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.

The second part of our workshop CODE = DESIGN took place in Graz last weekend. This time we focused on the ways in which code could be used to generate print content. Many thanks to all the participants and congratulations for your great results! We created a Flickr set for them and you can also see them in the slideshow below.

I just stumbled upon this piece of beautiful interactive web art. Now, usually when saying  the words »interactive web art«, they are synonymous to »Flash«. Wel, not this time, folks. What you see on this page has been done purely with HTML5, JavaScript and CSS – complete with audio!

After both YouTube and Vimeo have rolled out beta programs for HTML5 (read: flash-less) versions of their sights, the art and visualization community seams to start getting interested in the new Standard.

While some purists are already proclaiming the end of Flash, I think it will be around for a long time to come. Yet I like the fact that it is facing more competition from open standards. And now that two major players in the web video business are starting to toy around with those standards, Adobe might finally reconsider their priorities in terms of code optimization for their player.

Here at envis precisely, we are using Flash (along with other programming tools like Processing or openFrameworks) quite a bit as you might know for a wide variety of tasks (of which only few are directly web related). I don’t think this is going to change anytime soon, if only because I firmly believe that JavaScript is a terrible terrible language to do creative stuff with. Anyway, that might change as well, so we are definitely keeping a close eye on the developments there.

Today, the Twittagessen-No.116 which took part at NamNam (Munich). The idea behind Twittagessen is pretty simple. Everyone can invite some people at twitter. If you want to take part you just have to write a post at twitter with the hashtag of the event. We had #twittagessen-116. I guess it was  the biggest Twittagessen in Germany by now. Over 60 twittering people took part there and the little asian restaurant had a lot to do …

… It was a mixed group of participants. Right next to me it was Ralph, a nice personnel consultant for financial services. On my left side there was Kathi aka @Kirschkathi which is doing public relations. A nice bunch of people there talking about there jobs, »Völkerball« and Chocolate. Next time we will see us at Twiesn ; )

Markus and me are currently in Paris for the DD4D conference! To give you a glimpse into the conference, we will be live-tweeting throughout the event. So follow us on Twitter and watch out for the tag #dd4d! The conference blog can be visited to check what´s going on there…