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I Wrote a Book

I’ve been in the Bay Area all week for work, and I’ve been meaning to post this news since Monday when I finally made my deadline: my forthcoming book “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design” is now officially complete and in the hands of my publisher, New Riders. According to the listing over at Amazon, it’ll ship in early December, so you can pre-order your copy today and have it in time for the holidays. At some booksellers the current pre-order price is over a third off of the cover price, plus if you buy it through any of these links, its humble author gets a little kickback: Amazon (US), Barnes & Noble or Borders.com.

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More on iPad Magazines

I want to thank everyone for the overwhelming response to my post from yesterday, “My iPad Magazine Stand,” in which I laid out my thoughts on why most of the current crop of iPad magazine apps have dim prospects for long-term success. The thoughtful comments left here on the blog as well as the steady stream of RT’ing on Twitter have been terrific. It reminds me how lucky I am to get consistently intelligent and lively conversation in response to what I write. For a blogger, there’s nothing better. (It also makes me glad as heck that I didn’t follow my original instinct; when I finished my first draft of that piece on Monday, I actually decided not to publish it, fearing it was too shapelessly reasoned.)

In fact, I had wanted to jump into the conversation myself earlier but I’m under two deadlines at the moment so life is kind of hectic. Plus, I often like to see comment threads play themselves out without my interference before I engage — I find that the general direction of a conversation evolves more naturally if I hold back from potentially derailing it too early. After following along for a while though, there were a few quick things that came up that I felt I should respond to. So this morning I started adding a comment at the end of the thread but, as it got lengthier and lengthier, I decided to publish it as this blog post instead.

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My iPad Magazine Stand

Because I recently left a job at one of the most prominent publications in the world, people often ask me about my opinions on the cavalcade of publications rushing to the iPad — those apps designed and developed by newspapers and magazines principally to deliver their print content — and the chances I see for their success. So here it is.

To start, I think it’s too early to say anything definitive about whether these apps will become lasting delivery mechanisms for print content and brands. There’s still a lot that we don’t know about the iPad and its forthcoming competition, particularly about how user behavior will evolve as these devices become more integrated into daily life. So while I may use some definitive language in this admittedly very long blog post, I freely grant that the future is a mystery to me as much as anyone.

Actually, in conversations with people I know at various publications, I’ve been quite surprised by stories of strong advertiser interest in these apps. Anecdotally, publishers report heavy demand for advertising space, and in some cases apps have sold out of their ad inventory through the end of the year or even further.

That’s an encouraging indicator, but I think it may be more a sign of a bubble than the creation of a real market for publishers’ apps. According to Advertising Age, the initial enthusiasm for many of these apps has dwindled down to as little as one percent of print circulation in the cases of some magazines.

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iPhones for the Under-Two Set

My fourteen month-old daughter Thuy (who is completely adorable, by the way) adores few material objects in this world more than she does my iPhone. Among all of the toys that we’ve given her, and even among all of the things that she’s turned into toys, the iPhone is the one that consistently grabs her attention in almost any situation.

She’s at an age though where she doesn’t really use the phone so much as she just randomly handles it, pushing buttons on the screen here and there, turning it around, even holding it up to her ear (often backwards or upside down) to babble a conversation to some imaginary friend on the other end of the line. Mostly she’s just imitating what she sees her mother and me do when we use our iPhones, but it doesn’t change the fact that it can command her attention for ten or twenty minutes at a time — and for a parent of a young child, that’s gold.

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Someone Could Make a Lot of Money with Personal Finance Software

Mark Hedlund, the founder of shuttered personal finance Web app Wesabe, has written a fantastic post-mortem on his experience entitled “Why Wesabe Lost to Mint.” It offers tremendously candid insight into what they did wrong at Wesabe, what Mint did right, and the surprisingly persistent myths around failures and successes in both camps.

This is a story that is of course full of valuable lessons for entrepreneurs and anyone trying to create a product in a competitive marketplace. What’s even more interesting for me is that the last chapter has hardly been written in this category of software. This is not a case where Wesabe lost and Mint took the market, lock, stock and barrel. There’s still tremendous opportunity in personal finance software, mostly because, in its current state ca. 2010, most of these applications don’t fulfill their true purpose.

This is a point that’s very fresh in my mind. Having recently left a job with a healthy salary to hobble together income from multiple smaller sources while raising a young family, personal finance software has, unsurprisingly, become much, much more critical to me, and its failures much, much more evident.

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The Only Thing a Router Is Good For

Like many people reading this, I have a broadband connection in my home that manifests itself as a router — a vaguely futuristic, plastic box attached to a cable that runs into my wall. To that router, I’ve attached an Apple AirPort Extreme, a VOIP router and a switch for additional Ethernet connections. It’s a bit of a mess, and it could probably be simplified, but for the most part it works fine.

I make whatever minor adjustments are needed to these devices through software; either browser-based interfaces or Apple’s own AirPort utility. In fact, the only time I ever have to physically touch the whole setup is on the rare occasion when something goes wrong with the cable connection itself. Admittedly, in recent months that’s been more often than I’d like with my current Internet provider, but for the most part it happens rarely.

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Annals of Crime

Manhattan’s Film Forum cinema house kicks off a three-week festival of classic heist flicks on 1 Oct, a celebration of that oddly comforting movie genre that provides the vicarious thrill of watching the planning, execution and (usually) unraveling of elaborately conceived crimes. You can find the full schedule and more information at Filmforum.org. These sorts of movies were among the first films to really capture my imagination as a kid, and I have a great fondness for them. In fact, in more highfalutin moments, I like to claim them as a minor inspiration for my interest in design — there’s a vague but visceral connection between their emphasis on puzzle-like narratives and the act of designing.

At its most basic, the structure of a heist film is an echo of the design process: a problem is identified, plans are developed, a team undertakes its implementation, and the story climaxes on the heist or the execution of the design itself. The dramatic tension of that final act defines the genre, but it’s the lead-up, the intricate preparation, the clever inventions and novel insights into the problem that provide the bulk of its raw pleasure to me. As a designer, there is for me a familiar echo of the work that I do in creating a solution when I watch on screen a cadre of experts — the safe-cracker, the sharp-shooter, the explosives expert — gathered around a blueprint of a bank, running through their plan of attack. Who doesn’t secretly want their work life to be like that?

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The Times Has a New Opinion

The New York TimesLate in the day yesterday, one of the last major projects that I worked on at The New York Times launched: a major overhaul of NYTimes.com’s Opinion section, now rebranded as The Opinion Pages. I shepherded this project from its inception to the completion of its design, but left the company before its implementation got underway. So I’m really happy to see that in its launch state, it’s still very close to the design that we created several months ago. Kudos to my former colleagues who have undoubtedly done a tremendous amount of sweating the details over the past several weeks to make this a reality. And I’m happy to see their hard work is already receiving complimentary notices.

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The Twitter Brand and What Comes Next

Twitter LogoBuzz Andersen has posted some really insightful comments on how the landscape is changing in the world of third-party Twitter apps. Quoting his partner in developing a Twitter app of their own, Andersen claims that “Twitter clients are going the way of email clients, ” i.e., becoming a commodity, and that the age of third-party innovation in this space is largely over.

For those who don’t monitor every pulse of the Twitter-scape, in recent months Twitter itself has made a marked change in strategy by investing considerable energy and care into updating its client applications (e.g., Twitter for iPhone and for iPad) and, very recently, its own Web site. For any other Web startup it would sound odd to say that these are surprising initiatives. However, in its short but rich history Twitter has become defined almost as much by third-party interfaces like Twitterific, Tweetdeck, Echofon, and others as it has by its own interfaces, so this activity is novel.

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Thoughts on News and User Experience

As promised, Tina Roth Eisenberg has posted video of my talk from last Thursday morning at FREITAG am Donnerstag in Zurich, Switzerland. If you didn’t get to make it to the event, or you just want to relive the good times, it’s all available for viewing at Swiss-miss.com or over at Vimeo. The videographer who recorded my talk did a terrific job giving you a sense of what the space was like, capturing the contrast between my ideas about digital news and the old world sensibility of the print shop-style showroom in which the lecture was held. Also, very helpfully, some of the slides from my Keynote deck were laid into the video directly, so you can follow along with the specific points I was making.

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