Lovecraft, an atheist, had no such shield as religion to instill in him a sense of significance. He was a fearful prejudicial man. You could argue that his ambitions as a writer was a grasp at immortality and significance, and in a way, he has succeeded; We still read his work, and will for a long time to come. This is the classic conceit of the starving artist. We grasp at creativity and produce to expand our existence enough to hopefully touch enough people to matter. As a musician and programmer, I see literally no difference between development and art.

So I’m struggling, as I do periodically, with the cosmic horror of Flash development, or indeed, with web development. On general terms, the absolute fewest of us have the luxury of working on a large project; something intended to last beyond the span of a client’s advertising budget. The last time i wrote something special -a role-playing game for kids funded by a well-paying client that still gets significant use, years beyond its intended lifespan- was years ago. I look at the work I do slip between my fingers and vanish into the uncaring void of the internet.

How do you cope with the sensation that nothing you do outlives the common housefly? I return to this subject on at least a monthly basis, and it can be absolutely devastating.

Outside of the money, what really keeps us in this industry? Anyone have any inspirational stories of transition? Goals met, the future changed?

But i can’t help but feel there is something to how i do things that must be at the very least affirming to some developers out there. Flash developers often work alone or in small groups, and few really have a big community to hang out with. It creates an atmosphere where you are never really comfortable with your own skill level, and for me at least it fostered a belief that everybody out there were doing rocket science and I was still building Lego cars and didn’t even bother to make the colors uniform.

I’ll write down some specific beliefs that have helped me a lot.

Object-oriented programming is there to make your life easier, not the machine’s.

When AS2 first dropped on us and i was firmly embedded in AS1 and prototype hacking, i could barely grasp the need for inheritance, and interfaces came much later. I was comfortable with functions-as-classes, long rambling frame scripts and include statements, and i felt like i was on top of the platform and what it could do.

Every time i tried to read about OOP i would be drowned in talk about design patterns and other things that are only really material from a philosophical point of view, but are often portrayed as fact, and digging your way through the religious forum conflicts you find out there can serve as a royal boot to the head if you’re trying to find your way in. My first bumbling steps into OOP were moving from include statements and frame scripts into a single frame script that instantiated an Application class. The actual difference was semantic at best, but it felt good  to test the waters.

The actual BOOM moment where i suddenly “got it” was when i started doing application design on paper. Previously I’d drawn visual states -Big boxy wireframes and rough line charts- and eyeballed the code from there, which was good while i was in the moment, but hell to return to a while later. When putting down thoughts i stopped writing MovieClip or Button, String and Array, and instead started naming things just what i physically imagined them to be. It’s an obvious thing in retrospect, but much like understanding Arrays and other such abstractions that no longer name objects, it was a huge mental tectonic shift. An image isn’t a MovieClipLoader in a MovieClip, it is simply an Image.  The change in work process was literally over night. I stopped starting at Application.as and working my way outwards. I started creating dozens of stub classes simply to have the names and concepts in place before i began the actual coding.

It dawned on me that OOP didn’t just let me apply programming principles i felt were beyond my need. It let me alter the fundamental constructs of the programming language. By compartmentalizing problems, i had been given the opportunity to break an application down into dozens of individual small problems that were typically easily surmountable, that in concert could be used to solve even bigger problems. A hypothetical image gallery is an ImageGallery loading xml into an ImageList containing ImageListItems consisting of an Image and an ImageInfoOverlay. I don’t have to worry about how the Image is displayed in the ImageList, the Image handles that. I don’t have to worry about what information to display about an image on mouseover, the ImageInfoOverlay does that.  Mentally, i’m not thinking about abstractions like sprites or arrays anymore; Those are simply words i use to describe a concept. The concept is what actually matters.

In summary: OOP lets you dictate the language in which you write your application. It is this key principle that lets a developer move from one OOP language to another with relative ease. I shudder to think what i would have gone through trying to learn C++ or C# with only AS1 under my belt. If i have any specific wisdom I’d like to impart on a developer new to OOP concepts, it would be this: Make it easy for yourself first, and you’ll be typing what is natural to you.

It is okay to have many classes, it’s okay to be verbose, and it’s okay to be an idiot

Actually, the more classes the better, because with every class you are bending the language semantics to your will. This comes down to the absolute basics. Say you are implementing a geometry algorithm for the first time. The document you are learning from refers to points as vertices. At this point, i would typically create a class named Vertex that simply extends Point and does nothing more than call super(). All i have done here is change the name of the Point class. Why? Because it’s one less step for my brain to walk while i’m learning this new algorithm.

I’m an artist first. I began as a designer, I consider myself a musician first, and i have the attention span of a cat. In spite of this, i find programming hugely empowering and satisfying. It wouldn’t be half as fun if i wasn’t able to recognize that my brain simply works in visual and physical concepts, not deep abstraction. It’s a common saying that programming is like explaining to a really, really dumb person how to do something, but i think it’s important to realize that you are also talking to yourself most of the time.

I’m comfortable with my own inability to work effectively with heavily abstracted patterns like MVC, because they don’t speak well to me as a person. My goal is to complete a task and ship a product i feel good about, not successfully apply a design pattern someone else put together in their own language. Which brings us to the next point.

If it floats your boat…

Design patterns can be absolutely wonderful things, but they should in my opinion be read as philosophies, not sets of rules. It is entirely possible to work within a very abstract design pattern and not be aware that you are doing so. I cherry pick concepts from patterns that i like and apply liberally with little real concern beyond getting the job done with a minimum of pain; Patterns are typically merely solutions to generic problems, and there is no reason to be afraid of them, or treating them like a set of commandments.

You’ll find a lot of technical developers with a very technical point of view that will, for instance, decry the merits of a singleton, while as a developer under stress a singleton can be an enormous timesaver. Don’t let the philosophical debate around patterns stop you from reading into them and taking with you what you need. In the end it should all help YOU be a better and more effective developer and prevent headaches, not the other way around. My first venture into patterns, a rudimentary exploration of MVC, resulted in me actually feeling dumber than before, and was a serious setback for me as someone getting comfortable with new concepts.

Fuzzy coding is fine within a known system

Don’t be afraid to create utilities for speeding up your workflow, even if it does mean doing something “dumb”. Unless it’s realtime or inner-loop code, optimization isn’t something you should even have to consider for solving menial tasks. Here’s one of my favorite utilities of recent:

Say i want to set up a TextFormat with a font name. I know the font is called “whateverfont”, but the actual embedded name of the font if i want to refer to it embedded is case intensive and may have spaces or extra characters that I’m not aware of, such as Whatever Font STD. Before, this would entail using an enumerateFonts call to grab the font objects, and then manually look through them to get the correct font name. With this utility, i simply call FontUtils.getFontBySimilarFontName(“whatever”). It allows me to be fast and loose, at the cost of a couple of extra loops when it gets called, which is ONCE when i declare the TextFormat. This is a trade-off I’m very ready to make, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t be allowed to.

You should allow yourself to be fuzzy and loose when coding, because it, again, takes your mind off the menial boredom and keeps your eyes on the ball.

Have fun

Don’t let nerds and sourpusses bring you down. Programming isn’t “for smart people”. It’s just another language, albeit one where clarity is the point and not the model. Don’t let high-end tech-talk make you feel poorly about your skills. Don’t be afraid to mix and blend. Think naturally. When you are starting up, think about the product you are making and not the individual problems within it; You can solve each problem on its own. Whatever way you solved the problem, the problem remains solved.

As Apple show off their new poorly named bullshit device that hurts the world and further closes off technology from hacker culture (high five Steve, you’re a fucking champ), the question on many lips is “so hey, Apple guy man, if you’re intending to challenge Netbooks, where be the Flash support?” To which Apple has no valid response, and fanboys and haters roll into cartoonish catfight balls of fog and violence over the pros and cons of this decision.

The primary pro, as far as i can tell, is that hey yo, woop, HTML5 is coming, and you know that will do everything Flash does so HEY FLASH IS DYING YO GET OFF THAT SHIP WITH THE OTHER RATS CANT YOU SEE DEY RUNNING LOOL.

The wild borderline incoherent ramblings of the HTML5-as-ark-of-the-covenant crowd never ceases to amuse me. I’m first in line to say i’m happy the web is finally up to supporting a native video object. In fact i strongly prefer the YouTube HTML5 player.

But video is not what Flash is.

The big ish with HTML5 is simply that it does not and will not do what Flash can currently do, and applications written in HTML5 are web apps like any other. Web development is and has been for over 2 decades a collection of kludged up solutions and technologies working in awkward tandem. AJAX for instance isn’t a technology as much as a methodology, but consumers lap it up as though the web is actually evolving as a development platform. The platform itself grows at an absolutely glacial rate, but developers and serverside tech are getting better at hacking it.

You know that funky Chrome startup page? A few snapshots and transitions? It takes over two thousand lines of code to get that up and running. TWO THOUSAND. I have written networked multiplayer video games in that many lines. That shit is bananas, b.a.n.a.n.a.s.  How, exactly do you propose this “leap for HTML” will take over for Flash? You are delusional.

The choice here for Apple would be between Silverlight, Unity3d and Flash, three technologies in direct competition over a very narrow web market segment that HTML5 has no intention and little hope of filling; Games. The more popular choice for developers in this regard remains Flash, and with good reason. There is a huge community, the platform has reached a level of maturity its competition has to work their asses off to match, and the language offers easily portable code, good OOP tools and is an excellent springboard for graduating to more powerful compiled languages. The day i have to write a game in markup and JavaScript is the day i quit the business and never look back. Terrible languages being brutalized to perform duties they were never designed to do.

What developers like is what gets used. I challenge you to point out a good collection of small-team indie games developed using pure web technologies that have had any real impact. What Apple has done here is simple. They have barricaded themselves off from a market that challenges their business model. Don’t stoop to assume otherwise.

But i love Dreamweb to death. Because i infer.

In 1992 i was 10 years old, and despite trying hard, completely incapable of understanding what Dreamweb was all about. It was a Blade Runner-esque dark sci-fi trip into a perpetually rainy city where the protagonist, Ryan, is suffering through a psychotic break.  Ryan, through his dreams, receives messages from a mystical council of hooded monks, who assure him the world is going to end unless 7 powers are stopped. These 7 powers conspire to tear apart the Dreamweb, which i assume is akin to Stephen King’s “beams”; the fabric of reality. These 7 powers are contained by 7 people. Ryan must murder these seemingly completely unrelated 7, or the world will end. As such, the game boils down to 7 murders. The puzzles are essentially murder scenarios to be played out.

In waking life, Ryan is miserable, working as a bartender in a dive bar. His frequent nightmares and messages from the dream world are beginning to distort his perception of reality, drives him into a deep depression, skewing his priorities to the point of open neglect. His girlfriend, Eden, a receptionist at Sartain corporation, is at the point of the game’s start weary of Ryan’s constant nightmares and turn towards the dark. She loves him, but he is drifting away from her, and she’s realizing that at this point she can do nothing but watch.

The game begins as Ryan wakes up from yet another apocalyptic nightmare. He’s been given the name of the first power, and has reached a point where the dreamworld seems more real than reality. He is convinced, and sets out to perform his divine duty. It’s the middle of the night, at Eden’s apartment. Eden sleepily tries to console her boyfriend, but drifts off, as Ryan gets dressed and exits into the perpetually rainy neon-lit metropolis, knowing only his target’s last name.

Granularity

The heart of Dreamweb’s appeal is atmosphere. Almost every element of the game is fanatically detailed. A common criticism of the game was the ability to pick up nearly every item that wasn’t bolted down, which resulted in a whole heap of confusing puzzles. Why, for instance, would you need a screwdriver to bend open a locked cabinet when you were already holding a full set of cutlery? It’s telling that the game’s UI contained a separate zoomed-in per-pixel view of the cursor’s surroundings;

This was a game that knew it was firmly embedded in a hardcore pixel-hunt and gave players a sniper scope to carry out the grim task. It was also not above putting players in situations where, if they failed to pick up a key item, they could leave without it and never be given the chance to get it back. Knowing what a key item was was hard enough to begin with.

Rather awesomely, the game models a sort of 1980s conception of the internet, being console command driven. Ryan can access a terminal to check his mail and the daily news, as well as check the contents of the game world’s common storage unit, the Cartridge. Some cartridges hold information vital to advancement, but the world is literally strewn with red herring cartridges, and the process of digging out the gold could be absolutely maddening.

The murders themselves, the payoff if you will, were loud and graphic. Ryan’s first kill involves breaking into a penthouse hotel room, burying an axe in the chest of an unsuspecting man, taking the head off another with a gun, and coldly executing his target as he begs for his life. The red flows free and often, and morality is never a question. Everyone is rotten, and anyone can die.

All this is framed in a wonderfully moody synth-based soundtrack by Matthew Seldon, which elevates the game from oddity to something quite special. If anything is fondly remembered about the game these days, it’s the music.

Dreamweb flounders a bit in terms of storytelling. It paints a broad picture of a man who thinks he’s saving the world, but is wildly out of control, and bombards us with hints that he might not be mad at all. Taken at face value, Dreamweb is a basic story of a Jesus figure who suffers for our sins and saves us all from chaos and oblivion, and for me this was both its largest strength and weakness. It begins with enough hint that Ryan is simply going bananas, but spends the last two thirds of the game reassuring us that he is in fact right. We are never forced to question our motive for murdering these people, and characters close to Ryan vanish as soon as they appear. The game can’t see the forest for the trees, and struggles to draw emotional investment. The mystery dies quickly, and leaves us with atmosphere and gore. A concept this good deserves so much more.

A Unity3D remake

I’ve been scrambling for a Unity3D project to devote my time to, and I’ve always gravitated towards the adventure game. Dreamweb is a wonderful place to visit but a tough place to stay, and every time i boot it up i recognize more things that could be bettered. A dark cyberpunk murder-scenario psychological adventure game? Why not give it a go!

I’ve been working on a Dreamweb re-imagining for the past month. I’m doing basic engine work at the moment, putting the mechanics into place for puzzle mechanics, item use, inventory management and, yes, combat. The game will be a first person adventure game in the vein of Penumbra, with a large emphasis on atmosphere, physical interaction, item-on-item puzzles, social engineering, computer interfacing and short, sharp combat. This is not a first person shooter. Bullets are important and big events, and a single one will do.

Besides this, i am writing a new script. The outline and characters are the same as the original game, but dialogue, puzzles, locations and core elements of Ryan’s character are thoroughly altered. So much so i am considering hiding Ryan and his name, as well as making his gender ambiguous.

I’ll keep posting news here as i go on. For now, as a teaser, here are the first 3 pages of the script for your perusal. Enjoy, and do post feedback! Dreamweb! Yeah!

If you haven’t played Animal Crossing on the DS or Wii, i strongly suggest that you find an opportunity to do so. On its own the game is addictive, but its weird implementation of massively multiplayer online play is really worth a long look. Nintendo are infamous for their friend code system, which puts users who want to play together through a good few burning rings before they can actually do so. Because of this system, you will never openly communicate with an identifiable unknown. The system allows for play with random strangers, but communication seems to be reinvented every time. If you are connected friends, you might get a full suite of options, but for random strangers you’re typically given what amounts to a few emotes and canned phrases. For a game with MMO pretentions, this is obviously hugely challenging.

Animal Crossing lets users that aren’t connected friends “interact” through side-effects of their actions. I had a real moment of wow when i spent a few irrational minutes making a pixel perfect nazi swastika pattern and put it up in my clothes shop for my (already utterly irreverent) animals to wear. Soon, the swastika pattern had migrated from my town to my few friends’ towns. And then the ball just rolled from there. Friends of friends of friends of friends would see nazi animals show up in their towns.

Media in Animal Crossing spreads like a disease. It’s a viral mmo.

An animal will show up in your town and ask for a new catchphrase. The next day, it might have moved out to another town. Which town? You’re not the one who decides. This lets you communicate ideas, but only to random recipients. This system is epitomized in the bottled mail system, which lets you write a message, put it in a bottle and toss it into the sea. Whoever gets the message is apparently completely random, throughout the online service. I have gotten bottled messages ranging from ascii cats to sorrowful suicide notes.

This is what makes Animal Crossing so enticing for adults i think. A combination of pure OCD collectomania and a world that seems wildly chaotic. In my mind, after a few weeks play, an Animal Crossing town is like an out of control train in a tight turn teetering on one rail.

What we begun putting together today is a purification of the bottled mail system. An anonymous client that lets you post messages into a pile, and retrieve random ones you haven’t written yourself. When you retrieve one, it is removed from the database. This ensures that a message is anonymous and personal. Of course, the system is widely open to abuse, but i actually don’t mind that aspect. Sitting on the beach sifting through debris for gold, you’re likely to find a whole lot of junk.

I’m hoping the system will find a place as a way to let off steam, and let off guilt. Somewhere to confess, or to be heard by someone who will know that somewhere, out there, a single individual posted this thought for a single individual to read. The internet is so often about the individual entity spreading information as widely as possible; the cluster bomb collateral damage model of information.

This narrows the focus back on the individual recipient, and theoretically eliminates the egotist exhibitionist publisher.

It’s the Anti-Twitter, anti-Facebook. It’s not about the masses, but the individual, sporadic connection of strangers’ eyes meeting sporadically through the window of a passing bus. The prototype is in development here, and I hope you’ll find it interesting as it evolves. At the time of writing it has almost no effort whatsoever put into the UI. Making it pretty comes next.

Lovely looking book so far. It’s a thorough beginner’s introduction to the Unity editor and its unique concepts, and contains enough references to Flash to be a real asset to the Flash designer/developer wanting to test the Unity waters. When I’m done with it, being a wonderful man, I’ll do the right thing and tell you if it’s worth your time

Splines is one of those concepts I’ve only recently started futzing about with. Bezier splines are neat for drawing, and i use Catmull-Rom splines for smoothly interpolating sequences of keyframes in animation. They’re neat, useful things. A toy I’m working on uses user-drawn Catmull-Rom splines as the basis of lofting and revolving 3d geometry. It’s not exactly NURBS, but it’s definitely in the same realm. It’s fascinating as hell. One of the earliest issues i ran into was getting the normal of a given point on a spline. And this is where it gets retarded, and i start over-engineering.

Instead of looking at the bigger picture, i immediately start looking for one-stop solutions for spline normals. After banging my head into that for a while, i realize a spline tangent is a more common goal, and i start banging my head into that one as well. The lesson here is that you don’t need one-stop solutions, and you don’t always have to use the smartest stuff if what you do winds up working. Turns out the easiest and most practical way to get a spline normal on a catmull-rom spline segment is to do the following:

1. Sample the point on the spline you want a normal for (p1)
2. Sample another point (p2) on the spline slightly further along; for instance if p1 is at 0.5, sample p2 at 0.51
3. Subtract p2 from p1: Bam, you have a unit vector (v) parallel to the direction of the spline at p1
4. Get the normal to v by swapping and inverting its components.

Since you’re sampling *along* the spline, the normal won’t ever flip.

It’s such an epic facepalm moment. Why did i think about it so hard? When you take a couple steps back and look at the problem “physically”, it’s dreamily clear! I’m sure there are “smarter” ways to get this information, but aside from the double spline sample (which is just a bunch of multiplications anyway) the rest of it is lightweight enough to be negligible. Unless you’re doing this a shit ton of times for a lot of geometry, the approach i outline works just fine, even for real-time purposes. In my naive fanciful mind, the “proper” solution is this overwrought slow thing that takes longer to execute. That might be complete bull, but hey

I Googled this problem and found nothing this straightforward, so i hope it’ll help someone else too.

The Enticer – Oblivion VS Rigormortis Live PA

My god, it makes me want to get back into hardcore. Give it another go. Every time i make another pass into what it’s become now i get more and more depressed by it, but listening to this still-fresh 4-year-old stuff we were up to makes me think there’s still hope

Dear Apple Inc.

Why do you feel the need to be such a dick? Where i come from, people who are so violently obsessed with proving their own self worth typically do so because they suffer from some sort of inferiority complex, or simply weren’t brought up right. There’s probably something freudian in there as well. I’m confused, Apple, because i remember a time when you were a legitimate underdog, and all of us who were faithful to you were so far and few between that we had to congregate in the universities and labs where you were available due to your prohibitive cost, and were absolutely stunned and delighted to meet another private owner of a Mac. I remember some of the most tightly knit communities around, because we all felt like underdogs right alongside you. Everyone, literally everyone had some nasty opinion of the Mac, of the OS or the lack of a perceived SOMETHING, and we had to stand up for you and fight for you, and in the end it made us all brothers of a sort. It felt good, you know? It felt good to believe in being right about something that others were wrong about. Even when you fucked us over again and again with worse and worse design decisions, we still believed you were the better choice. And you were!

I grew up a Mac user. The first computer in our home was a Mac IIsi, which was as much as my dad could afford, and it eventually became mine. From Crystal Quest and on, it’s where i got into computer games. Ambrosia had me covered for years; Avara, Maelstrom.. God knows how many adventure games. I had friends running 486DX2s, playing Duke 3D and Doom, laughing as i forced a 20mhz 3mb ram 10mb hd to run Marathon in a tiny, tiny interlaced window at 10fps. But my god i loved it. It’s how i got into the mod community, it’s where i cut my teeth on Photoshop, Director, Micrologic, it’s where i got into resource level modding with ResEdit. It was a damn fine computer, and i get soft around the heart when i think of it and what it gave me. Damn the commoners with their PCs. This machine was a tool. All through my childhood and early teens, i was fighting for the validity of this system, and i never once regretted a word i said. Some of my favorite tween memories are sneaking into the computer lab at my dad’s job to play networked Marathon games on their Powermacs. I still remember my Marathon serial number by heart from all the times i had to reinstall it on various machines.  ZS8KN J7RN MYGUGD6. I’ll probably remember that until age takes my memory.

Getting my very own Mac when i was 14 was astonishing, and it was a pretty big leap in how much of a flagbearer i became for you as a company. I got a Performa 5320CD, you know those with the built-in monitor? It looked like an absolute beast, but holy CRAP did it feel next gen. Every single bit of it was an absolute dream. At this point i was firmly embedded in the Marathon community, along the Marathon Map Makers Guild, one of the finest online communities i have ever seen, and another that makes me soft around the heart to recall. Finally i was on a system of my own that i could really dedicate to this work. I wanted to work with music, i wanted to work with art, and i wanted to make worlds in Marathon 2. At this point, my Mac wasn’t a mere computer. It was where i did my thing. Pretty much every fulfilling activity took place on the Performa, and i took the utmost measures in customizing my OS9 experience. That machine was MINE, and woe to the man who thought to try and invalidate it.

Magazines at the time reflected this attitude. We were fierce about our computers, because we were constantly under attack. While bigger names like MacFormat still tried to stay professional, others like MacAddict joined us in our ferocious counterattacks against this overwhelming offense from The PC Community (a nebulous and somewhat imaginary enemy). MacAddict cover CDs typically contained a video of a PC being destroyed in some way such as being hit by a car, “walking the plank” etc, and it was absolutely delicious.

But all good things must end. The end for me came when my Performa died, its warranty no longer valid, and my nonexistent teenager economy promptly ended my hopes of picking up a new Apple machine. This was before Stevie Jobs had returned, and machines were still, even at their cheapest, prohibitively expensive. You can imagine the dark night of the soul i went through when i found myself forced to accept a secondhand Windows 98 box with a busted HD on which to keep making music.

Windows 98 was an aberration of a system, and at this time, Apple was with all its warts and flaws by far the superior option. But you do what you got to do, and with time, i learned to live with a PC. Eventually, i learned to love it. Perhaps it’s the tinkerer in me that previously loved customizing the OS itself that led me to so fully embrace the through and through customization of a PC? Taking it from a hand-me-down piece of junk to something outperforming anything i’d ever owned was thrilling, and it blew my mind that i could not have done this, scrounging machines for parts and putting together better ones, on my old Mac. Of course the OS was still terrible and there was nothing like a sense of community spirit surrounding it, but for me, the 16 year old, the broken hated hand-me-down PC soon became just as valued a companion as my Performa had ever been.

In hindsight, i loved the community spirit, and i still miss it. The Windows platform has never been more than a platform, and most likely won’t be. It’s a place to do work, and whatever communities build must be built around the programs written for it. So why did we have this fierce community spirit? This absolutely ferocious urge to prove that what we had was amazing? Because what we had was amazing, and so few people got it.

So how come now, Apple, that pretty much everybody gets it, do you think you still have the right to any of this ferocity?

I’ll be frank with you. I’m heartbroken. When you were weak we fought for you, and you just stood there, gray faced, and took the abuse. We shielded you, because you weren’t the sort to fight. We’d be your frontline; you just keep being awesome. In this storm of peril and doom, you’ll survive. We’ll be your shield.

It’s hard to say that Steve Jobs hasn’t been good for you. My god he’s made you nearly unstoppable. You’ve gone from being the quiet nerdy kid in the corner to this enormous juggernaut. You have all the money, you have all the technology. You push the limits, you break new ground.

And you’ve become a friggin’ douchebag.

It’s a known constant of the universe that the underdog has an undisputed license to be an asshole. The worse your odds, the more shit you can get away with. Your odds are pretty good right now. In fact, i’ll say you’re doing damn good for yourselves. Why do you feel such a need to fight so hard? Too much.

I think your tone is wrong, and too much. You’re no longer something like an upstart fighting for survival. You’re one of the big boys, and one of the loudest and most visible. Where you are now, there is no need for this kind of adolescent behavior. You’re past that now. Watching you jump gleefully at any chance to attack the public image of your opposition has gone from being a funny sort of quirk to approaching full-on sociopathy. Your public willingness to be thoroughly idiosyncratic, while essentially a boon as a company, is beginning to look desperate.

You have become a company that is incapable of giving credit unless it reflects back onto you. You’ve become a company so obsessed with innovation that you fail to repair the fundamental issues with your product. The Finder of today is barely improved from the Finder i was using under System 8, yet your claims of OS supremacy remain furious as ever. I have no beef with your product. OSX is a wonderful system. It’s just odd that to make full use of it you must change its fundamentals, which is a feature you share uncannily with your foremost competitor. Until you have actually solved the problems you so vehemently accuse your opposition of having failed at, it seems odd to hear your cries of supremacy.

You have a history of assimilating fledgling technologies and giving them a serious facelift. You adore the notion that you brought multitouch to the world, yet forget that the technology was not yours. You have joined a worldwide initiative to bring touch driven interfaces to the forefront, but you give little back for what you take. The end result is a company that is not a good citizen. You don’t care about the city you live in. You’re more of a rabble-rouser. You seek conflict, and where there is none you create it.

Until you have a right to fight so viciously, it’d be nice if you held your tongue a bit. You’ve entered the company of others, and it’s time to be polite.

The “idio” in idiosyncratic stems from the Greek “idios”, meaning “one’s own”. It also means “private”. There is more to this game than merely standing out. Another more common word stems from idios, and i think you’re coming real close to its meaning.