I've been an Apple fanboi since back when the company was doomed. Up until the mid-90s I'd been an Atari fanboi. You can guess how big a fanboi I was by the fact it took until the mid-90s for me to finally accept that the platform was dead and that it was time to jump ship. I bet I was one of the very few people to ever own a Falcon030. While I started playing around with programming on the BBC and Spectrum, it was on the ST that I really cut my coding teeth. When I got my first Mac — a PowerMac 8200/100, since you ask — I also got Code Warrior. I made some half-hearted attempts at learning the Toolbox, but somehow it wasn't quite the same — maybe what was missing was that magic which came from knocking around at the assembly level with a single, well-known hardware platform. It wasn't until several years later and Xcode under OS X on an iBook that I really got back into programming, and then what drove me wasn't so much the technology as the community.
"Style over substance" — or something with similar connotations — has been the default insult levelled at the Mac since the beginning. Variations of it were used time and again by detractors to describe the applications available for OS X, especially during the rise of the Delicious Generation. The Mac couldn't host anything like the extensive software catalogue of Windows — especially in wake of the platform's abandonment by most of the big name companies which had previously supported it — but what it did have was a number of well-made applications from numerous small independent developers. Indie developers were craftsmen, and this was reflected in the thought, the time and effort, which went into producing their products. This was the community I wanted to join.
I never did, of course. Time and circumstance conspired against me. The challenges involved in first creating, and then marketing, a product seemed too great, and I shied away from them. And then the iPhone was released. At first, the connection between this amazing new product and the Indie community didn't exist, but eventually the SDK was released and the App Store opened — and the independent developers who had supported the Mac for all these years were there at the front of the queue.
Despite the many stories of small developers striking it rich over night, I never really imagined that I'd be able to produce a smash hit app. I knew that to do it properly I would need to work with others who would fill the gaps where my skills were lacking. The couple of apps I made were to back up my claims of being a proper grown-up developer. I made a few false starts at finding collaborators online (to my eternal shame, I managed to mess a couple of people about, as well as getting messed about — and royally screwed-over — myself), but eventually I gave in and went for one of the many suddenly flourishing iPhone developer jobs.
(I have to thank Steve Jobs, not only for creating tools which I want to use above all others available, but — most of all — for creating the environment where people will actually pay me to use them. It was almost impossible to get a job as an Objective-C programmer in the UK before the iPhone, but now — even today, a couple of years on — there is still a growing demand.)
I had hoped to join a team where I'd be part of the creative process, joining in the back-and-forth and contributing. In the main this has happened. I've worked with some excellent creative people, and — since being subsumed into the world of advertising — some excellent Creatives, but I can't shake the feeling that I've always been the junior member, there on sufferance, tolerated for their technical knowledge but otherwise to be seen but not heard. In short, that I wasn't creative like those others involved in the design process. (One colleague would constantly make comments along the lines of "…even people, like you, who aren't creative…" — they cut me every time.) Sure, I didn't have any formal creative training, but then I didn't have any formal programming training, either.
I guess that there's a broader question here: Is programming a creative endeavour? Certainly it's creative in that it is the means by which an end product is created. But how much creativity goes into that process? I realised a long time ago that as far as my creative colleagues are concerned, the answer is none — that all I do is basically typing maths. (In a particularly grim low moment I changed my job description on the office intranet to read "Typist".) I'd argue against this. While programming is ultimately a form of engineering (although this is mostly an American affectation, nerds who sit in chairs all days wanting to be classed with the guys who get to wear hardhats and build bridges), that doesn't mean that it is rigid and inflexible. The skill — the craft — comes from choosing the best, most elegant solution to the problem at hand. If not an artist, I am, at least, an artisan.
I got into a minor Twitter tiff with superstar designer Sarah Parmeter at Update Conf. As part of her presentation she told a story about talking to developer friends about what the iPhone could and couldn't do in terms of sending SMS messages, and suggested as one of her top tips that designers should find out about device capabilities. I expressed surprise on the back channel that any designer should need to be told this. But, looking back, I shouldn't have been surprised at all. Too many people involved in the design of apps seem to see discovering the abilities — and, more importantly, limitations — of the devices they're designing for as some kind of check on their creative freedom. (To be fair, at the moment this seems to be more prevalent among the ranks of mangers who now seem to be charged with designing apps — wire framing, as if this were some unimportant step in the design process — than with any of the actual big-"d" Designers I work with.) This strikes me as being akin to a sculptor not being interested in discovering the various contrasting properties of marble, brass and wood. And it casts the developer, who has to step in and say no, this can't be done, in the role of killjoy naysayer.
(And we now reach the point where clients are unwilling to pay for app design time, so could we put everything that their web designers need to know about designing for apps down in an email, thanks very much…)
Anyway. Sorry. Another unfocused rant. Tomorrow I hand in my notice. After than I contract for a while. And after that — if the comfort of contracting money and the fear of failure don't get the better of me, which there's a very good chance they will — I'll start up a development shop of my own. Maybe I'll be able to convince some of my Creative friends to come and join me. But I have some strong ideas of my own about app design, and I'm not sure how palatable they'll find them.
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