It’s interesting to see how this issue develops in two communities Im involved in, technology and music.

SoundCloud has grown in the last couple of years from a fairly niche site of home-grown music to become one of the go-to places for new sounds, both underground and commercial. The other got-to place to hear new music is of course YouTube, a site famous for its quality of commenter.

SoundCloud has a really neat commenting system: they can be attached to a moment during the uploaded recording, so that the commenter can make a comment about a specific moment in the music. SoundCloud also has a really nifty view for each recording: a representation of the waveform. The result looks like this:

Now, I may be jumping the gun here, but we’ve found that the vast majority of comments are positive. You get a few that are thinly-veiled adverts for someone’s own SoundCloud page, but the amount you could actually put in the trolling category is really small. In fact, when a comment is negative, its often actually constructive, maybe about an aspect of the sound that could be better. That’s not to say negative comments don’t exist, but on the whole, there are fewer than you might expect.

It might be that all our music is just great, of course. Don’t take my word for it, here’s the link to the latest ‘hot’ tracks on SoundCloud, and below are a couple I chose at random: just hover over a view of those comments, and you’ll see what I mean: positive comments drown out the negative!

Around 18 months ago, SoundCloud was hit really hard with spam. Fake accounts were being created in droves, and spam comments were numbering tens each day. They quickly got onto it though, and the problem has mostly gone away now.

The SoundCloud community is a fantastic one, a brilliant example of how a grassroots community can grow up, supporting its members along the way. Maybe it’s just testament to this community that the commenting system hasn’t gone the way of so many others. Is it that the music community, as opposed to the tech community, is just better behaved? More positive? Less bitchy? I’m not sure they are attributes we’d all apply to musicians. Maybe though, the difference is that almost everyone at SoundCloud is there to create something new, and this is something everyone has in common. As the community grows (and it is growing increasingly quickly), will these qualities remain, I’m not sure. For now though, I’m happy to be a part of a community like this. And the tech community could learn a lot.

Keychain Sync

On one of your Macs:

mv ~/Library/Keychains ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/

ln -s ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/Keychains ~/Library/Keychains

Then on each of the other Macs:

mv ~/Library/Keychains ~/Desktop

ln -s ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/Keychains ~/Library/Keychains

iDisk / Dropbox

You can of course use this trick to create yourself  a little iDisk/Dropbox too:

On one of your Macs:

mkdir ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/iDisk

ln -s ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/iDisk ~/iDisk

Then on each of the other Macs:

ln -s ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/iDisk ~/iDisk

Warning: This isn't actually going to merge multiple changes to your keychain – the latest one modified will prevail – and so if for some reason you deleted it from one Mac (or signed out of iCloud), it would also go on the others. The behaviour is also uncertain if two copies changed simultaneously. 

Caveat: Don’t blame me if this doesn’t work / you lose all of your data / this breaks the ToS for your iCloud account.

Don’t worry, it’ll be fine as long as we don’t poke it too hard.

Here’s why:

See? How irritating was that? there are other forms too, and we need an answer to why it’s used and why it should stop.

My answer?

There it is again. My answer is to address the reasons it is being used, and why it should stop.

Here’s why:

It’s like a grammatical construct specifically for putting an air of self-importance into your writing:

“I have seen the problem, yes, and there is no need to bother yourselves with all the various, so-called ‘sides’ to the debate, I have the answer, and I’m going to state it right now, right here, in a simple way for you simple people to understand. Here it is, here’s the answer…”

I can see why it has become popular, in fact I’m concerned that if I read back through my blog I might have done it myself. It’s an incredibly easy way to do two things. Firstly, it gives your argument a cohesive structure. State a problem, state that you’re going to provide an answer, and then state that answer. It’s like Powerpoint Presentation 101, in written form. As an aside for anyone who doesn’t know, saying what you’re about to talk about, talking about it, then saying what you talked about is a great way to bore your audience. Anyway, back to the case in point. So it gives you structure, but secondly, it also gives you a false sense of logical reasoning. It’s a structure that implies your answer is in fact the answer, and not just one possible answer, that is following the question. It implies a simplicity that may or may not be valid.

In speech, it gives the politician a method of rephrasing the question put to them in a way that matches the answer they want to give, and it gives them time to construct it that answer. What is even more interesting is that often, after stating very clearly that an answer or solution is about to come from their lips, the resulting statement will in fact not be a cohesive answer or solution at all. Whilst the first of these – the time to construct a reply – may be forgivable, the second is not, and yet it works because of the feeling of authority the construct gives, a sleight of hand with the tongue that slips opinion past as fact.

The difficulty and irony of discussing a writing technique that could be described as arrogant without sounding, well, arrogant, is not lost on me, but I see no other way. And of course, coming up with a solution to this problem could sound even more arrogant.

My solution?

I wouldn’t dare suggest such a thing…

The [scrolling] inversion seems inspired by iOS, wherein flicking up a page will cause it to scroll down (take out your iPhone and try it, if you don’t believe us).

It’s certainly the case that the inversion of scrolling is a confusion at first, but surely this is the most convoluted and confused way of picturing scrolling on an iPhone there has ever been?

The popular analogy here is a piece of paper laid out on a desk — in order to see more text on the top, you push it down, rather than up, with your fingers.

I thought the popular analogy was: if you want to move the content up, you move it up.

While in the Finder, for example, swiping three fingers from left to right brings up the Dashboard

No: while on the left-most space, swiping three fingers from left to right brings up the Dashboard, since the Dashboard sits to the left of your desktop spaces.

The Spotlight magnifying glass in the upper right hand corner now extends beyond system search, adding top results from the web, Wikipedia, and dictionary results to the list.

Umm, it did three-quarters of this in Snow Leopard already.

…the ability to navigate back and forth between websites by flicking the trackpad with two fingers, not unlike the single-finger swipe that works with mobile Safari.

Very unlike mobile Safari, since it doesn’t have that feature.

And there was me thinking that I’ve only been using this new OS for 20 minutes, I don’t really know enough to comment. I’ll leave that to the professionals.

If you’d like a real review of Lion, I’d suggest you go to head to John Siracusa’s over at Ars Technica. And put a pot of coffee on.

At the end of it all though, I still felt nonplussed (ahem), but for a different reason, well reasons. I thought that what I wanted from circles was intersections, Venn diagram views, circle-sharing and so on, but in fact what I want is so much simpler. I want to be able to search and filter as an information consumer, and I want to be able to share publicly or privately when being an information publisher.

As a consumer, circles are the wrong way around. One of the big changes to publishing in a post-internet world is that the barrier to publishing has gone, and so instead we use filtering after publishing to control the flow of data that reaches us. Circles force us to think about who we want to push our data to, as well as who we want to receive data from. Whilst that may be clever on paper, to me this is combining two paradigms, which for many (for me, at least) is just too much like hard work. Publishers used to do much of the filtering for us, so we could select an outlet and trust the information would be, for the most part, the sort of information we wanted. Then we got used to doing it ourselves, setting up our filters so that, for the most part, the got the information we wanted. One method at a time acts like a funnel, combining both acts like an information dam.

As a publisher, why so complex? When I post something on the internet, whether it’s a message or a photo or a video or a piece of music or an article, I want to do one of two things. That’s right: two. Either I’m publicly publishing, which means that I want as many people as possible to see what it is I’m publishing, or I’m communicating, which means that I want a small, select group of people to see whatever it is i’m sharing with them. In the first case, I’m putting something out there in the public domain for consumption, where I don’t want to restrict it’s readership: I want the reverse, I want the biggest audience I can find. In the second case, I’m communicating, privately, with one person, or a small select group. The communication is for their eyes only, and of course those people will know that. These people don’t need telling not to ‘reshare’ what I’ve just sent to them: be it a personal message to my girlfriend, some photos to my parents, a business idea to a couple of close colleagues. In the former case though, publishing, of course I don’t want to restrict others viewing or sharing. If I did, I wouldn’t publish it.

To do these two things, I need two choices: publish (to the world) or communicate (to a group, maybe of one). That’s it. And this can be done by having a blog and an email account. Or, just a Twitter account. Sure, there’s room for improvement: email was never designed for threaded conversations: Twitter is often too restrictive. And there are certainly cases where being able to grow the group of people in a communication after it has started would be useful (it makes less sense to try and shrink the group). But circles are just far too complicated for my needs. Maybe I’m in the minority, that most people want to finely control exactly who can access each bit of data they put out there, but for me it’s not complicated. It’s either public, or its private: that’s it. Everything after that is filtering.

Speed

It’s no secret that the 3GS only just about copes with iOS 4. I certainly couldn’t go back to version 3, but I do miss the snappiness that my phone had back then. Version 5 is pushing the ageing hardware even more, and this beta is just balancing on the usability line, occasionally falling off into a pit of hanging crashiness. Since there aren’t really any new features that should really tax the hardware that iOS 4 didn’t (apart from perhaps Notification Center) I’m going to put the rest down to this being an early beta, and that the bugs (and debugging code I assume is in there) are both to blame. If they’re not, and the final release of iOS 5 on the 3GS is the same speed as this beta, it will be debatable whether this update is for all 3GS users.

Mail

I can flag mail! I can mark it as unread! And here’s the best bit: weirdly formatted messages with tiny fonts and stupid forced line lengths get reformatted! No longer will I actually have to ignore someone’s emails (there’s a handful of people I know send mail like this – what is it that does it: Outlook, Blackberrys?)  just because of the chore of sideways scrolling that was necessary to read their unholyl rich-text musings.

And also: on the train with horrendous 3G coverage, mail was failing to send. The status bar at the bottom detailed these unsent messages until they successfully wooshed off, with an extra little vibrate too! Good, good.

Twitter

If you use Twitter, you’ll love the integration. if you don’t, I doubt it’s going to bother you. It would be nice if the tweet menu items get hidden if you don’t install the Twitter client (I haven’t test this but it would make sense).

I took a photo, and tweeted it straight from the camera app without switching to Twitter: it uploaded it using Twitter’s new photo sharing service. I located myself on the map on a train to Manchester, and direct from there tweeted my location. It’s not rocket science, but all good, and not switching apps is always a boon on older hardware, as this is where some of the biggest slow-downs can occur.

Maps

If you’re in the UK, you’ll have no doubt spotted the option to plan a journey by public transport, only to be disappointed that it never seems to find anything. Now it does! Now it finds ridiculous journeys for you that you’d never use! Baby steps though. And I’ve just bought the LJP app anyway.

Notifications

A better notification system was needed the moment push notifications were introduced and turned out to be A Really Good Thing. Even if you only call and text, the updated home screen view is a big improvement, and after that day out when you return to your phone that you left at home, you have a much more structured list of tiresome tasks to complete.

Camera

You can now use the shutter button to increase the ringer volume on your phone. Finally.

Widgets

Ok, so no-one at Apple has admitted it yet, but see Weather and Stocks in Notification Center? they’re widgets they are, and there’s no getting away from it: there’s gonna be a whole set of apps asking if they can put a widget up there in six months time.

And a good thing too. I just wish I could get rid of the damned Stocks one: not even deleting every stock I track has removed it yet, it stubbornly stays, empty, acting like a massive ‘go to Yahoo!’ button.

Music

A subtle change here: no longer will you find an iPod app on your phone, instead you’ll find the much more sensibly-named Music app. At the moment Apple get a new word accepted by the common tongue then they distance themselves from it like a self-conscience teenager huffing at his uncool dad who’s trying to use the word ‘brap’ in conversation.

UI

Not much going on here really, although maybe I’m being unobservant. The switch control (UISwitch) has gone from rectangular to round (steady on, Apple). Oh, and in iTunes on the Mac, the volume control has been updated a bit to be more metallic and shiny.

Summary

There’s a few biggies here that in another 24 hours I’ll wonder how I ever did without (NC, Twitter, Mail flagging) and there’s a big bunch of tiny things that have been fixed or improved that will keep me happy for weeks to come. The one big downside is the speed issue, but this is beta 1, and this is a two year old phone, filled to capacity (32GB of apps and data, I make Mail access 5 accounts totalling 7GB of data, 2 years of text messages…). It would be interesting to see if these sorts of things rally affect performance, I doubt they do very much (apart maybe for the SMS messages), I suspect that the beta-ness, the debug and the interaction between applications that really affects speed. This will be the main thing I’ll be watching as we move through the beta versions, but I suspect my advice for any 3GS owners wondering whether to upgrade when the time comes will be a hearty ‘yes’.

Addendum

You can argue the pros and cons of pushing a new OS to all your users ad infinitum, including where you draw the line (there were iPhone 1 owners upset they couldn’t have iOS 4, iPhone 3G owners upset they had to have iOS4…). Indeed the entire area of upgrade cycles of both hardware and software, and support for those systems, is very difficult to get right – I personally think Apple are actually very good at treading the middle path on this one (and yes, I’ve been on the losing side sometimes). WIth iOS 5 though, Apple have introduced delta upgrades to the OS, which means they can have much more control of how far they push new features to older hardware, which should help to soften the edge of the ever approaching upgrade cliff.

I certainly don’t expect everyone to love the device – indeed, it is imperfect in a number of ways – but not ‘getting it’ whilst 15 million people worldwide do ‘get it’ comes across to me as simply out-of-touch with technology and what drives it forward.

First off, I can’t imagine the next iPad to be much different, hardware-wise. It simply doesn’t need to be. Apart from one omission, a front-facing camera, iPad basically has all the features it needed. Hardware features, anyway.

• RAM. More RAM would certainly be a boon; at the moment Safari is very aggressive with its cache-emptying, to the point where switching between a handful of sites can be a pain as each reloads when you nip back to it. And the new multitasking has shown up more clearly the moments when paging delays the appearance of the next app. So yes, RAM would be nice, if not a necessity, as advances in the OS demand it.
• Power. Sure, everyone loves a faster processor, right? Well, the only times I can honestly say I’ve waited for my iPad are app switching, a faster processor may help this a little, but not as much as more RAM. And if a faster processor affects the battery life adversely, then it would be backward step.
• Battery life. It lasts for days! Literally. A journey to London and back, working on the train, playing and reading over the weekend, and it’s down to 50%. And in some ways it’s not surprsing; teardowns show the iPad is basically a big battery with a screen on the front. As batteries get more efficient, then great, we’ll get more life out of something the same size and weight. But until that happens, there’s no need to make device bigger or heavier.
• Front-facing camera. Of course. It’s been a glaring omision since day one. And when it gets one, iPad will suddenly be the replacement for a whole many more liveing room PCs.
• Back-facing camera. Who wants one of these? Seriously? Why does every new device have to also be a camera? Bar Augmented Reality apps, I can’t think of a single time I’d want to actually use my iPad to take a snapshot. AV is a cool concept, sure, but is anyone still using an AV app on their iPhone? I’m not convinced its a good enough reason to stick a second camera on the iPad. Apple have for the most part been about simplicity in design, and their products generally do one thing well. I’d love to see them break the mould and not put two cameras on it.
• Retina display. This is the area that seems to have caught out the early predictors, and I can see it being where we might see a difference between a 1.5G and a true 2G model. The exact resolution needed to be ‘retina’ is up for debate, but it’s true that the definition by Apple is not just pixels-per-inch, but takes into account viewing distance, which means that it wouldn’t have to be quite the crazily high DPI of the iPhone 4. The current iPad doesn’t quite do 720p (at a 16:9 aspect ratio, anyway) and so that is the obvious chalk mark for a new screen.
• Thinner, lighter, smaller. The current iPad is actually pretty chunky, it’s only Ive’s excellent design skills that keep it looking as svelte as it does. Having said that, I wouldn’t want to sacrifice that wonderful battery life. If iPad was a serious contender as an eBook Reader then I’d say it needs to lose some weight, but I don’t think it is, so it’s not so important. I know a 3 year old who can play “Need For Speed” for quite some time without his arms getting tired. Does it need to be smaller? In my opinion, no. The border is necessary until Apple add a way in iOS to disable touch events in the outside inch of the screen (and get rid of the home button). And if they did that, they might as well make the screen bigger, not the device smaller.
• Home Button. The current (developer-only) beta version of iOS introduces gestures that could mean the home button is soon surplus to requirements. As it is, the home button is mostly a pain; it’s always in the wrong place, and its a slower mechanism for switching applications than the gestures. The home button going, along with the toggling touch border, would be great improvements.

So it the hardware doesn’t really need a big update, does that mean the iPad doesn’t need any updates? Not at all, but the biggest changes I think iPad needs, and I want, will come from the software.

Last year, Jobs announced the next version of OS X, Lion, and explained how many features have been inspired by what the company has learnt from developing iPad (and by inference, iOS). This makes sense, and it also makes sense to think in the other direction; having used the first iPad, it becomes clear what features of OS X need to migrate back down to iOS.

• User accounts. If this never happens, it’s because of a short-sighted (and greedy) business decision. You cannot, of course, blame a corporation for being greedy; they are essentially the definition of it, but it may well turn out to be a poor business decision. People want to get an iPad to share, or ‘for the house’, and at the moment the lack of user accounts mean this isn’t viable. I’m sure that Apple simply see the device as a personal device, and want everyone to buy one each. But if another company roll out multi-user tablets first, they could well lose out. The alternative of course, is to keep driving the cost down.
• Keyboard. A number row. On the keyboard. That is all.
• App switching. The new gestures allowing app switching without the home button are a much faster way to work. They still need some work, but once they are polished then working on iPad will feel a lot more efficient.
• Notifications. An updated notification and messaging system (messaging as in application-messaging) has been need for a long time in iOS, and rumours are that it’s around the corner (although I’ve yet to see it rolled out to developers). Unified notifications of mail, tweets, messages, reminders and so on will be a big step forward; it’s the only place where currently iOS lags behind the other mobile OS offerings.
• Full screen mode. Introducing a ‘full-screen’ mode, and a ‘bordered’ mode to iOS would mean it could eventually lose its border, currently necessary to hold the device without indadvertedly pressing something. Once this is implemented, and implemented well, the hardware could then change to reflect the enhancement.

So, what have we learnt? Personally, I’m not very excited by the new iPad hardware coming in April. Its likely to be a teeny bit nicer in every way, but no hame changer. The hardware due in September? That might be more interesting. But what really excites be at the moment, is what we can expect from iOS 5.

I think that Andrew Marr was staring at a pile of shit on the ground and exclaiming to the world how horses are good-for-nothing.

Online articles have evolved, like horses: the majesty of one cannot be separated from its propensity to spew a steady stream of effluent from its bottom. Like our four-hoofed friends, regardless of the quality of the article, the likelihood of it leaving a trail of steaming shit in its wake is very high, indeed inevitable. Unlike horses (at least I think, I’m at the edge of my equine knowledge here), the sheer volume of nag’s apples left soiling the road may well increase with the quality of the article. I think the analogy is at the end of its useful life at this point, and we must retire it to the knackers yard, but the message remains: there’s a distinction between producing an interesting piece of writing and sharing it with the world, and anonymously spewing your bile all over someone elses. Stephen Fry put this phenomenon into words very eloquently: “the lower half of web pages is very like the lower half of the body — full of all kinds of noxious evil smelling poison”.

Sure, there are going to be blogs that hate as much as the commenters usually do, and there are certainly some perfectly reasonable comments being made on blogs, but these are exceptional case. And aren’t there ‘professional’ publications that make the majority of their profits through hating anyway?

Let’s not throw out the horse with the shit, if you know what I mean.