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Posts tagged with ipad

NYTimes as an iPad App: A Bad Example Not only is the NYTimes iPad app, slow, crashy, and annoying, but it also obliterates important formatting and features from the presentation on the web. Here’s an example from a Paul Krugman blog post which is presented with the view from inside the Opinion section of the app and from the website using iPad Safari. 1) It’s impossible to fully see if and when Krugman is quoting from Ozimek with the blockquote formatting blown away. 2) The hyperlink to the quoted post from Ozimek (which serves as acceptable way to reference while blogging) is oddly absent, quite literally breaking the web. 3) There is no hyperlink to rest of Krugman’s blog. Single blog posts from Krugman (as well as Brooks, Kristoff, The Dot Earth Blog, etc.) sit next to editorials, op-eds, and letters. It’s also unclear which blog posts are chosen to be inserted. They aren’t all in the Opinion section. Only a couple. Even though the NYT has labeled a ton of its content as blogs, and displayed them as columns of posts, most recent on top, they’ve really never seemed to embrace blogging. This might be more evidence of that than of a crummy iPad app. But note this is the second crack that The New York Times has taken at an iPad app (the first was the Editor’s Choice app). They’ve had a year to get this right and they haven’t, you still can’t even select text, and now they want nearly $200 a year for the pleasure of its use. The idea of an iPad app worth $200 (or $450) is genuinely exciting, but this isn’t it.

NYTimes as an iPad App: A Bad Example

Not only is the NYTimes iPad app, slow, crashy, and annoying, but it also obliterates important formatting and features from the presentation on the web. Here’s an example from a Paul Krugman blog post which is presented with the view from inside the Opinion section of the app and from the website using iPad Safari.

1) It’s impossible to fully see if and when Krugman is quoting from Ozimek with the blockquote formatting blown away.

2) The hyperlink to the quoted post from Ozimek (which serves as acceptable way to reference while blogging) is oddly absent, quite literally breaking the web.

3) There is no hyperlink to rest of Krugman’s blog. Single blog posts from Krugman (as well as Brooks, Kristoff, The Dot Earth Blog, etc.) sit next to editorials, op-eds, and letters. It’s also unclear which blog posts are chosen to be inserted. They aren’t all in the Opinion section. Only a couple.

Even though the NYT has labeled a ton of its content as blogs, and displayed them as columns of posts, most recent on top, they’ve really never seemed to embrace blogging. This might be more evidence of that than of a crummy iPad app. But note this is the second crack that The New York Times has taken at an iPad app (the first was the Editor’s Choice app). They’ve had a year to get this right and they haven’t, you still can’t even select text, and now they want nearly $200 a year for the pleasure of its use.

The idea of an iPad app worth $200 (or $450) is genuinely exciting, but this isn’t it.

My Late Night iPad Magazine Rant

I don’t think magazines need an app template or consistent user interaction behaviors (via Kontra). The problem is much bigger. None of the historically successful journalism outlets (including my beloved New York Times) have made anything worthwhile for the iPad. The Daily is a joke. The apps turned out by Adobe software seem terrible. These folks shouldn’t be let anywhere near Xcode. Their apps can’t compete with their own websites even when (like The New Yorker) much of the good stuff is gated (and publishers making textbooks are in the same sorry state). Design is the red herring of the magazine industry. In the same way that many people were happy to trade LPs for compressed CDs, and CDs for lossy MP3s, readers seem more than willing to put up poor design (even if they prefer simple design). The wrapper runs a distant second place to the stuff inside. How else could you explain even some people’s endurance through those marathon click sessions of a multipage formatted web article?

Apple needs to make that rumored newsstand app that would serve as the analog to iTunes and iBooks. Media companies need to be spoon fed their version of the MP3 or something like an ePub container format. They shouldn’t be making apps or the current mess of massively bandwidth hogging PNG images of text-based articles. They should be making the news. If the newsstand app was Apple’s, it would more likely work the way we all want it to work. Apple would allow the journalists to focus on the journalism instead of carousels. There would be fresh things to read at launch and perhaps the promise of nightly background downloads. By making such an app, Apple would be earning their Dirty Percent. News media patterns are not going to go back to some golden age of print.

As a news junkie and a small d democrat, I don’t want these companies to fail. If Apple doesn’t save the would-be magazine and newspaper app makers, I hope that someone in charge at those journalism outlets takes a long hard look at the truly killer-apps of the iPad which are almost all apps for reading (games, schmames). These iPad reading apps inspire real fandom like Instapaper (which I am using to write this post), Reeder, and Flipboard (among others, including Amazon’s Kindle). The great irony is that people are often (but not always) using these apps to read articles published by the same media companies that can’t figure out why they can’t get a steady foothold in the digital era.

The fact that Marco Arment, the developer of Instapaper, has partnered up with Readability instead of the New York Times strikes me as a failure of capitalism or at least the imagination of nominally smart people at the Grey Lady. Flipboard should have been bought by the Washington Post or Conde Nast by now and so on. The only sensible conclusion is that the heads of these companies don’t read on the iPad and by extension any tablet (or likely any screen at all). Like the music industry obsessing over their own death knell for the last decade, big journalism seems to spend more time writing their own obituaries than writing anything else at all.


It's the Ecosystem, Stupid

Marco Arment on the iPad and would-be participants in the market for tablets:

To be competitive, a newcomer to the tablet software market needs to replicate or sidestep the need for nearly all of Apple’s major efforts, including synchronization of media and data with Windows PCs and Macs, integration with popular web services, an integrated payment system that customers will actually use at a reasonable rate, a well-stocked music and video storefront, plenty of high-quality third-party apps and fun games, a sophisticated SDK and development environment, widespread retail availability and customer support, and an assortment of good first- and third-party accessories to fulfill common needs (cases, chargers, docks, screen protectors, extended batteries) and give the device new uses (tripods, speakers, styluses, input and output adapters, wall and car mounts).

I think Marco’s point is great, but stops too short, it’s not just the iPad. The tablet needs to work with the phone too. People seem to want to buy an app like Instapaper once as a universal app and have it run on both their iPhone and iPad. How would that happen across device platforms? People used to be worried about DRM tying iPod users to Apple through their iTunes purchases, but the “iOS X” ecosystem is so much more expansive. Countless bits entwine across devices to make an increasingly seamless experience. A fully Apple-less solution, cobbled together from a many headed hydra of Google, Android vendors, PC makers, netbook makers, and Microsoft, seems like a pointless exercise if not a Sisyphean challenge.


Turning Japanese

Yeah, I mostly just wanted to make the Turning Japanese reference and this had been sitting in drafts for a while. But still Big Think did ask Is Apple Making Us Japanese?

But Apple is doing something far more radical to us as a nation, something that might even outlive the innovative firm itself: it is singlehandedly transforming us into a society that will one day feel comfortable having emotional relationships with machines.

I’ve had an emotional attachment to OS X for a long time. And I haven’t been shy about sharing it. Though not to any of the particular Macs I’ve used (well maybe the 12 inch Powerbook which is pretty close to death). I think I formed an emotional relationship with my iPhone itself pretty quickly. With the iPad it seemed to take a little longer. I might not have fallen completely in love until iOS 4.2 was released. But now I feel like a full on technological polygamist.

No, no, not like that you dirty bastard. Quote via Buzz Andersen.


Obama Signs an iPad

The president creates some content.


“  As soon as something becomes digital, all friction is removed from making copies. That means all of today’s media – books, magazines, newspapers, music, television and movies – can be instantly and effortlessly duplicated. The web was built on that principle and continues to thrive when that principle is amplified. When content on the web is searchable, indexable, translatable, transcludable, quotable, or copy-and-pastable it matches an expectation web users have had for decades. Mess with that, and you fundamentally break the user experience.

I think the iPad is a fantastic amplifier of web-native content. It helps me aggregate and attenuate the content I’m interested in through feeds and shared content from my social networks. It makes me a better reader by reformatting and re-presenting that content in more digestible ways. The irony isn’t lost here: I read far more content from sources – mainstream or not – than I did before buying that device. But not one mainstream producer of content has helped me do that. The innovation has come from other sources: Twitter, Feeder, Instapaper, LongForm.org, Apture, and more.

In fact, the mainstream sources seem determined to do the opposite.” — Jeffrey Veen in response to Jeffrey Zeldman

Here’s hoping that the next version of iBooks gets the PDF highlighting and notes that were introduced for ePubs today.

If I finish some work ahead of schedule this week, you all might suffer a rant filled with my hopes and dreams for notes and metadata on the iPad, tentatively entitled, “Content Creation, Not the Herculean Task it’s Made to Be.”


The iPad Revolution

This essay from The New York Review of Books is sort of a skeptic’s take on the iPad, ebook readers, and recent technological developments more generally. The overall tone seems to be intensely conservative to me.

I’m trying to imagine a person reading this and afterwards trying to decide on a gadget for dad for Fathers’ Day. A person who doesn’t plan a day around every Steve Jobs keynote and doesn’t know about RSS or HTML5. I think that person would be confused and maybe a little scared for the future.

I don’t think the future is so scary. I think it’s really very exciting. We need to share the joy. If you’re the least bit intellectually curious, today is the best time in the history of the world to be alive. Apple isn’t going to squash that. They couldn’t if they tried.

Link via AK.


Walled Gardens in Portland and Cupertino

A Defense of Apple and the walled garden from Neven Mrgan. The post would make more than a couple libertarians proud.