My good friend Brent Simmons invokes a historical email from Linus Torvalds, about his disdain for C++

C++ is a horrible language. It’s made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it’s much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it.

Brent affirms his support while paying homage to plain-old C:

But I will admit to an enduring love of C. I still think of C not as C but as the language.

I loved C. Emphasis on the past-tense. As object-oriented programming concepts became popular, those of us who were programming in C or similar procedural languages had to find new, object-oriented languages to fulfill our needs. At the time, I chose C++. Or I should say, I had C++ forced upon me. Because C++ popularized the notion of object-oriented programming, it was the only choice presented to many programmers.

Because I ended up at Apple, the time I spent with C++ was thankfully short. They were fortuitously behind the times at the dawn of my career, and wound up taking a different path while my career was ascending.

Objective-C was Apple’s response to object-oriented programming, and continues to be the lingua-franca for programmers on Macs, iPhones and iPads. I loved C. I love C. But it always fell short for me. It lacked something. Objective-C fixed that. I hope I never have to program in C++ again. But tellingly, I also hope I never have to program in C again.

There are lots of great features from Python, Ruby, or JavaScript, that I’d love to see incorporated into Objective-C. By no means is it perfect. But for its elegance, and for the fact that it fulfills many of the requirements of object-oriented programming, while maintaining the familiar simplicity of C, it presently earns the title of the language for me.

[Update Nov 7: I’ve had a lot of reaction to my claim above that Objective-C was “Apple’s response to object-oriented programming.” This makes it sound like Apple invented the language, and they didn’t. But they have done more to popularize and promote it than anybody else. I stand by the meaning of it being “what they bring to the table,” when it comes to object-oriented programming].

Translation: Thanks to Anja Skrba, you can now read this article in Serbo-Croatian.

I enjoyed Jason Fried’s “Quick little UI feedback tip” in which he alludes to his use of a graphical shorthand for providing feedback on user interfaces. I like the idea of something akin to literary proofreading marks for quickly conveying change suggestions in the design process.

He describes the evolution of his own shorthand for annotating one particular kind of design feedback: the vertical misalignment of an element. He started out with a thin line indicating the vertical white space above and below the “misplaced” element, but settled on a more exaggerated use of squares above and below, to express how different the visual whitespace weights are.

While I applaud the thinking that went into Jason’s conclusion, it feels a bit too clever to me. I think it would be tedious to bother calculating and drawing perfect squares above and below the target text, and the squares on their own convey little information about the recommended design solution.

Instead of skirting around the recommendation, why not annotate the image with an overlay that shows the space that a corrected element might occupy? In this case, the implication is that the text should be altered in some way so that it forms a middle aligned element within its field:

With this notation, the green highlighted area represents the minimal vertical space that both contains all of the targeted element, and is middle aligned in the context of other elements. I believe this highlights, as well as Jason’s perfect squares do, that the current text is out of middle alignment. And like his squares, the degree of misalignment is conveyed by the unoccupied portion of the green band.

Beyond identifying the problem, it also offers a canonical fix: nudge the existing element, or increase its size so that it’s middle aligned within the green band. The band itself serves as a visual placeholder for a final, properly aligned element. Best of all, this annotation is quicker to make than perfect squares, and easier to verify at a glance that it conveys the intended feedback.

For those who don’t know the history, MarsEdit didn’t originate here at Red Sweater. I acquired the software from Newsgator in early 2007 (wow, coming up on 5 years!), and it had been developed originally by Brent Simmons as a feature of NetNewsWire.

Brent told me at one point that it was called MarsEdit, because “Mars is cool, and Mars is far away.” It turns out that was the abbreviated version of the story. I was treated to a longer version in Brent’s talk at Çingleton a few weeks ago, and now he’s shared it with the world via his blog. The name was inspired by a Seattle cafe called “Free Mars”:

I was thinking about names I thought were awesome, and remembered one of my favorite place names: the Free Mars café in Belltown. It occurred to me that “Mars” was perfect, because Mars is cool, it fits with NetNewsWire’s space theme, and Mars is at a distance.

I probably never would have named the app MarsEdit. Who knows what it would have been, had it grown up from birth under my care. But by the time I took over the app, I was such a MarsEdit fan, as a long-time customer myself, that the name just rolled off of my tongue. Of course I would keep it.

I was just reading the eulogy from Steve Jobs’s sister, Mona Simpson, printed in The New York Times. She recalls Steve’s general obsession with “love.” I think many of us who care deeply for Apple and its products are touched by the emotional angle the company applies to its designs. It has been an honor to inherit MarsEdit because it’s also a very emotional product, to its passionate users and for its developers, past and present. Brent’s story helps to underscore that legacy.

Marco Arment wrote about the negative impression he had when, after paying $4.99 for a single digital issue of The New Yorker, he was nonetheless subjected to advertisements. He calls the combination of up-front purchase combined with an advertising subsidy “double-dipping,” implying that the content providers are somehow charging you twice for the same product.

I just don’t feel comfortable paying for an iPad or web publication, no matter how good it is, and then having ads shoved down my throat. It makes me feel ripped off: what did I pay for?

His article touched a nerve with some of my friends and colleagues who are tied into the publishing industry, and who are aware of how important ads are to the revenue models of many magazines.

I think that I get, and agree with, the gist of Marco’s complaint. For better or worse, paying $4.99 for a digital copy of a magazine feels like a premium price. When you pay a premium price for content, it just feels wrong to many of us to have ads heaped on top.

Jason Snell, the Editorial Directory of Macworld, reacted to Marco’s post by suggesting that a magazine’s delivery medium shouldn’t affect whether or not ads are justified:

@marcoarment Wait, so an iPad version of a magazine shouldn’t have ads, but it’s okay in a printed magazine?

Jason goes on to suggest that publications have many costs, and typically the purchase price only pays for a fraction of those. Jason also links to a blog post from Craig Grannell, who also hammers the idea that publications need ads to cover costs, and closes with a quippish reply to Marco’s “what did I pay for?” question:

How about the content, and the wages of the people who write the content, and who design the app?

This epitomizes what I think is an overreaction by many folks to Marco’s post. People are zeroing in on the objection to ads, and inferring that Marco doesn’t believe magazines should be reasonably compensated for the content they provide. Marco never suggests this. In fact, he’s the one who ponied up $5 for a copy of content that he values. The exact price, and whether it supports the specific business model of the company he is patronizing, is almost beside the point. To him, it just feels wrong.

In response to the criticism, Marco seems willing to acknowledge that his feelings about the ads are trumped by the realities of the industry:

Tons of feedback from magazine/news people telling me that my feelings are wrong and that I simply need to accept that ads are necessary.

Peter Cohen, a journalist with years of experience writing for publications such as The Loop and Macworld, minces no words in his response:

@marcoarment It’s not your feelings, Marco. It’s your understanding of the economics of content production.

This is all well and good, informing Marco how wrong he is for feeling that $4.99/issue is a price that should justify an ad-free reading experience, but nobody seems to be willing to go deeper than vaguely condescending dismissal. All the accusations of contempt and ignorance are a little unsatisfying without specific analysis of Marco’s allegedly mistaken assumptions.

Obviously a magazine costs more than $0/issue to put out, and obviously it costs less than, say, $500/issue to put. Marco’s expectation to read a digital copy of a magazine without ads seems well-warranted if the cost of the purchase compensates the magazine with enough money to pay all of their staff, all their service providers, and some money left over for, if they’re lucky, pure profit.

If Marco had paid $500 for that issue of the New Yorker, I think few would challenge his expectation that such a price warrants an ad-free experience. But he paid $4.99, which happens to be the same price as a newsstand copy of the magazine. When you compare $4.99 to the $1.49/issue that The New Yorker charges its loyal subscribers for paper copies, printed on glossy paper and mailed to their homes, it already feels like a huge premium. Presumably the publishers are not losing money at $1.49/issue (with ads), or they’d cease selling subscriptions. [Update: it’s been pointed out that they may well lose money on subscriptions if they know they can capitalize on secondary sales of books, etc., to their customer base]

We don’t know how much The New Yorker pays for bandwidth, or what percentage of their overall expenses the cover price accounts for. We don’t know if there are partnership fees for the digital version, or whether it needs to pay back a major infrastructure investment. We don’t know the specifics. We just know that Marco paid $3.50 more than a subscriber pays for the same issue, that it didn’t have to be printed, that it didn’t have to be mailed, and that it’s offered for sale in a venue where practically no other editorial content is sold at a premium price.

Is there something wrong with paying $5 for a digital copy of a magazine only to be subjected to ads? I don’t know. It may be necessary. It may be fair. But it felt wrong to Marco, and it feels wrong to me. That’s the publishing industry’s problem to figure out, and ours to complain about until convinced, by reasoning and without blanket condescension, to think otherwise.