About apples, raspberry pies, and Italian kings

We had a raspberry bush at our house in Oregon. It started as a single slip, taken from a wild bush and transplanted into our backyard. It loved the wet weather, and it grew rapidly. Over the years, it expanded to take over an entire side of the backyard fence, even crawling under the fence and coming up on the other side. If we had let it, it would have taken over the entire backyard.

I'm not complaining. It bore lots and lots of delicious fruit, most of which was eaten right there at the bush.

The Raspberry Pi was stuck in my head all night long. I couldn't stop thinking about it. (I still want one, by the way.)

I can see the RasPi becoming the Next Big Thing. It's starting out as a bare-bones educational computer, sold at no profit. The entity making and selling it, the Raspberry Pi Foundation, is determined to keep it that way. But I can imagine it becoming more popular than anybody expected, and selling hundreds of thousands - maybe millions.

Eventually, the Foundation will find it profitable to put a version of it in a case, dress it up, and sell it for a hundred dollars or more. The profit from this version will enable them to drop the educational price, thereby offering it to even more teachers and students than before.

Then they will find it even more profitable to license the technology to other manufacturers. This will cause the commercial RasPi platform to expand like my raspberry bush. It will also cause the platform to fragment, like the IBM PC did, which may or may not be a Bad Thing. But on the other end, since they are a non-profit entity, the gobs of money they make from the licensing deals will allow the Foundation to lower the price on the educational model even more, making it even more accessible.

Okay, that's my vision, not theirs. In a way, RasPi is similar to early Apple Computer. Remember the Apple II? (Actually, most of you don't. Tch. Kids.) Well, the Raspberry Pi is also named after a fruit, and  the capitalized Greek letter Π looks a lot like the Roman numeral II.  Like the RasPi, the Apple II was a hobbyist's computer whose popularity turned the computing world upside-down and laid the foundation for both the Macintosh and the IBM PC. I look for something similar to happen with the RasPi. If they weren't a private foundation, I'd buy a slice of the company. As it stands, all I can give them is praise and publicity. Oh - and my business.

There's another single-board computer out there, also taking the world by storm. Arduino began in 2005 as an educational computer, for students to use with their design and control projects (robotics, for instance). According to Wikipedia, in May 2011 there were 300,000 Arduinos in the wild. However, Arduino and the RasPi are distinctly different. The RasPi is meant to replace the desktop (or laptop) computer, with keyboard, display, and mass storage device(s). Arduino is a microcontroller, meant to control robots, giant billboards, 3D printers, coffee makers - you get the picture. They don't compete - if anything, they coexist.

You can connect an Arduino-equipped appliance to a RasPi computer. In fact, in the near future, you will be able to program an Arduino board from a RasPi board. Now that's cool.


The Apple II moved successfully from the hobbyist and educational worlds to the Real World, and opened the way for others to follow. Arduino moved quietly and successfully from the educational and hobbyist worlds to the Real World. Arduinos are everywhere, but you probably don't know it. The Raspberry Pi will do the same thing. I don't expect it to displace the Mac/Windows/BigLinux boxes, but it will definitely claim its place on the stage.

Is anything NOT made in China?

I intend to research this for myself, but I thought I'd ask here first.

Recent news articles have exposed the terrible, sometimes fatal, working conditions imposed on workers who assemble Apple's iPhones and iPads in China. These articles have implicated Foxconn and many other Apple contractors in China, who pay their workers horribly, force them to endure long hours working in dangerous and unhealthy conditions, and more or less treat them as disposable supplies, like paper towels.

Apple has yet to respond in a way acceptable to socially conscious consumers; however, Apple's products have enough going for them that consumers are still buying them. That may change, if Apple does not quickly show some sense of social responsibility.  You read it here first, folks. But that's not the main thrust of this article.

Apple is not the only company to find itself in this predicament, with a popular and competitively priced product line, completely dependent on China for its manufacture. As I have said before, you cannot buy a small kitchen appliance right now that is not made in China. After this weekend, I will add that you cannot buy a men's suit for under $500.00 that is not made in China. Can you buy a flat-screen television that is not made in China? How about a smartphone?

Let's focus on smartphones for a minute. The largest (and maybe the only) viable competitor to the iOS smartphone right now is the Android smartphone. Two of the largest makers of Android-based smartphones are Samsung and LG, followed by Motorola, HTC, and the rest of the gang. Here's a serious question: Which Android-based smartphones are NOT made in China?


Samsung and LG are Korean labels. A South Korean businessman recently told me that iPhones make up 26% of the South Korean smartphone market, while Android phones make up the other 74%, with the  majority of those Android phones being Samsung. Are Samsung smartphones made in Korea? What about LG smartphones? Searching for the word "China" in their Wikipedia entries comes up with zero.

(Another big unanswered question: Can we assume correctly that working conditions in Korea are better than they are in China?)

And what about Nokia? Well, Nokia is a Finnish label.  That's right, one of the most reliable names in the cellular phone business is headquartered in the tiny (but very advanced!) country of Finland. According to Wikipedia, two of Nokia's nine manufacturing facilities are in China. But Nokia phones don't run Android. They still run Symbian, though some ran Linux for a bit and they're all slated to run MS Phone 7 starting in late 2011.

One of Nokia's subsidiaries is a relatively unknown company called Vertu. Vertu makes "luxury" smartphones by hand, out of the finest materials, in its factory in England. The screen is a thin sheet of clear, transparent, single-crystal sapphire. Each key is individually machined from a chunk of sapphire. All of the apps are custom-written, and they run on Symbian. Okay, so this one counts as "not made in China," but you won't find very many Vertu phones on the street. They start at about US$5000.

Does that leave Samsung and LG as the only smartphone choices for the socially responsible consumer? (And, as it turns out, for the environmentally responsible consumer - both manufacturers have been recognized for their environment-friendly practices.)

LET'S BROADEN THE DISCUSSION:  What about children's toys? Printed books? Flat-screen televisions? Stereos and home entertainment systems (even the ones with Japanese names)? Computer hardware? Dishes and cutlery? Automotive parts? Automotive accessories? Hand tools? Power tools? What can we buy today that is not made in China?

Please hit the Comment link and add to the discussion. Don't be scared off by the Captcha thingy or my comment-moderation policy. If you're not a spammer or a Net loon, your comment will be posted within a few hours.

In Honor of Steve Jobs

Better writers than me have written better eulogies than this for Steve Jobs in the past 24 hours. I recommend the ones at Wired and NPR. I'm sure Time will have something worthwhile to read. Since I don't have anything new or exclusive to add, this entry will be short.

Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer on Wednesday, October 5, 2011. He was 56 years old. He left behind a wife and four children, whom he loved and whom he carefully kept out of the spotlight during his very public career. He also left behind a vibrant computer company, one that in its own way (and in his own way) defined consumer computing, leading the way for Microsoft and IBM, and later for Google, Motorola and all the other "me-too" companies.

What did he do?  Well, an automobile is a complex piece of machinery, and yet every single automobile in the world is controlled in exactly the same way, with a steering wheel, a gear shift, and two pedals.  Jobs did the same thing for computers and computing.  Outside of what he has left for his family, that may be his greatest legacy.

With the iPhone, he also reinvented the mobile telephone.  And with Pixar, he reinvented animated, feature-length, family movies.

 He is named as inventor or co-inventor on over 300 patents, covering computers, telephones, music, and more.  Steven Levy, in his eulogy in Wired, named Jobs' six biggest technical and business accomplishments:

• the Apple II computer
• the Macintosh computer
• Pixar Studios
• the iPod
• the iPhone
• the iPad

In the NPR story, Robert McNamee, a venture capitalist, called Jobs a modern-day "Thomas Edison."  Moviemaker Steven Spielberg (what is it with all these Stevens today?) echoed that sentiment.

Whether you own an Apple product or not, Steve Jobs has had a profound and lasting effect on your life.

Edit:  I added the picture.  Not sure what the original source was; I swiped it from FB.

One great app for iPad

UPDATE, 25 SEP 2017: The Jot! app has become an orphaned app. If you have it on your device, keep it. It will never be updated. If you don't have it, I'm sorry. I don't know of a suitable replacement. The link to the author's website contains a short explanation for its discontinuance. The link to the app store points nowhere. I've left both links intact.

Unfortunately, the two screenshots in this article have also disappeared. Blogger detected an HTTPS issue with them and offered to fix the page for me. I accepted its offer, and now it won't give me back my pictures.
 
I have already written about the fact that, although Apple's App Store has thousands of apps for the iPod, iPad and iPhone, the vast majority of them are junk. Because of this fact, I have been very choosy about the apps that I download. But I finally found a really good one - two, actually.

Autodesk made their name and their fortune on AutoCAD, arguably the most well-known CAD software on the planet. They added to their product portfolio over the years, through clever R&D and through judicious acquisitions. I never thought of them as players in the app market.

This week I was looking for a quick and easy sketching app. I found one called Jot!, which works very well. (I think the exclamation point on the name is stupid, but everybody else likes it...) I'm increasingly pleased with it - the more I use it, the more I like it. It's simple and it's well executed. It's uncluttered. It's fast. It has some limitations, but for the purposes of brainstorming and doing quick sketches, it's fine.

Jot! is delightfully intuitive. It's meant to replace a pencil and yellow pad of paper in a meeting, or even the Expo markers and whiteboard at the front of the conference room. It doesn't try to do more than that, and that focus on simplicity is the key to its success. And then the fact that you can share Jot! sketches with other Jot! users around the globe, or that you can email them as PDF files to anybody in the world, serves to make it universally useful.

A Jot! screenshot. Yes, it really is that simple.

Jot! comes in three flavors:

• Jot! for iPhone, $2.99
• Jot! for iPad, $4.99
• Jot!Free for iPad

Then I thought I might like something with more features and more horsepower than Jot!. After snooping around for a long time (way too long) in the App Store, I found SketchBook, from Autodesk. It also comes in several flavors:

• SketchBook Mobile, $0.99 for iPhone/iPod Touch
• SketchBook MobileX, free for iPhone/iPod Touch ("X" for "Express")
• SketchBook Pro, $7.99 for iPad
• SketchBook Express, free for iPad

I had no idea that big companies like AutoDesk were writing stuff for iOS. If you're familiar with the full-size SketchBook Pro on the Mac OS X, then it should come as no surprise to you when I say that this is the best app I've seen yet for the iOS platforms. This is a well-crafted application, and once you get to know it, it does almost everything that the full-size version does.

The "Express" versions of SketchBook go far beyond Jot!'s simple capabilities. I like both Jot! and SketchBook. They were written for different purposes: Jot! for simple sketching tasks, and SketchBook for serious artistic creation. There is considerable overlap between the two.

The current "Express" versions of SketchBook also have a couple of serious bugs. For one thing, if you try to import a photo into SBX, or SBMobileX, the app crashes. Eh. So don't do that. If you pay real money for the Pro version (come on, only 8 bucks for the iPad, one buck for the iPod), you avoid those limitations entirely.

The SketchBook user interface takes some getting used to - about ten minutes the first time you use it, and about two minutes every time after that. That's not much. Serious artists may be frustrated by the limitations of the software, which are naturally dictated by the limitations of the hardware. Eh again. Go find a real Mac with a full-size screen.

A SketchBook screenshot. The real thing looks a lot better than this.

Jot! is from a two-person company called Tabula Rasa Labs. I know it's not even fair putting them in an article alongside Autodesk. That's like putting a jet ski in a photo next to a cabin cruiser - or an aircraft carrier. Honestly, I sat down to write an entry extolling the virtues of SketchBook Pro, and Jot! just kept working its way into the article. So even though the title of this entry is "One great app," I'm not averse to endorsing two great apps which, on the surface, do pretty much the same thing but which, after a closer look, are vastly different in scale and horsepower. I say get 'em both.

p.s. Remember, I'm not a shill. My opinions are not for sale. I only write what I feel like writing. See my "blogging for dollars" entry if you're not sure you believe me.

p.p.s. Friday, March 18: After using Jot! at home last night, I revised this article this morning. The more I use Jot!, the more I like it. I still can't believe I sat down to write an article about SketchBook Pro and ended up with this article.

More about apps (iPod, iPhone, iPad)

Here's why I say that 95% of apps are only marginally useful / relevant / practical. You may think that this entry is frivolous / trivial / unrealistic. I can live with that assessment. (You're still reading this, aren't you?)

I had heard about the Bubble Wrap app. I searched for "bubble wrap" at the App Store and downloaded a couple of promising entries. I was disappointed to find out that they were games, with time limits and scores. Not only that, but if you didn't move fast enough, some little gremlin snuck around behind you and unpopped all your popped bubbles.

In the real world, everybody pops bubble wrap. I haven't yet met anybody who can resist it. But in the real world, popping bubble wrap is not a competition. On one end of the spectrum it's simple, mindless fun, and at the other end it's therapeutic - sometimes group therapy, even.

I wanted an app that was as simple, mindless and therapeutic as real bubble wrap, not something that hijacks that relaxing experience and contaminates it with goals, deadlines, and stress. Heck, if i wanted goals, deadlines and stress, I'd put down my iPod and go back to work.

(I think that the author wrote this entry with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek. Maybe.)

Looking for iPod touch 4G accessories

I need your help finding some stuff for an iPod touch 4G.

I've done research all over the Web, and it's overrun by marketing hype, biased reviews (you know, shills), and advertising. I've looked in the local stores, and the selection is limited and overpriced. I figured I'd ask for help from my loyal readers.

I got a fourth-generation iPod touch as a gift, and I've already got scratches on the metal case. Eventually I'm going to scratch the glass front, or simply drop the thing, and that would be bad. I need to buy some protection for it.

What have you had experience with, and what would you recommend? Specifically, I'm looking for recommendations on:

• screen protector
• hard-shell or soft-shell case
• armband-style carrying pouch

While I'm thinking about it, I must say a word or two about apps. The first word is disappointing. The second word is wasteland, as in "Wow, what a wasteland." The current state of Apple's App Store is like the early days of the Mac, and the early days of the World Wide Web: there's a lot of content out there, and 95% of it is garbage. I'd estimate that 95% of what's at the App Store is poorly written, poorly debugged, and only marginally useful / relevant / practical. There's not a lot to differentiate a good app from a bad one: the reviews vary so widely as to call the credibility of all of them into question; and you can't even use purchase price as a reliable differentiator.

(I'll be adding to the wasteland, creating some apps for my employer.)

As for the music, well, I'm joining the revolution late, but not too late. I've finally become sold on digital / downloaded music. Among the massive contemporary offerings, I found some obscure gems. I found Aerie, an early John Denver album, formerly only available on CD as a horrendously overpriced import (if at all), now available at high quality and costing almost the same as it did back in nineteen-seventy-mumble. I also found Greatest Highs, a giant compilation album from the Kottonmouth Kings, a hip-hop group who specialize in raunchy (and mostly inappropriate) lyrics extolling weed and other stuff that I probably shouldn't be thinking about.

Yeah. So please, give me your recommendations for screen covers, cases, and exercise pouches. As always, your comments go through a moderation/approval screen, but unless they're an obvious sales job, they'll be approved instantly.

(I can't wait to see what AdSense offers up with this posting!)

What was once a "program" is now an "app"

Observe, with me, the interesting progression of terminology in the software industry.

(For those who are not computerly inclined, here's a quick definition of basic terms. Way back in the dawn of digital time, computers were composed of hardware and software. Hardware is all the tangible, physical parts of a computer: the metal case, the printed circuit board and all the little components on it, even the wires that connect everything together. Even soft plastic parts are still tangible, so we still call them "hard" ware.

Software is all the intangible stuff that makes computers run -- the programs. They're not tangible or physical, so they can't really be called "hard" ware. But since they're as essential to the computer's functioning as the hardware, they had to be called something -- hence, "soft" ware.)

Today we consider all the synonyms for "software":

• program
• software program
• firmware
• code
• suite
• application
• app

Back when computers were brand new, they used to run programs. A program was a series of instructions that the computer followed to complete a task. The earliest computers had to be programmed, or fed instructions, by flipping a series of switches on the front panel. (After flipping the switches hundreds of times just to enter one program, and still getting it wrong, engineers decided they needed to invent a different way to program a computer -- in a hurry. That's how we ended up with mass storage devices.)

Even in the early days of home computers, people called them programs. One program fit on one floppy disk, and to use the computer, users ran the program.

As computing tasks got more complicated, programmers started including other things on the disk: data files, libraries, configuration files, and additional programs to be run automatically by the main program. Since users weren't just running a single program anymore, programs began to be marketed as software -- an interesting, and not at all inappropriate, reuse of the generic term.

I still crack up when I see a marketing department or a magazine writer refer to these things as software programs. It's a hilarious redundancy.

Some software is critical enough to the computer's operation that it's stored in a memory chip inside the computer. Because this software is stored in hardware, it's neither hard nor soft, so the pros call it firmware.

We've come a long way from the days of flipping switches. Today you can use one programming tool on one machine to write programs in many different programming languages, for many different systems. This has led programmers to start referring to the stuff they produce as code. There's source code, object code, assembly code, byte code, high-level code, low-level code, compiled code, interpreted code, Mac code, Linux code, Windows code, ... and it's all just programs and programming.

Somewhere along the way, software vendors began to combine separate programs into agglomerations that were (supposed to be) more powerful than the individual programs. These were referred to as suites. For a while, everyone was selling an office suite. Adobe has a lock on the best graphics suite in the world. Other companies sell animation suites, CAD suites, audio/video production suites, gaming suites, and in a beautiful recursion, software development suites.

Also somewhere along the way, someone said, "We're not selling programs, we're selling applications." After that, what was formerly known as something else became known as an application -- still just a collection of programs and related software items.

With the introduction of very smart handheld devices such as the iPhone, someone said, "Since these devices are small, the term for the software they run should also be small." So an application became an app, as in "There's an app for that."

Ah, but the term app got away from its creators. First it spread to non-iPhone handhelds, and then to non-handheld hardware, and finally to browsers. Now any software that runs on any kind of computing device is an "app".

But when you distill it down to its essential parts, it's still just a program.