Design's "Holy Shit" moments

Mitch Goldstein eloquently captures the essence of design education:

Design is so big that it really is not possible to provide a comprehensive, complete education in 4 years—it takes a lifetime to even learn a small part of it. These moments of enlightenment are what make design education truly useful, because in these small moments a world opens up to a student. These insights and lateral connections propel students to spend time on their own to find out more, especially after a class or school ends.

 This is very close to how some of the best teachers I know work. It's hard to build classroom structures that turn these rare moments into reliable events, akin to engineering happy accidents. We need to take care not to fill the curriculum, flipped or otherwise, with so many structures that we crowd out the opportunity for these discoveries.

iPhone Camera Evolution

The makers of Camera+ gathered all six versions of the iPhone — from the first-generation model on through the iPhone 5 — and took pictures in similar conditions with each. The resulting photographs (viaTUAW) demonstrate the evolution of photo quality in Apple's bestselling handset.

Not just a demonstration of the specific improvements in Apple's iPhone camera, but a reminder of how far tiny imaging modules have come in the last six years. Camera phones have travelled a long way from this.​

The Facebook Phone Isn't Liked

All this adds up to some worrisome news for the behoodied one: if Facebook can't enthuse mobile users, the company is in serious trouble. Mobile users are going to be key to ensuring growth for the social network, and it needs to gather large numbers of smartphone users to build revenue and keep the shareholders happy

Not great news for Facebook for sure. Too much, too soon, or is the brand just not as extensible as many thought? Me? I'd Poke out my eyes sooner than have Facebook on my lock screen.​

Inventing Bowie

I could pick any part of Ian Baruma's The Invention of David Bowie in this month's edition of The New York Review of Books, but I think Bowie's role as a ​performer and actor–in the broadest sense possible–is particularly relevant:

Kemp taught Bowie how to use his body, how to dance, pose, mime. And it was Kemp who introduced Bowie to Kabuki. Kemp was fascinated by the onnagata tradition of male actors playing female roles. Kabuki is oddly fitting to Bowie, a theater of extravagant, stylized gestures. At climactic moments the actors freeze, as though in a photograph, while striking a particularly dramatic pose. Bowie never became a great actor, but he did become a great poseur, in the best sense of the word; he always moves with peculiar grace. Without the influence of Kemp, he might not have made the next step in his career, merging rock music with theater, film, and dance. They put on a show together called Pierrot in Turquoise. Bowie learned how to use costumes and lighting to the best effect. Sets would become ever more elaborate, featuring images from Buñuel movies or Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

David Bowie Is Making An Exhibition of Himself

I spent Saturday morning finally getting a look at the much-publicised David Bowie Is exhibition at London's V&A Museum, and to be honest I could have spent all weekend there. I ended up having about two hours there, and having to rush a little bit through the final sections as my friends were on a tighter schedule, but there was much more to spend time with, and I'll be making another trip before it ends in August.​

​It's a truly lovely experience for anyone who's spent most of their life staring at Bowie's LP sleeves, watching his promo videos and acting performances, and soaking up the visual aspects of his public personae. It's also an exemplar of what an exhibition might be. Whilst individual items might impress (oh to stand so close to that pierrot costume or to gaze upon Edward Bell's enormous artwork for Scary Monsters!) it's the cumulative effect that persists the longest. Was any living man's artistic life ever so thoroughly examined? Has anyone ever worn so many clothes that are so recognisable to so many people?

I could fill multiple posts with my thoughts on the various artefacts on display, but I'll wait until the next Re:Sleeves show to talk about them with Ben Waddington, and I urge anyone who's even curious about Bowie's work and life to see the show for themselves. Advance tickets are sold out, but 450+ tickets are available from the V&A daily. I'd get there early if I were you, and budget extra for what you'll spend in the shop while you wait for your entry slot.​

The Next Apple TV Remote Control

Some smart thoughts from Gruber on a putative iOS redesign, and this aside:

I’ve long thought we won’t see apps and an App Store for Apple TV until some future hardware revision of the product with a much-better remote control

I agree, but I think we've seen the future of the Apple TV remote, and it looks like this.

4000 Creative Suite Users Don't Want Their Tools In The Cloud

Some comments on the petition echoed what GigaOM readers had said earlier. Namely that freelance artists and designers — a key Adobe constituency — don’t want to rent the tools of their craft. Some threatened to stick with their existing Creative Suite product as long as possible and then seek alternatives like Corel.

I'm certain we've not heard the last of this. It's a big shift for Adobe and its customers.

Teaching Maths Classes with the iPad

​Leanna Lofte at iMore posted a nice overview of the apps she uses in her classroom. She's a Mathematics teacher, but a lot of these approaches adapt well for all kinds of instruction.

Newsstand is great when the publishers stop fighting the content

Jim Dalrymple follow's Marco Arment's lead and takes The Loop to Newsstand:

“I have resisted every digital platform since we sold the company…” he says. “From 1999 to 2013, there has been a variety of digital publishing platforms that have allowed you to take your website and put it into some kind of magazine, but none of them seemed viable to me.

“Move ahead 20 years from where we were, and here’s Newsstand…I’m convinced that Newsstand is the next big publishing platform, the next big shift. It won’t be the last one, but it’s the next big shift. I’m convinced that it’s where I need to be to publish something like The Loop Magazine.”

​I've bought magazines in Newsstand that I've cancelled after the first issue (Hello Sight & Sound), and others like Arment's The Magazine that I keep paying for and keep returning to. A pattern is definitely emerging.

​Is it even imaginable that a legacy publisher could ship a magazine this simple?

Dropbox is a Platform

Write for Dropbox is now available for iPad as well as iPhone (where it's now free-of-charge), and certainly looks like a nice solution for word processing straight to your synchronised file storage.

I've been heavily reliant on Dropbox for a few years, and it's increasingly becoming the back-end file storage solution for a whole ​range of apps that I use daily. It also provides much of the glue between my mobile workflow and what I need to do when I get back to the desktop (there are still a few things I like–or need–to do sat at my big-screen iMac). I use iCloud too, but I treat that in a rather different way–for now.

If I were building an app right now that needed reliable file syncing across different platforms and devices I'd most likely choose to build it on Dropbox, though a bit of me would still be nervous about trusting a critical part of the app to a third party. If you don't think that matters, you should check out Brent Simmons' excellent article from a few weeks back.

Update: Jamie Bullock is absolutely right when in that plenty of writing apps already use Dropbox for file syncing, and that it's surprising how long it's taken Dropbox to create its own solution. What's significant though is that Dropbox appears to be recognising that it's built a platform, and starting to build its own ecosystem of tools on top of it.

The News Legacy Publishing Doesn't Want To Hear

Was a price of 85% of revenues a good deal for this packaged publishing service? For some writers, it clearly was. JK Rowling became a cash billionaire via the traditional packaged publishing service, and obviously there are hundreds of other examples of authors for whom the packaged service has represented a good value.

But for every author who wanted and benefited from the packaged service, there were countless others who took it – if they could get it at all – only because they had no alternative.

Digital distribution has provided that alternative. And increasing numbers of authors are choosing it.

Great story, and a pretty revealing reaction from the publishers in Eisler's audience. Like I said, I'm less and less convinced that traditional book publishers are up to the task.

The Photographer Behind Apple's Product Shots

You’ve almost certainly never heard of Peter Belanger, but you’ve definitely seen his photographs. In fact, you may even see his work every day, and it’s likely that you own some of his most famous subjects.

Deceptively simple might have been a description coined purely for Belanger's work. I'm always blown away by how Apple's product shots really capture what makes the products themselves feel simple and elegant.

Getting Audio out of Dropbox on iPad

While we're on the subject of Dropbox, ​Fraser Speirs' timely request for a means of getting an audio file into GarageBand on iPad piqued my interest enough to to a bit of digging around. I've had reasonable results using Dropbox as a way of moving text/image/pdf files around with Apps like GoodReader, so I was keen to see how it works for audio.

​Turns out it's doable, in a reasonable but roundabout fashion. Kymatica's AudioShare is a 'document manager' for audio files, handling various transcoding, clipping and copying functions cheaply and easily. It links to Dropbox so you can bring in an audio file, transcodes it to something GarageBand can handle, and moves it to the system clipboard. From there it's simple to paste it into a track in GarageBand on the iPad, ready for overdubbing, processing etc.

​There goes another thing that we used to need the desktop computer for.

The iPad is Just for Consumption, pt #736

Since I’m a few years beyond fourth grade at this point, it’s tough for me to approach these apps exactly as a child would. But I’ve never learned to code, so I can claim beginner status there. Hopscotch was definitely more challenging for me than Kodable was. But I learned more about actual coding from Hopscotch.

It's not surprising that the iPad should be the natural place for kids to learn programming concepts, but it's still funny how many people still say that tablets can't replace PCs in the classroom.

More on Kindle Accessibility

Well Daring Fireball seems to have killed this site for now, but here's the Google cache of it:

Amazon has made a good start, but with a grade of (…wait, let me pull out my calculator here…) 73% (a low C) they still have some serious work to do to come up to the standard of accessibility we hope to see for our students.

Useful information for our ongoing assessment of eBook reader software, but more work to do on this front I think.

Oh Nintendo

Nintendo hopes smartphone software will help spur console sales, which will in turn lead to an increase in popular game titles for them, the sources said.

I still really want to see Nintendo get back its mojo, but this won't do it.

Adobe Hardware for iPads

Both Project Mighty and Napoleon appear to be small, simple pieces with an aesthetic reminiscent of the white and silver of early iPod models. The stylus has a single button, and the ruler is marked with a series of shapes that can be switched between to alter how the pen is drawing. On the iPad, Napoleon displays lines on the screen which a user can trace, effectively turning the tool into a digital protractor that allows the creation of sharp, specific shapes. The pen's input can be distinguished from human input inside the connected app, allowing users to perform gestures, such as undo, or to have their fingers act as an eraser.

Well this certainly shows that Adobe takes tablet computing (for which, currently, read iPad computing) seriously, as well they might.​ I'd be much more positive about their impact if they weren't tied to the Adobe Creative Cloud, but expect to see more stuff like this. 

​Also: Imagine how well this would work with a 12-15" iPad.

Resizing Images on iPad and iPhone

I've said before that as the months since the launch of the iPad have passed, the number of tasks for which I need to turn to a desktop computer has inexorably continued to shrink. One of the things for which I still find myself turning to the iMac has been the various activities around posting things online. This neat and dirt-cheap app tackles a simple but necessary step in that process: Reducing images to a reasonable size for online use. 

I'm going to revisit my list of things I need my iMac for soon, and see which of those I fully expect to get ticked off by simple and well-focused apps like Reduce over the next twelve months.

Will Digital Really Save Book Publishing?

On this weekend's Doom Ray, we discussed the announcement of a 66% increase in digital book sales boosting the UK publishing industry to an overall 4% growth. While it's tempting to think of high year-on-year growth as a kind of "iPod moment" for the book trade, I'm not so sure. The 1% drop in physical book sales might be small, but it seems like print is being propped up by higher-priced book sales in the face of shrinking numbers.

The big sales numbers for text-only paperbacks seems to be going to the Kindle, where prices and margins are squeezed tight (and likely to get squeezed even tighter by the collapse of the agency-model agreements in place between Apple and some of the European publishers).

The high-ticket books are where the profits are, and it's precisely where the digital books not only can, but must offer a better experience. It's an experience that's closer to an app than it is to a digitised book. I'm not convinced that's a game traditional book publishers are going to win.

Farewell Adobe Creative Suite

Adobe has shared with us that Creative Suite 6 will still be available for purchase, but it will not be updated beyond addressing bugs and OS compatibility. There will be no Creative Suite 7.

​It's all Cloud subscriptions hereon-in. If I even used any of the CS applications anymore, this might bother me.