On February 15, 2016, Stephen Fry left Twitter. It’s not the first time he’s done so, but it may well be the last. This time, the trigger was largely a joke he made at the BAFTAs about a friend, which resulted in the usual stream of bile being hosed in his direction from righteous keyboard warriors.

I don’t doubt some of them had a point. But I also don’t doubt many of them — probably the vast majority — didn’t think before they typed. Perhaps their comment was a knee-jerk reaction. Maybe they thought it was funny to have a go at a celebrity. In all likelihood, though, distance from another human emboldened them, and with the pile-on continuing, Fry decided enough was enough.

Later, Fry outlined on his blog his reasoning for quitting. He likened early Twitter to a kind of idyllic glade of sunshine and roses, which has now become a stagnant cesspool. Neither description is entirely accurate, of course. Early Twitter had its fair share of nastiness, and current Twitter in many ways remains amazing.

But even I as a niche tech journo, reasonably well known only in certain very specific fields, have felt the way in which online communications have changed. The ferocity of negative online comments on articles I’ve written has increased, as has hand-waving “I don’t believe you” idiocy, not least when I write about accessibility. I am, somehow, both an Apple zealot and an Apple hater. On Twitter, I occasionally get random horrible comments, which markedly increase in number whenever I dare to reply to one of the feminist writers and developers I occasionally converse with. Now and again, I even find horrible comments lurking in the approval queue on this blog, which has literally several regular readers.

For celebrities and other far more followed commentators who dare to allow the public some measure of access to them, it’s hard to imagine what they go through on a daily basis. I’ve assisted some over the years, when they openly asked for tech help. Their feeds were immediately packed full of dumb comments along the lines of: “APPLE IS RUBISH YOU IDIOT ISHEEP YOU SHOUD BUY ANDROID LOL”. Literally hundreds of tweets almost instantaneously appearing with the same ‘joke’. It’s astonishing anyone in such a situation manages to sort genuine communications from the noise. And it made me wonder why anyone would put up with this kind of thing for any length of time.

Clearly, for many, the positives outweigh the negatives. I see people with varying degrees and kinds of fame generously offering a little more of themselves, even as they’re in a spotlight that results in them being followed by a mob that can turn on a dime. I used to be slightly envious of such numbers. Not so much now. I’m grateful for the people who read my words, but in no hurry to end up in a position where I’m deluged by angry responses to everything I might share online.

But if I may, I would like to make one suggestion: that we all pause a little, far more often. As that great xkcd cartoon noted, there’s that sense people are all too keen to spend their time righting perceived wrongs online. The screen is little more than a shield, and anonymity too often a weapon. So whether you’re about to respond to someone online with millions of Twitter followers or just ten, or someone on Facebook you’ve never heard of, ask yourself whether you really need to. And if you do, ask yourself if what you’re typing is something you’d be willing to say face-to-face. And even if that’s the case, ask yourself if you’re being spiteful, cruel or unfriendly and whether it’s really necessary that we have any more of that kind of thing in the world.

You have to take activist websites with a fistful of salt. Many are well-meaning, and some manage to instigate real change. But much of the time, they’re a means for people to think they’re engaged in activism, when they’re really only clicking ‘I agree’ before returning to gorge on YouTube videos of penguins being challenged by a rope.

Nonetheless, I have a modicum of respect for a few of these sites, although in the case of SumOfUs, it would be more accurate to say that I had respect. And that’s because its new campaign, Keep the standard headphone jack in your iPhones!, is asinine clickbait of the type usually reserved for Forbes and Business Insider. Perhaps they should all join forces!

The campaign starts off in a calm and measured manner, with a photo of some headphones and the thoughtful, reasoned headline:

Apple is ditching the standard headphone jack to screw consumers and the planet

This is the sort of thing guaranteed to bring on board execs at Apple.

 

The petition text itself then begins (emphasis as per original web page):

Apple is about to rip off every one of its customers. Again.

Again. Apple just can’t stop ripping off everyone of its customers. Bought an iMac? Idiot! Apple ripped you off! Again. Even if you’ve never bought anything from Apple before, because Tim Cook probably has a time machine and will dump you in an infinite loop, in order to keep making that purchase and ripping you off — forever. That’s how nasty and evil Apple is.

If the rumours are true,

This being a great way to kick off a campaign, because, as we know, every Apple rumour has a 100 per cent hit rate.

the new iPhone 7 will have a non-standard, proprietary headphone jack — making every pair of headphones on earth useless.

This is true. As soon as Apple introduces a non-standard headphone jack, it will also emit a specialised EMP burst of some kind from every new iPhone, rendering all old headphones useless. They won’t work on other kit, and there’s no way whatsoever Apple would release any kind of adaptor that would allow you to use old headphones with the new input.

Not only will this force iPhone users to dole out additional cash to replace their hi-fi headphones, it will singlehandedly create mountains of electronic waste — that likely won’t get recycled.

The second I get an iPhone 7, I and every other iPhone 7 owner, will immediately throw out all our old headphones. SumOfUs has spoken.

There’s only one reason for this change:

The march of technology? Trying to make the iPhone better? Realising a port has run its course, and wanting to do something different?

to leverage Apple’s market share in order to extract even more profit from its customers.

Ah — of course! Silly me!

With virtually no third-party manufacturers ready to fill the new market gap, Apple stands to make a killing while we — and our planet — pay the price.

No third parties will be able to make Lightning headphones! And OUR PLANET WILL SUFFER. Presumably, iPhone 7 will also come with a built-in laser that automatically blasts nearby trees into oblivion while Siri cackles menacingly.

Apple, don’t repay iPhone users’ loyalty by ditching standard headphones and fuelling the e-waste crisis. Bring back the standard earphone jack.

The one that, currently, no-one knows whether or not it’s actually going or gone anyway.

This is right out of the Apple corporate playbook. A few years ago it swapped out the original iPod-dock connector with a new one, making countless cords, cables and chargers obsolete — for limited performance improvement.

“I don’t understand any of the benefits of the new Lightning connector, and will ignore its gradual rollout across a much larger range of Apple products, thereby making it a good thing in the long run. Also, Apple is evil because it embraced USB with the original iMac and didn’t stick with ADB. AND WHERE IS THE FLOPPY DRIVE IN MY NEW MACBOOK, TIM COOK?”

The screws in Apple products can’t even be opened with a traditional screwdriver — making it harder to repair a product you paid for.

SumOfUs is going to have a major shock the next time their new car/television/almost any piece of modern electronics breaks.

This decision will also have huge ramifications for climate change. According to the United Nations, up to 90% of the world’s electronic waste is illegally traded or dumped each year. We need to bring more care and attention to this growing issue — not aggravate it through reckless, profit-driven decisions that will deliver countless perfectly useable items straight to the landfill.

“Hey, Martin, do you have that generic piece of actually important and broadly relevant information about illegal electronic waste trade we can cut into this? I’ve just realised we’re 200 words deep and are 98 per cent froth. That’s at least five per cent too much froth, even for an anti-Apple tirade. Thanks.”

Tell Apple to respect its customers and our planet. Keep the standard headphone jack.

So here’s the thing: I actually agree with that last bit — and I’m not alone. Kirk McElhearn outlined for Macworld why the jack should stay, and it’s hard to argue with the points he and others make, notably: thinner devices than the iPhone 6s have a standard headphone jack; a Lightning headphone adaptor would likely need to be a DAC (and could be expensive); one port means no simultaneous charging/headphone use; and it’s an expected ‘default’ these days that exists on pretty much every major piece of consumer and computing tech.

But that doesn’t mean SumOfUs should clickterbate all over a site that’s supposed to be responsible. Still, you can guarantee that if the iPhone 7 shows up, headphone jack intact, the site will nonetheless claim victory, even though its likely impact would have been akin to the level of intelligence and rationality shown in its campaign: zero.

As a writer, even in an age of social media, it’s hard to tell whether anything you pen affects people in any serious way. In truth, much of what I write is opinion-based: thought pieces and reviews that might briefly help and/or entertain a certain section of a site’s or magazine’s readership, but that relationship between words and results is typically fleeting.

One major exception in my writing career centres around accessibility. When Apple’s iOS 7 for iPad and iPhone arrived, it made a lot of people sick. Aggressive animations became motion-sickness triggers for a surprisingly large range of people. I was fortunate enough to write about the subject for Stuff and twice for The Guardian. Apple rumbled into gear. Changes were eventually to iOS made via the introduction of Reduce Motion, which switched slides and zooms for cross-fades. I have it on good authority that what I and others wrote did have an impact on Apple’s decision-making.

Although motion/balance accessibility remains poorly understood, and third-party developers remain largely ignorant of these issues, merrily peppering apps with animated interface components, I and others are now broadly safe when using iOS. The same is not true for OS X. It’s been three years since I first wrote about the subject on this blog, and I’ve penned articles elsewhere, including for major tech publications. It’s hard to believe that Apple’s listening. The company, despite making great strides in vision/hearing/motor accessibility, appears either ignorant of or uncaring about motion/balance problems.

That might seem like an extreme statement, but I think it’s entirely fair. Major triggers, such as full-screen slides/morphing transitions, and also slide transitions within Preview and Safari, arrived in OS X Lion, and we’ve since seen three major updates to OS X without a single setting for overriding these animations. There’s no Reduce Motion in OS X, despite Mac screens being larger than iOS ones, which means the transitions displayed are more — not less — likely to cause problems.

Today, I fired up the new OS X Photos app. Within five minutes, I felt ill. I shouldn’t have been surprised that a motion/balance trigger is built right into the interface, with the main pane zooming while it crossfades. Presumably, someone at Apple thought this looked pretty. There’s no way to turn it off. For anyone who finds this animation problematic, their choices are to avoid Photos entirely or remember to close their eyes every single time they click a tab.

This is just not good enough. Apple is a company that prides itself on making its technology accessible. Given that a somewhat throwaway setting in a third-party utility can override or entirely disable the majority of full-screen animations, it’s hard to believe Apple couldn’t fit a Reduce Motion system into OS X if it wanted to. If developers could hook into that, most motion/balance issues would disappear in an instant, without affecting the majority of users, who could happily continue watching interface components zoom about before their eyes.

As I wrote today in an email to accessibility@apple.com, I’m sick of the current situation, figuratively and — in a fortunately fairly mild way — literally. Highly animated interfaces may be the ‘in thing’ right now, and sometimes have potential benefits in providing a sense of place; but that doesn’t mean Apple should overlook people for which these often aesthetic additions cause major usability, accessibility and health problems. I’ve no confidence anything will change. Every email sent feels like yelling into the wind, but I’ll be delighted to see and experience a change in direction should that happen in OS X Yosemite’s successor.

As reported by Eurogamer, Ars Technica, Rob Fearon and others, what currently passes for Atari (essentially a rotting corpse worn by Infogrames) has decided to throw lawyers at game developer Jeff Minter, in an attempt to get rid of the award-winning TxK, which is a bit too Tempesty for Atari’s liking. It’s been interesting to see the reaction online, which seems broadly split between staunch defence of Minter (who’s been making arcade-inspired games since the early 1980s, but not outright clones) and alignment with the idea Atari somehow has to defend its IP.

Rarely is gaming cut and dried. There’s precedent for companies suing others over a game’s mechanics, even if such lawsuits are invariably more often about a big company kicking the shit out of a smaller one with lawyers. But this particular incident is even messier, because TxK borrows from Minter’s own fantastic Tempest 2000, which he developed for Atari.

On balance, though, the side I’m taking on this scrap isn’t really for Minter nor for Atari, but for games. Much like in any other medium, individual titles do not exist in a vacuum — they are often influenced by what went before. Many titles are evolved forms of their predecessors. It’s how people learn. It’s how we get amazing mash-ups like Forget-Me-Not, or modern takes on old classics, like Pac-Man: Championship Edition.

This cannot happen when corporations fling lawyers at games in part based on older ones without good reason. And while it’s arguable Atari has some points in its letter to Minter regarding the similarities between TxK and the games that inspired it, the lawyers wilfully obfuscate and confuse, and in some cases offer outright fabrication. This includes the argument TxK includes an “electronic music sound track and sound effects which are indistinguishable from those used in TEMPEST 2000”, despite TxK having an original score. (I ‘look forward’ to Atari now suing every game that uses electronic music, just because.)

Then you delve further. Minter notes he once spoke to the Tempest X developer, who revealed it was changed just enough to enable Atari to not pay Minter any royalties. The game nonetheless remained closer to Tempest 2000 than TxK, showcasing the hypocritical nature of Atari when it comes to this series and business in general. But worse, Minter adds that he made it very clear he’d have been willing to negotiate some sort of licensing agreement. Atari, naturally, wasn’t interested. This is something I’ve heard is always the case with Atari, which is bizarre. Presumably, it’s satisfied with its terrible iOS Tempest, dumbed-down Caterpillar remakes, and using its IP as skins for gambling and casino games.

Of course, Atari’s been here before many times. It’s regularly rampaged about like a spoilt child, demolishing anything vaguely resembling Asteroids or Pong. And when Peter Hirschberg crafted Vector Tanks and the superb Vector Tanks Extreme!, Atari had them removed from the iOS App Store for resembling Battlezone, despite the latter no more being a copy of Battlezone than Space Invaders Infinity Gene is a copy of the original Space Invaders.

The smart move would be for Atari to make these games official. TxK and Vector Tanks Extreme! are both significantly better modern takes on Atari IP than anything the company has managed itself. Instead, the organisation revels in destroying games, angering people who love classic arcade fare, further ruining whatever remains of its tattered reputation; it prefers to bully developers rather than work with them, hiding behind lawyers and bending the truth.

I’ve no time for this, so fuck Atari. Hmm. It appears I did take a side after all.

Yeah, sorry about that link-bait title, but I figured I’d best get in on the current wave of tech stupid before my tech journo credentials are snatched away from me. Mind you, perhaps escaping would be a smart move while the majority of the industry loses its collective mind.

I mentioned tech writers tending towards bile last week, but the latest stick to smack Apple with appears to be the accusation that the company has lost focus and no longer understands the value of simplicity.

Jason Hiner’s piece for ZDNet is fairly typical of this latest raft of Apple Watch moanery, calling it “too ambitious” and “a bit of a mess”. He argues:

the fact that Apple released the product in its current form says something. In fact, it says a lot about Apple under the new leadership regime because it’s the first new product category of the Cook-Ive era. And as far as innovation and discipline goes, this is a wobbly start.

His core complaint seemingly revolves around a belief that all Apple products start out simple and then layer greater functionality as they evolve. He’s right that Apple builds on products (notably software, adding richer features) over time, but what is simple?

For Apple Watch, Hiner complains that the device tries to do too much and that there are a load of new functions for a user to figure out, which are

unlike any other Apple or tech product so they aren’t naturally intuitive.

But what is intuitive? What is fully natural? My dad recently admitted to me he’d never used copy and paste, and he’s been using Macs for well over a decade. He’d just been dragging selections around, muddling through. With Watch, you imagine quite a few people will do something similar, perhaps chancing across functionality. Others will dig deeper. But the point is that many pieces of functionality that tech pundits consider simple and natural are only so to them because they use these things every day.

Consider the mouse and the original Mac. Back then, the windows/icons/mouse/pointer interface wasn’t unique, but it certainly wasn’t commonplace. Then there’s the iPhone, with its gestural interface that had a fair number of elements that felt natural, but also elements users had to learn, in order to access all of the device’s functionality.

Of course, people slammed those things too, saying they’d fail, because that’s what you do with Apple. And perhaps Apple Watch will be a faceplant, but I think the tech industry would be a better place if writers actually started to spend a bit of time with kit before deciding that it was a waste of time, a mess, or too ambitious. (And you can bet that had Apple released a much more locked-down Watch, with a razor-sharp focus and far fewer functions, ZDNet would have been whining about Apple’s closed nature, and how the device was a rip-off for the few things it enabled you to do.)