About a week ago, a design acquaintance of mine mentioned Clients From Hell on Twitter. Although I consider myself very lucky on balance, with the vast majority of my clients being great, everyone in the industry has horror stories to tell. Clients From Hell is a place for anonymous contributions, and had me transfixed and also laughing at stories that mirrored some of my own experiences: clients who think that because they could really do something themselves, they shouldn’t have to pay you to do it for them; people who want you to design something despite not being able to supply any kind of brief; unrealistic businesspeople who want the moon on a stick for next to nothing.

But having followed this blog for a few days via RSS, I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with it. Horror stories are all very well, but I’m under the impression that some of these clients from hell have had the misfortune to deal with designers from hell.

Part of the problem of the blog is that there’s no context. So while it’s amusing to laugh at the ‘stupid client’ who said “the unicorns don’t look realistic enough”, that statement could make perfect sense. Unicorns are fictional, but they’re basically horses with a horn. Was the response to the unicorns in the design simply down to them not looking like horses? If so, that’s pretty efficient criticism from the client, not something to joke about.

Elsewhere, design snobbery is rife on the blog, and that’s quite depressing. If anything, it shows how many designers take their knowledge for granted and don’t take the time to explain the obvious to clients (or at least ensure they understand certain things). There are several posts ridiculing clients who respond to ‘lorem ipsum’ placeholder text negatively, but outside of the design world, who knows what this is? If you don’t make your clients aware that the text in mock-up designs is gobbledygook, how are they to know something hasn’t gone wrong?

And so it goes: a client wants a “darker black”, which is something almost everyone in the print industry must have said to printers at some point; another can’t find the shade of blue they want in the Photoshop colour picker—a hugely complex visual device for someone who’s not used it before; someone asks a designer to innovate by adding Flash animation to an email newsletter—not an outlandish request for someone not involved in web technology on a day-to-day basis; a banner is measured on-screen by someone else, which makes perfect sense if you’ve never worked with pixels in a design package; and one comment is from a client saying an iStockPhoto watermark doesn’t add anything visually, but were they informed that stock images, until purchased, are watermarked?

A designer’s job isn’t just to design—it’s to communicate. But this doesn’t just mean communicating the client’s message to an audience—you must also communicate with your client, and ensure they understand what you’re doing and what’s technically feasible. Laughing at someone who doesn’t share your technical knowledge doesn’t make you a great designer—in fact, it rather makes you the opposite.

Doing the rounds on Twitter today is a fantastic review posted by Larry Magid. It’s a review of a Mac, but with a difference—it’s a transcription of his take on the original Mac, which appeared in the LA Times on January 29, 1984.

It’s easy to forget just how revolutionary the original Mac was compared to competition at the time, but this review brings it home. The mouse was so uncommon that it’s scare-quoted in the article, and Magid explains how to use it. He also talks about the ‘desk top’, and appears to have been converted to Apple’s WIMP UI model, despite stating: “When this process was described to me, it sounded cumbersome, especially since I’m already comfortable with using a keyboard”.

Today, touchscreens are gaining ground. We’re moving from abstraction on a virtual desktop to direct integration with content via gestural controls. How long will it be before someone looks back at early reviews of iPhone and Microsoft Surface, finding it hard to remember a time when such interface conventions weren’t ubiquitous?

Pocket Gamer reports analyst Michael Pachter has been at the scaremongering juice, topping it off with a stupid olive. He says: “I think the iPod touch is the most dangerous thing that ever happened to the publishers, ever,” and this is because when the price of Apple’s device drops, kids will want one instead of a DS or PSP. “Why would you pay $20 for Tetris when you can get it for $6.99 or $3.99 on iPod touch?” he says.

Indeed. But I can’t for the life of me see how this is the “most dangerous thing that ever happened to the publishers, ever”. Lower price-points generally mean people just buy games instead of ripping them off (*cough*R4 on DS*cough*), and with the App Store being digital-only, overheads are much lower for publishers. Therefore, decent publishers that aren’t complete idiots should rapidly be able to find a way to make decent money from iPod gaming, more so as the device’s market share increases.

What the App Store and Apple handhelds could finally put paid to, though, is stupid publishers selling games for way more than they’re worth—across the board. To that end, the only thing that has reason to be scared of iPod gaming is greed—and by extension greedy and clueless publishers.

Once, there was this great app called Tweetie by Atebits. It was a Twitter client for iPhone and iPod touch, and very good, and the (Twitter-loving iPhone-using) people rejoiced.

And then there was Tweetie for Mac OS X. It was a Twitter client and very good, and the (Twitter-loving Mac OS X-using) people rejoiced.

And then there was Tweetie 2. It was a Twitter client for iPhone and iPod touch, and very good, and the (Twitter-loving iPhone-using) people GOT TERRIBLY ANGRY.

The reason behind the vitriol? The dev had the audacity to charge three bucks for his updated, rewritten Tweetie for Apple handhelds. Three dollars, for an app that you’ll likely use daily! Shocking!

But it’s not like this is without precedent. Increasingly, consumer-level software provides no upgrade cycle. On the Mac, the likes of Bento, iLife, Photoshop Elements, iWork and many others provide no discount if you bought the previous version, which is largely countered by the value of the product.

Tweetie 2 is on the App Store, which provides no upgrade model anyway, and so the dev had no other choice other than ‘work for nothing and eat baked beans every night for dinner’, which would pretty much guarantee no Tweetie 3 and no further apps. So, here are some helpful tips if you’re a Tweetie 1 owner who’s feeling hard done by:

1. Carry on using Tweetie 1. Atebits didn’t include a ‘blow up iPhone if user doesn’t delete Tweetie 1 when Tweetie 2 comes out’ feature. Your app will continue to work, enabling you, ironically, to bitch about its follow-up on Twitter.
2. Save up your pennies for Tweetie 2. I know times are tight and the economy’s screwed, but let’s look at something for a second: you’re sitting there with an iPhone or an iPod touch, which cost quite a lot of money. If you really want that copy of Tweetie 2, which costs all of $2.99 or £1.79, I’m fairly sure you could save up your pennies. Don’t have that Starbucks coffee for one whole day, or make your own sandwich for work. As if by magic, you’ll have saved enough cash to buy Tweetie 2!
3. Stop bitching. No, really—it’s getting old, and you sound stupid.

TechRadar reports Adobe’s firing more shots at Apple regarding Flash on iPhone. The arguments, made via an irritating, patronising ‘skit’ suggest 1) Apple is really stupid because Flash doesn’t run on iPhone, and; 2) Adobe is really great, because it can get Flash to run on iPhone.

However, important points are missed:

• The Mac version of the Flash plug-in sucks balls. It’s the main source of Safari crashes on the Mac desktop, and the sandboxed plug-in still crashes regularly on Snow Leopard. The likelihood is, on the basis of the Mac version, the Flash plug-in could also suck balls on iPhone. Worse, with iPhone being relatively underpowered compared to desktop Macs, a Flash plug-in would wreck Safari’s stability and speed.
• Adobe’s mostly crowing about standalone Flash apps. There’s a whole world of difference between Flash apps on iPhone and Flash working within a browser that has its own overheads. (Note also that Flash apps don’t have access to OS X for iPhone UI components, and so many of them are a mess in terms of interface.)

I very much hope reporters don’t start moaning in unison that since Flash apps run on iPhone, so too should the plug-in—but I’ll bet they will. In the meantime, perhaps if Adobe rewrote its Mac Flash plug-in so it was even remotely comparable to the Windows one, Mac users and Apple itself wouldn’t be quite so hostile towards the technology.