Find a great website on your phone and want to show it to everyone? Now you can. “Fling” what you’re watching, listening to, or doing on your phone by sending it to your TV with the press of a button.
But with a simple swipe, you’ll be able to “toss” the video stream to another display, like your TV screen.
It’s really not unlike Apple’s new AirPlay technology, actually, but Apple’s seems more expansive in its vision. AirPlay is more of an independent protocol and will support a broader range of devices like stereo receivers and even cheap consumer-grade speakers.
I just felt like I had to toot my horn today when I caught Google use of the word “fling” to describe the services; it was way close to my “toss.”
So I was laying in bed with my iPad the other night trying to jot down some notes from the day and I was frustrated by the experience. With the iPad cradled on my belly, it was really difficult to cram my hands down under the keyboard to type comfortably.
And to be perfectly honest, I have some difficulty typing on the keyboard even when sitting up with the iPad on my lap. It’s not as easy as Apple makes it look in the commercials.
Then it occurred to me that the positioning of the keyboard below the text you’re writing is a throwback to the days of the notebook computer. It doesn’t have to be down there. The keyboard on an iPad can be displayed anywhere on the screen. So I figured, why not adjust its position to better accommodate different typing positions (like laying in bed)?
So I mocked this puppy up (based on a screen grab from the excellent SimpleNote):
I figured that your arms will naturally spread apart to make the “page” you’re typing on visible while providing more natural accessibility to the keyboard itself.
To provide a glimpse of my idea in action, here’s a shot of me “typing” on my mockup.
Playing make-believe on the mock-up makes me feel like it’s a solid idea, so I’m posting it to the public domain in hopes that a developer currently producing a note-taking or word processing app (SimpleNote? Evernote? Hog Bay? Heck, Apple?) on the iPad will borrow it and make it real. If you are one of those people, I’ve got a slew of other ideas on how to implement, if you want those, too. Just drop me a line.
If you do borrow the idea and implement it, please let me know – I’ll be first in line to buy the app!
UPDATE:
One thing I forgot to mention when I originally posted this. My hands, situated above the “page” I was typing on, acted as a sort of visor that reduced glare and reflection on the portion of the screen that my eye were focused on (that is, the “page”). Just another little bonus to having the keyboard up there.
Update 2:
So it occurs to me that another benefit of a top-screen keyboard (I like that term better, too) is privacy. Your hands and arms would naturally provide a screen.
Like an aging porn star, Northwestel just can’t keep it up.
And by “it”, I mean that which is most important.
And in Northwestel’s case it is the internet. (So get your mind out of the gutter, already.)
Yet, despite the fact the current incumbent constantly flubs it like a clown in a circus, in the itsy-bitsy market of the Great White North no hoser would be fool enough to directly compete.
So it’s up to we citizens to seek alternative means of accessing the environment we all now live, work, shop, and socialize in, to fill in those gaps when Northwestel suffers from what I shall henceforth delicately refer to as Internet Dysfunction (ID for short).
It might surprise you just how many alternatives there are. Continue reading →
A secondary character in a primetime TV show quietly bites the dust in a hospital bed.
The doctor pulls a sheet over his face.
The detectives stand around, mournful of that last piece of information the dead guy failed to expel with his dying breath.
A random, anonymous nurse steps away from the foot of the bed to reveal a tag tied to the corpse’s toe.
Then she hands a piece of paper to one of the detectives for a signature. When the sheet is promptly returned, the nurse efficiently files it away in a folder.
In just a few seconds of monoculture television the modern generation gap is demonstrated: tags v folders. Continue reading →
You just got a new North American toll free phone number.
It has an unlimited North American long distance plan.
When someone calls, it hunts for you in a manner that you define. First it rings your iPhone, then your Blackberry, then your anachronistic landline, then your computer.
If it can’t find you, you can tell it to look for someone else, like your assistant or partner.
If it can’t find anyone in the end, it takes a voicemail message and emails it to you.
It offers all those annoying “PBX” services that the big companies use: press 1 for this, press 2 for that, etc, so you can integrate it into a multi-user environment and look all big business (assuming you aren’t to begin with).
In other words, it does everything you’ve ever heard that a telephone service can do, and then some.
And it costs you $15 a month.
A dream? Well, yeah, but not yours. It’s actually the dream of quality, easy-to-use voice-over-the-internet finally realized.
And here’s how to put it together yourself, super-cheap and super-fast. Continue reading →
I was managing my calendar on my iPad last night and something was bothering me about the experience.
Every time I deleted a repeating event, I found myself pausing in thought, losing trust in my instinctive nature.
Managing my calendar is something I do naturally in iCal on my Mac, and it’s a very natural process. So I took a moment to examine the process on my iPad to see what might be tripping me up.
I was surprised to find that it was Apple’s poor sentence structure.
Check these screen shots:
Repeating event deletion in iCal on Mac OS X
Repeating event deletion in iCal on iPad
Repeating event deletion in Calendar on iPhone
Do you see what tripped me up? It’s Apple’s funky grammar and sentence structure, regarding the word only.
The use of the word only in different positions of the sentence is confusing, not only for a user like me who uses both the Mac OS and the iPhone OS, but also for anyone using iPhone OS to delete repeating events.
On the Mac, the sentence is: “Delete Only This Event”. On the iPad and iPhone, it is: “Delete This Event Only”.
In iCal on the Mac, only is used an adverb, so it is modifying the action the user is taking. (Or that’s how I read it. I’m no grammar king, so I could be off in my technical specifications there. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong) Whether adverb or not, however, the fact that only comes early in the phrase is primarily important to communicating the meaning of the button’s action clearly.
On the iPhone and iPad, Apple turns only into an adjective (again, I could be wrong on my grammatical specifications, but that’s my take). Only now modifies the sentence’s subject, rather than the action. Not only that, but the word falls off the end of the sentence and could be ignored. And that was my problem. I was reading just “Delete This Event”, which is a full sentence and represents what I was essentially trying to do (delete one event in a collection of repeating events) and ignoring the modifier that hung off the tail end: only.
I think Apple’s got the phrasing wrong on the iPad and iPhone. The correct sentence structure to communicate the meaning to the user is, “Delete Only This Event”. The element of modification occurs early in the sentence and is immediately communicated. “Delete This Event Only” is, imho, not only bad grammar, but bad user interface design.
For better or worse, Apple, has set a sort of Gold Standard for iPad apps by pricing their various iWork apps at $10 a piece.
That makes a decent utility like Things seem ridiculously overpriced at $20 and OmniGraffle disastrously inflated at $50.
I was comfortable laying out $10 for Pages and this purchase set the standard for my expectations of the prices of other apps. As a result, $8 for Autodesk’s excellent Sketchbook was just right, but $10 for Brushes was too much. A sketching app provides less functionality and usefulness than a full-powered word processing app, and should be priced suitably.
From this perspective, the general-purpose task management utility Things is priced too high, especially when you consider that potential early adopters of this app have probably already shelled out $60 for the desktop version, and $10 for the iPhone version (and I thought I was being extremely generous paying that much for the iPhone version). Things should be priced under Pages, at about $8.
Then there’s Omnigraffle. I’m an Omnigraffle devotee from way back, and I adore the app on my Mac. It’s primary tool for my day-to-day work as an information architect and designer. But $50 for the iPad version, in light of the iWork golden mean, seems ridiculous.
Of course the argument is obviously that Omnigraffle is a premium app designed for a professional niche. But speaking as a member of that demographic, I still find it overpriced.
iWork is a $80 desktop suite. If you average the price of each app therein to about $27, then the $10 price of the iPad app is just over 1/3 of that price. In comparison, Omnigraffle’s $50 iPad price tag is exactly half the cost of it’s desktop counterpart. Omnigraffle’s pricing should have followed the Apple pricing pattern and been offered for about $30. I would purchase it at that point almost without question, assuming the unique functional and utility qualities were there, and they seem to be.
The platform-heavy $50 price tag for Omnigraffle on the iPad encourages me to just stick with the product on my Mac; I’m not compelled to invest in it at $50 (especially when there’s not even trial version to sell me on the product).
But this whole discussion simply points to the fact that the iPad app economy is (obviously) young and in a state of flux. No one really, fully comprehends the value of the iPad yet, and therefore it’s tough to extrapolate what the true general value of any app on the platform is.
The prevailing mentality seems governed by two things: the iPad is bigger than an iPhone, and smaller than a notebook. Therefore pricing and utility value also fall into that fuzzy middle zone.
At lot of the value system in the iPad app store will depends on Apple’s successful positioning of the iPad itself in peoples’ minds, something it hasn’t done very well yet (observe Letterman’s Top Ten list). Only when we all agree on what the iPad is can we agree on what an iPad app is worth.
But in the current climate, I call Things and Omnigraffle overpriced.
So, I was watching this video co-produced by HP, Adobe, and Microsoft yesterday…
…and I was struck by one thing: they still don’t get it.
And by it, I mean the iPad specifically, but in a more general sense I mean humans.
Like, check this screen shot:
This is how Adobe, HP, and Microsoft imagine that you want to edit photos on a mobile device.
The problem is, there’s hardly any photo on screen to edit. Look at all that surrounding interface! A browser bar, a browser tab bar, a massive tool panel, scroll bars (that aren’t even required!), and then big, fat, black bars on either side of the photo.
There’s more interface here than photo!
For comparison sake, I snagged a screen shot of Adobe’s Photoshop.com Mobile iPhone photo editing app:
Like, oh my gawd — it’s a big photo!
Not as if that makes sense or anything; I mean, filling the screen with the photo you’re editing and kicking the interface to the curb?
Even though these two screen shots demonstrate the exact same application – Adobe’s Photoshop.com – they clearly demonstrate the difference between Apple’s approach to mobile computing and the approach that just about everyone else is taking.
While it’s true that Adobe is responsible for the user interfaces in both screen shots, it’s important to examine the constraints that they experienced in designing each.
For the interface demonstrated in the first screen shot, on the HP device, Adobe was limited only by what its own proprietary media platform, Flash, could do. In other words, that’s Adobe’s version of an ideal mobile photo editing environment.
In the second screen shot, for the iPhone app, Adobe had to conform to Apple’s iPhone human interface guidelines. That’s why such a different app was produced.
I think of it this way: there are two parts to every sentence in the English language, the subject and the predicate. Apple’s mobile philosophy focuses on the subject – the person or thing which the sentence is about. In most cases that would be the person using the device or the material on the device they’re dealing with.
The other guys focus on the predicate aspect of mobile computing. They focus on the aspect of the situation that modifies the experience of the user. In most cases that is the software or the device itself.
So if I write a sentence like, “Sue edited the photo on her mobile device,” Apple would be concerned with the primary subject, Sue.
On the other hand, Adobe, Microsoft and HP would clearly focus on the mobile device and its software.
The result in the latter approach is an overabundance of technology. In the first screen shot, there’s definitely too much interface. The app has decided not to consider the needs of the user and instead just sort of pukes out everything it’s got in terms of functionality, cluttering the screen with a distraction of visual detritus.
Apple’s iPhone, on the other hand, provides the user with what he or she wants, as he or she requires it. Toolbars disappear off-screen when they’re not required for use. They don’t hang around to distract in perpetuity.
In many iPhone apps, there is literally no interface. Consider this screen shot from the acclaimed iPhone writing app, WriteRoom:
That’s it. Just you and your writing. Nothing else.
Compare that to Microsoft’s take on mobile word processing:
I’ll skip past the horrid green skin and just point out that, even on a miniscule screen, Microsoft believes you need as almost as much interface as subject area. And that’s just wrong.
The point of the matter is that, as Apple continues to release revolutionary new devices, first the iPhone and soon the iPad, competitors continue to miss the point. It isn’t about the device at all. That’s why Apple’s physical design is so minimalist, and it’s why they don’t pump the tech specs in their ads.
It’s about friction. Apple is all about reducing the friction a person experiences when they interact with a technological environment.
Until the other guys figure that out and quit drowning us in over-designed user interfaces and dramatic device forms, Apple’s just going to continue kicking their collective ass.
