After 4 years messing around with Movable Type and sporadically writing posts on here, I’m shutting down. This website has been real, and it’s been a great learning tool.
If you’re interested, please make the move over to blog.jehanalvani.com for new posts - some technical, some not - and hopefully a lot more regular writing. If you don’t feel like coming, it’s cool. I understand. I’ve appreciated your being here this long. Take care guys.
The Wired app is fantastic. There are a few, minor complaints floating around; I tend to agree that it’s too hard to differentiate content from ads, but the quantity of ads doesn’t bother me (though that may be because I’m admittedly enamored with the app itself).
I downloaded it at work, yesterday afternoon. I read a couple articles between working on various projects, and a couple more yesterday evening and on my commute in to the office this morning. It’s really fun. So I started to think about what, exactly, made reading the Wired app so much more fun than other magazines on the iPad, and I kept thinking about an article I read a while back – a couple weeks before the iPad came out.
(Incidentally, linking to Craig Mod’s website seems like saying “Oh yeah, you should totally go read Dumas. That “Count of Monte Cristo” is a really neat story.” You can play it up, but no matter what you do, you’re not doing it justice. His site, stories, illustrations, everything, is just incredible.)
In Books in the age of the iPad, Craig lays out how the the prevalence of digital media means that the stuff that eventually does get printed is the stuff that’s really worth printing. Texts whose value is increased by being in a physical medium, something you can hold in your hands.
He divides content into two categories. “Definite content,” is as described above. “Formless content” does not require a specific context or display to retain its value. The overwhelming majority of novels, blogs, and newspaper articles are formless. (Again, his article explains this much better, and in greater detail).
It’s clear that Wired spent a lot of time thinking about this. Taking Criag’s suggestion for “[placing] chapters on the horizontal plane with content on a fluid vertical plane” very literally, they designed movement between articles as a horizontal swipe, and pagination in articles as a vertical swipe. It’s surprisingly natural and takes only moments to get used to.
Additionally, the Wired team built multimedia additions into the app, allowing for videos or audio to play right in the article. It’s a great addition, and really adds to the experience as a whole. Reading about Trent Reznor’s methods for creating and mixing tracks while listening to each sample, sequence, and loop was a blast.
It’s clear that this is only a framework, there’s a lot of potential for great content to be built into digital magazines in the future. So far, though, this is the only print magazine that really gets it. That we don’t need to just re-package the print version of the magazine, but actually designing to take advantage of a new medium will add a lot of value in readers eyes. I doubt I’m alone in really being excited about where this takes us.
Steve Jobs in an open letter regarding Apple’s stance on Flash on iPhone OS
Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications.
Basically, Gruber repeatedly hit the nail on the head.
RIM gave the world a preview of their next-generation mobile operating system, today. The video is just awkward, showing business people in suits trying to dance seductively while poking at a floating, translucent mockup of the new BB OS, all while playing Black Eyed Peas’ “Boom Boom Pow.”
I could only make it a halfway through the second dancer. One more forced pelvic-thrust followed by an exaggerated checking of his watch, and I would have lost my lunch. RIM is capable of making good things, but based on their seeming lack of focus around touchscreen devices - not to mention the miserable failure that is the BlackBerry Storm - I don’t have much confidence they understand where the market is heading.
A solution so obvious that it was overlooked?
(via Daring Fireball)
It’s become so ingrained that water comes from the Brita that I just opened the fridge looking for the Brita to use to refill the Brita. The faucet was less than three feet away.
I’m ashamed.