Couldn’t join my buddy Jason and Kevin for Kevin Kelly’s book tour in Beijing for the Chinese translation of one of his earlier work “Out of Control”. Sigh… What can I do? Well, watch some of his talks in Youtube and have a snip of KK.
TEDxAmsterdam: Kevin Kelly from TEDxAmsterdam on Vimeo.
More of his talks here.
Hm… I should start reading his new book – What technology wants. Damn… I still have The Grand Design in my pipeline…
Get these cool Mac apps from indie developers at great price! Only $60 for 6 best-in-class indie apps!
The BODW week is over. Don’t wanna talk about the conference content. It’s generally OK. There are a handful of inspiring talks – the Nikon one, the Milk Design one…
I wanna talk about the conference package.
The moment after registration, I was given the conference package.
Boy, it’s heavy! it weighs over 2 kg according to the balance in my neighbor laundry shop.
Here’s what you get inside…
A bunch of brochures, postcards, design course prospectus, the event program guideline, the DesignSmart Initiative program book, the Inno Design Tech Expo exhibitor directory and a photo book about Wanchai.
This is ridiculous giving out 2kg paper garbage to every single conference attendee. I wear the bag with me the whole afternoon in the first conference day thinking about returning the whole package back to the reception. But, NO. I’m gonna blog about this.
To BODW organizer,
Stop handing junk to people. I know you guys are extremely old school and adhere to “normal” practice. Let me tell you… People don’t want this. Just give me a well designed web site with all up-to-date information there. Don’t hand me extra junk that are unrelated to a good conference experience.
The exhibitor directory weighs like 1 KG by itself. Who the hell in the conference would find that directory useful? Who the hell still read paper directory?
Instead of spending time preparing all these printed materials, getting them all inserted, transportation and stuff… why don’t you guys just pay attention to make one good program guide of the event. Just one… Make it optional. I don’t think every single person need a paper guide. Spend your other effort make a nice iPhone/Android app for the conference to help people get around.
It’s pretty ironic when almost all speakers in the event talk about minimal design, green design, respectful design, smart design. Looking at the conference package… it’s a piece of junk that weighs 2 KG. The paper exhibitor directory… it’s pathetic.
To My Dear Designers,
This is your conference. Can you fix this? Make some change, won’t you?
Don’t wanna be naysayer. But I honestly don’t think Richard Branson’s new “Project” magazine for iPad works.
I did not follow the launch event and all the press related to it. I knew about it in podcast (Buzz Out Loud). It sounds like a big thing. I mean it’s like the only big digital magazine trial after the Wired Magazine iPad edition.
The whole thing… it’s just another magazine on the iPad.
Here’s why I think it doesn’t work:
Contents
Content is great but not anything better than others – it’s like tech x lifestyle x urban living magazine. It’s a bit of Wallpaper, a bit of Monocle, a bit of Wired, a bit of CG…
Reading Experience
I don’t like reading magazine in a self-contained iPad app at all. Why don’t I just read from a browser?
The cool thing of iPad is… the Internet is in your hand. You read the Macbook Air review in Wired. Then, maybe, you wanna open a new browser page in Safari and browse Apple’s site for the spec and stuff. The beauty is the free interactions of information. This kind of interaction is very personal and unpredictable.
In a digital magazine, I have to follow the contents in order. This is not a modern digital experience.
So, what experience the magazine offer besides missing the interaction with information?
You get a bunch of videos, photos with a “X” button signaling where you tap to reveal a label, interview recordings, columned text, flicking the screen frustratingly.
Maybe I am too old. I found that noisy. What is the focus? The articles? The photos? Buttons in the photo?
User Interaction
Bonnie made a wonderful quote, “It’s like wizard book in Harry Potter”.
In Harry Potter movie, the books the characters read… The illustrations in book can animate and people in photo can speak…
This is a great insight! This kind of digital magazine only works in fiction. It’s good demo but not good interaction.
To me, I feel like the whole magazine is very much like those flash web sites features in theFWA. You know… those fucking full browser screen flash web site that chokes your whole Mac!
A large part of the magazine (namely, intro page of featured articles) is a full screen video in the background with static text laid out in front. It’s just visually too much. Background moving, text fading in, sometimes, there’s sound… Should I pay attention to the video in the background? Or, read the text? Or what?
The user interaction is the most frustrating part. It makes me feel I am stupid!
Check the page below:
Do you notice the black band saying “Tap the covers to see inside”?
Tap on the images and they will pop more stuff!
Now, count how many buttons are there?
You would guess every element around the edges are buttons. That’s smart. But it’s actually only the red cross on the bottom right and the black circle dot in the middle right are buttons.
The cross at the bottom left corner signals more stuff below (scroll down).
There are so match things I think touchable yet not touchable. When touch something, it be response to you with a hugh callout.
Can I just sit, relax and enjoy the contents in a paper magazine effortless flicking pages?
User Interface
One big problem in user interface: the “links” or “buttons” do not feedback on touch. There’s no highlight when you touch links or buttons. You don’t know if a bold header is just a header or it serves as link as well.
Navigation is not web done either. You can flick left/right to switch between articles, flick up/down to scroll. But, very often, it’s hard to get the app response to the flick you intended to. That’s mainly because the page has a big element which response to touch. The touch is being registered to that element in the page. You can that element responds to your touch while you actually want to flick the page.
It took me quite some effort to flick through this page. I kept smudging the “dirt”!
Web Experience
There’s no web counterpart. When I first heard the magazine’s name, I googled it for official site for more info. I’ve got only other web sites mentioning about it. There’s no official “Project” mag site. WTF?
Try some key words yourself: project mag ipad, project virgin
Wrap up
This thing is done so wrong… The photos look great, illustrations are beautiful, articles are well written. Adding them up results in a crappy reading experience.
Is it because it’s just me who fail to appreciate snippets of textual, video, audio, interactivity and graphical experience all put in one screen?
Or, it’s just like multimedia CD-ROM in the 90s? Remember Microsoft Encarta CD-ROM and Human Body CD-ROM?
I think people don’t need an app for magazine. This has been proven in the 90s with the automatic death of multimedia CD-ROM as the Internet became popular. Or, well, iPad magazine is just not for people who read….
Bill So - iPhone / Mac Developer in Hong Kong. His products include Clip It! and Finger and Numbric. They are distributed under his company Headnix. Bill is also the host of CocoaHeads Hong Kong. You can hire him for programming, consultancy and training.
Enter the query to search and hit enter.
This work by Bill So is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Hong Kong License.
RSS Feed. This blog is proudly powered by Wordpress and uses Modern Clix, a theme by Rodrigo Galindez.