The Problem Digital works, completely divorced from a physical medium and transferable between devices, now lack one of the key ways we’ve given value to these cultural products in the past: their physical size.
Category: Technology
The death of the desktop PC, and soon the laptop, has been widely reported in the media recently. Tablets, phones and a myriad of other embedded devices will make the power of fixed computers unnecessary for all except the video editors and 3D renderers amongst us.
Ebooks are not books. They’re not ‘electronic’ books. In the same way that MP3s are not vinyl and Second Life isn’t real life (who’da thunk?). The book industry is not moving to ebooks. The publishing industry is expanding from paper to electronic screens. The losers will be those who think they are moving to electronic […]
All this ‘shopping shifting’ – from physical goods to electronic goods, and shopping in physical spaces to shopping from ‘wherever you are’ (i.e. via mobile phone web/app) – will further reduce the quality of the stuff we can buy.
I want an operating system that doesn’t define me. Or perhaps, one that defines me better. In a sense this is why I use Linux. I can make all manner of choices with it which reflect my personality when it comes to computer use. However, I don’t think it does it well enough.
What does open source innovation look like, and how will it win out over iOS and Windows? (This post inspired by a recent episode of the Ubuntu UK Podcast (UUPC).) Here’s a list of open source innovations:
As with many things that I blog about here, a couple of articles and a podcast have come along at once to suggest a change in the air. This time it’s the end of the expectation of free stuff that we’ve come to love on the Net.
Martha Lane Fox was appointed by Gordon Brown as the UK Digital Champion, and has founded the RaceOnline2012 campaign to get all people of working age on the Internet (10 million of us Brits haven’t used the Net, but to do so would help us a lot).
Another fascinating – and in parts infuriating – podcast from Sitepoint, who bring in two User Experience Designers to repsond to Ryan Carson’s tweet that “‘UX Professional’ is a bullshit job title. It’s just a way to over-charge naive clients. All web designers should be UX pros”.
One of the things that has occured to me about this Engagement lark (and perhaps explains why I’m interested) is that those whose work I’ve read are trying to design systems which encourage the best default behaviour.