Global Moxie - Blog

Tapworthy App Design at SXSW

Josh Clark — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:29:08 UT

I’ve just catapulted myself to Austin for the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, where I’ll spend the next five days grazing brain food by day, beer and bbq by night. It’s geek heaven up in here, a hacker’s hootenanny, a designer’s delight. I’m just saying. If you find yourself in Austin for SXSW, too, do say hello. Heroically dedicated stalkers can follow my schedule at my.sxsw.com (or sitby.us or sched.org if you prefer those flavors). And of course, you can always chase me down by following @globalmoxie on Twitter.

I especially hope you’ll join me for an afternoon of roll-up-your-sleeves iPhone revelations on Monday, March 15. I’m curating the iPhone workshop that day, three hours of nitty-gritty sessions about making kick-ass iPhone apps with yours truly, Joris Verbogt, and Jonathan Stark. We’ll stake out Ballroom F of the Austin Convention Center starting at 2pm.

I’m kicking things off at 2pm with Tapworthy: Designing iPhone Apps for Delight and Usability. It’s a fun talk and a nifty preview of some of the ideas from my new book Tap Happy. I’ll talk about: the elusive ingredients of “tapworthy” apps; why building iPhone apps is like designing a physical gadget; usability gotchas on the iPhone; and how the best iPhone designers turn constraints — limited screen space and fleeting user attention — into advantages for their apps. Along the way, I’ll share some behind-the-scenes glimpses into the design process of popular apps including Facebook, Twitterrific, USA Today, Things, and others.

(Alas, it seems I’m scheduled against a keynote by Twitter CEO Evan Williams; poor guy, I’m sure his talk would’ve otherwise been quite well attended.)

Joris Verbogt of Mangrove made the trip from Rotterdam and follows my fandango with his Objective-C Crash Course for Web Developers at 3:30pm.

Build your first iPhone app in 60 minutes flat. Along the way, you’ll tour Apple’s developer tools and learn the basics of the Cocoa Touch framework. Discover how to use your PHP and JavaScript experience for an informed approach to coding iPhone apps. Apply familiar JavaScript design patterns, for example, to handle interface programming in Objective-C.

My Providence chum Jonathan Stark closes out the show with Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Jonathan will share techniques from his O’Reilly book of the same name:

The free PhoneGap framework lets you build first-class native iPhone apps using just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — an approach that also lets you create Android and Blackberry apps from the very same code base. Explore the pros and cons of this technique as you learn to create native-looking animations with jQTouch and hook into advanced iPhone features (accelerometer, GPS, vibration, and sound) without ever touching Objective-C.

Seriously. This is going to be awesome. Come by and say howdy, and walk out an iPhone code slinger, too.

Tags: conference, design, iphone, josh, speaking, sxsw

“Curating” SXSW’s iPhone Apps Workshop

Josh Clark — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:59:40 UT

With March only a few months away, I’m already all atingle for South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi), the annual creative geekfest in Austin, Texas. As a high-proof cocktail of tech talks, late-night parties, design inspiration, and live music, SXSWi lights up all my creative and professional synapses. I’ve attended before, but the tingle is especially tingly this time because I’ll be on the other side of the podium.

This week, I learned that SXSWi is trying something new for 2010: workshops. Each workshop will present three hours of deep, detailed content on a focused topic. The time will be divided into three one-hour sessions, each presented by one or two dazzling designers or clever coders. I’m especially excited about the workshop on iPhone apps — not least because I’ve been invited to organize it, or “curate.” More on that in a sec.

SXSWi’s program has always blended concentrated tech talks with free-wheeling panel discussions. In recent years, though, organizers have encouraged more speakers to tackle the former — the concentrated, nitty-gritty approach — since it delivers lots more learning for the audience than moderated chit-chat. A one-hour talk ups the ante for presenters, of course, since it requires lots more preparation and brainwork. But hey, it’s those big brains that draw people to SXSW in the first place (and OK, sure sure, the enormous quantities of beer and barbecue).

The workshops take this approach one step further by delivering not just one, not just two, but wow! three hours of rich, advanced content from people who know the topic inside out. The three sessions will complement each other, one leading naturally into the next, with the goal of arming attendees with a mountain of ideas and techniques to inspire them in their work. Workshop rooms will seat 200, and I bet we’ll see ’em full.

I’m beyond flattered that I’ve been asked to curate the SXSWi “iPhone apps” workshop. That theme is already too broad to tackle on its own, and over the next few days I’ll whittle that topic down to something more focused. From there, my job as curator is to cull through over 2300 proposed talks to choose three sessions, in consultation with SXSWi staff, to suit that refined topic.

This is still evolving, but at the moment I expect to focus the workshop on interface design and user experience for iPhone apps, an area where techniques and best practices are still evolving. (See this choice interview with Tweetie’s Loren Brichter, for example, for just a taste of how developers are exploring the proper use of touch gestures in apps.) I have a hunch that some version of my own proposed talk, “Best iPhone Apps: Ingredients for Apps that Delight,” will play a role. We’ll see. (And hey, if you voted for my talk, thanks!)

I’m just getting started, so iPhone developers and designers, please do chime in. Drop me a line or leave a comment here about the technical topics that sing to you, particularly those that address design and user experience. See you in Austin!

Tags: conference, iphone, josh, mobile, sxsw

Ready for My Close-Up: September Speaking Events

Josh Clark — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:02:30 UT

It's me! Come by for one of my four US homecoming events.

After nearly a decade full-time in Paris, I moved to Providence, Rhode Island, over Labor Day weekend. I’m considering the move to be like opening a new branch office; I’ll be splitting my time between Providence and Paris. I’m looking forward to spending more time in the US, and to mark the move, I’m making several live stateside appearances this month, talking iPhone apps and iWork power tips, and I hope you’ll stop by to say howdy. Here’s the rundown:

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Free webcast: “Best iPhone Apps: The Must-Have Downloads” 1:00 pm US Eastern Time. Join me for a survey of the must-have apps for your favorite glossy gadget. Along the way, I’ll explore how the iPhone is changing our personal relationships to information and computing, as well as the qualities that make a great app. The webcast is free, but space is limited. Register now.
Capitol Macinitosh user group, Austin Texas
7:00 pm. The magic of video conferencing whisks me down to Texas to join CapMac’s iPhone special interest group to for a free-wheeling conversation about what makes for a terrific iPhone app. Join us at BB Rovers Cafe & Pub at 12101 Jollyville Rd., Austin, TX. Find out more.

Friday, September 18, 2009

Boston Apple Store: Best iPhone Apps
6:00 pm. Join me at the largest Apple Store on the planet for an hour of conversation about iPhone apps. I’ll run down the list of must-have apps and take a look at ways large and small that the iPhone changes the way we live and work. 815 Boylston St., Boston, MA.

Friday, September 25, 2009

Boston Apple Store: iWork ‘09
6:00 pm. I’m back in Boston, this time to talk about iWork ‘09, with a quick tour of Pages, Keynote, and Numbers, followed by a deep dive into the power features that put Apple’s productivity software into its own league.

Hope to see you at one of these events!

Tags: iphone, iwork, josh

Best iPhone Apps: Picks, advice, and resources

Josh Clark — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 16:18:22 UT

Since Best iPhone Apps hit bookshelves, several publications have asked me to share my top-ten lists for various categories of apps (thanks!). Here’s a selection of those writings from around the web, all tailored to help you unlock the full potential of your iPhone or iPod Touch...

Forbes: “Best iPhone Apps for Creativity”
Pack your phone with an easel, darkroom, notebook, crooning robot and more, with my picks of the ten best apps for scratching the creative itch.
Forbes: “iPhone Apps for Road Warriors”
The iPhone is a device of convenience and context. Unlike laptops, notebooks or messy collections of Post-It notes, your phone rarely leaves your side, making it a handy vessel for bottling brainstorms, managing to-dos and itineraries, or capturing on-the-go information like expenses or billable hours.
“Best iPhone app ever? Book has one answer”
Columnist Gregg Ellman reviews the book and dishes my personal list of top-10 must-have apps. If you could only have ten, these are the apps to get. (Spoiler: Instapaper takes the top slot.)

What do you do with all those apps?

Once you’ve downloaded all those apps, how do you keep them organized? I examined the problem over at the O’Reilly Media blog:

Informal testing here in the O’Reilly laboratories indicates that flipping through the book tends to triggers bouts of deliriously eager downloading. Alas, freshly minted App Store addicts quickly discover that an ever-growing mountain of installed iPhone apps can create more headaches than they collectively solve. Productivity apps become ironic jokes when it takes a full minute of flipping back and forth through screens to locate them; and there’s no fun in a game that you can’t even find. A healthy collection of iPhone apps calls for an equally healthy hygiene regimen for your iPhone. Here are a few pointers for keeping your apps tidy and your data safe.

Among the tips:

Safety First: Safeguard your privacy with a passcode.
Collect Your Greatest Hits: Consolidate your most-used apps on the home screen.
Get Organized: Divide remaining screens by category, task, or state of mind.
Shine the Spotlight: When all else fails, Spotlight can help you find an app in your sea of downloads.
Do you really need ‘em all? Prune unused apps.

For more iPhone info...

Best iPhone Apps website

Check out the Best iPhone Apps website at iphoneapps.oreilly.com for a daily download recommendation, a weekly head-to-head app smackdown, and a growing collection of iPhone tips and tricks.

For a steady stream of iPhone chatter, follow @oreillyiphone on Twitter, where I’ve started steering my iPhone banter. (Those of you following me at @globalmoxie will be either relieved or chagrined to find it largely iPhone-free going forward; adjust your Twitter account accordingly.)

Tags: books, creativity, iphone, josh, press, travel

Vote Early and Often: My SXSW Talks

Josh Clark — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 09:43:18 UT

I’ve proposed a pair of talks for SXSW Interactive, Austin’s fabulous brain-bending shindig about technology, media, and culture—and I need your help. Over 2200 talks have been proposed for 300 slots, and a big part of the selection process is in the hands of the public. In short, I’d like your vote.

My two talks are “Best iPhone Apps: Ingredients for Apps that Delight” and “Nerds on the Run: Tech and Casual Fitness.” I’m super-excited about both of them and I’m planning fun, lively explorations of how emerging mobile technologies are affecting areas of our life that have typically been non-technical. I’ve included details on both talks below.

SXSW is always as much about the attendees as it is about the speakers. It’s an old saw that some of the best info at SXSW is exchanged in the hallways (or parties) outside the talks and panels. The good folks who run the conference have, for several years, acknowledged the importance of audience know-how by asking the public to help choose the talks through a nifty online voting system called the PanelPicker. SXSW even encourages blatant vote-begging like, um, what I’m doing here:

Rallying your friends and associates to vote for your panel proposal demonstrates energy, motivation and organizational ability. And, all of these skills are important when it comes to organizing a successful panel for SXSW.

So, friends and associates, please take a second to check out my proposals and give them a thumbs-up if you find them interesting. You don’t have to attend SXSW to vote, and voting takes only a moment: You do have to create a PanelPicker account, but registration is quick and painless. Vote here:

...and while you’re at it, please do feel free to add a comment in support of the talk.

Best iPhone Apps: Ingredients for Apps that Delight

Best iPhone Apps: The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders, O'Reilly Media, July 2009.

In Best iPhone Apps: Ingredients for Apps that Delight, I’ll explore the principles, design decisions, and wild-eyed ideas that combine to make remarkable iPhone apps. For my latest book, Best iPhone Apps, I stress-tested thousands of apps. Along the way, I uncovered an alchemy of design patterns, clever insights, and cultural shifts that result not only in useful apps but in genuinely delightful mobile experiences. This talk is aimed at app developers and designers as well iPhone-toting enthusiasts interested in exploring the eye-popping things you never knew your glossy gadget could do. Topics covered will include:

What are the key design patterns of the best iPhone apps?
Why is USA Today the best news app, and what can developers learn from a carpenter’s calculator app?
How does iPhone change the way people work and play, and how do the best apps fit into those new work styles and habits?
What do a global map of public toilets, a Parisian bicycle finder, and a listing of local concerts have in common? What do they tell us about how precise personal context transforms our relationship to information?
What are the most amazing apps you’ve never heard of?
Why are delight, beauty, and all-around adorability especially important in an iPhone app?
How does a hiking app blaze the trail for savvy handling of offline and online usage patterns?
With photo, video, and voice, the iPhone makes typing (and even reading) so last century; how do the best iPhone apps change the way we express and process information?
How do the best apps make clever use of free web services like Last.fm, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, and others, to create rich tapestries of personalized data? What are the pitfalls of using these APIs for developers and users?
Why are App Store reviews so lousy at helping to identify great apps or aiding developers to make them? Who’s the market for the best apps?

Nerds on the Run: Tech and Casual Fitness

One of my favorite iPhone apps, RunKeeper, maps and shares your running routes, letting you add photos and text updates along the way.

In “Nerds on the Run,” I’ll review a new generation of gadgets and online services that are transforming fitness chores into video games, head-to-head challenges, and dazzling cascade of personal stats. Backing this talk is my experience with my überpopular “Couch to 5K” (C25K) online running program, which has helped thousands (millions?) of skeptical, would-be exercisers get off the couch and start jogging. It’s all about introducing fun and usability to personal exercise, making fitness more game-like. Work your body by working your mind in this fun exploration of fitness as tech-enabled play. Topics covered will include:

Why does exercise suck for so many people?
How has the Couch to 5K program persuaded so many people who loathe exercise to start running and actually like it?
How can you transform chore-like work into play-time effort?
How can you get serious about fitness (or any kind of work) by taking it less seriously?
What game-like elements can be applied to personal fitness?
What mobile apps, websites, and gadgets can improve your attitude about personal fitness routines?
How does instrumenting your workouts with a new generation of fitness gadgets and online services create tech-enabled play?
How can you find new motivation by creating a delicous statistical mosaic of your personal fitness progress?
How can social networking and online sharing sharpen your physical workouts?
How do new technologies build upon old-school motivational methods like written exercise journals or running clubs?

Thanks!

Many thanks for taking your time to help my little campaign to speak at SXSW. And hey, please do consider coming to Austin for the show in March 2010. SXSW Interactive is an incredible event, and I’d love to see you there.

Tags: c25k, conference, iphone, josh, mobile, running, sxsw, technology, usability

Buzz for Best iPhone Apps

Josh Clark — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 09:23:02 UT

It’s a tough business making a living from words, code, or anything else built only out of ideas and your brain’s restless ramblings. You work away in isolation, focusing all your energy on crafting something that you hope and trust others will find useful, fun, engaging. But you just don’t know if the thing will actually pan out until you sheepishly push it out into the public. It’s exciting, consuming, thrilling, and generally terrifying.

Best iPhone Apps: The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders is my latest thrill ride. My new book hit shelves the last week of July, and the response has been incredibly gratifying. According to Nielsen’s sales-tracking service Bookscan, Best iPhone Apps debuted as the #23 bestselling computer book in the US in its first week, and then rose to #17 in its second week. It’s attracting five-star reviews at Amazon and kind reviews in the press, too. Here are a few highlights:

The Boston Globe featured Best iPhone Apps as “The Find” in its Sunday book section.
Tech writer Gregg Ellman called the book “a great help” in his syndicated column, which appears in newspapers nationwide. (He also dishes my personal top-ten list of must-have iPhone apps.)
Blogcritics.org called the book “a must have” in its review.
CIO Magazine wrote that Best iPhone Apps “cuts through all the clutter” of the App Store’s 70,000+ iPhone apps.
Amazon.com featured the book on the front page of its Computers & Internet section.

Many thanks to my pals, readers, and customers for all your help and support over the course of the Best iPhone Apps project. There’s no way I could do any of this without you. And stay tuned! The project continues over at iphoneapps.oreilly.com, where you can vote for your favorite apps and, very soon, enjoy a steady stream of fresh app reviews. More editions of the book are planned, too; the book’s already at the printer for its second print run, with a bunch of updates to keep it fresh.

Tags: books, iphone, josh, press

Best iPhone Apps: Reinventing (and Designing) Books in the Web Era

Josh Clark — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:43:57 UT

My latest book, Best iPhone Apps: The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders, hit bookshelves this week. I’m proud of it for lots of reasons—fun content, tight writing, colorful design, and a topic that’s at the bleeding edge of consumer computing. Most of all, though, it’s been especially exciting to be part of an experiment in publishing by my publisher, O’Reilly Media, in an effort that company chief and big thinker Tim O’Reilly has called Reinventing the Book in the Age of the Web.

O’Reilly (whether you’re talking about the man or his company) has always been uniquely forward thinking about the intersection of books and technology. And so, yes, O’Reilly Media distributes books online as PDFs, ebooks, and iPhone apps; it allows online access to its entire back catalog via the Safari Books Online program; and you can even read books right from their earliest drafts through the company’s Rough Cuts program.

But those innovations are all about format and distribution. The typically savvy thing about O’Reilly’s latest experiment with Best iPhone Apps and others is that we’re exploring how technology affects not only form but content—the way we read and tell stories. As Tim wrote in his “Reinventing the Book” post, the web has made episodic content comfortable and familiar; blogs, Wikipedia, and Twitter feed us brief dispatches that depart from traditional, long-form narrative. So when Tim and Sarah Milstein wrote their terrific bestseller The Twitter Book earlier this year, they purposely embraced this approach, even writing and designing the whole book in PowerPoint for its idea-per-slide format. Tim explains:

Now, you might ask, how is a book authored in powerpoint a web publishing experiment? It boggles the mind!

The web has changed the nature of how we read and learn. Most books still use the old model of a sustained narrative as their organizational principle. Here, we’ve used a web-like model of standalone pages, each of which can be read alone (or at most in a group of two or three), to impart key points, highlight interesting techniques or the best applications for a given task. Because the basics are so easy, there’s no need to repeat them, as so many technical books do. Instead, we can rely on the reader to provide (much of) the implicit narrative framework, and jump right to points that they might not have thought about.

Perhaps the biggest driver, though, was the need for speed. We couldn’t imagine writing a book about twitter that wouldn’t be immediately out of date, because there are so many new applications appearing daily, and the zeitgeist of twitter best practices is evolving equally quickly. So we needed a format that would be really easy to update. (Again, modular structure helps, since new pages can be inserted without any need to reflow the entire document.) We plan to update The Twitter Book with each new printing.

Each page tells its own tale, featuring a single app review.

As Tim noted in a pair of tweets, my Best iPhone Apps book is very much modeled on The Twitter Book. Instead of a sustained narrative about getting the most from your iPhone, the book dedicates a page (sometimes two) to an individual app review. It’s a collection of bite-sized content appropriate to a collection of bite-sized mobile apps. Every page is its own self-contained tale, a review of a single iPhone app, complete with full-color graphics and screenshots wrapped in a gorgeous design (if I do say so myself).

I don’t mean to make this sound more grandiose than it is. Best iPhone Apps is essentially a catalog, a format that’s not itself anything new in publishing. Yet a catalog is distinctly web-like in its bite-sized, indexed approach to content. It’s a format that matches up with the way people consume content today. (Speaking of catalogs, the influential counter-culture Whole Earth Catalog is often credited as a conceptual forerunner of the web. However, the Whole Earth Software Catalog, a computer spin-off not entirely unlike Best iPhone Apps, was a business flop in the mid-1980s, an idea before its time—or more specifically, an idea before the web, an important element of what I hope will be my own book’s success.)

Keeping it fresh

Each chapter has its own app-style icon, and a whimsical iPhone wallpaper image.

So a catalog-style presentation was a logical choice from an editorial perspective, but it also offers an important publishing advantage, too. This modular page-per-app approach means that the book is easily updatable (dropping in a new review is as easy as dropping in a new page), which likewise makes collaboration easy (other authors can contribute a page here and there). Moreover, modular content migrates easily to the web. Look no further than the book’s companion site, Best iPhone Apps, which trickles out a fresh review from the book every day, with content already perfectly suited to the web. The river flows both ways: I’ll be adding fresh reviews to the site which will, in turn, make their way back into the book with each new printing.

The iPhone landscape changes even faster than the twitterverse, with thousands of new apps appearing each month, a process that’s only accelerating. That means that updates to Best iPhone Apps, as with The Twitter Book, are necessary and inevitable. We’re still sorting out the schedule of these updates—it depends on how the book sells—but all of this means that the book is a living organism, both online and in print. It will evolve as the market of iPhone apps continues to evolve, a quarterly (for example) report on the state of the iPhone.

Some will poo-poo the physical book and prefer to stick with the free online version, following it as a daily resource or dipping in for a once-in-a-while search. That’s fine, and I hope people find the site to be a useful reference. But the book has its own special appeal. As Kathy Sierra is fond of saying, “atoms matter.” There are certain print-only benefits of portability, browseability, and giftability that only books can offer, and all of us enjoy the tactile pleasure of a physical object, especially a book as pretty book as this one. Even though the info is available online, there’s something irresistible about the atoms.

These factors mean that much of the project’s success turns on the book’s design—its appeal as an object, its modularity, and the ease and speed with which it can be updated to keep up with the torrent of iPhone apps arriving daily.

Author-friendly design

I wrote Best iPhone Apps in Pages, the Apple word processor. Adding a new page is as simple as choosing a layout template from a menu and replacing placeholder images and text.

What made all of this especially exciting for me personally was that this is my first-ever outing as a book designer. I not only wrote the book but I also crafted the entire interior design—the layouts, illustrations, colors, and fonts. (I couldn’t have done it without the help and encouragement of O’Reilly legend Edie Freedman, creator of the O’Reilly animal covers, and can-do production editor Nellie McKesson.)

The project’s emphasis on speed and turnaround meant that it was important to work with a tool that was author-friendly, an environment that married content and design easily and without distraction. I naturally chose Pages, Apple’s excellent word processor and page-layout program. As I’ve written (at length), Pages is a terrific writing environment, with a combination of style and substance perfect for writing a book like Best iPhone Apps. The entire book was written and designed in Pages using a handful of page layouts, templates that are easily redeployed for new app reviews. Pages makes this easy by letting you capture page layouts and reuse them for new pages, dragging and dropping new screenshots and icons into place for each new app.

I designed an iPhone gem icon for each chapter. Top: Best Apps at Work, Best Apps on the Town, Best Apps at Leisure, and Best Apps at Play. Bottom: Best Apps at Home, Best Apps on the Road, and Best Apps for Your Health.

Not only do the layout and application make it easy to add new apps to the book, but I tried to create a bright, gem-like design that reflects the spirit of the iPhone interface, too. Each chapter has its own icon, reminiscent of an iPhone app; the design of sidebars is inspired by iPhone dialog boxes; quick tips are presented in speech bubbles like iPhone text messages; and the headline and caption font is Myriad Pro, Apple’s signature font.

In the end, it all came together in what I believe is a great combination of form and function. The book offers useful, timely content in an elegant wrapper that happens to be designed to keep it useful and timely. I hope readers enjoy the end result as I enjoyed putting it together. Check it out for yourself.

Tags: books, business, design, iphone, iwork, josh, writing

The Future in Your Pocket, and Why I'm Writing Another Book

Josh Clark — Thu, 28 May 2009 19:32:10 UT

Photo by Stu Spivak.

My elementary school in Minneapolis had the most mind-blowing student assemblies. Sure, sure, most schools of the era shuffled in guest speakers for their captive student audience, but they were usually the stock just-say-no and scare-em-straight folks, with a few career-day types thrown in. Not Harrison Open School. We got a swami. We got a Secret Service agent. I’m just saying: We had great assemblies. But one of them really stuck with me, and I’ve thought about it every few months for the three decades since.

It was 1977. I don’t remember the speaker’s name, but he made music. Electronic music. With big, heavy equipment. His gear filled the stage of our homely auditorium, and he sprang from machine to machine to make this weird music of blips and bleeps and eerie organ sounds. And he knew how to warm up the crowd; Star Wars had arrived in theaters that spring, and he used his outrageously fancy equipment to boom R2-D2 sounds at us, all chirps and whistles.

He owned us: He. Was. Awesome.

At the end of his show, he stepped to the front of the stage. “One day,” he said, “some day in the future, all of you will be able to have a machine that does all this, makes music like this.” Then he pulled out his wallet and held it up. “And it will fit in your pocket.”

I’ll never forget it: “It will fit in your pocket.” I was six years old, and that was the first time I really ached for a specific vision of the future. For me, the future wasn’t rocket cars. It wasn’t living on the moon. It wasn’t even R2-D2. The future was having my own little synthesizer, a computer in my pocket to make stuff.

So I waited for the future. At first, I thought it had arrived in 2001 with the iPod. Bam, music in your pocket, just like the man said. But that was just a player. It couldn’t make anything. It wasn’t a creative device. It wasn’t until 2007 that I realized that it was the iPhone I was waiting for. Apple’s fabulous device is the only thing that has ever resembled my childhood notions of the future. For me, it’s the very first time the future finally got here.

A computer. In your pocket. That helps you makes stuff. People are painting magazine covers, composing music, writing novels, you name it. And of course the phone can also do all the magical things that we’ve already started to take for granted: plucking any information or video from thin air; taking commands by voice or touch; mapping out the world around us. Now we’re talking. This is what the man from 1977 was getting at.

But the future came on so fast that it’s a little overwhelming. After a year of living and working with my prized iPhone, I’m still discovering and marveling at the things it can do. And I know plenty of people who are frankly paralyzed by all the options in the App Store.

So I’m writing a book about it. For the last few weeks, I’ve been working on my next book for O’Reilly: Best iPhone Apps: The essential guide for discriminating downloaders. The book is an authoritative guide to the best, most useful, and most entertaining iPhone apps. Full of colorful and helpful illustrations, this catalog of iPhone gems gives you the lowdown on each app, with brief tips on how to use it. It’s a wildly fun project, a professional excuse to play with my favorite toy and explore the possibilities of the most productive tool I’ve ever owned. And I’m especially excited that I’m contributing to the design of the book’s interior, a first for me.

That means I’m neck-deep in iPhone software, spelunking the App Store’s darkest nooks and crannies to find novel, clever, and generally indispensable apps. As I go, I’ll likely note some of them here on my blog, and probably many more via @globalmoxie on Twitter, before the book is published in late July.

But I’d also like to know what your favorite apps are. What apps convince you that the future's here, too? What apps make you unstoppable, or more productive than ever? What apps delight you most, or make you laugh out loud? What app has changed some fundamental way you do things? What app do you use to while away spare minutes (or hours)? Post a comment with the favorites that have earned a place of honor on your iPhone’s home screen.

And hey, this is important. This is the future we’re talking about, after all. And it fits in your pocket.

Tags: apple, books, iphone, technology

iWork ’09 Tips, Interviews, and Book Reviews

Josh Clark — Thu, 28 May 2009 14:49:33 UT

Photo by Felipe Bachomo.

I hit the bricks this month to spread the word about my book, iWork ‘09: The Missing Manual, and even managed to get a few folks to listen as I preached the gospel of beautiful software making our work lives more productive and creative.

iWork is Apple’s suite of elegant, get-stuff-done software: the Pages word processor, Numbers spreadsheet, and Keynote presentation software. It’s a terrific alternative to Microsoft Office, and my book details how to make the most of it—with lots of juicy insights about common-sense document design along the way.

Several kind journalists indulged me and my proselytizing:

Chuck Joiner interviewed me for the MacVoices podcast, and I really enjoyed it (notwithstanding my alarming tendency to say “you know” every few seconds).
Mary Rotman posted a Q&A with me, along with my favorite iWork tips at the O’Reilly FYI blog.
Garry Barker of the Australian daily The Age notes the necessity of The Missing Manual series for understanding subtle software like iWork: “Mr. Clark’s Missing Manual on iWork is full of good advice in easily absorbed form.” (Thanks, Garry! But please, call me Josh.)
Web Worker Daily’s review of my book wasn’t really a review of my book, but nonetheless called it “a great title for acclimatizing yourself with Apple’s lovely working environment.” Much appreciated!

And I’m especially flattered to see that the book is featured this week on the front page of Amazon’s Computers & Internet section, where it’s been bouncing around the list of top 100 titles for the past month. This has all been so much fun, and it’s great to see the book finding its audience. I enjoyed writing it, and it’s great to see people enjoy reading it, too. Thanks to all.

Tags: amazon, books, iwork, josh, podcast, press, software

Marathons, Makers, and Surviving the Dark Middle

Josh Clark — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 14:02:06 UT

Photo by Josh Clark.

The Paris Marathon swept through the city today, and for a few hours the town belonged to its runners. (See my photos at Flickr.) I live just a few steps from the marathon course, and on the morning of the marathon, it’s always my habit to slip down to cheer on the runners. I park myself just before the 25km mark, about two miles past the halfway mark. I clap, I yell, I smile, I shout their names.

When I was younger, I used to run marathons. I no longer have the time, energy, or legs for the classic distance, so I seek out my challenges elsewhere, off the road. But I like to think that I still understand what marathoners need from their spectators. And here, in the dark middle of the race, runners need encouragement, reminders that they’re strong, that the finish is ahead: plausible, real, within reach.

As the runners glide past my vantage point, they’ve already plowed through more than 15 miles (15 miles!) and still have 11 to go. For some, that means as much as two more hours of running. By now, many of them are already showing the effort (sometimes pain). It’s going to be 11 miles of fighting inner demons, of willing tired bodies to ignore the alarm bells. Mind over matter, mind over matter, mind over matter.

To folks who have never done it before, it sounds ridiculous, masochistic. Nope, it’s optimism. It’s nearly 40,000 people who came to the starting line believing this impossible idea that they can actually cover 26.2 miles at a fast clip. The start is all excitement and possibility, and the end is all accomplishment, joy, and relief. But in between, in the long middle, that’s where you find out who you are. That’s when the doubts creep in to gnaw at the optimism that launched you into this madness. And with 11 miles to go, I can already see it on some of their faces: Jesus, what the hell am I doing to myself?

Everybody’s got their own way of pulling through. The support of family at a carefully chosen point in the course; visualization of the finish; running for a cause; fear of failure; simple discipline; blind faith. Often, it’s all of them wrapped up together in a powerful motivational bundle.

Photo by Josh Clark.

Most of the runners finish, and before long, they forget the pain, let go of the demons. All that remains is the optimism and the accomplishment—the start and the finish. A huge number of these marathoners will even do it again. The thing that sticks with them is not the pain of the marathon’s late miles, but the thrill of possibility and the glow of accomplishment. Get me back out there, I want to do it again.

For reasons I don’t completely understand, I’m personally drawn to long, challenging solo efforts. Fifteen years ago, marathons fit the bill. Now, in my professional life, I similarly seek out big, complex projects to shoulder on my own. This always seems like a great idea at the beginning. But then there’s the long middle. The strain of the thing sets in, the anxiety about whether I’ve finally bitten off more than I can chew. When I rounded the 500th page of my book and realized that I had only a few weeks to finish the remaining 400, I felt like one of those runners. Wiped out, flagging, fighting the demons, painfully aware of the remaining distance. Same thing during the long construction of Big Medium 2. Jesus, what the hell am I doing to myself?

And like the marathoners, I eventually found my way to the finish—exhilarated, delighted, flush with accomplishment. This process repeats over and over again: I imagine that I can somehow complete an impossible project and, after some period of agony, actually get it done. Soon afterward, in spite of myself, I find myself looking around for the next thing, some new test, some new challenge. Before I know it, I’m in the thick of another long and agonizing middle, wondering just how I got here all over again.

Photo by Josh Clark.

Every single one of the makers I know finds some significant part of the creative process to be downright excruciating. And yet, like childbirth or a marathon, the pain’s memory fades, and we’re soon ready to tackle it all over again. It turns out that the marathon—every kind of marathon—is a creative process, an act of self-invention. That’s why it’s so oddly addictive despite the evident pain. Every maker is a marathoner and vice versa—powered by optimism and faith and a stubborn inability to recall the torture that’s come before. Without this convenient amnesia, we wouldn’t have writers, coders, or artists; their projects would never get started, let alone finish.

If you’ve got one of these troublemakers in your life, here’s how you can help them fight their demons: Stake out a position around 25km and remind them that they can make it, that the pain won’t last. There’s a finish line ahead. Lots of them, in fact.

Tags: creativity, inspiration, life, marathon, motivation, paris, running, work

Message from Beyond

Josh Clark — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 11:54:39 UT

I received this invitation from M. Salimou, a self-professed big medium.

Like most urban mailboxes, mine collects its fair share of flyers, hand-delivered by old-school guerilla marketers. Ads for locksmiths, menus for Chinese restaurants, vaguely desperate pleas from neighborhood realtors. This week, though, I was bemused to receive a flyer from a big medium.

No, not that Big Medium. This was a missive from another medium entirely, un grand medium to be precise. Click the flyer image to enlarge, but this is the gist in English:

Monsieur Salimou
BIG MEDIUM - AUTHENTIC CLAIRVOYANT - HEALER

Specialist in all things occult. Quickly resolve all your problems: Love, rediscovered affection, absolute fidelity from your spouse, immediate return of a loved one, marriage, luck, protection against danger, lifting of curses, tests, contests, work, success, sports, job search, business, etc...

Bring a photo or object. Serious, efficient, fast. Results guaranteed. House calls possible.

As it turns out, this is exactly the kind of big medium I had in mind when I named the Big Medium content management system... a medium to help mere mortals communicate with a mysterious (technical) realm. It's a nifty double entendre for the fact that the Internet itself is a fairly hefty medium itself. Alas, unlike M. Salimou, my big medium doesn't make house calls.

Tags: bigmedium, life, marketing, paris

David Byrne Never Stops Making Sense

Josh Clark — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 14:08:36 UT

Burning Down the House: David Byrne in concert (and tutu) at Olympia in Paris.

Last night I had the good fortune to find myself in the front row of a David Byrne concert, just a few feet from the man himself. The show was terrific, an amazing experience all around, and I had a huge, silly grin plastered on my face for all 120 minutes. Blissed out.

It wasn’t just that Byrne and his ensemble sounded so great. It wasn’t only that they threw themselves into the show with so much energy, spirit, and humor. Or that the choreography had such an endearing, almost homespun feeling (and... tutus!). No, the thing that made it such a great personal experience for me was that it was so evidently a great personal experience for David Byrne.

After every song, he seemed delighted and even surprised by the audience’s applause. He seemed buoyed, actually elated, by this exchange between musician and audience, and this enthusiasm reflected back into his performance, back onto us. The show was fresh and new and crackling with energy.

But here’s the thing: It’s not fresh and new. This tour has already seen something like 80 concerts in the last seven months. Many of the songs were from Byrne’s Talking Heads days, tunes he’s been performing for more than three decades. And yet the look on his face last night was as if he’d just discovered the pleasure of performance right then and there. He seemed at once thrilled and bashful. David Byrne has always glowed with a kind of boyish wonder, even when engaging in social criticism, and his boyishness hasn’t faded at 56.

David Byrne makes stuff, lots of it: songs, movies, books, photos, operas. I’m sure it helps that he’s, y’know, a creative genius. But no matter how clever you are, making stuff—inventing something new—is hard and challenging work. While invention always starts with passion and enthusiasm, it’s easy to lose both in the hard slog of bringing it to fruition. Add to that the relentless grind of on-the-road touring—the symphony of airline flights, hotel rooms, rental cars, long stints away from loved ones—and it must be tough to keep the thread of the original passion: Well, how did I get here?

Of course, making it seem fresh and effortless is the essential job of a performer. But not all performers can do it. I’ve seen concerts where the musicians seem completely indifferent to the performance and the audience, traipsing right up to the edge of outright hostility. Of course, that eventually happens to most of us in the work that we do, even when it’s work that we love: The hassle of the work sometimes overtakes the reason we started doing it in the first place. This is something that I often struggle with, spinning the words and code and designs that I make for a living. I have to step back from the work, remind myself why I’m doing it, why I got started in the first place. It’s a matter of self-preservation, sure, but more important a matter of maintaining creative momentum. If you conflate the dreary parts of your work with the creative payoff, you risk poisoning your inspiration.

After 35 years of performances, Byrne seems able to keep the two aspects in perspective. “After 10 days off the treadmill, we’re back in gear and it feels wonderful—we’re ecstatic,” Byrne wrote in his blog after the first show of the European tour, two weeks ago. “This is why we put up with the jet lag and the constant dislocation.”

David Byrne and company: “Ecstatic” after their show in Paris.

The cool thing is that this passion—this “ecstasy,” to use Byrne’s word—for making and sharing is contagious. When I return home from a terrific concert or an inspired art exhibit, I always have new energy for my own creations. There’s something galvanizing about seeing something created with care and presented with gusto: music, books, JavaScript code, paintings, meals, whatever. Seeing someone else’s creative payoff reminds me of the creative payoff in my own work; it restores courage and passion. And hey, that’s not a bad takeaway from a rock concert.

In the end, I suppose it’s about looking forward, remembering what you’re working toward. When Byrne introduced the show, he said he’d be playing some of his new stuff (applause) as well as some of his old stuff (applause). And then: “So there’s the present, and there’s the past. And then we have the future. And maybe we can give a little applause to the future, too. If we do that, if we think about it that way, maybe the future will be a little bit better.”

Tags: art, creativity, davidbyrne, inspiration, life, motivation, music, paris

My Latest Project: A Book

Josh Clark — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 21:11:31 UT

So I’m writing a book.

I signed a contract last month with O’Reilly to write a book about Apple’s iWork software for the publisher’s Missing Manual series. I couldn’t be more tickled. O’Reilly is hands-down the best there is when it comes to tech and computer books, and I’ve always loved the Missing Manual series. Created by New York Times gadget guy David Pogue, the series emphasizes friendly down-to-earth explanations and a lively editorial tone. I’m humbled and altogether delighted to find myself among the ranks of O’Reilly authors.

Both personally and professionally, the project is a nice fit for me. I make humane software for creative people; my professional mission is to help smart folks get clear of technical hassle to share their ideas with the world. Now I’m writing a book for a series with the same mission, focused on software that is itself incredibly friendly and elegant. It’s a nice evolution for me, explaining to the average Jane how to make her life easier with thoughtfully designed software.

Pages, Keynote and Numbers: a svelte software suite.

So, what is it? iWork is Apple’s productivity software, an alternative to Microsoft Office in a tidy bundle of three programs: Pages (word processing), Keynote (presentations) and Numbers (spreadsheet). I’ve griped and groaned about Microsoft Word in the past, finding it so miserable that I simply stopped using it around 2000. By contrast, Pages provides a lovely, sleek writing environment. It doesn’t have Word’s kitchen sink of features, but in a word processor, less is truly more. Pages’ slender diet of toolbars and other “window chrome” helps you stay focused on actually getting stuff done, and that’s what it’s all about. Hold the “Word art”—I’m happy to take a clean, intuitive workspace instead. Keynote and Numbers provide similar experiences in their particular domains.

The software is a pleasure to use, and it’s turning out to be a pleasure to write about, too. I’ve been working on the book for a couple of weeks now, and with over 100 pages behind me, I’ve discovered some distinct similarities between writing a book and spinning code. More on that over the next few weeks, along with details about the publication date etc.

In the meantime, forgive me if I’m a bit quiet here as my writing efforts shift to my offline project. I’m excited about this project, and I think you’ll like the result. Stay tuned.

Tags: apple, books, iwork, josh, software, work, writing

Dot Your I’s

Josh Clark — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 21:52:41 UT

Lawyers like to insist that you include ™, ® and © trademark/copyright symbols with logos and product names to mark your intellectual property. Unfortunately, these little legal symbols tend to swarm your logo like fruit flies, adding visual noise to the design.

I like the solution used by Jean Louis David, the French chain of hair salons. The designer smuggled the ® and © symbols into the dots above the “i” letters in the logo. It’s a great solution that gets the legalese into the logotype without cluttering its design.

Bonus trivia: The dot above the “i” is called a “tittle.”

Tags: design

Jacques Villeglé: The Original Mashup

Josh Clark — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 09:15:39 UT

Jacques Villeglé, Rue de la Biche, Saint Denis (1963).

I’m completely wowed by the colorful Jacques Villeglé retrospective currently on at the Centre Pompidou here in Paris.

From the late 1940s to the early ’90s, Villeglé stripped layers of torn posters from the walls of Paris, mounting and framing his discoveries as-is. Each of these found works consists of months of layered advertising, with portions ripped away by passers-by or by workers making way for the next layer of posters.

The geological strata of these shredded ads reveal the artistic history of the city’s graphic design. Villeglé’s works are kaleidoscopes of capitalism, literature, cinema, technology and social protest.

In one work, a pirate-movie actress gazes out from a barrage of ads for oriental rugs, concerts and TV sets. In another, a John Steed lookalike roars his motorcycle through an explosion of striped colors and flying cigarettes. A series of movie posters morphs into a happy jumble of whorled and happily illegible letterforms. A De Gaulle campaign poster disintegrates into chaos, the French president’s mouth and mind replaced by a vortex of commercial images.

The effect is oddly beautiful. The bright colors and random patterns somehow approach the intelligence and boldness of Pollock paintings. Abstract expressionism meets pop art.

Jacques Villeglé, Boulevard de la Chapelle (1965).

The exhibition struck me as fascinatingly relevant in an era of online mashups and user-generated content: Who’s the artist here? Villeglé presents himself as nothing more than collector and flâneur, an urban observer who stumbles upon the works fully formed. He instead assigns authorship to “le lacéré anyonyme,” the countless anonymous hands who tore the posters (not to mention the designers and typographers who created each one).

“I like to save myself the creative agony,” Villeglé told an interviewer. “The whole world makes work for me. I only have to collect it.”

Villeglé’s work challenges the dominance of the individual artist while elevating the role of the man on the street. For web workers, this reversal of creator and consumer should sound familiar. Is the ugly beauty of the typical MySpace page really so different from Villeglé’s torn posters?

If Villeglé were just getting started now, one could imagine him working from screenshots instead of ripped paper. The online flâneur certainly has lots to explore. My Facebook news feed is filled with tiny glimpses of my friends’ creations... blown up, atomized and reassembled just for me, the work of countless anonymous hands. As sites plaster more and more layers of user-generated content, advertisements and web widgets across their canvases, the original personality and design of these sites are swallowed up, peeking out through the information collage like Villeglé’s pirate actress.

Jacques Villeglé, ABC (1959).

For designers, information architects, and writers who are accustomed to having complete control of their creations, this can be disconcerting. Like the posters in Villeglé’s work, our content is likely to show up in entirely different contexts than the ones for which they were conceived, creating something that is at once more and less than the sum of its parts.

Right now, you’re reading a blog post that I wrote specifically for display on this page of my site. Yet the moment I published it, it also appeared on my FriendFeed page, my Facebook news feed and in hundreds of people’s feed readers. In those new settings, my words are layered with another site’s chrome and keyword-specific advertising, stripped of my own site’s design, and combined with other content. It’s transformed into part of some entirely other work.

This is the new creative reality (although Villeglé’s work shows that perhaps it’s not so new after all). The moment we put something out there, it becomes fodder for productive combination. In many cases, as creators, we’re the ones who are blasting our work out there like confetti. Phil Gyford recently shared a diagram of where his personal photos, status updates, blog posts and music preferences appear on the web. Most of it just gets published automatically without his participation, and the diagram of how it works is itself a kind of collage ripped from the web:

Phil Gyford's diagram of his personal content careening around the web.

A good proportion of those sites I almost never visit: Pownce, FriendFeed, Tumblr, Jaiku, Brightkite, LiveJournal and Fire Eagle (which is designed so you don’t have to visit it). They trundle along, getting updated by the ghostly fingers of APIs without me actively using them. Quite magic, almost scary, and possibly a little pointless.

My own blog consumes other sites’ content with those same “ghostly fingers.” The right column soaks up and automatically displays content that I post to Flickr, Delicious, Last.fm, Twitter and Fire Eagle. It all gets mashed into an information collage that roughly approximates the state of my brain.

That’s the beauty of the thing. As our creations get mixed, mashed and cast into unexpected contexts, they often take on new force and value. I think Villeglé gets it right: “The fragment of the poster that I collect doesn’t interest me by itself. It has to be constructed in the tearing before it accounts for something.”

Tags: art, community, design, history, paris