Posted: April 6th, 2010 | Author: Jon Lund
| 4 Comments »
Few people would be surprised to hear that surfing the web from the iPad is great. Or that it’s perfect for magazines. Or movies on the move. But what about typing longer pieces of text. Using the 10-inch screen and a virtual keyboard? I myself had my doubts.
After having written my first articles in regular laptop-mode, onboard a plane, in waiting halls and on the train and home in the sofa, the conclusion is clear: the iPad sets new standards for writing “out of office”.
And I know what I’m talking about. I’ve written lots of documents sitting in my sofa with the laptop in my – lap. I’ve thought it OK, never really contemplating on what the writing process felt like. I do now.
What Apple has figured out, is that laptop writing is really very different from desktop writing. At the desktop I do ten-finger writing. My hands are by default placed on the home keys: asdf and jkl. I use a lot of keyboard short-cuts: I alt-c to copy, alt-v to paste, alt-f to find – and then I alt-s a lot to save the document I’m working on. And then off course I let my fingers slide over the trackpad to control the cursor.
These habits have followed me to the couch. I’ve been sitting with the laptop in my lap, desperately trying to force my fingers to my default finger position, awkwardly glitching over the trackpad and twisting my shoulders to hit the alt-whatever-keys at regular intervals. And it’s not until now I’ve realized the amounts of stress I’ve put myself through.
The Wii of word-processing
The key-difference between iPad writing and laptop-writing is this: When writing on an iPad the device in your lap is your friend – not an enemy. The only 800 grams-tablet begs you to not only touch and swipe it’s screen, but also to turn the device, tabbing new buttons, constantly switching the position of your body. Because that’s what you want to do, when you’re in the sofa – change position every once in a while. Cross your legs, uncrossed them again. Drag your feet up – pit them down. Shift the weight, while looking at the TV-set to catch a few minutes of a program that suddenly draws your attention. Get up to pour yourself some coffee.
This is what the iPad not only lets you, but encourages you to do. While laptops resists your every attempt to move you body in natural ways. With their 2 kilograms+, their screens, inflexibly fixed to the keyboard, and their desktop-based interface laptops inherently fixates you and forces you into evermore uncomfortable positions.
In this way the iPad is the Wii of word-processing. It lets you write with your body.
The keyboard works
The virtual keyboard featured on the iPad first surfaced on Apples iPhone. Typing on relatively small display of a smartphone is clearly a challenge, especially since you can’t feel the keys, the slight resistance of the “a”, “b” or “c” when hit, and conversely: the assurance from mistyping by accidental strokes.
On the iPad however, the keyboard works. Even without an active screen which could emulate the sense of typing a physical keyboard. Because of the size of the screen, which let’s you easily hit the keys. Because of the excellent auto-correction, which makes the production of text a mutual responsibility between your fingers, the keyboard and the iPad itself. And because correcting spelling and mistyping simply doesn’t distress you on the iPad to the same extend, compared to desktop writing. It blends in as a natural part of the dynamic iPad body-writing experience.
It’s all on the screen
There’s – obviously – no mouse on the iPad. And no trackpad either. Marking a place in the text, scrolling, activating menus (of which there are only the utmost necessary) – all is done by tabbing, pitching and touching the screen. In effect hereof the difference between the keyboard, which is also onscreen, and the mouse evaporates. The screen is all there is. And it’s very active.
There are no “alt” or “ctr”-keys either. If you want to select a part of your text you tab a word and drag an area until the portion of text you want to mark is covered. Tabbing the selection then let’s you copy or cut it. Turning the screen in upright position brings you layout menus for making the selected text bold – or eg have it centered.
Inserting pictures is the same: tab the image-button, choose your images – and it goes right on screen complete with lines helping you placing it nice in the text flow. Tab the image once and you can pitch a corner and drag it to resize – or simply move the image around the screen. Place your finger on it and copy-and-delete buttons appear. Tab twice, and you zoom the picture so display only a part of it. And so on.
Maintaining a sufficient overview
Small screens suffer from being small. You simply tend to loose the overview when writing longer pieces. this off course even more so, when close to half the screen is occupied by a keyboard.
Even here, however, Apple has managed to make things work. Tab a button and the keyboard is gone. Turn the iPad in upright position, and you get a full page view. Touch and hold in the edge of the page, and a navigator turns up.
Another curious thing about the iPad is how you save your documents: you don’t! Or rather: the iPad remembers your document by itself. At anytime you can exit your document – eg to look something up on the Internet. You return by opening Pages and voilà – here’s the document exactly as you left it.
Even if you switch off the iPad completely you’ll find your document as you left it when returning back in. Side by side with the other docs you’ve created.
Sharing sucks
This auto-saving on the iPad doesn’t help you much, however, when you want to continue your work at your desk-top computer. And this you want to do. However perfect the sofa-writing experience is on the iPad, you still want a regular computer when you sit at your desk. The more so because the iPad wont let you print in itself. You’ll have to have your document transferred to another computer in order to do so.
And this is where the chain breaks for Apple. Getting your document out of the iPad is done in either by mailing it or by uploading to the internet. And it simply doesn’t work well enough. First, it takes to much time and it’s a cumbersome process. Second, it doesn’t produce you one centrally stored file on which you work. Which is a pain, when you want to edit the same document from both your iPad and your desk-based computer. You’ve really got to do some work on that, Apple!
Passes with flying colors
Apart from this sharing-glitch, the iPad experience is wonderful. The iPad represents a transformative take on computing from the top of your lap, introducing a new paradigm for casual computing, which could fundamentally change the entire laptop-industry. Testing the word-processing capabilities of the iPad is tough. It passes with flying colors.
Posted: April 5th, 2010 | Author: Jon Lund
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Apples new touch-screen tablet-computer, the iPad, accept only “1st party cookies” by default. This is bad news for advertisers and analyst, who rely on “3rd party cookies” to work effectively.
To accept 3rd party cookies, you’ll actively have to go to the settings-section of the iPad and choose to “always” accept cookies.
The “cookies” section of the iPad. Only cookies “from visited” sites – that is: 1st party – are accepted by default.
To the advertising industry this is bad news, since the iPad thereby forces advertisers to show the same ads over and over again to the same iPad-users. 3rd party cookies would have allowed them to keep track across all the sites the advertising campaign in question is booked at. This is a pure waste of money from the advertisers point of view.
Futhermore the iPad move will make the targeting of advertisement to users with a known previous surfing pattern exceedingly difficult. Such as showing car-ads on a general news-site to users who in the past visited the website of eg. Volvo or BMW. More money down the drain.
Apple also deprives analysts and researchers from gaining the same level of detailed insight in the surfing-habits of iPad-users as they’ve had in traditional surfing environments. Finding out whether men or women, young or old, urban or rural users are the ones most prone to surf the web gets exceedingly difficult. Not to mention finding out which sites and clusters of sites different demographic groups tends to be most affiliated to. Developing “clever” e-commerce and media strategies hence becomes more difficult.
The “from visited sites only” approach isn’t new to Apple. In the iPhone and iPod touch-universes they did exactly the same. The difference is, that the iPad with its several times larger screen is a regular surfing device. Therefore the iPads lack of 3rd-party cookie support are deemed to have a much more significant effect – provided that is, that iPad sales takes off.
The advertisers and analysts had it coming, however. A growing anxiety over the privacy of users surfing the web have caused an international political movement to demand sites and advertisers to step back and let users alone while surfing the web. For that very reason the iPad “all sites” cookies denial won’t be the last one either. Advertisers and analyst are therefore best served with a lowering of their targeting ambitions, looking elsewhere to harvest the fruits of digital media.
Posted: March 24th, 2010 | Author: Jon Lund
| 2 Comments »
Hopes are high that the iPad – Apples new tablet computer – will open up a new life for online magazines when it starts shipping in early April. With good reason, my latest report shows. Danish experience with “traditional” online “flip-pages” e-papers, indicates a massive appeal of the printed-edition-metaphor in online publishing. In January 2010 15% of all adult Danes visited at least one e-paper, up 26% from same period 2008.
The report (“Waiting for the iPad: the track record of Danish e-paper solutions” – find reference below) shows the time spend at Danish e-papers to have doubled from 5 to more than 10 minutes per user during the past two years. Also the study shows users of e-papers flips a lot of pages during a visit – actually e-paper readers turn 3 times the number of pages of ordinary web-site users. However they don’t spend more time, simply browsing quickly through the e-paper. The study builds on data from the two largest e-paper solution providers, zmags and i-paper, powering a host of online weekly ad circulars and e-magazines.
Originally I myself was quite hesitant embracing the e-paper concept, which seemed strangely archaic in it’s attempt to restore “good old days” publishing, imposing limits to yourself which did not make sense in an online world. Lately, however, I’ve come to recognize the value of the book (or printed newspaper) as a browsing medium: it holds the promise of selection and quality, of covering all relevant aspects of a subject, of bringing you the satisfaction of getting to know what is worth to know in a limited time. Also the advent of videos and rich media content during the past years have enriched the epaper, actually allowing for image galleries, embedded videos, overlay text presentation, search, integration of social media elements, comments, integration to facebook and twitter and the web at large.
In the report I predict some low-cost projects and a few show-off prestige projects to emerge during 2010, but find major take-off unlikely to occur before at the earliest 2012-2013. The reason is, that iPad publication faces a number of barriers, which will need to be addressed. One is off course the number of iPads on the market. In a previous report I estimated first year sales to reach 20.000 units in Denmark, growing steeply to some 200.000 sold in 2013. Also the revenue-split model laid forth by Apple, claiming 30 percent for themselves poses an obstacle, like the lack of support of Flash in the iPad meaning most established e-paper (which are Flash-based) will need to be re-programmed. Finally most of the e-papers surveyed in the report are relatively simple e-papers, basically being static images without much interaction apart from flipping pages and zooming in and out. A more full-blown e-paper concept will increase the cost – and production time – of producing e-papers: Story-lines, content, text, images and videos will have to be created, the complexity of lay-outing the e-paper will increase and – if social elements are added to the e-paper – the dialogue at the e-paper will have to be monitored and nursed.
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“Waiting for the iPad: the track record of Danish e-paper solutions”. 14 pages, 3 illustrations.
To order the report, send an email to jon@jon-lund.com including your contact information with subject: “Buy Jon Lunds Epaper succes”, and you’ll receive both the report as pdf-file and an invoice.
Posted: February 11th, 2010 | Author: Jon Lund
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Socialistan is the largest country in the new world accounting for 31 % of total time-spend. Here by far the most Danes are actively engaged in updating their facebook-status, twitting and blogging. The women of Socialistan leads on, while men are more passive.
You won’t find a Dane who hasn’t spend time in Googledom within the past month. For 24 % of their online-time they’re googling around, looking up numbers and facts and using the tools of the Internet.
Especially men are fond of Newscorpey. They like to stay informed (though top issues evolves around sex, gossip and crime stories). The country is ruled by the “old media” who find a hard time in the fact they’re not the key media providers anymore, accounting only for 15 % of the time Danes spend on the Internet.
In Disturbia you’re engaged in buying and selling. Danes loves this – however there’s nowhere enough online outlets to satisfy their needs: one third of all Disturbia-activity is spend second-hand shopping, consumer to consumer.
The mobile moon is orbiting around our new globe – especially powered by the iphon-ish way the internet are spreading to the pockets of Danes.
(Time spend for the four countries all are Gemius-figures for +15 years olds surfing (top 300 sites) in August 2009, which I’ve digged for you (I also analyzed them and drew up the above map). Socialistan activity is documented in Facebook rules Danish social networking, in Danish facts: Twitter is a small, elitist niche-site and in arto.com vs facebook. If you want to know more about the gender issues, check out War of the gender reborn on the internet: Women socialize, men gather information. For documentation of Newscopey-characteristics, see Economics of news: the case for qualitative journalism on the internet. Disturbia-facts and -explanations are found in Eroding powers of digitalization revealed: Secondhand-shopping, telecommunications and e-banking rules e-commerce in Denmark and Oldschool/Newschool: Top 25 Danish e-commerce sites evaluated – Consumer-trust and exploitation of business opportunities. For more on the Mobile moon check “Christmas sales at Apple App-store. Assessing the Danish market for iPhone applications”, Smart-phones leading the way: The case of iPhone and dedicated mobil-sites in Denmark and The seven faces of iPad. Assessing the potentials of Apples new tablet-device. Several other findings are available from my hand; check out the reports-section of this site)
Posted: January 28th, 2010 | Author: Jon Lund
| 1 Comment »
The Apple iPad doesn’t challenge one, but seven (today) distinct markets with yesterdays launch of the iPad tablet flat-screen-computer. This is one of the key findings after I’ve analysed the market potentials of the new fabled device. Read all about it in my new report “The seven faces of iPad. Accessing the potentials of Apples new tablet-device” (link below).
Not only net-books find themselves in a new uncomfortable situation. Also the gaming console industry (Nintendo), the e-book readers (Kindle), the GNDs (Garmin), portable media players (iPods (!)) and the smartphone-market (Androids) are, in varying degree, under fire. The iPad may also give rise to a whole new market, professional and private-use applications, taking the promises of the iPhone app store to yet higher levels.
Why? Because the iPad manifests itself as the first true convergence-device to this day.
I also estimate the market potentials of the iPad and find find all the affected markets selling a total of two billion devices a year on a worldwide basis. Given this potential I find the iPad to be able to sell some 50 million devices by 2013, starting out with some 5 million i 2010.
Here’s what I find the iPad-market to look like:
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“The seven faces of iPad. Assessing the potentials of Apples new tablet-device”. 16 pages.
To order the report, send an email to jon@jon-lund.com including your contact information with subject: “Buy Jon Lunds The seven faces of iPad”, and you’ll receice both the report as pdf-file and an invoice.
