Hazel just drew a picture, which she wrote words around: her version of the song “Little Peter Rabbit”. She’d written many of the right letters in roughly the right places (LITL PET RABT etc.) and probably the first whole sentence she’d ever tried to write. Nic loved it.
Hazel’s beaming smile was topped off with: “I’m so proud that you’re so happy with me, Mummy.”
Awesome wee beastie.
Many of you will have heard about the “terrible conditions in Apple factories” in China, quite possibly from GetUp.org.au’s recent campaign. Problem is, one of the biggest reasons we all heard about this in the first place was a guy called Mike Daisey, who went to China and interviewed workers at Foxconn, the company that makes most of Apple’s gear. He was also heard on This American Life, an excellent public radio program from NPR in the US, that’s also heard on ABC here in Australia.
Mike has now admitted that he lied, and NPR have retracted their story based on his piece. He simply made up many of the crucial details, including the man with the claw hand ruined by a metal press, the underage workers, and the workers exposed to N-hexane. Some of those issues are real (to some degree at least) but he can’t verify them directly, and claimed he did. He’s now retreated into claiming that he’s presenting “theater”, but he’s repeatedly claimed his words as the truth, and they are not.
Foxconn is not a place I’d like to work, but workers there get paid higher than the average wage, and are less likely to commit suicide than the national average. Apple have, by admission of the local inspection board, done more than other companies to ensure a safe, fairer working environment. Foxconn may well be a boring, horrible assembly line factory, but Mike Daisey making it sound worse than it is doesn’t help.
UPDATE: Here’s a transcript of the latest NPR show, entitled “Retraction”. A key quote:
As best as we can tell, Mike’s monologue in reality is a mix of things that actually happened when he visited China and things that he just heard about or researched, which he then pretends that he witnessed first hand. He pretends that he just stumbled upon an array of workers who typify all kinds of harsh things somebody might face in a factory that makes iPhones and iPads.
And the most powerful and memorable moments in the story all seem to be fabricated.
Over the last several years, I’ve taught university students, high school students, and working professionals. One of the remarkable things is seeing how creative software is being taught to younger and younger audiences. The same programs and techniques I taught to university first years in the Communication Design degree a few years ago are now going to kids in high school. Not just iMovie, either: they also learn Final Cut Pro, or maybe Premiere. Here’s the part that’ll make your head spin — there are Grade 6 kids being taught ProTools. Hell, I don’t know ProTools.
University clearly teaches more theory than app usage, and that’s as it should be. Universities should teach students how to think, rather than how to do. If you just want to know how to do something, I can teach you more practical skills in a two-day intensive course than you’d get in a semester of a university degree (really!).
Still, it’s a little unnerving to wonder just what they’ll be teaching at universities in just a few years time, when half the class knows multimedia upside down and sideways already. More theory? Not if they want to appeal to half their audience. It’s a tricky path to follow: claiming to teach work skills while appeasing academics’ need to publish. Teaching people how to think when all they want is a bit of paper that will get them a job. Dealing with the fact that most of them work, many full time, when you’re expecting them to devote 40 hours a week to study.
Here’s the truth. If every university student simply read what their lecturers wanted, read all the notes, spent the amount of time they’re meant to on study, and crafted assignments to satisfy assessment criteria, they’d all get perfect 7s. HDs. Or nearly. If you’re thinking of studying — do it. Very worthwhile. Just don’t think of it as a way to get a piece of paper, it’s a way to expand your brain and make you a more interesting, employable person. Just ask your lecturers what they want, and you’ll do well.
(And I’m a wolf with a megaphone.)
This is just a short post on how people receive information. Most people just read the headlines, or if they do read more, they just retain the headlines. And while tech-savvy people like most of this blog’s readers (I suspect) might know a bit more about technical areas, they likely won’t look much deeper into areas that don’t interest them.
For example, politics interests me, but conversations with other people reveal how little many people actually think about it very hard. And most people treat technical problems (what kind of TV should I buy, what phone is best, what does that button do) with a similar lack of information. It’s completely understandable: why should a random person know, for example, what Bluetooth does? Maybe they saw a logo on their new stereo and got curious. (Unlikely, there are many logos there.) More likely, a tech-savvy person told them: a relative or a salesperson recommending a solution.
So, it’s sad when people receive opinion second- or third-hand and accept it as truth. For example, the new FCP X received a rocky welcome — it wasn’t what people expected, it looked more like the consumer iMovie app than the old Final Cut Pro, it was missing a few features that some workflows require, they changed the interface, and the old version became instantly unavailable. But the program, judged on its own merits, is actually very good. It’s quick, it’s capable, it’s on a modern foundation. It’s not perfect, and will never be suitable for every workflow that the old FCP was good for. It’s not bad, it’s different. Simply because it’s easier to learn, in terms of the numbers of people who will use the program effectively, it’s a clear win.
The received wisdom, simply that “Final Cut Pro X isn’t any good” is simply wrong. But hey, it’s an ecosystem. If half the world’s editing schools decide that FCP X is unusable, it won’t be anywhere near as popular as FCP 7. The main reason they might decide that: because the prevailing industry mood is sour. And why is the mood sour? Largely because the initial feedback was bad. We’re still hearing the echoes from the sound of a thousand teeth gnashing. And because the internet is an echo chamber full of sheep.
Take another look. (There’s a free trial.) Evaluate your workflow. See if the next point update will bring back features you need, and keep using FCP 7 if you need to. And if you decide that FCP X is a great program that doesn’t deserve its flak, shout it out.
Be a wolf with a megaphone.
This is how I imagine it goes (though see update at end!):
This process means well, but misses its goal by a wide berth. Checklists aren’t completely worthless, but if the people who draw them up aren’t razor-focused on the needs of the kids rather than their own jobs, it’s going to be deeply flawed. If you get long-entrenched IT people on the list, you might end up with truly poisonous, irrelevant nonsense on the list:
If they’d focus on the kids, they’d come up with a checklist containing items like:
…none of which they’ll get with a tablet laptop. Instead, they end up with heavy systems that don’t last the day, that come with some limited demo software, and which will eventually be binned with the same software and nothing new. The teachers will end up doing IT support instead of teaching, and kids won’t care about the laptops at all. The “tablet” part will end up as merely a box on a checklist that nobody uses. Art class will try, until they discover that the provided software is MS Paint.
Simply adding “touch” to existing solutions doesn’t change them. It doesn’t encourage kids to read more. It doesn’t reduce the teachers’ IT support burden. And as many teachers have discovered, you don’t revolutionise education by providing an electronic whiteboard. Doing “the same things we’ve always done, but with computers” isn’t going to lead to anything revolutionary for students.
Finally, here’s the big checklist item they haven’t considered.
That’s why they should get iPads.
UPDATE: Apparently it’s simpler than that. A source tells me that a very large company (that I won’t identify because I don’t have a lawyer handy) routinely bribed high-up government staff to keep Apple out of NSW schools. So there you go. Journalists: investigate!
On Siri, the intelligent assistant in my new iPhone 4S, after I’d asked it to play various tracks and albums:
“How does she find all this music?”
Late, I know, but worth a few words.
Steve Jobs, the late founder and CEO of Apple, has had a huge impact on my life. Since grade six, when I found an Apple IIe (sorry: Apple //e) and discovered the joys of programming in AppleSoft BASIC, my die was cast. I hung around Apple resellers in high school, wishing I could afford a Mac; I looked through Mac magazines and picked my favourite fonts from font ads (Claude Sans I liked at the time). My father shared this passion for technology with me. We’d look over these things together, and he wanted a Mac too. We did have a CAT, an Apple II clone, which I had used all through high school for assignments, but it was time to upgrade.
Eventually, my parents bought a Mac LC, on paper for the family but (of course) mostly for me. Much discussion was had about the configuration we’d choose: with two floppy drives or with a single floppy drive and a 40MB hard drive? With a larger 640×480 monitor in 256 (8-bit) colours, or a smaller 512×384 monitor and 16-bit colour? Those 16MHz were pushed to their limits, and eventually I installed a video output card (the screensaver Satori played at a club one night) or a maths co-processor that I used to render 3D models a frame at a time. That one was fun: the render was controlled by a text file, full of all the instructions for the scene. During ad breaks in the Friday 13th movie I was watching, I’d uncomment a single line, set the render off, then head back down to the TV. Next break, I’d come back up, re-comment the previous line, and uncomment the next one before setting it off again. This was not a simple project; the animation was of a bubble rising from a sink in front of two mirrors with a camera swooping around in front (using sine waves for smoothness). It’s all a little easier now.
Since then, I’ve owned:
The first Macs I had weren’t made while Steve was in charge, but he set them in motion. The changes he brought in 1984 to the general computing world are still with us, and the continuation of that with the iPad in 2010 (just last year!) will spur more changes to the otherwise mostly stagnant desktop environment. Lion has changed things already. In a few years time, Macs will have touch screens and will likely function in a similar way to iPads for much of the time. The distinction will blur, and Windows 8 is going the same way, with a tablet interface front and centre.
As anyone who’s worked in a large organisation knows, committees have a tough time changing things. Big change comes from above, without warning. Steve did that, famously dismissing focus groups: “If Henry Ford had asked consumers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse” and simply making what he wanted to use. No committee forced the inclusion of some “vital” feature (like a “call” button, or a hardware keyboard, or F-keys on the earliest Macs), and the result upturned industries. That single-minded focus doesn’t make friends with everyone — but it does make the majority happy. Of course, we’re all part of minorities too, and won’t like every choice.
(Side note regarding openness: I’m happy knowing that there’s no malware in the App Store, but disappointed that I can’t exercise my own judgement regarding apps that contain nudity, swearing or anything else that’s deemed objectionable. On balance? The web is still open, web apps can be saved to the home screen just like App Store apps, and I’d rather not need antivirus software on my phone.)
What Steve also did was to bring a sense of the importance of design to technology. It defined my career. I could create and edit videos on my Mac, so I did. I could design on my Mac, so I did. Every creative thing I’ve done since school has been done on a Mac, or an iPhone. Something Steve invented. It’s absolutely remarkable for one man, who I never met, to have such an influence on so much of my life.
All I can say is thank you, and rest in peace.
Hazel is looking at a photo of Jake, my late father.
“Looking at this photo makes me sad, because Grandpa Jake has died. But I’m happy because I can still look at it.”
Hazel, you rock.
First, read Do users change their settings? » UIE Brain Sparks. Then, think really hard about the way you design your next piece of software, website, object, etc, because 95% of your audience will likely experience it the way they first see it. They won’t tweak fonts, change font size, or anything else. If it’s a TV, they’ll use it on default settings, and won’t switch it to saner brightness/contrast/whatever settings, or retune it to receive more channels. If it’s a computer, they’ll probably never change the desktop picture, screen saver or keyboard shortcuts. If it’s a car, they might not even know that you can change the steering wheel position.
If you change your environment to better suit your needs, you’re not normal. Other people are not like you. Give yourself a pat on the back for exploring, but don’t be surprised when everyone you know is using the defaults, and make sure that you choose good defaults for your projects.
As she gets older she’s coming our with some real gems. This morning:
My question to you is: why don’t Q and U have any mouths? How can they speak? That’s my question.
And yesterday, in tears:
Where is the ship coaster? That’s my favorite coaster, and ships are my favorite vehicle.