Do you remember when film photography was ubiquitous and consumer digital cameras were just starting to come onto the market? (Worryingly, there will be readers of this blog that won’t.)
At the time, there was any amount of commentary from the tech boosters who said that of course digital photography would supplant film soon enough. Meanwhile the naysayers trotted out a list of reasons why they wouldn’t be trading in their “real” cameras for these second-class substitutes and couldn’t see why anyone would.
I don’t need to tell you how that one worked out, but let’s look at the process by which this happened.
Mass-market consumer digital cameras started with the Casio QV-10 in 1995. With a resolution of a quarter of a megapixel (0.25MP) combined with pathetic image processing it was clearly a pale precursor to the intelligent and vivid cameras we enjoy fifteen years later. Yet it was essentially a modern digital camera: A (large) pocket-sized device producing colour pictures, with internal memory, a colour screen on the back and the ability to transfer pictures to a computer. The digital camera technology of today may be better but it isn’t fundamentally different.
In this first stage, the mass market and many pundits view the new technology as a loser. It’s both far more expensive and has far worse quality and usability than the thing it’s supposed to replace. This is the “birth” phase of a technology, where the early adopters spend a fortune to get something that’s massively compromised, yet shows promise and provides a fair amount of exclusivity.
I got my first digital camera in 2000, five years after the QV-10. It was a Fuji MX-1700. Costing around £400, it produced 1.3 megapixel images and had a 3x zoom lens. There were cheaper cameras, but they had even lower resolutions, worse image processing and no zoom lens. On the upside, it was extremely pocketable and produced crisp, well-exposed pictures. On the downside, the pictures were still very low resolution and it was very slow to use, with a lag of what seemed like around a second between pressing the shutter release and the camera capturing and storing the image. Compared with most compact film cameras, it was incredibly expensive toy. Yet for these faults, it was a good replacement for much of my film photography. I could see my images immediately after they were shot and show them to other people. Having paid for the camera, each shot was effectively free. Best of all, I could transfer them to my computer and put them on my website, which was in the process of becoming a far more common way of sharing photos than making prints. For its time, and for the things I did, it was fantastic. But not everyone “got it”, or was prepared or able to spend that amount of money to replace the “perfectly good” film camera they were used to using.
This is the “growing-up” phase of a technology, where products reach a wider audience who are prepared to make some compromises in respect of older devices in return for benefits in areas which they consider to be more important to them. Often these benefits are in cost and convenience rather than quality.
Now digital cameras are ubiquitous. When we talk of “cameras” we mean “digital cameras” and tend to specify “film cameras” if we mean otherwise. Film is the preserve of retro enthusiasts and a tiny minority of professionals. Businesses based around film technology have either died or revolutionised their operations towards digital. Any discussion of “will digital replace film?” now seems anachronistic and nonsensical.
In this “mature” phase of the technology, the new technology is superior in almost every way to the old. Generally, it’s cheaper, quicker, more convenient, more flexible and has better quality. Not using it involves a large degree of compromise to get a niche benefit that the mass market simply doesn’t care about.
This is where I see ebooks and ebook readers going. Right now they’re in the “birth” stage. Often they’re more expensive, lower quality and more hassle than just buying a printed book. It’s easy to see why relatively few people bother — and why those that do are considered a little strange. To most people it makes little rational sense.
But before long — and I believe we’re just entering this phase with devices like the Kindle and particularly the iPad — we’ll be in the “growing-up” phase. There will be definite pros and cons to ebooks and printed books, but not a clear-cut overall benefit either way. Which you choose will depend on what matters most to you. Cost, convenience (of carrying, purchasing and storing), display/reading quality, the ability to share and annotate, style and image. Some (richer) students will plump for an iPad over carrying a rucksack full of half a dozen fat textbooks. Other people will stick to the venerable printed book for a variety of reasons, including simple cost.
So how long before ebooks reach their “mature” phase? Five years? Ten? Almost certainly not any longer. Whatever device you’ll use to read them (phone, tablet, laptop, something else) you’ll have anyway, so no-one will think of that as a significant cost. The ebooks themselves will be much cheaper than their paper equivalents, where those even exist. Ebook reader quality will far exceed what’s possible on the printed page, in resolution, clarity and flexibility. Annotating ebooks and sharing those notes will be far easier and more powerful than on a paper page. You can’t search a printed book in any automated way at all, yet the ways we’ll be able to search, analyse and navigate ebooks in a few years will seem incredible compared to the best search technology we have today. And while some will wax nostalgic about the heft, the texture, the smell and the patina of the traditional printed book, in most cases they simply won’t be buying new ones. “Book” will mean “ebook” in common speech, and discussions about “ebooks vs. print” and will seem as quaint as the battles between digital and film photography advocates in the mid- to late-1990s.
I’ll miss printed books in some ways but I’ll be constantly reminded that the ebooks that have replaced them will have done so because they’re in every reasonable sense better. Rapid, incremental technological advancement will turn that potential into reality.
I just hope I’ll have the time to read more, but I won’t bet on that.
The long-awaited and much-hyped Apple iPad is out, receiving a fairly upbeat response in the media and a much cooler, going on hostile reaction among bloggers and commenters.
Spec-obsessed techies bemoan the lack of hardware features and the relatively modest screen resolution, processor power and storage space. But the iPad isn’t about any of those things. It’s about providing a great user experience for the things it does, not beating the competition on points.
What competition, anyway? Netbooks, the Kindle and other e-book readers, smartphones and even Windows 7-based tablet computers are all aimed at different uses and audiences. Assuming Apple wants to keep selling iPhones, MacBooks and iMacs, it clearly doesn’t believe the iPad is a replacement for your phone, laptop or desktop. The iPad is in a category of its own for now.
So cutting past the “I wanted two cameras, multi-tasking, Flash and a 500GB hard drive” crowd, let’s ask the real question: Why wouldn’t you want an iPad on your coffee table?
What would be so terrible about being able to pick up a hand-held device with a lovely big screen and browse the web?
Why would such a thing be so awful if you wanted to curl up in a chair — or in bed — and watch a film or some YouTube clips?
Could you really not enjoy reading a book on such a thing?
No-one is stopping you popping your (smart) phone in your pocket when you go out. And no-one is stopping you working on a fully-featured laptop or desktop computer with all its multi-tasking, power and disk space when you want to do some serious work. The iPad is for sitting back, browsing, watching, listening. Writing the occasional email, tweet or comment. The kind of thing you probably either squint at a smartphone to do, or struggle to do with a netbook or toasty laptop and its poorly-suited trackpad.
You don’t need a full, multi-tasking OS to do any of these things. You don’t need Flash. You don’t need USB ports. And you don’t need a lot of storage, although by many sensible standards, the top 64GB model has a lot of storage — but not if you’re the kind of chap that has a computer dedicated to running BitTorrent.
No-one needs an iPad. Even at what appears to be a modest price for what it is, it’s a luxury item. While I would definitely argue that most working people and students need a computer and that many would benefit from having a smartphone, this in-between category of slick media viewer is pure indulgence. It will stand or fall not so much on what it can do, and even less on what it can do that other gadgets can’t. The user experience will be everything.
The test of the user experience isn’t on the spec sheet or in the promo photos or videos. It’s in getting into your hands (and hopefully, living room) and having a go. I’ll reserve further judgement until I get a chance to do just that, but if it’s as much of a joy to use as the iPhone and iPod Touch then it’ll definitely be finding house room and earning its keep by pure pleasure alone.
We’ll be seeing a lot more of these kinds of devices in future, from Apple and many others. Not just tablets, but a myriad of things-that-compute-that-aren’t-computers. For all its versatility, the general purpose computer and operating system is lousy to use, still feebly perpetuating the same interface and interaction design of the first Macs (and Lisas) back in the early 1980s.
Smartphones show promise, but their small screens will always limit their uses for many applications, at least until we can wire them into our goggles or optic nerves. The future is computers that are smaller, more specialised and more numerous, each of which is limited to but hopefully beautifully suited to its task. With its screen, controls, software and storage, what is a digital camera if not an elegantly-specialised computer?
If you ran a big organisation, why wouldn’t you want half a dozen iPads in the waiting area at reception?
So you decide to do the community-spirited thing and help to clear ice and snow from your public street. Then someone slips over and hurts themselves. Can you be sued?
Legal experts said home owners could fall victim to the same laws if they tried to clear an icy path but failed to do the job properly. John McQuater, president of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers, admitted: “If you do nothing you cannot be liable. If you do something, you could be liable to a legal action.”
By clearing the snow from your paths, you do not invite any extra liability that wouldn’t have existed had you done nothing and left the snow on the ground. The only circumstance in which you might invite a claim was if you acted completely unreasonably, and somehow created a new latent hazard that had not existed before your actions.
I’m glad that’s cleared the matter up.
Elf and safety gorn mad or just very sloppy reporting? You decide.
Last week I launched @SutMobLib, a Twitter account that tweets the location of Sutton’s mobile library in real time. No, I’m not sitting here all day sending messages. A program does that automatically. Every time the library gets to a new stop it posts up its location.
@SutMobLib on Bing Maps Twitter Search
The utility of such a thing isn’t immediately obvious. While I don’t like to generalise or assume too much, I suspect that the vast majority of mobile library users don’t use Twitter. So far a grand total of nine people have signed up to follow @SutMobLib and most of those are various sock puppets of mine.
@SutMobLib on Tweetie 2 "nearby search" for iPhone
Unlike most Twitter accounts that belong to real people, @SutMobLib isn’t great for conversation. It’s even less intelligent and interactive than it looks. Anyone that wants to be reminded when the library is visiting their neighbourhood would be better off just putting the relevant day in their calendar.
@SutMobLib is useful because Twitter is now more than just a social network connecting people. It’s become a platform for realtime geospatial information, where things like the mobile library can post up what they’re doing and where they’re doing it, as they’re doing it.
Experienced Twitter users know that while half the power of Twitter is following people you’re interested in and conversing with them, the other half is reading realtime searches for keywords, phrases and hashtags. Recently, Twitter enhanced the power of its search by allowing members to post up their precise geographical location with each tweet, which other members can then discover by searching around an area rather than around a hashtag or topic.
So Twitter has become a radar. Tweetie 2, a Twitter client for the iPhone, allows users to search “Nearby” based on the user’s current location and shows a map covered with plotted tweets. Web users can do something similar using Bing Maps’ Twitter Search. The popular client TweetDeck shows pop-up maps underneath geotweets.
Realtime geospatial search brings a new dimension to finding out about the world. For the first time we can pull up live information about a place, whether that’s people’s conversations and observations or the solipsistic self-reporting of things that tweet like Sutton’s mobile library. Various urban annotation and virtual graffiti projects have existed before now but Twitter brings this capability to a mass-market social network with tens of millions of members. Through reading conversations about coffee in Soho or chemo at the Royal Marsden Hospital, our awareness of the world around us just got a great deal broader.
@SutMobLib showing as a geotweet in TweetDeck
For some, that will mean discovering, spontaneously and without specifically searching for it, that a friend — or the mobile library — is around the corner and might be pleased to see us. The world around us is constantly shifting, with opportunities and hazards popping up and then disappearing again, often without leaving a trace. Now we can see those traces. Serendipity is the spice of life and it’s just got a very big helping hand. Fire up your radar.
—
Further reading on where ambient intelligence is taking us:
The Litl in conventional laptop mode and in easel mode
I have a love/hate relationship with computers. Or more properly, I love computing and hate general-purpose computers. Supposedly modern operating systems — Windows, OSX, Linux — are far too complex for the average user let alone novices. Collectively they’re responsible for wasting more human time, energy, money and ingenuity than anything in the history of civilisation. Even Facebook. A plague on all their houses.
While most users can get their machines started up and find their way somehow to the internet (generally by double-clicking the big blue “E”), most administration tasks leave them stumped. Installing, upgrading and removing software. Managing drivers and plugins. Adding new hardware. Connecting to a new ISP or wifi hotspot. Virus checking. Backups. I doubt that more than 10% of home computer users really have their systems in order and know how to do all of these things competently.
So when I see the new Digital Inclusion Task Force (it’s a UK thing, international readers) announce that there are 10 million people in the UK that have never used the internet, not only does it not surprise me but I worry that it’s a precursor to a misguided, expensive and ultimately futile attempt to get those people online with conventional, general-purpose computers. I think that would be a mistake, because such things are horribly, unnecessarily complicated if all you want to do is get online.
For this and other reasons I’m very pleased to see the launch of the Litl, though currently they appear only to be selling in the US at present. The Litl styles itself as a “webbook” and aims to massively simplify basic, everyday computing.
Almost as good as a real kitchen timer and only $690 more expensive
In many ways it’s a similar concept to the forthcoming Google Chrome OS but it runs on its own custom, simplified hardware. You get what appears at first sight to be a conventional laptop with a 12-inch widescreen. It’s not a touchscreen, so all interaction is done with the keyboard and mouse. There’s also an optional basic remote control.
In many ways the Litl is defined as much by what it doesn’t have as by what it does. Unlike a netbook, the Litl is designed to be permanently connected to the internet. There’s no hard drive, just a small 2GB internal flash card that stores programs and a temporary data cache. The full hardware spec is here. All persistent user file storage happens online — in the “cloud” — and is completely transparent to the user. This arrangement completely eliminates the need for backups. It also makes it possible for users with multiple Litls to sync them together simply by connecting them to the same online account.
There’s also no optical drive. I’ve no idea whether you can install extra software but if you can presumably it’ll be coming from an online app store rather than a DVD or a conventional installer package.
Most importantly, there’s no conventional Windows, Linux or (obviously) OSX installation. It runs a heavily customised version of Ubuntu Linux but don’t expect to find a GNOME or KDE desktop or a terminal window.
The home screen is a set of thumbnail "cards" -- no menus or icons here
The custom Litl OS starts by presenting a home screen of “cards” — large icons representing websites, apps and “channels” (persistent mini-apps). This is much more similar to the iPhone’s home screen of icons than Windows’ start menu, OSX’s dock plus Applications folder and Linux’s start menu lookalikes. As with the iPhone, a card can simply be a web bookmark. In fact, this is the only native way to store bookmarks on the system. If you want anything more sophisticated you’ll have to use an online bookmark app such as Delicious.
There’s also a search box at the top of the screen which defaults to Google.
So from power up you’re just one click away from your favourite websites and immediately able to search the web without opening a single menu or app.
This approach is both obvious and brilliant. No other OS does this, yet how many people do anything other than open their browser when they first start their computer? While in other OS’s you can configure your browser to start automatically, almost no-one does. Most of us hunt through an icon-cluttered desktop, menu or dock. The Litl treats the web as the main event, not just one of the many things you can do with your computer but very often won’t.
And this reflects the overall Litl philosophy — concentrate on the essentials and forget the rest. That makes it far less versatile than a general purpose computer but also far easier to use and maintain. In fact, having done as much research on this machine as possible without actually getting my grubby mitts on one I’m not sure what kind of maintenance it’d actually be possible to do. All software updates are delivered automatically without asking or even notifying the user (why would they care?) As mentioned above, there’s no need for backups or any kind of conventional filesystem that might require organisation. You’ll need to select your wifi network and type your password for it when you first set it up but that’s about it.
The general response online from techies to the Litl has been lukewarm but then it’s not for them. Yes, you can get a more powerful and versatile computer for much less (Litl retails at $700). But I doubt you can get anything that has the same combination of simplicity and functionality. The nearest thing to it is probably the iPod Touch but that’s stretching it a very long way. The Litl really is in a class of its own.
If everyone can use one, everyone will want one
While Litl seem to be marketing the device as a “lifestyle” product to the kind of urbane, affluent families in their promo photography (think one Litl per member of the household, plus a couple of spares for guests), I think it’d be absolutely great for first-time computer and internet users. Whether that’s younger children, older people who retired before computers made it into the workplace or anyone else that’s somehow missed out, getting those people online should be about the opportunities that the internet offers, not the curse of owning and babysitting a fussy, fragile, high-maintenance computer.
If you can’t use a Litl you definitely won’t be able to manage Windows. If some of those new Litl users eventually “graduate” to Windows or another full OS, that’s great. And if they’re happy sticking to the Litl, that’s great too. If there aren’t rows of Litls in public libraries, schools and community centres across the country in the next year or two we’ll definitely have missed a great opportunity to get many people online that otherwise would have found it too difficult.
And wouldn’t it be greater still if the mainstream OS vendors devoted more time to simplifying their cranky, bloated systems so that the rest of us can have more power without paying the price of complexity?
Ethical Consumer has a feature called “Love this, ban that!” which asks an assortment of the green and the good which saintly products they love and which evil ones they’d ban. Sadly, no-one took the opportunity to challenge the premise that banning things is the best way to steer society down a more sustainable path and to allay the well-founded suspicion among many outside the green ghetto that environmentalists tend to be ban-happy authoritarians.
Inexplicably, Ethical Consumer didn’t contact me to take part in their survey but I’d like to nominate the bicycle as my favourite “ethical consumer product” and the cycle helmet for an immediate, total ban backed up with the full force and violence of the criminal justice system.
I hope that choosing the bicycle as my preferred product needs little explanation or justification but my putative ban on cycle helmets might be a little more problematic. For a long time I’ve harboured the suspicion in my more paranoid moments that there’s some kind of collusion between the road/oil lobby and elements of the cycling fraternity to ensure that cycling in Britain remains a marginalised, unpleasant and largely despised activity.
For those of us looking to travel between around a mile and eight miles without an extreme amount of cargo, the bike should be the default the choice. Done right, cycling is convenient, cheap, safe, accessible, fun and sustianable.
Done right.
It’s not possible to uninvent the bicycle but if Shadowy Forces wanted to minimise the number of people cycling so as to benefit their Evil Agenda they’d probably want to chip away at all the things that make cycling potentially great so as to diminish the whole experience. If you can’t ban it, knacker it.
Here’s how to do it:
Cycling is cheap? Can’t have that. Now, let’s see. Let’s start at the obvious place by making bikes more expensive. Load them with features that cost more to build (complex braking systems, gears, suspension) and require expensive expert maintenance rather than DIY. Turn the bike from an everyday utilitarian thing, a utensil, and make it a product. Desirable. Fashionable. Consumerable. There’s a lot of choice, so shop around. Read reviews. Get recommendations. Worry, because it matters. Who’d want to be seen riding a cheap bike? An unfashionable bike? A tatty bike? Now accessorise. That expensive bike needs an expensive lock — or two. Got to protect your investment. Buy insurance. (Shop around, shop around.) Compare the tensile strengths and style options and get a helmet. A bone dome. A skid lid. Don’t be cheap — your skull could depend on it. Get a hi-viz jacket that’s more breathable than a string vest and only fifty times the price. Padded shorts for that tiny, bony saddle. Special shoes to couple perfectly with your special pedals. A messenger bag from this week’s premium brand.
Here’s the safety strategy: Make it less safe and make it feel less safe. The best way to make cycling less safe is for cyclists to ride faster. Encourage this wherever possible. Forget ambling, casual, pedestrian images of cycling. Emphasise sport, fitness, competition. Measure speed. Sell speedometers and odometers. Get people to monitor their performance. Track their MPH, their heartrates, their calories, their carbon footprints. Compare with others. Compete. Idolise road racers, couriers, extreme mountain bikers, BMXers. Alleycatters. Lance Armstrong. Jump the red light. Race other cyclists. Race cars. Race the clock. Race, race. It’s not fun unless you’re taking risks. Life is one big risk, right? Cycling just got a whole lot more dangerous for the sake of a marginal shortening of the average journey. Ohh, wipeout. Nice one.
Now the perception of safety. Talk about safety, safety, safety so everyone thinks danger, danger, danger. Don’t show images of cyclists without helmets, especially not children. Never children. Sending your children out on bikes without helmets is tantamount to child abuse. Don’t you care? Don’t you care about the children? Would you send them out to their deaths? Photos of cyclists without helmets are like images of people with cigarettes. Historical documents. Anachronisms. Forbidden outside the intellectual safety of the academy. Be safe, be seen. Hi viz. Yellow jacket, yellow jersey. £100 lights that can dazzle shipping 20 miles off the coast. Lumens. Got to get more lumens. You need a bell? You need a foghorn. Radar. Missiles, if you could get them. And you need training, because it’s a war out there. Drivers hate you. Pedestrians hate you. Other cyclists hate you. The law is indifferent, the police don’t care. Every other road user will kill you if they get a chance. Unless you get trained. Unless you can stay one step ahead of them. Unless you can get them first. So you go to boot camp. You get trained. You are approved. You are a Cyclist. You feel a little bit safer in that dangerous place. Until you see the ghost bike. Don’t be a statistic like the pallid, mangled wreck chained to the lamppost at the roundabout. Don’t be a victim. Go faster. Be a winner. Beat them.
Do you smell? People shouldn’t smell. If you cycle, if you cycle fast, you’ll smell. You’ll need a shower. Does your workplace have showers? No? Don’t cycle. Does the pub have showers? No? Don’t cycle. Does the shopping centre have showers? No? Please, don’t cycle.
But if you don’t mind smelling, you can’t cycle to work because they don’t have lockers. You need a locker for your helmet. Your jacket. Your padded shorts. Your special shoes that couple so, so perfectly with your special pedals. Your quick-release (eezy-steal) saddle. Your lights and all their lumens. Your handlebar computer with its data, its intimate knowledge of your body, your performance, your lifestyle. Your hydration system. Your lock. You worry about your lock. It cost more than your first bike. And the bike itself? That needs a CCTV-monitored, thumbprint-secured, climate-controlled vault. A lamppost won’t do because your bike takes a month’s work to buy but only a minute or two to steal.
Are you fat? Don’t cycle. You don’t, do you? Fit people cycle. Fat people do not cycle. (Fat people do not swim. Fat people do not run. Soon, fat people will not walk.) Cycling is about fitness. Fat people, un-fit people, do not cycle. Fat people look ridiculous on bikes. Fat people look crap in lycra. Fat people look even more fat in lycra, if such a tragically hilarious thing could be possible. Fat people can only go slowly but cyclists must go fast. They must race. They must perform. They must compete. Fat people are not fast off the lights. Fat people do not look like Lance Fuckingarmfuckingstrong. Fat people must enshroud themselves in cars as a prophylactic against polite society’s sight of their ungainly self-propelled movement. Fat people must squeeze themselves onto buses and trains and tubes with all the other huffers and puffers, the children and the old people, the timid and the nearly dead. They say obese but you read fat. People like you are an epidemic. You are contagious and the things you must do to make the rest of us safe you are not allowed to do. If you are fat, don’t cycle. You don’t, do you?
Cycle helmets are the most visible and potent symbol of all that’s wrong with Britain’s (anti-)cycling culture. Cycle helmets say we cannot cycle without the right precautions, the right equipment, the right infrastructure, the right training. Cycle helmets say there must be more to cycling than a person, two wheels and the surface of the Earth. Let’s ban them now before it’s too late. Let’s lock up all the people who buy them, who sell them, who use them. Let’s drag them off to jail in handcuffs, in tears.
You’re free to republish/copy this article under the Creative Commons Attribution licence provided you credit me (Adrian Short) and give a link back to the original article. Thanks.
This article is now available as audio in twoparts on AudioBoo.
Ethical Consumer has a feature called Love this, ban that! which asks an assortment of the green and the good which saintly products they love and which evil ones they’d ban. Sadly, only Mayor Boris took the opportunity to challenge the premise that banning things is the best way to steer society down a more sustainable path and to allay the well-founded suspicion among many outside the green ghetto that environmentalists tend to be ban-happy authoritarians.
Inexplicably, Ethical Consumer didn’t contact me to take part in their survey but I’d like to nominate the bicycle as my favourite “ethical consumer product” and the cycle helmet for an immediate, total ban backed up with the full force and violence of the criminal justice system.
I hope that choosing the bicycle as my preferred product needs little explanation or justification but my proposed ban on cycle helmets might be a little more problematic. For a long time I’ve harboured the suspicion in my more paranoid moments that there’s some kind of collusion between the road/oil lobby and elements of the cycling fraternity to ensure that cycling in Britain remains a marginalised, unpleasant and largely despised activity.
For those of us looking to travel between around a mile and eight miles without an extreme amount of cargo, the bike should be the default choice. Done right, cycling is convenient, cheap, safe, accessible, fun and sustianable.
It’s not possible to uninvent the bicycle but if Shadowy Forces wanted to minimise the number of people cycling so as to benefit their Evil Agenda they’d probably want to chip away at all the things that make cycling potentially great so as to diminish the whole experience. If you can’t ban it, knacker it.
Here’s how to do it:
Cycling is cheap? Can’t have that. Now, let’s see. Let’s start at the obvious place by making bikes more expensive. Load them with features that cost more to build (complex braking systems, gears, suspension) and require expensive expert maintenance rather than DIY. Turn the bike from an everyday utilitarian thing, a utensil, and make it a product. Desirable. Fashionable. Consumerable. There’s a lot of choice, so shop around. Read reviews. Get recommendations. Worry, because it matters. Who’d want to be seen riding a cheap bike? An unfashionable bike? A tatty bike? Now accessorise. That expensive bike needs an expensive lock — or two. Got to protect your investment. Buy insurance. (Shop around, shop around.) Compare the tensile strengths and style options and get a helmet. A bone dome. A skid lid. Don’t be cheap — your skull could depend on it. Get a hi-viz jacket that’s more breathable than a string vest and only fifty times the price. Padded shorts for that tiny, bony saddle. Special shoes to couple perfectly with your special pedals. A messenger bag from this week’s premium brand.
Here’s the safety strategy: Make it less safe and make it feel less safe. The best way to make cycling less safe is for cyclists to ride faster. Encourage this wherever possible. Forget ambling, casual, pedestrian images of cycling. Emphasise sport, fitness, competition. Measure speed. Sell speedometers and odometers. Get people to monitor their performance. Track their MPH, their heartrates, their calories, their carbon footprints. Compare with others. Compete. Idolise road racers, couriers, extreme mountain bikers, BMXers. Alleycatters. Lance Armstrong. Jump the red light. Race other cyclists. Race cars. Race the clock. Race, race. It’s not fun unless you’re taking risks. Life is one big risk, right? Cycling just got a whole lot more dangerous for the sake of a marginal shortening of the average journey. Ohh, wipeout. Nice one.
Now the perception of safety. Talk about safety, safety, safety so everyone thinks danger, danger, danger. Don’t show images of cyclists without helmets, especially not children. Never children. Sending your children out on bikes without helmets is tantamount to child abuse. Don’t you care? Don’t you care about the children? Would you send them out to their deaths? Photos of cyclists without helmets are like images of people with cigarettes. Historical documents. Anachronisms. Forbidden outside the intellectual safety of the academy. Be safe, be seen. Hi viz. Yellow jacket, yellow jersey. £100 lights that can dazzle shipping 20 miles off the coast. Lumens. Got to get more lumens. You need a bell? You need a foghorn. Radar. Missiles, if you could get them. And you need training, because it’s a war out there. Drivers hate you. Pedestrians hate you. Other cyclists hate you. The law is indifferent, the police don’t care. Every other road user will kill you if they get a chance. Unless you get trained. Unless you can stay one step ahead of them. Unless you can get them first. So you go to boot camp. You get trained. You are approved. You are a Cyclist. You feel a little bit safer in that dangerous place. Until you see the ghost bike. Don’t be a statistic like the pallid, mangled wreck chained to the lamppost at the roundabout. Don’t be a victim. Go faster. Be a winner. Beat them.
Do you smell? People shouldn’t smell. If you cycle, if you cycle fast, you’ll smell. You’ll need a shower. Does your workplace have showers? No? Don’t cycle. Does the pub have showers? No? Don’t cycle. Does the shopping centre have showers? No? Please, don’t cycle.
If you don’t mind smelling, you can’t cycle to work because they don’t have lockers. You need a locker for your helmet. Your jacket. Your padded shorts. Your special shoes that couple so, so perfectly with your special pedals. Your quick-release (eezy-steal) saddle. Your lights and all their lumens. Your handlebar computer with its data, its intimate knowledge of your body, your performance, your lifestyle. Your hydration system. Your lock. You worry about your lock. It cost more than your first bike. And the bike itself? That needs a CCTV-monitored, thumbprint-secured, climate-controlled vault. A lamppost won’t do because your bike takes a month’s work to buy but only a minute or two to steal.
Are you fat? Don’t cycle. You don’t, do you? Fit people cycle. Fat people do not cycle. (Fat people do not swim. Fat people do not run. Soon, fat people will not walk.) Cycling is about fitness. Fat people, un-fit people, do not cycle. Fat people look ridiculous on bikes. Fat people look crap in lycra. Fat people look even more fat in lycra, if such a tragically hilarious thing could be possible. Fat people can only go slowly but cyclists must go fast. They must race. They must perform. They must compete. Fat people are not fast off the lights. Fat people do not look like Lance Fuckingarmfuckingstrong. Fat people must enshroud themselves in cars as a prophylactic against polite society’s sight of their ungainly self-propelled movement. Fat people must squeeze themselves onto buses and trains and tubes with all the other huffers and puffers, the children and the old people, the timid and the nearly dead. They say obese but you read fat. People like you are an epidemic. You are contagious and the things you must do to make the rest of us safe you are not allowed to do. Fat is getting thinner all the time. If you are fat, don’t cycle. You don’t, do you?
Cycle helmets are the most visible and potent symbol of all that’s wrong with Britain’s (anti-)cycling culture. Cycle helmets say we cannot cycle without the right precautions, the right equipment, the right infrastructure, the right training. Cycle helmets say there must be more to cycling than a person, two wheels and the surface of the Earth. Cycle helmets say that cycling is more dangerous than not cycling. Let’s ban them now before it’s too late. Let’s lock up all the people who buy them, who sell them, who use them. Let’s drag them off to jail in handcuffs, in tears.
Someone famous once said that the true definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting the results to be different. Well I keep going back to the Sutton Council website and nine months after launch it’s still not any better. Arguably it’s worse.
Wibble.
In no particular order:
1. No redirect from sutton.gov.uk to www.sutton.gov.uk
That’s one small step for the DNS admin, one large dollop of timewasting annoyance for dozens of users every day.
2. Enormously bloated top navbar.
So useful that they let you hide it (now). Does that tell you something?
3. No distinct visited link colours
Want to know which links you’ve already clicked? Tough. Perhaps the designers were off for Usability 101. So irritating that I wrote a Greasemonkey script to fix it. (Who says users never want to customise their council’s website?)
4. Abysmal RSS implementation
No autodiscovery. Homepage RSS icons link to a help page rather than the feeds themselves. On the help page even the enormous RSS icon isn’t a feed link either, just a pretty picture. And once you finally manage to subscribe, you have the exquisite pleasure of renaming “Latest press releases RSS feed” to “Sutton Council news” and “Sutton Council” to “Sutton Council jobs” in your feed reader. All of which makes me think that none of this was designed by someone who’s ever used RSS, let alone tested properly. Please fix it before one of us dies.
If the current homepage is to be believed, Sutton is the kind of place where people are ecstatic to have TWO ice creams, wear flowers in their hair and grow beards. This isn’t cool, it’s the dad dance of civic web design. How about letting the real content speak for itself without having to compete with this junk?
6. The clock/calendar anti-pattern
Put the entirely useless current time and date where the content date should go, then type the content date into the story titles. Is this really a content management system or is someone just bashing it out with FrontPage? (Extra bonus points will be awarded to any designer that can find the time/date on the screen of every user’s computer. Clue: It’s not in the browser.)
7. Search form uses POST rather than GET
Want to bookmark or link to a page of search results? No can do. Some basic instruction in the meaning and usage of HTTP methods required. Failing that, just copy every other search form on the entire web.
8. No permalinks
1999 called — they want their URLs back. I wonder whether I’ll have time to fix all my inbound deep links and bookmarks to the site before they change them. Again. Permalinks are cool. Two-ice-cream girl take note.
9. Don’t Contact Us
It’s there, but can you find it? Enjoy the multi-step form when you do. Wizards are magic!
10. Subscribe to this page
Except it doesn’t work. Never has. Makes no sense. A small prize is offered to anyone that can explain clearly 1) What it’s supposed to do and 2) How you use it. I’m just a web designer and not a very bright one at that. Goes right over my head. (Tip: There’s already a general subscription mechanism for web content called RSS.)
Today the Sutton Guardian has run a story in which I and Bob Steel from the Sutton Green Party accuse MPs Paul Burstow, Tom Brake and the Sutton Lib Dems of distributing deceitful and misleading leaflets about today’s European Parliament election. I stand by that accusation and presume that the Greens do likewise. For the avoidance of any doubt I am not connected with the Greens or any other political party. Continue reading →
