Einar Thorsen

Professor of Journalism and Communication at Bournemouth University

Publications | Conferences | Teaching | Projects

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OS architects dream of a pure rebirth, enter the iPhone

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Jean-Louis Gassée on Apple’s Next Macintosh OS:

The main cause of OS cancer is backwards compatibility, the need to stay compatible with existing application software. OS designers are caught between yesterday and tomorrow. Customers want the benefit of the future, new features, hardware and software, but without having to jettison their investment in the past, in their applications.

OS architects dream of a pure rebirth, a pristine architecture born of their hard won knowledge without having to accommodate the sins of their fathers. But, in the morning — and in the market — the dream vanishes and backwards compatibility wins.

Enter the iPhone.

Courtesy of John Gruber.

Get Your eBook in the Apple iBookstore – Lulu Blog

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    "Apple has selected Lulu as a certified aggregator to provide content for the iBookstore. We have been hard at work pushing hundreds of titles to the store as part of a pilot program to ensure all of our processes are ready for the volume of content that we expect.

    […]

    All eBooks planned for iBookstore distribution must have retail pricing that complies with Apple’s guidelines. We will automatically price Lulu eBooks submitted to the iBookstore to meet these guidelines. The creator revenue that you receive per sale will be 80 percent of the profit after deducting Apple’s share. On a $9.99 book, for example, you will receive $5.60."

    External link

    Del.ici.us tags: lulu ibookstore apple epub publishing books

Thoughts on Flash

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    Steve Jobs:

    "Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

    The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 200,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.

    New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind."

    External link

    Del.ici.us tags: apple flash html5 adobe stevejobs

I was shown the media’s future 16 years ago: now with the iPad, it’s here – The Observer

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    I was shown the media’s future 16 years ago: now with the iPad, it’s here – The Observer

    Alan Rusbridger on iPad and future of news:

    "In the space of four days my sense of scale has changed. On Tuesday, my new iPad seemed like a rather overblown iPhone. By Friday, I found myself irritated at trying to read emails or type on the iPhone, which already seemed mean and cramped. A tabloid newspaper page seemed exotically large, a broadsheet like a street hoarding. The iPad just seemed natural. Maybe Apple has simply rediscovered what book publishers, over the space of 400 years, came to a more or less settled view on – the right shape of page for what the human eye and hands feel easy with.

    […]

    Has the Guardian (or the Observer, for we share the same digital space) ever looked more beautiful? […] The NYT browser version doesn't look bad, either. The BBC, as ever, is irritatingly good

    […]

    Will it catch on? It feels like a transformative interim step […]

    Will it transform newspaper finances? […] only if you switched off the printing presses."

    Del.ici.us tags: ipad apple alanrusbridger future journalism newspapers

Announcing WebKit2

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    Announcing WebKit2

    Anders Carlsson and Sam Weinig, from Apple’s WebKit team:

    "WebKit2 is designed from the ground up to support a split process model, where the web content (JavaScript, HTML, layout, etc) lives in a separate process. This model is similar to what Google Chrome offers, with the major difference being that we have built the process split model directly into the framework, allowing other clients to use it."

    This will be seriously impressive!

    Link courtesy of John Gruber.

    Del.ici.us tags: webkit2 programming apple