Why an iPad mini still doesn’t make sense →
Why an iPad mini won't work, part one: Craig Grannell disputes the competitive demand for a 7" tablet based on offerings from Samsung and Amazon.
Why an iPad mini won't work, part one: Craig Grannell disputes the competitive demand for a 7" tablet based on offerings from Samsung and Amazon.
I’m a big fan of the file-sharing service Cloud for little things like sending screenshots to coworkers. Its core competitor Droplr has always looked interesting but wasn’t an option in the office due to its ads and lack of extended private URLs.
That’s all changed today with the launch of Droplr Pro. Ad-free, stats, private drops and more for $3 a month, $30 a year. Droplr differentiates itself from Cloud’s pro offering with much bigger upload options (1GB vs. 250GB), but at the cost of a hard limit on total storage space (100GB vs. virtually unlimited.) I’ll investigate more later in the week.
Frequently asked questions:
Q: How do I install this?
A: Um… are you stupid or something? Just attackclone the grit repo pushmerge, then rubygem the lymphnode js shawarma module – and presto!
Technology Review’s Jason Pontin, in a frank assessment of publishing and tablet apps:
A recent Nielsen study reported that while 33 percent of tablet and smart-phone users had downloaded news apps in the previous 30 days, just 19 percent of users had paid for any of them. The paid, expensively developed publishers’ app, with its extravagantly produced digital replica, is dead…
…I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and printlike on something open, new, and digital.
Last fall, we moved all the editorial in our apps, including the magazine, into a simple RSS feed in a river of news. We dumped the digital replica. Now we’re redesigning Technologyreview.com, which we made entirely free for use, and we’ll follow the Financial Times in using HTML5.
Many argue that native apps are our future. Some industries where processor speed is key (e.g. gaming) will stay native for quite a while. However, as this article illustrates, the first wave of tablet apps for publishing are a failure. I expect Newsstand to be a failure. Publishing understands the openness and fluidity of the web is the way to go and I think many more industries will follow suit to HTML as well.
When I first heard about this listening to an episode of The Industry podcast my first reaction was “wait, another to-do list app?”. This one looks pretty cool though: full syncing on iPhone, iPad and web with a streamlined interface and it apparently will be free.
It’s not out yet but I’m keeping my eye on this one once it reaches the App Store.
If you like podcasts, Instacast is an essential app. It’s one of my most used apps and has been on my home screen for almost a year. The app manages and organizes podcasts extremely well, to the point where I’ve abandoned iTunes podcast management completely. Today marks its 2.0 release with a bunch of enhancements; I can’t wait to dive in to see what changed.
An inspiration for Mondays.
Henry Blodget writing for New York Magazine:
“Mark has done two things in his twenties,” a colleague of Zuckerberg says. “He has built a global company, and he has grown up.” The second one made the first possible. When early mistakes risked an employee mutiny, Zuckerberg knuckled down and learned how to lead. He made himself the pupil of some of the best bosses in business but had the maturity never to let outsiders sway his overall vision. He got adept at hiring the right people, and, more important, firing senior employees whom the company had outgrown.
Zuckerberg is clearly a very smart guy and has evolved on some things. Yet there’s other aspects, mostly centered around privacy and design, that he has far to go. Also Blodget credits too much to Zuckerberg directly; engineering, PR and other groups have really helped solidify Facebook’s social lead.
I think we’ll find Zuckerberg’s state several years from now a more interesting question. Will growth slow? Will there be a “next big thing” that will force Facebook to address competition?
Web developer/designer Jonathan Christopher:
We can’t help but to be influenced by headlines like Instagram getting bought for $1B. As ridiculous as that is, as much of an outlying circumstance it is, we can’t help but to want something like that to happen to us. Seeing something that ridiculous happen almost makes it seem like “small” dreams of one day getting a $1M payout that much more realistic, almost deserved in some way.
Ultimately it seems to me that big payouts have become the definition of success in our industry, and to be blunt I think that sucks.
This slide from a tech talk by Instagram’s Mike Kriger says it all. You can have fast tech, but sometimes clever design allows you to pounce on that tech earlier in the user experience.