It wasn't too bad, it took a few hours to get the basics up and running, then there was quite a bit of tweaking. The leap sdk is coming together but theres still a lot for developers to do. There are gestures but you still need to roll quite a bit yourself. I'm going to do another post much more in depth about the gestures and how to handle them in the next week or two.
Using print as an example of good high resolution design is interesting, but it misses one of the main reasons we have drop shadows and fake textures in non-print design.
Drop shadows and textures provide affordances and a visual language to communicate what a user can and should interact with on screen. They provide a visual hierarchy to the user so they can easily see what is content and what is interactive, etc.
Print has no interaction, so it's a bit naive to say we're going back to print aesthetics. We need a new way forward that provides both. Web apps have been experimenting with this for a while now. Some of these ideas work, some don't, but we can't just pretend print design has all the answers.
I'm pretty sure Airplay does exactly what you're talking about. If you play a video from YouTube or even streamed off your computer via airvideo, the apple tv connects to the server directly and the iPad or iPhone just acts as a remote. It doesn't use battery or network.
It's just seamless and you don't need to know how it works to use it.
I disagree. Not knowing how it works makes me not want to use it.
I don't know if you're right or not, but certainly YouTube and desktop iTunes is only a subset of AirPlay content. This doesn't really scale without providing a spec for content to follow.
All iOS apps must use HLS for videos longer than 10 minutes and Apple verifies compliance during the app store review process. As mentioned, with AirPlay all HLS media files are downloaded directly by the AppleTV, not piped through your device. I can tell you from experience it works very well.
You can put the iPad to sleep and it will continue to play the video on the AppleTV, but my guess is that if you turn it completely off or move it outside of wifi range you'll lose the control connection so the video will stop playing.
Where did you study Interaction Design? I'm getting in a masters in it at CMU after getting an electrical engineering BS. The masters here is a great program.
My app is heavily effected as well. I have a Picasa client that auto-caches photos for users. The app manages the cache and clears it when needed, but certain albums can be manually set to cache by users so they're never deleted. I wouldn't want all these photos backed up and I don't think apple would allow it. Them going through and deleting the data themselves basically breaks the app for our users though.
The article you're referring to I think was written by Mark Weiser. It was called "The Computer for the 21st Century" unless you were thinking of a different one.
The author seems to think that because there will be 20 or 50 viable androids they will somehow dominate. It seems to me that this is much more a branding/marketing problem for android.
Categories like this tend to support just two or three brands at the top of consumer mineshare. Think coke vs pepsi or BMW vs mercedes. The problem with android is it's not really a choice for a consumer. By picking android they really need to make a much more complex choice of which actual phone to get. The real choice the consumer is making is iPhone vs droid incredible or some other specific phone. In the end all the manufacturers under the android umbrella are competing with each other as well as the iPhone for mindshare.
I definitely agree that android will have more units out there than iPhone eventually, but I think the iPhone will easily be the brand with the much stronger mindshare in the category. Normal consumers will still see it as iPhone vs all those other phones. Apple will also have the biggest profit in the smart phone category as a result.
Remember, google is selling eyeballs to advertisers, not phones to consumers. They're playing a different game than apple.
> Categories like this tend to support just two or three brands at the top of consumer mineshare.
The consumer electronics market seems a lot more varied than two or three brands holding mindshare. Walk into a store to buy a TV and you'll see at least 7 brands you recognize (Sony, Toshiba, Sharp, Samsung, LG, Panasonic, Mitsubishi). And those are just the asian ones.
Sure, but ask any consumer what they think the best brand of tv is and it will probably fall between two or three brands that they can think of. I'm not saying a particular category can't be big enough to support a lot of brands. I'm saying in the consumers mind there are usually just 2 or three they think of.
http://unboundformac.com/dropbox.html
I'm interested to see where they go with it and how they approach the problem differently.