Author: mike

Categories
Comics iPhone Mobile News

New iPad magazine showcases graphic journalism

The comics medium has been used for journalism for a while now. Joe Sacco’s Palestine is a prime example; a personal and immediate first-hand account of life in the occupied territories.

Symbolia Cover ArtSymbolia magazine takes this form of journalism to the iPad as a Newsstand app.

Symbolia is available in the iOS App Store. Download is free, an annual subscription is $11.99 for 6 issues. Single issues will run $2.99. The app comes free with the preview issue, which showcases Susie Cagle’s piece on the Salton Sea.

Newsstand Icons
Newsstand Icons are rendered differently from normal apps, like the Zinio icon at left.
Apple’s Newsstand is a very underrated iOS feature. Newsstand apps are essentially iOS apps with additional privileges that allow pushing of new content to your device so that the latest issue is available to you offline. Apple hasn’t promoted Newsstand much, but there are an impressive number of major titles available, including the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Esquire, Wired, and others. You can easily differentiate Newsstand apps from others on the app store by their icons; instead of the rounded square icons, Newsstand apps are rendered to look like magazines or newspapers. It’s a good thing, too, as the ‘store’ feature in Newsstand is kind of broken.

Ironically, today News Corp. announced that they are shutting down The Daily, but tablet-based magazines such as Symbolia and Marco Arment’s The Magazine seem to be gaining momentum. The Magazine is already profitable, has hired an editor, and increased its rates for writers. The economics of these magazines are very compelling in comparison to print magazines, and the barriers to entry have never been lower.

Categories
social shopping user experience UX

Update: Changing font size in iTunes 11

Changing font size on iTunes 11
Changing font size on iTunes 11

Fernando Alves points out that iTunes 11 does have a means of increasing the font size.   To increase the font size used in lists, check the “Use Large Text for List Views” option.

Note that there is only one large text font and the standard font, there is no fine control of font or font size. This option also only changes the font size of the list-oriented screens (Songs, Playlists) and not the other display options (Genres, Artists, Albums).

Using the alternative font doesn’t really change the row height in these tables, so the end result seems a little crowded, but at least the text is bigger.

Categories
Blog Mobile News

Samsung’s playing hardball

This detailed article from Horace Dediu at Asymco discusses how important mobile is to Samsung, and just how much they are spending on advertising and sales-related expenses (commissions, incentives).

It might be surprising to note that Samsung spends considerably more than Apple and Microsoft. But it also spends more than Coca Cola, a company whose primary cost of sales is advertising.

However, advertising is not the only form of promotional spending. Samsung also pays commissions and “sales promotion“.

They are in this to win, which is one reason they are the only company besides Apple who are showing profits in mobile. You can bet that this will eventually translate into more influence over the Android platform, if not an outright purchase.

Categories
Blog

A quick WordPress tip…

…for folks that haven’t updated their blog in forever, like me. Be sure you categorize and tag your posts when you write them, going back afterwards is tedious and error-prone. Also, using the QuickPress interface from the WordPress dashboard isn’t such a good idea, as it defaults the category to ‘uncategorized’ and only lets you manually type in tags. When you do fix categories and tags on your posts, be sure that you don’t inadvertently change the publish date in the process, I managed to do that somehow as well.

This may be different in the new version of WordPress, I must admit. I also must find out soon, I’m long overdue for an update. WordPress is great, but it changes often and it’s easy to get behind. There are also generally new versions in the pipeline, too. WordPress 3.5 is now in release candidate status, so doing the recommended update to 3.4.2 is probably not the best idea, but updating to the newest version has its own risks of breaking themes and plug-ins.

Categories
iOS development iPhone Mobile News social shopping user experience UX

Mobile Links for week of November 25-30 2012

Android shopping traffic lags behind iOS, despite the larger number of devices. GigaOm asks why:
Why are Android users less engaged than iOS users?

Nice detailed graphs and links to several good stories on the topic. I do take issue slightly with the idea that “willingness to buy stuff == engagement”; everyone buys devices for different reasons. But if you are writing shopping apps or marketing your business on mobile devices, it’s important to understand the different types of users and the strategies that work best on each platform.

IDC: Developer Disinterest Could Kill RIM & Windows Phone Ya think? Out of all of the companies I’ve interviewed lately, only a couple are planning to put their apps on Windows Phone, and nobody is planning to support BlackBerry.

11 Apple iPads per hour vs. zero Microsoft Surface tablets Schadenfreude aside*, this is a significant indicator about what a misstep it has been for Microsoft to sidestep its OEMs.  They don’t have nearly the distribution network they need to go it alone.   Also, Surface exemplifies how badly MS has misread the tablet trend; it’s not about the hardware, its about reducing the computing experience to something that is quick and pleasurable.  Shoehorning desktop Windows onto a tablet barely capable of running it fails both tests.

*Actually, I’m not enjoying this at all,  I’m a Microsoft shareholder, and my investment has seen no growth, while my Apple stock has gone through the roof.  Steve Ballmer has got to go.

In BII MOBILE INSIGHTS: Mobile Technology May Define The Future Of Healthcare, PriceWaterhouse Coopers presents a video talking about how mobile is influencing healthcare.      The other links/reports on this page are pretty good, too.

Categories
user experience UX Web Design

iTunes 11: First impressions

Very First impression: More pictures, Tinier fonts that cant be resized.

While the new font is fairly readable, the smaller size is a bit of an insult for my aging eyes. Not cool, and not changeable, as far as I can see.

At first, it looks like the navigation is very different, the sidebar that has been with us since iTunes 1 is gone, replaced by a ribbon which lets you choose content types and view a dropdown of your devices. Turns out that you can still turn on the sidebar, it’s an option in the View menu.

iTunes Match came up pretty quickly, and is no longer called out in the sidebar list. Device management features seem to be working better with my iPhone 5.

I’ve left my desktop with the old version and will post any interesting comparisons I find.

I have noticed some glitches in the way some of the screens load, where the HTML 5 layouts are either messed up or text fields are displaying with strings like “DI6.SortOrder.Featured” instead of the title “Featured”. I”m wondering if some instances of the servers are not syncd up. Apple runs iTunes on tens of thousands of servers, and restarting them for updates is not an instantaneous process.

Edit: Gruber has a pretty good summary of the new interface already.