Interface Me With Speed Please

So, with the ongoing obvious caveat that any sort of blogging on gadgets or technology is probably a waste of your time and no doubt conceitedly wrong-headed if not erroneous on its face...

I've been thinking some more about portable computing interfaces. Nerd alert.

SO, basically, the deal is that I am, like, really excited for the Chrome OS. The more I use Chrome as a browser, the more I realize how superior it is to other browsers simply for that RUSH of SPEED like gunning a V8 on a stretch of western highway, that even the smallest hint of acceleration in this velocity-twisted information economy is like a drug after a couple days of being off the stuff. And accordingly, I'm using more and more web apps. Google Docs? Loads and saves faster than a text editor. Gmail? FUCK Outlook. Never again. Switching between seven windows, fifteen tabs, faster than opening a new Windows Explorer window? Put it all online. I don't care. I'll do anything for that RAW, that FAST, that DATA-RUSH interface high that is instant micro-multi-tasking.

So, the iPad. The future of computing, maybe? According to the media? According to people who like shiny things? I had a new idea about this.

The iPad is the bridge. Many gripes about the possibility of Chrome OS sucking involve the potential lack of native applications. I have no idea if this is true or not, but, let's look at the iPhone OS.

Of the 50 apps I have on my iPhone, 30 of them would have no function if not connected to the network. Of the other 20, 12 are straight-up games, and then 5 more are basically "entertainment related" (a simple program without the need to save much data or interface with other apps). There are 3 stand-alone apps on my iPhone that I have downloaded, that improve the function of my mini-computer without an Internet connection.

Now, if Apple let you really alter the structure of their mini-computers, I might have some more utilities, some need to save data to the device itself. But they have already made it, for almost all intents and purposes, a Network-OS. And we've learned to love it. In fact, our use of the internet as an interface has shifted to take advantage of this relatively light-weight OS, utilizing networks rather than storage space, the cloud rather than OS, html and scripting rather than registry and resources.

Now for the second big part of the iPhone OS: multi-touch. Also, changed our interface to data. I find it absolutely incomprehensible that I can hand an e-coupon pulled up on my iPhone screen to any store clerk in America, and they will pinch and flick as naturally as if they were opening a paper envelope. Have an iPhone? Look at the way you turn the pages of a book. It's a little different now, isn't it?

This was what spurned this thought: this week I was talking to an IT tech in my work's new building. He was using a Fujitsu tablet PC, running Windows 7. So he says, this is the only tablet PC on the market that is multi-touch capable. He had bumped it up with 8gigs of RAM, SSD, etc (though bear in mind that in all these anecdotal examples I'm about to give, its really the SSD making the difference). He showed it to me--pretty slick. Boots from cold in less than 10 seconds. Loads programs as fast as you can click (literally, I watched him do it). Scrolls Microsoft's Earth mapping program, pinch, flick, all that, beautifully. Not like "other" multi-touch phones, that don't quite have that iPhone zip, but exactly the same.

Now the interesting part, is that he says it is best on Microsoft programs. Why? Because Microsoft has designed Windows 7 for multi-touch. I asked him what other companies have multi-touch capable software. No one. Because this is the only tablet PC with multi-touch (I think HP has that media wide-screen desktop thing, don't they? That's a custom, light-weight OS though, I think). He said he uses Explorer as a browser (I know, right?) because it's so seamless. Because it is designed for the interface. Everything else just acts like his finger is a mouse.

So, what I realized is not that any particular OS is going to be the next-new-whatever, but that I continue to see evidence in furtherance of the thesis that it is not any particular functionality that is really driving the usefulness of technology, but the seamlessness of the interface. The seamlessness is the SPEED by which we can interface our data. The quick response of the steering wheel that makes us think we are driving a high performance sports car, even if we are not. We want to feel the pull of the acceleration on our loins, see the speeding white lines of our data as we open and close it at will, flicking it around the roadway. The deep, psychical pull of the modern obsession with speed and acceleration is too deep rooted for us to be post-speed. Control is just too sexy.

iPhone OS taught us to love speed again. It taught us that as long as we're moving fast, we're interfacing our data better. And for the most part, this seems to be correct.

Now, if the Chrome browser is any indication, Chrome OS could be our flying car. We're okay with interfacing all data to the network. We'll adapt for the speed of it. I have no idea if Chrome OS is going to be multi-touch capable or not, but I can tell you that I'm sure developing multi-touch for a OS based on a browser is a lot easier than for Windows 7 and all Microsoft software. Firefox has multi-touch. Does the Chrome browser? I forgot to ask my new IT friend. But how much of a leap will that be?

And you know what the Chrome OS will definitely have that the iPhone OS will not? Moveable walls. It's going to be open-source, or at least open-enough that you can run say, a light-weight Ubuntu partition for all your old-school, mouse-click native apps and games, hard-save data, and private-private-private stuff, and then Chrome OS for your network interface. My IT friend had a couple virtual OS's on his souped-up Fujitsu. Know how long it took him to boot a virtual XP OS? Less than a second. Ubuntu? Less than that.

iPhone OS has made a lot, a lot of money off of its closed nature, because it pulled ahead. It was the innovator, and as such, was showered with gold. But apart from a high-design drink coaster, what is it they are really introducing? Something that they cannot hold by themselves forever. It's only a matter of time before someone else can replicate it, and they will replicate it open-source (whether its Google or not, simply to highlight their competition with Apple) and it will be cheap and fast and easy and will go onto any netbook you can slap a multi-touch screen on. People will buy Apple, because Apple makes very nice coasters. But their lock on the interface can't continue for ever. Nobody can restrain the human impulse for interface speed.

So, as sure as I can be without it actually existing yet, I'm super primed to buy a multi-touch mini tablet as soon as Chrome OS is actually an actually thing.

Next week: back to your regularly scheduled predictions and condemnations about the death of god, the re-birth of sex, anti-capitalist economics, and drug-addled anarchistic metaphysics.

Users Program Their Own Functionality

Early morning coffee thought:

Perhaps the next big thing ought (dangerous word, that) to be customization of software.

I already wrote a bit about how our interfaces, the means by which we access our data, are tailored to an unreasonable expectation of "the common user", rather than our actual needs or uses of that software.

Think of this as the death of software humanism.

Consider: how much did you pay for the software (I know "app" is "in" now, but indulge my anachronism) that you use the most? $500? (fancy processing suite) $50? (video game) $5? (phone app) $0? (media player)

Your investment ranged from a lot, to nothing. Now: how much would you pay to fix "that one thing you can't stand" about the program? Or, to add that "one feature you really really want?" You might add another $50 to your $500 investment? Or you might pay $2 for something you downloaded free?

Somewhere, the sound of a cash register is waking up a capitalist.

Think about it. Most users probably uses 10% to 50% of the functionality of a given application. Why are they paying for the entire program? Why are the advanced users paying for the support of all the features for users who won't use them? What features are popular, and what features are useful? What new features would engender the need for further features? What features lead users into bad use habits, than then engender the need for new features they never needed to begin with?

The development of software is sadly, a simple timeline. Why is version 10.4.2.1 just another succession? Why aren't there versions 10.4.2.A and 10.4.2.B? The use of the software is actually being limited by its development. Sure, there are support costs, but think how many different version of a software are in use simply because people don't update. M had iTunes 6 until I made her update recently. People are using old versions of software because they don't want to keep track of new releases, and therefore missing out on bug fixes that would improve their use. So there already are multiple versions out there, but the feature set ranges from "crappy" to "less crappy". M didn't update, because she didn't need all the advanced features, like Genius, etc. Okay. So give her the paired down version. If she was using software with only features she liked and wanted, maybe she would be more invested in bug fixes.

Right now, only a few really interested users keep track of new releases. The rest of people click "ok to update" by accident. But if people were given the option to define the sort of program they used, and to control what it could do, they would probably opt for simplicity they could understand. And beginning here, they could expand their use of the software. Once the basic level is mastered, they could experiment with new features.

Of course, the worry is that this will lead to a full menu of options that people don't understand, like the Windows 7 release prelude. What's the difference between Home Professional and Amateur Office Complete Suite? And what about a hundred different paywalls, blocking your ease of mastering the software as it asks you for $5 per new menu you'd like to explore?

The key is not just to nickel and dime software users, anymore than to treat them like an undifferentiated mass. Software use has aspects of a market in it. It is a machine that thrives on masses. iTunes would never have become one of the biggest media player options, if it wasn't free. Many phone apps wouldn't make money at all if the "lite" version wasn't reduced in price. There's a lot of software, like WinRAR, and other utilities, of which only a few people are willing to buy the full version, and the rest are fine to get along with the shareware version. The reason that it is apparently "impossible to sell media" on the web, is that the machinic-masses of the files and the users, combined with the technology, have made this the conditions in which the technology is used. mp3s have gravitated towards nearly free. Adobe Suite has gravitated towards $1,000,000. This is the way software is used, and the way it defines the cost.

Now, the idea is to take the fluid variables beyond the shifting of cost, supply, and demand. Everyone knows this machine is fluid, and always shifting, trying to find its balance. Why is the functionality of software not seen as a similar machine, an interface of people, technology, semiotics, and data, that would benefit from the flexibility of being treated like a dynamic machine?

And of course, it acts like a dynamic machine already. The concept of shareware made its own popularity. Firefox has a large number of add-ons, treating functionality as apps. The concept of an app itself, a program and interface good for one specific task, is a step in this direction. We need to let functionality define itself. We need to let the users program the signs of the interface.

Next up: literature. I will totally re-write the my short story to end the way you want it to. $5 upgrade.

Resistance in the Flesh

I have been re-reading Lebbeus Woods' blog post about resistance, while listening to Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol II. Not that these things are really related, but this is sort of the mode I am in, recounted to you in Socio-Net status format. Though I must say "Cliffs" is perhaps the most beautiful piece of ambient music I've ever heard.

Lebbeus Woods' blog is a rare one, and a favorite of mine. I don't always understand what he is talking about, but more often then not I get something to think about. I don't rush to his blog in my RSS reader, scanning through it quickly the way I do some of the mammoth feeds out there. I wait until I have some time to sit and read, more like a traditional magazine article.

The post "Architecture and Resistance", is one of the best things I've read in a while. He begins with a short thought or two on the concept of resistance in architecture, and then proceeds into a "resistance checklist", which is stellar.

Normally I very much dislike such reductions of so-called wisdom into tiny, petit fours bites. This is a very popular way to gain "wisdom", whether it be page-a-day calendars, quotes, or self-identifying
distillations of knowledge into warm, brothy nothingness (the ubiquitous Chicken Soup method), which seems to equate knowledge and wisdom with anecdotes so tepidly coddling as to lull the reader in a sense of warm, christian/humanist self-satisfaction that couldn't be shattered with a steel pole.

This resistance checklist is none of that, instead bringing with it more of the black humor aesthetic of situationist graffiti. It is a checklist that is not meant to be checked off, as if accumulating any number of these items and claiming them as one's own would somehow create a positive status or identity. Some are unlikely, others impossible, and some are probably contradictory. Some are minor, and others would be so life changing in actuality that they seem to be at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek, if not actually ironic.

Of course, this comes off not as a light garnish of critical thinking, but as a fire hose. I suppose something could be said about the teaching of contrariness, obfuscation, and paradox as a key theme of resistance itself, and certain items on the checklist would carry this idea. But let's not get too situationist here--there may indeed be love underneath the cobblestones, but this doesn't necessarily make tearing up the Paradise Parking Lot the embodiment of resistive action.

I tend to think of these as something a bit more sublime than hurling newspaper boxes through Starbucks windows. More like small prayers, or syllables of mantras, that must be said ten thousand times to actually mean anything. And I don't mean to head east as an opposition to the street poetry of late capitalism--we could take as model the paradigm of what we think we resist, instead of the nihilistic rejection of all that symbolizes the hate we hate. So, rather than any sutra, how about the Book of Revelations? How about that text, cited again and again as rationale for neglecting the environment, bombing the ____, or the inherent violence and war of the world? What knowledge lies here?

And yet its not my intention to get into a theological discussion here (though often my roads lead there), but to say more simply--sometimes you have to read the part about the dragon about a hundred times before you really get it. Is it the devil? Is it the federal government? Who knows. More likely than not, the things we are totally convinced are completely symbolic are actually anything but.

Which gets me to a particular point on the checklist, which stood out to me like letters in flame.

There are plenty of great ones, which I like either because I whole-heartly agree, or find them especially challenging. But this one:

"Resist any idea that contains the word interface."

spoke to me exceptionally loudly. Maybe it was simply because I was researching Flash-based eBooks that day, and compiling notes for a presentation to someone about them, and I had written the word "interface" about 76 times in five pages. Or maybe because I've never really liked the word at all. But it got me thinking. Firstly, the sentence says not to resist any ideas about an interface, but to resist ideas that contain the word "interface". This is an interesting distinction. Maybe we could say any idea that needs to explain "where the amazing interface be at" is clearly a bad idea, because an interface should be immediately apparent, if it is to be an interface. It's like labeling the go button with a sign saying "go button". Idiotic, and essentializing of function over form.

But then, we might note the obvious paradox--this checklist item does in fact contain the word, "interface". Is this all a joke? As simple as: "do not read this sentence"? Or are we to take some ludic bit of knowledge away from this; maybe we just "missing the interface for the words" as the saying goes? Maybe we are studying things too deeply.

I think something different--or at least, this is the knowledge I got out of it. I think it is a warning to resist all interfaces. Resist any idea that contains the word "interface", is a admonition to resist ideas seeming to require interfacing. In other words, resist any sorts of logical wranglings that might lead one into definitional arguments about semantics, or stoic discussions of paradoxes starring heroes and animals.

The sort of philosophy that cares about hypothetical, universalizable cases is one that tries to interface to life, by way of allegory, metaphor, and analogy. In any given Socratic dialogue we learn an awful lot about what "wise men" do versus "foolish men", or what gods are like, but very little about actual life. Yes, this is the birth of the canon of philosophy, but it's thousands of years old! I love allegory and analogy as much as the next writer, but please. You can only read Plato so many times.

These sorts of ideas--of logic, of comparison, and of Venn diagram dynamics--all require an interface to work them. They are compatible with circuitous diagrams, and universal, "all or nothing" statements because this sort of thinking, of the abstract and the general, is the interface by which we can access certain types of knowledge. This does not mean that it is false knowledge, or somehow faulty. But it is hardly all there is, even though it is often taken to be such, and therefore, we resist it.

The same thing is true for any interface. Sure, we can operate any number of gadgets via an interface, but as soon as it breaks down, we kick it in the chassis or slam it against the counter. Beyond all of the interfaces ever designed, there is the maximum interface: the systems flowing through the hands and the feet, the eyes, the mouth, the ears, the skin, the tongue, the penis, the vagina. Wired directly to the brain. So maximally interfaced, there is no way to get around it, no way to hack over and above, but only through--the Flesh Circuit--already bent forever, humming vibrations of feedback without
a power source.

You may not be down for elan vital, but still, it exists and persists. Maybe you're not a mystic, but you can feel the drone of the universe. Even dead flesh still has a taste. Even lifeless substrate registers a feel. There is no incompatible format. There is only incomprehensible data. And it isn't just background noise, either. The unconscious is the substance of ones and zeroes, the basic data set, and the presence of circuit, broken or not. Resistance is feeling, the potential of blocked flow.

So you can keep the interface--the easy to understand, the attractive, well-designed, user-ready, plug-and-play, all-inclusive. The Chicken Soup for the Consomme-Soul. The Designer Revolution for Party People. Better yet, is the inner, constant resistance--the idea that cannot be contained with an interface.

Selected Ambient Works Vol. II doesn't even have song titles. How's
that for interface!