2012-02-03
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Main Tunnel on the Hida Tunnel. Taken from a truck for high-lift work, looking down from the tunnel ceiling before opening to the public.
From the new iPad application Tunnel for iPad ($10), with images and captions by engineering photographer Hoichi Nishiyama. (via)
2011-01-22
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2010-11-11
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Harris Tweet - made from genuine Harris Tweed. Yes, it’s the iPad case for the discerning lady or gentleman (thanks, Chris).
2010-10-07
Incompetence, Malice and ereading
I’ve been meaning to write about URLs, text and non-web online publishing for a while, but now I don’t have to, because Craig Mod has, and he did it better than I could have done. (He’s also going to get more attention, which is great, because it’s more likely things will change.)
Some choice quotes (although you should read the whole thing):
Am I reading text? If the text in your ereader isn’t text but is instead an image (.jpeg, .png, etc) then, by golly, your ereader’s incompetent.
Can you copy text? If you can’t, your ereader’s incompetent.
Is there a publicly facing pointer (URL, etc) by which you can reference the content in your ereader?
As Mod notes, it’s amazing that things like the iPad Wired app, which fail all three of these points, have been so highly praised. However, I’m more inclined to put malice (or its close relation, “business reasons”) as the reason for some of these decisions, in some apps. Despite the fact that Twitter, Facebook and email can drive readers to a site, it seems some companies would rather their magazines and newspapers lived in hermetic isolation.
At least the Guardian’s iPhone app, which is far from flawless, has the ability to email a link and post to various services, although (oddly) it fails to have a simple “Open in Browser” option. From what I’ve seen, neither the Wired app, nor any of the Mag+ publications, have such obviously useful features.
At least, as Mod notes, we’re only six months into the life of the iPad (and barely a couple of years into widely-used mobile devices). Perhaps with time will come a realisation that locking things down isn’t the best idea.
¹ Hat tip to dan w for the links.
² In one of his footnotes, Mod approving notes Instapaper, which I agree gets almost everything right. Hopefully at some point I’ll write about the (somewhat weak) social aspects of the app, though.)
2010-06-20
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Russell Beattie: The end of WIMP and the rise of Touch
You could argue this is stating the obvious, but this is still a worthwhile article, since the obvious is often easy to miss.
2010-06-09
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2010-06-02
The Future Of Magazines
I have a worrying feeling that Instapaper isn’t the future of magazines; it’s a short, brief possible now of magazines, for those of us who understand it.
Yesterday evening I started reading this Wired article, which I found via the Instapaper front page. I got home to find it was also in the print edition of Wired UK, but of course I’ll finish it on the phone, on the way to or from work. I also read far more on the Guardian in Instapaper than in its own app. Generally, I seem to be able to find more than I can manage during weekdays from my delicious network and other recommendations.
Meanwhile, every publisher seems to want to get their icon onto my phone (and, if and when I get one, an iPad). The Times are pushing their app on video screens in the Tube; Wired and Popular Science are just two of many magazines which hope to bring not just interactivity and a nice experience, but that promised land of a sustainable business model.
But, but; does that mean that each of them ends up in a silo, or a glass box, with the web sites turning into vestigal stubs, paginated into unusability? If that happens, where does that leave my Read Later bookmarklet? And are those of us who do graze on articles and reviews and, yes, blog posts, no matter where they come from (and with less concern for who published them than whether they’re interesting) just too small a tribe to be on publisher’s radar?
I hope I’m being overly alarmist here. I hope the app fad dies down, and that the focus returns to good simple texts on generally available web sites. Still, I’m a little worried.
2010-04-26
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2010-04-05
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The dumbing down of the American automobile has provided for people with passion and understanding for computers but disinterest toward driving to make a lazy analogy about the positive march of progress. It’s wrong. A specific aspect of the car analogy (the engine) is somewhat appropriate, but to say ‘the iPad is a car’ is to suggest that computing is going to become a dull, tedious, more dangerous experience, and I’m pretty sure that isn’t what anyone means. (Although, I am interested to see if the comfort that comes from a seamless, risk-free computer makes users even more vulnerable to phishing scams…)
I’ve used an iPad, and it was an illuminating and inspiring experience. I’ve driven an automatic car, it was shit. An iPad is not a car.
”Ben Ward: The iPad is not a car
The quote sums up the (probably overlong) post pretty well, but if you don’t know about cars, it might be worth a read. Personally, as someone who doesn’t drive, I wish people would stop using the lazy (and, as Ben points out, often troublesome) car analogies. Is there really no other technology of the last century you can compare computing to?
2010-04-03
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styledeficit on the iPad.
My take? The publishers want it to be CD-ROMs. They want it to save their businesses. It might, but I wouldn’t bet on it, and anyway, that’s not what’s interesting. What everyone else does - the everyone else that built so much of the content on the web that we care about daily - that’s interesting.
Is it closed? It’s more closed than an Apple ][, but then so is pretty much every computer of the last thirty years. I’m sure there were people in the 1980s who would have argued you can’t be creative with a mouse.
Will a proprietary format win? Well, maybe if you count Objective C, and maybe for digital magazines, but the web is powerfully corrosive.
Am I worried? No. I’m sort of excited. But it’ll take a while for us to really see what happens.
