Marco Arment wrote a great post about people's anger and hostility towards Apple for The Magazine, his by-weekly iOS only magazine. He's just published the piece on his blog. I'd recommend reading it, and if you're an iOS user, subscribing to The Magazine through Newsstand.
Given all the recent chatter about publishing on iOS and the Newsstand app with the shuttering of 'The Daily' and the arrival of 'The Magazine', Marco Arment weighs in today on his personal blog. As the inventor of 'The Magazine', it's worth a read to get his take.
Apple's television add campaign for the iPad mini has been some of their best recent work. The new print campaign is starting to show up now and it may be even better. 9to5Mac has posted shots of the iPad mini adds found in two recent magazines.
Very simple. Very elegant. Very effective. In all the right ways, very Apple.
Craig Mod has written a brilliant piece about the current state of publishing. There are so many nuggets of information that are applicable in so many places, I can't possibly summarize them here. I'll give you two samples.
In product design, the simplest thought exercise is to make additions. It’s the easiest way to make an Old Thing feel like a New Thing. The more difficult exercise is to reconsider the product in the context of now. A now which may be very different from the then in which the product was originally conceived.
Newsstand is perhaps the most underutilized, under-imagined distribution tool in the short history of tablet publishing. If you squint your eyes and tilt your head at just the right angle, you’ll notice something magical about Newsstand: given the proper container, it’s a background downloading, offline-friendly, cached RSS machine people can subscribe to. For money.
There is no doubt we're going to be seeing dramatic changes to the very idea of publishing in the coming years. The coming world will be a fundamentally more democratic place than we can even imagine. The possibilities are really exciting.
Read this story.
Macstories has a post today detailing a method of throwing Newsstand into a folder on iOS devices if you never use that capability. They verified that it works, and I've now done this on my iPhone 5. I use Newsstand sparingly on the iPad, and have no problem with it being there on my home screen. I find Newsstand to be absurd on my iPhone and am happy it's gone. Thanks to Cydia developer Filippo Bigarella for devising this easy fix.
This issue brings up a larger point, and that's the inability to rid yourself of Apple's preinstalled apps and services. It's great that new iOS devices come with some apps from the factory. It gives new users an opportunity to explore the capabilities of the device. It would really be nice if Apple would trust it's users enough to delete some of the non-critical apps or services like Newsstand or Game Center. I'm not going to hold my breath.