on 11 April 2010
So Apple has finally done it: having prevented Flash Player from coming to the iPhone (and iPod touch and iPad), it’s now, with the revised clause 3.3.1 of the iPhone developer agreement, closed the door to Adobe’s constructive and innocuous workaround of allowing Flash developers to convert their projects to iPhone/iPad apps.
The Flash app packager in Creative Suite 5, which Adobe is still promising to launch intact on Monday (shipping in May), provided a very simple way to produce content visually and convert it into apps, with little or no coding required. As of last Friday, Apple’s only permitted route is to code from scratch in the iPhone SDK, a totally different proposition requiring skills alien to a whole sector of the content industry.
What’s Apple’s reasoning for all this? We don’t know, because there’s been no public announcement; nor have any of us in the tech press so far managed to extract any statement from Apple. My call to the UK PR office was met with a request to email; the email was met with silence. Two days later, that silence remains unbroken worldwide.
Apple had already established (despite recurring rumours to the contrary) that it wasn’t going to allow Flash content to play on iPhone using a plug-in player, the way it works on Macs, PCs and other mobile devices. The difference here is that it’s not even going to allow apps that effectively have their own built-in player, simply because they were created using third party tools (the restriction doesn’t just apply to Flash, though it’s by far the most significant technology affected.)
Everyone can see the business case for keeping Flash Player and its mobile version, Flash Lite, off iPhone. Apple controls content (other than websites) on its mobile platform via the App Store. It only allows apps that it thinks are of a suitable nature and quality, and it takes a cut of every app’s purchase price, while generously distributing free apps without charge. It doesn’t want users installing Flash Player once, then using it to access a zillion unvetted third party apps. I get that.
But none of the same arguments seem to apply to allowing developers to use Flash to make apps, then delivering them, using the packager, as approved apps via the App Store. continue
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Adobe,
Apple,
Business,
Computing,
InDesign,
Internet,
iPad,
iPhone,
Law,
Media
on 9 April 2010
Some publishers are stumped when asked to retrieve material from old editions. Unlike web content, printed copy doesn’t always go through a CMS, and the only final version may be the one on the page. If you’re sitting on an archive of InDesign or QuarkXPress documents, it can be difficult and time-consuming to answer questions such as ‘Can you pull out all our brochure content on the education market?’
Enter PageZephyr, which searches, displays and extracts the content of QuarkXPress and InDesign files. continue reading at www.macuser.co.uk
Tagged as:
Business,
Design,
InDesign,
MacUser,
Media,
QuarkXPress,
Reviews
on 8 April 2010
Now that the Digital Economy Bill is becoming law, it’s time to move on from
campaigning against it to working out how to cope with it.
That’s why I designed the poster above, which you’re welcome* to print out and stick up. Please click the image to download the PDF, which is scalable, so it’ll look nice on your favourite size of paper. continue
Tagged as:
Business,
Computing,
Copyright,
Design,
Internet,
Law,
Media,
Open source
on 3 April 2010
Blogging in response to somebody else’s blog is not usually my style, but Cory Doctorow’s anti-iPad rant on BoingBoing is so well written that it demands active disagreement.
Essentially, Cory doesn’t like the iPad because it’s a closed platform. He takes several different common objections and twists them (in an intelligent way, not a stupid Peter Mandelson way) to support this view. But it is, ultimately, just a view, not an argument.
Loose screws
Cory is a literal geek: he likes to take things apart and put them back together and tweak them. But not just metaphorically, like most of us who work with technology. He really has to physically dismantle stuff. As he says:
I believe – really believe – in the stirring words of the Maker Manifesto: if you can’t open it, you don’t own it. Screws not glue. The original Apple ][+ came with schematics for the circuit boards, and birthed a generation of hardware and software hackers who upended the world for the better. If you wanted your kid to grow up to be a confident, entrepreneurial, and firmly in the camp that believes that you should forever be rearranging the world to make it better, you bought her an Apple ][+
Well, now. Although the Apple II was on the wane by the time I got my first computer, my reasoning was similar to the above: my friends had Sinclair Spectrums, and liked playing Jet Set Willie but weren’t doing much else with them. The Commodore 64 seemed to offer more possibilities for programming, and it was this that helped persuade my dad to stump up the extra cash (more than double).
But, like the Speccie, the C64 came in a sealed plastic case, and it never occurred to me to prise this open and dive in with a soldering iron. continue
Tagged as:
Apple,
Books,
Computing,
Copyright,
Design,
iPad,
iPhone,
Mac,
Media,
Open source
on 26 March 2010
© Adam Banks 2010 licensed to Dennis Publishing Ltd
Desktop publishing software was conceived as a jack of all trades and master of none: not somewhere you created content, merely somewhere you brought it together. You’d prepare your photos in Photoshop, illustrations in Illustrator and words in Word, then import them into your pages.
These days, though, it’s increasingly feasible to do it all in InDesign. A decent text editor is built in, and although modifications to photos still require external software, the donkey work of converting RGB to CMYK can be left to the PDF export stage, workflow permitting.
Perhaps more often overlooked is the fact that InDesign now provides enough drawing, editing and effects functions to let you construct logos, page furniture and diagrams to a high standard without leaving the application. While many designers still habitually fire up Illustrator for these tasks, more layout-focused users, to whom Illustrator is a closed book, may not realise how straightforward it can be to draw their own graphics within InDesign, rather than reaching for the clip art.
Here we’ll use an example logo to tour the path drawing and editing functions in InDesign CS4, seeing how complex shapes can be built up using basic Bézier pen skills and simple polygons; how Adobe’s Pathfinder tools combine objects; and how type can be integrated and customised.
Read the full tutorial in MacUser Vol 26 No 7, on sale now.
Tagged as:
Design,
InDesign,
Mac,
MacUser,
Tutorials,
Web design
on 26 March 2010
Bill Clinton told his election team, ‘It’s the economy, stupid,’ but the relationship between prosperity and political attitudes is far from being a no-brainer. Sometimes, when the going gets tough, the tough get going; so from the destitution of the Weimar Republic we gained Bauhaus, Brecht and the Bomb. Then again, the Great Depression in the US was effectively a cultural intermission, unless you happened to like crime novels.
Is the current downturn galvanising or frustrating us? One barometer is conservatism, and there are unmistakable signs of a puritanical tendency: three in one week, at the time of writing.
First, as you’ll recall, Apple chucked out several thousand ‘overtly sexual’ products from the App Store, the only route by which software can be installed on iPhones and iPods touch. Phil Schiller, a man whose public role as Steve Jobs’ deputy may or may not owe anything to his physical resemblance to Deputy Dawg, mentioned ‘degrading and objectionable’ content. Which Apple, of course, had already approved.
As Phil admitted, the process favoured any ‘well known company with previously published material’ – so Playboy stayed, while an independent beachwear catalogue found itself excluded. ‘Ice skating tights are not OK either,’ one curious developer was advised. Bang goes Debbie Does The Winter Olympics, then. continue
Tagged as:
Apple,
Google,
Internet,
iPhone,
Law,
MacUser,
Media,
Sex,
YouTube
on 8 March 2010
The Apple Store on London’s Regent Street is the perfect symbol of the company and products we’ve come to know and love: it’s gorgeous, shiny, enticing and impossible to ignore. For most people, it’s also a completely inconvenient place to buy a computer.* Luckily, there are plenty more options, because Macs are available these days from a greater variety of outlets than ever before.
So where should you shop, what should you choose, how can you buy it safely, and – perhaps the most topical issue here – is there any way to shave a few quid off that exquisitely typeset Apple Store price tag? Wonder no more, because in this article we open the doors to the world of Mac retailing and invite you to browse. Ground floor, perfumery, stationery and leather goods, wigs and haberdashery, kitchenware and state-of-the-art consumer electronics – going up…
Read the full article in MacFormat issue 219, on sale now.
Tagged as:
Apple,
Computing,
Consumer,
Mac,
MacFormat,
Tutorials
on 4 March 2010
on 26 February 2010
The trouble with being a Mac user is it lulls you into a false sense of security. It’s like what happens with snow. In most northern countries people aren’t surprised by it, and just trudge around looking resigned until it goes away again. Windows users have the same kind of relationship with stuff that fails to work, does the opposite of what they meant, or tells them to wait while the system restarts to complete installation of another essential update.
But Britain only gets heavy snow once in a while, so when more than eight flakes fall we panic and cancel everything. Similarly, Mac users faced with an unresponsive dialog box are liable to freak out, run to Starbucks and plaintively nurse a two-shot hazelnut skinny venti latte while tweeting about their terrible morning from their iPhone.
Appropriately enough, my problems with Virgin Media began a few weeks before Christmas. I should first point out that Virgin cable is probably the best broadband service in the UK, being the only one not dependent on bits of wire installed by BT before you were born. But early in December it started slowing down in the evenings, eventually falling to below dial-up speed the same week I was trying to send a magazine to press. Call me fussy, but I don’t want to have to work all night so I can publish the results in the morning. I’m not Belle de Jour.
At the time of writing my broadband still isn’t fixed, and the reason is the continuing crapness of tech support departments. Calling tech support is like playing a classic videogame: you have to shoot down several waves of cannon fodder before you get to the boss. As in Space Invaders, first-line staff repeat a preset range of moves without any intelligence, constantly shift their position, and emit nothing more meaningful than a series of bleeps. To make any progress you have to get through to the second line, which must also be defeated before you reach your real target: the third-line engineer.
(It’s not clear, incidentally, why the word ‘engineer’ was adopted in this context. I always imagine them sitting in their cubicles wearing sideburns and a stovepipe hat.)
Turns out Virgin have added a bonus level. continue
Tagged as:
Apple,
Business,
Internet,
Mac,
MacUser,
Virgin
on 8 February 2010
I’m posting this partly to publicise the Hedley Barrel Race and Beer Festival, if anyone’s in the area, and partly for portfolio, because I don’t often get asked to do posters. (Weird how posters are every graphic designer’s favourite show-off medium, yet most of the ones you actually see are horrible.)
The design is within the identity I created for The Feathers Inn*, a 200-year-old Northumbrian pub that’s won just about every award it’s eligible for since being taken over by my wife’s nephew a couple of years ago. Worth a trip into the wilds for.
The logo (in the background here), based on early Victorian engravings, is a knife, fork and spoon bent into the shape of the Prince of Wales feathers; it’s now the pub’s sign too. Type fans will spot Adobe’s excellent Wood Type fonts and ornaments. The other face here is Monotype Fournier, based on cuts just a little bit older than the pub. I love the way it’s elegant and awkward, conservative and quirky, all at the same time.
Tagged as:
Design,
InDesign,
Marketing,
Media,
Photoshop
adambanksdotcom @crazycolours @flayman @pauljchambers I'm quite surprised nobody who "does know" has offered Paul a job, the way he's handled it = great CV 
