The Mac App Store launched Thursday, and Herman Miller stock went up two points in anticipation of all of the chairs Steve Ballmer has probably been throwing at people this week.  There’s no way the sweaty-pitted Microsoft CEO isn’t beating his middle managers like red-headed step-children after the news came out that people downloaded a million apps in the first day, with 10,000 apps available at launch.  The Mac App Store changes things in ways that people in Windowsland cannot even contemplate, although when Win7SP2 launches with the MSFT half-ass attempt of the same concept, I’m sure we’ll hear all about the greatness, just like we’ll hear about how great judicial advocacy is from Teapotters that have railed against it for the last two years when they need it to keep Guantanamo bay open.

The Mac App Store changes things in a big way, both good and bad.  Back when I got started in this industry, if you wanted to write and sell an application for a Mac (or a PC), you rode your dinosaur to work, hired a bunch of people to put your crap on floppy disks and into boxes, and then either sold it yourself in your local computer stores (kids younger than 20: imagine a Best Buy with only a computer section, that didn’t suck), or you got your retail boxes dumped into the channel and flushed out to big stores and catalogs.  (Catalog: a paper version of Amazon, but it took 4-6 weeks to get your stuff.)  Then the internet happened, and people sold software on web sites, where you somehow sent money and either got a download or got a CD-ROM sent to you through the pony express for later installation at your own leisure.

But if you had this great software package, you had this huge list of problems.  Gotta set up a web site.  Gotta get a shopping cart system in place.  Gotta take credit cards and get a merchant account and whatever SSL nonsense your ISP wants you to get.  Or, gotta bend over and spread for PalPal’s cut of the vig.  Gotta find a way to have a download center that isn’t just at widget.com/dontlookhere/dl/product.zip so the first person that buys your crap doesn’t just spam the magic link to the world and let everyone download.  Gotta come up with come crazy system of software enablement, serial numbers you type in and send securely, whatever obfuscated nonsense you need to keep the world from just emailing your ZIP file to all of their friends.  Gotta find a way to drive traffic to the site.  Gotta find a way to get people to return to the site for upgrades and new versions.  There are a lot of moving parts, a lot of things to consider, and either every software reseller reinvents the wheel, or you join some tribe or cabal or commune or collective or whatever else to use one common set of machinery for everyone’s releases, and you pay for the privilege.

So now you avoid all of that.  Pay Apple a hundred bucks to join, upload your DMG file, and you’re in a searchable, centralized catalog of apps.  When a new Apple user fires up their iMac for the first time, there’s a pretty little icon to click that brings them to a huge store filled with games and productivity apps and stuff people can click on without scrambling for their credit cards or signing up for yet another e-merchant account that will probably eventually get hacked, with your password and Visa number and home phone ending up in a torrent sent out to every script kiddie in the world.

There’s also the issue of central maintenance.  When you have to push out a patch, you don’t spam out emails, and you don’t have to write complicated code to beam back to the mothership and check if the latest version is installed on the user’s PC. You tell Apple you have a new version, and let them do the dirty work.  And when a person bricks their MacBook or spills juice in their iMac and has to go get a new machine, they just plug in their username and all of their apps magically download again.  There isn’t a two-month process of trying to remember all of the crap you installed, or a weekend-long backup and reload on an external drive or a pile of DVD-Rs.

Yeah, there are downsides.  You’re paying Apple that hundred bucks, and they’re also skimming 30% of the take on your sales.  But do you know how much banks take from mom and pop companies on merchant accounts?  I’d tell you, but there are like 79 different surcharges and monthly fees and address verification fees and machine rental fees and every other nickel-and-diming the banks can think of to hit you with.  That 30% erases a lot of headaches.  And compare it to how much of a discount you’d give in channel sales, and it’s not a bad deal.

There are all of the “walled garden” arguments you’ll hear from the Microsoft camp.  You’ve heard the same arguments since the App Store showed up on the iPhone, although you haven’t heard as many of them since Windows Phone 7 adopted the same exact strategy for their app store.  And you probably won’t hear much more about it after that Windows 7 Platinum Home Deluxe SP2 Zune Marketplace shows up in the next rev of their OS, providing the same exact walled garden, albeit with a lot of the wall’s pieces removed to appease any of the big software makers that balk.

I think by the fall, everyone at every point of the food chain is going to try to launch their PC app store.  Amazon’s probably brewing one; I’m sure all of the hardware manufacturers like HP and Dell are going to have a long, painful meeting this Monday where some idiot who has never installed software in his life but can wear a mean tie and gets all of the ZDNet headlines beamed to his Blackberry is going to pitch their genius idea to launch their own bundled crapware app store on their new computers.   App stores will be the add-on toolbar of 2011, just like they were for phones in the last 18 months.

Another argument that is a plus and a minus is what the hell this will do to pricing.  People are now used to paying 99 cents for a game on their phone, so good luck on putting your desktop game on the App Store for $79.99.  Sure, you can trim down that price a bit because you’re not paying $47 a copy in merchant account fees to Bank of America.  And your game is some one-gig DVD release and not just a two-screen screen-tapper you wrote in a weekend.  It’s going to cause unbundling of suites, like Apple is doing with iWork and iLife, where people will only buy the apps they want, at a lower price and a smaller download, instead of buying a full package of apps on a DVD.  I don’t know what the magic price point will become, although I’m guessing people will be less apt to buy a $99 app and more willing to pay something like $19 for Real Apps and $4.99 for games and entertainment.

I just got the update and installed the App Store, and gave it a quick drive to download the new Twitter client.  No problems, no surprises.  I haven’t bought anything yet, but when I get a free second (which will be in like June) I will probably hunt down the latest versions of some of the older registered payware/shareware I have, just to make the next update easier.  All I can tell you now is, I’m glad I’m not working at a hardware manufacturer that’s probably going to go on damage control and require all of its R&D center employees to waste a lot of their free time generating stupid powerpoints re-selling an already done idea.  Also glad I’m not driving across the 520 bridge every morning to potentially have a 57-pound Aeron chair thrown at my head.

In 2003, I made a list of every book I read that year. I haven’t done this since for a few reasons, although laziness is the biggest one.  Also, I don’t read as much as I should, and these lists are never accurate.  It’s like every top-100 record list by rock snobs that have Captain Beefheart on the list.  I can guarantee you that far more people listen to Boston’s first album than Don Von’s, and but people put him on the list because they want to look superior or act like they have a refined taste.  (For the record, I am listening to “More Than a Feeling” on repeat as I write this, something I do for hours at a time, until I decide to switch to “Don’t Fear the Reaper” or “Freebird”, or the Oakland SWAT team knocks my front door off the hinges because my neighbors have phoned in a potential Waco standoff, because there’s no other possible reason for someone to listen to side 1/track 1 of Boston - Boston 483 times in a row.)

Okay, so here is a partial list of the books I read in 2010 that you should read but probably won’t, because this post itself just broke the 200 word mark, and that’s way too long for anyone not on near-lethal amounts of ADHD medication.  Oh, in no particular order.

• Loner: Stories by John Sheppard - This is a story collection by my pal John Sheppard that contains three stories previously released in Air in the Paragraph Line, plus a story entitled “Loner” that completely blew me away.  John’s an incredibly underrated writer and the book is worth it for this one story.
• Meat Won’t Pay My Light Bill by Kurt Eisenlohr - Kurt is better known in these parts as the artist who painted the AITPL 13 cover, but he’s also an awesome writer.  This is a very Bukowskian novel about a punk named Lupus who wants to quit working and spend his time painting, and all hell breaks loose.  If you liked Post Office, this book is totally up your alley.
• There Are a Million Stories in the Naked City by Fiona Helmsley - This is a cool-sized pocket book that consists of 120 pages of creative non-fiction stories about Fiona’s days world of punks and strippers and heroin and a dirty, pre-Giuliani New York City.
• Awkward 1 - I first met Awkward Press editor Jeffrey Dinsmore during my brief stint in LA in 2008, which was right before he got Awkward up and running.  They’ve since done a more substantial second issue in 2010, which tells you something about my reading backlog.  This episode has five short stories about awkward occurrences, all of them great.  Each one is pretty innovate in how the story unspools, like Honor Rovai’s “Housesitting”, which starts off as a letter to a housesitter that quickly morphs into a crime confession.
• The American Book of the Dead by Henry Baum - A high-concept thriller about the end of the world as brought on by a far-right conspiracy by religious fundies in a Cheney-type style.  It’s a good plot that would (or will?) make a great movie, but is also noteworthy in that it was self-published and isn’t just another SKU number regurgitated from the entertainment-industrial complex.
• Air in the Paragraph Line #13 - I know I published it, and I wrote two of the stories, but I also read a metric fuck-ton of stories before selecting these, and I re-read everything here a million times during the production of the issue.  Todd Taylor’s “Banjo Alien Zen” is one of my favorites in here, as is Rebel Star Hobson’s piece about the insanity of working in a redneck-infested convenience store.

I didn’t buy as much this year because I re-read a lot of old books.  I moved, and in the process of moving, I tried to tightly prune my collection and dump books that had followed me across the country multiple times that I should have read but didn’t.  Also, I tried to nail down what I was supposed to be writing, or what I wanted to write, and a lot of that involved re-reading books important to me.  Here’s a partial list of what I re-read, all books worthy of purchase, if you’ve got that Amazon gift card from xmas burning a hole in your pocket:

• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson - A panic Kindle purchase when I realized I was on the way to the airport for a cross-country flight and had nothing to read.  I practically inhaled this on the plane ride home, and it was just as good as the first half-dozen times I read it.
• The Risk Pool by Richard Russo - This is pretty much becoming an annual read.  Nobody paints a picture like this guy.
• The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick - Alternate reality we-lost-to-the-Nazis fiction at its finest, especially since all alternate reality fiction currently written is some right-wing wonk trying to get across some point about how paving roads is socialism.
• The Fuck-Up by Arthur Nersesian - One of my favorite books about New York, even if there is a geographical goof about every five pages.

So what should I be reading in 2011?

One of my new year’s resolutions is to get a reality show of mine picked up on the upcoming motorized combative sports channel that Viacom is trying to get off the ground in 2012.  I’ve been reading all of these bullshit Syd Field books, and trying to figure out this new Mac software package ScreenFuckerPro, which is supposed to have some wizard mode where you enter a noun, a color, and a verb and it spits out a perfectly formed 120-page screenplay.  Over half of the stuff on UPN or whatever it is called this week uses this program.  I think my copy is broken, because I downloaded a torrent and used a fake serial number, and now no matter what nouns and verbs I put into it, the result is always the pilot episode of Felicity.  I’ve spent the last 200 hours trying to figure out the key macros and wizard screens and pull-out side palettes, and I probably could have just written the damn treatment in notepad by now, except that involves work, and I still can’t figure out if I’m supposed to use notepad or wordpad on a Windows machine, and no matter which one I use, the thing ends up unwrapping and putting the entire damn thing on one line with \874 and \262 and Ä instead of quotes and dashes.

So I’ve been trying to wrap my head around some kind of “green” demolition derby - something that captures the essence of classic motorized combative sports and their ability to transfer the pent-up sexual frustration of middle America into twisted metal and bent-up mid-70s shitheap Buicks and Chryslers with some angle that will get idiots who buy Green everything to shell out money on pay-per-views.  And the answer is not just to have an all-Prius demolition derby, although if you’ve ever seen a Kammback body car get rear-ended when it’s nosed into a wall, it’s probably as tasty an instant replay as any self-defecation Taser scene from COPS. (And yes, I have tried to pitch an all-pants-shitting/all-Taser COPS spinoff or special, but getting John Langley to return my phone calls is like trying to book Kanye to play at a Klan rally.) The Green-buying public is too into the notion that their priceless hybrid will run for four million miles and won’t ever age or die young; they are not cool with seeing Japanese plastic and metal on jackstands in some hillbilly’s garage, getting the glass punched out, the frame pre-notched, and the precious Toyota high-gloss Driftwood Pearl covered with spraypaint flames.

Don’t get me wrong; an all-Prius demolition derby would sell.  There are enough people in red state America that hate hybrid cars and would love to see them get smashed to pieces in an orgy of ZEV destruction.  There are millions of people that would foreclose on their houses and sell their children to sex predators just to keep filling up their 2-MPG pickup trucks at four bucks a gallon.  In the flyover states, the hybrid is seen as The Enemy, much like homosexuals, the Macintosh computer, and “rap music” (which hasn’t been called “rap” music for something like twenty years, just like nobody calls “alternative” music “alternative”, but the second you ask some mouth-breather in Arkansas about MTV, which hasn’t played any music for at least fifteen years, they will always, without fail, tell you “well, I’m not really into that rap or alternative music.”)  Woodrow Wilson didn’t drive a hybrid, and nowadays, it’s all about looking back and glomming onto whatever dumb ideals got us stuck in two world wars and a great depression, because that’s how things are Done Right.  And of course, the best way to spread the word on how we shouldn’t embrace progress is to use a complicated modern computer network that was invented by communists, Jews, socialists, pederasts, sodomites, ivy-league academics, and Californians.

That, in a way, is an example of what I need to do.  The internet is a modern, progressive breeding ground of ideas and hope and communication and change, and yet every damn time I read an article about a wildfire or a tsunami, there’s at least a dozen redneck Patriots blaming the whole thing on Obama and socialism.  All computer networks that don’t involve two machines you personally own connected to each other with a loopback cable are intrinsically socialist; if you pay $39 a month for a DSL or cable connection, do you think that you and every one of the other millions of subscribers are using exactly $39 of bandwidth?  Either you are downloading torrents of every episode of The Dukes of Hazzard at a gig a clip and relying on the fact that your neighbor is an idiot who only downloads a quarter-meg of emails from his brother-in-law every month and leaves most of his bandwith unused, or you’re not using the entire potential of your connection and you’re essentially doing the same damn thing as someone who pays thousands of dollars into Medicare and never gets sick.  I would argue that the internet is the most successful form of socialism ever implemented.  What magic mojo gets the most radical fundamentalist conservatives to embrace an entirely socialist technology created by companies that pay their workers to give their gay atheist pets sex change operations?  That’s the nut I need to crack to be able to sell the destruction of hybrid cars to a population that largely fears cars and feels that any form of motor sports is a misogynistic affront on humanity in the same vein as hunting puppy mill-bred dogs with a sniper rifle and raping their corpses.

Fuck this is hard.  If someone would have bought my Who Wants to Be a Prophet show back in 2007, I’d have a foot in the door and a half-dozen spin-off shows where I’d show up to one meeting, change one adverb in the title, and get an Executive Producer credit fat enough to keep my beak wet in this sports steroid abuse memorabilia hobby.  (Do you know how much a game-used Barry Bonds HGH suppository goes for on eBay?)  Maybe the demolition derby will use all Priuses, but all the drivers will be hot lipstick lesbian types with lots of tattoos and rockabilly clothes.  I’ll get some BMX bike or street skate has-been to host, and maybe a British-accented supermodel wannabe to cohost.  Gotta go write this up - wish me luck.

2010 has come to a close, and I am getting a slow trickle of end-of-year letters and holiday cards in the old fashioned paper format, both things I always wish I would do, except I think about them roughly two days before xmas and all of my postal addresses are years out of date and in sorry shape.  Maybe I should put a reminder in iCal around mid-July that says something about thinking about this.  Another option is not giving a shit, which is more appealing.

But here I am, and here’s a year in summary for those who were not paying attention:

• January brought about another trip to Vegas, my tenth trip there for my birthday.  I brought along my brand new DSLR, which I still know next to nothing about.  Highlights of the trip include paying for a dinner that cost roughly as much as my first four cars combined (although admittedly I used to drive some pretty shitty cars) and seeing Marc get so drunk that he sang “Turbo Lover” with great enthusiasm.  Photos of the trip, whittled down to a mere 100 photos (I took 49,324) is on flickr.
• In February, I quit my job at the Korean status report company that happens to also make mobile phones.  During my tenure, I did all of the things a high-priced technical writer is most adept at doing, such as working at trade shows answering questions about said company’s televisions and washing machines, maintaining a bug database that was hardly used because the company preferred to use ten-meg excel spreadsheets mailed to the entire division to keep track of bugs, and daily maintenance of a farm of cell phones that nobody used that required battery-out reboots.  You can read more about my departure at Three stars in the sunset.
• I published the 13th and probably final issue of Air in the Paragraph Line, which included two of my short stories, and lots of other great stuff by John Sheppard, Timothy Gager, Hassan Riaz, and a dozen or so others.  Check it out in paperback on Amazon - only $9.95 for 240 pages of excellent reading.  Or if you’re a Kindle person, it’s only $1.99 for the e-book version, which is a steal.
• I got a tech writing job at a company nobody has heard of, which sells a pricing software solution that I could explain in maybe four hours with a whiteboard and a lot of markers, provided you have at least a minor in economics.  The good news is that I got on a team with three other writers and two more open positions (I have been working solo forever), met some good folks, and got to work in Java again.  The bad news is that when you have a product that only a couple of dozen companies use, you tend to do stuff like make the interface only work in IE6 and have a configuration situation that’s roughly as intuitive as being given nothing but air, earth, fire, and water and having to build a B-2 stealth bomber.  But the pay was good and the Cokes were free, so I planned to hang out there a bit and slog away at 600-page config guides.
• After roughly six months at the new job, I got a call from my old boss at my job in New York where I worked from 2001-2007.  They offered to let me work at home doing what I did back then, and I accepted, bringing the job total for 2010 up to three.  The new job has been a great situation, albeit a bit weird to be back editing things I wrote years ago.  It’s great to be back with the band after so many years apart, but of course the best part is I no longer spend two to three hours a day in my Toyota stuck on traffic on the I-880.
• We bought another house, the unit four doors down from our previous one, to have more space and to give me a home office.  It’s roughly twice as big as the old place, and after a few months of insanely high stress, it’s a pretty decent situation.
• My seasonal allergy situation got progressively worse, and I went on a whole armada of pills, sprays, and inhalers to combat it.  I briefly tried acupuncture, which I found to be a crock of shit.  I then got allergy tested and started allergy injections, so we’ll see how that goes in a few months when I get up to maintenance levels.
• We went to Denver in August to see the Rockies.  I spent more money than I have ever spent for a pair of seats right behind home plate, and of course they lost that game.  But we had a good time, and I shot roughly 847,231 photos.  I also found out Prince Fielder does not like being called Cecil, especially when he is at bat.  There’s some non-baseball pics of Denver here, along with the Coors Field tour, and the first and second game against the Brewers.
• I saw a total of six baseball games this summer: Rockies @ Giants twice, Brewers @ Rockies twice; Cardinals @ Giants, and Rangers @ A’s.  Photos of a lot of those are here.
• I got a new MacBook Pro, the highest-spec’ed i7 15” model, the day the new rev came out.  It is a sweet piece of machinery and I love everything about it, except the fact that it has not made me write more or better.
• I also got an iPad in October.  The world is divided into two types of people: those who have no idea who the hell would ever want an iPad, and those who realize that they will forever change the way you use a computer.
• I went back to New York for the first time since leaving in 2007.  They’ve cleaned the subways since I left.  Once.  See also this and this for the full report.
• I guess I read a lot over the year, but a good chunk of that was re-reading.  Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City was probably one of the more enjoyable books I read in 2010; Jerry Stahl’s Pain Killers was also a good read.  I also, thanks to the Kindle, got through a big chunk of Philip K. Dick’s older works, with Ubik being a great work and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch completely blowing my mind.
• I’ve realized I had all but given up on being timely or in style with music, and I probably listened to mostly crap I’ve had for twenty years.  I think the new 2010 album I enjoyed the most in 2010 was A Star-Crossed Wasteland by In This Moment, although I am the only person in the world who liked their previous album better, but you can’t argue anything with a metal fan, which is why I have given up on ever reviewing albums.  The new Devo was okay, and BT released eleventy billion remixed tracks, which were decent but nowhere near This Binary Universe, which still probably remains, to me, as one of the best albums ever recorded.
• I have big plans for 2011, and none of them involve writing more dumb bulleted lists, so I hope this gets it all out of my system.