{% blockquote -Aaron Sorkin http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/17/stevejobs-film-idUSL4E8GH8O220120517 Reuters %} I know so little about what I am going to write. I know what I am not going to write. It can’t be a straight ahead biography because it’s very difficult to shake the cradle-to-grave structure of a biography. {% endblockquote %}

Aaaron Sorkin gave a few great little tidbits about his forthcoming Steve Jobs film while doing press for his new HBO show, The Newsroom. He’s working on finding the best angle for the film, which hopefully means it’s not going to be too biopic/Forrest Gump-y.

Drama is tension versus obstacle. Someone wants something, something is standing in their way of getting it. They want the money, they want the girl, they want to get to Philadelphia - doesn’t matter … And I need to find that event and I will. I just don’t know what it is.

Sounds good to me. This only reaffirms what I wrote yesterday, that Sorkin is the right guy.

LAST UPDATE: May 23, 2012, 2:33 PM EDT

This post has been updated numerous times. Scroll to the bottom of this post for the latest information or read the following subsequent posts. Thanks to all who contributed information and added to the conversation in the comments.

• May 20: They Write About Podcasts, Don’t They?
• May 21: Don’t Blame the Advertisers
• May 21: What Dan Benjamin Said
• May 23: The New Media Isn’t All That New

I’ll be honest: I don’t know the answer to the question posited in this headline. But I can speculate.

For those who don’t know what 5by5 is, it’s a podcasting network founded by Dan Benjamin. He founded it in 2009, but I first heard of it when he started broadcasting The Talk Show with John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame in July of 2010. This iteration of the show is technically a reboot; Benjamin and Gruber hosted a podcast of the same name from 2007-2009.

5by5 really took off in early 2011 when Merlin Mann, of Hipster PDA fame, started his own show on the network with Benjamin, Back to Work. Around the same time John Siracusa started his show on the network, Hypercritical, and the rest is basically history. 5by5 quickly became a premier podcasting network, especially for shows about technology and the self-employment lifestyle in general.

Though Gruber’s Talk Show was normally recorded weekly, it’s not so out of the ordinary for it, or really any 5by5 show, to skip a week unannounced or futz with the broadcast calendar. So when no new Talk Show episode had been posted since May 2nd, it wasn’t that much of an anomaly. Listeners just figured that the show was on hiatus; Gruber is often mysterious about his whereabouts on the air.

But Twitter lit up this afternoon when Gruber posted to his widely read site a link to a brand new version of the show, sans Dan Benjamin, on the Mule Radio Syndicate, a different podcasting network started by designer and Gruber’s American McCarver compatriot Mike Monteiro. No explanation for the move was offered in his blog post. And the new show, which he appears to be hosting alone with guests (this week it’s John Moltz), starts up right where the last show left off. No welcoming the audience to the new network, no reason is offered for the move. It’s just another episode of The Talk Show for Gruber, well, it’s his third first episode.

So what happened? Both Gruber and Benjamin remain silent on Twitter. No live 5by5 broadcast was recording when this news hit the web, so no live comments from Dan. For now we have no facts as to what happened. But I have some ideas.

First off all, I think it’s pretty safe to assume this is the result of a falling out. 5by5 still lists The Talk Show as a current show, with Gruber’s name still appearing on a few pages on the site. If this was a long-brewing, considered and amicable separation, I’ll bet Dan would have had time to get the site in order and basically list The Talk Show as an archive.

Then there’s the fact that Dan released a new 5by5 iPhone app for broadcasting live and archived shows from the network. Listed in the App Store as a “Benjamin Productions” product, it sells for $2.99. I wondered, when I saw, why it wasn’t released under the 5by5 name. I’m sure there’s a good explanation for that, but suffice it to say, even though he’s on nearly every show on the network, Dan usually doesn’t take public ownership of most of the site’s output. Perhaps that didn’t sit well with everyone.

Now I’m wondering whether or not that app, which is the 32nd most popular paid entertainment app in the App Store as I write this, and the monies collected from the sale of it had anything to do with the split. The network has a solid business model: they sell ad time on all of their shows. The app now becomes a separate revenue stream. I don’t really have an opinion either way on whether or not the app should be paid or free, but it’s very interesting that, moments after linking to his revamped Talk Show, Gruber posted a link on his site to Mule Radio’s iPhone app, which is free. From Mule’s description of the app on their Web site, emphasis theirs:

Our friends at Black Pixel have built the finest, FREEST podcast app around. Your favorite Mule Radio shows, 100% free.

The app launched yesterday.

My best guess is that there was either something related to the money the network was generating and/or the credit Gruber was or wasn’t getting for boosting the network to its current prominence. 5by5 probably wouldn’t be what it is without Gruber’s significant influence, but that cuts both ways.

The Talk Show always had two hosts. Dan Benjamin helped keep the show on track when Gruber would wander off and riff. This new show lacks that structure and is instantly less enjoyable to listen to. I’ll certainly give the new Talk Show a chance, but Dan will be sorely missed. The show didn’t really hinge on either of them; they made a perfect team.

I hope we’ll get an actual explanation soon, but for now the show’s fan-base seems confused and put off. The initial reaction seems to be “Good riddance, John. Let’s see how you do in the wilderness.” Maybe Dan Benjamin actually built a network of fans even more loyal than those who visit Daring Fireball daily. Maybe the assertion that there would be no 5by5 without Gruber is incorrect.

Best of luck to them both.

UPDATED May 18, 2012, 5:53 PM EDT: Hacker News has a great thread going on why this split happened so suddenly. User dimensionmedia points out the following tweet from Mule Radio Syndicate:

So no bad blood, at least not between Mule and 5by5.

There’s also some speculation that the show’s t-shirts may have something to do with this. It sounds silly to actually write that sentence, but these shirts were a hot commodity in anticipation of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). To add a bit of conspiracy theory to this, Gruber announced a run of Daring Fireball t-shirts today.

A number of people have pointed out the awkward sign-off from that May 2nd episode. William Savona posted the clip on Twitter:

Hacker News user bjplink transcribed it:

{% blockquote %} Benjamin: We’ll be back regular time next week, right? Gruber: I guess so. Benjamin: Ok. Thanks John. Gruber: Adios. {% endblockquote %}

UPDATED May 18, 2012, 10:41 PM EDT: Hacker News user lukeman dug into the Mule Radio app and found this:

So Mule now has The Talk Show and its new iOS app is really a reskinned 5by5 app that never was released (check inside the app bundle and you’ll see the class prefix is FBF and the 5by5 logo is even in there—presumably unused).

Daniel Pasco, the CEO of Black Pixel who makes the app, took to Hacker News to clear up confusion:

{% blockquote %} The application and the source code in question belongs to Black Pixel. We designed and developed the application in-house, at our own expense, and were going to license the binary for free, non-exclusive use on the 5by5 network, but that deal didn’t work out.

Quite some time later, we got to know the folks at Mule Radio, and felt like there might be a good opportunity for our work to see the light of day. So we discussed things with them and licensed the binaries to them for use on their show. {% endblockquote %}

An honest mistake, but one worth noting.

Gruber also interviewed Pasco back in June 2011 when Black Pixel acquired NetNewsWire.

Updated May 19, 2012, 8:01 AM EDT: While there are still no definitive details on what happened with the split, John Gruber, his Wife Amy Jane Gruber and Mike Monteiro took to Twitter last night and basically spelled out that there was nothing amicable about this. A reader also pointed out to me that, before any of this news, Dan Benjamin tweeted to following to a listener asking why there hadn’t been a show in awhile:

A few hours later, Amy Jane Gruber, who tweets a few times a month, started talking about the split:

And finally:

Lonelysandwich is Adam Lisagor, known for his unique Internet advertisements. He is also an Executive Producer of Put This On and a co-host of You Look Nice Today, a weekly conversation podcast he records with Merlin Mann and Scott Simpson. I suppose we could assume she is quoting John, but then that would imply she had a problem with Dan Benjamin. Updated May 20, 2012, 5:32 PM EDT: Commenter HarveyMunchkin points out that this interpretation of this tweet is probably backwards. See below.

Late last night, John responded in his own oblique way with a single tweet related to the split.

The loudest voice on Twitter was Mike Monteiro, who started Mule Radio Syndicate:

He also retweeted a few choice tweets:

There is still no full story as to why the split happened and, other than his single tweet, Dan is yet to acknowledge it. These tweets pretty much confirm this wasn’t a clean, amicable break, which makes you wonder who’s running Mule Radio’s Twitter account.

Updated May 20, 2012, 5:32 PM EDT:

This is the last update I plan to make to this post, but if anything new comes up you can be sure I’ll write a new post about it.

Gruber linked to Paul Ford’s post from January, 2011, “The Web Is a Customer Service Medium” last night, the crux of which is, “‘Why wasn’t I consulted,’ which I abbreviate as WWIC, is the fundamental question of the web.” His chosen excerpt includes “the way that digital groupies claim ownership of their heroes online,” perhaps chiding those who feel blighted by his (or, in fairness, Dan Benjamin’s) actions.

But he also leaves this part out:

The web is not, despite the desires of so many, a publishing medium. The web is a customer service medium. “Intense moderation” in a customer service medium is what “editing” was for publishing.

So, is this story the fault of the “digital groupies” for taking ownership of their heroes, or the fault of the publisher for not mitigating this customer service blip properly?

I wrote my own piece on why this is a story, which I just posted.

Also, I enjoyed this post by Joshua Altmanshofer. It’s a nice, personal reaction to this whole story.

The title of episode 42 of Hypercritical, a weekly technology podcast with John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin, refers directly to Walter Isaacson, the author of the widely acclaimed and seminal biography of Steve Jobs. Plainly, it is called “The Wrong Guy.” John Gruber summarized the 75 minute takedown best:

…his multi-faceted critique of the book is simply devastating. I went into this podcast knowing that I thought the book was flawed, knowing that Siracusa did too, and expecting to be nodding my head in agreement with him throughout the show. But it’s worse than that. Isaacson blew it, a one-time opportunity forever squandered. Jobs picked the wrong guy.

Siracusa’s overarching complaint is that Isaacson had little understanding of the technology industry as a whole, thus he not only botched little details of the story of Jobs’s life, but missed the main point of what made Jobs so different from his contemporaries. He notes that much of the history in the Isaacson’s book has appeared elsewhere in greater detail with more stirring narratives. Unforgivably, in Siracusa’s view, he wasted the unprecedented access to Jobs by asking the wrong questions because he didn’t grasp the enormity of Jobs’s accomplishments.

Earlier this week it was announced that Aaron Sorkin will be writing the film adaptation of Isaacson’s book, which is poised to become the definitive Steve Jobs biopic.¹ Based on his past work, I believe Sorkin is the right guy.

Since his return to the big screen with Charlie Wilson’s War in 2007, Sorkin has worked exclusively on narrative films based on true histories. In fact, his other works are so closely linked to actual, larger than life entities (the presidency, the military, late night broadcast television) that one could argue his universe is one entirely built upon real people and events.²

Sorkin is known for his pin-sharp dialogue and staple “walk-and-talk” circular conversations, but I don’t think that’s what makes him such a sought after writer. The main theme through most of his work is genius and expertise. What makes people strive to be the best? What makes them better at what they do than someone else? He is drawn toward stories that explore unchecked power and those who are smart enough to subvert the rules of the game, whatever the game may be, to their own needs.

Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Gust Avrakotos in Charlie Wilson’s War is ingenious enough that he is capable of stoking a secret war below the radar of the American people. Jonah Hill’s Peter Brand in Moneyball has the ability to see the game of baseball on a plane that no one else in the profession was ready to rise to, and Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane was able to follow his gut well enough to push the revolutionary system through.

And, of course, Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network had the foresight to view social networking not as a product to simply be monetized like his foil, Andrew Garfield’s Eduardo Saverin, did, but as a revolutionary new class of Web site that could conceivably change the way people use the Internet. He compares Facebook to fashion: neither will ever be “finished.”

Sorkin may not always get the facts right, but he is able to tell emotionally compelling stories that bring us closer to understanding what makes successful people tick. Take this monologue from Sam Donovan, the rough around the edges “ratings guy” brought in to help the struggling show at the center of Sports Night, played by William H. Macy. While walking a group of executives around the show’s set, he tells a story of Cliff Gardner, brother-in-law to the inventor of television Philo Farnsworth³, who taught himself to blow glass in order to make tubes for Philo’s invention.

I’ve looked over the notes you’ve been giving over the last year or so, and I have to say they exhibit an almost total lack of understanding of how to get the best from talented people…. You said before that for whatever reason, I seem to be able to exert some authority around here. I assure you it’s not ‘cause they like me. It’s ‘cause they knew two minutes after I walked in the door I’m someone who knows how to do something. I can help. I can make glass tubes.

Speeches like that one are littered throughout Sorkin’s work. There is John Henry’s (Arliss Howard) “bat shit crazy” one in Moneyball and Andrew Shepherd’s (Michael Douglas) “I am the President” diatribe in The American President. With great power, for Sorkin, comes great elocution. These characters are able to articulate what’s hiding in their souls better than their real-world counterparts ever could.

I’ve never been too fond of biopics in general. Lives rarely have a narrative arc that can fit within the time constraints of a feature film, and so most films that chronicle a life do so to the detriment of telling a decent story. Instead they try to cram in the milestones that their subject will be remembered for. Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs suffers from this too, trying to cover the biggest events of his life at the expense of exploring what it is that made him Steve Jobs.

Aaron Sorkin, on the other hand, has made a career out of trying to understand what makes extraordinary people extraordinary. We will probably never fully understand how Steve Jobs turned out to be the innovator he was, but I’ll bet Sorkin is more interested in his inner machinations than getting the specifics of his experiences on screen. That’s what makes him the right guy to pen this film.

“Leaked” set photos, teasers for teaser trailers and poster premiere dates have all become standard bits of movie marketing in the last few years. This one today from Paul Thomas Anderson, who is currently finishing up his 1950s cult-themed film The Master, is probably my favorite of them all. The director emailed photos of the film’s 65mm negative being cut by hand to Anderson fan-site Cigarettes and Red Vines. From his verse-styled accompanying text:

These shots include our lovely
Negative Cutter, Simone, imported
all the way from France to cut 65mm
negative. She does it all with a pair
of scissors from Staples.

The posts author then cropped and inverted the one picture of the film’s actual negative and shared it on Flickr:

I never thought I’d hear about a negative cut again for a major U.S. release. It should come as no surprise that I’m more excited for The Master than any other 65mm release I can recall.

Brilliant scoop from Cigarettes and Red Vines¹ and a great way for Anderson to pump up his cinematically nerdy fans.

{% blockquote -David Bordwell http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/05/13/the-gearheads/ The Gearheads %} A selling point of digital cinema to the creative community was the promise of complete control over the film’s look and sound, so that the audience gets exactly what the filmmaker envisioned. To assure that integrity, the director will have to shoot and finish the project on digital. That will take away an entire dimension of choice—specifically, shooting on film. {% endblockquote %}

Another great long post from David Bordwell. Perhaps the best bit is at the beginning when he teases a new book on the industry-wide digital shift “due out on this site in a few days.” Given the depth of his “Pandora’s digital box” series, color me excited.

I considered linking this Forbes article yesterday that blames HBO for the unprecedented level of piracy Game of Thrones has experienced this season, but something seemed a bit off about it. Thankfully, Dustin Curtis took the time to do something Forbes writer Erik Kain didn’t: some journalism.

Kain cites an interview with Eric Kessler, HBO’s president, in which he claims Internet streaming is a passing fad. Curtis watched the original interview and transcribed large swaths of it. Turns out Kain just made shit up.

Who would believe that the president of HBO is so dense that he would make such an absurd comment? It’s so unbelievable that I went the primary source, a 40 minute video interview with Mr. Kessler, which draws a fascinating picture of HBO’s business strategy. After listening to the entire interview twice, I could not pinpoint where Kessler actually said “temporary phenomenon.” He hinted at the opposite, in fact, and then he articulately rationalized HBO’s position from a business perspective.

I am yet to watch the entire interview myself, but I’m glad someone did and offered some analysis instead of writing a shocking, link-baiting article.¹ Kessler lays out HBO’s business model, which was the missing link that stank up Kain’s original piece. From Forbes:

We subscribe to cable-TV for only a few months of the year – just so we can watch Game of Thrones. But I would happily pay more for a stand-alone HBO GO service year round than the $15 (I think) it costs to tack on HBO to our cable. This would net HBO even more revenue over the course of a year. Quite a bit more, actually.

Bullshit.

I too would prefer to get HBO Go on its own, without a cable subscription, or have the ability to purchase new content on iTunes or Amazon, but I know that HBO makes a great deal of money from agreements with the cable companies. Here’s network president, Kessler, as quoted by Curtis:

There are 60, 70, 80,000 customer service agents on the phone every day, and you know what they’re talking about? They’re talking about HBO. The affiliate covers that cost. The billing systems. That’s the affiliates. If you watch HBO 5 minutes a month or 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, that’s not a cost we have. In addition, we benefit tremendously from the fact that the cable operator bundles HBO into existing packages. So if they offer double-play or triple-play, you know, they say, get HBO free for three months. The ability to market and bundle with the affiliates is very beneficial to us.

HBO is in the business of making content, not building infrastructure. By allowing the cable affiliates to shoulder the costs of delivering and selling the network, they can focus on making great content that people want to watch. Delivering that content is another business altogether.

I don’t entirely agree with Kessler’s assessment of the current state of things. His explanation of why HBO will stick to its plan is because it would be too difficult to branch out and deliver content on its own. I respect that, but I don’t think it’s very forward thinking. It is, however, an extremely considered position. Here’s Kessler again:

You know, you go to Netflix or any others, and there are hundreds of thousands of pieces of content that you’re streaming. We will never compete in that ballpark. We don’t want to compete in that ballpark.

What we compete on is quality. If you want HBO programming, the only place to stream it is through Go or through our affiliate portals.

HBO is perfectly happy with the way things are and feels that the risks of building their own delivery network outweigh the benefits. Clearly, given the caliber and the popularity of their content, they are doing something right.

The premium network will experience extreme piracy as their portal becomes comparatively closed over the next few years, but will that be their undoing? Not yet.

I was skeptical that this post by Joss Whedon on Whedonesque, a fan-run message board, was legit, but now that the Washington Post went ahead and published a story on it I feel pretty confident it was in fact penned by the director of the record-setting box office smash of the moment, The Avengers. The message to his fans is rather shticky¹ but there is one nugget in there I think is worth discussing.

When “asked” about how he would feel if Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises eclipses the runaway financial success of his feature debut, Whedon had this to say:

I’m glad I made you ask that. I will feel sad. But let’s look at the bigger picture, and I can’t say this enough: THIS IS NOT A ZERO SUM GAME. Our successes, whoever has the mostest, are a boon to each other. We’re in the business of proving that superhero movies aren’t just eye-candy (they’re eye-TRUFFLES!). People seem intent on setting us against each other, and though I’m proud to be Woody Strode to Nolan’s Kirk Douglas, I think they’re missing the point. Whatever TDKR does on its first weekend, the only stat that matters to me is the ticket I’M definitely buying. Nolan and Raimi INVENTED the true superhero flick, yo. (Special mention to Jon Favreau and James Gunn.) Happy to be in the mix.

Tongue-in-cheek as his piece is² I think this excerpt comes from a genuine place. Box office numbers have long been the bludgeoning stick of Hollywood’s power set, but that goofiness has seeped into fan culture. Which superhero is better? Well, which one had a better opening weekend? Box office, for many, isn’t just a way for big wigs to flex but a way of taking audience temperature.

I don’t that’s true anymore, chiefly because I don’t get the sense that audiences actually like these movies all that much. It feels like every few weeks a film comes out that is massively, stupendously just good enough that people come out in droves to see it. Whenever I talk to people who love big budget superhero films there is always this sense of apologism, that they love these movies because they’re not “Oscar fodder” or “great movies.” The Avengers, it turns out, isn’t just good enough, it’s more good enough than the other superhero films out there, about $500 million more good enough so far.

Whedon took the opportunity of being at the center of a zeitgeist to ply his fans with this fun “I’m still me” posting, to let them know that he is still the same nerd he was when he came into this game. I can’t help but wonder about his off-handed remark about the invention of the superhero movie though. He’s left out a major contributor to the form and I think there’s more to it than just plain forgetfulness. The modern superhero craze would not exist in its current form without the contributions of Bryan Singer, but I don’t know that fans will agree with that.

We can split hairs about the history of superhero cinema,³ but Singer’s 2000 X-Men changed the landscape of superheroes on film. Suddenly these movies could be darkly existential outings with complex characters, not the gloss and razzle-dazzle of, say, a Joel Schumacher affair. X-Men opens at Auschwitz, for goodness sake. Without fear of fan reprisal, Singer took the source material and made what holds up as a great film, perhaps still the best of the Marvel breed.

I could maybe see a world in which Sam Raimi makes his Spider-Man if Singer had never dipped his toes into comic books, but I see no way that Christopher Nolan would have ever gone in the direction he did with Batman Begins without the existence of X-Men. Singer cut the genre⁴ down to its core and showed other filmmakers that you can make serious work out of these layered yarns. He kicked off this movement and it seems he has gotten lost in the conversation.

Whedon wasn’t making a judgement as to who is the best filmmaker; he was simply talking to his fans on their level, reiterating accepted knowledge to fire them up. Nolan and Raimi and Jon Favreau and James Gunn (whose Super was something of a comic-lover’s wet dream inasmuch as it provided all the gooey raunch that better filmmakers know to leave out) are names that resonate with this set and get them pumped. Singer, on the other hand, is still stupidly paying for Superman Returns, a film I believe was an incredible exhumation of the oft-doomed franchise. But fans didn’t like it and Singer got the boot.⁵

There are so many odd accepted truths about these films, like that Ang Lee’s Hulk was a disaster or that nobody liked Indiana Jones and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I disagree with both of those assertions but I get sideways glances when I pronounce that fact. “You liked that?” Very much so, actually. I don’t know where these homogenized opinions came from. Did the rise of the Internet congeal opinions? Has Rotten Tomatoes infiltrated the minds of moviegoers, making movie goodness a binary metric? Or maybe things were always like this and I’ve only noticed it recently.

The Avengers, for all its heart, is only a so-so film that barely carries the mark of Whedon’s efforts. It does little to move us forward and certainly doesn’t seem like the filmmaker was able to squeeze much of his own personality into the piece.⁶ It’s a box office smash and it’s certainly good enough, but it’s no X-Men (or Superman Returns for that matter). I’d like to see the form elevated instead of being massaged, but ticket sales tell a different story. The more of the same you make the more money you can rake in.

I want Bryan Singer back.

{% blockquote -Stijn Debrouwere http://stdout.be/2012/05/04/fungible/ Fungible %} A movie review on Amazon is not Roger Ebert, and if you’d ask any avid reader, they’d all tell you that the one isn’t even comparable to the other and that they’d never even consider getting their entertainment criticism on Amazon or through a cold, anonymous recommmendation [sic] engine on Netflix. Yet that’s exactly what so many Americans are doing now. Nobody makes any sort of conscious decision to stop reading entertainment journalism and arts criticism. It just turns out that way. {% endblockquote %}

Debrouwere’s May 4th article has been causing a stir across the web because it gets to the heart of the problems with old media. The crux of his argument is that journalism isn’t just changing, it’s being replaced by other kinds of content many of us never anticipated.

He gets so much right about what’s wrong with the old way of thinking about journalism. The above quote, the only bit in his piece that relates to film criticism, nails it. Most readers probably still claim to love reading film reviews, but in reality that’s just not where they’re getting most of their movie advice from.

Read every word of Debrouwere’s piece. It’s a sobering breakdown of where the industry is. He wraps it back around to the notion that by letting go of our old, stodgy outlook of journalism (and other things that used to fill newspapers) we can look forward to a more exciting written future. I’m game.

{% blockquote Eric Kohn http://www.indiewire.com/article/calling-all-college-age-film-critics-indiewire-partners-with-locarno-film-festival-and-the-film-society-of-lincoln-center-for-film-criticism-workshop-in-switzerland Indiwire %} This summer, Indiewire is partnering with the Festival del Film Locarno – aka the Locarno Film Festival – along with the Swiss Association of Film Journalists and the Film Society of Lincoln Center to run a workshop for aspiring film critics.

Indiewire and Locarno will select six college-age participants to attend the two-week festival in early August, where they'll write about the program in a deadline-driven environment. With the support of Gohner Stiftung, the festival will provide housing from July 31 through August 11. Indiewire will contribute with a share of the travel expenses depending on the country of origin of the participant. {% endblockquote %}

Sounds like an amazing opportunity.

If you’re the right age and even remotely interested in writing about film, I suggest you apply.

I heard about Drafts, Agile Tortoise’s iPhone notes app, when it initially launched. I’ve been a fan of the company’s apps for some time. I am still blown away by Terminology’s deep integration with Instapaper, and Phraseology has turned out to be my go-to iPad text app for editing long for pieces. So it was only a matter of time before I got on this train…

Drafts is an app with a very simple premise: write stuff. The interface is extremely spare by design. Launch the app and you are brought immediately to a new, blank note with the keyboard ready for typing. The 1.1 update Agile Tortoise pushed out this week allows you to send your text to a slew of other apps, including OmniFocus, Tweetbot, Sparrow and any app that recognizes plain text via iOS’s stock “Open in…” function. On top of that (and this is what sold me) you can even send your text to Dropbox (more on this in a moment).

I refrained from purchasing Drafts until this week because I didn’t see where it fit into my life. Since the initial version had no form of document sync I thought it would just add clutter and cruft to my workflow. As it turns out, my workflow already was cluttered; Drafts actually alleviated some of that mess.

Here’s a word on Dropbox integration from the Drafts 1.1 release notes:

“Save to Dropbox” action. Note this is not sync, but an export feature. Once you link your Dropbox account, selecting this action exports a timestamped text file to the /Apps/Drafts folder in your Dropbox.

Sync, by its very nature, adds a layer of complexity to any app. When do my documents sync? Where do they go? What happens if the sync gets interrupted? Even at its best, sync can get sloppy fast. Apps that sync over Dropbox seem to interact with it differently. For example, if I’m working on a document in Byword on my Mac and save it to Dropbox, if I leave the Mac app open and then go edit the document elsewhere, say on my iPhone (or even in another app on my Mac), it will cause a conflict. So I have to remember to close all instances of the app, something I learned the hard way. By forgoing sync altogether, that complexity melts away in Drafts.

For years now I have considered true sync an absolute minimum for any plain text editing app that I use. Drafts’ implementation, however, forced me to reconsider why I thought sync was so vital. For the most part, I sync files that I either am currently or soon will be editing. It hadn’t occurred to me that I could, or even should, write something on an iOS device that wouldn’t eventually be finessed into a final piece, that I could just write.

Back before the days of polished iOS writing apps, I always rode the subway with a notebook and a pen, often scrawling whatever came to mind. I rarely even turned that writing into anything later, it was just my way of working through some ideas. While I still keep a Field Notes memo book with me most of the time, I rarely turn to it anymore; all of my mobile writing happens on iOS.

The victim of this change has been my aimless scribblings. Nearly every app I use on iOS utilizes the same basic “document” model. Whatever I write usually needs a name and/or tags so that it can be differentiated from the other documents. As such, I couldn’t open an app and start writing Without feeling like I was working on something. That isn’t the only kind of reading I should be limiting myself to.

Drafts fills this crucial, creative void for me. I have no compunction about launching it and typing, well, anything. What I see, what I feel, what I’m thinking about for a potential future project, anything at all. I didn’t even realize I hadn’t been writing like this anymore, but I’m glad I now have a simple, fast solution for doing so. For 99¢, how could I not have bought it sooner?