There’s a lot of talk every time Apple releases a new product. The vast majority of that judgement comes without ever having seen or touched the new product. Hey, I can do that too.

I almost wasn’t going to share my thoughts after reading Jeff Croft’s blog post about the iPad this morning. But I’m hardly one to be shy.

I think the iPad is the future of the PC. Period. Looking at the specs, it’s easy to dismiss the iPad as just an up-sized iPhone. The fact of the matter is, it basically is. So how is “now” equal to “the future”? The answer, lies in Japanese mobile phone habits.

In Japan, a majority of people count their mobile phone as their primary computing device. Their phones are typically capable of many more things than your typical handset. Until the iPhone went on sale in Japan, non-Japanese phones sold very poorly in the that market, because they couldn’t handle the day-to-day computing that people had become accustom to. For the past ten years, the mobile web has been a part of daily life for many Japanese.

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While working on a friend’s wedding web site an oddity in Chrome’s handling of @font-face came to light. Paul Irish’s code works wonders for enabling the inclusion of alternative typefaces across browsers. Using Goudy Bookletter 1911 on a production site is exciting. But the navigation breaks when I load up my site in Chrome 3 at work.

As you can see here, the letter spacing of .2em is not applied to the typeface.

But as soon as I remove the “Goudy Bookletter” declaration from the CSS it magically starts working.

A search through Google produces nothing relevant so I thought I’d document the problem here. Considering this does not affect the latest version of Safari I have no problem waiting for the fix to work its way into Chrome.

Update: Just to clarify, Chrome 4 fixes this issue.

Tim O’Reilly is getting a lot of links to his “War For the Web” piece. For the most part it’s worth a read. However, I wonder what goes through a “guru”‘s mind sometimes when they write lofty pieces like this. Do they just run it off all in one blast, (like I will on this post) or do they let it sit a couple days, edit, rethink and then post?

I ask because in the middle of his piece, where he names those who “threaten” the future of the open web, he goes after Apple’s App Store policy, exposé-style:

The Apple iPhone is the hottest web access device around, and like Facebook, while it connects to the web, it plays by a different set of rules. Anyone can put up a website, or launch a new Windows or Mac OS X or Linux application, without anyone’s permission. But put an app onto the iPhone? That requires Apple’s blessing.

There is one glaring loophole: anyone can create a web application, which any user can save as clickable application on their phone. But these web applications have limits – there are key capabilities of the phone that are not accessible to web applications. HTML 5 can introduce all the new application-like features it wants, but they will work only for web applications, and can’t access key aspects of the phone with Apple’s permission. And as we saw earlier this year with Apple’s rejection of the Google Voice application, Apple isn’t shy about blocking applications that it considers threatening to their core business, or that of their partners.

So, because Apple limits what apps can be on the phone, they’re closing down the web? Um… wha? The iPhone is a bit more than just a web-access device, by the way.

He says “one glaring loophole” as if Apple mistakenly forgot to lock down Safari to only approved websites. Name the last time Apple forgot to lock something down in error. The iPhone is not the web. iPhone Apps don’t alone give access to the web. The device, although popular with geeks, doesn’t have the marketshare it’s influence might lead you to believe.

Secondly, there’s nothing in HTML5 that is available in the iPhone that Apple only allows access to by an App. No, a web app doesn’t have access to various APIs available in the iPhone, but those functions aren’t part of the (actually still incomplete) HTML5 specs. In other words, Apple hasn’t broken anything web related. In fact, they should be given credit for a) bringing HTML5 to the mobile world b) being a forebearer of HTML 5 in the first place… hello? WebKit? You know, free, open-source and the same thing Chrome and a number of mobile browsers are based on? C) bringing the real web of any kind to a phone.

I’m all for a transparent App Store review process, and I’d love to see Google Voice natively on the iPhone. But this passage simply lacks logic. It’s more as if Mr O’Reilly needed more big names to bash in his piece.

If this isn’t a joke about open-source design, I don’t know what it is.

Is this like Apple’s Magic Mouse?

It’s almost the complete opposite of Apple’s approach with their new mouse. The Magic Mouse has one giant button that can do 10 things, we have 18 small buttons that can each do two or more things. And a scroll wheel. And a joystick. And 512k of memory.

There’s a reason Apple is the most successful consumer goods company in the world, and why your company has the tasteful name “WarMouse”.

How do I hold the mouse?

We have found the most effective way is to rest your first three fingers on the mouse with your thumb on the joystick. Your index finger controls the first two vertical rows, your middle finger utilizes the two middle ones and the scroll wheel, and your ring finger the last two rows.

If you need a FAQ about how to hold a mouse with 18 small buttons, and a scroll wheel and a joystick… then perhaps it’s not the most ideal device for an appendage with only five digits.

Seriously, someone tell me this is a joke.

Don’t miss last night’s Castle. Along with the Halloween humor there is a glorious reference to Firefly in the first few minutes.

Makes me consider “space cowboy” for next year.

Castle on Hulu

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Need a job? Are you a freelancer who knows me? I’ve done some advising for a very early-stage Internet dating startup (they have a clever new angle on the old idea) who are looking to build up a small freelance design and development team, and I’m looking for freelancers I know whose contact info I can pass along to the founders.

Unfortunately, I can’t share many of the details publicly. However, I imagine they would share them with you directly if they make contact.

Here’s what they’re looking for:

• Front End Designer*
• Front End Developer (CSS/HTML/JS)*

• Back End Developer – fans of the LAMP stack preferred. Open to PHP, Ruby on Rails (or others if you can convince them why).

*are you both an amazing designer and front-end coder? These two can be combined if the right person is found.

These are very non-descriptive descriptions, I realize. Right now, they’ve worked more on the business and experience end of the spectrum, and less in the realm of nailing down specific technologies and techniques. This means the people working on the tech side will have a lot of influence on what gets built… a unique opportunity.

If you’re the designer… you’ll work with the founders to bring their idea into a lucid reality. They have a solid idea of their customer’s experience with the site, but need you to carve that into something tangible.

If you’re the front-end developer, you’ll take the tangible interface and carve it from standards-compliant code. Experience with mobile web interfaces is a plus here, as that is also in the cards.

If you’re the back-end developer, you’ll be choosing the tools that are best to serve the data needs of the web app. You’ll have a considerable amount of influence over how this is will all be implemented and scale.

That’s it. If you find this kind of openness exciting, drop me an email at my usual address and I’ll pass your information along. (I’ve disabled comments on this post.)

Hopefully the open source project will live on in some form. Along with my personal site I just used SimplePie (along with Yahoo! Pipes) to add photos to a blog I keep with some old friends.

So effective immediately, we are ceasing development of SimplePie and shutting down the project. We will shortly be pushing all code to GitHub. The mailing list will continue to serve users for the time being, but my sincerest hope is that someone will take up the charge to fork SimplePie, fix all of its issues, and continue on with this project that’s been such a huge part of my life for the past 5 years.

SimplePie is ceasing development

It’s a sad state of affairs when one of the original public library systems needs to shut its doors. You may know the Free Library of Philadelphia by the old stories of Benjamin Franklin starting the one of the first public library systems, the Library Company of Philadelphia. Sadly they’re also the first major library to close.

We deeply regret to inform you that without the necessary budgetary legislation by the State Legislature in Harrisburg, the City of Philadelphia will not have the funds to operate our neighborhood branch libraries, regional libraries, or the Parkway Central Library after October 2, 2009.

Via Daring Fireball

Also seen on Boing Boing:

Just look at that list of all the things libraries do for our communities, all the ways they help the least among us, the vulnerable, the children, the elderly. Think of every wonderful thing that happened to you among the shelves of a library. Think of the millions of lifelong love-affairs with literacy sparked in the collections of those libraries. Think of every person whose life was forever changed for the better in those buildings.

And ABC News.

Update

After this was brought to a broader audience’s attention a letter-writing and email barrage has helped save the Free Library of Philadelphia. (via Boing Boing)

Since most people who read this blog think of me as an “Apple guy” (I take offense to “fanboy”) I will provide you with my two-week review of Snow Leopard. It will be many, many words (and thus I’m not going to edit this heavily. If you catch a typo, let me know).

Firstly, do you need to run out and buy Snow Leopard? No. There’s no rush. Should you buy it at some point? Definitely. I mean for the cost of a week of lattes you get back a bunch of space on your hard drive (reduction in print drivers and the introduced use of code compression), can use the machine almost instantly after waking it from sleep, and get useful new integration between the dock and Exposé. That’s totally worth $30.

There’s a lot more to my review…

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Every time a friend moves to a foreign country for a while that country comes up on my radar more frequently. It happened when Kate went to Australia and it seems to be happening now that my friend Pete is going to Kenya.

Yesterday Rocketboom’s field correspondent Ruud Elmendorp submitted a piece about solar powered cell phones now available in Kenya. With the problems they have getting sustained electricity citizens have trouble communicating. Now they can place a call without traveling to a distant landline.