All entries tagged: Apple
What should news apps on the iPad look like? John-Henry Barac on space & touch in digital news design
When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad last month, there were immediate debates over what kind of impact it would have on both the news habits of consumers and the bottom lines of news organizations. But one thing seemed obvious: that the iPad would be a glorious playground for user-interface designers, information architects, and others who think about how information should be found, structured, consumed, and designed. That 9.7-inch screen, combined with the iPhone’s multitouch interface, will inspire some innovative new ways to present news. At the unveiling, the only taste we got of these new ideas was The New York Times’ iPad app (above), which brought a bit of the typography and layout DNA of the print newspaper onto the device.
To think about these issues, I got in touch with John-Henry Barac. He spent a decade at The Guardian on the print side, as an art director and designer, then moved to the digital world. As a consultant, he designed The Guardian’s first iPhone app, which stands out as one of the more interesting within the iPhone news app world, much of which bears a certain bland sameness. (I particularly liked the small tag icon that allows the curious to quickly match other stories to the keywords of the current one.) John-Henry’s now an independent design consultant, anxious to get his hands on an iPad and to explore the new medium.
Here’s an edited version of our conversation. Among the topics we discuss:
This Week in Review: Google’s new features, what to do with the iPad, and Facebook’s rise as a news reader
[Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week’s top stories about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh]
A gaggle of Google news items: Unlike the past several weeks with their paywall and iPad revelations, this week wasn’t dominated by one giant future-of-media story. But there were quite a few incremental happenings that proved to be interesting, and several of them involved Google. We’ll start with those.
— The Google story that could prove to be the biggest over the long term actually happened last week, in the midst of our iPad euphoria: Google unveiled a beta form of Social Search, which allows you to search your “social circle” in addition to the standard results served up for you by Google’s magic algorithm. (CNN has some more details.) I’m a bit surprised at how little chatter this rollout is getting (then again, given the timing, probably not), but tech pioneer Dave Winer loves the idea — not so much for its sociality but because it “puts all social services on the same open playing field”; you decide how important your contacts from Twitter or Facebook are, not Google’s algorithm.
— Also late last week, several media folks got some extended time with Google execs at Davos. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger posted his summary, focusing largely on Google’s faceoff with China. “What Would Google Do?” author Jeff Jarvis posted his summary, with lots of Google minutiae. (Jeff Sonderman also further summarized Jarvis’ summary.) Among the notable points from Jarvis: Google is “working on making news as compelling as possible” and CEO Eric Schmidt gets in a slam on the iPad in passing. Keep reading »
This Week in Review: What the iPad might do for news, a leaky New York Times paywall, and the Newsday 35
[Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week’s news about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh]
The iPad’s big reveal: Apple unveiled its new tablet — the unfortunately named iPad — on Wednesday, a week before the Super Bowl, and the buzz was as least as big: The Internet practically broke under the weight of the hype for Apple’s latest product. Rather than bury you in opinions about the specs and perks of the iPad, I’ll focus on what people are saying about the gadget’s potential impact on print and online media, especially journalism. Here goes:
Let’s start with the runup. Print media folks had high hopes that the iPad would revolutionize their industries — even, as The New York Times put it, giving old media “a chance to undo mistakes of the past. In three smart posts, the tech sites TechCrunch, Gizmodo and Wired said the iPad could be a tool to change publishing, but, as Jason Kincaid in TechCrunch wrote, “someone will need to deliver the content.” Then there were the pre-emptive debunkers, who argued that the iPad would be “just another distribution platform,” merely a circulation tool for journalism, and a “massive distraction” for newsrooms.
After the announcement, the overwhelming reaction from the tech world was one of disappointment. The Guardian has a roundup, and you can itemized lists of iPad beefs by the web giants Mashable, Gizmodo and Gawker, as well as new-media-watcher Steve Yelvington. But there were a lot of people wowed and encouraged by the iPad announcement: A lot of them were old media people — publishers, as this MediaWeek roundup especially shows. As MediaCritic’s Scott Rosenberg observed, the iPad demo played largely to the delight of those who want to mimic the paper experience, but those who see the web as bringing in a new relationship with news seemed to expect more. Keep reading »
