Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

Telegraph Turns to Fiction for Inspiration in iPhone Piece

Okay, Telegraph. We know what it’s like. The hotly-anticipated launch of what just about every­one now accepts will be the iPhone 4G (or at least, the 4^th iter­a­tion under another name) is just around the corner, and the blogs and rumour sites have pretty much got the situ­ation sewn up. You need to write some­thing to show that you’re rel­ev­ant and in touch with the shiny tech that your read­ers’ kids (or grandkids) so des­per­ately want. But what new insight can you bring to the table? What excit­ing new facts can you breath­lessly pass on to your audience?

Well, none, as it turns out — as the Telegraph’s impress­ively titled Matt Warman (Consumer Technology Editor — please ladies, don’t push) ably demon­strates in this piece from yesterday’s online edi­tion. Entitled “10 reas­ons not to buy Apple’s new iPhone 4G,” the art­icle is (to bor­row from its equally heavy-handed sub­title) a tri­umph of mis­in­formed opin­ion and con­fused, con­tra­dict­ory dross. Apparently the best strategy for writ­ing on sub­jects where you have no new inform­a­tion is to make wild, unsub­stan­ti­ated claims and use lots of weasel words.

Full dis­clos­ure: I’m a full-time Mac user (hav­ing con­ver­ted about two years ago) and bought the iPhone 3G when it came out. I also intend to buy the new iPhone when it’s released, hav­ing failed to be swayed by Mr Warman’s com­pel­ling brand of fic­tion. I have a func­tion­ing brain, and while I’ll hap­pily enter­tain any valid cri­ti­cism of Apple or its products, I do tend to draw the line at stuff that some grumpy hack has just made up.

The art­icle as a whole reads like an impetu­ous rail­ing against Apple users in gen­eral, with the author’s no doubt noble inten­tions for inform­at­ive dis­course giv­ing way to the sad, embittered swipes of someone con­vinced he’s been denied mem­ber­ship of the cool club. But he can’t make up his mind as to how per­vas­ive the iPhone gang really is, as the open­ing paragraph’s “so ubi­quit­ous it’s not even cool any more” gives way to the “self-important minor­ity” halfway in. Warman presents his ten reas­ons, of which nine can be clearly said to be com­pletely false. Read the art­icle for the full text of each of his points.

1. “It’s expens­ive”: Blackberry and Android hand­sets are appar­ently “a lot less” than Apple’s “extor­tion­ate prices,” and appar­ently the only thing respons­ible for that dis­tinc­tion is the Apple name attached to the iPhone. Unfortunately Warman doesn’t provide any num­bers to back this up, pre­sum­ably because it’s a com­plete exag­ger­a­tion. He writes, “If the iPhone weren’t made by Apple, net­works would have had to start giv­ing it away on £30 a month tar­iffs years ago.” Funnily enough, I just checked the Orange web­site, and you can get an 8GB iPhone 3G for free on a £30/month tar­iff. What a coincidence.

2. “It’s anti-technology”: Warman takes the idea that Apple can be seen to some­times lag behind com­pet­it­ors with cer­tain new fea­tures, and runs with it — pro­du­cing the notion that some­how this is a con­cer­ted effort to sup­press tech­no­lo­gical advance­ment. Apple does some­times lag behind, clearly, but when they’re sure a new fea­ture won’t com­prom­ise the user exper­i­ence, it gets intro­duced (see: teth­er­ing, copy and paste, MMS, push noti­fic­a­tion). If Apple don’t think they can do it right, they don’t do it at all (see: still pho­to­graphy on the new iPod Nano). That’s not “anti-technology”, that’s prag­mat­ism. As Gordon Ramsay might say, there’s no point serving a pile of shit.

3. “No Flash”: Apparently the iPhone “can’t show you most of [the web]” because it doesn’t sup­port Flash. I’m a heavy web user, and I’m strug­gling to think of a single occa­sion in recent memory where I haven’t been able to do some­thing on my iPhone due to lack of Flash sup­port. A poorly thought-out res­taur­ant web­site, per­haps, with a menu in Flash and no altern­at­ive. That’s just as much a prob­lem for desktop users without Flash installed, and hardly rep­res­ent­at­ive of “most of the web”. Whether you think the iPhone should sup­port Flash or not, this “most of the web” notion is pretty laughable.

4. “No mul­ti­task­ing”: Looks like someone hasn’t read the pre­view mater­ial for iPhone OS 4.0, where mul­ti­task­ing sup­port will be intro­duced. Feel free to harp on about how long it’s taken for this fea­ture to be made avail­able, but remem­ber this is sup­posed to be an art­icle about why you shouldn’t buy the new iPhone, which will sup­port mul­ti­task­ing. Whoops.

5. “Its bat­tery life is ter­rible”: This hasn’t been true since the ori­ginal iPhone. I’m using a tired old 3G, and I can use it heav­ily for most of the work­ing day and still have 40–50% bat­tery remain­ing when I get home. The 3GS is bet­ter, and no doubt the new model will improve on that too. People need to get used to the idea of daily char­ging, because you can’t pack this much tech into this space and not have demand­ing power con­sump­tion. This is true of any com­par­able smart­phone. The days of week-long Nokia bat­tery life are in the past, I’m afraid — get used to it.

Christ, are we only halfway through?

6. “Developing apps for it is cost­ing you money”: Apparently time spent on devel­op­ing applic­a­tions for the “self-important minor­ity” of iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad users is wasted. Actually, not just wasted — as a non-iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad user you’re actu­ally pay­ing more for ser­vices that sup­port the Apple plat­form, appar­ently. Those minor­ity 50 mil­lion iPhone users, 25 mil­lion iPod Touch users and 2 mil­lion iPad users are such a drain (num­bers source: recent Apple key­notes; vari­ous). What utter tosh.

7. “It comes with offens­ively bad head­phones”: This is the most agree­able of the ten points — the head­phones are def­in­itely not great. However: a lot of people don’t care, and who the hell buys a smart­phone for its head­phones any­way? The iPod head­phones are just as bad, and that hasn’t held the iPod back from becom­ing the world’s most per­vas­ive MP3 player. Was this the best Warman could offer in terms of groun­ded, informed cri­tique? It seems so.

8. “It’s not very well designed”: Read the art­icle for the full fla­vour of this point. Suffice to say, if Mr Warman knew any­thing about product design, he wouldn’t be writ­ing drivel for the Telegraph. Coming from him, the unsub­stan­ti­ated “not very well designed” doesn’t really hold much water. Next.

9. “It charges for sat­nav:” Since when was a smart­phone sup­posed to be a replace­ment for your TomTom? Key points: there are sev­eral very afford­able nav­ig­a­tion apps avail­able (there may well be free ones — I haven’t researched this much); Google may well intro­duce their own offer­ing very soon; the free nav­ig­a­tion offered on Nokia and Android is pretty piss­poor. The built-in map­ping on iPhone is great for all uses apart from driv­ing, unless you have a pas­sen­ger to work the device for you, in which case it’s fine. This is not a valid cri­ti­cism and cer­tainly not a key determ­in­ant in pur­chas­ing the new iPhone.

10. “Those iPod docks are hold­ing back bet­ter tech­no­lo­gies”: A gem to fin­ish on — pre­sum­ably Mr Warman had a bad exper­i­ence with not being able to plug in his Creative Zen at the Travelodge. I’m yet to see any of these “bet­ter tech­no­lo­gies” that should appar­ently be sup­plant­ing the Dock Connector. Hotels, cars, hifi man­u­fac­tur­ers all sup­port the Dock Connector because of the pop­ular­ity of the iPod. Quite why this should be included on a list of reas­ons not to buy the new iPhone, I don’t know. Yes, don’t buy it because you won’t be able to plug it in any­where, because everyone’s sup­port­ing the vile Dock Connector — oh wait. Ignore me.

This is unfor­tu­nately just the latest in a long line of linkbait-style tech­no­logy art­icles appear­ing in main­stream media. Apparently drum­ming up a bit of con­tro­versy with largely fic­tional, irrel­ev­ant non­sense is just as fruit­ful as writ­ing prop­erly researched, insight­ful mater­ial. At least it is if you work at the Telegraph. Please, people, let’s leave the tech­no­logy writ­ing to the folks who actu­ally know what the hell they’re talk­ing about. Standard dis­claimer: I don’t count myself among that num­ber. I’m just glad I didn’t buy the paper and thereby inad­vert­ently pay money to read this bollocks.

The Happy Coder

How did you fin­ish work yesterday?

I was in a roof garden in cent­ral London, sip­ping cham­pagne under the early even­ing sun with the rest of my office, because we delivered a major pro­ject on time, on spec and on budget.

The day before — Sunday — we worked from 2pm to 1am to square away the last few bugs and last-minute fea­ture requests, and instead of abandon­ing us to get on with it, my bosses were there with us, shar­ing the load and provid­ing advice and encouragement.

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MySQL Troubleshooting Tip of the Day

One of our EC2–hos­ted data­base serv­ers had to be rebooted last night, and when it came back up some of our database-driven sites were work­ing, oth­ers weren’t. Upon fur­ther invest­ig­a­tion I found the fol­low­ing mes­sage crop­ping up in mongrel_rails and phpMy­Ad­min logs:

Error No. 1033 Incorrect inform­a­tion in file: ‘<filename>’

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Notes on the New Design

For the curi­ous few: a smat­ter­ing of detail on what went into this new theme.

For one reason or another I decided that I wanted to cre­ate a theme that emu­lated a news­pa­per lay­out (a small one, gran­ted). That called for a colum­nar lay­out — not the most straight­for­ward thing to achieve in HTML. Support does exist in CSS3, but it’s not per­vas­ive enough for me to be com­pletely com­fort­able using it, and I didn’t feel con­vinced it would give me the con­trol I wanted. I ended up with a cus­tom solu­tion that works well for mul­tiple posts but struggles a bit when dis­trib­ut­ing a single post across mul­tiple columns — I’d like to think it copes in most situ­ations, however.

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Flying Moses, what the devil’s going on?

Ahem, yes. So I got a bit car­ried away on a train the other day and decided to do a com­plete redesign of the good old blog. As always, it’s been ter­ribly neg­lected of late, so I decided to change things up once again in an attempt to zap a bit of life into my blog­ging activ­it­ies as a whole.

There are a quite a few changes, as you’ll no doubt observe, but the main shift is to a format that favours shorter, more punchy posts — hope­fully delivered at more fre­quent inter­vals — presen­ted in such as way as to encour­age bite-size, con­veni­ent con­sump­tion. I’ll be try­ing to post more often while writ­ing less; hope­fully less waffle and more hil­ar­ity. Oh yes.

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ASP.NET Sucks Huge Balls, And I Hate It

Now that I’ve got your attention…

Full dis­clos­ure: I make my liv­ing as a PHP pro­gram­mer. So I can cough to the tri­bal bias right off the bat. I’m also a big fan of Open Source. That aside, I’ve had the mis­for­tune to have worked briefly on ASP.NET pro­jects in the past, and am cur­rently con­tract­ing for a com­pany — a PHP shop — whose own super-fine PHP-based web­site is being redeveloped extern­ally for polit­ical reas­ons, by a sis­ter com­pany versed only in ASP.NET. We’re about to take cus­tody of that site as it if were our own spawn; need­less to say the fire­works have already begun in earn­est. So here’s my take on some of the prob­lems with ASP.NET.

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