Marco Arment comments on the state of so-called ‘open’ systems Linux and Android in his post Great since day one. The article is a must-read for anyone interested in new technology, but also a reality check for geeks.

Too often, kit from tech companies—often Apple, but others too—is slammed online, due to the geeks who write the tech press getting their knickers in a twist about a ‘lacking’ feature from a product (despite it only being of interest to them), or praising a product for something so niche that a consumer would never discover it (let alone care if told about it by someone considerably geekier than they are). Note that I myself have been guilty of this, especially during my earlier years of hackery. These days, I am extremely careful about checking my tech writing against an internal geek filter.

To me, Arment’s post wonderfully sums up why it’s going to take a lot for Apple to be beaten to a pulp by Android. The latter is a good system, and there’s a lot of noise online about it, but much of the drive is by geeks who like the geekiest aspect of the system. By contrast, the iPhone and other iOS devices are typically favoured by normal people. In the long run, I think there’s space for both systems (and others), but to expect Android to conquer iOS due to offering features because it can rather than because it should is bafflingly stupid.

Another slice of fried gold (smeared in shit, sadly) from the BBC in iPhone 4 signal fault leaves Apple ‘stunned’. What left me more stunned is how, once again, the BBC’s reporting is little better than copy-and-paste blogging, although they let someone else bang the same old drum about iPhone 4 ‘problems’ rather than bothering to do any actual reporting themselves.

In the report, Pocket Lint’s Stuart Miles says Apple raises questions about the iPhone 4: “Why, for the first time, has Apple released a bumper for their phone, and why does no one else have this problem?” My question: why doesn’t the editor of Pocket Lint (and a BBC reporter) not only know that every phone suffers from human-oriented antenna interference, and that some companies even note this in their instruction manuals? Maybe they should have asked the guys from AnandTech to comment instead—at least they know what they’re talking about regarding iPhone 4.

So I just went to Google’s home page, to see what all the fuss was about. Here’s what I saw:

After checking my surroundings to make sure that I hadn’t abruptly time-travelled to 1996, my web designer side kicked in and wondered what possessed Google to utterly destroy the basic fundamental usability of its search engine’s home page.

One of the core benefits of Google’s search engine has always been its simplicity. It gained marketshare by avoiding all the crud rivals added to ‘expand’ the search experience for users. With Google, you got a plain white page with a search box—simple and efficient.

Having used other Google products, I always had the nagging doubt that the Google home page aesthetic was more down to the company’s lack of design skills than anything else, and this new update pretty much confirms that. The current page has a background that makes it extremely difficult to read any of the on-screen text. It’s the kind of abomination that would have gotten a junior web designer fired from any self-respecting agency in 1996, let alone in 2010.

In an added nail to the coffin, the ‘change background image’ link that you can just about make out at the bottom-left of the page (that is if your eyes haven’t already exploded) doesn’t actually enable you to remove the background. Instead, you have to sign in to your Google account, assuming you have one. From a user-experience standpoint, this is crazy, but maybe Google just doesn’t care—after all, there are no ads on its home page.

Lukas Mathis has written a great piece on Safari Reader. If you’re not familiar with the feature, it’s new in Safari 5. Using a keyboard shortcut, a panel slides up, containing the content of the article you’re reading, stripping everything else. In many cases, it also manages to stitch together multi-page articles automatically. The typography in Safari Reader is suspect, but the idea itself is what’s caught the attention of many people, who are proclaiming it to be the Worst Thing Ever (Ars Technica seems particularly miffed).

The reason for the anger is because Reader strips the ads, the branding, and everything apart from the content. As Mathis notes, though: “If your users are using a third-party product to make your product usable, you are doing something wrong.” That is a sentence that every single content provider on the web should read several times, digest, and, if necessary, write in permanent marker on both hands.

Something like Safari Reader shouldn’t be necessary, but it is, and that’s because the majority of content providers now offer such a poor reading experience online, burying content in amongst dozens of ads, or splitting up small articles across dozens of pages, in order to maximise ad impressions. This is a hateful, cynical, user-hostile approach, and it’s precisely because of this that the likes of Reader and the wonderful Instapaper exist.

In my life as a web designer, I’ve watched in horror as companies have forced clean, efficient designs to mutate into nasty ad-infested, unreadable disasters. The questions “Can’t we get at least one more ad above the fold?” and “Can we make the text smaller, so we can fit more on the screen?” still fill me with horror. And I’m constantly baffled by online publications that see fit to split a 20-item gallery of tiny images over 20 slow-to-load pages.

I’m not saying ads are inherently bad, nor that they should be removed from every website. Just don’t make them the focus. And in some cases, splitting articles in a sensible manner can actually aid usability, even taking into account the ‘infinite’ height of web pages. Just make sure that if you’re involved in any aspect of creating a website that you don’t make the user’s experience so bad that they feel compelled to use third-party technology in order to easily read your site’s articles.

One of the craziest online screw-ups by a media company is currently playing out. Pulse News Reader by Alphonso Labs is a visually engaging RSS reader for iPad. Rather than being primarily text-based, it aims to pull in imagery for each article, providing a more aesthetic and elegant experience than competing apps when you’re working through feeds.

Pulse has been riding high: it’s well-rated in the App Store and Apple CEO Steve Jobs mentioned it at WWDC on Monday. But then things started to go crazy. The New York Times wrote a story about Pulse, but this only alerted the publication’s legal department, who forced Apple to pull the app.

Twitter went mental, bloggers were in uproar, and the app returned. Had sanity prevailed? Nope. Times spokesperson Robert Christie told the world: “We think it has been reinstated by error, and we have asked Apple for an explanation.” In a totally surreal twist, the Times itself is now covering the ongoing spat.

So what did Pulse do to anger the Times? Apparently, it had the audacity to ‘frame’ the site’s content when a full article was accessed, and it’s also a commercial product. The Times’s legal brains and talent (and I use those words loosely) decided this breached two of the absolute no-no terms regarding Times content. The fact that Pulse acts like almost every other RSS reader and Twitter client out there doesn’t entirely seem to have escaped the Times, but in one of the most boneheaded pieces of reasoning I’ve ever seen, Christie said that if other commercial RSS readers were making use of Times content, they were most likely doing so under an agreement with the The New York Times Company.

This is clearly bullshit of the highest order. No RSS reader developers gain permission/agreements with content providers, because doing so would take years, and there’s an assumption that feeds are provided freely, so you can access content. Still, this is The New York Times Company, and I had a run-in with its legal team in the late 1990s when I had the sheer cheek to ask permission to reprint (with full accreditation and a link) on my non-commercial site a single gig review from the Boston Globe. (Net result: a price-list and a legal threat for something I’d not even done.)

So, The New York Times Company, here are my helpful hints for you. Choose one of the following:

1. Stop using your heavy-handed legal morons to drag your company back into the 1990s, and recognise that if you provide RSS feeds, applications are going to—shock!—use them. And, you know, some people making apps that do might even want to eat, and so they’ll charge for their product (like you do), but they’re not charging for your content, you utter dimwits.
2. Remove all your feeds, which deals with the problem nicely, since no evil RSS readers and Twitter clients will then be able to ‘frame’ your content in the manner you find so abhorrent. Of course, you’ll then be called Mr Stupid of Stupid Town in the Stupid Corner of the Stupid Bit of the internet, and you’ll lose a load of readers, but, hey, you brought that on yourselves.