When DRM is a force for good - the Apple App Store software renaissance

Once upon a time we had a pretty good collection of educational software for children.



It wasn't quite as good as what we could find in the late 80s and early 90s (Windows 3.1 and especially Mac Classic), but it wasn't too bad. Of course most of it was written for Windows 3.1 and Mac Classic. Very little of it still worked when we gave this set away to people with older machines and younger children.

There's nothing like this software now. In the absence of a reliable and cost-effective distribution channel, a balanced approach to copy prevention (digital rights management), a stable computing platform and a process to eliminate semi-fraudulent garbage software prices were high and the quality was pretty darned lousy.

That market went away.

So is the web a replacement? Is there comparable educational software on the net?

This story gives one answer ...

Be the Best You can Be: Math fact drills for an Asperger's child - two excellent solutions

First I went to the web, where I was again reminded of an old unsolved business problem. We have yet to figure out a way to deliver quality web based software solutions to this kind of niche market. It's not a technology problem, it's a business problem.

The best web solution I could find was Math Playground, and that required digging through heavily ad surrounded sites, sensory overload sites that were annoying even to a non-Asperger's person, dozens of me-too sites, spam sites, suspicious domains, and so on. In other words, lots of junk or marketing efforts.

Once upon a time I might have tried finding educational software for OS X or even (further back) Windows, but that market hasn't just died, it's died a thousand deaths...

Of course there's also the Wii, but those apps tend to be very expensive (Nintendo's cut), heavy on the entertainment, and rarely focal enough for my needs.

So I skipped from the web to the astoundingly successful Apple (iPhone/iTouch) App Store.

There I downloaded five Math Drill apps. Some cost money, some were free. The ones that cost money were all less than $3 so, as far as I was concerned, they were as good as free ...

... Of the five apps I tried only one was a real dud (stupid advertisers), two are excellent, and two are quite usable...

So what does the Apple Apps Store have that the web, desktop OSs, and the Wii don't have? Four things:

1. A balanced approach to Digital Rights Management. App store games can be synched to as many as five devices from a single Library/user account. (Practically this means a single OS X user account a single iTunes user account. See also OS Xuser share design flaw.)
2. A distribution channel, albeit one that's currently overloaded (a solvable problem).
3. A quality filter, weeding out the criminal and the plainly stupid.
4. A stable computing platform
   

With these four advantages the iTouch/iPhone platform and the Apple App Store has created a renaissance in small market, targeted software - a flurry of creativity last seen in the early 80s.

And, much to my chagrin, we owe much of it to the DRM ...

Just imagine what will happen Apple does launch their widely expected netbook-variant, particularly if they bundle it with Amazon's iPhone Kindle app and back to school books ...

App Store overload - smarter browser needed!

The iPhone/iTouch/iNetbook-t0-be Apple App Store recently passed the 25,000 app mark.

Let's assume 15,000 are available in English. Delete 500 flashlights and 1000 defunct or buggy apps and you still get a vast number of applications. I have about 90 applications on my iPhone *; that means I'm using less than 1% of what's been published.

Did Apple really imagine how big the App Store was going to be? Does the media understand how much this success owes to Apple's Digital Rights Management FairPlay (DRM) infrastructure? (Maybe and No.)

It's a staggering success. It's also becoming unusable.

I recently went looking for math facts/math drill apps (my reviews here). I found a pretty good set and paid for four of them**, but it was a haphazard experience. I'm sure I've missed some excellent examples. Apple's browsing and search tools are simply overwhelmed.

The App Store's "advanced" search is pretty darned feeble. Happily, they've got some very good examples to draw from. The iTunes UI for constructing smart playlists is pretty damned good. Apple needs to reuse that design in the App Store.

Please!

* Those are the ones I or my children use. There are another 10 or so that we've set aside and no longer keep on the phone. The iPhone app management browser is completely overwhelmed by 90 apps, but presumably iPhone 3.0 will address that.
** And that's a part of the genius of the App Store. I didn't agonize over my purchases. I looked at a few reviews, always checking the negative ones first, then bought without a qualm. $1-$3 doesn't take much thought when I'm 90% sure the product will be pretty good. If only my earth-world purchases were so predictable.

The Dow is at 1966 levels?!

We're used to thinking that the Dow is at 1997 levels. I think that's a pretty reasonable bargain -- we really do have a lot of advantages over 1997.

Summers claims that's a gross understatement ...

Larry Summers: There's never been a better time to buy! - How the World Works - Salon.com

... One striking statistic suggests the magnitude of the opportunity that is before us in restoring our economy to its potential. Earlier this week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, adjusting for inflation according to the standard Consumer Price Index, was at the same level as it was in 1966...

Huh? That's the first time I've seen us compared to 1966.

I did write a few weeks ago that I wouldn't be shocked if the Dow were at 9000 by November ...

JAMA Editor does not have an ego deficiency problem

DeAngelis, editor of the largest circulation journal of medical research (JAMA)  has been around a while. The experience evidently hasn't hurt her ego any ...

JAMA Editor Calls Critic a ‘Nobody and a Nothing’ - Health Blog - WSJ

...The call from Fontanarosa was followed up by ones from JAMA editor-in-chief Catherine DeAngelis to Leo’s superiors, Leo says. He said she asked his superiors to get him to retract his article in the BMJ. Leo says he decided to call DeAngelis directly to find out what, in particular, she might be objecting to. He said she was “very upset” but didn’t make specific complaints about the article.

In a conversation with us, DeAngelis was none too happy to be questioned about the dust-up with Leo.

“This guy is a nobody and a nothing” she said of Leo. “He is trying to make a name for himself. Please call me about something important.” She added that Leo “should be spending time with his students instead of doing this.”

When asked if she called his superiors and what she said to them, DeAngelis said “it is none of your business.” She added that she did not threaten Leo or anyone at the school...

DeAngelis has talked with the press before -- so she can't claim naiveté. This is a person with a wisdom deficiency and a temper problem. Maybe Leo really is on to something with his conflict of interest challenge. We'll probably find out, since DeAngelis has now turbocharged his inquiry.

Dreaming of iPhone 3.0 - my wishes

We're all dreaming of iPhone 3.0. It's a good break from reading about the collapse of western civilizations.

After reading the PC(!) Magazine list I want to play the wishing game too. Here's an update to my prior iPhone "demands" (Most of them are not on the PC Mag list):

1. External keyboard support like the folding keyboards that were once sold with Palm.
2. A standard way for 3rd party applications to synchronize with the desktop (maybe through the heretofore off-limits USB cable).
3. Something that lets me do instant messaging without paying SMS fees. (Background notification, multitasking, whatever)
4. A Calendar API so 3rd party apps can get at Calendar data and manipulate it
5. Filemaker for the iPhone (ok, so that's not an Apple thing, but I miss it)
6. Fix the weird scrolling and text limit problems with long contact and calendar notes
7. Make the Calendar app more real. Better control of alerts, ability to do invitations, etc.
8. Tethering. This will probably happen.
9. Support multi-account synchronization: Currently you can sync with MobileMe and Exchange Server. I want to be able to sync to Google with Exchange Server and to my corporate Exchange Server but keep the two separate.
10. Steal some PIM/Calendaring/multiple sync features from the (still unreal) Palm Pre
    

Against this list there are former "Demands" that I've now given up on, because they were either misguided or because I don't think Apple can do 'em:

1. Forget about Tasks and Notes. I wanted them when I thought Apple could do MobileMe but they can't. Now I'm prepared to wait for Google to do 'em and for Appigo to manage the client side. The key is access to the Calendar.
   
2. Search: I'd like to be able to search for strings across apps, but I think this one's too hard. Most apps have finally added in-app Search and that's working for me.
   

I'm surprised by how many workarounds have developed around the iPhone's fairly severe PIM/PDA limitations. Google's Exchange service has been a miracle.

Update 9/13/09: I've been thinking about the possibility of iPhone instant messaging combined with Google Voice and a possible (if Apple allows it!) Google Voice app for the iPhone. Line those things up against AT&T's diabolical mobile phone contracting schemes and we might save some real money -- which might not make Apple happy.

Pogue reveals the GrandCentral/Google Voice matters I've missed

I've used GrandCentral and GrandDialer for months to call Canada free of charge. That alone paid for my iPhone's data service.

I didn't use any other GrandCentral features, mostly because they didn't seem that impressive.

Turns out, I was missing quite a bit. David Pogue, who's name is a hallmark for excellence in technology writing, fills in a heck of a lot of the gaps today. Read the entire article (emphases mine).

One thing Pogue diplomatically omits is that if you put your GC number on your business card your number will follow you even after you turn in your corporate cell phone ...

State of the Art - Unify the Phone Numbers and All Else Follows - Pogue - NYTimes.com

... Google Voice began life in 2005 as something called GrandCentral...GrandCentral’s solution was to offer you a new, single, unified phone number, in an area code of your choice. Whenever somebody dialed your uni-number, all of your phones rang at once...

... Each time you answered a call, while the caller was still hearing “one ringy-dingy, two ringy-dingies,” you heard a recording offering four ways to handle the call ... This subtle feature saved time, conserved cellular minutes and, in certain cases, avoided a great deal of interpersonal conflict.

GrandCentral also let you record a different voice mail greeting for each person in your address book..

... You could also specify which phones would ring when certain people called. ...you could even tell GrandCentral to answer with the classic, three-tone “The number you have dialed is no longer in service” ...

... Any time during a call, you could press the * key to make all of your phones ring again, so that you could pick up on a different phone in midcall. If you were heading out the door, you could switch a landline call to your cellphone.

GrandCentral also offered telemarketing spam filters, off-hour call blocking (“never ring my BlackBerry on weekends”), and a dizzying number of other functions...

... Google Voice starts with a clean, redesigned Web site that looks like an in-box, à la Gmail. It maintains all of those original GrandCentral features — but more important, introduces four game-changing new ones.

FREE VOICE MAIL TRANSCRIPTIONS ... the Web site displays transcribed words more faintly (light gray) when it is less confident about the transcription. Fortunately, it generally nails numbers — phone numbers, arrival times, addresses...

FREE CONFERENCE CALLING ...

... DIRT-CHEAP INTERNATIONAL CALLS If you dial your own Google Voice number from one of your phones, you’re offered an option to call overseas at rates even lower than Skype’s (and much lower than your cellphone company’s): 2 cents a minute to France or China, 3 cents to Chile or the Czech Republic. Sweet.

TEXT MESSAGE ORGANIZATION .. Google Voice, however, does the right thing: it sends text messages to whichever cellphones you want — even multiple phones simultaneously.

Even more important, it collects them in your Web in-box just like e-mail. You can file them, search them and, for the first time in cellphone history, keep them. They don’t vanish forever once your cellphone gets full.

You can also reply to them with a click, either with a call or another text; your back-and-forths appear online as a conversation.

... You can, if you wish, turn off that “press 1, press 2” option, so when the phone rings, you can just pick it up and start talking. Google has also done some Googlish integration; for example, your Gmail and Google Voice address books are the same.

... As a side effect of Google Voice’s ring-all-phones-at-once technology, you sometimes find fragments of Google Voice error recordings on the answering machines of the phones you didn’t answer. (Solution: make your voice mail greeting at least 15 seconds long.) There’s a learning curve to all of this, too...

The downside for me? Now I have to pay for my calls to Canada. Still, a great bargain.

I LOVE the address book integration. I'm looking forward to Google's iPhone client, which is pretty much a sure thing.

And whey they add Google Video Chat and Gmail integration ...

I wonder what the phone companies did to piss off Google.

Update: Never fails. As of this moment GrandCentral isn't recognizing my un/pw. It worked this morning. Since I had a gmail account for email and a spamcop.net username I have a bad feeling about where the bug is.

Update: I guessed right about the bug, so I was able to fix it. The account info page on GC still shows my old username, it just doesn't work any more.

Apple had a similar problem recently. I wonder if this has any intersection with a recent Google bug that transiently locked me out of my entire Google identity!

Update 3/13/09: Some mobile phone plans have unlimited calling for 'friends and family' numbers. So if the GrandCentral number is 'friend and family' ...

Twitter and Facebook - because feed readers didn't make it

I've been a Twitter value skeptic as noted in Explaining twitter and CB Redux, but the world is not cooperating.

Communications, especially corporate communications, that once would have gone to blogs are going to twitter. At the same time desktop feed readers are dead but Facebook is very popular.

Both Twitter and Facebook use subscription technology (feeds), but they're quite different from the persistent world of the blog post. Importantly, a single tool is used for both authoring feed items and consuming them.

The blog/feed paradigm, I fear, didn't quite cross the cultural chasm. The technology got stuck with the geek elite, which is not a happy place to be. Maybe there were just too many moving pieces ...

So we're taking a diversion. I don't think it's the right way to go, but this isn't the first time I've seen this play. I hope I'm wrong.

If we do wander the Twitter back roads, it won't be a permanent diversion. Sooner or later, in a slightly different form, we'll return to persistent, open ended, indexed, document like artifacts with feeds ...

Help Google give you better ads - and think about your identities!

Google is now targeting ads based on what it knows of your interests, but only a computer-specific basis.

So the next time someone at work fires up Gmail to launch a corporate video chat, you can review the ads on the overhead projector and find all about their hobbies -- or at least the hobbies they search about from work. Hopefully hobbies involving whips, manacles and pumpkins aren't part of workplace searching.

This is probably a good time to think about your identity management strategies. Remember, on the Internet everyone knows you're a dog. If you're using something like Google Video Chat for business communications you should fork out $10/year for a Google Apps domain (DreamHost recommended over eNom) and assign anyone wishes one a business-only Gmail ID.

In the meanwhile you may wish to review your Google Ads Preferences.

Now, it might have been nice if Google had made this an Opt-In program, but before we pull out the torches and pitchforks note that

• You can Opt out from Google Ads Preferences.
• The interest tracking is identity/machine specific. So if you search for dungeons and manacles at home, but search for seed varieties at work using the same Gmail account, your home machine will feature exotic ads and your work machine will have work ads.
• If you search for rude things at work you may be in trouble, but since most corporations track work browsing you're in trouble anyway.
  

I'm going to use it to see if I can get Google to show me more interesting ads!

Update: I tried adding interests, but Google's "interest ontology" was pretty dull. It was also tedious to navigate. It also lacked key discriminators. I'm not interested in Windows hardware, but I am interested in iPhone or Apple hardware -- but those filters were missing. I gave up after a few minutes.

Ideology measured

I took this survey ...

FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: A Nation Neither United Nor Divided

... The CAP survey posed 40 political and ideological statements to a group of 1,400 American adults, and asked them whether or not they agreed with them. You can answer the questions for yourself here; they cover a wide range of topics in the areas of economic and domestic policy, foreign affairs, societal and 'values' issues, and the proper role of government. Although benchmark surveys of political ideology are nothing new, this is one of the most comprehensive and best-constructed efforts that I've seen...

I scored 239/400. Interestingly that's supposed to make me "very progressive", but the average score is 210. So a 10% above average score makes one "very progressive"?!

That seems suspicious, but it turns out that the range of American scores is only between 160 and 247!



So Americans very tightly bunched around the "200" score, which is kind of odd. It suggests that people may have very strong opinions in selected areas, but very few people have very strong opinions that are all aligned to one extreme or another.

I fall out as somewhere between "Democrat" and "Liberal Democrat". Some of the questions were internally illogical however, I would have answered "none of the above" if I could have.

Things get weird on the extremes. The average Obama voter scored 244 and average McCain voter scored 169? That's an amazingly polarized electorate.

I'm having trouble making sense of this ...

Which would you choose?

The Devil smiled, and said ...

Really, it's not hard.

You have two choices.

Sign here and you will live in reasonable health until your 80th birthday. On that day my servant, Victor Von Cheney will visit you. The torture will be terrible. Your bones will break, your teeth will crumble, your eyes will see darkness, your spine will twist and your hands will lose all feeling.

You don't care for that?

Then sign here. You will live a normal life. There will be some good times and some hard times but you will live with you mind intact into your 80s. Of course there will be some illness. Macular degeneration will steal your vision. Osteoporosis and arthritis will crumble your spine and mangle your nerves. Neuropathy will make you clumsy and, of course, your teeth will go. You will pass Von Cheney on the street but he shall take no notice of you.

No, really, you must choose.

Advice? You are asking the Devil for advice?

Well, in truth, I feel for you. It was not I who made this world.

I shall tell you three things. Select your memories. Declare victory when you are ahead. Do not save for a better grade of wheelchair.

Now choose.

Insuring against the end of the world

A fascinating development ...

Credit protection madness - Paul Krugman - NYTimes.com

Marketwatch reports:

The cost of buying protection against the risk that the United States will default on its mounting debt has surged in the past months, outpacing the rise in corporate-credit costs, now that the government has absorbed more private-sector debt...

... the people buying these contracts are crazy. A world in which the US government defaults would be a world in chaos; how likely is it that these contracts would be honored?..

The fundamentals are insane, yet "serious" people are offering this product. The comments on the post are quite good, particularly this one by "TC":

The price of CDS on the US may not necessarily be driven by outright purchases of CDS on the US. Rather, these contracts are often used as part of more complex arbitrage strategies. This could cause the price of a CDS contract to deviate from theoretical fair value by a significant amount...

So this development is fascinating because ...

• In the esoteric world of finance 2.0 there's an angle from which this "makes sense" -- probably the same angle used by AIG's wizards in 2007.
• The people who are selling this know they'll never have to pay out -- because if the US collapsed we'd be using seeds as currency.
• There exist buyers who are either speculators betting on delusional customers or currently delusional customers.

So it's a bit of a mini-review of the past year in one news report.

The Apple Chromestellation Netbook: OS X mobile + Safari + MobileMe. What role AT&T?

Peter Burrows almost has it right. He forgets that the iTouch is running OS X (albeit a strange spinoff of 10.x at this time) but he's close ...

The Big Question About The Rumored Apple NetBook: Will It Run MacOS? - Peter Burrows BusinessWeek

Dow Jones Newswires is confirming reports yesterday that Apple plans to introduce a Netbook. The story says that Taiwanese display maker Wintek Corp. is providing 9.7 to 10 inch screens to huge PC contract manufacturer Quanta Computer, and that the device will be on the market in the second half of the year.

.. One good guess is that it’s the world’s biggest iPod Touch, rather than the world’s smallest Mac. Such a device would not run the MacOS ... better for browsing the Net and watching your movies and such via iTunes, not to mention less demanding games and other graphically-oriented programs found on the App Store. And if the device had a real keyboard...

Everyone's responding, as they should, to the collapse of the laptop pricepoint and to the coming Google branded Chromestellation netbook. Microsoft will give away a Netbook version of Windows 7 tied to Windows Live, so what will Apple do?

A zillion people have noted that the Apple iTouch is basically a keyboard-free $230 small display netbook, now with about 25,000 App Store applications including the Amazon Kindle.

Add a keyboard and a bigger display and Apple has a $300 Netbook with a browser that uses the same AppKit engine that powers Chromestellation. This can compete with a $200 generic Linux netbook.

Apple also has a currently feeble (albeit slowly improving) online companion - MobileMe. They also have something called AppleTV with video distribution via another product called, I think, "iTunes".

So it seems Apple can't help but sell an iTouch/Netbook with media distribution and, probably, a tie to MobileMe.

The interesting question is what role AT&T or other mobile carriers might play. What does Apple's AT&T contract let them do? Will Apple and AT&T sell a carrier-subsidized MobileMe bound Netbook with embedded GSM 3G wireless? Will there be special prices for bulk school purchases? Will school books start being sold electronically via Amazon for display on the MacNetbook Kindle.app?

We should know by the 2009 back to school buying season.

Gordon's 2nd law of happiness

Gordon's 1st law of happiness : "The secret of happiness is ... editing."

Gordon's 2nd law of happiness: "As soon as you're ahead, declare victory."

Good news for the gray of hair

The other day I teased my 7 yo. "What do you mean Dad has gray hair?!" I said for the benefit of a bystander. She replied, "It's not gray, it's gray-white".

So this is good news ...

Well - Unlocking the Secrets of Gray Hair - NYTimes.com

... Notably, scientists haven’t found a link between signs of aging in hair and real aging in the body. A major study of 20,000 men and women in Copenhagen looked for any links between heart-disease mortality and physical signs of aging like gray hair, baldness and facial wrinkles. They found none.

“People with premature graying of the hair don’t die any sooner than anybody else,” said Dr. Leo M. Cooney, professor and chief of geriatrics at Yale University School of Medicine. “I think the study shows that gray hair has something to with your genetics and very little to do with premature aging...

Obama replies to Buffett - change can't wait

Warren Buffett recently complained that the Obama administration is trying to do too many things at once, that they should simply focus on the economy.

This reads like a reply ...

The White House - Blog Post - Taking on Education

In the opening of his speech today at the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the President met critics head on who complain of too much change, too fast:

Every so often, throughout our history, a generation of Americans bears the responsibility of seeing this country through difficult times and protecting the dream of its founding for posterity. This is a responsibility that has fallen to our generation. Meeting it will require steering our nation’s economy through a crisis unlike any we have seen in our time. In the short-term, that means jumpstarting job creation, re-starting lending, and restoring confidence in our markets and our financial system. But it also means taking steps that not only advance our recovery, but lay the foundation for lasting, shared prosperity.

I know there are some who believe we can only handle one challenge at a time. They forget that Lincoln helped lay down the transcontinental railroad, passed the Homestead Act, and created the National Academy of Sciences in the midst of Civil War. Likewise, President Roosevelt didn’t have the luxury of choosing between ending a depression and fighting a war. President Kennedy didn’t have the luxury of choosing between civil rights and sending us to the moon. And we don’t have the luxury of choosing between getting our economy moving now and rebuilding it over the long term.

The Kennedy comparison is unfortunate, maybe he probably should have paid more attention to Vietnam and less to the moon landing.

I trust Obama on this one. Bush and the GOP laid waste to much more than most people imagine. We're on a boat with a thousand leaks, we can't patch them one at a time.

Americans who don't like this should have voted for Al Gore in 2000.

PS. On reflection, I think America is now discovering that they've elected a geeky intellectual who meant what he said. That must be unsettling.