For this week’s Photoshop Contest, I asked you to design some new interfaces for iPhone 4.0. And you know what? Some of these look pretty damned cool.
First Place— Juan Ozuna
Second Place—Katrina Laffey
Third Place—Torsten Wulff
The Apple tablet could change everything. That’s what people are hoping for, revolution. But revolutions don’t actually happen overnight, especially if you’re talking about turning around an entire diseased, lumbering industry, like publishing.
The medium is the message, supposedly. The iPod was a flaming telegram to the music industry; the iPhone, a glowing billboard about the way we’d consume software. The Apple tablet? Possibly no less than the reinvention of the digital word. If you look very generally at the content that defined the device—or maybe vice versa—the iPod danced with music, the iPhone’s slung to apps and, as we were first in reporting a few months ago, the tablet’s bailiwick might very well be publishing.
Since then, the number of publishers—of newspapers, magazines and books—reported to be talking to Apple has exploded: NYT, Conde Nast, McGraw Hill, Oberlin, HarperCollins, the “six largest” trade publishers, and Time, among many others, are making noise about splaying their content on the tablet. A giant iPod not only for video, photos and music, but for words. That’s what they’re lining up to make ritual sacrifices for. Publishers want this, whatever it is.
I say “whatever it is,” because, for all of the talk and pomp and demos, they haven’t seen the Apple tablet. They don’t know what it’s like. They don’t know how to develop for it. As Peter Kafka’s reported, neither Conde Nast (publisher of Wired) nor Time will be ready to show anything for the tablet on Wednesday, much less a mindblowing reinvention of the magazine, because Apple’s keeping them at arm’s length. (Why? Secrecy, which matters far more than launch partners. All the leaks about the tablet have come out of third parties, like the goddamn publishers, so Apple’s not telling them much more than they are the rest of us.)
The sole exception, that we know of, is the New York Times. The Gray Lady has a team of three developers embedded in Cupertino. This makes a certain kind of sense, given the content the tablet is framing, and which publisher is currently best suited to delivering that content in a new experience.
When it comes to experimenting with the display and digestion of the digital word, the NYT has aggressively been the most innovative major publication on the web: Just look at the incredible infographics, the recently launched NYT Skimmer and the NYT Reader. Logically, they’re the print publication perhaps most able to realize the early potential of a device that’s essentially a window for displaying content. And it doesn’t hurt that Apple loves the NYT.
The tablet might just be a big iPhone, but the key word is “big.” What defines the tablet in opposition to the iPhone is the screen size, less than any kind of steroidal shot to processing muscle. A 10-inch screen will hold 10 times the screen real estate of the iPhone’s 3.5-inch display. That’s room for ten fingers to touch, navigate and manipulate, not two. Real estate for full web pages, for content apps that are so much more than news repackaged for a pocket-sized screen. The ability to really “touch what you want to learn about” is an “inflection point for navigation,” that is, the potential to truly “navigate serendipitously,” as the NYT’s media columnist David Carr put it to me.
Think of it as a more tangible version of the force that drives you from a Wikipedia page about gravity to one about the geological history of the planet Vulcan, touching and feeling your way through everything from a taxonomy for Star Wars fanboys to the Victoria’s Secret catalog.
The Wikipedia example might be particularly apt, actually. If we use iPhone history as a guide, given that the tablet is likely to be an evolution of the iPhone software and interface, it’s likely these publications will be content “apps” that will be islands unto themselves: So it might be easy to wander all over the NYT’s island via the tips of your fingers, but not so easy to float off to the WSJ’s abode. At least to start, we assume it’ll much like iPhone apps. For all of the very whizzy Minority Report wannabe demos from Sports Illustrated, we don’t know what the content apps are actually going to look like, or what they’ll be able to do on the tablet. In particular, what is it they’ll be able to do that they couldn’t do on the web right now, given how powerful the web and web applications have become over the last couple of years? (Look at everything Google’s doing, particularly in web apps.) The question, as NYU Journalism professor Mitch Stephens told me, is whether the tablet’s capabilities can “actually get the Times and Conde Nast to think beyond print?”
If you think the newspaper and magazine industry is slow, the book industry is prehistoric. As whipped into a fervor as HarperCollins and McGraw Hill may be about jumping aboard the full color Apple tablet express to carry them into a new age of print with “ebooks enhanced with video, author interviews and social-networking applications,” past the Amazon schooner, they take years to move. And they’re likely in just as in the dark as everybody else.
There’s also the macro issue that it just takes time for people to figure shit out. Think about the best, most polished iPhone apps today. Now try to remember the ones that launched a week after the App Store opened. It’s a world of difference. New media, and how people use them, aren’t figured out overnight. Or fade back to the internet circa 2006. Broadband wasn’t exactly new then, but so much of the stuff we do now, all the time—YouTube, Twitter—wasn’t around.
The apparent readiness to yoke the fortunes of the sickly publishing industry to Apple, and its tablet, oozing out of info scraps and whispers, like a publishing executive telling the NYT that, versus Amazon, “Apple has put an offer together that helps publishers and, by extension, authors,” is deeply curious. The publishing industry wants the iPod of reading, but they’ve clearly forgotten the music industry’s traumatic experience when they got theirs. Apple basically wrested control of legal digital music, and the music industry got far less than they wanted to make up for it. Hollywood, in turn, played their hand far differently, scattering bits of movies and TV shows across tons of services, so no one had any leverage, especially not Apple. (Hence, Apple’s negotiations for a subscription TV service with Disney or CBS always seem delicate at best.) I don’t know why Apple would be any more magnanimous with publishers than record labels, given the chance to be gatekeeper.
The gatekeeper matters, because it dictates the answer to publishing’s current crisis: “How we gonna get paid?” The NYT is bringing back metering to its website; book publishers weep over the fact that Amazon has decided books are worth precisely $9.99. Publishers want to control their financial destiny. Apple wants to control every element of the experience on their devices. (Apparently, they’ll get to.) I want to be able to read the NYT, WSJ, The New Yorker, Penthouse and Wired, in all of their dynamic, interactive, multitouch glory easily and cheaply. Ads might be the secret to making that possible. Ultra targeted, innovative ads designed just for the tablet. At least, in the future—Apple’s acquisition of mobile ad firm Quattro, and its CEO’s ascension to VP, have happened too recently to bear much fruit yet.
Point being, there’s a lot of stuff publishers have to figure out, from the big stuff to the little stuff. Apple hasn’t exactly sped up the process by giving them much to work with, either, but for one publisher that we know of—and maybe a couple we don’t. The tablet might change the digital word the way the iPod changed digital music. But it’ll take some time.
Thanks to Joel for that awesome render; original CC printing press image from JanGlas/Flickr
Motion blur! It doesn’t just ruin photos. It’s also something that can be used for artistic effect, when done properly. And for the results of this week’s Shooting Challenge, we’ve got 117 photographers who did just that.
This is my favorite Korg, and I thought this would be pretty cool to capture “In motion!”
I used a Canon Rebel T1I
f/25
20 Second Exposure
18-55mm Lens (shot at 27mm)
ISO 100
Developed in Lightroom2
And my lighting was a small fluorescent tube light, the size you would put in a closet and such… -Marcel Maynard
Camera:Canon EOS REBEL T1i
Lens: 18-55m F/3.5
Exposure:3.2
Aperture:f/22.0
Focal Length:28 mm
ISO Speed:100
Exposure Bias:-1/3 EV
-Shant Meguerdichian
Camera: Canon S90
Shutter Speed: 0.81 sec
Aperture: F/8
Focal Length 6mm
ISO: 80
Exposure Compensation: -0.7 step
-David McGibbon
Speculation and guesswork aside, if Apple’s got a tablet, we need to know how to handle it, physically. So, with two pieces of cardboard, scotch tape and Photoshop, we crudely mocked one up. It was… unusual.
Tablet PCs have been around for years, but they’ve got keyboard, ball-jointed necks and all manner of extraneous fixture and features. Smartphones are sort of like this new slate-like variety of tablet, only they’re too tiny. Buttonless, slick, slab-like tablets do currently exist, but they’re rare, and no one has found the right software pairing to make them particularly versatile. A 10-to-11-inch tablet wouldn’t be totally new, but since none of us are really clear on how you’re supposed to handle it in real-world situations, we built our own.
Here now, in the darkest, dingiest corner of the tech world’s favorite rabbit hole, we’ve performed a hands-on with our cardboard version of Steve Jobs’ mythical product. So, before it exists anywhere outside of our collective imagination, step into Tablet Sutra, the at-times-awkward position-by-position walkthrough of tablet handling:
The hurdles for a tablet like this aren’t just technological. This is a device that’s going to have to convert its usership to a whole new kind of physical experience. We’re used to laptops and smartphones, and we take the things they’re good and bad at for granted. The tablet’s software may be a wonderful mystery box with massive potential, but the tablet form factor, like any other, won’t be for everyone.
If you think we left out any key tablet positions, mention it in comments—feel free to upload photos—or send a note to our tips line with “Tablet Sutra” in the subject line. We’ll be on the lookout.
This generation of Android phones is faster, more powerful and generally awesome-er than anything before. But for whatever reason, they don’t have one thing other smartphones take for granted: multitouch. Here’s how to fix that, and so much more.
Google’s Nexus one and Verizon’s Motorola Droid are, in a sense, miles ahead their competitors in terms of hardware specs, but moreso because they’ve got much newer versions of Android’s software, with 2.1 and 2.0, respectively. In the midst of a slew of new software features and despite base-level hardware and software support, Google, who has always been cagey about the multitouch issue, continues to leave it out of their core apps.
This is especially weird in the cases of the Droid and Nexus One, which don’t just support multitouch on a hardware level, but fully support it on an OS level, too. It’s really just the apps, like the browser, the photo gallery and the maps app, which exclude support for multitouch gestures such as pinch-zooming. Why can’t all Android users have use the same gestures that iPhone, Pre and HTC Hero owners can, if their phones can already accept multi-finger input? Only Google knows. But there’s something you can do about it. Actually, there are two things:
Rooting is most intensive method, and can actually do a lot more than add multitouch to your phone. What this does, basically, is give you deep, system-level access to all your phone’s software and parameters, which lets you run unsanctioned tethering apps to writing apps to your SD card (by default, Android phones restrict you to the device’s limited, onboard memory), modify the device’s stock apps, and most importantly, swap your phone’s software out completely, with what’s called a new ROM. To get native multitouch apps on your phone, you can opt for an entire flash ROM, or just a more narrow set of hacks. But you will need to root your device.
So here’s how to get multitouch on your new Android phone, natively:
Now, if the above instructions seem like overkill for a relatively minor feature, don’t have any need for the other goodies that rooting promises, or aren’t satisfied with the current state of Nexus One and Droid homebrew, you have another, easier option:
As I mentioned before, the Droid and Nexus One’s shared dirty secret is that they support multitouch out of the box, but don’t support include the gestures necessary to get any use out of it. This means that unless you’re willing to hack your phones, as seen above, you’re not going to be able to get multitouch in your native browser, or for that matter any of your native apps. The easy solution? Download Dolphin, a browser that include multitouch gestures (and a lot more cool stuff, like swipe gestures, RSS feed subscriptions and a built-in Twitter client.
For photos, try Multi-Touch for Gallery, which is a full photo gallery replacement, or PicSay, which is a combination gallery/photo editor. All you’ve got to do is search for these apps in the Android Market, install them, and designate them as your default web and photo browsers.
There are other mulitouch apps in the App Market, from games to utilities to simple tech demos. Drop your favorites in the comments, and I’ll add them to the post.
That’s pretty much it! If you have any tips to tricks for getting the most out your phone’s hardware, please drop some links in the comments-your feedback is hugely important to our Saturday How To guides. And if you have any topics you’d like to see covered here, please let me know. Happy pinch-zooming, folks!
It’s sort of stunning how many stellar smartphone options Verizon Wireless customers suddenly have, but lest we forget that RIM’s hotly-anticipated Storm2 was rockin’ the suburbs late last year. For those who sprung, we’re curious to know if you’re happy with your decision. Do you think RIM adequately addressed the gripes from round one? Is the display responsive enough? Was the addition of WiFi what sealed the deal? Are you annoyed that you didn’t hold out for the new Palm lineup? Feel free to get really real in comments below — we get the impression that Waterloo needs all the feedback it can get when it comes to QWERTY-less mobiles.
How would you change RIM’s BlackBerry Storm2? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 22 Jan 2010 22:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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For all the talk of sexting, you’d think it was the only kind of text out there. Not so! There’s plenty of other ways to message, most of which come with just as much regret:
Texting after one too many fine imported lagers
Blasts to give your cult to-the-minute updates on Xenu’s ETA
A picture message that doubles as an Admit One to the gun show
Updating your friends on calorie counts and Weight Watchers points
Sending bad juju via SMS
Sending out obscure lyrics from 70s glam-rock bands
Sharing your Dexter fan fiction, 160 characters at a time
Spending an hour creating the perfect ASCII Vulcan salute
This is the life of an Apple Genius: Computers caked in toxic waste, screaming customers, dead cats, raging homophobes, and oh yeah—getting punched in the face.
We’re protecting the identity of the Geniuses who relayed these tales of total cockbaggage with pseudonyms, since some of them might still work for Apple. If you want to see all of the stories on one page, just click here.
Now tell us, which Genius deserves some free pizza to ease their suffering, like we did for abused Genius Bar customers? (Sorry we can’t send you guys a medal, sheesh.)
Computers in movies look nothing like the beasts we lug around today. They’re thin and light, a single pane that jumps to life when touched. Technology follows Hollywood dreams; here’s hoping this montage is a portent of what’s coming soon.
The world will be shocked if Apple doesn’t reveal a tablet computer next week. It won’t be the first, not by any stretch, and it won’t be the first multitouch device, naturally. But as we envision it, the tablet represents the fusion of two of the most steadfast dreams of sci-fi nerds and ordinary people alike.
This reel, compiled for Giz by Mike Byhoff and Frank Cozzarelli as a celebration of sci-fi’s longstanding love affair with tablets and touch interfaces, is pretty self explanatory, but there are a few things to think about:
• The greatest literary device in sci-fi history, the actual Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, was, in fact, a tablet.
• Gene Roddenberry was—like some tech analysts these days—in favor of the tablet coming in large and small sizes.
• The Incredibles, created by Steve Jobs’ Pixar, not only has the most Apple-like vision of a tablet, but shows it sliding out of a manila envelope, three years before Steve drew the slender MacBook Air out of the same.
• We’re not sure what Bart Simpson is doing to that iMac either, but apparently “Mapple” beat Apple to the punch with touchscreen all-in-ones.
• It is physically impossible to craft a montage of sci-fi interfaces without showing Tom C. in Minority Report.
• You may say that the tablets of Moses weren’t exactly interactive. Fine, believe what you will, but take our advice and stay the hell away from golden calves.
There are plenty more crazy touch computer sightings in TV and movies—if you can track any down, be sure to post them in comments.
Special thanks to Mike Byhoff and Frank Cozzarelli of Gawker TV for working overtime to pull this reel together. The catchy music—chosen for its sci-fi-friendliness, its nice buildup, and its utter lack of resemblance to 1990s techno—is “Lovely Allen” by Holy Fuck, which you can (and should) buy here at Amazon, or here on iTunes.
We know you’ve got questions, and if you’re brave enough to ask the world for answers, here’s the outlet to do so. This week’s Ask Engadget question is coming to us from Addison, who now needs a shiny new laptop bag to house that shiny new laptop that arrived for Christmas. The kicker? TSA approval is passionately desired.
“I was lucky enough to receive a new Laptop (ASUS UL80Vt-A1) this Christmahanukwanzaakah. Hurray! The only problem is, my old LL Bean Messenger bag just isn’t going to cut it anymore now that I’ll be carrying around my precious laptop along with school books and a whole gaggle of cables. Perhaps your readers could suggest to me a replacement? I would prefer a messenger / shoulder style bag, but if there is an especially cool backpack out there, I wouldn’t turn my nose up at it. TSA compliance would be an added bonus since I have to fly quite a bit nowadays. What do you think, could you and the hive-mind give me a hand?”
Air travel just gets worse and worse these days, so we’re emphasizing that “TSA-approved” bit for Addison’s own good. We know the bulk of ’em ain’t that pretty, but for the jetsetters out there who have had a chance to weed through and pick the best, we’re hoping they’ll share their secrets down below.
Ask Engadget: Best TSA-approved laptop bag? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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