Aaron Moodie

Boycotting Hollywood

2012-01-23T00:00:00-08:00

Boycotting Hollywood

23rd January, 2012

I really love going to the movies. I’d put it up there with one of my most enjoyable pastimes. My partner and I normally go at least once a week, and I sometime go by myself to see the pointless, plotless, CGI overloaded spectaculars that no one else is interested in seeing.

It’s not a cheap outing either. With ticket prices in the $18 per adult area, or $20 for 3D (plus $2 for the glasses) and $25 for IMAX, an outing for 2 including snacks is easily in the $50 plus vicinity. Once a week for a year, and that’s looking at around $2500 PA. It’s quite a lot, but it’s something that I truly enjoy, and so I’m happy to pay for the experience.

But there is a problem. My movie going is supporting an industry that wants to destroy the internet. The internet that I use every day. The internet that I rely on to make a living. This industry wants to handicap and maim the most incredible technological feat the world has ever seen. They want to do this for their own financial gain, and because they have failed to keep up with the modern world, hoping instead to stop the innovation and progress that has left them floundering. Unfortunately, it is the money that I spend on movies that is enabling them to do this.

I have never anything good to say about the RIAA or the MPAA, but with the close call last week that was the SOPA and PIPA legislation, I’ve decided that words are not enough. So it is with great reluctance that I have decided to boycott Hollywood, and anyone in the film industry associated with the MPAA. This means no more films, whether at the movies, on TV, on the DVD’s I own or via iTunes. Not even torrented or downloaded films, as this will only add fuel the piracy that drives the scaremongering on congress.

Unfortunately, this also means that there are a number of other business and services that I will no be using, despite them having no direct affiliation with Hollywood. I’ve really enjoyed using letterboxd.com, but if I’m not watching any films, I guess I won’t be writing any reviews. And I’ll no longer be tuning into At The Movies, the fantastic film review show on ABC.

It saddens me that it has come to this, but to think that the more films I watch, the more likely it is that something akin to SOPA will come to pass makes me feel ill. It also makes me extremely mad that anyone could be so greedy as to try and ruin something for the entire planet just because they failed to adapt.

There is a silver lining though. I’m looking forward to seeking out and supporting those independent film makers who are trying to make a go without the help of Hollywood. I can see that sites like youtube are going to become an even bigger part of my viewing experience. I’m also very excited to see what comes of calls to action like this one posted on Y Combinator. I’ve already read of a couple of great articles in response, which make me hopeful for the future of film making, and the film making industry.

Web Design And The New Normal

2012-01-15T00:00:00-08:00

Web Design And The New Normal

15th January, 2012

As my partner is fond of saying, “there’s a better kind of normal”. We don’t often question our habits or practices, as to us, these have always been the norm and it isn’t until something new comes along that we realise how bad thing were before.

I feel like this is currently happening in the world of type design. For a long time type designers have been dealing with software that was either cumbersome, unreliable or both. Software that wasn’t in tune to the way people worked, was buggy and until very recently, wasn’t even compatible with the current Mac OS. Yet this same software is often regarded as the ‘standard’ in type design.

That seemed to change in the last few months with the introduction of a new type design application, which in a very short time seems to have supplanted itself as the new, or soon to be, standard. How? It’s simply better. A better kind of ‘normal’.

Watching this, I can help but look at the state of web design software and wonder when we will see this happen here. For too long Adobe has ruled the roost with a suite of applications that don’t actually work all that well for web design. Although Photoshop and Illustrator can be used to design websites, neither is the perfect fit. Photoshop’s type setting tools are abysmal, and Illustrator doesn’t have any bitmap editing capabilities. But as these applications aren’t specifically for web design, that’s to be expected. Fireworks on the other hand should be the perfect fit. Sadly, it’s but a straggling remnant of the Macromedia acquisition which hasn’t seen any significant development in a long time.

Ironically, Adobe was once that breath of fresh air designers so sorely needed. At the turn of the century, the desktop publishing and design industry was dominated by Quark. It was what I was taught as a student, and was the goto software package for almost every designer across the globe. But for all it’s dominance, it didn’t stand a chance against InDesign. Within 3 versions, Adobe had muscled Quark out of the spotlight with a product that outshone it in every way. I remember even the national Quark rep at the time telling us to jump ship. That there was a better kind of normal, and it was called InDesign.

But that was then. Now, Adobe seem to be loosing their focus the more they try to stay relivent in both print and digital design. Over the last few months I’ve looked at a number of newer design programs by independant developers hoping to find something more tailored to web design. Although there is a lot of promise, I’ve yet to find anything I’d call a ‘Fireworks Killer’, something that just feels right and does everything one would expect as a web designer, something that just feels normal.

Making Your Own Options

2010-05-17T00:00:00-07:00

Making Your Own Options

17th May, 2010

Jobs is right, we have a choice. In a recent heated email discussion between Gawker Media employee Ryan Tate and Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Tate criticised Apple for forcing developers to build their iPhone/iPad apps in Apple’s native Cocoa API), instead of being allowed to use other means (such as Adobe Flash/AIR).

Jobs replied:

Wait - of cause they don’t have to. They don’t need to publish on the iPad if they don’t want to. No one is forcing them. But it appears that they DO want to.

This is the same argument that Google offer when criticised about privacy issues with their applications, and it’s completely right. There is a choice, but it’s a frustrating choice, as to go elsewhere usually means moving to a poorer alternative. Gmail is a far better webmail system than Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail, just as the iPad is far better than any other tablet device currently available.

So if there is nothing better to move to, then what option is there? The option is to make your own option. The web is filled with great examples of similar situations where people have not been happy with the alternatives to the status quo, and so have made their own. Firefox and Linux are two great examples of this, and more recently Diaspora, an open social network being developed in response to the lack of alternatives to Facebook. The amount of public funding this project has received is a clear indication that people are willing to support such alternatives. The OLPC XO-1 showed us what is possible to achieve with hardware, and even though it’s no MacBook killer, the proposed plans for the XO-3 are sure to cause waves if the OLPC Project can pull it off, which with more public support, is completely possible.

As Jobs boasts, there are currently 200,000 plus apps in the iTunes app store. But pretty much all of these have been built by independent developers, not by Apple, and the iPhone and iPad are only a success because of these apps. If developers are truly unhappy with where Apple is headed and the limitations that are being enforced on them by the iTunes app store, then start by directing support to a platform that doesn’t have such limitations. And if none exists, make your own.

As Clay Shirky states in his book Here Comes Everybody, Linus Torvalds would never have gotten any where if all he had done was petition Microsoft to make Window more open. Only by taking action to create an alternative OS did Torvalds get Microsoft’s attention.

The options are out there, you just have to create them.

How Piracy is Pushing the Digital Envelope

2009-07-28T00:00:00-07:00

How Piracy is Pushing the Digital Envelope

28th July, 2009

News that the Swedish online music service Spotify will be releasing an iPhone application has been generating quite a bit of a buzz online. Spotify provides an extensive online music library that is free to access and listen to. The free service is supported by adverts, or you can sign up for £9.99 a month for a premium account, which has no ads (you will need to have a premium account in order to use the iPhone application). Spotify is a great example of online music distribution done right. Sure, you can’t download the tracks, but it’s there to use for free, allowing you to ‘try before you buy’ from somewhere else, which is what I mainly used bit torrent trackers such as The Pirate Bay for. The question is, would there even be a Spotify if it wasn’t sites like The Pirate Bay?

Back in April, when The Pirate Bay founders were sentenced to a year in prison for their operation the site, the BBC published an interview with Mark Mulligan from Forrester Research. Mr Mulligan went on to say how Spotify was “one real example we’ve got of how the music industry is building a new (legal) business around new ways of distributing music”. The thing is, Mulligan fails to mention why the music industry is building this new business, or, more to the point, how they have actually been playing catch up to a digital distribution model that has been in full swing for almost 10 years. Piracy.

Matt Mason, author of The Pirate’s Dilemma, says that “piracy is the sharp end of innovation”. In a recent article for the BBC, he wrote about how pirates are “highlighting a better way for us to do things; they find gaps outside the market, and better ways for society to operate”.

Site like The Pirate Bay have shown people that music, movies and all sorts of digital content can be easily distributed online (much to the dismay of the companies controlling and monetising that content). But without people taking these risks and, in this case, developing new methods of distribution, the chances are that services like Spotify would never have been considered, let alone be the working, productive business model it is today.

Epaper And The Future of Magazines

2007-06-26T00:00:00-07:00

Epaper And The Future of Magazines

26th June, 2007

After years of speculation, digital paper is finally stating to make an appearance. Like movies and music before it, mainstream publishing is moving toward the digital realm, and with many of the top electronic brands such as Sony, Fujitsu and Philips pouring resources into the development of digital paper, electronic books and readers using this new technology are sure to be as much apart of out lives in the future as the iPod is now.

With the help of the Internet, the last 10 years has seen a massive increase in the publishing of digital publications and zines. There are now sites such as pdf-mags.com that cater specifically for independently published digital publications, and more recently, the iTunes store has seen the inclusion of PDF magazines as part of their podcast subscription service. Magazines such as The Fader have already started making the transition and are now letting readers download a digital copy of the magazine for free.

As we have already seen, copyright and illegal distribution of digital files over the internet has become quite a thorn in the side of the music and film industries, with the RIAA and MPAA going as far as to sue individuals for downloading copyright material. Recently television networks in Australia have started blowing the “piracy” trumpet, claiming that the illegal distribution of television shows over the internet are hurting the ratings and are responsible for a loss in advertising revenue.

So what then for the publishing industry? Will the AAP and MPA be the next to cry thief and start taking the public to court? Or will a smarter approach be taken, one that doesn’t involve making criminals out of ones customers. Sooner rather than later we will see the emergence of an iTunes like application for storing, arranging and viewing digital and PDF magazines, which will only help to propel the digital publishing arena forward, and will most certainly do for publishing what pod casting had done for radio. This is where the magazine and book publishers need to be looking. It won’t be long before storage and reading devices using digital paper arrive to integrate with these applications, at which point the digital publishing revolution will truly begin.

1000 magazines in your pocket anyone?