Sunday, June 26, 2011
Illogical Songs
My attempt to live according to the lyrics of obscure songs has hit something of a logical hiccup. On the one hand I'm told that "Nothing that's worth having comes without a fight", and on the other that "Nothing that's forced can ever be right, if it doesn't come naturally leave it". Oh, what's a boy to do?
Saturday, June 04, 2011
Josephine Hart
The news of the death of Josephine Hart was a blast of cold air on an otherwise beautifully warm English summer Friday afternoon. The announcement came in a company-wide e-mail — Lady Saatchi being the wife of one of our founders — popping up in my inbox incongruously alongside the mammoth, on-going "where shall we go for drinks after work?" exchange.
I never met Josephine — we were once, briefly, in the same room: our little glass-walled meeting room on the 3rd floor: I ran in, jabbed a key on a laptop to make it behave itself, then ran out again; she was on the phone in the corner the entire time — but I had hoped to. I'm sure no-one will mind me mentioning that we were in the early stages of planning an app based on her West End Poetry Hour. I had badgered everyone I could find to be allowed to work on it, and was looking forward to the experience. (I secretly hoped to impress by suggesting the app be entitled "These Fragments". I also hoped to be able to argue her into including "The Fire Sermon" in place of "A Game of Chess". She would doubtless have been able to see instantly through my paper-thin knowledge of modernist poetry.)
The article on her passing on the BBC website ends with her quoting a quote by Yeats. The full quote runs, "Art is a social act of a solitary man". I had never heard this before, but I think it perfectly captures the dichotomy present in the process of creation.
I never met Josephine — we were once, briefly, in the same room: our little glass-walled meeting room on the 3rd floor: I ran in, jabbed a key on a laptop to make it behave itself, then ran out again; she was on the phone in the corner the entire time — but I had hoped to. I'm sure no-one will mind me mentioning that we were in the early stages of planning an app based on her West End Poetry Hour. I had badgered everyone I could find to be allowed to work on it, and was looking forward to the experience. (I secretly hoped to impress by suggesting the app be entitled "These Fragments". I also hoped to be able to argue her into including "The Fire Sermon" in place of "A Game of Chess". She would doubtless have been able to see instantly through my paper-thin knowledge of modernist poetry.)
The article on her passing on the BBC website ends with her quoting a quote by Yeats. The full quote runs, "Art is a social act of a solitary man". I had never heard this before, but I think it perfectly captures the dichotomy present in the process of creation.
Sure, Deadlines Suck, But…
My first thought on reading Marcus Zarra's post — and Jeff LaMarche's follow up — on the iOS development community's response to the release of The Daily app was to Tweet "Whoa. So The Daily app was basically written by the iOS dev equivalent of The Travelling Wilburys?". My next, well...
I am a salaried iOS developer working for a reasonably big-name company. (I won't name them here, but if you're really interested in who they are — perhaps you'd like to take a shot at getting me fired — you can find out with only a couple of clicks. And if I write the post I'm planning for later today, you probably won't even need to do that.) I have worked on apps for some fairly well-known brands and personalities. I'm not sure there's one of them I'm totally happy with — which couldn't have been much better if only I'd been given more time to polish, or if certain design decisions hadn't been made. I'm going to be attending a couple of iOS dev conferences later in the year and I really hope there's some kind of amnesty scheme in place because otherwise I'm likely to get a well-deserved slapping from the likes of Matt Gemmell or Mike Lee. So I can understand where Marcus is coming from — I imagine what he had to put up with was an order or two of magnitude worse. But...
This is the bit I have to qualify by saying that I've never used The Daily app. It isn't available in the UK and I don't have a US iTunes account. But I read the same press coverage as everyone else, where people whose opinion I respect mentioned that there were certain flaws with the app. I also read that most of these were fixed in later updates. Great.
The iOS-slash-Mac developer community is, as Marcus observes, a wonderful thing. It's most of the reason I got involved in the first place. (It wasn't until the iPhone came along that it was actually possible for me to turn this into a full-time job.) It is a community of craftsmen, each more than happy to share trade secrets with their peers. But what it has never been — and it's possible that I'm accusing Marcus of having rose-tininted specs here — is some kind of uncritical, mutual appreciation society. There has always been criticism. Bad design and bad implementation has always been called out. If the only notable difference your app offers over its dozen competitors is that its window smokes while it's working, you will be openly ridiculed.
If there were problems with The Daily app, falling standards of politeness within the community shouldn't be blamed for attention being drawn to them. The buck always stops with the developer. So instead of complaining, admit things could have gone better. Maybe explain a little about the kinds of pressure you were under to deliver — those of us who are in the same boat will nod along in understanding, while those who get to work without deadlines and idiot management can feel glad they're not in your shoes. And then knuckle down to making the 1.1 as best you can, given the same constraints of time and resources.
I am a salaried iOS developer working for a reasonably big-name company. (I won't name them here, but if you're really interested in who they are — perhaps you'd like to take a shot at getting me fired — you can find out with only a couple of clicks. And if I write the post I'm planning for later today, you probably won't even need to do that.) I have worked on apps for some fairly well-known brands and personalities. I'm not sure there's one of them I'm totally happy with — which couldn't have been much better if only I'd been given more time to polish, or if certain design decisions hadn't been made. I'm going to be attending a couple of iOS dev conferences later in the year and I really hope there's some kind of amnesty scheme in place because otherwise I'm likely to get a well-deserved slapping from the likes of Matt Gemmell or Mike Lee. So I can understand where Marcus is coming from — I imagine what he had to put up with was an order or two of magnitude worse. But...
This is the bit I have to qualify by saying that I've never used The Daily app. It isn't available in the UK and I don't have a US iTunes account. But I read the same press coverage as everyone else, where people whose opinion I respect mentioned that there were certain flaws with the app. I also read that most of these were fixed in later updates. Great.
The iOS-slash-Mac developer community is, as Marcus observes, a wonderful thing. It's most of the reason I got involved in the first place. (It wasn't until the iPhone came along that it was actually possible for me to turn this into a full-time job.) It is a community of craftsmen, each more than happy to share trade secrets with their peers. But what it has never been — and it's possible that I'm accusing Marcus of having rose-tininted specs here — is some kind of uncritical, mutual appreciation society. There has always been criticism. Bad design and bad implementation has always been called out. If the only notable difference your app offers over its dozen competitors is that its window smokes while it's working, you will be openly ridiculed.
If there were problems with The Daily app, falling standards of politeness within the community shouldn't be blamed for attention being drawn to them. The buck always stops with the developer. So instead of complaining, admit things could have gone better. Maybe explain a little about the kinds of pressure you were under to deliver — those of us who are in the same boat will nod along in understanding, while those who get to work without deadlines and idiot management can feel glad they're not in your shoes. And then knuckle down to making the 1.1 as best you can, given the same constraints of time and resources.
Wednesday, June 01, 2011
"Poems from a Notebook [#328]"
This is a quick (at least by my sluggish standards) attempt to write something with a golden era feel to it. I think I got close — I nailed the paper-thin characterisations, anyway. I've had the idea rattling around for a while, but it was pushed to the fore by my trip to the Out of this World exhibition at the weekend. Well, it was either this or work out how quickly an iPhone 4 could calculate the nine billion names of god. An hour on Wikipedia gave me a selection of names and terms to throw into the mix, so from a distance it might look like I know what I'm talking about.
And in case you were wondering about the "[#328]" — well, under the Many World interpretation, this is just one of a near-inifinite number of ways in which this story could have unfolded. I considered at least a half dozen other causes of the narrator's pathology before choosing this one. Maybe I'll come back one day and — in a Warhol-esque manner — write up and publish some of the others. Who knows, one of them may even be worth reading.
And in case you were wondering about the "[#328]" — well, under the Many World interpretation, this is just one of a near-inifinite number of ways in which this story could have unfolded. I considered at least a half dozen other causes of the narrator's pathology before choosing this one. Maybe I'll come back one day and — in a Warhol-esque manner — write up and publish some of the others. Who knows, one of them may even be worth reading.
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