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Rest in piece little buddy.

[From xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe]

Idiotic. Copy paste wasn’t missing because of an ideological reason. It was missing because it wasn’t ready. Same with an SDK and an App-Store. Multitasking presents a usability challenge that I wager they are nearly set in addressing. I bet the camera is supply chain related (same with the iPod Touch). WIth Apple products, what is MISSING is the interesting part, as it usually leads to exposure to ideologies, challenges or works in progress.

[From What We Learned About Apple Yesterday]

My thoughts on the iPad are similar to my thoughts on the iPhone upon its first release: its about the possibilities of the hardware, not the software itself. It’s about the modality of the device rather than the specifics of what we think others will use it for.

The iPhone on its first ever release, with 1.0 software had barely one screen of applications. It had no Exchange support, no push e-mail, no copy/paste, very little in the way of batch operations. It was a template for what the device could be, applied to hardware that held its promise.

The iPad is the same thing. From what we’ve seen, in terms of the mode of its representation, it fits exactly what we saw from the iPhone: an empty screen of apps coupled to hardware which at once seems obvious and new.*

All the criticism points to the “do I need this.” That isn’t the right question to ask. The right question to as is “what can this do?”

Software wise, iPhone OS 3.2 has the same limitations as 3.1.2, just with more screen. TO focus on that is missing the point completely. We all know, without a doubt that multitasking is coming, as is a higher pixel density on the basic iPhone. We know that a lot of what is valued from Android and other platforms will make its way to the iPhone and iPad. We know this for the same reason we all knew that when iPhone OS 1.0 was released, an app-store was coming, as well as copy/paste.

Why isn’t it here now? Because its not perfect. The same reason the iPad hasn’t come until now. The same reason that the iPhone copy/paste didn’t come for a bit.

Now, the iPad. The fact that people are spending so much virtual ink about “do we need this, do people need this?” misses the point. People didn’t need a better phone. A phone was a phone. And yet, people need and covet their iPhone. The iPhone has transcended what people judged it on: a PDA and a phone. It has become a general purpose device more in line with the usage of netbooks than phones. The iPad likewise will transcend what people are judging it by.

My parents, wife and others all expressed their intrinsic “want” for the device. They want it because (for my mom), it’ll be great for reading and browsing the web without overhead of a laptop when on a plane or at home. For my dad, its a simple way to do what he does most with a computer. For me, it’ll be a great home automation device, Slingplayer, lights controller, Sonos controller, Facebook/Email device for my wife and e-book reader.

It’s telling when the results of a product release is more confusion than jubilation. Confusion leads to innovation as people try to wrestle with a concept. The iPad just opened up twice as many pixels and many times the amount of processor power to the promise and concept of innovation.

I can’t wait to get started working on it.

* The lack of a camera on this device and the iPod Touch are befuddling though.

I wonder if they are also seeing concurrent apps running from the same device, and that’s how they know? I imagine the Tablet will be able to run multiple apps in a grid of some sort, given the screen size.

[From Apple Tablet: The Second Stage Media Booster Rocket ]

A pretty big deal I think, especially considering the move from entertainment companies from “impression” based metrics to revenue.

[From Boxee Blog » Coming soon: Boxee Payments]

One feature I’m looking forward to in iPhone 4.0 OS is the potential inclusion of background tasks and daemons. The Android OS has this in a (relatively) poor implementation, and through jailbreaking I’ve been experimenting on it with my 3GS.

The potential downside to multitasking is errant processes drawing down the battery. Those of us with laptops are familiar with the sinking sensation when we lookup in the title bar and see our batteries depleting faster than normal, only to fire up Activity Monitor and find it was (usually) Flash causing this, or something similar. Lately it’s been Growl.

My suggestion for multitasking on the iPhone is for Apple to allow “slots” that the user can assign applications to. Applications would have two stats: daemonized and running, which would let the programmer do two different normal thread run cycles. Foreground and background basically.

As for presentation of running state, Apple is going to have to create real estate that is the forward facing UI for background tasks. The top bar on the screen could work, given more PPI real estate. The lock screen is an obvious choice, but I also think Apple is going to seriously have to alter how the Springboard works to accommodate a richer device experience that isn’t so isolated into “app to app” modalities.

One of the shortcomings to iPhone OS and one of the nice things about Android is that Android treats its OS as a hierarchy, from the base level OS (represented by widgets, notification, home screen, etc) down to the application level. iPhone is more decentered. Springboard is relatively inert, while the applications have more root functionality. The only hierarchical system that the OS has is push notifications, which in its current form isn’t highly optimized.

OSX is a hierarchical OS with menu bar, dock, desktop and dashboard as its top level modalities. It’ll be interesting to see how this translates to the iPhone OS.

This is late.

I have a valid reason for this however.

2009 and the decade that was leave me sort of exhausted. It’s not a matter of just life changes (there were a ton), direction changes (again) or personal growth and development. It’s that as the decade progressed, living – the very act of getting up in the morning – started to become a process almost algorithmic in scope.

A decade in which we became post-human. We live outside of ourselves as much as we live within. The filters and the boundaries that used to be recognized as the “private life” permeated with every new innovation in connectivity, portability, transparency, “social” and Social to the point that we’re very, very close to eliminating the physical and haptics from the interface, going straight to the cybernetic organism.

As of now we’re textual cyborgs, or more appropriately given the cross-modality of expression: digital representational cyborgs: entities existing by and through the representation of digital data.

At any rate: the maintenance of self as such is tiring.

Tiring and without end. The downtimes we used to be accustom to are making way to in-flight wifi, smart dashboards in the car, push notifications, twitter and SMS. Post-humanism, the transference of self into more forms than the pure physical, is not science fiction. It’s fact. And to some its a predicate toward living.

That includes for me.

Moments not online are moments I’m free from myself more than with myself. That is disturbing. That means that when I’m running for 10 miles or so, and completely off grid, I’m without identity. There is something poetic about that, or disturbing. Choose.

This brings me to the decade.

I started the decade searching for a way to bring myself into two planes of existence simultaneously. 2000 was the year of Ricochet, promising universal wireless broadband via a bulky adapter and lamp-post based transmitters. Those transmitters are still all around, Ricochet is not.

Ricochet was part of my plan to allow myself to bifurcate into two parallel identities. one a person, one an IP address.

I did not get that through wireless transvergence, but I did end up maintaining that bifurcation through a site and identity I’ve maintained for almost twenty years now. The last decade was one in which the concept of “me” as an online identity almost, and nearly superseded the identity of me as me.

I spent ten years working away from that.

In the last ten years I did a lot. I graduated college. Lost my long held high school job. Lost my mind a bit in the middle there. Got into grad school, met Amy, got married, got my job at WBR, befriended my favorite band, had a kid and now I’m again on the cusp of some major changes.

The ten years that have passed have realized things I previously dreamed about in the world. We saw the best of what human innovation can offer to connect us to concepts of ourselves far exceeding physical limitations, and at the same time realized that so much growth out of ourselves doesn’t necessarily mean the best of humanity will always be represented.

For me, I’ve had the privilege of working with great tools, technology and people to explore the aspects of our post-human condition to various extents, both artistic and practical.

The current state we’re at has what I took for granted as a normal reality. We are pervasively connected with ubiquitous computers, something that was relegated to clunky devices in academia when I graduated college. But what is that doing to us? What is the fact that I’m writing this at 38000 feet over the midwest doing to me?

We are at the fulcrum of a decade poised upon either an ascension to something amazing or a descending into something slightly mortifying. I hope the power of the tools we wield are used in a way to construct a better reality for ourselves. I hope that we don’t take the elevation of dimensions of existence beyond mere physical as a way to remove accountability and personal motivation from our every day living.

More than anything, I hope that the world I am raising my son in retains the sense of aesthetic beauty which ultimately shapes memory and history more than pixel laden design and curvy aluminum.

I hope that in ten years, when my son is 11, he can still wake up and go outside to a sun rise, and leave the phone behind. Even if only once in a while.