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With the near ubiquity of web access through my iPhone, when I look at a serious productivity app, a high-priority requirement is to have useable access from both laptop/desktop and iPhone. If offered only through a browser, rarely can the one interface work on both devices well.  Even simple navigation events like a double-click or scrolling are problematic on an iPhone, not to mention the lack of Flash. 

So, web app developers that want wide acceptance need to either introduce an installable client for the iPhone and a decent API, or provide an iPhone-friendly web interface that can be accessed safely over Safari.  For some apps, only one mode of access makes sense (GPS-related mapping for example), but for others it's a major turn-off.  This isn't just limited to iPhone of course: Android and (soon) Palm Pre users will have the same requirements.  And it's not going to go away. Increasingly, more users will be accessing apps through a smartphone than a laptop.  If nothing else, any web app should have a good public API and let the market come to the party with different ways of accessing and manipulating the content.

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If you make a living from design, then you need to be closer to the edge than if you make your living from selling widgets. So when your widgets are design objects then your risk profile is higher than other widget companies. Apple is a poster-child for a product company trading on its innovative and elegant design, but so is Alessi, maker of famous kitchen accessories and other items. The McKinsey interview with Alberto Alessi, current CEO of Alessi, shows the sort of focus and approach that a design company has, when compared to the others. The commercial aspect is there, of course, but it's almost secondary to the idea of expression, and the necessary level of risk that is required.

As Alessi says:

Well-organized, mass production companies try to work as far as possible from the borderline. They cannot afford to take too many risks. But by all producing the same car, the same television set, and the same fridge year after year, those companies are making products more and more boring and anonymous.

The destiny of a company like Alessi is to live as close as possible to the borderline, where you are able to really explore a completely unknown area of products. The problem is that the borderline is not clearly drawn. You cannot see with your eyes where it is. You can only sense these qualities.

His metaphor for his role in the business is as a gardener, and, as with gardens, you need to cope with wet seasons and dry seasons.  From the article:

We consider our core activity to be mediating between, on one side, the best possible expressions of product design from all over the world and, on the other side, the final customer's dreams. I prefer discussing "customer dreams" instead of "the market," because market is so rough.

Deep down, I feel that my activity as an artistic mediator in product design is not very different from the role of a museum director or even a filmmaker—putting together and organizing talents in different fields to get to a result, which is not a mass-produced product in the traditional sense, but a product that's trying to speak to the masses in a new sense, like a well-made film.

To do this, we make use of some qualities that are more and more rare in industrial culture today, such as sensibility, intuition, and the desire to accept a bit more risk.

It's a refreshing message.

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I've been writing music since I started learning piano as a kid, although I only started capturing the output when I got my first synthesizer at age 20 and could plug it into a cassette recorder.  Some years later, I give you accumulated tips and suggestions, both mine and from others, on how to improve your musical output, whatever kind of electronic music you make, and particularly if you do it as a hobby, like me.

Preparation

1. Work when you're most productive or creative.  Alternatively, just work when you have the time.  Either way, make the time.  Every now and then, set aside a couple of hours to get into the zone and stay there without interruptions.
2. Set aside time to play with and explore your tools. Get to know the ins and outs. Turn that knob up to 11 and see what happens.
3. While you're playing around, if you hear something you like, capture it. Store the patch, record the sequence, make a note, whatever, but don't waste it.  Then, when you come back to it you can extend it, take it further.
4. Always have at least one track on the go, so that you can dive in and play with it when you get an opportunity, even 20 minutes. Even if it's just a bass line or a sample.
5. Make it easy to get going. If you need to turn on twenty-seven instruments, wait for a computer to boot, re-patch the hifi, and re-read the manuals before you can start engaging, you'll find excuses not to.  As a corollary, it means that even if you have 15 minutes before you have to go to sleep, or go out, you can do even something small to take your track forward in the time you have.
6. Listen to a variety of music, and find something to appreciate in everything. Within limits of course. Don't punish yourself either.

Equipment

1. Whatever tool you have, whatever crappy or minimal setup you can afford or have room for, use it anyway.  The Beatles had less than you do, and look at what they did. I started with a single synthesizer and had to do multiple overdubs between a 2-track tape recorder and a VCR.  Sure, it sounded pretty crappy, but I could write tracks and learn from it.
2. Don't necessarily follow the crowd and use what they use. You'll probably end up sounding like them. Find a collection of gear that works for you.
3. With modern music software and soft synths you have more than you need.  Keep a small collection of synths, drums, effects with enough variety that you can work with them.  Don't keep chasing new soft synths.  The truth is they don't actually make a big difference.  They don't write music, you do.
4. Get decent headphones.  If your music sounds ok through them, you'll have a much better chance of it sounding good on a variety of other people's sound systems.

Creativity

1. You don't get on skis for the first time and do perfect parallel turns down a hill.  You need to practice and make the mistakes. Similarly, a producer needs to create an amount of music before it's any good.  The sooner you start, the sooner you get to something you like.
2. To have good ideas, you need to have lots of ideas. To have great tracks, you need to have a number of tracks.  They don't all have to be brilliant, but use them as practice.
3. If you're awake early or can't sleep, go and spend half an hour working on a track. It can be a very creative time.
4. Good production can take an average track and make it great. Work out how to bring out the best in what you're hearing.
5. If you don't like a track, strip it back: delete the bits you don't like and start again. Backtracking is fine.
6. If you don't like your bass line or a drum sound, replace the sound with random patches or samples.  Use rhythmic sounds in a melody; use orchestral sounds in a drum loop. Eventually you'll find something interesting that will take your track in a new direction.
7. Find a loop in a track you like or would like to emulate to some degree, and use that as the basis for your track. Build a song around it, then take away the original loop. [Thanks to Tom Ellard]
8. Don't try and sound too much like someone else. Even while you're working in a genre, create something that sounds unique, and learn to embrace that difference.
9. Accept that a track may end up somewhere different from where you started or intended. Let the music be "uncovered" as you work on it.
10. Finish the current track before starting a new one. This doesn't always happen, but keep the number of working tracks to a minimum. Learn to get it out the door, to a sufficient level of quality.

Production

1. The valuable effect in your arsenal is EQ.  With modern tools, EQ can be applied to every instrument. Give everything some space in the spectrum.
2. A bit of reverb goes a long way, but a little adds a nice sheen.
3. Don't over-quantise or over-correct. Employ some randomness, add some human error.
4. When you think have it sounding great, take a long break and come back to it later.
5. Compare your music with tracks you want to sound like. Try and analyse what the gaps are.
6. Browse the production tips in the various forums online that pertain to your musical interest and your equipment of choice.

Distribution

1. Release your tracks under a Creative Commons licence, with attribution. Let people take them and extend them. It's both a compliment and a networking opportunity.

That's all for now, but I reserve the right to add more.

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With the financial crisis and all, now's a good time to look at the web apps you use and rely on, and put a continuity plan in place. We're not at the bottom of the market yet, so many of those start-ups without a solid revenue model, and offering compelling reasons to continue using their services, just may not be around in six or twelve months time. And you may not get much warning.

So, where possible, export your data and back it up, ideally in a standard text, CSV, or XML format that you can wrangle -- with various degrees of difficulty -- into a usable format elsewhere.  At a time like this, open data is more than a privacy issue, it's may be a survival issue if that data is critical to your personal or business life.  Failing that, getting hold of the source code may be a fallback if there is someone who can get it up and going long enough to get the data out. Think about any hosting you use as well. Make sure you have your digital assets backed up, including config files, images, htaccess files and so on.

I'm thinking about the things I use regularly, and which of them have the best margin to business failure, and which I care about.

• Google
• Flickr (Yahoo!)
• Delicious
• SimpleGTD
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Bloglines
• Posterous
• Evernote
• NuevaSync
• etc.

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In IEEE Spectrum, there is an article on a revolutionary new power source. "Randell Mills, founder of BlackLight Power, says his reactor liberates energy from hydrogen in a totally new way." Sound a little suspicious? A little more from the article...

Mills is unfazed by the criticism, having faced down the physics establishment since he first put forward his hydrino theory some 20 years ago. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, he veered into physics after taking some courses at MIT in the late 1980s. His theory has been evolving since then. Not only does it explicitly reject quantum mechanics as it is currently understood, it also attempts to explain physics and chemistry "from the scale of quarks to cosmos," as Mills puts it. Unlike quantum theory's statistical approach, his theory is completely deterministic.

You can read about it all in his magnum opus, The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Physics, a 1771‑page work that he's self-published on his Web site. It claims to offer explanations with no "spookiness or weirdness" for quantum phenomena like entanglement, as well as some extraordinary predictions: that under certain conditions electrons acquire antigravity properties, which Mills calls "the fifth force," and that the mysterious dark matter permeating the universe consists of large hydrino agglomerations.

The thing that makes this smell more than anything else, even apart from the lack of truly independent analysis and the self-published new unified theory, is the financial angle. If this technology were really as revolutionary and successful as he says it is, I would like to think that most people with that knowledge would abandon the commercial upside, give away the IP, and get this out there and being used as quickly as possible. He could still be famous, and probably rich, but be a hero at the same time. In my world, holding back on disclosing technology that could solve significant global energy problems makes you a colossal and selfish prick.  So, global asshole, or charlatan in a caravan selling snake oil?  Spectrum seems to have made the call.

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I'm a little annoyed -- not devastated though -- to find that Google Notebook is going into suspended animation. I'm annoyed because I made a conscious decision to start using it in anger not that long ago, but also annoyed because they've left it unfinished. Google Notebook is/was for me a very useful online, access-anywhere, searchable, taggable place to put stuff, but it does have its issues.

• The editing options are limited. You can't embed images or other media items for example. You only have four text sizes. And so on. The KISS principle, sure, but include the essential functions.
• The HTML markup it uses to store its notes is atrocious.  If it's one thing I hate it's spaghetti markup with span tags everywhere and embedded CSS in the attributes. Gmail's HTML is a little better, but have these people not bought into separation of style and content?
• The architectural metaphor they've chosen doesn't feel right somehow. I'm never sure exactly where a new note is going to end up.
• It's ugly. Aesthetics count. Beauty counts. It looks and feels messy and a little clunky. Its missing some UI polish and user psychology insight.

Maybe its demise has something to do with the lack of monetisation opportunities they brought to it, and opinions will vary. Regardless of why, now I have to find a replacement. Some options that come immediately to mind.

1. Use paper and pencil. Yeah, nice one Grandad. Heard of the web?
2. Store all my notes on a USB thumb drive with an editor for each OS, and carry it everywhere with me.  No, that's dumb.
3. Upgrade all my notes to Google Docs. I don't mind Docs, it's fine for more formal documents, and you can wrangle the CSS and HTML code if you want to (and I do). It's not very lightweight though, and there's an amount of opening, closing, and clicking that takes a bit of time.
4. Use the cross-platform and iPhone poster-child Evernote. Nope, it just doesn't do it for me. It likes you to install stuff even though you can access it through a browser. And you can't edit any item through the iPhone that has rich text.
5. Zoho Notebook. Much more polished than its famous cousin, you can draw lines and shapes, and embed stuff everywhere. It looks pretty but I worry about the portability of a multimedia format. You can export pages as MHTML, but that's not exactly widely-used. And again, limited editing and formatting capability.
6. Some other 2-bit company that I've never heard of with an "online notebook" solution.  Like they'll be around in six months time.
7. Find some open-source online notebook code that works with the MySQL instance provided with my hosting.  Good idea. but haven't found one of those yet. It also has to be something I trust.
8. Make my own. Well, that's slightly tempting. I don't "do" databases so I'd have to use something simpler like Amazon SimpleDB and maybe pay for some storage. It has the advantage of being all completely under my control, but it comes at the expense of my time, and other priorities.
9. Use an on-line wiki, like Zoho Wiki or PBWiki. Wikis are great but they're for more structured documents with high connectivity between pages.  Notes, almost by definition, are not strongly linked, and have little hierarchy, and quick capture and retrieval is essential.

Any other options?

[Update 18-Jan-09: added option 9]

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Many have often thought that the use of large touch screens has to be the way forward for user interfaces, if we're to move away from the keyboard+mouse (or trackpad etc) dominance of the last twenty years of personal computing, and I have always strongly agreed. For entering text, a keyboard works just fine, in whatever layout you prefer.  But many of the tasks that computers should be doing for us are not primarily text-oriented. Look at the iPhone (as if you haven't already). You use your fingers to drag, slide, flick, pinch, and point, and only use a keyboard when you're actually entering text. It's intuitive, and developers are coming up with new ways of interacting with data through its screen. Many of the things we want to do on computers are only text-oriented because that's they way we've always done it, dating from our prehistoric green-screen days.  On a touch screen, you want to move a window?  Don't grab a mouse to move a pointer onto the border of a window, just stick your fat finger on it and move it.

Single-touch resistive screens, as most popularised by Palm, were the first step forward out of the keyboard+mouse rut. The capacitive multi-touch screen has been the next evolutionary step, and I for one, am very enthusiastic about the next step: having a large multi-touch screen. I imagine this screen as a significant part of my desk, probably inclined like an architect's drawing board, and the office of the future would not have people using keyboards a large proportion of their time.

So, naturally, I'm excited about the iTable, as I was about Jeff Han's demos. What will people do with it?  It's an area ripe for innovation.

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This is not a new track, but I wanted to test the automatic media player thing in Posterous.  And it's a good track anyway. Listen and be amazed (or not) at my skills on bass.  Hint: all the guitars you hear are done on a bass, even the bit at the end. But, Peter Hook I am not.

For your edification, Servolex is part of the name of a satellite town of Chambéry in Savoie, France, where we spent a month in 2005. The town's full name is La Motte-Servolex. We walked there one day from the centre of Chambéry, for something to do. Unfortunately, it's uninspiring in a modern, functional way, so we turned around and walked back. It's a place where not even the residents can be bothered to write anything about it on Wikipedia¹.

Servolex

Ed: No, it seems it won't automatically replace this with a player, I need to actually email the file to the blog. Which I'm not planning to do. Just click it on and it should pop up whichever default player your browser is set up with. Sigh.

By the way, there is much more music at the Dr Dr Aardvark site.

1. It turns out that they prefer to wax lyrical on their communein French. Trés bien, mes amis.

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Everyone loves a list. I was looking at the TIOBE programming languages list for 2008 with some level of discomfort, thinking I was more out of touch than even I had thought, and scratching my head at the kids of today. I mean, D? And ABAP, Pascal, and Logo? But a bit of Googling showed up the community disquiet at the methodology underlying the list, which made me feel better.  It pointed to a competitive list, the Language Usage Indicators, that had a (IMHO) more sensible top 20 that better sat with my own observations.

Even that list surprises me a little; the assertion that "Assembly" still gets a good workout makes me smile, and then wistfully remember long hours hand-assembling Z80 programs in 16K of RAM, and entering and debugging it with a hex editor. Tell that to the young web jockeys of today with their context-sensitive IDEs and GB of RAM. But even I defer to the PDP-8 programmers entering boot code by rocker switches in octal.

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