I’ve been putting some fun things on the AEJMC Newspaper Division blog:
Nice article, if the link works…
New Tools for Today’s Investigative Journalist
I may have chopped off a few characters at the end or the address while fumbling with another “new tool” — not one mentioned in the article. My new $90 (refurb) Pandigital Android tablet is mostly for reading, not for any high-tech news-data crunching, but it’s proving useful. Newspaper websites’ mobile editions are actually readable at the breakfast table.
Panpad (my nickname for it) doesn’t use the latest version of Android or the standard Android Market for software installation, so I can’t do my usual bookmarking yet with a Delicious.com app or send the link to myself with a Gmail app. I can copy app installers from my Droid phone via SD card, but phone-specific apps, voice-input or gps won’t work on this more modest wifi-only device, and some of the apps are meant for a newer version of Android or a faster processor.
But it’s easy enough to launch Gmail or Delicious.com in the browser for now, but I do miss the delicious-bookmarking shortcut.
The Pandigital 7-inch is no iPad in screen quality or speed either, but (unlike an iPad) it does let me tap in words with my right hand’s long guitar-player fingernails the way I did on my old Palm Pilots, and it does have the SD card slot to share mp3s and documents with my phone or Macs. It has no camera or voice recognition, but it does fit a jacket pocket on at least one of my jackets. It works with my Verizon mifi hotspot or campus wifi. And being able to tap/type right-handed is important right now while I recover from an RSI injury to my phone-flicking left thumb.
(Perhaps it’s a hidden virtue that the Panpad isn’t able to play Angry Birds.)
As for saving links “in the cloud,” while the only Delicious app I have here needs an update (new owners, new widgets), this WordPress app does work as an Android extension on the browser’s “share” button. As a result, maybe you’ll see more blog-posting here related to interesting shareable Web content, like the article linked above.
Note: Apologies if I haven’t caught all the glitches in this tap-typing — the keyboard shortcuts sometimes turn “an” to “Android, give me “for” for “do,” and change “to” to “or” while my eyes are focused on the screen keyboard. I’m also trying to make sure I’m not typing a string or l’s for backspaces, “v’s” for spaces or random “a’s” for uppercase, when I mean to hit the keys below those letters. But it’s still easier on the eyes than my 1/3-the-size Droid phone screen.
The latest update of The New York Times Droid app shows some improvements, but I still prefer reading the Times mobile Web site with the phone’s browser. The good news: For those of us with aging eyes and smaller Android screens, the app now does larger fonts and uses the phone’s horizontal mode.
However, you still can’t zoom in on routine photos or graphics.
I also noticed there is no linkage between clearly related stories, such as today’s item about new New York education chief being recruited secretly and her actual appointment story. Only one of these appeared in my morning “latest news” feed, so I had to go search the “New York region” feed to find the other.
On the full Times website, a “Related” sidebar takes care of the connections.
Another continuing annoyance, the Times app’s “share” button only provides the headline of the story and a compressed URL, as shown above. It copies and pasts that combination into e-mail, Facebook, Delicious bookmarks, blog posts and other services.
Unfortunately, some of them want more. There is still no way to copy and paste a story summary or selected paragraph or two into a blog post or email. Delicious, for example, expects the URL and headline to paste into separate fields, with a third field for a summary or notes and a fourth for searchable keyword tags.
Finally there is a small improvement in the app’s advertising. My earlier visits would only show me a single ad repeated over and over — an ad for home delivery of the Times, which is not available in my neighborhood, something the Times might be able to discern from the GPS data it accesses through my phone.
The small improvement is that the startup pages of the Times now show a different ad. I think it is for a hotel chain but the image is so small that I can’t read it. However, the Times subscription ad comes back as soon as I click on a story. Maybe I’m supposed to book a room at the hotel and have the Times delivered there.
Posted in Computers, Newspapers, Radford, Tablets & eBook Readers, usability, WebDesign
Khoi Vinh (subtraction.com), former design director at The New York Times, offered some design-inspired thoughts the other day on “why most of the current crop of iPad magazine apps have dim prospects for long-term success,” which has prompted dozens of intelligent comments and a follow-up post: My-ipad-magazine-stand and more-on-ipad-magazines.
The combination sent me looking for something I’d read by Bob Stein a while ago, The future of the app, and an interview he did on NPR’s On The Media.
Stein’s Voyager company was creating innovative e-books and before that video discs back before the Web was spun. Some of them were so good, I’m thinking of buying an old computer that can still play them. … which has me worried about the portability, searchability, longevity, archivability and general persistence of material created in the form of “apps” for particular computer, tablet or smartphone hardware.
I suspect folks like Bob Stein and Khoi Vinh are thinking about those issues, too… so I’m posting this here as a reminder to dip back into those discussions at their blog sites more often.
Online magazine or app publishing systems mentioned in the discussion, and related links:
Footnote: Unrelated, but interesting — The Observer on Khoi Vinh’s departure from the Times.
Related: Recent Chronicle of Higher Education article on Michael J. Bugeja and Daniela V. Dimitrova’s Vanishing Act: The Erosion of Online Footnotes and Implications for Scholarship in the Digital Age, lamenting the way redesigns and e-comings-and-goings kill links, even on the open Web. (We were on a panel discussion of related issues at AEJMC six years ago.)
I just installed the new TIME Mobile for Android application and the first thing I noticed was a totally wrong advertisement.
That reminded me: The first thing I saw when I loaded The New York Times Android app a couple of months ago also was a totally wrong ad.
And it’s still there: Every time I read a story.
My phone is smarter than that, especially if the applications are as smart (and intrusive) as they claim to be. But apparently not.
I sense a trend here: Smart media companies putting out “smartphone” apps with dumb ads. I wonder if they’re making the same mistakes on the iPhone side?
So what is TIME trying in vain to sell me on its Android app? Why, an iPhone app for its sister publication, CNN/Money! Dumb.
And how is the Times annoying me with the same ad over and over? By repeatedly presenting an ad for something I WANT, but can’t have: A home subscription to the Times. Follow that ad’s link, type in my zip code, and I get a rejection notice.
Only my love of irony (and the replacement cost) keeps me from throwing the phone across the room.
I just uninstalled and reinstalled the Times app to confirm my recollection of the first of a half-dozen Big Brotherish messages that greeted me when I installed it:
This application has access to the following:
Your location
fine (GPS) location
If that’s the case, you’d think something behind the scenes could check my location and offer to sell me something other than an unavailable home subscription.
The install warnings say the application also has access to “Services that cost you money; directly call phone numbers.” I’m still not sure what that means, but I guess I trust The New York Times.
Like I said, irony is a hobby of mine.
The news apps for the Droid annoy me in other ways, enough to send me back to the Droid’s Web browser and the “mobile” version of the news organizations’ Web sites. For one thing, the Web version offers me more opportunity to enlarge the size of the type I’m reading. It also takes advantage of the Droid’s horizontal mode
Also, I’m a bookmark addict, using the “delicious.com” bookmarking service as http://delicious.com/bstepno to post hundreds (OK, thousands) of links to articles I’ve read, or feel guilty for not reading, or want my students to feel guilty for not reading.
The Droid offers a handy “Share This” button, with Delicious as one of the options (along with e-mail, Twitter and blogging engines), but some of these apps don’t implement Delicious sharing correctly. For example, the Times and USA Today apps plug both a story headline and URL into the “URL” field of the “Save to Delicious” screen, just they way they do when you “share” via Twitter or e-mail. That isn’t going to work with Delicious, which has separate fields for URL, title, notes and keywords. It forces me to cut, paste and edit, and I don’t always have time.
A related annoyance: The apps don’t allow me to copy a random paragraph from a story and paste it into a blog post or Delicious bookmark summary. “Sharing” means “share the headline we gave you, and that’s all.”
The Result: I’m sharing fewer stories from the Droid, more from my laptop, except when I switch to the Droid’s Web browser and the news sites’ “mobile” versions instead of the publications’ custom apps.
The Worry: As publications erect “paywalls” on their Web sites and make their Android, iPhone and iPad apps the 21st century equivalent of paid subscriptions, these news providers will take away the freedom to copy and quote easily that I (as an educator and blogger) have enjoyed for the past decade.
The good news: Buried in the last paragraph of today’s story about “jailbreaking” iPhones was some good news on the freedom to quote: “In addition to the decision on jailbreaking, the Library of Congress also granted an exception to artists who remix copy-protected video content for noncommercial work…”
USA Today also buried that news, but hits closer to home, saying the ruling will “allow college professors, film students and documentary filmmakers to break copy-protection measures on DVDs so they can embed clips for educational purposes, criticism, commentary and noncommercial videos.”
That sounds like I can feel guilt-free when I cut and paste from DVDs of movies for the course I’m planning next spring semester, inspired by the “Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture” project. Yay!
Posted in News, Newspapers, smartphones, Tablets & eBook Readers, usability, WebDesign
An AP story in Editor & Publisher says advertising in newspapers’ iPad apps is doing better for publishers than website ads.
Does that also extend to iPhone and Android phone app ads?
After a month with a Droid phone I’m underwhelmed by the newspaper apps I’ve tried. I’m more impressed with the mobile versions of some Web pages, including the NYTimes.com and WordPress.
I don’t have an iPad yet, and hope its app designers aren’t building in the same annoyances:
Biggest flaw in the specialized apps:
Providing no “cut and paste” to allow smartphone-based bloggers (or other readers) to quote selectively from a story. All browsers let you copy and paste. Why don’t apps? If this is a content copy-protection scheme, I’m against it. “Freedom to quote and share” should be written into the Constitution of Apps.
Second most annoying app limitation: Providing fewer ways to enlarge text and graphics than the Web browsers do.
Third: Not using the Droid’s “landscape” layout for larger-font column views, graphic zoom, etc.
Back to advertising: By far the most annoying thing about the Times app for Droid is that it repeats the same ad on all pages and, in this early version, the ad is for something that I WANT, but know I can’t buy — home delivery of the Times, which is not available in my southwest Virginia mountain-valley neighborhood. The irony has stopped being funny.
Related things I’ve read, Tweeted about, bookmarked with Delicious or posted to some other blog in recent weeks, but neglected to mention here:
Posted in Digital Culture, Newspapers, Tablets & eBook Readers, Television, WebDesign
Tagged apps, droid, ipad, newspapers, smartphones
It was a tough decision, but having an excuse to write that headline made it all worthwhile.
My first “smartphone” was a Handspring Treo 180, almost 10 years ago. When I moved to Knoxville a few years later, the lack of T-Mobile service disabled most of the smartness, so I regressed to a Palm TX paired to a Cingular Razr Bluetooth phone, a semi-smart setup.
Last weekend, I wrestled the “iPhone vs. Droid” decision to a conclusion. With a Droid, I get Floyd: Verizon covers the neighboring county, AT&T doesn’t, and Floyd has some of my favorite folks and music stops on the crooked road. (I made the decision despite this horrible Droid website.)
Now I just have to convince my friend Clyde that I ordered the new smartphone (smart new phone?) before reading his blog saying that news folks should get smartphone-savvy right away. “Honest, Clyde, I got the Droid because of Floyd” sounds like one of those 1940s novelty songs.
Maybe I’ll get an iPad next month.
Anyhow, I’ll point AEJMC Newspaper readers to Clyde Bentley at the University of Missouri for a timeline for “Mobile Newspaper Success”… The road to 2013: A timeline for newspapers.
Responding to a Gartner Research study that forecast mobile devices would replace PCs in Web access by 2013, Bentley built a timeline from the endpoint to the present.
If you’re a “key editor” at a newspaper, you should get a smartphone this month, or you’re already playing catch-up.
By August-September, Clyde says, newspapers should be training their news and ad staff on “mobile potential,” if they want to stay on track with the Gartner deadline. Within a year, mobile reporters should be producing niche-market features for mobile customers. Clyde’s examples: “Smoke-break wraps, during-game scores, pre-commute weather.”
He doesn’t mention one crossover: Twitter (or Facebook status updates), whether Twitter’s 140-character limit is really enough for a “nugget of news” or not. Newspapers, broadcasters and online-only newsies are already tweeting away to anyone with a smartphone Twitter app, including Clyde’s own blog. So obvious it went without saying, I guess.
(I’m @bobstep on Twitter.)
(Note: If anyone from Verizon offers me a “referrer” bonus check for the slogan “Get Floyd with a Droid,” I’ll take it.)
Wired has Steven Levy and a baker’s dozen authors, publishers and spirit-channels (how else to include McLuhan?) reacting to the Apple iPad’s arrival this month: “How the tablet will change the world.”
Over at FutureOfTheBook.org, Bob Stein adds to what he had to say in Wired, under the heading “Follow the gamers.” See this for background on Bob.
I still have a stack of Stein’s pioneering e-books, which combined text, graphics, audio and video on CD-ROMS or DVDs before we had devices that allowed comfortable reading from a screen. I wish my new OS-X Macintosh would run OS-9 to play them.
See if:book: follow the gamers — my piece in the april Wired.
I met Bob Stein almost 10 years ago, when he was working on an e-book authoring/reading system called TK3 (more about it here), but somehow I lost track of his projects. Archive.org shows his company’s last page here. I wonder what happened. It looks like Sophie is its new incarnation. In fact, checking my bookmark lists, I see I saved a link to it in 2006! So much software, so little time. Still, it will be good to catch up when I have time for more browsing.
Speaking of catching up, Stein’s observation about how long it took to get from Gutenberg to Cervantes reminded me someone else I met around the same time — Mitchell Stephens, whose “the rise of the image, the fall of the word“ would be a great candidate for a multimedia e-book treatment itself.
Wired and other CondeNast magazines are headed for the iPad. Here’s a video intro.
As a subscriber to Wired from Vol.1 No.1, this new iPadded edition reminded me of the classic e-zine Suck.com’s instructions for coping with the old dead-tree and advertising-bloated edition, c. 1995:
Footnote: I’m not the only nostalgic Wired (and Suck.com) reader.
Additional: Can Apple’s iPad Save the Media?
Although things could change on this front as more periodical publishers launch issues they’ve been preparing for the iPad, Apple’s demonstration of the New York Times on the iPad left a lot to be desired.
The forthcoming Apple iPad will have a folding case/stand available (price not announced), visible in several configurations if you scroll down the technical specs page. When closed, the case looks like a fancy leather cover for a legal pad. Open, the case could have several modes, including one that reminds me of an old friend…
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Uses for iPad case:
* easel for digital photo frame, portrait or landscape
* TV stand (in landscape position)
* prop to use iPad as monitor with bluetooth keyboard
* typing stand, with on-screen keyboard… This also could be called,
* “cooler-user” mode, since it puts the iPad an inch or two above the lap or knees. (None of the info pages give a bottom-of-case operating temperature, but if it’s anything like my MacBook…)
With the case folded into a typing stand, I think the iPad looks like the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 I owned 25 years ago! (Of course the iPad should do a few more things. Well, a few hundred thousand more things.)
Posted in Computers, History, Tablets & eBook Readers, Technology
