Fraser Speirs has written a nice description of what makes an iOS ambitious, and he has a Google spreadsheet to back it up. (The link to the spreadsheet is at the bottom of the piece.)
All posts tagged app
When I am doing just about any kind of reading or film watching, I find that having my iPhone or iPad handy is really about having Wikipedia handy.
(If you haven’t donated yet, you should. Do it now. Give them $5. $10. It’s easy. I’ll wait. Really. No, really, I’ll wait. Go donate something.)
Occasionally I have my MacBook with me, and I actually find myself looking for the Wikipedia app that’s on my phone and tablet. Crazy, yes, but when you want to look something up quickly, it really is nice to go straight to where you want to go.
With that in mind, I would like to thank Andy Ihnatko for point out how easy it is to create desktop web apps in the latest iteration of the Mac OS, Lion. How easy?
This easy:
Launch Automator.
Click on create a new App.
Find and drag the “Get Specified URLs” action into your workflow. (Just type the name into the search box until Automator finds it for you.)
4., Paste in the URL of the site you want to view.
Find and drag the “Website Popup” action into the workflow. Choose a size for the window.
Save. Done.
Here is what you get:
wikipedia-app.png
And it pops up this:
Wikipedia app using the iPhone sized screen
AlertNotes for iPhone. Great app with a really amazing/obvious idea: you write down the reminder the way you think about it and the app translates that into an alert. The only thing this thing is missing is speech recognition.
This video over at MSDN is great not only because it’s an interesting bit of history — and a moment when Jobs reveals his ability to see into the future and he’s doing it at a Microsoft event — but also because it’s a great explanation of how web applications work.
Design, Then Code is a nice place to begin thinking about making an app for iOS devices. The name is certainly good, in that it stresses thinking about the user experience in advance of building the code that creates the functionality, but the idea that one can do all the design work ahead of the construction is something that I thought we were long past. I understand that they are responding in some fashion to the sort of user experience nightmares that folks often point out as being the great weakness of Google’s application offerings, where there is a lot of functionality, you just can’t figure out how to get to it.
Why does it have to be one or the other? I thought we were beginning to figure out that it has to be both?
The American Dialect Society, which earlier this week named the term ‘app’ word of the year, has the following definition:
The shortened slang term for a computer or smart phone application.
But Ian Bogost thinks it’s worth thinking a bit more about, and it is more than simply smaller functional units, a la the unix philosophy, with each one performing a specific task and that complex tasks require piping data through an array of applications:
The app is a mixed blessing for computer aesthetics, just like music sampling is for music. On the one hand, we get many variations of the same thing that can surprise us when refashioned in different permutations. But on the other hand, we get fewer coherent, complete takes on things. And there’s a risk that deep meaning slowly seeps out of every unit as each does less and less. Apps and web services like Foursquare and Facebook give us a preview of this potential future agony, one in which the most basic chunk of meaning is the conveyance of a piece of data from a database to a screen and back again.
As I begin to assemble materials for my spring seminar surveying the digital humanities, I find myself trying to come up with categories, especially for describing arenas of activity. The digital humanities can be quite overwhelming when you are first introduced to them, and because everyone comes to them from so many backgrounds and with so many agendas, it’s hard to separate personal visions from something more synthetic.
Towards the latter, I am trying to think about how to describe some of the things that people regularly do, and I’ll be posting some of my initial thoughts in a series of posts that I will myself later synthesize into something like a syllabus and/or guide. Readers who want to follow along are welcome to do so. I am going to tag the posts with the number for the course, 531, and I will try to update earlier posts so that they turn up under that tag as well.
One of the first things to break out for me is the area of visualization, which is so important that it’s built into most network analysis applications. Visualization, especially dynamic visualization which allows you to adjust your view of the data in various ways, is an essential part of analysis and understanding.
Many of us are used to working with built-in visualizations toolkits like those found in Network Workbench or ORA or even Excel/Powerpoint — Numbers/Pages for those Mac users who eschew Microsoft’s productivity apps and OpenOffice users forgive me for not knowing the equivalents, but R also possesses some remarkable graphical abilities.
None of them can compare to the graphical and/or visualization abilities of two languages build for doing this kind of work: Processing and Protoviz.
Up next: a comparison of the two.
It’s become something of a cliché that the iPad is for content consumption, leaving the business of content production to the “old-fashioned” general purpose PC. It turns out, if you leave matters to developers, they will come up with a lot of innovative ways for people to create content even with a fairly limited — in terms of processing power and memory — device like the iPad. Business Insider has a great write-up of a whole bunch of apps and uses that is worth checking out: go read it for yourself. I especially like the video for Studio Track — the video is not brilliant, but the app is.
I am about halfway through typing up my notes from the NEH Institute, and I am getting a little frustrated with my viewing options in my beloved OmniOutliner. And so I think to myself, “Self, you’ve just finished writing a decent-sized document in Pages. It now has an outline view. Why not try it out?”
And so I export an RTF from OmniOutliner — because Pages does not recognize OPML documents (and Word won’t either) — and open the RTF document in Pages. Okay, it kept the formatting but it doesn’t know what lines are headings, subheadings, etc. I can live with that.
What I can’t quite get my head around, however, is the sudden change in file size:
- OmniOutliner document: 12KB
- Exported RTF document: 25KB
- Resulting Pages document: 197KB
That’s an 800% increase over the RTF document and a whopping 1640% increase over the original file.
And for the sake of reference, the same file as a Word DOCX is 96KB.
Great googly moogly. I have to assume that both Word and Pages are inserting a whole bunch of infrastructure “just in case” it’s needed later. What all that is is not yet clear to me, but I hope to do some exploration in the next few days and I’ll get back to you on what I find.
A year and a half ago the New York Times had a nice write-up on R that still serves as an introduction to the software/programming language. I know, I know. I am beginning to speak a different language. I blame it all on Tangherlini.
In the weirdly wonderful category comes news that the Library of Congress offers a virtual tour of its facilities via an iPhone/iPod Touch app. Here’s the link to the web version of the iTunes Store: link.
A number of vendors and environments are arising to support the easy creation of applications for the iOS platform. Two in particular stand out in my mind and are worth checking out:
If content creators really want not only to have a say in how their content gets distributed but also help to innovate the forms and kinds of content, we need at least to be aware of the possibilities if not get our hands, and minds and content, in the game.
According to this post on 9-to-5 Mac, it looks like there is limited support for exporting webapps/RIAs/whatever created in Flash to HTML5′s Canvas element. This is precisely the Adobe I know and love: offering its users, content creators, the chance to develop in their preferred medium. I know Adobe bought Macromedia for Flash, and Flash did, and does, make it incredibly easy to develop a variety of interesting tools and user experiences, but Adobe shouldn’t risk its future by trying to determine what people will create. Adobe is at its best when it’s offering “best of class” tools and IDEs that work for how people want to create.1
There’s a Youtube video from an Adobe demonstration at a conference somewhere, but it’s not so great that I’m embedding it here. Definitely go to the 9to5Mac page if you’re interested.
-
And, no, I don’t really don’t know where I stand on the whole Apple doesn’t want developers exporting out of Flash CS5 for iPhone/iPad apps. (And can we come up with a term that covers Universal apps for the iPhone OS platform — that is, those apps that will run on the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and the iPad? “Universal apps for the iPhone OS platform” is kinda clumsy.) ↩
