It must be really difficult to pick support for Animals as Leaders. They’ve carved out a niche as a ridiculously technical, progressive metal jazz fusion band. I mean, how many other bands are like that?

Bloodworks seem pretty aware of the fact that a narrow-minded individual might not expect a death metal band at a show like this. Having said that, an incredibly tight set, great musicianship and brutal vocals more than justify their presence here. Local, too.

I accidentally discovered Apollo’s Arrows this week through a friend. I’m not sure if he knew something I didn’t about tonight, but either way I enjoyed them then, and I enjoyed them live more. It must be pretty intimidating to go on straight before a band like Animals as Leaders but, once they settled, they played brilliantly. A sort-of combination of Saosin, At the Drive-in, (post-hardcore, not crazy experimental) The Sound of Animals Fighting and in:aviate. A very entertaining and talented frontman made for a brilliant opener for AAL. I hope these guys do well.

Animals as Leaders are just amazing. The Joiners is a tiny venue and it gets hot. So hot, in fact, that my awareness of my own soaked clothes dissipated. Tosin was worse – his black shirt was shining by the end of the set. Still, the band put on a fantastic show. Three astounding musicians working perfectly together. Playing seamlessly with a backing track, you wouldn’t have believed what they got away with. The venue was packed with sweaty, smelly, inconsiderate metal-heads but I didn’t care. We even got a track off their new album, which was more jazz than metal and I wasn’t a massive fan, but still got it!

Some more famous light at The Joiners forced me to shoot with black and white in mind this time. Pleased with these, actually. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of band members missing. It was so packed, I had to stay where I was throughout the show. Luckily, that was about five feet from Tosin during AAL’s set.

Bloodworks

Apollo’s Arrows

Animals as Leaders

OS X has been my operating system of choice since Tiger. It represented a realisation that you can have decent portable hardware and a great-looking interface that gave me quick access to the things I used most, whilst maintaining relatively easy access to things I didn’t. I have always been pleased with OS X as an operating system, which is why I continue to use it professionally and in my leisure time today.

OS X Lion (10.7) brings a number of changes, presumably inspired by the fact that Apple’s touchscreen devices have been so popular. After an afternoon’s use, I am under the impression that a future generation of tablet computers will run this a convergence of this and iOS. By that time, I will not be using OS X as my main operating system.

Things I don’t like about OS X Lion

Spaces. The concept of multiple desktops has been a staple of my computer usage since before Apple cribbed the idea from Linux. In a previous job, I used an Ubuntu-powered computer, where I discovered spaces and how much easier they can make your computing life. Until today, I ran a 6-desktop configuration in two rows of three desktops. I did this so that I had quick access to Desktop 4 (web browsers) from Desktop 1 (text editor) and quick access from Desktop 1 to Desktop 2 (databases and terminals). If you’re interested, 3 is virtual machines and image editing, 5 is IM clients, notes and RSS and 6 is iTunes and stuff I don’t really touch regularly.

Apple has completely removed the ability to configure Spaces with Lion. You get one row of desktops and that’s it. This completely cripples my usage of the concept. I can access web browsers and terminals from text editors, but then I have to skip through two spaces from an IM client to get to a web browser. I seriously cannot justify – further than wanting a nice, pretty, single line of desktops in the abortion that is Mission Control – this decision. It’s completely ridiculous!

Spaces also had a cool little feature where you could view your whole grid from way above, then invoke Exposé and move individual windows between desktops. This, too, is totally gone. In order to view a desktop’s open windows, you have to invoke Mission Control whilst said desktop is selected.

Mission Control suggests to me that Spaces and Exposé had a child and found out that they were cousins when it was already too late to terminate the poor, unfortunate bastard.

Scrolling has now been inverted. To scroll down, you sweep up; to scroll left, you sweep right. Disabled (it didn’t instinctively occur to me that Apple would allow you to disable this. My past, PC-using self would be very disappointed in me).

New Mail.app is nothing really to write home about. Still no ability to arbitrarily file things using only the keyboard. It’s like Apple saw Sparrow and decided they would make something with a worse UI. I’ll stick to GMail web UI, thanks.

iCal promised to bring a fantastic new UI. It’s basically the same as old iCal, except they’ve made it look more like a leather journal with pages torn out of it.

Your username now appears constantly in the menu bar, with no apparent way to hide it. I am the only user of this computer and I know my name, thanks, Apple. Update: Maxim Harper tells me that you can remove this by CMD-dragging on the name. Thank Christ!

To view the desktop, you now have to “spread with thumb and three fingers”, which is just about as difficult as it sounds. Rather than sweep up with four fingers, which was super easy to do on a whim.

CoreAnimation pervades your entire experience in Lion. It makes every single little thing you try to do take just that little bit longer. You do things by Apple’s rhythm, now, punk. Pages turn, things zip about and flash and fade in-and-out. Why? I have no idea. I thought Windows 7 was a little over-animation-y, but this is ridiculous. Interface animation adds nothing to your ability to accomplish a task. If you want to stare at a pretty rectangle for a bit, buy some tropical fish.

Things I like about Lion

LaunchBar still works.

Spotify the service is brilliant. There’s tonnes of music on there now, and being able to import your own library and OTA sync with mobile devices is brilliant. The purchase-able MP3 bundles are a bargain (if you’re bright enough to spend £50 at a time). They’re doing really great things for music consumers when the recording industry seems to be working on triple-jointing its elbows so it can simultaneously scratch its own back and steal your wallet (or put you in jail). Kudos to you, Spotify.

My problem with Spotify, and the reason I’ll probably cancel my subscription (again), is that the player is broken. It’s a horrific abortion of an application. A worthless, frustrating, horribly-designed, fundamentally loathsome piece of garbage.

I come from a media library school of music-listening. That is to say that I have all of my music available to me all the time in iTunes. I can browse by artist, album, genre, I can arbitrarily create playlists, all the nice things that Spotify pretends to be able to do, but doesn’t. Say you’re in the mood to listen to something you know you’ve got in your library. Here’s a worst-case, oft-realised scenario of how that situation could end up causing you to want to kerb stomp a puppy:

• I’d like to listen to this album today
• I search for the album
• I’m presented with a visually cacophonous assault of things that are likely irrelevant to what I was looking for
• I realise what I was looking for was in my library, not Spotify’s and Spotify’s search only searches their catalogue
• I drop back to “Local Files” and I have to Command[Control]-F a string precise enough to match the album I want to listen to (I suppose I could create playlists in this instance, but by now I’ve illustrated that Spotify’s search is worthless, and the app doesn’t allow you to browse by artist or album unless they have the artist/album in their library. Suck it up, pansy)

Say I find my albums, and I want to queue them in a playlist, in the order I choose. I sort by “Added”, foolishly assuming that this will be able to emulate iTunes’ behaviour, whereby adding music to a playlist results in a playlist automatically sorted in the same fashion that I added it. If I add an album in Spotify, and sort by the earliest added, it seems to flip the track listing order, so that if I choose tracks 1-12 and add them, the order that they appear in the playlist is 12-1. I can’t even trick Spotify into doing what iTunes does perfectly and intuitively.

Assuming I’ve actually managed to find something to listen to, things go well from there. The controls are way more responsive than iTunes, which is nice. I don’t have to hit pause then wait for three seconds for music to stop before I can answer a phone call. Sound quality seems good, although if you’re doing something CPU-intensive, playback gets noticeably jittery (I say “noticeably” because I do a lot of CPU-hungry stuff, and have never noticed iTunes stutter).

Spoonful of sugar notwithstanding, the final (small-to-some) gripe I have with Spotify is their library tagging and how they force it on you. My #musicmonday posts are calculated programmatically by gathering all the songs I listened to in the last week, querying a few web services to get song lengths, then calculating the amount of time I’ve spent listening to artists individually that week. Naturally, as I started using Spotify as my main music player, I decided that I would implement Spotify’s music metadata API search, as I noticed that musicbrainz wasn’t getting a lot of the tracks that I was submitting. Having done this, I noticed that when using the Spotify music metadata search, submitting strings that it had obviously sent to last.fm as scrobbles, it couldn’t find this music from its own database! How is that even right? Is it not working from the same data? To make matters slightly worse, it seems to have inferred tags from my library. I have a beautifully-tagged iTunes library, which Spotify has taken it upon itself to apply its own shitty metadata to!

So there you have it. Spotify’s player all but completely ruins the whole experience of finding music to listen to, and my own esoteric obsession with collating data on said music. I guess Spotify’s plan is to piss me off so much when I’m looking for music to listen to that there’s no data to collate. Problem solved.

Even in my meat-eating days, I wasn’t a huge fan of fish. Every now and again, however, I would get this feeling that fish fingers were the best thing in the whole universe and I had to have a brown-bread-and-butter fish finger sandwich, stat. So I’d make one and be really excited, eat it, then want to vomit my skull out of my mouth because fish fingers are gross.

Naturally, when Charlotte announced that Quorn makes “fish” fingers, I was intrigued. I haven’t eaten “real” fish fingers in maybe 8 years, so this was quite a tempting prospect. They look like real fish fingers (seriously, though, how hard was that to do?) and they smell fishy when they’re cooking, but they’re basically this breaded, stale-tasting paste stuff. They’re truly vulgar. If I ever think that eating them will be a good idea in future (and I will), someone remind me about this so I don’t do it again. Thanks.

The concept of a conference is a good one. Great minds in an industry coming together to share wisdom and spend time with others who share their passion and interest is a positive use of anyone’s time. The problem with things that look so great on paper is that, due to unforeseen variables, they often fall short of their potential. I’ve been thinking about why I didn’t enjoy FoWA and why I did in an attempt to understand whether I should go to them again, and attending dconstruct served to illustrate that I am a conferences guy, but I have to make some concessions and choose where I go carefully!

Firstly, I’m going to assume that every industry that has these things is the same. I know they’re not, but you understand that I’m talking about my own personal observations. Your mileage may vary and I’d like to know why it does, if you have time.

Humans are obsessed with celebrity. We love it. Those of us who believe ourselves to be above it are not. We go weak-kneed and fumbly when in the presence of our heroes and there’s no two ways about it. I don’t like this behaviour, but I am definitely not immune to it. I try to remember that people I consider to be celebrities are just people who’ve excelled in their field and gained a lot of recognition for what they do. They’re normal people who do normal things like apply deodorant and get their hair cut and cross the road and hate aubergines and we tend to forget this.

Conferences are a great way to create celebrities. If you’ve a relatively obscure interest, they effectively gather successful people to talk about how they got successful and tell you how to be more successful and that’s fundamentally a good thing. I think it’s important, however, to remember that the concept of a celebrity isn’t particularly healthy for the subject or the observer. On a long enough timeline, a subject will grow aware of and buy into their hype and become aloof (if they weren’t already!) and the observer will go to further extremes of their character type (the sycophant or the hater) and it becomes a self-perpetuating monster. No-one wants that.

Furthermore, as an attendee, you’re likely to be in love with what you do. You’re hardly going to sit for a whole day and listen to someone harp on about asparagus if you hate asparagus. Therefore, I think it’s important to have people talk conceptually on their subject. If you’re at a web development conference, listening to an evangelist preach HTML5 is redundant. You might make some conversions, but you shouldn’t be there to do that! The people who are going to embrace your talk will all know everything you’re going to say anyway, and the naysayers with conviction will probably just bitch about you on twitter.

So, why was dconstruct so good? For me, it was because people were talking in the abstract. I am a PHP developer primarily. I have other interests related to this industry but, gun to head, my day starts <?php and ends ?>. Whether I’m any good at it or not is irrelevant, but it’s not going to be beneficial to me to listen to another PHP developer talk about either why PHP is so good or why they’re so good at it. There was none of this at dconstruct.

(Quick disclaimer. What I took away from people’s talks isn’t necessarily what they were talking about, so if you’re one of the people I am talking about and I got it wrong, maybe you should consider your approach!)

Marty Neumeier’s talk on beating the game by getting ahead of it seemed like stating the obvious. He talked about four different types of new product (different-good, different-not-good, not-different-good and not-different-not-good) and, although I felt his process for identifying these products was flawed in that you had to wait until it had gone to market to really tell, he gave a good framework for new product developers to decide on whether something was worth the effort really only based on an idea. A lot of companies wouldn’t be failing if they listened to a guy like Marty talk for 30 minutes.

Brendan Dawes’ talk on how to get the most out of your product and process by removing as much of it as you feasibly can was quite inspirational to me. This is something that I have quite a strong opinion on not only because it can be a real money saver, but because it can also improve your overall product by removing the weak links. It was, therefore, reassuring to hear that someone I consider to be successful has had such success by following an ideal that I subscribe to. If you weren’t interested in what he was saying, the anecdotes, animations and accent should’ve been enough to involve you anyway.

David McCandless spoke about his approach to data visualisation and made me jealous that he’s been able to get access to stacks of data to do cool things with, but he also strikes me as the guy at the party who will call you in a week with an answer to whether there’s a correlation between breakups and major holidays, or whether cool is cooler than awesome. More than that, though, he made you feel like it’s good to be that guy, and it can be really rewarding and unpredictably interesting to investigate things in this way. He seems to be really inspired by social interactions, which I can relate to. I tend to obsess over byproducts of social interactions, and I was pleased to see that it can be productive!

Unfortunately, I was interrupted during James Bridle, so I think I missed a lot but what I did hear about the interconnectedness of data and the importance of revision as a journey (using Wikipedia and those awesome Iraq war volumes as a case in point) just hit the nail on the head. We have the ability as a hive to revise and collect all of our knowledge to educate and solve, and I hope this ability becomes part of everything. Wikipedia is criticised heavily for containing inaccurate information, but I rarely see it done by intelligent people. They’re too busy correcting the mistakes.

John Gruber spoke a lot about movies and Kubrick and I like both of those things.

Tom Coates’ presentation was like 8GB, and visually brilliant. Sadly, I don’t feel like I really gained anything from it. He spoke about the abstract concept of a network and how practical applications can benefit everyone. If you get a chance to see this, you should because he’s a great speaker!

Merlin Mann is an interesting guy. He doesn’t at all look like any picture I’ve ever seen of him. He spoke about the importance of being a nerd, how it’s dangerous to be comfortable with your abilities and making good choices. He’s basically the voice of all nerds, giving us a big hug and going “it’s ok, no great, to be a nerd but, in the interest of mortality, you should dial it down around people who don’t care”. The world needs nerds to obsess over the things that no-one else cares about. Nerds will constantly be trying to improve things that they disapprove of, and I don’t think that constant, objective improvement has ever been a bad thing. The A-bomb’s obviously terrible, but it’s a damn good example of a thing built to do a thing that does it fucking well. And it’s because of nerds.

I was a little disappointed that all-but-two of the talkers seemed to escape and not attend the after party. I knew that John Gruber would leave – he barely had any interest in getting up and speaking, much less mingling for five minutes with the people without whom he’d be nothing. That being said, it was nice to chat with Brendan about moviepeg and how, as a developer, I’m interested to see how designers approach things and elaborate on that a bit more, and it was cool to chat with Merlin further about embracing nerdism. I try not to be that guy who goes up to speakers and go YOU.WERE.GREAT because I don’t consider it to be constructive (and there are almost definitely enough people to do that without me chiming in), so I only attempted to talk to the people I felt like there was more to say to.

If you were there, or know anything about the speakers, you will notice that there are some omissions. My mum told me that if you don’t have anything nice to say, you should keep quiet (those of you who know me should see your faces!).