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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most of us are not in the caves of Afghanistan struggling with a satellite phone to upload a picture of breaking news that, even full of noise or slightly blurry, has value. Rather, as reader of Web logs and online-only publications, and as the editor of The Magazine, I’m seeing plenty of photos taken for reported features that should be better.
Good article. While I love the iPhone 5 camera, and it's great for most regular needs, I don't expect to see blurry low-light shots in proper online articles.
At a large wooden table sat a man with a laptop. I’m sure you can picture that. But this man had a stack of Starbucks gift cards laid out neatly to form an arrow. The arrow pointed to an iPad that was being used as a sign. The sign read “Test my App and Coffee’s on Jim.”
Great idea. There's a bunch of things you could test out using this approach, I'm sure.
I Accidentally Bought a Banksy in 2003
So I kept my Banksy around, and even paid serious bucks ($250!) to get it framed properly. I joined Twitter, and made it my avatar, because surely that would help me sell it. Over the past five years, I have regularly made attempts to track down someone who might be able to at least walk me through what you do in this scenario. So far, I’ve had no luck.
Very nice. I had my own bit of Banksy-related good fortune back in 2006 when I got a couple of copies of the Banksy Paris Hilton prank cd before HMV twigged and pulled them from shelves. The photos I posted on Flickr the same day went global, and are pretty much the only ones that still show up in a Google image search. I toyed with selling one of them, but Paris Hilton's record label decided to use their muscle (and a spurious claim of copyright violation) to put paid to any eBay listings.
Most of Futurilla's content is intentionally non-location-specific, and we're generally interested in things that are relevant wherever in the world you happen to be. I'll make an exception though for the forthcoming Birmingham Architecture Festival, organised by the talented Laira Piccinato. That Birmingham didn't already have such a festival was shocking enough; that it should be initiated and successfully organised by one person, and a non-Birmingham-native at that, is doubly amazing. As I write the project is fully backed on Kickstarter, and tickets for the events are selling out quickly. If you're anywhere near Birmingham UK on the last weekend in May you should grab tickets now. If you're not, you should back it anyway, just because.
It's great that our long-time home city is spawning such amazing festivals these days. With things like BAF2013 and Still Walking being added to well-established events like Fierce, Flatpack and Supersonic, this place is becoming an even better place to base a creative business, and to live.
With a starting price tag of $329, Apple’s iPad mini was initially dismissed as too pricey to attract budget-conscious consumers drawn to Google’s Nexus 7 and Amazon’s Kindle Fire, which, at $249 and $199, respectively, were significantly cheaper. But the device proved wildly popular, and has since established a new mainstream price band between the tablet market’s high end ($499 and up) and its low end ($249 and down). And it unquestionably expanded Apple’s tablet market share.
That Apple should take a similar approach to the iPhone should surprise precisely no-one.
Other people find smartphones and tablets even more frustrating. Imagine not being able to hear audio cues or unlock a device. A two-fingered swipe or pinch isn’t effortless with osteoarthritis or with a finger in a cast. The World Health Organization estimates 295 million people worldwide are visually impaired, and nearly 40 million are blind. Ever answer a call or check Twitter without seeing what you’re doing?
Back in 1995-1996 when I was helping people set up some of the earliest cybercafes, we quickly learned that the emerging connected world needed to be, and could be, accessible to all regardless of physical or sensory impairment, and that improvements in accessibility frequently benefited all users. The Macintosh was generally a good platform for supporting screen readers and assistive devices, though it could get pretty expensive quickly (similarly for adding multi-lingual support), but OS X changed everything by building this stuff right into the out-of-the-box experience. That iOS still has the best assistive support is no surprise, but this isn't about one platform winning—it's about driving the whole market to do the right thing.