Rebecca Ruhlman Designs Welcome to the drafting table of RARDesigns. A full-service media design firm.
So my dear internets, This past week a tablet was passed down from on high to form a new covenant with God’s – err Jobs’ – followers creating a new digital Eden.
The official launch of the iPad during Passover/Easter weekend carried the tone of a tent revival.
“It is the coming of the new laptop!”
“The iPad will render all books in the future useless!”
“The iPad will single handedly save all print media!”
Well, praise Jesus, the holy covenant and all that. The true revelation is a resounding…
The device is okay.
I’d hardly say that it would replace a laptop. Replace netbooks? Sure – they were pretty useless to begin with. The main interface is just a bunch of iPhone icons with huge valleys of space between them. Once you spend the $30+ to load your basic iWork package (something that should have been preloaded on the device.) it is a cumbersome pinching and twisting to delve deep into the layout functions to do tasks that were only three clicks away on the computer. Plus, you only have your single power plug to connect to any peripheral that you need to load content for your presentation or to print things out. Basically you need to sign up for their Mobile Me service and storage to get anything and you better have a wifi enabled printer.
As an E-Reader, it is lackluster. For a great reader experience go use a Nook or a Skiff Reader.
(I halt to mention the Kindle as the interface gives me horrid GameBoy flashbacks.)
The black and white LED screen is the biggest detractor to eReaders like the Kindle as it brings up horrific memories of trying to play a Gameboy in any amount of natural light.
The bookshelf is a lame interface cobbled together from previous apps. And though I only got to play with the floor model, those suckers get pretty hot. I would definitely need a blanket or an insulated case if I were to cozy up with one of these things.
On the bright side, Safari is immaculate. Web browsing has become a brilliant immersive event with this machine. And short of the non- W3C compliant Flash
sites (more on that later), it has been the easiest, crispest virtual ride I’ve ever taken through the internet.
The new iTunes store was fun and Video playback was like having a flatscreen HDTV right in your hands. While there weren’t a lot of optimized apps for the new system, a couple were impressive. I can’t wait until paint and sketchbook pro apps are ready to go. Create a pen for the interface and I am in heaven. Thomas Reuters’ news app created a great intuitive aggregation of the service’s top reports, and Marvel… Gosh, that was the best comic book experience I’ve ever had and, I know I’m going to loose my nerd cred, I hate comic books. The potential in creative translation for print media is limitless. Too bad none of the test iPads had any magazine Apps to run.
Mag+ live with Popular Science+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.
This brings me to the savior part. We here in the magazine biz have been chasing after every shiny new fad looking for something to replace our old profit models. Custom search didn’t do it, nor did specialized social networking or selling off our editorial integrity and knowledge to the highest bidder.
What the iPad, and more importantly the iPad store, offers is a closed system and a reasonably high price point even after Apple takes its share. Other separate services have already started leading us here. Zinio and eMagazines let readers cast electronic subscriptions for enriched PDFs of many popular titles at prices similar to those on the newsstand.
Hearst media even helped create the Skiff as a direct delivery tool for its stable of publications.
The Kindle tried to lock down contract deals with some publishers who eventually bawked an Amazons greedy percentage grab.The biggest barrier to any of these working was price; especially when media companies are giving away all their hard work for free. Because the iPad is more than just a one-application device, it has a chance to become ubiquitous enough to change the game. You’ll already be running all your basic applications and internet functions on it. You’ll have by your side 24/7. So, why not put a cheaper magazine subscription on it? You’ll have by your side 24/7.
Now, the supreme court is allowing for cable providers to close the floodgates of information. With the recent Comcast ruling, the court takes a giant step back from net neutrality that may render the FCC useless for anything but fining us when we tell them to Fuck off. The gates of the internet are closing. Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch are in negotiations to make all Murdoch’s properties only searchable by Bing, The New York Times and many other papers and putting up content firewalls and press services are filing lawsuits against major aggregators like the Huffington Post who appropriate other’s content to make ad sales without the originators getting anything on click through.
The iPad raises the price of apps to a reasonable-enough level that the media industry can say, “the hell with it” to the open web. there are a variety of App subscription/ ad models that can be implemented from a straight up subscription, to giving the App away free and then charging for archives and premiums, to a variety of rich-ad based variations. Plus, the exclusivity of the experience, you can’t just burn an RSS unless the publication lets you, allows one to raise the dismal price of online ads.
During the iPhone OS4 preview this week, Steve Jobs took a direct stab at both Google and Adobe with his “7th Pillar” (more religious allusions Steve?) iAds. The openness that a lot of open web supporters are scared about loosing is a myth anyhow. The search model had all media boiled down to one provider – Google. Media developers don’t have to play bullshit games to garner google rankings. Now as app based interaction takes hold through mobile interfaces, Apple offers a different paradigm. They want to set themselves up as the primary rich-ad distributor with a 40% cut off the top.
No more SEO gaming of web crawlers and secret algorithms. But, are we just trading google for the iTunes store? Somewhat yes, but web apps don’t have to run on apple’s development code to work, and the ipad isn’t the only tablet slated for market. Google ads were primary drivers in the market and they were butt-ugly blocks of text and buzzwords compiled to garner higher rankings. At least, the Jobs model wants to bring design back on the internet. And to that I say, “Can we get some web standards?”
As a concept, programming up to HTML 5 and CSS 3 is a great idea once standards are solidified. Unfortunately, most of the world doesn’t run on the latest version of Safari, Chrome or FireFox. Quite frankly, 90% of my work is programming stuff down for customers who’ve never updated their browsers past IE5!
Seriously, people hit update! It will not melt your machine.
This week, with Apple’s new OS preview and Adobe’s highly publicized CS5 launch, there has just been a literal shit-storm going back and forth over support for the Flash development platform. To that end I’m backing off till next week. Tune in next week to read who bitch-slapped who. This has been a crazy-exciting month for web designers and tech-geeks alike. I’ll be very interested to see who is standing at the end.
This also means…
Flash can suck it!
As a designer and generally visual person, it hurts me to see Flash go. It allowed me to create complex actions without having to learn coding. But, it is a buggy, non-standard plugin that really was most useful in kicking IE along to stubbornly perform javascript tasks. Now that Microsoft’s feud with Sun Microsystems, the developers of java and javascript, is over there is no reason to play these games.
That leads us to the big announcement next week – the release of Adobe CS5!
Adobe’s latest tweak to its visual development studio system. The biggest news is the inclusion of Flash Builder (a totally visually-based, run-and-gun version of Flash) and an iPod compiler for SWF documents. You can create a stand alone app in Flash and then have it translated for iPhone, but not create a playable widget for iPhone optimized websites.
Now, I’m a designer. I like to solve things visually, and learning coding for me is like learning calculus – painful. I much rather have a visual interface that allows me to just do stuff. That’s why I like Flash, but if it doesn’t translate for the market I need to reach then it does nobody any good. What I’d really like to see is a visual development tool that allows me to convey my ideas while converting it to web standard code without me having to do abstract logic problems in my head. Please Adobe, don’t be too proud. That’s what killed Quark’s hold on desktop publishing.
So in short, if the iPad and a variety of similar tablets are widely adopted traditional media may have a profitable, new way of doing business. The first generation of the iPad is okay but not great. I’ll wait as I’m much more excited about the HD iPhone to be released in June. It is supposed to multi-task, carry a better user oriented camera, be open to multiple service providers and fix quite a few of the bugs that irritate me with the current version. Finally, Adobe gets a full update with CS5. I can only hope they take out the windows style interface from the CS4 version. It ticks me off. I bought a Mac for a reason, Adobe – sheesh! And, can we make a web-standard, interactive website development system, please? I want to go back to being a designer and not a programmer in cool, hipster glasses.
Thank you.
Tags: adobe, apple, cs5, css 3, fighting, html 5, ipad, iphone, Journalism, Media, nook, os 4, steve jobs
