iPad

Storytelling and the Evolution of Mediums

February 14, 2013 By Mark Leave a Comment

Following up on several previous posts about mediums and how mediums affect storytelling, I recently ran across an article that illustrates my claim that stories exist apart from the mediums we use to communicate them. From PCMag:

Just like soap opera characters wake up from years-long comas or return from beyond the grave, two cancelled daytime dramas are getting revived.

Prospect Park today announced that All My Children and One Life To Live will in fact get a second chance as the anchor programs on The Online Network (TOLN).

In a sense this development probably doesn’t even seem evolutionary, let alone revolutionary. And from the point of view of the end user it’s probably neither. You fire up whatever glowing screen you want to look at, you input a few commands, and voila: content. But consider what this means for television itself. [ Read more ]

The Missing iPad Review

May 11, 2010 By Mark 12 Comments

I get the utility of hype. If you can work people into a frenzy about a given brand in a crowded marketplace, you sell more of that product. Fair enough.

But after you’ve got that spanking new Ferrari parked in the garage you’ve still got to take your three kids to school, including their sports equipment. After you’ve had that delicious pedicure or manicure, you still need to plant your garden or rake your leaves. And of course there’s all that gizmo-driven exercise equipment in your basement, which you used exactly twice.

Point being: it’s one thing to buy yourself something cool and another thing to use it in your day-to-day existence. Products that require a lot of care and maintenance generally get neither, meaning we tend to avoid those products or destroy them in short order.

Now that all of those how-the-iPad-will-change-the-fabric-of-the-universe-twice posts have faded into the coffers of Steve Jobs, I find myself confronted with a deafening silence on more banal points like utility and usability. If you’ve had an iPad for a while, and you’re using it regularly — or, alternatively, not using it regularly — I think you could corner the market on iPad news by answering any or all of the following:

What’s it like to lug an iPad around?
It weighs 1.5 pounds. You can talk all you want about how that’s super-light for a laptop, but it’s still 1.5 pounds. The average person is not built to carry a weight like that, let alone manipulate it in one or both hands. (If you think I’m kidding, grab yourself a much-easier-to-carry 1.5 pound barbell and lug it around for a day.)

[ Read more ]

The iPad and Me

March 30, 2010 By Mark 7 Comments

Whatever you think about Apple and its products, it’s hard to deny that their marketing machine does an excellent job projecting the company as both a technological leader and cultural trend-setter. The latest gizmo to get the full Apple-hype treatment is the iPad, which has been variously described as everything from the greatest invention since sliced bread to the greatest invention of all time.

As a piece of technology, I don’t have an opinion about the iPad. It lies outside my interests, and there’s no scenario in which I see myself needing one or buying one.

What’s most interesting to me about the iPad is how the book business has both embraced and distanced itself from the device, as if it’s critical to publishing’s aims. To the extent that the iPad creates pretty portable pictures, I can see how that might serve the aims of an art book, but when it comes to text I see no inherent advantage in the iPad over any other e-reading device.

More to the point, as a content creator I see the iPad as essentially meaningless. The works I create are almost completely described by text (no images, little formatting), and my goal for that content is to make it device independent. Because the ePub and PDF file formats already allow me to do that, the existence or non-existence of the iPad (and any other similar device) is a non-issue for me.

I’m not waiting for the iPad to make my work viable, portable, deliverable or readable. If it sells like hotcakes, great. If it doesn’t, great. Apple’s market share is nothing I care about, and the same goes for Amazon, Sony, and anybody else who intends to enter the e-reader marketplace. I’m taking my content directly to readers one way or the other, and nobody’s going to get in the way of that. Anyone who tries to do so by controlling the technology will be undermined by the competition. Anyone who tries to do so by controlling the market will be side-stepped and cut down by the internet.

— Mark Barrett