maxtm

I received an Amazon Kindle for Christmas, and I’ve enjoyed familiarizing myself with it. While I enjoy reading, I often find myself too busy to get around to purchasing books to read. With the Kindle, I can buy a book over the air in a matter of seconds and dive right in. That ability to buy content wirelessly, in addition to the e-ink display, is what I believe makes the product successful as a replacement for casual reading. Electronic books will entirely replace paper books, of course, in the same way that MP3s will never replace vinyl—but they will take a huge share of the market as it catches on.

One of my favorite features is that it automatically synchronizes the last page read with all your devices you have the Kindle app installed on. So if I am going somewhere and don’t want to bring my Kindle along, I can pull out my iPhone, open the Kindle app, and pick up right where I left off. Another great feature is that you can scroll to any word for an instant dictionary look-up that appears on the bottom of the screen.

And the thing I miss the most about real books is to be able to thumb through to figure out approximately how you are progressing. The Kindle does have a progress bar at the bottom, but sometimes the appendices are so long it is not a good reflection of progress. I wish it was also easier to highlight and bookmark pages.

Overall, the Kindle is great at replacing paperbacks. But the difficulty in highlighting and note-taking makes it a tough sell for textbooks, and the black and white screen and poky screen refresh rate means it can’t touch newspapers or magazines. Even the formatting and navigation for newspapers and magazines leaves a ton to be desired.

So, of course I, like many, am intrigued about what Apple is planning. Everyone pretty much agrees they are releasing some sort of tablet aimed at revolutionizing print media. And I can imagine a 9″ or so tablet with a full-color screen and 3G and Apple’s usability pretty much taking over the newspaper, magazine, and maybe textbook industry. It’s books that I’m having a hard time envisioning, at least without an e-ink display. I don’t mind reading a small part of a book on my iPhone, but the backlit display is tiresome and consumes battery life quickly. The Kindle, meanwhile, chugs along for a couple weeks happily and is easy on the user’s eyes. I am fascinated to see how Apple intends to overcome this obstacle, or whether they will avoid it entirely by placing their tablet in a different market segment.

Nobody really knows exactly what to expect, but Amazon is already bracing itself with two announcements this week: one, that they are moving to Apple’s App Store pricing model, and two, they are giving an SDK to third-party developers. Whatever happens, on January 27, it’s about to get really interesting.

Ever since taking classes in communication design, I am much more aware of the fonts that people use. So I was quite surprised today to see that the blockbuster hit Avatar—which had a $500 million budget—uses a free font for the subtitles that is included on just about modern computer, Papyrus, which is only a tiny step below Comic Sans in the world of most despised fonts. Here is a blog entry from Papyrus Watch, a blog that really hates Papyrus. You’d think with a budget this size, they could come up designed something a little classier… it was really, really jarring.

The New York Times talks about the use of text message donations for disaster relief in this interesting blog post on Bits. People had donated $1.2M by text message for the Haiti earthquake fund by Tuesday evening by texting “Haiti” to the short-code number, 90999, at the U.S. State Department’s urging. This message spread mainly through social networking sites. Many of my own friends’ status messages on Facebook reflect this.

I have long believed that smaller charitable donations can add up as long as the means to do so is easy and understandable by the public. Text message donations for disaster relief funds are proving to be effective, largely because people can do something easily, and at the risk of sounding cynical, without much effort. People are willing to act as long as they feel empowered to do so.

In a more personal note, I have friends who are in or are from Haiti. I implore anyone reading this to also donate as much as they can. Haiti is in complete catastrophe and needs all the help the world is willing to give them. Thanks to Christian for the photo.

Update: More than $10 million has been raised so far.

The 160-story Burj Dubai opened this week (despite some construction left to do), making it officially the tallest building in the world. The Chicago Tribune has an interesting piece on Chicago’s involvement and influence in the building. Now if they could only solve the Chicago Spire’s financial woes.

After 15 weeks, my first semester of ID is finally concluded… whew! Here you can see all my final work from the semester:

• Intro to Photography Final Photoset (flickr)

• Intro to Product Design I
  • Midterm Project — Ped Files (pdf)
  • Final Project — Redefining Dining (pdf)

• Intro to Communication Design I Final Work (pdf)

• Intro to Design I Final Presentation & Appendix (pdf)