Apple to the rescue

This may be a far-fetched sentence, but Apple may be –as a side effect of selling gazillions of their devices- saving the printed media industry, and with it, offering photographers a lifeline.

There is no doubt that the productized innovations Apple brings to life are of extreme quality. Most of them are sexy just by themselves however, the more lasting effects are the behavioral patterns that change in us and stay with us longer than the products themselves. The personal computer, the iPod, revolutionizing our music library, and have us rediscover portable music, iTunes and the App Store, making us think we can buy everything “by the song” and on-demand, and the time-bending Podcast anybody-can-broadcast radio shows. More recently, the swipe and pinch gestures present on the iPhone and then on tablets. I find it really amuzing when kids try these out at deceptively not touch-enabled big-screen TVs.

But the latest lasting contribution by Apple may come attached with the new iPad.

I am not an iPad user myself, mainly because I usually carry my laptop around and I have not found an excuse yet to get one of these, but I have started to see a trend in many iPad users to have paid subscriptions to magazines. The quality of the media is just amazing and the experience resembles more closely –and sometimes improves- that of a traditional magazine. Content is “curated”, carefully diagrammed and the quality of the photography is great.

The latest addition to the iPad family, the iPad III, has a Retina display.

More resolution, fine, everybody gets it. But here is the biggest impact of it: at 264 dots per inch, it is coming really, really close to the standard 300dpi resolution for most printed output!

The Retina display is not just a higher resolution screen, it is effectively replacing paper! Granted, the experience is that of a “backlit paper” and it does not have exactly the same quality of our traditional dead tree material, but in terms of resolution, it is very close.

So these three elements: the availability of quality content, the improvement of the reading experience, and a suitable physical media that effectively replaces paper, plus “always on” connectivity. This may be what a 2012 Guttenberg would have in mind!

I am a relentless optimist, and I think that this will manifest itself in the next couple of years as a renaissane of the printed media industry –or should I say “pay to read” industry?- and with it, more work for photographers for other three reasons: first, better content expectations can only be fulfilled RELIABLY by dedicated, proficient professional photographers; second, the revenue stream from paid subscriptions offers a sustainable model to pay for such talent; and, maybe not as important but still a factor, the higher resolution screens require better photo quality production from end-to-end, from capture to manipulation.

Huba Rostonics is a Weston, FL-based Photographer, Blogger and Photography instructor. He is constantly looking for new things to put a frame around. You can check his work at http://www.rostonics.com. He also publishes a free weekly photography podcast in Spanish on http://www.Phocaccia.com/podcasts.

The App Reigns

I should have known. I dared to mention the iPhone and I just got a gazillion hate mails.

The conversation went south quickly, falling into the this vs. that and the "I was here before" conversation.

What this made me realize that -personally- I care less and less about the device, about any device, and more about the apps. Functionality and content are king in my reign. TiVo and the DVR have done more for TV in my case than color, HD or any other improvement.

In the case of a computing or a Smartphone device, the reality is that very specific tasks are attributed to the Application and not the device. Nobody "Macs" or "PCs" something. But you do Photoshop an image, and you "throw it into an Exel" and on a bad day, it is your Outlook that is "acting up". In one concept: The App is the verb.

On the device, I have some killer apps that I just need to have. My preferred ones are:

Pandora. My music, randomized and with new stuff! Love it on the computer, even better on the handheld when it can go everywhere and has XG access.
Evernote. This is a powerhouse application. If you haven't tried it, you should. I just loved the first version because of the concept of ubiquity. The idea is a Notebook that can be accessed by a variety of ways, web, PC or Mac client, and Mobile client. In addition to this, the first version allowed for hand-written notes, email-to-notebook entry, and note emailing as well as a neat web-clipping functionality. On the mobile, it gets even better when you add the camera and the geo-tagging functionality.

GMail Sync. I mean Contacts and Calendar too.

Google Voice. If you read "The Mobility I Want", you know why. This is the closest thing to unified communications Nirvana.

iAccept

I am amazed at how many things can Apple get us to accept as normal, and -sometimes- even as better.

First, it was the brilliant move from Apple's side to force every customer to attach an unlimited data plan to the iPhone. This single clause in the contract had more influence on user experience than any of the technical aspects of the iPhone, so this one was -as bold as it was- an unusual one. But we accepted it.

This was accompanied by its huge size. Yes, the screen is great, and it is more or less thin, but let's be honest, it is almost the size of my 1999 Palm Pilot. Granted, it had a little apple on the back. Accepted.

Then the dubious reception and voice quality (at least on the first versions). There they went, the happy iPhone users predicating that it was just "a minor nuisance" on a super-innovative phone.

The last one, -and one that we live with every day- the on-screen keyboard.

I swear. The one app that iPhones should come with, and that no user should be able to uninstall, is a spell checker. Spelling errors and typos must have gone through the roof since the adoption of this device. Oddly enough, I just read that iPhones have surpassed Blackberries in the domestic market. This means that the trusted little keyboard that so many users swore by, has been traded for the unreliable, jittery touchscreen.

So we not only accept this, we embrace it.

I am wondering if the Apple effect could be translated to other concepts and make us accept those things that are "the right thing to do" even if they mean increased costs or moving away from our comfort zone. How about an iBus that would make us take public transport instead of our own car? or An iBulb that will finally convince us that turning off the light bulb when we have left the room IS a good idea? iMortgage, a product that gets banks to assume their share of the Real Estate bust? Anybody iBurger, made of organic stuff that costs $20?

For now, let me try to convince my teenage daughter that an Oldsmobile is a great car. I hope this little Apple sticker works...

The "unconvergence" age

Everything is cyclic. In business and technology we see it all the time. We push, push, push and there is a point where the market stops us as saying "that's just way too much".

The convergent device has been great. Being able to integrate phone with PDA and then being able to GPS locate and email almost everything on the device is just fantastic.

However, I find myself more and more in a situation where I would rather prefer a second device, an example is when I am driving following a map and suddenly somebody calls.

The question here is how do we approach this? I can think of three basic solutions:

1.- Better and smarter peripherals. If the audio interface and a second display on goggles could be an option, maybe -and just maybe- we won't need a second device.

2.- The dedicated device collection. We tried this, and while we somewhat like it, it is not the Holy Grail. Carrying a collection of dedicated devices is not a good answer.

3.- The second, multipurpose, connected device. One is not enough? Try two! Not a brilliant idea but if we can limit the number of devices that we carry to two, and both can do everything we can dream of, we also get redundancy. To some extent this is happening with the arrival of the iPad. In fact many appleheads just think in "number of Apples I own". Good for Jobs, that is Steve Jobs.

4.- The interactive environment. Let's expand on concept 1. Turn your car into a peripheral. When you sit in your car, your device works like a security token and information is shared. Suddenly you have access to the map on your personal device and display it on the dashboard, or your phone can use the car stereo, and the car marks your calendar for the oil change. To some extent we are there. Now expand that thought to Home and the big screen TV, or the office's keyboard, mouse and monitor and desk phone.

Whichever way we go, the key here is to establish the real, secure Personal Area Network. Is Bluetooth ready for this?

iPhone came - Some friends are coming along

So far Apple has experienced a spectacular product success with its iPod line of music players. Apple's statistics indicate that 100 million iPods have been sold. This 29th of June, Apple is releasing its latest creation, the iPhone converged device, the media is all hyped-up about the features, the functionality and the prohjected sales of 10 million of these devices.

The iPhone is a data-centric device, and as such it is being offered with a diversity of Mobile Internet plans, including an All-you-can-eat option.

This is what is really thrilling and disruptive of the iPhone. The instantaneous creation of 10 million mobile Internet users with ubiquitous Internet and with an almost as good experience as on a desktop, laptop or tablet PC.

10 million new users, accessing broadband content on the Internet, whenever, wherever they want. The first impact on this of course is the traffic, a maximum of almost 4000 additional Gigabytes on the network. This might not sound as much considering the enourmous capacities built into todays networks.

The real impact is of business and social nature. The introduction of the telephone, the Internet and -most lately- a high grade of adoption of broadband access have reshaped the business world and the lives of people here in the US and around the world. Business models unthinkable of before, become possible by the adoption of these technologies. Online document delivery, application hosting, such as Google Documents and Spreadsheets, photo printing through the web, Vonage, Skype, and software and video downloads as well as the 99c/song model would not be possible without broadband.

In the same way, the availability (and the assumption of a demographic with the availability) will eventually lead to new business models to be discovered. The exact successful ones are difficult to predict as they require that fortunate factor of being accepted by the public. Mobility is being replaced by pervasiveness.