October 6, 2014

The Magazine Diaries

The Magazine Diaries book

When Peter mentioned that he was starting a little project ahead of Magfest to collect into a book the honest 100-word reactions of a hundred people working at the coalface of magazine publishing, I expressed some concerns. Oh, I had no doubt he could do it, or that the result would be interesting, but I worried that unless he allowed anonymous submissions, it would end up being hagiographic and present an imbalanced view of the industry.

I needn’t have worried.

It’s not, to be sure, filled with invective and doom, and there are some submissions that seem to describe a thriving, bullish, even arrogant industry that I just can’t recognise, but through some strange alchemy he’s managed to create a fascinating little vignette whose very variety gives it a clear voice with which to describe the magazine business in 2014.

If you’re interested in magazines – either from the inside or the outside – I think you’d find The Magazine Diaries intriguing. It’s a fiver, and the proceeds support MagAid.

Buy The Magazine Diaries
October 3, 2014

How to chose the right iPhone (spoiler: I have no idea)

When the iPhone 6 went on sale, I tweeted that anyone thinking of buying one had to go into a shop and try the two new sizes before committing; there was no other way to, aha, grasp the physicality of these devices. Now, I think even that doesn’t go far enough.

I’ve been using the iPhone 6 as my main phone for a long time (Matt is reviewing the 6 Plus, and we’re constantly comparing notes and switching devices) and I’ve vacillated so much about whether it’s good compared to its predecessors I ought to be hooked up to a generator.

I forced myself to go back to the iPhone 5s for 24 hours to see if that helped crystallise my thinking, and it did. It did indeed feel pokey after the bigger expanse of glass on the 6 (I’m using it in Standard, not Zoomed mode), but for me at least it was much more comfortable to hold. I had to shuffle the phone around in my hand less, it felt more secure, and it was easier to use one-handed. (I’m cautiously confident I don’t just think this because I’m more familiar with the 5s.)

The rub, though, is that I think the bigger screen has wooed me. Basically, physics doesn’t let Apple have its cake and eat it; if you want a bigger screen, you sacrifice some of the ergonomic benefits (for those of us who don’t have big hands) of the 3½″ and 4″ models. If I’d just walked into an Apple store and hefted the iPhone 6, I’d have dismissed it. Weirdly thin. Slippery. More difficult to use one-handed. And I’d have been perfectly happy with the screen size of my 5s. Now, though, I think I’d choose that set of compromises that gives me that bigger screen. I’ve only begun to think that thanks to many days of intensive, in-anger use, however. I’m in a privileged position to be able to do this; how anyone else will make the right decision for themselves is beyond me.

October 1, 2014

Do smaller screens present information better?

I’m struggling to articulate something as I review the iPhone 6 (and advise on our review of the iPhone 6 Plus), so perhaps I can start a thought here and you can help me finish it.

I like the iPhone 6 and I liked the 5-series, but I miss the 3½″ form factor. I miss it not just because of how it nestles in the hand (relevant especially to the iPhone 3GS and earlier) and is eminently one-handable, but importantly because of how and how well it can present information.

When you have a small window onto the internet, the way in which you present its information has to be meticulously crafted; apps have to consider and use every pixel or point so carefully. There’s a care and craftsmanship that you have no choice but to apply if you have any ambition that your app could be called be well-designed and efficient.

But when the window gets bigger, you have to worry less about this efficiency. The bigger screen absorbs and forgives. This isn’t, note, a technical thesis; this isn’t anything to do with Auto Layout or @2x versus @3x at different ppis, and nor is it a diatribe about platform tribalism or web apps versus native apps… and yet all of these feed into it.

It sounds perhaps like I’m accusing devs of being lazy. I’m not, though the wider context of app development – increasingly hard to make it as a pure indie app dev, having to make difficult decisions about resources with a broadening line-up of targets – married to the shall-we-call-it simple design of iOS 7 and 8 also feeds into this thread.

So that’s where I’m at: a bunch of half-formed but deeply-felt thoughts about mobile phone screen size and how well information can be presented. If you can form a coherent, balanced and nuanced narrative out of all that, for god’s sake tweet me.

(There’s one more thing to ponder in this context: the Apple Watch.)

My setup
September 28, 2014

What’s next?

“What are you going to do next?” is something I’ve been asked often by friends and colleagues since it was announced a few weeks ago I’m leaving Future at the end of October. It’s a fair question, not least because it’s one I’ve been asking myself a lot, and the answer is simple: I don’t know.

Make no mistake about it: this is terrifying. At some point I’m hoping it will start to be exciting at least as well, but right now it’s mostly deeply disconcerting; I am constitutionally not well suited to not having money arrive regularly in my account on the 28th of every month.

Still, it feels like the right thing to do; there are two reasons I’ve decided to leave now despite having no other job to go to. The first is to do with me; since I started 12 years ago I’ve been steadily (if not always deliberately) climbing the ranks in magazines to my current position of editor-in-chief, and the more senior I’ve gotten, the more I end up merely administering rather than creating stuff. And I miss that. I miss writing, I miss researching, I miss communicating with an audience. I’m excited about being excited again, and stepping off the monthly grind of a regular magazine will be a balm. Some of that, to be sure, is to do with how I feel about a situation rather than the situation itself – which brings me on to the second reason.

The job in the current climate has frankly become too challenging for me. I’ve faced – and not shied away from – a few significant challenges in my career, but had I stayed I would have faced some especially tough ones. They don’t sound to me like the fun, get-your-teeth-into-them, let’s-all-make-something-amazing kind of challenges, so – and I am a little ashamed of this – I’m not prepared to take them on. If you’ve read Jason Snell’s announcement or Serenity Caldwell’s similar note you might get an inkling of the context; certainly, since I read them between handing in my notice and it being announced, I read them both with a mixture of amazement and weariness at how familiar the stories were. I’ll leave behind some wonderful brands and some astonishing people, and I wish them nothing but the very best in meeting the challenges the next six, 12 and 18 months will bring. Nothing about my decision saddens me more than knowing I won’t be working in the same room as some truly inspiring colleagues and friends.

So, what am I going to do next? In the short term, I’m going to get back to writing, speaking and consulting, and while I’ll be pitching ideas to technology and lifestyle brands in the coming weeks, I would, of course, love to hear from you if my expertise sounds useful to you.

Longer-term, I frankly don’t know. I have a nebulous aspiration that once I disentangle myself and my brain from the overhead of my current job, I’ll get some clarity on what I do want to do next, and it might be something completely unrelated. I’m very lucky that my wife supports – indeed, is delighted by – my decision, so while we have a rocky few months ahead, financially, I fervently hope that we’re building towards a happier 2015.

If we’ve worked well together in the past, I’d be most grateful if you would let me know if you hear of any opportunities you think I would a good fit for.

I don’t know what the next chapter will be. Let’s turn the page and find out.

September 15, 2014

Us vs. Them

There are a couple of words that I keep seeing crop up in the discussions of the Scottish referendum happening on social media that have really started to worry me: ‘them’ (and they) and ‘us’ (and we).

I know these terms have relevancy in a discussion about national identity, but so often when I see them used they seem to presage a kind of ugly, subtle but wildly pervasive xenophobia, a combative sense of circling the wagons and rigidly defining groups of people; us versus them. It’s there from Yes voters and there in No voters. It’s there from Scottish people and from English people. It’s not everywhere, no, but it’s there, and it’s horrible to see.

(I don’t, incidentally, get a vote in the referendum; I’m Scottish but I live and therefore vote in England.)

This post originally appeared on Medium.

June 26, 2014

There were three of us in this marriage

It takes a certain hubris to give relationship advice, and that’s no less true for me; for sure, my wife and I have to work, sometimes very hard, at our relationship, and despite us both being articulate, empathetic human beings, we can fall into having the same old arguments.

But we’ve been together now for nearly fifteen years (married for nine), and we have come to notice that at our best we have a process, a trick, even, that makes our relationship strong. So fuck it; for what it’s worth, here’s the one bit of advice we’d feel confident enough to offer up.

(It’s not, despite this article’s title, an open relationship, infidelity or threesomes. Sorry.) We talk about ‘The Team’.

We’re not flatmates. We’re not two independent human beings who happen to occupy the same physical space for 10 hours a day. We are The Team. (Of course, another way of saying that is ‘a family’.)

Sometimes, sure, I’ll do things based on what’s best for me. And sometimes my wife will do things based on what’s best for her. But usually those are only for small things — for anything big, anything even moderately important, we do things based on what’s best for The Team.

This isn’t about compromise, about doing ‘what she wants’ or ‘what he wants’. It’s not about subjugating your own wants and ambitions and so building resentment over years. It’s not about only doing dull, grown-up things and never having any fun. It’s just about switching your priorities.

Your marriage, your relationship, is important. For me at least, my family — just my wife and I at the moment — is the most important thing in the world. It deserves respect. It deserves attention. It deserves to be seen as a third person in your marriage. There’s you; there’s your spouse, who you think is every kind of wonderful; and then there’s The Team.

The Team, this third person in your marriage, is its own thing. You need to take care of yourself, your partner and it. It has its own wants and needs. The decisions you jointly make on its behalf might not be things either of you realised you wanted, and yes, sometimes you’ll both decide to do things for The Team that are not easy, or not things you’d choose to do if you were on your own or even dating. But it works.

This isn’t generic ‘make time for your marriage’ advice, nor a platitude about putting others before you. For us, it has become an important and practical tool in keeping us grounded and keeping us pulling in the same direction. Keeping us happy and happily in love.

Do things for The Team. Try it. Put The Team first. Every time you do something selfish, check yourself; I wasn’t working for The Team there. You’re not flatmates. You’re a family. You’re The Team.

(Actually, we have one more piece of advice: buy loads of paper plates. Especially for food prep, they bring a measure of calm and ease rare outside prescribed pharmaceuticals. Recycle them, sure, and buy paper plates from a sustainable source, but buy them.)

This post originally appeared on Medium.

April 9, 2014

Pinch me; I’m dreaming about the future of computing

I had a vision for the future of computing many years ago. I don’t claim it was a vision nobody had had before me, but it was an original vision, inasmuch as, so far as I can tell, it was a spark of invention and clarity that happened inside my head. Shoulders of giants and all that (by which I probably mean Iain M Banks) but it feels like mine, and so it’s mine to share with you. It was this:

Through the fog, the best I guessed at least a future of computing would be is one of homogeneous ubiquity (now, I’d describe this as a kind of natural evolution of the cloud, but that wasn’t a concept we’d had marketed to us then) and that we’d ‘pinch out’ a nub of computingness and shape it to our needs as and when we needed it. The visual image of this that flashed into my head — which, now that I come to tell you about it, feels embarrassingly if entirely appropriately eighties — was of a (probably neon, if we’re honest) 2D grid that represented computing, into which you’d reach, grasping computing, pulling and forming it into the thing you needed to do right then. You’d roll computing between your fingers, fashioning it, Plasticine-like, into a search, or a command, or a camera, or a screen, or some porn, or a whatever. (You wouldn’t actually, physically do this, you understand; it’s an analogy of how you’d unthinkingly tell an amorphous mass of [currently-] unthinkable processing and maybe AI power how to immediately form itself to your needs, rather than pawing in an inefficient and ungainly fashion at a handheld slate that does this or a desk-bound, finite screen that does that.)

And here’s the thing that prompted me finally to put this idea in writing: I realised that, in a colossally primitive way, I’m already starting to experience it. It’s the merest pre-echo, the slightest foreshadowing of this potentially huge, though doubtless gradual, shift that could happen in computing.

What I mean is: I’m very lucky that, as a technology journalist, I have a fair few different computers lying around — Macs on the desktop and as laptops, iOS and Android devices, Chromebooks and more. And what’s more, and more pertinent, is that the oh-so-gentle move to the cloud — with Dropbox, Google Docs, rich email clients such as iCloud, and more — has meant that I’m increasingly less likely to care about on which computer I do stuff. That’s not to say I have relinquished or would be comfortable relinquishing at all yet the idea of ‘my primary work computer’ or ‘my primary personal computer’ — although even there I’m beginning to wonder if my primary personal computer is my old MacBook Pro or my iPhone 5s — but it’s definitely true that I am, however crudely, simply and only reaching out to grasp whatever computing resource is to hand and making it do the thing I want.

Frankly, and of course, I have no idea if this idea of the future of computing will prove valid, or that what I’m doing now is a precursor of the shift in computing that that vision portends. It feels valid to me, though; and it feels, for the first time since I had the idea when I was a teenager, that I can see, stretching ahead of me, a continuous if meandering line from here to there; from now to then.

This post originally appeared on Medium.