Barac consulting

I have been interviewed by Josh Benton from Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. He wanted me to talk about the iPad from a newspaper / iphone app designer perspective.

I found Josh’s question about the NYT demo particulary tough. It is great to see what they are doing – and exciting to see something that is an iPad newspaper app in progress (not a proof of concept). A project in it’s early stages is bound to have some unresolved areas, but it’s good to see the NYT looking to find ways of retaining the edited nature of the paper, and the ability to stumble upon a story. There was a glimpse in the demo of an interesting page which has more of a grid structure with short excerpts of stories, drawing on the interesting work NYTimes.com design director Khoi Vinh and software developer Andre Behrens have been doing with Times Skimmer.

It will be interesting to look back and see, once there are a first and second generation of iPad apps, how these thoughts and those of others look with hindsight.

A thought provoking post on the uses of the ipad at Monday Note. News on the iPad makes a lot of sense, but is part of a rethinking of how newspapers collect, generate and distribute stories. I think it makes sense to think of newspapers as curaters of information and also increasingly as app makers, software developers. And this is interesting:

It’s worth it: unlimited access, a fantastic and intuitive search engine, a recommendation system that learns the way I read thanks to its statistical algorithm, intelligent folders, all sorts of alerts, endless catalogs of topics, rich multimedia contents, a readers community, etc.

Readers community. I don’t think anyone has got that right yet, and there is so much potential there for the newspaper and the reader.

Thanks for the link to Nieman Lab, with fascinating roundup of iPad thoughts and other gems.

This might well be the new Apple iDevice. The housing you can see is made specifically for the device it is holding. Only Apple would do that, surely / Image from Engadget

During the last few weeks I have a had a few conversation about Apple’s expected tablet, some of which have involved the other person saying “Yes, but what is it for?” I think it is aimed at various audiences, and here are some very subjective musings on why that might be: Most evenings, after meals have been eaten and small children put to bed, some members of my family sit on the sofa looking at Facebook, using email or avidly reading Mumsnet on laptops which really look too cumbersome for the task at hand.

This is fantastic, an infographic from Gigaom which analyses the sales of apps on the iphone/ipod touch done in a format which makes for a beautiful scrolling graphic on the iphone, and points to some exciting possibilities

As iphone apps, web apps and other products bring more user goodness but also more complexity, I find myself drawn to the elegant simplicity of these Japanese Stereoviews – the 2 adjacent images of the stereoview have been turned into an animated gif, to bring jerky but oddly compelling 3d to the computer screen. Of course, that’s what our eye-brain team are doing all the time, so images following in rapid succession will have a similiar effect. Why didn’t I think of that before? LOVE IT! I posted this before on my tumblr account, and a few people said nice things about them, so I thought i’d repost the link here. See more at Pink tentacle

There is something more to write about why this new medium is so different, and offers up fantastic opportunities for designers. Apple themselves have acknowledged this in their presentations, saying that creating great apps is 60% design. And this isn’t just some truism – the iphone, and to some extent android phone apps are making waves because of the new qualities