I told myself that I wasn’t going to comment on the latest Steve-job that humanity as a whole is giving itself. Sadly, I was unable to resist. Hence, my latest post on Falkvinge on Infopolicy.

I, like every single freaking person on the planet, have an about Steve Jobs, and the things he has done in his life. I’m not going to share it with you right now, because it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all.

When most people blabber about Steve Jobs, they’re rarely flapping their lips about him, personally. After all, most people in the world don’t actually know Steve Jobs, nor have they ever even met him in passing. The things about which most people yammer are the effects and consequences of Apple, Inc.’s product releases and business practices.
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It’s those trends and issues that matter. But the fact that Apple, specifically, was the company to catalyze all of them doesn’t. And it especially doesn’t matter that His Holiness Dalai Lama Steve Motherfucking Jobs happened to be the CEO and founder of the company that did all of these things.

Continue reading at Falkvinge on Infopolicy

Steve Jobs is a majestic beast, and I would like to shoot him with a blunderbuss.

He is a visionary and a genius, a rebel who lets nothing and no one stand in the way of his dream of the future. If only his vision of the future were less cynical.

There are counteless articles discussing fears that the iPad might mean the beginning of the end for the Mac. The near-universal “no” argument is that professionals will always need the power that Macs afford, versus iPads, which are primarily “content consumption devices.”

Exactly. Steve Jobs recently said that, “PCs [i.e. Macs] are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them.”. Obviously, as anyone in the US knows, the amount of people who own trucks is much higher than the amount of people who actually need them, but if our culture were sane, one could probably approximate that 1% of people would own trucks. This sounds an awful lot like the 1% rule: the assumption that only 1% of people actually create anything.

This is why it would make no sense for Apple (and by “Apple” I mean Steve Jobs, because seriously, who else at that company makes any actual decisions?) to kill the Mac. The 1% will buy Macs, and create “content” to be “consumed” by the 99% with iPads and iPhones, as envisioned by Jobs. Obviously, with the introduction of iOS apps such as iMovie, there will be some ability for those without a “creation device” to do something creative. But the limitations of such apps, and, for that matter, touchscreen interfaces themselves, mean that only in a small variety of cases will one be able to produce anything of professional quality on an iDevice. If you want a degree of control that’s necessary for professional quality, you’ll need a general purpose computer, such as a Mac.

Perhaps, to some degree, it’s always been this way. Creating something to show on a television has to be done with all sorts of professional equipment. The fact that everyone, for so many years, has owned a device which could be used for endless creativity has been by accident. Only 1% of people have leveraged the creative capabilities of their computers. Steve Jobs simply aims to remove the complexity of computers for those who don’t wish to create anything.

So, why is this cynical? Is it because Steve Jobs desires monopolistic control over the lives of creators and consumers alike? Is it because Steve Jobs believes he can tell people what they want, and that they just have to lie down and accept it? No, it is because Steve Jobs is building creative professionals an ivory tower. He chooses to reinforce the idea that only 1% of people create anything, instead of asking, “why?”

The answer, of course, is that creating things is really, really difficult. Not actually being creative, though. Anyone can come up with a great idea. But the execution of these great ideas is, to 99% of people, extraordinarily difficult.

There’s a different Steve who is asking that question, “why?”. Stephen Wolfram.

Wolfram is the creator of Wolfram|Alpha, a sort of plain-English calculator which can take, for example, the phrase “wind speed of Hurricane Katrina times stock price of Cisco” and actually give you a result. It’s interesting if not mind-blowing in its current form, but it’s only the beginning of Wolfram’s plans for the future. In an oddly downplayed remark near the 11:45 mark of a TED Conference talk, Wolfram describes how Wolfram|Alpha integrates with Mathematica, a complex computational programming language he created. Already, you can type “spiky” into Mathematica, and it will use Wolfram|Alpha to understand which complex shape you’re talking about.

But then, Wolfram speculates what might happen once this plain English technology gets even better: “It really gives one the chance to democratize programming. I mean, anyone will be able to just sort of say what they want in plain language, then…Wolfram|Alpha will be able to figure out what precise pieces of code can do what they’re asking for.”

That’s amazing in and of itself. Now replace “programming” with “computer-generated animation.”

Obviously, it’s going to be an extremely long time before I can give my artificial intelligence assistant a sci-fi movie script and have it render the whole thing in Avatar-level detail before my eyes. But at least Stephen Wolfram is working to bring us closer to a world like that. Steve Jobs, on the other hand, isn’t even trying to lower the barriers to creativity. He is taking the barrier between “amateur” and “professional” and electrifying it with 40,000 volts.

Lately I’ve noticed that some developers are avoiding building apps and, instead, are building custom web pages that are designed specifically for the iPhone. [...] Yesterday another one came along from Nextstop, which is a cool new app for sharing cool things to do near you (great for travelers to check out) and they, too, decided on HTML5 instead of doing an iPhone app.

Some reasons Nextstop likes HTML5:

1. Rapid iteration. If they code a new feature tonight, you get it tonight. No waiting three weeks for you to get their latest.
2. It prepares their systems for building a native app. Why? Because apps can include a Safari browser instance inside, so all of this work is reusable, even if they do a native app.
3. It’s easier to build and debug because you don’t need to do a lot of specialized coding to make the native app work properly.
4. It fits into the greater web easier for users. In an iPhone app it can be jarring to take users out to a web browser, but if they already are in the browser they are used to going to other pages and back again using Safari’s navigation.

That sounds like a really great idea, doesn’t it. You know who else thought so? Steve Jobs:

WWDC 2007, SAN FRANCISCO—June 11, 2007—Apple® today announced that its revolutionary iPhone™ will run applications created with Web 2.0 Internet standards when it begins shipping on June 29. Developers can create Web 2.0 applications which look and behave just like the applications built into iPhone, and which can seamlessly access iPhone’s services, including making a phone call, sending an email and displaying a location in Google Maps.

But then the developers were all like, “Nooooooooo!” and Apple was all like, “Fiiiiine!” in October 2007 and announced a way to build native apps. But submitting an app to the App Store and going through the approval process is annoying as hell for developers, so they’re getting around that by doing what Apple wanted them to do anyway in the first place.

That Steve Jobs sure is a crafty one.

Unfortunately, all mention of Dan Lyons, who played Steve Jobs on the Interwebs, disappears completely after the first paragraph of the article. And it’s only alluded to there at all after an “UPDATE”.

The entire text of the article talks about how Jim Goldman is a bad reporter and didn’t tell everyone about something or other regarding Steve Jobs and how he’s maybe dying which you should all STFU about anyway because dying SUCKS so leave him alone whether he is or not. But Fake Steve? No, you have to watch the embedded videos to know what the hell they’re talking about in that aspect.

Now, it’s not too unreasonable to ask someone to watch a video to understand what you’re talking about in a post. It’s rather unreasonable to require someone to watch a video to understand what you’re talking about in a post and NOT ASK THAT IT HAPPEN.

Nowhere in the text of the article is there a reference to “the included video shows Fake Steve Jobs saying blah blah blah.” This is not very useful to people who would like to actually read your article as opposed to mindlessly clicking on a video which will have to load and be watched in the same page without switching to their IM window in the middle or whatever when they don’t even know if it’s worth watching based on the subject matter.

Also it’s extremely confusing for iPhone users. Gizmodo loves the iPhone; they give it its own gigantic section of App Love. So why are they writing an article which relies on video embedded with the Flash that the iPhone still doesn’t have?

Bad Gizmodo.