Better Elevation

Violet Blue writes about the lack of innovation and the monoculture at WWDC. Most of the article reads as contrarian, counterculture bullshit, but there’s a block of text dedicated to an interaction with a developer at a party that I just can’t let slide.

The short version is that a guy walks up to the author and her assistant at a party and says hello. Because he acknowledges their gender, they decide to spend the conversation mocking and trolling him.

He asks me, “What do you girls do?”

Juliette replies, “We’re models.” I add, “That’s actually how we met!”

My PA answers his questions about what kind of modeling we do – we are apparently not with an agency. Mind you, my PA actually is a model, one that flies out of town for shoots more than I’d like to have her away from me.

She is also an Objective-C programmer that can code circles around most of them – with her outrageous fingernails somehow always intact.

Right. She’s a supermodel and a genius developer. She just does the personal assistant thing because the money is so good.

His shirt read Bottlerocket; he explained that it was his company and he made major Apple applications for a list of companies, which he rattled off in succession, beginning with Spin and ending with Disney.

Here’s where I get pissed off. It’s one thing to be mean to the guy at the party, but did he really do something so unspeakably offensive that you have to out him in the article? The only possible outcome is damage to his reputation. The reader gains nothing. There’s no journalism here, just a jerk with a chip on her shoulder.

“So,” I pointed to his buddy’s Daring Fireball shirt and said, “is that your company?”

No, he said. Unprompted, he mansplained who John Gruber is to Juliette and I, a full-on name drop on meeting Wil Shipley at this very party, (this apparently required more mansplains), and then I was told that Bottlerocket boy was from Dallas where it is much hotter than San Francisco.

“Mansplains”? This guy assumes you’re a much nicer person than you are. He takes the time to answer your questions politely. He actually seems like kind of a stand-up dude. So what do you do? You make up new words to mock him, of course.

At which point Juliette cut in saying, “Wait. Don’t computers… Need to be kept cool or something?”

He agreed in seriousness, while I spilled my drink – out of my mouth with an uncontrolled laugh.

No, they never got it. And no, we were not dressed they way you probably think we were.

Act stupid and people will assume you’re stupid. Kudos to this guy for his kindness.

Immediately following that story, she shares this anecdote:

I attended the SmileOnMyMac/Smile Software party, and that was another fun one. Really great people, gracious host. A much more typical WWDC tech party: three or four women, around 40-50 men. It was just fine, I didn’t feel too out of place. Until I went to call up an Uber Cab.

Phone in my hand, a gentleman named Jim Dalrymple turned to me and says loudly, “Hey, what phone is that?”

I respond, It’s an Android, Samsung-

Before I finish he shouts at me, “Sucks for you!” Laughing, he turns, and then walks away as I’m saying to the men looking embarrassed in his stead, “Yes, but I have reception.”

Girl, humiliated.

Someone made you feel stupid in public? How awful.

When people ask me about getting into this community, I usually tell them that the first rule is “don’t be a dick”. Whatever you may think of developers, the iOS and Mac community is pretty stellar, full of genuinely nice people who want to make great things and spend time with great people. Male or female, don’t be surprised if your shitty attitude gets an angry response.

Deservedly, this article is catching a lot of heat on Twitter and from outspoken developers.

The fact is that it is unusual to see women at a developer conference. And yes, sometimes developers are a little socially awkward. That’s just how this works. If you can’t respect that, or work to improve matters, just stay home. By adopting this attitude at something called “Worldwide Developer Conference”, the joke is on you. The Bottlerocket guy will probably get a few messages of solidarity, while nobody worth talking to will want to go anywhere near you.

It would be great to have more women in the industry. But you know what would be even better? To have more nice people, regardless of gender.

So don’t be a dick.

…Ladies.

Jay Graves wrote up a helpful explanation of what KeyGrinder is and how it works. I may have moved to a different company, but I still use KeyGrinder every day.

People sometimes ask how I got into software design. Easy, because of NetNewsWire.

Years ago, I delivered pizza to make money. Not much, of course, and most of what I did make went into my gas tank. I was broke, eating pizza for every meal and sleeping on the floor in my mom’s living room.

For years I’d read about all of the latest rumors and goings-on via sites like TUAW and Macrumors. I read the coverage of every keynote. App launches and updates were like candy. I read blog posts from Mike Lee, checked out wallpapers from Louie Mantia, and clicked through to everything John Gruber linked. I watched as an outsider, fascinated by the depth of the community and its rich, interesting characters. Some people have their celebrity gossip magazines, I have NetNewsWire full of nerdy feeds.

I was nervous when I got to meet Brent Simmons for the first time. Alex King, a mutual friend, noticed that we were both in San Jose at the same time and emailed us to suggest we grab a drink. I had wondered what I could possibly say of interest to Brent Fucking Simmons, but I decided to go anyway. Brent was gracious, kind, and if he ever wished I’d shut up and go away, he didn’t let it show.

Instead, what happened next was like having a hand reaching out to me from my laptop’s screen; Brent pulled me into my own RSS feeds and introduced me to all of the people I’d been reading about for years and whose software I used every day. Two years later, I’ve managed to land a gig where I get to work with some of the most talented and passionate people I’ve ever known. Hell, my boss is a goddamned rocket scientist. What I do for a living isn’t work, it’s recess. I feel like the kid in the movie who gets to go pitch for the major league team.

Now that Black Pixel is taking over ownership of NetNewsWire, the comparison is ever more apt.

I love to create. In my eyes, the true measure of an experience is in its ability to inspire me. In the same way that a great song makes me want to pick up a guitar, I make software because I’m inspired by great software.

And NetNewsWire is great software. I’m humbled by the gravity of it.

Speaking of friends with game-changing apps, Ryan Nielsen’s company Tumult has released Hype, an HTML5 animation builder for the Mac. Even if you don’t plan to use it, Hype stands a good chance of changing the web animation landscape and helping to displace Flash.

My friend Michael Simmons and his company Flexibits have released their long-awaited calendar app. Creating appointments is simple: you just type something like “lunch with John Tuesday at noon”, and it creates the event for you. This sounds simple, but there’s something fun at play here: it feels like you’re telling your secretary to update you calendar, rather than doing it yourself. How great is that?

Last week, a respected and popular company released a new Twitter client. Unfortunate timing, given recent developments, but it’s safe to assume that they started work on this project before Twitter decided to become a bunch of assholes.

Immediately, my own timeline started filling up with tweets proclaiming that this new client was the best thing since sliced bread. Particularly, that it was well-designed, thoughtful, and amazing. The very traits of great software that inspired me to become a designer in the first place. Naturally, I took a look.

Three dollars and a short download later, I was enjoying a beautiful, carefully-considered… tutorial. Maybe “enjoying” is the wrong word. I may have used some expletives. It’s not important.

I examined the tutorial and took a few mental notes, then moved on. How did this app feel? How did it prompt me to use it? Twitter apps are the new “hello world”, so it’s always fun to see a fresh approach to a very familiar problem.

While my friends were all heaping praise on the interface and interaction design of this new app, I couldn’t help but cock my head a little at some of the decisions. Tap and hold for popup tab-bar things? Triple-tap? Non-standard table cell behavior? This felt like something alien. Like an Android app.

Given what I do for a living, friends have naturally been asking what I think of the app in question. If you’ve ever met me, you’ll know I’m not shy, especially when offering design opinions. Why start making exceptions now?

I proudly declared this app to be the Lady Gaga of Twitter clients. With Lady Gaga, it doesn’t matter if her music is any good. Nobody talks about her music. The discussion is always about her: her clothes, her hair, her antics, whether or not she’s really a dude. Music is the excuse to show up. This fancy new Twitter client felt like a whole lot of design built upon a very thin excuse.

I also mentioned something about tarted-up pigs.

Secure in how clever I was in my analysis of someone else’s work, I wrote an entire blog post decrying it. Your opinion is wrong, mine is right. I’m a designer. I know better than you. I opined that everyone thinks they understand design. Everyone wants to look like they have good taste, and this app was merely successful in that it was a safe thing to be opinionated about.

…On second thought, maybe I shouldn’t be a complete dick about an app that some very talented people put a lot of time and effort into. Nobody understands having your design shat upon like a designer. And none of us are enthusiastic about having it done publicly. So I didn’t post it.

Instead, I gave some thought to why this app bothered me so much. It was a safe thing to be opinionated about, but if I’m being honest, that door swings both ways. My opinion was far from unique, but most of the people agreeing with me (or joining in my complaints) were designers. That’s interesting. Is it possible that we’re just being catty? That this team’s work is very good, and really we’re just upset that the attention is going to them and not us?

Great design is tricky. It’s easy to pick apart decisions after an app ships and second-guess its creators. What’s harder — as anyone who has ever created something knows — is being the guy in the room who has to fashion those decisions from whole cloth. Sure, everyone likes to think they have good taste. But the smart ones still hire a designer.

In their ads and product announcements, Apple likes to use the word “magic”. There’s an entire cottage industry of bad Internet comedians who poke fun at them for it. But it’s part of the Apple brand, and the truth is that there is something magical about the iPhone and the iPad. These devices are doing incredible things in bold new ways. They’re changing the world by changing the way people interact with technology. If you’re making software for iOS and you aren’t inspired by that, you should switch to another platform.

We do what we do because we want to be magicians.

And that, I think, is where the problem comes in. This beautiful and amazing new Twitter client is full of flashy graphics and tricks. As magicians, we’re not just observing their moves and misdirections, we’re studying them. And while I can’t speak for anyone else, it seems to me that the irritation is not that the tricks aren’t well-executed, it’s that they’re very by-the-book. We’ve seen these tricks before. We see them as being cheap because instead of being pulled into the experience, we see how the trick works.

But what matters is that the audience doesn’t.

That’s the whole point, right? We create things because we want to delight, entertain, and empower our users. While the specifics of how they did it may be interesting from an academic point of view, the important part is that they did. People really seem to like this app. I can be a jerk about it and point out the trap doors, but then I’m just that guy who awkwardly ruins the show for his increasingly disinterested date.

In design, opinion is currency. But being negative is a cheap trick, too. And if I can get past that, maybe humility isn’t the only lesson this app has to offer me.

Texas governor Rick Perry:

WHEREAS, throughout our history, both as a state and as individuals, Texans have been strengthened, assured and lifted up through prayer; it seems right and fitting that the people of Texas should join together in prayer to humbly seek an end to this devastating drought and these dangerous wildfires;

Good thinking. God doesn’t give a fuck about your problems until state government gets involved.

Louie Mantia posted an excellent screencast on how to use textures in Photoshop. He references CG Textures, which is my own favorite source. If you enjoy his wallpapers, you should check this out.

I was all for it. Until this (emphasis mine):

Citing unnamed sources, CNN.com reported Wednesday that UberMedia is looking to attract users to its own microblogging service by addressing common complaints about Twitter, such as its restriction on the length of a message and how it can be confusing to newcomers.

Microblogging without message length restrictions is blogging. Or a very convoluted IM setup.

Well-defined.

My friend (and boss) Daniel Pasco on design:

Every task, no matter how small, is worth pouring your heart into. Whenever we look at a new project, I ask myself “What is it about this app that is going to make it a Black Pixel app? What characteristics do I want people to associate with our brand?” For us, those characteristics are great design, real utility, beauty, and delight.

As the guy responsible for the entire creative department at Black Pixel, It’s heartening to know that I report to someone who cares just as much about these things as I do.

Austin Kleon:

There’s this very real thing that runs rampant in educated people. It’s called imposter syndrome. The clinical definition is a “psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments.” It means that you feel like a phony, like you’re just winging it, that you really don’t have any idea what you’re doing.

Guess what?

None of us do.

I’m putting this on my fridge.

Noted Canadian Guy English points out a subtle but important problem with multitasking gestures in 4.3:

The problem isn’t that they’re not handy (zing), rather that they break what I feel is one of the key wonders of iPad — it becomes the application that is running. These multitasking gestures add a set of interactions that relate not to what is on the screen but to an abstract higher-level of functionality. The touch screen is now an input into two systems: the application and the operating system.

June 6th through the 10th. A renewed focus on the Mac, including space in the Apple Design Awards. This should be a very interesting year.

This font exists. Someone made it. Think about that for a moment.