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I don’t presume to know what’s going to happen – if anything – now that Apple outlawed third-party API abstractions, but it did make me think a bit about the different ways people see portability.

The whole dance seems strangely fascinating: developers have obvious reasons to want their applications to run on the most diverse number of architectures – specially in a market which still isn’t so clearly defined as the PC market – and platform vendors have an equally obvious interest in having the best applications around run on their platforms.
But it gets further muddled up when platform vendors control the gateways to the platform, something that’s – as far as I can tell – unique to the mobile market. Now the platform vendor not only wants the best applications for themselves, they can filter out competing applications and leverage the system to keep good applications out of competitors’ platforms.

But back to portability. Portability becomes progressively harder – and less efficient – the higher we go in the abstraction scale.
Hardware portability may have many pitfalls, but is homogenous enough to be achievable in a wide range of targets without sacrificing too much functionality, as is the case for the Linux kernel.
OS portability gets a bit trickier. Even though the underlying hardware may have conceptually similar interfaces, the exposed APIs may vary greatly and the problem becomes two-fold: keeping the amount of OS-specific code low and providing an integrated experience in the different OSs. This can still be somewhat solved either with additional abstraction layers, like Java’s Swing, or with using one ported toolkit, like Gtk for Windows, but both options make sacrifices.
The current mobile market takes these problems a step further, by having wildly different hardware platforms, even more incompatible APIs and to some extent even different interaction paradigms (while most other PC architectures agree on folder/file, click/drag and window/desktop paradigms).

All this culminates in the only non-dubious argument for Apple’s move: quality assurance. They’re hold on developers might turn out not to be as strong as they wanted, but at least in terms of quality, demanding applications to be written specifically for them is a certain win.

Or course, this rambling is pretty much moot when it comes to Apple, which has a force-choke grip on their specific market niche and an equally force-related hypnotic influence over masses of developers and users. They can pretty much put “receive a kick to the balls/tits” as an EULA requirement and you’d still see millions flocking to Apple Stores to buy whatever cute gadget they’ve got next.

It’s just interesting as an open-source developer, to whom portability is such an obvious advantage, to see it being used as leverage tactic.

And in the end I’m only slightly annoyed by Apple’s decision because it’s another reminder of a possible 1984-esque future where access to technology – both by users and developers – is metered out by our not-so-benevolent corporate overlords.
There are certainly other giants out there intent on keeping general-purpose computing alive, but the thought is still haunting, that a sort of K-T extinction event might creep on us without our noticing and cause all the PC dinosaurs to die of uselessness when the mobile devices become powerful enough, suddenly taking away all our hacking freedoms.
Haunting indeed.

Ok, right… so I gave up and bought an iPod.

I’m sure the net is filled to the brim (don’t you sometimes wish it had brims?) with posts about it, being the monopoly and the cult commodity that it is, but I must express my tiny nagging frustrations with it anyway.

It’s obviously a lot nicer on the eyes than my old iRiver. A lot thinner and lighter too, but I guess that’s the kind of improvement you should expect after 6 years (the iRiver was exactly as big and heavy as a 2nd generation iPod).
The battery-life is also like comparing a 20 something guy with a 98 year old with with a heart bypass in a marathon… the thing just goes, and goes, and goes…

Then come the problems, the first of all being the click-wheel. I’m sure a lot of people love it, it’s sleek and innovative (or at least was), but it’s just not for me. I’m a button guy, I like clicking something and knowing that it will do exactly one action, like, say, upping the volume by a set amount or skipping ahead a set amount of time. The click-wheel is just to sensitive for me, I keep having to activate “hold” to avoid messing with the volume when I have my hands in my pocket, and then deactivating it to be able to skip a song, something I used to do just by pressing the easy to feel button on the old iRiver, without even having to put the hands inside the pocket at all.

The other problems are the proprietary interface and cable. I loved how the iRiver was just an external HD, you just had to dump the songs in the “music” directory and be done with it, but now I have to use ipod-specific programs (the linux versions aren’t exactly fancy like iTunes, but they work) and carry the damn ipod cable whenever I think there might be a small chance of needing a sync or wanting to put some other files in it. Of course the upside of the whole monopoly deal is that almost anyone has an ipod cable nowadays, but it’s still not as ubiquitous as mini-USB cables, and I must say that there’s also one big advantage to this: the proprietary interface allows offloading the indexing task to the desktop application, meaning the iPod doesn’t have to rescan the music collection after a sync, so feels way snappier than the poor old iRiver.

Then we have some minor usability quirks. I got used to some features the iRiver had and really grew to like them a lot, incorporating them into my music listening habits, like for instance the ability to seamlessly change shuffle modes with just one button, switching between “all” and “directory” (which in my case meant “artist”).
I used to listen to my whole collection on random, and would switch to “artist random” when I felt like hearing more of something. This could be done with just one click, and wouldn’t stop the currently playing track. On the iPod you have to click the central key 3 times in order to access the shuffle mode, and even then you only have the “song” and “album” options, unable to shuffle artists.
This leads to another small problem: the whole directory idea behind the iRiver made it possible to organize your collection any way you saw fit, with any degree of granularity. Simply put, it was a sort of “power-user” device. The iPod locks you to the artist/album/track paradigm, with its advantages and disadvantages.

But the only thing that really annoys me is the lack of a “play next” or “queue” function. The “on the go” playlist is a nice feature and it has been suggested as a replacement, but it’s just not the same thing. I wanna be able to keep listening to random songs from my whole collection and simply specify what the next song should be, without leaving shuffle mode. Many people seem to have the same problem and I haven’t been able to find a suitable solution.
Right now I have to wait for the current track to stop, then browse for the one I want to hear, wait for it to finish, then browse back to the whole collection.
Why not add this to the menu you get when you hold down the center button while browsing? If only Apple had a suggestion box… perhaps in a future firmware update…

In the end I’m obviously satisfied with it and it’s clearly a very polished product, specially considering the lack of real competition, but I still feel I need some time to get used to it…

This is the moment you realize you just did something supremely stupid:

Trying to salvage my trusty iBrick I decided to buy a new bigger hard disk to breathe some life into the poor thing.
I felt quite smart for finding a good price on a 60G disk, but the satisfaction didn’t last long. When I popped open the iRiver I noticed what I should have thought about a long time ago: the old disk has an IDE connector, the new one a ZIF.

So yeah… I just bought a useless 1.8″ 60G disk and still haven’t solved my original problem.

The cable that attaches the main board to the disk has what seems to be a ZIF connector, but the cable’s soldered to the main board in 3 (!) places, so I don’t think I have a good chance of messing around with it and achieving something useful.

I think I give up. That’s enough trouble for a 6 years old gadget. I’d say it’s well beyond its life expectancy.
Since there aren’t any other good options around for big players, it looks like I might end up buying my first Apple product ever. I just hope I don’t get infected by the “apple simplex” virus…