The Mirror’s Edge iPad launch has had quite an interesting story. Initially, it was planned to launch for iPhone and iPod Touch early this year, but then it was mysteriously delayed. Why this delay? Well know we know. EA decided to wait for the iPad to launch, and it was well worth the wait.
Mirror’s Edge for iPad: Reviewed.
Matt Patenaude’s Open Letter to Mozilla
Matt Patenaude, developer of Bowtie and Bluebird, regarding Firefox and Ogg Theora support:
“Mozilla’s decision to use Ogg Theora and Vorbis for video and audio (respectively) is certainly admirable: personally, I would love an open codec to gain widespread industry notoriety and usage. The fact is, however, the production industry has already standardized on H.264. Nowadays, H.264 is perhaps the most common codec for Internet-distributed video, with the exception of Flash, much of which is encoded in H.264 anyway.
Content producers love H.264 because it works with their existing workflow tools, and there’s widespread hardware-level support for H.264 on a number of devices, including the iPhone and Android-based phones. The benefits brought by a switch to Ogg Theora — if any even exist — are vastly outweighed (for most content producers) by the time and effort required to make such a switch, and quite frankly, most producers don’t want to be serving up both H.264- and Ogg-encoded content.”
Could you say he’s wrong? You can’t deny H.264 has become pretty much a standard, and Firefox is still missing from the list of compatible browsers.
I think this time would be quite fair to follow the trend.
Apple Publishes New iPhone Ad: “Concert”
Apple has published a new iPhone 3GS commercial, called “Concert”, entirely focused on Shazam. It’s pretty cool.
Check it out after the jump.
A 2.5 Year-Old Uses an iPad for the First Time
I once read the best way to test a tech product’s design is to give it to someone who’s not tech savvy and see what’s all the interaction about. What better than a 2.5 year old to test the iPad? We’ve stumbled upon this post over at Laughing Squid, and the result is very interesting.
From the post:
“My iPhone-savvy 2.5 year-old daughter held an iPad for the very first time last night, and it turned out to be an interesting user-interface experiment.
As you can see, after geeking out on my Sutro Tower homescreen, she took right to it — including figuring out how to enlarge some of her favorite iPhone-legacy apps to 2x to display full-size on the iPad screen. If you’re good at understanding kid-speak, you’ll also notice that she immediately saw its potential as a video-display device. She lamented the lack of a camera, and wondered about its potential for playing games.”
Watch the video after the break. As Cody also said, “she’s a good example of why there’s the big bezel.”
Verizon CEO Has Told Apple of iPhone Interest
Associated Press reports:
“Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg says the company has told Apple that it wants to carry the iPhone. But he declined to say when - or even if - the popular smart phone will be available for Verizon Wireless customers.”
So they officially asked. I still have many doubts though.
iBooks and Private APIs
Latest post by Marco Arment on his blog:
“iBooks’ use of tons of private APIs is frustrating on a few levels, the biggest that it makes all third-party reading-related apps second-class citizens.
I won’t be able to offer many features that iBooks has (such as a true brightness control or integration with the system dictionary), but my customers will expect them, making my app inferior to Apple’s in key areas.”
Now this is an important problem developers have to face right now. Apple’s official applications (the iWork suite, iBooks. I expect MobileMe to join the list in the near future) make use of private APIs that enable features, like the aforementioned system dictionary, 3rd party developers don’t have access to. And as Marco reports, it’s a huge problem, especially to the average customer’s eyes who doesn’t know anything about APIs and frameworks.
Say you want to develop an alternative spreadsheet application because you have a good idea, you’re most likely headed to fail when it comes to implement the basic functions you can see in Numbers, from Apple.
Now you can either give up or come up with a custom solution for your needs. As it stands now, you simply don’t have access to those APIs, and there’s nothing you can do about it but complaining, hoping Apple will its their decision. It’s time to be creative again.
Typekit, iPad and Web Fonts
Now that we know all the fonts included in the iPad, it’s time to analyze the web fonts situation. The Typekit guys have published a post about their test with Typekit library and Mobile Safari.
The results are interesting:
“It turns out that iPad ships with a version of Mobile Safari that is almost identical to what ships with the iPhone. And while it supports CSS @font-face, it won’t work with OpenType or WOFF fonts. Instead, using @font-face on the iPad requires fonts to be converted to the SVG format.
Rendering multiple weights from a font family can cause Mobile Safari to crash, even when the individual font file sizes are small (<5k). In our testing, using two weights from a family caused Mobile Safari to crash on up to 50% of attempted page loads, and the crash rate seemed to increase as we increased the number of weights we added. “
Read the full post for all the other technical details, but I think all these errors will be fixed with an OS update.
Fonts for iPad & iPhone
Interesting overview of font faces / styles available for the iPhone and iPad. I didn’t know the iPad had Papyrus.
The Guardian Launches New “Eyewitness” App for iPad
The Guardian has launched a new application for the iPad called “The Guardian Eyewitness” (available for free here) which, just like the Eyewitness series launched by the newspaper in 2005, focuses on news photography, one photo at the time.
From the official article:
“The Eyewitness series was launched in print at the time of the Guardian’s switch to the Berliner format in 2005, and consists of a daily full-colour, double-page spread devoted to the most compelling news photography. The decision to dedicate so much space to a single picture was a revolutionary move for a newspaper.
The Guardian’s head of photography, Roger Tooth, describes the philosophy behind the series as one that is devoted entirely to showcasing the world’s best photos in superb detail: “We want to hold your attention for more than two seconds … we want you to appreciate the work that the photographer has put into the image,” he says. “We’ve been waiting for a chance to replicate the scale and impact of the newspaper’s Eyewitness spread series on the web - and I think this is it.”
The app seems pretty simple, as its only purpose is that to showcase photos and describe them with a few lines of text. As you can see from the screenshots after the break, the application makes an interesting use of popover menus and thumbnails. Overall, it looks good.