The future of manufacturing will be personal manufacturing of small items, One day you'll order your car to be printed out from an independent manufacturer. The future ain't what it used to be.
Check out this trailer for The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore by Moonbot Studios, lead by ex-Pixar animator William Joyce.
This iPad book is just as much book as it is animation and game, with interaction all throughout the app, such as having you draw or play a piano, participate in mini-games and even, as the children will love, play with food.
The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore is available on the App Store for $4.99 — not a bad price if you’ve got young kids to entertain, or you’re just a big kid yourself.
The Internet, for so long a visual and auditory medium, is increasingly a tactile one. Anyone who uses an iPhone, iPad, Droid, or other touch-screen device knows the great pleasure of racing through the Web with their fingertips, expanding the teeny, pinching the huge, swooshing away the lame, and poking everything in sight. Slate has embraced the tactile web with both hands: We have great free apps for the iPad and Android as well as an iPhone app that's about to get a makeover.
The future of manufacturing will be personal manufacturing of small items, One day you'll order your car to be printed out from an independent manufacturer. The future ain't what it used to be.
The future ain't what it used to be
Should tablets be classified alongside notebooks as Mobile PCs? HP has its fingers crossed and hopes no as the rising popularity of the iPad could see a new mobile PC king crowned in 2012.
If tablets are considered as mobile PCs, Apple is expected to ship 60 percent of global units, or 60 million iPads in 2012. Add 15 million MacBooks next year and the Cupertino, Calif. company will sell 75 million mobile units in 2012, accounting for 25-30 percent of the worldwide notebook market.
That’s compared to 45-50 million units from HP, industry publication DigiTimes reports Friday, citing sources.
Several analyst firms already consider the iPad a PC. In 2010, the classification made Apple the top-PC seller in the United States. In January, Canalys found Apple ranked as the No. 3 global PC maker when Mac and iPad sales were combined, putting the tech giant just behind Acer and HP. Arguments against classifying the iPad as a PC weakened even further when Apple unveiled iOS 5. The new mobile OS eliminated the need to sync the tablet with a PC. The advent of wireless syncing with iTunes coupled with iCloud backups also removed any need for a PC for iPad owners.
What do you think? Is it time to consider the iPad as a PC, like the MacBook?
A peek inside the new Apple Thunderbolt cable
a small step for digital technology, one giant leap for CyberInterNetics
very interesting
As digital reading grows in popularity, the publishing industry needs to recognise that new technologies put user experience at the heart of what they produce, and that traditional print processes are no longer adequate.
UX Magazine has recently published a piece on the role of user experience in the publishing industry that pulls no punches. Here’s a summary:“The book publishing industry has a history of creating products for a ‘customer’ that they never speak to, speak of, see, interact with, or consider. Instead, many publishing houses consider their authors to be their primary customers, with author services being one of the major components of the business.
The poor regard paid to readers and customers, the actual book consumers, is embarrassingly inadequate. Most of the traditional process of book publishing is cut off from the outside world, with those on the inside isolated from the end consumer. This system of buffers and padding has lead to an almost catastrophic denial of usability, with customer satisfaction almost completely disregarded. If it works, it works. If not, too bad. Print another book and move on.
The publishing industry currently does not understand the language of UX. It lack a means to describe how users interact with content, as the only gauge traditionally used is that of sales figures (i.e., point of purchase performance in the retail landscape).
Several months ago, we [UX Magazine] piloted a program to deliver digital course materials to students enrolled in a select group of medical test prep programs. These students were evaluated at the end of their courses, to determine how using digital materials affected their learning experiences, as well as how they felt about using the materials. Actual usage data was also collected and compared. We learned that for most of the time, the students were using the digital versions of their course materials as quick reference tools. The most used feature was search, favoured over other features, such as note taking, highlighting, bookmarking and sharing. The context in which students used the products most often was the classroom. Not online, not on the bus, nor on the train. They were listening to a lecture and at the same time using the eBooks to quickly look up terms and formulas, to reinforce the lecture in a context.
This pilot program represented a real turning point for us…. In the world of software application development, UX designers and researchers physically watch people using an application and determine information about them and their needs through observation. In the eBook world, the ability to track usage data, feature adoption and time spent with each product has meant that we have a whole new world open to us, and a new way of conceiving of and talking about our products and product development.”
One of the additional points I’d make is that, by its nature, publishing defines itself as a print medium and continues to do so even as print declines in favour of digital reading. To take an obvious example, a model predicated on publishing journal issues at regular intervals makes little sense in a context of realtime site updates and RSS feeds. One of the things I particularly like about a site like Breathing Spaces is that, although it retains some of the legacy elements of the print medium (i.e. the structuring by journal title and issue), it frees up users to engage with the content in a much more meaningful way – which they certainly do. Most people actually engage with Breathing Spaces through search rather than navigation (including searching for images or for an author’s homepage), while the most popular sections include the respiratory disease and species indices.
To my mind, this sort of semantic development, when combined with usability testing and search analytics, provides a blueprint for how online publishing can map itself onto user expectations, rather than print conventions.
The tablet with a keyboard? ~plasmaborne
Wondering just where in the hell those Sandy Bridge MacBook Airs with Thunderbolt are? Sitting in a warehouse, just waiting for OS X Lion to go gold, according to the most recent report.
Reports Apple Insider:
[N]ew Thunderbolt-enabled Sandy Bridge MacBook Air models expected to go into production this month have been ready and waiting for some time, according to people familiar with the matter. But management is currently unwilling to usher the new models into the market with the current Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard operating system.
Instead, the Mac maker is said to be locked on waiting till it can image the new notebooks with a Gold Master build of Lion so that buyers are afforded the latest and greatest Apple experience. This includes complimentary iCloud services that will come built into the software, offering a means of automatic data synchronization that is both unparalleled in the computing industry, and paramount in an age when consumers are adopting a digital lifestyle in which they own and operate multiple mobile devices.
The MacBook Air’s not the only Mac waiting on Lion before it gets sent out to the Apple Store: new Mac Minis featuring Sandy Bridge innards and ThunderBolt ports are also in the same boat, as well as new Cinema Displays.
Depressing news if you’re waiting to pull the trigger on a new Mac, but if it’s any consolation, I’m using Lion right now: it’s this close to prime time.