iPhone 4 wasn’t much of a surprise to anyone paying attention. I think this FaceTime mobile videochat is the biggest news (of course his “one more thing”) — it has vast implications for mobile communications of all sorts (and the notion of telepresence, in general). Will consumers fall for FaceTime? That’s the big if. If so, then we are probably officially “in the future.” If anyone could deliver ubiquitous videochat, it would have to be Apple.

The Bad News

Apple still doesn’t have a cloud service (eg., Google Docs) — that’s really holding them back. I was disappointed that rumors of a new cloud product didn’t emerge. This would allow all your files and media files to be synced over wireless and we can ditch that USB cable leash. The iPad really stinks without this capability. To add insult to injury, AT&T’s data-plan repricing will keep us tethered to WiFi and our PCs for some time to come. Let your iPhone share its 3G connection to your iPad? Fuhgettaboutit.

The Good News

I would agree that Apple’s competition simply cannot keep up with this rapid pace of development. Apple has managed to compress the development cycle down to a year and still manage to release consistently significant products that push the whole industry to innovate, and hopefully we all benefit. The cost of the software continues to go down, the revenues for developers go up, and the quality of the experience gets better and better.

The Prediction

No Verizon (and/or Sprint) iPhone until mid-2011, earliest.

Yesterday, Pope Steven P. Jobs convened his disciples to unveil the latest creation of his orthodoxy. In surveying the mainstream, industry and social media response, we have observed the following archetypal reactions to the announcement as negative. We offer these playful animal names to stretch the archetype metaphor as far as it can go:

1. The Sheep: May have fallen prey to the lead-up media hype
2. The Elephant: Strong gut instinct to forcefully remain skeptical of new devices and models, especially those from Cupertino
3. The Crow: Fixates on feature lists and spills vitriol when an expected bullet point cannot be printed on the product’s marketing materials
4. The Wolf: Rejects the App Store model as the “mall-ification” of the open, free, pastoral internet currently enjoyed
5. The Beaver: Invested heavily in mastering Flash development and resents how Apple and Adobe relations ends up hanging them out to dry

Therefore, we conclude that the iPad could only deliver rapture to devotees.

The iPad tablet computer appears to simply extend the form factor of the iPhone/iPod touch devices to a larger screen dimension. But to say that the iPad is only an overpriced web browser, or underpowered touch laptop is to miss the point by approximately one mile.

Editor’s Note: we are aware of how our Twitter embeds have failed due to dependency on a third-party. That’ll teach us to not simple screengrab the tweets and link to Twitter as a static image

A Small Herd of Elephants:

A designer/developer retorts:

Hypothesis

The simple enlargement of the oleophobic multi-touch screen enables an incremental but significant expansion of the Touch OS to afford a greater set of user interaction complexities and sensitivities to the capacities of the human body. Indeed, the device fashions itself more to the user than anything we have yet been able to purchase. Rather than machining the user into the requirements of the computer, the iPad’s beauty is how it instinctively and delightfully adapts to human factors.

These demonstrations of Apple’s iWork productivity suite exemplify how the GUI and basic modalities of the 20th century operating system have evolved towards a significantly more tangible, less mediated, indeed “intimate” experience. Direct manipulation of objects emerges in favor of severely mediated interactions guided by your disembodied hand, symbolized by the arrow pointer. We remember how Douglas Englebart’s mouse and requisite virtual re-mapping of gesture into cartesian space is an archaic form.

We are not embarrassed about nor pay much concern to the insistent persistence of the QWERTY keyboard, an interface devised originally to slow down the typist, as the mechanism of early typewriters would jam easily otherwise.

Rather, the iPad envisions a computing experience much closer to Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad, where the models of elegant and direct manipulation have yet to be reborn in a contemporary system.

Revelation

The iPad is not cause to celebrate the device itself, but rather to announce the retirement of the 20th century GUI and OS. It has served us well for a few decades and profoundly transformed humanity. Instead, being reminded that Steve Jobs appropriated the innovations of window, menu and icon by Xerox PARC into the Macintosh OS, we revisit Mark Weiser’s (CTO of PARC) vision of the computer for the 21st century. His group’s vocabulary of tabs, pads and boards forms an invisibly cohesive infrastructure of ubiquitous computing as an attempt to deliberately abandon the monolithic totalitarianism of the personal computer.

For certain, Apple leads the industry in being able to amass mighty fortunes ($50 billion this year) to implement our lives with tabs (iPhones, iPods) and now pads (iPad). Of course, there are many more incremental steps to take on the path of computing ubiquity. It did not occur with the singular release of a product and it won’t ever happen at once. But each gradual step is a blip on the continuum, forming a kind of punctuated equilibrium that disrupts conventions sufficiently to shed the cruft and detritus of the regularizing activities of computer industry — feature driven bloatware, piling atop legacy code, reinforcing conservative modalities and affordances that some people “cling to like guns and religion.”¹

The tech industry will be in paroxysms of future shock for some time to come. Many will cling to their January-26th notions of what it takes to get “real work” done; cling to the idea that the computer-based part of it is the “real work”.

It’s not. The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.

The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party.

via Fraser Speirs

There is an emancipatory promise in the new tablet computing model if it succeeds at eliminating labor involved with using and maintaining a PC. It’s a new kind of casual computing. A revered Mac developer sums it up:

For as frustrated as I was with the restrictions, those exact same restrictions made the New World device a high-performance, high-reliability, absolute workhorse of a machine that got out of my way and just let me get things accomplished.

The bet is roughly that the future of computing:

• has a UI model based on direct manipulation of data objects
• completely hides the filesystem from the user
• favors ease of use and reduction of complexity over absolute flexibility
• favors benefit to the end-user rather than the developer or other vendors
• lives atop built-to-specific-purpose native applications and universally available web apps

The iPad as a particular device is not necessarily the future of computing. But as an ideology, I think it just might be.

via Steven Frank

Antithesis

Critics correctly point out that the iPad represents a future that biases media consumption over production while enforcing a strict corporate governance over software and hardware possibilities.

A Wolf in Sheep’s clothing:

Some go as a far as dismissing it as “crap futurism” framing the iPad as the anti-computer, more akin to the strip-mall-ification of personal computing. They cannot reconcile the hegemonic force of Apple Inc. as a primary capitalist enterprise bringing mass scale innovations to market.

Furthermore, we could equate the iPad with the re-enabling of an addiction to the corporate media establishment, at the expense of burgeoning peer-production by the free and open source geek-onomy.

Other voices denounce it as “unnovation” for living room leisure and superficial amusements to merely fill e-waste landfills without humanitarian credentials.

A howling Wolf:

These “doing it because we can” arguments also miss the point. A year from today, in 2011, iPad users will very likely enjoy a rich collection of creativity tools, provided by Adobe and numerous indy developers alike.

Developers cautiously reorient us to the creative potential:

Even Parsons students are apparently blind to the stunning potential of using tablet computing as a profound augmentation of the creative process because it lacks a camera.

Young Crows?

The PC will still be around for some time to come, of course. But when we start carrying tablets and employing them for ambient computing tasks related to both consumption and production throughout our professional and leisurely life, we will enjoy being more human, less dominated by the totalitarian tendencies enforced by using a laptop which demands our full and private attention and fails to afford partial and shared attention. We take for granted what the disembodied interaction of trackpad, pointer and 20th century operating system models forces us to endure. On the contrary, with tablet computing, we start to benefit from the fruits of the next phase of ubicomp where our Apple pads and tabs are at the ready to help us self-fashion ourselves into less-machined casual computing citizens. The tablet helps us return to a day when we were not stuck in front of computers, but instead we clutched notebooks, palettes, and sketchpads and focused on people and ideas, not “the computing administrative debris.”²

Regarding Flash

Rather than taking on this beast of a sub-topic (again and again and again and again), we will defer to others who are posting on this, and stay on-topic. Briefly:

Leave it to Beaver

Try building a player that runs a huge range of dynamic content written on a variety of tools (some of which you don’t control) by developers with massively varying skill levels. Now try making it compatible, consistent, and performant across dozens of OSes, browsers, platforms, and devices. And maintain backwards compatibility with the last 9 versions even while your target platforms change. And keep it under 5MB. And maintain it in parity with an OSS effort (Tamarin). And try to keep up with the demands of one of the most active and vocal developer communities.

via Grant Skinner

The reactions from these members of the Flash elite reflect a humility and respect for what that medium has been able to accomplish. The bombast from the anti-Flash clique, however, espouses open standards at all costs. Both viewpoints will need to reconcile how ubicomp will simplify and dissolve computing into the background. Against Adobe’s ability to conquer divergent hardware with convergent software, Apple is building a nascent ubicomp empire on unified hardware and software.

Comic Relief

A fellow named Neil Curtis chopped up the opening Apple keynote of 2010 to just include the adjectives. A somewhat hilarious synopsis of the keynote ensues.

Naturally, nothing could upstage Bishop Stephen Colbert unleashing the wünder tablet out of his suit pocket at the Grammy Awards to mesmerize and prime the purchasing audience. Tuning the zeitgeist.

Synthesis

It is remarkable how easily Apple can infiltrate cultural feeding grounds like this and inject its new product into our attention space to initiate a brilliant marketing campaign to regularize the iPad into existence. Consider how they deployed the iPod into the cultural discourse and how effectively normal it has become, a fully regular life condition, the way you listen to recorded music. Apple is big music.

The next massive regularization phase established the iPhone as an infiltration into everyday communications, primarily by wireless telephone and its bevy of sub-channels. Apple is at the heels of Nokia, the worlds largest mobile device maker. Apple is big telecom.

The iPad affords a new and novel kind of computing. The full adoption of its use in everyday living will reflect yet another stage of regularizing Apple into our lives. At this stage, Apple is ubiquitous to our daily life, always at hand.

Is Apple big ubicomp?

Footnotes

1. Barack Obama’s comments on the 2008 campaign trail. Via YouTube
2. See Edward Tufte’s early analysis of the impact of the iPhone on interaction design.

Image from Constant’s New Babylon: the hyper-architecture of desire [google book] By Mark Wigley¹

Expanding upon a micro-thought from a panel discussion

“#IFP09 thankyou Thomas Malaby for showing me Constant’s New Babylon: a post-monetary configurable architectural mesh http://bit.ly/2Rv1Gr” – @aquarious

The tweet above implicates multiple layers of private property that mesh the various networked but self-fashioning aspects of a typical public realtime hypertext exchange these days. The layers of exchanged property include Twitter (messaging), Bit.ly (shortlink), Facebook (social web), Google Books (content publishing) and related software (browsers, apps, OS, etc.) to render social media towards public communications.

These private and corporate accumulations of virtual cultural capital derived from user contributed content add value well beyond their physical capital which comprises the workforce, server farms, bandwidth, energy and even brand identity, all subsumed as value commodities optimized for self-fashioning and auto-meshing. The notion of this hypertext broadcast evokes the antagonism between the private property of the communication transported by publishing tools and the public nature of the participants and their expressions. The binary boundaries of labor theory models have been blurred between distinctions of…

• public/private
• property/commons
• production/consumption
• exploit/contribute
• work/play
• oligarchy/democracy
• self/group
• asymmetrical/egalitarian
• physical/virtual

Indeed, new language is required to express the hybridity and mutation invoked by the social forces of emergent design technology.

History has presented us with examples of imaginary objects and structures that prefigured our contemporary conditions. In pondering Constant Niewunhuys’ New Babylon as the ultimate imaginary object of urban architectures, there is also Bush’s Memex as the ultimate imaginary object of knowledge consoles. These future-minded design studies arrive out of creative practice and military research disciplines, respectively. But they share a common perspective on the destiny of humankind as a networked and reciprocal society.

Indeed, the Memex already serves as a de facto historical artifact of a proto-hypertext pre-digital device to foreshadow the Internet. By synthesizing the virtual of knowledge networks towards a metaphorical or rhetorical architecture eventually built as the Internet, perhaps the digital memex, maybe the virtual New Babylon, a layer of self-fashioning protocols and exchanges emerged that sit between physical transit and everyday life. Vannevar Bush imagined his Memex microfilm knowledge console as the liberation from libraries, towards exchangeable and reconfigurable knowledge media. He extended self-enrichment through participatory scholarship with the promise of technology to overcome the limitations of physical media and the requisite bureaucracy to manage it. He imagined the basis for the internet before the digital computer and the network were fully conceived and implemented. Meanwhile, before the digital network engendered hyperconnectedness and hyperfragmentation as intrinsic structures and conditions of hypertext knowledge distribution systems, Constant Niewunhuys appears to have applied a parallel idea of hyperarchitecture to the basis of a futurist society built upon a “unitary urbanism.”

The post-monetary vision of Constant’s New Babylon envisages an architectural mesh of “infinitely reconfigurable spaces”² where a post-capitalist society of self-fashioning actors thrive beyond commodity exchange in the conventional sense. We wonder if the physical architecture of humans will eventually evolve into this rhizomatic, multi-layered, multi-dimensional, network of cellular or atomic structures that represent and disseminate information or embody and interconnect human habitats across the Earth in a uniformly neural network pattern. This pattern resembles the visual forms of the digital network, our understandings of neuroscience, biochemistry and atomic physics. Is it the eventual but wholly natural state of human society?³

The cellular design affords the infinite and reconfigurable mobility of capital and commodity exchange of all sorts across the boundaries of time and place. Humans may eventually construct a habitat that resembles a web of interconnected self-regulating, post-national, post-regional communities who thrive on unfettered commodity exchange, beyond scarcity, beyond the immaterial. Labor and value creation in this kind of a post-monetary urban planning concept depends on an individual’s accumulation of knowledge credentials, artifacts of cultural production and the distributed economics of emergent peer-to-peer micro-transactions — peer production.

“After rehearsing these few salient features of today’s art criticism, I must say on the contrary that for our situationist comrades, for Constant and myself, the three-dimensional explorations in question here can in no way be an object of enthusiasm, as they are but scattered elements on the path toward a future construction of ambiences, a unitary urbanism.” – Guy Debord⁴

Leave it to Guy Debord to take all the fun out of sci-fi fantasy.

Footnotes

1. via Google Books
2. Thomas Malaby at #IPF09, The New School
3. Think Powers of 10, by Charles and Ray Eames, which illustrates a repeating pattern of nature’s architecture from atom to cosmos.
4. Constant and the Path of Unitary Urbanism on Google Books

MEMEX TWO POINT OH

It only just dawned on me. These status-tweet-feed conflations I’ve been following and fueling — this is the MEMEX that I’ve been talking about on these pages. Maybe not MEMEX 1.0 — our trails comprise not only encyclopedic knowledge and book knowledge — they also encompass our communication and social context all wrapped up in knowledge. Social networking is contemporary knowledge machined into media trails.

Whatever “social networking” becomes, Twitter today, who knows tomorrow, we can still be sure that Vannevar Bush was one of the first to fantasize about the business of socially mediating knowledge through machines via exchangeable, reconfigurable machine-readable media (i.e. beyond books and paper).

The #IPF09 Internet as a Factory and Playground Conference at The New School, conferred by Trebor Scholz, discusses the notions of value creation in the networked wealth of a distributed and highly creative, productive, efficient human at work. Vannevar Bush has not been mentioned at the sessions I’ve attended, but a new discovery included Constant’s New Babylon project, perhaps the architectural parallel of the Memex.

Today’s big announcements at Adobe MAX signal bold moves to strengthen the reach of the Flash Platform while simultaneously heading off Apple’s reluctance to offer the plugin in Mobile Safari. By allowing Flash Professional CS5 to export to native iPhone app code, Adobe wins big by giving its massive author base the means to get in on the App Store action. As a Flash developer myself who has made repeated but ultimately failed attempts to tackle Cocoa Objective-C this is very welcome news. When you’ve spent years in one language, the brain gets hardwired and is resistant to learning something so radically different. Plus, Flash developers invested so heavily in the platform, it’s a bitter pill to swallow and drop it all in favor of being locked into Apple’s ecosystem.

However, allowing Flash designers to bulld iPhone Apps means that we will see abuses of human interface guidelines and a deluge of submissions into the approval process. We can expect Apple to push back on this in whatever way they could to preserve the brand integrity of the iPhone experience.

In terms of expanding the Flash Platform into greater ubiquity, the announcements of RIM, Google and Palm joining the Open Screen Fund heralds an imminent reality where Flash content will run just about everywhere except in the iPhone Mobile Safari. By 2011, those blue question mark icons that appear where Flash browser plugin content is supposed to run will likely become a marketplace liability for Apple. Indeed, when customers can enjoy Flash enabled websites that work on every device except Apple’s, we finally imagine a scenario where not supporting Flash in Safari could actually affect sales. The demonstration of Flash Player 10.1 working very nicely on a Palm Pre underscored this notion.

Before today, I was thinking that the centrality of Flash as a de facto multimedia “standard” was in question. These thoughts were inspired by the advent of the App Store and improved web standards browser implementations such as CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and the CANVAS and VIDEO elements. However, after today, my confidence in Adobe’s ability to maintain strong support for the Flash platform is renewed by their clever responses to the shifting marketplace by resisting the force of fragmentation or at least channeling it into their advantage.

Flash haters like Gruber will remain skeptical and vaunt the merits of standards and Cocoa over Adobe’s assets. But the truth remains that there is a massive author base that knows Flash and an even larger consumer base that expects Flash content to run on their smartphones.

Video spoof of Mythbusters that Flash isn’t on the iPhone
FAQ for developers

Make me an app that would auto-sync the URLs of all my currently open tabs to a shortened URL that I could syndicate at will.

For example

http://tabs.to/mercurious would redirect to the 11 browser tabs that I have open right now, in your browser.

I suppose it could be built as a Firefox plugin and companion website that syndicates vanity URLs and offers a social API to disseminate into other services.

It would contribute towards the notion of MEMEX, by putting the live trail of my research in front of a “camera” — a social feed, in actuality.

It would serve the function and purpose of this MEMEX accessory, illustrated in the figure:

Since writing this post, it appears that AT&T has disabled the USSD service reminder messages for Medianet prepaid data packages. Icing on the cake: they also opened the 3G faucet. Considering these significant improvements to the value proposition of GoPhone, we’re down to 3 reasons.

One can only surmise that executives schemed these crippling aspects to AT&T’s GoPhone prepaid offerings to exploit every inducement towards a “postpaid” (ie. 2 year contract) plan.

I’ve been trying to equip unlocked Nokia devices with prepaid data accounts for benevolent design research purposes integral to my work at Parsons on mobile media design work for grant funded projects.

1. Relentless balance reminders. Even with a $20 100MB package for a month’s worth of data access, you are barraged with irritating and intrusive balance reminder service messages, after every single use. You’ll need to click to dismiss the message after every text message and every data connection, and certainly when data intensive apps are running in the background, such as Google Maps with Latitude. These USSD messages, apparently, cannot be disabled by a customer service representative. Clearly, they are an intentional annoyance disguised as a customer service to coerce you into a 2 year contract, or flee to a competitor.
   Update ISSUE RESOLVED

   

2. No 3G data support. Online chatter can be found espousing the merits of enjoying pre-paid 3G data, but the phone company was listening. These comments remain mythical and historical musings, as GoPhone data only supports 2G (EDGE GPRS only), as of this writing, no matter how much you’d be willing to pay. Again, they’ll be happy to convert your account to a “postpaid” commitment in order to subscribe to 3G data.
   Update ISSUE RESOLVED
3. No unlimited data offering. The same online whispers that spoiled the party on 3G prepaid data probably cued AT&T to cap its data offering to 1MB and 100MB denominations. Of course, this never implied tethering, although many forumistas falsely claim that prepay is the ultimate loophole.
4. No visual voicemail on iPhone. At least without doing naughty things like jailbreaking, it is reported that visual voicemail is not supported on a pre-pay GoPhone plan and SIM in an iPhone. To not have visual voicemail on an iPhone is like having a PBJ without the first ingredient. Apparently, the executives responsible for upholding the 2 year contract conspiracy agree.
5. No international roaming (beyond Mexico). Although the prepaid target market is clearly revealed by this sales policy, it dissolves the possibility of being able to keep a prepaid globetrotter number and bounce around the Earth’s sublime GSM network based on the à la carte reality of travel — it’s occasional and ad-hoc, not a feature to add to a monthly plan.

Research suggests that T-Mobile is the better choice for prepaid services in the United States. At the minimum, they do not employ the dealbreaker balance reminders, which is enough reason for me to expend my remaining balance and get a new number from the local German provider of mobile telephony. Those Europeans sure know a thing or two about running a mobile phone infrastructure. But there are so many reasons why telecom (and law enforcement, for that matter) will always keep prepaid mobile telephony a stinky deal.

Could we fix systemic flaws simply by printing a new denomination with a picture of a mag-lev train riding through a wind farm on the back of the bill?

The Preamble

I’m not an economist or an expert on currency markets. But I am a designer. When designers are presented with problems, they instinctively imagine design solutions. This is my proposal to work towards solving the current financial crisis and restore the greatness of the United States of America. It is inspired by the three previous attempts of Presidents Lincoln, Jackson and Kennedy to re-nationalize our currency. Most people don’t realize that our currency is based on the Treasury Department selling debt to an international banking cartel that funds the Federal Reserve Bank. When you really try to figure out what the Fed is, you realize that it’s not really Federal (beyond the appointment of leadership positions by government) and it’s not really a Reserve either. And it’s certainly not the purest form of a United States currency. We’ve tried issuing a non-fiat currency of US Notes in the past, often nicknamed the greenback. According to economist, S.G. Fisher, ‘the Greenbacks were the best currency that ever a Nation had.’¹ Naturally, banks hate this kind of currency as it diminishes the role of debt in a financial system, which is how they get to make money out of thin air.

The Problem

The Federal Reserve is far too powerful; above the authority of Congress² and probably above the President.³

Our Lender of Last Resort is now so mired in debt and inflationary triggers that it’s hard to imagine its capacity to finance a green economy revolution. The Fed is stuck with financing the bailouts and an exponential debt that now equals the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and has doubled the amount of money in circulation. In other words, the international financiers that actually supply the Fed with loans to issue Federal Reserve Note dollars have not only doubled their investment, but also crafted the conditions to cause devastating inflation down the road, which will invariably benefit them with more and more indentured servitude to their unquenchable money making.

The forces of globalism naturally seek a more stable currency, one that is more protected from the boom-bust cycles that work out great for the international banking cartel. Just consider how unbelievably profitable the housing-bubble collapse and ensuing bailouts have been to JP Morgan and Goldman-Sachs.

In addition, a Central Bank system thwarts pure capitalism and fuels crony capitalism by centering monetary policy in the hands of a winner-take-all few. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve is widely regarded as the most powerful man in the world economy. And this is good? The US campaign finance and lobby system only worsens the situation, nurturing a corrupt partnership between the corporate person and legislators.

Whether your political perspective is leftist or rightist, it’s pretty easy to accept that the Federal Reserve just might be the source of all economic evil. Libertarians hate it. Liberals should hate it for epitomizing the secret subversion of government and a blatant conspiracy to enrich private interests at the expense of the state and the public common good. The only people who really support the idea of the Federal Reserve are Centrists, who by nature, don’t want to rock the boat. And dissolving the Fed is a truly radical idea, Titanic Big, maybe bigger.

The Solution

Launch a parallel, alternate US NOTE greenback dollar in the spirit of a national project, such as financing a war or major sci-tech project. Like JFK’s proposal, Treasury could issue $30 and $200 US “green” notes. The New Greenback’s value would be directly coupled to Green bonds to fund new eco-economy projects (renewables, mag-lev trains, smart electric vehicles). The value derived from the presumed economic strength of a “free” energy grid that fuels a “clean” transportation network promises a staggering profit potential once initial outlay is capitalized. The Greenback 2.0 captures our national economic potential as an alternative to the petroleum economy. Big Oil is completely tethered to Fed notes and the entrenched oligarchy.

New Greenbacks would likely have restrictions like the original US fiat currencies: maybe you couldn’t pay your income tax with them, or buy gasoline. Instead, they would be used to buy green energy and transportation, as well as acceptable goods and services. We would use New Greenbacks to buy clean energy from wind/solar/tidal farms, pay fares on mag-lev trains, purchase leases on electric smart vehicles and debit tolls on smart highways (with EZPass 2.0 powered by Greenbacks). Commercial business would be free to accept Greenbacks for everyday transactions based on a market-derived exchange rate against Fed Note dollars. Banks and other financial institutions would probably disparage this currency since they’re in on the Federal Reserve cartel.

The Result

Greenbacks (US Notes) would compete in the marketplace with Federal Reserve Notes to diminish the international banking cartel’s grip on our government, economy and monetary policy.

Greenbacks would buffer against inevitable Federal Reserve Note inflation while providing a means to exchange value based on the assets of environmentally sound, renewable, basically unlimited energy sources and the subsequent transportation capabilities that would drive a new 21st century marketplace towards a future without debt.

Instead of making money out of thin air through the Fractional Reserve System, an alternate US Note currency would make money out of an ambitious, game-changing clean-and-green energy and transportation system.

Footnotes

1. This is an awesome quote and S.G. Fisher is an awesome name, but I’m having trouble fact-checking this person and attribution beyond the Wikipedia entry where I found it.
2. According to the Accounting and Auditing Act of 1950, section, 31 USC 714(b), congressional audits of the Federal Reserve may not include “deliberations, decisions and actions on monetary policy matters.” According to the law, in other words, the Fed simply cannot be audited by Congress. Or by anyone else, for that matter.
3. Conspiracy Theory: In 1963, President Kennedy had tried to circumvent the private Federal Reserve banking cartel by issuing legal tender notes in $2 United States Notes denominations. Many speculate that this cost him his life as all the notes were recalled days after his assassination. Andrew Jackson killed the Federal Reserve, but we don’t really know the whole story. Some say it was just a shallow personal vendetta against the bankers that ran it. Others say Jackson was sincere. Abraham Lincoln used US Notes to help finance the Civil War, also assassinated. Call it coincidence or assume the banking cartel operates above the law as it has every reason to and has gotten away with it for more than a hundred years.

1. O8AMA
2. K8TLYN¹

We hope this helps explain the hiatus. These two projects consumed all of my extra time. I’m just catching my breath now. A new semester brings new potential.

Footnotes

1. Reference to my daughter, Kaitlyn Carroll, born December 7, 2008. This girl is no mere footnote in history. Mark my word.

Strategist Smackdown

A Democrat mouthpiece annihilates his Republican counterpart. Truly humiliating.

via YouTube

O’Reilly Hung Out To Dry by Donahue

Although a pathetic shout-match between partisan extremists, O’Reilly lost this bout.

via YouTube

McCain Utterly Destroyed by a Maine ABC Affiliate Anchor

If this reporter anchored a major news network, our country would be a better place.

via YouTube

Decision 2008 Convention Chatterbox

The party conventions have magnetized the polarities of choice for our next president. Indeed, historic moments on both sides of the aisle.

“Identity politics” aside, instead, let’s just stick to the real issues. Presidential Election 2008 will come down to this decision for the American people, in three talking points:

Talking Points

If you:

1. don’t mind oil, no matter the price¹
2. don’t mind the government legislating reproductive rights in the bedroom and religion in the classroom²
3. don’t mind trickle-down economics³

…then you should support McCain/Palin.

If you:

1. want to start getting off oil, no matter the price⁴
2. don’t want the government legislating any reproductive rights or injecting religion in science classes and libraries⁵
3. reject trickle-down economics⁶

…then you should support Obama/Biden.

Divide and Conquer

They’ve gone ahead and done it, in act of bleak desperation, and made the election about 3 stupid things
(oil/abortion/the-economy-stupid).

The selection of Gov. Palin as Vice President without a truly acceptable vetting process is a blatant act of sexist pandering by McCain and reflects his poor judgment, especially considering there are so many other qualified and tested party rank-and-file women to select from (Sec. Rice, Sen. Snowe, Gov. Whitman). If you have to be sexist and choose a woman, for tactical purposes only, at least be smart about it. Atrocious!

It’s an evil-genius move, that smells like Karl Rove took a dump all over it. Play the VP choice like a talent-pageant.

“America’s Next Vice President: So You Think You Can Run The Free World!” – Tonight on FOX

The American thirst for playing out the pretty girl story on TV is unquenchable. It’s a contagious addiction to “narrative” rather than any real substance. This reality-show amusement reflects our fractured sense of true reality in a national quest for impossible authenticities. The guilty pleasure of liking and disliking people for superficial reasons bleeds into the real voting process. In dystopian horror, our democracy seems to be punishing qualified candidates for being too elite through accusations of elites of the highest order. This tactic envelopes discourse into pure us vs. them categories where the mutual contempt between intellectual haves and have-nots collide. Is this an Idiocracy in the making? Why wouldn’t we want a deeply intelligent individual in the land’s highest office. The most elite candidate, please. The Founding Fathers were the most “cosmopolitan” men of their day. If it wasn’t for them, we’d have the monarchy that the GOP is intent on coronating.

A Czechoslovakia Problem

I’ve seen the propaganda reels of McCain’s senile gaffes and it ain’t pretty, even when you discount it all “being taken out of context.” He’s just not sharp these days. I want a sharp commander-in-chief.⁷

And then there’s the most spine-chilling propaganda reel about McCain that you will ever see, with the guy from Book TV, the last place you’d expect to find a kind of whistleblower…

“There’s gonna be other wars. I’m sorry to tell you. There’s gonna be other wars.”

Footnotes

1. McCain/Palin and GOP machine is all about more drilling, denying inconvenient truths, and stalling to be conservative.
2. McCain or Palin would likely appoint anti-abortion and possibly pro-creationist justices to the Supreme Court during their term(s). Palin gutted funding in a surplus state for Teen mom support services.
3. You’ll see no relief to the middle class, no penalties for big business to foot the bills of the nation’s financial crisis, and social security will be gutted and privatized.
4. Obama will dedicate towards truly solving the problem of oil.
5. Obama or Biden would never appoint an anti-abortion justice to the Supreme Court. Palin tried to have books banned in the library.
6. The middle-class would likely see some economic relief, the greed and corruption of unfettered big business would likely be assessed, and social security would be preserved and nurtured.
7. Especially one who has traveled the world. Palin’s travel history is atrocious. Executives need international travel experience. It’s a basic qualification.

Why haven’t people complained about this?

Does this imply Weather might have been built on a yet-to-be announced Dashcode iPhone workflow? Dashboard Widgets as iPhone Apps.

Seems like the natural course of mobile ecosystem evolution. Web Standards as native app dev to expand the developer market. Learning Cocoa Touch is tough. MobileSafari is sandboxes from so much functionailty. Dashboard Dashcode dev is the middle-ground between HTML and Obj-C. Location aware apps written in JavaScript, on the way?

by Danielle Cassley and Jason Citron

game type: Block puzzle role-playing game hybrid (MMo)

game platform: for iPhone and iPod Touch OS 2.0, free on iTunes App Store

Game Brief

A superb 10-week opus by 22 year old designers Danielle Cassley and Jason Citron, Aurora Feint is, indeed, a beginning. Their lush fantasy graphics situate you in a puzzle narrative that combines Bejeweled, Tetris and their own uniquely original block breaking physics with power-up purchases and unlock systems. Players mine five basic natural resource essence blocks (wind, water, earth, shadow, fire) by three-matching to clear. Aurora Feint exploits gestural controls ingeniously by applying gravity to blocks, making the accelerometer sensed screen reorientation a game move. Tilt the screen to cross swap and let the blocks re-fall into place. Music and sound effects very effectively reinforce both the narrative and pure-play experience value with satisfying stone-clunks and brick-booms that punctuate reverb-y chord progressions – all adding up to a Tolkeinesque atmosphere. Earned power-ups directly boost play enjoyment by adding new blocks to the autoflow. Play reward revolves around bigger and more beautiful block explosions. This game is very comparable to the Puzzle Quest franchise which brought the three-match RPG genre to consoles like PSP and Wii.

Rocky Launch

After a rough launch of unstable build that (when it worked), executed questionable privacy security practices (passing your address book over insecure transport) without disclosure resulting in an uproar and apology, climaxing with an official de-listing from the App Store, only to be re-listed as a maintenance update, appearing to resolve some of the version 1.0 errors and security concerns. Crisis averted skillfully despite the developer’s failure to realize that such a well-designed and free Touch game wouldn’t be a smash hit. The developers are accepting users crash reports by email which illustrates a challenge of providing support for App Store apps at the moment.

How to recover from Aurora Feint crashes

In the currently available version 1.0.0.1 running on iPhone 2.0 you will encounter serious bugs that seem to corrupt the local app data and then prevent it from launching. You can best resolve this issue and avoiding further App Store problems, including fatal reboot failure that requires a full system restore, follow these steps:

1. With your iPhone/touch plugged-in to your sync machine, after choosing the device in the source column
2. Open the Applications tab
3. Choose to manually manage Applications
4. Uncheck Aurora Feint
5. Apply the sync
6. Click on Applications in the source menu (left-hand side)
7. Contextual click (control-click, right-click) on the the Aurora Feint icon
8. Choose Delete
9. Confirm both dialog boxes asking you how to deal with the file
10. Choose iTunes Music Store, Applications, and search for Aurora Feint
11. Re-download Aurora Feint, confirming dialog boxes
12. Choose the device in the source column
13. Open the Applications tab
14. Check Aurora Feint
15. Apply the sync
16. Launch the game on the device

Your previous character should be appear, after negotiations with the server. It may not be the most recent version of your character, so you may have to re-play the make up for the lost progress. Seems like a big “David Hasselhoff!” to play this game. We, agree. If you haven’t yet installed Aurora Feint, consider holding out for a new version from the game developers, instead. An update from Apple to fix the serious bugs in Cocoa Touch 2.0 would likely solve some related problems that cause catastrophic crashes as you attempt to uninstall and reinstall apps through the mobile version of App Store, not a recommended method.

We haven’t tested the multiplayer aspect of the game, but should we decide to trust their new privacy security policy and try it out, we’ll update this space.

Aurora Feint succeeds at being well designed for mobility by saving the game state and allowing a full game resume. This feature rewards quick burst play and mitigates the consistent interruptions typical with play on-the-go. Few other non-free games at the App Store are this well polished and well adapted to the mobile OS X Touch platform. We look forward to the inevitable software updates from Danielle and Jason, along with the needed fixes from Apple, to make the whole play experience reliable and enjoyable.

Grade: I (Incomplete)

We’ll review again after a round of major updates.

• Aurora Feint official site
• Aurora Feint forums
• Aurora Feint on App Store
• Aurora Feint review by Touch Arcade

Although we began work last year on Safari based WordPress Theme and Plugin suite that had potential to offer the untethered convenience of mobile blogging, we were beat to the punch by Automattic/Effigent. Built on the iPhone SDK as a native Cocoa Touch app makes a robust touch UI crisp in its access and delivery.

Splendid as a portable notepad where you can quickly start local drafts of posts. Later, when you’re on the desktop, local drafts get posted to remote drafts for editing and production tasks.

The ability to easily integrate photos by the standard camera and photo library API is perfect for screen shots in this case.

Rumors of a copy and paste feature in iPhone 2.1 abound. This WordPress Touch client really won’t be complete until a great select and hyperlink user interface is developed.

What’s The Killer App?

To put it one way, when urged to flick icons on microquest for stroke amusement and no app earns a tap, then I’ll know The Killer App has arrived.

An examination of the current crop of games reveals:

• No quick game you can really just quickly resume and play in microbursts. This attritibute is essential to The Killer App.
• No true one-handed gameplay. Over sensitive gesture games need not apply. Killer App must be usable while holding onto a pole or handle for use on public transportation.

These two attributes exemplify the special needs of mobile software design not yet satisfied by the new App Store marketplace.

The Free Essential Dozen:

Great free apps, but none of these are The Killer App.

1. NetNewsWire for feedbag
2. WordPress for bloggoreah
3. Facebook for status-faction
4. AIM for buddy-talk
5. Twinkle for micro-blogging
6. iPint for parlor tricking
7. Cube Runner for cube running
8. Tap Tap Revolution for groove gripping
9. Pandora for music genome hopping
10. Urban Spoon for jiggle picking meals
11. Yelp for added locative chow-hounding
12. Remote by Apple for magic jukeboxing

Stay tuned to this space as the situation evolves.

It’s assumed that the Dev Team jailbreak tool currently cracks firmware 2.0. The tragically named “Pwnage Tool” is not yet publicly released. However, if the Dev Team decided to release “Pwnage” at this very moment, it would presumably bypass AT&T/Apple activation procedure.

In this scenario, perhaps millions of users would grab “Pwnage” and then back off Apple’s activation server. That would be a huge favor to Apple on behalf of the rogue development community.

Could it happen?

UPDATE: In retrospect, this was a dumb entry. Rather than retract it, we’ll just leave it as evidence of this day’s mass hysteria and leave it at that.

Any iPhone user (2.5G and 3G), who needs to activate their phone with iTunes is out of luck right now. Apparently slammed by activations or launch glitches, now is not the time to perform an update or restore function on ANY iPhone, as you won’t able to reactivate it on AT&T until the glitch is solved. (via Gizmodo) Standby for updates on the situation. We realized an unlikely hero could save the day.

Hold off on Restore or Updates

Hopefully, you’re not in our position: our iPhone 2.0 firmware leak early adoption led to an App Store download binge and the eventual major crash by overloading with third-party explorations that left it sort of bricked, stuck on the Apple logo boot screen. We put iPhone into recovery mode and restored, but now iTunes Music Store returns splendid errors (-9838) and now (-4).

Update @ 3pm: Persistence and patience pays off, as we get into the great Activation queue cloud in the sky and get activated and ignore resulting errors, as advised by rampant iRumoring. Currently restoring and allowing hysteria to subside.

New firmware sports crucial “sleeper features” – Screenshots and Safari YouTube plugin

The web is alive with chatter about the iPocalypse, as many other owners are experiencing the outage. Apple appears to have temporarily closed (UPDATE: they’re back) its support discussion forums to block outage outrage on its own threads.

We had iPhone 2.0 installed, and enjoyed one it’s two best “sleeper features” – screengrab (hold home button with top lock button) and the new Safari YouTube plugin that we predicted. The latter feature has huge implications for the question of Adobe Flash Player for iPhone, as it effectively mitigates the problem of the “blue question-mark” missing-plugin indicating on millions-and-millions of embedded YouTube players scattered around the web.

Video clip on YouTube

David Carroll, Sven Travis, Benjamin Bacon, and Haiyan Huang debuted their mobile media installation, “1000 Cellphones” at the opening of Synthetic Times 2008, a media arts exhibition at The National Art Museum of China, Beijing, as a Cultural Olympics venue.

1000 Cellphones is comprised of custom bluejacking and bluetracking software visualizing active devices on four aligned flat-panel displays mounted in the foyer of the museum’s café.

The software extracts the last six digits from discovered device MAC address ID signifiers gathered by the tracking tools. It then converts these digits to an RGB Color HEX value, and renders a 2D perspective particle in virtual space. Device names animate across the screen, revealing radio identification evidence of the most recent 10 devices found.

In addition, devices are bluetooth push “spammed” mysterious photographs to willing device users.

The custom PULL software tools were written in Python, mySQL, PHP, XML and ActionScript 3.0. PUSH tools are “off the shelf” Bluetooth spammers.

“1000 Cellphones” and the Synthetic Times exhibition remain on view through July 3, 2008 at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China.

• View photo gallery of Synthetic Times 2008 Exhibition
• View photo gallery of 1000 Cellphones Process Documentation
• Visit official Synthetic Times website

Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad MIT thesis was covered by Create Digital Motion after I posted the video clip from MIT’s New Media Reader featuring Dr. Alay Kay from Xerox PARC give a lecture on Sketchpad. The video clip has since garnered over 10,000 YouTube views and other “instances” of the film on video sharing sites — so appropriate given Sutherland’s contribution of the idea of a “master” and “instances.” His contributions to computer aided design history extend well into its origins and beyond its final outcome.

Peter Kirn says it best — what I think, he was able to say about this…

Additional Demonstration Footage Also Emerged

This Sketchpad film on YouTube: Part 1

The computer has been, in a sense, nothing but a very elaborate calculating machine. But, now we’re making the computer be more like, almost like a “human assistant” and the computer will seem to have some intelligence.

It doesn’t really. Only the intelligence that we put in it.

{Emphasis added.}

Professor Steven Coons
Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT
Co-Director of The Computer Aided Design Project

The professorial site’s URL identifier has been streamlined to an expressively concise:

»»» dave.parsons.edu

Update your bookmarks. Here you can see Ivan Sutherland busy updating his link to my site on the TK2.

In a stunning sweep and a victory for Apple any way you slice it, an unnamed party has purchased the “iPhone DevTeam” Pwnage tool demonstrated on YouTube, widely announced for release today. The team has been disbanded and the jailbreak and unlock scene will probably never be the same again.

Surely the lawyers have locked this one down tight, and we’ll probably never know, but bets are on Apple using both the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the almighty, irresistible dollar to squelch these hackers once and for all. Their tool seems to violate the reverse engineering and copyright circumventions intrinsic to the DMCA, by allowing the customization of the firmware and operating system files.

We hope the term “pwned” is retired now. We didn’t think someone could come up with a word worse than “blog” and then see it leak into the vernacular. Perhaps the Apple legal team is defending not only their intellectual property, but also the English language?

April Fools?

Her Majesty the Queen of Impressions Returns to the Boob Tube

Back in the glory days when the Simpsons first aired, I remember watching The Tracey Ullman Show afterwards, characterized by her zany characterizations that I was probably too young to fully appreciate. She’s back, but this time on premium cable, and last night premiered her new series State of the Union. She is at times hilarious, at other times utterly depressing for her spot-on renditions of the great contradiction that is the US of A. The premise behind the show is the cliché “day-in-the-life” snapshot, stitched together with a Google Earth inspired CGI intersitial and voice-over à la Idiocracy. The premiere’s highlights included the Bollywood Pharmacist, Tony Siricio as indy-flicker and of course, Princess Bloggini herself, Arianna Huffington. If you can tolerate the hit-or-miss bag of tricks intrinsic to impressions, and Anglophile humor, or just like comedic uses of makeup, give it a shot.

» Official Previews

Steve Jobs “just says no” to Flash on iPhone. Well, on first glance, that’s just what he says now, and we all know, like a good episode of Lost, there’s always more to unpack and nothing is what it seems. Considering Adobe’s product line, the so-called “missing middle Flash product” suitable for the iPhone doesn’t yet exist. The middle product refers to something between Flash Player for the desktop and Flash Lite for mobile devices. But, considering the pipeline, it’s only a matter of time before Adobe AIR Mobile hits iPhone and just about every other mobile device, smack dab in the middle of the entire mainstream interactive media ecosystem.¹

Despite all the nay-saying, Adobe seems determined to get Flash on OS X Touch.

The brilliance of both Apple and Adobe waiting for Adobe AIR Mobile to launch is that it addresses all issues and pleases both parties politically:

• AIR Mobile is likely to be built upon AJAX, WebKit and Flash Player with the ActionScript 3.0 VM, as it is on the desktop, so it will be robust, efficient, modern and support both Apple’s and Adobe’s standards. It will please developers, designers, open standards proponents, lovers of proprietary goodness, and every other regular user who just wants everything to just work.
• AIR Mobile will solve the installation and distribution problem inherent in Flash Lite. Flash Player for the desktop has never been about standalone application installation. AIR on the desktop bridges this gap. It’s only a matter of time before Adobe sends AIR into the mobile device space and allows creators to put mobile app icons on standby screens with a few clicks. Just think Apple AppStore, or jailbreak AppTapp for Adobe Mobile AIR.
• AIR Mobile will bridge the fading distinction between web – desktop – mobile by allowing creators to write software in one environment (eg. Flex Builder) and distribute codebase to all three of these crucial platforms in a truly hybrid sense.
• It’s really no coincidence that Apple and Adobe are both investing heavily in products named “Air” — the notion of the data-cloud, cloud-sourcing, everyware, and webware is nascent. Narrow-minded jargon-lovers will call it Web 3.0, but intelligent folks will hopefully leave this lame version number moniker behind and use the appropriately visionary language espoused here.

Multi-touch API is the key

The central unresolved issue that remains is a multi-touch API. Any version of Flash for iPhone will need to have its intrinsic APIs updated for multi-touch and that will need to translate to a higher-level ActionScript object so that designers and developers can trap events related to multi-touch gestures. Without gestures like pinch, flick, zoom and others, it’s really pointless to put Flash on iPhone.

At the end of the day, talk about politics, performance and battery life are probably just the red-herrings that both Apple and Adobe need to work out the vexing issue of multi-touch APIs. In fact, it will probably take a few years before all platforms (Windows Mobile, Symbian, Android and iPhone) all reckon with multi-touch on all levels of hardware and software.

The alleged YouTube Mobile Safari plugin in OS X Touch 2.0 beta is probably all the beehive needs to chill out and give Apple and Adobe the breathing room they need to get multi-touch worked out, and deploy Mobile AIR on a dizzying and divergent array of devices, platforms and crotchety carriers.

Previously:

• YouTube plugin for Mobile Safari Suggests No Flash in iPhone 2.0←
• Will iPhone Ever Run Flash?←

Footnotes

1. This is based only pure postulation and not informed by any confidential Adobe insight.

Specula-palooza Rocks On

The latest in Flash and iPhone rumor-mongering suggests a YouTube plug-in for Mobile Safari will accompany this summer’s Touch OS 2.0 update. An uncorroborated claim indicates that this plug-in is contained within the recently seeded developer iPhone SDK 2.0 beta firmware.

This would theoretically enable embedded YouTube movies to work on the billions of pages that currently flaunt the dreaded blue question mark icon. Presumably, a page with an embedded YouTube SWF player might show a thumbnail with a play icon that when tapped would load the clip in the native YouTube player or some embedded player within Mobile Safari. This would be similar to what happens when you load an embedded MP4 video file via the native QuickTime player within the iPod function.

In technical terms, Mobile Safari may parse the OBJECT and EMBED tags that point to the YouTube SWF player and redirect the path to the video into its own native player.

It’s important to note that not all YouTube videos would work. In fact, numerous clips not encoded to MP4 H.264 remain only available in the Flash codecs Sorenson Spark and On2 and therefore would not play in the Mobile Safari YouTube plugin. Although, Apple and Google seem to be colluding to convert the vast user-generated video library over into the H.263 format. It’s truly doubtful that OS X Touch 2.0 contains additional video codecs beyond H.263.

However, rather than subscribing to comment stream appearing below rumor sites, this YouTube Mobile Safari plugin is very likely not a clue towards a Flash player for iPhone. In fact, this could be the kiss of death for the chances of seeing it soon.

This kind of Mobile Safari plug-in access is precisely what Apple is shielding from Adobe (and other third-party developers, thanks to the sandbox intrinsic to the SDK). In many ways, a YouTube plugin acts as a trojan horse to usurp dominance from Flash in favor of WebKit and open standards. For most people who crave a Flash Player for iPhone, it’s the frequent dead-end to embedded YouTube clips that has them most irked. Once that kink is worked out, will users really miss Flash?

The other crucial importance of a Mobile Safari YouTube plugin is that it bypasses the main sticking point: how to implement multi-touch via an ActionScript API in the Flash Player!

We’re not suggesting Flash Player won’t ever appear on OS X Touch, but if a native YouTube plugin appears for Mobile Safari this summer, it has big implications for Adobe’s mobile strategy, and concerns the long-term viability of Flash as a de-facto standard if the mobile medium cannot be captured.

We’d love to see Flash on OS X Touch. There is a vast designer and developer community out there fluent in ActionScript that would thrive in a Touch world. It’s all about a multi-touch API from here on out. We’ve tinkered with both Mobile Safari web application design with WebKit and AJAX and also attempted to pick apart Cocoa Touch. There is no middle ground yet, and the Touch application market is nascent and fractured as a result. You’ve either got really crappy web applications or sketchy jailbreak apps. Yes, this summer’s launch of the AppStore will change the game forever. But, until the vast Adobe-enabled developer community is employed to create, the market will be constricted by limitations and learning curves.

Previously: Will iPhone Ever Run Flash? ←

It has been awhile since posting to mercurious. However, we’ve been hard at work updating our academic site. This site now documents recent student work:

• Freshmen Processing work
• Muzzi, the digital pet —music player hybrid
• Info Wraps, a mobile informatics research project

It also now features a commercial work samples page that highlights an eight-year career in the interactive media industry. Perhaps the most interesting additions include ancient works from the vault, some almost a decade old.

In fact, getting this site together in this manner has been long overdue.

» New and improved professorial site on parsons.edu