Gizmodo asks: What would it take for Apple to make a new iPad truly exciting again? Apple’s device is, after all, two years old now, and beyond totally revolutionising tablet computing and bringing with the latest version a display akin to print, it’s now a disappointment, argues Sam Biddle:

The new Apple iPad is kind of a paradox: At the same time it’s both the best possible tablet you can buy, and yet, it’s a disappointment. It retained the crown with an incremental performance bump.

See? (Obligatory link to ‘everything’s amazing right now and nobody’s happy‘.)

Waah, poor us: saddled with a piece of technology so well-executed in its first two iterations that the current generation is a letdown by virtue of not being Earth-shattering. We took a timeout from our tears to wonder: What would make a new iPad truly different, and even amazing?

People not banging on about how the new iPad isn’t amazing, despite the fact it kind of is?

Apple needs something that fundamentally changes the iPad.

As the new iPad’s terrible sales figures prove! (What we need is something that fundamentally changes tech journalism. Possibly involving mandatory lobotomies for many tech journalists.)

It needs something that makes the iPad a different, better sort of object, rather than just a refined one.

Because users and developers love nothing more than established popular platforms becoming moving targets. Just look at Android. Everyone loves Android!

Look, everyone’s a critic. We’re trying some constructive criticism—a wish list of ideas for a new iPad that actually feels new.

I WANT A UNICORN!

Luckily, Gizmodo then produces a list that doesn’t require magic or technology that doesn’t exist. No wait—it does precisely the opposite.

Imagine if the next iPad could run for days without a charge.

Imagine if electricity was free and smelled of strawberries!

Just imagine a subtle solar cell on the iPad’s back that would at least slow the battery drain while you’re using it outside.

Just imagine your iPad turning into the 2012 equivalent of a solar-powered calculator!

And focusing on a more efficient processor instead of a more powerful one would let Apple squeeze extra hours out of your pad—and we’ll take extra hours and days of life over a few aggregate seconds shaved off app launching.

Right up until Apple says it concentrated on the battery over the processor and Gizmodo runs with APPLE STUPID BERKS WITH RUBBISH PROCESSOR SCANDAL MEANS ANDROID WILL WIN.

And then we get “make it indestructible”, “make it flexible”, “improve the camera”, “resist the fingerprints” (OK, I like that one), “kill the Dock connector”, “GO GO GADGET PAGEVIEWS”, all before the wonderful finale:

Apple knows it doesn’t have to do any of this. For now. It can put out a minor upgrade every year and sell millions and millions more iPads—so why try? Because trying is what made Apple the most valuable technology company in the world.

If you’re still reading and your brain hasn’t exploded, here’s what not trying apparently  looks like:

• A Retina display considered by many to be among the very best displays that have existed, ever;
• Massive behind-the-scenes improvements in graphics power to ensure the screen doesn’t compromise performance;
• A battery that’s massively more powerful than its predecessor, housed in a case with roughly the same form factor.

Apple has shown that it can take its best current product (say, an iPhone 3GS), disassemble it, and put it back together as something golden and incredible and worthy of spectacle. Say, an iPhone 4. The step between those two phones was radical. The way the 4 was built, the way it felt, the screen, the camera that was like nothing else—it was dramatic.

I agree. The shift between the iPhone 3GS and the iPhone 4, which was mostly about improved performance, a better camera and the Retina display, really was dramatic.

A fundamental change.

Just like the new iPad. Which. Got. The. Same. Kind. Of. Changes.

After a few more years of institutional incrementalism, these iPad press conferences are going to stop justifying themselves. With enough cautious updates, the iPad will just turn into another thing you can buy. There’s no magic future there. But the magic future is what we all want.

The magic future is what we already have.

Kotaku reports on a tragic incident involving two children, from a story that originated at WJBF. They’d reportedly been playing Call of Duty, when one picked up a semi-automatic belonging to his parents and fired off some rounds, one of which fatally wounded the other. This is, of course, a horrible and tragic event, but the inference from the reporting is crazy.

The case—which has led to a charge of involuntary manslaughter—is being called an accident. Still, the television station reporting the incident spoke to child psychiatrist Dr. Dale Peeples…

Here we go.

who said that playing games like Black Ops could have contributed to this terrible event

Because kids never played ‘war’ before modern videogames arrived.

“A game that is rated M for Mature, probably doesn’t belong in the hands of a 12 year old”

Neither does a SEMI-AUTOMATIC GUN.

While it’s common to dismiss media outlets’ convenient linkages between violent video games and crime as sensationalist, this time—because of the closeness of the crime and the gameplay—it might not be as easy.

How about this for a link: had the child not had clearly far too easy access to a dangerous weapon, the other child would not have been shot. This has nothing to do with a videogame and everything to do with the gun.

Hat-tip: Xander Davis

AppStart recently argued in favour of an iPad mini with a 7.85-inch screen, and the story is now doing the rounds on Mac rumour sites. Inevitably, they are using it to back up ongoing unsourced garbage from publications that should know better than to claim a wee iPad is definitely due this year. Or possibly next year. But it’s definitely due! Honest!

The short of the thinking in this case is that a 7.85-inch iPad would result in a device with the same PPI as the original iPhone, and would therefore conform to Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines:

[When] Apple was designing its first iPhone (circa 2006), company engineers determined through testing that the minimum comfortable size for an interactive element on a touchscreen display is 44 x 44 pixels. Anything smaller would yield erratic results. The pixel density used to arrive at this number, naturally, was that used in the first iPhone — again, 163 PPI. […] In layman’s terms, all this simply means [is] that no app has tappable input zones smaller than Apple’s approved dimensions. Whatever the size of a given menu option in a given iPad app, it cannot shrink beyond Apple’s pre-established minimum. It might take a bit more hand-eye coordination, but overall interaction should not be affected.

This all sounds great until you realise that one of the fundamental aspects of iPad design isn’t slavish adherence to minimums, and that all existing apps have been designed for the current form factor. In other words, app designers haven’t been thinking about what-if scenarios such as a mythical 7.85-inch iPad—they’ve been optimising their creations for the 9.7-inch screen on the current models. That goes for everything: multitouch interactions; UI components and navigation; text sizes; and so on.

Arguing everything would be fine if a 7.85-inch iPad arrived with a 163 PPI screen is nonsensical. At best, existing apps would be fiddlier to use, causing more hit errors, and the text within them would be smaller and therefore harder to read. Apple to date has rarely been about compromising user experience in order to force itself into another market segment, and so I can’t see it doing that with the iPad. Additionally, Apple’s clearly moving its entire iOS line to pin-sharp Retina displays, and so why would it release a new product with a far inferior display to existing ones? Far better to perhaps power-up the iPod touch with 3G and improved electronic guts, thereby turning that device into a more viable iPad mini.

Reuters on Samsung seeking a killer design. Some great quotes from Samsung Mobile’s vice president for design, Lee Minhyouk.

I might not be at (Ive’s) level yet, but I believe Samsung will produce such iconic products one day. It’s not just effort that makes it possible for a new product to be a massive hit. It also has to be timely, and technology should be ready to make a certain design a reality.

I feel a bit sorry for Lee, but the way Samsung will produce iconic products like Apple’s will only be when it stops copying Apple’s iconic products and makes something truly of its own.

Mashable’s Lauren Indvik writes about magazine apps looking bad on the new iPad. She mostly refers to publishers who wanted to retain print-like magazine design and therefore cunningly churned out rendered PNG or JPEG files for each page, rather than using native text. Now the new iPad has a resolution far greater than that of its predecessor, these magazines all look like blurry crap.

Indvik lists a bunch of examples, stating they all looked terrible, and noted that Vogue was the sole exception, because the company

was able to optimize for the iPad’s “retina display” ahead of time

She then worries about file-sizes, stating that magazine apps are already big enough, and so we could see titles ballooning to unworkable levels. The problem is in the methodology used to create the apps:

Magazine publishers who use Adobe’s software all begin with InDesign to develop layouts, [Zeke Koch, senior director of product management of Adobe’s digital publishing arm] explained. Those layouts can then be exported in three different kinds of formats: as images (.png or .jpg), PDF or HTML. Different kinds of files — images, for instance, or video and audio files — are embedded within those larger file types.

Since magazines began publishing on tablets, “virtually all” publishers have chosen to export their digital editions as PNG (.png) files, Koch said. “The primary reason they did that is because the fidelity is perfect. What you see on the desktop when you’re designing is exactly what you see on the iPad when you’re finished. Images are the fastest thing to load, and if you’re trying to create a quick, effortless browsing experience, images are the way to do that,” he explained.

One of the magazines I write for, Tap!, took a wildly different approach. Instead of designing its app by thinking like magazine designers, the team started with a blank canvas and designed an app (YouTube). It developed a publishing platform that works on the iPad (TechRadar), to create a digital magazine for the iPad. The net result is that Tap! looks great on the new iPad, largely because it’s using native text rather than rendering to flat images. It looks so good that a prominent UX designer I recently chatted with initially refused to believe me when I said the app had not yet been optimised for the new iPad.

The Tap! team isn’t blind to Apple’s new device. It is working to optimise those relatively few components that require optimising for the next issue, but because of the nature of the app itself, it will grow rather more subtly than its contemporaries. To my mind, this is a way forward: create something new and don’t root yourself in publishing’s past. This is why the following claim from Indvik’s article almost makes my brain explode:

What Vogue did — and what all other titles will have to do in the coming weeks — is begin exporting their digital editions as PDFs, said Koch.

Great. Bin any innovation in magazine apps in terms of navigation and new interfaces and return to literal virtual versions of magazines. And it doesn’t end there:

But what about file size? I pointed out to Koch that Vogue was nearly as large as Wired‘s first issue for the original iPad. Unfortunately, he said, magazine files will be larger for iPad 3 readers because the image and video files need to be delivered at a higher resolution.

There are ways around this. Tap! doesn’t hold videos locally, but pulls them down on demand. From a user experience standpoint, this does mean if you’re on a crappy connection you can’t watch the videos, but it also means that a few issues of the magazine don’t fill up your iPad. It’s about balance, which, to my mind, is what a lot of the future of publishing is about. Trying to cling on to the old ways of doing things will prove fatal to the industry.

Indvik does at least ask about an alternative in her piece, essentially treating mag apps as compiled websites:

But why not render in HTML? I asked Koch. Wouldn’t that make the files smaller, and give readers the added benefit of selectable text?

Koch claimed that publishing in HTML wouldn’t substantially reduce the file sizes. “In both cases, you have a bunch of words, and descriptions of where things should be, and multimedia. Those multimedia files are still the same size.”

I’d argue this is inaccurate. Native text is smaller than rendering text to flat images—even newbie web designers understand this. It’s also ignoring the accessibility drawbacks of rendering to flat images.

To be fair to Koch, he’s also talking about overall file sizes, because assets like video won’t drop in size, but I’ve already addressed this point. But he also makes an argument that is the crux of the matter, showcasing why so many publishers are working with systems that are not optimal for tablets:

He said the big disadvantage with HTML is that it’s “not very good at layout out things predictably and perfectly.” Rather, it’s optimal for helping people create content that will adapt to any size screen. [sic]

This pretty much sums things up: ‘predictably and perfectly’. Almost everything in digital magazine publishing reminds me of web design in the mid-1990s. Back then, I had to fight hard against people who would attempt to render entire web pages as images, because this would enable everything to be laid out precisely. Never mind the fact this screwed things up from an accessibility perspective, and also totally ignored the benefits of the new medium. But at least there was some excuse back then—browsers were basic and no-one had experience to draw on. The arguments were new. Today’s web standards, however, provide a ton of control from a typographical and layout standpoint, but things are just different to how they are in print. You define anchor points and containers within which your content can move and shift, reflowing depending on the needs of the user.

But the thing is, Tap! showcases that you needn’t just jump from PNG to PDF to HTML: there are alternatives to all of these things that give you enough precision while also providing accessible content that enables you to keep more than a couple of issues on your iPad before being forced to delete your entire music collection. Again: try something new. Build for the medium. Start with a blank canvas, not a readymade that essentially forces you into a particular way of working that is not optimal.

The article’s conclusion is particularly maddening in this respect:

So there you have it. Magazine readers need not despair about the appearances of their magazines for too much longer, as publishers are working to optimize their editions. The fix is relatively simple: publishers will have to increase the resolution of their image and video files, and export their digital editions as PDFs. iPad 3 owners will have to suffer longer download times, and won’t be able to store as many magazines on their devices as iPad 1 and 2 owners, but that’s the price one pays for a visually stunning reading experience, no?

No. That’s the price we pay for publishers not following Apple’s own advice and thinking different, instead choosing to cling to the wreckage of essentially deprecated ways of working.

Further reading: Tap!’s editor weighs in on the new iPad’s display and the supposed bloating of magazine apps.