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Idiot Comics Worth Contemplating

A list of good Idiot Comics by Robert Sergel:

• Ex-girlfriend
• Things I learned in Portland, Oregon
• If at first
• Signs I am slowly dying
• Angry nostalgia (an instant classic!)
• Quiet Kid in “Nothing Left”

Here’s a brief article on Sergel.

Yet Another iPhone-a-thon

I haven’t yet been moved to say a lot about this year’s WWDC. I was pleased to see updated macs a-plenty — including new 13” macbook pros and 15” macbook pros with insanely good battery life (although that may be due at least as much to significant efforts to manage consumption as it is because of the new polymer-lithium custom-form-factor batteries.

And of course there were the iPhone announcements, with OS 3.0 and the new iPhone “GS.” Supposedly the “S” stands for “speed” but an Apple product with “GS” in the model name makes me think of the Apple II GS which my friend Mike had in high school. I remember being jealous of the high-quality color compared to the Apple IIc we had at home. When something announced last week reminds you (however inappropriately) of a computer you used 20 years ago — in the late 80s — the newness and the hype for the new product kind of lose their luster.

But on the whole, the keynote seemed to present parallel growth and development on both the mac and iphone lines. But what did the WWDC as a whole present? I’ll turn it over to Gruber:

Hence the symbiosis: Apple now has two full-fledged developer platforms, Mac OS X and iPhone OS, derived from one core system. Neither felt more important than the other this year at WWDC, which is remarkable considering that one of them hadn’t even shipped two years ago.

But look at their vectors — their relative rates of growth — and ponder how much longer until WWDC begins to feel like an iPhone developer conference with a Mac developer track. My answer: next year. In other words, I think it will have taken just three years for the iPhone to supplant the Mac as Apple’s primary platform. By 2011 it will be obvious.

Ah, the truth will out. How long until “WWDC begins to feel like an iPhone developer conference with a Mac developer track,” indeed. I’m reminded of a few posts from previous years. It seems like the iPhone is a preview of what’s to come in OS X, just like Mike Ash feared. And despite the improvements to the mac lineup (still the best laptops you can buy, despite it all), Mac guys are not feeling so much love anymore. Still.

I bring up these past posts because Gruber’s “oh-hey-it’s-the-iphone” comment reminded me of them. Not to highlight the sour grapes aspect (I’m not really so bitter anymore, mostly I don’t care), but to say “I told you so” even though the Grubers of the world couldn’t care less because hey, they’ve already bought more than one iPhone so of course it’s the platform of choice for them.