Entries tagged “iphone”

Last week's issue of The New Yorker attracted a lot of attention for its cover art, which was created on an iPhone by artist Jorge Colombo.

From the New York Times to gadget blogs to design sites, the work certainly got a lot of attention. But while a few stories did a decent job of talking to the artist behind the work in addition to covering the technology involved, most seemed like they were fixated on the tools instead of the end result. That'd be understandable if all of these venues were filled with people who'd never seen an iPhone before, but even the tech-savvy got pulled into the "gee whiz, a small computer can make pictures!" aspect of it.

The truth is, Colombo has been creating art for The New Yorker (albeit not covers) for a decade and a half — he didn't suddenly become a recognized artist by using an iPhone. It's not surprising that the magazine would encourage an established talent to use new media to express himself. But that odd fixation on tools over talent perhaps reached its apotheosis in the New York Times's story on Brushes, Steve Sprang's clever little app that Colombo used for his artwork. The piece offers a link for buying the application, but doesn't explain how to buy any of Colombo's work. While I'm glad to see the application's creator recognized, it seemed odd that in all this coverage, very few people talked about how to support the artist who made the cover itself.

Fortunately, we have the means to support Jorge Colombo's work within our community as well. Colombo has been featured on 20×200 a number of times, and in fact his iPhone editions made their debut back in April on the site, as Jen Bekman gleefully notes here.

So, go ahead and buy Brushes. That's cool — Steve Sprang deserves to be rewarded for his creativity. But I think we should be recognizing Jorge Colombo as the artist who uses these tools as well. A work like this beautiful sketch of an interior at Grand Central Terminal starts at just $20. Our technologies are succeeding best when they become invisible or irrelevant compared to the ideas they're being used to express.

Please (re-)visit Dan Cook's seminal Nintendo's Genre Innovation Strategy essay from 2005. It's chock-full of his signature revelatory insights, in this case inspired by the excitement and skepticism surrounding the announcement of the controller for the Nintendo Wii (then known as the Revolution).

Among many other inspired moments, Dan offers up, early in the piece, two key points.

• The increasingly hardcore nature of the game industry is causing a contraction of the industry.
• New intuitive controller options will result in innovative game play that will bring new gamers into the fold.

He goes on to describe the evolution of individual genres within the gaming industry, reaching a conclusion that was surprising to me, but that intuitively felt correct upon re-reading:

As the less hardcore players burn out on the game mechanics of their favorite genres, they too are at risk of leaving the game market. The result is a steady erosion of the genre’s population.

What is left is a very peculiar group of highly purified hardcore players. They demand rigorous standardization of game mechanics and have highly refined criteria for judging the quality of their titles. With each generation of titles in the genre, they weed out a few more of the weaker players.

This made me think of the recent innovations around the iPhone and, particularly, the games that have been created for the iPhone app store. Prior to the iPhone's release, high-end mobile phones had, essentially, become a really specific gaming genre, catering to hardcore "players", consisting of tech reviewers and industry analysts whose tastes had evolved as all genres must. "They demand rigorous standardization of game mechanics and have highly refined criteria for judging the quality of their titles. With each generation of titles in the genre, they weed out a few more of the weaker players."

The iPhone was about Nintendo-style innovation, applying the same rules that Nintendo has, and achieving a quite Nintendo-like result of producing a device that is fun, satisfying, and very inexpensive to develop innovative games for. As Dan says about Nintendo's history of innovating in controllers:

One of the easiest ways of creating a new genre is to invent a new series of verbs (or risk mechanics as I called them in my Genre Life Cycle articles). One of the easiest ways of inventing new verbs is to create new input opportunities. Nintendo controls their hardware and they leverage this control to suit their particular business model.

And this is exactly what Nintendo has done historically. The original Dpad, the analog stick, the shoulder buttons, the C-stick, the DS touch pad, link capabilities, the tilt controller, the bongo drums … the list goes on and on.

The touchscreen and tilt sensor in the iPhone are just another in the series of controller innovations, and they've yielded the results that these inventions always do. Only, instead of Mario being the brand that benefits from this new set of verbs, Apple is the brand that benefits.

And all of this confirms my suspicion that the iPod and iPhone are not only designed to be subscription hardware that you repurchase constantly, but that Apple is deliberately creating their devices so that the only way you can level up in this game is by buying a new iPod or iPhone.

It's worth concluding with one of Dan's final points:

Nintendo’s strategy of pursuing innovation benefits the entire industry. It brings in new audiences and creates new genres that provide innovative and exciting experiences. The radical new controller is a great example of this strategy in action.

Surprisingly, this also benefits Microsoft and it benefits Sony. As the years pass, the hard core publishers that serve mature genres will adopt previously innovative genres and commoditize them. Their profits will be less, but they’ll keep a lot of genre addicts very happy. Everybody wins when a game company successfully innovates.

I see both of these strategies as a necessary and expected part of a vibrant and growing industry. Industries need balance and Nintendo is a major force of much needed innovation that prevents industry erosion and decline.

According to Amazon's account of holiday bestsellers, "Nintendo Wii dominated the top sellers in video games and hardware including the Wii console, the Wii remote controller and the Wii nunchuk controller." Worldwide sales of the Wii are nearly equal to sales of the Microsoft XBox 360 and Sony Playstation 3 combined.

An application that appears cluttered or illogical is harder to understand and use.

Aesthetic integrity is not a measure of how beautifully your application is decorated. It's a measure of how well the appearance of your application integrates with its function. For example, a productivity application should keep decorative elements subtle and in the background, while giving prominence to the task by providing standard controls and behaviors.

An immersive application is at the other end of the spectrum, and users expect a beautiful appearance that promises fun and discovery. Although an immersive application tends to be focused on providing diversion, however, its appearance still needs to integrate with the task. Be sure you design the user interface elements of such an application carefully, so that they provide an internally consistent experience.

From Apple's iPhone Human Interface Guidelines.

I've been wanting a portable magazine reader device for ages (everyone focuses on ebooks, but my attention span is too short) so I have to point out Texterity's magazines for the iPhone, especially because so many magazines that I like are already being published this way, including ReadyMade, Vibe, Make, Craft, Baseline, and others.

A couple of caveats worth noting: I have a pretty simple policy about blogging things that I originally receive as an email pitch from a PR company -- I don't do it. I'm making an exception here because this seems useful, and I'd have linked to it if I found it through any other means. Also, I'm a little troubled by the idea of building web experiences for a single user agent (Safari Mobile) on a single device, even though the geek in me loves such things, and even though I use these services myself. Isn't this what the mobile CSS profile was supposed to be for?

One of the things I love most about my job is that sense of discovery you get from working with people that are chock-full of good ideas. One great example is Brad Choate's 100+ iPhone Feature suggestions. I don't have an iPhone, but I love the sense that he could have just kept reeling off desired improvements infinitely, especially since he's the kind of guy who can actually make some of these requests happen, even if Apple doesn't indulge.

Mitch Wagner has a provocative, comprehensive, and entertaining look at the recent conversations about Apple and the enterprise over at InformationWeek entitled "Does Apple Have A Moral Obligation To Serve The Enterprise Market?" Though some part of the conversation is pegged to my recent posts about the topic, I should clarify that, despite my strident tone, I don't think Apple has a moral obligation to create products that meet the requirements of enterprises. I think they have a social obligation to bring their tradition of great user experience to more of the business world if they want to really want to have the biggest possible cultural impact.

Part of my premise here is that Apple, with its focus on aesthetics and user experience, clearly cares about its intangible impacts on culture. I am fortunate enough to get to talk about these sorts of things as part of my day job, and the the people i work with who do all the smart thinking about it spend time designing for both the best experience and the widest adoption. i tried to capture that a bit in my comment on Mitch's post:

There are two parties responsible for much of the failures in enterprise IT. Certainly, there are IT departments that choose their own convenience or the imperative of manageability and homogeneity over the end-user experience of their coworkers they were supposed to be serving. I have worked in IT and understand all too well the temptation to make those awful tradeoffs.

My posts were directed much more at the other responsible parties: Vendors who aren't ambitious or imaginative enough to consider that something can be both enterprise-grade and usable.

I also enjoyed some additional thoughts over at The Mac Observer:

The primary focus was Mr. Dash's argument that his company, Movable Type [sic], achieves the desired goal, and he wrote: "You can meet all the (reasonable) requirements of an Enterprise while still creating a product that delights and inspires the people who make up that organization."

Thus, if corporations force users to use crappy tools and subjugate them, corporate users should revolt and demand more from the IT managers who are supposed to serve them, according to some. In order to assist in that process, the implication is that Apple has a moral obligation to do the same: make great enterprise products that employees love and still checks all the corporate IT boxes.

I'm not sure John Martellaro is completely accurate in his encapsulation of my viewpoint, but I found it remarkable that he managed to make this, too, a Microsoft-versus-Apple story. Hint: It's not. It's about user experience, and I'd point again to the example of Research in Motion and the Blackberry. It's a phone that, from a feature perspective, does even more than the iPhone, albeit less elegantly for any task that doesn't involve entering text. However, RIM has made a product that users are passionate about, even addicted to, while still meeting all the needs of the enterprise and insinuating themselves deep into corporate (and political) culture. Succinctly, they've changed the way people do their jobs, and in doing so, changed the way people live their lives. The iPhone is forced to be "my other phone" for a lot of people whose phones are business tools, and no matter how pretty she is, a sexy mistress is nowhere near as meaningful as a committed marriage.

All of that aside, Martellaro nails one point in his essay: "ultimately the resolution requires a cultural change". That's the part where everyone who wants to make technology for both work and play can have a hand in making things better.