MagAppZine
Digital publishing with MagAppZine: Give us 15 minutes [and a PDF]. We’ll give you an [iPad] app; http://eicker.at/MagAppZine
Digital publishing with MagAppZine: Give us 15 minutes [and a PDF]. We’ll give you an [iPad] app; http://eicker.at/MagAppZine
HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript interaction design tool Adobe Edge: the beginning of the end of Flash? http://eicker.at/AdobeEdge
Adobe: “Adobe Edge is a new web motion and interaction design tool that allows designers to bring animated content to websites, using web standards like HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3. – Edge will be updated regularly to add new functionality, stay ahead of evolving web standards, and incorporate user feedback to provide the best functionality and experience possible. This is an early look at Edge with more capabilities to come. – This version of Edge focuses primarily on adding rich motion design to new or existing HTML projects, that runs beautifully on devices and desktops.”
RWW: “So does Edge’s launch mean that Adobe caved and ceded the battle to HTML5 over Flash? Adobe doesn’t see it that way. Although battles make for good headlines here in the world of tech journalism, it’s not really an either/or scenario when it comes to the ‘Flash vs. HTML5’ conundrum in the professional world. For today’s Web designers and developers, both technologies are still used. – ‘HTML5 is an opportunity for Adobe,’ explains Devin Fernandez, Group Product Manager for Adobe’s Web Pro Segment, ‘that’s not to say there aren’t opportunities for Flash.’ He contends that Flash will continue to push forward, and, as we have reported previously, it will focus on areas that HTML5 cannot yet address as well – like 3D gaming for example.”
VB: “Edge isn’t meant to replace Adobe’s existing web design tools like Dreamweaver or Flash – instead it’s just another option for developers. Adobe is making the software free during its initial testing period, and it’s encouraging feedback from developers. The company says it will update the software faster than anything it’s released before to keep up with the rapidly changing world of HTML5.“
Le Hegaret, W3C: It is too early to deploy HTML5 because we are running into interoperability issues; http://eicker.at/c
The most powerful colours in the [Web] world: Colors of the top 100 Web brands; http://j.mp/aHmXeB #Blue vs. #Red
A sea of favicons, presented proportional to the sum of reach of sites using it; http://j.mp/Webicons (via @VizWorld)
NMAP: “A large-scale scan of the top million web sites (per Alexa traffic data) was performed in early 2010 using the Nmap Security Scanner and its scripting engine. As seen in the New York Times, Slashdot, Gizmodo, Engadget, and Telegraph.co.uk … – We retrieved each site’s icon by first parsing the HTML for a link tag and then falling back to /favicon.ico if that failed. 328,427 unique icons were collected, of which 288,945 were proper images. The remaining 39,482 were error strings and other non-image files. Our original goal was just to improve our http-favicon.nse script, but we had enough fun browsing so many icons that we used them to create the visualization below. – The area of each icon is proportional to the sum of the reach of all sites using that icon. When both a bare domain name and its “www.” counterpart used the same icon, only one of them was counted. The smallest icons – those corresponding to sites with approximately 0.0001% reach – are scaled to 16×16 pixels. The largest icon (Google) is 11,936 x 11,936 pixels, and the whole diagram is 37,440 x 37,440 (1.4 gigapixels).“
Santa Maria: We should have native tools to do our jobs, a real web design application; http://j.mp/cpGqbU (via @rivva)
Santa Maria: “The web and its related disciplines have grown organically. I think it’s safe to say the web is not the domain of just the geeks anymore – we all live here. And those of us who work here should have sophisticated, native tools to do our jobs. … So why not build a desktop app for web design around WebKit? I’m not talking about an in-browser AJAX toolkit for dragging elements around and changing fonts, but an actual desktop application built with WebKit as the core to its display. It could have accurate rendering and previews for the way page elements would look, but with some of the WYSIWYG tools desktop design apps have. We wouldn’t just approximate pixels in a flat comp, our CSS would be baked in to the layouts we draw and create on the page. And as Webkit grows, so to could this new app, always taking advantage of the latest and greatest functionality. Just like a browser, it could pull assets from remote servers; and just like a desktop app, it could make use of local processing power and OS level functionality. This would allow it to effectively combine some of the best of both worlds, with a foot firmly planted in the web. – The advantages would be monumental, allowing a strong creative and explorative process, while seeing how things could react on a live stage. It would fulfill many of the items on my wishlist because these are already part of core browser functionality. We would essentially be designing with live page elements; not a picture of a text field—but a text field you could click into and start typing, and then drag to a different area of the page entirely. – I know I’m generalizing; I’m a designer first and most certainly not a developer, but I’ve been occupying this space and using these tools long enough to have a hunch for what works and what doesn’t. An application like this could change the process of web design considerably. Most importantly, it wouldn’t be a proxy application that we use to simulate the way webpages look – it would already speak the language of the web. It would truly be designing in the browser.”
Interesting, this is something I’ve overlooked as a web designer.
Harding, YouTube, on HTML5 vs. Flash: We need to do more than just point at a video file; http://j.mp/9KjIKL
RWW: “The battle between HTML5 and Adobe Flash for dominance over video on the Web is likely to end poorly for one of the two, and lately it’s been looking worse and worse for Flash. Steve Jobs wrote an open letter to the Web stating why Flash would remain banned from iPhones and iPads and just yesterday, Apple got an ‘unexpected ally‘ in its anti-Flash crusade – the adult entertainment industry. – But today, just to keep from making things too cut and dry, Google-owned video site YouTube has come out with a list of its own reasons on why Flash is here to stay, for now, and HTML5 simply isn’t qualified to handle the job at hand.”
Harding: “We need to do more than just point the browser at a video file like the image tag does – there’s a lot more to it than just retrieving and displaying a video. The tag certainly addresses the basic requirements and is making good progress on meeting others, but the tag does not currently meet all the needs of a site like YouTube. – To that end, we’re excited about the new WebM project. Google is open sourcing and contributing the VP8 codec to the WebM effort. Google, Mozilla, and Opera have all committed to support WebM, and we have already started making YouTube videos available in the WebM format. Adobe has also committed to support VP8, the video codec for WebM, in an upcoming Flash Player release. … HD video begs to be watched in full screen, but that has not historically been possible with pure HTML. While most browsers have a fullscreen mode, they do not allow javascript to initiate it, nor do they allow a small part of the page (such as a video player) to fill the screen. Flash Player provides robust, secure controls for enabling hardware-accelerated fullscreen displays. … Video is not just a one-way medium. Every day, thousands of users record videos directly to YouTube from within their browser using webcams, which would not be possible without Flash technology. Camera access is also needed for features like video chat and live broadcasting.”
CT: “It may seem that Steve Jobs is on a lonely crusade against Adobe’s Flash format with the rest of the industry simply waiting who this battle will turn out. While Adobe is rallying support for Flash, Apple receives support from a rather unexpected ally, the adult film industry. The founder of Digital Playground, one of the porn heavyweights in the U.S., told ConceivablyTech that it will abandon Flash as soon as the desktop browsers fully support HTML 5. We also learned that 3D is just not there yet and that online movie streaming is unlikely to replace Blu-ray discs anytime soon.”
WebM: “The WebM project is dedicated to developing a high-quality, open video format for the web that is freely available to everyone. – The WebM launch is supported by Mozilla, Opera, Adobe, Google and more than forty other publishers, software and hardware vendors.”
WTF is HTML5: and why we should all care; http://j.mp/WTFisHtml5 (via @fleep)
Jobs on Flash: We strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open; http://j.mp/aJCfrS
Schonfeld: Is Steve Jobs ignoring history, or trying to rewrite it? http://j.mp/buaNKQ
Gerrit Eicker 19:11 on 23. August 2011 Permalink |
MagAppZine: “…is a New York, NY based company founded in 2010 by former Apple employees who teamed up with an Adobe engineer to create the ultimate digital publishing tool. – MagAppZine allows publishers to create branded apps for their publications and distribute them to the world via mobile devices like the iPad, opening up their business to a whole new audience while maintaining a lower overhead. – The company’s slogan, Publishing Gone Digital, reflects MagAppZine’s mission: to give all publications the opportunity to distribute their content in the most modern way without spending an exorbitant amount of time and money.”
MagAppZine: “The creation of your branded MagApp and deployment onto the Apple App Store [starts at $2,994].”
O’Reilly: “Is the platform targeted toward a specific kind of publisher? Paul Canetti [founder]: ‘Clearly the name brings in magazines first and foremost, but the tool itself is really applicable to all sorts of publications. Anything that can be a PDF is fair game. I have a lot of conversations with small book publishers looking to create a bookstore app on a particular topic or as a branding tool for the publisher or a specific author. It is my philosophy that you should be everywhere your readers potentially are, so when someone searches for you on the App Store, it’s you that they find.’ – How can book publishers use the platform? Canetti: ‘The bookstore app is really cool, and chunking up books into collections fits nicely under the umbrella of the app. I’m also excited to start seeing sub-divisions of books – selling chapter by chapter – or using the subscription functionality to have a sort of book club app or a series where new content is being released regularly. … We’re also rolling out a new tiered monthly pricing structure that has plans starting at $99 a month.‘”
RWW: “It’s a white label, DIY app-publishing platform that is limited to PDF uploads, website viewing in an in-app browser and in-app sales of multiple issues of any publication. It looks really well thought out, simple and accessible. The price is about to drop substantially, too with the Fall release of the 2.0 version of the service. … Can PDF-type content do well in an app store context? I’m not sure, but if I had print-style content to distribute I think I would give this service a shot. It looks much nicer, frankly, than magazine reading app platforms like Zinio or HP’s Magcloud (which I love in theory but never use in practice). I want to go directly to the magazines I want to read, not wander around some app store from the app store that’s 75% filled with magazines of questionable quality.”