Apple
Amazon Launches New Kindle
07/April/10 09:43 AM Filed in: eBooks
On April 3, Amazon released a new version of their ebook reader in the US with plans to roll it out worldwide towards the end of April. It’s available in all Apple stores and is of course named the iPad.
The iPad Kindle app makes the iPad Amazon’s best ebook reader to date. Apple’s iBook store has about 60,000 titles at present in the US verses Amazon’s 400,000. So Apple allowing Amazon to jump on board with it’s book store and ebook reader is an interesting move. Steve Jobs would never allow Microsoft to move their Zune music store to the iPad platform so why allow a competitor Amazon?
The bottomline for Apple at the moment is to sell hardware and having an extra 400,000 ebooks available on the hardware platform is good business. I’m sure Amazon thinks that the Kindle app for the iPad is a trojan horse to bring customers over to future Kindle devices and I’m sure Apple knows this too.
But, I bet that once Apple has about the same amount of titles on their bookstore as Amazon, Steve will drop the Kindle app like a sack of potatos.
Early Days of Art Direction on Apple's iPad
06/April/10 09:46 PM Filed in: Art Direction
One of my favourite people in the world, Stephen Fry, sees the first version of Apple’s iPad as a ‘John the Baptist’ in the way it will pave the way for a new niche in computing. A whole new platform if you will, that is finger operated and does away with the cumbersome keyboard and mouse model.
Software will have to be rewritten from the ground up to make the platform jell. This is doubly true for redesigning traditional print based content as content is king on the iPad.
The following is a video by art director and lucky bugger, Brad Colbow as he looks at three new apps for the iPad from magazines publishers Time, GQ and Popular Science...
A lot of the early reviews make a point of saying that the iPad is not for creating content but is for consuming it. There goes my Xmas money...
Software will have to be rewritten from the ground up to make the platform jell. This is doubly true for redesigning traditional print based content as content is king on the iPad.
The following is a video by art director and lucky bugger, Brad Colbow as he looks at three new apps for the iPad from magazines publishers Time, GQ and Popular Science...
A lot of the early reviews make a point of saying that the iPad is not for creating content but is for consuming it. There goes my Xmas money...
Technology Catches Up To Print
05/April/10 05:17 PM Filed in: eBooks
I spent part of the Easter long weekend refreshing my notes for a class I teach on book design. I wanted to include information on Apple’s new iPad and to make sense of how it might change traditional book publishing. My initial thoughts were that it might change newspapers, magazine and textbooks but there would always be a market for printed books like the fantastic range of children’s books I fill my daughter’s library with.
That is until I saw the following video from a presentation by Penguin in the UK...
If my two year old can navigate an iPhone’s pre-school apps with just a finger, imagine how much she would enjoy the larger screen and richer content displayed on the iPad.
It’s going to be a very interesting couple of years for mainstream book publishing.
That is until I saw the following video from a presentation by Penguin in the UK...
If my two year old can navigate an iPhone’s pre-school apps with just a finger, imagine how much she would enjoy the larger screen and richer content displayed on the iPad.
It’s going to be a very interesting couple of years for mainstream book publishing.
Me Mobile Pretty One Day
02/July/09 09:46 AM Filed in: Branding
With title apologies to David Sedaris.
While iPhone owners were busy banging their overpriced first-generation handsets on their foreheads, Apple followers have been fiercely belittling the logo for the new syncing feature, MobileMe. BuzzFeed gathers the links to the best, seemingly endless cheap shots.
On first seeing Apple’s new branding for MobileMe, I was struck by how over engineered it appeared. Do they really need so many elements in the design? Other Macheads are up-in-arms at how similar it looks to the WindowME signature Microsoft rolled out some years ago. Whatever their grievances, I think it’s a bit on the nose and at odds with Apple’s simple and elegant DNA.