An iPhone Application I Cannot Make

I'm actually trying to finish a program for the iPhone. I've always wanted to make a toy or gadget, and since I have zero engineering expertise, I'm happy to let Apple provide that end and leave me to the software.

VCRs duly excepted, I'm new to programming. There is a bit of a learning curve. As with most things, all you need to know is what you can or can not do. I blew this. Apple has made some things easy (you can drag and drop menus, windows, whole interfaces, anything that looks standard on the Mac or iPhone) and they've made one thing very, very hard: every program has to shut down when the phone rings. This completely shattered my dream of building the perfect alarm clock. I've moved on, shattered, and am trying to finish something new that I'll show you in June. Until then, perhaps you can do me a favor and make this application.

Wouldn't it be amazing to use the iPhone's camera as a makeshift barcode scanner (see Delicious Library pull this off)? Consider using this in a supermarket. Suddenly a whole world of information would be available beyond what packaging chooses to reveal:

• Can you get this thing cheaper online?
• Scan two products and compare them on cost, nutritional value, or other criterion that matter to you.
  
• Vote with your money: is your brand of tuna sustainable or depleting the ocean? is your "All-natural" chicken everything you hope it is (All-natural being a label that has little in the way of regulation and meaning -- I mean, aren't all chickens natural)? Are you being pandered to, is this product 'green-washed', or is there something interesting going on here? Is this company trying to change? Would the cheaper standard bulb save me money or the more expensive CFL lightbulb? Over a year?
  
• How much carbon did it take to get your sea bass from Chile to New York?
  
• Exactly how many hamburgers did I buy last month? Yikes!
  

I know that having more information leads to better purchases. It also leads to greater sustainability. Supply chains will wizen up and food will arrive at your market without the need for preservatives as the exact number of buyers is known in advance. Something is to gained here. For starters, preservative free food can be sold for more. More relevant to those of us not in the food business, food will get cheaper and healthier. People just won't stand for bad food as they'll be given the choice of two products identical in price and they'll take the food less doctored. And that will make all the difference.

Green Houses

One of the Times' blogs has a post on green architecture that covers some of the quite quantifiable advantages to building with both sustainability and community in mind. While I disagree with making any standards mandatory (government being useless at imposing them at any meaningful level, and people being clever enough to get around them), I do believe that we are beginning to see how environmental friendliness and efficiency is cheaper in the long-term and long-term is is how we should think about homes. Sadly, but thankfully, self-interest might prevail, especially if tax breaks for too-large homes come under scrutiny.

Also, consider this National Geographic article on how Disney and Orlando came together to form a new kind of exurban landscape. There is an interesting connection, but the article makes not one mention of Celebration, FL, another Disney project, that was designed with community, technology, and environmentalism from the outset.

Update: This post by Alex Steffen at World Changing sums up everything I said above, and so much more that I wish I had, neater and in-depther. It looks at the suburbs through automobile use, but the conclusions are the same: It takes a lot of space and CO2 to end up less happy than citied folks.

Ah Modern Architecture

We've not really had a particularly good word for modern since, well, Modern.  Post-modern is not really descriptive (even with the modifier) and is probably just used to sell books.  Perhaps this we're stuck with Modernism because, as aesthetics are concerned, we haven't had a great shift away from what just was -- Modernism.  Or perhaps they just took the best word first because they were alive and working first.  

This initially-promising, ultimately-too-short-as-with-most-Slate-articles article article has gotten me remembering the worst of Modern architecture.  My grandfather designed his own home in Cuba (allow me to describe it gently: concrete square on rectangle) and his Bauhaus 'aesthetic' was rooted in the same dialectic philosophy that drove him off his island.  It seems like men and women of that era didn't do anything without a manifesto or theory (getting the groceries must have been a chore).  

Amazingly -- an accident of unlucky history -- almost all of those theories were similar in this respect: rich white men kindly telling worker's that they should want to live in buildings that look an awful lot like the factories they kill themselves in.  As time past, the rich white men forgot why the buildings looked the way they did (why is forgotten first) and wanted them for themselves because they looked different, were in nice parts of town, and were vaguely European and Americans have had inferiority complexes about vague Europeans since before Edith Wharton's day.  

4 thoughts: 

1. Isn't Frank Lloyd Wright impressive by comparison?  His main interest wasn't theory but how people should live their lives in their spaces, his main aesthetic was a decorative integration with nature and the need to limit choice (furniture stuck to the floors; no basements for no clutter). 
   
2. Shouldn't we allow the environment and environmentalism to function as our governing aesthetic?  If we align our houses with the sun, keep them a reasonable size, have our windows let in the most natural light, use renewable materials, etc. doesn't a sense of well-being come from the home that's greater that just looking nice?  
3. Isn't Frank Gehry's stuff really, really ugly? What about Liebskind?  Rem Koolhaas?  Could 1,000 monkeys given 1,000 years come up with something as disgusting as that Venice Beach House?  I know it's Venice Beach, but come on.  What if these ideas trickle down into the mainstream?  What if we forget that these are ugly buildings, have nostalgia cloud our taste, and then go on living in cities filled with these things (like Tati's nightmare, Playtime)? 
4. Do we find these building attractive because they were built?  Isn't this a case of the emperor's new clothes?  While not horrible on a Clement Greenberg scale, doesn't the architecture critic function as a salesman with an interest in conflating shit and shinola?  Is the businessman lucky enough to build a building really so easily deceived by namebrand architects and so confused by aesthetics? Perhaps his isn't an aesthetic decision?  Consider Ratner's Atlantic Yards: after much community opposition (it will be a terrible drain on the area), he hired Gehry to redesign the project as if his minimal changes and maximal name would make all the difference in the public's eye.  All Gehry did was plopp out a skyscraper, call it Lady Brooklyn, and hope that by confusing a beloved statue with a reviled project some goodwill might rub off.  Beware the professional expert. 

Wool vs. Cotton

I've got a larger post on consumption and the environment coming (hence the one-day delay), but I found this quite interesting -- in part because I never thought to ask the question.  Which of the two fabrics is better for the environment?