USA Today Restructures to Focus on Digital Products | ClickZ

USA Today on Friday became the latest publication to de-emphasize its print edition in favor of digital products. The paper announced it will layoff about 130 employees, approximately 9 percent of its staff, and restructure its newsroom and management to focus on Web and mobile content.

via clickz.com

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The Future of Wireframes – Articles – MIX Online

Riddle me this: How do you piss of a UX professional? The answer: Call him a “designer”.

These days, user experience professionals look down on the word “designer” because it implies that their primary role is to paint pretty pixels. UX is more than that, they clarify. Much more!

Just how much? Well, here’s a diagram (that uses pretty pixels) to explain how much more—

via visitmix.com

Nice overview of how the concept of wireframes is evolving.

I especially liked the part of “functional wireframes”, although I do not believe this concept works: I do not know a client in the world who doesn’t take wireframes too literally, and throwing a “willing suspension of disbelief” requirement into the mix will be a stretch for most clients or even art directors, who respond primarily to visual cues.

TOC’s Wednesday Devices, and Gadgets and EReaders Update – Tools of Change for Publishing

via toc.oreilly.com

O Reilley’s “Tools of Change” is launching a Wednesday review of hardware news in the e-reader space, with a recent slew of announcement and upcoming tablet devices this will be an interesting ongoing read. Most new devices are based on the Android platform, and general acceptance of this OS for e-book reading is also creating interesting opportunities and challenges for publishers.

Patent Gives a Glimpse of Apple’s Plans for a Touchscreen Mac [Voices]

via All Things Digital

Since the iPad was announced, we’ve been waiting for the day when the tablet and its iPhone operating system could be melded … Read More >>

From InDesign to iPad: An Overview (Part 1)

I presented a session called “InDesign to iPad” at the InDesignSecrets Print and ePublishing Conference, May 13, and have heard from a number of people that it would be useful to repeat some of this information here. The session was very short and focused on the various methods for putting content on an iPad (content from InDesign, at least). I obviously, cannot repeat the whole session, but here’s the general outline.

Where We Are Today

After talking to a number of colleagues about this topic, and reading everything I can about it, one quote stands out for me… something that Branislav Milic said to me while in Seattle:

“2010 is the year of announcements”

The point is that every company seems to be throwing their hat into the ring, coming out with something new and exciting and hoping that their idea will stick. Many announcements don’t even appear to be turning into real products, but no matter… everyone feels the need to jump out and do something.

That said, Apple did ship the iPad and sold over a million of them in a few weeks. (And estimates indicate that Apple may be selling over 200,000 per week — more iPads than Macs!) That counts for something. So because of this success, many people feel that the iPad is the target to hit — the device on which their content must appear.

via indesignsecrets.com

Great post from David Blatner, and still true after a few months… The announcements in this space are piling up, the ePub format is NOT the holy grail of eBook publishing, and I predict that smarter app containers are under way that will allow the re purposing of content, as evidenced by yesterdays liquidpubs announcement …

liquidpubs™, Next Generation Digital Publishing Solutions Launches Today

(PRWEB) August 23, 2010 — liquidpubs is a set of services and technologies that allows publishers of magazines, newspapers and books to offer a groundbreaking experience of their content on tablet computers and smartphones. For newspapers and magazines, whether it’s the iPad, iPhone, or an Android based tablet or smartphone, liquidpubs has a scalable app that, through our customization process, plugs into publishers’ existing content management systems and other design tools.

via ww2.prweb.com

I am in the process of finding out how this compares to Woodwing and Adobe’s suites of products in the same space.

Then this happened – A smartphone retrospective

Aug 19 2010 ∞

A smartphone retrospective

This is what high-end smartphones looked like in 2007:

Smartphones were an established consumer-electronics market with devices that people thought were pretty cool, but often frustrating and with serious shortcomings and design flaws.

Then this happened:

Other manufacturers had neglected touchscreens for years, but Apple figured out how to do a touchscreen well, and did.

Fans of the former types of smartphones and much of the tech press declared this smartphone useless or not capable enough because of its lack of a keyboard, its non-removable battery, its lack of expansion slots or ports, and other hardware features in which Apple chose differently from what most other manufacturers were doing.

That ended up not mattering. Now, most high-end smartphones look like this:

---

In early 2010, subcompact, inexpensive computers (a.k.a. “netbooks”) looked like this:

Netbooks were an established consumer-electronics market with devices that people thought were pretty cool, but often frustrating and with serious shortcomings and design flaws.

Then this happened:

Other manufacturers had neglected tablets for years, but Apple figured out how to do a tablet well, and did.

Fans of netbooks and much of the tech press declared this subcompact, inexpensive computer useless or not capable enough because of its lack of a keyboard, its non-removable battery, its lack of expansion slots or ports, and other hardware features in which Apple chose differently from what most other manufacturers were doing.

That ended up not mattering. And now, other manufacturers are scrambling to build tablet products as quickly as possible.

How do you think the subcompact, inexpensive computer category will look in three years?

All original content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 U.S. License except that which is quoted from elsewhere or attributed to others. In short, you may reproduce, reblog, and modify my content, but you must provide proper attribution.

via marco.org

Great post via Marco.org, he points out that the plodding smartphone evolution was smartly disrupted by the introduction of touch screen tech in the form of the iPhone, much in the same way as the iPad introduction will I think be a disruptive technology to net books, and perhaps even to the laptops.

Inkling Raises Series A Funding Round Led by Sequoia Capital

Inkling has produced a groundbreaking platform for interactive content publishing in a market that’s primed for innovation,” said Mr. Schreier. “With its visionary product strategy and phenomenal team, Inkling is leading the way for digital content platforms, not just in education, but in digital publishing everywhere. We’re excited to be a part of it.

via businesswire.com

Adobe Taking the Lead in “Open” Digital Publishing?

The idea is that the publication goes through design and production once, and is then rendered in different versions, for different platforms. Publishers will not be forced to hire a slew of Objective-C programmers to enter the iPad arena, and designers won’t be forced to become programmers. Maybe most significantly, publishers will not be forced to choose iPad over Kindle—they’ll be able to release editions for both, without a lot of extra programming and development. Magazines will be published with their own viewers for whatever platform, generated directly from InDesign CS5.

via adobe.blogs.webucator.com

10 Design Hints When Creating Digital Magazines

“Designers need to make things simpler.” That’s the call-out from Russell Clark, whom we asked for advice for designers of digital magazines. He came up with these 10 design hints when creating great digital magazines:

via zmags.com