zimbabwe

Explore the suburbs with friends, look for parks and lakes, play frisbee at said parks, play tennis with friends, get really dizzy on the spinny things at said parks, eat at Applebee's, start conversations with Applebee's staff, organize a group pelvic thrusting session throughout Applebee's parking lot, organize late-night group exploration of Lowe's, walk through back alleys looking for interesting things, make Mario hats out of paper, buy people flowers, go to foreign restaurants and delis, stay up late at night sitting in hammocks, see bands performing, take road trips, attend music festivals and marathons and barbecues, paint, play arcade games, mess around with old consoles/computers, play tabletop games, romp through woodlands, play with pets, work out, explore houses, look for critters in woodlands/houses, wander streets at midnight, go to karaoke bars, rent movies from tiny stores, make music, go to the boardwalk, visit aquariums, watch sunsets, set off fireworks, go to cities and look for interesting people, spend excessive amounts of money on dollar menus at fast food places, walk on beaches, collect and polish rocks, build models, read up on ancient cultures, play pool, learn martial arts, play board games, sit and hold hands with people...

That's approx. 45 things that I culled from the photos I've taken in the last month alone. Obviously it's not the whole of what the last month of my life has been, nor are they the only things you can do without anything at all. The reason I had to resort to my own photo collection is that given the whole of possibility regarding just my small, few-thousand-people suburb and the several surrounding locations my mind goes nearly blank.

I spent years of my childhood exploring just one of the 3-5 parks within walking distance of my house, and I can say with authority that within that park lies a series of tall-grass areas called "mazes" that hunters go on, a pavilion complete with barbecue equipment and charcoal, series of forested areas that merge with rivers and which are ripe for building things in, two lakes - one hidden from view - a waterfall leading to a lengthy river hike with quite a few natural pools, an old abandoned chapel, a dance hall, a baseball diamond, a mountain overlook, and the entrance to a statewide hike that I've never entirely walked along. And this isn't a huge park, either: I'd say it's a few acres at most. Within several miles of that park are multiple parks that are much bigger that I've never had much of a chance to explore.

On the secluded cul-de-sac where I live there're a good 20 people, including children ranging from infancy to college age; there's a former FBI agent whose hobby is landscaping the house in which he lives; there's a devoutly religious father who travels to foreign countries to help improve lives; there are two families about whom I know nothing whatsoever, who I would get to know better if it weren't for the fact that there are a million other things I want to do first.

Every time I go to New York City, I'm staggered by the knowledge that I could spend months on a single block of the city and not run out of doors to enter, people to meet.

That's not even mentioning the Internet, which I'm rather a fan of and which has millions of communities I'd love to discover. Here we occasionally see articles on how to clamp down on noise, people complaining about reading 200-300 RSS feeds at a time. I read 13 RSS feeds because I've learned that it's impossible to read everything that appears online. Even with those 13, I'm used to spending hours and hours every day exploring new things, talking to people, getting involved in discussions. Trolling fights with lawyers from Taiwan. Arguments like this, where I feel the need to write stuff to people I've never met but still know the names/handles of. People like you.

Tomorrow the plan's to do yoga with some friends, perhaps design a web site or two, possibly go hiking, listen to an album by the Kinks that I haven't heard yet, possibly head over to the library and pick out books at random, see if any of them are worth anything. Chances are much more than that will happen, but I'm not going out of my way to plan things at 4AM. Things will happen. That's all I need to know.

If money was no object, I'd go tour the building of every company I'm infatuated with, then I'd visit all the big cities, drive across country, go to airports and bus stations and taxicabs, meeting people everywhere. I can't even begin to think of what I'd do beyond the United States. I want to see everything. I want to visit small folk villages in Mexico and hitchhike across Europe and maybe learn some languages... But that's beyond my immediate scope, because I know that within a dozen miles of where I'm sitting now, there's a place where I can learn to swing dance and ballroom dance and jazz dance and ballet, and there are jazz clubs and garage spots for screamo bands, music stores where people could tell me how to play any instrument I can get my hands on (music stores that have HARPS in them. Isn't that awesome?), pool halls and barbershops and supermarkets and florists and lots of things I've probably never even thought to think of. I could spend my life in this miniature suburb and never run out of things to do. A barber who's an old friend of my mother's and an old middle school music teacher who plays the flute both spent their lives in this town. I don't think I want to do that, but I know that's always an available option. And jeez, I haven't begun to talk about the various options available given a gorgeous girl and a full gas tank and a picnic blanket, and that's probably another few lifetimes worth of things to try out.

Haven't you ever felt these moments, where you think about everything in existence and feel, like, holy SHIT, there are six billion people in the world and if I wanted to I could meet any one of them? I'm having that feeling right now. Like, I'm writing this to you, and I don't even know you, and you don't know me, but each of us is living a completely different life and we think completely different things, and if I were to meet you we wouldn't know anybody in common or any of the same places and we'd each be talking to a person with a lifetime's worth of fascinating things to explore. That is so cool I can't quite imagine it.

I'm sorry if this was an excessive response to your inquiry, but I think it's silly to say there are only 30-40 things to do. I can think of 30-40 fun things to do without getting up from this couch alone, though I'd rather you not ask me to list all those things.

The specific issues the OP mentioned were installing drivers and tweaking system preferences.

There's an application called Mega Zoomer that gives all Cocoa apps a sexy fullscreen view. But mostly, the answer's that Mac users don't like fullscreen.

That's because the exchange for a lot of OS X stuff is: You pay a small sum of money in exchange for developers that work their asses off on making your user experience perfect. Delicious Monster, Cultured Code, RealMac, Blacktree, Panic Inc. - especially Panic Inc. Then there are the developers who don't make commercial Mac apps but who are part of the same developer scene: Coudal, 37signals, Neubix, on and on.

They're actually why I bought OS X: Once upon a time, I used Virb - designed by Neubix - read their blog, and slowly came across these other developers and their blogs, and fell in love with all these small development teams whose lives focus on developing their applications and making a profit. When I got my Mac, I started with a few of those teams' applications. Specifically, I bought Panic's Coda and demoed CC's Things. The experiences I get with those applications are stupendous.

Coda's the only thing I use that makes me love coding; without it, I get bored easily with the processes. I'd say it's absolutely been worth my $100 purchase. A hundred dollars for a code editor, FTP transmitter, CSS styler, a set of well-formatted reference books, and in-app browser testing? That's a damned good deal. And yes: I can do that for free, I could open emacs next to Safari, download free guides online. But it's worth my money not to ever have to bother with that stuff at all.

The license agreement... I don't find the license agreement at all frustrating. You click "Accept" once, then never see it again. MobileMe I got almost immediately: It syncs up everything I've got, gives me a nice email system, and it's worth the money I pay for it. I've seen the free alternatives, and they're not worth paying money for.

As for the "trivial bits of software", I've found I need very few applications to complete my Mac experience. I used the free OnyX to tweak my settings, I got Dropbox, and outside of Coda and iWork I find I rarely need anything else. I used to use Fluid.app to run web applications I liked, and that was free. Max converts every file format I need converted, excepting WMVs which I can convert using iTunes in a virtual simulator, and I need to convert WMVs very rarely.

Some people need free. Some people think that everything should be free. They're absolutely allowed to go that route. But most Mac users don't find it outrageous to pay developers for their time. A hundred dollars for a product is nothing, when that hundred dollars ensures never once having to look in a help manual to get something done or dealing with a crash or a slowdown or anything, really. It's similar to the thousands of dollars spent on the Mac itself. You don't pay that money for the RAM, or the screen. You pay that money because Apple tries to guarantee that things don't fuck up for you, and the impressive thing about Apple is that things really don't fuck up. I've been on my current set-up for a year and I've had five total crashes, each from weeks of multitasking processes without ever putting my computer to sleep. I have no problems that I can't find an app for. A lot of things on the Mac are so simple that I now have problems using Windows and Linux because they can't handle the functions that I use now. So no, that doesn't bother me, because for my money I get trust. Working with Ubuntu bothers me, because things don't feel like part of a logical whole. It's a matter of personal preference.

Get off your high horse. Do you think this is new? We saw it with Hearst and his papers, we undoubtedly had it in the radio era though I'm too young to be able to provide names. There has always been more focus on celebrity than there was on anything else.

Richard Dawkins is still a celebrity. He's a prominent and brilliant scientist who writes bestsellers on the side. Culture is no worse off than it was a hundred years ago. There's just more of it, and that means there's more of the tripe along with more of the good, and that means that for all the twenty-year-old cynics there's even more to wearily shake heads at. Recall that a hundred years ago, the idea of a global community where enlightened people commented on tech stories would have been an impossibility.

From my own experience, using Gmail is a different experience in each OS. I can't stand to use it on OS X, whereas on Windows it was always open.

I've known some very cool people who LARPed, some of the biggest jocks I've met play WoW, D&D and MtG are huge among the drama cliques in the Northeast, and the NYC hipster crowd has made stuff like web design a social boon. YCombinator's own OMGPOP is probably the ultimate example of that.

But I've gotten into some fairly heated arguments on HN about just how accurate labels are, and I'd rather not get into that again.

There's also a Mac application that lets you resize your window from any side, but I don't recall what it's called.

Growing up without any noticeable athletic skills, the nerd-jock duality was a pretty important part of my childhood. Nerds were the kids who carried calculators, wore glasses, dressed poorly, read books for fun, liked to be right in class, and had few friends. Jocks were athletic, well dressed, and popular, but probably stupid as well. Every person in my class could have listed, by name, the “nerds” and the “jocks” among our classmates, and if we’d transferred to a different school, we could have identified them on sight. It was, for me, and I suspect for many other kids like me, the primary sorting system for my peers

He's talking "cool kid" versus "uncool kid." End of discussion.

Dungeons and Dragons players, Star Trek geeks, anime fans, weapons geeks, LARPers, fantasy enthusiasts. Wanting to make money instantly boots you a step or two above the absolute dregs.

The last thing I saw that remotely resembled an interesting "concept design" was when Apple told a bunch of people they were making an iPod phone with multitouch, a full-featured web browser, cover flow, and on-the-fly Youtube access, but that wasn't a concept design, that was a product unveiling, because Apple doesn't do concept designs because Apple thinks they're bullshit as well.

* Either you can take a risk and attempt something insightful, or you can stick a superlative after a number, which always works.

* Today you're feeling ambitious. Let's go for 20. There are 20 brilliant laptop concepts out there, right?

* There aren't? There're only thin laptops, urban laptops, stylish laptops, and big laptops that aren't really laptops?

* Oh, well. Every laptop designer has come up with a superthin laptop idea. Use all of them. They're all mindblowing.

* Write a few sentences if you feel like it. Sometimes you can even write that you don't like the laptops you're presenting as mindblowing.

* Submit your blog post online for SEO.

* Make sure that in your profile you identify yourself as a New Media feller:

"My new blog redefines what many misunderstand, SEO."

* Learn to ignore the complaints from people who think there ought to be more substantial posts.

I would say profit, but that web site doesn't have advertisers yet, so really it's more of a feel-good process.

I don't know if my forthcoming college degree will help me make money, because right now I don't know what I want to make money doing. College is giving me time to try out a dozen different things and meet a few hundred terrific people, so that when I leave I know more about myself and about what I want to do than I did when I came in.

I pointed out the lack of logos while looking at the screen. Obviously an Apple product has a logo, on the back where the user isn't forced to look at it. I think the logo looks nice; some people disagree. But the point is that when you're staring at the phone to use it, there's a lack of visual clutter. The stuff that I don't constantly see doesn't matter. (I'll point out the inconsistency of the HTC design, with its completely unnecessary "3 megapixels" distinction, that plastic bump (is that for headphones?), and the generally odd feel of the items' positioning. The iPhone, on the other hand, is almost entirely centered, save the tiny camera hole appearing directly underneath the locking button.

My talk about the one button referred again to the front of the phone only. Using the iPhone OS, there is a total of one button you use to navigate. The other three buttons are insanely minimal in purpose: Two for volume, one for turning off the display. You know this, of course, but you've decided to snipe meaninglessly, as also you know that the connector port by no means counts as a button, and that even were you to count it as a button, the iPhone would still have fewer buttons overall than the Hero has visible on the front alone. I'd point out the feel of those buttons and how much poorer the buttons of the Hero look from the shots taken, but that's getting pointlessly involved in an argument we shouldn't be having in the first place.

I'm sorry my post was too long for you; if you'd like, tell me and I'll attempt to summarize my posts so you can legitimately join in this conversation.

But it's sad that people will buy hardware that conspires against them to make their life difficult.

ubernostrum said:

I can't honestly say that my iPhone has made my life difficult.

You said:

You aren't trying to write free software for it.

So you ignored his point, namely that the iPhone's software hasn't at all conspired against him, and went on nonetheless, with a little hint of snark. I hate snark even when it's justified, though you very often post snark in places where snark is useful and accurate. Every time you get into one of these arguments, however, it's a nuisance. You had a valid starting point re: Jailbreaking, but when ubernostrum gave a valid response, you snarked for no reason other than snarking; when I asked you to stop, you snarked at me.

I get your point - that you meant to say something other than what you said - but it would help your case if you ever took the time to explain yourself with a less-than-pompous attitude. I know I'm not the only one who gets pissed off at you for occasionally being a dick, particularly when this community works well because so few people are.

The UI looks very chaotic (except for the web browser, which looked terrific). That home page with the two clocks and the smaller icons below it? Horrible. I also don't like the three-button curve that appears on the bottom, and how I can't tell from looking what the two buttons on either side will do, because they lack context within whatever application that is.

Graphically, there's a lot of random crap that doesn't seem to have a reason for existing. A ton of gradients, a ton of stylistic decisions I dislike. For instance: putting the letters on the numeric buttons for the phone dialer. Those letters will never be used on the Hero, because there's a better solution (display a separate keyboard). They're there just to emulate older, poorer phones, and they add clutter where clutter's not needed. (I could be very anal and say that I dislike the slight space between the various numbers, because when you're dealing with a nonphysical interface there's no need for space between buttons, and there's no aesthetic advantage for it, and it adds visual complexity.)

Compare that to the iPhone. There are absolutely no unnecessary parts to any of it. The only custom image you get appears when you have to unlock the phone, and it only appears there so that there's no blank space on the unlocking screen. The main phone OS has a black background. The only added elements are the icons, which serve as instant distinction between functions. The OS's options appear only as an icon (similarly to how System Preferences on the Mac runs as an application instead of a special function). You get a simple grid of every single function on your phone, bar none, and the way you customize how it looks is by moving applications around. The only stylistic choice in that layout is the rounded curves of the buttons, but there's even a logic behind that: by trimming the buttons down, Apple reduces the clutter that would otherwise appear in a screen that's a single grid, and the rounded corners add a physical limitation to the graphic's design. If they'd stuck to boxes, then you'd get a lot of ugly icons like I see in the Hero, a lot of attempted complexity. By rounding the corners Apple added a slight style that compels designers to adapt to that shape, and adaptation to that shape usually means making something simple and user-friendly.

Look at the globe icon on Hero's Bookmarks pane. Or the seemingly meaningless simplicity of the home page shown in Image 8 of that last post. Or in Image 5, how the selector bubble on the bottom would overlap the selector bubbles of the unselected icons. Image 17 shows it most clearly: Look at the iPhone next to the Hero. From the iPhone's screen I can make out twelve separate actions from the image alone, barring the knowledge I have of the other apps (that twelve discounts the Twitter and Facebook apps, as well as Safari). I can tell that there are four pages of applications and that there are six new Mail messages. Even the top bar is simplified: I can make out the reception and the battery life, and see that the time is 6:56 PM, because the design is so high-contrast. On Hero, I can barely make out what the clock says, I can't read the top bar at all because it's multicolored and so doesn't translate with the poor camera quality, I can't read any of the icons except for the Browser (whose icon is incredibly vague), the only other application I can read is that of the Phone, and at most I can make out six buttons, two of which are very vague. It's all on a low-contrast background, to make things worse. The iPhone has the single button visible, and the purpose of it is incredibly simple: it quits applications. With the Hero, I can only guess at the two - Search and Back - and those two make the entire phone look lopsided.

I'll also point out that there is an HTC logo on the Hero and no logo whatsoever on the iPhone. In fact, the only visual mark on the iPhone at all is the square on the button that is shaped like an application button.

This is the distinction in design that I mentioned to jrockway. When I, and others like me (many of whom are iPhone developers), look at things, this is what we see, and we see it instantly. Where other people might get a vague feeling of something not being right, we break designs down almost reflexively. When I use an OS, the very first thing I notice is how the OS handles my clicking the desktop and starting a selection box, and the second thing I notice is the design of application windows; I'll reject a lot of applications and web sites and so on within seconds of seeing them because something doesn't look or feel right. Sometimes I rationalize that by saying I don't want to use a product that wasn't made by somebody with the same insane passion for detail that I've got; other times I think it's one of those small irrationalities that help us all filter the world. In any event, when talking design I don't mean whether or not something looks pretty, because pretty can be deceiving (and Apple's been guilty of this too: see brushed metal and reflective surfaces). I refer more to the logic of a design: Why was each individual design choice made, and how does it add up to the integrity of the overall design?

That's not how everybody ought to judge things. It's just as arbitrary as judging things by how much they let you tinker around with them, or how open their software is. Some people will never care about it, just as I rarely care about open source work. But what I've come to understand is that for each of us individually, this various arbitration isn't just a way of being contrary, it's how we look at the world around us, and dismissing that to parade a bunch of points is ignorant and contemptful. If I were going around mocking the FSF and its fans, I'd be just as much an asshole as the people who insult Apple fans for spending excessive amounts of money on things that don't offer a lot of functionality. You might like the idea of downloadable themes: To me, theming is a terrible abomination. It speaks of cowardice and a lack of design integrity. You probably think that's absolutely ridiculous, but try to understand that I see theming in a similarly ridiculous light and you'll start to get what I mean when I made that point about different markets and different people. It's okay that we all look for different things, so long as we respect those various opinions and don't look down at them for being nonsense.

I'm not just writing this to you, jmonegro. I'm writing it to a lot of the people in this thread and others, who keep clashing by arguing a viewpoint like it's the definitive Truth. A lot of time is wasted bickering because a lot of us here don't like admitting that two perfectly logical people can still disagree on things, and especially where things like Apple products are concerned people occasionally get very vicious. (Not on this particular thread, thankfully.) I'd like it if some of you reading this could take the time and consider the dissenting side's points of view; sometimes, it's okay that people disagree and it doesn't have to lead to the beating of a dead debate horse.

(Thanks a lot for posting those links: I'd never seen the Hero before and I likely wouldn't have if you hadn't made finding information so convenient.)

I understand you like free software. You've spent two years reminding people here about how much you love free software; loving free software is awesome and it promotes a lot of good feelings in the programming world. But you have this tendency to jump into arguments and start parading your views no matter how logical the other side seems. I mean, we know the App Store is fucked up, and we complain about it, and we know that to you, the iPhone's being closed is a complete no-no. But you refuse to even admit that the other side has a logical point. This is something like the fifth time this week where you disagree with somebody not by refuting their points, but by implying that the person you're arguing with hasn't got a clue what they're talking about.

Having a contrary viewpoint is awesome. Disagreeing with other people's philosophies is awesome. Getting into protruded debate is awesome. But your occasional tactic of debating with somebody by ignoring everything they're saying and assuming they're ignoramuses is pointless and irritating. Stop.

Twitter is miniature compared to many of the huge networks out there. Bebo, Hi5, Orkut are all huger than Twitter, last I checked. (EDIT: I checked after posting this and Twitter's past all of them globally according to Alexa, but not in terms of users.) I don't go out of my way to analyze Facebook, but I know that a Facebook fan page having a million followers is fairly routine, even for relatively minor fan pages. Getting followers on Facebook is much easier than it is on Twitter, and it gives you the exact same relationship with your audience, but even stronger because there's comment/photo/video support.

I don't mind Twitter at all - I wish more web sites would be so elegant - but a lot of the hype about Twitter being the "next big thing" is only half true. It's the NBT in that it succinctly represents a lot of the coolest things about the Internet, but it's not the only site to do that and it's one of the smaller examples out there.

Amazon has announced a larger, more expensive Kindle DX for textbooks and periodicals, which it will test-market to college students.

Last year I paid $500 - the price of a Kindle - for my textbooks. I didn't open most of them. Returning them was a pain in the ass. I hate going out and buying them, period. If there's a device that lets me buy books each semester for only $50 total, or - not to suggest illegal activities - that lets me download them via my college's student hub, then I'm going to take the DX and never let go of it.

College students know a good deal when they see it.

If any part of you cares about usability, or about gorgeous interfaces, or about incredible design, then you can't go with any phone other than the iPhone. There's no competition. The Pre is the closest thing there is, but even it's not at all close.

Apple as a company has thoroughly nitpicked its designs. Some people don't notice - you seem like you're the type not to be anal about design. For the people that live for design, the iPhone is something of a miracle. I can't think of many things that are as beautiful as the iPhone.

Most people are somewhere between me and you. Some people don't want many features, but they want the things they've got to be gorgeous; other people don't notice the little blips in design and stick to phones that are better at other things.

The iPhone and Android aren't competing with one another. They're mobile OSes that focus on doing very different things, aimed at different markets. Google gets that. I don't know if the phone manufacturers licensing Android get it, because they keep trying to compare themselves to the iPhone. They shouldn't; they have a solid product that happens to target a different market. So what's neat is that you can get the phone you want and I can get the phone I want, and we can both go away thinking we've got the better phone, and both of us are right.

As an English dick, I'm fine with "Fail". It's simple and to-the-point. Much better than "Fmylife" or similar flippant things.