Another Media Revolution?

Last Thusday Apple held a small press event in New York City focused on some education initiatives. They had several announcements, including a new digital textbook format, a revamped iTunes U, and an updated iBooks app for the iPad. The part of the announcement that I'm most excited about, and want to focus on here, is iBooks Author, Apple's new tool for creating interactive ebooks.

Like most Apple software, Author makes what was once a difficult, frustrating process and makes it so easy to create a polished ebook with interactive elements, it's fun! Author is right at home with Apple's iWork offering, especially Pages and Keynote, and can in fact use existing Pages and Keynote files so you can incoporate them in to a book via drag and drop. There are a few shortcomings, but they are minor, especially for a first release version of software, and do not stop you from completing the task at hand.

A completed book can be previewed on an iPad, exported as a PDF file, or published to the iBookstore, where, similar to the App Store, Apple takes a 30% cut of your sales for hosting the files, handling the money exchange, and the downlaod bandwidth. There has been a lot of talk about the licensing agreement, as books finished in Author cannot be sold anywhere except in the iBookstore.

So what does all of this mean? I believe this is the first shot in yet another media revolution. The video and music industries have been totally upheaved over the course of the last decade. Somehow the print and publishing industries managed to keep their lock-in intact. With iBooks Author and the iBookstore, anyone can be an author and publisher. Ever want to create and sell a book of your photography? You can now, practically for free.

Media creators should be jumping for joy, as these interactive books aren't just PDF files that you slide across your mobile device screen. No, they include video, audio, HTML5 code, slideshows that can have interactivity and feedback built in, quizzes, and an open toolset so you can build your own widgets.

I agree completely with Alex Lindsay and his take on all of this. This is an exciting time - an individual, with very little money (did I mention iBooks Author is free?!) can create stellar books (or apps, or music), have them on the iTunes Store or iBookstore, and be making money. That means more individual voices are heard, which provides us with rich views of the world as even more people can share theirs.

I'll be sharing the start of mine tomorrow.

App Press

Click for larger image.

Late last week some of my photography was featured on a blog post by a company/service called App Press. App Press lets designers and photographers create iPad and iPhone apps without programming code. Their service allows you to create pages on a web application that runs in Chrome, with the assets stored on their server. Once you have your page(s) completed, you purchase an iOS app that allows you to preview your page or issue (a collection of pages). Once you are satisfied with your app, you can even make it available in the App Store and sell it.

I'm looking at App Press to create a portfolio app. So far, I'm fairly pleased with it. There are some limitations you have to work around but the end product looks and works great. As I use it more and experiment with some other ideas I have, I'll report back with my findings.

My Top 5 iOS 5 Features

Apple unveiled iOS 5 at WWDC last week. It won't be coming to your iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch until this fall, but I thought I'd tout the 5 features I'm most looking forward to:

1) New Camera Features - Apple has improved the photo taking experience in iOS 5 tremendously. The Camera app can now be accessed from the lock screen, saving a lot of time and swiping and tapping. They have also sped up the "time-to-shoot". Throw in that you can now use the volume up button as a shutter release and an exposure & focus lock tapping on screen controls, and the camera application has probably seen the most improvement of any app in iOS 5.

2) iCloud Documents - Syncing documents to the iPad and iPhone right now is a mess. It is not easy or intuitive, and trying to explain to someone how it works is painstaking. With iCloud documents, your docs are up-to-date on every device with no effort on your part. Plus Apple created an API for it so other developers can utilize it as well. Hopefully they take advantage of it quickly.

3) Safari Reading List - If you are familiar with Instapaper, then this one will be logical. Safari's Reading List feature will save an article online for you to read offline at a later time. Better still, they will sync across devices. There are always a ton of articles that I'd love to read at some point, and I usually either bookmark them or Favorite them in Twitter. All these extra bookmarks and favorites clog things up, and I usually forget why they are there. Hopefully Reading List will take care of this problem.

4) Newsstand - I love magazines. I'm not a huge reader, but I love the shortness of the articles, they great photos, and the ease of taking one with you wherever. What I don't like is the HUGE pile of magazines that form mountains on my floor. Hopefully Newsstand will make it easy for publishers to provide us with great magazines (interactivity please - not just pdf versions of your print version) and make it easy for us to download and manage our subscriptions.

5) AirPlay Mirroring for iPad 2 - This will be huge for a lot of people. I look forward to playing games and surfing the web on my TV, while using the iPad as a control. It won't be the preferred way for a lot of things, but sure beats having to find an adapter and cable and then being tethered to the TV.

So those are my top 5 things that I can't wait to have on my iPhone. Really there wasn't anything I didn't like in the announcement. There are so many good things coming down the line, it's going to once again make my iPhone feel revolutionary.