The new sport of Apple bashing

Harking back to the mid 1990s I well remember the doom and gloom that PC users heaped onto the poor Apple Mac user.

Remember these gems of wisdom of the time?

"It'll be dead before the year is out."

"Microsoft won because they have a better product."

"Apple only make toys; they are not serious !"

Yes, "dead by the end of the millennium" company Apple have built a company on the back of good design and only releasing the best products that just work.  The "i" products we know and love - iPod, iMac, iPhone and iPad.

And now we have Apple, the second largest company in the USA by capitalization, having to defend itself against every man and his dog ripping off their designs and, and a new idiotic chorus of clueless pundits saying that Apple is "this big powerful bully suing the little guy"..

Well, first, I wouldn't say Samsung is a "little guy". I even own some of their appliances and home entertainment products. But I would say that the Galaxy family of tablets and smart phones is definitely riding on the backs of Apple's design and innovation.

But the really sad part is that Samsung's designers actually have the industrial design chops to have gone their own way. They have done it before, so why be a follower now?

I'd say it is because of the gutless and vision-deprived company wannabes who manage "brands" these days, rather than put in the effort to build a company that has soul, knows where it is going and tries to excel in everything it does. It just degrades the efforts of staff who really want to prove to their bosses and peers that they have the talent and commitment to produce great design and great products, but aren't given the chance to prove it.

The same can be said for companies that would rather poach gun-for-hire talent with no 'skin' in the game than actually train staff in the "way" (to paraphrase HP,) that they "do" design.

Designers don't design to shift boxes, they design to enrich lives. Apple designers get to do that, but not many others are part of something as vibrant and dynamic as Apple.

Pity.

Flood Relief and Online Collaboration

I must say I've had a wonderful, if stressful week, and of course it involved building web sites, but this time I was pleasantly involved in a rather unique musical adventure.

A mate called me from Brisbane - yes his building was flooded out - and asked if I could help a friend of his put together a web site in only 1 week in aid of the flood relief efforts up there.

We've been affected all around Australia by the floods first in south east Queensland and now in north west Victoria. After 10 years of drought  in Australia it is both welcome but also awe-inspiring to witness the power of nature, and how she can really bowl a yorker at you.

So this group in Brisbane was getting together a group of 20 bands and musicians to donate a "b-side" song each to help raise awareness for the official Premier's Flood Relief Appeal. The idea was to enter an official receipt number into the home page of the site and they donator could then get access to a whole album of downloadable songs from the unlocked downloads page. I was asked if I could help out, and as always I said yes before thinking about the amount of work involved, or how to actually achieve what they wanted.

Now initially it made sense to me just to run the campaign from Facebook and Twitter, and this was great for promotions and spreading the word, however we still needed a site to host the downloads, the band information and links to their MySpace sites, so I went looking for a content management system (CMS) aimed at unlimited downloads and one that had a stable of musicians.

I found several sites pitched at the music industry but the one that fitted the best - with a little manual tweaking - was the FourFour platform.

So, for most of my spare time over the last week I've project-managed the whole job on Basecamp and along with the group in Brisbane I helped build the site using its templates and some custom coding.

Now I'm quite used to Basecamp - I've had an account for about four years now - and it always amazes me how people who I invite into using it just "get it" pretty well straight off. It is a wonderful collaborative tool that allows all messages to be in one place, and since the team members all worked at different places, and the organisation of who was doing what was very casual - a milestone would be set and somebody would just volunteer within an hour or two and it would be done.

I also worked with a graphic designer from Brisbane (who was shanghaied just like me I suspect ;-) who did the logo in a very tight deadline and with an amazing amount of options in the couple of days we had to get the look of the site right. The only hiccup was a last minute change to the maroon of the Queensland rugby team from the original colour that was a little closer to the AFL football team's colours. As always in Queensland, rugby won!

The site is now live, and we did miss the friday deadline, but we did hit our next one which was before Australia Day. So if you want to have a look at a weeks' worth of collaborative work that started with a phone call on a Monday and was live a week later, check out Bsides4Brisbane.com!
Bsides4Brisbane.com!