Wow, the Tories really are scared of AV, aren’t they? In BBC article Ashdown attacks Osborne over AV (whose content sadly wasn’t entirely literal—I’m sure many of us would pay good money to see Ashdown give Osborne a kicking), the former Lib-Dem leader called out Osborne for trying to dig up dirt on the ‘yes to AV’ campaign.

What Osborne had discovered was, I’m sure you’ll agree, shocking in the extreme. The pro-AV camp, in favour of electoral reform, is being partly funded by the Electoral Reform Society, in favour of electoral reform. It’s clearly broken Osborne’s little mind that a society in favour of electoral reform and called the Electoral Reform Society would use some of its money to fund a movement campaigning for electoral reform.

But wait! Osborne said it stinks for another reason: the commercial arm of the Electoral Reform Society, Electoral Reform Services Ltd (ERSL), runs election services. The BBC says:

[Osborne] claimed that ERSL stood to benefit financially from a switch. The firm has denied the accusation, saying a switch would have “absolutely no impact” on its revenue.

The thing is, even if Osborne is right, it’s interesting he’s against the ERS part-funding the pro-AV vote. After all, Osborne is a member of a party usually fine with whatever private companies get up to, positively encouraging organisations to do whatever it takes to make huge piles of cash.

But what really stinks is the manner in which the Tories are fighting against AV. Make no mistake: this isn’t about history, democracy, Britishness, complexity, finance, extremism or any other argument you’ve heard. The sole reason the Tories are against AV is because the Tories stand to lose seats. AV will rebalance British politics so that the majority liberal vote gets slightly more weight and the minority Conservative vote gets less. Tories argue this is unfair, ignoring the fact that what’s really unfair is how regularly the Tories have been in government, with majorities, despite not having the backing of the majority of the voters.

One of the things that bugs me about iOS is Apple’s real-world design. It makes some of its apps akin to real-world items, and so you get a leather-bound calendar for iCal or a virtual book for iBooks. The idea is to presumably assist people in how to use something by providing something they recognise.

The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t really work. Virtual items with virtual controls don’t perform like their real-world counterparts. You don’t have a scrolling panel in a real calendar, for example. The design often doesn’t follow through to the details either, which is particularly apparent in iBooks. That app sits its ebooks on top of an image of an open book, but the image never changes as you read, never updating the number of pages beneath the one(s) you’re viewing. Therefore, what could potentially have been a useful indicator of where you are in any particular volume becomes detrimental (because the eye makes the assumption you’re not making progress, and iBooks then has to provide an alternate—software-oriented—progress bar), and iBooks therefore manages to feel less book-like than Kindle. Amazon, of course, does away with design garbage, instead just giving you the content and a few ways to adjust how it looks (in terms of font styles).

A further problem is addressed by Ben Brooks at The Brooks Review. In Don’t Mimic Real-World Interfaces, he talks about how instead of realism, software designers should be striving to take full advantage of the power of computers, providing new solutions to problems, rather than aping ones built in the real world decades ago.

Ask any person who has used Soulver for Mac or iOS if they think Soulver was difficult to figure out—it is leaps and bounds better than any other calculator app, yet it doesn’t look like any other calculator app. It took me all of two minutes to figure out how to work the app and to realize just how much better it is. What Soulver did was not try to replicate the beloved HP 12c, instead they rethought what a calculator app was to be—and how it should be designed if it is only made for use on a computer, from day one.

It is what calculators would have been if they were invented at the same time computers were, instead of what we have with most calculator apps.

I totally agree with this. Soulver is a fantastic app, like a ‘back of an envelope’ that does the sums for you. Instead of being a virtual calculator, it’s a little bit spreadsheet, a little bit text editor, and quite a bit of power under the hood that you can choose to use or not. If you’re a beginner, you can simply paste lists of values (such as a shopping list of items and prices) from emails and other documents into the main pane and it’ll work out a total (without you having to laboriously remove related text, which also removes the context from your calculations). If you’re happy going deeper, you can work with operators, currency conversion, and mathematical functions. You might argue that Soulver lacks that initial point of recognition (“This is a calculator?”), but it enables you to do commonplace calculations a lot more quickly than you can in typical calculator apps for Windows, Mac and iOS.

In a related article, Brooks also looks into iCal and its resolute desire to stick with real-world conventions and simulated paper, rather than rolling in more dynamic design ideas from GTD apps that would benefit everyone. Given the absolutely hideous iCal UI (Ars Technica) in one of the latest Lion builds, I don’t suspect anyone at Apple shares Brooks’s opinion, nor his taste.

(One possibility, of course, is perhaps the design is intentionally hideous. There’s a full-screen button on the new iCal, to make it a proper full-screen app, in the same manner as iPhoto ’11. If people are so offended and distracted by the torn paper and horrible fake-leather toolbar, perhaps they’ll be more likely to explore the new mode.)

A nice piece by Stu Dredge over at The Guardian, on Amazon’s Appstore terms. The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) is warning devs about Amazon’s pricing fluctuation, which will enable it to pay developers either 70% of the purchase price for their game, or 20% of the developer’s List Price, whichever is greater. The IGDA’s concerned, because:

Some developers will probably win in this scenario, but some developers – most likely, those near the bottom of the list – will lose, not gaining enough sales to offset the loss in revenue per sale.

And Amazon also reserves the right to make a game free that’s selling well, to which the IGDA responds:

This sort of promotional activity may attract consumers away from competing markets and into Amazon’s arms. But it might actually represent a net loss for the developer, which was already doing quite well and didn’t need to firesale its game at that moment in time.

Yeah, well, tough. This is how things are in Amazon-land. I know of a couple of book publishers who ended up going under because Amazon kept discounting products to the point that they effectively lost money, but Amazon’s not fussed, because it knows there are a lot of other publishers—and customers also flock to where things are cheapest. It won’t be any different for Android games and apps.

From a personal standpoint, I’m not terribly keen on Amazon’s terms, though. The rush-to-the-bottom on Apple’s App Store is bad enough, with games discounted within days of going on sale. While Apple’s managed to ‘train’ iOS users to buy stuff, they’ve also set an expectation that games should be dirt-cheap (something not entirely helped by giant publishers like EA and Gameloft doing regular fire-sales); and while I like games being more affordable (rather than being 30-quid cartridges), they don’t really need to be just 59p. But at least on the App Store the dev has a choice—Amazon’s terms are a little off in that regard.

Still, Amazon’s the one company that could really give Apple strong competition in the app/tablet/smartthing space, and so despite its iffy terms, I’m excited to see where it takes things.

The Guardian reports that US cinema chains are run by fucking idiots. OK, so The Guardian’s language isn’t quite that fruity (the article is ‘US cinemas threaten not to show films in video-on-demand dispute’), but I think my intro sums things up nicely.

Cinema is under increasing pressure from television, largely because people now have TVs the size of a wall, and they can watch stuff in private, without having idiots around them yammering on phones and stuffing overpriced popcorn into their faces, and, occasionally, their mouths. But with Hollywood studios planning to make new releases available for online rental two months after they debut on the big screen, US cinema chains are threatening to not show films by the likes of Universal, Sony, Warner Bros and Fox.

THAT WILL WORK!

No, wait. It won’t.

Two things here:

1. Cinema chains rarely leave anything other than blockbusters on for more than a few weeks. Therefore, if the window really is going to be reduced to two months, it isn’t really going to make any odds anyway.
2. Cinema chains rattle on about how cinema remains relevant because it’s all about the experience. If that’s really the case, cinemas shouldn’t feel threatened by video-on-demand—they should instead be doing their level best to improve the cinema-going experience. Clue: this doesn’t involve sticky floors, suddenly turning the best seats into super-expensive VIP chairs that no-one ever sits in, charging more for popcorn and a drink than a meal out at a local pub, and sound systems that distort the audio so much that you think the latest Oscar winner is about a bunch of bees disguised as humans.

Good grief. While everyone’s still reeling from the shock of Lenovo’s 23-inch tablet and the non-shock of dual-14-inch-screen tablet Kno quietly passing, Kyocera’s seen its chance to fight hard to top the Bonkers League Table of Touchscreen Stupidity.

As anyone paying attention to the smartphone battle between iOS and Android will know, it’s often a fight between usability and bullet-points. Apple hardware and software is designed to be easy to use, but is somewhat locked-down, and so Android and its hardware partners regularly respond with a list of exciting specs and bullet-points, typically offering ‘more’ in a number of areas that geeks and engineers care about, to best Apple’s shiny toys.

We’re thinking that with the Kyocera Echo, there was a discussion that went along these lines:

“We need something to beat the iPhone. What can we do to be one-up on those guys?”

“Other Android phones have done more speed, more RAM, more installed and impossible-to-remove third-party apps, so we can’t do any of that. What’s left?”

“What about… screens?”

“Genius! The iPhone’s only got one screen, so we’ll clean up if we release a device with two!”

And so (probably) was born the Echo, a device Katherine Boehret on All Things Digital says:

may turn out to be a niche product

No kidding. The device is a fat little bugger, due to the dual-screen nature, and it’s also awkward to get it into dual-screen mode. Worse, though, is this little nugget of information:

only seven of the phone’s apps work in the mode that runs an app on each screen

So even Nintendo DS-style arguments don’t really work here. Instead, you have a device where you can get:

• a slightly bigger screen with a huge black bar across the middle of the content
• a standard-sized screen, hiding the other within the device’s bulk
• ‘Simul-Task Mode’ on seven (count ’em) apps

Sounds great.

Now, where’s my damn 12-screen Android phone? That’s sure to be a winner!