If you’re not British, you perhaps won’t know that the country currently has a government that is, to put it bluntly, rather toxic. It’s set about systematically dismantling the welfare state, including the NHS, and reducing taxes for anyone earning over £150,000, despite yelling “we’re all in it together”. The latest murmurs are that bank holidays are in the firing line, backed by reports arguing if bank holidays were scrapped, the UK would be £19 billion better off (BBC News).

These kinds of reports drive me nuts, because they are based on dry numbers and not how humans work and interact. Simply measuring the UK’s typical output and applying it to days off is simplistic in the extreme. This is because holidays give many people time to rest and recharge, and they enable people to do things together, thereby increasing morale. By removing holidays, productivity during some of the working days that would replace them would be lower, and that £19 billion would end up being a very optimistic figure. This is even more the case when you examine the losses that would impact the leisure industry if those in the UK by default had fewer days off.

Another argument in the same article, is merely to spread out the holidays throughout the year, because they’re currently mostly in the spring and summer:

[ Centre for Economics and Business Research founder Douglas McWilliams] said that by spreading out public holidays, rather than scrapping them, people would enjoy them more.

Spreading them out is certainly a better idea than scrapping them altogether, but why would people enjoy the holidays more if they were moved to less appealing times of the year? That the UK has most holidays in spring and summer is beneficial, because people can make better use of them. Move one from August to November and you just have people moping about on a day off, staring out the window at grey drizzle.

Before I became a freelancer, there were two things I steadfastly believed employers should never mess with: pay and holidays. Oddly, many employers do screw around with both, but those that don’t generally have more content staff. Whatever goes wrong at work, people at least know they have their days off and their pay cheques. The UK, though, now has a government that’s happily assaulting the incomes of more or less anyone who’s not hugely wealthy (Guardian), and I wonder if it’s only a matter of time before some halfwit Tory or Lib-Dem MP argues in front of the Commons that no-one really needs bank holidays anyway—before one of Parliament’s extended breaks, natch.

Good grief. I have a really busy week, turn my back for a moment and the entire bloody internet explodes about OMG GOOGLE GLASS IS TEH BEST! Bad internet! Go to your room!

Google outlines more about Project Glass on Google+:

We think technology should work for you—to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t.

Call me old-fashioned, but I also happen to think technology should actually exist and be available to buy, rather than companies shitting out pointless concept videos. If Project Glass was available now, I might be all: “Hmm, that’s actually quite clever of Google.” But as a concept video? Gah! Did someone from Microsoft take over Google when we weren’t looking?

A group of us from Google[x] started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment.

Or pulling you out of every single moment by overlaying said moments with horrible pop-up messages and stupid advertising. It’s one step away from Google Mandatory Brain Implant, which would give you no escape from massive corporate giants desperately trying to sell you things and that git on Google+ who just won’t stop asking you stupid things, despite you practically begging him to stop.

As for exploring and sharing your world, things are bad enough with smartphone zombies walking along the streets during rush hour, staring glumly at their glowing screens while the world rushes by. With Project Glass literally sitting between you and the world, I expect a lot of people would start exploring the underside of a really heavy bus and sharing their innards with the world.

The sky is once again falling for Mac users, with many now hit by the Flashback Trojan. The BBC reports that 600,000 Macs might be infected! But that also happens to be a figure well shy of the number of viruses that can screw up Windows PCs.

Ultimately, infection from viruses and malware continues to be a numbers game. Such things are extremely rare on the Mac but less so on Windows. Apple has since released a security update, but once again an antivirus company started stiring:

“People used to say that Apple computers, unlike Windows PCs, can’t ever be infected—but it’s a myth,” said Timur Tsoriev, an analyst at Kaspersky Lab.

I don’t recall ‘people’ ever saying Apple computers can’t ever be infected—that is the myth. And, of course, Kaspersky Lab would be thrilled if millions of spooked Mac users suddenly started using its products. But the reality is that even those Mac users who don’t have a clue about security will be less likely to be affected by trojans, malware and viruses than their Windows PC-owning chums, and with Gatekeeper for OS X Mountain Lion, such problems will become even rarer on the platform. It’ll be interesting to see if Microsoft follows suit.

As ever, the best advice—on Mac and PC—remains the same: don’t open documents and files if you aren’t confident about where they came from and that they won’t screw up your computer.

Brett Terpstra is currently putting together a comparison document of iOS text editors, with the help of anyone who wants to contribute. It is turning into a wonderful thing for writers, who can now pop over there and do a quick scan to see what editor will best suit them. When the spreadsheet was first devised, word and character counts were missing from the list—something that has since been rectified.

The omission of counts is surprisingly common when it comes to text editors in their early stages and, in some cases, even when they’ve been knocking around for a while; in fact, iA Writer was initially missing any kind of count in its iOS app, and the Mac version lacks an on-screen count in windowed mode. This caused me to utter the following on Twitter:

Note to devs: if your text editor doesn’t include word and char counts, you’ve just rendered it useless for many writers.

Developer Alastair Houghton responded:

Note to writers: word counts are a much harder problem than you might imagine. You may want to be more specific.

Which is fair enough.

I find it curious so many text editors initially lack counts, but I suspect that’s because they’re created by engineers and developers who don’t do a lot of writing themselves, or at least only write without being commissioned by editors. But writing isn’t just about smashing out words—it’s often about smashing out a specific number of words.

When I write for a publication, I will be supplied with a brief (or a response to a pitch I’ve made) and a count. In the US and UK, this is most often a word count. In Europe and occasionally in the UK, character counts will be used instead. For print, this is generally a strict target, because copy has to fit into a predefined space. Online, there is more flexibility, but you will still be paid by the word or character, and so there’s not much point in writing five times what you’re commissioned to, unless you’re rich and just writing for yucks. (Additionally, focus and clarity are important in written copy—shorter pieces online tend to be read in their entirety. Write too much and you risk flabby copy, which won’t win you further commissions.)

On knowing your target, you need a mechanism to see how close to it you are: hence a word- and/or character-count in a text editor. Without this, you risk falling short (meaning you have to rewrite or, worse, ‘pad’ a piece of text) or massively overwriting (resulting in brutal editing, often cutting out great text that then becomes worthless). Either way, you’re potentially wasting time. And even if you do overwrite (which is very common—I typically edit down features from anything up to double the commissioned count), you still need to know how close to your target you are while working. This is because in-house staff won’t be happy if you file 5,000 words of copy for a 2,000-word commission. Regularly make a production editor’s job harder and they’ll mention this to the editor and you won’t be getting more work from that publication.

If you’re working on a text editor, here are three count mechanisms I recommend checking out, in apps I use myself:

• iA Writer for iOS: Optionally has an on-screen title bar that includes ongoing word- and character-counts. I’d also like to see a selection count, but just having the total document count is acceptable.
• WriteRoom for Mac: Optionally includes statistics in the title bar in windowed mode at the bottom-left in full-screen mode.
• Scrivener: Provides an on-screen word- and character-count, but also enables you to define a target for the current document. A bar then displays clearly how close you are to meeting this target.

Really, though, this is all about one of the most important aspects of development: learning the needs of your audience and how they use what you create. When it comes to writing, many writers need to know how much they’ve written, and so if you’re not providing that information (preferably permanently on-screen, but at the very least through a keyboard shortcut), you’ve failed them and they will very likely move to a rival app. But in a more general sense, this is the case for any app for any platform: exclude something enough of your audience considers essential and you are reducing your potential sales.

I was surprised yesterday to see 148Apps run a post on the Atari Pong Developer Challenge. I’ve written about this before on Revert to Saved, and the Atari competition is essentially spec work. Presumably gullible and desperate (or perhaps just naïvely optimistic) indies get to submit their ideas, which become the property of Atari, and one lucky winner ends up with a huge wodge of cash, although as Brian Robbins pointed out in February, said huge wodge might not be quite as huge as the dev was expecting. In his words:

If this were a typical publishing contract, there’s no way I would recommend any developer to sign these terms, no matter how desperate or cash strapped they are.

This is something of a far cry from 148Apps’s take:

Now is the chance to cash in that indie cred for a beefy paycheck.

More like cashing in your soul for a chance to win the King of the Spec World crown.

Like others who have run this story, 148Apps claims Atari is somehow extending an olive branch to the indie dev community, but there are other ways to do this. Atari could so easily have created its own shortlist of indie devs that create great games—perhaps great retro games, in some cases—and chucked a dev fee at them, thereby commissioning exciting and innovative indie games based around the Pong theme. This could then have been released as a series on the App Store, and if Atari was really wanting to doff its We Love Indies hat, it could have revenue-shared. But the Pong Indie Developer Challenge? That still, like a synonym of the original game’s name, stinks.