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➶ Viewfinder for iPad
It’s been a busy 24 hours: Fraser Speirs’ brilliant Viewfinder application for Flickr photo research is now available for iPad.
It’s $9.99 on the App Store. I love the desktop version, and this looks to be a fantastic extension of the OS X app.
Disclaimer: Viewfinder for iPad contains some copy written by yours truly.
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Reeder for iPad
Whilst I’m yet to actually pick up an iPad, I’m thrilled to see my very favourite iPhone RSS reader, Reeder, is now available for iPad. It looks every bit as stylish as the iPhone original - and available on the App Store for $4.99.
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Apple Design Awards 2010
Whilst there were no OS X awards this year, ADAs were handed out for iOS apps.
iPad
As I don’t yet own an iPad, I’ve yet to play any except for Flight Control HD: I loved Flight Control on the iPhone, and the iPad version is just as fun (and stylishly designed).
iPhone
I own three of these: with the Jamie Oliver app making an appearance on my homescreen. Articles is slick (congratulations Sophia, and DoodleJump addictive. But to see the Jamie Oliver app win made me particularly happy. I use it pretty frequently, and it’s a genuinely awesome app. I’m really excited to see if there’s an iPad counterpart in the wings, too.
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➶ Apple's Worst Security Breach: 114,000 iPad Owners Exposed
Gawker says that AT&T, not Apple, are the source of the leak. But nothing draws traffic like misleading Apple headlines, eh?
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The 7 Stages of Apple Haters’ Grief
- Predict failure of new apple product
- Attribute early success of new apple product to rabid fanbois affected by the reality distortion field
- Attribute longer term success of product to stupidity of consumers
- Purchase previously scorned product for stupid relatives so they stop bothering you to help support the open source version of apple product sold by Super Lucky Technology Extreme that you convinced them to buy
- Purchase previously scorned product for yourself just to see what all the fuss is about
- Admit that you now own and use the product, but complain about the product’s lack of an sd card slot on Internet forum
- Forget prior criticism of product, claim that it was revolutionary and an example of how apple used to be really innovative, but has now lost its edge.
Rinse and repeat
[Courtesy of the Ars Technica forum]
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Limited Observations on Magazines and the iPad
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been fortunate enough to use an iPad at Realmac HQ. Since its arrival, I’ve tried a few of the magazine applications: TIME, Popular Science and then today WIRED. In short, I love reading them on the device. However, the experience is far from perfect.
Issues
At launch, each magazine seems to go down the route of ‘an iPad app per issue’. Both TIME and Popular Science have since moved over to one app with in-app purchasing. I certainly wouldn’t want more than one icon per magazine on the iPad - even with iPhone OS 4.0’s folders feature - yet as Pieter Omvlee points out, in-app purchases don’t get listed on the App Store’s What’s New section - meaning that publishers with in-app purchases and looking to show off a new issue of their magazine miss out on the marketing.
Filesizes
Whilst the Wired app may be visual stunning, with plenty of Pixar multimedia in the launch edition to keep me happy, the 527MB filesize is quite spectacular. So spectacular, of course, that it’s well over the 20MB threshold for over-the-air downloading. AppSizeMatters’ dissection of the app reveal that a significant amount of the application’s bulk is through the heavy use of PNGs (there’s seven used per page), with images alone taking roughly 360MB space up. Whilst the use of hi-res PNGs means the pages look stunning, it seems rather wasteful, not to mention turning the application into something entirely unaccessible. Want to use VoiceOver in your app? Tough. Want to quote some text in an email or blog post? Tough. Want to download the latest edition of Wired whilst on-the-go on your rather expensive iPad 3G? Tough.
Navigation
Just a small, quick observation: the navigation around certain apps is highly confusing in my limited testing. Whilst magazines have established that you scroll down to continue reading an article, and left / right to switch to the next piece (or advert), beyond that, I’m never sure how to navigate around.
Another gripe: most magazines have a table of contents, but no matter where you’re reading in the magazine, some will insist on showing the ToC from the top - even when you’re a hundred or so pages in, meaning you have to do a fair amount of scrolling to see what else is in the vicinity of the article you’re currently reading.
Reading in landscape
My favourite aspect of the magazine apps so far has been the landscape reading - the swiping between spreads instead of reading a single-column flowing piece feels far more iPhone like than just scrolling a page in Safari (and that’s entirely due to the use of the organic elasticity when swiping between spreads).
Final thoughts
Looking at magazines and the iPad right now, it’s clear there’s plenty of room for improvement. Subscriptions, and a dedicated store perhaps, are both things Apple would want to control and provide. But the magazines themselves - and their partner Adobe - still need to look at how they build the magazine editions. 527MB per issue of Wired, whilst offering readers a seemingly large amount of content, seems to say more about the lack of image optimisation in Adobe’s new publishing system than it does the content within.
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[JooJoo CEO] Chandra Rathakrishnan …. went on to describe the iPad as just “another storage device with web capabilities.” Of course, there’s at least a chance Chandra was actually paying the iPad a compliment, since a “storage device with web capabilities” would be a pretty big step up from the JooJoo.
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➶ Apple announces iPad pricing for the UK
My predictions of £399/£499/£599 for the WiFi models (with another £100 on top for the 3G) wasn’t far off: they’re priced at £429/£499/£599 - with 3G being another £100. I’m personally holding out on the iPad, and instead getting myself an iPhone HD on launch day.
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Yes, [the App Store is] a closed system that Apple controls completely. But the same devices that support the App Store also come with a very advanced web browser. Personally, I think that if a device is capable of running HTML, CSS and JavaScript, I don’t think it can be described as “closed”.
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Gowalla’s iPad App looks stunning.
© Nik Fletcher 2010 ~ Contact
