The application is very pretty – and that counts, this is iOS!  At launch, you’re presented with a set of example projects, and you can create your own (I don’t think touch-and-hold is a great way to get the contextual menu for delete/duplicate/copy into new project, but it works well enough).

Inside of a project, there are two views: the code editor and the execution window.  The editor is good – it’s not as good as Textastic (and there’s no configuration possible – not even changing font size via pinch & zoom), but it’s perfectly usable (the worst part are the tabs at the top where you can switch between files, where the tabs are bizarrely small).  There are elements of the editor that are superb: if the editor can tell that the function arguments are a colour, then you get a colour wheel, if the argument is a sprite, then you get a sprite picker, and so on.  That’s the way to make coding on an iPad faster and more enjoyable.  The keyboard, like Prompt and Textastic, has an additional top row with keys you’re likely to need (paired quotation marks and brackets, +=, and so on – it’s interestingly a very different set of keys to Textastic (both have their advantages).  Also available via this extra keyboard row is a very nicely formatted set of help documents that explain the methods that are available and how to use the app in general.

Applications are developed in Lua - this isn’t a language I’ve done a lot in, but I’ve seen enough and it’s similar enough to other languages that it’s easy to get familiar with it.  I sincerely hope that the developer plans to offer additional languages (Python!) in the future (perhaps as in-app purchases?).  Most importantly, there are methods available that expose the iOS interface to the code (especially touch information and drawing routines).  These are somewhat limited compared to writing an iOS Objective C application in Xcode on a Mac, but perfectly usable in this context.

Once the application is complete, you can switch to an execution window.  Two thirds of the screen are the application’s display, with a sixth for textual output (e.g. debugging) and a sixth for parameters (e.g. sliders that you can use to pass values to the application – these are extremely easy to use in the code).  Unfortunately, given Apple’s restrictions on apps, this is all that you can do with an application at present.

The app is well made and does what it aims to do very well.  There’s clearly room for expansion (minor interface tweaks, more languages, more access to iOS features) as well.  The remaining question is whether there is any practical use to the app, given that you’re restricted to running your applications within the Codea app itself.

(It’s possible that this restriction will be lifted or weakened in the future – with Apple it’s difficult to tell.  It does seem likely that there could be a version of the app that allowed you to export (as a collection of text files) and import code, just as an application like Textastic can – or even some sort of seamless sharing via Dropbox or iCloud.  This would make it easy to share applications, but you’d still need to run them in Codea itself, unless they were pure Lua and didn’t use iOS at all.  However, it seems feasible that someone could then write an emulator/interpreter for Codea apps for OS X (replacing touch with the mouse), so you could run your apps externally if you liked.  It seems very unlikely that you’ll ever be able to turn them into full-fledged iOS applications).

The app demos very well – it shows a glimpse into the future where not all development is done on traditional desktop/laptop systems.  However, I can’t see how it can be of any practical use – except for education.

For education, this seems like an extremely valuable application.  In an educational context, it doesn’t matter if the app can run standalone or not (it would be nice if you could easily share it with someone else, like a teacher).  The interface is approachable, and the language friendly, and there’s potential for creating very impressive apps.  I would love to teach a short course where the students did all their development in Codea (perhaps on a beach away from a typical “lab” environment…), assuming that the students all had iPads already (and we have an AppleTV and large TV to demo things to each other).  I hope that someone does do this (and writes it up somewhere where we can read about it!).

This application is amazing.  Even if you have no interest in programming, you should buy it to support the developer.  If you do have an interest, you should have bought it already.

Even before I had an iPad, I’d mostly stopped using my laptop.  The only time I did use it was when travelling overnight (I’d take it if I had to work while away, or in case there was an emergency and I had to work on something).  I don’t need a full computer for this – typing on a software keyboard on a 9.7 inch screen is perfectly adequate for emergency work, and when combined with a bluetooth keyboard (which is small enough to easily pack, and I already own) and a monitor (now a TV via AirPort mirroring) it’s quite useable as a work-while-travelling device.

The only missing component was the software: for a very long time there was nothing available.  There are oodles of word processing applications, note takes, and there are even a few HTML editors – but nothing designed for real programming work.  I’m not sure why this is, but I suspect that most professional programmers already have something along the lines of a small MacBook Pro or Air and find it convenient to travel with that, so wouldn’t use an iPad, even in these situations.  The best available was, unfortunately, using SSH (this was before Prompt, too) and doing the word in a command line on a server somewhere.

At $14, Textastic is expensive for an iOS app, but cheap for a programmers tool (it’s definitely worth the price).  This is a text editor, not an IDE, so you don’t get a debugger or interactive prompt or anything like that – it would be difficult to do that anyway given Apple’s restrictions, and I prefer a dedicated programmers text editor to an IDE anyway.  (You can easily switch to other apps that together provide most of what an IDE does).

It’s a good editor – it does syntax highlighting for many languages (including Python and everything else I’m interested in), shows line numbers, and you can switch the file’s encoding and line ending choice.  You can quickly jump to “symbols” (e.g. method), although I generally just scroll since I know where I’m going.  There’s a decent find (and replace), and you can choose from DejaVu Sans Mono, Courier New, Luxi Mono, Monofur or Inconsolata for the font.  There are a variety of colour themes, there’s control over tab settings (including soft tabs) and word-wrap.  Although you can set the font size, you can also just pinch & zoom to get the size that you’re after, which is far superior to manually picking a size.

Generally the app does what it should: it gets out of the way and lets you get on with writing/editing the code.  There’s an additional top row in the keyboard that offers symbols that you’re likely to need (this oddly scrolls horizontally to fit everything in) so that you don’t have to toggle between keyboards often (except for numbers) if you’re not using an external keyboard.

Where the app falls down for me is where iOS in general performs badly: moving data between applications.  You can share files to the app (e.g. from Dropbox), and there are actually many ways of getting files in and out (via WebDAV, iTunes, creating local files), but you’re left with the same issue that lots of iOS apps have: you end up with duplicates.  To its credit, the app tries to address this (e.g. it can know that a file you’re editing belongs in a particular Dropbox location and sync the changes back), but at the end of the day it’s clearly a hack.  The app is still useable, but this does mean that I more often read code in it than write it (it’s far better for reading code than the Dropbox app is).

It seems obvious to me how to fix this problem (I don’t understand why it isn’t already the case).  Surely nearly every programmer that would use this app has their code stored in some sort of repository (CVS, SVN, Git, Mercurial, Bazaar, etc).  The repository is the file system.  The app has a working copy checked out, and you can commit changes back to the repository.  The app doesn’t need to support every action that the VCS/DVCS offers – really just (in SVN terms) add/remove/update/checkout (and perhaps propset) – if you need to do something else, then you use a dedicated SVN/Git/etc app).  This completely solves the issue of multiple copies of files, because that’s exactly what these tools are designed to handle.

Unfortunately, the app would need to support at least SVN, Git, Mercurial, and Bazaar since there’s a lot of diversity at the moment.  However, it seems likely that there are libraries that can be used (even in iOS) that would handle a lot of the grunt work.  If the app let me check out a SVN working copy, make changes, and then commit them back, it would be absolutely perfect (I’d pay ten times the price if the app supported this).

If you need a programmers text editor on iOS, then I highly recommend Textastic.

SSH isn’t pretty, but somehow Prompt is.  Although there’s a lot of space required for the keyboard, connections, and settings, Prompt somehow makes the remote display quite large enough to be readable (and if you use an external keyboard, then it’s perfectly sized, and you get the control keys and arrow keys working as you’d expect).  Connection management is very simple, and all the settings you’d expect (initial command, prompt string, etc) are available.

The keyboard includes an additional top row that has the keys that you need to use most frequently in SSH (escape, control, tab, /, -, |, @, arrow keys) and are missing from the standard iOS keyboard.  It even autocompletes using the shell history, saving typing long paths and commands repeatedly.

There’s very little I can say about the app other than if you will ever need/want to SSH from your iPad, then this is, without any doubt, the application to have.  It’s $11, but worth easily five times that much; I’d grumble and probably try and convince work to contribute to it, but I’d pay $100 for it.  If you don’t know what SSH is, then this is not the app for you.

(Before Prompt, I used iSSH which also does VNC – I use VNC a lot less frequently, but still need it occasionally, so now I need to figure out which is the best VNC app, which are unfortunately all fairly pricey.  If you have suggestions, let me know!)

Aspects of the app are good – the templates are very customisable and generally nice, and it’s a pretty simple process to create a card.  The pricing ($6.50 including postage) is extremely reasonable considering the cost of a decent (not customised) card elsewhere.

However, there are considerable flaws: the purchasing is odd – it doesn’t use the standard in-app purchasing system (I can’t understand why not), so you’re prompted for more information than simply your App Store password; the App is bizarrely iPhone/iPod resolution only (nearly the same interface would work perfectly well on an iPad, where you’ve got access to all your high-quality photos via Photo Stream anyway); and the cards take forever to arrive.

The latter is the most significant flaw, of course.  In a few cases (e.g. “thank you” cards) it doesn’t matter how long the card takes to arrive; in most cases (birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas, …) timing is actually very important.  We sent a card while visiting the Auckland Museum at the end of the school holidays, and it took over a week to arrive; one has apparently been sent to us (around the same time) and has yet to arrive.  The “shipping notification” email arrives days before the card does, indicating that the problem isn’t in the printing, but in the delivery (presumably they are being printed in Australia and there’s some sort of international shipping delay causing issues).

It’s likely that this is a problem specific to New Zealand (and perhaps isolated other countries).  Unfortunately, that does mean that it’s less likely that it’ll be quickly fixed.  We’ll probably try this again in a couple of weeks, and see if the speed has improved – if not, then the app is only useable in rare circumstances, which is unfortunate, because we’d likely otherwise use it quite frequently.

Where the app is occasionally useful is that it can be connected to your MySKY box, and you can remotely schedule a program to be recorded.  This is essential for those times when you’re away from home and remember that a new program is starting in a few hours and you forgot to schedule it.  The scheduling is limited (e.g. you can’t set up a series link), but it’s good enough for these situations.

As you’d expect from SkyTV, the process of setting this up is incredibly painful.  You need to enter your SkyTV account details and the unique ID of the smart card in the MySKY box, and although this should be a smooth process, it never works first time – and then, without anything being done at all, will ‘magically’ start working at some later date (I’m guessing that the linking process takes time, and the app fails to tell the user this, leading them to believe they did something wrong).

Once it is finally set up, though, it’s very simple to use – just find the program you’re interested in recording and a few taps later it’s scheduled.  Test it at home first, of course!  (But not right away, because, as above, it doesn’t appear to work until a few hours have passed since the initial setup).

If you’ve got MySKY and an iOS device, then this is absolutely an app that you should have installed (it is free, after all!).  If you don’t have MySKY, but you do want to use a TV Guide on iOS, then this is the more comprehensive one for New Zealand listings, so (again given that it’s free), it’s worth having.

Note that the app doesn’t offer any sort of iSKY (on demand video) access.  It would be extremely nice if that was added in the future, but I’m skeptical that it will be.

PyPad lets you create multiple modules and execute each of them.  However, only a subset of the standard library is available, and there’s nothing iOS-specific available (so you can’t access the camera, or touch information, and so on).  Getting code in and out of the app is done via copy and paste.  The standard keyboard is provided, with start/pause/stop buttons.

I keep the app installed so that I can (via AirPlay mirroring) demonstrate simple Python snippets.  However, if I have an Internet connection available, then I can do that in Prompt (ssh’d to a server that has Python installed) much more elegantly.

The app is clearly limited by Apple’s restrictions as to what’s acceptable for iOS.  However, it does seem like it could do much more (e.g. see Codea) if more of the standard library was available (this would mean rewriting chunks, I presume) and if there were special iOS-specific modules available for accessing things specific to the device (especially for accessing touch and graphical output).  It could accept .py and text files from other applications, making it easy to get code in (e.g. from Dropbox) and share files (as text) – although perhaps that crosses Apple’s boundary for what’s ok.  It would be nice to include the Python documentation, too (I have a separate app for this, but it makes sense to have it in once place).

The app is only $2, so if you’ve any interest in Python on iOS, then I’d recommend buying it to have a look and to encourage more development.  You probably won’t end up using it that much, however.

I gather the interface strongly resembles the dedicated TomTom hardware.  It’s useable, but not as clean or elegant as I imagine Apple’s app will be when they finally reveal it (but I strongly suspect that Apple’s one will be iPhone only, at least at first).  Given that most of the time you’re glancing at the map or just listening to the turn-by-turn directions, the interface isn’t overly important anyway.

It’s done well with directions so far – no errors, and easily correcting when mistakes are made.  The maps have sufficient coverage even in Warkworth and Ahuroa, and being a proper navigation app there’s no need for a cellular connection (unlike with the built-in Maps app), which is essential in Ahuroa, since there’s barely any coverage.

The app is certainly better than having to rely solely on another person to navigate.  Although I don’t often need instructions (since I’m usually driving somewhere I’m familiar with), in the cases where I do, it’s useful to have, and over the course of a year, I think that’s probably worth $100.  (The monthly traffic subscription, however, is not – I haven’t even bothered trying this out).

I’ve tried various free/cheap navigation apps, and although they’re ok, they’re absolutely inferior to this one.  I’d recommend it to anyone that thinks that they’ll get $100 of value out of it, especially over the next year (it seems very likely that iOS 6 will have a built-in app).

The setup is essentially like Risk: a board of locations (countries in Risk) that each have a number of armies and varying numbers of neighbouring locations.  The options in a turn are similar as well: attack, fortify (i.e. move armies from one country to a neighbouring one), or pass.  Even in fortification Quarrel beats Risk – rather than only being able to fortify at the end of your turn, you can do it throughout the turn, but once you’ve moved armies from one location to another, neither of those can then fortify or attack later in the turn (they can receive armies from another neighbour).

Attacking is where Scrabble comes in – rather than relying on the luck of the dice, like in Risk, each player is given the same eight letters (that always form at least one eight-letter word, as well as many smaller ones) and whoever makes the highest scoring word wins the battle.  Not only is there more skill (and less luck) than in Risk, there’s more than in Scrabble, too, since you always have the same letters to work with as your opponent.  The length of the word you can make depends on how many armies you have (so if you have three and your opponent has seven, you’ll need a pretty awesome three-letter word). All the ‘double letter’, ‘triple word’, ‘use a letter from another word’, ‘make multiple words at once’, and hard limits to board size elements from Scrabble are gone: these are the parts I hate most about Scrabble, so for me that’s a clear win.  It’s all about making the best word (i.e. longest and with the highest point letters).

Speed is also a factor – if your word is the same number of points as your opponent’s, then whoever finished first wins.  This comes into play quite a lot – it’s often better to go for a high scoring word really quickly than take a bit longer trying to find the best word possible.  Games can also be against the clock, which adds considerably to the difficulty.

There are many other subtle elements to the game, which clearly indicate that it has been well thought out.  In addition, the graphics and sound are very well done (cutesy little stylised fighters).

I’d recommend this game to anyone that likes word games and/or strategy games like Risk.  There’s very little luck involved (none, really, if you exclude the computer opponent behaviour), and a lot of strategy required.  Games can be quite simple but also range to very difficult.

I’d love to see a future version include a multiplayer (i.e. multiple iPad) game option.  It could also possibly borrow the concept of “continents” from Risk and have some additional larger boards where there are locations that give additional reinforcements if you’re holding the entire island.

Firstly, I would be shocked if more than two thirds of government agencies were not already using some form of open-source software already.  For a start, it’s nearly impossible to use the Internet without accessing something running Linux or Apache.

More importantly, it makes no sense at all to aim for governments to be using more open-source software.  They should be using the software most suited to the job at hand, whether closed source or open source.  What benefit is there in requiring open source?  If they think it’s cheaper, then they should look more closely, because it’s often not.  The same applies to being more secure.  There are absolutely situations where the best choice is an open-source one – but there are absolutely situations where closed source is better.  I don’t want government employees forced to use less than the best tools because of some ideological burden placed on them by someone wanting a cushy job for the next three years.

They have a few other requirements:

Software developed in-house will be made publicly available.  A nice idea, but (a) I’m fairly sure that most of the in-house software is of no use to anyone else, (b) I suspect most of the software you’d assume was in-house was actually developed by non-government contractors, and, most significantly, (c) not all code is ready to be shared.  If a government sysadmin writes a quick script to do a job, do we really want to add the pressure that it will be publicly available (and given that it’s the government, it’s reasonable to assume that someone will be looking at everything).  As long as the software does the job, that’s good enough (in the “in-house” context).  What would be worthwhile is ensuring that government agencies consider whether software should be released to the public – I’m sure that there is some that would be of general interest and where the quality is suitably high.

Agencies considering technology purchases over $2 million would first evaluate whether publicly available technology would substantially meet their requirements.

Ugh.  A technology purchase over $100 should involve consideration of whether there was an existing public tool that could do the job – this should always be the case, not just for obscenely costly jobs.

Labour would also create a government “app store” to provide “a short circuit for fledgling NZ software developers to get to market” which would allow local developers to submit software for purchase by government agencies. Labour promises to ensure “informed neutrality” in software purchasing with due consideration of open-source software.

I really don’t understand what this is trying to achieve.  There’s no indication that local developers would be preferred (only, with no reasoning, open-source software), so how does this help local developers?  This sounds like a way to spend a lot of money for very little gain.

What they are missing are the most important “open”s: open standards (and open formats) and open data.

Governments should only be using software that produces and accepts files that are in formats that are open standards (this includes Microsoft Office documents).  We do have a “New Zealand official interoperability framework definition” already, but it could be significantly expanded on (see what other governments require, for example).  Everything the government produces should be in some sort of open format and everywhere the government accepts data at least one open format should be accepted.  Open standards apply to other areas too, but open formats is the key in “ICT”.

We have a limited commitment to open data already (see data.govt.nz).  This should be significantly expanded on – every data set that the government creates (and there are a huge number of these) should be publicly available, so that (a) we have transparency, and (b) other researchers can benefit from the data.  The only limitation is privacy – unfortunately even when a data set appears to be anonymous it is often possible to identify individuals - it would be worth spending money on figuring out how to get past this so that we can share just about everything without breaching individual people’s privacy.

I have mixed feelings about voluntary student membership.  In general, I much prefer the idea that students get to choose whether they are members – I would hate to be forced to join an employment union.  However, I was Vice-President of the Students’ Association for a year, and I know that at least some of the work that they do is very valuable, unlikely to be done by anyone else, and with apathetic students extremely difficult to get members to voluntarily sign up (even with great marketing, and great reasons, and a lot of work).

I attended Massey Albany in the early years; when I started there there wasn’t a students’ association specifically for Albany, just membership in MUSA (the Palmerston North based association).  I remember attending the meeting where we voted on creating a separate association specifically for Albany (in my first year, I think, and not because I cared in those days, but because I was in the hostels and we got dragged to anything that needed numbers).

My experience therefore is with a very young organisation, at a young, fairly small, campus.  I’m sure that the well-established associations at the large institutions work quite differently (we did have some contact with them, but not enough to get a sense of how things actually are – and this is over 10 years ago now).

VSM was a big deal in my day too.  Waikato had gone voluntary and basically fallen apart, and there was the big vote about whether we should be voluntary or not.  The only association I recall going voluntary at that time was Auckland University’s.

Often one of the arguments against compulsory student membership is that the association is used as a political vehicle for views that students do not necessarily share. One of the aspects of the executive committee in my year as VP that I particularly liked was that the political views of the members of the committee ranged from ‘left’ to ‘right’. My political views (at the time at least!) were fairly opposite to the President’s, but we worked well together and the range (also of other members) meant that we association wasn’t pushing generic political agenda – we wanted students making informed decisions of their own, and to provide services that we believed were of general benefit to the student community.

It’s unfortunate that this isn’t always the case.  However, the apathetic nature of students makes it easy to change this.  Get a couple of hundred students together to vote in someone that has similar views to yourself, and you’ll end up with either (a) a nicely diverse group, or (b) vast numbers of students voting (highly unlikely).  It’s possible that the result of a diverse group is just endless bike-shedding and bickering, but also possible that you get a great politically neutral group of leaders.

At the time (possibly still) Albany was a campus with students unusually focused directly on course work.  There were more ‘mature’ students (with existing lives to get back to), local students (who had an existing local community), and students that were simply uninterested in anything on campus other than classes (in many cases, even those!).  There was no large group of young students who moved to the area to attend the university, who are often the most active group on campus in terms of extra-curricular activities.

This was a particular challenge.  The ‘traditional’ roles of a student’s association, for example, include a lot of activities that simply weren’t of interest to these students.  The question we repeatedly faced was whether it was our role to offer them to those students that did want them (and thereby foster on-campus life), or whether it was more appropriate to recognise that our students didn’t actually want us to do these things.

The two most obvious examples were Orientation (from the students’ association point of view, more a giant party than anything else) and the student bar (Scholars’ – later sadly renamed to something I can’t remember).  I personally have extremely fond memories of my early university days that involve Orientation and the bar – but I know that only a small proportion of students attended Orientation or regularly used the bar, and yet their association fee supported both.

(In theory, both of these could make a profit or at least break even, and so the cost would be less of an issue.  However, even without the cost, there’s a lot of time involved and that’s time that the association could be using elsewhere).

Many of the functions that the association provides could move to the institution.  For example, handling disputes (academic grievances) typically involves a representative from the association.  I was involved with these both making a complaint myself (I didn’t use a rep) and representing other students who had problems with staff. This honestly is a difficult process: the staff member is likely to be combative (given that things have escalated to this point), even when they are wrong.  It’s scary and complicated and it really does help to have someone that knows the system there to help you.

Most institutions already have mentor and support staff who could take over this role; many of these are or were students themselves.  They might even do a better job (being properly paid and not subject to elections) than a student representative.  Cases where they wouldn’t be able to be unbiased enough to support the student would be rare.

In my time, members of the executive committee handled this job.  It probably would have been better as a paid non-elected position (we had a restructuring plan that would have made this so, but it was discarded by the next executive). This is probably more ideal than the employer being the institution, but I doubt it would make much difference in the vast majority of cases.

Similar to this was the ‘welfare’ role: basically giving grants to students with financial hardship.  This absolutely should have been a paid position (again we planned to do this: I think it did get done at some point in the last decade). Again, I think that the institution could take over this role (they’re already involved in giving out money) without much difficulty.

I do wonder what is gained in the scenario where the bulk of the work done by students association (with essentially compulsory funding) is simply moved to the university (with compulsory funding).  The cost will increase (because student representatives generally work for pitiful amounts of money), bureaucracy will increase, and the service might get a little worse.  Students still end up paying the same amount (if not more), it’s just a different bunch of people signing the checks.  With these apolitical roles, why would students care who ran these services, as long as they were available?

(To be truly voluntary, you’d switch to a ‘user-pays’ model, where you pay for assistance with academic grievances, and some of your hardship grant would go to paying for the person that organised it; if you didn’t use these services you wouldn’t pay anything.  I like ‘user-pays’ for a lot of things, but this sounds awful to me).

The “student press” is often cited as a loser in this change.  In my day, our executive resurrected the student paper, and although it wasn’t a huge success (and there were certainly lots of issues that arose from it) it served a useful function and I think it was the right thing to do.  It did cost a lot of money, although in theory this could also be something that broke even.

A lot has changed with the media in the last decade.  It’s already possible for any student to easily have a public voice – they don’t need to be published in the student paper to do so.  I don’t really know what “student press” have to offer that students can’t do for themselves (more-or-less for free) if they’re interested.  The largest cost of the paper in my time was the wages: realistically waged writing positions are dying everywhere.

If a group of students (within the students’ association or not) created a (predominately online) publication that was worth reading, then advertising (much easier to organise online than in print) would pay something towards their time.  If they were extremely good then there would be real money (there are plenty of independent writers earning a reasonable or good living).

Doing actual journalistic work (rather than opinion pieces, comics, fluff pieces, reprinting news, etc) is valuable and takes significant effort.  The “student press” is likely to struggle to still do this – but publications everywhere are struggling to still do this.  When someone figures out a solution, the students can use it like everyone else.  In the meantime, surely at least the journalism students would like to have a vehicle for their work?

Other than advocacy, welfare, campus life, and the press, the main activity in my day was supporting clubs & societies (a branch of campus life, I guess).  In my year, the university also had employees responsible for this, and we worked alongside them.  We did a better job than they did, probably because we cared more and were ‘closer to the ground’, but I know that wasn’t the case every year (on average, the university employees probably did a better job).

Clubs were difficult because of the nature of students at Albany (as above).  It takes effort to start a club and help from someone (both in organisation and money) really does help.  If people aren’t interested enough to do it on their own, does that mean it’s not worth doing?  I think that someone should provide some assistance, but not a lifeline (if there just isn’t interest, then it has to die). Like welfare and grievances, it doesn’t really matter who provides this assistance.  Given that institutions are very competitive with each other (a separate problem!) showing that you have a great campus life, with many thriving clubs, is probably marketable enough that it’s worth doing.  Once a club is going, it really doesn’t need the association for much, though.

Personally, I think my ideal would be voluntarily membership where the default is to be a member (i.e. voluntary opt-out).  This way the students that just don’t care either way get the benefits, but anyone that wants to save the (generally very low) membership fee or has some sort of political opposition can just untick a box when enrolling at the institution.  Around the box would be two ads – one from the Students’ Association explaining how you get great value for money, and one (from ?) arguing the opposite point of view.