Yesterday on Cult of Mac, Leander Kahney wrote The top 5 secrets to designing a killer iPhone app site, citing the importance of a decent web page for marketing your app or game. He suggested: make the site a single page; use an iPhone image with your app inside as the main image; include an instantly recognisable App Store badge; use animated screenshots showing the app in action; and display the price up-front.

I rather grumpily commented that tip six should be devs including some kind of downloadable media kit, and, surprisingly, a dev just emailed me for some advice on this, and so I figured I’d share it with the world at large.

First, some reasoning for me being grumpy about a lack of press pages. I write about iPhone and iPod touch apps a lot, but many of the articles are round-ups. Commission rates are such that you don’t get a lot of time with each app, and so you need to maximise the amount of time you spend using it and writing about it, and minimise everything else. Time I have to spend faffing about taking screen grabs, syncing my iPhone to send the grabs to iPhoto, and then extracting them to Finder, is time I could have instead spent using your app or your game.

Furthermore, although Apple intelligently provided a means to take grabs on a device (hold the home and sleep buttons), this is, at best, awkward. I often end up back on the springboard, because I pressed the home button too early, or ‘missing’ the right moment in a game, because my fingers were otherwise engaged on the multi-touch screen, and requiring two of them to take a trip to the iPhone’s tactile buttons was a quest too far.

What makes me happy is when developers deal with this themselves. You know the best bits of your own game or app, so should provide insight into such things for people writing about it. And you shouldn’t be saying “just go to the site and grab something there,” unless the site has appropriate material. Two companies that utterly get this are GymFu, whose press area is fantastic, offering PNG grabs, icons and press releases, and Madgarden, whose Saucelifter website provides succinct info, a bunch of PNG grabs you can drag to Finder or Windows Explorer, and a downloadable press pack.

If you’re thinking of revamping your website for an app or game, take note of the Cult of Mac article, but also ensure you include a press page or at least some basic assets for download:

• As a minimum, ensure your app or game grabs are full-size PNGs, which are not lossy. Compressed JPEGs are not usable in print, nor are resized images and those with watermarks.
• If there are specific points about your app you want to share, include these in a succinct text overview.
• To seriously make friends with hacks, provide everything as a downloadable ZIP.
• And always make sure you provide an email address for media enquiries—otherwise people like me sometimes give up and go and write about someone else’s creation instead.

It’s not necessary to have all this in a separate press section, although you can if you choose. Just having usable PNGs on app info pages is enough. The important thing is you do something, rather than just bung heavily compressed grabs online and avoid telling writers how to contact you.

Update: As a couple of people have already said to me, this information is largely good for anyone developing apps and games. Ensure people can contact you. Provide info about what you create. Provide uncompressed screen grabs for download.

About a week ago, a design acquaintance of mine mentioned Clients From Hell on Twitter. Although I consider myself very lucky on balance, with the vast majority of my clients being great, everyone in the industry has horror stories to tell. Clients From Hell is a place for anonymous contributions, and had me transfixed and also laughing at stories that mirrored some of my own experiences: clients who think that because they could really do something themselves, they shouldn’t have to pay you to do it for them; people who want you to design something despite not being able to supply any kind of brief; unrealistic businesspeople who want the moon on a stick for next to nothing.

But having followed this blog for a few days via RSS, I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with it. Horror stories are all very well, but I’m under the impression that some of these clients from hell have had the misfortune to deal with designers from hell.

Part of the problem of the blog is that there’s no context. So while it’s amusing to laugh at the ‘stupid client’ who said “the unicorns don’t look realistic enough”, that statement could make perfect sense. Unicorns are fictional, but they’re basically horses with a horn. Was the response to the unicorns in the design simply down to them not looking like horses? If so, that’s pretty efficient criticism from the client, not something to joke about.

Elsewhere, design snobbery is rife on the blog, and that’s quite depressing. If anything, it shows how many designers take their knowledge for granted and don’t take the time to explain the obvious to clients (or at least ensure they understand certain things). There are several posts ridiculing clients who respond to ‘lorem ipsum’ placeholder text negatively, but outside of the design world, who knows what this is? If you don’t make your clients aware that the text in mock-up designs is gobbledygook, how are they to know something hasn’t gone wrong?

And so it goes: a client wants a “darker black”, which is something almost everyone in the print industry must have said to printers at some point; another can’t find the shade of blue they want in the Photoshop colour picker—a hugely complex visual device for someone who’s not used it before; someone asks a designer to innovate by adding Flash animation to an email newsletter—not an outlandish request for someone not involved in web technology on a day-to-day basis; a banner is measured on-screen by someone else, which makes perfect sense if you’ve never worked with pixels in a design package; and one comment is from a client saying an iStockPhoto watermark doesn’t add anything visually, but were they informed that stock images, until purchased, are watermarked?

A designer’s job isn’t just to design—it’s to communicate. But this doesn’t just mean communicating the client’s message to an audience—you must also communicate with your client, and ensure they understand what you’re doing and what’s technically feasible. Laughing at someone who doesn’t share your technical knowledge doesn’t make you a great designer—in fact, it rather makes you the opposite.

On Twitter just now, Adam Banks just pointed me at a truly laughable article: A Portuguese success story: could i be the future of newspapers?

The laughable bit isn’t the publication itself (well, apart from the dreadful name, which pretty much guarantees no-one’s going to find it online unless they know about it): the new daily is doing what various commentators have for a long time suggested newspapers experiment with. It leads with opinions rather than news people will have already seen on TV or read online, then provides a quickfire overview of recent news stories, before exploring some topics in depth.

The laughable thing is that this is being described as innovative. As Banks suggested, we’ve had publications like these for quite a while now—they’re called magazines.

Because information and media is very accessible online, there’s a generation growing up that expects everything to be free. Because they’ve only known torrents and online sharing, they think nothing of taking what they don’t have the right to take, be it music, movies or content.

I’ve had this kind of thing happen to me on occasion. Things I’ve written have been reprinted without credit or permission, often in eBay listings, but sometimes in blogs. Bits of websites have also been grabbed, but usually for personal projects, by people who probably don’t grasp the way copyright works, and I’ve never seen a need to smack anyone with a legal hammer of doom.

What’s staggering, though, is how a general disregard and ignorance for copyright is spreading throughout the commercial arena. We had the BBC nicking a Robert Llewellyn YouTube clip, and Lily Allen stealing all sorts of content to, ironically, bitch about rights infringement in the music industry (and the subsequent revisionism that followed), but an hour or so ago something truly bizarre was reported.

Edgar Wright, he of Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz fame, said on Twitter: Answer me how this http://tinyurl.com/yfr6ad4 is cut down to this http://tinyurl.com/y9w3s3x without my permission, blessing or approval.

The Times had, without permission, taken Wright’s heartfelt tribute to Edward Woodward, hacked it down and, in Wright’s words, “gut[ted] it of all feeling”. Amazingly, Media Monkey reports that the rip even made the print edition, with a photo of a grinning Wright placed cheekily alongside.

Although I utterly disagree with chilling government proposals regarding copyright infringement law, it is shocking how few people realise that just because something is online, that doesn’t mean it’s freely available to use and abuse as you see fit. That a supposedly professional organisation like The Times, stuffed full of journos who could write their own piece (or at least have the decency to ask Wright for permission), so blatantly stole work from anyone, let alone a famous film director, is almost beyond belief.

Update: The Times online has now updated the article, using all of Wright’s original copy and crediting his blog as the original source.

Update 2: Wright reports that, on his request, The Times will make a donation to a charity of Edward Woodward’s family’s choosing.

Apple crushed Psystar in court; the ruling reported on November 14 stated Psystar had no right to hack about with Mac OS X and sell Mac clones.

Oddly, commentators are saying this is a bad thing. PC World called it a ‘hollow victory’, providing all the usual garbage arguments like “what if [insert car company] only let me [park in certain places/drive on certain roads]?”, ignoring the fact that with Apple, the entire unit—hardware and software—is the product. (And, car-argument fans, with Intel Macs you get your own roads and can also drive on everyone else’s.) Boxed copies of Mac OS X are to enable people to update existing Apple products. And since other platforms and PCs exist, Apple in itself isn’t a monopoly.

The main argument rearing its ugly head, though, is that Apple is stupid in restricting its OS to Apple hardware alone. It could, some say, have huge market-share if only Apple allowed its software to appear on every PC around, or even if it just licensed to choice vendors such as Dell.

This is bull. Apple is, despite what some people seem to think, primarily a hardware company, and it makes the bulk of its money from relatively high-end kit. If Mac OS X could be run on cheap hardware, that wouldn’t increase its market-share—it would just eat into Apple’s profits. This already happened once, during Apple’s disastrous experiment with Mac clones in the 1990s. And lower profits for Apple leads to less R&D and weaker products—a vicious cycle that would neither benefit Apple nor the industry as a whole.

Furthermore, Apple runs a relatively tight ship, and that’s because it deals with the entire package itself. If Mac OS X had to officially run on a huge number of additional pieces of hardware, problems would hugely escalate, and the platform’s stability—much of what makes it so appealing in the first place—would be gone.

Ultimately, Apple cares about profits. Sure, it doesn’t want its market-share to plummet, but then that’s not happening. Even in these dark financial days, Apple’s share is (very) slowly rising. And even with its small market-share, Apple consistently outperforms the competition; but it’s a fallacy to believe Apple would perform better if it ditched its lucrative hardware in favour of cheap Dell laptops running Mac OS X.