Practicalmadness

Before I tell you what I have to tell you, you should know that in my life I’ve never identified myself as a hardcore gamer. As a kid I cut my teeth not on the PlayStation or on PC games, but on the old Super Nintendo machine. While many of you craved, and still crave, the adrenaline rush of Quake or the immersive, novelistic aspect of a Zelda or Final Fantasy, I liked Dr. Mario, Mario Kart and, yes, Super Mario Bros.

Anyway, today marks the logical next step in a return to console gaming that began a year or two ago with the purchase of a Nintendo DS, and continued last year when FedEx brought me a much-coveted Wii system. Today, for the first time, there is an Xbox 360 in my house.

The deciding factor for me was the news this week that Rock Band would (finally) be coming to the Wii in late June, where it was announced that Rock Band Wii would feature roughly the same gameplay and graphics as the compromised PlayStation2 version of the game. Even worse, would not offer any downloadable content or online play even though technically the Wii (with its Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection service and flash-based storage) theoretically makes such things possible.

Rock Band is an awesome game even with sub-HD graphics and stereo sound, and I’m not so impatient that I can’t wait until June to get my fix. What was telling to me about the announcement was that despite the Wii’s (admittedly basic) internet features, Harmonix simply didn’t consider it worth the effort to try to bring the same online experience enjoyed by Xbox and PS3 users to the Wii platform, and in fact considered the Wii to be about on par with the now eight-year-old PlayStation2. Except that unlike the PS2, Wii users would have to wait eight months for their version of the game to ship.

And though I didn’t know it until I was standing in Best Buy with an Xbox under my arm, the same is true for the Wii version of Beautiful Katamari, the game I chose to inaugurate my new toy. Katamari for Wii is also coming out in June (six months after the 360 version), after its developers originally hinted that the game might never be released for the Wii.

Let me be clear: I love the Wii. It’s an amazing system and I don’t mean to imply that this is some kind of zero-sum game where the Xbox has drunk the Wii’s milkshake. The two consoles will be living side by side next to my TV set, and I’m sure I’ll play them both often.

But the Rock Band announcement got me thinking. There is a lot of money to be made from downloadable content, and Xbox Live has been the gold standard both in that arena and for online multiplayer gaming for ages. One of Rock Band’s killer features is its downloadable content, specifically the ability to buy, download and play new songs and continue to get some great fun out of the game months or years after you’ve finished off the 60+ songs it comes with. And of course, MTV, EA and Harmonix are likely making a fortune from players who, having already shelled out $170 for the main Rock Band bundle, keep coming back to spend money to add new content to the game. It’s a huge opportunity, so for Harmonix to basically say it is not worth the effort to try to bring that feature to the Wii speaks volumes about the Wii’s viability as an online gaming machine.

Another data point was this Slate article which basically rips into Nintendo for the general shittiness of online gaming on the Wii, specifically as pertaining to the just-released Super Smash Bros. Brawl which should be a natural fit for the kind of world-class online play the Xbox is known for. To be honest, I haven’t even tried to play Smash Bros. or any other Wii game online yet, but that’s probably because the Wi-Fi Connection experience is such a pain in the ass on Nintendo’s other online platform — the DS handheld — that it never occurred to me that the Wii would be any better. Even though my best friend also has a DS and the same games, and now has a Wii with the same games, the process of trading and entering Friend Codes is so cumbersome that we’ve found just waiting until she can come over and play works just as well. Oh, and I should tell you: she lives in Vermont.

As much as I love the Wii’s ability to bring people together and provide some quality fun-time to people who’d otherwise never look twice at a console, there’s something kinda perverse about a console that is known for party games and yet is so terrible at online gaming.

Though Speaking of Milkshakes

Having already said that this isn’t a thing where I’m choosing the Xbox over the Wii, there is one device of mine that — if it were a living thing and not a mass of metal and silicon — should really be quaking in its boots right now: my Apple TV. Without giving you a full rundown of my home theater setup, suffice to say there’s a shortage of HD video inputs on my TV and one of those is currently occupied by an Apple TV that hardly ever gets used.

The Apple TV is great at what it does, don’t get me wrong. The problem, both with its original incarnation and the new “Take 2” software update released last month, is that it doesn’t do enough things or the right things.

It’s fine for streaming photos and music from your computer, sure. But really, how often does one do that? For playing music, it’s usually easier to just plug your iPod into your stereo speakers than to set up streaming. And in my experience people are way more likely to use the computer itself for showing off photos (where they have more control and easier access to their stuff) than involve some other piece of gadgetry. I know Steve Jobs likes to say that photos are great on the Apple TV because they’re “already HD,” but his customers are generally smart enough to know that as nice as their pics look on an HDTV, they look even better on the 24-inch iMacs they already own.

The crowning feature of the current “Take 2” Apple TV is movie rental downloads, especially the new HD rentals. But think about that, would you? It’s a $299$229 device whose primary benefit is to let you pay Apple another five bucks a pop to watch movies over the internet. I’ve tried this out, and it’s all right. But the catalog is (at least for now) pretty slim, and most of Apple’s movie studio partners are choosing to wait until weeks after a film’s DVD/Blu-ray release to add their content to the iTunes Store. I happen to think video-on-demand services like iTunes are the wave of the future, but the current iTunes offering is very, very 1.0. And even so, Microsoft’s been offering a similar service through Xbox Live for ages, and unlike the Apple TV the Xbox 360 is a game console and DVD player as well as a set-top box.

The buying and viewing experience on an Apple TV is very nice, and it may very well be a better set-top box than the 360. But the 360 is quite simply a more useful device in any number of ways, and if my day-to-day is any indication it’s likely that people just don’t need set-top media center extenders like the Apple TV unless, as on the 360, those features are just the icing on an already delicious cake.

I’m a pretty casual gamer, but I’m an even more casual internet movie renter. If Microsoft’s on-demand movie rentals can come anywhere near the value, quality and ease-of-use on the Apple TV on a device which is also a world-class online gaming machine, they’ll have earned a loyal customer and I’ll have one fewer Apple device cluttering up my home theater shelf.

So, apparently despite suggesting Barack Obama is the Democratic frontrunner only as what Keith Olbermann termed an “equal opportunity stunt,” Geraldine Ferraro is not a racist. Nor are Michael Richards, Dog the Bounty Hunter or Bill O’Reilly.

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about this strange phenomenon of non-racists who just happen to think less of black people in Slate:

Implicit to the racist card is the idea that no racists actually live among us. After reality TV star Duane “Dog” Chapman was taped by one of his sons dropping n-bombs, a more loyal son insisted, “My dad is not a racist man. If he was he would have no hair. He’d have swastikas on his body and he would go around talking about Hitler. That’s what a racist is to me.”

The idea that America has lots of racism but few actual racists is not a new one. Philip Dray titled his seminal history of lynching At the Hands of Persons Unknown because most “investigations” of lynchings in the South turned up no actual lynchers. Both David Duke and George Wallace insisted that they weren’t racists. That’s because in the popular vocabulary, the racist is not so much an actual person but a monster, an outcast thug who leads the lynch mob and keeps Mein Kampf in his back pocket.

Let’s call it “country club racism” — the kind of soft bigotry that comes from having never really needed to interface with actual honest-to-god black people on anything like an equal footing. And it’s not strictly an upper-class phenomenon. You’ll find it in poor suburbs and small towns, working-class neighborhoods of big cities, anywhere where you have a tight-knit group of white folks whose only interactions with African-Americans are over a fast food counter or Wal-Mart checkout lane.

True story: back when I was in high school in Birmingham, Ala., one of my classmates came over to my lunchroom table. He had a cartoon he wanted to submit for publication in a student newsletter I was editing, called “Winnie-the-Jew and Nigger Too.” You can probably imagine what it looked and read like. I was appalled, and I think I barely managed to spurt out a question of whether he thought it was appropriate, or whether he thought it was racist. And he was like “nnnngh, I dunno, I just thought it was funny.” And you know, I absolutely believed him. I have no doubt in my mind that that kid — who, by the way and no fooling I swear, just starred in a major motion picture — “just” thought a picture of Winnie-the-Pooh in a yarmulke was hilarious, just like Gerry Ferraro thinks she’s “just” tellin’ it like it is.

Updated April 3rd when I realized that somehow the Markdown filtering never got turned on, and this post has looked like nonsense for weeks.

Nomenclature

Prediction: in the first six months after third-party apps and the App Store are publicly released in June, “[app name] Touch” will be just as prevalent — and just as annoying — as the plethora of Ruby on Rails plugins named “acts_as_[plugin name].”

Distribution

Speaking of the App Store, I’m not 100% settled in how I feel about Apple serving as the gatekeeper for all iPhone software in the universe. Obviously having someone vetting publicly available apps to make sure they’re not malicious or liable to destroy one’s $600 $400 gadget is good, and $99 for some great access and support is (as John Gruber has written) a no-brainer. But this does make establishing a legit homebrew community for the iPhone rather difficult, which means serious hackers will probably stick with the existing jailbreak/toolchain stuff for a while to come.

My real question would be this: Apple’s announced some great processes for development, public distribution through the App Store and private distribution through the Enterprise App Store. But are developers allowed to load their apps onto their own iPhones for testing without keeping them tethered to the Mac the whole time? And if so, couldn’t a developer write a little homebrew app for themselves and load it onto the iPhone directly?

I had originally posed the question of whether developers could load and test their own apps without keeping their iPhones tethered to their Macs, but John Gruber’s already answered it:

So it seems like the answer to my question yesterday about how users will be prevented from running apps downloaded directly from developers (rather than through the App Store) is that unsigned apps will only work on your iPhone if you pay (and get approved) for a $99 iPhone developer account. But does that mean that approved developers will be able to freely exchange unsigned apps with each other?

I’ll be looking into this further, but my first impression is that no one can install unsigned apps onto the iPhone. An IDP membership includes an Apple-provided digital signature you can use to load your own apps onto your phone, which you need even if you want to use the live testing/debugging features they showed off yesterday. Non-IDP members and people who don’t yet have their certs can only test their apps in the Simulator. And I’m sure there will be some controls in place to ensure that developers can only install their own apps, to prevent a gray market in unsigned/unapproved apps.

The above notwithstanding, I love the idea of the App Store. Just imagine if Apple had a program that let musicians and filmmakers distribute their content on the iTunes Store in a similar way, in return for a nominal membership fee and a 30% cut of sales. It would be absolutely huge. This is the kind of thing Apple can do when they don’t have record labels and movie studios to make nice with.

Simulation and Simulacra

The iPhone Simulator (which is actually called “Aspen Simulator,” after the iPhone’s original codename) is teh shit. Even if I never succeed at learning enough Objective-C to write a real iPhone app (which is where I’m at right now), this is a fantastic tool for iPhone web development. Right now developing an iPhone interface for a web site (like I did for the Oscars Game) requires one to have their iPhone physically in front of them for previewing, and other so-called iPhone simulators are simply desktop WebKit views inside an iPhone-looking window.

Well, the iPhone Simulator really is the iPhone UI environment, with a real copy of Mobile Safari. But it’s not the whole iPhone OS stack. I know it at least shares networking stuff with the host OS (i.e., Leopard) because I was able to browse to one of my handy projectname.local.practical.cc URLs in Mobile Safari for testing. This is actually not a bad thing, since it means that (theoretically) anything that works on your Mac, network-wise, should also work seamlessly on the iPhone.

Coming Up Hard(ware)

Though I’ll take this opportunity to make one thing abundantly clear: iPhone developers do not seem to get any access whatsoever to any hardware besides the camera, and the camera looks like it’s only accessible via the Photo Picker UI element. Apps will not be allowed to talk directly to the Dock Connector port (so no fancy new peripherals) or the cellular modem (so no picture messaging until Apple sees fit to provide it).

Ironically, the only hardware an iPhone developer will have to worry about is memory, since the iPhone’s APIs don’t have the fancy new garbage collection introduced in Objective-C 2.0 for the Mac. (Though to be clear: iPhone apps are written in Obj-C 2.0, just without garbage collection.)

Get The Data (or Not)

And all iPhone apps will be sandboxed: they won’t get access to any memory or filesystem resources except their own, so one couldn’t write an AmazonMP3 client which downloaded songs over the air and loaded them directly into the MobileiPod app, nor could you hack in the ability to upload or download files from a web view. You can store and use data on the device in your apps, but you can’t sideload or sync that data from a PC, and you can’t get it from any other iPhone application. And you also don’t have access to any shared data stores besides the ones Apple’s made available. So while Mac desktop apps can talk to the shared calendar/to-do store on Leopard, the same cannot be said about the iPhone’s calendar.

It’s a (necessary) shame that Apple doesn’t yet offer anything like Palm’s “HotSync conduits,” some kind of interface allowing iPhone apps to synchronize with a data store on the user’s desktop PC via iTunes the way Apple’s own iPod, Mail and Calendar apps do. Without desktop syncing, my dream of somebody building a world-class iPhone task manager that integrates seamlessly with, e.g., iCal or Things or OmniFocus seems at least a little harder to achieve.