martin luther style

My latest hundred or so dollars to Apple for developer signing certificates has finished evaporating and the apps on my kids' ipads are now non-functional. The answer, obviously, is the one Steve Jobs gave while still in corporeal form: web apps. Alas, you can't be a prophet in your own house, your own town, or perhaps even the whole state of California where good web apps are concerned.

I used to use Cordova to bridge the gap and I still admire the framework mightily. Most of my apps were essentially only a manifest (and Apple's private key) away from happy functioning on my kids' machines. The latter point proves sticker than the former.

I've gone all Martin Luther and nailed my complaints to the wall. My biggest complaints about audio in web apps is that backgrounding and sleep are broken after more than ten years even for trusted apps pinned to the home page. OK. iPads now permanently mounted to the walls. They're on forever. They never sleep and they never multitask. They run a full screen web page. If the Apple ecosystem hasn't improved in ten years, there seems little hope now. This post is instead about two great devices that make this ecosystem go.

The first is the Redpark combo gigabit ethernet / charge over lightning / PoE box. My iPads are delightfully WiFi-free and always charged. The box fits in a 2-gang wall box behind the iPad. It just works like magic. Apple should be ashamed that they do not sell this box. Seriously.

The second is the iPad 'Windfall' wall mount from Heckler Design. You wouldn't guess that there are many different ways to fold sheet metal into a tablet mount. There apparently are. Just as there are a surprising number of ways to build an essentially all-glass tablet and have most of them suck, so it is with tablet mounts. The Windfall delights. The iPad mounts easily. The mount includes enough space for a POE adapter to be tucked inside for flush installs. The wall-mounted back bracket is drilled with the typical VESA holes and also for the holes on a 2-gang wall box, which is how mine are mounted.

In a more perfect device union, the Redpark box might have some GPIO and support WebUSB in addition to Ethernet, but it is hard to imagine such a box winning Apple's seal of approval. If Apple were the kind of firm likely to support the kind of user empowerment represented by WebUSB, I probably wouldn't need to nail iPads to the wall in the first place.

A Heckler mount and a Redpark adapter together cost more than some nice Android tablets, some refurbished iPads, and some dedicated PoE-enabled industrial touch screens on clearance. They made sense for me since I already had the iPads and the actual iPad user experience with full-screen Safari seems unbeatable for less than very silly money. If these iPads die prematurely from running non-stop then I'll probably replace them with more of the same.

computing, again

I wrote a lot of words two years ago about the search for a computer for my daughter. That search
ended with a 12" Macbook running Chrome and a Raspberry Pi. They work fine for her, though
I wished for a machine that was a cross between the Macbook and a convertible Chromebook.

Apple introduced the iPad Pro in the meantime and they have even refreshed it once since. It may not be exactly a viable hybrid of the Macbook and convertible Chromebook, but it is probably at least the arithmetic mean of the two.

I dinged Apple in 2015 for missing WebRTC, WebMIDI, packaged web apps, and some other
Chrome goodies. Apple delivered on WebRTC and even has a thing they call multitasking now. My version of LOGO runs in Safari adequately and even works with the Apple Pencil.

Would I buy my daughter an iPad Pro today? No. It basically sucks at computering. Offline web apps still suck and web pages saved to the home screen aren't just the second-class citizens that regular web pages are -- they are some kind of third class entity. Safari is now happy to use the camera to take pictures of your credit card and auto-fill web forms for you, but has matched none of Chrome's progress in talking to fun things like little robots or craft cutting machines like those from Silhouette using WebBluetooth and WebUSB.

Fortunately, my daughter's rig will probably last another three years. I'm in the market myself now and I find that I want most of the same things a child should expect. I have been struggling with some vision problems and I can't decide if I should upgrade from my 13" Macbook Pro to a new 15" machine or get a smaller touchscreen machine that I can put my face closer to. I think I would love a convertible 13" Macbook Pro.

I already own a 9.7" iPad Pro with a Smart Keyboard. It totally sucks at computering. It's such a bad computer that it moved me to tears this afternoon. Its hardware is fantastic. LTE is seamless. Its keyboard is pretty great if you can learn to live without the escape key. Its speech-to-text is fantastic. Its web browser is easily in the top three. But it's just phenomenally user hostile. It hates me. I'm nothing more than a sack of meat capable of holding a credit card up to its camera. A Mac lets me drag a song out of iTunes and into Safari. iOS turns that drag out of Music into a hyperlink into the iTunes store. The iPad Pro is almost exactly the philosophical opposite of the One Laptop Per Child OLPC.

It's so bad that it makes me wonder if anyone left in Cupertino ever actually had a good computer. Are the Macbook Pros built to be good computers, or do they merely fail to prevent happy computing? An oversight, perhaps?

I think the right answer is to use Cordova to build a WebKit-based computing environment that supports all the missing pieces and the idea alone exhausts me. In the past, I could download a BLE-enabled browser for iOS, or a WebMIDI-enabled browser, or a WebRTC-enabled browser, or a Kiosk browser that revealed certain parts of the machine to Javascript but none of these let me build a machine with the I/O abilities of a Commodore 64 with BASIC and PEEK/POKE.

I don't have the answer yet, but I hope to by the end of 2018. I'm sick of hoping that somebody will take all this amazing hardware and decide to make a computer out of it.

fragile

We recently decamped to Woodley Park so that we could complete an overdue home renovation project. As we packed, I placed digital cameras and a microscope together in a box and labeled it 'optoelectronics' for the movers.

My wife crossed that out and wrote 'fragile'. Hers was the better label.

baby teeth

The plastic passenger's side door handle on my plastic 2014 BMW i3 is loose. I think that means it's about to fall out so that the permanent door handle can grow in.

the future

In the future, all cars will be as stylish and intuitive as my 2004 Toyota Prius. I feel that I owe you all at least a thousand words on the majesty of this car. The universe keeps sending me signs that I need to write this piece about this Citroen DS of the aughts. The last signal was a 2CV on a flatbed truck on the Baltimore Washington Parkway.

Today is not the day for that piece. It's the day for another observation about the future.

My mother died about a week ago. The police entered her home and found that she had passed away in the evening. The police were incredibly helpful and compassionate but they did one thing that surprised me. They found my mother's wallet in her purse and removed her driver's license.

After expressing all of the regular human sentiments about the loss of my mother, the officers added that they would make sure the driver's license made its way back to the MVA without delay. They seemed quite proud of their attention to this detail. I was proud for them.

In the distant future, priests from the Temple of the Great and Mighty Fraternal Order of P'lice will help souls find rest by guiding their Holy Driver's License back to the Shrine of the Motor Vehicle Administration. People who die apart from their License will doom their souls to roam the earth in the back of a taxicab. People who die without ever performing the Sacrament of the License would wind up in Purgatory until their soul could parallel park to a seraph's satisfaction.

Perhaps these souls are among us already. It would explain a great many squeaks in the city's taxi fleet. I rest easy knowing that my mother's soul is at peace somewhere at the Great Drive-In Movie in the beyond. I may park next to her some day.

player one

Elon Musk pegs our odds at not being in a video game as "one in billions". The argument goes something like this: Our nascent AI technology is advancing so fast that it is difficult to imagine that it could not produce a realistic simulation of the universe. Once that happens, the number of virtual universes will outnumber the real.  Mumble mumble recursion mumble.

Here's my counter argument. Any magic AI technology on its way to delivering a credible simulation of the universe will stop and tell the user that it would be cheaper to just create a real universe instead.

amateur hour

I volunteer for a neighborhood organization. I run all the neighborhood business from a dedicated iPad Mini 3 with LTE. An earlier experience with a 'rugged' ZAGG keyboard had me nearly ready to chuck keyboard, iPad, and iOS.

A new keyboard has me hanging on for a bit longer. That keyboard is the awesome Logitech K480. Every surface is hard plastic. Every plastic edge is a bit sharp. The thing weighs in at just over 800 grams. That's 100 grams more than an original iPad! The whole thing seems like it could be an entire 80's 8 bit home computer by itself.

The best part is the Mike Mulligan-esque 'Bing Bang Crash Boom, Louder and Louder, and Faster and Faster' sounds you get when you slap the keys around. The second best part is the serious slot in the back. It will hold an iPad mini in portrait with a smart cover folded behind it. An iPad mini in portrait has almost as much vertical real estate as an Macbook Pro Retina 13.

The K480 keyboard can do one trick more. It has a chunky dial on the side that picks which of three paired devices will receive input. The slot will hold an iPad mini and an iPhone 6 together in portrait.

The K480 is happy to pair as a keyboard with essentially any bluetooth machine. This means that it has an actual physical key with the blessed letters 'e', 's', 'c' silkscreened right on.

I downloaded and installed iOS 9.3 on the iPad mini after yesterday's iPad Pro announcement. I hoped a extra bit of Pro-ness would somehow permeate the iOS line. I hoped that iOS would stop taking virtual acetone to the escape key. No such luck. This Pro operating system still hides the escape key from 'keypress', 'keydown', and 'keyup' events in Javascript. Amateur hour.

With the new iPad Pro 9.7, Apple has caved on a physical keyboard and a stylus for iPad-sized tablets. When will they end their war on escape? I don't need 1024 levels of escape. I don't need to know the angle at which I press escape. I don't need John Lasseter to say that it's the most realistic escape ever. I just want escape.