king talk

Bonnier globals R&D released a nice video about Mag+ some weeks ago. Due to the recent launch of the iPad in the states, they updated their concept for Popular Science+ and matched it to the iPad. In my opinion it’s a good concept which was well implemented. It’s a pity, that the overview mode can´t be displayed on the iPad. It looked really nice and the user could see what he has seen and what will be next.

The idea of the big background image and the horicontal text seems to work pretty well.  In times of blogging we learned to scroll down for reading. The user can swipe through the pages, which is a common iPhone gesture and should be established. On the other hand they have that concept called »heat up mode«. Rubbing a specific text area allows you to mark text and write additional notes to that »hot information«.

Mag+, is Bonnier’s digital magazine platform, is a project that began months ago in a collaboration between Bonnier’s global R&D task force and BERG, a London-based design studio. Their goal has been to preserve all the qualities that make magazines such a powerful, popular medium—inspired packaging of carefully curated content by a team of expert editors, delivered in a visually dazzling issue with a beginning, middle and end—and at the same time to reinvent it in a way that makes it come to life on the iPad’s screen.

Hey kids! Your new favorite app has arrived at Apples App Store! We call it iScraper and it is our first submission to the store.

So, what does it do, you ask? iScraper is a fun little application that lets you view the worlds ten tallest buildings in a fascinating new way. Just move your device up to see the top of a building. Move it back down to return to the ground. Then just tilt your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad in order to switch to the next image.

You can get it now for free on the App Store.

Apples self proclaimed »magical« device has been announced yesterday and I am already certain that it is the most misunderstood product they announced in years. Steve Jobs has been clumsy enough to state that it is better than a laptop and better than a phone. These statements naturally led to the assumption that the iPad should be compared to those two categories of products. But let’s start from the beginning.

First, there was an enormous media hype. It had to be a revolution. It had to replace Netbooks. It had to do multitasking. It had to »do something that nobody expects yet everyone will need«. Even if Steve Jobs had pulled out a coffee making, hologram enabled super-tablet with Duke Nukem Forever pre-installed, it couldn’t have lived up to the buzz.

That said, I do not believe that the iPad will replace a lot of laptop computers or iPhones. I think of it more as a competitor to Amazons Kindle. Actually, the Kindle DX (which has the same screen size as the iPad) will cost you $489 – about the same as a low-end iPad. While the Kindle with its eInk display (which is pretty remarkable from all I’ve heard) completely focuses on textual information, the iPad is more driven by the web- and multimedia experience – two fields in which Apple has been doing quite well so far. And most hands-on reviews I’ve read so far stated, that it did remarkably well in those areas, in matters of both design and speed.

Thomas asked if we truly need a device like this in a previous post. My personal answer is maybe. Though it will never replace my computer or my phone completely, there is a certain set of things that it could do very well and possibly better than any of those other devices. Weather or not this is worth a $499 price tag will stay unanswered until it arrives in my local store. But what I do know is that Apples products have a tendency to make you want them even if it isn’t perfectly rational.

Oh, and just one more thought. Microsoft tried to stuff a full blown PC into the tablet format a couple of years ago and ingloriously failed. Let’s see if Apples approach proves to be better.

It´s out there folks! The iPad! Looks like an oversized iPhone, never mind. The content will be displayed within a big black frame with no ability to use Flash, no expandable storage, no camera, no USB, no SD card slot, no multi-tasking, it´s not really light-weight and slow touch-keyboard starting with $ 499. Anyway the Interface Design has some nice solutions for this screen size. They redesigned the Adressbook, Calendar and iWorks just for this device and they did a good job in this point. The hardware seems to be very low if you compare it to a netbook, but if you check it against the Amazon Kindle it offers you a lot more possibilities. After all I think this is one of the most understood gadgets that came out the last years…

Hmmm… Do we really need this?

via Engagdet