Rainblog

Today Apple released its new iBooks Author software, a free authoring tool to allow writers to create books for iOS devices such as the iPad. Sounds nice, but there’s a little catch hidden (and I do mean hidden) in the EULA. Books - in Apple’s new proprietary format - created using the tool may only be sold through Apple’s iBookstore.

I don’t like proprietary formats and lock-ins. I resist buying books from Amazon because their engineered lock-in forces you to read the books in Amazon’s Kindle software, which isn’t as good as some other e-readers (such as Stanza, which Amazon bought to kill). Given my choice, I’d rather buy books in the open and widely-supported ePub format. I’d like to see everyone follow the lead of O’Reilly, who offer their titles in 4 or 5 formats, unprotected by DRM, and trust in the honesty of their buyers.

I’d hoped that we might move in that direction, and that before long I’d be able to buy books from the vendor of my choice in the format of my choice and read them with the reader of my choice.

Apple, it seems, may have other ideas.  

Stanza's swan song

The popular ebook reader, Stanza, has now been updated for iOS 5, but new owner Amazon says that this is the last update.

I stopped using Stanza, formerly my reader of choice, because it was unusable on iOS 5. In its place, I started to use Apple’s iBooks, which turns out to be a remarkably capable and polished reader. I’m downloading the new Stanza update, but I’m not sure I’ll go back to Stanza.

Like the lady said, “you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone”. iOS 5 seems to signal the end of the line for Lexcycle’s excellent free ebook reader, Stanza. Stanza was mostly solid on iOS 4, but if you run it on iOS 5, it vomits error messages and dies.

There’s not much hope of a fix, because Lexcycle has been acquired by Amazon, who have an e-reader of their own and small interest in developing a competitor. Kindle for iOS is fine in its way, but it’s no Stanza. 

Incidentally, I seem to be running into this purchase-and-kill a lot lately. Another of Amazon’s victims was online music store Amie Street, which Amazon bought up and promptly closed. Similarly, Getty Images has taken over free stock photo site stock.exchange. The site still proclaims itself to be “the leading free stock photo site”, but this is apparently some interesting new meaning of ‘free’ that actually means ‘give us all the money’, because as far as I can tell nothing about the site is free at all. But I digress.

So, no more Stanza. Alternatives that I’ve looked at so far include the Kindle app (free) iBooks (free), the Chinese-made ShuBook (ad-supported, or $1.99 through in-app purchase), Bluefire (free), and GoodReader ($4.99). Two I haven’t tried are i2Reader ($4.99) and MegaReader ($1.99), which both get mixed reviews.

ShuBook fell at the first fence when it choked on the first ePub that I fed it. It’s also designed according to what I think of as a common Chinese aesthetic, which says that something isn’t beautiful until looking at it makes your eyes bleed. Look at a Chinese newspaper sometime and you’ll see what I mean. It’s not just that being an ignorant gweilo I can’t make sense of it, it’s that every morsel of space must be packed with information and, preferably, bright colors as well. So, ShuBook goes.

GoodReader doesn’t do ePub at all (but it stays on my iPod because it does an awesome job of displaying PDFs). Kindle doesn’t like ePub either: I could probably feed it .mobi versions of the books that I’m interested in, but it’s not particularly special as an eBook reader, and it doesn’t have the ability to group books into categories: you end up paging through one long list.

So the two front-runners seem to be Bluefire and, amazingly enough, iBooks. Bluefire does a nice job of displaying eBooks; it’s responsive and crisp, seems stable, and it’s free. You can also download content in-app from Feedbooks (my favorite free bookstore). The downside is that, like the Kindle app, there’s no way to organize books into sets.

iBooks has a strike against it because of its hideous and space-consuming faux bookshelf interface. I assume this was the brainchild of whoever was also responsible for the fake leather travesty imposed on iCal and Address Book in OS X Lion. I don’t know who it was, or why the perfectionist Steve Jobs signed off on these abominations, but they need to go. My hope is that at some point Jony Ive will walk whoever was responsible behind the Apple Store and put a swift, merciful iBullet in them, so Apple can go back to designing interfaces that work, rather than interfaces that oh my God, it looks just like a real bookshelf, isn’t that the cutest thing?

Anyway, despite its ugly UI, iBooks has some real strengths. You can display your books as a relatively unadorned list, hiding most of the nastiness of the fake bookshelf. It handles PDFs, categories, and user-managed collections. Display is quick and crisp. It has bookmarks, table of contents features, direct control over brightness, and search, both within collections and books. Somewhat to my surprise, I’m finding that iBooks may actually be the best alternative to Stanza out there.

So iBooks is going into the coveted spot on my homescreen formerly occupied by Stanza, and Stanza is being removed (forever?) from my iPod. So long, Stanza, and thank you.

Everything old … really old … is new again.

Along with jetpacks and flying cars, one of the staples of early science-fiction was the videophone, usually in the form of a clunky desktop or wall unit. We’re still waiting for a practical jetpack, but here’s my colleague @asonnenberg talking to @jaredklett using FaceTime on iPhone 4. What you can’t see from this photo is that Jared is actually walking in the street: FaceTime - which is wi-fi only - is running over a Verizon MiFi in his pocket.

File under ‘we live in the future’ and take a moment out of your day to be quietly amazed.

Apple’s new amended developer agreement for iPad/iPhone development has been generating lots of talk over the past few days. Everyone has a theory as to why Apple chose to ban third-party development environments, ranging from a grudge match with Adobe, to multi-tasking issues, to a deliberate attempt to make Cory Doctorow’s head explode. OK, I made the last one up. No one’s saying that yet, but we shouldn’t rule it out.

In correspondence with Greg Slepak, Steve Jobs essentially gives his papal blessing to the theory put forward by John Gruber, which hints that while there’s some truth in the official line that cross-platform tools deliver inferior user experiences, it’s really about Apple maintaining a lock on the market. A market where developers can target a meta-platform over and above Apple’s mobile devices is one that Apple can’t control. That’s a threat to Apple’s business model so they’ve seized the chance to try and cripple the meta-platform from the outset.

Even without Jobs’s endorsement, it’s clear that Gruber’s probably right, but he doesn’t spell out all the implications. Apple’s move doesn’t just target the meta-platform; it also targets competing platforms, such as Android.

Consider a world where cross-platform tools such as those offered by Adobe were permitted by the Apple SDK agreement. If you’re developer X, you build your application using those tools, and release it for all the possible mobile platforms simultaneously. Now Apple’s mobile platform is just another platform. Sure, developer X’s shiny new application is available on iPhone, but it’s also available on Android and who knows what else. There’s no compelling reason to choose an iPhone if you want to run developer X’s new app.

The problem gets worse if Apple allows cross-platform tools in principle, but rejects apps submitted if they don’t measure up to their expectations of quality (which would be the case if Apple were serious about rejecting cross-platform tools in order to guarantee the best possible user experience). Developer X submits their new killer app, and Apple rejects it because the scroll bars work the wrong way or it doesn’t multi-task nicely. Developer X shrugs and says “At least I can sell it on the other platforms.” Now the killer app is available on rival platforms … but not on Apple’s. That’s a disaster from Apple’s point of view.

Developers have limited cycles. If they can use a cross-platform tool, then putting in so many man-hours of work will let them target all the platforms supported by the tool. But if Apple won’t let them use a cross-platform tool, then the man-hours needed to bring a product to market on all the platforms just doubled: they need to develop and test on Apple’s environment, and on the cross-platform tool. If the developer can’t afford to make that investment, they need to make a choice: develop for Apple’s platform, or for the other guy’s?

What Apple is counting on is that they currently have the most attractive platform. If developers have to choose to target only one, Apple hopes that it will be the iPad/iPhone. That can also become self-reinforcing: if more and better apps are available for Apple’s platform, the platform becomes more attractive. If developers have more experience working with Apple’s tools, they’ll be less likely to develop for other platforms using other tools. Apple is trying to use its early lead and Section 3.3.1 to starve the competition.

This isn’t about Adobe. They’re just collateral damage. What’s really at stake is dominance of the mobile platform, and Apple is using everything in its toolbox to ensure that it, and no one else, comes out on top.

Apple doesn’t want to be first among equals. Apple wants to be first. Period.

Our office is full of iPads, but it looks as if for one new owner the honeymoon is already over. Our sales director would really like to take a Keynote presentation from his desktop to his iPad (where he has an iPad version of Keynote), but the iPad doesn’t want to make it easy for him. And the language he’s been using is terrifying.

Apple’s suggested methods for getting a file off your desktop and onto the device apparently include “mailing it to yourself”, “putting it on a website”, and using iTunes file-sharing. The first two options smack of desperation. As for the last one, if you’re the kind of person who says “I need to move this file from here to there, so naturally I’ll use my music player software”, your mind must work in a very strange way.

For a company that prides itself on design and usability, Apple has some strange blind spots. I’ve written before about the bizarre issues involved in syncing an iPod, where every application ends up inventing its own method for sharing data with the desktop. The fact that the iPad launched without a good, transparent way of moving data between the desktop and the device is odd enough, but it may even be a deliberate choice. Apple recently went after the makers of the ebook reading software Stanza and GoodReader, forcing them to change their apps so that they could no longer browse the device’s filesystem for content transferred there using a USB sync utility.

It’s still not clear why Apple insisted on the change. The official statement says that Stanza violated the developer agreement by using private APIs. Insisting that developers use only public APIs is fair enough, but Apple could easily have made the filesystem accessible through a public API. If they don’t, is it because unrestricted filesystem access might permit piracy or does Apple feel that users need to be shielded at any cost from the mind-destroying horror that is a modern hierarchical filesystem? Has Apple chosen not to simplify moving content between devices as a matter of policy, or is it because they haven’t yet found a good, user-friendly way to manage the process?

During my time at Sony, I once saw an informal demo by Jun Rekimoto, a man who probably comes up with a dozen brilliant UI solutions before breakfast every day. At one point in the demo, he showed how to transfer a file between two computers by tapping on the screen of one with a lightpen, then walking across the room and tapping on the screen of the second. Of course the file wasn’t really “in” the lightpen; the transfer took place across the network, and the business with the lightpen was largely sleight of hand. But it was also a brilliantly simple metaphor that was instantly understandable. You pick up the file here, you put it down over there.

Apple needs to get over whatever odd scruples are holding them back and make data transfer between devices work like that. You need to be able to walk up to your desktop machine with your iPad or your iPhone in hand, and move files between the two with a single, simple motion. The whole business should just work - like Jun’s demo, and like everything else on the iPad - with a simplicity and obviousness that could easily be mistaken for magic.

But in the meantime, I’m afraid you’re going to need to keep mailing files to yourself. 

One of the things that used to drive me crazy about working on Windows boxes was that there were so many different ways to do the same operation. In most applications, copy and paste was done with control keys: Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V. But the indispensable putty followed the X-Windows model: left-click copies, right-click pastes. The equally useful Trillian used a hybrid; left-click copies, Ctrl-V pastes. And I never did quite figure out how to copy and paste in DOS boxes, but I think it involved the entrails of a chicken and a signed authorization from the Pope.

Any time you find yourself doing the same basic operation four different ways, something’s broken.

Which brings me to the iPod/iPhone.

I finally cracked and bought myself an iPod Touch, as a replacement for the elderly Palm Zire 71 that I’ve been carrying everywhere for the last six years. The Zire, incidentally, still works fine, but for a variety of reasons I felt it was time to move on. I’m now in what you might call the ‘honeymoon period’ with the Touch, if by ‘honeymoon period’ you mean the span of weeks in which you discover that your new bride is an incredibly flexible contortionist who has read every page of The Perfumed Garden, but also smokes foul-smelling cigars in bed and wakes up at four every morning to sing baritone arias from German operas at the top of her voice. In short, there’s good news and bad.

One of the glorious things about the Palm was the ease of syncing the device with your desktop. You sat it on its cradle, you pushed the button, it ground away rather slowly, and you were done. There were quirks but, by and large, Palm really delivered on the promise of no-brainer bidirectional syncing.

The iPod is a different story. To coin a phrase, “how may I sync thee, let me count the ways”.

Generally, syncing data from Apple’s built-in applications - Address Book, Calendar etc - is simple. You hook up the iPod, and iTunes syncs things for you. It’s when we move on to third-party apps that the insanity kicks in.

Two apps that I added to my iPod immediately were SplashID and SplashMoney. I’ve used them so long on the Palm that there was no question that I’d buy the iPhone versions when I made the switch. They both sync wirelessly with the desktop: you start the desktop app, then open the corresponding app on the iPhone and press the sync icon. Pretty straightforward.

I also knew that I wanted OmniFocus on my iPod. I’ve been using it on the desktop for a while, so the idea of seamlessly syncing to-do lists to a portable device was very appealing. OmniFocus actually offers a bunch of ways to sync. You can do it in the cloud, through MobileMe or WebDAV or you can do it over wi-fi in the same way as the Splash apps: the desktop app runs as a server, and the iPhone app connects to it.

I’m an outline junkie, so I had to have an outliner. Until Omni Group delivers OmniOutliner for the iPhone, the best game in town looks to be CarbonFin. The way you sync with the CarbonFin iPhone app is as follows: you sign up for their Outliner Online website, which lets you upload outlines from your desktop in OPML format. When you hit the sync button on the mobile device, it pulls your outlines down from the web. A bit clunky, but it works.

A few weeks back Hog Bay Software were giving away copies of WriteRoom for free, so naturally I grabbed a copy. Like CarbonFin, WriteRoom offers a website-based syncing method, with the interesting quirk that you actually use your Google username and password to log in. It also offers syncing over a local wi-fi network. In this case the iPhone app acts as a server, and you use Safari on the desktop to connect to it. My first thought when I realized this was “Awesome, my mobile device is running a web server.” My second was “Wait, what the fuck?”

GoodReader uses a similar mobile-device-as-server model. It also offers direct web download. And it supports USB-based sync, using a separate desktop application that you have to download from a partner site. Most of these methods are more or less straightforward, but each one is presented and documented in its own way.

Finally, there’s Kindle for iPhone, which uses something called WhisperSync, Amazon’s proprietary name for what appears to be another web-based syncing model. Amazon figures you don’t need to know the details and they’re right, but it’s a little unnerving because you don’t know exactly what it’s doing and when. Is this book on my device, or is in the cloud? Amazon thinks you shouldn’t need to know or care, which is fine if you live in a world of permanent ubiquitous connectivity, but may prove problematic in real life.

So, half a dozen apps, a dozen ways of doing things. And here’s the real kicker: remember that one-touch sync that Palm had? You can forget about that. To sync my new iPod, I need to start iTunes and SplashID and SplashMoney and OmniFocus on the desktop, fool around on a couple of websites, and then run all the corresponding iPod apps, one after the other. As the man said, this ain’t rock’n’roll, this is genocide.

In an ideal world, there would be one method by which all apps (including third-party apps) could sync their data over USB, one method by which all apps could sync data over wi-fi, and one method by which all apps could sync data through the cloud (Apple would want to make this MobileMe, I would want it to be possible to use a private WebDAV server instead). Instead of having to manage each app individually, there would be a single uniform interface where the user could kick off a synchronization. But in bizarro iPod world, everyone is free - or obliged - to invent their own way of doing things. The result is anarchy.

My feeling is that Apple dropped the ball on this one. I haven’t read the developer documentation, but the sheer number of different approaches taken by the third-party developers argues that they never offered the necessary underpinnings that would allow uniform solutions. For a company that has long prided itself on promoting ease of use by design, that’s a pretty grievous failure.

Suddenly, the Windows copy-and-paste clusterfuck seems modest by comparison.

Among the generally lacklustre announcements from Phil Schiller’s keynote speech at Macworld, Apple is introducing a three-tier price system for iTunes. If he goes on to announce a two-button mouse, we’ll know that Steve Jobs really is dead.