ABC Player

Kudos for ABC on this one.  Real nice app.  The iPad just makes images pop and when you have some great images, it makes the app look even better.  That is what this has.  Awesome large images and previews of ABC shows.  Ability to watch quite a bit of past episodes, check scheduling and keep a history of videos watched gives this app a lot of positives.

Epicurious

For the aspiring cook, this app is for you.  It feels like the Betty Crocker cookbook.  Tabs on the side, big images, ingredient list, reviews and more.  Solid functioning app.  The one thing lacking is video.

GAP 1969 Stream

I like this app not because of the GAP or products, but because of an entirely new way to navigate.  The app gives off the impression that it is endless.  Keep scrolling left, right or up or down you will never come to the end.  It repeats, but it works as well.

USA Today, Reuters, and Bloomberg

USA Today

USA Today takes a safe approach to their app.  It looks EXACTLY like their newspaper and functions like a web site.  At times you can get lost when navigating through articles.  The ads don’t function that well.  Orientation of the device does not provide that much enjoyment.  The app is ok.

Reuters

The Reuters app is a great news app.  Very clean.  It uses icons that we are familiar with (the dot notation for swipes).  Image gallery, pop up video and ease of getting back to all of the main articles.  They make use of orientation by moving the article to the right and giving you options to jump to other sections or directly into an article.  Interactive stock tickers give this app a little more life.  Overall, solid.

Bloomberg

Bloomberg took a different approach to colors, instead of white or light background they went black.  Not a fan.  Very little images if any, navigation is clunky, drop-downs seems like a band-aid to get to where you want to go.  Hopefully next release will be improved.

Alice in Wonderland

Here is another app that got a lot of hype.  You can read a story and move objects around.  Is that really ground breaking?  It is basically a picture book with areas that you can either swipe/drag or rotate and they move.  I think pop up books and scratch and sniff are more interactive then this.  From a layout and design perspective it is pretty cool.  Reading to your kids the book also is nice since they can interact with some objects.

Disney Digital Books

Every once in a while someone hits it out of the park.  Disney did just that.  The Toy Story version of the digital book is pure awesome.  Simple animation makes the book come alive.  Read along with highlighting the words helps the little ones read.  Ability to record my own voice so my kids can hear me read the book to them is awesome.  Add some games, have some of the pages ‘color-able’ and you got a great app!

Marvel Comics

I will say this first, I am a biased Marvel Comic fan.  With that said, this app is awesome.  The store is a simple lift from the Appstore (looks identical) but that is not the point you should care about.  Nor the ability to download a ton of old and new comics.  The point you need to pay attention to is once you start reading or I should say ‘living’ the comic.  The comic view provides a traditional read of the full page but you can also dive into each of the letter boxes and read the comic that way.  You eye is no longer jumping to the action box half way down the page but your involved in the intense story of the box.  Swipe and it animates to the next box.  Nice job.

Men’s Health

Men’s Health is a ‘container’ app that you can view and purchase other issues.  They do a OK job with this app.  The content is lifted straight from the print piece  and put into the iPad.  So swiping through pages is the normal.  What you see in print is what you see in the iPad.  The one thing they added is interactivity ‘on-top’ of the pages.  What I mean by that is when you land on an article blue plus signs light up where you can interact.  You can view a video or take a poll.  It is nice since it takes the guess work on what your supposed to do.

BMW Magazine

Talk about a glorified PDF reader.  No interaction except for some hot spots to link out to the web.

Wired

There has been a tremendous amount of hype surrounding this app.  The hype was around 2 areas, the first being the app itself and the second being the controversy of Adobe building the app in Flash, which Apple denied.  That is another story.  The app itself, in my opinion falls short.  The app does not train the user into what to do next.  Your left clicking (touching) and swiping random spots just to see if anything is linked.  There are ads that do some interaction and others where you think there would be but do not.

I will be taking a look at a few applications from Brands or Publishing companies.  The reason I am choosing that avenue is I am a Technologist at Story Worldwide and need to keep up on the trends and happenings that my clients competition is doing.  There are some great apps developed solely by independent developers, which I may feature but for now just Brands.

The 3 I have chosen are the following, Nike Football, Financial Times and the Weather Channel

Nike Football

The Nike Football app gets high marks with me.  Very easy to use.  Vibrant colors and a ton of videos.  A few things I like are the use of the bottom portion of the screen to put simple navigation to go from section to section.  I enjoy the large use of images on every screen and the ability to orientate the iPad and the screen shifting to a better and more usable position.

Financial Times

Yet another newspaper app, this one succeeds.  They don’t try to do too much with it.  FT presents the articles clean and the navigation between them is easy.  They provide an indicator to get back to the start or the main page of the newspaper on the left hand side.  I feel that is easy to find since you a swiping left and right.  The other big plus is the background color is a tan/parchment color which is easy on the eyes.  Much nicer than the standard white background.

The Weather Channel

If you have the Weather Channel app for the iPhone then you are fully aware of its features.  The iPad version is the same thing just in a bigger format.  Radar maps are bigger, video is bigger, 10 day forecast is bigger.

I am neither a CEO or a know-it-all but I have a different point of view that people are missing.  Let me first start out with an analogy.  Think back to when you were a kid and watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom (if you don’t remember this show, think Animal Planet).  Theses were fascinating shows about wildlife.  All sorts of wildlife.  The big episodes or the episodes that were always cool to watch were with the Lion.  The Lion is the main event.  Always!  At every zoo and every show, when there is a Lion, people stop and watch.  So true with this show.  Sometimes two Lions would fight.  Sometimes they would just sleep all day.  Other times they would hunt some prey.  No matter what they were up too you were glued to the TV waiting for the Lion to attack…yes…a Wildebeest.  The Lion would sneak up on a herd and take one down.  They would feast for hours and then move on.

Now bear with me here, I am not comparing any of these technologies or companies to either the Lion or the Wildebeest, but just the battle.  The battle would produce a ferocious scene; dirt flying everywhere, animals watching and running, blood spurting.  Most of all, the Vultures would come to wait and benefit from the battle.  Once the Lion was done, it was their time to feast.

I am a Vulture.  I am going to feast on these battles.  Why?  It is because I am a technologist and I have too.  The way I look at it is this; sure one technology will probably overtake the other but until then I will support both and deliver both.  I will feast on the remains of the war of words and the war of the diverse technologies to deliver what is right, appropriate and on target to my clients.

Here is another example.  One of my clients is a Fortune 500 client.  Thousands of employees.  They all use IE6.  IE6 is bad.  Real bad.  Not only from a security standpoint but from a coding perspective as well.  It is buggy, renders CSS differently than other browsers, and requires a lot of extra effort to make it work.  There are sites out there that are not supporting it any more.  But when a client is paying you to develop a web site and they cannot view it on their computer or better yet from, ANY of their company computers, that is a big time #FAIL.  So what do we do?  We do what they want us to do and make it work.

There are 2 rules in Customer Service that I learned from Stew Leonard’s:

Rule #1: Customer is always right.

Rule #2: If Customer is wrong, see Rule #1.

As a technologist, I am not going to deliver a solution that only works on X percentage of the devices that are out there.  If I am building a web site, not only will it work in older browsers but mobile phones, netbooks, iPads, Android Tablets etc.

So what’s the point?

There are 2 points.

Point 1:  You don’t have to rely on one technology to do a job.  Each of the technologies in question came out because one does something different from the other.  The questions should be, what are you trying to accomplish?  Answer that first, then the technology will shake out from that.  I had someone ask me about HTML5 vs Flash and what do we do since Flash is not available on the iPad.  What are you trying to do?  Will your customers go to your site on an iPad?  If so, lets make an iPad enabled site and leverage what the iPad does best.  Keep Flash for the desktop based site.  What’s the problem with 2 or 3 different sites?  You don’t wear dress shoes to go running.  Choose the right tool for the job.

Point 2:   While companies argue and battle regarding what technology will win, I will need to support all of them until there is a winner.  By supporting all of them, I will deliver 100% coverage to my clients customers which makes everyone happy.

So the next time someone asks, “Will HTML5 take over Flash?” or “iPhone vs Android”,  your response should be “I hope it is a long battle”.

So after having it in the office for a week and messing around with it how would it really hold up with ‘real world’ use.  I decided to bring it home this weekend.  Here is my recap.

Friday Night: After running around when I got home and making dinner I was able to settle down with the iPad and my family.  I showed my kids and they instantly thought it was cool.  Probably because it was a new gadget in the house.  I went to the app store and downloaded a few games (all free) and they were hooked to the big screen.  So Friday was an A+ with the kids.

Saturday Morning:  Like most people, Saturday is the day to catch up on the week that has passed.  So with my coffee and my iPad I started to surf the web for the latest news.  I started with Google News like I always to on my Laptop.  After reading some headlines and clicking over to the news sites, I had hit and misses.  The resizing became more of a pain surfing the web for some time.  Flipping the iPad horizontal was better but still a pain.  Grade B.

Saturday Mid-Morning: While I was prepping to start running around with the kids, I flipped on Netflix for them and they watched Tom & Jerry for a bit.  Kids Grade A+

Saturday Afternoon: During my running around my car died.  That was it.  Time for a new car.  (we have been thinking about getting one so this just seemed right).  I opened up Google and did some searches for local dealers and their inventory.  Well, most of the sites are in Flash so it was very difficult for me to search and find out the info I needed.  Grade C-

Saturday Late Afternoon:  I did end up visiting some dealerships but more on that later.  When we got back we decided to do some DadPerfect basketball shots.  See DudePerfect.com for more info.  After hitting two shots from down the driveway and over the garage I went in with the kids to show them how the experts do it.  So we whipped up DudePerfect.com and….wait…that is Flash.  So we fired up the Laptop instead.  Grade F

Saturday Evening: After putting the kids to bed I started to check out the app store.  A few things I noticed.  1.  Not a lot of apps yet, that will eventually change.  2.  Not a lot of free apps.  3.  Why are these apps 1000% more than what the iPhone are?  Is it the bigger screen?  Anyway, I downloaded a few different ones.  Some for the kids, some books, magazines and games.  The one I was excited about was the Bible.  I can bring the iPad to church and have the Bible right there.  When I started to view it and read it, the glare from the screen was a little annoying.  It seems ok for web pages and images but when I really needed to focus on text I did not like it.  Grade C-

Sunday Morning: After looking at a few cars I wanted to do some more research.  I went to MazdaUsa.com.  That proved useless.  The site detected my browser as an iPhone so I got a skinny mobile site.  I tried to hack the url to get the full site but kept getting an XML error.  I Google’d some Mazda terms and found some links into the Mazda site but same result.  Argh.  I then went over to BMWUSA.com.  Mobile site appeared.  I could not do anything.  I tried entering my zip code.  I tried clicking on some dropdown menus and nothing.  Site was not working.  I went over to Ebay.com so I can just view some photos.  That worked but not as fulfilling as I wanted it to be.  Grade D

Sunday Evening: I skipped the afternoon since I ended using the Laptop to view the sites listed above.  So my car died again today leaving me and the kids stranded, has to be alternator.  I dropped my wife off at work earlier in the day and now it was time to pick her up.  We hop in the car that works and take the iPad.  The kids are playing Tic-Tac-Toe and having a blast on it in the back seat.  Kids A+.  Me – C- because the screen was so bright it was annoying me on the way home.

My overall impressions.  It is nice.  Videos look nice.  Kids love it.  When push came to shove and I wanted it to do what I do on a normal basis, it failed.  Until the Internet converts everything to HTML5 and out of Flash then it will be worth it.  Until then, you need to rely on ‘apps’ and pay for everything that is normally free on the Internet.  For another game console or a portable DVD player for the kids, sure it is good but I can get those for 150 bucks.

My son was visiting a web site that needed the new QuickTime plugin so he downloaded it.  Great.  No problem there.  Then I went on the computer to synch my iPhone with iTunes to get some new music (I know..it is just a really cool phone).  When low and behold I get an error stating I cannot use this version of iTunes since I have a new version of QuickTime.  Ok.  No big deal.

How can I upgrade?  I can’t.  iTunes won’t let me even open it up.  I tried to “repair” the installation and that did not work.  I “unistalled” iTunes, downloaded the “new” version, installed it and everything should work…right?  NO.  Same error.  Cannot use this version of iTunes with the version of QuickTime.  What’s up Apple?  So I uninstalled iTunes AND QuickTime, and installed it AGAIN.  All is fine now.

That sequence of events happens more often than no with Windows software so I am a little taken back by the snooty upity company called Apple that it happened to them.