Exact Editions Blog

David Weinberger’s Joho the Blog often has interesting stuff about content, labelling, usability and web styles and fashions. Yesterday he blogged a devastating critique of Microsoft’s new music player from Andy Ihnatko in the Chicago Sun-Times. The bottom line (in Weinberger’s summary):

Zune sucks because it was designed to meet the music industry’s needs, not the users’.

Ihnatko’s review is convincing, but then I am not completely enamoured of the iPod either. But this comment about making the user … Keep Reading

The Guardian reports and the Press Gazette site confirms that the paper is to close. I suppose that it is possible that a bid will emerge, post mortem, but it must be much harder to revive a title once its journalists and staff have been let go. So this may be the end of a valuable magazine…..

Google have changed some aspects of their reading-interface. See their blog announcement.

There are a couple of aspects to the new style that I dont like. Google Book Search now lets you scroll down a book in the way that you might scroll down a PDF file with a slider. It doesnt help me that you get pages in a cut-off situation and not always regularly in the middle of your viewing area. Just because we have had this system … Keep Reading

Greenslade has a gloomy but well-informed account of the financial prospects of the Press Gazette.

It will be a great shame if this informative and well-written magazine ceases publication. And if it does, it will be the first time that this has happened to one of ‘our’ magazines.

One of Greenslade’s comment-makers has this opinion:

Funnily enough your blog has helped kill it Roy – people in the media want online news about the media and they

Many of the digital magazine systems that use a ‘file download’ approach allow the user to ‘turn the page’ herself, eg by pointing and clicking to the bottom right hand corner of a virtual page. The page then moves across the screen before your amazed eyes to lay out a new two page spread (or a full single page if that’s your preference). Click on this link to find a page-turning example.

At an early stage our programmers produced … Keep Reading