Nancy Chandler's Wonderful Paper Maps

The maps have remained popular in part because they offer a lot more than just a way to get from one place to another. They also offer carefully curated recommendations. Rather than depicting a traditional city layout, or firing off a laundry list of attractions in the style of a guidebook, Chandler's maps combine the best of both worlds, plotting destinations while adding pithy advice or useful tips about what to expect. The expertise come from meticulous research and well-placed connections. "If we stopped selling maps," said Nancy Chandler, "we could become taxi drivers."

I love Bangkok, and I love Nancy Chandler's maps. In fact the two have been almost inseparable in my mind since my first trip there seven years ago.

Digital Textbooks Still Have a Way to Go

“It’s moving steadily forward,” said Tim Bajarin, president at Creative Strategies Inc., a tech industry research firm. He predicts that it will take two to three more years for the digital textbook industry to reach critical mass, and that he believes Apple now has a head start. “In many ways, you have to look at this as an Apple evangelistic move. The textbook industry has been relatively slow.”

Solid assessment of the current state of digital books in the classroom sixteen months on from Apple's iBooks launch. It's a big shift, and it was always going to take a while for educators to adapt their thinking and processes to the new medium. In many ways I'm glad to see that people are taking the time to learn how to do it properly, rather than just shovelling old content into the new form. I've been really impressed by the way those people I've worked with on iBooks projects have been quick to grasp the potential, and have begun thinking about how to make it work best in their own contexts.

Tablet Sales to Beat Notebooks in 2013

So, a mere three years after Apple launched the iPad, 2013 looks set to be the year that tablets trounce the traditional notebook computer. Remember how many people said that they couldn't see the point of the iPad, when you could buy a cheap notebook for less? Remember Netbooks?

McQuarrie's Beautiful Star Wars Paintings Brought To Life

​That's the promise of the just-announced Star Wars animated show, replacing The Clone Wars and arriving in 2014. I remember seeing Ralph McQuarrie's paintings in 1977, before the film arrived here in the UK, and being instantly captivated. I can't wait to see how this turns out.

Re-engineering Pinch-to-zoom for Paper

I really like Paper as a sketching App for iPad,and it's intriguing to see how developer FiftyThree is approaching the difficult task of dealing with added complexity. As iOS apps begin to take on more functionality, and become viable replacements for more traditional desktop software, this kind of ing becomes more and more important. 

“Pinch to zoom” reinvented zoom for touch devices, and Apple made the gesture ubiquitous by including it in iOS. “Pinch to zoom” is now probably the single most broadly understood multitouch gesture; it feels like something we’ve been doing all our lives, even though it entered the popular lexicon barely six years ago.

Pinch-to-zoom in the latest version of Paper works like a loupe tool, but one where you can directly work within the magnified section. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it's a definite improvement to an already-essential App.

It Depends What You Mean By "Winning"

As usual, some very clear thinking on this from Benedict Evans. It's a quick read, eloquently expressed, so go read the whole thing. I wonder how the whole smartphone share thing looks if you plot the numbers on a as-yet-speculative scale of potential smart devices, and include TVs, wristwatches, and cars.

The End of the Used Game Market is Good for Developers

Interesting take on this from Penny Arcade's Ben Kuchera, prompted by the brewing storm over Xbox One's game licensing system. In short, when you buy a game on disk from Microsoft, you're really buying a license to play it on your machine that's tied to your account. You can move that license around to play it at a friend's house, or you can give up the license (likely for some credit against new games) and never play it again. You can also give the disk to anyone you like and they can install it, but they can only play it if they buy a license. It seems like a solid idea, but it's complex for users to wrap their heads around, and it'll likely kill second-hand sales stone dead. Ben makes a good argument for this being a good thing, and it'll be interesting to see what developers do with the price flexibility that this affords them.

i'll be talking about this with Kyle on Doom Ray this weekend, so let me know your thoughts in the usual places.​

The "Android Is Winning" meme and the Myth of Market Share

First, market share without context assumes that each percentage of market share is equal to another – that every Android activation is equal to an iOS sale. Nothing could be further from the truth. You can’t simply total up market share and determine a winner any more than you could count up coins or poker chips without knowing the underlying value of those coins or chips. A penny does not have the same value as a quarter and only a small child would rather have more coins than fewer coins but more money.

​Seems like not a week goes by without someone telling me that Google has a bigger share of the smartphone market than iPhone. I'd love to split a restaurant bill with some of these folks.

Is Xbox the Last Traditional Console?

Implementation issues aside, Microsoft's focus on the living room versus Sony's cloud emphasis seems both more traditional, and more of a sure thing in the short to medium term.

Assuming that neither Sony nor Microsoft manage an outright coup with a better price, a better release date, or sufficiently compelling exclusive games, this is the choice you'll make: do you bet on the company who wants to let you take a traditional gaming experience anywhere you'd care to be, or the one that demands you stand still in exchange for increased immersion and functionality?

This is not the TV Experience You're Looking For

Microsoft's Xbox One launch emphasised its ambition to sit at the centre of your living room, but if you were hoping it could free you from the existing cable/satellite prison then you'll be sadly disappointed:

The problem is that the Xbox One's TV integration is the same familiar nightmare we've known for nearly 20 years now. Instead of actually integrating with your TV service, the One sits on top of it: you plug your cable box's HDMI cable into the Xbox, which overlays the signal with its own interface. If you're lucky enough to own a newer cable box, you'll get to change channels directly through the HDMI connection, but most people will find themselves using the One's included IR blaster to control their cable or satellite boxes — a failure-prone one-way communication system that stubbornly refuses to die.

Yahoo! is on a Roll

Yesterday was a big day for Marissa Mayer's Yahoo, with the announcement that they'd purchased Tumblr, followed by the launch of a revamped Flickr. Long term the Tumblr acquisition is big, and tells us a lot about how Yahoo sees its future. It's also a clear indication of how Yahoo is changed under Mayer's leadership; the announcement was honest and straightforward, and acknowledged the concerns of Tumblr fans that they might "screw this up" in the way many think they screwed up Flickr.

Fitting then that yesterday should be the day that Yahoo shows its hand on Flickr, and what they're doing to 'fix' it. As a long-time (pre-Yahoo) Flickr subscriber I'm cheered that the new design and subscription model doesn't throw out everything I've loved about the service. The features I've relied on all seem to be intact. Rather this is about demonstrating commitment and renewed relevance, and the big bold moves that show it means business. 1TB free photo storage is an order of magnitude greater than most existing offers—make no mistake, this is as much a shot across Dropbox's bows as Google's (and I love that slider that lets you see how many photos you can store).

​Initial communication over what it means for existing users was less than crystal-clear, but it's pretty straightforward. Existing Pro accounts carry on as before with the same rolling subscription (for the time being at least). Free users all get a terabyte of storage, ads, and lose image stats. I think that's a pretty good trade-off for most regular people. $49.95 a year buys you statistics and strips out the ads. The curve-ball option they're calling "Doublr" gets you 2TB for a few cents short of $500. That's an interesting option, though the price/capacity would need to change before I'd consider it good value. Hard to see yet what they're planning for that.

​All in all these changes are positive, and give me renewed hope in Flickr's future, and for Yahoo too. I'm hoping more than ever that one of Mayer's first calls on joining Yahoo was to Tim Cook, and that we'll see deeper and better integration of Flickr in iOS and Mac OS X over the coming months and years.

​UPDATE: Right on cue, 9to5mac reports that deeper Flickr integration is on the cards for iOS 7.

Turn Graph Paper Sketches into iPad Platform Games

Nice idea. Wile I'm sure this has pretty heavy constraints it could be a great way of prototyping ideas, and of getting into games design.

Players simply design their level by hand, creating any traps or obstacles they want the avatar to surmount while climbing five stories and reaching the goal. Pixel Press uses proprietary character recognition to allow the iPad's camera to pick up the sketches and convert them to graphic elements in the level. Then the creator has to test the level, refine it and add skins to make it look like a polished game

Robin's Kickstarter is already a quarter of the way toward its goal, so here's hoping it'll be funded.

The App Industry Needs its Auteurs

From last week, TNW has an interesting take on the emerging new role of Director within the App production world:

As Apple’s App Store nears its five year anniversary, a new kind of storyteller is rising in importance: The App Director. This isn’t an official title, but it’s definitely a state of mind and an important trend to take note of as we enter the app ecosystem’s pupae stage.

I was reminded of this by both last week's Doom Ray interview with Steve Stopps of Blitz Games, and by some of the Masters student work I've been looking at this week. There's definitely an emerging new category of the app 'author' who may not be coding directly, but needs to have a complete view of e whole experience and how it's delivered. This may emerge from more traditional design education, but there'll need to be significant adjustments in how we recruit, assess, and how we prepare students for the deep digital literacy this requires.

The Terrifying Reality of a Glass Future

At one point as I climbed the stairs and approached the second floor, I saw a group of five people wearing Google Glass, all silently staring off into space. I couldn’t tell if they were wirelessly having a conversation through their eyeballs, or just bored by the presence of real humans in front of them.

We are going to disallow these in our classrooms aren't we?

Flat Earthers

There's no doubt that Microsoft tapped into some kind of a trend with its ultra-flat 'Metro' UI design for Windows, but I for one think that it goes way too far, jettisoning the subtle visual cues that makes the best app designs feel like more than pixels behind a smooth glass screen. Tim Green over at Medium thinks so too, and provides a well-considered narrative on just how flat is flat enough for iOS.

Google Wants Everything

​Gruber is spot-on here:

Google is a hyper-competitive company, and they repeatedly enter markets that already exist and crush competitors. Nothing wrong with that. That’s how capitalism is supposed to work, and Google’s successes are admirable. But there’s nothing stupid about seeing Google being pitted “versus” other companies. They want everything; their ambition is boundless.

I've wondered before if Google is becoming what Microsoft was in the late 90s and early 2000s: A barrier to innovation elsewhere. Time was, if it was a market Microsoft might enter then smaller businesses were afraid to touch it. This isn't "open"; this is wanting perfect data on everything you do and needing to own all of the entry points to get that.

iPhones Become Microscopes for Cheap Disease Identification

DIY iPhone Microscope Costs $8 to Make

Internal medicine and infectious disease specialist Isaac Bogoch and his colleagues turned an iPhone 4S into a fairly accurate microscope by attaching an eight dollar, three-millimeter ball lens to the smartphone's camera lens using double sided tape.

​Things like this are inspiring. Just think of the potential for affordable distributed diagnosis.

This could be a nice competitor to Eventbrite

I love Eventbrite, but I'm sure it could use a little competition. If Tito works as good as it looks, it might just give the whole event ticketing market a kick in the pants. Also: We need more apps supporting the amazing Passbook on iOS.

Love some of these features too:

With Tito you have a huge amount of flexibility in setting up your tickets. Custom discount codes, private links to secret tickets, and you can even run your event as a lottery.

BBM Comes to iOS, Android, and Nobody Notices.

We’ve known BlackBerry has been planning to offer BBM on rival platforms for quite some time. Now that services like WhatsApp, iMessage and Kik are dominating the messaging world, BBM will finally expand beyond the BlackBerry platform.

​Anyone still interested?

Different and Yet the Same.

Unlike Apple's Game Center application, what Google's offering is backend support for developers rather than a standalone application. Think of it more like OpenFeint than Game Center -- you can sign in using your Google+ login in-game, and that login will track your identity (including leaderboard scores, achievements and saves) across various games and devices.

Forgive me if I'm being dense, but what part of that is "unlike Apple's Game Center"?