Paloma Blanca

The nineteen-eighties is a period sometimes referred to as “the decade without style”, or “the decade with no taste”. Even if you didn’t live through it, you can still snigger at the shoulder pads in re-runs of ‘Dallas’ or ‘Dynasty’ or the rolled-up jacket sleeves in ‘Miami Vice’.

And Crockett’s jacket was usually white. Cars were white. Stilettos were white. Abba dressed in white.

I can’t remember exactly when taste and sanity returned, but nobody wants to go back there, not even the fashion industry, notorious for lack of ideas and recycling old styles.

But over the last year or so, I’ve noticed a return of white cars to the roads. New ones, so clearly deliberately chosen by their proud owners. (If you’re buying second-hand, colour is a less important consideration. I’ve never liked mine much — a very pale metallic bronze.)

In some people’s minds then, a white car is not crass, vulgar and tasteless, as everyone agreed after the eighties. Improbable as it seems, they think it’s cool.

It bugged me. I kept asking myself how a proportion of the population could miss the obvious fact that white is the epitome of tasteless colour choice for a car. Who was to blame?

Eventually, I worked it out. It was Jonathan “Jony” Ive.

He designed the first iPods and iPhones. Yes, they were white, but they looked amazing compared to anything else on the market and were beautifully made. They were far more expensive than the competition, but some people like that. The device becomes a status symbol, and the whiteness a kind of trademark. The accessories were white as well. It can’t be a coincidence that Jony Ive began his career designing toilets.

Of course, iPhones and iPods aren’t necessarily white any more. (In 2008, the last, cut-price batch of the iPhone 3 was BLACK.) But it’s too late. The curse of the nineteen-eighties had been forgotten, by some people at least. They buy white cars.

Bustin’ Out Dead or Alive

I recently was donated an “obsolete” iPhone 3GS, which had been behaving erratically occasionally, and its owner upgraded to a later model. I don’t “do” Apple, for a number of reasons, but took the phone to tinker with, and perhaps learn something.

I don’t buy Apple products, essentially because I don’t like the company’s attitude. I don’t like the way that everything is locked down and restricted; and I don’t like the way that consumers, software developers, and even mobile carriers are relentlessly exploited for cash. (Let’s all shed a tear for the poor mobile phone companies.)

I realize that most of the consumer victims of Apple are perfectly happy with their purchases. They believe the higher prices are because they’re buying “quality” and when they’re jumping through hoops to do things the Apple way, they don’t actually know that there is any other way.

Take iTunes, for example. There’s no fundamental need for you to have a special software application to buy stuff off the internet. A web browser is fine. But using the same software application to manage your phone for backups and updates and to buy media from an online store and to play stuff on your PC and to download apps is just MENTAL. No software developer would have come up that concept, except in this case where the objective was to lock your iPhone to one store and one account.

As you probably know, there is a process to break an iPhone free from Apple’s monopoly store, “jailbreaking”, which makes use of flaws in the system. Every time Apple plugs a hole, the hackers find another one, and so it goes.

In my case, with a phone several years old, there was a well-established range of jailbreaking options and many a tutorial on the net. I chose a polished hacking utility called “redsn0w”, which subverts Apple’s firmware update to install jailbroken system software and an independent app store, Cydia (named after Cydia pomonella, a “worm” or larva often found in Apples). I’m a long-term user of Debian Linux, and was amused to see that Cydia uses a version of Debian APT to install packages.

From Cydia, I got a utility (“ultrasn0w”) to unlock the phone from its mobile carrier as well. Mobile companies lock phones to ensure that they get the contract and call revenue, but I’m sure that Orange got their money’s worth from that phone long ago.

Let me finish with another Apple story. I did once buy one of their products, a USB keyboard. I was fed up with the poor quality of PC keyboards, with their cheap, rub-off legends, and the Apple one was better-made, and looked stylish. So stylish, in fact, that you couldn’t actually type on it, since the keys had the feel and travel of those on a 1980s calculator. But here’s the Apple bit: it came with a USB extension cable (in case the built-in cable wasn’t long enough). But the two USB connectors to join the cables were made with a non-standard “key” and notch, to make sure that you couldn’t use the free extension cable with any other bit of USB equipment. Now that’s just plain nasty.

Flash In The Pan

Steve Jobs lied. That’s one of the curious features of Apple Fan Syndrome (A mental illness which I have just invented. Don’t worry, doctors do it all the time.) Anyway, where was I? Yes, Apple fans tend to believe what the company tells them, particularly the late Glorious Leader, to a degree unmatched in any other consumer group.

What I’m thinking of in particular was when Steve issued from on high his “Thoughts On Flash” a long discourse on why Adobe Flash was not appropriate for (his) mobile devices. The most controversial point was where he alleged that Adobe Flash is inefficient and prone to software flaws (or “bloated and buggy”, as we would say in the software world).

The fact is that he was absolutely right about that. Although most of us encounter Flash by playing movies or sound clips on the web, it’s capable of much, much more. A cornucopia of different capabilities. And that is the problem. Adobe has put so much extra functionality into its product that it’s a struggle for the company’s engineers to keep it efficient, reliable and secure.

But the claim from Steve that the reliability issue was an important factor in banning Flash from Apple devices was just a smokescreen. Even what he calls the “most important reason” is only just squinting sideways at the real issue. Steve says that the cross-platform nature of Adobe Flash (i.e. that it works and looks the same on PCs, Macs and non-Apple phones and tablets) is bad. He says that Flash therefore can’t take full advantage of the features of an iPad or iPhone.

Again, that’s not the real reason. Apple’s real problem with Flash is the power built into it. If you’re a developer, you can use Flash to create a complete “user experience” of menus, icons and windows, all within the Flash application. In general, that’s not a clever thing to do, but could perhaps be justified under some circumstances. But the anathema to Apple of allowing a rogue user interface onto their devices is the real show-stopper. If Flash was just a dumb movie-player, there would be no problem with it, no matter how bloated or buggy it was. (The official App Store is full of them).

That kind of intolerance towards different ways of doing things is characteristic of the Apple approach. On the plus side, users have less to learn; but against that, they are constrained in what they are able to accomplish. However, exposure only to the one true way means that generally they are unaware of what is missing. (Unless it’s some missing piece of major functionality, such as “cut and paste”.)

One of the side effects of the Apple ban on Flash seems to have been a decline in the number of web sites which use the “extra” functionality of Flash to replace normal web page features. (You will know these: a fixed window in the middle of the screen and the first thing to appear is a “Loading – Please Wait” message.) This is good. The sooner the rest of the Internet ditches Adobe Flash the better. It’s bloated and buggy.