Simplicity
mattgemmell.comA major lesson I’ve learned (which I had to teach myself) is that it’s OK to cut out negative people from your life. Everyone has a right to their opinion, but people don’t have a free pass to be heard by you, particularly if their manner of expression is consistently unpleasant or unproductive. It took me a long time to separate the enjoyment I get by knowing that people are interested in what I write, from a sense that I had some kind of democratic responsibility to listen to any sort of feedback, even the trolling and the ad hominems and the meaningless, illogical snarks.
Estimated reading time: 4 min
Entitlement and Acquisition
mattgemmell.comSparrow’s acquisition is a success story. Indie devs make a great product, build a customer-base, and are rewarded with a buy-out from a big company and they get new jobs with that company. It might not be what your particular goal or end-game is, but it is a success. I’m really happy for them.
Estimated reading time: 5 min
Managing Email Realistically
mattgemmell.comYou, however, are a normal person, and the time you’d spend on all those formal task-management rituals is better spent aimlessly surfing the web, or even going home early. You’re just an ordinary lassie or laddie who gets too much goddamned email.
Estimated reading time: 7 min
Replying to App Store reviews
mattgemmell.comWould those things solve all the problems? No. You’d need to go to a different planet for that. Or sell to dogs, whose default position is that they love everything. Meanwhile, here in reality, there are stupid, mean people who will leave stupid, mean reviews.
Estimated reading time: 6 min
The Piracy Threshold
mattgemmell.comThe vast majority of people are happy to buy your stuff, but only if you’re reasonable about it. £10 for a movie isn’t reasonable; it’s greedy. People don’t feel that’s the right price. We’re not asking to get things for free, but we’re not willing to be fucked.
Estimated reading time: 4 min
Augmented Paper
mattgemmell.comThese new classes of devices, so immediately personal and portable and tactile, aren’t desktop-era shrines demanding incantation and prostration. They’re empowering extensions to our real, actual lives - and that’s a profound thing. They take what was once prosaic or mundane, and give us just a taste of superpowers. They’re augmentations, and they should be beautiful.
Estimated reading time: 10 min
App.Net for conversations
mattgemmell.comADN simply can’t afford to sell you, whereas Twitter must do so.
Estimated reading time: 13 min
Morality and Persecution
mattgemmell.comIt makes me shake with rage, and weep with frustration, that in the year 2012 we still allow the madness of denouncing homosexuality. My wife and I aren’t religious - indeed, as thinking, rational people who can so easily see its human-fabricated nature and the many evils it has visited on the world, we’re contemptuous of and embarrassed by it - yet we’re permitted by the state to be married.
Estimated reading time: 13 min
On/Off Switches
mattgemmell.comIt’s a train-wreck, and one that happens all too often when we allow our thinking to stop at “this new type of control looks cool, let’s make one like that”. We have to think about how and why particular interfaces work, rather than just mimicking their outward appearance.
Estimated reading time: 4 min
Erik recommended this story.
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