This week, Google released an iPhone web app for Google Latitude, their location-aware social networking tool. The weird part was this program was just a web app running in the iPhone's Safari browser and not even an app like Google has made for almost every other phone. Here's a snippet from the TUAW post about it:

As Google's Mat Balez notes in his blog post announcing the Latitude release, Google actually developed a native app for Latitude... only to have Apple, uh, suggest that the big G redo the concept as a web app to avoid user confusion with the Maps app. Really? Must have been an interesting phone call.

No kidding. Google spent all their sweet time, no doubt, making a really nice and powerful iPhone app to allow you to manage contacts and see where your friends are on a map. Then, while submitting it to the iTunes App Store, they're told that Apple will not accept this. Great, that's a couple months of programmer time down the drain for Google.

Hold on a second here, though. When Apple announced the App Store, they announced their venture capital friends were putting together a fund for new small businesses to make apps for the phone. One of the first companies that got in on that cash was Pelago Inc., which started a service call Whrrl. I've since then deleted that app and used one that a number of my friends are on called Loopt. All of these apps are already doing the same thing that the Google Latitude app wanted to do, but apparently because Google is a much bigger partner and competitor of Apple's they do not get the option to do an app like this. It doesn't make any sense, and it costs Google thousands of dollars down the drain just because Apple can axe anything they don't like for their phone.

It's even a bigger problem for Apple and third-party hardware makers. Apple does give an API to interface with hardware devices that a company develops and plugs into the iPhone. Companies have already made nice car mounts that will charge your phone and add a couple other features. Medical service providers have made adapters to hook up various types of medical equipment, and Apple has been fine with this. But add some cool thing that will let you do things with still or video cameras? A cool way to import video to your iPhone? The company will likely spend millions developing that hardware component and thousands creating a cool iPhone app to interface with the hardware. But, in the end, if Apple wants to say "no" to the app submission the company has a cool hardware gadget with no way to use it.

On one hand, Apple does all this controlling of applications in the iPhone App Store in the name of protecting the customer, and in some cases they are protecting us from crappy products. But, with situations like this (and some other things that they should have protected us from but got out) it's proving that not only are they doing a terrible job of protecting us, but Apple is too often blocking the cool stuff. Often Apple is even blocking the cool stuff because they want to release their own version a couple months later.

I think that Apple should keep the platform more open. We would get more crap, but the iPhone App Store ecosystem would be even more healthy and have even cooler solutions for iPhone users. Besides, without Apple protecting us from the crap, we would still mark it as crap and not use it. I'm not saying that Apple cannot host the app store, but let it run free and see it become even more useful and powerful.

First of all, yesterday I went out and saw Pixar's latest film, Up, and it was a blast. As usual, the cartoony but more-and-more realistic-looking animation was superb. The plotline was very touching at points but still contained enough eye candy and silly jokes ot keep everyone on the edge of their seat and laughing. In short, it was another great Pixar film, although I'm not yet sure where it will go in my personal favorites; that can only be determined over time, I think.

This afternoon, though, I took the chance to rewatch the film in "Disney Digital 3D", which is just Disney's fancy branding to the RealD digital technology. Unlike old 3D glasses that used separate polarization or colors to each eye, RealD uses a more advanced polarization on alternating frames of the digital projection. This results in a much crisper picture than the older 3-D technologies, but it still suffers from a slightly dark look due to the polarization, although that might be due to the fact that I was sitting almost at the front of the theater.

My experience with seeing it in 3-D wasn't amazing, but I did find it interesting. Only at a couple points in the film did the characters or sets seem to jump out of the screen for me, but when they did, the effect was pretty cool. Most of the time, the 3-D effect was subtle or barely noticeable, or at least subtle enough that I couldn't decide if it looked much better than the regular 2-D projection. On the other hand, when the film was showing photos or artwork on a wall, it definitely felt more flat to me, so maybe it's just my imagination building last night's show into 3-D. I think, to Pixar's credit, they never stooped to the level of making shots just so they wow the audience in 3-D, but they only used it to full effect when it filled the story. (I've seen numerous previews for other movies where it just seems that all the characters are sticking their face right up to the camera, which might be overwhelming but at least seems gimmicky to me.)

My main disclaimer on this front is that I do have an eye condition that does make it hard for me to see things far away (I'm almost legally blind, but not quite), and it may be that part of this condition makes it less exciting to me. People often ask me what I can see compared to them, and I tell them that I've never seen like them so I cannot really compare.

I guess my point is that the 3-D technology in films these days is much better than it was even a couple years ago. If it sounds intriguing to you, check out the new world of 3-D films and see for yourself if you like the experience. And speaking of which, besides a bunch of new films coming out in 3-D over the next year, it seems that both Toy Story and Toy Story 2 are going to be released in Disney Digital 3D over the next year before Toy Story 3 is released in June 2010.

In a rather odd dichotomy, this shirt is one of my most geeky but also one of my most sporty-looking:

As you can see, it almost looks like a sports shirt. All the geeks wear it because it's the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, of course! Yes, that's right, it's the ultimate answer to everything in Douglas Adams's classic Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.

Of course, this shirt was from ThinkGeek.com, the place to get all things geek. It's been featured on "The IT Crowd" and Transformers as well. I think I actually got this shirt as a present from work. One time, we all did a good job on a project or something and the boss bought us all whatever shirt we wanted from ThinkGeek.

One of the reasons I was excited about this shirt today was because tonight we're going to watch The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the 2005 film that was co-written by Adams and was released by Touchstone Pictures. I enjoy the film a lot and am looking forward to sharing it with friends.

This is a shirt that I got at a show just two and a half blocks from my house. Of course, it wasn't just because the show was that close that I went, it was also because I've been a big fan of Derek Webb for much longer than that. It's dark red and has a rather weird design on the front top left of the shirt, like this:

The artwork has Derek Webb's name and a bunch of black sleeves pointing to a target next to his name.  Also, in black lettering, it also says "The Ringing Bell" under his name, which is the name of his latest album.  The shirt is based on the album artwork for The Ringing Bell which was designed by Portland Studios and pictured below:

Wait, no, that's the album cover, but the shirt is based on the cover of the graphic novel that Portland Studios made based on the lyrics of the album.  It's a fun interpretation of the content of the album, and here's that cover:

Derek Webb has spent many years as part of the band Caedmon's Call, although he did not often write many of the popular songs that were on Christian radio. In the early 2000s Derek left Caedmon's Call to start his own solo career, and he came out with guns blazing. She Must And Shall Go Free was a plea to the church to stop in-fighting and begin to be the church that Jesus called it to be. I See Things Upside Down, his second album, is probably my favorite because it is filled with big production values and lots of electric guitar licks, although many die-hard Caedmon's fans didn't like this style. He got back to the acoustic guitar-based songs and put in a more political bent in on Mockingbird. The Ringing Bell is one of my favorites as well, as more electric romps are included and it's a little more whymsical at parts.

So, back to this concert. In fall 2007, Derek Webb and his wife, artist Sandra McCracken, did a short tour of the U.S. with a couple artists to fill out a band. I don't know who booked the Varsity Theater down the street, but I knew I wanted to catch Derek with a band, because I love his sound compared to his acoustic sound. I know he doesn't tour with a band often, so I had to catch it. Thankfully, it was on a Sunday evening with not much going on for me, so I went. It was a great time, Derek played lots of my rock 'n' roll favorites, and I got this T-shirt and the Sandra McCracken albums I didn't already have. I loved how Sandra, after her opening set, had to go back to the bus to make sure their 4-month-old baby was sleeping or taken care of and then came back to play keyboards later in Derek's set. It was great to see an artist that I enjoyed appearing at the local concert hall, and a lot of people came out to see the show. Ohh, and after that I went to the Chatterbox Pub in St. Paul with some friends for the first time, although they didn't go to the concert.

If you'd like to check out Derek's music, you can use this NoiseTrade widget. And by clicking through to the NoiseTrade site, you can even download the album for free, given that you tell your friends about it.