The PlayBook itself is much nicer than I’d expected. RIM knew how to create a nice OS and a nice tablet, at least. In particular, it doesn’t feel cheap. My HP Touchpad suffered from creaky plastic, it felt cheap, but the PlayBook avoids this. The device has a back coated in some rubber-ish material which makes it pleasant to hold. The power button, despite what reviews have said about difficulty using it, seemed easy enough to press. Overall, it’s a very nice piece of hardware and remarkably comfortable in the hand.

The only complaint I have about the device itself is its bezel: RIM printed “BlackBerry” across the bezel. If I pick up the device and hold it at any orientation other than the text’s, it looks stupid. The iPad benefits here from having really no markings on its front aside from the home button, and that doesn’t demand a proper orientation. If I pick up my iPad and start to use it upside down, the screen will reorient itself. It doesn’t look stupid, it just works. It accommodates the user. I’m not sure why RIM feels it must remind the user they’re holding a BlackBerry device, but, again, it looks stupid.

The PlayBook ships with a number of apps and their quality varies, which I expect. Most apps are reasonably nice, but slow. I just expect scroll lag in non-iOS software now. webOS suffers from it, Android suffers from it, and QNX, the PlayBook’s OS, suffers from it. It’s especially noticeable, of all places, in App World, RIM’s app store. When I attempt to scroll through applications in App World, it stutters through a small list of applications, frustrating me. This is curious, but I assume it’s a side-effect of certain applications using either Adobe AIR or WebWorks (essentially HTML/JS apps). AIR apps all seem to suffer performance issues. I haven’t seen many WebWorks apps, but I assume they suffer the same — browser performance on these devices just isn’t there. The iOS can’t handle it, and my own little tests with WebWorks seem to show the PlayBook can’t either. Maybe future browsers and devices will make web apps appear equal to native apps, but until then it’s a bad idea.

This presented a problem for me when I decided to look at how a developer might make a fairly normal GUI app. Currently, you have two options: Adobe AIR and WebWorks. Again, these suffer from performance issues. The WebWorks route is simple, but RIM offers developers very little assistance. There is no usable GUI framework via JavaScript. You’re very much on your own there, which is fair enough for web apps, but makes it difficult to create apps that fit in with the rest of the OS.

AIR offers a GUI framework of sorts, but the performance issues are so frustrating that I can’t imagine subjecting a user to them (and yet RIM has done just that). In addition to that, I find the entire development process for AIR apps frustrating. While WebWorks keeps the process simple, AIR seems built only for developers using Adobe’s wonderfully overpriced software rather than command-line tools. So, if you’re not willing to pay anywhere from $250 the $700 USD, you might as well ignore AIR altogether.

Your third option² for app development is the NDK: C and C++, not much else. You get your common libraries for these devices, including OpenGL, APIs for the OS and its windowing system, and other expected libraries. That’s about it. This should change with the next version of the OS, apparently BlackBerry 10, as RIM introduces Qt and Cascades, the latter a framework used by The Astonishing Tribe (TAT). To put into perspective how important that last bit is, let me just say that the applications that seem most apparently built by TAT are also those that never experience lag. Never. Their apps, however, are also about as useful as toys, so make of that what you will. Currently, however, Cascades and Qt are not exactly ready. You can demo them now, but I don’t imagine you’ll make a PlayBook app using either.

The NDK, despite its lack of a GUI framework, is actually the nicest of the three options for application development. Game developers in particular seem pretty well off here. RIM provides some utility code to create an EGL context, render text, handle orientation changes, and so on. It’s not much, but it reduces the amount of code one has to write. Additionally, one can inspect the code to see that it’s not doing anything funny and otherwise just learn how RIM expects developers to handle things. I think RIM knew what they were doing here, so it’s a shame that they didn’t put more into it. AIR and WebWorks are, by comparison, garbage. AIR in particular offers the most tortuous route to application development. WebWorks is nice but it’s too early to view HTML apps as competitive with native apps. For someone like me, the NDK is really the only good option for PlayBook development.

I’ll probably continue writing some posts about this, but this should serve as a sort of introductory post for future writing on the PlayBook. If there’s something in particular someone is curious about, I’ll be glad to divert some focus to that as well. Personally, I’d rather write about development, so now that my semester is over and I have a summer’s worth of time to do some work, I’ll try to offer some sort of commentary on development for the PlayBook and other devices.

Now count the number that don’t suck.

A Handy Table of Contents

1. What Is OakTree?
2. What’s Wrong with WordPress?
3. What’s Wrong with <Other Tool>?
4. Does Spifftastic Use OakTree?

What Is OakTree?

I cover this in the README for OakTree, but it is essentially a tool to generate a static HTML blog. It takes in a series of posts and spits out the blog. It is very simple to use, seeing as there are a grand total of four commands you use to interact with the blog via the oak tool: init, newpost, sync, and rebuild. The last two are the same thing with a minor difference, so it’s actually much closer to three commands.

An OakTree blog is comprised of two things: templates and posts. Posts are stored in a source/ directory, templates in a templates/ directory under the blog’s root, and the generated content under public/. Posts are Markdown files with a bit of metadata at the top to store a post’s title and time (in case you want to, say, publish something with a future date). Templates are written using the wonderful Mustache, so it’s very simple and very easy to get things working.

To start a blog you run oak init in some folder or other and your blog is generated. This produces a blog_spec file with some data about the blog you’ll need to customize, as well as source/, public/, and template/ directories. The template directory comes with a basic blog.mustache template file that you can then customize to whatever ends you like. It’s actually not that bad of a starting template if you like barebones sites. After that, you create some posts and run oak sync (or oak rebuild, if you’ve modified templates or something looks off, to regenerate the entire site).

Like I said above, this is simple. OakTree is not trying to do everything, it’s just trying to do what I want in a way that’s easy for me to use. It’s slightly git-ish, though far less sophisticated and probably nowhere near as fast. The important thing to remember is that OakTree is made specifically to do one thing: generate a blog. It doesn’t run a preview server, it doesn’t monitor your filesystem, and it doesn’t do much of anything sophisticated. It’s dumb and predictable and I like it that way.

One minor note: OakTree is a Ruby gem. It is written entirely in Ruby because that seemed like the easiest way to get things running. Turns out I was right, Ruby is the easiest way to get things running. I don’t really want to focus on how OakTree is implemented or what language it uses because it doesn’t matter and nobody gives a shit. It might be important to anyone who attempts to use it for their own site and decides they want, say, post categories. They’ll have to dig through the Ruby and prod me with questions to do that, but it’s really not important.

What’s Wrong with WordPress?

Though there’s nothing particularly wrong with WordPress, it tends to lean on the overkill side of things. WordPress tries to be everything to everyone, it is the universal blogging tool of blogging tools. This is nice and it shows a great deal of care on Automattic’s part, but this also means I’m stuck customizing a tool to fit my needs.

Take link posts for an example of a feature not built into WordPress – these are currently a hack sitting on top of the OakTree theme and rely on custom fields in posts. Just getting them working was a pain in the neck, and they’re still not quite right. OakTree does them exactly how I need them, and doesn’t require using filter/action hooks to make things work.

After that, we have databases and gigantic amounts of code that I know nothing about. How long would it take to familiarize myself with WordPress’s source code? Probably longer than I care to spend. Additionally, working with a database means I have to keep backups of two separate parts of my site, and having done this a couple times already (switching hosts and whatnot), I know I don’t want to deal with restoring from a backup again. It’s not very fun. Overall, it just means there’s more I have to concern myself with, and I would much rather not think about how my site works (strange as that sounds).

OakTree as a result is static HTML. There’s no database, no admin page, no configuration files on the server, nothing other than site content. It’s very convenient. It’s not particularly clean, considering it makes a mess of the filesystem, but the way the resulting blog is structured works well enough that it’s not terrifying either. I imagine it’s very rsync-friendly.

What’s Wrong with <Other Tool>?

I looked at a few other tools before starting this. One was Octopress, which I believe I heard about by way of Matt Gemmell. It’s a pretty nice system, and I’d recommend folks check it out just because it’s quite neat. Problem is that it’s also very large, and I don’t quite know what’s going on in it, and customizing it looked like it was going to be more trouble than it’s worth. So I’m not using Octopress. I had a hard enough time installing it in the first place, so I just don’t want to work with something that I don’t fully understand. Further, Octopress uses Jekyll which in turn uses Liquid. Liquid is not fun. I’d much rather have a mustache than diarrhea, however that goes. That’s not an objective opinion, by the way – I just plain don’t like Liquid.

Movable Type is another nice tool¹ that’s far too large and menacing for me to wrap my head around. It seems to require a database, but may not use it to provide content — just for working on the blog, so that’s a plus. It’s a nice trade-off. That said, it didn’t get rid of the database, so I’m not entirely comfortable using it. I’ll also reiterate the “far too large” comment: Movable Type is an old (sort of) tool, and that usually means there’s a lot under the hood. I’m not interested in figuring out how to work with it (which is obviously a failing on my part), so it’s off the list.

There are probably some other tools out there I looked at but dismissed just because they disagreed with me in some way or other. Overall, my needs were so simple that it made more sense to just write a quick tool to do this myself.

Does Spifftastic Use OakTree?

Ha, no, of course not. See, there’s a problem: I have to move everything from the database to source files. In addition, I have to convert my WordPress theme over to OakTree (this is the best way I can think to word this other than “I have to port OakTree to OakTree”). OakTree isn’t finished either – it still needs support for RSS feed generation (which I imagine is fairly simple compared to the rest of the project). The process of moving Spifftastic from WordPress to OakTree will be very slow, but it’s inevitable.

I did not expect to find a human-powered, systematic, months-long, fraudulent (falsely claiming to be collaborating with us, and worse) attempt to undermine our business, being perpetrated from call centres on 2 continents.

Stefan’s evidence is damning, to say the least, especially when the address accessing their databases comes directly from Google. I’m not sure that Google proper (as in Mountain View) would have approved this, but from their recent changes to search, it’s hard to say what they might be doing anymore. Perhaps they’ve just instated a new motto: “Do no good.”

Honestly, though, I don’t believe this is known within Google, at least not outside of some corrupt group.²  The lack of technical prowess (“human-powered”) about the operation is strange for Google, given its tendency to over-engineer its way out of all situations. Where’s the MapReduce or the AI callers with synthesized voices?³ As much as I would love to believe this goes all the way up through Google, this sounds like something a small group wanted kept under wraps – it’s still pretty damned awful, but no reason to break out the tin foil hats.

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Powerline is a Vim plugin by Kim Silkebækken “which allows you to create better-looking, more functional vim statuslines.” Basically, it makes your status line easier to read and look awesome. Installation is pretty simple if you use either Pathogen or Vundler (I prefer Pathogen), but it does require some custom fonts to get the full fanciness effect. Powerline comes with a patcher to patch existing fonts, but there are some pre-patched fonts kindly provided by Nick Quaranto over in a gist, including Menlo.

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Apple, for all the shit they get for being “closed” and “evil”, has actually done far more to wrestle control back from the carriers and put it into the hands of consumers. Google set off to help in this goal, then stabbed us all in the back and went the complete other way, to the side of the carriers. And because they smiled the entire time they were doing it and fed us this “open” bullshit, we thanked them for it. We’re still thanking them for it!

I’d never really looked at Google’s behavior in this way, even after they’d aligned with Verizon. I’d kept tabs on the situation, but this way of viewing it hadn’t crossed my mind. Siegler raises a lot of interesting points that, frankly, have me looking twice at Google’s behavior lately.

As far as I’m concerned, much of Siegler’s article comes across as very conspiracy theory-ish, which rubs me the wrong way and immediately raises a bullshit alarm in my head. That said, considering Google’s behavior just recently, it does seem that they’re going a bit far just to become (even more) dominant. It’s strange, smells funny, and really comes across as disingenuous. Twitter also seems to agree, if their statement, sent to Siegler, is any indication. At any rate, his article’s worth the read, especially if you (like me) tend to read Siegler as being particularly, and perhaps at times annoyingly, pro-Apple, as it offers an interesting way to see Google and Android.²

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So, this brings me to Phraseology, a relatively new app by Agile Tortoise. Phraseology is like most other editors until you get to its awesome revision tools — tools that I never thought I wanted or needed, and which are now causing me no end of grumbling when I do any writing elsewhere. It set itself apart by being uniquely useful when other editors were content to just edit and synchronize documents. Although Phraseology is great for just writing, its main strength is in revision, when you pull out the Arrange and Inspect tools to tear apart your writing. These instruments make it unique among iOS writing apps, as they allow you to easily rearrange your paragraphs to control flow and analyze your text, identify commonly used words based on their word class (e.g., verb, noun, determiner, and others), and see how your document measures on various scales, such as the Gunning fog score.¹ This allows you to revise your writing far better than similar tools.

It bears mentioning that support for iCloud or Dropbox is not available, though the former wouldn’t be very useful without an accompanying iPhone or Mac OS application. The lack of Dropbox is a ding against the app, but depending on how often you transfer documents between devices, this may not be as important. At the very least, it is not difficult to email your documents to yourself or synchronize using another app, as awkward as it sounds. That said, Agile Tortoise has stated that Dropbox support is coming.

In addition to the other tools, there is one optional tool that you get only by purchasing Terminology, another Agile Tortoise app: built-in thesaurus support. Terminology acts as a dictionary and thesaurus, and includes a variety of sources for most words (excluding neologisms or other uncommon words²). By owning Terminology, you can select a word in Phraseology and look it up, and, if you want, replace it with another word without having to manually copy text back and forth between the two apps. The integration between the two works well, and I personally think it’s a nice touch. So, if you really want a thesaurus that the app supports, it’s worth the extra few dollars (at the time of this writing, it is $2.99 USD). If you always have a dictionary and thesaurus on hand, you may not need it. Again, it’s an optional purchase, so it comes down to your needs.

Phraseology’s offerings are much more beneficial to writers when compared to its peers, which often focus on document presentation, no longer special synchronization or markup formats, or a lack of user interface or features (Phraseology’s user interface keeps well out of your way, resulting in only a slim toolbar on the left side of the screen, so depending on how little UI you want to see, this may or may not be a problem). Phraseology is an app that is suitable for writing more than just first drafts or page layout (which Phraseology cannot do), and is most useful during the most important and difficult stage of writing: revision.

So, I obviously like it. The lack of Dropbox support is disappointing, but given that it is planned, I see little reason to concern myself with it when I have not found any other writing apps that provide tools better than Phraseology. The additional Markdown support is useful, as I write all drafts using it, so that is a benefit for those who do the same. If you require a dark or nighttime display mode for your editors, Phraseology does not currently offer one. Similarly, the font choices are limited, and there are only two ways to organize documents: a main documents list and the “archive.” I bring these up only because they can be deal-breakers for some. Organization doesn’t benefit me as much as it may benefit others, and some people may need white text on a black background to get into their writing.³

Overall, Phraseology is the most useful writing tool I have, even considering those available on Mac OS. Its tools may not be useful for everyone, especially depending on how much you use your iPad for writing, but they are very good at what they do, which is helping you improve your writing. So, I recommend buying it, since I’ve personally gotten a lot of use out of it, but the important thing is that you look at how you write and decide if it can help you.

I initially just wrote this to post on the iTunes app store entry for Phraseology, but it got kind of long. So, iTunes got a slightly shorter version, and what you see here is closer to how I intended the review to read. I do think it’s strange that I wrote roughly 1,200 words just because I like Phraseology, though.

Spifftastic

I more or less revived and partly revised Spifftastic early on this year. I was concerned spam bots would pull my content from RSS feeds, using it to make their spam sites look legitimate, but that’s no longer on my mind. It’s a pointless fight, and anyone duped by a spam site probably isn’t interested in my writing anyway. Instead, the new focus was purely on readability. I wanted a site that I would be comfortable reading, one that didn’t hurt my eyes, and one that focused entirely on my writing instead of a Twitter sidebar or advertising or millions of distractions. Daring Fireball and Marco Arment, whose sites I consider to be extremely readable,² were my primary inspiration when it came to the new design, so kudos to them for having the sense to care about readability. So, while it’s still a work in progress, I’m actually fairly happy with where Spifftastic is now.

Unfortunately, I’ve been incredibly bad about actually writing on here. There are a vast swath of excuses I could pull from to say that I was too busy, but I’m sure if I wanted to I could do this daily. This might change in 2012, but I don’t know and I won’t make any silly promises either to myself or others regarding update frequency. At the very least, I want to make sure that I never feel like I’m obligated to stick to a particular topic or theme as many writers seem to believe they should. If I focused my writing only on a small subset of the world, for one, it would limit me, and for two, it would bore everyone (myself included). Instead, I’ll just do what I can and write whatever I need to write.

Android & Ascension

This is a small point for 2011, but Ascension is mostly dead in terms of sales. It’s not much of a surprise to me, and hopefully not to anyone else, but I’ve been uncomfortable with updating it and it has otherwise stagnated. There are certainly other live wallpapers out there, though I don’t know how many offer the same level of configuration as Ascension. The biggest obstacles to updating Ascension, and really producing anything for Android anymore, are, firstly, that I no longer use an Android phone (and indeed cannot afford one just for testing), having since switched to an iPhone 4S, and secondly, I frankly dislike developing for Android.

The former obstacle is one of the absurd high points of the year, as strange as it is to say that. I now use an iPhone 4S, and I really am stupidly happy with it. Android, for all its niceties (and there are plenty to go around), has some serious problems when it comes to updates and stability. Furthermore, to those who would suggest rooting phones to get updates, I find that to be unacceptable. These are phones for people who should not need to hack their devices to make them work as desired. It’s disgusting, to me, that anyone would suggest purchasing a device that initially makes one unhappy, but think it’s OK because you can void the warranty by replacing the lousy software. It’s a solution that should never need to exist.³

The latter, that I dislike developing for Android, is harder to diagnose. Many different problems culminated in my ending irritation with Android development. This includes the slow emulator (this is the only way I can reasonably test view layouts on differing screen sizes), fragmentation in general (i.e., hardware and software fragmentation), Google’s poor response to fragmentation,⁴ the lack of updates to existing devices, and my disliking Java.⁵ By all accounts, developing for iOS is far better simply due to the APIs that Apple provides, Xcode’s support for almost all things Apple (complain about Xcode as much as you want, it is eons ahead of the corpulent Eclipse), and the wide-ranging documentation on most topics (this is hit or miss, but my experience has shown that Apple’s documentation for both Mac OS and iOS APIs is far clearer). As a result of the two obstacles, I focus primarily on Mac OS and iOS, both of which make me far happier than the competition, both in my using and developing for them.

The Fabled Degree

As I mentioned above, I’ve continued as usual toward getting my English degree from Boise State University (best known for its windy campus and garish blue football field, probably). So far, that’s been going well, despite driving me to the edges of my sanity and patience. My instructors have all given me a lot of freedom to do what I want in their courses, typically by leaving assignments wide open and encouraging experimentation. I’ve never been a fan of rigid assignments and I appreciate anyone who tosses the tired old pedagogical approach to education, so I can’t stress enough that the instructors I’ve had at Boise State University have been incredibly good to me (and other students) by giving us that freedom to do as we please.

There are two important points to my education this year: I discovered I greatly enjoy writing non-fiction and I launched [nc]oetry, my poetry blog. Both of these are going to be rather important down the road, especially as it pertains to both my education and my writing. In addition, they both probably offer a closer look into what my education has wrought upon my tiny brain so far.

The former is by far the most important, though I suppose it’s not very surprising in retrospect. Much of my writing has been non-fiction to begin with, though I often felt that fiction was where I had to be — creating worlds (or expanding on this one), characters, and entire weaves of history are all interesting, but there is something fundamentally cool about being able to say what I wrote is real. Non-fiction has the allure of being true (at least for the most part), something that actually happened, will happen, or even just something crazy that someone actually thought and is now being seen in a new light. So, that connection to reality intrigues me, even if it is frankly very dull when one thinks about it.

The latter is, as far as I’m concerned, fairly unimportant. It reflects one decision though: to consistently write poetry. I update it weekly, every weekend (either Saturday or Sunday — I decided that this week that Saturday gets the retrospective to close 2011, while Sunday gets the poem to open 2012), with either a new poem or a revised copy of an existing poem, though I have not yet provided any new revisions to already-posted poetry. This started out as one of the aforementioned wide-open assignments for a course, and has ended up as something that I care quite a bit about. It will, ultimately, be one of my long-term projects. Whether it results in something greater than itself has yet to be seen, but I have a number of plans for it that should keep it interesting well through 2012.

Going Forward

This is going to be the short schism where I look forward to something or other. Very short, really, because I dislike the idea of setting up expectations for the future.

First off, I can only hope the Stop Online Piracy Act dies in a fiery wreck and takes its supporters with it. The people and businesses behind it deserve nothing less than immolation. Though many of them cannot be affected due to their position in the world (which one would think should preclude them from having any say, as they might as well be holding a gun to our collective skulls), I believe it is in everyone’s best interest to ruin those that can be affected. I hope the Todd Wassermans of this world finally understand why these companies cannot be trusted, even if they cease to support such terrible acts.

As mentioned above, I hope I get my act together and write more overall, though preferably in some way that would actually get me an income (Spifftastic, unfortunately, has little chance of making me even a single cent, especially given how much I loathe advertising). Unfortunately, that last little detail will likely make my life a living hell going forward. English majors, and likely others with similarly frowned-upon degrees, are probably in for a rough ride in the coming years, though that may have always been the case. The uncertainty I face as a would-be writer is, admittedly, very troubling at times, but I don’t feel like this is ever anything more than a mild concern. Like most humans, I’m fairly adaptable – I’m not required to suffer any particular path when there are many others available to us all.

I plan to continue working on my various personal projects in the hope that one of them will at some point show enough merit that it can go beyond the experimental phase. Most of them die out during that period due to some enormous hole I failed to consider, unfortunately. In particular, I will continue working on my little game (which I haven’t actually mentioned before, as far as I know) until I either go insane or complete it. It’s hard to say exactly what I want to do with my projects, however, so I really just want to have enough time to work on them.

So, that’s it. I hope you don’t have any regrets about this past year, because that’s a waste of your time. Enjoy the new year.

Go Daddy runs horrible, sexist Super Bowl ads. PETA members and others who think animals should be treated kindly are fully justified in canceling their Go Daddy accounts because of founder Bob Parsons’s elephant shooting this past spring.

We now already know that Go Daddy is sexist and that Bob Parsons thinks shooting elephants is fun. These two are both pretty awful, though the former is something many companies are guilty of in crafting their advertisements.¹ The latter is also inexcusable, and I can’t imagine why Mr. Parsons needs to kill elephants. There is simply no good reason for it, as he doesn’t need an elephant for food or any other resources, and there’s no reason for him to be in a position to shoot elephants. So, we have two strikes against Go Daddy.

That said, these weren’t enough to get most people on board with destroying Go Daddy. What it really took was an enormous third strike: supporting SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act (that would, ironically, harm everyone but pirates). Following the backlash from their supporting SOPA, Go Daddy did a heel turn and rescinded their support in the wake of many pledging to and following through on transferring away from Go Daddy to another domain registrar. Despite the unsurprising change of heart, it is safe to assume that many still loathe Go Daddy, and Wasserman doesn’t get it:

What’s troubling . . . is the anger against the company for not fully internalizing the opposition to SOPA. It seems as if nothing short of a North Korean-style show of emotion will convince Go Daddy haters at this point and that’s just weird.

The problem is that Go Daddy started out supporting SOPA. They can change their stance, but the fact is that the change reeks of bullshit: they’ve only done it to appease those who believe Go Daddy’s change is good enough (in other words, the Wassermans of the world). So while Go Daddy may have rescinded its support after shooting off a leg and wrecking its reputation, at the core, they are the same Go Daddy. Their support for SOPA showed a clear disinterest in their customers and the Internet in general, broke any trust that many may have had with Go Daddy, and that is why Go Daddy has to burn.

Much of the work contained on [nc]oetry is still in its early stages and hasn’t seen much revision, and there is also the chance first drafts will pop up on there (though I try to at least revise things a few times before throwing them up, as my first drafts are almost always garbage). This also means that I will probably post future revisions of already-posted poems, meaning you can see how things change over time and I might take a moment to explain why I made a change, even if it’s usually just based on how I see a poem after a fair amount of time.

I don’t know where [nc]oetry will go down the road, but I intend to keep it up for as long as I can since it gives me further motivation to continue working on poetry in addition to long-form writing.¹ It may eventually merge into Spifftastic, though probably as a separate blog (i.e., poetry.spifftastic.net or something along those lines). Another possibility would be to replace it with a blog where multiple authors contribute poetry and writing on poetry on a semi-regular basis, but that’s a long ways off. Ultimately, there are a lot of places this could go.