2012 January

The Bedtime Nooz

January 30, 2012 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

For anyone outside of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis & St. Paul Minnesota, the name of the anchor of WCCO-TV, Dave Moore, and the “Bedtime Nooz” has no meaning. Add to that people born after 1960 or so either missed it or were too young to stay up late on a Saturday night. My Mom would go to bed about 10pm, even on the weekends. My Dad would stay up so my older sister and I would stay awake and watch the Bedtime Nooz with Dave Moore. Our Dad would make a pizza about midnight which always seemed like some sort of shared secret treat.

WCCO-TV was the leader in the Twin Cities market and Dave Moore was a very serious, accomplished and trusted news anchor. This was in the day when the evening TV news — both national and local — were must-watch TV and just about everyone did. As such, someone like Dave Moore had quite a stature in the Twin Cities so having him perform such a loose, goofy and humorous rendition of TV news was amazing and a magnet for all ages.

Here is a special which WCCO’s heir to the Dave Moore throne, the now retired Don Shelby, hosts and is a fun look at the Bedtime Nooz. Worth a watch if you’re old enough and even if you never saw it:

Filed Under: Media Shift, Television

Too Many Don’t ‘Get’ iBooks Author

January 20, 2012 By Steve Borsch 2 Comments

I’m stumped as to why smart people like this, this and this are surprised that Apple delivered a high level tool to support Apple and have a EULA that says as much?

Apple is not Adobe, a company making generic authoring tools. Apple did not announce “iBooks/Android/EPUB3 Author“. If a content creator or publisher wants to create and ship a generic EPUB book — and have it delivered on multiple platforms — there are plenty of other tools to enable them to accomplish it.

With respect to the bullshit about Apple’s “walled garden” and how iBooks Author “locks in” people, I also push back on that too:

Did these same people notice that iOS development tools (i.e., XCode) won’t compile Android apps? Gee…wouldn’t that be nice if their great mobile tools enabled a code-once, deliver-anywhere scenario for app developers?
Did they notice a decade ago that iTunes wasn’t created to manage music for all MP3 players on the market?

Apple’s tools support their hardware…just like Amazon’s “near-forking” of Android does to optimize and position the Kindle Fire as a front-end to Amazon’s store (and I don’t hear any cries from these same people that they can’t buy from the iBooks store on their Kindles or Kindle Fire).

So to suggest Apple is somehow “locking in” publishers or subverting EPUB3 standards is ludicrous. One can still opt to use generic EPUB tools and publish everywhere, including the iBooks store, or use this optimized-for-iPad tool and publish to the overwhelmingly dominant tablet on the market.

Filed Under: Web/Tech

Will Today’s Announcement be Apple’s Pages ’12

January 19, 2012 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

Had an interesting conversation last evening at Minnedemo, the local Minnesota startup showcase. The focus of the conversation was around high level tools for web app development, mobile app development and, specifically, around iPad publishing.

My analogy was to the *explosion* in activity when Desktop Publishing (DTP) hit. My wife and I started a business to publish her IP since at the time we owned a Mac SE/30, Laserwriter and a copy of Pagemaker. I bought all the books I could on type, layout, graphic design, and here we are, more than 25 years later, with a thriving consulting/publishing business.

We (and many others) want to play in the iPad (and later Android tablet) space and no, delivering just a PDF won’t cut it. We want to participate with fully interactive and rich media content, and we need tools that do for mobile publishing what DTP tools did for print publishing.

One argument I made last night for today’s Apple announcement today is that it will be Pages ’12 and better, easier distribution for any publisher, large or small, to deliver in to iBooks. Makes complete sense because many have touted the current Pages product as arguably the best EPUB product on the market. The argument for Pages ’12 is that it will take advantage of EPUB3, a new standard with many more features (view the links in the righthand menu on this EPUB3 page).

In a nutshell, EPUB3 will enable many of the new bells-and-whistles in HTML5, layered publications (which many of the standalone ebooks display), and delivery of media types like video and audio in a much better way.

Why did I, with confidence, make a second argument that Apple will nail the high level tools piece for publication creation? Besides owning the dominant tablet platform by a long shot, I’ve used all sorts of high level tools. Apple’s Pages, Keynote, and even the oft-maligned and soon-to-be-not-supported iWeb, were the simplest and easiest tools for their tasks that I’ve ever used! I know, I know…there were severe limitations to these tools and there were issues often with bloated code and items that weren’t displayed properly (e.g., with iWeb: it turned all images in to .PNGs which made it tough for some who *had* to deliver webpages to Internet Explorer 6 users that couldn’t read .PNGs) but the ability to achieve awesome results made figuring out how to workaround using them worth it.

Stay tuned…today’s announcement will undoubtedly be interesting!