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

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

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

Best iPhone Apps: The essential guide for discriminating downloaders

Thu, 28 May 2009 16:23:54 UT

Best iPhone Apps: The essential guide for discriminating downloaders

I'm hard at work on my next book, Best iPhone Apps: The essential guide for discriminating downloaders. Here's the gist: With nearly 40,000 programs for the iPhone, the App Store is chockablock with remarkable software to do just about anything. Best iPhone Apps helps you find the most valuable nuggets in the App Store's treasure trove. It's an authoritative guide to the best, most useful, and most entertaining iPhone apps. Full of colorful and helpful illustrations, this one-of-a-kind catalog gives you the lowdown on each app, with brief tips on how to use it. Coming soon: July 23, 2009 from O'Reilly Media.

Tags: books, iphone, josh, software

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

iWork ’09: The Missing Manual Now on Bookshelves

Josh Clark — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 07:41:15 UT

My book about iWork ’09, Apple’s remarkable collection of productivity software, started shipping from Amazon this week and should be available on the shelves of fine booksellers everywhere starting next week (May 4).

Snap up your copy of iWork ’09: The Missing Manual by ordering the paper book from Amazon or by downloading the ebook from publisher O’Reilly. O’Reilly also offers a nifty discount when you buy both the paper and electronic versions at once. (You can read ebooks on iPhone, Kindle or Sony Reader, or as a PDF on your computer.) If you happen to subscribe to O’Reilly’s nifty Safari Books Online service, you can read the complete book online.

iWork ’09 includes Pages, Keynote and Numbers: Apple’s word processor, presentation software and spreadsheet program. While familiar, these programs do lots of things in new and different ways than their stolid Microsoft counterparts. They make it astoundingly easy to create beautiful documents and presentations. iWork ’09: The Missing Manual gives you the complete tour; the book is comprehensive at nearly 900 pages but, no kidding, it’s also lots of fun. (I can’t imagine that any other software manual has ever featured so many superheroes.) With a uniquely witty style that helps you learn quickly, this Missing Manual explains not only how to use every feature, but why and when, with entertaining and helpful examples every step of the way.

For more info, check out:

Tags: apple, books, iwork, josh

iWork ’09: The Missing Manual

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 14:09:13 UT

iWork ’09: The Missing Manual

Complete coverage of Pages, Keynote, and Numbers, Apple’s remarkable collection of productivity programs for creating stunning documents, slideshows, and spreadsheets. With a uniquely witty style that helps you learn quickly, this Missing Manual explains not only how to use every feature, but why and when, with entertaining and helpful examples every step of the way.

Tags: books, iwork, josh, writing

Big Medium 2: The Complete Guide

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 14:03:09 UT

Big Medium 2: The Complete Guide

A comprehensive overview of Big Medium, the website management system for designers and their clients. This friendly, accessible tour of Big Medium starts with a nuts-and-bolts explanation of how non-technical editors can add and edit webpages without any HTML know-how. The book gradually builds to more advanced topics, from custom site design to system administration.

Tags: bigmedium, books, josh, writing

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

iWork ’09: The Missing Manual Available for Preorder

Josh Clark — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 14:25:32 UT

iWork ’09: The Missing Manual by Josh Clark. Published by Pogue Press and O'Reilly Media.

Last week, I polished off the edits for my forthcoming book iWork ’09: The Missing Manual. This weekend, I start reviewing the galleys. From there, the book zooms through the final production process on track for publication on or about April 30.

I know, I know, the anticipation is killing you! Me too. Take action to calm those frayed nerves: Preorder the book from Amazon, or start reading right away by purchasing the "rough cut" version. (The rough cut is like the beta version of a book, giving you online access to the book as it goes through the edit process; for a few bucks more, you get a discounted price off the final printed book, too.)

What’s Cool About iWork ’09

iWork ’09 is Apple's remarkable collection of "productivity software," a bland phrase for a normally bland category of software. An inspiring spreadsheet program? A rousing word processor? The concepts seem improbable—but as usual, Apple beats the odds. When the company unveiled its iWork collection of programs, Apple proved that doing serious work doesn’t have to feel serious. The package includes Pages, Keynote and Numbers: iWork’s word processor, presentation software and spreadsheet program. While familiar, all three are remarkably different from what came before. For the needs of most individuals, small businesses, educators, and families, the whole experience is a big step up from the dreary orthodoxy of Microsoft Office.

All iWork programs put an unprecedented emphasis on the design and polish of your final document, making it almost effortless to create results that look not only professional, but actually stunning. Pages turns the mild-mannered word processor into a graphic design program; Keynote’s visual gymnastics make your Mac look like a Hollywood special effects studio (Al Gore even won an Oscar for his Keynote slideshow); and Numbers spreadsheets morph your gray columns and rows into dazzling multimedia reports.

When even your spreadsheets sparkle, it’s hard not to feel energized about your work.

This isn't about glitz, it's about the quality of your working life: When even your spreadsheets sparkle, it’s hard not to feel energized about your work. This, of course, is Apple’s strong suit. All of the company’s software is tuned for helping regular folks painlessly turn out sophisticated creations to rival the pros—from making music to editing movies to creating photography books. Apple has a certain magic for making powerful software approachable and with iWork the results are at once so productive and satisfying that it becomes—and please, don’t tell the boss—almost fun to get work done.

What’s Cool About This Book

This should go without saying, but iWork ’09: The Missing Manual is comprehensive: In around 900 pages, the book details every nitty-gritty feature of Pages, Keynote and Numbers. You’ll find clear evaluations of each feature to help you determine which ones are useful to you, as well as how and when to use them. Shortcuts and workarounds save you time and headaches and you’ll even unearth features that Apple's own instructions don’t even mention.

But the book is also more than a run-of-the-mill manual. Like the whole Missing Manual series, this guide is a breed apart. Most software manuals aren't especially fun. Or friendly. Or inspiring. I set out to make this one all three.

Beyond just the mechanical aspects of using iWork, the book gives you practical aesthetic advice about document design and presentation—techniques that the pros use for weaving elegant layouts. Pages, Keynote and Numbers give you amazing technical tools to create luxurious layouts—or shoot yourself in the foot. This book helps keep the lead out of your sneakers with simple, good-natured tips for planning and preparing your document layout, based on tried-and-true principles of graphic design. Similarly, the Keynote section offers tips for building a presentation that won’t turn into a snoozefest. Throughout, you’ll find carefully constructed sample documents showing how to put iWork’s tools to best effect and, hopefully, provide a hint of inspiration for your own work.

If you're not yet sold, I'll let you in on one other little secret: No other software manual has ever featured quite so many superheroes. Most of the book's sample documents follow the further adventures of a company called Up & Away, Megaville’s leading superhero outfitter, where no task is impossible and every cape fits perfectly. You, of course, are the hero of this particular story and well before the end of this book you will have discovered your superpower: an unwavering ability to create spectacular documents. How can you resist? Order yours now.

Tags: apple, books, iwork, productivity, software

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

Why does Big Medium always ask me to sign in twice at login?

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 09:03:48 UT

Question

Why am I always prompted to enter my user name and password twice when I sign into Big Medium?

Answer

This typically indicates a minor problem, easily fixed, with the index.html file in your installation’s bmadmin directory.

When you install Big Medium, the installation instructions call for updating two URLs in the bmadmin/index.html file. The problem may be that either you did not update those URLs, or that you updated the URLs to use a domain that does not exactly match the domain that you have configured in “Settings>Big Medium Server Info.” (For example, the problem could be triggered if you use the domain example.com (no “www”) in the index.html file, but you use www.example.com in your Big Medium settings.)

The result is that you’re signing into a domain that does not precisely match the domain that you set up for your moxiebin URL in the Big Medium settings. This means that Big Medium cannot capture the login cookie, and it asks you to sign in a second time at the correct domain. (In other words, you’re actually signing into Big Medium via two different URLs).

You can fix the problem like so:

Sign into Big Medium with an administrator account.
Go to “Settings>Big Medium Server Info.”
Note the domain that you use in the “moxiebin URL” field.
In a text editor, open the index.html file in the bmadmin directory, and update the two indicated URLs so that the domain matches the moxiebin URL from step 3.
Upload the revised bmadmin/index.html file to your server.

After making that change, you should no longer be prompted to sign in twice.

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

Winning the Uphill Battle

Josh Clark — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 14:55:57 UT

Parisians and their Vélib bikes. Photo by stttijn.

As any of my friends will confirm, I’m pretty much obsessed with Vélib, the public bike-sharing system here in Paris that makes it super-convenient to zip around the city on two wheels. It also gets my geek on: Vélib is a complex system that neatly tucks away its complexity behind a simple interface and some clever behavioral incentives.

Here’s how Vélib works: There are over 20,000 bikes distributed among 1,500 stations throughout the city. Pick up a bike from one station, return it to another. You purchase a daily, weekly or annual subscription, which allows you to ride the bike as much as you like in 30-minute chunks. The bikes aren’t for leisure rentals; they’re intended to be used for quick, direct one-way trips of 30 minutes. You have to pay for longer trips, and overage fees add up quickly.

As you might expect, these one-way trips are not evenly distributed throughout the city at certain hours. Bikes tend to clump in some areas and empty out in others. To address this, workers circulate in trucks, moving the bikes from full stations to empty ones.

It turns out that this is an uphill battle. Literally.

See, Paris has a handful of steep hills. The Montmartre neighborhood, for example, is perched at the top of a rise some 450 feet above the Seine. Taking a bike down the hill has a certain obvious appeal, but riding back up to the top... not so much.

The uphill penalty is financial as well as physical. The hills are at the outer edges of the city, so the extra time to get up a hill for trips from the city center can easily nudge you over the 30-minute free period. It can cost money to ride a Vélib bike up the hill. The result: In Vélib’s first year of service, bike stations in Montmartre were always empty. The brute-force method of moving bikes by truck couldn’t keep up.

Over the summer, though, the good people of Vélib added a simple behavioral incentive to the system: Return your bike to one of 100 stations perched over 60 meters above the rest of the city, and 15 minutes of free riding is added to your account.

Riding uphill is now a power-up.

They turned a hassle into a game, pain into points. Riding uphill is now a power-up. The free minutes are a bonafide reward, too, saving money on destinations that are often outside of the free 30-minute radius. More bikes make it back up the hill. Since the program was launched in June, over nine years of bonus minutes have been awarded.

As a software developer, I obsess over performance bottlenecks, inefficient areas of code that bog down the rest of the application. It turns out that the best solution often isn’t a brute-force route through the problem (“let’s truck the bikes up the hill”) but rather an elegant sidestep around the issue (“how can we get the riders to do it instead?”).

So the systems guy in me loves this solution, but even more, it appeals to something more playful. I love that this simple tweak made an uphill commute feel more like a game, where you earn points and reward for your effort. It reminds me of Jane McGonigal’s spirited encouragement to do more to “make the real world more like games,” which I wrote about a few months ago:

Her idea: By introducing game-like systems into our work and home lives, we can imbue otherwise tedious tasks with the spirit of reward and collaboration that makes gameplay fun. Jane pointed to a game called Chore Wars which turns housework into gameplay for families. (“Finally you can get experience points for housework!”) She also pointed to the Nike+iPod gizmo that transforms running into a community video game.

Vélib fixed a performance bottleneck by introducing a game into the system. What’s not to love?

Tags: community, life, paris, usability, velib