For at least a month now I’ve been drooling to get my hands on Aperture, Apple’s workflow centric RAW image “darkroom” geared at professional level photographers. Last night, Carrie and I went down to the Apple store to see if we could at least get our hands on it and play with it, and were essentially totally snubbed by the employees there. It’s sort of astonishing to me still, but essentially here’s how it went down.

Right as we walked in I could see they were conducting a demo of the software to a few people in an otherwise completely empty store. I headed over to the demo, and Carrie went to look at other stuff. After watching the employee spend 5 minutes talking about how neat the white balance adjustments were (which is nothing special, at all, whatsoever) I grew antsy, and left the demo to go see if Aperture was installed on other machines. I wanted to use it, not watch a live version of the online demos.

This is where it gets sort of sour. I asked an employee if I could actually use Aperture on a machine, and he wasn’t sure, and got his manager. The manager came over to me and said “Aperture is pro level software and requires the right machine configuration, so you can’t use it. We have to demo it to you.” Snub. I was pissed, and thinking back on it, I still am. This guy was obviously suggesting, through his tone of voice, body language, and the words he said, that the software wasn’t for me, without even knowing anything about me or what I do.

And it’s these kinds of rash assumptions about me that have always grinded me. On first impression, I have never fully conformed to a sales person’s ideals. I either look too young, too shabby, wear cheap clothes, and I’m often humble when fishing for information (I usually know more about a product I’m interested in than the sales person, but I often play dumb to encourage a sales person to possibly tell me something I didn’t already know). I’ve fought against this kind of thing my entire adult life. While it’s nothing compared to racial or gender prejudice, it’s still prejudice of some sort, and it’s revolting.

When I was an officer for the corporation I cofounded, I was often involved in situations where people were a bit surprised to see a young twenty something who skateboarded to work, not in suit and tie, involved. I sat on a government board that channeled government funds into technology training centers, and at my first meeting the guy next to me asked “Are you taking notes for your father?”

But it’s most aggravating when I have cash money in my pocket ready to buy a product I know everything about and get snubbed because the sales person has made an assumption about me or whether I’m “worthy” of the product I seek.

Never, not ever, make an assumption about the people you’re selling to. Assume every person who walks through the door is ready to buy, and it’s your job to make that as easy for them as possible.

As I’ve been juggling a lot of things on OS X lately, I keep finding I wish I could do certain things that I’m not able to do. Here’s my latest wishlist:

Mini Window States
For all applications that need to show some kind of status, like Mail, NetNewsWire, iChat, or any other app whose state might change while it’s in the background, there should be some kind of in between minimized and maximized state, much like iTunes 5 has the “mini” view with the current track.

Because I’m using Quicksilver exclusively now (removing all items from your dock does the trick), I could use that area to line up my applications in mini-state and easily see who IM’d me, or emailed me, or what RSS feed just updated.

Growl comes to mind, but it never works on my machine, and when it does, it only seems to work for a few applications at best. I’d rather that it just become part of the OS X norm so it’s done right.

Smart Window Management
Give me a single button that cascades similar application windows, or just does something smart to tidy up the windows. I’ll often have a few dozen windows open (two monitors encourages this bad behavior) and I want to just get them under control. The Expose Drag and Size Mode I mentioned a while back would do the trick. I still want it.

Tabbed iChat
Seriously, let me put my conversations into a single window. Make sure that I can have 10-20 conversations without the interface going nuts. I’d switch to Adium X, but I like iChat better. It’s more solid, handles iChat stuff better (like voice, video, dragging and dropping images, etc).

Consistent Close Window Behavior
Sometimes when you click the red pill with the x, the application closes, sometimes just the window. Do it one way or the other and I’ll be happy, just make the behavior for the button the same across the board.

Is it too soon to talk about SXSW? Maybe, but in any case, I’ll be on a panel this year with Leonard Lin, Veerle Pieters, Nick Finck and Matthew Oliphant entitled “Starting Small: Web business for the rest of us.”

I’ll specifically be talking about my adventures in self employment and what kind of opportunity that can bring, but also, the risks involved. If you’re going and you’re interested in that kind of thing, I hope to see you there! I’m going to use some killer metaphors, and maybe wear an interesting hat.

This is exciting – I opened llor.nu up as an open source project today. This means that you can download the source and get it running on your machine, but more importantly, it means you can contribute to the production application and see your fixes/features on the live game.

From the start of this project I always expressed how important I felt the players are, and how they shape the game in significant ways, and how listening to them is important.

Opening the project amplifies this belief. While a small group of core contributors will continue to hold the line when it comes to deciding what patches make it into the production version, that line will be drawn by the help of indepedent developers who see problems, or think the game would benefit from their contributions.

I’ve picked the BSD license for the code, which means that there’s a lot of flexibility. There was a great wrestling match in my head over whether I should be so open, but in the end, all the fears I had over what might happen if the software were so open didn’t make sense. If people spinoff new versions with neat features, I can incorporate those features. At worst, there will be a lot of clones, but I suspect that if I continue doing what I’m doing, the original will remain the best.

I’ll follow up with some more info in later posts, but for now, go check out the already active development site. We’re rushing towards a 1.0 release, at which point we’ll close the beta and officially launch the game.

Rosa Parks died today (well, yesterday now) at the age of 92, a respectable age for someone who motivated significant change in how the US government and population treated racial segregation. I’ve known about Rosa Parks and her story since junior high, but it didn’t occur to me until today that she’s been alive all this time. While I’m not sure I can be sad about someone who passes at the age of 92, I am sad that I didn’t realize that there was this woman who showed incredible courage and wrought such change, and lived to see that change up until today.

Of course I see this as my own personality flaw. Surely there are people alive now who have in the past changed the course of human events in significant ways, and here I go about my days oblivious to what they’re doing now. When thinking of Rosa Parks, I can’t help but think about how her life after not giving up a seat on a bus must have been, what kind of family she leaves behind, and what she thought of politics and the state of things in the world today.

Perhaps even more sad – while I’d love to be able to learn the history and lives of people like Rosa Parks, I can’t think of who’s alive today that one might consider legendary. It’s not that there isn’t any, it’s that I truly don’t know.

Who would you like to spend time with today who you feel made a significant impact on improving the lives of others, either by fighting for civil rights, making scientific discoveries, etc? Who are the legends that walk amongst us?

I’m taking the topic up again because the last time I did it raised all sorts of questions from ColdFusion developers. The most common theme from ColdFusion developers was that I was comparing apples and oranges, or rather, apples and blueberry muffins. ColdFusion is a platform, Rails is a framework on a platform. I understand this and agree and sympathize with the arguments, but in the end, I think the arguments are fruitless.

Ultimately in life I want to create things, usually web applications, and to me, ColdFusion and Rails are the same thing – both are tools I can use to get me there. With ColdFusion I can use frameworks like Fusebox or Mach II or my own custom frameworks but in the end there are things that Rails can do that no ColdFusion framework can do easily or at all, and that’s what I’d like to talk about:

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I’m elated – seeing people I know do good things like Upcoming.org is one thing, seeing it acquired by Yahoo! is just something else. Yahoo! has been making some good moves lately, and even before the acquisition of Upcoming.org I felt like they actually had a chance to take the lead over Google in terms of overall value.

Congratulations Andy, Leonard, and Gordon. You’re all an inspiration for me to continue creating and sharing what I love.

I was talking with family members this weekend who are admittedly not of the Internet, everything is P2P, generation about how open file sharing is likely to change the traditional roles of record and movie labels in the music and entertainment industry. While savvy about music, I was surprised that people within my family didn’t see the writing on the wall – that more and more we’re seeing examples of bands releasing their works directly to the public through the Internet, bypassing labels, and doing well because of it. Some go so far as to release entire new albums for free (and free of any DRM in pure, raw MP3 form) with the idea that by doing so, it will spread their music to new listeners who might end up buying their music or going to the shows anyhow.

So, for those who are surprised or skeptical of the importance (or rather, the lack of) that major entertainment giants will have in the next 5 to 10 years, consider the following disruptive technologies (things that distribute the once coveted “expertise” of those major labels to the masses) and you tell me if you think major labels stand a chance:

The internet + weblogs + peer to peer networks (P2P).
The internet is to weblogs and P2P networks as water is to sailing, agriculture, and modern plumbing. A huge amount of human beings on this planet have access to the internet in some form, and within the next 5 to 10 years, it might even be more accessible than water. Layer on things like weblogs or forms of self publishing and the ability to rapidly distribute files with very little effort, and you’ve suddenly made a record label less important for your band’s success.

Sophisticated recording software on the cheap.
Apple’s Garageband is a shining example of a tool that can get non technical musicians into the world of digital mixing. It’s not the best there is, but if you’ve never played with digital mixing, it’ll split your closed mind wide open. Because of this, and similar technologies, record labels are less relevant. When a band can mix and release entire albums on computers that cost $499, record labels become much less relevant.

Personal Media Players, or PMPs.
We’re seeing very popular forms of PMPs already with the audio only iPods, but we’ll see (or are seeing) the same kind of revolution with players that support video. When consumers forget about what a CD or DVD is, and only know their media as a digital file, record labels and movie studios and distributors will become less relevant to the consumer. Combined with the ease of distribution over the internet, independent creators of music and video content will distribute directly, and to every kid who is currently 10 years old or younger, it’ll be as normal as it was for people over 30 to buy CDs or even cassette tapes.

Digital video cameras.
High definition digital video cameras are on the cusp of becoming commodity electronics, meaning it won’t be long before everyone has one. Combine that with dead easy tools like iMovie and everyone will suddenly have the ability to shoot images of the same quality as movie studios. The talent required to turn quantity into quality will need to catch up with the pros, but given the current state of the Hollywood Churn Machine combined with the sudden influx of technology to the masses, where do you think the talent pool will shift?

The only thing, in my opinion, that will slow down the eventual unseating of big business and media is the lack of an easy, brain dead simple way of paying those who produce content for their efforts, either directly or indirectly (everyone needs to eat). Other speed bumps like weeding out what content is good from the bad will happen automatically (as it happens all the time currently with memes that spread like wild fire) and ironing out digital rights management issues (that currently penalize the majority of good, law abiding people, and do little to subvert the scofflaws) will sort themselves out as a critical mass of interest makes doing DRM right a highly desirable economic interest.

But despite all of this, I think one of my family members pointed out where record labels might retain some relevance – “They might help get you on Jay Leno.”

And at first I nodded my head in enthusiastic agreement, only to reconsider. The idea of there being a Jay Leno to call might be completely archaic in 5-10 years as the creation of media is distributed nearly as wide as those producing it. Weblogs taught as that far more people want to produce their own content for the world to see than we would have ever guessed. At best, record labels have a chance of converting their promotion skills to more fit the blogosphere and might become bloggers/advocates. Instead of taking in the majority of what the music sells for, they’ll get a small commission of every song sold that can be directly attributed to their efforts.

We’ll see if I’m right in 5 years.

I have an in-window air conditioner in my office window because it doesn’t make sense to cool the entire house, which stays pretty cool during the summer, just to cool my tiny office. But it also doesn’t make sense to let computer equipment cook my brains either, hence the dedicated unit.

So I’m looking at the unit now, sitting in my window, and because of a weird installation mix up from last summer, the frame it sits in has been reversed. When I installed again this summer, I turned the frame around (as the user manual suggested, something I never read until this summer), and on the frame there was a strange, and very large, cocoon of some insect.

It’s been facing me all summer, obviously dead, but just now out of the corner of my eye I saw movement, and I immediately began to dread and look forward to what I might see. I saw nothing, and now I wish that instead of just looking over I saw something insane.

So let’s pretend something insane did happen. Forget what you just read.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw movement, and when I looked directly at the cocoon I saw that it was moving. As I got closer, it looked like something was trying to bust out, the contents inside rolling around. Grossed out and apprehensive about what might emerge I began formulating a contingency plan for when this creature decided to enter my insect free office. I’d open the other window and shoo it out or something. Maybe catch it in a cup and post pictures of it on Flickr.

Before I could even grab something to use for shooing, the creature exploded out of its cocoon, moving so rapidly that my eyes could hardly make out that he was headed straight at my face, and was expanding, all claws and teeth. It must have been shaped like some kind of octopus because in a split second, I was flat on my back with its insectious claws digging into the back of my head, its body covering my entire face, mandibles chewing off my nose, and spitting out my teeth, merging it’s nervous system with mine in the process.

The event would be what would eventually form my new super villain persona – Insectious Octopod Man, the super villain that speaks Insect and rules the world by way of ants and roaches. Aphids will trim my finger nails now. My hair will be managed by centipedes, and movement will be conducted by swarms of locusts. You’ll know when I’m coming due to the dark cloud and all of the crop ravaging.

I’m setting up an insurance company. Pay your premiums, and I’ll make sure you’re taken care of. I make no guarantees about those without policies.