Apple; you make amazing computers. Your hardware is sturdy and reliable, and when it’s not reliable you have great customer services to back it up. Your operating system is Unix-compliant, attractive, relatively stable and easy to use. Your phones are well-made and have a pretty decent OS, which is improving at an acceptable rate. You as an entity are the only weak link in the chain. You are the overbearing mother of the technology world; you refuse to ever let your products truly go to their new owners.

Without the indie software scene, OSX would be nothing. Sadly, some parts of the OS are so frustratingly closed that some things become almost prohibitive. The software you build and sell is fit for purpose (on-par with industry in some cases, below in most), but not nearly adequately varied to rival Windows or Linux.

When you released your phone, it was like the popular girl in school – looked so good in every way, but forced to spend more than 10 minutes with it and you wanted to smash it against a rock. Then came the App Store, and things were good for a while. You still, however, refused to let go control and some trivial things became impossible. This prompted an incredibly talented and generous group of people to start hacking the device so that people were free to use it as they wished. This was, after all, their right (regardless of terms and licensing – you part with outrageous amounts of cash, the right is yours!). You struggled for a while, but now you seem to have given up, which is nice. Thanks.

All of this meandering leads me to the crux of my point. You might be able to pull the wool over some people’s eyes regarding Flash on your devices, but you don’t fool me. I hope your hypocrisy left a horrible taste in your mouth when you wrote your letter to Adobe. If you think that any piece of Mac hardware or software is open, you must be kidding yourself as well as everyone else. How dare you preach openness whilst you supply us with phones and iPods that you can’t even change the fucking battery in?! How dare you preach openness when I have to run the risk of rendering my phone useless just so I can install software I want on it?! How fucking dare you preach openness when you actively and vocally restrict Flash from being installed in any capacity on a device that I own?!

And another thing; HTML5 may well be relatively open compared to Flash, but if I want to use HTML5 video, I guess I’ll be needing the H.264 codec (at time of writing). That famously open source codec. What’s that? It’s not open source? So Firefox (truly open) will never be able to support it? Sounds great.

Before you preach openness, maybe you should do some research into what that actually is! Give your devices to your customers and let them do what they wish. If I want to deplete my battery in 10 minutes using Flash and all my simultaneous processes, that’s my prerogative. If I want to consequently complain, you’ve got leverage to tell me where to get off! Honestly, sometimes your smug sense of superiority makes me hate you and everyone who makes excuses for you.

I hope I’ve made my point.

Onto you now, Adobe. This will be shorter.

Hey, Adobe. I see you’re getting all upset because Apple won’t let Flash run on their mobile devices. That’s pretty annoying for everyone involved. Whilst I disagree with their methods, I am totally with their justification. If you can’t even write a Flash plugin for a device with 2.66Ghz Dual Core processor, 4GB RAM and 512MB graphics memory without resorting to slowdown, memory hunger and frequent crashing, then you shouldn’t be writing plugins for devices with a fraction of that power. Seriously, Flash is the number one reason I scream at my laptop every day, and I’m almost certain that there’s plenty you can do about it. I wonder why you don’t.

I heard that Apple also now ban apps from being distributed using their nice, open App Store if they’ve been compiled using IDEs you wrote. Man, that sounds just like something they’d do, but have you ever actually used one of the apps compiled with your IDE? As a technical exercise to prove it’s possible, you’ve nailed it. Go you. But try using one. My God, it borders on harrowing it’s so terrible.

Your problem is really quite similar to Apple’s when you think about it. You give developers all of these great tools that can theoretically do amazing things, then you totally screw them by making a horrendous platform for their use. This subsequently screws their users, too, because people just don’t want to use apps that frustrate them. I’m now at the stage where I close any website that looks like it’s full-Flash. It’s that bad.

In case I haven’t made it apparent what might help you – make Flash better. Make it not crash browsers and eat memory and slow computers down all the time. I know it’s not as simple as that, but if anyone can do it it’s you. Seriously, no-one else could because, well, they’re not allowed!

And now, to my avid reader. There you have it; Apple and Adobe are just as bad as each other. So bad, in fact, that it’s created a convenient little blind-spot to badness that both of them can live in until the mighty Google comes along and sells the world to aliens after America accidentally signed it over to them without reading small print.

If you really care about open, buy an Android phone. Wait, that’s Google. Buy a Palm. Wait, that’d be a pointless waste of your time. Uhh. Sell all your stuff and go live in the woods with hippies and the squirrels so that none of this inane shit really even matters any more.

As a (relatively) normal person, I don’t see why games companies have these events. I mean sure, a great willy-wave is fitting every now and again (especially when you’re knocking out an awesome game soon) but you’re making it impossible for reviewers to effectively communicate to their audience. You’re subsequently breaking the review process and cheapening your release!

I, therefore, propose that if a company has a game to review they send a copy to the reviewer and have them review it in the way they would normally play a video game (if you’re from Hawaii, and you usually play on a beach with hula girls and piña coladas, lucky you! (nationalist stereotyping aside)). Using this method removes peer and corporate pressure, as well as the temptation to be greedy from the review process. If you’re a reviewer, either pay for your own ticket and disclose that even though this could’ve been a subsidised event, you’ve integrity. Your review will serve your audience much better!

Thanks.

Look what just landed on my doormat. Right now I’d sooner be sodomised with a baseball bat than vote for Alan Whitehead.

I, and many others like myself (it would seem), am tired of this, but I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t think there’s anything I can do about it. I could not vote, but a lack of vote doesn’t count against everyone, so that’s useless. I could vote for a minor party, but that’s just as useless. If something so whimsical as Rage Against the Machine getting to number one at Christmas can be achieved through the internet, maybe something as important as the party running our country can be organised, too. I’m not talking about something radical or game-changing, just everyone who’s pissed at the government voting for the underdog (whoever that may be). I don’t want to see someone else go “I hate the DE Bill, but what are you going to do?!”. Vote for the fucking Pirate Party – they’re the only ones who seem to care about what I care about anyway – freedom of action.

With that pretty hefty disclaimer out of the way, unfortunately, your appearance says a lot about you. Stuff like your hair style, clothes, piercings, tattoos are all things you choose and even if you don’t care what they’re saying, they still speak volumes about the sort of person you are.

Now, take the worst fucking hair style in the world; the faux-hawk. This hair style says you like the thought of being a little alternative, but don’t have the balls to take a razor to your head. Not only is it obvious that you’re just a guy with normal hair, but it’s also obvious that you just combed it up to a point and gelled it into oblivion. This is not committing to an image choice, it’s tentatively suggesting that you might like Biffy Clyro’s new stuff, or you heard the Arctic Monkeys when they were only on myspace. Like it or not, the way you look cements a first impression, and “fuck, that guy looks weird!” is a much more positive response to your existence than “fuck, that guy would be pretty hardcore if he had some balls!”.

If I know you, and you have a faux-hawk, I’ve always hated it about you and wished you had a better hair style. We will never be best friends. That’s almost definitely ok with you, but I’m offended by your lack of spine every time I have to look at you. You might not think I look great, but that’s ok; you’ve got a faux-hawk.

I was linked to a quote on twitter by someone way higher profile than me, and it appears to have sparked a bit of a debate, so I’ll weigh in.

Honestly, I’m shocked that in 2010 I’m still coming across ‘web designers’ who can’t code their own designs. No excuse.

I 100% wholeheartedly agree with this. How can you possibly design for the web if you don’t understand the limitations of the platform? Sure, you can draw a picture of a website, but will it work? If you’re lucky. Not EVERYTHING you can draw is easy or even sensible to interpret to a website layout, so you’re really limiting yourself or risking a substantial backlash if your design process isn’t influenced by a knowledge of CSS, browser inconsistencies and all of the cool little things web browsers can and can’t do.

I have to work with quite a few people who are “web designers” but don’t know HTML and it’s the most frustrating thing. It’s so clear when you’re working with a design of someone who doesn’t know the platform.

A couple of responses were to do with top chefs not working in their own restaurants or product designers not making the products they design. That has missed the point entirely (which is odd, because the source of one of those comments is incredibly well-respected) – chefs CAN cook, and could do it beautifully if they wanted/needed to. Product designers MUST know about the production process of the product they’re designing – you couldn’t just sit down and design a car or an aeroplane without knowing about production, materials and the thousands, probably millions of things you need to know about the product and production process.

So, from now on, if I work with you in your design capacity and you don’t know HTML or CSS, you’re not a web designer, you’re a website picture drawer.

Imagine this, Americans, if you will. You work every day of your life. It sucks. Instead of paying your HMO payments every month, you pay a smaller amount to a government-mediated healthcare agency. Now, imagine that you’ve been paying this “national insurance” your whole life. You’ve never used it. You’re retired. You live on a state pension and your savings. You’re in a car accident and break your leg. Your government doesn’t try to weasel out of paying up for your treatment. EVERYONE pays for EVERYONE else’s healthcare. When you’re ill enough that you need medical attention, you get treated. You don’t have to spend your time in hospital arguing about the percentage of your treatment that will be covered. You don’t have to sell your house to pay for meds or an operation, because everyone is paying for everyone else’s treatment. Imagine that. A society where everyone is on the same side, all helping each other stay healthy.

And, there we have it, the only plausible reason that the US media would be justified in this outrage – they’re representing a people who don’t want to help their fellow man. It’s either that or the media I have access to represents shareholders in medical insurance, whom I can’t imagine will be doing too well out of the healthcare reform bill.

If you’re American or you know someone who is, I’d love to hear something on this, because I only ever hear that it’s unpopular; never why, and I just don’t understand!

Just so we’re clear, I’m not saying it’s perfect, and there are a lot of people who complain about the NHS, but we complain about waiting times, not dying because we can’t afford to pay for treatment. That’s the kind of math I can do easily.

Amongst the many positive things you could say about the internet, the fact that it’s made country boundaries borderline irrelevant is probably my favourite. You can communicate directly with someone from anywhere, and where they live doesn’t come into it (unless they live in China). In fact, the only people obsessing over what country you’re in are people who flat-out don’t get it, or are stuck in an age where it actually mattered. Licencers are pretty much top offender on this one. They have a product that doesn’t require any delivery charges, can be consumed pretty much anywhere that has a computer and a phone line and yet it’s still more difficult for me to watch the latest season of Heroes when it first airs than it is for me to buy a teacup from the other side of the world. It ain’t right.

Why is it taking so long for the recording industries of the world to capitalise on the Internet as a distribution platform. Not a week goes by when I don’t hear that some company is in dispute with Apple over performance rights for song demos, or Spotify because they’re broadcasting music that isn’t licenced for a specific country (does that even make sense anymore?!). It seems that they’re happier to chase down and try to punish the few than they would be squeezing money out of the many!

The main reason for this came from the BBC’s commentary of Oinkgate (it’s a pattern, and I’m sticking to it!). I learned something I didn’t know about the site’s “owner” – that he has/had around $300,000 sat in PayPal accounts. The upkeep for a site of that popularity isn’t going to be cheap, so the fact that he was able to accumulate that amount of money and keep the site going is indicative of an ability to profit from this model (as an aside, if the owner of Oink was the scumbag, ripoff merchant he’s being painted as, there wouldn’t be $300,000 sat in PayPal account – it’d be sat on his drive. The fact that he didn’t spend the money indicates to me that he was either undecided on what to do with it, or was rainy-day saving it. Well, it’s raining pretty hard on him right now! If I’d donated any money to Oink, I’d be absolutely fine with it going towards his legal costs!). So, what we have here is a website with a (supposed…) subscription model and 100,000 users max, netting the owner of the site $3 per user profit. If you can’t see where I’m going with this already, you may as well close the window now. All you need on top of that is track previews to see if what you’re downloading is actually worth the money and you’ve got yourself a profiting business.

Now I realise that this sounds almost identical to Spotify, but with one important inclusion for me – the fact that my money got me something quantifiable. Spotify charges a lot of money (an amount that I’d be happy to pay for a good download subscription service, by the way) for what you get, and I think they’d give you more if they weren’t being constantly hounded by record companies to stay within their anachronistic constraints!

In conclusion, recording industries of the world, stop fighting the people you rely on for money. If you’re really about maximising profits, try giving us something that we actually want, for a reasonable price, for a change. You’re never going to stamp out piracy, but when you try to make things harder for the pirates, you’re actually making it harder for the people who legitimately acquire your product (see DRM, region encoding, copy protection, serial numbers, the list goes on…). If you need some help getting something started, I hear Alan Ellis, 26 is pretty good at this sort of thing.