A bit of confusion aside, this really got the message out there. Thirteen senators have withdrawn their support for it (including mine!).

As many have said, this is just the beginning. There’s a war looming. But it’s an auspicious beginning.

Gruber and Marco have both mounted their inevitable defense of the iPhone’s muting behavior — but, uncharacteristically, I actually agree with something Marco said:

The user told the iPhone to make noise by either scheduling an alarm or initiating an obviously noise-playing feature in an app.

The user also told the iPhone to be silent with the switch on the side.

The user has issued conflicting commands, and the iPhone can’t obey both.

It’s a typical design problem: it can’t be heavy and light and big and small. Neither decision will satisfy everyone all the time or cover every edge case: if Apple implemented Mute in Ihnatko’s preferred way, millions of people would be just as irritated when their scheduled alarms didn’t wake them up.

This is hard to quibble with. If you have one mute switch and no ability to tell the alarm what you want it to do in that situation, then, yes, you’re going to piss somebody off.

So Marco makes a good point: under those constraints, there is no right decision. But then he goes on to say that Apple made the right decision:

When implementing the Mute switch, Apple had to decide which of a user’s conflicting commands to obey, and they chose the behavior that they believed would make sense to the most people in the most situations.

That’s good design.

But that’s not good design. That’s just choosing one of two bad designs, on a hunch.

I think this is emblematic of the Apple enthusiast mindset: that it doesn’t even occur to them to expand the scope of the problem beyond the constraints that Apple has imposed. There are other options: you could make the alarm vibrate instead. Or you could present the user with a choice (something that Apple rarely does) — in the alarm app itself, say, or the first time the user puts the phone on mute with alarms active. Or something. But all other options are, apparently off the table: the alarm either must go off or mustn’t go off. Those are your choices.

Most of iOS’s “user-centric” design decisions are predicated on the notion that Apple knows best. But this is a situation where Apple not only doesn’t, but can’t, know best. I’d be a lot less annoyed with Apple zealotry if it would just acknowledge this: not that Apple makes mistakes, but that their uncompromising ethos often forces them into situations where every available option is a mistake.

There’s absolutely no reason a community group, organization, or collection of friends couldn’t share everything they needed using protocols and servers that have existed almost since the dawn of UNIX. And with federated protocols like XMPP (on which Google Wave was built) there’s also no reason that such services couldn’t “scale” to include progressively larger circles of contact.

In the end, the need for profit can only ever add unnecessary and unwanted side-effects to our medium of communication, whether it’s omnipresent and invisible tracking of everything we read and say, a visual landscape overrun with advertisements, or software that disappears and takes our data with it once we stop paying rent. The “cloud” model is becoming popular first and foremost because it enables new forms of profit. However with just a tiny amount of work and responsibility, we can make the Cloud’s few advantages redundant, re-possess our information, and finally move to an era of worldwide, decentralized, participatory digital democracy.

I think I’m in love.

What do you worry about? I’m talking about loose nukes, global warming, economic meltdown, creeping fascism.

All of the above, and anything else in that general ballpark. As one does. Sometimes I remember that I evidently assumed that Ronald Reagan was probably about as weird as it was going to get; that that all seemed a bit over the top, a grave if semi-comic but blessedly temporary anomaly. That’s scary.

But the good things are really good, and often great. The baked-in full-screen support, the swipey navigation options, Mission Control, Launchpad — all unqualified wins, in my book. This feels like an operating system designed for laptops, in particular small laptops, and I couldn’t be happier about that.

And then there are all these little surprises that make you smile: the login page that automatically pops up when you join a public network; the auto-correction stuff (though the smile fades quickly in this case; need to figure out how to turn that off); the animations when you bring an app out of fullscreen. I grimaced when Lord Jobs proclaimed his intention to mine iOS for OS X features, but some things actually do seem to translate well.

There are meatier things here (the application autosave/state management stuff is a real gamechanger, I suspect, and probably the first step toward document management that finally transcends the file system), and I look forward to playing with them. But for now I think I’m just going to keep swiping back and forth between applications, grinning like a fool.

Here he is, standing sentinel at my desk, warding off intruders.

The problem with e-mail, young people say, is that it involves a boringly long process of signing into an account, typing out a subject line and then sending a message that might not be received or answered for hours. And sign-offs like “sincerely” — seriously?

Lena Jenny, 17, a high school senior in Cupertino, Calif., said texting was so quick that “I sometimes have an answer before I even shut my phone.” E-mail, she added, is “so lame.”

It’s articles like this that make me feel most keenly the steady encroach of old-fogeyhood. Whippersnappers! says my sclerotic oldbrain. Can’t form full sentences! Attention span of fruit flies! Death of intelligent discourse! … and so on. Which is, of course, exactly the reaction this article is aiming for. It’s certainly not targeting the teenagers it quotes (and quietly mocks). This is aimed squarely at the aging practitioners of an ancient and needlessly verbose slow-texting mechanism that’s clearly on its way out.

Couple of things here: it’s worth pointing out that the drop in visits to Yahoo! and Hotmail that the article uses as its point of departure have been mostly offset by an increase in Gmail use, a dot that the author mentions in passing, but fails to connect:

The numbers testify to the trend. The number of total unique visitors in the United States to major e-mail sites like Yahoo and Hotmail is now in steady decline, according to the research company comScore. Such visits peaked in November 2009 and have since slid 6 percent; visits among 12- to 17-year-olds fell around 18 percent. (The only big gainer in the category has been Gmail, up 10 percent from a year ago.)

But, more to the point: I don’t think this is a zero-sum game. Unlike snail mail, which really has been more or less obviated by all these new communication mechanisms, email doesn’t have to wane in order for SMS/Twitter/etc to wax.¹ It’s mostly a different niche, and, to the extent that it was being used for short punchy insta-chats, it was being used incorrectly — or as stopgap, at any rate, until a better solution arrived.²

That solution is here. Beyond that, I don’t think there are any other conclusions to draw.

The iPhone isn’t so much a phone as a replacement for a phone. That’s an important distinction, because it’s an early instance of what will become a common pattern. Many if not most of the special-purpose objects around us are going to be replaced by apps running on tablets.

It’s not just a new software platform. It’s a device that can, through software, change the way we live our lives in meatspace:

In 1938 Buckminster Fuller coined the term ephemeralization to describe the increasing tendency of physical machinery to be replaced by what we would now call software. The reason tablets are going to take over the world is not (just) that Steve Jobs and Co are industrial design wizards, but because they have this force behind them. The iPhone and the iPad have effectively drilled a hole that will allow ephemeralization to flow into a lot of new areas. No one who has studied the history of technology would want to underestimate the power of that force.

The future gets cooler, and scarier, every day.

The only slight wrinkle to this familiar story is that Steve Jobs called the guy. Not to grant him an exception or anything: just to reiterate his demented policy, with — I gather — a couple of toothless palliatives thrown in. Because there are no exceptions. There is only the Way.

The developer, who seems like a very nice guy, was gracious about it:

Steve Jobs has a well-deserved reputation for creating great quality products and for his passion for excellence and user experience. I’ve also read that he is a detail-oriented executive and a hands-on guy who is intimately involved with his company’s work (in a way that few other CEOs are).

His phone-call reinforced those notions and went further to suggest that he was also a very conscientious guy who cared about people. The fact that he took the time to read my email, think about the app and then personally call me was amazing.

I guess we’re supposed to be impressed that Lord Jobs would deign to call a mere developer to tell him personally that he’s shit out of luck, but really I find this kind of thing profoundly depressing. Not so much because Apple continues down their draconian path with iOS — that’s just the way it is, and there’s no point in lamenting it anymore. Mostly you just avert your eyes. What’s bumming me out is that at least some portion of the development community now accepts Apple’s ecosystem lockdown as a fact of nature, entirely inaberrant. And, worse, they feel actual gratitude when its mastermind reaches down from on high, like a benevolent deity, and … doesn’t help them, at all. A kind of deus ex machina, minus the part where the deus does something useful.

This is how the ridiculous and the unacceptable worm their way into the general consciousness — slowly, bit by bit, until you forget what it was like, back in the old days, when you were allowed to fix your bugs.

Nevertheless, I found myself battling tears when Ubuntu made this gracious offer. I still have deep regrets about the many hours of my youth I wasted trying to get Slackware to recognize my soundcard, or read a CD, or not destroy my monitor when I misconfigured the refresh rate. So now, in 2010, when a Linux distro does something more than laugh derisively and erase my hard drive when I issue a command it doesn’t know about, I think it’s perfectly natural — and totally understandable — for me to get a bit misty. ¹