≈ Relations

Steve Yelvington’s blog and twitter stream @yelvington are a must read in my daily inbox.  His latest post called: Algorithmic layout: Another thing the visual journalists are going to hate is a must read. Here’S (a little bit more than) the gist of it:

Print designers want total control over arbitrary layout. The makers of tools for print designers — especially Adobe — will be trying to cram their toolkit into digital bottles. Adobe’s plan for the iPad was to use InDesign for page layout, generating Flash components that would be compiled into a downloadable app. Now that Apple has killed Flash on the iPad, magazine designers are making iPad “applications” that are really collections of giant JPG files generated by print tools.

Image files! No wonder the apps are so huge. It’s like a flashback to the mid-1990s, when the New York Times homepage on the Web was one big GIF file.

Here’s my prediction: Algorithmic layout is going to win. The economics are brutal and they will decide.

We already have Gannett moving its newspaper layout work to central “Production Centers” — hospices for print. My friends in the visual journalism community hate hate hate this. I understand why. I laid out newspaper pages for years. Decoupling product construction from reporting and editing the news is not something to celebrate. But I also understand the economic drivers behind it.

The entities formerly known as newsrooms — Gannett calls them “Information Centers” — will oddly enough be more closely coupled to their websites than their print products. Their world will be inverted. They will be paying more attention to metadata — classification, tagging, geocoding, the elements of the semantic Web.

When you do this right, you create the conditions necessary for efficient algorithmic construction of a broad set of products tailored for specific situations. Web pages. Apps for the iPad. Mobile services. Microzoned products, defined by geography or interest or the user’s current status, delivered via electronic or even print processes, but “finished” with fairly little human involvement in the “pages” that are consumed

I very much agree with Steve, that at least for non-print products and escpecially tablets,  algorithmic layout will win. Here is (a slightly edited version) the comment i posted on his blog:

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IMHO algorithmic “layout” already has won in web and mobile. It’s the only way to produce that content in an economically feasible fashion for a multitude of devices and screen sizes. Ok, it’s discussable if the placement of boxes in a mostly linear fashion deserves to be called layout

More advanced algorihmic layout using constraint-based layout techniques to place content on a 2d grid  is  used in  directories, most yellow pages and catalogues.

The publishers desire to have a newspaper like rendition of the content on  tablets like the ipad (not sure if this also the readers desire)  can IMHO only be solved with algorithmic layout.   National/global monthly, and may be weekly magazines can be manually relayoutet twice for a horizontal and a vertical layout  for a single device like the iPad. But even Adobe admits that their approach is not suited (maybe yet) for daily newspapers,

And even these magazines often have a placed layout only for one of the orientations and use very simple algorithmic layout for the other.

Manual layout will not be able to scale with the upcoming plethora of tablet devices. It is also impossible to have a manual layout that works well with user scalable font sizes (IMHO one of the big advantages of  tablets in an aging society).

Alltogehter manual layout is simply undoable on a daily, or subdaily basis for a multitude of screen sizes and devices.

Hence we are working towards story(tyoe) templates, , priorities, placement rules and layouthinting in our approaches towards newspaper-like renditions of newspaper content on tablets and  e-readers.

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But i don’t think, that algorithmic layout will be used near term in german newspapers.  May be in a support role for small ads and for initial placement on some pages, but not for the newspaper as a whole.

Dank rivva (dessen Fortbestand durch das von den Verlegern gepushte Leistungsschutzrecht hoffentlich nicht in Frage gestellt wird) erreichten mich heute zwei Meldungen zum Thema Rundfunkstaatsvertrag, die beide am 13. Juli 2010 veröffetlich wurden.

In der Pressemitteilung zur Jahrespressekonferenz des BDZV heisst es (Hervorhebung von meir):

Drei-Stufen-Test wird zur Farce

BDZV-Hauptgeschäftsführer Dietmar Wolff hob hervor, dass es angesichts der bislang nicht ausreichenden Refinanzierung der Onlineaktivitäten durch Werbung von „existenzieller Bedeutung“ sei, im Internet auf Bezahlinhalte zu setzen. Jüngste Studien und auch Verlagserfahrungen im Markt zeigten, dass die Nutzer durchaus bereit seien, für attraktive und exklusive Inhalte zu bezahlen. In diesem Zusammenhang kritisierte Wolff das Engagement der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten, die mit ihren gebührenfinanzierten Onlineauftritten jede Marktentwicklung konterkarierten. Die Verbreitung von textbasierten Portalen wie „tagesschau.de“ und „heute.de“ auf allen Verteilkanälen habe nichts mehr mit Rundfunk zu tun. „Es ist ein Skandal, dass die Rundfunkräte den presseähnlichen Angeboten grünes Licht geben und den Drei-Stufen-Test damit zur Farce machen“, so Wolff. Die Zeitungsverleger würden mit allen ihnen zur Verfügung stehenden juristischen und politischen Mitteln Front gegen diese Praxis machen.

Zeitgleich heisst es in einer Meldung zum Verweildauerkonzept (eines Teiles des Rundfunkstaatsvertrages) auf Tagesschau.de:

Rund 80 Prozent der Inhalte nicht mehr abrufbar

Während viele Verlage damit beginnen, ihre Archive für die Allgemeinheit zu öffnen, muss tagesschau.de den größten Teil seines mit Gebührenmitteln erstellten Online-Archivs löschen. Betroffen sind ca. 80 Prozent der Inhalte. Zusätzlich problematisch: Auch das Löschen kostet Geld, denn es muss eigens organisiert und programmiert werden. Da die Budgets in den Telemedienkonzepten gedeckelt sind, gehen die Lösch-Kosten zu Lasten neuer Inhalte

Kennt jemand das URL-Schema von tagesschau.de und heute.de? Oder steckt irgendwo im Seitenquelltext der Primärschlüssel?. Wäre schade wenn das Archiv ohne jede Privatkopie verschwinden würde.

A number of screenhots taken from various news apps. Right now not taken in any particular order.

Rem.: Unfortunately the iPad Screenshot facility does not store the orientation of the screenshot with the image, so that i couldn’t use the upload facility from the WordPress iPad App as i wantec too. Apple you have to fix that

My favourite  news apps so far: Reuters, BBC . Least favourable: NYT (the iPhone app is better) and iKiosk. More on this later

My $0.02 (first edition)

The perfect device for baby boomers and pensioneers

As i already twittered : It looks like the perfect device for my mother (just turned 80).I always did not set-up a computer for her (although i’m storing a couple of my old ones at her home). It would just have been too complicated for her. Still she is very interested to learn about that internet thing. And as her eyes got worse she is not able to easily read the newspaper or regular size books.

Others agree:

• A colleague walked into the office yesterday morning, saying: “Now we know what to buy for our parents.”
• More on this for example on jageree.com and Ultimi Barbarorum

A future version will probably add a camera (jointly with a camera for the iTouch) and grandma’s are able to have iChats with their siblings and friends.

A home and an away version

I’m happy to see  a  WiFi only version of the iPad as well as a full mobile version. i already have an iPod Touch and an iPhone and have complementary uses for them at home and away.

I’m not too happy to have no GPS in the WiFi device because with offloaded Maps i would love to use it also in the car or on holiday etc (Romaing charges are just ridiculous high in europe, so i typically offload maps of the region before going on holiday)

A lost opportunity

A lot of people are complaing about missing features. I typically don’t because i firmly believe in simplicity. There are exceptions (see e.g. above).

But right now i think Apple lost an opportunity to not add a MiniDisplay Port and or micro USB port as video and serial connector. May be even add  a third  proprietary connector if neede.

Placed them side by side and  they would not need more  room on the device than the 30-pin connector.   You  could even build an  dongle to convert the threesome to a 30-pin connector in order to  be able to  the existing iPod accessories.

I know it would potentially cannibalize the existing iPod  3rd Party ecosystem (you wouldn’t if you build / sold the above dongle.

But having separat small standard ports would:

• make the connector cables much more elegant (no bulky dongles)
• beam the  port capabilities into the current time
• especially would enable digital video out. I suspect that the A4 SoC is perfectly able to do digital video, but  having only analog video out has mainly to do with the aging 30-port connector. It may also have to do with making content providers happy)

Open Questions

These have mostly to do  with my professional view on the iPad (as the head of the R & D lab of one of the worlds largest newsagencies currently looking very hard at ereading:

• When will iBooks be available outside the USA?
• Will it offer subscription based pricing models that magazines and newspapers can use (although the app is called iBooks? But we also got used to buy videos etc. in an app called iTunes :-)
• Will the SDK contain classes for rendering ePubs or will tht be private to iBooks?
• Will ePubs automatically opened with iBooks?
• …

Misc

iBooks looks an awful lot like Delicious Library (as others have olso noted). Could swear that Mike Matas (the original designer of Delicious Library that joined Apple in 2005) had a hand on it. But then learned that Matas left Apple  in July 2009.