At Best Buy today, I checked out the various tablets.
All of them had a massive anti-theft device attached to the bottom. Like a big plastic half a tennis ball glued to them. Except Apple's iPads--those had an anti-theft thing like a little disc the size of 3 stacked pennies.
For a device you're supposed to HOLD, any weight advantage those other tablets have by being smaller & plastic is lost by their big attachments.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Friday, May 27, 2011
How iOS 5 Widgets Could Work
My thought is they would fit in among the springboard icons, and moving them would have the icons flow around the widget. Hopefully several sizes are allowed. 2x1, 2x2, 4x2, etc.
In that space, the app runs and show its information. This 2x2 one is 266x294 pixels on the iPhone 4 (or 133x147 on non-retina iPhones). Purely shrinking down the weather app's screen to fit, it works. Designed properly with a bigger font and such would look awesome.
A wider 4x1 size, perfect for showing the most recent email messages.
Two 4x2 sized ones would fill a screen--email on top, Facebook or Twitter below.
In edit mode (wiggling icons) those that allowed could be resized by dragging an indicator in the lower right corner. Simply drag the widget's corner to be as tall or short as you want. And a normal (X) in the upper left corner to delete.
Some would be interactive, tap the Music one (that shows the album artwork as it's default!) and there would be pause/play, next & previous buttons.
Some might just open the app--like Notes would show the most recent note's text, but tapping opens the Notes app.
We'll find out on the 6th how close this might be.
In that space, the app runs and show its information. This 2x2 one is 266x294 pixels on the iPhone 4 (or 133x147 on non-retina iPhones). Purely shrinking down the weather app's screen to fit, it works. Designed properly with a bigger font and such would look awesome.
A wider 4x1 size, perfect for showing the most recent email messages. Two 4x2 sized ones would fill a screen--email on top, Facebook or Twitter below.
In edit mode (wiggling icons) those that allowed could be resized by dragging an indicator in the lower right corner. Simply drag the widget's corner to be as tall or short as you want. And a normal (X) in the upper left corner to delete.
Tap to activate (a glow effect around the border & fade the rest--like when you open a folder/group?), then allow scrolling and interacting with the widget-app. Tap outside to return to normal.
Some would be interactive, tap the Music one (that shows the album artwork as it's default!) and there would be pause/play, next & previous buttons.
Some might just open the app--like Notes would show the most recent note's text, but tapping opens the Notes app.
We'll find out on the 6th how close this might be.
Sunday, May 15, 2011
iPhone 5
If Apple really does an edge-to-edge screen on the iPhone 5, which makes sense, I wonder which of the ways they will do it:
1) Keep the screen identical to what it is now, and shrink the rest of the phone around it. Cool because it's a smaller overall iPhone, but doesn't give a bigger screen.
2) Keep the current 640x960 screen resolution and just stretch it a little to be a bigger screen. Apps won't have to change at all, everything would be slightly bigger. No changes to apps is a huge plus, and likely is a major reason to do it this way. But this lowers the dots per inch. If my math is right, you can do up to a 3.8 inch screen at 640x960 and that's just above the magical 300dpi "Retina" resolution.
3) Increase the resolution of the screen, so the center 640x960 part is the same size as before, but now more pixels around that. Existing apps could run as-is in an inner area of the screen, really looking exactly as they do now with a black/white bevel around the edge of the screen. Updated apps would use the bigger resolution and go edge-to-edge.
There are even a couple interesting new resolutions: 1024x768 is the iPad resolution and 1280x720 is one of the HD video resolutions. Unfortunately, the HD one may be too tall. Stretching the screen to fill the space on the current iPhone 4 looks like about 40 pixels on the left and right would do it. That would be 720 wide--the nice HD video number, but adding the same on top and bottom is only 1040, quite a bit short of widescreen HD.
The iPad one is easier to reach, with a slightly wider iPhone screen. But really the device would not be much wider than when it's in some of the cases now, or the width of earlier generation iPhones & iPod touches (taking into account the outer edge of the curved 3G/3GS ones)
I'm going to guess #2, because of the big advantage of keeping the resolution the same for developers.
1) Keep the screen identical to what it is now, and shrink the rest of the phone around it. Cool because it's a smaller overall iPhone, but doesn't give a bigger screen.
2) Keep the current 640x960 screen resolution and just stretch it a little to be a bigger screen. Apps won't have to change at all, everything would be slightly bigger. No changes to apps is a huge plus, and likely is a major reason to do it this way. But this lowers the dots per inch. If my math is right, you can do up to a 3.8 inch screen at 640x960 and that's just above the magical 300dpi "Retina" resolution.
3) Increase the resolution of the screen, so the center 640x960 part is the same size as before, but now more pixels around that. Existing apps could run as-is in an inner area of the screen, really looking exactly as they do now with a black/white bevel around the edge of the screen. Updated apps would use the bigger resolution and go edge-to-edge.
There are even a couple interesting new resolutions: 1024x768 is the iPad resolution and 1280x720 is one of the HD video resolutions. Unfortunately, the HD one may be too tall. Stretching the screen to fill the space on the current iPhone 4 looks like about 40 pixels on the left and right would do it. That would be 720 wide--the nice HD video number, but adding the same on top and bottom is only 1040, quite a bit short of widescreen HD.
The iPad one is easier to reach, with a slightly wider iPhone screen. But really the device would not be much wider than when it's in some of the cases now, or the width of earlier generation iPhones & iPod touches (taking into account the outer edge of the curved 3G/3GS ones)
I'm going to guess #2, because of the big advantage of keeping the resolution the same for developers.
Friday, March 25, 2011
VPN
My brother Pete is in the process of moving to London (the cool one in England, though I'm sure the London in Kentucky is lovely.)
He wants to be able to still watch videos via Hulu, we want to be able to watch shows from the BBC. But each of them block, Hulu only is available from the US and BBC only from the UK.
Thanks to the upgrades at dd-wrt.com we both now have VPN servers on our routers. So we'll connect across the Atlantic Ocean to watch TV through the other's local Internet connections :) Very cool--and I'll use it from free WiFi places too, encrypted and much more secure.
Sunday, January 9, 2011
UI
UI Design matters more than before...but really has changed. I've read complaints about the Mac App Store, and how apps aren't conforming to the Mac interface guidelines. It still matters to have a great looking and intuitive UI, but the actual look & sticking to guidelines so every program is identical I think matters much less.
The web is the biggest thing that changed all that. People have grown accustomed to sites that all look unique and have navigation in slightly different places and in all sorts of styles. Menus, buttons, links, the all look different depending on the site. But as long as it looks good and is well designed, people figure it out. It's probably even a skill we keep improving: getting better at figuring out a new website.
And that's something the iPhone and Android continued. I've even bought a few apps (like Weightbot) purely because their well designed UI got some press and I wanted to check them out.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
iPhone App Piracy
Over 9 months after it's been gone from the App Store, one of our apps is being pirated more than it ever sold.
Version 1.0 had an little banner ad spot at the top, so we could promote our other apps. Version 2.0 needed more space, so we removed it. No legitimate purchasers have gotten that version 1.0 since December 2009. In fact the entire app was removed from the App Store in February 2010 as part of Apple's big sexy-app-purge.
For the past 10 days, a year after the version with the ad was last available, that ad page got over 32,000 unique views according to Google Analytics. That is more than the total number of copies sold the entire time it was in the App Store--22,935. (And doing the past 3 months, it's over 280,000 unique views--more than 10x the total sold.)
All 100% piracy* (Yeah, a couple could be people who bought, never upgraded, and are still playing...but there can't be many of them--say 99.9% piracy.)
The good news...we can show ads to all those people pirating it. And the poker game itself is still there and better than before (bluetooth games, etc.) For iPhone. For iPad.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
iPad² & 1
There's a precedent:
* When the iPhone 3GS came out, Apple kept the 3G as an option to still buy, for a cheaper price.
* Same thing when the iPhone 4 arrived, you can still buy a 3GS for $100 less.
* And sometimes it's been done for the iPod touch--they kept one closer to the 2nd generation as the low end model when the 3rd came out.
I'm not sure how many people chose the lower end ones, especially for the iPhone. But it keeps real price pressure on competitors.
They could do the same for the iPad. When the iPad² comes out, presumably with cool new features like cameras, keep the current 16GB WiFi one as a lower end base model. And price that to kill competitors: $329, $349, $399, whatever. Most people will opt for the more expensive newer version--but it makes a really low price for competitors to beat (especially since they don't even really beat the current price without doing much smaller screens.)
* When the iPhone 3GS came out, Apple kept the 3G as an option to still buy, for a cheaper price.
* Same thing when the iPhone 4 arrived, you can still buy a 3GS for $100 less.
* And sometimes it's been done for the iPod touch--they kept one closer to the 2nd generation as the low end model when the 3rd came out.
I'm not sure how many people chose the lower end ones, especially for the iPhone. But it keeps real price pressure on competitors.
They could do the same for the iPad. When the iPad² comes out, presumably with cool new features like cameras, keep the current 16GB WiFi one as a lower end base model. And price that to kill competitors: $329, $349, $399, whatever. Most people will opt for the more expensive newer version--but it makes a really low price for competitors to beat (especially since they don't even really beat the current price without doing much smaller screens.)
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