Something that’s cropped up in my Twitter feed a lot recently is the assignment of gender to items for purchase, notably magazines and children’s toys. I’m largely against this practice, and responses to that stance have roughly fallen into one of four categories: I’ve got a daughter, this seriously pisses me off, and I agree with you; I just agree with you anyway; I disagree and assigning items by gender in stores is necessary; it doesn’t matter and you are an idiot-face who should get a life.

I’d like to address the last two of those points. I strongly believe gender stereotyping does matter, because it leads to a prescriptive society, one where we’re conditioning both children and adults regarding what’s “not for you”. From a young age, we see a sea of pink for girls and blue for boys; girls are presented with saccharine kitchen equipment made from plastic, whereas boys are offered science kits. As for adults, I today saw a photo from Tesco that faced the following magazines in a section indented for men: The Economist; Private Eye; New Scientist. I’ve seen similar myself in a number of stores (and not just Tesco, although it’s a common offender, even in stores with plenty of shelf space), with the women’s section mostly including things to do with fashion, houses and gardens.

As noted, this kind of behaviour impacts on society, by aligning genders with certain tasks and expectations. The result leads to terribly sad stories: a girl who says she wishes she was a boy, so she could one day go into space; a designer recounting how when she visited a local school, none of the girls had considered going into a technical career, because it just hadn’t occurred to them—it was something boys did.

In stores, we should place more emphasis on listing by category and eliminate listing by gender unless absolutely necessary; the counterpoint I’ve heard to that from several parties is item assignment by gender is frequently necessary and, indeed, in direct response to consumer demands. I’d argue it’s in response to consumer habits, which isn’t quite the same thing, and habits are sometimes there to be broken. Sexism still exists in advertising, but not to the extent it once did (“Christmas morning, she’ll be happier with a Hoover”—without irony), and yet consumers still accept (and claim to want) an immediate gender split when searching for certain products, both in stores and online.

Offline, such categorisation makes little sense and also doesn’t expose someone to a full range. With toys, splitting your audience immediately by gender not only restricts said gender to whatever the seller has deemed appropriate for them, but also essentially eradicates happy accidents, where someone might pick something they’d not previously considered, but perhaps within a category that they enjoy. (For example, games and kits are often split by gender, regardless of whether a girl would, say, actually prefer something on a stereotypically male pursuit like football, or a boy would enjoy making jewellery.) With magazines for adults, such a split seems insulting rather than merely ill-considered, with the possible exception of magazines specifically targeted at a single gender—most style/fashion magazines, for example, although those could just as easily be grouped under that category.

Online, things are trickier, because you can’t just turn your head and see a large selection of products that are available—you instead have to start filtering immediately. With toys, most people would consider whether they’re shopping for a boy or a girl and immediately filter based on that. Online stores therefore cater for this, categorising toys accordingly, in order to maximise sales.

There’s an obvious point that people should really gift-search for a child based on the things that child enjoys rather than specifically aiming at its gender, but the biggest offender here remains assumptive categorisation—the aforementioned ‘pink plastic kitchen for girls’ and ‘science kit for boys’. Stores should by all means attempt to make recommendations by gender (or list top toys for boys/girls, based on actual sales figures) if they feel they’ve no option, but they should also take far more care to categorise items as appropriate for boys and girls. At least then, the result is a wider range for all children. This in combination with gender-based lists is imperfect, but it at least moves things on from the equivalent of a default barely different from those vintage sexist adverts and towards something more befitting of a modern and open society where children have equal opportunities, rather than being shoe-horned into whether they’re ‘pink’ or ‘blue’.

Further reading:

• Let Toys Be Toys campaign
• Gender Agenda, by Laura Kirsop
• Boys will be boys, by Christopher Phin
• How parents are battling sexism in toy shops (Independent, May 2013)
• Tesco keeps chemistry set as a boys’ toy despite protests (Independent, May 2013)
• At Boots, science is for boys and pink princess toys are for girls(Guardian, May 2013)
• Hamleys’ baby steps towards gender equality (Guardian, December 2011)

Stuart Dredge has written about the recent online row about paying journalists. The short of the story is Nate Thayer was asked to repurpose an article for The Atlantic for no money, and countless toys were rapidly thrown out of countless prams by countless writers, bloggers and people who just really like throwing toys out of prams.

Dredge is calmer than most, and argues against the commonplace default position these days that people should always be paid for writing.

My wife and I have a site called Apps Playground, about children’s apps, which is profitable (to the tune of £20-£30 of App Store affiliate fees a month, once hosting costs are deducted) as long as you don’t factor in the time we spend writing it. So we’re writing for free, but it’s our own thing.

If someone – say a big technology site like TechCrunch or Mashable – asked me to write the kind of stuff I do for The Guardian for them for free, would I? Obviously no. If they asked me to do a guest piece for free in my role as Apps Playground co-founder, with a link to the site? Obviously yes. Different hats.

On the surface, this looks similar to the regular ‘write for us in return for exposure’ offer every seasoned writer I know gets from publications on a fairly regular basis. As Dredge notes, writing for free is about the trade-off—whether or not you will potentially see more overall long-term value/income in return for giving away some of your time.

That said, this is looking at things from an individual’s viewpoint rather than a wider context. When publications—especially online—trend towards unsustainable rates (or in many cases, no rates), everyone’s individual one-off potentially leads to a situation where no-one gets paid. As someone who’s almost entirely a professional writer these days, that scares the shit out of me. Having been doing this gig for well over a decade now, with (so far) precisely no editors hunting me down and repeatedly punching me in the face while yelling about inaccurate use of interrobangs, I like to think I’m doing a pretty good job of things. But even so, it’s hard to see how it’s possible in the long term to compete against free, if that’s the way things go.

Dredge notes:

Perhaps, too, there are simply too many journalists, and new digital economics mean we’ll have to work harder and scrap smarter to stay in the game. There’s an interesting parallel with musicians here, I think, which is probably a separate article in itself.

He may well be right. Perhaps the entire creative sector is moving towards an end point where the vast majority of those within it—even those who’d previously had long and healthy careers—simply won’t be able to survive. Writing, music, and other creative endeavours could become little more than hobbyist pastimes, filling an hour in an evening before the creator goes to bed, ready for another day doing a ‘proper’ job, whatever that might be. That doesn’t so much horrify me as make me incredibly sad. If we cannot find a place and see value in creative tasks, I think we’ll be poorer for it and publications/other outlets will increasingly become unfocussed; however, perhaps with more people having a voice, diversity will flourish, great new creators will break through, and people will start once again thinking about paying directly to read, watch or hear more work from them, rather than waiting until they’ve a spare evening to craft something new.

Update: Gary Marshall adds his thoughts.

In my role as games editor for Tap! magazine, I see and download more iOS games than most people, and so when trends occur, they tend to be very apparent to me. One that’s very much in full flow is the lardy iOS game. In some cases, it’s perhaps excusable for an iOS game to have a very large file-size, if it has a ton of art and other assets, but some recent downloads strike me as utterly crazy. Puzzle Quest 2—essentially a match-three game—weighs in at 576 MB. Worms Crazy Golf HD clocks in at 436 MB—for a side-on artillery game! (By contrast, the similar Super Stickman Golf is an eighth of that size.) And there are many other examples.

The problem is, things get worse on the device, because the app download is only half the story—the buggers then decompress on your device, since app bundles are essentially ZIP files. And then this happens:

• Modern Combat 3: 1.75 GB
• The Oregon Trail for iPad: 1.22 GB
• Puzzle Quest 2: 1.22 GB
• Worms Crazy Golf HD: 995 MB
• Infinity Blade (previously impressively svelte, but no longer): 923 MB
• Street Fighter IV Volt: 876 MB

And then there are countless fairly simple games racking up space into the hundreds of megabytes, often due to poor compression and a lack of interest in efficiency. A good point of comparison are the iOS ZX Spectrum emulators. Elite’s ZX Spectrum collection for iPad is well over 100 MB but the universal Spectaculator is just 19 MB when decompressed. Both apps are essentially the same, enabling you to play ancient Spectrum games on your device. Cracking open the app bundles reveals major differences in approach, though: Elite’s app is packed with hefty PNG files (each up to 2 MB in size—two thirds of the executable file, which is only 2.9 MB), used as full-screen backgrounds for every game’s selection screen. They make the app a little prettier, but also hugely increase its weight. Similar fairly pointless additions affect other iOS games, too, such as Namco’s Galaga collection, which weighs in at 144 MB, in part due to a pointless ‘you’ll only watch this once’ 36 MB movie being included in the app bundle. For good measure, all the jingles are WAV files, so you get 20-second clips of music weighing in at 1.5 MB or so each, rather than relatively tiny MP3s.

Most platforms tend towards bloat as developers learn new tricks and push them in terms of presentation, but iOS has two massive problems in this regard: devices have fixed storage, and updates must be downloaded in full. On the first of those points, if you have an iPod, an iPad or an iPhone, you cannot add extra storage. If your device is fairly full, are you going to delete a ton of games, music and apps to make way for the latest bloated ‘epic’, or are you going to think “sod that” and just download a smaller, sleeker game instead? (This, of course, makes the assumption people actually bother to look at such details; it’s more likely that many download games and only then get annoyed when they realise it wants to grab a fifteenth of their device’s storage, and that there’s no easy way of making room. And I’ll bet only a fraction of iOS device owners who do check app sizes in App Store listings realise apps decompress when on the device—Apple really should be listing expanded app sizes as well as download sizes.) On the second point, once you have a bunch of games, what then when updates appear? It’s all very well downloading a few updates for small apps, but those listed earlier in this article total several GB. If you’re on capped broadband, that’s a huge chunk of your monthly allowance; even if you’re not, you can tie up your bandwidth downloading such colossal games, thereby annoying other people in your household.

I can’t really see things changing. As iOS matures as a gaming platform, a large number of developers are getting sucked in by ‘realism’, ‘gloss’ and ‘3D’. Over time, we’re going to see more—not fewer—games that are in excess of 1 GB to download, and even larger on devices. But sooner or later, people are going to get sick of not being able to load new games, and of massive updates, and they’re just not going to bother. At that point, it’s the devs that care that should win out; and it’s not quite like the old days of squeezing every byte out of a VIC-20—all you’re really having to do is think a bit about your assets and the formats you use, which is a very slight compromise to your vision, in order to improve the practical side of user experience.

See, this is the problem with sites that depend on eyeballs rather than sites that just happen to quite like eyeballs. The former needs HITS HITS HITS and churns out any old article that, too often, ends up with a quality level akin to a cunning anagram of the capitalised text earlier in this sentence. A case in point: MacRumors. Now, I sometimes like MacRumors, and I earlier today linked to a great piece on OS X sandboxing. So how is this followed up? With a load of unsubstantiated crap, based on claims by ‘sources’ that spoke to Digitimes—presumably, the same kind of ‘sources’ that have been so stunningly accurate about everything Apple in recent years.

To be fair to MacRumors, the site’s reason for existence is in its name, but, just once, I wish one of these sites would start pushing out informative, interesting analysis, rather than reporting any old crap that comes their way and misinterpreting it. From the latest post:

Digitimes claims that Apple is going to “completely overhaul” its product lineups in 2012. The site specifically lists the iPad, iMac, iPhone and MacBook Air lines.

MacRumors then quotes the following from the original Digitimes report:

Apple plans to completely overhaul its product lineups, including iPad, iMac, iPhone and MacBook Air, in 2012 and is expected to finalize order volumes for key parts and components for the next-generation iPad in December, according to sources in the upstream supply chain.

And comes to the following conclusion:

We interpret the report to mean new designs for the listed product lines.

I interpret things slightly differently: Digitimes, which far too often just flings bullshit guesswork about Apple on to the internet, has just flung some bullshit guesswork on to the internet. Maybe Apple will or won’t redesign some of its products next year, but unless you’ve got some solid, hard facts, please just stop reporting on rumours that have no substance.

Arnold Kim has written a great article for MacRumors about the upcoming sandboxing restrictions on OS X. I admit to not really thinking about this a great deal, but it’s clear Apple’s new approach could be a very big problem for any Mac user who uses anything beyond pretty basic apps:

Examples of Mac Apps that will be affected include iTunes controllers (Tagalicious, CoverSutra), inter-app communication (Fantastical), apps that browse the file system (Transmit), system-wide keyboard shortcut utilities (TextExpander), file syncing, and backups utilities.

From what I’d heard in the past, apps that require ‘deep’ system access and hacks were most at threat, but it’s clear that such access and hacks are actually pretty commonplace. For example, if apps that browse the file system (beyond, I suspect, Open/Save dialogs) are at threat from being booted out of the Mac App Store, that’s practically every app related to web design.

Jason Snell commented for Macworld about the plans:

Not only does this approach risk turning the Mac App Store into a wasteland of arcade games and one-trick-pony apps, it risks dumbing down the Mac app ecosystem as a whole.

What’s clear is that Snell might have been being optimistic here, since many of the very best one-trick-pony apps are those that provide extra functionality to existing apps. A case in point: I Love Stars, which shows a rating for the currently playing iTunes track in the menu bar and enables you to amend it by clicking dots/stars. It’s pretty depressing to think that even apps like this might soon disappear.

Snell:

While developers can always opt out of the Mac App Store, they’re reluctant to do so.

There are good reasons for this. First, most Mac users never buy new software, but Apple is using the Mac App Store to change this, training users to buy apps in much the same way it did on iOS. But I suspect it’ll be increasingly rare for people to stray beyond the store, and so if your app isn’t included, you risk losing a lot of sales. Secondly, I still suspect the Mac App Store is only temporarily an optional means of installing Mac software. At some point, it’s going to become the only way, perhaps with OS X Whatever 10.8 Is Called, in 2013. If this all comes to pass, we really will have seen a lot of iOS come back to the Mac—perhaps a bit too much.

Note: I’d welcome any comments from developers on this article, not least if I’m misinterpreting how things might come to pass next year on OS X.