timosudmann:

People don’t want to watch a certain show by tuning in at 8 p.m. on Thursday on CBS anymore. People want on-demand, people.

/via jarredbishop: wesort

TestFlight | iOS beta testing on the fly
Free over-the-air beta distribution Quick. Painless. Magical*.
* Thanks Apple, for building the tools to make magic possible

via workersoftheweb

IKEA robotics – an interesting take on objects, behavior and object behavior

(via slavin > kthread)

designlanguage:

Because the primary input method of the iPad is a single piece of multitouch glass, developers have incredible flexibility to design unique user interfaces. It’s hard to appreciate the variety of UIs though, since turning the screen off removes virtually all evidence of them. To spotlight these…

Bryan Rieger

Jeff Jarvis on News Corp´s Daily

(thanks sarah!)

frederikfrede:

we are passionate about what we do. Unfortunately, all of that passion goes from being a creative blessing to an albatross on your morale when mixed with “pitch adversity.”

Let´s start with the website usability and the user experience: If you want to find a list of your friends, don´t click on the “Friends” button on the homepage. You´re not gonna find it there. That´s not a big thing but an ugly one. More disturbing is the inscrutable (almost random) treatment of links contained in wall posts. Some open in an overlay, some open in a new window, some open in the same window. After scrolling 2 miles down the wall I don´t want to open a photo in the same window. My browser´s “Back” button will never take me back to exact position I was before because of that effing endless scrolling javascript thingy. Yeah, I know, disruption is trendy, awesome, etc … but on my Facebook wall? Really?

Anyway, it seems everybody else got used to it as nobody is really complaining about it – except me. So maybe I´m wrong. Meanwhile, I´ve accustomed myself to open links with two clicks. It feels a bit like a step backwards.

Now back to the Facebook´s announcement: I´m using their Android and their iOS application. I don´t like them but the mobile website is worse so I have to stick with them. First off I feel betrayed as I can´t see all the wall posts I can see on the website. I can´t see who liked what and who has got new friends (that I may know, too). These are quite essential pieces of information for me – probably more important than all those YouTube videos of epic lolcats, fails and wins. Also I have the feeling that I don´t have access to all functionalities the website provides. I want to able to delete accidentally posted “inappropriate” jokes. I want to block friends and “friends”. I want to block awesome viral applications and scientifically valuable user polls about my kissing behaviour setup by people I went to school with decades ago.

These are a few features I really miss in the mobile applications. But I don´t like them not just because some things are missing … no. There are also a things that shouldn´t be there: Wall posts from users or pages I actually blocked on the website. It seems one of the 500+ Facebook developers was thinking this: “Maybe he just wants to read the post on his mobile device only.” No, I don´t. I´m pretty sure the same developer was responsible for the “Delete” functionality. I know they would never really delete a post. I´m not naive. But please: Don´t tell my friends that I posted more articles if they can´t view them.

In 2011 everything will change, Facebook says. Either they will fuck up the website to match the mobile applications or they´re gonna hire some better user interface designers and user experience architects to take care of usability and consistency. I hope the latter. I really do.

Then came Flipboard. Flipboard turned my Twitter streams and my Facebook streams and some RSS feeds into my very own personalized newspaper – and after flipping its virtual pages for a few times I got bored of it and finally forgot about it. Not on purpose, it just happened. Then some day (today) someone tweeted about a service called PostPost.com which is basically a browser-based version of Flipboard. Yes, I read it on Twitter. So as you can see I´m still using social media services to keep me informed but I did neglect Flipboard. I read that tweet and it immediately brought up old feelings and the question: Why did i neglect my Flipboard?

The data coming from services like Twitter, Facebook and even RSS feeds is timeline-based data. Applications and services like Flipboard and PostPost.com take this data out of its context and rearrange it to make it look like a classic newspaper. But the way we read classic newspapers is different to the way we consume timeline-based news streams. All news events covered in a newspaper seem to have happened at the same time, there´s a global timestamp for all articles of an issue (the issue´s publication date) and the news events probably happened the day before (unless it´s silly season). The context of the news articles is either category, location or whatever rubrics the newspaper contains. The articles could be on any page of the newspaper issue as long as they are in the corresponding rubric. 

News items in a news stream do have their very own publication date and because these streams are timeline-based each item belongs to its exact position on this timeline. You can´t move it around.

Because Flipboard did shift around the messages they got irrelevant to me as I was expecting them in a certain visual order. Yes, the pages are sorted by date in Flipboard as well but the visual representation doesn´t fit the context of the individual articles.

I´m not saying services like Flipboard or PostPost.com are crap. Their content just don´t work with classic newspaper layouts. 

ninedaysoff:

I totally didn’t notice this until now: embedded Youtube videos feature the watch later option. Nothing I would have craved for but this moves youtube a step closer to an app-like/desktop-like web experience.

A nice collection of data visualisation examples that proof data can be transformed into art.