Don't blink.

Hey, I'm in the New York Times! Too bad it's too late to do anything about it.

Tears on the keyboard, click click click.

I can't tell you just how disappointed I am that the iPhone is once again a closed system; that Apple saw fit to encrypt its firmware so that all the third-party applications that have popped up are no longer installable. As the author of one of the more popular pieces of said software, I have a dog in this fight, sure. I'll admit it was incredibly satisfying to know that hundreds of people were using and enjoying my Books application. People were sending me thanks left and right, some even sent donations. It was an amazing feeling and could make me all Sally Field on my good days.

More than that, programming on the iPhone was fun. The Cocoa API is just wonderful to hack in. And I may be the only person outside Cupertino who has gotten a UIWebView to work, and damn it, that's important to me. As I've said before, many people have told me they bought an iPhone only after they discovered my software was available. Now, what do they do, Apple?

We can wait and see what the Dev Team comes up with, I suppose. But I'm not optimistic.

Color me impressed.

Well, Amazon MP3 is a big winner as far as I'm concerned. I just downloaded Feist's "1234" for 89 cents, DRM-free. It's only available with DRM in the iTunes store (and for ten cents more), and as a reviewer pointed out, oh the irony--this is the music from the new iPod nano ads. Ha!

I also bought the long version of "Call Me" by Blondie, which isn't even available as a single download on iTunes. That made me HAPPY! (Yes, I admit I feel guilty too, Blondie being the very definition of a guilty pleasure.)

The Amazon mp3s are encoded at 256k (variable bit rate), which still doesn't sound as good as a 256k AAC file, in my opinion. But frankly, the price differential (99 cents for Amazon, versus $1.29 for iTunes Plus) makes the difference. And of course, if it's a choice between DRM and non-DRM, it's a no-brainer.

(I'll still buy full iTunes Plus albums, rather than the Amazon version, though, as the price tends to be the same in that case.)

Long ago I decided that what's good for Apple is good for me. So I'm hoping that NBC/Universal and Apple will work out their differences, and the songs on Amazon will also be available on iTunes Plus. And here's looking forward to the day when all digital music is DRM-free. It's comin'. It's comin'.

The party is almost over.

I was thinking the same thing as Daring Fireball...

... if you have the urge to hack around on your iPhone, you might as well do so now, as I strongly suspect that this week’s imminent iPhone software update is going to render inoperable the existing ways of hacking/jailbreaking the iPhone. Notice how no one’s yet figured out how to install or modify the software on the iPod Touch? Whatever Apple’s doing on the Touch in this regard, I expect them to begin doing on the iPhone this week. (I’d love to be proven wrong.)

So would I, dude, so would I. But we won't be.

Ah, the perils of users.

Here's the problem with non-commercial software, kids. I don't want to implement what everyone is asking for--PDF support in Books.app. PDF is a horrible format for eBooks--there's no way to reflow the text, since you're basically looking at a picture. I don't want that reading experience for myself. But a lot of people do.

So? What to do about it?

I'm thinking about a tip jar, with a certain amount of money required for me to begin work on PDF support. If I'm gonna do something I don't want to do, I better get paid for it. That seems fair, doesn't it? What do you think?

The number of people using Books.app is pretty impressive. And if someone doesn't want to pay me, maybe they'll be motivated to code it themselves.

Now that's a Slylock Fox.

Bob Weber, Jr. is now officially the coolest cartoonist in the Sunday papers.

BWA HA HA!

MY DOMINATION OF THE IPHONE HACKING COMMUNITY CONTINUES APACE!!

Edit: Shit, I already used that phrase. Oh, well.

iPhony.

My conquering of the iPhone Developer Paradise continues apace... the various versions of Books.app have been downloaded nearly 500 times since version 0.1, and that's only direct downloads from Google Code; the Installer.app package downloads don't count in that, I think.

I'm kinda enjoying the notoriety. Now I just have to maintain my sanity in the face of all these darn users. Pesky users, interfering with my perfect code...

Golly!

I've gone and released the first version of Books.app, my native eBook reader for the iPhone, and despite being on-line for only 18 hours and heving no direct publicity from me, it's already gotten 50 downloads. That's pretty kewl.

HOWCUM?

Had a nice dinner last night with Godfrey and his wife, but I'm just hoping we didn't give them fodder for a submission to They'll Do It Every Time:

Mr. & Mrs. Sooperparent always complain that they never have adult conversations because they stay with their kids all the time....

... but when they finally go out with friends, guess who they talk about all night? OHHHH, YEAAHHHH!

Oh, snap!

Sweet! I can use GutenMark to automagically split chapters with abandon, and as a side-effect the books will look much, much prettier! I've already got one book converted...

More Books.

Still plugging along at that iPhone eBook reader. I've now developed it to the point where it can break things down by chapter.

Here's a look at the list of books; note the disclosure triangle indicating you can access the book's chapters (which is just a directory). (I've only split one book up so far--ideally I'd have the iPhone do this automatically, but I think it might be better to have a "server-side" program do that and transfer the resulting files to the phone, à la iTunes.) Here is a list of chapters; the titles are just taken from the names of the text files, so again it's pretty simple. And finally here is a chapter being read; notice that the back-arrow says "Chapters," but it says "Books" if you access a book that doesn't have any chapters.

More to come!

Hmmm...

Two headlines in today's Washington Post:

• Primary Season Getting Earlier
• Bush May Try to Cut Corporate Tax Rates

In other news, the pope may be Catholic and snowballs melt in Hell.

Books on a Phone, part 2!

Well, I coded my first "app" for the iPhone today, a very simple dealio that presents a list of text files (i.e. eBooks) and presents the one you click on so you can read it. These are eBooks on your phone itself, not the web! Hot darn!

At the moment it's very ugly and kludgy; you don't remember your scroll-point or anything, so if you leave the program to do anything else, you're SOL and have to start reading from the beginning. It only works with text files (no HTML or anything else). And there aren't any chapter divisions yet.

But it's a good first step.

I put a couple of screenshots here and here.

Different ways of seeing the world.

K: You're on Twitter? Isn't that a little too encouraging to stalkers?
Me: I have a stalker? Cool!

In response to a comment below.

Let me be clear, I don't want to ape Pixar... Well, not really. But I do want my animation to be, y'know, GOOD. And mostly, right now, I think it's fear that's holding me back at the moment. (And before I get deep into this, let me emphasize that I completely agree with Lango that one should make a film to make a film, not get a job; in fact that's my standard answer now when people ask me whether I want a job in The Industry.)

Fear of what? I don't know. I suppose there's a lot of mourning there as well. I was already a bit out of the animation mode when my father died, and in some way that's made thing even more difficult to take up again. That's a kind of fear, isn't it?

But mostly, I'm just bloody lazy, and I want to be fluent in my new software immediately, no learning required. I suppose I ought to start over with C4D the way I started with Hash A:M--slowly and with tiny projects at first. Let "Citizen Kane" come later.

So--back to basics with a small story, just to learn, not to distribute.

But I've gotten so spoiled by all them film festivals!

Speaking of which, on September 28, <ESC> will open the Philadelphia FirstGlance film fest. All my Philadelphia peeps, I expect to see you there. More info is at this link.

A Tale of Two Softwares.

Saw Ratatouille yesterday, and as usual when I see a Pixar movie, I was partly enthralled by the story and filmmaking, yet depressed by the quality of the animation and how far I am from that skill level. Now I know, come on, I'm not going to be able to compete with the best CGI studio Of All Time, after all there are multiple layers of criticism over each animator, which even if I had the skill of the average Pixar animator, I wouldn't have, working alone as I do. Nonetheless, with each passing day that I don't animate, and there have been a lot of them, my skills and ideas are atrophying, and my chances for Making a Splash are decreasing.

I may be so down on it because I made a major purchase of a new animation toolkit a while back, and learning the new skill-set for it is hard. My old software was fantastic for animation, and still is, on balance, but the render times are horribly slow, especially on a Mac. Not to mention, the owner of the company is extremely active in the user community, which would be great if he wasn't such a megalomaniac! I may yet go back to the software, but not back to the community, that's for damn sure.

The new software is rock-solid and renders beautifully, but the animation toolset is primitive, comparably. And animation is what it's all about for me. So I may have no choice but to go back to the old...

In the mean time, I'll find something else to be depressed about, I'm sure.

And what's with that eye-stick?

We're about a week behind on Daily Shows, and tonight we watched the episode featuring historian Robert Dallek. While his work on Nixon and Kissinger sounds extremely interesting, I have to admit I was somewhat disturbed when, as the interview was winding down, he shouted "EXTERMINATE!" and vaporized Jon Stewart.

Twit.

I've gone ahead and created a Twitter account. If you feel like knowing what I'm doing at every darn instant of every darn day, go ahead and subscribe at twitter.com/ZachBG. And please let me know if you have been Twittered; as of now I only have one person who I'm following, and I'd love to add more.

Hooray for time-wasters. Now, back to your regularly scheduled iPhone blogging.

Books on a Phone!

One thing which must, must, MUST be remedied is eBooks on the iPhone. I was thinking of creating some sort of WebKit interface (as soon as I learned WebKit, anyway) to allow one to convert Gutenberg text files to a more iPhone-friendly interface on-the-fly. Well, as it turns out I don't have to, because some other people have gotten there first.

For instance, visit manybooks.net, which has hundreds of texts from Gutenberg already available in an iPhone friendly HTML format, as well as small PDF files. The HTML implementation is a little wonky at the moment, but I assume it will get better with time.

The other alternative is textoniphone.com, which looks promising according to a brief review in iPhone Dispatch. Alas, I can't evaluate it myself, as they'll be upgrading their servers all weekend.

edit: Matthew (that's Mr. Manybooks himself!) mentions in comments scrollbox.org, another alternative which looks very promising. Personally, with the creation of the unoffical iPhone SDK, I believe the best solution would be a custom-made app based on GutenMark. But my ideas have always been bigger than my coding ability...