Failing once again to write about Interesting 09

I keep trying to write up my thoughts on Interesting 09 (short version - awesome fun), but obviously the further away we are from it the less useful that is, except as a personal reminder. Also, I've been sidetracked by the Gainer Furs community.



Fur, or Furrs, or Furries, tend to get a pretty bad press on the Internet, and I can broadly see why, but I never felt it was wholly fair. Everyone has their own fixations or hobbies - most are admittedly not as visual as dressing in a fur suit or as hard to explain as actually being a wolf, but they are nonetheless idiosyncratic. When Alex mentioned that she had heard that the Dinobots were going to appear in the next Transformers film, I could not have been prevented from rattling off the litany: Swoop, Sludge, Slag, Snarl, Grimlock. We agreed that Sludge had the real name short straw, although Slag was pretty unfortunate, albeit not as bad as it would have been if he hadn't been a fire-breathing triceratops. Everyone has crimps in their wiring - if yours does not make you feel that you are in some way a horse, be grateful.



That said, I was a little surprised when somebody told me about gainer furs - people who believe that they are animals (usually wolves - not sure why, but wolves are very popular), which at this point is not very surprising, and who want to put on large amounts of weight, which still is. That link is probably not reliably safe for work, incidentally, and is also just quite odd.



Live and let live, obviously. However, a group of pro-ana (anorexia) enthusiasts did not follow this maxim and, having found the site through whatever means, arrived to ask some searching questions about the lifestyle decisions of the furry gainers. This brief battle of the anorexics and the furry gourmands did not last long, both communities being prone to tiring easily, but it did provide one of the great Internet exchanges, on the event of one of the furs posting pictures of his development for the admiration of the group.



Anorexic: I just threw up a little.
Gainer: Glad I could help.



The message? People are pretty odd, but as long as they stay in their own communities they generally don't have to deal with that as a bad thing. In the right environment, oddness is neither disruptive or destructive and, by extension, the person you have just met might be outside that environment for the first time in a long time. There's probably a lesson about the importance of sensible nutrition, but I'm having trouble grasping it.



You are a guest in a surprising number of environments, and if you're about to cut up rough then you are probably in some way a guest, because people tend not to cut up rough in their homes or home communities. Also, be it ever so recondite, almost everything that exists has a user community, and the best way to migrate them is not to tell them that the product they like to use make you throw up.

Nearness

Making complex and ultimately pointless machines to accomplish minor tasks has origins in the hypothetical machines of Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson (and, of course, Professor Branestawm).


In the realm of the physical, the origin of the modern-day Rube Goldberg device grows from these drawings and from, I suppose, complex systems like the increasingly ludicrous attempts to make world record attempts for continuous domino runs less tedious.


Fischli and Weiss defined the genre in the early going with The Way Things Go - a lengthy game of physics which, let's say, may have in some small way inspired Wieden and Kennedy's hugely popular advert for the Honda Accord, Cog.


These devices are a popular online video sharing phenomenon, as they are usually made up from common household objects and provide creativity bragging rights. One of the best, Contraption, was made by Baynham and Tyers; Ben Tyers went on to make a large-scale device for Punchdrunk's Tunnel 228 exhibition, called (thematically consistently) The Machine.


Timo Allarn of the Touch project and Jack Schulze of Berg have collaborated on a new twist on the model -starting with an Oyster card, London's RFID-enabled transport pass, the interactions are created by proximity rather than touch. Smoother and less analogue than the clunky, funky mechanical devices, it's oddly fascinating to watch.


...and, by the time I actually get around to posting this, all over the web. Ho hum. Sorry about that, but if there's one person left who hasn't seen it, it's interesting!

The fox, the chicken and the bag of grain - Apple day

So, no Apple tablet, which means that the 12" G4 Powerbook on which I am writing this can once again breathe freely, or more precisely whirr like a toy boat on crack. What did we get?


Not a huge amount. I was expecting the Beatles to make their bow on the iTunes Music Store, since it seems to be Monetise the Beatles Day, but no. The biggest bump went to the Nano, which got an FM radio and a video camera. The iPod Touch got a capacity bump, but no camera, as was expected. No tablet. A new software update for the iPhone and a new iTunes program, neither of which really justify an event.


The Nano is the most interesting change. It doesn't predate on any other Apple product, really - you might choose between a Nano and a Shuffle, but the real competition is with other solid state media players - or at least, it was. With the addition of a video camera, it becomes, potentially, a competitor with the entire Flip-inspired range of small, phone-form pocket solid-state camcorders. The Nano is only standard definition, but the sort of video that these cameras usually take - impromptu street footage - is unlikely to suffer too badly from the drop in quality. The Nano seems to be opening up a second front as a secondary device - a pocketable that isn't a phone. Also, the inclusion of an FM radio, however late, brings it up to the same level as every other MP3 player so far made. The argument for excluding the radio was that it detracted from the unitary purpose of the iPod, originally. The business and aesthetic logic for including it now is presumably that it can be brought into the iTunes Music Store ecosystem.


The omission of an added camera to the iPod Touch is ether a technical failure which will be corrected in the next upgrade or a decision to keep the cost low and keep the Touch as an entry-level gaming and music platform - an iPhone for people with big record collections and small wallets. Accepting that very few sane people will buy an iPod Touch and an iPhone, Apple wants to upsell where possible, without making either device undesirable.


I think that the people saying that the inclusion of a camera would potentially damage the iPhone are broadly right, but there's a question of the future here, also. Right now, even in technologically advanced American cities, open wireless access is relatively limited, and 3G coverage is often pretty flaky, so having a device that switches between 802.11 and 3G for data seamlessly, and which makes calls across 3G and 2G networks, is a big deal. So, a Touch with a camera would let you do many of the things that a phone would, but you'd still need a phone. The tipping point if you add a camera now is the ability to take, upload and email pictures and video, which would certainly make the combination of an iPod Touch and a very cheap 3G pay-as-you-talk phone powerfully tempting, which eats into the sellability of the iPhone, potentially. However, if you add city-wide wireless data access to that, the phone part becomes almost totally redundant for a large chunk of the target audience - well-heeled young metropolitans who very rarely leave the boundaries of one city or another. It becomes Touch plus $20 phone left in glove compartment, pretty much. Apple might be starting to react already to the future convergence pull to a single 4G/wifi device which acts as a small computer platform and works-anywhere VOIP phone - the Utopian Apple Tablet, say?


Either that or they just couldn't get it to work in time.


So, Nano (for battery life, exercise customisations, FM radio) and Touch (for gaming, wireless Internet, progressively limited VOIP), or Nano and iPhone, but not iPhone and Touch (too great an overlap), and better iPhone than Touch.


Where, though, is the grain-spitting winged fox of the tablet?

Android apps - links to follow

This actually from the realisation that I couldn't answer a question about the experience of the HTC Magic on Twitter due to character limits (arguably exactly why you should etc. on Twitter). There's a lot of Magic/Hero versus iPhone 3GS comparison out there, which I won't add much to, although I suspect that my usage pattern would be even more frustrating with an iPhone because at least with the Magic I can replace the battery towards the end of the day (although that convenience is balanced out by the verdamnt non-standard headphone jack). That aside, any smartphone stands or falls on its apps; the Android Market (which I want very much to call the Goblin Market every time) is not as heavily populated as the App Store, and it may never be. However, the openness of the system means that programs can be loaded on without official sanction (a friend with a G1 in Los Angeles showed me a battery life app he had built and loaded on from his PC as being easier than looking for the right one on the Market), and there's a sense of being part of a plucky underdog team that, while the actual experience of being a plucky underdog may be pretty sucky, is at least nice to feel.



However! The brief here is to recommend some Android apps, so let's do it.


First up (and this is the point at which the it-just-works crowd started to mock me openly, and not without good reason), the installed soft keyboard and camera apps are a little ropey. Even for a 7-day test, I'd recommend installing Better Keyboard and switching to it. It's skinnable and significantly more functional. The Hero has a better keyboard, which you can install on the Magic by rooting it, but that is, I think, unnecessary drama. Snapphoto adds elements to the camera - zoom, white balance, lighting defaults - which make it feel less like a slightly crappy cameraphone and more like a slightly crappy ultraportable. It's never going to be a winner for images, but with snapphoto I feel like I can go out without a support camera, at least in daylight.


Having paid a few dollars to fix things that really should have started out better, I'd recommend:

• Astrid - a to do app which syncs with RTM. The more task lists you have, the more confusing the Astrid view becomes, but it's handy for identifying tasks and ticking them off.
  
• Barcode Scanner - very much what it says on. If it hooked up with Delicious Library I would marry it.
  
• Beebplayer - not iPlayer mobile for Android, and cursed somewhat by the condition of 3G in the UK, but a good live/listen again player, at least.
  
• Beyondpod - or ACast, although I found the last ACast update led to a lot of forced closures. Podcast listening and RSS reading, obviously.
  
• Google sky map - Pointless, but rather lovely app that shows you the star map wherever you are pointing the camera. Point it at your feet and experience the Australian night sky!
  
• Layar and Wikitude - both augmented reality programs, they stretch the processor to its tiny whining limit, but are worth trying.
  
• Shazam - one-use, but that one use is genuinely handy - just like Shazam elsewhere, it identifies background music.
  
• Streamfurious - live streaming radio, obvs - ACast and Beyondpod can do this also, but Streamfurious is better for livestreaming rather than streaming podcasts, as far as I have so far determined.
  
• Twidroid - A Twitter app, but one with the advantage of running in the background, if that's something you see as an advantage.

Spotify, obviously, will shortly be joining this list, unless they have managed to cock things up badly. And, realistically, something like TasKiller to clean out your processes once in a while.


So far, my experience of Android vs iPhone is almost exactly predictable - if you are hooked on Google apps, Android is great, but the 3GS is a better media phone even before the tight integration with iTunes (which integration Doubletwist makes a lot less significant, although not insignificant at least for now).