Via Fraser Speirs, an article by Alan J Reid called Instructional Designers Wanted: No Experience Necessary:

Apple recently unveiled its digital book-authoring program, iBooks Author, and I’m scared.

The last three years that I have dedicated to pursuing my Ph.D. in instructional design & technology, which centers on interactive digital text, have given me a new perspective on the delicate balance that is necessary for classroom technologies to be productive and fruitful rather than novel and superficial. The seemingly endless hours that I have spent reading journal articles, writing papers, reading book chapters, taking in lectures, reading conference proceedings, and reading some more, have left me feeling as though I have earned some sort of badge that licenses me to make qualified observations about new educational technologies.

But that’s just the problem; you don’t need to be qualified. iBooks Author allows any Apple user to design and develop an interactive, multitouch textbook. No design experience necessary.

Reid’s text echoes concerns we’ve seen in practically every single industry where digital has marched (and, sometimes, blundered) in and opened up that particular discipline. We’ve heard the same arguments in desktop publishing, photography and web design, and now we’re hearing it about textbooks.

I can’t deny that user-friendly digital products can make things tougher for professionals, because there’s a line of thinking that ‘anyone can do it’. But here’s the thing: eventually, enough companies come to the realisation that everyone can’t do it. I’m seeing graphic designers I know getting more work of late as companies stop faffing about creating their own botched attempts at marketing material and instead get professional designers to produce it. And online, web designers are once again finding that companies are understanding that, no, the MD’s nephew armed with an old copy of FrontPage isn’t the best way to present themselves to the world. These things are always cyclical, with professions mostly reverting to the pros—or at least those professionals who truly are great at what they do.

But that doesn’t mean we should ever rally against opening up creative pursuits to the masses. The fact that anyone can now make a website, or publish some photos, or—in the case of iBooks Author—create an interactive book is a fantastic thing. It means some people will find talents they never knew they had; others may be able to fill niche gaps that professionals and publishers cannot or will not; and in cases where funds simply aren’t available, I’d sooner someone bashes together a (hopefully) factually accurate digital book with perhaps less-than-optimal design using iBooks Author than have those they are teaching go without.

In short, empowering the masses is great; but there will always be room for good designers for things that need good design.

Pocket Link’s Paul Lamkin, quoting Samsung AV product manager Chris Moseley on a possible Apple TV:

We’ve not seen what they’ve done but what we can say is that they don’t have 10,000 people in R&D in the vision category. They don’t have the best scaling engine in the world and they don’t have world renowned picture quality that has been awarded more than anyone else. TVs are ultimately about picture quality. Ultimately. How smart they are… great, but let’s face it that’s a secondary consideration. The ultimate is about picture quality and there is no way that anyone, new or old, can come along this year or next year and beat us on picture quality.

“PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

Most of the techie portion of the internet is talking about the iPad 3, after the usual rumour sites starting posting components of what might or might not be bits of the next Apple tablet. One of the most common rumours is that the next-gen device will get itself a Retina display, and Wired today started talking about the apps Apple should demo.

In the context of the iPhone and iPod touch, a Retina display means a display where it is—for people with standard eyesight—more or less impossible to resolve single pixels on the screen. Instead of jagged text and graphics, the 326ppi screen provides print-like imagery. By contrast, the current iPad is 132ppi—better than most computer displays, but lacking when directly compared to current iPhones and iPods. With the next iPad, the hope is that Apple would up the resolution to 2048-by-1536, and while this wouldn’t have the same pin-sharp qualities as the iPhone and iPod, it would nonetheless be tricky to resolve individual pixels unless holding the iPad closer than is sensible and comfortable. So no playing Sniff the Angry Birds for you, if you want to keep that illusion of smoothness in the graphics.

But here’s the thing: 2048-by-1536 is a massive display size. It’s bigger than 1080p (used by the 21.5-inch iMac) and wouldn’t even fit on the display of a 27-inch iMac. Think about that for a moment: a 1:1 recreation of an iPad Retina display would not fit on the largest display Apple currently ships. But said display is driven by a powerful computer, not a svelte tablet that doesn’t have the graphics grunt of a Mac or PC.

I’m quietly hopeful that Apple has some kind of genius/magic/pixie dust and will reveal an iPad 3 with a Retina display within the next two months. But this is dependent on various factors: the screen actually being of a high enough quality and possible to manufacture quickly enough in large numbers; such a display not adversely affecting performance (after all, it will require some serious GPU clout); battery life remaining very close to the existing seven-to-ten hours you can get from reasonably careful usage. Apple is not a company for bullet points—it leaves out technology if the rest of the device would be compromised. We’ve seen this in the iPhone with 3G on the original model and now with 4G. There’s every chance we could see the same on the iPad, which could end up with a rather more conservative refresh, along the lines of the iPhone 4S (perhaps getting a RAM and speed bump, Siri, and a better camera).

I’m sure if this happens, most of the tech press will use this as proof once again that Apple is doomed, Tim Cook is some kind of blundering fool who should immediately be fired, and that Android tablets will soon grab 99.9 per cent of the tablet market. Me, I think that an iPad 2S would sell like hot cakes, and that Apple should only bring in cutting-edge technology when it’s ready. If that happens to be this spring, great; if not, I’m more than happy to wait.

From a Guardian article on Twitter Joke Trial:

The utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer says we should welcome the exponential increase in the possibilities for surveillance. If others know more about us, we know more about them. We will move to a free and open society. We will be less ashamed of our secrets and less censorious of our neighbours. Disclosure will bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number.

That or people will tend to lie even more than they do now.

Late last year, I wrote about the increasingly absurd nature of IAP (in-app purchase) on iOS. The subject was Hipstamatic Disposable, which offered a bizarre pricing model that made you buy new and shiny virtual digital film for your new and shiny virtual digital film camera. I joked that we’d soon see driving games were you had to fill up your car with fuel, matching prices to the real world, just to enhance the realism. Several devs responded on Twitter, with at least some degree of seriousness, that I shouldn’t be giving certain publishers ideas.

The thing is, I’m not against IAP entirely, since it can be used for good. For example, it’s a great way to offer new content, or a ‘demo’ of a game that can be unlocked once you complete a few levels; it’s also a means to enable gamers to skip ahead through buying extras (i.e. cheats), which is fair enough if your difficulty curve is well-defined. The problem is that too many companies are now using IAP to gouge customers; they look at the top-grossing charts and see grind games performing well and therefore implement grind-or-pay mechanisms of their own. The vicious cycle continues, even infecting classic games like Tetris.

If you’ve not yet played it, the new Tetris for iPhone and iPod has the most astonishingly bat-shit crazy IAP possible. The sad thing is the game itself is, in my opinion, really good. You get a standard sub-optimal swipe mode, but also a new one-touch version that retains the game’s strategy but works well with the touchscreen. Additionally, there’s a compelling level-based puzzle mode that has you blast your way to the bottom of piles of junk. I’ve not had so much fun with a Tetris game since the version released for the original Game Boy.

But EA had to weld IAP to the game and ruin things. The puzzle mode has power-ups and these are paid for using T-Coins. You can either get T-Coins by grinding away scoring in the main mode, or by paying cold, hard cash. 200,000 T-Coins? A snip at $99.99! That’s a $99.99 IAP. For Tetris. Or you could ‘just’ pay $29.99 for a 12-month T-Club subscription, which earns you 15 per cent more T-Coins with every game! That’s right: for just 43 times more than the game itself costs, you can get a slight speed bump to how fast you acquire coins to spend elsewhere in the game. Of course, you don’t have to pay, but without doing so, you’re effectively screwed in the puzzle mode when it comes to decent scores and ratings (which is essentially what any iOS puzzler is about).

This is hateful, but it’s becoming all too common in the iOS gaming world. We now see freemium sports games that demand you pay for more ‘energy’ that is otherwise replenished at a painfully slow rate. And similar mechanics are evident in other genres, too. To my mind, this is the greatest threat to iOS gaming, which could become known not for great games, but for the fact it costs tens of dollars to buy yourself a right to play a bit of a game, but only for a set (and short) period of time, regardless of your level of skill and investment to that point.

I’m really not sure what the solution is. I’d started off thinking about 1980s arcades, which rewarded skill, in the sense that you still paid per play, but the better you got, the longer you stayed on the machine. The thing is, such ‘hardcore’ mechanics would alienate many contemporary gamers, who don’t expect to be booted off a game for not having perfect reflexes. But ‘pay for a slice of time’ in a more general sense feels even more like a corruption of gaming’s purity. Perhaps it’s a sign of the times and of my age. Music continues a move towards a subscription model, with you paying monthly for as much music as you can take in, rather than owning a more limited number of albums forever; television and movies, too, increasingly drift towards such models. But I still fear for gaming when instead of you paying a sum of money upfront for a finite slice of entertainment, you’re instead presented with absurd difficulty curves or arbitrary limitations that can only be overcome by delving into your wallet. And even then, you’ll be expected to delve at regular intervals.

I hope this is just a blip. I hope that the efforts of indies such as Zach Gage and Jeff Minter, both of which offer fantastic iOS games for set prices, encourage other developers to take this path, rather than gouging. But every month I see more developers dipping a toe into the freemium waters, under the guise of ‘social gaming’ or ‘value’, when what they’re really doing is hoping our wallets will chunder coin vomits into their banking toilets.