Matt Gemmell has some tips for designers working with developers:

Traditionally, developers aren’t great designers, and vice versa. There are many exceptions (ahem), but generally the art of one group is a mystery to the other – yet we routinely have to collaborate on projects. As someone who has worked in both areas, I’ve put together a list of tips for designers, on how they can make life easier for the developers who have to bring those designs to life as apps and web sites.

If you’re a designer (or developer, for that matter), and are working on a project or will be, go and read this.

Marco Arment talked about the app economy on NPR’s Planet Money. I loved this comment:

When the market is that big of everybody that uses the Internet, any little differentiator can get you enough of a customer base to support yourself and a few other people.

Marco says that the ease of purchasing applications on iOS—and the number of users who do purchase applications—means that running a relatively small business is possible, which wasn’t really true on the web just a few years ago.

It seems obvious, but it’s a very big deal that a multitude of people can create businesses that do very niche things and be successful, without worrying about getting big. They can just focus on making their product better for their very specific customer base, and make enough money to support themselves comfortably.

I argued a year ago that this is important, too, because it allows a number of businesses doing similar things to co-exist. When a market’s economics force businesses to take a majority market share to survive—depend on getting big—they necessarily preclude other businesses from surviving in that market, too. This is true of most advertising-supported businesses, because making decent money from advertising requires significant scale. But for paid-for applications, you don’t need that scale. You just need a loyal group of customers who pay and tell other people about your application.

That allows a much more diverse and unique market to develop, because developers are (relatively) free to experiment. Markets that depend on advertising should become relatively homogeneous while markets where customers pay for the products should be relatively more diverse.

Buzz Andersen:

Awhile back, Jacqui Cheng from Ars Technica contacted a bunch of folks (including me) for a story she was putting together about what iOS devs would most like to see from Apple in 2012. Unfortunately I never got around to responding (sorry Jacqui—the holidays were crazy), but if I had, one item would have stood an order of magnitude above everything else on my list: better rich text formatting support in the middle layers of Apple’s development frameworks.

Now this may sound like a surprisingly mundane request considering the number of whiz bang things people are expecting from Apple in 2012, but if you’ve ever tried to develop a native iOS applications that present textual content downloaded from the Internet, you probably share my frustration.

So, so right.

Jason Snell wrote a terrific piece about why iBooks Author is a big deal for publishers, and if you haven’t, you should read it. He pointed something out that hadn’t occurred to me about iBooks Author. He wrote:

I look at iBooks Author and wonder if it might be, even now, an alternative for publications that don’t want to build an app—or feel that the app they can afford to build won’t be very good. What if periodical publishers could get access to Newsstand by publishing issues using a tool more like iBooks Author, to a standardized format? What if people could buy subscriptions to magazines and newspapers in the iBookstore? Instead of building an expensive container, we could spend our money on the stuff we put inside that container.

I think it’d be better if new editions showed up in the Newsstand folder, but that’s not the point: this is a really, really good idea. Publishing on the iPad right now is not very nice; magazines tend to be static images, even for text, and as you’d expect, the experience is terrible for readers. Creating a full-fledged application for their publication is prohibitively expensive and very difficult, so they haven’t done it. They’ve chosen a route which largely fits their existing workflow but results in a poor experience for readers.

iBooks Author could help eliminate that. Publications can create new issues that are really nice to read and are tailored to fit their own identity, without ever creating their own application. Publications would get the convenience and the unique design for their own publication, and readers would get a good reading experience.

Apple has to be thinking about something like this, because it makes too much sense not to. Building an application isn’t the solution for publishing on the iPad, because it’s not something everyone can do. Creating a workflow that is largely similar to a publication’s current one is. Working with iBooks Author, or whatever the application becomes, would be an addition to their work—additional work for sure—but it also largely fits what they’re already doing.

Evi is a new app for iPhone and Android that’s similar to Siri, except it can do more. Evi can answer questions about how to make a certain dish, who was president during a certain time period, and other kinds of questions that Siri would kick you off to a web search for.

If you don’t have an iPhone 4S but want Siri-like functionality, you’ll want to check it out.

David Wineman:

Apple is trying to establish a rule that whatever I create with this application, if I sell it, I have to give them a cut. And iBooks Author is free, so this arrangement sounds pretty reasonable.

Watts Martin responds:

So Apple’s “audacity” is that they’ve created a snazzy creation tool that, from all appearances, only works with their viewers. Wineman is correct in that it’s the license, not the technology, that prevents you from taking a .ibooks file and selling it somewhere other than Apple’s store. But you don’t have much reason to sell something this thing creates outside Apple’s store, ’cause it ain’t gonna be creating those snazzy multimedia books for your Kindle Fire.

The new version of xScope is out, and if you’re a designer of any kind, you’ll want to get it. I did.

Apple announced three things today: textbooks for iPad, a new iTunes U app for teachers to manage classes and for taking them, and a free iBooks authoring application for the Mac.

I’m going to talk about the iTunes U app and textbooks, but I do want to say that this is incredibly exciting. Apple is trying to re-make education, and it’s very clear that this is something that means a lot to them. This isn’t just another business opportunity—it’s a chance to do something great and improve people’s lives. Apple is the only company with the platform, resources and passion to completely change how we learn in school, and they recognize it. What they announced today is the best example of why Apple is different than every other consumer electronics company. Their goal is not to make and sell devices. Their goal is to make the world better, and however cliché that sounds, that really is their goal.

iTunes U

Before, iTunes U was a section on the iTunes store with lectures from various schools and organizations across the world. Now, iTunes U is also an iOS application with direct access to those materials—and also a place for managing courses. Teachers can upload their class’s syllabus, books, handouts (documents, presentations, PDFs, web links), quizzes, assignments and media, and it’s all organized into a single place for students. Students can also take notes for each class within it, but the feature-set is so basic I don’t see this being very important.

But being able to manage classes within a single application is a big deal, both for K-12 and college students. When I was a kid, what I struggled with most was keeping track of all of the assignments and handouts from each class. Papers would get buried at the bottom of my backpack or I would lose them altogether. That’s not only bad for the student, but it’s also bad for the teacher, because they have to keep copies of every handout around for students who lose it and deal with students who aren’t prepared for class because they didn’t complete their assignment or didn’t bring it. If they’re using the iTunes U application, teachers and students won’t have to worry about it, because everything will always be on their iPad.

That’s less of an issue for college students, of course, but having each class’s presentations and materials with you at all times, able to look something up or study, is incredibly convenient.

The bigger picture for iTunes U is Apple’s created a very convincing way for people to take classes online. We can take classes online now, but it’s a terrible experience at many schools. Students still need to buy textbooks, and the class is managed through something like Blackboard or Moodle, which are rather bad. Because the experience is so bad, online classes tend to be something people suffer through for the credit, rather than something engaging that they learn from.

iTunes U could change that, because it’s actually nice to use. Everything is in one place and well-organized. It’s hard to overstate how important that is for a student: because everything is in one place and they know how to use it, there’s much less mental overhead for figuring out what they’re supposed to do. They just do it. That’s especially important when you’re taking a course online, because whether the student does their studying and assignments depends on their motivation to do so.

Textbooks

The new iBooks application includes digital textbooks, with books from McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. These aren’t static books, either—they’re what you’d get if you combined an Inkling textbook’s capabilities with Push Pop Press’s UI concepts. Textbooks can include video, Keynote presentations, 3D images, interactive images (for example, you can inspect different parts of a cell membrane) and chapter reviews.

Those interactive elements are important, because textbooks can more effectively convey certain types of information that’s difficult to do on a static page, but what’s most important is how good the reading experience is, and how easy it is to take notes. We’ve had digital textbooks for a while on the desktop, but they were never very good for those two reasons: they were difficult to read and take notes with. After using one of Apple’s new textbooks, though, they nailed it. Text is clear and, well, easy to read. Taking notes and highlighting text is easier in iBooks than it is in a real book; to highlight something, you just slide your finger from where you want the highlight to start to where you want it to end, and to making a note is just as easy.

iBooks also has a study cards feature, which takes the textbook’s glossary and highlighted items and turns them into flash cards, and it works really well. It’s a perfect example of what makes digital textbooks so convincing.

And textbooks are $14.99 each, or less. $14.99. Fourteen dollars and ninety-nine cents. Less than a night at the movie theatre. I’ve paid $250 for a single textbook before. $14.99 is what’s known as a big deal.

This isn’t exciting because Apple’s the first company to create worthwhile digital textbooks. That honor goes to Inkling. It’s exciting because Apple’s the only company that is in a position to completely change how we learn, and iBooks certainly has the power to do so. For the first time ever, elementary and high school students will be able to replace twenty pounds of books with a one-and-a-half pound device. They won’t need to decide between bringing a textbook home for homework and a backpack that strains their back. They won’t have to worry about forgetting a book. It’ll all be in a paper-sized computer that they can carry with them everywhere they go.

Cody Fink has a great look at Phraseology on Macstories.

Interesting new app from Greg Pierce, who also made Terminology.

Phraseology is for writing, and it looks quite good. I love the archive idea. Instead of deleting pieces you don’t think work anymore, you can just archive them—which is great, because sometimes I realize what an old piece needs to work, so getting them out of sight, but not out of storage, is great.

Bloomberg reports on the iPad 3:

Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s next iPad, expected to go on sale in March, will sport a high-definition screen, run a faster processor and work with next-generation wireless networks, according to three people familiar with the product.

In other words, John Gruber called it back in February 2011, when he wrote that he thinks the iPad 3 will have a double-resolution screen, and he’s said rather definitively since then. Of course, he also said that Apple may release the iPad 3 in Fall 2011, but one thing’s for sure: if you want to know what Apple’s going to do ahead of time, Gruber’s the guy to listen to.

Interesting that they are pushing for LTE support—it could indicate that they are targeting the next iPhone for LTE support, too, which I didn’t expect.

I can’t wait to see what the double-resolution screen looks like in person. Imagine just how beautiful applications can be with so many pixels and such a great screen.

Instagram’s CEO Kevin Systrom released a few details about their plan for how to do advertising:

“I think the advertising experience is going to be extremely engaging,” Systrom said. “It’s much harder with text,” but Instagram offers photos, and brand names such as Audi, Kate Spade, and Burberry have joined Instagram.

“They’re sharing pictures of products and the message of their brands. That shows we’re at the beginning of what will come with brands,” he said.

As Marco points out, this likely means they’ll insert photos from companies—advertisements—in our timelines. I’m not sure how they’ll do it otherwise.

This could be an interesting form of advertisement, if advertisers use it as such—rather than show straight print-like adverts, they could use it to tell stories about their products. Audi could use it to take well-done photos of their cars in use, ones that fit with Instagram’s purpose, to convey a more general feel of what Audi is to viewers, rather than simply try to convey specific information (e.g., “best-in-class safety!”). Of course, other forms of advertisements could be used in more interesting ways—print adverts in particular—but they tend not to be.

Advertisements could be done in an interesting and effective way, but not only is it likely advertisers won’t use it as such, but the entire concept walks a fine line. Delivering ads within someone’s timeline—a stream of photos from users the user decided to follow, and thus is inherently private—will likely end up feeling invasive. I wonder, too, if Instagram will target ads to users. What personal information do they have to target ads? And if they don’t, that makes the venture a lot less likely to be successful.

Five years ago today, Apple introduced the iPhone. We haven’t quite seen a presentation like the one Steve Jobs gave that day before, we haven’t seen one since, and we may never see one on that same level again. Typically, we have a fairly good idea of what Apple will introduce. That day, we had no idea—and what they did introduce was so far beyond what we thought capable for mobile phones, it blew our minds, and shifted the entire mobile industry. And laid the foundation for the iPad, which is doing the same for computing generally.

Here’s a link to Apple’s video of the presentation. Here’s Ryan Block’s coverage of the presentation for Engadget.

Idaho will require all high school students to take some online courses to graduate, and are giving each student and teacher a computer or tablet. Instead of lecturing, Idaho intends for teachers to increasingly provide guidance for students as they move through lessons on computers or tablets.

Unsurprisingly, many people are angry. One teacher doesn’t understand how this could possibly improve education:

Rather than relying on technology, she seeks to engage students with questions — the Socratic method — as she did recently as she was taking her sophomore English class through “The Book Thief,” a novel about a girl in a foster family in Germany during World War II.

Ms. Rosenbaum, tall with an easy smile but also a commanding presence, stood in the center of the room with rows of desks on each side, pacing, peppering the students with questions and using each answer to prompt the next. What is an example of foreshadowing in this chapter? Why did the character say that? How would you feel in that situation?

…

She said that while technology had a role to play, her method of teaching was timeless. “I’m teaching them to think deeply, to think. A computer can’t do that.”

She said she was mystified by the requirement that students take online courses. She is taking some classes online as she works toward her master’s degree, and said they left her uninspired and less informed than in-person classes. Ms. Rosenbaum said she could not fathom how students would have the discipline to sit in front of their computers and follow along when she had to work each minute to keep them engaged in person.

Nothing wrong with the Socratic method—my favorite high school teacher used it extensively, and I learned more in that class than I did in many of my college courses—but perhaps Ms. Rosenbaum should re-consider her strategies if she has to “work each minute” to keep them engaged. There’s no way the Socratic method is effective for her if her students are so chronically disengaged.

In-person classes still require a lot of self-directed effort from students, like actually reading the material, and there’s nothing she can do if they aren’t doing it. The problem she’s facing has nothing to do with technology. Her problem is the same one all teachers face and that they will face regardless of whether there is technology involved or not: motivating her students.

Her job is not just to get her students through the material. Her job is to get through to them. Her job is to make them see why the piece of literature they are reading is relevant and meaningful and insightful. Without doing that, whatever teaching method she employs will be completely ineffective.

Which is why her criticism is completely beside the point: whether she has to adopt the state’s new method of teaching, or sticks with her traditional method, her primary purpose remains the same.

(Via Fraser Speirs.)

Clayton Morris hears that Apple’s January event will be about iTunes U and the textbook project Steve Jobs was working on, as mentioned in his biography.

Walter Isaacson wrote:

In fact Jobs had his sights set on textbooks as the next business he wanted to transform. He believes it as an $8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction. He was also struck by the fact that many schools, for security reasons, don’t have lockers, so kids have to lug a heavy backpack around. “The iPad would solve that,” he said. His idea was to hire great textbook writers to create digital versions, and make them a feature of the iPad. In addition, he held meetings with the major publishers, such as Pearson Education, about partnering with Apple. “The process by which states certify textbooks is corrupt,” he said. “But if we can make the textbooks free, and they come with the iPad, then they don’t have to be certified. The crappy economy at the state level will last for a decade, and we can give them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process and save money. (pp. 509-10).

I am incredibly excited, if not surprised, that Apple is working on a project so integral to education. Our education system, from elementary school to university, is very much broken, both in its overall intent and how it uses technology. Education today is too expensive and too irrelevant.

Fortunately, though, that also means there’s huge improvements we can make. Apple has quietly built an incredible educational resource, iTunes U. Anyone, for free, can download lectures from some of the world’s best universities and watch them on their own time. They can be taught how to develop iOS applications by Apple engineers at Stanford, cosmology from UC Irvine, economics from UC Berkeley, China’s history after the collapse of the empire from Harvard University, or even how to bake and make pastries from the International Culinary Schools at the Art Institutes.

It’s an incredible resource, one that we should probably all take advantage of more often. But what it also shows is that education does not necessarily mean attending a single university, choosing a narrow major to focus on, purchasing a $200 textbook, sitting through several lectures each week and taking a midterm and a final. It could still be all of these things, but it doesn’t have to be.

We need to begin finding new models for education, because our current one is failing us terribly, and certainly not sustainable, either. I don’t know what Apple’s planning nor the extent of it, but I’m glad to see that they are trying to improve education.

In a rather dull report from the Wall Street Journal on Apple’s intentions for TV, there was one line of interest:

Apple’s uptick in talks with its media partners is part of the company’s strategy to change the way consumers watch TV, just as the company transformed the music and cellphone industries. Mr. Jobs envisioned building a TV that would be controlled by Apple’s mobile devices in order to be easier to use and more personalized, according to people familiar with the matter.

I don’t find that particularly surprising, but it does shed a bit of light on what Jobs meant when he told Isaacson that he had finally “cracked” the problem of making a good TV. Relying on iOS devices to control the TV would solve a couple of the biggest problems with an Apple TV: what kind of remote to use to control it and how they get around the issue that people purchase new TVs only every five years or so, which means the device’s capabilities would be quickly outdated.

It’d certainly be an interesting model. Apple TV applications could reside on the iOS device, and the TV acts more or less as a dumb display. Managing applications would be simple and so would controlling the TV, and even better, the Apple TV’s capabilities could be upgraded with each new iPhone or iPad, since what it can do would depend on them.