The Mindful Coder

Universe Dented, Grass Underfoot

Thursday, 6 October 2011

After the WWDC keynote four months ago, I saw Steve, up close.

He looked old. Not old in a way that could be measured in years or even decades, but impossibly old. Not tired, but weary; not ill or unwell, but rather, somehow, ancient. But not his eyes. His eyes were young and bright, their weapons-grade intensity intact. His sweater was well-worn, his jeans frayed at the cuffs.

But the thing that struck me were his shoes, those famous gray New Balance 993s. They too were well-worn. But also this: fresh bright green grass stains all over the heels.

Those grass stains filled my mind with questions. How did he get them? When? They looked fresh, two, three days old, at the most. Apple keynote preparation is notoriously and unsurprisingly intense. But not so intense, those stains suggested, as to consume the entirety of Jobs’s days. There is no grass in Moscone West.

Surely, my mind raced, surely he has more than one pair of those shoes. He could afford to buy the factory that made them. Why wear this grass-stained pair for the keynote, a rare and immeasurably high-profile public appearance? My guess: he didn’t notice, didn’t care. One of Jobs’s many gifts was that he knew what to give a shit about. He knew how to focus and prioritize his time and attention. Grass stains on his sneakers didn’t make the cut.

Late last night, long hours after the news broke that he was gone, my thoughts returned to those grass stains on his shoes back in June. I realize only now why they caught my eye. Those grass stained sneakers were the product of limited time, well spent. And so the story I’ve told myself is this:

I like to think that in the run-up to his final keynote, Steve made time for a long, peaceful walk. Somewhere beautiful, where there are no footpaths and the grass grows thick. Hand-in-hand with his wife and family, the sun warm on their backs, smiles on their faces, love in their hearts, at peace with their fate.

Previous:

Teardrop Skepticism

_____

I would always hesitate to quote John Gruber on opinion but this is beautiful, insightful and hopeful http://oranj.us/4u

Perka and similar alternative payments/loyalty startups always bring up a feeling of complexity because this space can be extremely challenging to get right. Trying to think through some factors that are crucial
- Geography which immediately implies the need for a sales force that needs to engage merchants across many diverse cities and markets.
- Which immediately makes scaling a factor of complexity
- Assuming you have a driven & creative sales force and an awesome loyalty product that somehow gains traction with some critical number of merchants in various industries, to make money you need to build into and integrate into the larger alternative payments ecosystem.
- Which means that at some point you have to deal with and integrate into financial institutions, merchant networks and the likes.

Towards dealing with and planning for this complexity, I would love to work for two types of companies in my future - alternative payment/loyalty companies and large scale computing companies. Both roles are towards preparing for complexity - one more engineering focused and the other more entrepreneurship focused. But both problems of architecture.

Sage advice on choosing a co-founder.

What did Apple announce? A lot of spin, actually, but also two simple features. These features do not allow third-party applications to multitask. That is, on iPhone OS 4, as with now, only one applications runs at a time. What these new features do enable is functionality that fulfills many of the same use cases as multitasking. Let's look at them:

Services. Apple is adding a set of service APIs that allow background processes access to a subset of the device's functionality. Such services have access to, at least, notifications, geolocation, deferred computation, VoIP, and media playback. Having a service API limits the ability of background applications to run errant and destroy battery, but that is not a primary concern. As I stated in my previous post, the real concern with multitasking on an embedded, swapless device is memory consumption. Battery life is a straw man. So how do services solve the memory consumption problem? Alone, as described in the event, they don't. But iPhone OS will continue to kill applications that leave the foreground. Thus, applications will need to be refactored to provide a background component that only uses the new Service APIs. Without the risk of unbounded multitasking, memory pressure is greatly relieved.

Serialization. This was tacked onto the end of the discussion of the new services API, as if it was another service. But it is not. Described as "fast app switching" during the event, this is essentially a serialization API. When apps exit, they may choose to save their state to the backing store. When they restart, they reload this state. iPhone OS provides a simple object serializer today, called NSCoder. It is unclear if Apple is just pushing for better use of this class, or if they are adding additional APIs to make serialization both easier and more powerful. Either way, this will make it appear as if applications are actually multitasking—even though they are not—by allowing them to recover their exact state on restart.

So what about these solutions is "gonna be the best?" Nothing. In fact, what was announced is not even multitasking. Moreover, the new functionality isn't anything that other platforms don't offer today. Android, for example, provides excellent support for both of these features via Services and Bundles, respectively. The new iPhone APIs are not novel. But, despite the spin, that isn't what matters. All that matters is the user. If these APIs are sufficiently robust, they will benefit the user by enabling developers to make better apps.

This post by Robert Love is an excellent understanding of what Apple has very loosely termed "Multitasking". I think Apple's implementation is smart but I don't think its true multitasking. However I don't think true multi-tasking is feasable at this point in time given that the bottle neck isn't the complexity of implementation, its the battery technology available.