Fred Wilson has changed his mind about the iPad:
It feels less like a computer than any computing device I’ve owned. It’s easy on me in a way that the other devices are not. So I’m now convinced that tablets will have an important place in our homes and our lives.
The question is not-and never has been-do you need an iPad. The question is after you’ve had one, would you miss it. The answer is yes.
Freedom from Porn
Steve Jobs offers iPad users “freedom from porn.”
And yet the iPads’ measures will offer an unprecedented porn experience.
An ad-busting from Berlin Mitte.
The Future of Magazines?
Wired just released an iPad version of the magazine a few days ago and it seems to be selling quite well. Apparently it basically consists of a giant 500 mb archive of PNG images.
The magazine is already being heavily scrutinized. Interfacelab has posted a widely linked, scathing review:
The only real differentiation between the Wired application and a multimedia CD-ROM is the delivery mechanism: you download it via the App Store versus buying a CD-ROM at the now defunct Egg Head store at your local strip mall. And I really mean that comparison. For all of the interactivity that was touted in the Flash prototype, what we’ve really ended up with is a glorified slide show. Instead of the “Next” and “Previous” buttons you might have been used to on those old CD-ROMs of yore, you instead swipe left and right to change pages (well *cough* images of pages).
[...]
The problem with these XML + images architectures is that they are essentially reinventing HTML with no added benefit. When I showed the Wired app to a colleague of mine, someone I consider to be one of the top HTML/Javascript developers in NYC, his assessment was the same: Why the heck didn’t they use HTML5? We stepped through each “page” of the Wired application, looked at each interactive piece – but failed to find anything that ruled out the use of HTML and JavaScript.
Information Architects also posted some very critical analysis:
First, the paper magazine was crammed into the little iPad frame. To compensate for the lack of interactive logic, this pretty package was provided with a fruity navigation. In the end it was spiced with in-app links, plucked with a couple of movies and salted with audio files (“interactive”). Then it was off to marketing. And it sold 24,000 copies. Dammit. It’s the Nineties all over again.
For the most part i think these articles are spot on, yet on the other hand, they miss one crucial point entirely. When I see these new magazine apps on the iPad, i inevitably have to compare them to their corresponding websites, and let’s be honest – the Wired website is a rather depressing pile of tiny annoyances and technological frailties. It seems to have constantly decayed and deteriorated ever since Douglas Bowman’s excellent 2002 redesign.
I find this typical of professional publishing ventures on the web. For some weird reason, the publishing industry seems to have come to believe that in order to make money online, they need to treat their readers like shit. They are splitting articles across a gazillion separate pages to increase pageviews and they are forcing terribly invasive Flash and banner ads on their readers until their eyeballs explode. At the same time, their websites look noticeably worse than their print products and it appears that they are spending considerably less effort on creating a polished and compelling online product. As far as the web is concerned, they’ve already given up. It’s really no wonder that people aren’t willing to pay for something like this.
And that’s why i’m excited about these new efforts by the publishing industry, like Wired magazine or Popular Science: Because they are once again striving to deliver high quality digital products and a good user experience. It’s no surprise really that they are reinventing the wheel for no good reason and that they are building platforms on terrible technological foundations – the same was true some twelve years ago on the web. But at least they are trying to produce something of high quality again. Now let’s wait and see how this turns out in the long run.
Added later (June 01): Aegir Hallmundur of Ministry of Type weighs in as well.
Even later (June 04): Joe Clark has an interesting post about this as well.
To compete with Google, Apple has to make Mobile Me free
Sachin’s Posterous – To compete with Google, Apple has to make Mobile Me free:
Why do I need to USB sync my new iPhone or iPad with iTunes before I can use it? [...] Mobile Me should be the true hub for all your data, while your laptop should be just another client device with equal rights as your iPhone or iPad. All your devices should sync with the cloud.
But for Mobile Me to be this hub, and for Apple to maintain their dominance on the mobile front against Google, they must make Mobile Me free. Until they do this, Google will have better cloud integration with their mobile devices.
I wholeheartedly agree but would add another argument for making Mobile Me free (at least for people who have purchased an iPhone, iPad or Mac): Not only because Apple should try to unshackle the iPhone and iPad from their dependence on personal computers and to improve the user experience for their customers, but also because right now, they are driving droves of users into the arms of Google. I personally have never even considered subscribing to Mobile Me, because as i see it, Apple is selling a product for $99 annually that’s inferior to what Google is giving away for free. So instead of Mobile Me, i use Google Mail, Contacts and Calendar on my iPhone for syncing and cloud integration. This means that switching to Android becomes a much more tempting proposition for iPhone users, because switching is easy and it stands to be expected that integration with Google’s online services is more capable and refined on Google’s own operating system. Right now superior user experience and brand awareness are Apple’s main advantages over Google’s Android, but Android is rapidly catching up in these areas, and when they do, Apple better have something to match Google’s excellent cloud service integration.
Previously: Tim O’Reilly in the New York Times on the same topic.
How to Return Facebook’s Privacy Settings to What You Signed Up For
At Lifehacker:
Online privacy expectations are evolving, but whether Facebook likes it or not, a lot of us want the privacy settings we signed up for when we joined the service. Here’s how to use Facebook’s new privacy controls to regain your original privacy.
How to Return Facebook’s Privacy Settings to What You Signed Up For
I Am Sitting In A Video Room 1000
For this piece, someone has uploaded a video to Youtube, downloaded it, then re-upped the downloaded video, and repeated the procedure 1000 times (via):
An homage to the great Alvin Lucier, this piece explores the ‘photocopy effect’, where upon repeated copies the object begin to accumulate the idiosyncrasies of the medium doing the copying. Full words: I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now.
Previously: Generation Loss
Magnasanti
A while back i came across the following video (via Rock, Paper, Shotgun), which shows the creation of Magnasanti in Sim City 3000, a hellhole of a city with a population of 6 million citizens:
Now Vice Magazine tracked down the creator of Magnasanti and presents us with an interview:
There are a lot of other problems in the city hidden under the illusion of order and greatness: Suffocating air pollution, high unemployment, no fire stations, schools, or hospitals, a regimented lifestyle – this is the price that these sims pay for living in the city with the highest population. It’s a sick and twisted goal to strive towards. The ironic thing about it is the sims in Magnasanti tolerate it. They don’t rebel, or cause revolutions and social chaos. No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line. They have all been successfully dumbed down, sickened with poor health, enslaved and mind-controlled just enough to keep this system going for thousands of years. 50,000 years to be exact. They are all imprisoned in space and time.
I like to think the last remark is in response to the RPS comments thread:
If anyone’s wondering, I am not autistic, or a savant, nor suffer from OCD, or suffer from any other form of clinical mental disease or illness for that matter.
Stark Expo 2010
Iron Man 2 keeps being an abundant source of design fiction: The Stark Expo 2010 website seems to be some curious viral marketing effort for the movie.
There’s also a neat japanese commercial for augmented reality glasses by Stark Industries (via):
Previously: Iron Man 2 gadgets
How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet
This essay by Douglas Adams from 1999 about the internet is just as relevant today as it was back then:
Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.
And by the way, happy Towel Day everyone!
How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet
