king talk

What is that again? Flipboard? What is it? It‘s the world‘s first social magazine. It‘s inspired by the beauty and ease of print media, Flipboards mission is to fundamentally improve how people discover, view and share content across their social networks.

Flipboard began a quest one week ago. Going to transform how people discover and share content by combining the beauty and ease of print with the power of social media. Flipboard also announced the immediate availability of its Flipboard App for iPad?, a social magazine that brings to life the stories, photos, news and updates being shared across Twitter and Facebook.  With over 1 billion messages posted every day, social networks are quickly becoming the primary way people discover and share content on the Web. The result is a huge influx of incoming messages and links people must sort through across multiple web sites just to stay up to date? said Mike McCue, Flipboards CEO. They believe the timeless principles of print can make social media less noisy, more visually compelling and ultimately more mainstream.

Designed from the ground up for iPad, Flipboard creates a magazine out of a user‘s social content. Simply launch Flipboard and flip open the cover to get started. From the Table of Contents readers can view their sections and personalize the magazine. The Facebook and Twitter sections let readers quickly flip through the latest stories, photos and updates from friends and trusted sources. Because Flipboard renders links and images right in the magazine, readers no longer have to scan long lists of posts and click on link after link – instead they instantly see all the stories, comments and images, making it faster and more entertaining to discover, view and share social content.

Flipboard also lets readers easily create sections around topics or people they care about. You can choose from Flipboards suggested sections on topics such as sports, news, tech and style, with content hand-curated from popular and interesting Twitter feeds. Or, create an entirely new section by searching by topic, person or Twitter list to make Flipboard even more personal.

Start reading your magazine by downloading Flipboard. You can follow them at www.twitter.com/flipboard.

Some days ago I hat the opportunity to check out Siri, an iPhone app which acts like your personal assistant and can be controlled mostly via speech recognition. It‘s really working pretty good, I have tested it and was really surprised. You can see a real test at this demo video. Unfortunately this App is US only. Siri acts like a real assistant, understands what you‘re saying, accomplishes tasks for you and adapts to your preferences over time. Today, Siri can help you find and plan things to do. You can ask it to find a romantic place for dinner, tell you what’s playing at a local jazz club or get tickets to a movie for Saturday night. Siri is young and, like a child taking its first steps, may be awkward at times. This app may occasionally misunderstand things you ask it to do even within its range of understanding.

You can converse with Siri through combinations of spoken requests, typed keywords and phrases, or graphical user interface requests. As you express what you want to do in the way most comfortable to you, Siri applies a patented algorithm to sift through multitudes of possible interpretations, applying what it knows about your location, the time, your preferences, and your task context to determine the most probable understanding of your intent. Nonetheless, Siri will improve quickly by getting to know you better and understanding a broader set of tasks. In fact, right now, Siri’s learning how to handle reminders, flights stats and reference questions. Our vision is that, over time, you’ll trust Siri to manage many personal details in your life – from recommending a wine you might enjoy to managing your to do list.

Siri was finally aquired by Apple two months ago. Now that it is an Apple property, I don’t expect the virutal assistant technology to make its way on to competing devices — especially Android phones. Maybe we will find this gadget in other future Apple devices?

Multitasking UIs in webOS (left) and iOS 4

So, the iOS has joined the multitasking party. Expectations were pretty high, given that Apple has taken a lot of time to deliver this feature and Palm (now HP) has already brought a great take on multitasking to the market with their webOS.

Perhaps it is my experience with webOS that makes the iOS multitasking feel so awkward to me. An I am not talking about the fact that only certain services (like data, location or audio) can run in the background. I am talking about the interface and the user experience – usually fields where Apple is extremely strong.

But this time I am disappointed and I don’t even know what exactly is wrong. With webOS, I instantly had a coherent mental model that was properly represented by the interface. Open apps were windows, when I throw an app away, it is closed and the process will stop.

In iOS, there is no simple way to completely close an app. EVERYTHING ends up as an open app in the app tray when the home button is pressed – even applications that do not have multitasking capabilities and therefore don’t even maintain state. This is especially annoying because it breaks the trust of the user. Also, it completely clutters the little tray.

Even worse, the process of removing a »running« app is very complicated. It involves double-pressing the home button (which potentially kicks you out of your app if you do it too slow), then performing a long press on an icon (artificially slowing down the user) and then tapping the little close icon (which is a quite small target).

Again, the comparison helps. In webOS, you are performing the same gesture two times: swipe up from the gesture area to go to the application switcher and then swipe up the app card to throw it away. Sure, this gesture has to be learned, but so does the interaction that Apple uses.

Wired also has a comparison of mobile multitasking. They take a look at Android as well.

Concentrating at work feels hard if you have the possibility to play around with the new iPad. ; ) Appearance is deveiving, we got something cooking…

Honestly, I am not really a fan of Adobe. I think their software has become way too bloated which in turn is slowing down the development. Also, the Flash IDE (not the technology itsself) is just horrible.

Now Adobe has shown off a prototype for their very own tablet at the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco. It runs Android and features both Flash in the browser and AIR applications.

Now, from what I wrote in the first paragraph, one could assume that I must hate this thing. But as a matter of fact I find it rather delightful to see, that Adobe (and Google, who provide the Android operating system) are not simply sitting there, leaving the field of tablets entirely to Apple with their iPad and HP (I am assuming that HP will announce a WebOS tablet, which would be awesome).

In the video, the software appears to run quite smooth and I love the prototypish transparent enclosure you see in the video – even though I would never buy one that looks like that.