Why I'm in favour of Proportional Representation

[andrewducker]

According to the BBC, the current polls show Lib Dems on 33%, Conservatives on 32%, Labour on 26%.
Which would give a seat allocation of Conservatives: 246, Labour 241, Lib Dems: 134.
Or, in a more easily digestible table format:

Party	Percentage	Seats
Lib Dems	33%	134
Conservatives	32%	246
Labour	26%	241

It should be pretty fucking obvious that this is an electoral system that is fucked in the head.

Comments

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

If you're going to force a background colour for the table, please also force the font colour. My layout makes it impossible to read – as will anyone whose font is set to a lighter colour.

[andrewducker]

Sorry! I used an HTML generator to knock the table up and didn't think about that. Fixed it now.

[andrewducker]

Oh - and did you notice the Apple thing I linked to today? Really interesting interview with one of their early engineers.

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

Yes, I did – what do we reckon? Justification for the horrible App Store restrictions?

[andrewducker]

Interesting background on it, at least.

The thing is, that I can totally see it as a trade off. If you want people to produce the best applications for your system then you want them to make ones specifically for it, rather than just chucking together a bad port (as has been seen in a lot of console ports).

However, you're also locking out a lot of people that are happy to produce an iPhone/iPad application, but need to be economical, and produce one that is also an Android app, Palm app, etc. So Apple has to make a decision as to which way they go, and developers can then decide whether they want to make a trade-off too.

I think the problem is that Apple have decided to do this _now_, when people might already have sunk a lot of time/energy into producing apps that they are no longer allowed to distribute, and they are quite reasonably now angry about that.

When it comes to content restrictions I'm a bit more hard lined about it. In that if Apple want to turn themselves into Disneyworld and only let in things they consider "nice" then that's up to them, but if I'm going to have a phone, notebook replacement, etc. then I'm going to have one that I can read whatever I want on. And yes, stuff will still be available via the web, but I'm going to go for the most open platform I can, so that nobody can tell me that the apps I want to read/play with are forbidden knowledge. I've been installing apps on my phone for a fair few years now, without anyone telling me what I was allowed access to, and I'm not willing to lose that functionality. Other people might be happy to, or even overjoyed that someone is willing to provide a nice safe environment for them, but it's just not for me.

[skington.livejournal.com]

Quite how are you going to write a cross-platform that works on an Android phone, a Palm phone, and an iPad, though? It'll look rubbish on at least one of the platforms.

Also, for all that the initial "hey, anyone can write apps for the iPhone, they're called websites" line from Apple regarding iPhone development was spurious and insulting, I think it's more justified for iPads.

[andrewducker]

Why would it necessarily look rubbish? It might not look _standard_, but that's not the same as rubbish. Being able to have 95% of the code the same, with the UI layer using different button styles would make support and development massively easier.

[skington.livejournal.com]

There's vastly more screen space on an iPad than a phone, though. If you try to blow an iPhone app to iPhone size, by all accounts it looks stupid. You pretty much want to start from scratch UI-wise when writing an iPad app.

And not looking standard is rubbish, when you're Apple and trying to launch a completely new type of user interface. Same reason as why the original Macintosh didn't come with cursor keys: you want to force people to think in a new way.

[andrewducker]

I don't give a damn what Apple thinks looks rubbish. _I_ get to make my own aesthetic judgements, thank you very much, and if Apple wants to restrict the applications that I run on my own appliance, based on what aesthetic judgements someone in Apple HQ makes, then they can frankly fuck off.

(ire not aimed at you, by the way, merely there to express the strength of my feeling on this issue.)

[skington.livejournal.com]

Think of this another way.

Suppose you're a city council that has recently decided to replace all the pavements in the city centre with large slabs of real actual stone rather than tarmac or concrete. It looks great, but it also means that when utility companies decide to dig up the road they need to take the stone slabs out and carefully stack them so they can replace them once they're done.

One contractor decides "to hell with that", digs a hole in the ground, fills it in, and replaces the missing slab with tarmac. From now on, that bit of street looks a little bit worse, because in the middle of a nice stretch of stone pavement there's an ugly bit of tarmac.

Fans of the broken windows theory of policing would even say that it makes it more likely that in the future another utility company will also choose to cut corners / do what it does everywhere else, and fill in a hole with tarmac or concrete.

Either way, because some people chose to ignore the new rules, the overall effect of renovating the street was spoiled.

Apple have recently launched the iPad, which has a much larger screen than any other touch-screen phone, be it iPhone, various flavours of Android, or Palm. Apple-written versions of the iPhone apps are notably different, and use much more of the screen than if they were simply upscaled versions of their iPhone equivalents; hell, a number of the standard iPhone apps weren't ported, because they're so simple that they'd look silly on an iPad.

The iPad is significantly different from any other touch-screen system currently in existence, including the iPhone / iPod Touch. This is a very good reason to develop with the iPad in mind, rather than using some sort of intermediate compatibility layer.

And, at the moment, Apple's aesthetic judgement is better than yours. They've had the advantage of very smart people spending a lot more time than anyone else has, individually, on thinking about how applications on such a form factor with such a user interface should work, and their design decisions have fed into the overall OS and UI. They've provided APIs for providing the standard sort of interface that they'd expect most applications to use, or at least start with.

Suppose a company comes out with a new form factor and/or user interface, and says "hey, guys, we think this is the best way to use this new product of ours", and then follows up with "and we'd really rather that you only stuck to this way of developing applications, not the way you're accustomed to, because really we think that's much better". Perhaps you should think "hey, maybe they're up to something" rather than saying "screw them, I'll just do what I've always done".

[andrewducker]

They possibly might be right. And if they want to put out good user guidelines then that's fine.

And if they want to say "Follow them or you can't write software for our platform" then I have no interest in it.

[skington.livejournal.com]

I completely understand your point, and I'm aware that what I'm about to say could easily leave me open to people paraphrasing Benjamin Franklin's point about people sacrificing a little freedom for a little security at me.

Having said that, how's Linux on the desktop doing these days?

Far more people than probably you or I would like put up with substandard computer systems because, eh, they don't care, or IT won't let them change. If said system is actually much more usable than the alternatives, then I'm not sure what the Right Thing to do is. Decide to develop for Android or WebOS or something, for purity's sake even though it's a far less interesting environment, at least at the moment?

[andrewducker]

Windows on the desktop is doing very well - and part of the reason for that is that anyone at all can write applications for it.

Android has trebled to 9% in the last few months. Apple is on 25%, so it's got a way to go, but it's doing pretty well, so far as I can tell. I'm getting an HTC Desire next, and last I heard Orange and O2 can't actually keep them on the shelves right now.