Launching Three Things

First, I'm hosting a Movember Letterpress event called MOPRESS, on Sunday 18 November at The Scratch, the best pub in the world, at noon. If you're reading this, you're invited, and you can pick up an invite by clicking on the little tiles to the right.

It's a fundraiser, where you play Letterpress against as many people as you like, and the loser of each game pays $5 to Movember. Don't have Letterpress? (App Store link just there.) It's free to play one game at a time, but you'll probably want to spend $1 on the full version. Don't have an iOS device? We'll have some spare. Come and have a drink anyway.

Second, I'm presenting the final Brisbane InDesign User Group meeting for the year on Tuesday 20 November, talking about the new features of CS6 and how to create an iPad app directly from Creative Cloud tools. Free, but you'll need to register.

Third, I've just launched a 10-minute documentary I made at the 48 Hour Game Making Challenge 2012. Good people doing crazy things in two days flat, this video was inspired by Brendan Keogh's epic series of articles written on the event last year. Hope you like it, and if you want something similar made for your event, just drop me a line: iain [at] funwithstuff.com.

Working too hard

Recently I've been to Sydney, worked 12 hour days, filmed a lot, written a lot, and done a heap of freelance. It's good, but it's not, if you know what I mean.

And I'm still waiting for my Blackmagic Cinema Camera.

Final Cut Pro X: The Free Rough Guide

Between being busy and posting on Twitter a fair bit more regularly, I haven't posted here in a while. One of the things I've been busy doing is writing regular articles for The Hub, part of macProVideo.com. Here are all my articles there.

One big thing I've done over the past several months is to create a large (9000+ words) rough guide to editing in Final Cut Pro X. It takes you from ingest, past the rough cut, through the fine cut, to effects, transitions, export and archiving. If you're new to editing or just to FCP X, I really hope it helps. And it's available for FREE, serialised in six parts, starting today and for the next five days. Here's Part One: Import and Organize.

If you like it, tell your friends. If you want video training, start with this free series by Michael Wohl. And if you want training in-person, contact me! I'm an Apple Certified Trainer, and that's what I do for a living these days, through my site: trainingbrisbane.com.

Food blogging is not the devil

Today, at the Noosa Food and Wine Festival, I went to a session The Courier Mail held on Social Networking, Blogging, and Mainstream Media. The panel, eight strong (and this was noted by MC David Fagan) was stacked with old media faces: food reviewers, editors, and so on. Two food bloggers were present, and they seemed both well liked and competent. Indeed, many of the panelists seemed reasonable and erudite.

However. There was a palpable bias, stemming from the fact of their employment, that old media was better, more reliable, more authoritative, more responsible, less prone to corruption, and so on. At one point, someone said the problem was that "we need to find a way to get people to pay for [it]", where "it" stands for information about restaurants — the reviews and opinions which so many people give away for free on the internet. It's fair to say that at least some of the panelists just don't get it.

Here are a few points that I'd dispute:

Yes, a newspaper's experienced reviewer can give a longer and more thorough opinion than random unpaid amateurs online.

Yes, some reviews are rigged (positively or negatively) on Urbanspoon, Tripadvisor (they do food too), Eatability and other sites, but the vast majority are not. The solution is not, as one panelist suggested, that "maybe the restaurants should start suing Urbanspoon". The public is just about smart enough to discern a worthwhile review from a valueless one.

No, I don't think many people really read food blogs compared to print media. Print still has the stickiness of simply being there on a table, ready to picked up and leafed through; I have to choose to visit a blog. It's the same reason that broadcast TV survives: many people are happy to consume what they are served. The influence of "food blogging" is, I think, overestimated.

However, I think they perhaps underestimate the power of the amateur review. If I'm looking for a special occasion meal, then yes, I'll read the opinions of the best reviewers. If I'm on holiday or really can't be bothered cooking, I'll just call up an app, look on a map, and find the best looking place nearby. I judge those places based on the collective wisdom of the internet, fed through my personal filters, possibly amended when I turn up and see the place. If a place has multiple negative reviews from different people and no positives, it's unlikely that they're all fakers from the restaurant next door. I didn't need a professional review, just a thumbs up or down.

And that's the thing. Print is still the place people will go for regular, informed opinions about restaurants and much else besides. They also have an important role in introducing people to new restaurants. Today, though, they're not the only source of that information. While real foodies (and I am not) will still prefer the in-depth print review, I don't usually need it, and can get the brief information I seek without print.

Before the internet, I would have asked a friend or taken a blind stab, and now I can ask strangers. I don't ask food bloggers, just random users of whatever service showed up on Google and looked reasonable.

Similarly, before the internet, I wouldn't have tracked down an old paper for a review from months prior. The mobile internet answers the "is this restaurant any good?" question in a way that print never did and answers the "what's the best restaurant near here?" question in a way that it never can. Print never solved either problem, they only gave a restaurant something to photocopy and display next to their menu on the street.

To keep their current committed foodie audience, print media needs to ensure that their content is better than the alternatives, and that it's just as visible. Their content's fine, but they're losing the visibility war that's so important for the casual review-seeker. If print wants to remain relevant, it needs to make its content just as obvious, searchable, location-enabled and user-comment-friendly as its competitors. If not, their audience will slowly drift away. Convenience, in the end, always wins.

Magazines on the iPad

What you'd think would be relatively simple has become quite a contentious battle. Magazines, books, newspapers and anything else built of words and/or pictures is going digital. Print will survive, but not as the primary consumption method for most of us.

Amazon, with the Kindle, and others with earlier e-readers have been pushing this future for text-heavy books for some years now, and they've gained enough traction and done enough deals to make that future assured. Yet, if you want to read a magazine you'll probably be wanting an iPad. A larger, colour, interactive display makes a world of difference, and a magazine is a very different game to books. Images are important, layout is important, fonts are important — and none were deemed important in the ebook world.

Zinio was one of the first companies to get the ball rolling here, back when all they had was a Mac and PC PDF-based reader app. It was painful back then, largely because reading a magazine on a computer screen was hardly the personal experience readers expected, and because the reader app was quite slow — on the desktop, it still is, thanks to AIR.

Adobe, as makers of the dominant publishing application InDesign, took their time, then produced the Digital Publishing Suite. Not based on PDF, it allowed a variety of additional multimedia widgets and could deal with horizontal and vertical layouts, to allow reading in either orientation — so long as the designers re-designed every page. (InDesign makes this process easier than it might be, but it's hardly automatic.)

Biggest criticisms of the Adobe DPS: magazine issues are huge, often over 500MB (largely because each page is simply rendered as a flat image) and you can't zoom in. (A competitor, MagAppZine, chose a similar delivery method, but uses more heavily compressed images at double the resolution, allows zooming, and looks good on the retina display.)

However, another important factor is that it's completely inaccessible. As there's no actual text present, there's no way for the system's text-to-speech functionality to make any sense of it. Despite all the other issues surrounding magazines-as-images, I suspect that a legal challenge from an interested organisation will put an end to this strategy in the long run. (It's worth noting that Zinio's solution does include full text, as text, on request.)

So how did Adobe and MagAppZine (and others) end up with just a series of images? If the layout is important, the delivery method, for now, has to be an image or a PDF. For a truly accessible, lightweight, text-rendered-by-device-quickly layout, you'd have to rebuild each magazine with HTML, and there's no easy way to do that right now from InDesign. (It's coming, but not ready yet. Maybe in CS6?)

Recreating print layouts in HTML would require a great deal of extra work, a whole set of skills that print designers rarely have, and that's assuming they can clear the rights issues for distribution of their favourite fonts. It's a non-starter for organisations already struggling to make a profit.

The biggest question for me is: why not PDF? Yes, it requires more effort to render, but it requires a whole lot less effort from the designers. And Adobe know their PDF. The big reason is that Adobe are trying to support the device first and the designers second. Like Apple, they've chosen to force designers, to some degree, to design specifically for the iPad (or other tablets) and not to support existing workflows, technologies and formats.

Apple's motivation is clear and oft-stated: to ensure the best experience on their devices. Adobe's solution, though, is hardly great for consumers, especially now that we have the retina display. What's their motivation? To be fair, they may have done this because, like Apple, they feel that displaying unmodified magazines as zoomable PDFs on the iPad results in a poor experience for users, and they feel that repurposing the content for the medium gives much better results. (Personally, I want the magazine layout, unchanged, and I'm happy to zoom in and move about.)

Maybe they made the choice that they felt was best for consumers. However, some less charitable people may say that they saw an opportunity to make a large amount of money, to become the middle man between publishers and the App Store. Some may say that. But I couldn't possibly comment.

Hazelwatch

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.

In The Apple Factory

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:

The learning tightrope

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.

The Internet is an Echo Chamber Full of Sheep

(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.

Why Do Schools Buy Crappy Tablet PCs?

This is how I imagine it goes (though see update at end!):

• Someone high up in the government sees that kids somewhere like using iPads — perhaps even for educational purposes.
• That person sets the process of "getting kids touch computers" in motion.
• A committee agrees on a checklist of requirements by which tenders can be judged.
• Vendors present their tenders.
• One of the presented options ticks more boxes than the others, and is chosen.

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:

• can connect to wired networks (because we haven't deployed wireless yet)
• can use legacy Windows XP software (because Mr Jones likes Minesweeper)
• comes with Comic Sans (because it's "friendly")

If they'd focus on the kids, they'd come up with a checklist containing items like:

• weighs as little as possible
• can go through a school day without being charged
• is simple to use and hard to mess up
• allow kids to comfortably read textbooks on-screen
• allow teachers to discover and share new software
• allow kids to discover and share new software

...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.

• allow the kids to do things we haven't even thought of yet

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!