Back in January, I complained about the user experience of shiny disks and also the manner in which the TV and movie industries continue to be dicks. It wasn’t a particularly unique piece of writing, and yet it struck a nerve, rapidly becoming one of the most-read articles I’ve ever written for this blog.

Since then, we’ve seen Matt Gemmell write a piece called The Piracy Threshold, where he blames piracy on the “incredibly short-sighted, greedy and stupid” media industries, and The Oatmeal’s amusing take, I tried to watch Game of Thrones and this is what happened. Both articles summed up my earlier thoughts on the piracy debate:

If your studio isn’t making content legally available, affordably, and on a worldwide basis, shortly after broadcast, you’ve only yourselves to blame when people hit torrent websites and download it for free.

Note that this isn’t advocacy of piracy—it’s the reality of the market we find ourselves in, with industries desperate to cling to old business models. Some people, though, have a different take. Harry Marks, notably, has strongly reacted against people he terms ‘entitletards’. On the Oatmeal comic, he responded:

I tried to watch Game of Thrones and realized downloading it illegally was doing fuck-all to help the situation.

I tried to watch Game of Thrones and decided to wait two weeks until it came out on DVD because I don’t have the patience of a toddler.

He also responded to Gemmell’s piece with a retort that blames the users and not the studios for piracy, arguing that people are now too used to instant gratification, and that there are plenty of services you can use to access legal content. However, the majority of these remain US-only, and it’s perhaps easy for someone in that country to have a skewed viewpoint when it comes to the availability of legal media. Again, Marks and similar thinkers might consider anyone complaining about that whiners or ‘the entitled’, but the fact remains we now live in a connected world. If I can now chat to people all over the planet in an instant, it’s rather absurd that I can’t legally watch a US TV show—even a topical one—for many months (or longer) after its original broadcast date, by which point I’d probably know what happens in it anyway through spoilers being found accidentally. This, of course, helps no-one: I don’t get to watch the show, and the studio doesn’t get my money.

On Twitter, Marks, I and others also got into a row over another key argument in the current debate over piracy and rights: format shifting. Fair-use/fair-dealing laws vary by country, but it’s currently illegal in the UK to format-shift pretty much anything, including CDs to your computer (as MP3 or some other digital format). The law on this might soon change in the UK, providing a personal-use exception, but studios will almost certainly fight hard against such changes in any country; recently, for example, the MPAA attacked a proposal in the USA to provide a legal exception for DVD ripping, because the studios make a lot of money reselling content.

Part of the aforementioned Twitter discussion turned into one about constant rebuying. If you own a CD or DVD, should you rebuy that content digitally, or should it be legal to rip to digital for personal use? Some will argue, morally, they’ve already paid for the content, so why can’t they do what they want with it? Others will equate the same action to effectively grabbing a free digital copy when you merely already own a copy of something on vinyl or VHS. And yet what if the content you want access to simply isn’t available digitally? Should a favourite album or TV show remain out of reach, because the studios no longer care about it? In part, the solution in the future might be massive services along the lines of iTunes Match and Netflix, but there will always be gaps in the catalogues, even if you’re signed up to all of those available.

I’d also argue that the problem in any forced-rebuy model is that such notions have historically led to planned obsolescence and restrictions—a lack of flexibility in media specifically designed to keep having you buy the same material again and again. For the studios, this can be great, and it’s one of the things that caused the media sales spike during the shiny disc era. But for users, it always comes back to the same thing: the user experience is weaker than it should be. With shiny discs, there are all kinds of problems that I mentioned in my earlier piece; with digital, the main issues are ease-of-playback across owned devices (in this often not being possible) and availability, with studios semi-randomly pulling content from services and often ignoring any country that doesn’t happen to have a ‘U’, an ’S’ and an ‘A’ in its name.

Marks concludes his piece with the following:

I don’t care what your reason is. I don’t care that you don’t like how things are. Bottom line: there is no justification for piracy.

I happen to agree with the last bit of that. But I also happen to think there are reasons for piracy that can relatively easily be fixed by studios, if they have the will and the foresight. There is, of course, a chunk of the market forever lost—those that will never pay for anything. But as Apple and others have proved, it’s possible to ‘train’ people back into buying media, as shown with music; that industry was once thought doomed, but Apple rose to prominence through offering a strong user experience and making content readily available and affordable. And if any service is good enough, we’ve seen how technology creates a halo effect, with a small number of advocates having the potential to drive a disproportionate number of sales. I just hope the studios are listening, watching and reacting accordingly.

Update: Gary Marshall points to a piece talking about both sides of the argument by Andy Ihnatko. Within, he also mentions the sense of entitlement angle, and I should note that I see the Oatmeal comment more as a general statement about the industry rather than a scathing criticism of a specific show. Ihnatko does also say “If a distributor shows up […] with a product we want, we’ll buy it,” which is rather my point.

OS X Lion and now OS X Mountain Lion (due out this summer) showcase that Apple’s increasingly interested in building global and focussed systems across its various devices. Some pundits misunderstand Apple’s ‘Back to the Mac’ approach as a medium-term goal to merge OS X and iOS. Really, Apple’s instead moving to a place where the OS itself doesn’t matter so much as the equalisation of services, such as messaging, the syncing of notes, and so on.

But one of the big wins on iOS that’s coming ‘Back to the Mac’ is a sense of focus. As desktop PCs have grown in power and monitors have gotten bigger, we’ve rapidly moved from an environment for work to one of distraction. It’s far too easy to end up with a monitor full of windows, each fighting for attention, the net result being that no single window (and therefore no specific task) ever gets your full focus.

As of Lion, Apple introduced a full-screen mode for apps. This went beyond the kind of full-screen mode found in operating systems such as Windows by taking over the entire screen (not even leaving a menu bar or app launcher visible) and also, in the case of well-designed applications, adjusting the interface to be more appropriate for a full-screen view. On first installing Lion, I wasn’t entirely convinced by this new feature, not least due to having a 27-inch iMac, which made many apps in full-screen mode look ridiculous. But the sense of focus was useful, and I started using a handful of apps—Scrivener, WriteRoom, iCal, Mail—in full-screen mode, and I was thoroughly enjoying the experience.

And then I got sick.

Something abruptly went twang in my brain, and I realised I was getting dizzy quite a lot of the time. It took about a day before I realised that I was getting motion sickness from the full-screen transitions in OS X Lion. (I didn’t realise this more quickly, simply because I’d never previously had motion sickness.) I suddenly realised how heavily eye-straining animations are used within Lion, and tried avoiding them entirely. The result of this: significantly less dizziness.

Animations and animated transitions in operating systems are something that’s becoming increasingly common, and Apple’s a huge fan of them. Often, they are extremely useful, because they provide an indication of something that’s just happened or that’s happening right now. That might sound laughable, but for a newcomer to computing, this is a major advantage over the ‘instant’ interface responses older operating systems offered. The problem is that Lion is full of sliding—aside from switching apps in full-screen mode, you also have things like Preview, where moving between pages slides between them, and slide-based navigation in Safari.

From a default standpoint, I’m still not against these animations/transitions, because they are informative and give someone using OS X a sense of spatial awareness in a virtual space. In the case of a page of a PDF sliding upwards, you know which direction to go to get that page back. Similarly, if apps slide around in full-screen mode as you switch between them, you remember which app is where and can easily navigate to it. The problem is that there is no alternative. Whereas the Dock gives you Scale and Genie effects (along with the ‘hidden’ Suck), the sliding in Lion cannot be replaced with something that’s easier on the eyes, such as a cross-fade.

I realise that I’m an edge case, but I’ve received messages on Twitter and by email from people who have similar problems. I’m also currently working on a website for a charity that deals with people who have motion problems, and they’ve said that any scrolling can cause those they care for to have major dizziness issues. To that end, Lion—or at least many of Lion’s features—is entirely inappropriate for them, and that’s sad in an operating system that otherwise strives so hard to be broadly accessible.

I’m not sure what the solution is, and I don’t hold out any hope that Mountain Lion will help me. Apple is, after all, a company that reduces rather than increases options and very much takes a ‘this is right’ approach. I’ve sent feedback to Apple and done that thing and written to Tim Cook, explaining the problem. But I’d love to download Mountain Lion this summer and at least have the option to adjust the transitions that are adversely affecting me and, it seems, other Mac users. By all means leave the defaults as they are, but a crossfade replacement for sliding—even if it’s something you have to activate via Terminal—would be the most ‘magical’ thing Apple could offer me this summer.

Further reading (April 17): ReSpaceApp could solve OS X Lion motion sickness problems.

Via Fraser Speirs, an article by Alan J Reid called Instructional Designers Wanted: No Experience Necessary:

Apple recently unveiled its digital book-authoring program, iBooks Author, and I’m scared.

The last three years that I have dedicated to pursuing my Ph.D. in instructional design & technology, which centers on interactive digital text, have given me a new perspective on the delicate balance that is necessary for classroom technologies to be productive and fruitful rather than novel and superficial. The seemingly endless hours that I have spent reading journal articles, writing papers, reading book chapters, taking in lectures, reading conference proceedings, and reading some more, have left me feeling as though I have earned some sort of badge that licenses me to make qualified observations about new educational technologies.

But that’s just the problem; you don’t need to be qualified. iBooks Author allows any Apple user to design and develop an interactive, multitouch textbook. No design experience necessary.

Reid’s text echoes concerns we’ve seen in practically every single industry where digital has marched (and, sometimes, blundered) in and opened up that particular discipline. We’ve heard the same arguments in desktop publishing, photography and web design, and now we’re hearing it about textbooks.

I can’t deny that user-friendly digital products can make things tougher for professionals, because there’s a line of thinking that ‘anyone can do it’. But here’s the thing: eventually, enough companies come to the realisation that everyone can’t do it. I’m seeing graphic designers I know getting more work of late as companies stop faffing about creating their own botched attempts at marketing material and instead get professional designers to produce it. And online, web designers are once again finding that companies are understanding that, no, the MD’s nephew armed with an old copy of FrontPage isn’t the best way to present themselves to the world. These things are always cyclical, with professions mostly reverting to the pros—or at least those professionals who truly are great at what they do.

But that doesn’t mean we should ever rally against opening up creative pursuits to the masses. The fact that anyone can now make a website, or publish some photos, or—in the case of iBooks Author—create an interactive book is a fantastic thing. It means some people will find talents they never knew they had; others may be able to fill niche gaps that professionals and publishers cannot or will not; and in cases where funds simply aren’t available, I’d sooner someone bashes together a (hopefully) factually accurate digital book with perhaps less-than-optimal design using iBooks Author than have those they are teaching go without.

In short, empowering the masses is great; but there will always be room for good designers for things that need good design.

Pocket Link’s Paul Lamkin, quoting Samsung AV product manager Chris Moseley on a possible Apple TV:

We’ve not seen what they’ve done but what we can say is that they don’t have 10,000 people in R&D in the vision category. They don’t have the best scaling engine in the world and they don’t have world renowned picture quality that has been awarded more than anyone else. TVs are ultimately about picture quality. Ultimately. How smart they are… great, but let’s face it that’s a secondary consideration. The ultimate is about picture quality and there is no way that anyone, new or old, can come along this year or next year and beat us on picture quality.

“PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

Most of the techie portion of the internet is talking about the iPad 3, after the usual rumour sites starting posting components of what might or might not be bits of the next Apple tablet. One of the most common rumours is that the next-gen device will get itself a Retina display, and Wired today started talking about the apps Apple should demo.

In the context of the iPhone and iPod touch, a Retina display means a display where it is—for people with standard eyesight—more or less impossible to resolve single pixels on the screen. Instead of jagged text and graphics, the 326ppi screen provides print-like imagery. By contrast, the current iPad is 132ppi—better than most computer displays, but lacking when directly compared to current iPhones and iPods. With the next iPad, the hope is that Apple would up the resolution to 2048-by-1536, and while this wouldn’t have the same pin-sharp qualities as the iPhone and iPod, it would nonetheless be tricky to resolve individual pixels unless holding the iPad closer than is sensible and comfortable. So no playing Sniff the Angry Birds for you, if you want to keep that illusion of smoothness in the graphics.

But here’s the thing: 2048-by-1536 is a massive display size. It’s bigger than 1080p (used by the 21.5-inch iMac) and wouldn’t even fit on the display of a 27-inch iMac. Think about that for a moment: a 1:1 recreation of an iPad Retina display would not fit on the largest display Apple currently ships. But said display is driven by a powerful computer, not a svelte tablet that doesn’t have the graphics grunt of a Mac or PC.

I’m quietly hopeful that Apple has some kind of genius/magic/pixie dust and will reveal an iPad 3 with a Retina display within the next two months. But this is dependent on various factors: the screen actually being of a high enough quality and possible to manufacture quickly enough in large numbers; such a display not adversely affecting performance (after all, it will require some serious GPU clout); battery life remaining very close to the existing seven-to-ten hours you can get from reasonably careful usage. Apple is not a company for bullet points—it leaves out technology if the rest of the device would be compromised. We’ve seen this in the iPhone with 3G on the original model and now with 4G. There’s every chance we could see the same on the iPad, which could end up with a rather more conservative refresh, along the lines of the iPhone 4S (perhaps getting a RAM and speed bump, Siri, and a better camera).

I’m sure if this happens, most of the tech press will use this as proof once again that Apple is doomed, Tim Cook is some kind of blundering fool who should immediately be fired, and that Android tablets will soon grab 99.9 per cent of the tablet market. Me, I think that an iPad 2S would sell like hot cakes, and that Apple should only bring in cutting-edge technology when it’s ready. If that happens to be this spring, great; if not, I’m more than happy to wait.