I’d like to discuss some aspects of the new UI style here, in comparison to iOS 6.

The only surprise for me was that others were surprised. This is an aesthetic change that has been on its way for quite some time; I even wrote about it more than a year ago, where I described it as Augmented Paper.

Whilst much of the rest of the industry has moved to a less embellished UI style (admittedly partly just for differentiation’s sake), iOS remained firmly rooted in the practice of clearly delineating sections of each screen, using pseudo-3D visual effects like gloss and shadows, and mimicking physical affordances.

The thing is, we’ve grown up. We don’t require hand-holding to tell us what to click or tap. Interactivity is a matter of invitation, and physical cues are only one specific type. iOS 7 is an iOS for a more mature consumer, who understands that digital surfaces are interactive, and who doesn’t want anything getting in the way of their content.

The basic functionality hasn’t changed. You still use iOS in the same way, and almost everything is where you expect it to be. The same gestures work. There are a few differences here and there – it’s a major new version of the OS, after all – but the changes are mostly aesthetic. You won’t be confused by iOS 7 if you’re accustomed to a previous version.

You will, however, probably find that it feels more fluid, responsive and modern.

Colours vs borders

iOS 7 may work the same way, but it looks very different. The changes are summarised effectively by comparing the Contacts app in iOS 6 and 7, when viewing a contact’s information.

iOS 7 forgoes borders, instead relying on colour to indicate interactivity, and dividers to organise information. Controls are implicit, based on labels or icons, positioning, and having visual ‘energy’ via a theme colour (which differs from app to app: it’s blue in Contacts and most other apps, red in Music, and yellow in Notes). Icons are elemental and presented as outlines, and there seems to be a trend towards omitting headings from screens within a hierarchy.

Legibility and calmness is the order of the day, seemingly heavily inspired by Windows Phone, which is like a foreground-to-background colour-swap of iOS 7. Some people are complaining about the slender default typeface (you can thicken it if you choose, and even boost the point-size globally for apps that support the feature), but Retina Displays ensure that everything is sharp and readable.

Clarity, of course, can’t be added – it must be the result of removal. For iOS 7, the vestigial appendage was faux depth.

Flatness

iOS 7 isn’t flat. There are subtle shadows, lighting effects, gradients, and even new (rather gratuitous and distracting, in my opinion – and thankfully optional) parallax effects. It’s more flat, certainly, but not two-dimensional.

Apple doesn’t design things by having a goal like “let’s make it flat”. That’s a bizarre concept, because flatness in itself doesn’t have a corresponding rationale regarding user experience. Flatness may be a visual treatment that provides a certain desirable quality, but it’s not an end in itself.

The relevant goal in this case was an emphasis on content rather than medium, which I wrote about in issue 2 of The Loop Magazine. In iOS 7, apps are aesthetically and conceptually just content, with functional and informational adornments where necessary. Tables aren’t so obviously controls, but rather lists of things. The focus is on function rather than form.

Consider how Messages looks now, compared to its iOS 6 counterpart.

We can quibble about colour choices, but when viewed against the new style, the sheer weight and gimmickry of the bubbles and bevels and shine becomes very apparent. The navigation bar at the top hangs there like a lintel, frowning away. It’s a pretty Photoshop job, but to my eye it now looks chunky and theme-y, like a skin for jailbroken devices.

The shift in style is even more apparent when you receive a phone call.

Bevels, grip-handles, embossing, shadows, gloss, inner-glows and acres of hard button-borders. The chrome on the iOS 6 screen eats away 60% of the display, and very much has the appearance of an alert. The newer version not only lets you see more of the caller’s photo, but is a quieter presentation. It’s not a fetishistic encrusting of widgets, but rather just content – with a few options hanging around if you wish to use them.

There’s another aspect of the change that’s important too: someone finally opened the blinds.

Light

iOS 7 is much, much lighter – in the colour sense, and consequently also in visual weight. Breathable whitespace is everywhere, and is used to unify and homogenise previously disparate interface styles.

The overall impression is of brightness and openness. The extent of the change (and its consistency of application) only becomes obvious when considered in aggregate. Here’s a grid collage of iOS 6 stock apps:

And here’s a corresponding grid of iOS 7 stock apps, showing the same screens where possible. These are all publicly-released iOS 7 screenshots from Apple, of course.

You should have some sense of a brightening in the second set, compared to the first. It’s more apparent if we put the grids side by side.

The change becomes especially striking if we reduce the complexity of colour by pixellating:

The smear of murky tones across the lower-right half of the iOS 6 grid is replaced with whites and a few light blues on iOS 7. Similarly, iOS 6’s handful of different visual styles (and several eccentric outliers) have become essentially two main themes on iOS 7: the paper-like, bright style in about 75% of apps, and the dark utility style for the remainder.

Press coverage is disproportionally focusing on the Home screen (about which more in a moment), but the reality of day to day usage is that you’ll spend time in apps. Where there were previously gloomy cubbyholes and low ceilings, there are now floor-to-ceiling windows, skylights, and clean surfaces.

I think it’s an enormous improvement, and a typically opinionated move.

Home

The area of most contention seems to be the Home Screen, particularly its new icons. It’s a very visible part of the OS and device, but ‘Home’ is of course a misnomer: it’s more like a launcher, rather than a place you spend any significant time. You’ll visit it very frequently, but you won’t be staring at it.

The Home Screen, and stock icon design, is much brighter and simpler than before. Although it’s not obvious from screenshots, the spacing of icons is different now, and the icons themselves are each a few pixels larger.

The top margin below the status bar has been reassigned to make more room for icons, label text is larger, and the dock area is now simply a frosted panel. The sacrifice of boundary in exchange for legibility can also be seen in the icons themselves: their content is bigger in comparison to their total area than on iOS 6. The glyphs and designs are more recognisable for it.

I feel that there are some specific design issues (the corner radius, content weight in a few places, some inconsistent gradient directions, background contrast, and a couple of icons – like Notes and Reminders – that are overly abstract and empty), but those are both fixable and also subjective. I saw a mockup which addresses some of those issues (mockup on left, iOS 7 on right), albeit introducing a few of its own, but it’s hard to determine whether I like it because it’s more familiar or because it’s actually better in any functional sense.

The new icons are distinct and identifiable, and not fussy. I believe that we’ll see some changes before the final release, and I have a sense that it’s the part that has received the least sustained attention, but its character is in spirit with the evolution of the rest of iOS 7.

Content first

A month ago, I wrote about my impression of Jony Ive’s approach to design, and why the skeuomorphism backlash is misdirected. Reading the piece again now, it’s remarkably prescient.

iOS 7 is a decluttering of the most exciting, profitable, desirable mobile operating system available. It’s a shift away from artefact, and back to essence. It indicates a clarity of vision, and a continued willingness to pursue simplicity ruthlessly.

Gone are embellishments like gloss and bevelled edges, shadows and borders. Visually dead areas that provoke tension rather than inspiring relaxation. Weight that suffocates, rather than open air to breathe.

The new iOS is designed for a different environment, and a different maturity of mobile user: one who recognises simplicity for what Jony Ive believes it is. Not something as pedestrian as familiarity or consistency for its own sake, but rather focus and clarity.

In the field of user experience, there’s a huge and unhelpful overemphasis on similarity, familiarity, and the ability to formally reason about interfaces. People are more nuanced. We respond based not only on experience or reason, but also on emotion and intuition.

Too many interfaces run immediately to the well-worn toolbox of simulation and explicitness, imposing a cognitive straitjacket not only on the user, but also the designer. We too easily forget that the only thing that matters to people are their goals: their own tasks, and content. With limited attention, we want to devote our focus to what’s important, rather than distractions and artifice masquerading as design traditions.

Apple’s philosophy – and particular genius – has always been in sieving the demands of users, technologies and the cultural zeitgeist, and finding the right hundred things to remove for every one thing to keep. I care about what my devices can help me do, and how they can enhance my life. I don’t care about patting a designer on the head, or being distracted from what truly matters.

iOS 7 is an interface’s coming of age, acknowledging that its users – and our industry – are now all grown up.

I’ve always had an irrational fear of developing heart problems (I have no particular family history of it, and I hadn’t had any worrying symptoms before). It’s probably because I’m not great with needles or blood, and the heart is blood central. Nothing more complicated than that. Silly, and eminently manageable – until that day.

Despite the event being objectively surprising, then, my main thought (through the haze of fear) was “Well, this is it – at last”.

I shook. I’m not sure whether it was adrenalin, fear, or the fact that ambulances are cold at 3 AM on an Autumn morning. Probably a combination. I remember the next few hours more as images than narrative.

Night, sirens, hospital. Needles, blood, and the deeply unsettling beeping of a cardiograph. Nurses and doctors, tests, waiting, and (eventually) the light of a new day that might as well have been a new century.

A quiet and surreal taxi ride home, through an exaggeratedly normal Thursday morning in the city. People going about their business like a street scene in a musical; whistling, and studiously avoiding looking at the camera.

The ride took seconds and hours, and then it was abruptly over. Pay the fare, step out of the taxi, and… that’s it. Resume routine, until told otherwise. I had a sense that I must have misplaced an instruction booklet (perhaps from the government) detailing how to proceed in such situations.

The junction between mortality and mundanity is an exquisite source of perspective. I sat down on the pavement. I laughed, and then I cried, and then I realised that the boundary between the two is treacherous and illusory. Then I walked up some stairs, unlocked my front door – drab on other days; resplendent on this one – and went inside. I’d recommend the experience to anybody.

(Twenty-seven hours later, we picked up the keys for our new home. You couldn’t write the schedule of real life as fiction, because it just wouldn’t be believable.)

I spent most of that long post-emergency-department day on the couch. At length, I wandered through to my office, pulled my block of sticky notes across the desk towards me, and picked up my favourite pen – the one my wife bought for me. The familiar instrument suddenly seemed unbearably, agonisingly poignant, and a few more tears quietly fell. I would later realise that, in that moment, the pen had become a totem for my fear of being taken from her.

I wrote one word: Legacy.

As a tool of years of self-torture, that single word eclipses even my mostly-imagined terror of cardiac arrest. I curse it weekly. It’s my master.

I’ve come to see my impromptu trip to hospital as a message, or perhaps a reminder. An unsubtle and artless nudge. A memento mori, as if I needed one.

I’m haunted by thoughts of what I’ll leave behind, and I don’t mean in the biological sense of offspring: after all, anyone can do that. Nor do I mean the fond remembrances of family members, which have a limited radius and fade quickly once a generation passes.

What troubles me is a compulsion to contribute something enduring, that can speak of me when I’m not there. It’s difficult to do that in my line of work (making software). We create software that will live only for so long, and whilst it indicates our design priorities and our insight into what other people need or want, we tend to see software as an entity unto itself. Few people look at an app and see its creator. As a representation of the self, software is usually very opaque.

I’ve tried releasing source code, of course. I think you can tell a lot about how a developer views their work, community and career by how much code they’ve released (assuming no artificial constraint exists to prevent them doing so). I was very nervous before I released my first piece of open source Cocoa code, years ago.

I don’t remember what the code was, but I vividly remember the inner debate. The issue of competition didn’t enter my mind, but fear of ridicule certainly did. Was I good enough? Did this reflect well on me, or poorly?

But you can leave this behind, my mind whispered. And so I released the code, and plenty more since.

Code, at its best, can give you a little more of a sense of the author – there’s certainly art in it. It’s the art of a cold and analytical world, but there’s room for personality and creativity there. It might even make others think of the author just a shade more than a software product itself.

Code rots just as apps do, though. It gets out of date. Platforms and APIs move on. Entire languages fall out of favour and become historical curiosities. Infectious licenses aren’t so much a solution as they are an unhelpful denial of reality. There’s no immortality for me to find in code, either.

So I began public speaking. My fear of it had long since vanished, years before I spoke at my first conference in my current capacity as a Mac/iOS developer. I’d already spoken in front of rooms full of people in many different countries, before OS X was ever released.

Public speaking is better at temporarily quieting that nagging voice in my mind, because people naturally entwine the message with the speaker. It’s personal, and it’s an opportunity to reach people on a visceral level, albeit for a very brief time. At its best, a good talk can create some ripples of change in how the audience thinks about something.

Still, you’re only up there for perhaps an hour, or even less. A year from now, few will remember the specifics of what you said. After a further year, they probably won’t even remember that you spoke. Speaking certainly fits the bill for exposure, but its half-life is sobering. For me, it’s not enough.

And so I write, and have the audacity to self-publish online.

I haven’t worked out the details of how to make these pieces permanent, but the very structure of the internet reassures me that at least some of them will survive in some form. It’ll take hundreds of years for my words to become incompatible with their audience, and I can edit at my leisure. You can read them whenever you want; I will always be on stage, even when I’m only a memory.

Everything I’ve mentioned – apps, open-source code, public speaking, and writing – has an element of ego. I’ve probably even listed them in increasing order of egocentricity. Those who don’t like a particular piece will usually fasten upon the undercurrent of chutzpah which marks the whole endeavour, rather than the argument itself. I don’t deny that it’s a factor.

But it’s not about ego, even if ego is involved. That’s what you wouldn’t guess from my online persona, and I take pains to keep it that way. I’m actually trying to quell a low-grade panic that’s always in the background. A voice that won’t be quiet. I actively worry about it.

I don’t have a particular problem with the biological inevitability of personal oblivion. Someday, some hour, some moment I will cease to be. An instant of black, and then non-essence. No afterlife with ancestors, and no higher plane of consciousness. I don’t believe in those things. I believe in my internal universe just silently blinking out of existence, and me along with it. It’s natural, and I think I can accept it – intellectually.

But I’ll lie awake worrying about being forgotten. I’ve had conversations about it over the years, and I’ve learned that it’s not generally a motivator in people’s lives. I’m the unusual one. Maybe it was some trauma of the past. Maybe I should talk to somebody about it. He was such an introspective child.

I’m not searching for personal glory, but rather a marker that can endure more Winters than I will. Some connection – empathy, ideally – from a future consciousness back to the one that’s typing this sentence.

How morbid, some have said. You’re too young to be thinking that way. Dum vivimus, vivamus!¹

It isn’t that simple.

I couldn’t write a purely ‘professional’ blog that just chatters about what’s going on in my business, or reacts to the latest minutiae of our endless parade of electronic toys. Aside from it being done a thousand times over, everywhere on the web, that kind of writing just wouldn’t let me sleep. It’s not enough. Without character, the author becomes interchangeable, and thus forgettable.

That’s why I’m willing (and compelled) to put myself out here on display. An eponymous collection of words, with articles that sometimes touch on very personal things. I’ve spoken about technical topics, of course, but also about writing, and divorce, and depression. Religion and politics. Prejudice and discrimination. The truth of me. Things written by an actual person, while I’m still here.

Equally and consequently, the other authors whose work I most enjoy reading tend to talk about not only professional but also personal topics. I may not share your specific love of guitars or coffee machines or pencils or hiking boots. I may have no comparable personal experiences with which to truly understand the tragedies and triumphs of your life. But you’re more real to me because of them. Not just a masthead or an avatar, but a human being that has actual shape and colour in my memory.

I truly hope that the same is true for me. It’s the reason that I write. The type of feedback that means most to me, by far, is simply this: your words moved me, and I’ll remember them.

Yesterday was my birthday; I’m 34 now. Every year, no matter where we both are, my mother calls me at the exact minute of my birth (21:22). In the background, I can always faintly hear a clock ticking. I’m never entirely convinced that it’s just the grandfather clock in the hallway. Time marches on.

I’m fine, by the way – as far as I know. Indeed, I’m quite happy not knowing. If I follow the family pattern (on both sides) and avoid accidents, I might still be vexing people half a century from now. It’s taken me a while, but I do now believe it’s at least possible.

I hope that legacy won’t still haunt me then, because by that point it’ll be too late. My own fear of passing entirely from memory has been a companion for many years, but I’m sure I could adapt to its absence. And of course, it’s that very fear that I’m really talking to right now.

I wrote this for you, demon. Rumpelstiltskin. My trusty cathexis. I still see your shadow, as clear as ever.

But perhaps if I keep writing – if I keep trying to connect and to resonate – then one day, you might begin to fade.

Shawn talks about the value of gaining momentum, and the need to push past fear of the first draft. I’d certainly agree with that. I’m always fascinated to read about other writers’ processes, and in keeping with that I’d like to share some of my own reflections on writing.

Topics

The main obstacle I usually face is finding my thesis. In most cases, I have only the topic itself in mind, and haven’t decided in advance how I feel about it, or what my position is. I have ideas and thoughts, but the connecting thread between them is murky.

I usually realise that I want to write about a topic before I’ve worked out what my argument is. The act of writing about it helps me discover my position, or at least to hone it into something coherent and hopefully interesting. I think it’s absolutely fine to use writing as a means to explore a subject; indeed, I think that doing so produces more honest and better-reasoned results. Writing is too useful a tool to save for the end of the journey.

Process

I write against notes. I know that’s an odd phrase; you were probably expecting “I write using notes”, or “from notes”. That’s true, but I specifically write up against the top of my notes, in my text editor of choice: BBEdit.

I arrange my notes in a text file, add some space above them, and then start writing at the top of the file, transforming a note into a thought or section and removing it. Thus, I write against or through my notes. Preparation is essential: your thoughts have to be in order to make that system work. I use simple bulleted lists to organise points – a list for each topic or section, with a maximum of two indentation-levels. It’s simple, and it works.

Regarding structure, if (as here) I’ve read something elsewhere that seeded a piece, I tend to acknowledge and summarise it at the beginning of the article, rather than interspersing my remarks between quotes. Personally, I hate “quote and respond” pieces, even though I’ve written a few on occasion.

Some people love them (like Craig), but I find them difficult to write – or even read. Threading a narrative through multiple quotes is one thing, but (for me) an email-like quote-reply-quote-reply structure reads more like the work-up for an article, rather than a finished piece.

Length

I write for this blog and one or two magazines every month, so I’m accustomed to both unbounded writing, and working to a word count (or indeed a character count). They’re two very different kinds of writing, and I’ve learned a lot about my own style as it pertains to length.

When I’m not writing to a count, I have two natural lengths of piece:

• 700 to 1,000 words for a compact exposition on a topic. This is also an ideal bite-sized chunk of text for the reader, and fits well on a single page. It’s no coincidence that the majority of commissioned magazine pieces fall into this band.
• 2,000 to 3,500 words for a more detailed exploration or discussion.

The zone between the two is a death march. A wasteland. I have noticeable difficulty writing to that length, and when I’ve done so, I often feel the piece reads like a too-long version of the shorter type.¹

That’s utterly subjective on my part, and perhaps I’m making it into a psychological barrier for myself, but I would have serious reservations about a limit of, say, between 1,200 and 1,800 words. To me, it feels unnatural.

Editing

Editing. Editing. Editing. It’s all in the edit. Writing is easy; editing is hard. You’re paying for the edit, not the words. Write for yourself, edit for your readers. There is nothing more important than editing.

All of those statements are absolutely, fundamentally true. Editing is crucial. Like all writers, I should really do more of it. When you ask a writer for their tips on editing, they’ll respond in the panicked, embarrassed manner of a European being asked by an American to translate a Latin inscription²; they feel they should have definitive knowledge on the subject, but they can probably only bluff their way through in the hope that the other person doesn’t know enough to contradict them.

No-one writes because they enjoy editing. There’s a name for those people, and it’s artless jackasses autistic savants soulless automatons editors. For the rest of us, I can at least offer a few tips from my own experience.

Full, patient read-throughs are essential – do them when you’re finished, not when you’re twiddling your thumbs and searching for a closing paragraph. When I encounter errors or poor style, they usually don’t stop me dead – instead, I read on but I get a vague sense that something is wrong. When that happens, I’ve taught myself to isolate the last five paragraphs and re-read them on their own (absolutely isolated, in a new text document). I don’t know why it works, but it does. Flaws become apparent.

It’s in the nature of writing to be blind to what later seem like obvious flaws. It’s not ego; it’s just that when you’re reading a piece that you wrote, the words you see are coming from your mind, not your eyes. Force yourself to slow down, and trust your instincts. Any whisper of disquiet probably means you’ve recently passed a typo that’s still a correctly-spelled word, or that you’re repeating yourself.

One of my weaknesses is crutch words, phrases and punctuation constructs; you’ll no doubt be able to find some in this article. Word-frequency tables can be useful (Scrivener can do that), or even just a quick find-all on a suspect stem-word.

Another weakness of mine is flabby language. I’m too proud of my vocabulary, and I sacrifice succinctness so I can show it off. The only solution is practice, careful read-throughs, and ruthlessness. Or perhaps, in the fullness of time, acceptance of your own style.

“Write drunk; edit sober”³ is a great piece of wisdom. I’ve found that it’s functionally equivalent to “write at night, edit by day”. Writing in the evening gives me the courage (and the emotional investment) to tackle difficult topics or angles that I might wrongly shy away from in daylight. Editing by day, though, acts as a safety net – and also improves the accuracy of your editing.

A corollary is that you shouldn’t submit (much less publish) anything after about 7pm, if you wrote it the same day. If it has emotional resonance for you (particularly if it deals with anger or outrage), I’d move the limit back to 4pm. Otherwise, nothing good will come of it. I could tell you some stories about that.

Block

Everyone suffers from creative block; it’s both a psychological and a biochemical phenomenon. The simplest advice is to take a break and try again later, and it usually works. Read twenty pages of a novel, or go for a fifteen minute walk.

When that’s not feasible, I try thinking aloud, and forcing myself to answer questions about the topic or piece – usually while throwing a beanbag up at the ceiling and catching it again, repeatedly.

I re-read (and reorganise) my notes, then take individual points and expand them into sentences or paragraphs. I’ll rewrite them later, of course, but the shift in context seems to jog my creativity. Even writing sentence-fragments can be useful.

There’s a final piece of wisdom for avoiding block, but it’s so absurdly impractical and unrealistic that I mention it for novelty only: don’t write on deadline day.

Show up

For me, the flow of writing is something like this:

1. Identify a topic. It’s fine if I don’t have any particular thoughts on the topic yet.
2. Find an angle, and jot down some thoughts from that perspective. The angle might be whatever is topical, or one of my interests, or the focus of the publication I’m writing for, or it might just appear organically.
3. Develop a position (or more than one), and work up a framework for the piece.
4. Express my position as clearly and effectively as I can, via the cycle of writing and editing. If that means modifying my position as I learn more about the topic and my response to it, so much the better.

Writing is absolutely a skill that you can improve through practice. Indeed, practising actually changes the nature of writing, as with anything. The experience is different depending on how often you do it. Once a month just isn’t enough if you want to break through your barriers and find both the mechanics and the art of it getting easier. Practice also allows you to find your own authentic voice, which will be evident no matter what style of writing you choose to do.

There’s no substitute for just showing up each day, or week, and writing something. Write until it hurts too much, then stop until not writing hurts too much. Writing is agony, but it doesn’t matter because it’s a compulsion.

Remember that you do your best writing when you respect your audience – which is why writing for yourself is the wisest thing to do. The worst kind of writing is constrained; written in someone else’s voice, or from their position, or in their style. Ideally write about the things you’re interested in, but certainly write in your own way.

Write with integrity. That doesn’t mean objectivity, but rather personal authenticity. Be vulnerable. Be honest, but above all be engaging. Be uniquely yourself by not trying to be anyone else. And bear in mind that you’re probably your own worst critic.

I wondered aloud recently whether I’ll ever reach a point where I know how popular an article will be before I publish it; I still have no idea, and I’ve been doing this for eleven years. The consensus on Twitter was that I won’t, and I think that’s probably for the best.

I’m extremely gratified that you choose to read the things I publish here. It means a lot to me. In thanks, I promise to continue pretending you’re not there at all, and write for myself alone.

I’ve made sexist remarks. I’ve jumped to sexist conclusions, or made sexist generalisations, secure in the various axes of my male, white, heterosexual privilege.

I’d like to elaborate a bit on my own continuing journey towards identifying and addressing my own prejudices.

When you read the phrase “addressing my own prejudices” in the previous paragraph, you probably jumped to a conclusion: that I’m some sort of partially-rehabilitated erstwhile monster, guilty of rampant sexism that was so bad as to cause me to re-evaluate my life. You probably assumed that this article was one of those pieces, where the ex-addict becomes a counsellor for Alcoholics Anonymous: a redemption story.

That’s not the case. I have no horror stories to tell you. The aforementioned acknowledgement of the times I’ve been sexist was entirely truthful, but I was never the sort of maladjusted maniac who would shout “bloody women drivers!” out of the car window for all to hear.

I’m not blameless, though, and it’s far too easy to write about sexism (or any prejudice) from the safe position of a virtuous arbiter of morality. The problem with prejudice is that it’s perfectly possible to find it abhorrent yet nonetheless also find yourself displaying it. I think we’ve all already agreed that prejudice on the grounds of gender (or race, or sexual orientation, or the long list of other things we discriminate based on) is a bad thing. The debate has ended. Instead of rehashing it, I think it’d be a lot more helpful to take a look at our own experiences and behaviours. I’m happy to go first.

I described the process as my continuing journey deliberately; I’m still there. I’m moving forward, but I’m a work in progress. Of course I am. I’m not sure what science’s current opinion is on how much of our macroscopic, society-level behaviour can be attributed to our genes, but my feeling is that I’m mostly a product of my environment. My prejudices are a matter of social nurture, rather than nature. Our culture gave me the tools to bear prejudice, but I’m having to find the tools to eliminate it on my own.

I’ve heard people say that if someone is brought up in a sexist society and thus becomes sexist, it’s not their fault. That’s a bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand. On the surface, it’s true – but it sidesteps the question of continuing responsibility. If the same sexist (or racist, or whatever) person is capable of re-evaluating their own position but does not do so, then they’re responsible. Perhaps not for becoming prejudiced, but for remaining so. It’s difficult to adequately define ‘capability’ in that context, but if you’re reading and comprehending this, I’d say you’re probably capable of self-evaluation. I certainly am.

I work in the technology industry, if such a thing exists (the actual technology industry, where I write and debug code, design and build software, and have an education in the field – not the technology-related segments of other professions like tech journalism, or tech marketing, or capital investment for tech). My industry is famous, deservedly or otherwise, for occupying a uniquely ominous Venn intersection regarding sexism: a mathematics-based science subject, with notoriously poorly-socialised practitioners. We’re the industry whose conferences have semi-naked ladies pretending to like the phone they’ve been holding for six hours, and whose job adverts juxtapose “crush” with “code”. We’re absolutely the most macho of the least macho professions in recorded history. The inevitable outcome of pubescent heterosexual male insecurity on a massive scale.

Our society is sexist (I’m not bothering to clarify which type: you know that I mean the usual one, which is to say harmfully discriminatory towards women). All human societies are sexist. Many, and perhaps most human societies are even overtly misogynistic. I don’t think that’s still being debated either. We’re brought up that way.

In terms of how that sexism manifests itself, let me draw an artificial distinction based on my own experience. I see two kinds of sexist attitudes again and again:

1. Assigning certain characteristics to women, often based on perceived differences from males. “Women are too emotional” and “women are weak” are difference-based assignments of characteristics.

2. Assuming that women are intrinsically less capable than men, in some capacity. This is often based on either an absurd generalisation of flaws from a real or stereotyped individual (“women are bad drivers”), or more subtly on an inability for men to separate the essence of a skill or task from the way in which men perform it.

The two can be combined – the former is often used as ‘evidence’ for the latter, for example – but that’s not always the case. It’s easy to dismiss the first type of sexism as simple and laughable prejudice that doesn’t stand up to inspection, but the second type is thorny. You can construct something that at first glance sounds like a reasonable argument for that kind of sexism. Here, let me try:

“Women, on average, are physically weaker than men. Thus, for situations where physical strength is a key asset (such as, perhaps, combat), men should be chosen.”

That statement sounds eminently reasonable to some people. You, dear reader, being an educated and insightful person will of course recognise its various flaws:

• It makes a slippery slope assumption that an entire field of endeavour is predicated on a single characteristic.
• It ignores the possibility of multiple roles within a profession.
• It sidesteps the large issue of how current (alleged) optimality for one factor balances against wider social repercussions in the medium and long term.
• It makes an exceptionally wide and stereotypical generalisation and treats it as fact.
• It excludes people of a given gender based on a distinction regarding strength, as if the two were equivalent (thus allowing weaker men to fight, but not stronger women).
• And so forth.

But not everyone is capable of making that analysis. Even some of those who can see those things aren’t willing to then try to internalise them, and thus come to understand and believe that the original statement is flawed.

Back to me for a moment. I’m still working on finding and hammering out those nurtured dents and flaws, but that second type of sexism – about capability – feels alien to me. I’ve been guilty of the first, certainly, but I can’t get into the mental model I think you’d need for the second. The reason for that, I think, actually also indicates the way that we can reach those who are either unwilling or unable to rationalise their prejudices: role models.

How was your childhood? Answer in fewer than thirty words, please; your hour is almost up. People tend to fall into two camps regarding how they remember their childhood: idyllic, or awful. I remember mine as being both, which is probably closer to the truth for most people. I wrote about some aspects of it a few years ago.

Next month, as usual, my mother will hold her annual show. She’s a dance teacher (of the ballet and tap variety), a fellow and examiner of the various dance associations, she has a string of letters after her name, and every June she and her pupils put on a recital, the proceeds of which go to charity. This year is her 47th consecutive year, since she started her own dance school at the age of 16.

Next month is also my 34th birthday, which makes the dance show in 1979 all the more impressive in retrospect (I assume she took a purely directorial role for that one since it was only a few weeks after my birth, but I’ve never asked). I was born into a world where my mother had always worked, and always continued to – and where she had a battalion of pupils whose leotards bore her initials. It was also a world where, from about a month before I arrived until after I was ten years old, the Prime Minister of the UK was a woman. All perfectly normal for me.

My father worked too, of course. His own upbringing was vastly different from mine. I grew up in a large house, went abroad twice a year on holidays, and attended a fee-paying high school. He grew up in a single-end flat in a tenement in a poor part of Glasgow, with only his father. His mother died when he was young, and his brother lived with their grandmother. He fended for himself, and life wasn’t easy.

My father is in the motor trade. In his youth he built trucks, but later he moved to sales, and he’s been selling cars for longer than I’ve been alive. The motor trade is macho in the real sense, and in previous decades was closer to the wild west. Modern (and dare I say European) standards of consumer protection didn’t really apply, and I’ve heard some wonderful, terrible stories.

I remember one about a customer, decades ago now, who had financed a car and was late with his final payment. Time went on, reminders were sent, and payment was promised but didn’t arrive. The customer was sitting at home one night, no doubt about to go to bed. The phone rang, and it was the car dealership yet again, which was unusual at such a late hour. The customer was asked to look out of his window, at his beautiful new car – and he did so. His attention was directed to the single brick which had been carefully (and harmlessly) placed on the roof of the car, at some point since the customer had arrived home that evening. It was intimated that if payment didn’t arrive soon, the customer would find the brick – and more like it – inside the vehicle at a later date. He made his final payment the next morning.

A macho environment, then. A poor and tough upbringing, and then the motor trade – and yet my father is (and always was) a reader and a thinker. He’s by no means a quiet man, but I can’t recall a single sexist remark from him at any point. I suppose that that’s no surprise, given who he was married to (they’ve been divorced for more than twenty years, I might add). The relationship wouldn’t have lasted five minutes otherwise, and certainly not a couple of decades.

I had positive contributions from both parents in regard to my view of women, despite society’s much more negative and insidious messages. My family situation was very broken for a long time, but overt misogyny or even sexism was not only impossible but patently ludicrous. All of the examples I saw were positive. I never really made the association between women and inferiority that seems to be at the core of most sexist attitudes. I had capable, impressive, admirable role models. I was fortunate.

I mention occasionally that I’m a Star Trek fan. I’m one of those people who has seen every episode of every season of every series, multiple times, and who knows an enormous amount of trivia about the fictional universe; a real geek. I remember the controversy in 1995 when Star Trek: Voyager first aired. I was the same age as my mother was when she started her own business, and the issue on people’s minds was that the new starship had a female commanding officer.

The premise of Voyager is simple enough: a starship gets transported to the other side of the galaxy, alone, and it’ll take seventy-five years to get back home to Earth. There are plenty of promising seeds for drama:

• The need to integrate the (much smaller, non-Starfleet, and initially uncooperative) crew of another vessel that Voyager was sent to capture.
• Suddenly being cut off from everything that’s familiar, being tactically vulnerable, and being faced with a journey that will take a lifetime.
• How to balance the need to retain a command structure with the reality of now being a self-sufficient community.
• The challenges of maintaining Starfleet’s various principles of non-interference and peaceful exploration, whilst being overwhelmingly outnumbered and keen to expedite the journey home.

The character of Captain Janeway was a revelation to me. She was nuanced and believable, and addressed the ‘issue’ of being a woman by demonstrating that it just wasn’t an issue at all. She had femininity and compassion and vulnerability, and she also had an iron will, principles she defended at enormous cost, unquestioned authority, intelligence, nobility and courage. She wasn’t a character whose stereotypically female qualities had been exaggerated in order to simplify and compromise her, but nor were they ignored.

Seeing Janeway, I saw the women I actually knew: complex, three-dimensional and credible people who just happened to be female. I very much identified with her, in a way that I never could with Kirk’s rashness and swagger, Picard’s detachment and emotional inaccessibility, or Sisko’s truculence and brooding. Indeed, I found that the limited palette of male qualities applied to the prior captains caused them to blur around the edges, and to sometimes be more caricatures than men.¹

Voyager’s last episode aired in 2001, and three years later I met my wife, another impressive woman. She’s a fellow software developer, and now manages a team of engineers. She’s been responsible for far, far more revenue than I ever will be – many millions of dollars. She’s strong and principled and capable. She’s also petite, and soft-spoken, and kind, and beautiful. She’s been known to cry at some of the more heart-wrenching Star Trek episodes. None of these qualities are in opposition to each other.

I somehow manage to both grow a beard and cry (every time) when John Hannah’s character reads the poem in Four Weddings. I’d watch a romantic comedy over a football match any day of the week. I believe that my capability, intelligence and essential masculinity remain undiminished. I’m also learning – slowly – to lean on my wife, when I need to.

We have a long way to go, as a society. We still attack women leaders on spurious grounds. We still apply double standards regarding how we view women, then judge them for it. My own industry, despite some progress, remains unwelcoming to women. Appallingly, there’s still a sick vein of outright hatred towards women, as recently publicised (Not Safe For Work / NSFW / Trigger Warning) regarding content on Facebook.

Men still see women as being different from us, which they usually are, and we still think that those differences diminish women’s value or capabilities, which they don’t. We still fail to separate ‘different’ from ‘worse’. In doing so, we damage ourselves, because we must necessarily reduce ourselves to caricatures to underline the unimportant differences.

I remain on a journey. My goal is to realise where my prejudices lie, to become aware of them, evaluate them through the eyes of adulthood, and attempt to redefine my views and correspondingly alter my behaviour. To reconstruct myself, so that I become what I want to be rather than what I was made to be. Some days I feel like I’ve made progress, and some days I make a backwards step. That’s normal. The key, I believe, is simply to continue. To try.

Eventually, it will stick. Most of us are capable of re-evaluating our feelings and thoughts, and working out which ones are prejudices. By doing that, we can begin to reconstruct our ideas of what parts women can play in our shared society, and start to reverse millennia of repression, disrespect and under-utilisation.

We can acknowledge differences and embrace them for what they are, by realising what they aren’t. We can accept that different levels of privilege call for different levels of encouragement, and that positive discrimination may well be part of the solution for the negative kind. We can learn to see the successes and achievements of women in the same way we do for men: the triumphs of fellow people, which edify all of us.

Eventually, anyway. I’m still working on my part. Sieving my own prejudices is a journey I’ll probably always be on, and that’s the whole point.

I’m not atoning for anything. I’m not writing this piece as a mea culpa, because I don’t think anyone benefits from that or even wants it to happen. I don’t think I’ve been particularly anti-women during my life. I consider myself to be a feminist², and I think that any rational person should feel the same way.

My shortcoming – like many men, I think – has been in awareness. Prejudices tend to be invisible to the bearer until explicitly pointed out (or until after some maturity sets in, perhaps). The challenge we face is developing the unnatural habit of checking what we’re thinking before we act upon it, and reassessing whether we should be thinking it at all.

I’ll continue to work on that. Thankfully, I’ve been fortunate enough to have grown up in an environment (and a time) that allowed me to acknowledge that we have some way to go before our culture’s treatment of women corresponds to the reality of the women I know.

I’ve been lucky to have strong, positive female role-models throughout my life, and indeed to be married to one. I’ve only been improved by it, as a person and especially as a man. Masculinity gets a lot easier when you give women the respect they deserve, and realise that our female role models are role models for all of us.

I am a man. I have heroes. Some of them are women.

Readership, whilst still modest, has been growing healthily since the last time I shared statistics, and I’m grateful that people are continuing to find value in the words I publish here. Here’s the latest graph of visitors, unique visitors, and pageviews for the years 2007-2012 inclusive.

(The graph is clickable to visit the original on Flickr, which includes a textual summary of the data for those who can’t see the graph itself.)

This blog isn’t the only place you’ll find my writing: I regularly write guest pieces for tech-industry magazines, and I’ve had a monthly column in Tap! magazine since the very first issue two and a half years ago.

I’ve also had the privilege of having pieces published in each of the first two issues of The Loop Magazine, and I’m very keen to write more in the future.

Here are some of the most successful articles I wrote during 2012, in no particular order.

• Augmented Paper – A discussion of an increasingly-prevalent UX aesthetic that appeals to me on touch-screen devices.
• API Design – My years of experience in creating reusable code-components distilled into 25 rules.
• Closed for Business – Open platforms don’t work for commercial success. Closed is where the smart developer money is.
• Managing Email Realistically – Your fancy email-filing system won’t work. Be ruthless instead.
• Morality and Persecution – A response to Pope Benedict XVI’s appalling condemnation of homosexuality.
• Replying to App Store reviews – Why it would be a bad idea for Apple to let developers reply to App Store reviews.
• Releasing Outside the App Store – How to release Mac apps outside the App Store, complete with updates, licenses and payments.
• Familiar is not a design – Thoughts on a misguided concept for layered window management on iPad.
• Misogyny – A condemnation of our continuing discrimination and sexism towards women.
• How Designers Can Help Developers – Tips on how designers can help app and web developers, including practising good Photoshop hygiene. (I also wrote a piece from the opposite perspective: How Developers Can Help Designers.)

I’m just a few months away from this blog’s ninth anniversary, which is quite a milestone. I get a great deal of satisfaction from writing here, and I hope to continue for a long time to come.

You can stay up to date via my RSS feed or by following me on Twitter or on App.Net.

Thanks for reading.

I recently redesigned this blog once again, and as I did so, I thought about how my perception of blogs in general has changed over the past decade.

In my first few years of blogging, I tended to use every possible widget and feature. For Thistle, I implemented all kinds of things: a comments system, categories, dated archives, themes, support for multiple authors, ‘sticky’ (pinned to the top) posts, various syndication formats, and much more.

I had sidebars packed with clutter. Twitter and Facebook didn’t exist yet, so there were no tweet-streams or follow buttons, but I certainly had lists of recent posts, popular posts, and my own favourite posts. I had drop-down category lists (with counters, and category-specific feeds), trackbacks and pingbacks, and buttons to message me on AIM or ICQ.

I had calendar widgets that indicated which days I’d blogged on. I had “Log in” links for the admin area. I had a theme-chooser (for the visitor to use) at one point. I’m reasonably sure I had left and right sidebars for a while. My footers, to my lasting shame, even had some faint grey text indicating how long it had taken to generate the page.

Fast forward to today, and my past self would be perturbed by this blog’s current design. He’d probably ask if the CSS was broken, like the smart-arse that he was. My tastes have changed considerably since I saw fit (around 2003-2004) to head my blog with a desaturated photo of myself holding a katana – but even then I’d already removed most of the unnecessary functionality.

I realised that I’d been focusing on my own obsession with what was possible, rather than what’s actually useful for the reader. A year and a half ago, after much soul-searching, I made the jump from dynamic to static blogging, and kept the default Octopress theme with only minor tweaks.

Better, but still with a noticeable pane of actual content, framed on two sides by cruft. The line-length was also excessive, making it tiring (for me) to read. The current appearance, however, comes a lot closer to the essence of what I want. It looks like this:

I was talking to my friend Evgenia about blogs recently (do say hello, and encourage her to start her own – she’s thinking of doing so), and at this point I should restate something I told her: I think that blogs are for their authors first, and their readership second.

I don’t think there’s any reasonable way, or any need, to separate vanity and ego from a personal blog. Writing is inherently about its author, and is a product of their personality and opinions – that’s not something to be shy about, and we shouldn’t try to change it either. So, write for yourself – and hold yourself to an appropriate standard, because you’d better believe that others are judging the person as well as the piece – but as soon as you publish your views, you’re inviting readers to take a look. I think that the needs of the reader and the author are more aligned than many blogging systems seem to believe.

Having had a decade to think about it, I want to share my views on what I think you do and don’t need on a blog today. Your needs may be different, but perhaps you’ll find something to think about. I bet you could simplify your blog in some way without detracting from the reading experience.

One brief note before we begin, courtesy of my wife. It’s easy enough to test your assumptions about what’s being clicked on your site, using appropriate analytics. If you’re using Google Analytics, for example, you may find its In-Page Analytics display (in the Content section) very useful.

Don’t let the data stop you making a design decision, but do check your assumptions against actual behaviour. You can even use Analytics to do A/B testing, if you’re really into your metrics.

With that said, here’s a breakdown of what I feel is important for a modern blog.

Readability

There’s no higher priority than readable text, and yet bizarrely I still regularly find blogs with tiny fonts, long lines, tight spacing, background textures, or inverted colour schemes. Don’t do that. Your words are worth reading, so present them with due care.

• Make text sufficiently large. Default blog themes are getting a little better at this, but I still think that most have text that’s much too small for the layout.
• Never break text- or content-zooming.
• Aim for a line-length of between 2 and 3 alphabets. That means you should be able to fit the entire alphabet at least twice, but no more than three times, on a single line in your layout.
• Use an appropriate line-spacing; probably in the 50-70% range. That means that the empty space between lines should be about half the height of a line of text, or a bit more.
• Try to go with dark text on a plain light background. If you do, respect the user’s text-selection colour. Otherwise, choose a suitable selection colour to provide contrast without excessive saturation.
• If you soften your text colour (from black to grey, for example), only do so very slightly.
• Focus on the content. Ruthlessly minimise any meta-elements at the top of an article. People don’t want to interact with those; they want to read what you’ve written.
• If you run ads, keep them outside of the content area, without exception.

Hypertext etiquette

There are some areas where it’s OK to be clever, but the basic tenets of hypertext should be left alone. Sites with links that are almost indistinguishable from surrounding text just make me shake my head. It’s antisocial.

• Links should be obvious. Personally, I still firmly believe in underlined hyperlinks (in body copy; I make an exception for headings), in a distinct colour. Blue is a great choice. Make the underlines solid. Don’t use underlines for anything else, either (never for emphasis).
• Make a clear distinction between visited and unvisited links. Visited links should still be as distinct from the surrounding text as unvisited ones too.
• Don’t make links that open new windows or tabs; it’s grossly hostile to the reader. The only (possible) exception is for one-shot, brief off-site interactions, like social intents. That’s a possible exception.
• Don’t ever break the back-button. Don’t even touch the functionality. It’s not yours to play with.

Responsiveness

Don’t have a separate mobile site. Definitely don’t just ignore mobile devices. Design your site so it’ll look good on at least:

• Large screens like desktop monitors or laptops.
• Tablet devices, in both orientations.
• Phones, in both orientations.

Your site should reflow and restyle itself gracefully to suit the screen’s dimensions. These days, you can do it all in pure CSS using media queries. Consider interaction methods, too: hover doesn’t really work on touch-screens, for example.

It’s fine to take a principled stand on browser support (it’s your blog). It’s also easy to get some actual data, to help you decide what to test on. I have a very Apple-skewed readership, for example, so these are my test priorities, in order:

Yours will probably be a bit different, particularly regarding the importance of IE.

Utility for the reader

I’ve found that there are very few essential features for a blog, except displaying its content effectively. You probably don’t need much more than these.

• A search field. By all means bounce to a search engine, but do have a visible search feature. As your readership builds, people will want to cite or revisit pieces they remember reading, and their first port of call will be at your site.
• A feed that’s auto-discoverable via the appropriate link tag.
• A favicon, for convenience in feed-readers. People will complain otherwise.

As a courtesy, and as common sense, you’ll probably want to include some contact information too.

SEO considerations

The best way to optimise your site for search engines is to keep writing, and don’t try to trick the system, but there are a few practical considerations you’ll want to take note of too.

• Ensure your article permalinks are stable, and don’t (visibly) use query-strings.
• Ensure your permalinks contain the titles of their articles.
• Provide per-article descriptions (summaries).
• Have an archive page, to ensure that all past articles are reachable (and crawlable) within a link or two of your homepage.
• I’ve found it advantageous to provide authorship information linked to a Google account.

Optional functionality

There are only two optional features I could think of, and they’re both conveniences for the reader. Not everyone will make use of them, and they do incur a design cost on the page, so keep them in your article-footer if you do choose to include them.

• Social sharing. The reality is that people will want to share your articles at some point, so you might as well make it easy to benefit from the free marketing. You’re writing to be read, after all.
• Category indices (even virtual ones that just perform a search), if you use categories. It’s a poor-man’s “related posts” feature, and it’s more than adequate.

Regarding categories, I have some advice: specify either one (ideally), or two (at most) categories per article. Choose the most relevant ones. It’ll have the side-effect of automatically trimming down your category list, and helping you determine what your recurring topics are. Resist all temptations to file a piece in any more than two categories.

For any greater granularity of metadata, trust the content and the search engines’ indexing. If you choose to use keywords, don’t list them on the page itself for the user (using metadata is fine; your article summary should be there too).

I recently added one other piece of optional functionality, which I’m still experimenting with: author marks.

Elements to remove

Finally, here are some of the elements I’ve used and then later removed over the years. Every one was difficult to let go of, but I’ve missed none of them.

• Comments. You almost certainly don’t need them. I used to routinely get dozens or even hundreds of genuine comments per article, and I felt that they took away some of my control of my own writing. Let people use their own blogs or social media to respond – you can still read them en masse if you wish. For example, any tweets regarding this article will be collected here.
• Date-based index pages. People won’t use these. Nobody arrives at a blog wondering what you wrote on a specific date. The presence of seemingly-duplicate extracts on multiple index pages (for example, your category indices and also on date indices) creates a lot of noise in your site’s search results too.
• A feed button. By all means have a feed, but acknowledge that it’s for a tiny (and fairly technical) minority. Auto-discovery is enough. For mobile devices (where it’s often harder to copy a page’s URL), there may be some benefit to having an explicit link – but keep it in the footer.
• Header cruft, such as social media links. Trim your header mercilessly. Even mine probably still has too many links.
• Background textures or colours. The design should serve the text. Text should never be made to conform to a design for any purpose other than legibility, on a personal blog.
• A sidebar. This is the meta-element of useless cruft. Everything in your sidebar that you think you need can be either moved or deleted. A sidebar is a blog’s junk drawer. If you really must have an agglomeration of heterogeneous clutter, put it in your footer instead.
• Social media timelines. If people like your writing, they’ll follow you (or will actually reach your blog via social media). You don’t need tweets embedded on your blog. Also, a person’s aggregated tweets look strange in isolation.
• Your github repositories, instagrams, and so forth. I can see the case for advertising your products, but keep the projects, photos, profiles and such on your About page, or as links in your footer.
• Recent posts. Your main page presumably shows extracts of your most recent posts, perhaps with pagination. That’s all you need. People will read for interest. For most of your readers over time, your recent posts are old news.
• Popular posts. Let the reader decide what they like. If you wish to suggest some of your own favourite posts, do it from your About page, so it’s optional. Lists of post-titles are dense and distracting, so keep them hidden away.

Towards more readable blogs

I’ve spent inordinate amounts of time writing for the web; a third of my life, in fact. For most of that time, I somehow neglected to consider that perhaps my own preferences and behaviours as a reader might also apply to those who read my output.

When I visit a new blog, as I do several times each day, my first assessment is whether the content is obscured by the design. I’ll rarely consider whether the design enhances the content. I’m visiting for a purpose, and the purpose is to read.

There are lots of popular writers whose blogs I read every day, and whose writing I admire, that break several of the guidelines I’ve listed. Just off the top of my head, I can easily list Marco (he has date archives), John (sidebar), Shawn (sidebar), Matt (line length), Craig (line length) and Jim (comments). I wanted to mention Ben too, but he pretty much nails my list.

It’s easy to see that all of those blogs do follow the same ethos, though – considered words, respectfully presented.¹ Tastes differ, but good taste permeates.

If you write online, make sure that your blog serves your readers’ needs as well as yours, and lends appropriate weight to your well-chosen words.

I get a great deal of pleasure from reading responses to my articles, most of which are via my Twitter account. I was reading the stream of tweets referencing the article via Topsy recently, as I do for all my pieces, and I was once again fascinated by the extracts and quotes people choose to use.

In the majority of cases, the sections people quote from my articles agree with my own impression of what the important points were. I’d love to attribute this to careful writing and well-formed arguments, but of course it’s more due to the reader paying attention.

In some cases, though, people choose to refer to articles (and thus, in a sense, summarise them) using what I feel are either secondary points, or even actual mischaracterisations of misinterpretations of what I’ve said. The fault for that will be mine in some cases, and in others it’ll be the reader’s.

I had a spirited discussion on Twitter earlier today about a vague idea for offering some extra insight regarding my own view of an article’s salient points.

There were a few standard suggestions, which I’d already dismissed as not quite appropriate. Emphasis, for example, is more of a linguistic tool (to indicate or be analogous to verbal emphasis) than something to be used at the logical level. I also think that emphasis is ugly and diluted when used for more than a single clause or so.

The next suggestion (and probably most popular overall) was pull-quotes. I’ve used those perhaps twice in total on this blog before, and each time I felt self-conscious about it. Pull-quotes can make you seem arrogant, in my opinion. There’s something crass about them.

Since this discussion took place on the internet, a few people even deigned to give me a high school writing lesson, saying that no additional means of highlighting passages should be needed if I just make my point properly. Thanks for that.

Abstracts were mentioned (I think that arguments should be allowed to build; I’m not writing academic papers), as were sub-headings (similar objection to abstracts), and unacceptably ugly inline styling like boldface or underlining.

Things got a bit more interesting when Branch was mentioned, which has the sort of neon-highlighter-pen concept I’d been thinking of – you can see examples here, though again I don’t like the underline; only the hover appearance. That implementation is reasonably close to what I’m after.

No matter how carefully written a piece may be, the reader is an unknown factor. Different people will interpret your words differently, and it’s not possible to completely eliminate that. Perhaps that’s even a positive state of affairs.

In any case, everyone will have different “take-home points” from a piece of writing. As I see after publishing each piece, everyone’s highlights (or summaries, or key points) are unique. The author of a piece has of course conveyed their position in the piece itself, but (except for perhaps an initial tweet, or the meta description contents of the page) we’re not often in the position of listing our own highlights.

I think that’s a shame, because there can be value in getting a sense of what the author of a piece feels is the main thrust of their own argument, or a sense of what they feel might be notable or quotable.

Accordingly, I’ve implemented a system to do that on this blog, which I hope to use in future. I’m also providing the relevant code so you reuse it yourself if you wish. I call these annotations Author Marks.

My design criteria were contradictory:

1. Don’t be visually intrusive, or imply arrogance.
2. Replicate highlighter-pens on paper.

As I thought about it a little more, I realised that Author Marks are somewhat like extras on a DVD; a little bit of additional content, which you must choose to view, giving some insight into the piece from the author’s perspective.

For simplicity, I decided to make use of the HTML5 mark tag (with the author-mark CSS class applied) to indicate those segments. This has the advantages of being semantically valid, portable, and readily accessible to user-specified stylesheets.

1

<mark class="author-mark">An important point to note</mark>.

Highlighting of marks is off by default, but I’ve made a simple JavaScript which you, dear reader, can use to enable highlighting if you want to. The appropriate activation links are at the top of each article (just under the heading, beside the publication date – and only on articles which actually have author marks). When active, the activation links look like this:

For the sake of demonstration I’ve also added a live activation link here:

I’ve added some gratuitous marks in this article’s text so you can readily test the functionality. For example, this phrase has been marked. In actual usage, I’d try to limit the number of marks to a handful per article.

For those reading this in a feed reader, or with JavaScript disabled, here’s a screenshot of how it looks.

You can find the JavaScript in this github repository, complete with instructions for use.

I’ve gone back and added some marks to my Tail wagging piece as a sort of test run.

It’s my hope that this can serve as a way for me to provide a hint about my own sense of a piece’s key points, and highlight anything I think is particularly pithy. You’ll be free to either be complicit, or just amused at my own vanity or (in your opinion) misguidedness.

I’m very interested in further discussion on this topic – but do feel free to wilfully mischaracterise this article on Twitter instead.

Our industry is in the throes of an aesthetic shift. At one end of the spectrum, there’s the stitched leather and wood of iOS; at the other, the stark, ascetic information-spaces of Windows Phone. It’s more than a change of fashion: I think it highlights our continuing struggle to understand how to design and build products.

In that context, one seemingly offhand remark of Ive’s really struck me:

One of the things that really irritates me in products is when I’m aware of designers wagging their tails in my face.

The context of the quote is that Ive is talking about overly-embellished design; he’s railing against clutter, and arguing for simplicity – whilst debating what simplicity actually means in a practical sense.

Our goal is simple objects, objects that you can’t imagine any other way. […] Get it right, and you become closer [to] and more focused on the object. For instance, the iPhoto app we created for the new iPad, it completely consumes you and you forget you are using an iPad.

For Ive, simplicity is about immersion: becoming so engaged with the task or experience that the device disappears. The iPad becomes a stack of photos, or a novel, or a calendar. A noble and sensible goal.

Enter skeuomorphism, the term du jour.¹ At first glance, making the interface visually resemble a physical object seems like a reasonable way to create that immersion. But it’s not that simple.

Primacy vs context

Ive is making the point that whilst embellishments (like skeuomorphic design elements) can be perceived as clutter, that’s not the core problem. The actual issue is that such designs wrongly focus on analogy rather than essence: a paper book itself, rather than the novel inside.

We forget that physical objects are also just specific embodiments – or presentations – of their content and function. A paperback book and an ebook file are two embodiments of the text they each contain; the ebook isn’t descended from the paperback. They’re siblings, from different media spheres, one of which happens to have been invented more recently.

The biggest intellectual stumbling-block we’re facing is the fallacy that just because physical embodiments came first, they’re also somehow canonical. The publishing industry is choking itself to death with that assumption, despite readily available examples of innovative, digitally-native approaches.²

Designing a digital embodiment of content (or a tool) in terms of a corresponding physical object tends to happen for one of two reasons:

1. An attempt to make the (newer) digital object more familiar.
2. A failure of imagination.

The latter reason is often dressed up as the former, and taken to fetishistic extremes to compensate for the inherent lie that it perpetrates. That’s Ive’s tail-wagging: a self-conscious, and possibly gratuitous, focus on form without due respect to function or essence.

You can make a lot of arguments for tail-wagging, of course. “We can capitalise on what people already know”. “Familiar objects are less intimidating, especially to non-technical users”. “The physical analog informs the digital design”. They’re all true, to varying extents. That’s the point at which many designers and developers stop thinking.

The thing is, those arguments are also all untrue, to varying extents, because the digital world isn’t like the physical world. An iPad demonstrably is not a book, and doesn’t behave like one. Digital embodiments have their own unique strengths and weaknesses in comparison to physical ones, and metaphors from one world can only be stretched so far before breaking in the other. Usually, the seams appear quickly.

That’s what Ive is talking about, I think. He’s not saying that skeuomorphic or embellished design is “bad” in any absolute sense, but rather that it’s false. It’s obviously false on the visual level, but the issue runs much deeper: it’s false because it implies that you can generalise experiences from different realms of interaction. It’s making promises that not only inevitably fail to deliver in some way, but also actually compromise the uniqueness, and quality, and essence of what you’re creating.

It’s logical to now ask the question: which is more important? Some kind of conceptual ‘purity’, or actual usability? It’s a valid question. It’s also probably a Straw Man, at least partly.

Truth in design

There’s a question I try to ask myself when I’m creating something: “Is this true?”

I define truth here not as factual accuracy, but as fidelity to both intent and embodiment. A design is true if it fulfils its requirements judiciously, and yet surprises and delights its intended audience. An app is true if it has a purity of vision and focus, and serves its intended customers on their terms. A piece of writing is true if it resonates with the people who read it – even if the details must be changed in order to better do that.

Truth, in this sense, is the opposite of betrayal, or carelessness. It’s the antithesis of compromise, for any reason except making something as good as possible.

I’m also using “true” to mean essential; not in the “required or indispensable” sense, but rather fundamental and elemental. Containing everything that should be, and nothing else. Take a look at your nearest Apple product, then think of a competing device. In all likelihood, only the Apple product is true, and you can immediately sense that.³

It’s another thing that Ive feels strongly about.

Our competitors are interested in doing something different, or want to appear new - I think those are completely the wrong goals. A product has to be genuinely better. This requires real discipline, and that’s what drives us - a sincere, genuine appetite to do something that is better. Committees just don’t work, and it’s not about price, schedule or a bizarre marketing goal to appear different - they are corporate goals with scant regard for people who use the product.

We’re all familiar with products that are the result of misguided goals. That’s not innovation; it’s more like innobation:⁴ unproductive, aimless differentiation for its own sake. Onanistic design. Tail wagging.

Thus we arrive back at skeuomorphism, and the justifications offered for it.

Great experiences are the sum of multiple factors. Any one thing being off can ruin the overall effect. Content and context, focus and environment: they’re inseparable and necessary parts of the whole experience.

Software experiences aren’t just software; they’re also about the device. Alan Kay was right: “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” We can’t literally do that, but we can accept that the hardware is part of the user’s context when using our software. The two exist in symbiosis, to create the user’s context.

iOS 7 will be unveiled soon, and rumours abound that Jony Ive’s influence will push it further along the spectrum towards a flatter, more elegant, more elemental presentation style – a ‘backlash’ against skeuomorphic overindulgence, as the press would gleefully have us believe, as if it were all simply a matter of personal taste. iOS 7 may indeed have such an appearance, but anti-skeu won’t be the sentiment behind it.

Currently, I think that there’s an inherent tension between iOS and its devices. The aesthetics of the OS have never quite fulfilled the stylistic promise of the hardware design, and I think that’s probably intolerable to Jony Ive.

Much of the lavishness of iOS (and its imitator, Android) feels like an artefact of the desktop era; a time when we were all still learning how to think about computing devices. By contrast, Windows Phone leaps to the other extreme, being as different as possible for the sake of it. Clear boundaries, sleek lines, and a kind of overt zen futurism.

It reminds me very much of Ive’s (and his hero Dieter Rams’) hardware design. Purely in terms of complementary aesthetics, the iPhone is the best Windows Phone device in existence. But I digress.

Adolescence

Our industry isn’t young anymore, but it’s still full of fear about whether so-called non-technical people will be able to use its products. I think we’ve been trying to get to less adorned, more information-centric interfaces for quite some time, but we’re still making the same tired old arguments from the golden age of human-computer interaction, about how humans need faux three-dimensional cues about the affordances of on-screen objects. Buttons apparently have to look “pushable”, or no-one will push them.

The reality is more nuanced. Our tastes, and capabilities, have moved a bit beyond screamingly-obvious knobs and dials. We don’t need drop-shadows to encourage us to poke at something. All we need is an invitation, in the form of icons or labels or animations which imply functionality, and a consistency of presentation which allows us to make a good guess about what we can interact with.

Modern software interfaces are already loaded with abstract presentations that aren’t presented skeuomorphically. We pinch to zoom into photos, and we swipe to move between horizontally-tiled pages of data. We tap and hold to display contextual menus, and we’re accustomed to layouts reflowing when we rotate the device.

Children don’t seem to be having problems grasping those concepts, even if Jakob Neilsen thinks they should. They’re not confused by interactive data-surfaces; they’re frustrated when actual, printed content in the physical world doesn’t respond the way they now expect it to.

Intuitiveness has become unhelpfully conflated with familiarity. The reasoning is simple enough: things that are already familiar don’t have to be re-learned, so we assume that they’re more “intuitive”. That’s a big assumption, but we treat it as if it’s fact.

Sometimes, familiar things aren’t as intuitive as they could be, and a new, unfamiliar thing might be more so. Another possibility is that a new thing might be equally intuitive, but also have other benefits which justify its initial unfamiliarity. In either case, intuitiveness cannot be divorced from context.

Skeuomorphic design is a pernicious example of the false dichotomy between what’s unfamiliar and what’s intuitive. We don’t need a shadowed jewellery-box of bauble-like icons in order to grasp the essence of the interface. “Tappability” is no longer measured in simplistic terms of apparent physical affordance. The very non-physicality of software interfaces allows us flexibility when conceptualising and investigating them. Skeuomorphism, however well-meant, can all too easily become a cognitive straitjacket.

Nobody is arguing that a notepaper icon might be easier to locate when the user wants to write down some text, or that a telephone handset is much less intimidating than an audio waveform or some other abstract symbol. That’s reasonable, and fair enough up to a point.

But the issue is that, inevitably, we don’t practise restraint. It’s difficult to do so with an approach that celebrates excess, inspirising designers to actually disdain others’ work for lack of realistic shadow-casting, texture effects, or other such monumentally point-missing trivia.

The reality is that skeuomorphism enshrines and validates a failure of vision, and even worse, a failure to capitalise on the medium. That’s a betrayal of a designer’s implicit duty of trust to make something that is the best, and to treat all other goals as secondary. I think that’s a responsibility that Ive feels very strongly. I doubt that anyone has ever had to remind him of it.

Any backlash against embellished design itself is by definition misguided. The deeper problem is injudicious design, which excessive skeuomorphism can be emblematic of. Design which falsely promotes one embodiment over the essence of content and function. A lack of creativity and insight, masquerading as a deliberate aesthetic choice.

That is the issue, and that’s what is anathema to people like Jony Ive – and probably to you too.

As I’ve mentioned previously, this blog is built and deployed statically with the wonderful Octopress. The distribution includes a default theme which you’ll no doubt be familiar with. Here’s how this site used to look, using an only-very-slightly tweaked version of it:

I’ve wanted to change that theme for some time now, and I’ve finally been motived to do it by the clean, readable presentation of The Magazine, Medium, and indeed the new Loop Magazine (I wrote a piece for the inaugural issue, you know).

I recently happened upon Aron Cedercrantz’ Octopress blog theme on github, and liked the style very much. I’ve made a number of changes to it, as follows:

• The header has been redesigned.
• The typography is now serif-based, rather than sans.
• The theme is now more responsive to varying screen sizes and devices.
• I’ve integrated the default Octopress theme’s responsive mobile navigation.
• I added my footnotes popover functionality.
• Purple is my favourite colour, so it’s the active/hover link colour rather than the usual blue. I’ve kept the dark red visited-link colour, for contrast.

I’ve also taken this opportunity to clean up elements on this blog itself:

• The header navigation has been simplified.
• I’ve made my About page a bit briefer.
• I’ve removed (almost) all sidebar elements, except for the one and only ad.

I’m very happy with the new theme, and hopefully you’ll agree that it’s an improvement. If you’re reading this via my RSS feed, here’s a picture of the new design:

It should also work well on your beloved iOS devices too, as the following screenshots show. The article shown in each screenshot is Staying Afraid.

iPad, portrait and landscape

iPhone, portrait

(I like how “Matt” tucks in above “Gemmell” in this layout.)

iPhone 4 or earlier, landscape

This layout uses the mobile navigation popup-menu, to avoid having lots of tiny links.

iPhone 5, landscape

The additional horizontal space on a landscape 4-inch display allows the full navigation to be shown.

There are inevitably some rough edges, of course, and I’ll be continuing to test and tweak the design over the coming weeks. I hope you’ll find the new design more pleasant to read and browse.

My hope is that the cleanliness of the design will not only be more comfortable for you, the reader, but will also encourage me to improve my writing’s focus, succinctness and indeed frequency. In the worst case, it’ll at least look that way.

As ever, thanks for reading.

I think that ADN is important, and I’d like you to consider joining me there.

ADN is a social media service like Twitter, but you pay for it. There are a few tiers of membership:

• $3 per month, if you pay yearly (i.e. $36 per year).
• $5 per month, if you pay monthly.
• Developer membership (with API key generation, etc), for $100 per year (about $8.33 per month).

There’s also a free tier, but you must receive an invitation from a yearly-paying member in order to sign up for it, and there are some limitations on free accounts – primarily that you can only follow up to 40 others. If you’d like an invitation, keep reading.

For Twitter users, ADN works just as you’d expect: you can follow people, and they can follow you. You can see your replies and mentions, the stream of posts from those you follow, and the global stream. You can send and receive direct messages if both the sender and recipient follow each other. There are even multi-user private chat rooms.

You can repost and “star” others’ posts. You can include usernames, hashtags, links and photos in your posts (and ADN themselves will host your media files, subject to file-size and storage limitations; you can even manage those files online). You can even natively “mute” users you don’t want to hear from at the moment, but don’t wish to actually unfollow.

You get 256 characters per message instead of 140, for your extended edition thoughts. Each post has a permalink which is visible on the web, with its surrounding conversation, even if you’ve not signed up to the service yourself. So far, so familiar.

The interesting part, though, is what you won’t be used to from Twitter. There are no ads, anywhere. Because it’s a paid service, there’s no spam at all; I’ve certainly never seen any. There’s an active and happy developer community, which ADN actually financially rewards. There’s a rich, modern, relentlessly improved API. And again because it’s a paid service, there’s a commensurately (and vanishingly) low number of Bieber fans, teenagers, illiterates, and sociopaths.

But the real difference I notice is in the conversations. On Twitter, the back-and-forth tends to be relatively brief, not only in terms of the 140-character limit, but also the number of replies. There’s a certain fire-and-forget sensibility to Twitter; it’s a noticeboard rather than a chatroom. Then there’s the keyword-spam (woe betide the person who mentions iPads, or MacBooks, or broadband, or just about anything). Oh, and let’s not forget the fact that any malcontent with internet access can create an account (or two, or ten) in seconds. Not a happy mixture.

That’s the paradox of Twitter, for me. The company has decided that it’s another advertising platform where its users (and their contributed tweets) are the products being sold; just like Facebook. Your participation is a means to an end: getting ads in front of eyeballs. The mission that Twitter has in mind for you is to see “promoted tweets” from other companies who purchase advertising. You’re meant to be reading, rather than writing.

However, given the endemic and burgeoning spam and trolling problems that find fertile breeding grounds on a service that (1) is free to join, and (2) has no directly business-aligned interest in preventing such antisocial behaviour, anyone with more than a certain number of followers is actually motivated to use Twitter more as a write-only forum. Followbacks have long since ceased to be the norm, and any account that practises unqualified reciprocal following is all the more likely to be a one-way broadcast outlet. Mutual following is also a risky business on a spam-saturated service, because of the direct-message system.

So, Twitter wants us to read, but isn’t interested in (and indeed, cannot be interested in) curating the content. We, as social creatures, however, want to connect and participate, but any such participation is doomed to decrease as our exposure to the unfettered masses rises correspondingly.

It’s a bit different on ADN, primarily due to a certain proprietorial air. Its users are paying customers, after all, who have stumped up their money for the service itself. They don’t need to be otherwise ‘monetised’, and indeed would doubtless vote with their wallets and go elsewhere if they felt that their position was being unreasonably taken advantage of. Such is the relative power and privilege of the consumer – particularly when the product in question is actually a subscription service, with a major and nominally “free” competitor.

ADN simply can’t afford to sell you, whereas Twitter must do so.

So, we have three major factors which are likely to influence how users conduct themselves:

1. In almost all cases, they’ve paid to use ADN. In the remaining cases, they’ve been invited by someone in the former category.

2. The user-base is smaller.

3. There’s a sense of proprietorship, rightly or wrongly, and a presumed overt interest in the continuation of the service itself.

All of these factors psychologically pull towards the same perception: that of exclusivity (or perhaps “elitism” with a very lowercase “e”, for the staggeringly elite cost of three dollars per month). Then, add in the fact that you have almost twice as much room to express yourself in each post, and you end up with a very different beast from Twitter.

The practical effect, which I notice daily, seems to be that people are more willing to participate in conversations, and also more careful about how they express themselves. Such a broad generalisation has no hope of being true for everyone, but it’s been my consistent perception during the months I’ve been using the service.

Whilst I have fewer followers on ADN than on Twitter by a factor of five, I feel less pressure to post regularly, and more able to dive deeply into the occasional conversation (sometimes as a contributor, and more often as a spectator).

As a developer, I appreciate the rapid, open and forward-thinking improvements to the API (and clients thereof). As a customer, I appreciate the visibility and responsiveness of those who run the service (if you do have an issue, the buck stops at Dalton). But above all, I’m a user, and as a user I appreciate the most intangible and elusive of things: the atmosphere of the place.

It’s clear that smaller communities have a certain closeness due to their size, and that it’ll inevitably decrease as the service expands, since there will be fewer overlaps amongst the various social sub-graphs.

It’s equally clear that a paid service is a significant deterrent to spam (the economics just don’t work when your sock-puppet accounts cost you a handful of dollars each), and furthermore it’s the admittedly uncomfortable truth that any community which requires a credit-card to enter will probably have cleaner, safer, better-lit streets. There’s no great revelation there.

But then we come back to these wooly words like “quality” and “atmosphere”. ADN will inevitably become larger, and thus by definition less exclusive. Perhaps its cost will even decrease, as it already has done (when I signed up, the yearly fee was fifty dollars rather than thirty-six). However, by all accounts it will remain a paid service, and therein lies the nub of it.

We value what we pay for. We not only pay for things which we deem to be of value, but we also retrospectively assign and justify value based on what we’ve paid. Any consumer is familiar with the simple psychology of cost equating as much to value after the transaction as value does to cost beforehand (likely moreso, from my own experience). At its core, I don’t think that the reason for the noticeably different, warmer, more discursive “feel” of ADN is any more complicated than that.

It’s the macroscopic, aggregrate result of it that matters, though. People who are invested in something want to preserve it. A touch of judicious forethought here, and an additional few words of clarification there. A stance that errs slightly closer to participation, and slightly further away from shouting into the ether. Closing a shared door when leaving, and being careful not to slam it when the hour is late. It’s the same thing. Maybe it’s the self-interested civilising effect of club membership, and maybe it’s just “not in my back yard”, but I think the reason is probably unimportant compared to the effect.

I find myself more willing to write both throwaway and more personal things. I feel that ADN is more conducive to long-form, sustained discussion, and garners more considered responses. And the service itself, in my peripheral vision, is more of a valet than Twitter’s increasingly sinister overseer. I feel at ease to discover what the service means to me, in my own time.

A minor change – paying for it – has a profound impact on the experience.

With all that said, I’d like to put my money (almost literally, I suppose) where my mouth is, and invite you to try ADN for yourself – at no cost to you.

Invitations for a free account

If you’d like to try App.Net before you decide to pay for it, you’re in luck – maybe. The company has offered me a few hundred invitations to share with my readers, and if you’re quick, you can get one.

I’ve previously taken the stance that invitations to new social services should only be given out to people that you’d want to follow, and I don’t think that’s an unreasonable position. It’s particularly important when the number of invitations available is limited (ADN usually gives you about 5 at a time, I think, which are renewed as necessary), but the point stands regardless.

Having said that, the lifeblood of any social service (and certainly a for-pay one) is of course its users, and the network effect is very real. I’m not sure where the right balance lies between ADN’s current small-community, discussion-focused feel, and building a larger platform by increasing participation. It seems reasonable, though, that more users is probably better, at least for the present and the near future – particularly those users who choose to actually pay for the service.

As I’ve thought more about ADN and the way that I feel quite differently about it than I do about Twitter, I’ve come around to think it’s perhaps OK to cast a wider net.

In keeping with that, you can get your free ADN invitation here, if there are any remaining.¹

Note that if you sign up with my invitation link, you’ll automatically follow me on ADN, presumably saving you an inevitable click shortly thereafter (you can naturally unfollow me at any time). Also, keep in mind that free accounts impose a limit of following at most 40 others, but you can easily upgrade to a monthly or yearly paid account if you decide to.

Finding people to follow

ADN has its own resource page for finding people to follow, and there are many people-discovery tools available.

I’ve used Friendfind.co and ADN Friends to quickly find the ADN accounts of the people I follow on Twitter.

Here’s the list of people I’m following on ADN at the moment.

Apps for ADN

There’s a large and ever-growing directory of ADN apps, sites and services, including mobile apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows Phone and Symbian, desktop apps for Mac, Windows and Linux, and assorted services and browser-extensions. Do take the time to have a look through them. I’ve listed the specific ones I use below, and a few others.

On the web

The web interface to ADN is called Alpha, and you can find it here. It works just as you’d expect, with the features you’re used to from Twitter.

If (like me) you’re a great big vanity-pants and want to track who stars/favourites and reposts your stuff (like favstar does for Twitter), you can do so on on Reposted.me.

There are many third-party web ADN clients, and also browser extensions for Safari, Firefox and Chrome.

On the Mac

I use Kiwi for Mac. It’s modern, regularly updated, and stands shoulder to shoulder with my chosen Mac Twitter client, Tweetbot. Its developer is Isaiah Carew (isaiah on ADN).

It also allows me to drag images directly into the message-composition window (as Tweetbot does for Twitter), which I’ve always liked, and it can even cross-post to Twitter selectively if you so desire. You can read an interview with Isaiah about Kiwi too.

If you’d prefer another Mac ADN client, there are plenty to choose from.

On the iPhone

I use Felix for iPhone by tigerbears. It’s elegant, attractive, has excellent VoiceOver accessibility support, and is constantly being improved and updated. Its creator is Bill Kunz (billkunz on ADN).

You might also want to try Riposte, hAppy and Netbot (which is the ADN version of the much-beloved Tweetbot). Indeed, there’s an iPhone ADN client for every taste.

On the iPad

I use Netbot on the iPad (by Tapbots), and I’m keeping a keen eye on developments with my favourite iPhone clients too.

You may also wish to try one of these iPad ADN clients instead.

Windows and Windows Phone

I don’t personally use these operating systems often enough to have a chosen ADN client, but you can find ADN clients for Windows (desktop) and Windows Phone, with more being added every week.

Android, Symbian & Linux

Our cousins on Android are most welcome on ADN.

Symbian devices aren’t left out of the fun, and you can even find an ADN client for the Linux command-line, if that’s your sort of thing.

Accessible clients for users with visual impairments

Mozilla’s QA engineer for accessibility, Marco Zehe has written a guest article on accessible ADN clients. I work with accessibility technologies on iOS and OS X regularly, and ADN users are extremely well served in that capacity, as Marco notes.

Closing thoughts

Twitter isn’t going away, but for a certain type of user, it is going downhill. I’m in a very privileged position on Twitter, and I don’t just mean because a number of people have kindly decided to follow me; rather, it’s because I have the benefit of socialising largely with developers, designers, and other professional creative people. If there are leafy suburbs in a social network, then surely I reside in one – but the inner-city slums are sadly encroaching by the month.

I’ve long said that I’d like to pay for Twitter access, even just to get rid of ads and to have the ability to meaningfully support third-party clients with a guarantee of being able to remain financially viable. To pay the rent, if you like. But the company has refused to allow that option, and thus the street party is increasingly fringed by gangs. Trends and hashtags are graffiti more than they are useful data, and the sense of exposure (and my corresponding instinct towards taciturnity) is higher than ever.

It’s sad; truly. It’s also not the only option.

The developers that I count as colleagues and friends are well aware of a problem called the “race to the bottom”; it’s the trend in app pricing to sell software for a pittance like 99 cents, or even to make it free and just hope to find sustainability later or elsewhere. It’s a corrosive practice, that devalues not only our effort, but also our output. We’re worth more, and so are our apps.

Yet for some reason, many of us don’t realise that the same applies to services. Your free feed reader can go away, as Google Reader is about to. Your free email service has ads down the side, and is perpetually in a precarious position. Your free search engine has to track you, and sell your data. Your free social service puts you on the store shelf, and sells you to each advertiser who comes bidding. You have no right to complain, as long as your legal rights haven’t been violated. Because it didn’t cost you anything. And similarly, the service provider has little reason to care about your feelings, because you’re not a revenue source.

The solution – or at least the beginning of one – is simple enough: pay for it. Own your data, and your services, and your apps by being the customer. You not only gain power and control, but you also directly contribute to the longevity of the thing you enjoy. A payment is a vote, and is also a right to vote. If you have non-trivial feelings of annoyance when you find out that you’re the product being sold, then do something non-trivial about it, and take control of this small piece of your destiny.

The service providers (and app makers) surely deserve it, but you deserve it more.

Twitter will not let you pay, because they’d lose the right to rent your eyeballs and brain out to the companies who do pay. That’s just the nature of their business model, and no-one is under any illusions about it. ADN, by contrast, is a place where you can be the customer. I find that prospect alone very attractive indeed. When I get up on stage and tell people that they deserve to be paid for their work, that’s what I’m talking about. It’s an inseparable corollary of that to say that you deserve to pay – because of the control and privilege it gives you.

The ADN ecosystem is stunningly rich and healthy for such a young service, and its environment for the user is more akin to an artisanal coffee house or a book club than Twitter’s increasingly-contaminated noisy bus-station or juvenile detention centre. It’s just a nicer place to be, because people have chosen to be there.

If, as I do, you remember the heady days of Twitter a few years ago, and see all too clearly where things started to go wrong, perhaps you might at least consider putting aside any preconceptions and hedging your social bets.

I’m not quitting Twitter by any means, but I’m delighted that a service exists which allows me to pay (having all the privileges and comforts which that entails), and which seems designed to remain true to the original ideal of Twitter rather than the tarnished reality.

Once again, you can get your free ADN invitation here. I look forward to seeing you, and I look forward to your decision to pay for the service when you’re ready.

I’m mattgemmell on App.Net (and also @mattgemmell on Twitter). You should follow me.

Download

You can download the Alfred 2 workflow here.

Accepted input

I occasionally need to find out which day of the week (such as Sunday, or Wednesday) a given date will fall upon. Typically, I either open the Calendar application or invoke the Dashboard (with its Calendar widget), but since I use Alfred dozens of times per day, I thought I could probably get the information more quickly with a workflow.

The workflow is triggered with the day keyword by default. Without any additional arguments, today’s day and date will be shown.

With a single (numerical) argument, two or three results will usually be shown:

1. That day-number, in the next month in which it occurs (either this month or next).
2. Additionally, that day-number in the current month (only if it has already passed; otherwise, this suggestion is omitted).
3. The current day and month, in the year of that number (assumed to be in the current century, unless more than two digits are given).

The latter case will naturally be assumed if the number is sufficiently large to not be a valid day-number.

If two numerical arguments are given (regardless of delimiters; feel free to use spaces, slashes, dashes or whatever you like at any time), the workflow will attempt to interpret them sensibly, usually as a day and month.

The order of the two possible suggestions (day-month, and month-day) depends on your system’s locale. In the UK and Europe, for example, the workflow will assume you specified the day and then the month, whereas in the US the opposite will be assumed.

If the numbers are such that one is obviously a month, it will be interpreted as such regardless of your system’s locale conventions, as in this screenshot taken on a (UK) English system.

Finally, you can also specify full three-number dates (with either two-digit or four-digit years). In this case, the workflow will strictly assume you are using your locale’s date-ordering conventions, such as day-month-year in the UK or month-day-year in the US (again, delimiters aren’t important).

Interesting things for workflow developers

There are some points of note that might be useful for those who are creating their own (PHP-based) Alfred 2 workflows, as follows:

1. This workflow determines the system’s locale, and attempts to localise its output appropriately.

   You can add further localisations by inspecting the workflow’s file-structure on disk (specifically the files in the lang subfolder). Included in the download are English, American English, and very basic French and German localisations.

2. The calendar/day images shown in Alfred’s results are dynamically generated using gd, a template PNG and a TrueType font. If you add new localisations, suitable calendar images will be created on-the-fly.

Localisation

If you right-click the workflow in Alfred’s Workflows panel and choose “Show in Finder”, you’ll see its files on disk. Investigate the files in the lang subfolder to see how you can add further localisations, or improve the existing ones.

You can override the auto-chosen locale by double-clicking the “day” script-filter icon in the Workflow’s editing UI within Alfred 2, and following the instructions in the comments there.

Footnote

Once again, you can download the Alfred 2 workflow here. I hope you’ll find it as useful as I do.

I’m @mattgemmell on Twitter, and mattgemmell on app.net too. You should follow me. If you get some use from this workflow and want to feed my gaming habit (or something else), I have an Amazon UK wishlist.

Enjoy the workflow.

I often have to generate URL-safe (or filename-safe) versions of strings (called slugs), such as the titles of my blog posts, and I thought I’d create an Alfred 2 workflow to help with the task.

As an example, since I use Octopress as my blogging system, I create new posts as Markdown files with filenames in a certain format. The title of this post is “Generating filename slugs with Alfred 2”, and the corresponding Octopress-suitable filename slug would be 2013-03-26-generating-filename-slugs-with-alfred-2.markdown.

(Whilst Octopress has a rake task to pre-create files with suitable filenames, I prefer to work on my drafts outside of the actual Octopress site-hierarchy, in my Dropbox, then move them in later for publishing.)

Accordingly, I made an Alfred 2 workflow with the keyword slug for this task. You can download the Alfred 2 workflow here.

Making basic slugs

To invoke the workflow, you simply use the keyword slug in Alfred’s input window.

Continue typing the string you want to slug-ify (or paste it in), and you’ll see various options for the type of slug you want to copy. Highlight one (or press the corresponding command-key shortcut shown beside the option you like), and the relevant slug will be copied to the clipboard.

The options are:

• A plain slug version of the text.
• A slug prefixed with the current date (in YYYY-MM-DD format).
• A slug prefix with the date (as above) then the time (in HH-MM-SS format).

The date and time-prefixed versions are formatted such that files will sort predictably (chronologically).

File extensions

If you’d like to set a default file-extension to be used in your slugs, you can use the slext keyword (for slug extension). There are a few default options, but you’ll probably want to enter your own. If you decide against having a default extension later, you can invoke slext again and choose the remove option.

Once you’ve set a default file-extension, you’ll see additional options whenever you generate a slug. You’ll still see the basic no-extension options too, and naturally Alfred will remember your choice and prioritise it next time.

Regardless of whether you’ve specified a default extension, you can still specify one whilst you’re typing the string to slug-ify. If you do type an extension, it’ll override any default extension you’ve set.

Advanced options

You can change a handful of advanced options by editing some configuration parameters in the workflow’s actual code. It’s all in PHP script files on disk. To access them, simply select the Slug workflow in the “Workflows” section of Alfred’s Preferences window, then right-click the workflow’s name and choose “Show in Finder”.

A workflow is actually just a folder, and you’ll see all the contents. The file you want is slug.php, so open it in your favourite text-editor (I use, and highly recommend, BBEdit – which also has a free sibling called TextWrangler).

If your native language isn’t English, you might be particularly interested in the $preferred_locale option. It’s blank by default, which should cause it to use whatever is the default chosen locale in OS X (in the “Language & Text” panel of System Preferences). This option affects how certain characters are transliterated when generate a slug.

For example, if you’re an English speaker, and you pasted in some text including a “ö” (lowercase o-umlaut) character, you’d probably want that character to become a simple “o” in the slug. If you’re a German speaker, however, you’d likely instead want it to become “oe”, which is a better phonetic approximation of the original character in German. The slug workflow attempts to do these conversions automatically based on your system locale, using the rules in Johnny Broadway’s URLify library.

If you’d like to override the setting (for example if your system is set to German but you prefer the English style of transliteration, or vice-versa), feel free to set the $preferred_locale option to whatever country’s style you’d like to use (using standard two-letter country abbreviations, such as “en” for USA/UK/etc or “de” for Germany, and so on).

You can also configure your preferred locale without digging around in the PHP file itself, as follows. First, select the Slug workflow in Alfred’s Preferences window, and double-click the “slug Script Filter” box. It’s highlighted in red in the screenshot below.

You’ll see a sheet allowing you to configure this part of the workflow. At the bottom is a large text-field. By default it contains this:

php -f slug.php -- "{query}"

To specify a default locale for Germany, for example, you could add on “de” after a space, at the end of that line of text. So, it’d look like this:

php -f slug.php -- "{query}" "de"

It’s also highlighted in red in the screenshot below.

Click the Save button to save your changes and dismiss the sheet, and you’re done.

Footnote

That’s about it! Once again, you can download the Alfred 2 workflow here. I hope you’ll find it as useful as I do.

I’m @mattgemmell on Twitter, and mattgemmell on app.net too. You should follow me. If you get some use from this workflow and want to feed my gaming habit (or something else), I have an Amazon UK wishlist.

Enjoy the workflow.

Now, I want to share some Nintendo Game Boy Advance SP wallpapers with you, for your Mac or PC (or iPad and iPhone, if you crop/resize them yourself). The SP came in various colours and special editions, and I’ve recreated a few of them here. As a bonus, there are some other vintage Nintendo controllers and devices too!

These wallpapers are available in a set on Flickr, and are all 2880 x 1800. They were all drawn in Adobe Photoshop CS6 (with occasional recourse to Illustrator), using my beloved and fab Wacom Intuos5 tablet.

Please do not redistribute these wallpapers in any form. They’re for your personal use only. If you want to use them for any other purpose (such as including them on a website, as elements in another design, any profit-making enterprise or anything other than personal use on your own devices), then please contact me first.

GBA SP regular editions

This is the normal SP, in a variety of colours.

Nintendo Game Boy Advance SP wallpaper - grey

Download full-size – grey.

Nintendo Game Boy Advance SP wallpaper - dark grey

Download full-size – dark grey.

Nintendo Game Boy Advance SP wallpaper - red

Download full-size – red.

Nintendo Game Boy Advance SP wallpaper - green

Download full-size – green.

Nintendo Game Boy Advance SP wallpaper - blue

Download full-size – blue.

Nintendo Game Boy Advance SP wallpaper - pink

Download full-size – pink.

Nintendo Game Boy Advance SP wallpaper - purple

Download full-size – purple.

Nintendo Game Boy Advance SP wallpaper - white

Download full-size – white.

Nintendo Game Boy Advance SP wallpaper - black

Download full-size – black.

GBA SP special editions

A couple of my favourite special editions of the SP. First up, Zelda! This one (also called the Triforce edition) came with The Minish Cap.

Nintendo Game Boy Advance SP wallpaper - Zelda special edition

Download full-size – Zelda special edition.

The amazing and gorgeous NES edition:

Nintendo Game Boy Advance SP wallpaper - NES special edition

Download full-size – NES special edition.

Bonus Nintendo stuff

A couple of extra controllers, and the original chunky handheld that eventually gave us the SP, DS and 3DS.

Nintendo N64 controller wallpaper

Download full-size – N64 controller.

Nintendo NES controller wallpaper

Download full-size – NES controller.

Nintendo Game Boy wallpaper

Download full-size – Nintendo Game Boy.

Footnote

I’m @mattgemmell on Twitter, and also on app.net. You should follow me. If you enjoyed these free wallpapers and want to feed my gaming habit (or something else), I have an Amazon UK wishlist.

Enjoy the wallpapers!

Please update this feed in your chosen feed reader!

As always, the canonical feed you do want is: http://mattgemmell.com/feed

(It’s been valid for more than 8.5 years, and will always redirect to the appropriate actual feed – which now happens to be /atom.xml on this server.)

The old feed will stop working over the next few weeks (sometime in April 2013), so please do update your subscription now.

If you have any problems, you can bug me on Twitter or on App.Net. Thanks for reading, intelligent and attractive person!

Now, I want to share some Super Nintendo controller wallpapers with you, for your Mac or PC (or iPad and iPhone, if you crop/resize them yourself).

There were three different primary models of SNES controller: the Japanese (Super Famicom) version, the European Super Nintendo version, and the American Super Nintendo version. The Japanese and European ones looked almost identical, differing only in the logo and the font used for the labels of the “Start” and “Select” buttons, but the American version had several more changes. It shared the Start/Select label-font of the European controller (albeit in a lighter colour), but almost all of the plastic parts were a different colour from the other two versions.

It also lacked the Super Famicom crescents-and-discs logo, and instead of the Y/X/B/A buttons being green, blue, yellow and red respectively, they were instead paired: Y and X were a soft lilac shade, and B and A were a darker purple. Uniquely, the Y and X buttons were also concave, like the B/A buttons on the original NES, and the Y/X/B/A labels were in a different (narrow, italicised) font.

I drew all the various parts of the Super Nintendo controllers in Photoshop CS6, taking account of the differences between models and using Layer Comps to display each different model.

Super Nintendo controllers in Photoshop

These wallpapers are based on that master Photoshop document, and are available in a set on Flickr. I’ve created three basic versions: full, simplified (no text), and abstract (no actual controller outlines). Where appropriate, you can choose from all regional variants of the controller.

The wallpapers are 2880 x 1800 pixels, and each come in two editions: regular, and Retina Display. The pixel-resolution is the same in both cases, to allow you to crop/resize both editions as you wish, but on the Retina versions the actual controller graphics are doubled in size for extra detail and smoothness. If you prefer bigger graphics, you can of course use the ‘Retina’ versions on non-Retina devices too. If you use the non-Retina versions on smaller-screened devices, you’ll probably want to centre them, rather than scaling to fit the screen.

Thus, the following wallpapers are available below:

• Full: Japanese, European & American models (3)
• Full: Japanese, European & American models, Retina Display (3)
• Simplified: Japanese/European & American models (2)
• Simplified: Japanese/European & American models, Retina Display (2)
• Abstract: Japanese/European & American models (2)
• Abstract: Japanese/European & American models, Retina Display (2)

That’s fourteen choices. I’m sure you can imagine how much fun these were to export from Photoshop (not too much fun at all).

Please do not redistribute these wallpapers in any form. They’re for your personal use only. If you want to use them for any other purpose (such as including them on a website, as elements in another design, any profit-making enterprise or anything other than personal use on your own devices), then please contact me first.

Full controller

This version has all visual elements present (minus the cable; I didn’t think you’d want it snaking across your desktop).

Full - Japan

Download Full – Japan.

Full - Europe

Download Full – Europe.

Full - USA

Download Full – USA.

Full controller (Retina Display)

Full - Japan (Retina)

Download Full – Japan (Retina).

Full - Europe (Retina)

Download Full – Europe (Retina).

Full - USA (Retina)

Download Full – USA (Retina).

Simplified controller

For this version, I’ve hidden all text, labels and logos, to convey just the essence of the controller. There are only two variants instead of three, because with all textual and logo elements removed, the Japanese and European models are identical.

Simple - Japan/Europe

Download Simple – Japan/Europe.

Simple - USA

Download Simple – USA.

Simplified controller (Retina Display)

Simple - Japan/Europe (Retina)

Download Simple – Japan/Europe (Retina).

Simple - USA (Retina)

Download Simple – USA (Retina).

Abstract controller

Finally, this version removes any strong outlines (except the lovely disc around the Y/X/B/A buttons), including the controller casing/border itself. It’s just buttons floating in a solid-coloured background. To me, this one says “retro gaming”. Again, there are only two variants since there’s no distinction between Japanese and European models at this level of abstraction.

Abstract - Japan/Europe

Download Abstract – Japan/Europe.

Abstract - USA

Download Abstract – USA.

Abstract controller (Retina Display)

Abstract - Japan/Europe (Retina)

Download Abstract – Japan/Europe (Retina).

Abstract - USA (Retina)

Download Abstract – USA (Retina).

Footnote

I’m @mattgemmell on Twitter, and also on app.net. You should follow me. If you enjoyed these free wallpapers and want to feed my gaming habit (or something else), I have an Amazon UK wishlist.

Enjoy the wallpapers!

They’re all 640 x 1136 pixels and are on Flickr, with direct links to full-sized versions below. They’re designed to look good on your Lock screen.

NES buttons

(This is adapted from a free NES controller PSD by Jakob Öfverman – he’s @larshugose on Twitter).

NES controller iPhone 5 wallpaper

Download NES buttons full size.

The Legend of Zelda

Legend of Zelda iPhone 5 wallpaper

Download The Legend of Zelda full size.

Super Mario Bros 3

Super Mario Bros 3 iPhone 5 wallpaper

Download Super Mario Bros 3 full size.

Castlevania

Castlevania iPhone 5 wallpaper

Download Castlevania full size.

Metroid

Metroid iPhone 5 wallpaper

Download Metroid full size.

Footnote

I’m @mattgemmell on Twitter, and also on app.net. You should follow me. If you enjoyed this post and want to feed my gaming habit (or something else), I have an Amazon UK wishlist.

If you’re interested in playing retro Nintendo games on modern computers, I recently wrote about Nintendo emulation on a Mac, using original controllers.

SNES buttons (Europe/Japan)

(This one is from a brilliant free SNES controller PSD by Kubilay Sapayer – he’s @kubilayss on Twitter). For US readers not familiar with the real (ahem) SNES controllers, this is how they looked in Japan and Europe.

SNES controller iPhone 5 wallpaper

Download SNES buttons Europe/Japan full size.

SNES buttons (USA)

The controllers for the Super Nintendo were a different colour in the US, for some reason (and the console and game cartridges had an entirely different design). Here’s how the American controllers looked.

SNES US controller iPhone 5 wallpaper

Download SNES buttons USA full size.

Zelda: A Link to the Past

Zelda 3 iPhone 5 wallpaper

Download Zelda: A Link to the Past full size.

Super Mario World

Super Mario World iPhone 5 wallpaper

Download Super Mario World full size.

Super Castlevania IV

Super Castlevania IV iPhone 5 wallpaper

Download Super Castlevania IV full size.

Super Metroid

Super Metroid iPhone 5 wallpaper

Download Super Metroid full size.

Footnote

I’m @mattgemmell on Twitter, and also on app.net. You should follow me. If you enjoyed this post and want to feed my gaming habit (or something else), I have an Amazon UK wishlist.

With today’s powerful Mac (and PC) hardware, we can rediscover all of our favourite vintage Nintendo games via emulation – and you can even use the original controllers, if you have them.

Notes on emulation

Emulation of videogames consoles is legally questionable at best. Second-hand consoles are readily available to buy, and you should seriously consider grabbing them for fun and nostalgia. If you’re like me, you probably already have many or all of these systems in your basement or attic, waiting to be used again.

Downloading games that you don’t own is definitely illegal, of course, and it hurts the content providers. The only reason that we have games to play is because people pay for them – so please don’t download ROMs of games that you don’t actually own. It’s easy to buy huge packs of second-hand console games on ebay, often with the actual systems included, and it doesn’t cost a lot of money.

Having said all that, most of us probably have several gadgets (including current-generation games consoles) hooked up to our televisions, and may not have suitable ports or connections to keep old systems plugged in too. It can be much more convenient to play those older games on the ultra-sharp, vivid screen of your Mac instead. Every previous Nintendo system has an emulator available for OS X, and they all run just fine on 10.8 Mountain Lion.

On joypads

All emulators can be played using the keyboard and/or mouse, or any generic USB gamepad. Here’s my advice: choose your pad very carefully. Most older systems used a D-pad as the primary directional input device, and not all D-pads are created equal. RSI and wrist injury are a very real possibility, particularly if you’re not ten years old anymore.

Nintendo spends a great deal of time designing and testing their input devices, and they build products to last. I’ve consistently found that the original official controllers are by far the most pleasant to play with. They can all be used with your Mac without modification, using cheap USB adapters which I’ll talk about shortly. Precision is also important, and the original pads won’t let you down. You’ll find the NES controller’s D-pad to be firm and quite springy, and the SNES to be softer and feel more settled. Both will give you many years of retro gaming pleasure.

If you do decide to use a third-party replica pad (or perhaps even a modern USB pad), exercise caution and see how your wrists are handling it. Cheap knock-offs don’t go through anything like the Q&A of Nintendo’s official pads, and you’ll also almost certainly have to replace them much sooner.

(As an aside, if you have any spare official Nintendo controllers for any system that are in good condition and perfect working order, I’d be very interested in obtaining them. My email address is matt at this domain. I promise to cherish them, and to use them!)

NES

Prepare for a blast of nostalgia. The classic NES controller:

NES controller

This is a beautiful joypad. It’s chunky but extremely light, with a positive D-pad and concave, clicky buttons. It will also likely survive the apocalypse, and indeed did do so in living-rooms around the world.

You can connect yours to a Mac using a RetroBit Retro Adapter, which provides one NES port (so you might want to buy two adapters for two-player games).

NES USB controller adapter

To run the games, you have a few options. I use Nestopia, which you can also use via the excellent OpenEmu.

Nestopia NES emulator for OS X

It’s dangerous to go alone!

Super Nintendo (SNES)

The SNES was the primary system of my early teenage years. I first saw one in an electrical appliance store whilst I was waiting for my mother to buy a new vacuum cleaner. It was in a pod running Super Mario World, and Christmas was only a couple of months away. The rest is history.

It also had what is in my opinion the single best joypad ever made.

SNES controller

(The European and Japanese Super Nintendo/Famicom pads had these colourful buttons, rather than the US version’s purple-grey two-tone ones. I much prefer the colours.)

You can connect two of these beauties to your Mac via the Dual SNES Adapter, which provides two SNES ports.

SNES USB controller adapter

To play the games, you’ll want SNES9X, which again can be used either on its own, or as part of OpenEmu.

SNES9X SNES emulator for OS X

Pay no attention to the average middle-aged man standing by this sign!

N64

I didn’t get an N64 immediately, because I was spending most of my time flying around the world and working. When I did get some time at home, I was window-shopping and decided to just buy one on a whim. I got the Super Mario 64 pack, and also picked up Ocarina of Time. Playing Ocarina over the next week is one of my most cherished gaming memories. (Did you know that they remastered it for the 3DS? It’s an excellent version of the game.)

The N64 controller looked a lot like a spaceship, and you almost always held it with your right hand on the rightmost prong, and your left hand on the middle prong, to use the analog joystick. The stick sometimes felt a little bit high, but it was precise, pleasantly springy, and a bit of a revelation at the time.

N64 controller

You can connect this gargantuan joypad to your Mac using the N64 Controller Adapter, which gives you two N64 ports.

N64 USB controller adapter

To play the games, you can use OpenEmu, but for certain games you might also want to have the rather fantastic Sixtyforce on hand.

OpenEmu N64 emulator for OS X

Take it respectfully!

Gamecube

I did get a Gamecube on launch day, and thankfully it was purple (my favourite colour) by default. I think I lost about three weeks of my life playing Rogue Leader over and over.

The ‘cube controllers eschewed the N64’s C-buttons for a second analog C-stick (handily named, since it’s almost always used to control the in-game camera), which is of course now a standard feature across most consoles. It’s a very solid joypad with perfectly-placed controls, and a satisfyingly huge A button. I can testify that it readily survives repeated collisions with walls, but is susceptible to teeth-marks when chewed with rage.

Gamecube controller

To connect your ‘cube pads, you can use the 3-in-1 Magic Joy Box, which provides one Gamecube port, one Xbox (original) port, and one PlayStation or PlayStation 2 port. It is also not a sex toy, despite the awful name.

Gamecube USB controller adapter

To play Gamecube games, you can use Dolphin, which is also a Wii emulator (with which you can use your original Wii remotes via Bluetooth too).

Dolpin Gamecube emulator for OS X

Hoy, small fry!

No drivers required

All of the USB adapters mentioned above are plug-and-play, requiring no drivers whatsoever. Connect the pad to the adapter, then the adapter to the computer. Use the ‘Preferences’ (or similar) in each emulator to configure the buttons appropriately; OpenEmu has a particularly nice interface for doing this, showing the actual original pads.

OpenEmu controller configuration screen

What about handhelds?

The best way to experience handheld games is on the original systems, all of which are readily available to buy second-hand. My advice would be to get:

• A Nintendo 3DS (which also plays DS games),
• A Game Boy Micro (which plays Game Boy Advance games), and:
• A Game Boy Color (which also plays original Game Boy games).

If you want a bigger screen for your Game Boy Advance games, the SP series is fantastic, with plenty of options for the colour of the device. Additionally, if your eyesight isn’t what it was and you’re worried about peering at small screens, note that there are larger versions of both the 3DS and the DSi available too.

Nintendo 3DS and Gameboy Micro

If you want to emulate, I believe that all of the Nintendo portable platforms are supported on the Mac (with the exception of 3DS at the moment, as far as I know). I’m not sure how viable it is to play DS or 3DS games without a touch-screen, and certain games presumably won’t be playable at all due to their advanced use of the microphone, the screen-hinge switch and so on (the fabulous Hotel Dusk and Another Code series would be prime examples).

Buy the actual systems!

Simultaneous gaming

It’s possible to connect all of the aforementioned joypads to a single Mac simultaneously, but you’ll likely need a USB hub. I can highly recommend the Trust 10-port USB 2.0 Power Hub for the job; I have four joypads, three iOS devices and a Wacom Intuos 5 graphics tablet all connected to it without issues.

All Nintendo controllers connected simultaneously

For those with a powerful machine and a crippling case of Attention Deficit Disorder, it’s even possible to actually run all the emulators simultaneously too. Presumably, you’ll want to invite some friends over for that.

The Legend of Zelda, from NES to Gamecube

I’m @mattgemmell on Twitter, and also mattgemmell on App.Net. If you enjoyed this post and want to feed my gaming habit (or something else), I have an Amazon UK wishlist.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a hookshot to find.

• Counting is asynchronous (happens in the background).
• It tries not to count any more text than is necessary.
• It counts both the full text and any selection in the textview.

MGWordCounter uses NSString’s own (excellent) understanding of what constitutes a “word”, and thus will improve as NSString and the text system are enhanced in future.

The included dual-platform demo harness looks like this:

MGWordCounter demo

Why did you create this?

I do a lot of writing, and I find it extremely useful to have a live word-count (and character-count) for the piece I’m working on. I also like to try out new writing apps and text-editors, and I’d be disappointed if they didn’t have that feature.

I thought that the best way to make sure all my favourite writing apps of the future have live word-counting was to implement the feature in a straightforward, drop-in way, then I can just point those developers towards this code. Then they’ll have absolutely no excuse for not implementing it.

Getting the code

MGWordCounter can be cloned from its git repository on github. You can find the repository here: http://github.com/mattgemmell/MGWordCounter

Requirements and supported OS versions

• OS X 10.7 Lion or later (with ARC) for Mac
• iOS 5.0 or later (with ARC) for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch

License

MGWordCounter is distributed under an attribution license. You’re free to use it, with attribution, in any kind of project you like (including commercial and/or closed-source apps).

You can read the full license here: http://mattgemmell.com/license/

See the license page for information on using it without attribution too (for a fee). If you require a different license, you’re welcome to contact me.

Saying Thank You

As with all the other OS X and iOS code I’ve released over the years, I’m making MGWordCounter available for the benefit of the developer community.

If you find it useful, a Paypal donation (or something from my Amazon.co.uk Wishlist) would be very much appreciated. Appropriate links (and my other code) can be found here: http://mattgemmell.com/source

Sample code

The MGWordCounter project includes simple OS X and iPhone demonstration apps, showing a live word-count display above a text-view. Both apps are separate targets in the same Xcode project.

How to use MGWordCounter

Briefly, you create an MGWordCounter object by initialising it with a suitable NSTextView or UITextView, then you tell the MGWordCounter to start counting.

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wordCounter = [MGWordCounter wordCounterForTextView:textview];
wordCounter.delegate = self;
textview.delegate = wordCounter;
[wordCounter startCounting];

MGWordCounter will then post notifications (and call a delegate method, if you’ve given it a suitable delegate object) whenever the word-count changes. You can also specify a block to be executed.

Does it need to be my Text View’s delegate?

No. Normally, the MGWordCounter object will be your text-view’s delegate (i.e. its NSTextViewDelegate on OS X, or its UITextViewDelegate on iOS). However, this isn’t absolutely required.

If you already have a text-view delegate object, you can simply forward three delegate methods to the MGWordCounter from your actual text-view delegate, and everything will still work. See the comments in MGWordCounter’s header file for more information.

Can it work with something other than a Text View?

Potentially. If you can fulfil the (NS/UI)TextViewDelegate contract, and the “text-view” object you pass to the MGWordCounter responds to -string on OS X and -text on iOS, then yes, you can presumably make it work for other controls or even more exotic objects. This hasn’t been tested, however.

Bugs and feature requests

There is absolutely no support offered with this component. You’re on your own! If you want to submit a feature request, please do so via the issue tracker on github (and not via Twitter, email, carrier pigeon, smoke signals or anything else).

MGWordCounter is open source code for developers. If you find a bug, please investigate it. There are many NSLog statements (commented-out) throughout the code, allowing you to selectively inspect its workings. The algorithm used isn’t complex. Find out what’s going wrong, and fix it!

I’ll be glad to receive pull-requests for bug-fixes and enhancements on MGWordCounter’s github repository. Please try not to report bugs without a diagnosis and fix. Similarly, please try not to submit fixes without an accompanying explanation of what you’re fixing, and how. :)

Final notes

To keep up to date with future code releases, amongst many other things, you’d be well advised to:

• Subscribe to my blog at http://mattgemmell.com/
• Follow @mattgemmell on Twitter
• Follow mattgemmell on App.Net

Enjoy the code!

I have a theory on this subject, you won’t be surprised to learn. My theory is that there are two types of people: those who are actively puzzled by the behaviour of others, and those who don’t think about it at all. It doesn’t even occur to this latter group that others might not think the same way as they do. There’s no third group, by the way – and certainly not the mythical category of “people who truly understand the inner world of everyone else”. You only have the two basic categories:

1. Barely enough awareness and empathy to be confused by others.
2. No detectable empathy whatsoever.

Whilst the internet presumably has roughly the same distribution of each group as society at large does, it often seems like group 2 is in the majority. I want to talk a bit about those people, in the context of Twitter – though this stuff applies to any form of social media.

I want to be clear on this: I love social media. I spend a lot of time on Twitter (@mattgemmell) and recently on App.Net too (also mattgemmell). I’ve met many colleagues and new friends online. It’s pretty much my primary news source, too. The vast majority of people on there, as with any subdivision of our species, are decent, easy to get along with, and generally no problem.

But there are exceptions, of course. I’d like to list them, and talk briefly about each type. In the future, I can hopefully point people to this article, and say, yep, you’re dealing with (or are) that one.

Before that, a brief preamble.

What makes you so special?

I have a moderate presence on the internet, part of which you’re currently reading. To quantify that statement, this blog currently gets about a million unique visitors a year, about two million pageviews a year, and around 15,000 feed-pulls per day. I also have more than 20,000 followers on Twitter.

Those aren’t huge numbers, but they’re for a personal blog and personal social media profiles, so: lucky me / humble-brag / etc.

But it’s not luck, of course, because people don’t subscribe to a blog or follow you on Twitter randomly. Instead, they do it because they discovered the blog or person somehow, and liked what they read. Nobody signed them up without their permission; it’s opt-in. That’s what I love about the numbers, even though yours are probably bigger: I did that, with my own output. We all need validation, after all.

Fairly often, I get asked “how did you get so many Twitter followers?” Sometimes, people even ask if I paid to get followers, which apparently is a thing you can do. I didn’t. I assume that if you did, your new followers would be somewhere in the region of 95% easily-detected spambots, instead of Twitter’s usual ambient 30% or so.

There are really two honest answers to how I got my readership, and here they are:

1. I write interesting/amusing things.
2. I give people stuff.

You could add a third answer, in reference to the other two: whilst I certainly manage to offend people semi-regularly, I at least give the impression of mostly being a reasonably OK guy. Most people require that one, or the other two lose their attraction quickly. That’s a sensible state of affairs.

Human psychology isn’t very complex. If you derive benefit from someone, you keep them around; otherwise, they’re probably gone. Simple. As to what exactly I write that’s interesting, well that’s up to you. I’d guess that most people read the blog for its development/technical/design-focused articles. I think most people follow me on Twitter for both that stuff and also pithy/quotable remarks on same, and I know that the things I give people are mostly open source components for iOS and Mac. Sometimes, people have heard me speak at a conference, or read something I’ve written in a magazine too. It’s the same deal. That’s what people get from me. That’s why they hang around. That’s all fine, and to be expected.

There’s an observed effect whereby the more followers you have, the quicker you get new ones, because more people are sharing your stuff with their followers. It stands to reason. That’s what happened (and happens) with me, over the course of the 6 years I’ve had my Twitter account, and the 8 years I’ve been writing here on the blog. There’s no mystery about that.

Over that time, and because of the growing readership, statistically I’ve inevitably encountered some of the aforementioned less desirable types of people online. I will now categorise them for my own amusement (and yours too, if you like).

The Unfollower

If you’re not familiar with Twitter, here’s a brief summary of how it works:

1. You post short messages (tweets) on it. You have a specific name, just like you have a specific email address. You can “mention” other people by including their name in your tweet, and they’ll see it (as will anyone else who follows both of you).
2. If you want to see another person’s messages, you “follow” them. Then their messages show up in your “stream” of messages.
3. Thus, you have a set of people you’re following, and you also have a set of followers (people who are following you). This list doesn’t have to be symmetrical; you’re free not to follow someone who follows you, and likewise a person that you follow doesn’t have to follow you back.

(And yes, “followers” sounds cult-y and egomaniacal. Nobody is really comfortable with the term, but it’s the standard one now.)

There’s some other stuff, but you get the idea. By default, when you sign up, you’re not following anyone. You have to go and follow people explicitly, and you can unfollow anyone at any time. Simple idea.

For some people, though, just unfollowing you isn’t enough – they have to tell you they’re doing it:

I am unfollowing you.

Some people actually say that. They tweet it, making sure to mention my username so that I see it, or they actually email me. I’m not sure whether they think I’ll lament the loss of a follower (um, you’re a person who informs others that they’re unfollowing; I wish you’d never followed me in the first place), or whether they just want to injure me in some way for whatever I did that made them decide to unfollow (no offence, but you’re one person in thousands – I’m going to sleep just fine tonight). It’s bizarre, isn’t it?

Since following (or subscribing) is opt-in and entirely free of charge, I don’t understand why you’d want to actually tell someone you’re unfollowing them. Some people do it in a sort of sleazy way, by mentioning my username but not actually addressing the tweet to me (e.g. “I’m unfollowing @mattgemmell because…”), which seems to fit the personality profile. You can imagine the analogous real-life situation: they say something that offends somebody within earshot, the other person complains, and their response is “I wasn’t talking to you!” Scummy.

Please, if you have an issue with anything at all that I’ve said, keep these things in mind:

1. I almost certainly don’t care. I’m not being flippant or trying to anger you: I just… don’t. I’m already my own editor. I’ve already filtered my writing; if you saw it, it was approved by me for public release. What I mean is that you’re not going to change anything, and definitely not by being the guy who emails to tell me he’s unfollowing. If you tell me what it was that got rid of you, I’m going to do it more.

2. I’d rather you just unfollowed or unsubscribed silently. I don’t need to know about it, and I’m certainly not going to beg you to stay, or apologise for something I said. You’re just wasting time for both of us, and making yourself seem like a worse person. Unfollowing is a single click away; just do it! Click!

I want to be clear on one thing, though: when I say “I don’t care”, I mean it in the way I just explained: that I’m not going to use your opinion to alter what I say in future. I don’t mean that it doesn’t upset me, because truthfully, sometimes it does. Never in a “maybe I was wrong” way; instead, always in a “why is this person I’ve never met being unpleasant to me?” way.

That’s probably what The Unfollower wants, of course, but I can’t help having that reaction occasionally.

The Editor

I sometimes talk about things that are (for some reason; I’m not entirely sure why) seen as controversial, like religion, homophobia, misogyny, gun ownership and so on. I’m against all of those things, by the way. You probably are too, so why are they controversial? Or perhaps you’re in favour of some of them, and you’re now going to unfollow me. But I digress.

When I talk about those topics, I get email or tweets saying things like this:

You should stick to tech topics.

Believe it or not, this one is usually presented as a friendly, constructive, genuine suggestion. If it’s via email, it’s in the part of the email where the person is being reasonable, perhaps agonisingly so. They’re probably feeling magnanimous when writing the paragraph, and smiling to themselves when they re-read it before sending. Good job, champ, they may say to themselves – that was mighty decent of you.

Except that, of course, it’s an outrageously offensive suggestion. It’s offensive for at least two reasons:

1. It’s pretty much “don’t quit your day job”, which is always insulting.

2. You’re requesting self-censorship for my personal Twitter account or blog.

Let me turn the “why don’t you stick to talking about <topic>?” question around: what gives you the right to decide what I want to talk about?

Here’s my position: I’m not publishing a newspaper that you’ve purchased. You walked into my house. I’m OK with you hanging around, but 100% of the rules are made by me, and 100% compliance is absolutely mandatory. You get zero say in my content. There is no Letters Page for your complaint. You can’t ask to talk to my superior, because I’m at the top of the tree – and I’m going to agree with me.

There are circumstances where you get to complain about something that someone has written, to the extent of asking them to not write about that topic again. I can’t think of one right now, but I’m sure such scenarios exist. A free, personal, opt-in, opt-out-at-any-time social media stream is not in that category. It staggers me that anyone would have the audacity to even try, yet it happens. It’s abusive.

I understand that you may think I can benefit from your input, and that my personal tweets or other writings will be all the better for whatever editing you’d advocate. I understand that. If you’re being genuinely constructive, then fire away.

But I’ve got to be honest with you: I think I’m doing just fine without your help, and I plan to continue that way. That’s why you’re reading this.

The Stockholder

A lot of the people who follow me are software developers, and they have a special insight into this particular type of Twitter troll. When you’re a software developer who has released apps, you encounter a type of customer who feels enormous entitlement just because they’ve paid for (or even downloaded) your app. It doesn’t matter if it only cost one dollar; they still get imperious and outraged. It’s a kind of sickness.

But at least they’re customers, however you might define that word. People would never get entitled, say, just because they follow you on Twitter, right? I’ll pause to wipe a tear of either hysterical amusement or desperation from my cheek. Maybe both.

I am disappointed in your tweets.

I get emails saying that sometimes. Not often, but sometimes. From a person who is disappointed in my tweets. Disappointment means that you’re sad because your expectations weren’t met. Some people don’t stop to think that, maybe, their own expectations aren’t the same as what they’re entitled to. They think that those two things are the same. Whatever they expect, they’re entitled to. There’s a whole site of stories about crazy customers like that; it’s called Not Always Right. But read the rest of this article first, because you’ll waste a week there.

These “Stockholder” people actually put on their “upset customer” voice when they tell me why they’re annoyed, or unsubscribing, or whatever. Like I’m going to negotiate, or apologise. Let me make my stance on this clear: you’re not my customer. Firstly, you’re not paying me anything; following me or reading this blog is free.

Secondly, even if you have paid me something in some other capacity, like buying an app or a license for source code, you’re still not my customer here on the blog, or on Twitter. You’re just not. Your entitlements are zero. Your expectations are your own business, and you shouldn’t confuse the two. The outcome is just going to make you unhappy.

The Dehumaniser

This is a tricky one to talk about, because you’re naturally going to think “poor little rich kid”, or whatever. I don’t mean money rich (I’m not), but rather in terms of readership (I’m not even very ‘rich’ in that regard, either, to be honest). It’s possible you’ve encountered this type of person too, of course.

People make this subconscious shift in perception once your follower-count goes over a certain number. I’m not sure what that number actually is, but it’s lower than the number of followers than I have, because the shift has already happened (for those that are susceptible to it).

It’s probably because of our trivial, celebrity-enamoured culture, but whatever the cause, the outcome is the same: people don’t see you as being a regular person anymore. You’re no longer like them, and subject to the same treatment or benefit of the doubt. I think the idea is that you’re now privileged in some way, so you have to pay a corresponding price for it.

Now, I’m not arguing with the privilege part. I am privileged. You’re reading this, for example, maybe even after seeing a link on Twitter. I know that many thousands of others will read it too. If I complain about something publicly, companies tend to get in touch in a hurry, and fix it. I get invited to get up on stages and talk to hundreds of people regularly. I get sent stuff. My name is in a lot of apps. That’s a privileged position, absolutely. I’m really grateful for those things, and as I said before, the validation means a lot to me (that’s probably a weakness of my character).

The lament “but I didn’t ask for any of this!” is a valid one, but you probably don’t care much about that. Like I said: poor little rich kid. Go on Oprah and get it over with, right?

No. Wrong. We’re all still people, no matter what our follower-count may be. There are those amongst us who seem to forget that, and thus feel justified in making hideous remarks, that they would never dream of making in person. It’s a broken psychology.

One of the worst “you’re not a person anymore” remarks I’ve ever had was last month, in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook school shootings in the US. I’m not American (I’m Scottish), but I’m still angry and sad about the tragedy. Who wouldn’t be? I’m fairly liberal politically, and (particularly since I’m from the UK), I’m absolutely against gun ownership. You can think whatever you like about that, but I’d been tweeting about it and retweeting other people’s remarks on the topic. As you do.

I then got an email from a guy who began by informing me that he was unfollowing me; so far, so good – I actually appreciated that he put The Sentence first, rather than making me read through The Judgement to figure out the gist of his argument. Anyway, at one point he said that the reason I was tweeting about the Sandy Hook shooting was:

for the sake of nothing but viral self-marketing.

Let’s recap: the guy said that I was talking about the latest batch of shot-to-death American kids for self-marketing. I’m not even sure what capacity I’d be marketing myself in, on that topic. I provide neither kid-shooting nor kid-protection services. I can’t even vote in the US, and in the UK where I can vote, guns are already illegal.

I can only assume he meant that I was talking about the topic for cynical reasons; to get my tweets favourited or retweeted, in order to expand my vast online empire and readership using the currency of murdered kids. If he reads this article, he’ll no doubt think I’m doing it again. What a horrible person he thinks I am.

Because I don’t get to just talk about the stuff that you’re talking about. I don’t get to do that because, after my follower-count reached a certain number, I became Matt Gemmell Incorporated, and my tweets are now written by my marketing department. Which, of course, is nonsense (if I had a marketing department, they’d probably censor about half my tweets anyway).

Sometimes, people are successful at something, even if it’s something as silly as writing short messages on the internet. In some of those cases, the people even wanted to be successful at that thing. The rest of the time, it was a side-effect rather than a goal. I didn’t put myself up in front of anyone, like a D-list celebrity going on Survivor, or someone auditioning for The X-Factor. I didn’t “ask for it”. I just started a blog, and opened a Twitter account. I don’t even advertise this blog anywhere. I have no Google Adwords account, or anything else like that. Oh, and I was invited to every conference I’ve ever spoken at.

To the Dehumanisers, I’d say this: you’re the one who put me in this position. Sure, it was me who wrote the thing you initially liked – whether it was that article on such-and-such, or that chunk of source code called MGWhatever that you used in your app – but it was you who decided to follow me. Or to subscribe to this blog. Or even just to click the link on Twitter that some of your friends shared. That part was you.

I didn’t bring you here; I just looked out the window and there you were, peering in. I didn’t click the Block button, which is Twitter’s version of getting a restraining order. I was fine with it.

People, please

Every person on Twitter is a person, no matter what their follower count is. If it’s a company account, maybe you’re bound ‘only’ by the rules of politeness, sanity and the law – otherwise, go for it and ask them where the hell your software serial number is, or why your cellphone service is down (that’s one of the best bits about social media these days – rapid, personal customer support from companies clever enough to capitalise on it).

If, however, it’s a personal account, you have no rights at all. Well, maybe two: you can follow, and you can unfollow. That’s it. You don’t get editorial input, and you sure as hell don’t get to make objectively ludicrous and dehumanising accusations like the aforementioned guy did.

On social media, I am not a business. I’m just me, just like you are just you. I’m a guy in his 30s with some grey hairs, a wife, and some thoughts I’d like to share periodically. You can read them if you want, but you need to remember the basic context of our shared humanity. I get nervous before I talk at conferences. I miss my wife when we’re apart. At about 9:30 in the morning, after my first coffee, don’t knock on my door because I’ll be in the bathroom. With my iPhone, of course. Human.

Yes, I do have a business, and it’s your choice if you don’t want to do business with me on account of something I wrote (or because I’m an atheist, or pro-choice, or a feminist, or anti-gun, or because I swear quite a lot). That’s your right, and I wouldn’t take it from you. I’d perhaps advise you to reflect on the fact that you made a decision on that basis, but I can’t force you to do that.

In a personal capacity, though, let’s have a bit of humanity. Tone down the entitlement, and the editing, and the hurt-you-back “I’m unfollowing”. It’s unnecessary, and it only reflects poorly on you.

I’m @mattgemmell on Twitter. If you’re already following me, that’s where you’ll find the unfollow button, too.