Ms. Cordova began our first week of school by assuring my later embrace of capitalism. She took all of our school supplies, dutifully purchased by our parents with varying levels of commitment to quality workmanship, and seized them for the collective good of the class. The means of kindergarten arts and crafts production were thus pooled for the duration of the year. Knowing my mother as I do, I can only imagine how she’d seethed at this news. Despite what was invariably a limited budget, she’d been excited to provide me with quality stuff for my very first year of school. Her dismay at the thought of my rich and lustrous Crayolas being commingled with shitass waxy RoseArt crayons was a feeling that transmuted easily to anger at the well-meaning Ms. Cordova, who quickly redeemed herself as an otherwise excellent teacher.

I wasn’t thrilled to say goodbye to my first set of school goodies. I tempered my disappointment by seeking out the most exotic of markers and tools each time an art project brought us to select from the collective supply depot. In no time at all, the incident was forgotten amid all the crap that kindergarten students spend their days doing. Before I knew it, the sweet, perfect feeling of the last day of school was upon us.

Ms. Cordova said many sweet things to us and encouraged us all to do well in our lives. We then began the business of settling our kindergarten affairs: collecting our art and classwork into handmade, oversized folders. At the end, what remained of the art supply depot was redistributed to the class. We each got some say in our spoils and my top priority was to secure a year-long favorite: a long, slender Crayola marker of deep and lovely crimson – my favorite color at that age. I secured my prize and a few other selections and closed the book on kindergarten.

Or so I thought.

There remained the always interminable afternoon of mindless daycare time. This bothered me less than it otherwise might have as I contemplated the future and reflected on my collection of classroom junk. The afternoon passed unremarkably and I busied myself with my newly-claimed marker. Which, I now noticed, had a name inscribed in tiny, fine-point permanent marker and cursive script: “Nick Davis.” This, I knew, was written by his mother, doubtless similarly unaware of the seizure of property that would follow. Smugness washed over me as I relished finally getting one over on my bully. The marker’s dark red ink seemed richer than ever.

Then Nick, also a daycare inmate, strolled along to say whatever it is that very young people find so dismaying. Today, thousands of hands of Poker have taught me never to overplay my hand. Back then, I was infinitely more impulsive.

“Oh yeah? Well now I get to keep your marker,” I said, waves of invincibility and vindication blasting from every pore.

Uncharacteristically, Nick shut up. Even more unusual, he turned and left me alone. I frowned, but held onto the feeling.

Minutes later, Nick returned. Accompanying him was one of those people whose list of accomplishments ended with “completed high school” and who were thus popular at my particular daycare.

“Did you take Nick’s marker?” The daycare employee gazed at me as she spoke, words plopping out of her mouth like bits of mayonnaise.

“Uh, no,” I stammered. I then explained the restitution Ms. Cordova had made earlier that day for collectivizing our stuff.

“Yeah, but it has my name on it,” Nick squealed, pointing as emphatically as any child his age could at the meek white instrument in my hand.

The employee looked at the name scribbled on the shaft of the marker and confirmed Nick’s assessment.

She looked pained as she told me, “I’m sorry, it has his name on it, I have to give it back to him.”

I didn’t put up a fight. I hadn’t quite learned how to stand up for myself yet and, unaccountably, these employees were authorities like my teacher at school, like the police, like my mom. I relinquished the marker to a jubilant Nick.

I spent the rest of the afternoon stewing. I also hadn’t learned how to curse, but I’m sure if you translated my brainwave patterns to a modern equivalent, they would have read “What a bunch of fucking idiots.” I was never the kid who painted his nails black and listened to depressing music, but nor could I ever again blindly accept existing authority or “the way things are done.”

Today, I would change none of it. Iconoclasm is power to ignore established limitations, throw out the rulebook and go further than everyone tells you is possible. It opens your eyes to new ways of thinking and new means of solving problems. I suppose the social order requires that this way of thinking be kept to a bare minimum, but if you’re among the lucky few who delights in a bit of herecy now and then, shed your shame for it and trust the alternatives it helps you to discover.

In my adult life, few things have ever been more satisfying than going beyond what people have told me I was capable of doing.

At the same time, I find myself wondering how much this particular leaning of mine handicaps me. In the long term, I resent the hell out of being led or managed. I also dislike leading others. I am an organizational anomaly, suitable only for short-to-medium-term freelance work.

I think I’m okay with that.

Since Tallymander was made a Staff Favorite last month, I’ve noticed that there are more solutions to the tally problem in the App Store than when I began.

There are, of course, many ways to skin a cat. For me, Tallymander does the job best because I built it to my exact desires. Still, while many elements of design are subjective, there are good and bad ways to do things. Let’s look at some of the other approaches to the tally challenge.

Tally Max

A few things jump right out:

Inefficient use of space: The entire width of the iPhone’s screen is available to each tally cell, but the tally title is confined to a much more limited area. The title is the only element that the user can customize beyond the rails of your design — give it some room.

Unfriendly controls: A good, obvious rule is that the larger a control is, the easier it is to interact with. This is why, for example, the title bar of a window ends up being much larger than the controls to close it. You use the title bar more. It’s a puzzling choice, then, that Tally Max’s plus and minus buttons are the same size, since any given counter is likely to flow mostly in one direction. In Tallymander, the entire table view cell is the button. You’ve got a big, fat, 320 x 60 target to hit to accomplish your task.

Unmotivated interface: I have a neurotic obsession with LEDs. I have always loved them. That’s why they appear in pretty much every interface I’ve ever designed. Tallymander’s seven-segment counters exist because they’re readable and because I love how they look. I lovingly built each numerical glyph in Photoshop with the pen tool and spent hours tweaking the glows and highlights for each color. In Tally Max’s case, the counters are just flat output from a commonly available font. If the author didn’t want to bother motivating their appearance, why not use a simple text label, like Calculator does, and get a competitive edge from the ability to count beyond 9,999?

Tally Max makes other decisions I don’t agree with. Tallies are tied to calendar dates and they reset each day, with a record stored for previous days. It also organizes tallies into categories, which could be useful, but puzzlingly, you create new tallies from the Categories view instead of the Tally view. It’s weird and, ultimately, trying to do too much.

The one inarguably bad bit about Tally Max, though, is this note on its App Store page, screenshot taken 3/20/09:

That feels like a show-stopper. I would remove my app from sale until that business was resolved.

Clicker Tally Counter Plus

This app has a terrible name. I’m fortunate in having a girlfriend whose beauty is matched by an arresting, powerful wit and who comes up with terrific branding to replace my awful project codenames. I sympathize with the challenges involved here. At the same time, the name is very descriptive, so while it gets no points for imagination it will be easily found on the App Store.

The interface is simply gorgeous. I like the aesthetic a great deal, hearkening as it does to chunky, clicky analog gadgets of forgotten days. The font selection is tasteful and motivated to the overall look and feel of the interface. Bang up job.

For me, I sometimes find myself wanting to count multiple things at once. This app doesn’t address that need especially well, but it’s still the one I would pick if I had to choose something that wasn’t Tallymander.

Counters

Meh. The button lighting isn’t even consistent.

Game Keeper Plus

Game Keeper Plus touts itself as a score keeper, but can do other things:

Hmm, okay. I honestly can’t figure out how the hell this application works, though. Here’s another screenshot:

There’s a bit of backchat about the other apps that are built for keeping scores:

This sales copy explains everything, I think. In trying to do so much, it feels like the developer has overwhelmed himself and the user with… a whole lot of stuff. Admittedly, Tallymander wasn’t exactly built with scorekeeping in mind, but for basic game-related tasks I think it does pretty well thanks to a focused, easily-navigated user experience. When you try to do too much, you end up doing too much.

On the subject of doing too much, back to this app being positioned as a stat tracker for non-game related stuff:

That’s fine; I think everyone here, myself included, isn’t doing much more than building digital versions of the abacus. Still, with so much game-related terminology baked into the UI, it’s tough to create a pitch for this app’s versatility outside the scope of tracking scores. The user ends up having to build a mental translation table between the meaning of the game-related words and whatever custom use they’ve imagined for themselves.

I don’t know what the deal is with those eyewatering, heavily aliased pie charts, either.

The Upshot

Every problem space has a multitude of ways to approach its solution. This is a great example of that truth. Each of these apps brought different spins to the task of counting things, with varying levels of success. Gruber’s maxim about iPhone apps is proven once more: Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell out of the experience.

Except for Clicker Tally Counter Plus (say it five times fast), I think each of these apps could probably do with trimming some amount of functionality in favor of making cleaner, more easily navigated experiences. Remember that the iPhone screen is a cramped, tightly-packed place and that mobile users are hasty, impatient people. The less stuff your users have to navigate and the less time they spend having to consider their options, the happier they will be. Functionality and power is good, but it’s best if you can tuck it away until the last possible moment before the user actually needs it.

On that note, I wonder what I ought to trim from Tallymander.

Reader Benjamin wrote to me tonight and asked:

I have researched some into iPhone programming as I am obsessed with every application that is available for my own iPhone. The problem is that the amount of books and articles out there about programming for an iPhone is enormous. Do you have any recommendations for a few killer books to read in order to learn the process/language?

What a great question. It’s one I’ve been getting a lot from people I know since my apps went on sale.

Thanks to the popularity of the iPhone and the lure of the App Store’s profit potential, there’s plenty of crap floating around promising to teach you how to program for this new platform. Much of it sucks. Thankfully, there’s some gold to be found for iPhone SDK autodidacts. Let’s check it out.

Wikipedia

Say whatever else you want about it, Wikipedia is, unsurprisingly, host to some thorough Computer Science articles. Any time you encounter a term about programming you do not understand, consult Wikipedia. Here are a few examples to get you started:

Arrays

Loops

Model-View-Controller, the design pattern advocated by Apple for iPhone development.

Cocoa Dev Central

An incredible resource, Cocoa Dev Central hosts some excellent tutorials on Cocoa and Objective-C. It’s a great place to get started if you don’t know much and want to learn more.

C Tutorial

If you know nothing about programming, the C Tutorial is a great way to break yourself in gently. You’ll get the basics that will become your best friends throughout your work as programmer.

Objective-C Tutorial

Once you’ve done the C tutorial and you understand why it works, the Objective-C tutorial is a tidy intro to Objective-C, which is the programming language you’ll be using for much of your iPhone development.

Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X

After spending some time doing online tutorials, you’ll want to know whether or not you want to keep doing this. If the answer is yes, Aaron Hillegass’ excellent book is for you. You’ll learn about Objective-C and the Cocoa API. This is all translatable to the iPhone, as the iPhone SDK uses many similar frameworks and conventions in the Cocoa Touch API. About midway through, you’ll start hitting some material on desktop-specific technologies like Core Data. Once you’re at that point, it’s time to move on to…

Beginning iPhone Development

Beginning iPhone Development is accessible and friendly. Assuming you’re comfortable with what you learned in the previous resources, this book is a snap. Helpful, digestible tutorials and plenty of useful code for use in your own applications. This book covers every single thing you’ll need to get most apps up, rolling and submitted to the App Store.

Other Resources

This is by no means an exhaustive or complete list of the great resources out there for iPhone development. This is just what worked for me. Once registered through Apple’s developer program, you’ll also have access to developer forums. That community is indispensable and will help you around countless, seemingly insurmountable blocks.

Bringing it Together

Holy crap, you’re thinking. That’s a lot to read and absorb, Danilo. It is indeed. It takes some time, especially if you’re starting from scratch. Be patient with yourself. This may be the steepest learning curve you’ll ever encounter as an autodidact.

For me, I started Danilo’s Programming School. That was a commitment to myself that for one to two hours every night of the week, I would work through a tutorial or scribble notes from important subjects in previous chapters. After about two months, I hit a point of epiphany and suddenly the code was a breathing, friendly, understandable creature instead of an inscrutable block of text.

This only works if you commit to learning it consistently. It’s quite literally another language and another mode of thinking.

The results, like seeing your first product cough to life after compiling, or customers writing you because they love your work, are incredibly satisfying. If you want to bring a product into the world with your own two hands, nothing is more satisfying right now than building it for the iPhone.

The students, of course, carry the bulk of this responsibility, memorizing a routine of answers to be performed on cue for statewide aptitude testing. Teachers play the role of lion tamer in this burlesque, establishing rigid, unimaginative curriculum designed to maximize the school’s ability to deliver positive test scores. Finally, administrators like school principals are tasked with the role of ring master in these proceedings, made responsible for herding dozens of teachers and thousands of students toward some vague higher standard.

Putting aside the farce that is education tailor-made for test taking rather than genuine learning, there’s a story here in the impossible situation created for principals.

Monday morning, NPR ran a piece about the role of a principal as a school CEO. Districts look toward principals as standard bearers responsible for reducing school violence, for inspiring teachers and for innovating policy — and, correspondingly, for improving standardized test scores.

But this is a dreadful position to be in as a principal. The chief responsibility of a leader is people. Having the right people doing the right thing in the right place. More than ever, this is an exceedingly difficult proposition in public education. A principal isn’t empowered to “clean out the dead wood,” since teacher’s unions and district policies have mistaken public education for a government-subsidized jobs program. Inept teachers can’t be removed — merely shuffled around. In addition to being unable remove non-performers, a principal conversely cannot do all that much to reward high achievers. Benefits packages and compensation are inflexible realities established at higher echelons than where these putative “school CEOs” sit. Finally, even the most inspirational of generals would be hard-pressed to motivate troops as besieged as a legion of public educators. These are smart, educated individuals who know how to do math. They can see that their classrooms are over-filled, that their resources are limited and frequently out-of-date, that their students are less and less inclined to play the education game.

You want violence in schools to be reduced? It’s going to take more than clever leader at the helm. Students need a proper reason for attending school. Weekly rehearsal for the choreographed performance piece of standardized testing will not pass muster. You want the best and brightest contributing to the education of our young minds? You’ll need to do better than an empty suit pretending to be an executive even as a 10-year-old paint job peels around him. Educators need a mission they can believe in. They need resources to discharge that mission while also being able to pay their bills and live to standards befitting their hard work and contributions to the betterment of our world.

It sounds like a tall order because it’s the biggest public policy challenge in the history of our nation. So far it goes unanswered. But these reforms are essential to the survival of the next generation of Americans in an unforgiving, knowledge-driven global economy.

Yet, in comparing the hundred year progress of the major industries of our lives to progress in education, what greater indictment can be made?

I’m not quite done with incentive. Let’s leave education for a little while as we examine incentive just a little more in another area.

The Department of Motor Vehicles.

I’m going to give you a moment to let the chill run back out of your bones.

The DMV is a perfect example of an essential government service that fails to serve its users. In most regions of the United States, the opportunity to own or at least operate an automobile is a crucial part of being a productive individual. In order to enjoy these opportunity, a citizen must first pass through the gateway of the DMV.

You don’t need an inventory of the ways the DMV sucks at is mission. But just for the record: the lines are long. The service is often very slow. The facilities are rarely comfortable and are often in impressive states of disrepair. The staff are frequently unpleasant if not altogether assholes. Your chances of accomplishing a task at the DMV in less than two hours? Almost non-existent.

The cause, and our recurring theme, is incentive.

Everyone wants or needs to drive, so encouraging users to spend time at the DMV with pleasant facilities and efficient service is unnecessary. Paychecks are drawn through taxation and other compulsory fees, so being unpleasant to customers has no bearing on a clerk’s chances at having a job next year. You can draw dozens of cause/effect relationships, but the result is always the same: incentive is divorced from decision making. The DMV sucks because it has no reason not to.

When I lived in the state of New Mexico, that state began a fascinating project that draws my point into perfect focus.

New Mexico privatized their customer-facing DMV operations. What happened when incentive reconnected to the world of the DMV?

Customers were guaranteed in-and-out service within 15 minutes. The private offices were comfortable and clean. Clerks were friendly and genuinely interested in helping. Perhaps most telling, enormous signs plastered the walls sharing customer service phone numbers and encouraging anyone who felt even the slightest bit disappointed with the service to call and seek redress. In exchange for all this, customers paid a nominal “convenience fee.”

This was a shocking difference and well worth the money when compared to the government-managed alternatives.

So now I’m going to ask you. You really want the same guys who brought you the DMV to go to work on the brains of our children?

Books like Freakonomics share the obvious revelation that humans do nothing without incentive. Incentive is the fuel that drives all human activity, from our careers to our diets to our sexuality. Incentive is the motive power behind every human system at every level of complexity.

In the case of American education, this motive force isn’t hitched to anything that might benefit our children. Because the overwhelming bulk of our schools are funded through government taxation that has no chance of disappearing, no incentive exists for schools to innovate and improve. Want proof? Examine literally every other industry’s history since 1907. Small grocers have given way to Wal-Mart super centers and distribution hubs wired together by incredibly complex computer software programs that manage logistics without human intervention. Automobiles have gone from slow, rickety buggies to blazing hulks of shiny, sexy metal. Entertainment has quantum leaped from live performance to motion pictures to home televisions to interactive games.

Literally any industry you can conceive of has reinvented itself hundreds of times in a hundred years and barely resembles its atavistic forms.

Yet, in 1907 education consisted of crowding a group of young children into a room. They all learned the same things together. They all enjoyed a yearly progression from one stage to the next.

Does this sound nauseatingly familiar?

Yet how does this stasis occur? What factors allowed its creation and conspired to preserve its existence?

In the other examples I cited, incentives existed for pioneers to do things differently. Fortunes were won on the backs of good ideas. Filo T. Farnsworth, Sam Walton, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, Henry Ford, to barely begin a list, these men had the vision for a new world unshackled from the constraints that they knew were unnecessary. Part of what drove them was the power of their ability to imagine big solutions to big problems. The rest was incentive — the knowledge that they would be rewarded for their insights.

Because K-12 education is jailed within the constraints of all levels of bureaucracy, no such rewards exist for its innovators. Moreover, even the most altruistic of innovators will find no toehold in the mirror-smooth, impermeable surface of the government monolith that stands between themselves and the future of education.

Yet, this isn’t anything new. I’ve spent a lifetime thinking about education.

When I was a boy, I hated school. Not because I didn’t respect the power of learning. I hated it because I desperately wanted to absorb every piece of human knowledge and schools were designed for some dull purpose entirely unrelated to that pursuit.

Sure, there was a bit of learning that happened occasionally. But the greater purpose of public education, as I view it in retrospect, seems to be more focused on the homogenization of young minds than in equipping them for a lifetime of growth.

In the United States, education forces our children along rigid, non-customized paths for at least six years of early life. Regardless of your talents or interests, you spend all of your time learning the exact same things as your peers.  Think of this — six formative years, a tremendous span of opportunity, and it is squandered on one-size-fits-all busywork and enforcement of “color within the lines” thinking.

It misses the point that out-of-school activity gives these students the opportunity to diversify their lives in the few scraps of hours between their daily internment and dinner at home. The trouble is that school is a significant chunk of their waking lives and it is very likely to be time mostly wasted.

Would-be reformers of education share my fury at this reality . Yet I don’t hear much conversation surrounding the overall cause. That’s what I’ll talk about next.