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.

• random, stupid hashtagging #knowwhatimsayin?
• commentating on things. If I’m not watching it, I probably don’t want to read about it.
• geolocating – I don’t care where you are, or if you’re the mayor of there. Not sorry about it either.
• Instagram.
• Retweeting an old-style retweet. Find the source!
• Repeating a word you already used in a tweet as a hashtag #hashtag #repeating

I’m tired of things that annoy me ruining my enjoyment of social networks, so I reserve the right to unfollow people with a clear conscience and no fear of repercussions/hurt feelings.

The internet is full of cool, free stuff for you to play with. Some of it is made by cool geeks who don’t want anything in return, some is made by businesses who claimed your soul in their terms agreement. A few are cool geeks who becamse businesses that had to make money, and therein lies a problem.

How do you go from being some guy in his (or her, whatever) room, to some guy in a small office, to 400 guys in a crazy loft in San Francisco smashing their heads against the wall trying to figure out the least offensive way to make money from this brilliant thing they’ve created.

If it’s not already obvious, this is loosely based on Twitter. Twitter always seems to have struggled with making money. Sure, you can sell search data to Google and Microsoft, but that money isn’t going to cover everything. You could even get some investors to give you a boatload of money, but they’re eventually going to want to see some sort of return.

Once you’ve exhausted those avenues, it’s unfortunate but, you’re going to have to turn to your users. This presents a problem. Users hate it when you make money from them. Even if it doesn’t cost them anything at all. Show some adverts (some people – yes you, Gawker – take this way too far) and people moan that you’ve sold out. Start charging and you might as well have broken into someone’s house and just started taking their stuff.

It must be incredibly frustrating when a bunch of people are selling an app to use your service and making decent money from it when you can’t make income no matter what you try.

If it were me, I’d do what Facebook is trying to do. Get a load of businesses on board and promise them good advertising. When I say “good”, I mean advertising that might actually work. When I use Facebook, I see ads for stuff that relates to what I talk about and what’s in my profile. I probably see ads my close friends would see, too. That’s the only way I can explain some of them! Facebook ads don’t annoy me – I trust them. It’s all based on things I willingly tell them, so why wouldn’t I trust them? I’m a pretty reliable source when it comes to the things I like.

This seems to be what Twitter is doing. I don’t know how much real value there is in trending topics. I think they’re pretty useless, personally. As soon as something gets popular, it gets spammed and becomes pointless. Spam notwithstanding, there could be real value in selling trending topics. In order to do this, Twitter needs to put them in your face. They need them to be in pride of place on their website, on any native clients, anywhere. But doesn’t it make people moan?! God, take away people’s faces and their predisposition to whining about inconsequential shit goes through the roof, doesn’t it? The entitled rage at the #dickbar in Twitter for iPhone is just mind-bottling. Seriously; 1. Who is really that angry about the #dickbar? 2. Is Twitter as a service not worth it? I mean, they’ve got to try and make some money, haven’t they? If you’re not going to visit any of that stuff, just don’t. At least let them try to make money because, if they can’t, the service will disappear. Sure, you’ll move on, but Twitter is a job to some people and, as such, they rely on it to live.

Personally, I’m a fan of Freemium. Show ads, offer subscription. Remove ads if people subscribe. Replace one revenue stream with another. I happily subscribe to Instapaper (I would pay more for this) and Flickr (though I sense Yahoo! isn’t long for this world, so we’ll see what happens there) and I would pay for Twitter and Facebook, too. It wouldn’t need to be a lot, either. Marco Arment charges $1 a month. With Facebook’s 500,000,000 users or whatever it is, even if 25% of those people paid a dollar a month, that’s a decent guaranteed income for just being yourself.

I realise that willingness to pay for a service puts me in the minority. You only have to look at App Store reviews to see that. Before I bought Tilt to Live for iOS, I was reading the reviews (of this 59p, 99¢ game that is fucking awesome, by the way. Seriously, you’ll get your 59p’s worth in the first hour of play) and people were outraged by the fact that One Man Left added a game mode and were charging the same again for the new mode. 59p that you don’t even have to pay, and would-be 5-star reviews became 3, 2 and 1-star. Unbelievable.

I suppose what I’m getting at here is that people don’t spend enough time looking at something’s worth. If it’s always been free or cheap, it should always be free or cheap. Nothing should ever change, even though your users don’t pay, they’re damn sure going to throw their toys out of the pram if you change anything and demand that you put it right-the-fuck back.

I say fuck that. The people who created this awesome thing that you love are probably only going to try to change it for the better. Even when they’ve got to start doing something a bit lame to make some money, they’re going to do it in the best way they can. This isn’t only so that they don’t piss off their users, but so that they don’t ruin the thing they created. Chances are, if you love it, the people who made it and spend their lives improving it love it way, way more and don’t want to be the cause of it properly sucking. Stop fucking moaning about free things – this is the world; we’ve all got to make some money at some point.

Some people drink coffee. Some people drink tea. Some people are pretentious and drink some kind of infusion. Some people are deluded and drink a macrobiotic yoghurt. I drink energy drinks.

Not any energy drink; oh no. My energy poison of choice is Relentless Inferno. A delicious, orange-flavoured affair with a rich bouquet and layers of psychosomatic pep. I say “psychosomatic” for a very good reason. Each brand of Relentless (and Monster, and Rockstar) has the same amount of caffeine in, but only the orange one gives me the caffeine face-slap that gets my nose into a text editor and cranking out amazing websites for you all to buy stuff from.

Now, this may seem like some sort of crazy dream world. Granted, it’s pretty good. However, there is a problem.

Relentless The Company, is fucking with me.

There are approximately some shops local to me. Literally a fraction of aforementioned shops have stocked or currently stock Relentless Inferno. The very local-est shop to me used to line their shelves, like a delightful energy palace, with Relentless Infernos. These shall be, henceforth, known as the good times. I could walk for 30 seconds (or run for 15 in the rain) to reach my aluminium energy grail every morning, make small talk with the assistant about the weather or how cool it must be to work from home and be on my merry way to making those websites you’re all so desperate to use.

As I said; those were the good times. Soon, Relentless The Company saw what I was up to and decided it’d be fun to mess with me. As some bespectacled executive wised up to my purchasing habits, he began to envisage a world where he became the puppet-master to the marionette theatre that is my quest for energy drinks in the morning. He hatched a plan to dry up my Relentless Inferno energy well, just to see what would I would do. What a dick.

After trying to kid myself that Yellow Monster was good enough for too long, I decided to expand my search. The Newsagent had recently opened and its shelves were lined with promise. A huge section of Relentless Inferno awaited me. Soon, though, The Newsagent’s stock began to dwindle and the dickhead Relentless man won’t send any more supplies.

Now I walk for a mile round-trip to get my energy fill in the morning, and this shop (as of this morning) only has one Relentless Inferno left. I will have run out of sources, and I will have run out of Relentless Infernos.

My concern is this; that Relentless The Company are going to stop making my beverage. They’re expecting me to drink the other inferior flavours of drink before they send back the good stuff. Well, let me tell you something, Relentless The Company, I won’t drink fucking Brown Flavour. I won’t have Snot Green Flavour, either. The Red Flavour goes flat way too quickly, and don’t even think you’re going to tempt me with Anti-freeze Blue Flavour. I bet it’s not blueberry flavour at all. I’ll go back to Yellow Rockstar if I have to.

I want the orange flavour. It’s the best flavour of all the flavours you do, so why won’t you send more? I’ve depleted the stock of three whole shops in as many months. I’m more than representing myself, so why are you holding out on me?! I’ve got money, I don’t expect freebies. Just make sure my local shops (Medina Stores, Shirley, Southampton; The Newsagent, Shirley, Southampton) are stocked with the Relentless Infernos and we won’t have a problem.

We aren’t going to have a problem, are we?

If you work for Relentless The Company, and want to send me some Relentless Infernos for the inconvenience, or maybe you want to hook me up with a direct account so we don’t end up in this mess again, email me and let’s get this thing sorted. Ball’s in your court, guys

Thanks to Dan for the title idea. My original idea was way contrived

The advertisement model for monetising websites is age-old. Since people started looking at websites, they have been looking at ads. Google ads, Myspace ads, then later, the little squishy spider ad where you could win an XBOX (you never won an XBOX). It’s an easy way to make money from your site without having to develop a business model. Hell, sometimes your content isn’t able to earn its keep and ads or subscriptions are really the only way to make a bit of cash. All fine.

I don’t use ad-blocking software on my web browsers for a few reasons:

• They can be greedy and block things that I actually might want to see
• When developing websites which might have ads on, I always forget to disable them and spend an hour trying to figure out why ads are invisible
• I care that companies rely on ad income to perpetuate their content (on sites I regularly visit)

The first two reasons aside, I want to focus on the abuse of my care of a company’s income. Considering how easy it would be for me to just install some ad-blocking software in my browser, I don’t understand why companies insist on making me mad at their adverts. Take this, for example.

This is an ad in my face – it opened when the page loaded. I don’t block ads and I do actively click on things I might find interesting so that content creators get paid and keep on creating that content, so I’m insulted when these ads are thrust in my face. What’s more, I clicked the close link and the ad opened anyway. That is just shitty advertising.

So please, cool website owners (I’m looking at you, Kotaku), stop putting these horrible ads on your site. It cheapens your product and insults your users and I don’t want to have to stop reading your site like I did with Wired (in my defense, Wired is pretty terrible anyway).