Category Archives: iPad

The Case of the iPad Cases

With the next major revision to the iPad rumored to be announced as soon as next week, I figure I’d better get any iPad 2-specific posts I’ve had in the hopper posted quickly. In particular, I’ve been wanting to write about cases for a while, mostly because it took me nine or ten months to find a case combination that really works for me.

For a long time, I was very disappointed with the Apple Smart Cover, which to me is an example of a fantastic design on paper that in real life fell short of expectations. I always found it fell off its magnetic hinge too easily, and after toting my iPad to and from work for only a few months, its edges quickly became frayed.

But then I came across the iPad 2 Smart Feather from Incipio, a lightweight hardshell case that hugs the back of the iPad. A lot of cases do this, but this was the first I came across that also clasps around the Smart Cover’s hinge, securing it tightly.

Neither does it add much in the way of bulk to the device. So little, in fact, that when I recently bought a Logitech Zagg keyboard case, I was happy to discover that the Smart Feather fits comfortably in the Zagg’s slot. The Zagg is also designed to let you collapse the iPad on top of the keyboard for carrying them together, a configuration that still mostly works when you have the Smart Feather on the device. It’s not a perfect fit, but it does the job.

I’ve been using all three accessories — Smart Cover, Smart Feather case and Logitech Zagg keyboard — as I’ve been doing more and more of my ‘real work’ tasks on the iPad. Having a real keyboard is a huge help, and being able to carry the iPad anywhere without having to handle it too delicately has been a boon too. It all seems to be coming together… just in time for me to buy a new model.

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Introducing Mixel

MixelIn my post from August titled “What Comes After Reading on iPad,” I argued that while the iPad is a game-changing reading platform, there has been perhaps too much emphasis on that one particular aspect of the device. Apple’s “magical and revolutionary” tablet brings with it many other transformational qualities that are being undervalued at the moment, and at least a few of them will spawn new businesses and maybe even new industries.

I talked about a few of those opportunities in that post, but the one that interests me the most, and the one that I’m betting on in a big way, is the fact that iPad is an ideal digital art device, one that requires little or no training — no mouse to master, no pen and tablet to plug in. Straight out of the box, it’s a powerful, completely intuitive tool for self-expression: just use your finger to make a mark.

Even better, for the very first time in decades of personal computing history, we have an ideal digital art device in the hands of a mass audience, a huge and still-growing user base composed not just of professional artists and early adopters, but of people from all walks of life who are embracing the liberating simplicity of this new platform.

That’s big. It changes what’s possible for visual self-expression in a huge way. Now anyone can do this — anyone. They just need the right software. Creating that software is what my co-founder Scott Ostler and I are trying to do with our new company.

Our app is called Mixel. It’s a collage-making tool and a social network rolled into one. With Mixel, anyone can create and share digital collages using images from the Web, Mixel’s library, or your own personal photos from Facebook or what’s right on your iPad. You can watch a video (directed by the inimitable Adam Lisagor) that describes all of this over at our site, Mixel.cc.

Why watch it when you can try it out for yourself, though? As of today, Mixel is available for download in the App Store. And it’s free.

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The Post-Personal iPad

Over at Ars Technica, they’re asking whether the iPad is a PC or not, with some debate over the semantic boundaries of the term: does a PC have to have a keyboard? Must it be directly programmable? Does it have to be an open system? It’s an interesting discussion.

Apple’s line, of course, is that the iPad is a “post- PC device.” Their belief is that it augurs a new era that leaves the old paradigm of window, icon, mouse and pointing behind. For my part, I subscribe to that theory, for sure. As I said recently, I fully believe that iPad is a transformative innovation.

But I also have a slightly different take on this concept of a device that is “post-PC.” It’s not just that the iPad is such a different kind of hardware and software from what came before it, but it’s also that people regard the iPad differently.

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What Comes After Reading on iPad

I’m bullish on the iPad. Some people have assumed the opposite, based in part on my frequent criticism of the way publishers have risen to the challenges and opportunities that it presents.

But I really do believe that the iPad is a truly transformative device, an innovation that’s going to re-make the way we work with and play with technology. Looking back at its introduction in January of last year, it’s fitting that it debuted at the start of what I believe we’ll look back on as ‘the tablet decade’ — if we don’t end up thinking of it as just ‘the iPad decade.’

On the other hand, I think it’s still too early to know exactly how these devices are going to shape the next ten years. We’re all still discovering and exploring how different a multitouch tablet is from laptops and desktops. As that collective understanding progresses, we’re sure to see some unexpected if not startling new uses for them. There’s one safe likelihood though, and that is that the things that are attracting so much attention on the iPad today will probably become less exciting to us tomorrow.

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The Wayback Machine for Apps

Mobile and tablet apps change all the time, but there is no public record of the way an app’s user interface evolves with each new revision. What we need is a version of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for apps, but unfortunately because of the siloed nature of this class of software, it’s not possible to simply deploy bots to create one for us.

It occurred to me that one viable alternative would be to crowdsource something similar to the Wayback Machine by creating an app that would let any user upload screen grabs to a central archive on the Web. That sounds much more manual than the Internet Archive’s approach, l know, but in fact I think it could actually be fairly well automated.

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Gagosian on iPad

There’s good news for publishers of iPad magazine apps, which in the past I’ve criticized for being needlessly complicated, difficult to use and poorly realized. The good news is they’re no longer the worst offenders when it comes to presenting wonderful, valuable content within burdensome and user-unfriendly interfaces. The new champion is the Gagosian app for iPad, from the storied Gagosian Gallery. That gallery represents some of the most important contemporary artists of the past several decades, and the Gagosian brand is responsible for some wonderful contributions to modern culture. Sadly this app should not be counted among them.

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Adobe on iPad

These are not secrets: I’m no fan of Adobe’s Flash platform, I’ve been pretty vocal about my disdain for their bloated and maddening desktop software, and I’ve gone on record with my dislike for their tablet publishing strategy. So it’s sometimes hard for me to remember that Adobe is not in fact a monolithic company, that they’re not all bad. There are smart, impassioned people working there and they’re still capable of producing surprising, even delightful software.

For example, it’s worth noting that at least one Adobe team is producing some very good apps for the iPad. I’ve been a fan, if not a devoted user, of the company’s surprisingly lightweight and responsive sketching app Adobe Ideas since it debuted. I also think their Photoshop Express app is well done and, thankfully in spite of its name, very un-Photoshop-like.

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Two Weeks with iPad 2

Early in April, I decided to order an iPad 2 directly from Apple, after giving up hope that I’d be able to just saunter into an Apple Store and pick one up at my leisure, at least anytime soon. Once ordered it took sixteen days to arrive, which isn’t too bad, and I’ve been using it consistently since.

Here are some random thoughts on my first few weeks of usage.

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The Other Kind of iPad Magazines

For the past few days I’ve been using and enjoying TweetMag on my iPad, a new app from the smart folks at Toronto design studio Teehan + Lax. It’s a beautifully designed reader-style application that “uses your Twitter account to create simple magazines.” It’s very much in the mode of Flipboard, which also transforms your social media stream into magazine-like presentations of eclectic content.

I’ve often spoken of Flipboard as a promising hint at a truly new kind of reading experience, one that employs the power of social graphs and the magic of superior user experience design to present users with a coherent view of the world. Flipboard, in my opinion, is the first step on what will either be a long road or a steep climb towards a new way of interfacing with written content. Unfortunately TweetMag, as nice as it is, isn’t quite that second step. It’s an attractive refinement with merits of its own, but it’s still not the breakthrough that this genre of software is looking for.

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Unnecessary Explanations

Introducing users to a new app or set of functionality is a difficult task for which there are no easy answers. One of the oldest tricks in the book is to create a kind of instructional screen in which the interface is explained, either diagrammatically or through the use of elucidating circles, arrows, lines and notational text (what Apple has in the past called “coach marks,” a term I haven’t heard elsewhere but that I really like) directly over the interface. The idea is to add a meta level of guidance to help acquaint the user with the key parts of the interface and how to use them.

I’ve been noticing these more and more lately, a trend that I find regrettable. I’ve designed products with instructional screens and coach marks in the past, and they were miserable failures. In my experience, these types of parenthetical interfaces are almost always misguided, mostly because they run up against one of the (nearly) immutable laws of interface design: people don’t read interfaces.

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