The Apple iPad has an IPS screen, which apparently stands for Wide Viewing Angle. Take that away and the device becomes less interesting.

Here’s a scenario, based on many true stories:

The family is gathered in the kitchen talking about what movie they want to watch that evening. “What about Up“, suggests Stephanie. Her mother and father—as always—are out of touch and haven’t heard of it. Their daughter rolls her eyes, pulls out her iPod Touch and seconds later the trailer is ready to roll. She hands the iPod to her mother.

Father wants to watch too.

And he can. But to see properly, he has to get so close to his wife that they’re practically making love (in the kitchen; in front of their daughter; which is bad form). The iPhone and iPod Touch screens are not built to be viewed by more than one person at a time. They are too small to stand back from. And with more than one person it is impossible to look at head-on, so the image starts to distort.

I see similar scenarios all the time with people trying to share something on the screen of their mobile phones (and even laptops). Usually what happens is everyone takes turns looking. With a single photograph this isn’t terrible. With videos or several photographs, usually people tire of waiting their turn.

The iPad has a larger screen than a mobile phone of course, which means it can be put down and everyone can watch from further away. But this is a device designed for holding more than one for putting down and standing back from, and that means a wider viewing angle is crucial.

Here’s another scenario:

Grandma is visiting and wants to see some photographs of the grandchildren. Her daughter picks up the iPad from the coffee table (it’s always on standby and ready to go), taps to photographs and opens up an album. Even though she has technophobia and even has trouble operating her new television, Grandma knows how to swipe-gesture to the next picture.

Her granddaughter sits beside her answering “who’s that” type questions and can see because the viewing angle on this screen allows her to without being grandma-kiss-close. Meanwhile, Grandpa is sitting in the armchair opposite; busy resting his eyes.

Grandma starts laughing at something in one of the photographs and Grandpa stirs, coughs and grunts out a “Woz’that?”. Grandma flips over the photograph for him to see. The iPad is now upside down, but the photograph is not because Apple have thought to automatically flip it.

Would the iPad be better and more ’social’ if it had a camera for Skype video calls? Yeah, sure. But most companies would have added that feature and forgot about getting the important details right. Maybe they put in a cheaper screen that looks great but can’t be viewed at an angle. Or perhaps they pick the expensive screen but then don’t think about flipping the photograph. The other company has added more features, but they are a little frustrating to use.

The iPad is the ultimate social device for a very different reason. Yes, it will handle the Facebook stuff and whatever other social network. But this will be social for people who are in the same physical location too. It will be passed back and forth, held up so others can see from across the room, even operated together.

Social without the internet? Yeah, Apple haven’t forgotten about real life. They’re not led by trying to build new innovative devices, with tonnes of features and taking advantage of the latest trends in social networks. They think how the masses could use it and then they obsess over making that experience great. They think through hundreds of scenarios and make sure their technology supports how people behave. Their goal is to make the technology disappear. Far too many tech companies want to make the technology as obvious as possible.

Like every other company, Apple has to make compromises. But they choose a different set of compromises to everyone else. The camera will come later because the camera makes sense to the masses. But it isn’t their priority. Other features won’t get added at all, because Apple have decided it doesn’t fit any experience that an ordinary person would desire.

This frustrates a lot of people. Some of those frustrated people go to Microsoft, Google, Sony, Nokia, Samsung, Asus or wherever. Some, like me, live with it because we like stuff that works really well, hate technology that gets in your way and are willing to follow the Apple vision. And many people don’t have any idea what they want and just enjoy the advantages of the products.

This is what makes Apple a leader.

Yet so many of the vocal people on the Internet tried to predict what Apple would produce. Things that they want. Things that they want NOW! They shout ‘FAIL’ when Apple doesn’t do what they want. For some what they think they want.

These people dream like Microsoft. Or Nokia. Or Sony.

Well Apple doesn’t invent for the vocal minority geek brigade. They don’t feed off the buzz; they create it. They try to change the world by inventing for the masses.

If you want to judge the iPad, you have to judge it from the right angle. Not on its ports, or cameras, or command lines or features or lack of. With Apple people come first, not technology.

Sometimes they fail there too. They just succeed more than most because they try so hard.

It’s easy enough to come up with an idea. Fleshing it out into a fully fledged vision is a fair amount more work. Turning it into reality is more work than the majority would take on. But if you need to lead a team to make that vision happen… A team that has to be passionate and creative if they are to pull it off… If you’re trying to build a Disney World…

Life is full of habits. It’s full of conventions. And traditions. People act how they act because that’s how they acted yesterday. Companies act like other companies because it is easier just to copy one another.

Which is probably a good thing. It holds everything together in a predictable pattern.

But some people get bored with that. They see a way to do things better. So they set to work.

And then the world’s habits gang up on them and they lose sight of what they originally intended. Sometimes they do good anyway.

Good.

Heh.

Visions should change of course; being too rigid leads to failure. But they should change for good reasons. Because better ideas replace them or because the laws of reality were not quite understood. But not because it was too hard.

The world is charming like that. It likes to push you towards good enough.

Screw that charm.

It’s never good enough.

I’m in the middle of reading Good to Great by Jim Collins and have just finished a great chapter on confronting the harsh realities that people love to sweep under the proverbial rug. This paragraph really struck me:

Now, you might be wondering, “How do you motivate people with brutal facts? Doesn’t motivation flow chiefly from a compelling vision?” The answer, surprisingly, is, “No.” Not because vision is unimportant, but because expending energy trying to motivate people is largely a waste of time. One of the dominant themes that runs throughout this book is that if you successfully implement its findings, you will not need to spend time and energy “motivating” people. If you have the right people on the bus, they will be self-motivated. The real question then becomes: How do you manage in such a way as not to de-motivate people? And one of the single most de-motivating actions you can take is to hold out false hopes, soon to be swept away by events.

Acting with reality versus talking about dreams. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

The sprout of an idea occurred to be a couple of years ago while watching Bill Gates give his keynote at CES. He was doing his kitchen-of-the-future thing. Your kitchen worktop, he predicted, was going to be a touch screen monitor that showed you recipes. He followed this with his bedroom-of-the-future, where the walls were covered with monitors and you decorated your walls with the wallpaper of the operating system. Putting aside the nightmare of sleeping in a room surrounded by the Windows desktop, something else was bothering me: I knew this was never going to happen how he imagined it. And even if it did, it would be too many years away and pointless enough that it was not worth caring about.

The same month Steve Jobs got on stage at MacWorld and introduced the iPhone. He said:

When’s it going to be available? We’re shipping them in June — we’re announcing it today because we have to go get FCC approval… we thought it’d be better to introduce this today rather than let the FCC introduce this.

It struck me then why I had started to enjoy these Apple keynotes; every announcement came with a shipping date. They didn’t say anything until they’d built it. They weren’t talking about their plans; they were talking about what they had already done. They waited until they were forced to announce it to start talking.

Since then I’ve noticed this quality in others (though very much in the minority). I have grown to admire it. It’s far more interesting to hear what people have accomplished already, rather than what their goals are. Most people plan, dream and set goals, but how many of these actually get accomplished? I’d prefer someone to tell me they got up early this morning and ran a mile, than to hear them dream of running an ultra-marathon. Reality always trumps the dream.

But I had always thought that telling people your goals was a good thing. Tell a friend or publicly announce your goals and you will be held to account if you fail, right? Well I’ve tried this strategy and it has a fatal flaw: people don’t hold you to account. It is not embarrassing to give up; it just means you are like everyone else.

I started to try the opposite strategy: don’t announce what you are doing until you’ve achieved it. Planning to run that marathon? A week after training you can tell people you’ve been running every morning, but don’t mention the marathon you signed up for until you absolutely need to. This strategy, to my surprise, doesn’t just make you look like someone who gets stuff done rather than breaking promises, it is also motivating in itself. There is something far more motivating about telling people your accomplishments than your plans. It becomes something to look forward to. It’s frustrating to stay in stealth mode because you are excited about your plans, so you make sure you get stuff done so you can talk about it.

This strategy also stops you wasting time. I remember an evening many years ago when my dad couldn’t stop chatting away about a leaking tap in the bathroom. It sticks in my mind because he really didn’t have anything to say, but he kept on and on and I grew very bored. Actually fixing the tap took about five minutes. When you’re bored, you really notice how time consuming talking can be. Well that time stacks up whether you are being boring or not.

A year’s worth of gradual understanding recently got summed up by Mike Cane on Twitter:

A lesson I have learned the Hard Way: Those who talk about doing, NEVER DO. Those who STFU and show what they’ve DONE, win.

Shut the Fuck Up and DO IT.

STFU.

Yesterday this was running through my head while I was writing an email meant to motivate someone into getting some work done.

STFU, I thought.

And I did.

If my own motivation gets derailed by talking too much, maybe trying to motivate others by communicating a bold vision is actually destructive too. Maybe the way to motivate someone is not to express a compelling vision of what we can create. Maybe it’s just to start setting tasks and getting something done. To celebrate the achievement; not the vision. To let the motivation build itself.

Having goals, dreams and being visionary are all important. But I’m no longer convinced talking about them is a good idea. Not if you want your ideas to feed reality.

Of course no politician ever got elected by shutting up; so there’s already one case where STFU is bad advice. But then again, how much of what any given politician says actually gets done?

Well, I should probably STFU now.

At last I had made time to step away from my work and relax. Not just for one evening either; I was doing it every day. For a short while I had managed to breath some space into my schedule.

But space is a vacuum.

Currently, my time is packed with chores. I have a speech to prepare. Difficult problems to solve at work. A new project to draw up a proposal for. A diary that has an uncomfortable number of activities in it. Plus the usual pile of paper work to… ignore. To try and fit this all in, and make sure I still create time to relax, is difficult.

But I’ve been doing it.

Today, after doing my set number of hours of work, I pressed play on a new audio book, opened up my sketch pad, and smiled – proud of myself for carving out an evening of casual time.

Time to relax.

But.

By multitasking?

By crafting anatomical drawings in my sketchbook?

By listening to a book on the Six Day War and its impact on the modern-day Middle East?

Somehow it doesn’t quite fit my image of what relaxing should be.

But I’ve tried to fit that image. With a mindless movie or a novelty novel. And I’ve found that bores me. And boredom does not mean the same as relax.

Every so often I feel it is important to take some time to evaluate where I have taken my career so far. Stop, think and make conscious adjustments to make sure it goes where I want it to.

My most recent stop and think has been over the past few hours. I’ve made half the decisions I think I will need to before I’m happy.

My conclusion is that I have become far too generalised. As well as the areas I want to be involved in (design, CSS, JavaScript) I’ve found myself spending far too much time in MySQL and even server administration. I would like to move almost completely away from these areas. I have not the slightest regret about learning them; I just don’t want to learn any more.

PHP is a language I love and would like to continue using. But really, I want to spend less time there and more on the client side areas of CSS and JavaScript. These front end areas are where I want to really specialise. They are where I feel passionate. Databases, in comparison, make my brain eat itself so probably best to avoid.

Generalising, I do feel, is good. It is difficult to completely separate the different layers of a web application and so it is very useful to know enough to interact with areas that connect to my primary domain. In some cases that means communicating with specialists in other areas. In other cases it means setting up proof of concept demo sites that I don’t have to worry about scaling.

So generalising is useful, but two and a half years after starting my journey into web development, I now feel confident that my general skills are good enough. I will invest the time in keeping up, but I want to stop offering some of these skills as a service.

Instead I want to really start focusing on front end development. I want to hone my design skills and my JavaScript knowledge.

I especially want to focus in this area now that it is starting to become more sophisticated. Lots of really interesting things are happening now that browsers are starting to implement new abilities in CSS, JavaScript and even HTML. JavaScript libraries are also having a tremendous impact on the industry. This is creating a lot of activity and I want to be part of this hive.

In a way this isn’t a new decision I’m making. I’ve been trying to focus myself on Drupal user experience work almost from the start. But I’ve not been effective in positioning myself there, because my work has pushed me in a wider arc.

Particularly frustrating is the lack of time this has given me for work on the Drupal 7 User Experience drive. For the past 6 months I have hardly done anything in this areas. I just haven’t had the time or energy to do so. And quite honestly putting time into open source can be both harmful and rewarding. There is just a limit to how much one can offer without financial reward. This has nothing to do with motivation which I have an abundance of, but more about buying time.

Finally, I think as the web tries to do more and more crazy things, specialising is going to be a requirement to avoid mediocrity. I would have been specialising about now anyway, but I think this means that I need to take this a bit further and hyper-specialise. I’m not sure what that will be exactly yet; perhaps the industry will guide me there.

That’s the general plan. Just need to refine and execute it.

If you haven’t already read Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘How David Beats Goliath‘ do so now, or this will make less sense.

I’m still slowly making my way through Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals (I am about a third way through). At this stage it is easy to see Lincoln as a David who won the presidency by fighting the complacency of his rivals (the Goliaths). Lincoln was far and away the underdog, but he was very good at doing what those who thought it their destiny to win the presidential nomination would not. Goodwin writes (chapter 8):

Lincoln, like Seward, had developed a cadre of lifelong friends who were willing to do anything in their power to ensure his nomination. But unlike Seward, he had not made enemies or aroused envy along the way. It is hard to imagine Lincoln letting Greeley’s resentment smoulder for years as Seward did. On the contrary, he took pains to reestablish rapport with Judd and Trumbull after they defeated him in his first run for the Senate. His ability to rise above defeat and create friendships with previous opponents was never shared by Chase, who was unable to forgive those who crossed him.

Lincoln also broke the ‘rules’ by purposely remaining unknown as a contender until the last moment so that there would be little time for him to cause ‘offence to others’; which is exactly what Seward, who was favourite for the nomination, had unwittingly done. Instead the little-known Lincoln took his rivals by surprise and seized control of the political conversation at the critical moment, steering support away from his rivals and towards himself. He was able to do so because he had cultivated his army of supporters. And, perhaps just as crucially, by the hard task of also establishing friendships with those who could so easily have become enemies.

That’s a pretty obvious lesson that is technically easy for us all to use and benefit from. But how many of us are prepared to? Not only is it hard work to always make friends, but resentment feels a little too natural to fight.

I had a blog post in mind, half wrote it and then realised I’d be a bit of a hypocrite if I did. Which, as I said previously is not something to worry about, but certainly not something to aim for either. I have a better way of conveying my thought, I think, and shall attempt to tomorrow when sleep is not such a pressing matter.

Today began with sunshine, but not enough to distract me from work. I got a lot done and finished early. I exercised. Then completed dinner before settling down in front of the television for the latest episode of Lost. It was a great episode. I followed this with about three hours of drawing study. My day ended with another chapter from the book about Honest Abe.

Nothing exceptional happened, but for most days that’s perfectly fine. For an ordinary day this was a very good one. I will try to make more like it. Mostly I think it is under my power to do so.

Over the years I have learnt to be careful in my selection of bedtime reading. I know I must avoid anything too stimulating or my brain will gradually warm up and sleep become impossible.

Something similar happens when I’ve been drawing just prior to closing my eyes for the night. As soon as the world goes dark, it lights up again with beautiful three dimensional drawings of whatever I’ve been sketching. Much to my chagrin these are many times better than I can actually draw.

Perhaps it is that annoyance that stops me from sleeping. You would think that the vividness of the images would be so much like a dream that I’d get to sleep all the more quick-sharp. However, I suspect the similarity to dreaming could actually be tricking my brain into thinking that I’m already asleep; hence it doesn’t bother to initiate the actual sleep sequence.

Whatever theory proves correct, the images are beautiful enough (again far beyond my actual capabilities) that this is a kind of insomnia I can live with.

Except tonight I’m worried.

Because I have been spending the evening drawing skulls. And I’m worried about what this might inspire when I close my eyes.

I can only pray that I’ll be lucky and get a band of friendly pirates.

It’s late again.

It’s the pictures, you see.

I’ve been working hard on developing the habit of drawing everyday, and now I can’t stop. The more my pencil flows the more time seems to flow with it and before I know what is going on it is late into the wee hours of the morning.

My sketchbook needs more pictures. It commands me to create them.

The trouble is: drawing doesn’t inspire writing. I need to read books in the evening to inspire blog wisdom. Unfortunately, anatomy books for the artist just don’t cut it. And so you get this kind of thing.

Blogging everyday hard.