Raving and Drooling – A lion’s tail

Steve Jobs. 1977

“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do”

Apple announced it on their website like this:

It was first announced on Twitter at 9:38am AEST.

Bye Steve, you will be missed.

Last year, Steve Jobs said he wasn’t going to work full time at Apple. He was becoming a “background CEO” and would continue to work from home. We knew what that meant.

Today, he stepped down as CEO, marking the end of an era as the head of the most profitable and successful company on the planet. We know what that means too.

Steve is dying. Rapidly, I suspect. I would not be surprised if Steve does not see the light of 2014. If he does, it’s likely he will be a ghastly, dying skeleton of a man. He’s trying to limit the public impact on Apple. He doesn’t want the headlines to scream “Head of Apple dies today”. He wants to minimise the impact on his great company by slowly withdrawing.

We know Steve doesn’t want to leave. He is passionate about Apple. The company is more important to him now than ever before. Only a few decades ago, Apple almost disappeared. Steve got thrown out as CEO due to his crazy, intense management style and went off to found Pixar and NeXT. But Apple did not flourish without him. It fell into ruin and almost went bankrupt.

When Steve returned, he came back as an “interim CEO”, paying himself only $1 a year. He picked up the pieces of Apple and told everyone he could turn the company around. For many years he tried, and their computers gained some success. The G3 iMac was considered a revolution even though there was nothing specifically remarkable other than it was another “all in one” computer and that it came in a range of colours. But that in itself was revolutionary. “Computers can come in colours other than black or beige ? Amazing”

Then he brought out the iPod. People took notice and said “What’s this thing ? This is ok”. Many people denounced it as nothing special or a waste of time, but people ran out in droves to buy it. If anything ever kickstarted the digital music era, it was the iPod. There were many imitators, but the iPod reigned supreme and within a few years you simply could not walk down the street without seeing one on every jogger, every young kid, and even every elderly woman.

People said “Make a phone, Steve. Make a phone”. The market was dominated by Nokia and Motorolla. There was no room for Apple. How could Apple possibly compete with these giants of the industry ? Oh really ? You underestimate Apple ? They gave us the iPhone and the whole world went “HOLY SHIT STEVE !” It turned the phone industry on its head and suddenly EVERYONE wanted one. Nokia went from owning some 65% of the “smartphone” market to owning less than 10%. Apple destroyed them. Motorolla just gave up and pulled out of that market.

Apple not only won that battle, but without even trying, they forced their competitors to throw up their hands and say “Sorry, we can’t compete with Apple. They just did it too well. Everyone wants their product”.

Everyone who knew the infamous “Newton” tablet, released 20 years too early to be successful was holding their breath thinking “Please Steve, release a tablet. Now is the time. The world is ready. Release another tablet”. Critics said “Tablets are useless. Noone wants that crap. It was a failure before and it will be a failure now”.

He released the iPad and forever changed the computing industry. Within a couple of years, the iPad became the single most desirable Christmas present for the 8-12 year old demographic and you would see both teenagers and 70 year old women toting one around, pulling them out and emailing over dinner like it was nothing. Suddenly we were all connected wherever we were and it was trivial to bring up a web page or send an email over dinner.

Steve Jobs changed the world, not once, or twice, but many times. He virtually created the mp3 industry. He showed us how powerful a phone could be. He put the internet into the hands of every average person.

Everyone wanted Steve on their side. He was Google’s number one choice for their CEO, but he had bigger ambitions. I bet if they could have, Microsoft would have brought him on board and said “Please, bring your charisma and innovation to our company and make people love us”. But Steve has a company. He created Apple, and Apple changed the world.

So thank you Steve. I would love to think that you will be around for years to come and I certainly won’t be surprised if your give us another revolutionary invention that will change our lives before you leave us, but I also think there’s a good chance that you won’t be with us for more than a couple more years. But I bet that when Apple designs its next product you’ll be laying there on your death bed screaming “No no ! You’ve got it all wrong ! It has to be like THIS !”

I know that most likely in less than a few years, I will be writing a much sadder article in your name, but for now, we celebrate your life and we hope you give us more great computing revolutions before you bid us goodbye.

People say that the iPhone is incredibly fragile. I know people who’ve smashed theirs so easily. You just have to tap it against something and you can smash the screen. The iPad is a different story though. I swear it must be fucking indestructible. I have dropped mine countless times. Onto tiles, onto the road, onto concrete. I do it all the time. It always seems to land on one particular corner too. That corner is just so incredibly beaten up. Just look at this photo. Is that unbelievable ? I cannot possibly fathom how the thing is still working and hasn’t been smashed into a million pieces. They’re just really tough little bastards. I suspect the iPad 2 isn’t as tough. It just looks more fragile somehow. But this thing ? I reckon you could take it to war and it’d survive. One day I’m not going to be so lucky though. One day I’m going to drop it one too many times and the screen is going to shatter and I’m going to cry. But apparently that day hasn’t come just yet thankfully.

I was talking about macs with someone tonight. I don’t remember all that much else about what I was talking about. Probably due to the failed drink spiking that backfired on me and caused me to end up with me drinking my own spiked drink and from the tequila shots, but that’s another story.

Anyway, I was showing this guy my most prized mac, which is featured at the end of this post, and he asked how I’d gotten it. Sometimes I simplify this story and just tell people that I bought it an auction, but tonight I told this guy the real story, and for your benefit, here it is.

I was living in Perth with a girl named Amanda. It wasn’t a great relationship. We fought a lot, but mainly whenever she got drunk, which was often. We had a big fight one night. A really bad one, and I slept on the couch. I woke up the next morning and she was gone. She was gone all day. By evening I was wondering where she was and I was a little worried about her. I knew she wasn’t at our favourite bar, because I checked.

She came home about 6pm with a big grin on her face and the most amazing computer I’d ever seen in my life clutched to her chest. She said “I bought this for you at the auctions today”. She went on to explain that she knew Gray’s was on today and she wanted to do something to make up for last night, so she’d caught a bus all the way across the city and sat there all afternoon until she saw this machine come up for auction. There was a guy from Fremantle who runs the local classic mac store and he had bid fiercely against her, but she wasn’t going to let this go.

She ended up paying $86 for it, which was probably all the money we had left for the week, but she knew how much I would appreciate it, so she bid until the other guy gave up and let her have it. Then she lugged it to the bus station which was miles away and caught two busses home with it on her lap.

Yes, I did like it very much and I still do. My wife Jo bought me a beautiful guitar once, but it wasn’t as meaningful as what Amanda gave me. When I chat to classic mac collectors and I show them this photo, they say “Oh my god, I hate you so much right now”. This gift was special. She knew how into classic macs I was. Our house was full of them. I had like a dozen in the lounge room alone and you don’t wanna know what the spare bedroom was like. And she caught four busses and spent all day at the auctions so she could buy me this one and lugged it several km home because she wanted to make me happy.

She was doing something nice and meaningful for me to make up for our argument the night before, but she will never know how meaningful it was. I love this computer so much. But I also love the fact that she went to so much trouble to buy it for me. It didn’t work out and we’re not together anymore, but long after she’s forgotten about me, I’ll still have this computer and I’ll remember how she bought it for me.

Thank you Amanda, for the best gift of my life. I hope you’re happy, wherever you are now.

I need a lot of desktop space as shown in the picture below.

Apart from my main hackintosh with dual 22″ monitors, I have a mac mini running linux with a 17″ monitor to the left for all my terminal work, and on the other side, I have a 17″ G4 iMac just for IRC. I have an RSS feed in one of my channels, so I tend to click on links in that, but Safari on the G4 isn’t the fastest thing around, so I decided to pull some Remote Apple Events tricks out of my hat so as to load links in Safari on my main machine instead.

How I did it was to put the following into Applescript Editor, and save it as an Application Bundle (replacing the user, pass and ip/hostname in the second line) :

on open location theurl
	set dest to "eppc://user:pass@ipaddress"
	tell application "Safari" of machine dest
		activate
		open location theurl
	end tell
end open location

But for an application to handle URLs and be able to be set as the default browser, you have edit the Info.plist file inside the “Contents” folder of the app bundle and add the following:

<key>CFBundleIdentifier</key>
<string>com.pawz.openbrowser</string>
<key>CFBundleURLTypes</key>
<array>
	<dict>
		<key>CFBundleURLName</key>
		<string>Remote Opener</string>
		<key>CFBundleURLSchemes</key>
		<array>
			<string>http</string>
		</array>
	</dict>
</array>

Next, you have to tell OSX to refresh the launchservices info by running this command (which I’ve broken up into three commands just so it fits on this page) and replacing with the path to your app:

cd /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework
cd Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support
./lsregister -v -f /path/to/my.app

Lastly you need to enable “Remote Apple Events” in the “Sharing” panel of System Preferences on your “destination” computer. Now, you can load up Safari on the “source” computer and change the default browser to be your Applescript application and close Safari again. Now, when you click on links in any application, it will contact the remote computer, bring Safari to the foreground, and load the URL. Isn’t that just *awesome* ?

In Linkinus, you can get the currently playing iTunes track info by typing /itunes, which is all well and good, but what if you have a beautiful g4 iMac dedicated to IRC, but you play your music on another computer ? Alas, all is lost ! O wait, no it isn’t, all you have to do is enable “Remote Apple Events” on the computer with iTunes (in sharing, in system preferences) and then open up ~/Library/Application Support/Linkinus 2/Scripts/itunes.scpt and make the following changes:

1. Change:

	tell application "Finder"
		if (get name of every process) contains "iTunes" then set itunes_active to true
	end tell

To:

	set itunes_active to true

This will stop it checking on the local computer for iTunes. Next change:

	tell application "iTunes"
		if player state is playing then
			set theTrack to name of the current track
			set theArtist to artist of the current track
			set theAlbum to album of the current track
			set theBitrate to bit rate of the current track
			set theKind to kind of the current track
			set theRating to rating of the current track
			set theStream to current stream title
			set got_track to true
		end if
	end tell

To:

	set dest to "eppc://username:password@hostname"
	using terms from application "iTunes"
		tell application "iTunes" of machine dest
			set theTrack to name of the current track
			set theArtist to artist of the current track
			set theAlbum to album of the current track
			set theBitrate to bit rate of the current track
			set theKind to kind of the current track
			set theRating to rating of the current track
			set theStream to current stream title
			set got_track to true
		end tell
	end using terms from

… and lo and behold, you’re getting your iTunes track info from the remote computer instead. Geek points +1 for today.

If you were to ask me a couple of months after the iPhone’s launch, what the worst things were about the device, I would have told you very quickly and honestly:

1) The official applications (Maps, Mail, Safari) are riddled with bugs and crash constantly.
…and…
2) Apple are insanely, unreasonably, unfathomably strict with their developer restrictions – the SDK and NDA.

Not only could a developer not ask another developer a simple question about the SDK, but it was even forbidden to share your own code. Yes, on a platform based on open source software – it was forbidden to share your source. So, I put my love/hate relationship with Apple on hold, and put up with the iPhone while I waited for Android with bated breath. Because Android is open right, it’s gonna be innovative and new right ?

Well, early signs show Android is just a cheap iPhone knock off, and so is the hardware it runs on, but time will tell. More importantly, Apple have actually STOPPED being bastards. What’s that, you say ? Impossible ?

No, really. Back in October, they lifted the NDA. Instantly the ban on talking about fight club, err, I mean iPhone development was gone, at least among registered developers (which anyone can become for free incidentally) and within Apple’s little walled garden. But it looks like the lawyers haven’t finished being beaten into the ground, burned, drowned, chopped up into little bits, and then burned again just yet. There may be more joy on the horizon.

Look I predicted this. Ok, not here, in writing, but I swear I did predict it. Mainly as a last desperate hope for change that I thought was never likely to happen, but nevertheless, I hoped, and it seems it was not in vain. The shackles are coming off. Infoworld’s Yager covers some of the changes in a vague nonspecific way here.

Apple are setting up Open Source Code Repositories. They are providing more places to talk about development. They are even allowing distribution of apps outside the AppStore now. How we will install these apps remains to be seen, maybe developers can simply host an .ipa on their web site and that’s it. What was know is that now just because it can’t go on the App Store, doesn’t mean it’s not allowed to exist.

You write it, you host it, you take responsibility for it. That’s basically what Apple are saying and we must take this for what it is – the closest thing to true unrestricted freedom of development so far. Once developers all share the arcane secrets of background apps, PUSH, and system hooks – there might one day be no need to jailbreak at all ! And that’s a future that we should all look forward to.