Monday, June 7, 2010

the iPhone, development, and Hedonism

Sorry, should’ve clarified...some emails were going around amongst my colleagues, and we were discussing the newest iPhone.  While Apple is the king of cool right now, they're still stuck with a crappy cell phone provider that is worthless if you want your phone conversation to last longer than  30 seconds (about the average amount of time before an average call drops - with full signal strength, mind you).

For me, Flash happens to be a medium I work in, but I’m a Rich Internet Application developer, and HTML5 + javascript, or Flash + javascript, or Silverlight + javascript all can achieve the same thing (eventually)...My job is to make shit look cool (kinda like bouncing gradient balls using gravity to propel themselves through millions of particles of pixie dust (optimized by apparat, of course), all while synthetically growing and teaching you something about polymorphism, or something like that)

I don’t think the hedonistic value of owning an iPhone would actually improve my life in the least, aside from earning the respect and envy of toy collectors...I know I’m a luddite, because I don’t want a phone that surfs the web on a shoddy little screen (high res or not).

Smart phone or not, I hate surfing the web on tiny screens...watching a movie, or playing a game is ok, and getting some quick information distilled down to a quick blurb on twitter-like basis would be useful, but reading entire sites, surfing through the Nytimes, or even going to craigslist suck on these little screens (at least for someone like me with big fat fingers).  The iPad comes closer for casual users, or people who don’t need a professional development environment, and just some connectedness...the iPhone (compared to the Incredible) is ok, but I’m not losing sleep.

I’ve got to get back to making cool shit happen on the screen (whichever size screen that may be).


Oh, and Hedonism is an amazing scotch by Compass Box.  I really love their bottle of Peat monster, and they've got some yummy other bottles.  Try them out if you can. 

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