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Posts tagged with "iPad"

How Flipboard Was Created→

How Flipboard Was Created

When I traveled, I would buy magazines before I got on an airplane. I love magazines, I read them all the time. As I was reading them, I’d ask myself: “Why is it that the Web isn’t as beautiful as these magazines? What could we do to make the web a more beautiful place?” And of course, along with that line of thinking, I was saying to myself: “If this Apple tablet that is rumored ever happens, it would be the perfect form factor for doing exactly that - for making websites as beautiful as magazines.

Flipboard is currently featured in the App Store homepage, Apple’s iPad commercial and it’s sitting at #7 of the Free Apps for iPad chart.

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Ten Dollars And The App Store→

Ten Dollars And The App Store

What did $10 get you 15 years ago? All the games that would fit on a disk. A 5-inch floppy disk. Considering the massive improvements to the user experience, and the amount of utility that an app like Tweet Library offers, that copy of Duke Nukem 3D isn’t looking as expensive anymore. Toss in inflation, and your getting a Rolls Royce for the price of a VW Bug. Or, in more reasonable terms, two of those caramel soy moccachino things you drink every day.

The same happened when OmniFocus for iPad came out. And that app is priced at $40. What is the problem with these people that can’t do anything besides complaining and asking for discounts in forum posts? Why do they keep on criticizing developers when they price professional software (yes, Tweet Library and OmniFocus for iPad are professional apps. That’s it) at anything more than .99 cents?

These hypocrites pay $500 for an iPad an they expect every kind of app to be free / priced at less than a dollar. The real problem is the App Store gives too much visibility to games, and less importance to niche, more focused applications. It’s like go looking for a great bottle of red in a candy shop.

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iPad in the Dark→

iPad in the Dark

Then I discovered a feature of the Kindle app that the Apple iBook app lacks: reversed fonts – white type on black pages. This is a silly idea for paper books: hard to read and a colossal waste of ink. It is also a silly idea for ordinary Kindles that, like paper books, are read by reflected light. But with a self-lit, back-lit device like an iPad, it becomes a new way to experience books. Even with very low light levels, the contrast of the white letters against the black page is outstanding. In a dark room, it is very readable.

Funny how with all the advanced technology, all it takes is one tiny feature to change the experience: there is practically no excess light to bother other people.

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Twitter, Curation and iPad: Meet Tweet Library

On the internet, some words are often overlooked. When something becomes “popular” or even a “trend”, the original concept is abused and misinterpreted. It happened with “interface”, it happened with “geek” and “hipster”, it’s happening with “curation”.

Curation: “The act of curating, of organizing and maintaining a collection of artworks or artifacts”

Curation #2: “The manual updating of information in a database”

With Apple’s “curated” App Store platform, geeks and casual users have started using the term “curation” in their parlance to refer to a collection of items regulated by terms and strict rules. With 250.000 applications and stories of rejections, curation suddenly became an internet-wide topic of interest for the everyday iPhone user. This is not what curation is all about. Read more

Inkiness: Elegant Sketching for iPad

Here’s what happened with this post: I was going to write something like “here’s a neat little app for you to play with while Twitter is down”, then Twitter came back online. With a new CEO. Huge congrats to the Twitter team and good luck to Dick Costolo.

Anyway, I was going to talk about Inkiness for iPad. Inkiness is a very simple and elegant application to take notes on the tablet using your fingers. You can sketch and jot down your ideas, draw mockups (if you’re really good at it), share your creations via email, Twitter and (huge) Evernote. The greatest selling point of Inkiness is how simple it is: it’s just about sketching and sharing. There’s no fancy “import from” option, no PDF annotations, no additional features that would make it just like any other app out there. It’s about drawing with your fingers (it works great with my PogoSketch, too) inside an elegant and beautiful user interface. Read more