Federico Viticci:
There’s a lot of weirdness and inconsistencies going on in some Apple apps and interfaces, but the Home screen is the prime example of a user interface meant for 2007 which was subsequently patched and refined and patched again to accomodate new functionalities introduced in iOS.
His conclusion is spot on:
Apple needs to tear apart the whole concept and rebuild it from the ground up.
I know that after using Android 4.0 for a while, my iPhone’s home screen felt so very cramped and dated. The Home screen doesn’t just need to be a springboard to get to apps, in some ways it needs to be an app in and of itself.
Ben Brooks, Brett Kelly, Stephen Hackett, and I snuck into one of the side studios to shoot a quick video podcast before the expo starts.
The Value of a Handshake
As an indie tech writer, I mostly communicate with my peer community through tweets, emails, instant messages, direct messages, Instagrams, and text messages.
That’s why I’m in San Francisco this week for Macworld. Though I will surely write about the event and what transpires this week, that’s not my primary purpose for attending. I’m not here as a journalist with the goal of covering this Apple-centric event so much as I am here to meet the Mac nerds I am privileged to work alongside all year long.
A handshake and a “nice to meet you” is worth so much more than an @reply. A conversation over a cup of coffee is better than two dozen emails.
I’m not here for the event, but for the folks who’ll be filling the sidewalks and the Expo Floor. Putting faces to bylines and building real-world relationships with those who I read and write about make my job back home far more enjoyable.
John Gruber:
What’s satisfying about Apple’s current success is that it’s proof that you can succeed wildly by focusing first and foremost on making great products. That design does matter.
Stephen Hackett:
Talking about iPad apps in line at Starbucks isn’t weird anymore.
Adam Lashinsky writing for Fortune about the extremely secretive and productive culture within Apple. Lashinsky writes:
Almost nobody describes working at Apple as being fun. In fact, when asked if Apple is a “fun” place, the responses are remarkably consistent. “People are incredibly passionate about the great stuff they are working on,” said one former employee. “There is not a culture of recognizing and celebrating success. It’s very much about work.” Said another: “If you’re a die-hard Apple geek, it’s magical. It’s also a really tough place to work.” A third similarly dodged the question: “Because people are so passionate about Apple, they are aligned with the mission of the company.”
Reading Lashinsky’s article, I have to wonder if working at Apple is something I would love because of the strong emphasis on work ethic, productivity, excellence in what you do, and respect for everyone’s time, or hate because of the high-stress and non-personal environment.
The article is based on his book, Inside Apple, which hits shelves today.
Great piece by Matthew Alexander that is along the same lines as Topolsky’s article on The Verge last week about too many gadget choices.
Dom Leca, co-founder of Sparrow:
How did you apply for your job? How do you negotiate a deal? How do you review your employee work? What tool are you using when you’re sending message to your loved ones? SMS, Facebook messages, What’s app, Kik are all great new means of communication but mail still has its own territory. Email definitely needs to evolve. Sparrow 1.x is an attempt to marginally change habits. […]
We are trying to make the experience simpler and more enjoyable. This is the first step. Now that we have a pretty solid technical basis, we want to move on a 2.0 version where we can change the paradigm of mail: the way people think of it and use it.
My thanks to MindNode for sponsoring the RSS feed this week.
MindNode is an elegant, easy-to-use mind mapping tool for Mac and iOS. Whether you’re brainstorming for your next project, organizing your life, or planning your vacation, MindNode lets you collect, structure, and expand your ideas. And thanks to built-in Dropbox and WiFi sharing, even your biggest ideas can go anywhere your iPhone does.
MindNode is easy mind mapping for your Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Try out Mindnode Pro and MindNode touch today!
Their best quarter ever, and not by a small margin. Last quarter, more than 75% of their revenue came from iOS devices.
Here’s an interesting project on Kickstarter. Josh Milas and Alex Obenauer are seeking to re-imagine email by developing an email program that’s melded with a to-do app. The premiss is that the vast majority of your incoming emails are actionable in some way, shape, or form.
Lots of iBooks Ideas from Matt Gemmell. I’d add to the list magazines. I see no reason why Wired, The New Yorker, et al. couldn’t publish their magazines as iBooks instead. They would still be just as design-y and interactive but more usable and (in theory) smaller file sizes. Also, they’ll look better on a Retina Display iPad.
I noticed the snappiness right away. Especially with page turns. (Via Marco.)
Will Kujawa, a student at Oklahoma State:
In a few years Apple could dominate the [college] classroom similar to how Microsoft dominates enterprise.
Will also talks about how the majority of Apple products in his college classrooms are MacBooks, not iPads. That makes sense because for a student who needs a computer to take notes, do research, and complete papers and other projects, an iPad is not a replacement for a laptop or desktop computer.
A computer has been the standard college-student gadget for decades. It used to be desktops, now it’s laptops, and Apple wants it to become iPads.
Apple wants the iPad to be seen as a computer replacement. And so I can’t help but wonder if positioning the iPad as a replacement for textbooks is also a subtle way to slowly introduce iPads as replacements for laptops.
It’s like a twist to the Halo Effect — instead of an iPod leading to a MacBook purchase, buying an iPad for casual usage leads to keeping the iPad for more serious usage. It’s already happening in the professional sphere (examples: I, II, III).
As Stephen Hackett said, last week’s announcements had Steve Jobs’ fingerprints all over them.
WordPress.com now has a dashboard RSS reader, with the ability to Like, Follow, and Reblog posts.
Fraser Speirs gives a good overview of the good and bad regarding the new iBooks textbooks, iBooks Author, and iTunes U:
Apple already revolutionized education when it invented the iPad. While iBooks textbooks are a bridge from the past to the future—and we do need a way to get to the future—they are not that future. If Henry Ford had been an educational publisher, his customers would have asked for electronic textbooks instead of faster horses.
Michael E. Cohen:
Having access to good instructional resources is always better for students and for teachers than not having such access. And although interactive multimedia textbooks of the type that iBooks Author makes so very easy to prepare and to publish probably won’t make a bad teacher into a good one or a poor student into a candidate for valedictorian, it is much better to have them available for teachers and for students than not.
On this week’s of The B&B Podcast, Ben and I talk about meetings, snow in Seattle, Harry Potter jellybeans, and iBooks.
Brought to you by, Verses, who is doing a giveaway. Details in the show notes.
Matthew Butterick, type designer, wrote a letter to director Brad Bird about the use of Verdana in his movie Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol.
Joshua Topolsky:
For a journalist, it’s daunting — for shoppers, it’s starting to seem impossible.
See also, Grant Blakeman’s three-minute case for minimalism in design, marketing, and life.
Matt Gemmell gives a high-level look at what you’re getting into if you decide to publish a work via the iBooks Author app.
I’ve spent a the majority of my afternoon working in iBooks Author, and it is very simple to use. If you are wanting to ship a book that does not require this deep functionality then it would not be too much more work to release your book as an eBook, a PDF, and an iBooks book (or whatever the proper term is for a work that’s been built within iBooks Author).
An SDK for Writers
There are four primary components to publishing a book:
Writing and Editing: The first and most important component to publishing a book is the actual writing of it followed by the editing of that writing.
Distribution: How will you sell it and distribute it?
Medium: Will it be a PDF, an eBook, a physical book, or any combination? And now there is a new medium: an iBooks book. This is more akin to book-app combos such as Our Choice by Al Gore and Push Pop Press.
Our Choice is a deeply interactive book that shipped as a standalone iPad app. However, version 2 of iBooks now supports books like this natively. If you want to make a powerful, interactive, unique-looking book you can do so via Apple’s new tools, and then you can ship and sell them as books, not apps.
Design / Layout: Until today, if you wanted a book that worked like Our Choice then you needed to hire an iOS developer to build your book in Xcode. If you were designing a PDF or eBook you could do it in Microsoft Word or Pages, or for more control of the design you could use Adobe InDesign. The cost of these tools ranges from $19 (for Pages), to hundreds of dollars (for InDesign), to thousands of dollars (to hire iOS devs).
But now, if you want to make an attractive and interactive eBook you don’t have to hire an iOS developer to build you a dedicated app. If you are even remotely familiar with Pages then you’ll be able to take what you’ve written and turn it into a good looking and interactive book for the iPad and then distribute it on the iBookstore to an audience of millions of iPad owners who can buy it and download it with one tap.
In short, the iBooks Author app is a huge breakthrough for the independent writer and publisher. In this author’s humble opinion, this new and free app from Apple was the primary announcement of Apple’s education event today.
iBooks Author is the iPad SDK for writers and publishers. And it’s been simplified so it’s as easy to use as a word processor.
Apple’s official page for textbooks on the iPad, iTunes U, and iBooks Author. Also this morning’s keynote has posted.
Something I wrote almost exactly a year ago. It goes hand in hand with the piece I wrote yesterday.
