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I recently became a fan and satisfied subscriber of Spotify, a music streaming & playlist sharing app. Apart from wishing for some more features, there’s been just one big thing hampering my switch from iTunes as my primary music listening app. Mouse gestures. I absolutely love them as they make a lot of my interaction with the computer so much faster and enjoyable. Click and hold right mouse button & drag right to close a window, up and down to play/pause music, right and down for next song…
I have been using xGestures to enable system-wide mouse gestures for ages and I couldn’t live without it. Ok, ok, I could live without it technically, but what kind of life would that be?! :) If you’re on a Mac, go get it immediately.
Which brings me to my point, xGestures has built in iTunes commands for play/pause next song, etc., but no such thing exists for Spotify. Because it’s customizable you can set it to perform keystrokes in Spotify, but that way it would only work when the Spotify was already active. The need to click and activate the app is exactly what I wanted to avoid.
So I wrote a few short and extremely simple scripts in AppleScript that make Spotify the active app and tell it to switch to next song, previous song or play/pause. Then I set xGestures to execute the script based on the gesture I make. It works, sometimes with a bit of a lag, but good enough.
If you want to control Spotify with xGestures as well, here’s what you need to do:
1. Download the Spotify xGestures scripts.
2. In System Preferences, go to the xGestures panel and create a global gesture. I like to use right and down for next song for example, but you can use whatever you like.
3. For Gesture Action, choose Run AppleScript from the dropdown menu. Click Choose file and point to the script you downloaded. Do so for all three gestures.
4. Enjoy listening to music without the chore of having to actually click in Spotify. :)
Hope you find it useful. If you’re looking for some new music in Spotify, you can also check out my New Times playlist and hear if there’s something that suits your ears.
Governments around the world are mostly clueless about how to deal with the changes that the internet is bringing and even more clueless about where all this is heading in the long run. A point made excruciatingly clear by Sarkozy’s naive speech at the recent eG8 summit. Those misapprehensions then result in dysfunctional and counterproductive legislation like HADOPI which invariably results in failure. Civil society on the other hand is more empowered than ever by internet and changing radically to adapt to new realities. It’s fun and inspiring to think where all this is going, so I wrote an article about it, including some funky new examples like Bitcoin. It was originally written as a university assignment, hence the un-blog-like style.
With the growing complexity of modern society also grows the need of people to organise outside of the existing, and sometimes too rigid, organisational structures. Due to the continuing expansion of global interdependence this need is being ever more fulfilled in a global framework, less bound by regional and national borders than ever. Thus, international civil society and the organisations that constitute it have been on a great rise in the past few decades. From the humble beginnings of only a few such organisations at the beginning of the 20th century, past about 5000 such organisations in the mid 1970s we have come to almost 25000 international organisations in the year 2000 (Anheier and Themudo, 2002). Yet most of these organisations, although international in scope, still think in terms of a sum of nations and not fully embracing the evermore global viewpoint from the start. As an example of such thinking let’s point out United Nations’ system of economic statistics called the System of National Accounts (SNA). As Anheier, Glasius and Kaldor (2001) point out: “Adding the gross national product of all national economies of the world’s 180 plus countries would yield the approximate monetary value of global economic activity. Yet this value would not be the same as the size of the globalised economy, nor would it be identical to the value of the total international economy.” While the United Nations are not the best example when we talk about civil (therefore non-governmental society), it illustrates the kind of thinking that is typical for the old type of international organisation.
Organisational development
My hypothesis is that the vast majority of international civil society organisations will not only have to switch to a more modern and global viewpoint to stay relevant, but also adapt a more flexible and decentralised organisation model. Organisations of all types (governments, companies, NGOs) have already went through an extensive evolution of their institutional forms. The first phase was identified by Max Weber in 1924 (Anheier and Themudo, 2002) as the full development of the modern bureaucracy with its hierarchical order, predictability, stability etc. The second phase in the industrial era morphed the organisational structure in a slightly more horizontal shape, with organisation along the lines of functional activities (e.g. accounting, research & development, production…). The third phase that we are witnessing in organisations now brought the network type of organisation. Network organisations are more fluid and decentralised, with greater autonomy of it’s constituent parts. Therefore there is also greater power equality among the parts of an organisation and the hierarchical structure is flatter. This type of organising can be even more pertinent to international organisations due to differing conditions on the ground locally and fast changing circumstances which call for greater autonomy. The more centralised manner of decision making also carries with it a large time penalty which can seriously affect the operational capability of a diverse international organisation.
Enhanced ways of international organisation with the internet
While many international organisations have adopted the network principle to their benefit, we’re beginning to see new types of global organisations take take the principles of network organising to the next level.
The key element that enables further decentralisation, flexibility and fluidity is the internet. It enables organisations to adapt to circumstances in real time, bypassing long procedures typical for centralised organisations. They are able to do that because communication is instant and can also be delivered to greater number of people simultaneously. While all civil society organisations of this type use the internet to their benefit, their scope as well as type of activities varies greatly. Some only use the internet as a communication tool in a local or regional scope to organise on the ground activities. Others utilise it in a more global scope, but again with the aim of organising activities that involve physical presence. Fine examples of such practice are the many revolts in the Arab world which were greatly aided by the tools of online organisation, but ultimately achieved with on-site protests of people who were in part organised and motivated using internet-based tools.
Online-based communities and the weakening of the nation state
But there is also a new type of civil society that takes this concept further. We are talking about purely internet-based communities where almost all the communication, as well as the actions of the community or organisation are carried out online.
As with the rest of civil society, internet communities are based on the shared interests of their members and the causes they wish to advance. While they occupy an entire spectre of organisational arrangements, it is safe to conclude that most are very decentralised, some to the point of seeming anarchic.
Since they are based online, the physical location of individual members is often of little importance. Never in human history has physical location carried so little weight as it is able to in this type of online-based civil society. This delocalisation will prove revolutionary in the long term as it turns on its head the basis of organising of our society. All human societies so far have been based on the principle of locality, or better said, territoriality. The State is founded on the principle of territorial sovereignty, the ability to establish a monopoly of violence on a certain territory, the ability to collect taxes, to impose legislation etc. Once every person has the ability to partake in civil organising that is not based on location, the state loses in its importance and has to surrender many legal monopolies it currently holds.
This is made possible by the decentralised nature of the internet which limits the State’s coercive power which is much more effective in the physical world. At the same time the state is so dependent upon the internet that it cannot throttle it in a meaningful way without drastically hurting it’s economy and everyone who depends on it, i.e. everyone. The internet is therefore truly a democratising force to be reckoned with, but its contribution to democratisation on a national level, like with the Arab revolutions or empowerment of national civil society groups, is only a short to mid-term effect. In the long term, save for some large catastrophic event, the internet will most likely lead to democratisation on a global level, with the weakening of nation states in the process. It is also very likely that various kinds of global communities and organisations which constitute the global civil society will gain in importance, as they will be the ones facilitating the changes. This may seem far fetched and it is important to keep in mind that these are long term processes.
Free software movement
Let us therefore take a look at some mostly internet-based civil society movements that reveal the trends that lead towards a more delocalised world. First, it’s important to point to the Free software movement, based on the hacker culture of the 1970s and philosophically and institutionally framed by Richard Stallman in 1983 with the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation in 1985. This movement helped cement the principles of sharing and community contribution in the software community. That is hugely important as that spirit still fuels the rapid communal development of software that is an important factor in the decentralisation of all types of public activity and is itself produced in a decentralised way. This type of approach to intellectual property ensures the preservation of civil liberties that would probably not have been possible had only proprietary software existed. Most of the internet infrastructure today relies on open source software in one form or another and it would probably be fair to say, that the nature of the internet would be quite different today had the Free software movement never existed.
Bitcoin – monetary democratisation or threat to sovereignty?
A second example of a civil society community, based on online collaboration and the principles of open source software is Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the first truly digital currency. It is a currency that is not based in any nation state, only exists on the internet and in no physical form. There is also no central bank, other than the open source algorithms that power it. It is freely interchangeable with other currencies and can be used as a method of payment on a growing number of e-commerce websites. Most importantly, it’s transaction network is peer-to-peer based, transactions are encrypted, cannot be traced and the open source code on which it is based ensures that anyone can verify that the encryption is valid and that backdoors for e.g. governmental agencies do not exist. The project was started by a Japanese man who contributed the idea and the first algorithms. His identity has never been completely verified since no one involved with the project has ever actually met him in person. The running of the project is now being continued by the community with programmers and users from all over the globe. The pattern for this type of online community project is abundantly clear: decentralised, community based, almost exclusive online presence, completely delocalised. Yet this is only one case, and numerous projects such as this exist and the numbers are growing each day.
Bitcoin is a great example because it clearly illustrates the results of work of an global civil society organisation of the new type which we discussed above. Best of all, it demonstrates the impotency of nation states when their territorial currency is being encroached upon. Bitcoin has not yet gained in popularity to really get on the radar of nation states (except for some recent CIA interest). But even when they do try to prohibit it in the future, there is no effective way for them to do it. They can of course make it harder for people to use it with some local regulations, but due to the decentralised nature of the internet, there will always exist a way around it, even-though it may mean jumping through a hoop or two more. Even in the hypothetical chance they would be able to block it, how will they be able to block all the new alternative digital currencies that would appear to take its place?
That is why the global civil society organisations of its kind are likely to increase in importance in the coming years and command an ever larger presence in global governance. Naturally, they will keep evolving and will have to somehow institutionalise to preserve stability, predictability and other Weberian positive qualities, but even so, they are unlikely to end up looking like the international organizations of yesterday.
Sources:
Bitcoin official site http://www.bitcoin.org/
Bitcoin Wiki https://fr.bitcoin.it/
Helmut Anheier, Marlies Glasius, Mary Kaldor (2001) Introducing Global Civil Society.
Helmut Anheier, Nuno Themudo (2002) Organisational Forms of Global Civil Society: Implications of Going Global.
Jeroen Van Laer, Peter Van Aelst (2009) Cyber-protest and civil society: the Internet and action repertoires in social movements.
Richard M. Stallman (1985) The GNU Manifesto.
What happens when you apply basic usability principles to how public administrations operate.
You can carry your laptop wherever you want, it’s easier to type on and certainly a lot more powerful than a tablet. Yet, while that looks good in theory, would you want to carry around your laptop instead of an iPad? No.
While an iPad won’t do all the tasks as well as your laptop, it will do most of those you would do “on the go” well enough and it will even beat your laptop in some respects. It is, dare I say it, much more enjoyable to use overall.
Why? First of all, as the photographer’s saying goes: “The best camera is the one you have with you.” Same goes with the iPad. Because it’s much lighter, smaller and there’s but one wire to plug in or out, I take it with me much more often than I would my laptop. Best of all, it’s on instantly. That matters a whole lot.
Let me give you an example. The other day at a French lecture we were talking about a film director from the country of Benin. While I knew approximately where it was, my memory was a lot more sketchy regarding its neighbours and size. Look it up then, I thought. With a laptop I wouldn’t have bothered, but the little tablet was out in a second, instantly woken up and in 3 seconds I was already checking out Benin in the incredibly smooth Google Maps app.
Smoothness, that’s the other thing. While my MacBook Pro (13″ 2010) is undobtedly faster by specifications and raw power, the iPad feels much faster and more responsive. Some of it’s probably due to the faster flash drive, some due to more optimised UI (no saving needed), APIs and let’s not forget about the much more limited ways processes can behave. While I’m sure that can be a pain in the ass for developers, it delivers a much nicer experience to the users. Ironically, it makes a typical user feel much more in control, while the more command line oriented users and open computing purists would argue the opposite.
While I’m not saying everyone should switch to this kind of approach, it will make the vast majority of people feel much more satisfied and empowered by their computing experiences.
Guess what this post was written on? Because I had it with me.
The relationship I have with mobile network operators is usually one of love and hate. Love because in my geeky desire to have the freedom to get online everywhere, I desperately want the connectivity drug they’re peddling. The honeymoon usually reaches it’s peak when I discover that the 3G coverage is pretty good and the Speedtest app tells me the download and upload speeds are in the range of a few megabits, speeds we were pretty happy to get over our landlines only a few years ago. From that point it’s usually straight downhill into the pits of mobile operator hell.
First the price. If you want a normal data plan with Orange that will enable you to, well, actually use your smartphone the way it was intended with all the apps and goodies it will cost you at least 40€/month. For that you also get quite a lot of included call minutes and SMS messages, but it’s not as if they give you a choice to not buy them. I would. Gladly not buy them. So if you want internet you will pay through your teeth. Sadly I only later discovered Virgin Mobile with mobile internet prices that were slightly less hallucinant. Oh well, the contract was already long signed by then.
Naturally, it gets even “better” when things go wrong. Then the incompetence can really shine. I received a monthly bill that was more than twice the normal amount. Received might be an overstatement though, as the normal way in France is for them to automatically take the money of your bank account and you can only really complain post factum. Naturally I complained, using the e-mail form on the Orange website. The website which by the way is a horrible, unnavigable “wants to be all to everyone” portal type of affair. I got an automatic reply they received my message. Then I waited for the real reply to my problem. For two weeks. It never came.
Then I dropped by at the Orange store to inquire about the solution to this, they have overcharged me quite a bit. I mentioned I sent a request online, as it said on the site. The representative calmly replied that they simply don’t reply most of the time. Excuse me?!! Indeed, a world class customer experience. Sigh. :/ Then I asked what can I do about it at the store, since I know I haven’t made that many calls to rack up all those charges. She told me there was nothing they could do at the store, since they don’t even have access to that kind of customer billing data and I have to call this and this number… Some technology company, can’t even put together a decent customer relationship system.
Called the number, got an automated reply system where I couldn’t get a live person on and not for the lack of trying. Finally I gave up and went battling with their online UI once more to recheck the charges for that month. After mastering the extremely odd filter system I finally found the problem. A bunch of expensive calls to Algeria. Now it made sense. My previous phone had been stolen more than a month ago and those calls were undoubtedly a consequence of that incident.
Now you must be thinking: “What are you, an idiot? Why didn’t you block the number?”. Aaaah, but I did. In fact I did so less than an hour after my phone got stolen. I remember even being surprised how easy the process was, I just needed to call an automated number, enter my customer code and they told me it was successfully blocked. Well obviously NOT! Tried the automated “customer relations” number again with no luck and then finally gave up in disgust. Even if I got to them, how will I prove it wasn’t me calling those numbers…
That is why, among many reasons, I hate Orange.
Alas, there was to be another chapter in this saga. While I had no wish to get further involved with that giant lump of corporate incompetence, they were the only ones to still have a few iPads 2 left, when they have ran out at all other places. So I bought it there along with a prepaid 3G card I was obligated to take. Charging the account was a slight pain in the ass, as I have discovered after some Googling, they have changed the number where to enter the charging code I bought. The problems don’t stop there as the 3G connection on the iPad sometimes simply refuses to load the page and wants to load an orange.fr error page, which incidentally also doesn’t exist anymore and all I get is a 404…
That also is why, among many reasons, I hate Orange.
Mobile operators are destined to become simple commoditised bitpipe providers much akin to your home ISP. What are voice calls and SMS messages other than greatly overcharged data transfers anyway? With that transition come lower margins and less clout than they have now. I for one can’t wait for that to happen, I just wished they realised that sooner and focus on their core product which is efficient, fast and cheap data transfer. I’d much prefer that to these disgusting death throes of incompetence.
