Folk Copyright

In his Guardian column (who knew he had a column?!), Cory Doctorow introduces a pretty interesting idea: that copyright for corporations is one thing, and copyright for individuals is quite another. He calls the "real people" version folk copyright. This feels right; corporations have a legitimate need to protect themselves from things like factory-made pirate versions of their products. And they don't have a legitimate need to protect themselves from, as Doctorow suggests, someone who might "organise a singalong at the pub".

One of the things going on is that lawyers and the people who hire them are mistaking the actual role of lawyers in society; to work on issues that are of surpassing importance, broad and lasting impact, and social and economic needs. Not, I would argue, to attempt to change the kind of ordinary behavior that's embedded in our nature and our culture.

Rules are difficult to write, and hardly ever apply in all cases. "Don't steal" is a good rule, and there are penalties for stealing. But everyone knows that rules, and laws, are tempered by judgement. It's obvious -- although not literally stated in the rule -- that absent-mindedly pocketing the pen you used to sign a check is not stealing.

Attempting to extend corporate-level copyright law to individual behavior is the same sort of thing. The NFL's statement of ownership, broadcast with every NFL football game, could literally be taken to mean "you can't talk about this game". And a lawyer could easily (and mistakenly) wander into some sort of defense of that idea, but it's obviously not the point.

I think this sort of confusion about the proper and very limited role of rules and the people whose job it is to work with them is what Shakespeare was talking about in The Tempest ("The first thing we do is, we kill all the lawyers"). And Doctorow's idea rings just as true.

Copyrights?

You don't have as many rights as you may think you have, or deserve. And you have more rights than you know about.

Copyright is being argued about right now, all over the place. Some people think that they should own and control just about every aspect of things they write, paint, or otherwise create. J.K.Rowling, for example, thinks nobody should be able to publish a book about her books.

My friend Quinn, at QuinnCreative.com, has a clear, simple copyright statement on her blog: This entire blog is under copyright. No portion may be copied, displayed, or used, either electronically or in print, without express written permission of Quinn McDonald. On her blog (which is well worth a look!) she says that after finding one of her photos on someone else's site, it feels like "...a sort of Wild West out there in cyberspace." Meaning, I think, that she feels like she has rights that are being violated, and nobody is around to help. A perfectly understandable response.

Lawrence Lessig, who has some pretty clear thinking about copyright, pioneered the work on the Creative Commons -- an idea all about sharing, but still based on the idea that it's the creator's right to decide what and how to share.

But...I'm not so sure creators really have that right. Sure, we're all trying to make our way in the world. Yes, it's perfectly reasonable to earn money from what you make. And struggling to keep others from earning money that you think should be yours is, I think, human nature. But do you really have the right to control the things you make, write, paint, say, sing, dance, emote, or otherwise participate in birthing? I'm gradually coming around to a different position than I've had for years: no, I don't think you have that right at all. More to come.

Designing an eBook

I've been playing with Apple's tools for iPhone web apps -- basically some documentation, sample HTML, sample CSS, and some javascript. My sample project is an ebook -- not an ebook reader, as I don't have a whole closet full of content to load into it; just a single ebook.

Project Gutenberg has tens of thousands of books that volunteers have scanned, entered manually, and uploaded. These are available without many restrictions; for most purposes you're welcome to them. I wanted to experiment with longer texts, so I started with Jules Verne's Five Weeks in a Balloon.

The first thing I try to think about in a design project is "typical use" -- that is, if somebody using the thing will usually be standing on one leg and whistling, that's what I try visualize. In this case, if you're really going to read a whole novel on the iPhone, most of what you want is just the text. Not, for example, interface elements taking up space on the display.

The next thing you want is the ability to move forward in the text. Whether you're turning a page, clicking a "next" button, or turning a page, reading is primarily a dynamic process moving in one direction through a book or text. While my initial thought was that a "back to top" button was going to be needed, I realized that really you very seldom go "back to the beginning" when you're reading.

Another question was when to load the text. Five Weeks in a Balloon [iPhone link] is a long book, and if it's all on one page, it's a big page. Slow to load. On the other hand, once it's loaded you're done. And in the US, with our uneven cell coverage, I think it's to consider the case where the user starts reading somewhere with a good connection, then continues somewhere else without a connection at all.

The decisions I made all ended up leading me toward a very minimalist design. My version of Five Weeks in a Balloon has no additional UI beyond internal links (TOC to chapters) and browser UI (scrolling and Back). The CSS tweaks the iPhone browser UI to eliminate zooming and sideways scrolling; all you do is scroll down through a very long page. Almost as if you were reading it!

I've gone on to add some minimal graphics to the title page, and an icon, should you want to install the page on your home screen. Other than that, all my tests of tapping from one page to another, one chapter to another, javascript functions emulating page turning, all of that -- I've discarded.

The one thing I'd still like to add -- although it's difficult now that I've minimized away all the non-browser UI -- is some mechanism for remembering where you left off reading. Remembering across browser sessions, I mean.

There are other iPhone ebook web apps that have made different design choices. iDickens [iPhone link] is one, like mine, that's just a single text, but uses a chapter-oriented UI. ScrollBox [iPhone link] and Textonphone [iPhone link] are more like ebook readers that you load content into. I've also added two more texts: the (even longer) Life on the Mississippi [iPhone link] by Mark Twain, and Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz [iPhone link].

By the way...the links with the [iPhone link] notation will probably open in any browser, but may not look or work as well as when they're opened on an iPhone.

Earth, Air, Fire, Water

The new MacBook Air makes me think that my "plain old" MacBook is probably a MacBook Earth, which would make the MacBook Pro the MacBook Fire. Although MacBook Fire has a certain negative connotation, batteries and all, I'm going for the speed and power connotation instead. That leaves us without a real entrant for the "MacBook Water" position. What this clearly ought to be is a ruggedized, use-it-outdoors MacBook. Waterproof (to some extent), usable in direct sunlight, power-stingy, able to withstand being dropped, etc. Sort of a Mac version of the OLPC.

Just imagine what Apple advertising would make of the quartet:

• MacBook Earth
  
• MacBook Air
  
• MacBook Fire
  
• MacBook Water
  

You can never be too rich or...

Apple's new MacBook Air is a pretty clear design statement in the vein of the old adage by (I think) the Duchess of Windsor: "You can never be too rich or too thin." The designers' objective was a subnotebook, which is by definition small and light. The creative solution they devised was to accept the inherent requirement of a full-sized keyboard, and work instead on the third dimension. 

The interesting thing about this approach is its avoidance of cliched thinking. The typical approach, which every other company has followed in this case, is to equate "small" with length and width. To think of "small" in the same sense we use the term in reference to, say, mobile phones. 

This is the thinking that led to the ThinkPad 701 with its butterfly keyboard. Not that they necessarily would have been able to create anything as thin as the MacBook Air back then (mid 90s), but it seems to me that the effort expended on the clever keyboard shows the importance attached to reducing area rather than concentrating on the third dimension. 

Apple's design solutions -- lately, at least -- seem to avoid being locked into cliches. Cliched thinking, of course, is mainly the approach of managers and businesspeople. Designers and other creative folks are in the business of finding their ways around cliches. But not every company engages in design, and in almost every case the managers and businesspeople are the ones in charge, unable to (as they say in their cliched way) "think out of the box". 

That's why the recent products unveiled by Apple -- the MacBook Air, the iPod, the iPhone -- suggest that where the company has actually made original progress is in the way it's organized. Granted, Jobs is very aware of design, but it goes deeper; Apple seems to be organizationally avoiding cliches in this area.

Mobile design, iPhone mobile design

The iPhone represents quite a different take on mobile design; not just for Apple, but for third parties as well. You can't deliver traditional applications to an iPhone, at least not at the moment. What you can do (or if you're grumbling about it, what you're allowed to do) is deliver "web apps"; applications that run in the browser.

Web applications are sort of like playing the guitar, at least for me. It's so easy to get started it almost makes you giddy with excitement. Just like you can learn two or three guitar chords in a few minutes, you can build a web application that at least opens with hardly any effort. After all, the old name for a "web application" is probably "web page with a script." In fact, if you build the processing for your web app on the server side, all you need is a web page with a form. Making the layout as pretty as the rest of the iPhone takes a bit more effort (especially those blasted round corners), but it turns out that Apple gives you everything you need for that.

My history with the guitar features short periods of learning followed by long plateaus during which I didn't learn anything and usually didn't feel either motivated or capable of learning more. A musician explained it to me once: "the guitar is the easiest instrument to get started with and one of the hardest to master." I think iPhone web applications may be like that too. Most of the titles available so far are games. If other iPhone would-be-developers are like me, doing some simple games is the best way to start getting used to the tools and environment while some distant part of your mind ponders what you might want to create for real. If you can produce an original game along the way, so much the better! My default choice on a new system or language or IDE is always tic-tac-toe, although Apple gives away the source for a simple Sudoku game, too.

As far as I've seen, nobody has yet mastered iPhone web application development to the extent that they've produced a truly useful or compelling piece of work. But just wait. (I still can't play guitar, either.)

Newtops

Laptops are very good for entering text because of the (sometimes) full-size, usable keyboard. I've had a couple of laptops (a ThinkPad and a PowerBook) with keyboards as good as any I've ever used on a desktop system.

Laptops are also good for writing because you have lots of space on the display; I use the space for what I call multi-window editing -- I keep a "main" window open displaying the document I'm working on and usually have two or three smaller windows open displaying ideas I might work in, related ideas that might turn into something else, quotations, and so on.

Another valuable use for a big screen is mind-mapping. At some stages of writing I find mind-mapping very useful. Freemind is the most useful tool I've seen (try it!). You could design a mind-mapping application for a small screen, but the human-user side of the equation would become more troublesome. Seeing the connections is very important to the process of mind mapping.

Laptop-sized screen space is also important for graphics work, of course.

Laptops are not the best for everything, though, and some of their shortcomings are thoroughly entangled with their strengths. That is, one of the strengths of a laptop is the full, usable keyboard. The size of that keyboard is also a weakness -- anything that has a big keyboard won't fit in your pocket, at least not without some kind of radical transformer-like keyboard design.

Separate devices, each sized appropriately, might be one solution. A device designed to be a digital camera can dispense with any design compromises needed for text entry or communications or the like. But then, of course, you end up walking around with too many gadgets.

I have some other ideas, too. Stay tuned.