Coyote Tracks

It’s fascinating reading the train wreck of comments on The Verge’s story about Tim Cook saying “I’m not interested in being in the console business.” Two or three people suggested that iOS is the Future Of Gaming (feel free to read that phrase with FUTURISTIC REVERB CRANKED TO ELEVEN), and a whole bunch of angry gamers piled on to tell them they’re full of crap.

Crazy idea: maybe when Tim Cook said he wasn’t interested in being in the console business, what he meant was—and I may be going out on a limb here—that he is not interested in being in the console business. At least, the traditional game console business, like the Xbox and Playstation.

If the Apple TV gets an SDK, that doesn’t put Apple in the game console business; it puts them in the app console business. Arguably, they already are—it’s just that existing iOS devices are handheld, and so they are to the GameBoy what an app console in this sense would be to the Xbox. Would there be games for it? Undoubtedly. They’d probably make up a big chunk of what would be written for it. But compared to the Xbox and PlayStation, there would be a much higher proportion of non-game apps.

Serious gamers are people who buy hardware with gaming as a primary purpose. Casual gamers don’t do that. That’s what makes them casual. They’ll buy games for devices they’ve already bought, but they’re not going to go out and buy a new (or upgraded) platform solely to run a game, like a serious gamer will. They probably didn’t buy their device to play games in the first place—it just turns out that their phone is good enough at games that they’re not going to buy a GameBoy now. This is what market disruption means.

The Verge commenters believe that the gaming industry caters to serious gamers, and that Apple clearly doesn’t. QED. (That’s Latin for “so there.”) They’re right But the next generation of consoles are mostly going to sell to people who own the current generation of consoles: serious gamers who are into consoles at all already have one (or two or three). If Apple wants to make an app console, their market won’t be limited to people who own Xboxes and PlayStations. They won’t pitch this theoretical device as a game console, because it won’t be. It’ll be Something Else that happens to also play games. Not to beat an angry bird, but the set of consumers for whom that might be “good enough” is much larger than the set of consumers for whom it’s FIREBREATHING HARDCORE POWER or nothing.

This is all pie-in-the-sky theorizing. But if Apple does release a successful “living room” app console, I’d take a long, hard look at what iOS has done to the handheld gaming market before being blithely dismissive of what it might do to the game console market. A few years ago, executives at Nintendo sounded an awful lot like commenters on The Verge do right now.

I made it through a whole week a while ago of weekly cocktail recipes, then never posted one again! A streak of one week! Okay, scheduling isn’t my strong suit.

Here’s an interesting cocktail that’s the first one I made after I broke down not too long ago and bought a bottle of Benedictine. There’s a long tradition of monks making herbal concotions of a higher proof than you imagine. The best known over here is, yes, Jägermeister. (It’s unfortunate that over here Jäger has become the exclusive domain of college kids trying to get shitfaced; I bet good craft bartenders could probably do cool things with it if you could get them to stop snickering.) Instead of anise-tinged darkness, though, Benedictine is light and fluffy and full of honey flavor, and shows up in a lot of classic cocktails.

The Chrysanthemum—an old recipe that may have first appeared in the Savoy Cocktail Book—is unusual because it doesn’t seem to have a base spirit. Usually, you pair vermouth and Benedictine with brandy or gin or some kind of whiskey; here, though, they’re paired with one another. And it works.

Chrysanthemum

• 1.5 oz. dry vermouth
• 0.75 oz. Benedictine
• 3 dashes absinthe

Stir with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with an orange peel twist. (This is one of those ones where the garnish is important: the oil adds a little hit of citrus flavor.)

When it comes to the “iPad as work computer” debate, I’m pretty schizophrenic. For a while I was taking my first-generation iPad nearly everywhere, and I bought a clever little bag from InCase—which I no longer see on their web site—that has a sleeve for the iPad, a place to put the keyboard, and even room for assorted cables and chargers. My summation was, and remains, that while the iPad makes a mediocre netbook replacement, a netbook makes a really crappy tablet replacement, so on balance the iPad wins. My main computer at the time was a 15″ MacBook Pro; compared to the iPad, it was absolutely gargantuan.

Then, last year, I replaced the MBP with a 13″ Air.

I’m aware that not everyone could, or would want to, use an Air as their main computer, but for me it works splendidly. At this moment I’m using it as a desktop, connected up to an old but perfectly fine 24″ Dell monitor and using my Das Keyboard and a Magic Trackpad. While I’m considering replacing the Dell with a Thunderbolt Display later this year and taking advantage of its various connections—get a nice two-terabyte FireWire 800 drive, maybe, and wired ethernet—for the most part this is everything that I want from a desktop. And, if I want to go out to work, it’s lightweight, has the same resolution as the MBP it replaced, and has all the power of a Mac rather than, well, the power of an iPad.

Even so, often “the power of an iPad” is enough, and after buying a new third-generation iPad not too long ago I decided I wanted to see if I could get a keyboard/case combo for it as opposed to using the bag. Passing by a Fry’s a few days ago, I went in looking for the Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover, but they didn’t have it. What they did have was the Adonit Writer Plus, which looked pretty cool and seemed to be well-reviewed. So I bought it, and then gave it a field test in a coffee shop for a few hours.

The Adonit seems well-made and the keyboard has a nice feel, pretty similar to the current Apple keyboards—which I consider a high compliment, since Apple makes what I think are the best scissor switch keyboards on the market. The keys are smaller than Apple’s, but the keyboard itself is smaller than the iPad, so that’s to be expected. And the case is a very clever design, one that uses the iPad’s magnets to stay closed and uses its own magnets to hold the keyboard in place against its back: you can slide the keyboard back and forth to adjust the angle of the display, something that very few other cases handle as gracefully.

The big problem with the Adonit comes if you’re a touch typist. I am. On a good full-sized keyboard I can usually hit 100 WPM. This means that I’ve internalized where all the keys are on a typical American QWERTY keyboard at this point. If you screw around with where the common keys are in any substantive way, though, I’m hosed.

On the Adonit, they’ve put that little inverted-T for the arrow keys into the main “block” of the keyboard. The bottom row to the right of the spacebar runs command, option, left-arrow, down-arrow, right-arrow. The left-arrow is right under the slash/question mark key, so you can see on a normal keyboard that would put the up arrow in the same place as the right shift key. And so it does on the Adonit: their solution to this conundrum is to have the second row from the bottom end with slash, up-arrow, right shift.

Which means that every time someone who’s used to normal keyboard placement tries to make a capital letter or another shifted character using the right shift key, they move the cursor up one line and then type the unshifted character.

Do you know how many times you hit the right shift key in normal typing of text, particularly fiction, where there’s a lot of proper names? This is a great way to find out. For me the answer is: a whole damn lot.

If this arrangement doesn’t bother you—or you don’t think it will—then by all means, do check out the Writer Plus. For me, though, that compromise, combined with the slightly smaller keys that such a keyboard is constrained to have, turned out to be enough to make me take it back to Fry’s.

I may yet try out the Logitech Ultrathin, but for now it’s back to the InCase bag if I’m heading out with the iPad yet expect to be typing a lot.

(Or, you know, just using the Air.)

There’s been something of a kerfluffle the last few days in certain circles over John Gruber leaving the 5by5 podcast network and taking his show—in slightly different form—to the new Mule Radio podcast network. The talk is a mix of speculation over just what happened and the inevitable “why are you losers talking about this” responses.

Well, if you take away the snotty bits, that’s kind of an interesting question. To be sure, only a fraction as many people are wailing “how could John do this to 5by5’s Dan Benjamin” as were wailing “how could Jay Leno do this to Conan O’Brien” a couple years back, but it’s a sizable fraction. When your podcast drama earns a mention in Fortune, that strikes me as a signal of… something. I’m not quite sure what, but I actually think it’s something positive.

I’m quite skeptical of the notion that the way the Internet will disrupt Hollywood is by giving everyone the tools to make their own media. Everyone does have the tools to make their own media, to be sure; at least on the Mac, you can do some pretty high-grade stuff just with Garage Band and iMovie if you learn how to use them. However, a lot of what Hollywood produces still requires Hollywood resources. A garage filmmaker could spring for Final Cut Pro, but the box does not include a polished script, professional matte and CGI illustrators, makeup and costume artists, and Katee Sackhoff as the tough but sensitive female lead.

What can be disrupted this way, though, is anything that really doesn’t require that kind of crew and special effects budget. Things like talk shows, especially audio-only. There’s a certain level of commitment necessary to avoid coming across as the Three Guys Dicking Around With Skype Show. But once you get there—you get comfortable with your favorite podcast recording app, you invest in a good microphone, you come to terms with how dreadful you think you sound when you’re recorded—you can, at least in theory, sound as good as anyone on terrestrial radio. And you can be as specialized as you like: an audience of just a few thousand might mean cancellation for a local AM sports guy, but if you’re doing a My Little Pony fanfiction review show, a few thousand might be terrific. (Also, don’t tell me about it, so we can still be friends.)

What the little mini-drama in this space revealed to me, though, is how far along in the process this disruption already is. For a half-million people or so, John Gruber and Dan Benjamin are as big a deal as Conan O’Brien and Jay Leno.

In retrospect, of course, the disruption has been pretty obvious: 5by5 has about two dozen shows; Leo Laporte’s TWiT network also has about two dozen shows, most of them video, and recently built its own new studio headquarters up in Petaluma. And—talk about significant signals—the Revision3 video podcast network was recently bought by the parent company of the Discovery Channel.

That last one suggests that the way we cross the bridge from podcasts disrupting talk radio to disrupting scripted television isn’t, with respect to Paul Graham, by killing Hollywood. It’s by showing it a new way. A few years from now Time Warner may still not be allowing timely access to HBO shows—but they might be investing in an Internet-only production company heavily enough that it can do high-quality scripted shows. A sci-fi series of twenty fifteen-minute episodes at $50K a pop isn’t something that most current podcasting networks could pull off, but for Hollywood that’s loose change in the sofa cushions.

(As for the actual specifics of the Gruber/Benjamin Talk Show drama: why are you losers talking about this?)

The NYT’s David Carr writes that audiences are now rarely drawn to live television:

So far in the month of May, our household has watched exactly two minutes and one second of live television. NBC’s broadcast of “the most exciting two minutes in sports,” as the Kentucky Derby is described, was epic, unfurling on the big flat panel we finally bought. But I doubt our spasm of live viewing is enough to keep the television business in business.

Carr is making the assumption that his habits are reflective of a growing trend, citing a study that shows online viewing is up more than 46 percent in the last year. Remember that “up more than 46 percent” could mean a move from, say, 1% to 1.5% of the presumed viewing audience, but Carr’s fundamental point seems to be true: DVRs are everywhere, online viewing is rising, and significantly, the people who have recently entered that coveted 18-to-35 demographic—and who will enter it in the next few years—have effectively grown up in the age of video on demand.

The Oatmeal’s comic about pirating “Game of Thrones” and MG Siegler’s similar article set off a lot of “piracy is whiny entitlement” responses, sometimes thoughtful and sometimes…well, at least amusingly ranty. Here’s the thing, though: whiny entitlement is a valid market signal. It’s full of noise, but people who would have given you money for something if you’d been ready and willing to take it really do matter.

Carr’s article suggests that the writing is on the wall. But it’s not writing on that wall. It’s a graph. One roughly like this:

There’s a falling line indicating the amount of money studios and networks estimate they’ll make by continuing to stick with the distribution channels they have now; there’s a rising line indicating the amount of money they estimate they could make by embracing the Internet wholeheartedly.

Us cord cutters and Internet boosters like to think that studios just don’t Get It. But they do get it. What they get is that until the point those lines cross—whether that’s next year or ten years from now—making that shift costs them more revenue than it gains. Until twenty or thirty times more people stop paying for cable and satellite than do now, it remains in HBO’s best interest to give The Finger to The Oatmeal.

A while ago I put together a few OS X services to do various Markdown-ish conversions: Markdown to HTML, HTML to Markdown, and “Copy Markdown as RTF,” which would take selected Markdown text and put it on the clipboard as the equivalent rich text.

I’ve updated these to add the one piece that’s clearly missing: “Paste RTF as Markdown,” which does what you’d expect from the name—take rich text on the clipboard and paste it into another document as the equivalent Markdown. In addition, I’ve changed the services to be self-contained, including John Gruber’s Markdown and SmartyPants scripts as part of the package.

Lastly, I’ve added two wrappers for MultiMarkdown to HTML and Copy MultiMarkdown as RTF, which require Fletcher Penney’s MultiMarkdown to be installed in /usr/local/bin.

Note that both of the RTF conversions are in the “stupid pet tricks” category, since neither Gruber nor Penney’s scripts can actually create true RTF—instead, documents are converted to HTML and the HTML is converted to RTF with Apple’s textutil utility. MultiMarkdown documents you’re trying to turn into RTF will likely require some massaging. (That’s engineer-speak for “this will mutilate your work.”)

http://www.ranea.org/markdown_services.html

Is it just me or does it seem that nearly all of the stories that PandoDaily breaks are stories about the Arrington Nexus?

Sure, they make a lot of other posts. But usually, those aren’t stories. My complaint with TechCrunch a while ago—that a large proportion of their posts read like recycled press releases—is even more true about Pando. A sampling of current headlines: “CloudOn Releases an Android App Bringing Full MS Office Capability to the ‘Other’ Tablets”; “Adaptly’s $10.5M Round Will Buy the Social Marketing Platform a Sales Force”; “Updates to Grocery iQ App Keep Coupons.com Atop the Mobile Couponing Mountain.” (That last one’s second paragraph begins, “If nearly any other company released another coupon-based mobile shopping app it would be less than newsworthy.” Doesn’t that sentence read better when you strike nearly and other from it?)

When Pando does get a headline onto TechMeme it’s nearly always a headline like this one: “Sources Say AOL Seeking Buyers for Engadget and TechCrunch, Arrington ‘Not In The Least Bit Interested’”. EIC Sarah Lacy apparently went straight to Mike to ask if he was interested in buying it back himself (and makes a point of telling us that Arrington required her to quote him in full, so she’d include the “I was Team Pando all the way until Sarah Lacy fired me”), and she’s updated her article at least once with Kara Swisher’s denial of any interest in TechCrunch.

Who does she not appear to have talked to? AOL.

Lacy—and for that matter, Arrington, for all his apparent faults—can definitely do good work, and I’m not part of the “Arrington represents everything wrong with the new media” bandwagon. But asking AOL for a comment about the story “AOL seeking buyers for Engadget and TechCrunch” is not some kind of creaky “old journalism” tenet that the new media shouldn’t make time for, it’s basic fucking common sense. If they don’t meet your deadline, you write the sentence, “We reached out to AOL for comment, and will update this story if they respond.”

Arrington is a headline in this story because Sarah Lacy wants him to be a headline in this story. You can plug any name into it and still works: MG Siegler is, as far as we know, also not in the least bit interested. Neither is Mark Cuban, Tim Cook, Carol Bartz, MC Hammer, Marc Andreessen, Peter Dinklage, or Herman Cain. Yes, Arrington theoretically has more interest in that he’s shown interest in it in the past—but the bottom line is that he’s being brought up because he’s representative of what Lacy seems to think is her real beat: TechCrunch-related drama. The Arrington Nexus. While there’s a lovely story on PandoDaily’s site about the name coming from the Pando Trees, there are times it’s awfully hard not to notice the similarity to pander.

(Although if Tim Armstrong is reading this, he should drop me a line. We can chat.)