Creekside Chatter

The iPad is all about consuming content, but most of the conversation about that content has seen it in traditional silos:

• Audio, through iTunes
• Video, also through iTunes
• iPhone apps (and now iPad apps), through the App Store
• Books, through iBooks
• The Web, the most open of these options.

The last of those options, however, can incorporate all of the rest - even the iPhone applications. Given the space on the iPad screen and the reported speed of its A4 processor, web design is actually the easiest way to create applications for the iPad.

During yesterday's iPad event, which largely played out just as the rumors foretold, Apple did do something unexpected: they unveiled a version of the word processing, spreadsheet and presentation suite iWork redesigned for the iPad's 9.7-inch touchscreen. It's easy to write off iWork's inclusion as a minor perk only for business types only, but don't. The suite's fully-redesigned touch interfaces actually reveal more about Apple's vision of the future of computing than any other element of their new tablet. Here's why.

I used each iWork app yesterday, and while I couldn't spend enough time with them to come to a definitive conclusion, they definitely surprised me. Text-input issues aside (we'll get to that in a minute), each appeared more than capable of offering a similar, if not much improved experience, over their desktop counterparts. And for that, all credit is due to multitouch.

In Pages, one of word processing's most arduous tasks--formatting text cleanly and easily around graphical elements--has been made orders of magnitude easier with touch. Once tapped, pictures and charts can be moved, resized, rotated and masked with finger swipes, pinches and twists, as the text instantly and naturally wraps around them. Once a graphical element is touched, a contextual box can be summoned to the surface with another tap offering options unique to that element, such as its layering position, size, and the like. Again, my time with the app was brief, but the potential available once clicks and drags are replaced by our natural inclination to touch and interact with our fingers was immediately apparent.

I love the iWork apps for the desktop and can't wait to see them on the iPad. At $10 each, you can't complain about the price either!

But what does it mean for artists?

1. It's a digital sketchpad.

Autodesk's Sketchbook Mobile opened up the iPhone for artists to doodle in spare moments while waiting for trains, tubes, or mates in bars or elsewhere.

The iPhone has limited touch sensitivity but its main problem for this task is the small, low-resolution screen. The iPad is much larger and offers a resolution of 1024-by-768 pixel resolution at 132 pixels per inch. It's no mobile Wacom Cintiq though, as it's unlikely to have a professional-level of touch sensitivity (I'm speculating a bit here, though if it had, Apple would surely shout about it).

While Autodesk hasn't announced an iPad specific version of Sketchbook Mobile, the iPhone version will run on it. As part of the launch, Steve Jobs demonstrated the popular Brushes app on the device.

2. It's a portable portfolio.

Again, you can use your iPod to show off your portfolio, using something like Quark's new I Love Design app. Again, screen size and resolution are issues, so the iPad will allow you to show off your work in all its glory. Interactive designers should beware though, as with the iPhone operating system, there's no support for Flash sites.

3. A new lease of life for design.

The nature of reading a newspaper, magazine, or book on a train means that you'll appreciate the pleasurable layouts of print more than the strict segmented grids of Websites. Hopefully, this means that publishers will invest in design (and designers) for iPad versions of newspapers and magazines. Creating digital versions of magazines won't be as easy as taking your print layout and exporting an iPad version along with your press-ready PDFs—even at the iPad's 1024-by-768 resolution, an A4 magazine page with 8-point body copy won't be readable. Whether this means more jobs for designers or cruddy replicated layouts depends on whether the interactive magazine model takes off and provides enough revenue to support good design (as well as the whims of individual publishing houses).

For interactive designers, there's hope that the iPad will enable more creative use of interactivity. We've seen some incredible demos of what you can do with interactive newspapers and magazines—the best of which is Bonnier's Mag+ —but these are so much more expensive to create than print magazines in terms of time and manpower. This will limit opportunities here to the biggest newspaper and magazine publishers only.

As with the iPhone, where the iPad will create more work for interactive designers is in creating branded projects for clients. And with Flash CS5 slated to offer a simple Output for iPhone/iPad export system, creating apps could be simpler, quicker, and more suitable for small projects than you'd expect.

AudioOwl is an online repository of free audio books for iPod or any other Mp3 player. The audio books are neatly categorized under genres like children, adventure, fiction, comedy, fantasy and many more. You could either browse books by genre or search for them by title, author or keyword. When you click on a book, it provides you a brief description of the book, an audio preview and two download links – for iTunes and as mp3 files for each chapter in a zipped folder.

You would find the quality of audio recordings in the books to be quite good. That’s because the site fetches its downloads from Librivox where books are read and recorded by volunteers.

Features:

• Free audio books download site.
• Browse books by genre or search for them.
• Download in the iTunes format or as mp3 file.

The last person you’d expect to speak out against the Google Book settlement with the Authors Guild which will make available the contents of millions of orphan books in digital form is Harvard law professor and free-culture advocate Lawrence Lessig. In a lengthy essay in The New Republic he calls the settlement a “path to insanity” that will be “culturally asphyxiating,” but not for the reasons you might think.

Lessig believes the problem lies not so much with the settlement itself or Google, as it does with copyright law.  But after pouring over the complex language of the 165-page settlement, he believes more than ever before in the need to overhaul copyright law for the Internet era (a theme he’s hit on before). Here is the gist of the problem as he explains it:

The deal constructs a world in which control can be exercised at the level of a page, and maybe even a quote. It is a world in which every bit, every published word, could be licensed. It is the opposite of the old slogan about nuclear power: every bit gets metered, because metering is so cheap. We begin to sell access to knowledge the way we sell access to a movie theater, or a candy store, or a baseball stadium. We create not digital libraries, but digital bookstores: a Barnes & Noble without the Starbucks.