Cameron Moll:

At one point in time, J2ME (now Java ME) and WAP were the starting points for a discussion on mobile strategy and the web. Then, for a brief period of time, you talked about HTML/CSS. Now, for a growing majority of mobile strategies that don’t require a global presence on widely varying devices, the discussion begins with iPhone. Smart client is now iPhone app, and in many cases, the app is primary to the experience, not secondary to the browser. And iPad app may soon replace iPhone app as the starting point.

This American Life is a radio series on NPR (National Public Radio) which recently aired an episode exploring the joint-venture between General Motors and Toyota called New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. or NUMMI. The venture started in 1984 with General Motors providing a recently closed plant in California and Toyota providing its now legendary manufacturing process. NPR Automotive Correspondent Frank Langfitt tells how Toyota’s processes turned one of the worst automobile plants in the world into one of the best and how GM’s stagnant corporate culture utterly failed to embrace change and copy this success to its other plants.

John Gruber on the iPad’s impact on the rising generation of tinkerers (anecdotal but illustrative):

The iPad and iPhone are closed compared to personal computers, yes. But they are remarkably open compared to so many kinds of computing devices. Here’s an email I received today from Sam Kaplan:

I am 13 years old and a big fan of your site. I just made an app called iChalkboard. This is my second app, but my first iPad app. It allows you to simply sketch things out. Check it out: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ichalkboard/id322491414?mt=8. If you need any more info or a promo code, feel free to ask.

I hope you like it as much as I do.

He’s 13 years old and he has created (with the help of his friend, 14-year-old designer Louis Harboe) and is selling an iPad app in the same store where companies like EA, Google, and even Apple itself distribute iPad apps. His app is ready to go on the first day the product is available. Not a fake app. Not a junior app. A real honest-to-god iPad app. Imagine a 13-year-old in 1978 who could produce and sell his own Atari 2600 cartridges.

Somehow I don’t think young Mr. Kaplan sees the iPad as hurting his sense of wonder or entrepreneurism.

There is absolutely nothing about the iPad that portends the end of innovation, tinkering, programming, design. If that were the case, there wouldn’t be 150,000 applications on the App Store right this second. So what if you can’t make iPad programs on an iPad. I don’t complain I can’t make new dishwashers with my dishwasher.

The old guard has The Fear. They see the iPad and the excitement it has engendered and realize that they’ve made themselves inessential—or at least invisible. They’ve realized that it’s possible to make a computer that doesn’t break, doesn’t stop working, doesn’t need constant tinkering. Unlike a car, it’s possible to design a computer that is bulletproof. It just turns out that one of the ways to make that work is to lock it down. That sucks, but it certainly appears to be a better solution than design by committee gave us for the last couple of decades.

Cory Doctorow:

Then there’s the device itself: clearly there’s a lot of thoughtfulness and smarts that went into the design. But there’s also a palpable contempt for the owner. I believe — really believe — in the stirring words of the Maker Manifesto: if you can’t open it, you don’t own it. Screws not glue. The original Apple ][+ came with schematics for the circuit boards, and birthed a generation of hardware and software hackers who upended the world for the better. If you wanted your kid to grow up to be a confident, entrepreneurial, and firmly in the camp that believes that you should forever be rearranging the world to make it better, you bought her an Apple ][+.

But with the iPad, it seems like Apple’s model customer is that same stupid stereotype of a technophobic, timid, scatterbrained mother as appears in a billion renditions of “that’s too complicated for my mom” (listen to the pundits extol the virtues of the iPad and time how long it takes for them to explain that here, finally, is something that isn’t too complicated for their poor old mothers).

Quake II has been ported to HTML5/JavaScript (modern browsers only need apply; don’t even think of trying this in Internet Explorer):

In the port, we use WebGL, the Canvas API, HTML 5 <audio> elements, the local storage API, and WebSockets to demonstrate the possibilities of pure web applications in modern browsers such as Safari and Chrome.

The browser has indeed become the OS.

The United Kingdom has insane libel laws which make it almost impossible to expose frauds and quacks without ending up in legal trouble. In an April 2008 article, Dr. Simon Singh did precisely that, writing the plain and obvious truth that chiropractors often claim to be able to cure various diseases without any supporting evidence. The British Chiropractic Association (BCA) subsequently sued for libel and won an initial ruling. In a clear victory for free speech and honest debate in the UK, that ruling has now been overturned by the Court of Appeal. Efforts to reform Britain’s libel laws, which have received significant attention because of Dr. Singh’s case, will continue.

Apple has published a list of major websites that are “iPad ready”. By “iPad Ready”, of course, Apple means “doesn’t rely on Flash”.

Stephen Fry:

After he [Apple CEO Steve Jobs] leaves, I am finally left alone with an iPad. Finally I get some finger time. I peep under the slip holder, and there it is. When I switch it on, a little sigh escapes me as the screen lights up. Ten minutes later I am rolling on the floor, snarling and biting, trying to wrestle it from the hands of an Apple press representative.

That is not strictly true, but giving up the iPad felt a little like that. I had been prepared for a smooth feel, for a bright screen and the “immersive” experience everyone had promised. I was not prepared, though, for how instant the relationship I formed with the device would be. I left Cupertino without an iPad, but I have since gotten my own, and it goes with me everywhere.

When I was fourteen, I wrote space-invader games in BASIC on a VIC-20. If you were interested in computers back in 1982, I bet you did the same. When I was 18, I wrote multi-user dungeons in C on serial terminals attached to a Sun 3. When I was 22, I worked deep down in the guts of a text database system — still C, now on a Sun 3/80 of my very own, with one of those HUGE bitmapped screens with a million black-or-white pixels. I was in touch with my friends from university: we were going to write compilers and operating systems and cool stuff like that — and to some degree, we did. We sent each other our in-progress code, complained about each other’s programming-language designs, and laughed at how inefficient each others’ completely unnecessary reimplementations of malloc() were. [I remember a friend’s implementation achieving something like 18% occupancy.]

That was then.

Today, I mostly paste libraries together. So do you, most likely, if you work in software. Doesn’t that seem anticlimactic? We did all those courses on LR grammars and concurrent software and referentially transparent functional languages. We messed about with Prolog, Lisp and APL. We studied invariants and formal preconditions and operating system theory. Now how much of that do we use? A huge part of my job these days seems to be impedence-matching between big opaque chunks of library software that sort of do most of what my program is meant to achieve, but don’t quite work right together so I have to, I don’t know, translate USMARC records into Dublin Core or something. Is that programming? Really? Yes, it takes taste and discernment and experience to do well; but it doesn’t require brilliance and it doesn’t excite. It’s not what we dreamed of as fourteen-year-olds and trained for as eighteen-year-olds. It doesn’t get the juices flowing. It’s not making.

Actually, I couldn’t disagree more. Essentially, Mike Taylor is arguing that making lasagna isn’t making lasagna unless the chef in question has made every ingredient from scratch. But where does “from scratch” end? Home-made noodles and sauce wouldn’t be so bad but then those recipes call for ingredients that themselves might not be considered “from scratch”. Must one grow one’s own wheat and tomatoes before one can be said to have made lasagna in Mike Taylor’s mind?