14/05/10

Flash Flash Wars: Apple’s response to Adobe

Posted in Apple, Why didn't I think of that? | No Comments » Tweet This Post

Link: Apple Responds – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report

29/04/10

Flash Wow! This hurts! Steve Jobs open letter to Adobe about Flash, HTML5 and Open Standards

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Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

link: Thoughts on Flash

19/02/10

iPad Wired and Sports Illustrated on the iPad, a showcase of real media convergence. Girls in bikinis included

Posted in Apple, Books, Interface, Mobility | 4 Comments » Tweet This Post

We’ve been talking for years about media convergence since first Nicholas Negroponte coined the term and, we’ve grown accustomed to it on the web the hypermedia where all the rest converge.

As I often ask my students, I you didn’t knew the language in a website, would you be able to tell apart a newspaper, a radio station and a TV station only by watching at their websites?

You probably wouldn’t. Each medium trespasses its own traditional boundaries adding content formats from the others:

• Radio websites feature of course audio but are mainly made up of text and images
• TV station websites feature video but also text and audio
• Newspapers website are oftentimes mere translations of the printed medium but they add a layer of rich-media in audio and video

Traditional media on the web become hypermedia and are the medium of choice for the ever growing web generation. I don’t think this generation will settle, either on a desktop or on a mobile device, for a mere digital copy of a physical medium such a newspaper.

The reasoning is quite simple and it goes as follows:

I don’t read newspapers. So, why would I want a digital copy of a newspaper?

But what if I could experience the quality contents of a magazine/radio/TV the way I’m used to, meaning rich-media, interactive, personalized, social and real-time? Would I care if I’m browsing a magazine a radio station or a TV station? Probably not as long as I get what I want, where I want it and the way I want it, which is coincidentally what the iPad promises us.

The forthcoming Apple tablet brings us a little step closer to full media convergence, not that there’s anything especially new you can’t do right now with a browser and decent internet connection, but the new apps (or rather the new content and interaction design), the physical proximity, the multi-touch interface and the position sensor make the sensorial experience somehow different to anything we’ve seen so far.

Check also the Sports Illustrated demo and ask yourself if this is just a magazine or finally a true interactive TV.

Link: The Wired Tablet App: A Video Demonstration | Epicenter | Wired.com

13/02/10

iTunes Another huge milestone for marketing

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@albertcuesta tweets about this promotion (the “Promotion”) by Apple celebrating the 10 billionth download from iTunes (note that this doesn’t mean purchases).

iTunes changed the way you buy music, making songs and albums available for download, day or night. Seven years later, we’re about to celebrate our biggest milestone for music, yet — 10 billion songs downloaded. Buy a song, and if it’s the 10 billionth download, you could win a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card. It’s our way of saying thanks.

15/11/09

Publishing Apple changed the music and the cellphone industry. Can they do the same with publishing?

Posted in Apple, Interface, Internet, Usability | 6 Comments » Tweet This Post

The digitizing of the information changes the rules to everything. Production, storage and distribution costs tend to zero, consumers become also producers and as a result new industries appear that render well established ones obsolete in no time.

One example is the traditional publishing industry with a business model partly based on advertising and partly on subscription, a model that’s sustainable when trucks distribute tons of paper but obsolete when the net distributes terabytes of data.

On such an environment, advertisers flee to a much more interactive and responsive medium, namely the web, and subscriptions are no match for the free high quality content available online.

Who would still post an ad to a local newspaper when you have Craigslist.org or eBay.com? Or, who would pay for gadget reviews on the NYT when you have Engadget.com?

The result: many magazines and newspapers have closed their physical editions and have gone online if not closed at all.

Although Rupert Murdoch is trying to reverse this trend by charging for online access, I think the point is made.

With all this in mind the efforts to bring ebook readers to the market by companies such as Amazon (Kindle), Barnes&Noble (Nook) an Sony (Reader), just to mention a few, make perfect sense in a time of publishing crisis (crisis meaning change, not doom).

Even the endless rumors about Apple developing the mother-of-all-tablet-or-ebook-readers make more sense than ever (this is a bold statement talking about a company that has embedded rumors in their marketing DNA).

Can Apple do the same as they did in the music and the cellphone industries? Via cultofmac.com I stumble on a presentation by Freek Bijl, a Dutch internet strategist, that has put together a simple and yet enlightening presentation about the subject.

Bijl’s states that if Apple is to reinvent the publishing business they need to cover three basic needs:

• Distribution of content
• Business model where publishers can charge for content
• Usability so people can use the reading device as a newspaper or a book

So far, Apple has turned iTunes into an excellent platform for music and application distribution, it has a solid rock business model for both and the iPod and the iPhone have the best interfaces of their kind.

I can’t think of any reason why they wouldn’t want to extend this model to the publishing industry with content distribution via iTunes, micro-payments as in the iPhone App Store and a reading device that matches the iPod and iPhone usability standards.

I’m sure that the whole publishing industry (and that includes Murdoch) are eager to hear Steve Jobs’ next “one more thing”. Even more than the rest of us.

Here’s Freek Bilj’s presentation:

20/02/09

Design The definition of design by Steve Jobs

Posted in Apple, Design, Quotations, Why didn't I think of that? | 1 Comment » Tweet This Post

Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

15/07/08

iPhone Free open source native iPhone app to manage your Wordpress Blog

Posted in Apple, Interface, Mobility, Wordpress | 5 Comments » Tweet This Post

Join the advanced features on the iPhone, a fair flat rate data plan and the power of open source and you have Wordpress for iPhone, the first open source native app for the iPhone downloadable from the iTunes App store (which means installable with a single tap).

It supports self hosted blogs as well as the free blogs at WordPress.com

You can see all about it this screencast

Behold! You’re seeing the birth of the true mobile internet.

Stay tuned for the release. In the meantime you can install the iPhone Mobile Admin plugin to your blog and manage it from the iPhone’s browser.

20/07/2008 Update: The iPhone Mobile Admin plugin doesn’t work for WP 2.5 nor WP 2.6. Follow the discussion on Dan Cameron’s blog for more info.

12/07/08

iP Telefonica: Ten things to do to screw the launching of the iPhone in Spain

Posted in Apple, Barcelona | 2 Comments » Tweet This Post

When I learnt about the launching of the iPhone by Telefonica in Spain I knew that something was not right. One only has to see the visual and conceptual interference that the Telefonica logo produces on Apple’s website.

Read the rest of this entry »

09/06/08

A CSS error on Apple’s website!!!!

Posted in Apple, Design, Programming | 3 Comments » Tweet This Post

Apple got so carried away with the launching of the new iPhone 2.0 that didn’t take into account the lenght of the headers in some languages. Bad CSS.

Snapshot taken with Safari on Mac OS Leopard.

07/06/08

The one more thing in next WWDC will be an iWatch

Posted in Apple, Interface | 7 Comments » Tweet This Post

Two days and a keynote to Steve Jobs’ “one more thing” thing at the WWDC which means it’s mega-rumor time!

Here’s mine (via wmacphail): an iWatch, a watch with a multitouch screen which hooks wirelessly to your iPhone or MacBook.

Here’s the beast: