I’ve been watching this issue unfold with a good deal of interest, as I was initially planning on upgrading to the iPhone 4 upon its release here in Australia. As it stands, I’m not certain that I will be upgrading to the iPhone 4 based on this.

Given my current stance, it was with great interest that I watched the video of the overnight Apple press event regarding this issue to see if it could, perhaps, change my mind regarding upgrading.

I’m not happy with the current solution to the whole issue. To my way of thinking, providing every iPhone 4 owner with a free bumper case is an admission of a hardware design issue that probably should have been identified, and rectified, without actually making an admission. Based on this, and taking into account the effect this will have on a number of other thoughts, I strongly doubt I will upgrade. So what are those other thoughts?

Aesthetics

I love the look of the new iPhone 4. I love it so much in fact, that to cover it up with a case would, quite simply, not be an option for me. Add into that the fact that I dislike using cases on my phones for a number of reasons including the feel of them in my hand, and I’m reticent to purchase a phone that needs a case to work properly.

Location of “The Spot”

From looking at the images of the phone that I have seen from what seems like every conceivable angle, the spot is in about the worst possible spot for me, and how I hold a phone. I use a weird “claw” type grip on a phone whilst on a call, and I’m almost certain that my ring finger will sit precisely on the seam that separates the two antenna’s, therefore making me highly likely to suffer the issue, if it does in fact exist.

Uncertainty

It’s impossible to say, at this point, just how much of an issue the antenna, and its problems actually are; and its also impossible to know the circumstances under which they are likely to occur, in terms of reception strength. With that in mind, I don’t know whether or not I’m likely to suffer from this issue. At this point, I live in a relatively weak signal area, which seems to be the common link to this, other than actually bridging the antenna’s. Will I still live in a weak signal area if and when I upgrade? I don’t know.

I don’t seem to be affected by the so-called “reality distortion field” that people used to describe the way in which Steve Jobs affects people. As a result of that, a natural tendency to be skeptical about claims made by anybody looking to make a buck, and a preference for data to be qualified, I’m not convinced of some of the data used to make the point that “Antennagate“ is not an issue.

0.55% of Calls

Apple gave us a figure of 0.55% of calls to AppleCare relating to the iPhone 4 antenna. Sounds like a very nice, low number, except for the fact that I didn’t notice any quantification or qualification of that data.

Is that figure the total of all calls to AppleCare relating to the iPhone 4 antenna, which would mean that this figure is calculated from calls including those regarding iMacs, MacBooks, AppleTVs, and other Apple products? Not really representative of the percentage of iPhone 4 users who have called then, is it?

Is it the percentage calculated from the total number of iPhone 4 calls to AppleCare? Then sure, that is obviously an awesome figure. But once again, is it necessarily representative of the actual numbers of people affected by the issue? In short, no.

The issue has a large amount of mindshare in the general public, and when you take into consideration the number of people who think “There’s no need for me to call, Apple have already had a large number of people call about this, so I’ll just wait until they come up with a fix for it,” those numbers won’t necessarily be representative.

Additionally, there will be people who would rather write about their problems on various forums, and blogs on the internet, and wait for a fix to be released by Apple so that they don’t have to waste their time calling Apple about a problem they are confident Apple is well on their way to resolving.

1.7% Early Returns

At first glance, this doesn’t appear to need qualification or quantification. It doesn’t appear to be a figure that is open to manipulation or interpretation, but in reality, that isn’t necessarily the case.

Apple stated a 6% early shipping return rate for the 3GS, and a 1.7% rate for the 4. What they don’t state is the time frame in which the rate was calculated for the 3GS. Given that both Apple, and AT&T have a 30 day return window, this is important. Is it the first 22 days, or the full first 30? That alone decreased my trust in the figure, but I had other problems with it too.

Apple has previously stated, through emails from Steve Jobs personal email account, that they were “working on it.” “It” being a fix for this problem. If people are aware that you are working on a fix for a problem, and believe the fix will resolve it, they are, in my opinion, incredibly unlikely to return the phone based on this the problem. This is especially true when you consider the fact that customers still have another 8 days to return the phone.

I will conceded that, given the fact that the 3GS had none of the problems (either real or perceived) of the iPhone 4, this figure is fantastic for Apple, I just don’t necessarily agree that it is indicative of the size and scope of the issue.

In the end, unfortunately, Apple has created, for me at least, more questions than they answered. In fact, the only question they answered was whether or not this issue exists. To me, they have admitted, without explicitly doing so, that the problem is most definitely real. The questions they have created are unfortunately, more wide ranging, and relate to honesty, integrity, and transparency.

Edit: Title updated. Fucking widows.

Then along came Instapaper, and it solved many, if not all, of the problems that I had with reading long articles at my computer. It stripped all of the bullshit from the original sites, it collated them all in a single place, and it synced with my iPhone so that I could read comfortably in my favourite place to read – bed.

I’ve been a happy little Instapaperer for a while now, and I’ve gotten tremendous value out of the service in that time. I’ve discovered new articles courtesy of Give Me Something To Read, as well as filling my folders with great content from some of my favourite writers.

The iPhone app is, generally, fantastic, however lately I’ve been noticing that it lacks a certain polish that I would like. This is said with no disrespect intended, but lately, I feel like the interface is a little too text heavy, and maybe just a mite overwhelming at times. There is no real depth to the interface, and although that serves to help keep the application out of the way, and allow you to focus on the whole point of the damn thing – reading – it has, unfortunately, been doing quite the opposite.

And so began my search for an alternative to Instapaper. Unfortunately, there really is only one alternative and that is Read It Later. Read It Later does quite literally exactly the same thing that Instapaper does, but it does it with a little more…style

I haven’t really used Read It Later in anger as yet, but from the website to the iPhone app, the whole feel of Read It Later is different. Although they function, from the end user’s point of view, in exactly the same way; it feels as though Read It Later has spent more time in the hands of a designer, who has considered the things that I have mentioned above.

That’s not to say that I have switched from Instapaper to Read It Later. At least, not yet – I have not made a decision either way at the moment – but with a few minor tweaks – such as a light text on dark background option – to the iPhone app¹ it might be hard not to.

Footnotes

1. I may, of course, simply be missing these options. ↩

As some of you may or may not know, Rachel and I are moving back to Brisbane in approximately two weeks. We are moving back for a myriad of reasons, but chief amongst them is family. We are too far from family down here in Melbourne, and over the time we have spent here I have come to realise just how important family is to me. I have a baby niece who’s first year I will have missed the majority of.

With these changes in mind, I’m hoping to make a few more, and step outside my comfort zone. For my entire adult life, I’ve worked in an office, doing things that I mostly hated, because I wasn’t passionate about them. There are really two things that I am passionate about (other than my family) – helping people, and web design.

One of the few things I enjoy about my (very, very soon-to-be previous) job is helping people with a problem. It gives me tremendous satisfaction to be able to take a problem, analyse it, and solve it.

Other than that, I love making websites. I sit here at my Mac most nights, with Coda open, working on some form of web page or site, simply because I love it. And now, I want to do that for a living. So now, while I will apply for jobs that aren’t web design, I’m focussing on applying for jobs that are at the very least web design focussed. I want to get a foot in the door, learn even more than I have over the last few years, and be the best web designer I can be.

Wish me luck!

I’m taking some time to consider the place of this blog in my life, as well as changing my life drastically, yet again, by moving from Melbourne back to Brisbane.

I will still be writing, I just probably won’t be publishing, and while this blog will definitely be back at some point, it won’t be the same stuff that you can see here now. I don’t think anyone will have a problem with that.

If, by some chance, you want to get in touch with my, my contact details are in the “footer”.

I have a vague idea of what I want from a network, but the goalposts keep moving slightly every time I sit down to put pen to paper and write a plan or draw a schematic for it. I do know that at the very centre of it, I want a server that acts as a storage receptacle, a media server, a web server and an FTP server; and that I want to have an awesome media centre as the next most important piece that I don’t have, but what form those two devices will take I just don’t know.

In addition to that, there is the matter of the other devices on the network—my MacBook, and my Rachel’s Windows laptop, as well as the Wii, my iPhone, and the inevitable future devices designed to connect to a home network. How are they going to connect to the network, and how will they make use of the network resources? I just don’t know.

I do know that I don’t envy network engineers, or whoever it is that designs and implements networks, at all. It’s a thankless task, as I’ve found out on more than one occasion, and one that tends to create more headaches than it solves. All of that doesn’t faze me however, and I’ll keep plugging away at my plan until one day, I have exactly what I want, and a little bit of future proofing.

The site may look a little bit strange at the moment, but there is good reason for that: today is CSS Naked Day.

I’ve commented out the stylesheet link in the head of this site so that the quality (or lack thereof) can be clearly visible. And thats the whole reason for CSS Naked Day—to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good ‘ol play on words. It’s time to show off your .

I encourage you to take part.

I have, on countless occasions, written entire posts, spent hours editing, or rewriting them, only to abandon any hope of ever actually publishing them because I wasn’t 100% happy with the way they read, or with the very premise of them existing as part of some imagined legacy that I want to keep.

On other occasions, I spend too little time editing, or rewriting, or even considering the place of a particular blog post, and hit the publish button prematurely. All this serves to do is to bring the quality of my content, and therefore the quality of how I am perceived, down. Ultimately, I am only as good as what I publish.

When I do get it right, however, and I manage to write something that I feel is both of value, and well-written enough to be sent out into the world, it often falls onto a deaf, uncaring, or, more likely, uninterested world. Praise and positive reinforcement are not the reason I publish my musings, but I would be lying if I said that receiving comments, starting a discussion, or getting an email from someone about one of my posts was not something that I cared about. I have tried once before to run this blog sans comments, but I lose the sense of audience, or even the possibility of audience, and it fundamentally changes the way I write, and definitely for the worse.

As an aspiring web designer, I am also plagued with another problem with my blog: a lack of satisfaction with the design. Whilst this current design is only the third design that has been live on the site, the version number in my web design folder is marked as 13, with another design in the works. That’s right, this blog has been live for under a year, and I have started to code 14 different designs for the site, as well as brainstorming and sketching out countless others.

The time spent on sketching, and hypothesising of possible designs for the site has often brought me to my knees creatively. Writing HTML and CSS is my one creative outlet. My vice, my escape, my hobby, my passion. When I hit that wall of creative block, I have no outlet, and my passion lay fallow, eating away at me that I should be working on something, only to sit down and try and get angry when the code doesn’t come pouring out of my fingers and into the computer.

I do have idea’s for this blog, and even other projects. The three most preferred idea’s right now all involve design and development of individual blog posts. Unfortunately that would inevitably involve more time, and more frustration.

I’m not certain of what to do, or where to go from here. As it stands, I’ll continue to play it by ear, and post with the same sporadic frequency, and with the same variable quality, and continue to wonder what the value of keeping a blog is.

There are a number of things holding me back from deciding to go ahead with this, not least among them my back catalogue of posts, most of which are not of a quality or a specific theme that would allow me to design a page around them. Also, my complete lack of ability with graphical editors would mean that I am stuck with using colour, text, and the most basic of graphics. Another is the time commitment required to take a post from idea through to completion and publishing—I just don’t have the time free to do it.

The final problem is that of content management. I don’t like the idea of using something like WordPress that would need to be hacked significantly to do what I want, and the options that provide me with what I want to do don’t offer an easy, native comments solution. Sure, I could go sans comments, but I’ve been down that road before, and it was less than enjoyable and prolific.

But still, the desire sits at the back of my mind, gnawing away at my will to ignore it. I’ve had a few ideas of how I could do something, and I’ll go over them here, but the fact is, if I did decide to go down this route, I would end up being a curator rather than a creator. Not really something I want to do.

Designer Mixtapes

This is an idea that I quite like actually. A common interest amongst most of the designers that I admire seems to be music, and where theres music, theres mixtapes, or at least playlists. I had the idea to approach some of my favourite designers and ask them if they would be interested in putting together a mixtape, complete with cover art, and designing a page for it. They could choose whatever theme they liked (if any at all), and go hell for leather at it.

The problem with this, however, is one of copyright. I don’t want to be putting collections of MP3′s up on my website for download, and violating artists copyright. But I wouldn’t want to be curating a collection of mixtapes, without having them available for download either. Links to iTunes, with Magic Mixes or whatever they are called seems like an obvious solution, but one I’m not sure I’m comfortable with.

The List Post

Exactly the same as the above, but rather than asking designers to create a mixtape and have them design a page around it, I would ask them to come up with a Top 5 list. Once again, theme or topic would be left open to the designer in question, and they can go crazy with whatever they want to.

Do you think either of these would be a good idea? Have any other ideas that you want to share? Feel free to let me know.

It all started with this.

I started blogging again, and signed up to participate in Project52 because I thought I had something to say. But you and I both know, with the benefit of hindsight, and an exploration of my archives, that that’s bullshit. Sure, occasionally I might have something that I really just can’t help but write. But most of that is about 5 sentences of meat, and 15 sentences of gristle. And that’s a waste. A waste of your time, and mine.

No more.

Project52 was supposed to be about creating new content. Content that had worth. Content that had meaning. It was a stand against the shitty content that people have been creating. List posts, showcases, entire blogs devoted to pointing you towards other people’s blogs, which in turn were just point you somewhere else.

But for me, Project52 became, quite quickly, a chore. Instead of having something worth writing about, I was writing anything I could to try and satisfy the requirements of the project. I wrote about useless shit, like how I can’t sleep, or smoking cigarettes. I know, fucking pointless right?

It wasn’t just the Project52 stuff that sucked either. It was everything I wrote. Like a list of people I admire. I know, a list post right? Exactly what I was supposed to be a part of stopping. Sure, it had value, to me, and hopefully to the people in the list, but did I need to write it? No, and that’s precisely my point. I was blogging for the sake of blogging.

Which brings me back to Merlin’s essay. Which I have read before, but never let it hit me like it did tonight. I’m part of the problem. I create the shit that nobody wants to read, and as a result nobody really read it. Well, I’m done. For the time being, I’m walking away, unless I have something worth writing.

And you know what the cruelest irony of the whole thing is? I’ll probably have something to write now.

I read a very interesting post tonight by Darren Hoyt about how opening up Dribbble would lead to the inevitable degradation of the service. Random users would be signing up just to sign up, and others would be posting a lot of crap in the hopes of having someone “famous” take a look at their work. I can completely understand and empathise with the point Darren is making. I even agree that perhaps it should be kept private to protect the integrity of the service.

What I would personally like to see, if only to try to satisfy my insatiable curiosity for looking at beautiful design, is viewing opened up a little bit more. One of the commenters took the basketball analogy that Dribbble is known for and applied it exactly to my frustration at not being involved—I can’t watch “the game”. In a second comment he went on to suggest the introduction of a “Developmental League” similar to what the NBA apparently has (I have no idea, basketball is about as interesting as synchronised swimming and ice dancing in my opinion), where anybody can join, but you have to be “drafted into the big leagues”.

I like the idea that this guy had, and it certainly solves some of my frustrations with it, as I would be able to see whats going on in the “big leagues,” but I can’t help but feel that perhaps that won’t solve the problem Darren writes about. I thought about it for about 20 seconds and came up with my own idea’s.

Essentially, what I’d like to see is the site be opened into 4 levels of visibility, in the following order:

1. Open viewing—Allow anyone and everyone to see whats put up there. This may not be a realistic possibility, but I personally think its better than keeping everything behind closed walls
2. Allow me to sign up for a “Couch Potato” or “Supporter” (or some other such name) account—I can view it all, and even favourite things, but I still can’t comment on anything, or upload anything.
3. Enter the “Development League”—I can join up, or be invited, and be able to post images, and leave comments in the development league, and favourite anything that has been uploaded.
4. Join the “Big Leagues”—After I’ve been a member of the “Development League” for long enough, preferably a predetermined minimum amount of time, and I have done enough impressive work that I get to join in with the big boys. Also now give me the option of filtering the content I see, depending on the current set up of it.

I don’t know if any of this would help or hinder what Dan and Rich are trying to do with Dribbble, its just my two cents worth. What are your thoughts?