Eric Ogren for Information Week, in April 2008:

I am beginning to despair that Nokia will ever understand the U.S. market. As its recently revealed quarterly earnings tell us, its share of the market here dropped yet again. Despite the fact that Nokia is building a touch-enabled device that looks eerily similar to you-know-what, Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo called the iPhone a “niche” product.

Matt Hamblen for Computerworld/Macworld, yesterday:

Nokia sold 24.2 million smartphones in the first quarter, maintaining its global smartphone lead despite announcing it will move in coming years from Symbian to Windows Phone as its main smartphone operating system, IDC said. Nokia “may find itself in danger of ceding market share as the competition ramps up,” IDC said.

Apple shipped 18.7 million iPhones in the first quarter, IDC said, a new record for a single quarter “and inched closer to market leader Nokia with fewer than six million units separating the two companies,” IDC noted.

Apple’s not there yet, and Nokia may well manage to battle alongside Microsoft, but 18.7 million is a pretty big niche.

The Macworld article adds:

Overall, 99.6 million smartphones shipped in the first quarter, out of 372 million overall mobile phones.

How long will it be before we can just call ‘smartphones’ mobile phones (or just phones) and relegate mobile phones to something else? Dumbphones, anyone?

Given that the majority of the publishing industry continues to throw its toys out of the pram regarding digital editions and Apple, it’s interesting to read a very contrary viewpoint on FT’s Tech Hub, regarding the Telegraph Media Group’s iPad app:

Digital editor, Edward Roussel, says Apple has been “co-operative and helpful” during its development.

That was particularly true in making the app easy for existing print subscribers to access for free and Apple was even flexible in allowing the Telegraph to access customer data. Data has been another big sticking point for publishers concerned that Apple would not hand over information about their customers.

The Telegraph iPad app will cost £9.99 a month, but Mr Roussel is happy to give £3 of that to Apple because the App Store is such a “user-friendly” way to pay—and in any case relatively similar to the costs of distributing a print product.

Whether this points to a possible thaw in the frosty relationship between Apple and print publishers remains to be seen, but newspapers (and, indeed, book and magazine publishers) need to find ways to stay relevant, and an iPad app is one of them, despite any enforced compromises.

Via Cult of Mac.

Today is the UK referendum on electoral reform. Brits get to choose between FPTP and AV, and the vast majority of my political posts on this blog have been about it, including the much-read AV versus FPTP—just the facts, man. And an interview with someone a bit right-wing who doesn’t exist. (Note to non-Brits and the politically agnostic—don’t worry, I’ll be back to mostly banging on about tech and gaming next week.)

A bunch of people have asked me to explain in a little more depth about how the voting systems work, and so here’s a brief overview.

Briefly, FPTP (our existing system) works as follows:

• Vote for one candidate
• The candidate with the most votes wins the seat

The main strength of FPTP is that it’s dead simple; it’s also largely fair in head-to-head(ish) seats that are mostly a contest between two candidates.

The main problems with FPTP are that its winner-takes-all approach leads to tactical voting in more complex seats, and it also enables someone to take a seat with a minority vote share. There’s also the spoiler effect, which the Tories have used well in recent years—the ‘left’/moderate vote splits, enabling the Tories to win seats that Labour or Lib Dem supporters would have been happy(ish) going to the other candidate.

AV works as follows:

1. Vote for as many candidates as you wish, ranking them in order
2. If a candidate has 50% of the vote, they win the seat, otherwise:
3. Second-choice preferences for the lowest-placed candidates are redistributed.

2 and 3 loop until a candidate has over 50% of the vote. The end result is a winner with the direct backing of core supporters and indirect backing of people who think they are at least ‘better than the other guy’. This kills the spoiler effect.

How could this work in practice? Well, in a seat where a candidate already has a really strong showing, winning over 50% of votes, AV makes no difference at all. This makes sense, since the candidate clearly has majority backing from their constituents. But let’s travel back to a made-up 2010 and a fairly tight contest in a UK seat, with three candidates: Left Lib, Lefty Lab and Righty Con. Righty Con’s a lazy fucker, but he wins elections because the Lefty votes are split and because he has enough core support to squeak through each time. But in the expenses scandal, it was shown that he’s expensed a £25,000 hat and a decade’s worth of Smarties, and so polling suggests things will be tight.

Under FPTP, this is what happened in Made-Up On Thames in 2010:

Lefty Lib: 29%
Lefty Lab: 35%
Righty Con: 36%

As you can see, Righty Con only had a slim majority over Lefty Lab, but the majority of the voters didn’t want him. In fact, all the Lefty lot are now hugely pissed off and confused, and they’re banging on about tactical voting next time and how they should have voted for someone who wasn’t their first choice last time. But that might not have made any odds because not everyone would have done this and OH IT’S TOO CONFUSING.

In a magical world where AV actually wins the referendum today, here’s what happens in 2015, with the exact same turnout:

Lefty Lib: 29%
Lefty Lab: 35%
Righty Con: 36%

Man, those guys don’t learn, do they? The exact same result. Hurrah for Righty Con!

BUT WAIT! We have AV now, and so the votes don’t work in the same way. Lefty Lib is last, and so he is eliminated (possibly by firing squad) and his second-choice votes are redistributed. The vast majority of Lefty Lib supporters thought Lefty Lab was a better bet than Righty Con, and so this is what subsequently happened:

Lefty Lab: 58%
Righty Con: 42%

Lefty Lab now wins, backed directly by 35% and indirectly by the majority of the remainder. In 2020, Righty Con will have to work harder to appeal to a broader range of people, rather than being a lazy git.

And that, ultimately, is your choice today. I’m voting yes to AV. The system is imperfect and not what I’d choose if we had a larger selection of tasty reform-oriented treats, but I think AV betters FPTP in important areas. However, even if you disagree, go and vote. The UK rarely gets chances like this, so make the most of it and make your voice heard.

Ben Brooks asks:

if you had to start over, buying all of your apps from scratch, in what order would you buy them (the assumption being you couldn’t afford to re-buy them all at once, but over time you could afford them all). I have been thinking about this for a while now and I started with a list of all the apps I normally use that I would need to purchase. From there I started arranging them in order of what I would buy first.

I’m going through something vaguely similar now, because I have a new iMac. Rather than fire old data across, I’m thinking ‘what should I install first?’ and only having the most important applications on there.

But if it was a case of literally installing in order, how could that be achieved? I use SuperDuper! for back-ups, but could conceivably get by on Carbon Copy Cloner for a while first; I use Scrivener and WriteRoom for writing copy, but could use TextWrangler. In each of these cases (and more), I end up imagining using a sub-optimal solution, in order to create a linear list.

Entire world:

You’re overthinking this, you idiot.

Yes, fair enough, so here’s the stuff I absolutely would have to have installed, and that one has to pay for, in a vaguely linear order:

• SuperDuper! (incremental back-up/cloning)
• Scrivener (fantastic writing app)
• Acorn (image editor)
• SizeUp (window management)
• WriteRoom (full-screen text editor)
• On The Job (time tracker)
• Numbers (spreadsheet)
• Photoshop (image editor)
• Transmit (FTP client)
• BBEdit (text/code editor)
• Default Folder X (open/save dialog add-on)
• GarageBand (audio editor)
• Call Recorder for Skype (recorder, for use in interviews)
• iPhoto (photo catalogue)
• PhoneView (iOS device manager)
• iStat Menus (system monitor—I use it for the clock)

I do use other software, but those are the ones I’d really miss, roughly in the order that I’d miss them (or, rather, in the order that I depend on them).

UPDATE: A few people have asked where Dropbox is, which is fair enough. The above list concentrated on paid-for applications, which wasn’t clear. Free stuff I currently use daily includes Dropbox (online back-up/sync), Pastebot Sync (iOS-to-Mac copy/paste), Twitter, the Reeder for Mac beta, Carbon Copy Cloner (cloning, as a fail-safe in case SuperDuper! doesn’t work) and The Unarchiver. These, of course, could all be installed on day one.

Another day, another bonkers comment by RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis. In a Guardian article, it’s stated that he told reporters:

publishers want to be in control of their destiny, their business, their content. I don’t think they are willing to be hijacked in the way the music industry was before.

This is of course at once a barbed attack at Apple and sucking up to Adobe, whose software can be used to develop apps for the PlayBook, which, at the last count, supported approximately 53 billion SDKs, including “shit created for the VIC-20”.

But let’s back up a bit: Apple “hijacked in the way the music industry was before”. Presumably, Lazaridis is critical in what Apple did to become so dominant in music industry sales. And, presumably, that’s bad for the industry and consumers, right? After all, Apple:

• Created a system that enabled users to buy with ease, convincing some people to part with cash rather than downloading illegally;
• Fought hard for DRM-free audio, and eventually won that particular war, killing dead the ridiculous lock-in digital music files once had;
• Enforced price-points that kept music purchases affordable, but still left room for artists to profit;
• Made it easier for people to cherry-pick single tracks rather than be forced to buy an entire album for a few good bits;
• Ensured that the music industry carried on making money.

THOSE CUPERTINO BASTARDS! How dare they make digital music popular and become dominant by offering a user-friendly solution, also raising the profile of online music in general, to the benefit of the competition and the entire industry as a whole!

Man, sometimes I wish someone would hijack Lazaridis’s mouth. At least then something that makes sense might come out of it.