2010-06-09
post/679751537
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
post/550937188
2010-04-05
post/497842757
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
post/493100352
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.
2010-03-22
post/466005599
Amazon Kindle Apps for Tablet Computers - I saw you liked a page curl in your page curl, so I curled your page.
2010-02-04
post/370555168
Dick Brass in an editorial for the New York Times:Microsoft’s Creative Destruction.
After my post about possible iPad competitors, it was suggested that I was premature in ruling out Microsoft, with a link to a Gizmodo story about the Courier tablet project. However, years of experience have led me to dismiss anything Microsoft produces as a mere demo; for example, WinFS never shipped. Even if Courier does form the basis for a device’s OS, I don’t see the company being able to abandon the well-worn Windows metaphors.
Meanwhile, this editorial is a good summary of the problems Microsoft has. Sure, it’s still profitable (on the back of Windows/Office), but even their one undeniable hit of the last decade, the Xbox, isn’t dominant in the same way, and they have plenty of failures to point to. Perhaps the most telling quote is just after the one I’ve used above:
“Despite the certainty that an Apple tablet was coming this year, the tablet group at Microsoft was eliminated.”
2010-02-02
post/367094485
Steven Johnson in his article for Time: Apple iPad Shortcomings Spark Questions About Updates.
I suspect that iWork was, on some levels, a bad choice of software to demonstrate. iMovie feels creative to people, whereas Numbers and Pages don’t, even though I’d place bets on there being more published novels written in Pages than there have been big-screen films produced in iMovie.
Apart from iLife (and other media tools), the other missing link in creativity is a programming environment, but I also expect that to show up eventually (although maybe it’ll be more like Dashcode or Coda than Xcode; we’ll see.) Certainly, I can’t see a reason the iPad should be treated as a read-only device.
(Bonus points for the OpenDoc references, by the way.)
2010-01-31
post/363187108
I’d completely forgotten about JooJoo (neé the Crunchpad) until I saw a sarcastic post to Twitter about it.
Looking at the price ($499, the same as the iPad) and specs (which value a larger, widescreen display in preference to battery life, or storage capacity), I have to say this doesn’t look like it’ll be a success. Still, it’ll be another interesting data point for how to (if you?) can compete against Apple.
post/363181850
Brooke Crothers, a couple of weeks ago, in Tablet runs Motorola-Verizon software, Android. Maybe Google might not want to compete with a tablet, but ICD/Motorola/Verizon might.
On the other hand, even this short demo feels like it shows a lot of the dangers for an Apple competitor. For example, the commentary on the video states that the device can run either Android or Windows CE: why not pick just one? The photos app looks nowhere near as straightforward or, for want of a better word, pleasurable as the iPad’s demo has.
On top of that, the fact that multiple companies are involved is usually a bad sign. Still, it’ll be interesting to see if this can resist the juggernaut when (if?) it ships.
