the JOHN LAUDUN experiment

The iPhone, and now the iPad, are establishing that there is a place, even with the consumer utility device market, for general computing devices. In particular, Game Developer Research has just its report on the current state of game development. The 100-page document is available on their site and is covered in the the current issue of Game Developer magazine. Some of the trends revealed in the report include that the economic downturn has more developers working in smaller companies (less than 50 employees) and an increased focus on the mobile device market:

Of these mobile developers, nearly three quarters of that group are targeting iPhone and iPod touch development, a number more than twice the reported support for traditional handhelds like Nintendo DS and Sony PSP.

This only confirms our own household’s decision to retire our daughter’s Leapster that we had paired with my old iPod Video for road trips and mobile entertainment. Both were handily replaced by an iPad Touch that not only has the games and the videos of the previous two devices but also flash card activities, wikipedia, and other applications. General computing, baby, general computing.

For those interested in iPhone/iPad development and looking for other development environments than that provided by Apple, here is an interesting item: Ansca Mobile has released Corona:

Corona is built from the ground up to enable designers, web developers and engineers to quickly develop and distribute highly optimized native iPhone applications.

You can download a trial version of the SDK or you can get a full version with a one year subscription to their Corona Developer Program.

All in a convenient internet meme package:

I decided to play a bit with Wolfram Alpha. If I day traded, it would be a terrific resource. So far, that’s the only thing I have tried that has given me results that I knew what to do with. Now, it could very well be that WA is giving me results that are smarter than I am…

Here’s a trial search

Clicking on the link is just like visiting WA and typing in:

caterpillar cummins john deere

(Searching for makers of heavy equipment was the first thing that came to my mind.)

More than anything, this is for my friend Marcus:

First, the LED screen will not be there for long. Color e-ink with decent (enough) frame rates for watching video is on its way — or at least so I am told. Apple knows that this thing isn’t perfect, but I suspect they also saw that the technology in this category was lagging behind market interest and demand. iPad 1.0 is a placeholder in some ways.

Second, if I was 20 years younger, I would stop what I am doing now and immediately immerse myself in everything it took to develop native apps for this and the other devices that are going to copy it. This is the computing device that most people have wanted for a very long time. For better or worse, most folks are consumers, not producers. The IT revolution — Tim Berners-Lee core concept — was a blurring of that distinction. We have seen a lot of movement in that direction, and there are certainly a lot more people producing content than there was twenty years ago, but I think we are also seeing a flattening of the growth curve and a kind of stabilizing of who is going to do what for the time being. The iPad addresses that flattened curve very, very well.

I am delighted, and fascinated, by the emergence in the last few years of interest in the mechanical arts, for lack of a better description. Mechanics, machinists, and metal workers of various kinds (welders and fabricators among many others) suddenly find themselves in the spotlight. While only a few people are familiar with Douglas Harper’s classic study of a one-man agricultural equipment repair and fabrication shop, Local Knowledge, most will have seen Richard Sennett’s somewhat overly-romanticized The Craftsman as well as Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soul Craft.

These books are, of course, joined by shows like the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs and the Travel Channels Made in America (which is no longer in production). If you throw into the bargain the assembly-line porn that is Science Channel’s How It’s Made, which regularly re-runs on the History Channel I believe, and the Food Network’s Unwrapped, then what seems to have been revealed is huge thirst in America for, as our president put it in his inaugural address, “the makers of things.”

And, it seems, those makers seems to be folks with dirt underneath their fingernails.

It should come as no surprise, then, that in their discussion of “the new industrial revolution” that Wired chose for their cover the image of a wrench turning a nut … powered by a greasy hand, which is exposed to the world by the presence of a rolled-up shirt sleeve.

One of the dominant figures for “let’s get to work” is rolling up one’s sleeve. The arm and the hand go away, but the wrench remains in this Shell ad for “ideas into action”:

The abstracted wrench here transforms into a pencil, both emphasizing the “work of creativity,” of idea generation, and also the necessity of finding “ideas that work.”¹

There is also, I would argue, a subtle reinforcing of the leveling of the playing field between hand-work and idea-work. In fact, a recent article in the Harvard Business Review makes precisely that argument. In “Restoring American Competitiveness”, Gary Pisano and Willy Shih argue that the rush to commoditize manufacturing — resulting in outsourcing — of contemporary corporations has resulted in a breaking of the link between the folks in research and development on the one hand and the folks on the shop floor actually making the products.² What is lost is the productive conversation, the feedback loop, between those two groups, and that means ideas are lost. There suggestion is that the U.S. must encourage the rebuilding of an “industrial commons.” (Here’s a link to the article but be forewarned that it’s only to a summary page and that the download requires payment.)

John Nash over at Adobe has published a great essay on his personal blog about the nature and status of Flash vis-a-vis web standards, functionality, and the iPhone (and now iPad) embargo:

I came to Adobe ten years ago to build an open standards (SVG)-based Web animation tool. I like standards, and I have some experience here. … Here’s a quick summary of my long piece below:

Flash is flawed, but it has moved the world forward.
Open standards are great, but they can be achingly slow to arrive.
Talk of “what’s good for standards is bad for Adobe” is misinformed nonsense.
Flash will innovate or die. I’m betting on innovation.

Note that Nash actually worked on Flash’s competitor — remember Flash was created by Macromedia, then Adobe’s competitor for authoring applications — and is well aware of its history and its limitations. Most importantly, it’s a thoughtful piece with lots of details. No screed. No paranoia. Not your typical internet.

The Apple tablet/slate computer is out as of yesterday and it’s called the iPad — despite all the terrible jokes using that exact same name. It’s a sweet looking bit of hardware, and the pieces of the presentation I caught reveal some terrific software, too.

I’m going to leave to others to work out all the various ups, downs, ins, outs, and assorted other debating points that emerge after any Apple product release or upgrade. One thing and one thing only strikes me as immediately worth thinking about and which yesterday’s presentation flirted with: the iPad as one’s only computing device.

This question popped into my mind because while the iPad intrigues me as an addition to my own setup, it is even more interesting to think about it for someone like my mother. Everyone talks about “typical users,” and I suspect that a fair percentage of those “types” are really parents. For me, it’s my mother. My mother does exactly all those things everyone talks about being 90 percent of “typical computer usage”: e-mail, web browsing, some digital snapshot work, and … and that’s about it.

Say … those are all things you could do with an iPad. Why exactly do you need another computer if that’s all you do? In the case of the iPad, the other computer becomes a fairly large docking station. My guess is that Apple already knows this and is working on a more full-fledged docking station where users will manage the contents of their iPad from their iPad and not from iTunes on the docking computer.

That makes a lot more sense. Imagined this way, Jon Gruber’s concern about packing a keyboard with his iPad when he travels is exactly the wrong direction:

I can totally imagine traveling to conferences (or events like this) without a MacBook, but rather with an iPad and a keyboard.

The keyboard is for home or office, the iPad’s built-in keyboard will be what you use when you are away.