Ian Kynnersley

I want Craft, not Technology

2012-01-30T00:00:00Z

The title of this post comes from Robert Penn’s homage to two wheels: It’s All About The Bike.

It struck a chord with me. “I want Craft, not Technology”. Isn’t technology just a tool to make things easier? Isn’t it just an enabler of other, real, tangible things?

And yet, there is craft in technology. Like other craftsmen, developers bring their experiences, their personalities and their passions to bear. At least the good ones do.

As a consultant technologist, I spent a lot of time talking to people who wanted the cheapest possible technology to facilitate their aims. Is this wrong? More and more tools are appearing that cater to this desire and allow anyone to create an app, website or blog and instinctively that feels like a good thing.

I wonder how useful these cheap technology solutions are to people. If they allow someone to get their amazing content out into the world or to raise money for a great cause then it really does feel like a good thing. However, we also know that great content is more likely to find an audience if it is presented well. And we know that a web product is more likely to succeed if skilled designers and developers have crafted it to meet the exact needs of its users.

So where does craft fit in? How do we know whether a given problem should be solved by cheap facilitation or beautiful craftsmanship? Is it even our choice to make?

New Job

2011-08-31T00:00:00Z

After a couple of years of singing the praises of financial independence and the opportunities afforded by the freelance lifestyle, I’ve gone and gotten myself a new job…. obviously.

It wasn’t planned and the offer came out of the blue although I had been thinking about what work opportunities I might be interested in and thinking about how to plan career development as a freelancer.

I really enjoyed spending my spring and early summer working at Sidekick Studios and in particular I loved working in the office, something I didn’t really expect being an avid fan of working at home and in cafes. I liked the people and I liked the buzz in the office with so many interesting projects on the go and the idea of working at home alone started to lose its appeal.

When they asked me if I wanted to join as a full time Lead Developer / Creative Technologist I didn’t have to think too long about it.

There will be lots of changes at Sidekick and the fact that they have employed me indicates an acknowledgement of how big a role technology will play in their future.

Today is my first day so keep an eye on the Sidekick blog for posts from me about how we’re using technology to address social problems.

Wish me luck!

Photomonth Live

2011-06-26T00:00:00Z

As Elastik Mobile was building up its iPhone photography browsing platform in the autumn of 2009, we got in touch with the people behind Photomonth, a month-long exhibition of photography in East London. We discussed the possibility of making them an app that year but sadly didn’t have the technology in place in time and we decided to get back in touch in 2010.

The year went past and we did indeed get back in touch and there were a few conversations about how we could best work together. We quickly ruled out a simple app to let people find the different events and galleries as a bit dull and settled on the idea of a photography competition.

Photomonth itself is all about professional photographers showing their work but we wanted to do something to let visitors to the festival feel more connected to the event. We would encourage visitors to the festival to submit their best mobile phone photos to the competition and our favourites would be shown in the exhibition.

We designed and built a perspex display case to house an iPhone hooked up to a physical button. This case was mounted on a stand and installed in Leon in Spitalfields, East London in the heart of the festival. The phone was running a custom application I wrote which displayed photos that people submitted to the competition and the button allowed visitors to browse through the images at their own speed. They could also rotate the case to rotate the photo in the screen.

The event was really good fun and we had loads of great submissions which can be found in the Flickr group for the competition and the hand-picked, weekly galleries.

Artful Flickr

2011-06-26T00:00:00Z

Artful Flickr is an iPhone Flickr Browsing app that started life as a proof-of-concept for the Artful platform we were building at Elastik Mobile.

We liked it so much that we decided to put it up on the App Store as our first app and were blown away by its popularity. We had a huge number of downloads as soon as it went live and the numbers continued to rise. We have had well over 10,000 downloads to date and our analytics show that people spend an average 7 minutes using the app each time they go in which is phenomenal.

Unlike most Flickr apps that start by asking you what you want to look for, we start the app by showing you a single app picked at random from Flickr’s Interesting pool. Photos get into this pool by being rated highly, being added as a favourite by a large number of Flickr users and by the number of comments, etc. We then let people explore that photo (or pick another from a small number of other Interesting photos) and then follow their nose through that photographer’s other photos and favourite photos.

It remains the most successful app we built at Elastik Mobile.

Due to the closing of the Elastik Mobile App Store account, this app is currently not available although it is in the review process so should be live again soon.

The Apps of Elastik Mobile

2011-06-25T00:00:00Z

Elastik Mobile came into being sometime during the summer of 2009 and was formalised as a limited company during that autumn.

As the technical co-founder I spent a lot of the subsequent time writing code and building up a library of apps, mostly built around the Artful platform that we was the core of our planned business.

The Artful platform is a code base that makes it easy to create beautiful apps around related or interlinking collections of images and was originally intended to power a series of white-label museum and gallery apps and eventually, one master app in which art lovers could buy packs of images that represented an Exhibition or a Collection to enable them to carry around their favourite artworks in their pockets.

While these apps sadly didn’t materialise, we did build a number of apps that enjoyed varying levels of success in the app store, most of which were built on top of the Artful platform.

Here is a list of the apps we built with links to download the apps that are currently available† on the iTunes App Store:

Artful Flickr – our proof-of-concept app that turned out to be a really nice Flickr browser in its own right and proved very successful getting well over 10,000 downloads. This app will be available very shortly in the App Store so please check back soon.
Buttons – a magical camera that takes moments and locations rather than pictures. A friend put me in touch with the German artist Sascha Pohflepp who had been commissioned to bring his 2006 project Buttons up to date. The idea of a camera that captures a moment in time and then retrieves a photo that someone else took at the same moment really appealed to me and so we agreed to get involved. The app has had a good number of downloads and has featured in several gallery exhibitions.
MyMzk – we met a London-based arts and music journalist who was building a blog of weekly band interviews with exclusive songs to accompany them. We designed and built an app that kept up to date with each new entry and allowed users to listen to the songs whilst reading the interviews. Sadly, despite the app having been completed, the client’s other commitments have meant that this really cool project has yet to see the light of day.
Photomonth Live – this app was written to form the basis of an art installation and was never a publicly available app. The installation involved a physical stand and display case that housed an iPhone which was displaying a slideshow of photos submitted to a competition we were running to coincide with Photomonth 2010.
Cinémoi Cannes – we were approached by Cinémoi, the French cinema satellite channel, to build them a simple app to accompany their coverage of the Cannes Film Festival in 2010. The app pulled in a feed of their photographer’s red carpet shots to give people an insight into the glamour of the event. The app continued to get hundreds of downloads throughout the subsequent year. Sadly, when they came to us again in 2011, existing commitments prevented me from building the more detailed app they needed and their new app has now replaced the original in the App Store.
Football Stars / Tennis Stars – 2 related apps that took advantage of Wimbledon and the Football World Cup events in summer 2010 to demonstrate how simply apps based around the Artful platform could be built. We pulled together flickr images, youtube videos and wikipedia entries to give people an introduction to the best players in the world and allow them to follow their progress.

† Due to the fact that Elastik Mobile Ltd folded in late 2010, we closed the iTunes App Store account and removed all of our apps. The best ones are in the process of being re-uploaded to my own account.

Equilibrium

2011-06-07T00:00:00Z

I’ve just finished watching the second episode of Adam Curtis’s latest documentary series, All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace). The series sets out to tell the story of how our hopes that technology, more specifically the internet, would set us free from the established forces of power are idealistic and unfounded.

A new Adam Curtis documentary always brings excitement but I’ve seen a lot of criticism mixed in this time around. I’m not sure whether it’s because he’s tackling subjects that people I know are familiar with or whether people have started to see through his style, his persuasive, manipulative collages of music, found footage and compelling voice-over to find inconsistencies, simplistic arguments and muddled thinking. It is clear though that those who are most frustrated with AWOBMOLG are those who know most about the subjects he’s discussing.

However, being somewhat ignorant of the history of people and ideas that form the basis of his arguments, I still find him compelling. I love his way of drawing threads across history to link ideas and people with no obvious connection but whose ideas overlap or combine to make sense of events elsewhere.

In this particular episode, Curtis talks about ecosystems and equilibrium. He discusses the geological idea that nature left to its own devices will tend towards a state of balance and how the same concepts were used to describe our place in the world which leads us to the conclusion that without the established power structures such as national governments, humans would form self regulating equilibrium and to the role that the internet would play in this egalitarian new world.

He goes on to tell us how geologists have since come to realise that this idea of nature is actually completely inaccurate but so appealing to us that the idea has lived on long past being roundly rejected by the scientific community.

He concludes by revisiting the communes of the late 60s and early 70s. These were set up by groups of people who wanted to establish their own communities free from the traditional power structures where they could live as equals in a balanced and self-managing equilibrium. Every one of these communes however failed for the same reason: the power structures they left behind quickly re-established themselves within the groups.

This made me remember something my first boss told me when I was an idealistic and impressionable young man which, while simplistic and perhaps somewhat pessimistic, have stuck in my head ever since. He suggested that if you could somehow start again with everyone having nothing, no money, property, etc such that everyone was truly equal, you would very quickly find that equality shifting. People who could command respect would be listened to and those who could make things would start to trade. Power and inequality would soon start to develop again.

#4: The Mountain Goats

2011-02-26T00:00:00Z

Another singer with a non-musical, nasal voice but a lot to say and a serious talent for saying it. The Mountain Goats started life as one man, John Darnielle, a guitar and a tape recorder. No attempt at production, you can hear the tape whirring away throughout the songs but it somehow doesn’t matter. They were never about the sound but about the passion and the lyrics.

They have recorded a number of albums now in proper studios that sound clean and properly produced but I can’t help feeling that something was lost in the transition.

Tracklist:

Golden Boy (Ghana)
The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out Of Denton (All Hail West Texas)
Dance Music (The Sunset Tree)
Cubs In Five (9 Black Poppies)
No Children (Tallahassee)

#3: Bonnie 'Prince' Billy

2011-02-11T00:00:00Z

A change of sound this week. Things slow to a crawl with the beautiful but broken Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. His sound revolves around his cracked yet resonant voice and lyrics of love, loneliness, life, sorrow with deviations into sex and a rather black humour.

Tracklisting:

I See A Darkness (I See A Darkness)
Then The Letting Go (The Letting Go)
I Am Goodbye (Beware)
I Gave You (Superwolf)

The old native vs cross-platform debate

2011-02-03T00:00:00Z

The recent decision by 37signals to build a mobile web version of Basecamp, their flagship project management tool, instead of an iPhone app has re-ignited a debate that I suspect will keep rolling for a long while yet about native applications and cross-platform solutions such as the web or Adobe AIR.

Reading through the comments I came across an article about User Hostile Platforms which makes a very good case against cross-platform solutions. While its primary target is Adobe AIR – a technology that allows people to build applications that will run on the major operating systems, Windows, Mac OS X and Linux – the arguments are similarly valid for many web based solutions.

The main argument that I agree with here is that to build something cross-platform is a business decision, and nothing to do with users. It is far and away the cheapest route to the largest possible user base and is consequently very compelling to businesses and indie developers alike.

Users, however, want applications that feel right. Applications they can look at, understand and use without having to learn a new way of doing things or an unfamiliar interface and without having to think too much. They want applications that respond to all the tricks and shortcuts they use without thinking. They want applications whose notifications appear along with all the others.

Ask any iPhone developer who has tried to move away from standard navigational paradigms and they will tell you of confused faces and of people who tried their app once and never opened it again.

I admit I find the arguments for native, device-specific applications very compelling but in the case of mobile, the article above does not adequately cover the huge spectrum of options. With desktop applications, it is easier to argue for native applications because full integration with the system, speed and ease of use are all very important and, in reality, there are only 3 platforms you need to build for: Windows, Mac and Linux.

But mobile is much more fractured. There has been a lot of talk over the last 12 months about how (and why) the growth of Android should bring about an end to the dominance of the iPhone as “the one true platform” for apps and the best choice for launching a mobile platform. Not only that but the debate has highlighted the fact that, despite the phenomenal success of the iPhone, and more recently Android, there are still a huge numbers of people with other smartphones (Blackberry, Nokia, Symbian etc) and even larger numbers of people without smartphones at all. What about them?

The elephant in the room at this stage is perhaps the cross-device app frameworks that allow developers to use web technologies to build applications that can be compiled into native applications on a wide array of smartphones (all cater for iPhone and Android but many also target Blackberry, WebOS and more).

Frameworks such as Sencha Touch, PhoneGap and Titanium Mobile are the Adobe AIR of the mobile development world. While the integration with the operating system is more controlled on mobile devices (and therefore less of an issue) the one-size-fits-all approach to building applications leaves users with an unfamiliar interface and a less than optimal experience.

It is my experience that the users who are asking for web or cross-device solutions are the ones that cannot run native applications on their phones or at least do not have the range of great available apps that are available on iPhone and Android.

In conclusion, I think the future is very much in native applications (certainly for me). However, I think perhaps 37signals have got it right. Collaborative software like Basecamp should live on the web (in the cloud if you prefer) and as such, that is where they should put their efforts. The key is to provide as good a service and as good an experience as you can on the web (including on mobiles) while offering access to 3rd party application developers to build a suite of operating system-specific native applications.

Note: A hypothesis: Spotify is the most popular music streaming site ahead of Grooveshark and We7 because it is an application not a website. Note: 37signals have subsequently posted the visitor figures by device for the first 24 hours and iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) is way out front with 84%.

#2: Clinic

2011-01-31T00:00:00Z

This time I have a dig around the career of Clinic, a band from Liverpool who hide behind surgical masks and make a tremendous, hypnotic, driving, raw, garage-y noise that doesn’t deviate very much from a pretty simple pattern and who seem to divide opinion but who I think are one of the great guitar bands we’ve produced in recent years.

Enjoy!

Tracklist:

Return of Evil Bill (Internal Wrangler)
Harvest (Visitations)
Distortions (Internal Wrangler)
Walking With Thee (Walking With Thee)