First, the screen. My thoughts on the screen differ from most of what’s likely out there and I feel it’s necessary to put them into the appropriate context.

The first iOS device I ever owned was an iPhone 4. While I had seen, and briefly used, iPhones and iPod Touches prior to this, the 4 was my first real experience using iOS. Furthermore, I bought it in October of 2010, by which time every app that I could find had been updated to use Retina display graphics.

As such, the Retina display that Apple first shipped on the iPhone 4 is my baseline and it’s what I’ve measured all screens against since. Other screens have not fared well, and this includes the iPad 2.

This is not to say that I haven’t enjoyed using the iPad 2. I certainly have. I used it on average once a day for at least 30 minutes or so (and often far longer). It has travelled with me to other countries, been a tool I use at work and entertained me with video, text and more.

But the screen has always been a disappointment. Nowhere is this more apparent for me than with the loupe tool that’s used when you want precise placement of the cursor in a text field. Sometimes it feels as if this tool was created especially to demonstrate just how low the resolution is.

The new iPad fixes this problem. The screen is brilliant (in the literal sense of the word). However, I will admit that I wasn’t blown away by it as others sound like they were. For me, the screen is not so much a revolution as the fulfilment of the iPad’s promise. It is what I have always wanted the iPad’s screen to be. I am happy that it has reached that point but I would not call it a life-changing event.

The second thought is about Internet connectivity. While I purchased the ’4G’ model, I’m not referring to the download speeds or the antenna or whether the lower left corner gets hot through use. What I’m talking about is the ability to get on the Internet.

Much has been made of the differences between post-PC devices and traditional PCs (both laptops and desktops). Post-PC devices emphasise touch over other forms of user interaction, they generally enforce a simpler conceptual model of an application, they abstract away the file system.

But I think there is another important difference between post-PC devices and traditional computers that I didn’t fully appreciate until using the new iPad: post-PC devices need to be on the Internet.

Again, some context. I purchased the 16 GB Wi-Fi only model of the iPad 2 thinking that, while I obviously wouldn’t be able to use the Internet everywhere I went, I’d at least be able to use it in places that had public Wi-Fi. Before I had this thought, I should have considered more carefully where I live. Japan, for all its reputation as a technological wonderland, has not jumped on the free public Wi-Fi train with gay abandon. Or, indeed, any abandon. I have seen free public Wi-Fi spots in select places but it’s really been in very, very select places.

Private Wi-Fi networks, however, are everywhere. Mostly these are deployed by the mobile phone carriers. I’m not sure exactly why this is although I assume it’s to offload some of the capacity from the cellular networks. Whatever the reason, it means that, while there’s plenty of Wi-Fi around, if you don’t have an account with one of the carriers, it may as well not exist.

There is perhaps no more frustrating (#firstworld) problem than trying desperately to maintain a connection to the free public Wi-Fi network in Kansai International Airport before you get on your plane so you can download a book from Amazon to read on the flight. Well, no there is. It’s trying to desperately to maintain that connection while your phone happily jumps on SoftBank’s Wi-Fi network at McDonald’s. And Starbucks. And the airport’s train station. And numerous other locations.¹

When the time came to purchase the new iPad, I knew that this time I didn’t want to have that experience again. So I purchased the iPad through SoftBank and, in return for a small monthly fee, I now have access to their very extensive network of wireless hot spots. And it is glorious. It is easily my favourite part of the new device (even ahead of the screen). Again, having Internet connectivity is not so much a revolution as it is a step closer towards the perfect iPad. It feels silly to talk about iterations of the iPad as a progression towards some Platonic ideal but, well, I just spent $680 on the new iPad when I already own the previous model so let’s not get into semantics about what is and isn’t absurd.

Which brings me to the third thing. The New Yorker app on the iPad sucks ass. To be sure, 1) it has always sucked ass; and 2) this is not Apple’s fault. But these are my impressions and this left something of an impression on me.

For reasons that one presumes can only make sense to people that never actually use the app, the New Yorker on the iPad does not display content by getting the iPad to do the relatively straightforward task of rendering text on the screen (that’s exactly what they’d expect us to do!).² No, instead the kooks at Condé Nast have decided that they’ll serve the New Yorker to you as a gigantic series of compressed images. This bloats each issue out to 110 MB, an absurd amount for a publication that is mostly just words on a screen.

The decision to do this is bone-headed for any number of reasons (you can’t adjust the text size, you can’t select text) but the stupidity really comes into its own on the glossy 9.7″ Retina display. Unfortunately (for paying customers), the Retina display and its crazy high resolution doesn’t do the New Yorker’s flat images any favours. They’re blown up to fill the screen and, although the pixels on the Retina display are too small to create the pixelated effect you sometimes see on PCs, it nevertheless results in an image that, well, sucks ass.

I want to make clear that I love the New Yorker. It is literally my favourite publication and I think one of the three or four most important English-language periodicals in the world today. But fucking BusinessWeek has an app that doesn’t have this problem. BusinessWeek. The (rich) poor man’s Economist.

Please, for the love of God, I know you aren’t part of management, but Jason Schwartzman, you star in that delightful video telling us all how to use the New Yorker on our iPad. Please use your magic powers to solve this problem once and for all.³ I am begging you.

This is the sort of thing that you could be forgiven thinking was a translation error. This is business in Japan.

As a previous prime minister, as well as someone who has been around the block a few more times than I have, I’m tempted to give him the benefit of the doubt that his prescriptions (politicians need a better academic grounding, particularly in history, and should spend more time thinking) are what’s required.

Tempted but not convinced. There is a disturbing lack of acknowledgment that the problems the current crop of Japanese politicians are dealing with differ vastly from those which Nakasone addressed in the early 80s. At that time, there was still broad consensus amongst the Japanese population that economic growth should be prioritised.

Contrast that with today. Japan is a prosperous and wealthy country and it’s struggling to adapt to the present day a political system that evolved to deal largely with the problems of rebuilding a shattered society. Western liberal democracies have had a lot longer to do this and even they struggle with it (see: the United States).

Nakasone’s view that politicians today just aren’t as good as the politicans of yesteryear is, in my view, both arrogant and wrong. The politicians of yesteryear didn’t have to deal with the problems that the politicians of today have to deal with. Indeed, you could argue that they sowed the seeds for the many of the dilemmas the country now faces.

It probably goes without saying that none of these arguments are raised with Nakasone by the interviewer. Perhaps he has answers to some of these points but since they’re never asked, I’ll never know.

Nippon.com looks like an interesting site but if this is the standard of interviewing we can expect, well, you’re probably advised to just give it a miss.

The article is terrible and I have no idea why anyone has linked to it (and, frankly, why Businessweek published it). It does little more than briefly summarise the situation at Sony over the past decade. Critical analysis is kept to the bare minimum. This despite the fact that it’s over 3,000 words. Where do all those words go? Partly into laying out Sony’s problems (or, to be more accurate, the problems identified by the apparently sole source for the story: Howard Stringer) and partly into just talking about Howard Stringer and his background. Don’t know who he is and can’t be bothered reading his Wikipedia entry? Don’t worry because the boffins at Businessweek have you covered. Want actual analysis? Well, shit.

As I was reading it, two things gave me pause to wonder how well the story had been researched. At one point, the authors Bryan Gruley and Cliff Edwards (as difficult as it is to believe, this piece of reporting required the efforts of two people!) point out that relations between the hardware engineers at Sony in Japan and the content guys in the U.S. were so strained at one point that Sony’s U.S. movie studio had difficulty getting Sony products for use in its movies. It contrasts this with the ease with which Samsung could put its phones in blockbusters like The Matrix.

By Samsung I guess they meant Nokia. Which, you know, is an easy mistake to make: one being a South Korean electronic behemoth and the other being a Nordic mobile phone manufacturer. I for one am constantly confusing Koreans and Finns (the ears are how you tell them apart).

Later in the article, Stringer uses the phrase ‘Lehman shock’ to refer to the global financial crisis that began with the failure of the investment bank Lehman Brothers. The article says that this is Stringer’s ‘shorthand’ for the GFC. This should be setting off warning bells. Have the writers of this piece done any research about Japan? ‘Lehman shock’ is not Stringer’s shorthand; it is the way that Japan refers to the global financial crisis. Shouldn’t you have, like, asked someone what this term meant if you hadn’t heard before? Maybe it would have cropped up in all the background interviews you did with Japanese people?

It’s then that it hits you that there is a remarkable absence of any reporting involving Japan.¹ Sure, Sony’s a global company, Stringer himself is Welsh-born (which the article duly notes) and Kazuo Hirai (the article suggests he is likely to succeed Stringer) divides his time between the United States and Japan but Sony is still a quintessentially Japanese company. What do its problems about combining hardware with software say about Japan’s problems combining hardware and software? What do its problems about embracing the Internet as a delivery platform say about Japan’s problems embracing the Internet as a delivery platform? What do its problems about adapting to change, particularly that brought by a foreign CEO say about Japan’s problems adapting to change, particularly that brought by a foreign CEO? I don’t know because these questions are never even asked, let alone answered.

Sony is a company of engineers, we’re told, and that’s the reason software sucks. Memo to Businessweek: Google? Chock full of engineers. Microsoft? Ditto. Apple? It’s engineers all the way down (to Jony Ive).

Now granted they’re a different type of engineer and maybe what you meant were hardware engineers. Maybe this says something about the problem besetting Sony. (Ooh, an avenue for inquiry!) Any reason to believe that’s changed? All these new whizz-bang products from Sony like tablets and phones and laptops, I guess they’re all going to be running same great new Sony software now that Stringer’s reoriented the ship? Oh, what? They’re running Windows and Android? Software written by someone else? That Sony has no relationship with? Did you ask Stringer (or indeed any Sony executive) about whether they consider the outsourcing of their software to third parties an issue? That it prevents them from adding anything unique to their products that might differentiate them from cheaper ones from Samsung and other manufacturers? Oh. No, I guess not. I guess you were too busy admiring the Central Park reservoir.

There is a great article to be written about Sony. This is not it.

Those seemless updates have a downside, though. I use Google Maps three or four times a week. I also live in Japan. Until Saturday, when viewing Google Maps in English, the application displayed placed names in both kanji and romaji. On Saturday that feature was turned off in favour of what Google trumpets as single-language labels.

Bryce Stout, the Product Manager, proudly writes:

Using a single language can help users by making the map easier to read.

Really? Did any users ask for this feature to be enabled? Was it tested with users? Was it tested with users that actually use Maps in those countries? Surely there’s at least a good reason for why you did this:

We hope this change makes it easier to browse, explore and discover the world around you.

So the rationale behind this change is so that those playing at home can be virtual tourists? That’s great but I actually live here and was using Google Maps to, you know, get around.

Japanese kanji are notoriously difficult to read. This is particularly the case for place names. That said, names will often be written in kanji in addresses and so on. For those of us living in Japan whose language isn’t at native levels, Google Maps was a godsend for showing both kanji names and their transliterations. What Google seems to think made Maps easier to use has in fact made it more difficult.

Google allows you to switch native labels on but why is there not an option just to display both? Why am I being told what’s easier for me? And why is existing functionality being removed?

This is the world of web software. You are renting time. If you like something and it changes, tough. File a feature request and hope (pray?) that it is answered. I’ve written before about the impotent rage a user can feel when a software company makes a change to software you use and depend upon. I suppose it is a feeling to which we should become accustomed.

In all of this Google hate, I would like to note the helpfulness of Google’s Maps Twitter account. After realising the complete uselessness of Google’s Help Forum from my previous encounter, I decided this time to take to Twitter. My blasts of fury provoked sympathetic tweets from my friends and followers and (much to my surprise) an actual response from Google! In fact, two responses!

As grateful as I am that Google’s employees took the time to respond to my pleas (and I am grateful), it’s still frustrating to have a feature just removed without warning. That this came basically the day after Google changed the behaviour of Google Instant felt like a classic one-two. A reminder that web software is theirs, not yours.

Back to Work

http://feeds.feedburner.com/back2work
Merlin Man (he of Inbox Zero fame) and 5by5′s Dan Benjamin have joined forces to waste at least an hour of your week and prevent you from getting back to work. I jest, of course. The idea is to discuss strategies to help you work better. I’m not sure how well that works but I’m enjoying listening to it anyway.

The Brainy Gamer Podcast

http://feeds.feedburner.com/brainygamerpodcast
The only thing that’s disappointing about the Brainy Gamer Podcast is that there aren’t more of them. Michael Abbott was almost entirely responsible for me buying a PS3 (which might not sound like an achievement but, given the state of my relationship with Sony, is really more akin to the Paris Peace Accords).

Build and Analyse

http://feeds.feedburner.com/buildanalyze
One of the new podcasts and I’m listening to and, like most of the new additions, a member of the 5by5 network. Dan Benjamin (of The Talk Show and the Pipeline fame) has expanded his podcasting empire throughout 2010 and, together with Tumblr co-founder and Instapaper owner/developer, Marco Arment, discusses iOS, Mac and mobile web development. It’s pretty Apple-centric at present but they do detour into coffee from time to time.

Downloadable Content

http://feeds.penny-arcade.com/padlc/
I’m pretty sure this one is gone and yet I hang on just in case.

Dungeons & Dragons Podcast

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/rsspodcast.xml
Downloadable Content may have bit the bullet but the boys from Penny Arcade still make an appearance every so often on the D&D Podcast and, when they do, I put everything else on hold.

Front Page

http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/podcasts/frontpage.xml
The Front Page is one of the casualties of the end of my commute. Without a daily trek to and from work I’m often a few days behind at which point listening to the news is kind of beside the point. I do still like this podcast, though, so I’m hoping I can fit it into my schedule somewhere.

Hypercritical

http://feeds.feedburner.com/hypercritical
This is probably my favourite new podcast. John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin discuss issues relevant to the tech world. There’s an Apple angle often but it’s often about issues bigger than just Macs and iPhone. John’s observations are incredibly insightful and, because he doesn’t have a regular outlet (John has a blog but doesn’t update it that much), this is the best place to hear his thoughts.

The Japan Considered Podcast

http://feeds.feedburner.com/JapanConsideredPodcast
Am still subscribed to this but, in my heart of hearts, I know it’s gone.

JapanesePod101.com

http://www.japanesepod101.com/wp-feed-audio.php
I have about 40 of these backed up. I promise I will get to them.

The Moth Podcast

http://feeds.feedburner.com/themothpodcast
I can’t believe I’ve only been listening to this for a year but it’s a terrific podcast. Recommended by Dave.

New Yorker: Comment

http://feeds.newyorker.com/services/rssfeeds/comment_podcast.xml
The Comment section of the New Yorker is a short essay that begins every issue of the magazine. At least 50% of these will be written by Hendrik Hertzberg and be about the filibuster.

New Yorker: The Political Scene

http://feeds.newyorker.com/services/rss/feed/campaign_trail.xml
This is still my favourite discussion of politics. Although their discussion of the recent earthquake in Japan was laughably poor, there’s usually a nice smattering of experts to talk about whatever issue is most timely.

NHK English News

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/rj/podcast/rss/english.xml
Same problem as the Front Page podcast. I wish NHK put out their Japanese-language news as a podcast.

Slate’s Spoiler Specials

http://www.slate.com/podcast/id/2144834/
I’ve caught up from last year and am now only 11 podcasts behind. I still have /Lust, Caution/ on the list, though.

The Pipeline

http://feeds.feedburner.com/thepipelineshow
If you don’t include The Talk Show (see below) this was the first 5by5 show I started listening to and it’s still one of the best. Hosted by Dan Benjamin, I thought this one might run out of steam as Benjamin worked his way through friends and associates. Thankfully, that’s not the case (or he just has an incredible rolodex).

The Talk Show

http://thetalkshow.net/index.xml
Suspended for a brief ‘two week’ hiatus, The Talk Show has returned as part of the 5by5 network. Notable for a running segment in which hosts John Gruber and Dan Benjamin dissect a new James Bond film each week (they’re working their way through the series in order). This alone makes it worthwhile.

東京slow style

http://www.tokyoslowstyle.jp/podcast.xml
I still listen to Sasha as he continues exploring odd and different parts of Tokyo. This is the only podcast I’ve ever listened to which seemed to use an animated GIF as the image it displays on an iPod/iPhone. I assume it’s an animated GIF because as the show plays it cycles through images relevant to what’s being talked about. Kind of impressive just for the effort that goes into that side of things.

8-4 Play

http://eightfour.libsyn.com/rss
There’s not a lot of video game-related podcasts in this list any more but this is a new one that’s found its way on there. 8-4 Play is a translation company based in Tokyo. The reason I’m listening to the podcast? The company is home to Mark McDonald (formerly of EGM) and he leads a biweekly podcast with the rest of the 8-4 Play crew. The Japan angle is excellent for me.

37signals Podcast

http://feeds.feedburner.com/37signals_podcast
It’s not as regular as it was when it started out but if you enjoy listening to the guys from 37signals, you’ll enjoy this.

So that’s who’s on there but who fell off the list? Only one podcast! Incredible! And it only fell off because it stopped being recorded.

• アクセス The podcast was cancelled! Now I’m never going to find out what ガガンボン means.

Update: Subsequent to writing this, I posted on AVCon’s Facebook page that their donation drive was inappropriate and that they should reconsider their decision. Without any correspondence, they deleted the comment. I guess they’re not interested in people that don’t agree with them and they don’t think it’s in bad taste to start asking for donations at this time.

Disclaimer: I am no longer an organiser of SMASH! Sydney Manga and Anime Show. The views here are my own and do not represent the views of SMASH Inc.

Today the pre-eminent anime and video games convention in Adelaide, Australia, AVCon, announced on its Facebook page that it was soliciting donations from the general public to assist in bringing a special guest to this year’s event. The guest is not named and there is no discussion of what happens if the guest does not eventuate.

I wanted to write about this for two reasons. First, I now live in Japan. The relevance of this will become obvious in a paragraph. The second is that I worked on SMASH! 2009 and 2010. In 2010, we brought five international guests to Australia as part of our event, namely Yuko Miyamura (the voice actress for, among other things, Asuka Langley Soryu), Tiffany Grant (Ms Miyamura’s counterpart for the American dub), Matt Greenfield (founded of American production company AD Vision), Shaun Healey (better known as Endling) and Mikiko Ponczeck (better known as zombiesmile).

Clearly, AVCon’s timing is atrocious. It seems the height of insensitivity for an event dedicated to celebrating Japanese popular culture to be soliciting donations for an anime convention at the same time as the worst natural disaster to strike Japan in recorded history is going on. Even if it were true that soliciting for donations was unavoidable, did it really have to commence today? Could we wait until we at least know the death toll?

As bad as the above is, I also find this offensive in the way that it seems to represent a growing trend among event management in Australia. What trend is that? Well, it’s the view that, if you didn’t bother to organise your event properly, there’s no shame in just hitting up the fans for however much you’re short.

Let’s be clear: AVCon is a giant event. It runs over 3 days at the Adelaide Convention Centre. According to Wikipedia, attendance for the 2009 event was in excess of 4,000 people while attendance for 2010 was more than 5,000. This is professional convention territory. Now AVCon sells a range of tickets for its event so there’s no way to know exactly how much it brings in in terms of revenue but it seems safe to assume that, with a single-day price of $30 in 2010, and discounting some of those 5,000 people as being children under 10, volunteers, sponsors and vendors, you’re looking at an event that brought in excess of $130,000. To put that amount into perspective, last year SMASH! had attendance of approximately 2,500 people. My understanding is that revenues were less than $70,000.

So here we have one event, which is at least twice the size of the other, asking its fans for donations to bring a guest. The other, which has ticket prices less than those of the big event, does no such thing.

What’s the rationalisation for this? From the AVCon page:

Why are we doing this? Well, bottom line is we didn’t want to raise ticket prices, because we’re sure you guys wouldn’t be too pleased with that.

The bottom line isn’t that you didn’t want to raise ticket prices. The bottom line is that you didn’t plan your event properly. If you can’t organise things and keep your event affordable, then you don’t do something this year. That’s the difficult decision a professional event management team makes. They don’t run off to their erstwhile fans asking for another $20 to $500.

I can tell you for a fact that SMASH! would have preferred to be at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre last year but that they couldn’t afford it. So instead they worked hard to be there this year. And they made it. Not because of luck, not because they had to beg their fans for money. They made it because they planned it.

That’s what you do when you care about your fans.