

Before I get to those though, let me say one thing: I’ve been in a number of bands in my life, one of them fairly successful for a little while.  I’ve played a number of live shows, and I can pretty clearly remember all of them, especially the first.  I know what it’s like to play to a crowd that size (actually, as I mentioned to my son, I believe one time we had a larger crowd).  I know that nervous energy the guys must have felt.  I know how absolutely fun it is, to the point where the word “fun” is nowhere near adequate to describe it.  If you’ve never been on stage like that before it’s a feeling you almost certainly have no frame of reference to understand.  I also know that  no matter how much you prepare, no matter how much you practice, things never go *quite* right.  I suspect that’s true of any band regardless of how long they’ve been performing live.

The point is that most of the criticisms I’m about to say I can pretty much dismiss as nothing but typical first-time jitters, or the inherent difficulties in performing live.  There was nothing I saw that was egregious and beyond forgiveness.  I think they guys need to do a bit of polishing, but that’ll happen naturally the more they perform.  Because I’m such a big fan of theirs I want to see them giving top-notch performances every time they take the stage going forward, so maybe if they happen to see this they can take some of it and make improvements from it where they see valuable in  my opinions.

That all being said, what went “wrong”?

• Well, it looked to me like Gary at one point (I forget during which song) forgot to switch keyboard patches, or maybe missed a cue, I’m not sure.  It was pretty obvious though.  To his credit, he recovered quickly and even gave the crowd a little “yeah, I know, I blew it” look, which is about the best thing you can do in that situation.  Hang a lamp on it I believe is what they say when a fiction writer makes an nod to the audience when an obvious plot contrivance comes up.  This is similar.  No sweat Gary, nobody is holding this against you
• At one point, Brendt’s guitar had a technical problem and he had to switch, which I believe caused Carl and Joe to do a little improving to cover (I’m  not sure if it was that or if they just extended a section, but whatever, they covered for Brendt while he switched axes, which was good).  What can you do?  Equipment fails on stage, that’s part of live performance.  I think there may have been some mic issues along the way too, but if so they were a bit less obvious.
• During Joe’s monstrous and phenomenal drum solo he dropped a stick at one point.  He did a good job making light of it though, which I think got the audience even MORE into it!  So, while dropping a stick is something going wrong technically, in a way I think it worked in his favor.

Yep, that’s about it!  Some pretty minor stuff, and nothing out of the ordinary.  Oh, but…

One thing that’s maybe a little bigger though… Brian didn’t seem to know the words to some of the songs!  Now, hey, I wouldn’t hold a mistake or two against a singer.  Remembering EVERY word EXACTLY right over an entire set list is tough and a few flubs here and there aren’t a big deal.  And it’s also the case that he may have just been playing with some minor changes here and there, and I can live with that.  But there was more than a few times where I was singing along, knowing the words very well, and Brian appeared to be mumbling through.  It was some of the older material, so it’s somewhat understandable, Brian having not been around for the writing of that material.  Still, unless I’m somehow mistaken about what I think I was seeing and hearing, this is an area Brian needs to work on a bit.  It’s not *too*big a deal the first show or two, but a few shows from now I wouldn’t say the same thing.

Now, I have one last general criticism…  if you didn’t know this was their first show I think you could have easily guessed it.  There’s a certain polish to a band that’s done a lot of performances together.  Knowing each others’ ticks and preferences, knowing how to interact with each others’ stage presence, being excited up there without it overwhelming you and acting almost giddy, knowing how to get the crowd involved in various playful ways that don’t seem too contrived, smoother transitions between songs and segments of the set… these are things you learn over time, nothing else does it.  Like I said, I remember my bands’ first show and it was similar, at least for me (my guitarist and drummer had been on stage before so they were already a little more accomplished, but myself, the bass player and singer were first-timers and we certainly weren’t as polished).  For example, at times I almost expected Carl to pull a Tom Cruise and jump up on the nearest couch yelling “WE’RE PLAYING LIVE!!  WE’RE PLAYING LIVE!!”  Now, maybe Carl is like that all the time, in which case, ok, fine.  But I suspect not.  I think a few shows into this tour he’ll have that “I’m excited, and I’m going to BE exciting, but I know how to not go too far with it” feel to him and it’ll be perfect.

Again, this was their first live show EVER, so expecting complete fit and finish and total polish would have been unfair.  In fact, if you take everything together I don’t think there’s any question they did a better job than a lot of others bands have their first time  out, and they’re only going to get better.  I’m hoping they do another U.S. tour in a few months somewhere close because I think  seeing them after they have a few shows under their belts is going to be an even better experience.

One other miscellaneous note: the lighting all night was a bit on the dark side.  I don’t know to what degree the band has any influence over this though so it’s maybe not fair to label it a criticism at all.  But, from an audience standpoint there were a lot of instances where I wished I could see things a bit better.  All the video I shot was dark for sure, and while stage lighting isn’t meant to make my video-taking ability better, being able to clearly see the band *most* of the time is important.  It wasn’t drastically bad, but there was room for improvement I’d say.

So, just very minor quibbles really so far (aside from the not knowing the words thing), and nothing that isn’t easily explained by being a first-time live act.  But, I have one criticism left, and it’s a little bigger, and it’s frankly the only one that I’d say actually bothered me.

There was no mention of Mike Baker.

If you don’t know, Mike Baker was the original singer for Shadow Gallery who sadly passed away in 2008.  If you by chance read by ExtJS book you know it was dedicated to him.  I never had the chance to meet Mike, but through his music I felt like I knew him.  He was a fantastic talent who brought so much more to Shadow Gallery’s music than was even in the words in the first place.

Now, let me be clear: Brian Ashland has stepped in to replace Mike, an unenviable task for any musician, but one he’s done an awesome job at.  Brian has a lot of the same qualities Mike did and I think the guys made a perfect choice with him.  I also think they went about it right.  I know the loss of Mike hit them hard, as it did many of us fans.  They grieved, waited a respectful amount of time, and then moved on.  I remember some fans saying they should just close up shop after Mike died, but I never subscribed to that opinion.  The show must go on as they say, and the guys clearly had a ton left to offer the world, and Brian has I think been an integral part to making that happen.  Yes, its a shame that we didn’t get to see Shadow Gallery with Mike Baker fronting, but that’s the way life goes sometimes.  Brian is here now and it’s worked out great despite being spawned by a terrible circumstance.

All night I was waiting for some sort of  mention  of Mike though.  I felt like it was the right thing to do, especially given this being their first-ever show.  It didn’t have to be a big thing… they could have just picked one song that Mike especially liked and said “This one’s dedicated to the memory of Mike Baker.  We miss you buddy.”  It didn’t have to be a long, drawn-out affair… but Mike was a big part of what made Shadow Gallery so great over so many years, he’s certainly a big part of why I am such a big fan today.  To not say *something* at *some* point just felt like something really big was missing.

Now, there’s not a doubt in my mind that the guys were thinking of him tonight.  I’m sure he was in all their hearts.  I also know this to be true of many, probably most, of the people there watching.  I just wish we all had gotten the chance to share that together.  I suspect that would have been the biggest ovation  of the night and probably a big emotional release for many too.  If there was one disappointment from this show it was this.

But, let’s end this on an up note, shall we?!?  It’s real easy to do!

On September 5th, 2010, at Barley Creek Brewery in Tannershville, PA, one of the greatest bands of all time, Shadow Gallery, played their first live show ever.  I had the honor and privilege of being there.  It was an awesome show from start to finish, not far from perfect in my estimation.  This will be filed into my brain as one of my more cherished memories in life so far.  I think after a few shows, after the band has had the opportunity to polish the stage act a bit, they’ll wind up being one of those bands that you really should see live at least once in your life.  It’s already exactly that if you’re already a fan of course!  It was a great night overall and I just want to say thank you to Shadow Gallery for doing it!

And hey, Mike Portnoy, now that Shadow Gallery is a “real touring band”, when will you get them to open for you?  Then again, that might not be a good idea… that much musical awesomeness in one place has GOT to somehow be dangerous for any human being to experience

Twitter is stupid.  It’s a waste of time.  It’s people self-aggrandizing and trying to make themselves feel better about their pathetic lives.  It’s idiots telling you every little last bit of minutia about their day, as if anyone cares about their boyfriend problems or how lousy their boss is or how they are feeling “down in the dumps” or how they’re thrilled because their baby said their first word or…

Does that sound familiar?  Sound like you?  If so, join the club because that’s some of the *nicer* things I was saying about Twitter just six or so months ago.

Now, it’s a whole different ballgame.

You know the funny part?  It’s not that any of those comments aren’t true!  Indeed, a lot of Twitter is purely noise.  It’s nothing but a soapbox that any Tom, Dick or Harry can stand on.  It’s a place where people can drop any old thought they have for anyone that wants to see, whether it’s a thought worth putting out there or not.

But folks, I’m here to tell you, that’s exactly what’s so *right* about it.

What I’ve come to know over my years of life, as a generality, is that it’s the little thoughts that you have throughout the day, the seemingly insignificant bits of trivia that pop in and out of your brain, that are actually worth the most, you you as much as to other people.  Oh, to be sure, most of it, whether it came from your mind or someone else’, is just garbage that you have to filter through (and that includes anything I have to say as much as anyone else).  But, as the saying goes, inspiration strikes in odd places and at odd times, and the fact that you can tweet those thoughts is a blessing in disguise because even the ones that you think are fairly lame after the fact is often-times just what someone else needs.  Sometimes, it’s just the clue as to which thread to tug on to unravel the tapestry of doubt and mental inertia that people frequently get into.

How does it work?  Well, say I’m working on a difficult problem in some area, be it just life in general, something at work or some side project.  Maybe I tweet that I’m frustrated because things aren’t working out.  It’s just me bitching, which is pretty pointless.  However… what can happen is someone sees it… they say something that triggers a new train of thought in your mind and before you know it, and without them necessarily trying to, they’ve set you on a course towards a solution.  It’s those random associations that the best problem-solvers excel at that makes Twitter worth something… free-associating with other people multiplies the effect, and that’s precisely what Twitter lets you do.

But, there’s something else that makes Twitter really something special, and I can illustrate it with a personal example.

I’m a big Kevin Smith fan.  You know, the guy that writes and directs movies like Mall Rats, Dogma, Cop Out and Clerks.  The guy that’s too fat and gets kicked off of airlines   He’s a funny guy, and judging by everything I’ve seen of him, I suspect he and I would get along quite well if we ever were to meet.  We share a lot of common interests, have a similar sense of humor and don’t mind making asses of ourselves.  I think we’d get on great, as the Brits like to say.

But, the chances of me running into him are pretty slim.

Unless it happens on Twitter.

That’s what happened the other day: I follow Kevin because he’s entertaining in his tweets, and every now and again I comment back.  Kevin doesn’t follow me, but he does look for mentions of him in order to reply to fans.  This is a cool thing to do, but it’s not the point.  Kevin replied to one of my comments a few days ago.  It was a quick little silly reply, as was my comment to him.  It’s not like we all of a sudden struck up a deep conversation and are going to start dating or anything like that.  It was just two ships passing in the night, a quick little back-and-forth, nothing more, and nothing that Kevin hasn’t done with thousands of other fans.

So, on one level this is nothing special really, nothing unusual, but at the same time it’s neat just because I’m a fan and it’s cool to get a reply.  But think about what really happened there: I was able to interact with someone personally, albeit briefly and virtually, that I likely never would have otherwise.  Twitter allows for those sorts of connections, even if only fleeting as in this case.  It allows us to make connections with our heroes in some cases, those we look up to, the work of who we respect.  It in a very real sense makes the world a lot smaller, contrary to what some say about all the virtual interactions we all have these days.  Making the world smaller, making more people interact in more ways is a Very Good Thing(tm) in my estimation.  It allows us to understand people and things we otherwise wouldn’t, learn and experience things we otherwise couldn’t.  Twitter is an avenue to that.

Also, maybe Kevin checks out some of my tweets, thinks I’m an interesting guy, and begins following me.  Maybe some day we become friends.  It’s a possibility born of this new form of social interaction called Twitter.  It’s a new way to make friends, possibly friends you never would have had the chance to make otherwise, and that too is a great thing.

Much has been made of Twitter’s utility as a news source, and that’s very much true and another big part of its attraction.  I’ve heard about things before many others via Twitter.  For example, following certain people has allowed me to learn about upcoming Palm releases before the news showed up on any web site (we’re not talking a huge lead-time, but still).  Obviously, in big news situations, Twitter is even more valuable.  Being able to see those first-hand accounts of the unrest in Iran earlier this year shows the true power of what is, really, a whole new medium of communication.

You know, it really is an odd feeling to be saying positive things about Twitter, given how against it I was for so long.  In fact, my first 15 tweets or so were absolute jokes meant to expose what I thought of Twitter at the time… they went something along the lines of:

“I’m walking down the hall to the bathroom”

“I’m opening the door”

“I’m lifting the lid”

“I’m unzipping my fly”

“Aaaahhhh, that feels good!”

“Hands washed, returning to desk”

It’s absolutely true that some people do nothing but that sort of stuff all the time.  But you know, those people aren’t really worth following.  They aren’t contributing anything meaningful, not even trying to.   That’s of course something you have to decide for yourself on an individual basis… if someone like that is your friend then you’ll clearly be more inclined to want to know every last detail of their life.  Some people don’t think I’m worth following either, and that’s fine, they made that determination and who am I to argue?  I know some people follow me and find that I tend to be entertaining while occasionally throwing in a real, serious thought about various things (and yeah, sometimes tossing in a total clunker of a comment).  I do make an effort to make at least *most* of my tweet something that I think those following me would be interested to read, whether it’s purely a joke tweet (which tends to be most of them) or something more serious in nature.  Likewise, I follow people that I enjoy reading the thoughts of, even if not every one I find compelling.

You know, think of it this way: if you’re in a crowded room, with 100 people yapping at each other and having all sorts of overlapping conversations, most of it you’re going to ignore because its just obvious gibberish that you can’t even make out.  Some of it you can make out and conclude is banal, silly and not worth your attention.  Every now and again though, a stray couple of words will come along and make you go “hmmm, interesting”.  Its those bits of randomness that enrich us in ways we can never anticipate.

I like to tell my kids that learning, in and of itself, is one of life’s greatest pleasures.  It’s really kind of a rush when you realize you now know something that you didn’t five minutes ago.  This can happen quite frequently with Twitter.  You get pointed in directions you never expected and you go on journeys of discovery that you never would have otherwise, all because someone tweeted about something they thought was interesting.

There’s another aspect to Twitter though that’s extremely interesting that I think will gain more attention as time goes by, and that’s the amount of influence you gain over people.  The more people follow you the more people you can reach with your thoughts, the more people you can potentially swing to your point of view on things.  You know that saying, “be the change you want to see in the world”?  Well, Twitter gives *anyone*, potentially, the chance to do just that!    Of course, that makes it sad to realize some of the people that have the most followers, people you really wouldn’t want influencing anyone!  But, if these are the people society has collectively decided are its de-facto leaders, whether it leads to riches or ruin, I suppose it’s right.  You’ve still got to think for yourself anyway… but it can’t be denied that if someone has a million followers, anything they say *could* influence a lot of people.  It’s a new form of power that some are beginning to exploit and it’s something that bears watching in the future.  There’s a lot of good that can come from that, but clearly there’s a lot of bad too.

So, in conclusion: if you aren’t on Twitter yet, give it a shot, against your better judgment!  Follow a few choice people (might I suggest: ME?!?) and see what it’s really all about.  Get involved, post some things yourself and interact with others.  That interaction part is key!  It’s certainly worth something just to see the thoughts of others, but you take it to another level when you start to interact a bit.  Don’t be shy, tell the world what’s going on in that warped little mind of yours

Take it from someone who never would have been caught dead with a Twitter account just a few months ago: there truly is value there, and possibly a lot.  And don’t let the bits that actually do confirm your worst fears turn you off to the parts that run completely contrary to them… I think you’ll find more of the later.

I’ve been away from blogging for quite a while here, although I’ve been tweeting a lot (I’m SSOO lame!) and since I’ve been asked this question a number of times over the past few days I figured now is a good time to get back to it.

I’m a Palm Pre owner, and a fairly happy one at that.  There’s a lot to love about webOS and the Pre, and the future looks pretty good too.  But, there’s no denying that the EVO with Android is out there and looks impressive, and of course the iPhone with iOS 4.0 was just released this week.  Am I thinking of switching?  That seems to be the current question, for me and for a lot of people.

The quick answer for the iPhone is no, but maybe not for the reasons you think… I’m an avowed Apple hater, even though I own an iPad and frankly like it quite a bit.  That doesn’t change the fact that I detest many of their practices and philosophies, and I absolutely despise Steve Jobs in particular.  None of this is news to anyone that knows me.

What may be news though is that I’d have a very difficult time not getting an iPhone if it wasn’t for one thing: AT&T.  I’m a Sprint customer, have been for a long time, and I have almost nothing but good things to say about them.  The service has always been solid for me, and the price is unbeatable.  They have a decent lineup of phones nowadays, which wasn’t always true.  In fact, the lack of good phones a few years ago chased me to Verizon temporarily.  But AT&T is pretty awful.  The price isn’t great and the service is pretty crappy from what I hear (although interestingly, it seems to be a bit improved with the new iPhone).

I don’t think I could ever bring myself to suffer AT&T’s service for the iPhone, even though the device itself is something I’d be interested in.  It’s still got all the same downsides as any Apple device: lack of freedom, overhyped (but generally pretty good) operating system, some missing features I’d hate to be without… but it’s also got a lot of positives that largely overcome the negatives… excellent hardware (Apple has nearly always gotten the hardware right, and usually better than most others), tons of apps, most of the features I want in such a device.

Yes, if the iPhone was available on Sprint today I’d frankly have a very difficult decision to make.

EVO is the other competitor in my mind, and hardware-wise it seems to be a winner… although, I’ve seen some issues reported early on, but I expect they will be solved in future production runs.  Regardless, it’s hard to argue it doesn’t have some killer hardware lurking under the covers.  What about the OS?  Well, Android, in my mind, is just OK at this point.  It’s got warts for sure… interestingly, I think it has more warts than webOS despite having been out longer.  I haven’t seen any showstoppers though, but lots of little thing that would probably annoy me.

Still, Android is relatively open, which is a positive.  There’s a good and growing number of apps out there, which also is a big positive.  With Google backing it I expect it’s going to continue to improve rapidly, which is a third positive.  I think the bottom line is I wouldn’t be at all against owning an Android device, but the EVO is the only one I’d currently consider, given it’s available on Sprint and given that it has killer hardware.

And then there’s webOS and my Pre.

First, I’m still burnt that I can’t have a Pre Plus on Sprint.  I’m sure exclusivity was a dependency in getting the phones onto Verizon, which Palm had to do to try and build the user base.  Makes sense.  But it still sucks big-time for us Sprint early adopters.  It sucks because it goes a long way to solving some of the lingering annoying problems with webOS, primarily the “too many cards” errors.  Yes, they still happen, and more so now with the PDK-based games.  It’s frustrating to say the least.  Not to mention that I can’t have all the music and videos and eBooks I want on my phone now because the memory is constrained.

So, that sucks.  The Pre in  general, hardware-wise, is behind the curve for sure at this point and the gap is widening greatly.  I mean, I can’t really compare a Pre to the new iPhone or the EVO and have too much positive to say.  In  fact, the Pre having a physical keyboard is about the only positive thing I can say.  We’re starting to get some hints about new devices coming in the next few months, but those are already 3-4 months late in my opinion… I hesitate to say they are too late because if they come out in a few months and are top-notch then all would be forgiven… my fear is that any new Palm device will always be a few months’ behind the kings of the hill in terms of hardware…

…which means that webOS has to REALLY impress and make up for the lack of hardware.  Any you know what?  For the most part, it does, and it’s really the only thing keeping me with my Pre.  Look, to be clear, iOS and Android have their strengths and weaknesses, as does webOS.  I love how smooth iOS is under nearly any circumstance (based on my iPad and iPod Touch experience) and I wish webOS was always as smooth (it certainly is some of the time, but I can’t honestly say even most of the time).  Then again, webOS beats the snot out of iOS and Android when it comes to notifications.  Pluses and minuses to all of them.

Taken as a whole though, I’m still very much smitten with webOS and especially its development model (sans the PDK, which I personally don’t have too much interest in at the moment).  Palm still has the very best multitasking implementation out there.  Synergy still kicks the crap out of any alternatives on other devices.  As I said earlier, notifications are still unmatched.

I guess at the end of the day it comes down to this to me: I’m not switching, at least not right now.  I won’t get an EVO because I like webOS more than Android, and I like it enough more to overcome the EVO’s superior hardware.  I won’t get an iPhone because I won’t go with AT&T… but if Sprint offered it, I’d have a tough decision to make.

The takeaway here for Palm is this: I’m still a happy customer, but there really had better be a killer hardware refresh coming in the next 3-4 months.  I think webOS is fine.  I know you’ll continue to improve it of course, but I think you’re in good shape there.  The hardware though… it’s starting to take away from your great OS work and is looking worse and worse practically by the week compared to your competitors.  If I don’t have a new device from you in my hands in a few months, and not just a Pre Plus, well, I may be looking with longing eyes to an EVO… and at some point I MIGHT even be willing to take the AT&T hit to get an iPhone (that’s a lot less likely… maybe 5-10% chance… but I won’t rule it out completely).  I can be patient, and I understand the whole acquisition thing (I’m going through an acquisition at the moment too actually, and it’s the third I’ve been through in the past 15 years, so I really do understand the effect it has!)… but the window is closing.

Don’t let me down Palm!  Let’s see some new hardware that compliments what I still think is the best mobile OS out there… let’s see the total package that can go head-to-head with the EVO and the iPhone 4.  And get’er done sooner than later!  I know there’s some things brewing, but don’t make me wait too much longer or I may not be able to resist the temptations out there…

I’m weak, I need a greek fix soon!!

Well, it’s just about 2am here and I just got back from a business trip a few hours ago… I SHOULD be going to sleep, but instead I’m doin’ the ole’ blog thing!

On the flight back I saw the news that Apple has opened litigation against HTC claiming infringement on 20 patents (as per Android Central’s reporting).  This of course led to almost an hours’ worth of debate between myself and my boss on the drive home.

In short, this seems to me like the absolute stupidest move Apple could ever make because it puts them in serious jeopardy.

And plus, it’s in no way, shape or form about HTC or what they may or may not be infringing!  No, this is a proxy war between two (and possibly three) very big dogs.  And it’s a war I don’t see any way Apple can win.

To be clear, I don’t for a second believe Apple cares one bit about HTC directly and what patent infringement might be going on with them.  This is about one thing and one thing only: the threat that Android and Google pose to Apple’s place in the smartphone market.

Android has been gaining ground steadily since its release, which is frightening to Apple’s “we must thoroughly dominate the market” mentality.  They won’t be content with 70% or 80% or even 90% of the market.  No, it’s all-or-nothing for King Jobs and his minions.  The Nexus One in particular is a scary proposition for Apple because aside from being a pretty damned good smartphone by all accounts, it comes unlocked, which means it has the potential to penetrate the market much more through flexibility and availability on multiple networks alone.

Google is all but synonymous with cloud-based living at this point.  How many people rely on Gmail and Google Calendar and even Google Docs these days?  More and more, people are becoming comfortable with living their digital lives in the cloud, and Google has for a while now been positioning itself as the gatekeeper to that world.  Apple’s Mobile Me is in direction competition with that.

Now, tie smartphones to data in the cloud, which is what all the big players are doing now, and you see where Apple looks over at Google and says “woah, hey, THAT’S the primary threat”.  Not hard to come to that conclusion at all.

So, how does Apple deal with it?  Well, how they SHOULD deal with it is simply to continue to make good products.  They should compete on merit because, regardless of how you feel about them, you have to admit that they CAN compete on merit!  That’s what most normal people and companies would do… but then, most people are not, and most companies are not led by, over-the-edge egomaniacal control freaks.  Apple is, so the rules aren’t the same.

Back to smartphones for a moment… who makes Googles’ Nexus One?  Well, not Google… no, it’s our friends over at HTC.

And that exclamation of “AH-HA!” you just heard is Steve Jobs and his room full of lawyers realizing a strategy.

Apple doesn’t want to attack Google directly, really in any way, because that’s one helluva dangerous opponent.  Apple has more cash reserves at the moment, but Google isn’t exactly hurting in that regard by any stretch, and their market capitalization is pretty similar at the moment.  Google is certain to have a real nice patent portfolio by now with which to fend off Apple if they had to.  There’s probably some intangible assets they could deploy in such a battle too.  Whoever ultimately won, Apple would be wounded in that confrontation pretty badly.

What they CAN do however is attack a lesser opponent, someone Google depends on.  HTC fits the bill nicely.  How much of a dent would it be in Googles’ plans if HTC went bye-bye?  A pretty big one I’d say.  Google wants the Nexus One to succeed because that’s the business model they want to pursue.  They ultimately do want to own the hardware and the OS, just like Apple, and the Nexus One is the first iteration of that.  Sure, they could find another partner.  Motorola perhaps.  But HTC has a strong track record in this space and they are in many ways the best option.  Besides, if Google went to Motorola instead I’d expect they’d be served with a legal filing from Apple a short time later too.

And on the surface, it’s not a bad strategy.  Unless HTC has some strong patents to fight back with… and they’d have to be strong enough to be able to get injunctive relief against Apple almost immediately otherwise Apple could just litigate them into the ground over a prolonged period of time… then Apple stands a real good chance of winning that battle.

Here’s where it can get dangerous for Apple though…

Google isn’t likely to jump into it directly just like Apple wouldn’t attack them directly.  This is very much the United States and the Soviet Union fighting each other via Vietnam… neither side wants the fallout that would result from a direct confrontation, but you can be sure Google has a HUGE stake in this game and WILL be involved.  One way they could do it would be to hand HTC a bunch of patents to use against Apple with the understanding that Google has a perpetual, free license to those patents.  They could even decide to buy HTC outright, assuming they had the money.  I don’t think there’s any real chance of that though… what would  be the upside to taking on the litigation themselves?

There’s a much larger 800-pound gorilla in the room though, and this is the part that Apple may not be counting on enough.

Microsoft.

I think there’s a real scenario where Google and Microsoft team up against Apple.  Why you ask?  Do you know who makes a lot of Windows Mobile devices?  Yep, HTC again.  So far I’ve seen no hints that Microsoft is looking to produce their own hardware with Windows Mobile 7, so it’s  not at all far-fetched that they’ll be working with HTC again as a premier partner.  They won’t want to see HTC be destroyed either.

They of course don’t want to see Apple have the smartphone market locked up so tight that Windows Mobile 7 has zero chance right form the start either, and since Android is really the only viable competitor right now (as much as I love Palm’s webOS, to be fair, Android has more momentum as a competitor to Apple right now) they can’t afford for Google to be knocked down TOO far either.  Android doing well, at least for a little while longer, in a bizarre sort of way is actually good for Microsoft.

Microsoft getting into the fray, whether publicly or privately (and I strongly suspect we might never know if they do get involved) is a real bad thing for Apple because Microsoft has a MASSIVE patent portfolio.  And they’ve got patents on some pretty basic stuff that, let’s face it, EVERYONE is infringing on (and yes, you can make that same argument for Apple, IBM and a lot of others).  Microsoft PLUS Google though… that’s a battle almost no one could win (IBM could maybe pull it off, but that’s probably about it).

To put it in simpler terms: Apple runs the risk here of hitting not one but TWO hornets’ nests and then standing there laughing at them.  If Microsoft and Google decide to play the old “the enemey of my enemey is my friend” game then Apple is in for a world of hurt.

Then of course you have HTC, stuck in the middle, possibly having their value reduced massively…which is another angle to this: Apple could in fact be looking to purchase HTC.  I admit I just don’t see any reason they’d want to, but assuming they do, filing patent infringement cases can be a good way to reduce the value of a takeover target enough to make purchasing it far more attractive.  I pretty much discount this scenario though as it doesn’t make much sense to me in this case.  It’s not at all an unheard of tactic in business to be sure, but in this case it just doesn’t fit in my mind.

No, I think it comes down to Apple wanting to hurt Google without going after them directly.  So, we get to witness a fascinating little proxy war.  Apples’ boardroom calculus (or, Steve Jobs’ insane inner voice, depending on what you believe) says this will work… and it could, if Google stays out of it.  I don’t see how they can though… I don’t think Google can afford to let HTC fail; one way or another they’ve GOT to get involved.  The question then becomes if Microsoft feels threatened enough to get into it too, which is a huge gamble for Apple to take because while they can almost certainly beat HTC, and MIGHT be able to beat Google alone, there’s NO WAY they come out on top against both Google and Microsoft (plus HTC don’t forget).

Patent wars NEVER end good for anyone.  They’re a shitty, almost desperate tactic that frankly only bullshit companies pull.  And they ESPECIALLY never end well for the initiating company if multiple other companies gang together in common cause against them.  Only time will tell of course, but Apple quite possibly just sealed their own fate here.  If they miscalculated, if Google and Microsoft both get involved even if only under the table, that’s real bad news for Apple no matter how you slice it.

And that leads to the question of who’s driving this whole thing in the first place?  Steve Jobs is all but an absolute, infallible dictator at this point, so it’s completely reasonable to think he fell in the shower one morning and awoke an hour later with this plan in his head.  That wouldn’t surprise me.  Jobs has arguably almost ruined Apple twice, and he’s about due for a third try I’d say!  Maybe this is it.  Then again, maybe the entire executive committee got together and dreamed this up.  You know what, maybe Apple LEGITIMATELY feels like they’re in the right and that’s it!  That could be the case.  I don’t for ONE MICROSECOND think that’s it at all, but to be fair, it could be.

To conclude… ask yourself what the benefit of suing HTC is for Apple.  What do they stand to gain?  Do they need any added income from patent licensing fees?  No.  Is HTC any sort of direct threat to them?  No.  Is this really a matter of principal where they truly feel their IP is being infringed and they want to fight for their rights in that regard?  Could be, but I just can’t believe that.

What POSSIBLE reason is there for them to go after HTC at all?

There’s only one in my mind: Google.  (And maybe Microsoft to a lesser extent)

Patent infringement cases like this are the equivalent of the nuclear option.  Apple has clearly just pressed the button.  Let’s see who lobs ICBMs back their way and who has less scorched earth when all is said and done.  No matter if you agree or disagree with me I think we can totally agree this is going to be very interesting to watch!

I was reading a post over at The Register today talking about Opera Mini on the iPhone.  One of the talkbacks made a comparison between Apple’s App Store and a real store.

They said (essentially) that if you own a brick-and-mortar store you can choose to sell any merchandise you want and reject any you don’t want to sell.  You can do this for any reason, no matter how stupid to everyone else, and it’s acceptable.  They went on to say, by extension, Apple should have the same right and that’s why it would be OK for them to reject Opera Mini (if they do… apparently Opera hasn’t submitted it yet, or at least hasn’t heard an answer yet).  That’s why it is OK for them to reject any application for any reason and nobody should complain about it.

The person is of course correct about a store in the physical world.  It is well within the rights of the owner to sell or not sell whatever they want.  Shouldn’t the same right extend to Apple and their store?  Surely the fact that it’s not a physical store doesn’t make a difference, does it?

No, it doesn’t make a difference, and on the surface it seems like a perfectly reasonable, correct comparison.

The problem is, it’s not.

I’m reminded of the words of Jean Luc Picard from one of my favorite Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes “The First Duty”… while talking to Wesley he says “You told the truth up to a point.  But a lie of omission is still a lie”.

Now, the talkbacker wasn’t being dishonest.  No, he simply made a mistake in his argument, but one based on the same principal: you can make something false appear true simply by omitting a troublesome detail from the argument.

What’s the flaw you ask?  Simply put, there are other stores in the physical world that you could go to in order to buy something the first store doesn’t offer.  That’s how it’s meant to work.  Walmart doesn’t have the DVD player you want so you head over to Target for it.  You may be annoyed at Walmart for not carrying it, but you can’t claim they did anything wrong by not carrying it.  That would clearly be a ridiculous argument.

In the case of Apple, there is no other store to choose from.  You buy from Apple’s store or you hack your device and run afoul of crappy legislation (I’m looking at you DMCA… and by the way, if we ever meet up at a party I’m gonna bitch-slap your punk ass!)  No other store means that Apple is an absolute gatekeeper to anyone wanting to sell merchandise (read: apps_.  No such gatekeeper exists in the real world.  Sure, you may not be able to find anyone who wants to sell your product in their store, but you have many options to try, not just one with an absolute final say in all matters.

To go further, I’ll say what some won’t: Apple does have a monopoly (which in and of itself is not a legal or even moral problem) and they are in fact abusing it (which very much is both a legal and moral problem).  In my opinion they should be brought up on antitrust charges.  There’s certainly no shortage of people that would testify about abuses they have experienced.

What about the competition?  Well, Palm lets you install apps from outside their store, officially now in fact (and even before it was official they were at worst agnostic).  Microsoft of all companies, in light of their legally-proven monopoly abuses of the past, has always allowed this with Windows Mobile and unless they intend to change that now with their new app store, will continue to do so.  I’m frankly not sure where Android or Blackberry stand on things.

I do know that only Apple has seemed to be abusive about it if you go by nothing else but public outcry… well, maybe “public” isn’t the right word there… developer outcry perhaps.  Certainly the public doesn’t seem to mind very much, they are quite happy with their iPhones and the app store.

And therein lies the rub, as they say.  I can sit here and, as I see it, be right about all of this, but at the same time still be wrong!  If the public at large doesn’t have an issue with it, does it matter if it’s wrong legally?  After all, things are only illegal or wrong because society at large has deemed them so, and as public opinion changes so too do laws (we’re likely to see marijuana legalized in our lifetime for example).  Even taking the legal aspect out of the debate, iPhone owners are, by and large, very happy customers.  They don’t care if Apple rejects some apps for dubious reasons.  If they did, the sales numbers wouldn’t be what they are both in terms of phones and apps.

But in any case, I don’t think the comparison to real-world stores is valid.  Until there is another store someone can buy an iPhone app from, or Apple decides to allow “sideband” installs without jailbreaking… neither of which is likely to happen before marijuana is legalized!… it’s just not a valid comparison in my opinion, and because of it, to me, Apple is illegally abusing a monopoly position and should be prosecuted for it.

I’m not a lawyer of course, but that’s the way I see it.

(and yes, I’m pretty sure this means you won’t see me writing a book on iPhone programming any time soon!!)

CES was a good show for Palm, no question.  They “brought the thunder”, “made it rain” or whatever the hell it is the cool kids are saying these days.  In fact, I’d go so far as to say it was a great show for them.  They delivered on everything most of us thought they would based on various rumors and hints leading up to the show, and yet still managed to give us a surprise or two.

What did we get?  Let’s run down at least some of it:

• The PDK (Plugin Development Kit).  For code monkeys like me, this is the biggest announcement.  It allows us to write native applications in C/C++ that, from what I think I’ve understood through reading, wind up running essentially as browser plug-ins to the Webkit engine that provides the webOS UI (hence the PDK name).  No question this is cool and opens up a whole new world of applications.  In fact, one of the surprises Palm pulled off was a bunch of titles released into the App Catalog concurrent with the announcement that are pretty awesome.  I’ve downloaded a couple myself already and they are clearly head and shoulders above anything we’ve seen on a webOS device before.  However, all is not right with the world here, but I’m going to come back to this later because it’ll wind up being the main thrust of this post I suspect.

• The Pre and Pixi Plus and Verizon availability.  I used to be a Verizon customer but I’ve been a very happy Sprint customer for a number of years, long before the Pre.  To be frank, I could care less about Verizon and Palm being on their network, except for one key point: it opens up a whole new base of users to sell apps to.  In this regard alone this is a huge bit of news.  We of course knew this was coming for some time, although the devices themselves were kept pretty quiet until the past few days.  I am pretty pissed that I can’t get a Pre Plus as a Sprint customer though and my hope is Palm and Sprint make it available in the not too distant future.  The problem however is if its six months out say, which doesn’t seem like a crazy guess, then I’d bet we’re beginning to talk about a Pre v2 then (or v3, depending on who you ask) and maybe it’s better to just skip the Pre Plus.  The point of course is I want the damned thing NOW, so boo-hiss to Palm on this one.  I’m sure it makes sense from a business perspective… I’d guess Verizon made them being the exclusive provider of the Plus devices part of the deal, and Palm realizes that it’s more important to get webOS-based devices into the hands of more users and that us Sprint customers who get pissed are just a bit of collateral damage.  Makes sense for them.  Sucks for us though.

• The news about webOS 1.4 was where I think there were some surprises.  Certainly I didn’t really anticipate video (although I was hoping).  It sounds like a real nice upgrade all-around and kudos to Palm for continuing their free upgrades at a rapid clip.  Now, where the hell is voice recording guys?  I’m hoping it gets slipped into 1.4, or is there already and they just didn’t mention it.  This is one thing I REALLY miss from my Windows Mobile days and it’s surprising that a modern smartphone doesn’t have it.  Palm, if you’re listening, I can’t imagine for a second this is a difficult or time-consuming thing to implement… slip it into 1.4 and make at least me a very happy person!  Please!  I’ll name my next child after you… Palm Zammetti has a nice ring to it : )

• Flash is coming soon.  This is awesome news and will of course greatly expand the webOS application landscape.  I’ll be very happy to be able to show people Happy Tree Friends, Weebl and Bob and The Lonely Astronaut on-the-go again!  Here’s the one key question though: how is it implemented?  Is it the case that we can visit a web page and have Flash content work?  That’s a given.  However, will I be able to “install” a Flash app and launch it directly from the launcher?  In other words, will I be able to run a Flash application in such a way that it looks no different than any other webOS application?  That’s my hope.  Knowing the architecture of webOS I frankly EXPECT it to work that way.  Now, how “installation” works, I’m not so sure, but at the end of the day since webOS is essentially a browser for all intents and purposes, and Flash is a browser plug-in, I certainly think it SHOULD work this way and if it doesn’t then I’d say Palm has missed an opportunity.  Maybe it’s not up to them, maybe it’s 100% on Adobe, but I know if I was Palm I’d exert as much influence as possible to ensure this was the case.  At this point, if I had to bet, I’d bet it does work this way because it seems too obvious… but we’ll see.

I may have missed one or two things, but I think those are the really major items.

Ok, so now I want to talk about two things that I see as negatives about the whole native app thing that I haven’t seen mention of elsewhere.  First, stability.

Yesterday I was playing Asphalt5, which by the way is an awesome game!  However, it crashed on me twice in a ten minute period.  This was a hard crash too: I had to literally pull the battery to get any sort of reaction.

This is very much the risk you run with native applications.  We can talk all we want about the stability of Linux, how things are compartmentalized and all that jazz, but at the end of the day, its C, its pointers, and that’s a dangerous combination in the hands of lesser developers (hell, even good ones!).  It would be easy to say maybe we’re just looking at one poorly-coded game in my case, and maybe I’m making an unfair generalization from it.  The problem is that it’s a generalization that’s always been true on every platform out there!  The closer you get to bare metal, the more dangerous your code becomes, regardless of what safety the OS provides.  So, we may see some stability issues from this native capability, and unfortunately that’s going to wind up reflecting badly on Palm.  Remember, most users aren’t developers… they don’t know from C, or web versus native development, they just know that their Pre crashed hard playing The Sims, and they’ll blame Palm (and the company who created the game of course, in whatever ratio they deem correct).

I’ll be honest though: the sooner I see a Commodore 64 emulator ported over the sooner I’ll be 100% in love with the native capability : )

However, there’s a much more subtle negative… or, to put it more correctly, POSSIBLE negative (it very much depends on your point of view, as Obi Wan once said!).

So here we have Palm all along telling us the web application development model is the future.  They’ve built their whole operating system around that concept and in fact have I think effectively bet the future of their company on it because if webOS turns out to be a failure it could ruin them.  From the very start they’ve been telling us that HTML+CSS+JavaScript is all you need to create robust, top-notch applications for webOS, and I know that I for one believed it, in fact did before Palm said anything, and I still very much believe this to be the case.

So, do we now take the native apps as a tacit admission that the web development model doesn’t quite cut it?

I know what you’re going to say: only for a certain class of applications that might be true.  3D games still are not generally possible with web technologies (a few tech demos and even one or two relatively simple games that do exist being exceptions).  And to a large extent I agree with you… what web developers can do increases seemingly every day as the technologies and standards develop, but today, right this minute, there are clear limitations  Why should Palm say that only the web development model is right then for everything?  Why shouldn’t they say that maybe for certain types of applications there needs to be a different approach?

I’m ok with that in general I suppose.  I’m ok with saying “if you’re going to write this sort of application, the standard SDK is fine, and if you’re going to write this other sort of application than maybe you should be using the PDK”.  That makes sense to a large extent.

Where I see it as a negative though is from a philosophical perspective.  Palm is really the first company that has delivered in a mainstream way what many of us have been talking about for a few years: a web technology-based operating system.  To now have to admit it may not be all it’s cracked up to be (if you agree with interpreting it that way) is depressing to those of us that have bought into that model completely.

I was in a sense looking to Palm to push the boundaries on this web development model to new heights because I think they’ve positioned themselves better than any other company to do so.  And I believe they still will do just that, but I think now providing this native capability might serve to muddle the picture somewhat.

To be sure, I think there’s SO much more potential in the web development model, even for games, than what we’re seeing now.  There are a few games in the App Catalog today that actually begin to show what’s possible, and I really wanted to see Palm develop the tools for that model more.  And in fact, I’m 100% sure they are anyway!  If you read the developer site carefully, where they talk about the PDK, they also state that they are working on bringing JavaScript APIs to us developers that give us access to that sort of native power form the web technologies perspective.  Awesome!  That’s what I really want to see!  In fact, I will state for the record that I wish THAT was the primary announcement at CES… as cool as the native apps are, as neat as I think the PDK will be, I would much rather have heard how there were some new JavaScript APIs that gave us more robust hardware access.

I would have preferred that because, philosophically, it’s more inline with what Palm has been preaching all along: the web model.  It’s almost like there’s a dual message now, and from one point of view it’s good, but from another it’s bad.  If the web model was really up to task today we wouldn’t need the PDK.  The fact that it exists in a sense shows that it’s not, and I would have preferred Palm push the boundaries in that area more.

Still, philosophy is debatable, as are these points of view.  Palm did a great job at CES and I for one am VERY excited by what they announced.  I think they made the right moves, all things considered… so long as stability doesn’t prove to be a huge problem with the native apps (only time will tell) and as long as they continue to push the envelope on what the web development model can do.

On the later point, I think they will, but here’s my concern: how easy would it be for Palm to say “ok, we can relax a little now because when people want to code a Twitter client they can use the web model, and when they want to code Halo they can use the native model”.  I think that would be the wrong answer.  The RIGHT answer, to me, is “we’re going to work to make the web model so powerful that you never again need the native model, but FOR NOW, this is the temporary solution we offer”.  That’s cool with me… but over time I should need that PDK less and less, if Palm is doing things right!  If it doesn’t go that way then as far as I can tell they will have admitted the web development model was a mistake.

There’s one other possible third negative that I’m not even sure I agree with, even though I’ve thrown it out there as a possibility in discussions already, and that’s that this native capability might be a bad thing for small-time developers (like me!).  With the EA’s and GameLoft’s of the world in the mix now porting, who can spend so much more on development and, more importantly, ADVERTISING, than I ever could, it’s going to be harder for one and two-man type shops to make a buck.  I think those large development houses might effectively eat our lunch.

Now, some have responded to this by saying that it’s a shame not everyone can be successful but that’s the way the free market works, and I agree.  The difference however is that small-time developers really can’t compete against those bigger companies in most regards.  Like I said, advertising if nothing else.  Oh, to be sure, there WILL be successful small-timers…when it comes to games, a good, fun concept trumps the largest development and advertising budget you can name.  Word of mouth is an extremely powerful thing.

But, if that’s ALL you’ve got going for you, it’s a HUGE gamble to even develop a game.

I’m not sure how this is going to play out… some claim that it hasn’t had a negative impact on the Apple app store,   However, I’ve looked at a number of reports about the top-selling games of 2009 for the iPhone, and guess what?  Most of the top-selling games come from two sources: EA and GameLoft.  Hmm, I just might be on to something here, unfortunately.  Believe me, as someone who develops games and has a few projects gearing up that I hope to make some money off of on webOS, I certainly HOPE I’m wrong and I even WANT to be wrong!

One other thing I want to touch on, and that’s Ares.  I was going to write a rather lengthy blog post about that a week or so ago, but I decided not to because I wanted to think about it a bit more.

Here’s my basic opinion… technologically, it’s cool as hell.  The developers working on it deserve all the credit in the world, they are doing fantastic work.  And, it’s going to be useful for some people.  In fact, just being able to do some of the layout and have the basic skeleton code generated, that would be worth it to ME, someone who otherwise wouldn’t need it.

If I was running the show at Palm, would I have built Ares?  Probably not and here’s why: I don’t really think it’s necessary.  The barrier to entry with webOS is already so low that I don’t think Ares buys you much there.  As far as source control and emulation and all that stuff?  Any developer worth their salt has those bases covered anyway.
Who is Ares really for?  I don’t think it’s really for someone like me who has a strong web development background already.  The SDK and Eclipse plug-in gives me all I really need.  No, I think it’s for people that aren’t as accomplished a developer.  If I was running the show, I think I would have had a different set of priorities, a different resource utilization map (I also got some inside information on this aspect of it, which I won’t divulge because it was a private conversation… suffice it to say some reasonable arguments were made in rebuttal to my thoughts here… one thing I will say is that Palm certainly seems to have a vision and isn’t just doing things for the sake of doing things… whether a given decision turns out to be right or wrong, good or bad, having a vision is a key to success).

And here’s where that could be a problem: Palm has said for a while that they want quality over quantity in the App Catalog.  We’ve already seen hints that they’ve strayed from that a bit… might Ares push that goal further away?  If less talented developers can easily develop for webOS, will that result in a ton more “craplets” out there?  Maybe.

My suspicion about Ares is that at some point down the road we’re going to look at it and say “wow, Ares was a cool product, a neat idea, but there wasn’t much point to the exercise”.  Now, I want to make sure I say here that I could very well be wrong!  I spoke to someone at Palm about this and he mentioned that Ares is a forward-looking product, they see it as something that will be appreciated more down the road.  I think that’s a fair thought, and it might even prove to be correct… it may at some point down the road be recognized as a stroke of genius.  As we sit here today looking at it though, I personally doubt it.

Still, like I said, Ares is very impressive from a technology standpoint and I very much want to commend the team working on it.  Even if it winds up being a bust in terms of real-world usage I do think it’s pushing boundaries and showing us what a new model of developer tooling might look like.  In and of itself, that’s very much worth something.

One last point before I go… I’m going to deduct a few merit points from Palm for one thing: STILL NO **USABLE** FREAKING AUDIO API FOR JAVASCRIPT APPLICATIONS?!? I’m getting sick of silent games, or games using the same set of system sounds that everyone else uses.  Please, for the love of all that is good in the world, audio API yesterday please!