Filed under: Mostly Mobile, New Technology | Tags: Apple, Design, development, interface, ipad, iPhone, neoco, UI
If you’re lucky enough to have not heard of the new product that Apple will soon be bringing out, then this post might not interest you. If you are unlucky enough to have been overwhelmed by the multitude of blogs, tweets and parodies of the iPad, then don’t worry, this won’t be a fanboi wet dream of a post.
We at Neoco have always liked to embrace new technologies and whenever something new or exciting comes out we naturally get excited. This happened with the iPhone, which we now make applications for, and this is bound to happen with the iPad.
The rumour of an Apple tablet has existed for over a year and now that it’s soon to be reality, developers must look at ways they can create applications or adapt their current ones to best fit the new format. Thankfully, the iPad runs the same operating system and contains the same frameworks as the iPhone and iPod Touch so many developers can immediately get to work. The transition, however, may not be as simple as might be suggested by the fact that they both run iPhone OS.
It runs iPhone applications doesn’t it?
It’s well known that the iPad will run most current iPhone applications. Some won’t work due to hardware differences, some because of changes to the underlying frameworks.
The lack of a camera, which many expected to be included, means that all the fun photo adjusting applications become boring (since you must use an old photo form your library) and augmented reality applications (like those that point you to the nearest Tube stop as you look through the camera) obviously cannot work. GPS seems to only be included in the 3G model, so again like with the iPod Touch, this rules out turn-by-turn navigation programs for many people.
Some changes to iPhone OS 3.2 have curiously broken code from past versions. This is presumably an effort to improve the range of functionality, yet in the past they managed to find ways to do so without forcing developers to re-write their programs. Case in point: the Media Player Framework. It’s not clear whether this is just an iPad issue or whether it will affect all devices upgrading to 3.2, but essentially, the mechanism to play a video won’t work. In the past, the only way to play a video was to launch a full screen player. Now you will be able to play videos in smaller boxes, but you have to do so in a different way. Fortunately even if your application featured heavy use of videos, this should be easy to correct.
Then there is the size. Yes, it can run iPhone applications at their native resolution and, yes, it can scale them up to fit more of the screen, but both forms result in an appalling user experience.
At first it might be tempting to just increase the window size to take up the entire screen and leave the rest of the interface in the much the same form, but it should be pretty obvious that this will not make for an attractive application.
Because of these points and more, it is clear that users will expect developers to make iPad-specific applications. In fact, not just iPad-specific applications, but universal applications that work across the range of Apple mobile devices.
Design and interaction
For all their systems, Apple publish Human Interface Guidelines that describe how they envision all application user interfaces and behaviours. For the iPad they say that a few things need to be different from the iPhone/iPod Touch paradigm:
Orientation
If you spin the device round into any orientation and the interface must follow – this happens in a few iPhone applications, but far from all. Curiously, it sounds as though Numbers form the iWork suite for iPad will only work in landscape.
UI
You shouldn’t just make it bigger. As stated above, with such a large and rich screen this would make your application unappealing on the iPad. But it’s not just a case of aesthetics – Apple want applications to look more like the things they act model from the real world. Their Contacts application, for instance, is modelled after a pocket address book. Naturally this won’t make sense for all applications, but Apple is trying to encourage designers to think slightly beyond the traditional iPhone OS interface elements.
- Downplay controls such as buttons and drop-downs
- Avoid full screen transitions – present information in place where possible to improve the overall visual stability
- Use high quality, physically realistic graphics
- Present lists and their detail views together – e.g. the mailbox list and email preview are on the same screen side-by-side in Mail on the iPad
- Reduce modal interfaces (these interrupt the user flow) – e.g. avoid alert message pop ups by presenting responses inline
Having said that, developers shouldn’t attempt to make desktop-style applications – Apple still maintains that across the iPhone OS family applications should each perform one main task in a clear and concise way. I.e. an application shouldn’t sprout new features – only a new interface – and shouldn’t deal with a file system model of opening and saving files (all changes made to something should always be preserved, and only loss of data such as deletions should ask for explicit confirmation).
Actual Multi-touch
The iPhone and iPod Touch have had multi-touch technology for years, but in very few applications, beyond games, is it used. This is probably because there are few situations where it can be put into practice in a meaningful way on the small screen. With the iPad, Apple is encouraging a more touchy-feely approach to applications.
The crux of this? Lots to redesign for existing applications, lots more thinking/sketching/prototyping before making new applications.
Another worry is the increased fragmentation of hardware and capabilities of the devices an application is expected to run on. Fragmentation is one of the much maligned facts of the Android platform. There are so many Android devices with differing screen sizes and system resources that it is hard for developers to accommodate all forms. The beauty of the iPhone OS family used to be that it was simple but now you have 3 iPhones, 3 iPod Touches and 2 iPads, all with varying capacities. With new models coming out almost yearly, it’s foolish for developers to only focus on the latest systems and cut off the millions who bought one just last year.
What exactly is it for anyway?
All in all, Apple’s choices for the iPad suggest that they’ve carefully thought through what sort of niche the device sits in. The fact that it runs iPhone OS is great for developers as there’s not too much to learn and great for users as it will feel natural to those who have used iPhones or iPod Touches. They haven’t overloaded it with hardware features and focused on the software. Despite being both a hardware and software manufacturer, Apple have explicitly stated that it’s hard to compete in hardware – they will be matched very quickly by others. It’s software where they can claim to stand out above the rest.
It’s a little less clear what this niche is though… The iPad is too big to carry in a pocket / have with you always. In contrast, an iPhone would barely leave your side. The iPad isn’t the most convenient things to hold and you probably can’t use it with one hand or on the move. In contrast, you can type a text message on the iPhone with one hand while walking. Its giant screen will wow you, but will your eyes get tired of the bright light and colours after reading more than a few pages?
So be certain of one thing – the iPhone is going nowhere and will remain popular. But will the iPad succeed? We think so if the developer community can build great applications as they have done for its predecessors.
Filed under: Coffee Break, Cool & Online, New Technology | Tags: A whole bunch of HTML5 examples to check out, attribute selectors, Cascading Style Sheets, Create an animated pile of photographs using only HTML and CSS3, css, css3, CSS3 Examples and Progressive Enhancement, dev, development, Firefox, front-end, HTML, html5, HTML5 Graphs, Hypertext Markup Language, IE, Internet Explorer, Opera, pseudo-class, Pure CSS Coke Can, Safari, selectors, Star Wars Opening Crawl, World Wide Web, YouTube without Flash
You can’t go anywhere these days without someone talking about HTML5 and CSS3. OK, Maybe YOU can, but I can’t. So if you don’t know your pseudo-class selectors from your attribute selectors then here are a few links to the kind of things that may be appearing in your browser over the next few years.

Before we start, a little introduction to what I am talking about:
What is HTML5? the proposed next major revision of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), the core markup language of the World Wide Web. Or in layman’s terms, it’s the code we write to structure the web pages you see in your browser.
What is CSS3? the latest version of the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) standard, a presentational language which we use to make the HTML we wrote look like the design we created.
In short, HTML and CSS are the standards used to build the webpages you browse every day, and HTML5 and CSS3 are the future of those standards. Exciting eh?
Before you can take part in this round of future gazing, your going to need a modern browser, so no Internet Explorer people. Try the latest version of Firefox (download), Opera (download) or Safari (buy a mac). Make sure you update to the latest versions.
If you want to know what exciting new stuff your browser can handle, you can get loads of great info at http://www.findmebyip.com/ just navigate to that page and find out all about your browser. If you see lots of red crosses, it may be time to upgrade!
Alternatively you could check out Deep Blue Sky’s handy guide to HTML5 and CSS3 support – http://www.deepbluesky.com/blog/-/browser-support-for-css3-and-html5_72/
and now some examples:
Pure CSS Coke Can – http://www.romancortes.com/blog/pure-css-coke-can/
See what you can achieve without even needing the new standards!
CSS3 Examples and Progressive Enhancement – http://csswizardry.com/css3/
A number of examples of great additions to the CSS standard.
Create an animated pile of photographs using only HTML and CSS3 – http://media.24ways.org/2009/14/3/index.html
A whole bunch of HTML5 examples to check out – http://html5demos.com/
YouTube – http://www.youtube.com/html5
Try out YouTube without any Flash player, using the new embedded video tag in HTML5
HTML5 Graphs – http://www.rgraph.net/
Draw straight onto the canvas in HTML5. Get dynamically created graphs directly from your data, no images!
Star Wars Opening Crawl – http://www.gesteves.com/experiments/starwars.html
This only works in WebKit browsers (safari) at the moment, but it’s worth downloading the browser just for this.
That’s it for now. Happy Clicking Geeks, and see you in the Future!
Filed under: Ping.fm update by Neoco
So, good old Borris has decided to rebrand the captial! Is this just trying to push a sqaure peg through a round whole? With such an iconic image does London need a ‘logo’/brand NYC style? I’m not sure. All I hope is that the agency that’s been awarded the project is able to create a brand and logo that works across different media. Do we want/need a repeat of 2012? Fingers crossed they get it right!
Filed under: Brands & Marketing, Cool & Online, Design, Mostly Mobile, New Technology, News | Tags: Apple, Apps, beta, Digital, hype, insight, interface, intuitive, ipad, iPhone, iPod, itampon, jobs, magazine, means, new, News, publishing, quality, release, sanitary towel, steve, touch, touch me like you want me, what
OK so it’s what we expected – isn’t it? Maybe that’s the thing missing? Apple has delivered the iPad and it’s exactly what we thought it would be – a large iPhone. Maybe all the hype surrounding it meant it was always going to fail in some respects. Unlike the iPhone, which filled an already well-established need, there is no existing need the iPad fills.
The success of the product is going to be in the deals that are made with publishers and such like. It feels like the opportunity the publishing industry has been wanting and waiting for. The device does look like a natural digital fit for books and magazines. We’ve been talking to a few clients for some time now as to how to turn their print publications into successful digital publications. With the current size of the iTunes store and the press around launch this maybe the platform that gives each party what they are looking for and give more power and profit back to the publishers themselves.
The locked-down platform strategy will help the success of the product, raising the quality standard of the content and Apps as it has done on the iPhone. This strategy can only benefit the end-user who already knows how to interact with this new technology before it goes on the sale.
The tablet concepts that have been floating the net prior to the launch of the iPad all seem to have a similar solution for the user, which is to have a web ‘esq’ digital interpretation of a magazine layout. Much like the iPad itself, this is what we would expect. However, we’re going to want much more very quickly.
The content and interface should be focused around the device and the user, not existing magazine or website formats. Publishers and designers are going to need to get over this hurdle quickly if they are to help this industry cherish and grow.
The opportunities for such an intuitive device are massive, but it does require lateral thinking, better use of content integration and mix, and a client who is willing to lead the market. The device should throw up some really exciting solutions which I can’t wait to see.
Overall it looks like it’s going to be a very successful product for them and exceed expectations. I guess the bottom line for the consumer is do I want one? I know I do!
Filed under: Brands & Marketing, Hot List Clients, Mostly Mobile | Tags: app, application, Blackberry, English, ENO, Figaro Digital, iPhone, National, new season, Opera, version 20
The English National Opera has released an iPhone application that gives you details on the Opera’s current seasons. The application allows you to watch video trailers and also listen to streaming music from your favourite opera and is briskly updated with fresh information all year around. Thanks to digital marketing sensation Neoco and the team, this iPhone application is something that urban opera goers cannot leave home without.
With it’s growing fame, the app has recently been published for the case studies showcase of Figaro Digital on its magazine’s fourth issue.
Version 2.0 has just been released with updated content for the new season and a handful of functional developments.





