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So, nearly two weeks without an update, and this one is going to be about movies instead of anything really techie. Trust me, you don’t want to see my Core Audio code for 360iDev just yet; it’s going to take some time and luck in the next two weeks to get my demos lined up.

In the meantime, I took my daughter, Quinn, to How To Train Your Dragon today, and I’ve got animation on the brain again. That and the release (if not in my town) of Waking Sleeping Beauty, a documentary that tells the increasingly familiar tale of how Disney turned around its feature animation department from near-extiction to world-wide acclaim and massive financial success, largely on the merits of four classic films: The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King. Entertainment Weekly had a brief retrospective on how TLM initiated the turnaround, and Wikipedia has filed it under Disney Renaissance.

It’s a great narrative, stunning when you think of how the troubled studio of the mid 80′s lost Tim Burton and actually fired John Lassiter. But there are some pretty big holes that are missing in the conventional wisdom version of the story.

Not the least of which is the elephant in the room: just 10 years after The Lion King, Disney gave up on traditional animation, retraining all their artists in CG techniques so they could make debacles like Chicken Little. So what the hell happened?

Animation fan-boy that I am, I mentally split the post-Lion King movies into two groups: 1995-99 are the “formula films” (edit: previously said “unnecessary films”), and 2000-2004 are the “troubled films”. Let’s start with the first group. With the success of the four modern classics, Disney apparently had a formula, and forced all of its subsequent films to fit that mold: family-friendly musicals, with merchandisable funny sidekicks. In retrospect, some of those traits seem tacked on. Nobody remembers the songs from Hercules or Mulan, and the funny gargoyle sidekicks in The Hunchback of Notre Dame were a terrible distraction from what was otherwise a strong musical drama (Les Miz Lite, if you will). And the less said about Tarzan, the better. Interestingly, the collective opinion of Pocohontas seems to have gone up in the last few months, thanks to widespread perception that Avatar is effectively an expensive retelling of the same story (a point best made in this YouTube video)

They must have known they were in a rut, because they tried to break out. The effort is more admirable than most of the post-99 films. Aside from the icy artistic indulgence of Fantasia 2000, you have three films that feel like they were written by committee: Brother Bear, The Emperor’s New Groove, and Home on the Range, the latter two of which suffered production shutdowns, title changes, and massive retooling (to be fair, so did The Lion King, and that worked out OK).

They also made two sci-fi action films, Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Treasure Planet. U.S. audiences have never gone for animated action or drama in a big way – the Japanese will go wild for Gundam, but Americans won’t – and these didn’t change any minds. Atlantis is a bit of a obsession for me, in that I think it may have as good an Act I as I’ve ever seen, yet falls apart faster and more completely than any movie I can recall (if you’ve seen it, how much of the plot’s energy drains away once the big submarine is destroyed?). Anime fanboys saw superficial similarities to Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, but if anything, Disney didn’t steal enough. In Nadia, the bookish hero meets mystery girl in the first episode, and they are the main characters. Atlantis keeps Kida away from Milo for half the movie, trying to distribute our interest among a crew of stock characters who just don’t carry the story (listening to the DVD commentary, the producers keep talking about “the adventurers this” and “the adventurers that”… when they should be talking about one or two genuine protagonists).

Atlantis’ failure probably kept people away from Treasure Planet, which is a shame. Despite the too-easy “in spaaaaace!” concept (smirked at by the EW story cited earlier), it’s vastly more story- and character-driven, and deserves a second look. Just skip the Martin Short annoy-o-bot if you can.

The only film that really succeeded in this era is Lilo and Stitch, a deliberate turn against Disney’s frequent technological indulgences (Tarzan’s “Deep Canvas”, Treasure Planet’s mixture of 2D and 3D animation), in favor of a cheaper, more personal film. In various accounts, notably the book Lilo & Stitch: Collected Stories From the Film’s Creators, the filmmakers cite Dumbo as a spiritual touchstone, which itself was intended as a simple, cheap, and direct film after the indulgence of Fantasia. It’s the most character-driven Disney film of the decade, and easily the most satisfying.

But it wasn’t enough. Suits decided the films were failing not because of bad stories but because audience tastes had switched to CG: just look at Pixar’s hot streak (which continues today), or the upstarts from Dreamworks. And maybe the suits were right: audiences largely passed on last year’s fine The Princess and the Frog. At any rate, in mid-decade, Disney retooled for computer animation, and turned out more troubled films, like Chicken Little and the title-changed Meet the Robinsons. If Bolt worked, it did so by cribbing shamelessly from Toy Story.

But that’s the other elephant in the room. As Disney feature animation began its decline in 1995, Pixar began its seemingly unprecedented run of 10 straight hits with the release of Toy Story. Their industry-defining success has created a new set of formulas to work from: Dreamworks’ How to Train Your Dragon shares a lot of beats with A Bug’s Life (which I seem to like a lot more than most people), and Sony Picture’s Animation’s Surf’s Up has a plot almost identical to Cars, released just six months earlier, except that Surf’s Up manages to tell the same story in 85 minutes instead of 115.

It’s funny, though: much as I admire and enjoy every Pixar movie, I can’t say there’s any one of them that I really love, the way I love Beauty and the Beast (or Miyazaki’s The Castle of Cagliostro or My Neighbor Totoro, for that matter). I don’t fully agree with the “best picture” talk that surrounded WALL-E or Up… y’all do realize the whole film has to qualify and not just the first reel, right? That means you’re also nominating the fat pod people on the Lido Deck and the talking dogs flying biplanes too.

Yet every time I think that Pixar’s number is up, that their next film will be the Poconhantas-style disappointment that starts the decline, they dodge the bullet. Toy Story 3 seems somewhat unnecessary (and surely Cars 2 is), but there was plenty of reason to doubt a movie about a rat and another about a senior citizen, and they’ve been great. Pixar’s already made a non-suck sequel, maybe they can pitch two more.

Speaking of sequels, that’s the other thing these Disney Renaissance stories often forget: there was a movie released between The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. In 1990, they released The Rescuers Down Under. I recall reading one account saying the genesis of the film was a meeting where Michael Eisner asked for a tally of recent animated features, with an eye to making a sequel to whichever one had made the most money. Kind of takes the shine off the story, doesn’t it?

I’m speaking at two conferences in early 2010, as indicated by the badges in the right side column.

First is CodeMash in Sandusky, OH, January 13-15. I’m doing one four-hour “precompiler” tutorial on iPhone programming, and two sessions.

No, of course they’re not done yet. But here’s a bit of what I’m planning:

• Introduction to iPhone SDK – I’ve decided that rather than put up some slides to walk through the basics, I’m going to teach the entire tutorial in Xcode and Interface Builder. This means I need to not only write my examples in advance (duh), but to pull together a bit more of a script so I know where to stop and explain things: “Objective-C uses square braces for method calls, which are really better thought of as message dispatches”, “IBAction is synonymous with void, but tells Interface Builder it’s OK to accept a connection to this method”, etc. I’m also thinking about how to cover the most truly useful material in four hours. I think I’d like to do the trivial browser in the first hour to do basic project building, IB, coding, etc., a tabbed app in the second hour to play with multiple view controllers, and a navigation app in hours 3 and 4, since those are so bread-and-butter. The nav app might use the webservice of the conference’s session list… if I think we can really pull off tables, networking, and XML parsing in two hours. Gonna have to rehearse to convince myself it can be done in a group setting in that kind of time.
• How Do You Do That on iPhone? – This is just going to be a grab-bag of non-obvious techniques that you can’t get from the docs and instead have to learn from forums, programming guides, word-of-mouth, etc. Things like custom table cells and building the “full” and “lite” versions of your app with one Xcode project (hint: understand how “targets” work).
• Oh Crap! I Forgot (or Never Learned) C! – In a way, this is the last gasp of a book that I wrote 100 pages of before it just ended up not happening. My thesis was that for all the developers who never learned C, or did but forgot, it’s a real bitch to be thrown into the world of pointers and malloc and life without objects, especially when the premier guide to the language was last updated during the Reagan administration, and contains no-longer-helpful analogies to Fortran and Pascal. The idea of the book was to be a C primer that you’d work through with the iPhone SDK, not in order to learn the iPhone APIs right away (we already wrote that book), but so that there would be a specific workbench, freely and easily available, for learning the C language (this is where K&R basically says “use cc on the command-line and if that doesn’t work, go ask a sysadmin.”). The session is going to survey the language from the point of view of scripters and other modern-day programmers, with particular attention to memory-management concerns, and idioms that are unique to C (things like setting up “context objects” for callbacks, because you don’t have closures).

Then, in April, I’ll be at 360iDev in San Jose (register with my special link), speaking on the topic of Core Audio. The talk, Core Audio: Don’t Be Afraid To Play It LOUD is one where I’m going to try to play up the fun factor a little more, and embrace the fact that Core Audio is a goddamned hard API to master. If you can do anything in Core Audio, you should feel awesome, and I’ve found that small successes in this API make you want to learn more. Oh, and bonus points if you catch the reference in the session title.

BTW, more news on the Core Audio front in an upcoming post…

I was listening to a podcast talk from Mises University 2009 the other night called “Intellectual Property and Libertarianism”, in which speaker Stephan Kinsella made the usual Slashdotty-type case against IP from a libertarian perspective. This was novel for me, perhaps because libertarians tend to be very defensive of property rights, such as Ayn Rand’s assertion of IP as a right to the products of a person’s own mind.

Kinsella rejects Rand explicitly, saying her case offers little more than deification of the creator. His counter-argument is interesting: IP is inconsistent with property rights because it violates the rights of others to use their property. To wit, if I own a typewriter and a stack of paper, or a CD burner and some blank discs, then those should be mine to do with as I see fit. But because of copyright, I can’t use the typewriter to transcribe a book, or to use the burner to copy a CD, even if I’ve bought original copies of the hypothetical book and CD. IP asserts a partial ownership — enough to say “you can’t do that” — over this other property I own. That, according to Kinsella’s argument, is inconsistent and therefore invalid.

Interesting, and tricky, and I don’t quite know what to make of it.

It’s important because, of course, my income is highly dependent on the idea of IP. If I couldn’t charge for copies of iPhone SDK Development, I probably wouldn’t have spent hundreds (possibly thousands?) of hours over the last year and a half co-writing it. If I couldn’t charge for apps on the App Store, would I write them?

The counter-argument comes from the open-source crowd, who say to give away your content (which, by the earlier argument, you couldn’t own anyways), and make your money some other way. This is really appealing when you’re working in some field where the value isn’t in the content, per se. It’s easy to open-source your stuff when you make your real money using it for consulting projects, or running a service. It’s a lot harder to see a model that supports development of, say, productivity applications, where the value in the software is in what it lets the user do with their own data. Give that away and where’s the ancillary revenue stream that would fund future development? Tip jar? Selling t-shirts? Maybe this is why Linux has so few productivity apps of any note (a few mediocre-to-bad knockoffs of Office and Quicken and such, but you’ll likely never see something like Final Cut Pro on Linux).

Bringing it back to writing, there are economic models that can keep a tech writer going. One is that the owners of a technology can commission writing about a topic to spur interest: I’ve made more writing three articles on Core Audio for [redacted] than I made on my entire QuickTime for Java book. I think this is going to be an even bigger deal going forward, as books and feature articles become one more thing that platform owners will have to pay for themselves in order to get mindshare (much the same way that platform owners already provide technical documentation and tools… note that there’s much less of a market for commercial IDEs now that the Windows, Mac, iPhone, and Java platforms all have a free-as-in-beer IDE provided by the platform owners).

Another possibility is that the real value of writing blogs, articles, and books gets your name out there for consulting work, although in my experience, it’s hard to shake the impression that you’re “just” a writer. I just finished a month-long consulting/programming engagement and am working on a new app for the App Store, yet I’m still clearly far better known for my writing than anything else.

As for the IP of books and being able to charge for them, the existence of .torrents of pretty much any available eBook may put that issue to rest quickly enough. On the one hand, I think it’s absurd that developers won’t pay what amounts to about 20 minutes of the developer salary they’ll be able to charge once they’ve mastered its techniques. But maybe some/most readers would kick in some kind of payment if it were completely on a tip jar system? Enough to keep a writer able to pay his or her bills? Probably only on the most popular topics.

And that’s why you shouldn’t expect me to ever propose, no less actually write, the big Mac/iPhone media APIs (QTKit, Core Audio, etc.) book that I’ve kicked around for a few years. Something that nichey, combined with the rapidly falling price that readers are willing to pay for content, makes it effectively unviable.

An odd little coincidence. Six years ago tomorrow, I wrote the first version of Wikipedia’s article on the musical Chess. A few bits of that draft are still in the current article, including a very convenient phrase I used to describe the plot:

The story involves a romantic triangle between two players in a world chess championship, and a woman who manages one and falls in love with the other.

It’s that last bit that somehow quickly gets across the whole “this is not going to end well” concept of the show. Not a big deal, just atypically efficient writing for me.

So, amusing to notice it appearing nearly verbatim in PBS’ page for the Great Performances broadcast of Chess in Concert a few weeks ago:

… the East/West Chess Championship and the romantic triangle that develops between the Russian and American competitors and the beautiful woman who manages one and falls in love with the other.

Looks like someone used Wikipedia to write their blurb. Which is entirely sensible, just a total giveaway when you take the best bits verbatim.

For what it’s worth, I almost never contribute to Wikipedia anymore: as a reader, almost any interesting topics or excellent writing that I find gets deleted eventually, and that’s a huge disincentive. To steal someone else’s phrase, Wikipedia has forgotten more great writing than I’ll ever know.

Well, another go ’round with this: HTML5 won’t mandate Ogg as universally-supported codecs, and the freetards are on a tear. I was going to follow up on a JavaPosse thread about this, but I hurled enough abuse onto their list last week.

It’s abundantly clear in this blog that I don’t think Ogg is the solution that its supporters want it to be: I have a whole tag for all the posts where I dismiss Vorbis, Theora, and friends. Among these reasons:

• I don’t think it’s technically competitive.

• It certainly isn’t competitive in terms of expertise and mindshare, which is vitally important in media codecs: there’s a much deeper pool of shared knowledge about the MPEG codecs, which leads to chip-level support, competition among encoders, compressionists who understand the formats and how to get the most out of them, etc.

• Its IP status remains unclear. With even MPEG-4, following a lengthy and formal patent pooling process, attacked by AT&T’s claim of a submarine patent, I have no reason to think that Ogg wouldn’t face similar claims, legitimate or not, if there was any money behind it, which there isn’t.

• If I go to my former colleagues at CNN or in Hollywood and say “you guys should use Ogg because…”, there are no words in the English language that plausibly complete the sentence and appeal to the rational self-interest of the other party.

On this last point, I’ve got an ugly analogy: just as proponents of “Intelligent Design” are people who don’t really care about biology beyond the point at which it intrudes on their religious belief, so too do I think Ogg advocates generally don’t know much about media, but have become interested because the success of patent-encumbered formats and codecs is an affront to their open-source religion.

Ogg’s value is in its compatibility with the open source religion. It has little to offer beyond that, so it’s no surprise that it has zero traction outside of the Linux zealot community. Even ESR realized that continually shouting “everything should be in Ogg” was a losing strategy, and he said that three years ago.

I think the open source community would like to use HTML5 to force Ogg on the web community, but it’s not going to work. As others have pointed out, there’s little reason to think that IE will ever support HTML5. Even if they do, the <video> tag is not going to replace Flash or Silverlight plug-ins for video. Despite my initial enthusiasm for the <video> tag commoditizing video, I see nothing in the spec that would support DRM, and it’s hard to imagine Big Content putting their stuff on web pages without DRM anytime soon. And while you can put multiple media files in a <video> tag easily enough, having to encode/transcode to multiple formats is one reason that Big Content moved away from the Real/WMP/QuickTime switch to the relative simplicity of works-for-everyone Flash.

I’m tired of being lectured by computer people about media; it’s as ludicrous as being lectured about computers by my old boss at Headlines. Just because you use YouTube, doesn’t make you an expert, any more than my knowing how to use a username and password means I understand security (seriously, I don’t, and doubt I ever will). Kirill Grouchnikov pretty much nailed what computer people think good video is with this tweet. I’ll add this: there are probably a thousand people at Sun who understand 3D transformations in OpenGL, and maybe five who know what an Edit Decision List is. So they go with what they know.

A couple years back, I gave a JavaOne BoF in which I made a renewed call for a Java Media library which would support sample-level access and some level of editing, arguing that enabling users to take control of their own media was a manifest requirement of future media frameworks. By a show of hands, most of the developers in the audience thought it would be “enough” to just support playback of some modern codecs. JavaFX now provides exactly that. Happy now?

People who actually work in media don’t mind paying for stuff, and don’t mind not owning/sharing the IP. Video production professionals are so accustomed to standardizing on commercial products, many of them become generic nouns in industry jargon: “chyron” for character generators, “grass valley” for switchers, “teleprompters”, “betacam” tape, etc. Non-free is not a problem here. And if your argument for open-source is “you’re free to fix it if it doesn’t do what you want it to,” the person who has 48 shows a day to produce is going to rightly ask “why would I use something that doesn’t work right on day one?”

The open source community doesn’t get media. Moreover, it doesn’t get that it doesn’t get media. The Ogg codecs placate the true believers, and that’s the extent of their value.

This may be the worst print ad I’ve seen in years:

WTF? All fear Denny Crane, flaming head of the apocalypse?

I showed it to my wife who assumed, since it was in Play, that it was an ad for a video game. Actually, it’s for a comic book, but if you can’t even tell what an ad is for with close examination, that’s a pretty obvious fail.