Contemporaries

  • Japan
  • Iran
  • Ghana (Probably)
  • South Korea (Possibly)

Teams that will end the world cup with the same points total as England.

How very, very far we have fallen.

Suarez Bite

The BBC reports

Uruguay's Luis Suarez was involved in a controversial World Cup incident as he appeared to bite Italy's Giorgio Chiellini during their Group D clash. The Liverpool striker, 27, lunged at Chiellini in the penalty area just before Diego Godin's Uruguay winner.

The allegation is yet to be proved but the evidence appears pretty damning. 

image.jpg

If it is true, this would be the third time that Suarez has assaulted another player through biting them on the pitch with previous incidents at Ajax and Chelsea already on record. 

Can you imagine any other profession; say a lawyer, or a software developer, or a university professor, where an individual was seen as one of the top performers in the world but colleagues just had to 'deal with' the fact that every so often he bit one of them when he got too excited about doing his job.

The individual would be in prison and, if they had done it three times, they be struck off permanently and cast out of their job. 

Football needs to demonstrate that it has some standards and as far as Suarez is concerned, it should be three strikes and you are out. 

For good.

When to use the Oxford Comma

A fascinating article on the correct use of the Oxford Comma by Walt Hickey, via Jim Dalrymple.

We asked respondents which sentence was, in their opinion, more grammatically correct: “It’s important for a person to be honest, kind and loyal.” Or: “It’s important for a person to be honest, kind, and loyal.” The latter has an Oxford comma, the former none.

The result was pretty much down the middle, with pro-Oxford partisans commanding 57 percent of the vote and opponents to the tyranny of the extra comma grabbing 43 percent. Although those numbers might be enough to defeat Eric Cantor, it’s hardly a clear victory for the Oxfordians.

This traditionally has been another situation where the issue has been hi-jacked by binary pedants. My way is better than your way.

I think we should step back a bit and remember why we invented the written word. It was invented to facilitate communication, effectively as a medium to convey spoken word in the absence of the orator. This means you should use that additional comma to convey the spirit and feeling of sentence when it is appropriate and omit it when the sentence would be delivered in more clipped fashion or when wanting to deliver less emphasis.

Example one - When to omit the comma:

I had fish, chips and peas for lunch.

Example two - When to use the Oxford Comma:

Juliet was ravishing. She had the looks, the presence, and the demeanour to capture your heart in an instant.

Not difficult. Everyone comply immediately please. I will be checking with diligence, tenacity, and relentless focus.

London Rain

At the end of a long day, gazing out of the window with a glass of wine and wonder - as to the stories that are unfolding under each and every rooftop. 

 

 

 

Don't go to College

Marco Arment choosing to clarify his earlier advocation to be an academic slacker:

My philosophy about being a C student and not needing to do 80% of the work should also be taken lightly. That strategy works well if you want to follow a path like mine after college: working for small companies that care less about your GPA.

I was a C student because I was (and am) a slacker and lacked the self-discipline to do better, not because it’s the smartest path to take. Performing better opens more doors.

What Marco is too modest to say, but never the less is the truth, is that you can only afford to be a bit of a slacker if you are actually uber smart and naturally super talented. 

If this is true about you then the good news is that you can be a bit of a slacker but the bad news is people won't like you for it.

Evernote, iPads and MacBooks

I have travelled a lot from the pencil note hideout in the rural heart of England on business this week. 2 days in London, 3 in Bath and 1 in Madrid (indeed I am typing this on the flight home from Spain above a beautiful, turquoise, North Atlantic sea).

I have just noticed, on reflection, that I have done all this week's journeys equipped only with my iPad Air, rather than my usual iPad & 13 inch retina combo.

I sort of didn't notice that I had sub-consciously omitted the laptop but I think, in hindsight, there are two reasons:

  1. I have been attending board meetings with literally 1,000's of pages of papers and if there is one use case that the iPad is infinitely better than a laptop - it is as acting as the technological replacement of what would have previously been a spiral bound 500 page book of papers. Waltzing through London Heathrow and Madrid airports this morning, at the crack of dawn, with nothing more than an iPad Air, a pencil and a super thin Moleskine notebook, all in a perfectly thin leather case, was truly living the dream of the future compared to the old workflow of dragging a wheeled legal case with 20 kgs of paper in it. It used to be the case that if, as this week, I was going from one meeting to the next, without returning to my office, the paper was almost too heavy to carry. Reading all those pages on an iPad is in a different league compared to doing the same on a laptop.
  2. The previous underlying iOS flaw that made me always reach for my laptop on leaving the office for more than a day was the inability to have an accessible, local copy of files and emails available when I need it. It's Sod's law that the 'when' in that previous sentence is when I'm on a plane or on a train or in a foreign country or just even inside a big office with no network access. Thinking about it, one app has single handedly ameliorated this issue recently and that application is Evernote.

Many have bemoaned the lack of local storage in iOS mail so I will resist the urge to climb onboard that particular soap box but I have personally lost count of the times when I think - 'Oh yes, I need to reference that document that I sent / somebody sent me, last week / last month' only to find it is nothing more than an icon in iOS mail, tantalisingly unreachable and unavailable, causing me to reach for my laptop, where the sent items folder would have a real copy I could use.

It wasn't just mail. In my paperless world, I had experimented with Dropbox and Transporter in a quest to have a nested folder solution which gave me access to items I had filed but to no avail. Even with network access, neither Dropbox nor Transporter iOS clients could give me practical, speedy access to find the document I was seeking with the same ease that a swift spotlight & quick look search can on the laptop.

3 months ago I started using Evernote. Within a few hours of putting it on my Mac and iOS devices, I was quite giddy with its potential - I signed up to a premium account the same day. For context, Dropbox took me a year.

It's taken a few months of getting everything in but now it is settling down, my 'iOS can't get the document' failure rate is diminishing, almost to zero.

When I get round to it, I do intend to write up in detail some of the Evernote workflows I have developed but here's a few in brief summary:

  • I try and work down to inbox zero every day putting everything into the relevant Evernote notebook with a dated reminder for future action as necessary. if I need that email later, it's really easy to find using the iOS Evernote app.
  • ..Particularly, as you can set Evernote to keep specific notebooks synced locally by device. If I am taking my iPad to to a specific meeting, I can switch those books onto full sync and I know I will have offline access.
  • Using Keyboard Maestro, when I triage my mail on a mac, I have a hotkey that triggers a macro to file the e-mail and attachment in the right Evernote notebook, delete that e-mail message and move the focus to next message in the inbox (much easier than my many applescript attempts that never quite worked with some attachments). I find I can whiz through e-mails, super speedy, without that, 'should I delete it', moment of procrastination.
  • If I'm triaging mail on my phone or iPad then I have iOS keyboard short cuts set up so that with a couple of keystrokes I can do the same thing.
  • In all meetings I take hand written notes onto paper, then immediately photo them in the EN iOS app straight into the relevant notebook, time stamped and geo tagged automatically.
  • All receipts get photo'd and binned as soon as I get them, placed into the expenses notebook and tagged with type and assignment.
  • I have a 'Read later' notebook and anything that I don't have time to consume in the moment goes into that for attention later - 'instapaper' style.

Indeed, that last item. On getting off the plane in London tonight there was a 20 minute immigration queue which I spent using my phone to clear my read later book. What strikes me as I write the list above is that a number of those steps are actually easier to do on my iOS device than my laptop.

I'll never be that guy. The guy that says an iPad Air and ultra thin keyboard can replace the laptop but Evernote really has moved the needle for me as to the times a laptop is required and, interestingly, has done it subtly without me really noticing. I never want to have to train myself to use an iOS device instead on a laptop. I only want to do it when it's easier for me.

With all the new stuff of iOS8 coming down the track, that mystical 12 inch retina Mac Book Air that I'll order on the day it's released, just might not get out as much as I thought it would a few weeks ago.

Pure Blood

In part 1 of John Gruber's Epic, Only Apple he adroitly illustrates the point I was trying to land with my observations about iCloud Drive.

Gruber exploring the question 'Is Apple really the only company that can make operating systems, devices, and services, all work together in harmony?':

Here’s a tweet I wrote during the keynote, 20 minutes before Cook’s wrap-up:

Microsoft: one OS for all devices. Apple: one continuous experience across all devices.

That tweet was massively popular, but I missed a word: across all Apple devices. Microsoft and Google are the ones who are more similarly focused. Microsoft wants you to run Windows on all your devices, from phones to tablets to PCs. Google wants you signed into Google services on all your devices, from phones to tablets to PCs.

Apple wants you to buy iPhones, iPads, and Macs. And if you don’t, you’re out in the cold.

In a nutshell, Apple is the only company with the approach of - 'We exercise judgement to ensure that our playground is better than the others you can use but, if you want to play in our playground - you'll be playing with our stuff.'

I agree with John when he says (of operating systems, devices, and services, all working together in harmony):

I think it’s inarguable that they’re the only company that is doing it

It's also inarguable that Apple is the only company that making decent choices to curate the user experience, choices that sometimes defy popular commercial logic on revenue generation.

For example, when I worked in CE, I was always dismayed by the correlation between the amount of crapware that could be put on a machine and the revenue generated. You'd expect customers to know better and reject the shabby experience but they didn't. Indeed one well known retailer took revenue from manufactures to put crapware on laptops sold in their stores and then charged customers a service fee to remove it at point of purchase. The underlying justification being that this was the only way to make a return on product otherwise sold at zero or negative margin.

So, thank God that Jobs was famous for a single minded prejudice that when it came to what customers should experience - he knew best. And there continues to be an arrogance about Apple that it makes choices to curate and shape our experience. Choices that wouldn't always make it through a focus group or the test of popular opinion or short term commercial PnL tests.

Indeed, one of the outputs from WWDC that has fired people up is a renewed confirmation that the necessary confidence and arrogance to continue this approach still exists, after a few doubts had surfaced following the leadership change.

One attribute of this multifaceted curation is Apple's prejudice toward keeping everyone inside their eco system. If you are not of Apple's pure blood linage then you can't come into the playground or, if you do, you need to stay in your closely guarded sandbox. Sometimes this is for very good reason (I trust the contacts security on my iOS devices) but sometimes, it feels like dogma or worse - monopolistic behaviour.

For my part, I don't subscribe to the cynical conspiracy theory that Apple is step by step, executing a grand plan that makes them the Buy n Large of the tech world. Instead, I think that they can be occasionally guilty of believing their own propaganda and by chucking rocks at them from time to time when they get a bit too heavy on the 'pure blood' stuff - I think it helps keep them honest.

The best of Matt Gemmell →

This is an occasionally-updated list of what I think are the best articles I’ve written for this blog. The list isn’t based on popularity (though there’s a reasonable correlation), and instead reflects my own view of when I think I managed to make a point well, or express myself effectively.

All of Matt's writing is good. So the best...

iCloud Drive almost as good as iDisk

Viticci on iCloud drive:

With iCloud Drive, document sharing, a new document picker, and storage providers from third-party services, Apple is betting on a solution that combines aspects of traditional document organization with a more versatile sandboxing model designed for security and collaboration. It’s too early to tell whether the company may have finally solved inter-app document management on iOS, but – just like extensions – developers are excited, and I’m optimistic.

This is a major step forward from where we are in iOS and I can, sort of, understand why some are getting excited about this (Dropbox killer!) but there are some restrictions and limitations to the iCloud drive service:

As I mentioned above, the document picker will be the only way for users to access documents outside of an app’s container and developers will have to set the scope of their app containers to public. Furthermore, apps that decide to access a document from external app containers won’t simply bypass the sandbox to access the file: rather, apps will store a reference to the file, which will include a security-scoped URL that grants access to the file. The concept of security-scoped URLs isn’t new, as it’s the same technology that Apple uses on OS X to give apps access to files outside their sandbox across relaunches and system restarts.

..or in other words you won't be able to just drag an Excel file from one folder another and rename it - like a grown up.

On reading the excitement, I can't help but reflect on iDisk the service I used to buy from Apple as part of the .Mac package. As Wikipedia reminds us:

iDisk was a file hosting service offered by Apple to all MobileMe members that enabled them to store their digital photos, films and personal files on-line so they could be accessed remotely. With a standard subscription, MobileMe users received a 20 GB iDisk.

iDisk integrated with Mac OS X, appearing as a network drive. Mac OS X v10.3 through v10.6 could cache updates to an iDisk volume while off-line and synchronize updates later. Any WebDAV client could also access an iDisk volume.

Whilst many reported problems with mobile me, my iDisk kept all my key files in sync between multiple Macs and it even had an iOS client. When Apple binned the service in 2012, I was forced to run into the arms of Dropbox. Given the faultless service provided by Dropbox since then, I'm less keen to jilt them and run back into the arms of iCloud Drive. Partly through loyalty to Dropbox who saved my bacon when iDisk was arbitrarily scrapped and partly through the feeling I have of iCloud Drive still being designed to make life frictionless if you live totally in the Apple Eco system and a bit difficult if you don't.

Vile Bodies

In the years following the First World War a new generation emerges, wistful and vulnerable beneath the glitter. The Bright Young Things of 'twenties Mayfair, with their paradoxical mix of innocence and sophistication, exercise their inventive minds and vile bodies in every kind of capricious escapade. In a quest for treasure, a favourite party occupation, a vivid assortment of characters hunt fast and furiously for ever greater sensations and the fulfilment of unconscious desires.

Digital Journalism's challenges

Robert Peston, BBC Economics Editor and one of the most senior and respected journalists in the UK gave a lecture on the challenges facing journalists in a digital age which, despite its' length, is compelling reading:

All the growth in news readership is on the internet, on mobiles, on tablets. And an important cultural fact about those whose entire careers have been in digital, and have never had inky fingers, is that they don’t seem to have a fundamentalist’s hatred of news being infected by adverts and commerce.

...Now I don’t want to overstate the dangers, but what I would say is that we saw – with the phone-hacking scandal – how prone we are as an industry to cut corners in a hideous way when we face an existential threat, or indeed when there is money to be made. And to reiterate, what I see around the news media scene is the rise of a generation of managers schooled only in the etiquette of the internet, where the idea that editorial staff should be quarantined from marketing and advertising is seen as absurd.

...What I would conclude by saying is that we don’t yet have what you might call a stable ecosystem in news. The poll-tax funded BBC is one kind of news-media model. The loss-making Guardian, funded by vast private-equity capital gains, is another. The Daily Mail another still. And Quartz, Huffington Post and BuzzFeed something different again. There is diversity – which all ecologists would tell you is vital to long-term survival. But there is also pollution, from a dangerous elision between news that pays and news that matters. I am not confident that the Wheelers and Snows of this world aren’t an increasingly endangered species.

The lecture poses more questions than it provides solutions but it does adroitly summarise the concerns felt by many over the editorial independence of major sources of news.

I certainly don't have the answers, I guess no-one does yet. But, I suspect that ten years from now we will be more trusting of independent non 'monetised' sources of journalism than the traditional brands that we look to today.

How those independents will have the resources to do such investigation and reporting is the challenge - Nevertheless,  I'm naively optimistic. For all the challenges that digital age brings, it completely re-defines the resource model in a way that 'traditional' journalists can occasionally fail to conceptualise. One good local man or woman on the ground with a $50 phone can sometimes achieve more than $100,000 foreign correspondent did in the days of portable typewriters and phoning in the copy.  The prose won't be of Wheeler quality and the pictures might be a bit blurred but over time our new independents will co-operate, band together and form new networks and channels that citizen's social graphs will encourage them to trust.

In fact, I think in many places, this is already happening.

 

CIA (Social) Network

The CIA:

Whilst many have got a bit hot under the collar about this, I can't help but question - What's the point? We are not likely to see tweets saying - "Well done to our boys in (insert name of developing nation) for a good result last night." And, if we a see a toot along the lines of - "It wasn't us - honest", It's not going to carry a lot of weight.

The CIA needs a twitter account like a fish needs a bicycle.

Dr. Drang on design

Dr. Drang on how design is more than skin deep.

As an engineer, I can’t forget that design is how it works. When I was in college, I took seven design courses: steel design, advanced steel design, reinforced concrete design, advanced reinforced concrete design, prestressed concrete design, timber design, and a “capstone” design course that was intended to pull together what I learned in all the others. Now, when I need to analyze a structure or a piece of equipment, I ask for the design drawings. In my world, design is what engineers do to make things work.

Thoughtful.

Apple's Swift

Tim Steven's post - Apple's Swift explained is the best I have seen in terms of putting the new programming language Swift into context.

The biggest announcement for developers by far was Swift, a wholly new programming language intended to not only make writing those apps much easier, but also faster and more stable, while creating results that perform better in the end. Basically, it's promising to be all things to all coders. Is that possible?

That remains to be seen, but from what I saw today, it looks like it has potential. Join me as I break down what Swift is and what it means. Trust me, I'm a developer -- or at least I used to be.

I wonder how many people on hearing of Swift will vow to themselves - "I never really nailed Objective C, but, I'm really going to master Swift."

It's quite cool that the playing field gets levelled from time to time.

 

Ben Brooks' WWDC summary

Ben Brooks was one of the first out of the gate with his WWDC summary

I don’t typically do WWDC keynote wrap ups, but this wasn’t a typical WWDC keynote. You can find all the details of what was and wasn’t elsewhere, what I want to talk about is the things they announced which appear to be immediate game changers

It's a great summary, with almost every point spot on. There is one error and one omission.

When Ben eulogises iCloud drive:

This is effectively Dropbox, with far better integration in Apple products. You can’t beat this — you won’t beat it. And it’s on Windows. People like to dog on iCloud, but I’ve been using it seriously since it came out and I’ve yet to encounter any major issue — or even minor issues.

If Apple can scale iCloud Drive there will be no stopping it — and I really believe that.

This misses a key remaining downside - the inability to be able to save non-Apple files, which means iCloud drive is not 'effectively Dropbox'. Far from it. Without being able to save Word docs, Excel files etc. iCloud drive remains an addition to your file system rather than replacement for it. The file picker is a massive addition to iOS but it's still a walled garden with too much fruit on the wrong side of the wall.

The omission from Ben's list, which I think could be bigger than anything else in the keynote is the ability to add voice to messages. More than half the time I send a text or iMessage, I'm in a time compromised situation when I don't have the time or ability to type out a convoluted message, such as driving a car or rushing for a train. I can easily see most of my iMessages becoming short voice messages.

This will be huge and could be a game changer in the evolution of messaging.

War is over

Street banner on a festival bookshop

Over the past couple of weeks I have seen a few things that have got me thinking about analog and digital and why that statement often becomes analog verses digital with people taking sides in a fairly hardened fashion.

Poster in Hay book shop window

At the Hay book festival it's easy to see why book shop owners have an entrenched (but ultimately misplaced) hatred of e-books given the existential threat they pose to their livelihoods but the wider attitude of, 'books are good, technology is evil', that pervaded the event surprised me.

With the exception of a few eccentrics most of the authors probably wrote their books on PC's, researched their articles on the web, sold tickets for their show by e-commerce but still many of them struck or supported a terribly snobbish tone akin to - 'Books are for the intellectual elite whilst technology  is for the uncouth and uncultured'

The inference in many conversations was, if you really loved books, I mean really loved them, then you had to have a disdain for modern technology - The two things were virtually mutually exclusive.

This rather one-eyed approach though is not the exclusive property of the book lovers. When Casey Liss casually mentioned on two podcasts, ATP and IRL Talk that he thought vinyl records sounded better than digital audio. The approbation of the digital community rained down. Many technophiles took to their blogs and twitter to post comprehensive rejections covering every attribute (Dynamics, frequency response, imaging etc.)

In terms of dynamics, vinyl is terrible and often our songs needed fairly drastic compression (the audio kind) and limiting to fit into what is acceptable for vinyl.

Not only does vinyl have a narrower frequency response, but that response curve changes based on side length and how to the center of the record the needle is.

Vinyl sucks. I can't think of any axis it wins on

The argument quickly became a binary, scientific, evidential one - with Casey ultimately having to almost publicly apologise for daring to believe that he preferred analog to digital when listening to music.

I find this as equally puzzling as the Kindle haters - Many got so wrapped up in the science that they missed the point. Music is an art not a science. I will always prefer to read my well thumbed, orange jacketed, Graham Greene novels to any e-book copy. The e-book copy will be more faithful to the authors original text (my old copy has got a couple of pages missing and a red wine stain that makes a paragraph illegible) but the romance, the tactile feel, the old book smell, the memory of reading this book in cafe in Berlin before the wall came down, makes the overall sensory pleasure of reading the book infinitely superior to reading the text on my iPad. If Casey Liss, or anyone, feels the same way about music then so be it. End of. 

I posted a couple of years ago about how wandering through the web reminds me of the excitement and inspiration of wandering through the art of London.

..we would wander. Wander without destination or without a plan. We’d set off on the south bank of the river, walking and talking and we would see where the city took us. Maybe to the Jazz of the Barbican, maybe to the second hand books of the South Bank centre.

I get it more now in another place and that’s when I’m wandering through the almost infinite halls, corridors and possibilities of the web. I love having the time to lazily click from place to place, looking for the new, the innovative, the cool, the challenging, the inspiration. 

I feel more strongly than ever that the digital and analog worlds don't just compliment each other but they enable each other. Both are so much stronger for the existence of each other.

I feel privileged to live in a time when both exist. I want to fill my day with both. I don't want to have to take sides or choose.

I want to write in pencil in my battered black note book but then file a picture of it in Evernote. I want to keep building my library of Penguin classics but I'll probably find them on the web. I want to consume more books than I would have time to read by listening to them in spare minutes on my iPhone.

Next time you feel your position hardening in an analog v.s digital debate or arts v.s technology  -  stop for a second and remind yourself - you can have both. You don't have to choose. It doesn't have to be a battle.

Browsing Booths book shop

p.s. Casey was right. Vinyl does sound better than digital.