Twitter also exploded in popularity in recent times, and I resisted getting an account there because I failed to see why anyone would be interested in the fact that I ate a coffee yogurt and cranberry juice for breakfast this morning. Plus relying on a single server to manage nothing more than a stream of tiny messages seemed completely stupid. (Yes, I know I use Pownce for the same purpose, but it’s mainly just a way to stick a little thought-of-the-day feed onto my own blog). It’s like if everyone’s e-mail was all just off of a single server, like Gmail…oh, wait…

I hate to say “I told you so”, but when I read this erudite post on TechCrunch, it was like a breath of fresh air. If microblogging is truly a new part of basic Internet infrastructure like e-mail or IM, which I suppose it is at this point, then we need to introduce some standards and some reliable way to use the same technology with multiple service providers. Twitter may remain the top microblogging platform by virtue of its current reach and its brand, but the walled garden mentality can’t last much longer. The medium is too important to allow it to remain in the hands of only one provider, any more than there’s only one blog provider or one IM provider or one e-mail provider or one music download provider.

Just say yes to open microblogging!

For starters, I am a big believer in content aggregation. There are many well-established sites out there that host user content, and sometimes your own site is the best host. When it comes to blogging, video, podcasts, and so forth, it’s pretty hard to reinvent the wheel and make a splash these days. However, the pain point has shifted from how to host content to how to find quality content. Just go to YouTube.com sometime and you’ll see what I mean. Finding stuff that is meaningful to you and actually challenges your mind and your spirit is hard. Too hard.

So, with the idea of aggregation in mind, let’s move on to social networking. Social networking is awesome. We can quibble about how it might best be implemented, and some folks are hesitant to jump on board, but it’s definitely a concept that is in the process of reshaping the Internet. The problem I see is, again, that there’s a pain point where social networking and content aggregation aren’t always meshing very well. Facebook is a very different animal from Digg, and it’ll probably stay that way for some time.

Finally, I want to talk about Christianity. I hate to be blunt, but the Christian Web pretty much sucks. Sure, there are plenty of great church sites, and some ministries have done a lot of cutting edge stuff, and let’s not discount the growing swath of excellent Christian blogs — but by and large, there’s no great design or innovation going on that’s bringing all of the latest Web 2.0 and social networking inventions to bear and wrapping it all up in a package worthy of a TechCrunch nomination.

To summarize my post, I see a need for a service that solves this equation:

content aggregation + social networking + spiritual development - sucktitude = sweet

Interestingly enough, the first part of the name of this project starts with the answer to that equation. I leave it up to you to guess the rest of the name, as that revelation will have to wait a little while longer. In the meantime, I encourage you to leave your thoughts or any ideas you may have in regards how Christians can utilize Web 2.0 to the fullest extent. See you soon!

Anyway, I was thinking about how to implement lightweight feeds of latest comments, users, discussions, etc. for the home page of the super-secret Web project I’ve been working on, and after deciding an asynchronous job running some kind of message queue system was way overkill for the present time, I went ahead with implementing a simple stats cache using memcache. I already have a way to cache actual ActiveRecord-based models easily using the cached_model gem, but I didn’t want to use something that heavy for this. All I need are a few bundles of read-only attributes I can display in a pretty fashion on the home page, and an update every ten minutes or so is perfectly adequate.

What blew me away is once I’d started to write some simple test code, in a very short time my simple test code/prototype became the actual, usable product. What’s even more amazing is that I started to write some pseudo-code in a TODO comment to remind myself at a later date how to implement the actual database queries and hand the data off to a stats object, only to realize that I could simply type away for a couple more minutes and have real, working code! Now my job is pretty much over with, all done in about three hours max. Can’t beat that with a stick.

In Rails by way of the Ruby language, the dividing line between conceptual planning, prototyping, testing, and final robust implementation is virtually nonexistent a lot of the time, and that’s pretty darn cool. I could have done all of this stuff in my former love PHP, to be sure, but it would have taken longer and looked uglier. Ruby on Rails reminds me of another system that sports a serene, productive, and elegant design — one that starts with an M and ends with a c and is made by a fruit company.

BTW, some time soon I’ll have to tell you about my experiencing setting up an Apache/MySQL/Rails/Passenger (aka mod_rails)/Subversion stack on a virtual machine slice running Ubuntu Linux. Now that’s a party.

If you’re curious to hear more about how Inbox Zero works, and especially if you suffer from massive e-mail overload, check out this handy resource guide for further details. I think the systems we discipline ourselves to use for managing time and communication has a drastic impact on how productive we are in doing the things that really matter. I want to enter heaven knowing I spent quality time touching people’s lives rather than fiddling with techno-crud!

Well, I found it, and it’s called MacSword. It’s just a Mac frontend for public content released by the Sword project, which is pretty darn cool actually. I was able to pick up my favorite translation, the ESV, along with some good commentaries, concordances, and so forth. I’m very excited to start digging into some studies for my upcoming series called God: the Ultimate Travel Agent.

The Seeing

I went to the Macworld Expo in San Francisco, CA on Tuesday. Apple announced several interesting things, including movie rentals through iTunes and a new Apple TV product that lets you rent or purchase content from iTunes directly from your living room. But the most impressive feat that the Kingdom of Jobs was able accomplish was squeezing most of the functionality from a full-featured MacBook down into a teeeny-tiny super-slim sub-notebook called the MacBook Air.

My first glimpse in person of the MacBook Air was of a string of them that were hanging suspended in mid-air on one side of the large Apple booth on the show flow. The initial reaction I had was “whoa…optical illusion!” You see, when you look at a MacBook Air from the vantage point of seeing its topside, it looks like it’s a flat 2D plane. Seriously. There’s no perceptible depth at all. You know how you can look down at a piece of paper or an envelope and it doesn’t appear to have any thickness? That’s what the MacBook Air looks like from the top. When you angle down so you can view more of its side, only then do you notice it has a little bit of thickness, but even then it’s unbelievably thin.

The Feeling

After wading through massive crowds, I finally got to the row of MacBook Air’s that Apple was letting people play with. The Apple Guy™ who was assisting me let me unplug the power and hold it in my hands and feel its size and weight. Let me tell you, it’s every bit as impressive in real life as it is in any of the advertising. This thing is so light, so thin, so sleek — yet it feels sturdy and tight, like a single slab of metal. There wasn’t any “play” or creaking or flexing or anything that would indicate flimsiness. I’d feel pretty confident trekking around with this in my backpack. If you’ve ever used an iPhone or iPod Touch, it has that same kind of solid, expensive feel.

The Using

The screen on this thing is gorgeous, just like on the regular MacBooks. The keyboard feels pretty much just like the truly excellent standard MacBook keyboard as well, which is astonishing. This is no compromised sub-notebook with the emphasis on “sub” — it’s a real machine. Also intriguing is the large multi-touch trackpad. I’m not sure how much “aha!” this type of technology garners compared to the awesome multi-touch capability of the iPhone/iPod Touch, but it was pretty nice to be able to zoom and rotate images in iPhoto, Preview, and so forth. Now if they could come out with an “iDevice” that has a real touchscreen, then we’re talkin’ babe.

The Groaning

Despite Steve Jobs’ RealityDistortionField concerning the completeness of the MacBook Air package, there are some major drawbacks to consider. First of all, there’s no ethernet port. Yes, that’s right, all you get is wireless (802.11n) network support. Granted, you can purchase an optional USB-to-Ethernet adapter, but considering you only get one, count ‘em, one USB port on this sucker, it’s not an ideal solution. Also there’s no Firewire support whatsoever — a real disappointment for us fans of the superior I/O standard. Finally, the other obvious omission — and for obvious reasons — is the lack of an optical drive. That’s not really a criticism, as all super-thin sub-notebooks lack optical drives, but considering many people like myself play CDs and DVDs all the time on the road, it could relegate this product to a relatively niche status.

The Verdict

For a base price of $1799, you get one hell of a computer. It’s mind-bogglingly portable, fast, elegant, usable, capable, and I guarantee you will not find a single notebook from Apple or any other company around that will impress your friends and co-workers half as much as the MacBook Air. It’s a huge milestone in the evolution of the notebook, and certainly for the Macintosh platform, and I have no doubt that future Apple notebooks will be heavily influenced by the aesthetics of the MacBook Air.

Also, I’m making an announcement that I’ll soon be making an announcement (redundant, isn’t it?) about a secret Web site project that I’m busily working away on. Check out the latter part of the video for more on that front.

Thanks for watching, and enjoy the show!

Duck Season, Wabbit Season, Huckabee Season from Jared White on Vimeo.
Download High-Quality H.264 Quicktime Movie

What few people seem to get is that Apple’s success simply boils down to one thing: Apple is a philosophy, and it’s a philosophy that has been expertly executed for several years and is resonating with a growing number of people sick of the mainstream alternatives. Apple is way more than the sum of its parts, and the story is way more complex than just “Steve Jobs” or “iPod”.

The philosophy of Apple is that people deserve to be treated with respect. Don’t insult me by trying to sell me something that does way more than I need it to, looks crappy, and fails all the time in bizarre and frustrating ways. The simple, elegant design of Apple products isn’t just “cool”, it’s respecting the user. Take the iPod: it’s a very polite piece of hardware. It has a screen and a wheel. You can turn the wheel to pick logical options like Music. You look in your music, and you find the thing you want. Press the button, and you get your music. That’s it. No muss, no fuss, no blinking lights, no confusing array of buttons, no illogical myriad of options. It. Just. Works.

Or take Mac OS X. I loaned an old iMac G4 of mine to an older friend who’s in her 60’s. She used Windows for some office work years ago, but since then she hasn’t even had a personal computer and only occasionally went to the library to check e-mail and look at some Web sites. Once we got her set up with a Mac and showed her a few basics, she got going with it right away (with some help from her very smart little grandkids). Now she raves about the Mac and has told me numerous times how much more fun it is to use than Windows. In her words, it just makes sense and stuff is where you think it should be. Everything’s laid out in a simple, intuitive, logical, elegant fashion. Little does she know that a rock-solid, powerful UNIX core is blazing in the heart of her cute little machine.

Again, this is more that just “cool design, man” — it’s a deep-seated philosophy that the user should be treated with respect. Don’t insult them with multiple layers of obtuse, mystifying functions. Don’t bog the system down with badly-engineered code sludge, outdated technology, and irrelevant add-ons. Keep the visual look of the system smooth, functional, explanatory. Use eye candy to enhance the explorability of the interface, not just to get in the way and be annoying.

When I buy Apple products, I don’t just buy some hunk of metal with code loaded on it. I buy a complete, thought through, precision instrument designed to respect my intelligence and my time and give me exactly what I need to get the job done as well as make it an enjoyable experience. When I use Apple, I know I’m supporting a company that will support me if something goes wrong, and I know that I’m part of a committed userbase that also cares deeply about design and quality. The rise and fall of products on the Mac platform has sometimes come down to the sheer visual quality of the interface. Mac users care about quality.

So again, to the pundits out there who are constantly trying to figure out why Apple is so successful, don’t look at any one element. Look at the whole. Look at the philosophy. Apple is a mindset, and the more people “get it”, the more they’ll become dedicated customers and the company will continue to grow. We haven’t even come close to seeing the end of the rise of AAPL, my friends.

From what I’ve seen of it, it’s not a revolutionary jump into a higher plane of existence, but just a darn good upgrade to an already fantastic platform. And it will only serve to increase the distance between it and its rivals in the PC world in terms of design, innovation, usability, and sheer spit and polish.

There’s only one thing that sucks about it. I’ll have to pony up another 129 bucks for the basic privilege of using it. Darn you Steve Jobs! But hey, if my AAPL stock continues to skyrocket, I’ll probably come out ahead anyway.