Abdel Ibrahim picked 10 photos taken with his iPhone 4 to show what it’s capable of.

We’re approaching a point—or have already passed it with the iPhone 4S—where for most cases, our cell phone’s camera isn’t much of a limiting factor when taking photos. We are.

Graham Spencer reviewed Photoshop Touch.

Good review, and interesting app to see. It’s surprisingly well-featured in some ways, and disappointingly limited in others, but I think it shows just how capable the iPad is of doing “real” work. Imagine what’ll be possible on the iPad in 5 years.

When Obama took office, his administration said they would not prosecute medical marijuana dispensaries operating in accordance with state law. This signaled a new stance, where marijuana—illegal by federal law—would effectively be a state issue, as it should be. Since then, the administration has completely reversed their earlier policy. Tim Dickinson writes:

But over the past year, the Obama administration has quietly unleashed a multi­agency crackdown on medical cannabis that goes far beyond anything undertaken by George W. Bush. The feds are busting growers who operate in full compliance with state laws, vowing to seize the property of anyone who dares to even rent to legal pot dispensaries, and threatening to imprison state employees responsible for regulating medical marijuana. With more than 100 raids on pot dispensaries during his first three years, Obama is now on pace to exceed Bush’s record for medical-marijuana busts. “There’s no question that Obama’s the worst president on medical marijuana,” says Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project. “He’s gone from first to worst.”

Very disappointing. Their policy on marijuana was, short of decriminalizing it on the federal level, exactly right. Our drug laws are patently absurd. We should have learned from prohibition that it doesn’t work, and it makes things much worse, because it empowers criminals. And yet here we are, making the same mistakes we’ve already made, putting people in prison that shouldn’t be, and sustaining drug cartels and gangs.

Nick Bolton reports that Google is working on augmented reality glasses, and they will be available by the end of the year.

One Google employee said the glasses would tap into a number of Google software products that are currently available and in use today, but will display the information in an augmented reality view, rather than as a Web browser page like those that people see on smartphones.

The glasses will send data to the cloud and then use things like Google Latitude to share location, Google Goggles to search images and figure out what is being looked at, and Google Maps to show other things nearby, the Google employee said. “You will be able to check in to locations with your friends through the glasses,” they added.

I hope these fail.

Cheers to Google for trying to do interesting new work, but I absolutely abhor the idea of a constant connection to the web, and augmented reality glasses are about as bad as it gets.¹ Imagine trying to enjoy dinner with friends with these glasses on. You’ll be talking, and your friends—looking at you from behind these idiotic glasses—will be checking in and maybe even posting a video to the web.

I hate it, because it creates the feeling that you’re not really there—you’re looking at the world through a screen, through the data it presents. Your focus is on the web, because that’s the screen you’re looking at the world around you through. Your priority for focus is the web, and then the world. That’s insane.

And that’s not technology’s purpose, at least in my view. Technology should seek to make life better for people, in small and big ways, as humans. It shouldn’t fundamentally change how we relate to and interact with reality.

I recognize the world that we take for granted—one where a once-unbelievable amount of food can be grown per unit of land, where antibiotics make most bugs an annoyance, where we can be anywhere in the world in a day, where we can talk to anyone in the world at any time—is the result of dramatic technological changes which severely altered how people live. These changes, though, didn’t change how we relate to the world around us or our nature as humans.

But we’re approaching a new technological era where we can change it, where technology isn’t just something we interact with, but something that can be be a part of us, and where what it means to be human, something that’s been static for as long as we’ve been conscious, is up for debate.

I realize that sounds very science fiction, but we’re coming upon a time where it’s a reality, and we’ll have to decide those sorts of things. Augmented reality glasses are the harbinger of this sort of change.

1. A device which taps into our brain’s visual system and inputs this sort of data into our vision is my idea of hell. And unfortunately, we’re really not that far from being able to do that. [↩]

Patrick Rhone:

Like the curtain finally falling from the Wizard of Oz to find just a small, frail, man pretending to be far more powerful and relevant than he really was. Microsoft’s biggest miss was allowing the world to finally see the truth behind the big lie — they were not needed to get real work done. Or anything done, really.

It’s insightful as to why Microsoft is so insistent that tablets are really just PCs, too. If tablets are a new kind of device, one where people have moved on from requiring Microsoft Office to do work, Microsoft is in a very, very bad position. Effectively, they’re in the same position as any other competitor to Apple and Google: an outsider trying to get in to the mobile game.

But if tablets are PCs, then tablets will run Windows, and on Windows-running computers, Office is required to do do any work of value—which makes Microsoft an instant front-runner. If tablets are just PCs, Microsoft has the platform advantage—just look at the number of Windows PCs in use and the number of people who have grown up using Windows.

For Microsoft, tablets have to be PCs, because the other scenario is just too painful to contemplate. This is a fine example of how a wildly successful business can create institutional blindness to new realities. Because a dramatic shift in computing is inconvenient for Microsoft, and would require dramatic change in their business, they end up ignoring market events until they are just too big to ignore. And at that point, it’s usually too late.

Microsoft ignored the iPhone, and now they’re a minority player in mobile phones. They ignored the iPad for a much shorter time, but enough for Apple to sell tens of millions of them—and their response has been to insist that it’s not a new device, but just a different PC form-factor.

Cultured Code announced today that the Things Cloud beta is now public.

Long time coming.

Lukas Mathis:

So when I bought a TouchPad after HP discontinued it, I never assumed that I would use it for actual work. But I am doing just that. I’m using it to respond to email, to do research on the Internet, to take notes during meetings.

So why was it so easy for me to use the TouchPad for work, but not the iPad? I think it’s because there are a number of things the TouchPad does that make it more suitable for work.

He points out some of the areas where webOS was dramatically ahead of iOS, such as multitasking. In webOS, you can start an email draft, switch back to an email you’re replying to, or even start another draft, very easily. That isn’t possible in iOS. (You can, of course, save the draft, go back to your inbox, read the email, go to your drafts folder and open it up again—which shows precisely how far behind iOS is in this area.)

Over the next few years, iOS needs to improve significantly in these sorts of ways—the unsexy kinds of things that make an operating system much more useful for work.

Democrats want to create a “Reasonable Profits Board” for the oil and gas industry:

Six House Democrats, led by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), want to set up a “Reasonable Profits Board” to control gas profits. 

The Democrats, worried about higher gas prices, want to set up a board that would apply a “windfall profit tax” as high as 100 percent on the sale of oil and gas, according to their legislation. The bill provides no specific guidance for how the board would determine what constitutes a reasonable profit.

This is a joke, right? Tell me Democrats just read Atlas Shrugged and thought it would be a funny little joke to pull. Please?

No? Oh, right. I forgot that our parties decided to play a game of “Who Can be More Fucking Crazy?!” Looks like both parties are winning.

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Rian van der Merwe:

And the decisions that Clear made are as close to perfect as I’ve ever seen. I can picture the endless, difficult meetings and arguments that must have happened to decide what features to include in the app. Should we have Projects and Contexts? No. How about Due Dates and Filters? Nope. Well, why not!? Because Clear is a prioritized list of tasks that is fast and easy to edit. That’s it. Nothing less, nothing more.

I love Clear because it makes adding new tasks as quick as possible. So quick, it’s close to the simplicity of making a list on paper. That makes it perfect for situations where you need to quickly get a bunch of items down for future reference, and that’s what I’m expecting to use it for.

It’s difficult to appreciate just how hard it is to get to that point during the design process. When a design decision feels obvious, it’s a good indication the designer spent many, many hours trying to figure out the best way, going through a bunch of revisions and throwing them out.

My main issue—which Phill Ryu says they recognize—is items are limited to 30 characters. That’s not enough for all items, even when condensing the item. But once that’s addressed, it’s going to be a fantastic way to make lists.

Paul Graham on what he calls “schlep blindness”:

Probably no one who applied to Y Combinator to work on a recipe site began by asking “should we fix payments, or build a recipe site?” and chose the recipe site. Though the idea of fixing payments was right there in plain sight, they never saw it, because their unconscious mind shrank from the complications involved. You’d have to make deals with banks. How do you do that? Plus you’re moving money, so you’re going to have to deal with fraud, and people trying to break into your servers. Plus there are probably all sorts of regulations to comply with. It’s a lot more intimidating to start a startup like this than a recipe site.

The “less fun” ideas are increasingly turning out to be the most exciting ones. Square and Nest are two of my favorite new companies, and they’re tackling problems that are ostensibly very boring—payments and thermostats. And yet they’re making a much larger contribution than most new startups.

(Via Connor O’Brien.)

Ken Segall wrote a book about Apple called Insanely Simple. He has a unique perspective to write about Apple:

My observations come from over 12 years of experience as Steve’s agency creative director, from NeXT to Apple. Also relevant to my story are the years I spent on the agency team during John Sculley’s rule at Apple. And then I had some interesting (and often excruciating) experiences in the worlds of Dell, Intel and IBM — which made me even more conscious of what sets Apple apart.

We’ve read plenty of books and articles from outsiders, but it should be especially interesting to read something from someone who worked so closely with Jobs over a long period of time.

I just pre-ordered it on Amazon (that’s an affiliate link).

Phill Ryu:

And that’s the awesome part about technology, suddenly you have this new amazing touch input that’s in everyone’s pocket and you can latch onto that and create completely novel experiences. I don’t know, there is something just magical about that.

What’s exciting about Clear is how original the user interaction is. I think we’re in a sort of prologue for touch interfaces, where the user interface concepts are still largely similar to desktop ones. Clear is trying to push out of that and into the future, where touch interfaces are designed assuming everyone is familiar with them. It’s a lot closer to what you’d think someone who grew up using touch interfaces, rather than a mouse and keyboard, would want to use.

Tim Cook:

We started using it at Apple well before it was launched. We had our shades pulled so no one could see us, but it quickly became that 80-90% of my consumption and work was done on the iPad. From the first day it shipped, we thought that the tablet market would become larger than the PC market and it was just a matter of the time it took for that to occur. I feel that stronger today than I did then. As I look out and I see all of these incredible usages for it, I see the incredible rate and pace of innovation, and the developers — If we had a meeting at this hotel, and we invited everyone doing cool stuff on PC, we wouldn’t have anyone here.

If you invited everyone working on iOS or on that other operating system, you wouldn’t be able to fit everyone! That’s where the innovation is! That doesn’t mean the PC is going to die. I love the Mac and it’s still growing and I believe it can still grow. But I believe that tablet market can replace the unit sales of the PC market, and it’s just a matter of the speed at which that happens. It’s too much of a profound change in things for that to not happen. That’s just my opinion.

Interesting. To my ears it reinforces that Apple plans on making the iPad more and more capable as a person’s main computing device.

Greg Mankiw:

Consider these two policies:

A. An employer is required to provide its employees health insurance that covers birth control.

B. An employer is required to provide its employees health insurance.  The health insurance company is required to cover birth control.

I can understand someone endorsing both A and B, and I can understand someone rejecting both A and B.  But I cannot understand someone rejecting A and embracing B, because they are effectively the same policy.  Ultimately, all insurance costs are passed on to the purchaser, so I cannot see how policy B is different in any way from policy A, other than using slightly different words to describe it.

Yet it seems that the White House yesterday switched from A to B, and that change is being viewed by some as a significant accommodation to those who objected to policy A.  The whole thing leaves me scratching my head.