BookReview
Latest
TUAW Bookshelf: The Apple Revolution
On occasion, I will get a request to review a product, and based on the initial description sent to me by a PR flack, I just know that I am going to hate it. That was my initial impression of the book The Apple Revolution by Luke Dormehl. Fortunately, I ultimately found the book to be much more enjoyable to read than I originally anticipated. The book is yet another retelling of the Apple / Silicon Valley story with a focus on Steve Jobs. The Apple Revolution is subtitled "Steve Jobs, the counter culture, and how the crazy ones took over the world,"; which describes the book's premise very well. Dormehl had to write the book within the confines of history, so he travels down the well-trodden path of Steve Jobs as stinky hippie founder, genius behind the Macintosh, pariah who founded NeXT as revenge for being ousted from Apple, deep-pocketed visionary who bought Pixar and triumphant leader of Apple after his return in 1997. Despite the fact that this is a story that has been told many times, Dormehl uses a combination of literate writing and a profuse number of personal interviews with many of the original characters to bring a fresh perspective to The Apple Revolution. Ultimately, the book is not a deep dive into the personal life of Steve Jobs like Walter Isaacson's classic biography of the man, but a well-reasoned treatise on how the times helped to shape Jobs and eventually resulted in him being the person whose vision and singleminded pursuit of perfection shaped our culture today. Dormehl's prose reads like the script of a good documentary, not surprising as he has a background in both journalism and documentary filmmaking. Since his specialty is pop culture, he was the perfect author to explore the connection between the counter culture of the '60s and '70s and the eventual rise of Apple to its dominance in the personal electronics industry. The fruits of Dormehl's interviews are apparent not in pages-long descriptions of something that Jobs or his contemporaries may have done, but in short, to-the-point statements that help to bolster an argument or prove a point. TUAW's Michael Grothaus is quoted twice in the book, primarily for his perspective as an Apple employee during five years in the 2000s when the company was riding the success of the iMac and iPod to create the new computing paradigms -- the iPhone and iPad -- that are feeding the company's bottom line today. Unlike Isaacson's biography of Jobs, The Apple Revolution has no photos of the many players who have helped to shape our current cyberculture. And there's no reason to include those images; anyone with access to the Web and a bit of curiosity can easily search for any number of pictures or wiki entries about those who became heroes of The Apple Revolution. At 532 pages, The Apple Revolution is not a quick afternoon's read. Dormehl turns a story that we already know the outcome of -- that of Steve Jobs and Apple -- into a compelling page-turner that includes just enough unique details to keep even the discerning Apple historian happy. For example, at one point Steve Jobs was being considered for NASA's ill-fated civilian astronaut program and was turned down in favor of teacher Christa McAuliffe, who perished in the 1986 explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger. That's something I had never known until reading this book. I won't ruin the book for other potential readers, but there are other little gems to be found in the pages of The Apple Revolution. It's a great read, and a must for the bookshelf of anyone who has found their life to have been benefited by the many fruits of the Apple tree.
Inside Apple offers a quick read, corporate insights
I just finished Adam Lashinsky's "Inside Apple", now available for sale at most major vendors. It's a quick, easy read and clocks in at just over 200 pages with large, readable type. If you're looking for an exhaustive Tracy Kidder take on how Apple works and operates, this book isn't it. Instead, it offers a refreshing overview of Apple history and corporate culture from NeXT to iPhone. There's little here that's new or shocking, but it's all put together in a readable style. It's a perfect airplane book -- it will keep you entertained without requiring too much commitment. You'll find plenty of anecdotes, from how Apple developed its retail strategy to how it acquired Cisco's "iOS" moniker for its own use. You'll also learn about Apple's social structure (designers rule the world while the Mac teams have seen their status plummet) and its penny-pinching policies. There's a lot about Jobs and his quirks, both personal and business as well. What you don't get is a lot of deep analysis. I suspect that's because Apple's closed system didn't allow Lashinsky access to the people who could have provided those insights. There's a lot of back story and very little about the current state of affairs. Clearly, all his research had to be done from the outside, with ex-employees and those who have done business with the company. As the book points out, this secrecy has served Apple well. One section that really popped for me early in the book involved a discussion of Korean phone maker LG. Unlike Apple, they pre-announced a product and under-delivered it. It's a mistake that Apple, with its tight limits on information, would never have made. In the end, Lashinsky describes Apple's corporate culture and business successes, allowing each reader to draw the line from the cause to the effect. I found it an enjoyable read. If you are someone interested in Apple and its culture, you'll probably want to pick up a copy. Adam Lashinsky's Inside Apple book is available in the iTunes iBookstore for US$12.99 and from Amazon.
Review: Walter Isaacson's 'Steve Jobs'
I've just finished a marathon session of reading all the way through Steve Jobs on my iPad -- and I'm sure Jobs would have appreciated the odd harmony of people reading his life story on a device he helped create. After reading his biography, I'm no longer convinced that Steve Jobs would have liked me if we'd ever met in person. At least not at first. More likely, he'd have torn me a new one in our first meeting and told me that I sucked and everything I did was worthless. Then, in our second meeting, he'd have parroted my ideas back at me as though they were his own. It was apparently one of his signature moves, and it probably would have made me want to throw a chair at him. But even if I had been provoked that far, he most likely would have just bellowed that I should have thrown a better chair. Reading biographies is perhaps a different experience for me than it is for most people, since I spent most of my Master's thesis examining the concept of truth in biographical works. Most of the memoirs, autobiographies, and biographies I've read have fallen into one of two categories. Either the text was something designed to lionize its subject and make him or her seem larger than life, or else the writer had taken pains to focus on only the parts of the subject's life that fit into a clean narrative arc while leaving everything else on the cutting room floor, an approach that leads to easy and almost cinematic storytelling but leaves out much of the facts. Neither approach to biographical writing strikes me as particularly true; in fact, almost every biography I've read seems to contain about as much actual truth as an episode of Star Trek. The tendency to over-praise or over-dramatize is both pernicious and pervasive throughout the various forms of biographical texts. Walter Isaacson's 656-page profile of Steve Jobs falls in neither category. It is quite possibly the truest biography I've ever read. In the process of telling the unvarnished truth about Steve Jobs, it dispels much of the myth and magic surrounding the man and his legacy. It does not depict Steve Jobs as the information age's equivalent of Moses descending from Mount Sinai with an iPad in each hand. It would have been easy for some misinformed hack to portray Jobs that way in a quick cash-in "unauthorized" biography soon after Jobs's death, but it also would have been closer to fiction than biography. What Isaacson gives us instead is a portrait of a man with keen insight, brilliant powers of observation, and a stubborn determination to "put a dent in the universe." However, the biography also depicts a man with deep flaws, some of which arguably contributed to his early death. It humanizes a man who's spent much of the past decade as a living legend in multiple arenas, and it gives valuable insight into the person Steve Jobs was, not just the icon he became. After reading his biography, I get the sense that no matter how brilliant Steve Jobs was or how many fundamental shifts in our landscape he spearheaded, in the end, he was as human as the rest of us. It's a testament to Isaacson's skill as a biographer that readers can at last obtain the picture of Steve Jobs as a human being rather than a legend. Jobs's reputation as a control freak was legendary, yet he relinquished all control over the contents of his biography. It's a surprising move from a man who insisted on so much control over all of his life's projects -- the Mac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad were all born and thrived partially because Jobs refused to cede control over them. Jobs explained his motivations to Isaacson for his atypically hands-off approach to the biography. Partially it was because he wanted his children to know him better, flaws and all. It was also because he wanted to make sure that only someone possessed of all the facts about his life would write his story. "When I got sick, I realized other people would write about me if I died, and they wouldn't know anything. They'd get it all wrong. So I wanted to make sure someone heard what I had to say." Jobs's biography manages to allow him to get the last word in many debates. Many of the people who have toasted both him and his achievements will find themselves bearing the brunt of his last barbs against them. Some, like Jobs threatening to go "thermonuclear" on Android, have already been outed. Others are a bit more deeply buried within the text, but once found they're both candid and a bit stunning. "IBM was essentially Microsoft at its worst," Jobs said, reminiscing about the early days of the personal computer revolution. "They were not a force for innovation; they were a force for evil. They were like AT&T or Microsoft or Google is." My jaw dropped at this quote, but another later on in the book was more alarming. Immediately after heaping praise on his successor, Tim Cook, Steve said, "Tim's not a product person, per se." Considering that at many other points in the book Jobs heaped scorn on people like Bill Gates or John Sculley whom he also considered more concerned with profits than product quality, his unfiltered opinion of Cook's product sensibilities definitely raised an eyebrow. Much of the biography will be familiar to hardcore Apple enthusiasts. Chapters on the birth of the Macintosh will be familiar to anyone who's read Andy Hertzfeld's recollections at folklore.org, and if you're a regular TUAW reader there won't be too much in the chapters about the iPod, iPhone, or iPad that you haven't already read. Older Apple fans will likely find the earliest chapters about the founding days of Apple not much more than a refresher course. But I suspect that few people will be able to read the entire book and not discover some surprising fact about Steve Jobs that they didn't already know. If you come into Steve Jobs already hating him, the biography gives you plenty of reasons to hold onto that opinion. If instead you view Jobs as a personal hero, there are plenty of episodes within his life story that might make you reconsider that opinion. Isaacson doesn't shy away from describing Steve Jobs's darker moments or personality deficiencies, some of which border on the downright despicable. To put it lightly, Steve Jobs was not a "people person." One of his ex-girlfriends read about Narcissistic Personality Disorder in the DSM and said, "It fits so well and explained so much of what we had struggled with, that I realized expecting him to be nicer or less self-centered was like expecting a blind man to see." Even his closest friends, like Apple design guru Jonathan Ive, noted that Jobs often exhibited a vicious and unnecessary lack of empathy for those around him. The fact that so many people all over the world have been lauding him since his death, both friends and dogged competitors, speaks to the complex and paradoxical nature of Steve Jobs, a man whose greatest goal was to establish empathy between people and technology but who often displayed precious little empathy of his own. Isaacson's biography of Jobs isn't a character assassination by any means (though I do wonder why the first third of the book dwells so often on Jobs's body odor during the 1970s). That said, I still feel terrifically sorry for any employees who find themselves at the mercy of a supervisor who uses Steve Jobs as a managerial handbook, just like the legions of young would-be entrepreneurs trying to emulate the callous Mark Zuckerberg they saw in The Social Network. If anyone comes away from reading Steve Jobs thinking that being a leader makes it okay to be an asshole, they'll have missed about 99 percent of the point. Anyone can cut an employee to shreds or throw epic temper tantrums at the slightest provocation, but replicating Jobs's intuition, perfectionism, dedication, and vision is arguably something that only one person in seven billion can manage to pull off. Steve Jobs is at its core the study of the man himself, but along the way it's also a fascinating history of the genesis, near-death, and resurgence of Apple. It also describes the birth, near-death, and ascendancy of Pixar, with fascinating details I've never read before. As the book follows Jobs through the personal computer revolution, the birth of the Macintosh, his "wilderness years" at NeXT and Pixar, and his return to Apple and subsequent paving over of the landscape for the music industry, cell phones, and tablet computing, Steve Jobs's biography also offers incredibly detailed insights into how our world shifted from the hobbyist computing era of the mid-'70s to the ubiquitous techscape we live in today. Steve Jobs didn't enact any of these revolutionary changes singlehandedly -- his biography takes pains to make that clear -- but he was most assuredly at or near the center of all of them. Though the book makes his flaws obvious to readers, it also makes clear that we would be living in a very different world if Steve Jobs hadn't set out to put a dent in the universe. Anyone with even a passing interest in Apple's history, and anyone who's ever wondered how so very much about the technology landscape has changed so fundamentally in just 35 years, owes it to themselves to read this book.
Book Review: You Are Not a Gadget
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier (January, 2010) Alfred A. Knopf, 209 pages, $24.95 I'm often accused of being a Luddite -- mostly based on my fervent and affectionate clinging to several physical objects that are quickly becoming cultural artifacts: the ink pen, the paper book, and the vinyl record -- but those items haven't been the only 'evidence' my accusers have historically cited. In addition to that physical evidence, there has always been my suspicion that some of the things I valued in life -- listening to a whole album, reading an entire novel in one sitting before grabbing another off the shelf -- were also going the way of Betamax, and being replaced by short attention-spanned, sound-bited fragments of conversation that didn't convey knowledge or ideas in nearly the same way. This suspicion, this "feeling" if you will -- obviously doesn't originate with me, and it's often diluted (by the internet) into some version of "the internet is making us dumber" argument. Of course, that's not really the argument at all, but who needs to be bogged down with details these days? Enter You Are Not a Gadget, which I review below.
Book review: How To Wreck A Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop
How To Wreck A Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop by Dave Tompkins (Stop Smiling Books; $35) World War II increased the rate of human innovation to a pace unseen in any other period of history. New technology from the era includes everything from synthetic rubber to the atomic bomb to magnetic audio tape, which the Germans successfully kept secret until the war's end. After the Nazis fell, Lt. Jack Mullin of the US Army Signal Corps shot footage outside of Hitler's home, grabbed one of the Fuhrer's piano strings for a souvenir, and brought two AEG Magnetophons (along with fifty reels of Farben recording tape) back with him to the states. He then sold a recorder to Bing Crosby, revolutionizing broadcasting and music-making in the process. Another device that made its debut in World War II only to be later adopted by the entertainment industry is the Vocoder. Speech synthesis was the brainchild of a Bell Labs employee named Homer Dudley. Dudley surmised that human speech consisted of two things: the carrier (the noise that your vocal cords makes) and the formant (the sound formed from the carrier by your mouth, throat, and sinuses). Dudley went on to develop something called the Voder (Voice Operator DEmonstratoR), which used a carrier tone generated by a radio valve and a formant created by hissing air to create artificial speech. Hear a demonstration (and learn about how the Vocoder was used to defeat the Axis powers) after the break.
TUAW Bookshelf: Final Cut Pro 7 Quick-Reference Guide
When it comes to software reference books, there are three major varieties -- the detailed soup-to-nuts books that try to tell you everything and weigh about ten pounds, the "dummies" type that are usually so full of obvious information that they're relatively useless, and the small quick reference manuals that assume that you have some familiarity with your software and just focus on the things that you really need to know. Brendan Boykin's Final Cut Pro 7 Quick Reference Guide (US$29.99 for the printed text, $16.79 for the ebook version), part of the Peachpit Press Apple Pro Training Series, is one of the latter types. It's a small book when it comes to physical size; you can easily tuck it into a laptop bag with your MacBook Pro when you're heading out for location shooting and editing. The 212-page text is divided into sections roughly following the three-part Final Cut Pro workflow of ingest, edit, and output. Boykin, owner of Creek Mountain Media and an Apple Certified Master Trainer, definitely knows Final Cut Pro. Brendan not only teaches Pro Certification classes, but also works with Final Cut Pro and other Final Cut Studio applications to build digital video solutions for clients. The Quick-Reference Guide starts with an overview of Final Cut Pro's user interface. While this may seem like overkill for a text that is directed towards working professionals, this reviewer found the section useful as a memory jogger for such things as what the various colors in the render status bar mean, or what some of the many icons in the Tool Palette are used for.
Book Review: "The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs"
In "The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs," Carmine Gallo provides a framework for you to deliver a keynote like Steve does. The book provides both an Al Michaels and John Madden perspective of Jobs's keynotes: a play-by-play account of events married with analytical insight. While rich in detailing the stylistics of Jobs's presentations and the empirical evidence supporting it -- for example, limiting bullet points on slides, using simple language, and using the rule of threes to enhance a narrative -- the most captivating portion of the book is how it details Steve Jobs's preparation for his keynotes. Yes, even Steve Jobs, like the rest of us, must prepare for his preparations presentations. And prepare he does, which is evident in the stories of Paul Vais. An executive at Jobs's former company NeXT (that Apple later acquired, which brought Jobs back into the Apple fold), Vais recalled that "every slide was written like a piece of poetry...[and that] Steve would labor over the presentation. We'd try to orchestrate and choreograph everything and make it more alive than it really is." However, Gallo says that "making your presentation 'more alive' takes practice. Once you accept this simple principle, your presentations will stand out in a sea of mediocrity." Gallo's book follows many of the "Jobsian" presentation mantras he preaches. Like a Steve Jobs keynote, the book is simple to read and provides an easy-to-follow roadmap for a reference-minded reader. The one thing that most readers will walk away with is that Steve Jobs's on-stage presence evinces a style similar to that of Apple's products when they're on the stage of the showroom floor or marketed on Apple's website. As a result, as much as it serves as a Steve Jobs presentation guidebook, "The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs" in many ways is a Steve Jobs biography. "The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs" is available at many booksellers, including Borders, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble.
TUAW Bookshelf: Inside Secrets to an iPhone App
Many TUAW readers have probably bought an iPhone app and had the thought "I could do better than this!" go through their minds. Sometimes you're wondering when someone else is going to write an app to do just the thing you want to do with your iPhone or iPod touch. Carla Kay White was one of these people. She had an idea for a "Gratitude Journal", where you keep track of the everyday things you're grateful for. It's a great concept, and it can keep your spirits up when a prescription antidepressant fails you. Carla was writing her gratitude into a paper journal when she realized that her iPhone was just the platform for this tool. One problem, though – Carla didn't have any iPhone programming skills.What she did have was a good idea, a background in project management, and some minor funding to bring her concept to light on the iPhone. Inside Secrets to an iPhone App is a short (88 page) tome that not only tells the story of how she brought Gratitude Journal (click opens iTunes) to market, but how anyone with an idea for an iPhone app can do the same.
TUAW Bookshelf: iPhone in Action
I've never found book reviews to be terribly helpful -- technical book reviews even less so, as how one learns differs from person to person. Some iPhone devs out there learned simply by poring over Apple's copious documentation. Others have been poking at the iPhone's innards since pre-SDK days, learning as they went from forums and good old hacking. But once the NDA lifted, the floodgates of iPhone dev books opened. Each book and each publisher has a different angle both in content and presentation. Each book may appeal to different people and different learning styles with different backgrounds (not to mention the numerous sites, blogs and video resources out there beyond what Apple provides). Over the course of 2009 we'll be taking a look at some books in a new series called TUAW Bookshelf. We won't just be covering developer resources, either. There's a wide world of Apple-related reading out there, so stay tuned as we pull from our personal libraries and share our thoughts on what's available.To kick things off I read iPhone in Action by Christopher Allen and Shannon Appelcline, published by Manning. I wound up reading this first because one of the authors threw a few copies at me while at Macworld (sorry, I don't know who you are and I can't seem to find your business card!). We've got a few to give away, but look for that in another post this month.iPhone in Action is designed to be a soup-to-nuts intro to almost everything you can develop for the iPhone. This includes web apps, which was the book's main focus until the SDK was announced while they were writing. I don't think shifting focus to the SDK is a bad thing, and as near as I can tell it didn't hurt the content. In fact, I thought this book would make an excellent primer to Apple's mobile platform efforts. Having taught technology for six years, I can say this is the book I'd use for a 100-level course in developing for the iPhone. I'm not saying it will make you into an expert overnight, and I'm not saying you can't come to the table with zero dev experience, but as a starting point, it is wonderful. To find out why, keep reading...
