Tag : ipad

In March we launched Holler Gram, an app that turns your iPad into a glowing sign and simultaneously tweets into a predefined hashtag. It was perfect for conferences and we only did it as a bit of fun - which is why we are amazed that it's now been downloaded 45,000 times.

It's still being used by people all over the world and of the many fascinating uses people have found for it, the most humbling is from Australia where a group of teachers got in contact with us to say they'd been using the app to teach deaf children.

Anyone who has used iOS will be familiar with the way Apple uses animation in their apps. It's one of the most delightful features of the platform and users loved it, even before there was an App Store. If you use apps that don't employ judicious animation, you get a sense of something missing, of an undefinable lack of quality. 

Last week our new iPad app, the SXSW-themed Holler Gram, hit the app store. Today we’re introducing the Holler Gram to the world with a post on the design story and an in-person show and tell over a beer at MxM HQ this evening.

The Holler Gram is a cheeky, disruptive little number we’re calling “a physical messaging platform”. It turns your iPad into a glowing sign you can use during the sessions and parties of SXSWi 2011 this coming week. It’s fully wired up to Twitter and stacked with pre-set messages and a big numbers score-slider so you can unleash your inner armchair critic pretty much whenever and wherever you please. Intrigued? Read on...

We have a very small and talented development team here at Made by Many. We’re technology agnostic, and while we have a very strong Ruby backbone, we regularly supplement our in-house skills with specialists from a range of disciplines. Most often we do this with a trusted network of specialists. But now we are ready to add an exceptional Objective-C developer to our team.

The primary focus for this new role will be – of course – the iPhone and iPad (not forgetting the iPod Touch).

It’s been a tough month for Umair Haque. First, he conducted the world’s most boring and pointless interview at SXSWi, and now he blogs his extraordinarily muddled thoughts on theiPad.

It’s tough to sum up what he’s saying because it’s so confused. He seems to want the iPad to be more open both physically and in terms of installing apps and content. This is understandable in some ways, but he’s an economist, and his argument seems to be saying that Apple will not succeed with the approach they’ve chosen for fundamental market-based reasons. It’s just that he fails to provide any evidence at all that this is so.

Let’s take it one paragraph at a time.

The commonplace view within magazine publishing is that the iPad is going to save the industry. Will it? And in the process, will the iPad become a force of reaction, enclosing a free, open and infinitely connected internet within a landscape of small fences and high walls – the tallest being the ones around the iTunes store?

I had a short talk to give last week at ‘What’s on your iPad”, a well-attended event organised by the British Society of Magazine Editors and the Editorial Design Organisation. I adopted the role of sceptic and these were my questions.

Or so I tweeted whilst watching the recent Apple keynote. A month later and I don’t think I could have been more wrong.

Immediately after the iPad’s reveal, the interweb rippled with an argument between two tribes, those that want a computer that allows them to tinker under the hood, and those that don’t care about getting their hands dirty – they just want to email, surf, watch and listen. For me, this isn’t the interesting debate. It’s how the speed, screen size and controlled environment of the iPad now means that content design on screen can finally come of age and grow some balls. Big ones.

A great blog post by Lukas Mathis has been floating around Twitter for a few days now. In it he talks about the removal of features in software development. Specifically:

If you don’t pay attention, what started out as an elegant, simple application that perfectly solves a single problem, can quickly turn into a huge behemoth of an application that solves a ton of problems, but solves all of them poorly.

This, and some other tweet comments, got me thinking about the iPad (who isn’t?) and how I believe it’s a glimpse of the future for how we interact with personal computers.

In the 35 years since the arrival of the personal computer we’ve been on a continuous upward trajectory of feature enhancement and specification bloat. It’s not just the software, it’s infecting the very machines that we run the bloated software on.

Now that the dust has settled from the latest application of the Reality Distortion Field and we are all salivating at the chance to get our hands on the iPad, it’s time to think about how all of these devices will work in our day to day lives.

I’m a fully paid up member of the Apple devices fanboy club. I carry an iPhone and a 5th generation iPod with me wherever I go (even the largest capacity iPhone is nowhere near enough to store even a third of my music collection), I have a MacBook Air for holidays and overseas trips, a 17″ MacBook Pro for work and a huge cheese grater Mac Pro at home for media storage and its raw computing horsepower.

I love all of these devices for different reasons, but one thing I don’t love is the difficulty of keeping them all up to date with the latest versions of my data.

One response among designers and UX folk to Apple’s new iPad has been to criticise the effort required of users to command the haptic interface. Microsoft’s Surface had the same response, as did the interface that Tom Cruise used in Mission Impossible.

‘Ergonomically speaking, it’s just too much hard work’ is the usual response. There’s a lot of supposition and conjecture there though, mostly based on the received wisdom that less work is better. It seems obvious that they require more work to control, but I’m not aware of any long-term study into the ergonomic effects of haptic interfaces in everyday use or indeed that they are even hard work to use on a daily basis. I’m certainly one of those people that look at this kind of interface and thinks “It just looks like a lot of hard work”.