Kyle Deas

As a rule I avoid Gawker and its associated blogs, but I do have a soft spot for Lifehacker. The blog recently published a list of its favorite iPhone apps, and there was a theme running through the article that disturbed me a little. Here, let me pull out some representative quotes.

Looking to power up your iPhone with the best free and cheap apps out there?

With a couple of $10 multi-service IM clients available, Meebo stands out especially because it’s free.

Although not free (weighing in on the more expensive side at $2.99)

The catch: It’s $2. 

The biggest difference is price: PasteFire is free and MyPhoneDesktop costs a whopping $5.

Pano’s one of the more expensive apps in the list, at $3

Now, I know that one of Lifehacker’s aims is to help people find cheaper ways of living. And I also know that this ‘race to the bottom’, in terms of app pricing, is nothing new for iOS. The lower pricing has actually helped a lot of iOS developers: it’s better to sell a half-million apps at 99¢ than it is to sell 25,000 at $4.99.

But I do think that articles like this one reflect a widespread shift in the way people perceive software¹ and its monetary value. And I don’t like it. In fact, I would say that a world in which $3 - roughly the cost of a Big Mac - is a totally unacceptable price for a useful application is a world that has gone batshit insane.

The price trend for software over the last decade has been steadily downward. Apple’s App Stores, for the Mac and for iOS, have allowed developers to sell to users without worrying about distribution channels or payment processing. The internet, and the ad-supported model, has allowed online services to provide powerful, programming-intensive services at little or no cost.

But the rise of low-cost software seems to have given rise to the idea that this stuff is easy - that anyone with a few extra months and half an ounce of programming knowledge can bring an app to market or create the next delicious. And people don’t put a high value on things that are easy to produce.

The reality, of course, is that programming is hard, designing is hard, marketing is hard, and managing the people who do all these jobs is hard. On a superficial level, a programmer’s job is to write code and a designer’s job is to create user interfaces. But on a deeper level their job is to make decisions, and each one of those decisions is an opportunity for something to go wrong. For a tiny bit of interface lag to be introduced. For a common task to be made unintuitive. Good software is composed of countless such decisions, and each one is a place where something can break.

It’s incredibly difficult to bring a high-quality piece of software to market, and each one of the good, usable, useful apps in the App Store - and certainly every one of those on Lifehacker’s list - is a minor miracle, the culmination of a process that could have collapsed at almost any point along the way.

People deserve to be paid fairly for the work that they do. That’s especially true when that work results in an ongoing, appreciable improvement in your life. And the best pieces of software really do change people’s lives. Think about the applications or services that you use on a regular basis. What value would you attach to, say, Tumblr? Or Reddit? How about Angry Birds? Gmail? Instapaper? Evernote? 

I would hope, if you’re really honest about it, that the answer would be more than a Big Mac.

1. In this article, by ‘software’ I mean anything that requires developers to maintain, including mobile apps, desktop applications, and web applications and services. ↩

Last night I decided to watch a movie. I made myself a cup of tea, browsed Netflix for a few minutes, and eventually settled on the 1973 classic The Sting, with Robert Redford and Paul Newman.¹

About twelve minutes into the film I was startled by a gunshot onscreen. I was startled because I hadn’t actually been watching the film. Instead, I had been: having a text message conversation; sending a few quick emails; checking my RSS reader (twice); keeping up to date with the latest tweets; and trying, without much success, to pass a particularly vexing level in an iPad game called World of Goo.

I looked the film and realized I had no earthly idea what was happening in it. I didn’t recognize any of the characters. I hadn’t consciously processed a single line of dialog. I had actively looked at the screen for perhaps a minute, cumulatively, during the whole quarter-hour that it had been playing.

I like the internet, but sometimes I worry about what it’s doing to me. It’s not like I wanted to be this guy. The guy who responds to a text message while he’s driving, even though he knows it’s incredibly dangerous. The asshole who pulls out his iPhone at the party when everyone else is playing Scattergories. The guy who can’t make it through five minutes of a film without having something, anything, else to do with his brain. A guy who, in short, spends his time hopelessly trying to multitask, flitting, hummingbird-like, from empty task to empty task.

So I took my iPad and my phone and my laptop and I stashed them in another room. I moved the stack of half-read New Yorker and Wired magazines in there too, just for good measure. Then, I restarted the film and tried, for the first time in who knows how long, to really watch a film from start to finish.

And you know what? The Sting is a great fucking film. The Joplin soundtrack fits the mood perfectly. Redford and Neuman are cool, as always. It’s funny and compelling and exciting. And the details are well-done too, the little things, the costumes² and the set design. I enjoyed it more than I’ve enjoyed any movie in recent memory.

But I was still a little uncomfortable through the whole thing. Still a little itchy. Still felt like there were things I was missing.

I’m not usually much for New Years Resolutions, but I made just one this year. And it was this: be mindful. I want to really think about the things I’m doing, and cut out the things I do carelessly or out of habit alone. I want to stop shoving food into my face just because I’m bored, stop checking my RSS reader or my email just because a little red badge tells me I’ve got unread items out in the ether, weighing down my soul. I’ve only recently begun to realize that my time and attention are only worth as much as I’m willing to invest in them, and that recently I’ve been treating them as though they weren’t were much. Because seriously: is there anything less worthy of your obsession and your constant focus than Twitter?³

But being mindful is hard, and you have to start in little doses. That’s why I’m breaking it down to pieces of media. Every day, I’m going to try to focus for a few minutes on a work of art, whether it’s a song, a film, a novel, a photograph, or even a compelling blog post. Try to give the artist my undivided attention. Try to cut out all the bullshit.⁴

Try to be mindful.

And if the behavior I’ve described here sounds like you - if you can’t remember the last time you really focused on a piece of art, just because it was beautiful - then I recommend you try it, too.

Because life’s too short for multitasking.

1. The Sting, incidentally, was directed by the criminally under-appreciated George Roy Hill, who was also responsible for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Slaughterhouse-5, and The World According to Garp. The fourteen films he directed garnered 37 Oscar Nominations and 2 Best Picture wins, yet today I’d be surprised if one person in a thousand knew who he was. ↩

2. Seriously: the costumes. This film is like an ode to the well-fitted suit, in every color, cut, and style imaginable.↩

3. Or World of Goo, for that matter.↩

4. Maybe this is why people still enjoy movie theaters so much – it’s the last place it’s not socially acceptable to have your face stuck in a screen. Though even those walls are breaking down.↩

thesignaturething writes:

Yeah, Taylor Swift writes songs about her ex-boyfriends and uses their real names, and in a lot of ways it’s immature or obnoxious. But why do people act like she’s the only one in the history of music to do that? Remember “Cry Me a River”? We all love JT, the song is a jam and the video is hot—but holy jesus, why was there not more of an outcry about how fucking creepy it is?

A couple of tangentially-related points:

1. This video is fucking creepy. Music video directors don’t usually get a ton of recognition, but it’s worth noting that Francis Lawrence – in addition to directing music videos for just about every major pop artist of the last twenty years- would go on to direct Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” video, as well as Constantine and I Am Legend. I wonder how much of the video’s vision came from Lawrence, and how much came from Timberlake.
2. The most famous example of public-figure-as-song-inspiration that I can think of is “Layla”, a song for which Clapton garnered almost universal acclaim. I’m not denying the gender angle, but some of the backlash toward Swift might come from the fact that while Clapton and Timberlake both sound heartbroken, she comes off as a little petulant. Take a song like “Forever and Always”: sure, the lyrics are sad - but the music? It’s upbeat power-pop.
3. Julia, before you say it: no, the Unplugged version of “Layla” is in no way whatsoever superior to the original.
4. One thing that I think gets overlooked about modern pop-music is how weird it can be. My favorite example of this is actually “Viva La Vida”. Coldplay was a group that, until that song, had played conventional soft-rock music. But that song is a weirdly orchestral thing: gone are the electric guitars and the drum kit, and in their place is literally a string quartet. It sounds more like a genre cover of a Coldplay song than it sounds like an original Coldplay song. Yet it was a smash-hit by any standard.
   
    ”Cry Me A River” is the same way. The song is introduced by a weird organ solo that sounds like it was lifted from the soundtrack of a film about a haunted carnival. There’s a bass-line to the song, sure, but the rest of the percussion is all a-capella, a bunch of weird mouth noises. And the coda to the song features an interplay between Timberland’s backup singers and a string section.
   
   Of course, pop music is generally a conservative medium, but that’s precisely why I wish there was more attention paid to those songs that wildly appropriate musical conventions from other genres.

(Source: deadiiah)