Web muster

Art

Occasionally in my life I've received a gift and wondered - what do you, giver, think of me, that you believe that is something that will make me happy / I will find useful / deserves a place in my house? Obviously Claire Howorth has had a few of these experiences, as her analysis of David Cameron and Barack Obama's art-swop is pretty intense.

Art/web

I've only recently discovered the Gerhard Richter website. She's not the prettiest thing out there, but she's (a) not built in Flash and (b) extremely comprehensive. I also like that the site creators have taken both the artist's ideas and user needs into account when putting the site together, as this note on the Paintings section describes:

Although the artist intentionally avoids classification, we have placed his paintings into subjective categories for easy viewing.

Web

This week, both the Powerhouse Museum and the Brooklyn Museum wrote about why they've developed apps instead of websites for mobile devices. Fascinating insights. I wonder if New Zealand galleries, museums, arts festivals etc who have not tackled the mobile interface question yet will jump straight to iPhone app development?

Writing

Two articles I've recently enjoyed:

Federer as religious experience (2006) by David Foster Wallace (found via this list of the 'best magazine articles ever')

I'm Comic Sans, Asshole by Mike Lacher

And a blog I've just started following: The Subversive Copyeditor

Slow media, fast delivery

I've just returned from a motivating and exhilarating time at Foo Camp in Sonoma County, just outside San Francisco. I would say 'humbling' as well, except I don't think I could have come out of it any more humble than I went in.

One of the most interesting sessions I attended was one led by Kevin Kelly and Stephen Levy on slow media. The argument is that in these days of gimme-it-now insta-reporting, it's hard both for publications to support long-form, long-term reporting, and for readers to find the attention span to absorb it.

In the session, it was noted that only one person had a laptop open. In fact, I barely saw a laptop at Foo. It's not unexpected that in a tech-heavy audience most people will be carrying either an iPad or a smart phone, but it did surprise me that laptops were so little in evidence. One of the nice things about the iPad is that it's far less obtrusive in a small group of people - the wall of the laptop screen disappears.

The weekend gave me a chance to get a little more familiar with the iPad. I still haven't found my killer app, the use-case that convinces me I need one. If I travelled more, that would be a different case. But as it is, for writing I prefer a laptop (well, a desktop for anything longer than a blog post or email) and my freshly acquired iPhone is quickly becoming indispensable for everyday checking up and checking in.

However, if my long-desired essay mixtape were to eventuate on the iPad, I would probably shell out. It is a good reading experience, and well-suited to long-form writing. However, I want more than to just surf the web and bookmark and revisit and happen upon and be linked too great articles; I want some way of arrnaging and describing and sharing them.

Further reading:

The slow media manifesto

Matt Jones on magic windows and magic tables

Russell Davies on 'printing the internet out and squirting it into things'

My past thoughts in the grandly titled 'future of essay anthologies'

The iPhone

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has launched the new iPhone (anticipated by 'industry insiders' since 2002) during his keynote lecture at the MacWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco. According to my local paper, in an article syndicated from The Times:

"The iPhone was unveiled yesterday by Apple's polo-necked co-founder, Steve Jobs, ... to near-hysterical cheering from a crowd of 4000 Mac enthusiasts, who had been expecting either an Apple phone or a wide-screen iPod, not both."

The new iPhone, which Jobs says will 'reinvent' the telecommunications sector, got its media soft-launch in Time magazine, in an article you can read here, which describes the genesis of the phone as a mixture of Apple wanting to get onto the tablet PC wave and people hating the little buttons on their cell phones.

The iPhone abandons buttons for a touchscreen, which they will be hoping will prove as popular as the iPod click-wheel. The iPhone combines internet access, iPod functions, a built-in 2 MG digital camera and video playback features with the ability to make calls, and check your voicemail in a fandangled manner.

The phone is being released in the States this year, but won't make it to Asia-Pacific until 2008. The Time article points out a few glitches - you can't download music directly from iTunes, there aren't any games on it, you can't synchronise it wirelessly with a computer, and you need to be signed up to a cell-phone provider.

This last point is kinda important. As Jack Schofield notes on the Guardian's tech blog,

"However, in the US, you will only be able to get the phone from Cingular, apparently on a two-year contract. Frankly, if I was going to sign a two year contract with a UK network, I'd expect to get a $600/£300 smart phone free."

Schofield's bigger point however is about how Cingular has had to conform to Apple's requirements in order to get this bit of business, and what the wider implications of this might be ...

Image from the Time article