My Life to Live

"The first is that the hardware interface will be opened up — so people can start to sell gizmos that hook into the iPhone and interact with it... And then think of how your iPhone can hook directly into your Red One or a script supervisor’s keyboard and then broadcast timecode data, along with subsets of any necessary metadata back to a post house or the editing room. It’s going to make the set, the editing room, the producers’ office, the lab/post house, and all of the other pieces of the film chain much more integrated. At very low cost."

That's one of many reasons I started to learn programming for iPhones.

Why Apple keeps iPhone specifications quiet. "Apple is careful to expose access to hardware components in a manageable, sustainable manner. If developers are allowed to write “to the hardware,” the result is a broken platform where the vendor can’t move forward without breaking the apps."

"That has led Apple down the road of a tightly managed iPhone platform where the execution of third party software requires code signatures and sandboxing, and where access to hardware has been roped off until the company could perfect abstracted public access to features in a way that can accommodate new underlying changes as future models are released.

Users shouldn’t need to know how much RAM is available to the operating system of a mobile device, or how fast its primary CPU core is clocked at; what they should care about is how usable the device is and what it allows them to do. That’s the message Apple is working to control."

Results from my Great Advertising Experiment. "Essentially, throwing down 100 bucks had no effect at all on my sales – the same results as my Google test earlier this year… After these two days I am down $86! For me, advertising continues to be unhelpful and I cannot recommend it yet even though I want to! I want to have some way of promoting apps outside of position on the app store."

"My conclusion for now is that there is NO ad engine that can outperform the app store itself. I get more milage out of submitting free app updates that get under the noses of my customers than any other intervention to date. And it is always free so updating apps comes with a built in 100% return on investment."

the Sky Crawlers is the latest animation feature from Mamoru Oshii, that's more bound by the gravity than offering the thrill of flying in the sky as the poster would like to imply. The film spends most of its time on the earth except for the brief but exciting dogfight scenes in the blue, imaginary European sky. The introspective shots have lengthened even compare to his prior work, Ghost in the Shell 2. He even goes as far as borrowing characters' names from his previous films, that left me wondering if he's dwelling in his past glories, summoning the ghosts of his excellent works.

The overall story is sadly disappointing on many levels despite expressionless but interesting characters and plot elements. I certainly hooked and wished to learn more about 'Kildren' and the world that perpetuates battles in the sky. But we are left with dolls, rather than humans, that are closely orchestrated by the Puppet Master rather than having their own initiatives.

It seems to me that Mamoru Oshii increasingly views himself as a puppet master since Ghost in the Shell. You can control everything and impose your will on everything in animations unlike live action films, hence I consider creating identifiable human characters in animations far more difficult than people realize. It goes beyond human tendency to anthropomorphizing everything. In the end, I felt like Mamoru Oshii was fending off my effort to identify with main characters by their unblinking eyes & guarded dialogues. They were featured in Mamoru Oshii's previous works, but never they have been as prevalent as this film.

I was finally intrigued by the plight of main characters in the beginning of act 3, only to be stripped away by the last dogfight scene that defied my comprehension. In the end, despite lengthy 2 hours of running time, the film ends without satisfying emotional payoff or comprehendable conclusion.

It was disheartening to watch an unsatisfying animation with all the artistry went into making it as a diehard Mamoru Oshii fan. I hope that he'll find new joy and perspective in life, and venture to new theme beyond 'Peace is an illusion between wars.'