The Museum of Magazine History

Interfacelab and iA do an admirable job of ripping the new Wired iPad app to shreds. I don’t need to add more to what they’ve already said. I will add what they didn’t say:

Fundamentally, what makes Wired so good is the content. It’s a good brand because its content is good. This app is the equivalent of Wired taking its content, throwing it in a pit and pouring cement over it. It’s an instant fossilization. The content is mummified. Never to be touched or dissected or shared. I can’t even circle a paragraph on the fucking thing. 

With technology, shit is supposed to move forward. You’re supposed to be able to do stuff and experience stuff that you couldn’t before. This app is more like a tribute to magazines than a reimagining of where publishing can become.

It’s anti-Web, anti-sharing, anti-copy/paste - anti-everything. It’s a disservice to what was created. On the Web, content lives and breathes. This isn’t a digital magazine. It’s a tomb.

One final thought: there’s an odd irony about the whole experience. The iPad brings us closer to content – physically – than any technology to come before it. The whole experience is almost a tease. You’re swiping and touching all these “pages” and you can’t do a single thing with them. Welcome to the Museum of Magazine History.

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IPad Impressions (Because The World Really Needs One More F#*%ing Blog Post About the iPad)

Yes, everything that can be said about the iPad has been said, except what I’m going to say (which is hopefully different than what others have said - maybe):

• I input less on this thing. There is no keyboard. I explore less. I find myself bookmarking pages that I like perusing because I don’t see myself doing anything highly interactive on it. By taking the keyboard away, I’m pressed towards a passive posture (I’m not insinuating this is bad, it just is).
• You can’t multitask. This is a good thing. Without being poked and prodded by juggling five things at a time (which usually includes some sort of chat client), we’re giving our brains a chance to dive deeper into the experience in front of us.
• I have one question for content creators, publishers and even some of the application designers out there: why did you wait for the iPad to clean up your shitty designs? USA Today. Time magazine. New York Times. Even some of the apps that have Web interfaces got an upgrade. Why not make them great on the Web?
• You can’t resize the Web browser. By imposing this constraint, it frees up designers to think more about composition and art direction. There are two modes – horizontal and vertical. It’s a hat tip to paper. You can’t resize paper.
• Historically, devices became more magical by getting smaller. From a big cassette player to the Sony Walkman to the iPod shuffle. Imagine if the iPad came first. Imagine if rumors started flying around of a “miniature iPad that could fit into your pocket.” It would run all of your existing apps (scaled down) and it would let you make phone calls.
• I don’t think anyone will do long form reading on it. The Kindle is small, light and feels more like paper. I don’t think people want light emanating from a book they’re trying to read. I could be wrong here.
• I think the introduction of $5 magazines-as-apps that look like Web pages without all the garbage is preposterous.
• There’s something irksome about the way this thing shuns the Web – not just in terms of Web browsing, but in terms of how it overwhelming imposes its own patterns and paradigms that only render things more cumbersome. Maybe this is where we’re headed: vertical lock-in from device to cloud. That would suck.

These are my impressions after a couple of days. What’s fun about a device like this is that I can honestly say I don’t know what my impressions will be in a week or a month or 3 months. For all its strengths and faults, it is different, and it’s forcing us to ask new questions about design, technology and how we want things to work. That’s always a good thing.

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Come Say Hi To The Basement.org Guy At SXSW

First off, my apologies for the lack of postings on Basement.org. I am still alive and I've got thoughts I badly want to get down, but time is sparse these days unfortunately.

If you're attending SXSW Interactive, I will be there along with some of my partners in crime from Arc90: Tim Meaney, Avi Flax, and Rama Poola. Tim and I will be giving a talk that should've been called The Revenge of People, but instead it's called The Revenge of Editorials. It's about the Web, people, craftsmanship, content and all sorts of other stuff. We're excited to about it and hope you can join us. It's our first time at SXSW. We look forward to the sensory overload.

In any case, if you'd like to meet up, feel free to email me or ping me on Twitter.

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The iPad & The Side Streets

Anyone that follows this blog knows that I'm an unrelenting advocate of building great user experiences. Whether on the Web, mobile or desktop software, great user experiences enlighten, flatter and elevate users.

As technology continues to accelerate forward, it's become even more critical to mask away the complexities of how things work and to just make them work. Period. Thanks to the likes of Apple, user experience isn't "something we should think about" anymore. It's a key differentiator. A better-designed anything will win.

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The Essential First Step To Blowing Minds

"Less is more."

It's a powerful phrase. It's one of those rare quotes that itself is illustrative of what it's trying to say. If we decompress it, we're really saying something like "If you show less, then each thing you show carries more weight."

Taking the thought a bit further, I'd assert that less isn't only more, "less" is often essential to success. Conversely, "more" often leads to failure. When we release a product, we often want to talk about its power and versatility. Truth is, nobody else wants to hear about that. They want to know – in as simple a manner as possible – why something should matter to them.

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The Admiral's Club & The Junkyard: What Would We Pay For In Today's Web?

When new concepts or constructs are introduced to us, we tend to quickly cement our perceptions about them into stereotypes. Over time, these stereotypes firm up and solidify. They become quite difficult to undo.

The Web today is understood to be "free" in the broadest sense. Here's the general stereotype around the Web today:

Don't put toll booths all over the Web. Let me go where I please and don't charge me money to see anything I want. It's ok to advertise because I understand you need to make money somehow, but don't charge me for content.

Continue reading The Admiral's Club & The Junkyard: What Would We Pay For In Today's Web?...

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The Rise & Fall of The Nintendo Wii

At Arc90, one of our meeting rooms is proudly called the Wii Room. It’s an informal meeting space with a whiteboard, projector and…a Nintendo Wii. When we first got the Wii a couple of years ago, it was a universal hit at Arc90. The bowling and golf games in the Wii sports package were just plain fun.

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Basement.org Turns 5 Today

Five years ago today, I launched this blog, www.basement.org. I actually can’t believe five years have passed. I’ve tried to cover the things that interest me (and hopefully interest some readers) around technology and design. Looking back, it’s been a lot of fun, if at times daunting to post something, anything. Still, no regrets.

Basement.org has often been pegged as a bitch-and-rant blog that just does a whole lot of complaining and not much doing. That’s probably true to some extent. I like to think basement.org is for bitching, while Arc90 is for doing.

Still, I’m kind of proud of some (by all means not all) of the stuff that’s made it onto this blog. It’s still a young, fumbling kindergartner today. Hopefully it’ll pay attention at school, eat its vegetables and have a generally well-adjusted childhood.

Above all else, I hope I can keep the curiosity and desire to look forward in place. In many ways, this blog is about daydreaming, as corny as that sounds. The real world gets plenty of press these days. It’s more fun to daydream.

Note: If you’d like to check out some of the more popular posts, here’s a list from 2007.

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