4 posts tagged “mac”

One of the hardest things for me as a blogging Apple employee always had to be watching the public misapprehend the company's intentions while remaining prudently silent.  Apple is slowly opening the lines of communication to its stakeholders these days (witness the recent series of letters from Steve to Apple customers--a veritable deluge of communication by Apple standards!), but in general I think it has traditionally done a far worse job of managing its relationship with its loyalists than many ostensibly less enlightened companies.  As a result its reputation has often suffered unnecessarily.

The latest example I've seen of this is the consternation over Apple's failure to seed the Leopard GM build to developers.  A lot of the negative reaction toward this that I saw on Twitter was probably, at its root, based on an assumption that is frequently fed by Apple's poor standards of communication: that Apple as a whole disdains (or at least disregards) third party developers, and therefore as a matter of policy the company had decided to deny developers the GM (perhaps to extract more money from them?).

Well, I may not work there now, but I did work in the OS division of Apple for several years (I even briefly worked as the liason to a major third party developer, Adobe), I'm pretty familiar with how things work there, and I'm still in touch with a lot of people who worked on Leopard.  And I don't believe for a minute that this was true.  I'm convinced that the key fallacy behind this, and a lot of other mistaken ideas about Apple, is the idea that the company always operates as a homogenous entity, and that everything it does is as a result of some company-wide, top-down animus.  The reality is usually a lot more mundane.

I have known this to be true in cases where people give Apple too much credit as well as not enough.  One of my favorite examples was a post of Dave Winer's some time ago in which he saw Apple's addition of a certain feature to a certain Apple app as evidence of a brilliant, fully-meditated stratagem of Apple's to dominate a certain market.  I had been privy to some of the discussions about adding the feature in question, and my perception was very different.  Rather than coming from on high as part of some master plan, the initial feature request Radar had originated with an enthusiastic low-level employee from an entirely different team, and it was initially denied because the right people didn't see the value in it.  It wasn't that Apple as a whole decided that it wanted to dominate a new market--it was, at least initially, the idea of just one person operating independently.

By the same token, on the negative side, I suspect that the explanation for the missing seed (pure speculation on my part, to be fair) has nothing to do with any malicious or greedy organizational intent (or even plain old indifference) on the part of Apple, but rather with the fact that the time between the GM build and the Leopard ship date was likely too short to make an advance seed practical.  I would guess that the OS people were quite motivated to get the product in the hands of the consumer as quickly as possible (and meet the difficult October deadline) without introducing any unnecessary delays.  If the particular Apple employees in charge of seeding were out of line in this situation, I would guess it was only in the sense that they understimated the importance of such a seed in many developers' minds in their hurry to get an already delayed release out the door.

My point in all of this, I suppose, is that when it comes to interpreting Apple's actions, Ockham's razor is usually the best guide: the simplest explanation is to be preferred.  Apple, like any company, is composed of a large number of pragmatic individuals, most of whom don't have any sort of agenda beyond trying to do their job and meet what are usually pretty demanding project deadlines.  The scary Japanese guy who thinks AppleScript engineer Chris Nebel has an anti-Japanese agenda and is trying to sabotage AppleScript localization would be better off assuming that any perceived sins on Chris' part are sins of omission.  And the people who were haranguing Apple over its disdain for developers would be more fair not to ascribe malice to something that could be easily explained by ignorance.

Of course, this wouldn't be as much of a problem if Apple could just get better at communicating with its customers and developers.  Here's hoping that things like Steve's DRM letter and iPhone refund are the start of a move away from Cupertino's obsession with total secrecy, and that misunderstandings like this can be resolved or avoided altogether through reasonable dialogue in the future.

So, how did you do with that weekend goal? No goal? What did you do this weekend?

I didn't have time to answer the original question Friday, but I did have an interesting project this weekend.  In addition to the usual socializing, I decided to finally do some work on a hacking project I've had in mind for awhile: a program that translates coordinate data from the MacBook Sudden Motion Sensor to MIDI.

What this means in non-technical terms is that my little app allows you to use your Mac laptop as a Theremin-like musical instrument.  As you physically rotate the machine on its X and Y axis, it translates the changes in orientation into musical pitches, which can be used to control any software that understands MIDI (GarageBand, for example).

To answer the question about how I did with the project, it actually went quite well.  I have it working in a basic way, and now I just need to work on tweaking it to make it more "musical."  My plan is to eventually have it work in three distinct modes:

Continuous: A.K.A. Theremin mode.  The app will play a specific note the user chooses, and then simply bend the pitch up and down as the laptop is physically rotated.

Discreet: The app will play a series of separate notes as the laptop is rotated (sort of like dragging your hand across a keyboard).

Drums: My idea here is to divide the X/Y grid into six distinct areas (which the app will recognize by analyzing a combination of the X and Y axis), and allow the user to assign a specific drum to each area.  Theoretically, this would allow a user to place the machine on his or her lap, and play it like a drum kit by hitting different parts of the surface.

My hope is to have all of this done in time to present the app at dorkbot San Francisco next month.  We'll see how I do...

Well, it appears that the WWDC party I'm throwing Monday has finally eclipsed Burning Man to become the number one event on Upcoming.org.  This is exciting, but also a bit terrifying, because now I'm really concerned about overflow of our space at 111 Minna (especially because a lot of less informed people are bound to find out about it the day of and show up without an RSVP).

In any case, it should be pretty awesome.  Chris Moulios gave me a preview of his fun A/V set, which mixes in a lot of classic Apple ads and computer nerd movie references with various music videos, and I think it'll go over very well with the geeky audience.  I'm a tad concerned that some of his material might be too risque or sexist (especially a Benny Benassi video he was playing), and I'm kind of dreading asking him to tone it down, but other than that I'm pretty thrilled with what he's doing.

Today I should probably try to find the time to call 111 Minna to resolve a few remaining questions.  Oddly enough, though, there seems to be very little left for me to do at this point--which, in a way, only freaks me out more because it makes me think I'm forgetting something.

Those of you who aren't in the geek-o-sphere proper probably don't know this, but I'm actually somewhat well known in the Mac developer community for hosting an annual party associated with Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference.  This will be the third year I've done it, and, while it started in 2004 as a humble dinner at Bucca di Beppo (blech!) each year it's gotten bigger and bigger.

This year, my friend Brent Simmons (developer of the highly successful NetNewsWire RSS aggregator for the Mac) offered to get the company that acquired his company (NewsGator) to kick in some money to sponsor the party.  This, of course, only encouraged me to be more ambitious than ever with my party plans, and what we ended up with is pretty awesome:

• It will be held at 111 Minna.
• There will be free drinks.
• Chris Moulios--an uber-famous audio software engineer (try a Google search on him), current Apple employee, and sometimes DJ--will be doing what sounds like an amazing experimental A/V performance.
• Broker/Dealer (San Francisco-based electronic artists on the uber-hip Ghostly International label) will be performing a live set as well as a DJ set.

I'm also going to try to get the tamale lady to come.

One of the fun side effects of tracking RSVPs for the party through Upcoming.org is that we've actually made it onto the "Most Popular Events" list--right up there with Burning Man and Snakes on a Plane!  As my friend Iroro would say: r-r-r-respect!