iPad
Thursday, June 10th, 2010
Looks like Banksy’s Exit to the Gift Shop is influencing folks out there. This viral campaign by a group of San Francisco artists, Freedom From Porn , who are protesting the ban on adult material within Apple’s walled garden, clearly cops a few licks from the British artist’s great new movie.
Freedom From Porn from Freedom From Porn on Vimeo.… Read the rest
Monday, May 3rd, 2010
I bought an iPad the day it came out and wrote a couple of times on the blog and in our newsletter that I’d be posting a review of it. Well, the review is 80% done and sitting on my desktop, but I never finished that final 20% because, frankly, I got sick of reading about the iPad and decided that I didn’t want to add any more verbiage about it to the blogosphere. Short version, though: despite various qualms (no Flash, speakers on only one side of the device, the primacy of Apple’s walled-garden app store, a shutter effect when loading Safari pages, and the ick factor of Apple’s recent, increasingly heavy-handed business and public relations tactics), I like it. It has fit comfortably alongside my other various screens, and, particularly, it makes watching web videos a really lovely experience.
But I was prompted to write this short blog post after checking out John Gruber’s site today and going to this link to a post by Craig Hockenberry, who describes the iPad’s huge potential and current limitations as a communal device. In that 80% done review, that was my single biggest complaint about the iPad. Here’s what I wrote:
No User Switching: This is actually my biggest critique of the iPad, and it strikes at the existential question of its identity — that is, whether it’s a standalone device or a peripheral. Few are claiming that the iPad can do all that you need… but, at the same time, arguments for it focus on all the things that it can do that your laptop can do too. By its design, though, it is a peripheral device because, even before you can properly turn it on, you need to sync it to a master computer with iTunes. Fine — iPods are the same. However, the iPod is fundamentally a personal device. It’s got your music and your earbuds go in your ears. The iPad’s large screen, however, makes it a perfect communal sharing device. The iPad is a great device to leave on the living room table for all members
… Read the rest
Thursday, April 8th, 2010
Husband and wife producers Joke and Biagio have a highly useful post today up on their blog. (Useful, that is, if you own an iPad and are a screenwriter.) Titled “How To Write a Screenplay on the iPad,” it is the result of a bout of insomnia that has wound up adding functionality to the iPad’s Pages application.
From their blog:
If you have an iPad, chances are you’re going to buy Apple’s iWork app Pages sooner or later. At $9.99 it’s not a break-the-bank piece of software, and it’s sort of a must-have for iPad owners, anyway.
The full, desktop-version of Pages ‘09 has a screenplay template, but…alas…that template is missing from the iPad version. Besides, that template’s not very good…the margins are wrong, and it doesn’t work the way I’d like it to.
So We Experimented
Since I’m used to not sleeping these days, I stayed up last night and built a new screenplay template for Pages 09. We then took that template, added some hot keys, saved out a Pages doc, emailed it to Nate’s iPad…and voila! It worked!
For the link to the download template you need to make their fix work, head over to their site.
… Read the rest
Tuesday, April 6th, 2010
We just went to press on the new issue of Filmmaker very late last night and as we were doing so we had some informal conversations on a possible iPad version of the magazine. (Check out the blog hopefully later today or tomorrow for my review of the device.) So far not many magazines have published iPad specific editions due to two reasons: iPads weren’t available for testing; and publishers, designers and editors are still in the process of rethinking their products for the iPad platform. Conde Nast is apparently going to be experimenting with several different approaches across all their publications throughout the summer before making a final judgement and I think that’s smart. Among the things to consider:
How much should the print publication be a base in terms of design and content?
How dynamic (or not) should a publication be, i.e., how much updating and continual reworking of content?
How much should a publication pull in from social, if at all?
Should pricing be single issue, subscription, or a free-standing app? Should issues be each discrete apps or else a single app that archives all the issues?
How should advertising be rethought for the platform? Should advertising, if it’s included, intrude on content (i.e., in the same frame) or be separated from it?
For small publications without large staffs and robust development teams, is it worth moving to iPad without the resources for major rethinks?
Brad Colbow has a good video demo’ing three publications on the iPad: Popular Science, GQ and Time. Already it’s interesting to see how publishers are grappling with the possible new conventions of the iPad. (I agree with Brad — I don’t like the design changing so much when the iPad revolves from portrait to landscape mode.) Colbow likes Popular Science, which was designed by Bonnier, whose demo iPad video I posted on the blog a couple of months ago. From their own blog, they lay out six design ideas related to their digital philosophy:
- SILENT MODE. Magazines are a luxury that readers can lose themselves in. Mag
… Read the rest
Wednesday, March 31st, 2010
The first round of Apple iPad reviews has hit the ‘net. David Pogue of the New York Times split his somewhat muted review into two points-of-view: the tech geek and everyone else. He begins both by writing, “The Apple iPad is basically a giant iPod Touch.’ The tech geek POV review is mixed; the “everyone else” pretty positive. Edward Baig in USA Today is less equivocal:
The first iPad is a winner. It stacks up as a formidable electronic-reader rival for Amazon’s Kindle. It gives portable game machines from Nintendo and Sony a run for their money. At the very least, the iPad will likely drum up mass-market interest in tablet computing in ways that longtime tablet visionary and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates could only dream of.
Walt Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal is also pretty impressed:
For the past week or so, I have been testing a sleek, light, silver-and-black tablet computer called an iPad. After spending hours and hours with it, I believe this beautiful new touch-screen device from Apple has the potential to change portable computing profoundly, and to challenge the primacy of the laptop. It could even help, eventually, to propel the finger-driven, multitouch user interface ahead of the mouse-driven interface that has prevailed for decades.
Significantly, both Pogue and Mossberg report 11.5 – 12 hour battery life with movies continuously playing and WiFi on.
Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing also scored a pre-release iPad. She calls it “a touch of genius”:
It strikes you when you first touch an iPad. The form just feels good, not too lightweight or heavy, nor too thin or thick. It’s sensual. It’s tactile. And it’s a good way to spot a first-timer, too, as I observed with a few test subjects. The dead giveaway for an iPad n00b is pausing a few breaths before hitting the “on” switch, and just let the thing rest there against skin.
The reviews all point out some of the device’s limitations: no camera (so, no Skype or teleconferencing), no Flash (so lots of online video won’t play), no USB, and the centrality … Read the rest
