Informationweek Influencer
David Barnard (@drbarnard)
- Twitter Bio:
- Former recording engineer now heading up an iOS app company, App Cubby.
- Location:
- San Marcos, TX [near Austin]
- Website:
- http://www.appcubby.com
David Barnard's Selections From the Web
Louie Mantia, Dave Wiskus, Marc Edwards, Seth Clifford, and Rene Ritchie talk about the future of iOS design, from heavily textured themes and skeuomorphs to minimalism and digital authenticity, and the evolution of typography, icons, and more. Editor-in-Chief of iMore, co-host of Iterate, Debug, ZEN and TECH, MacBreak Weekly. Cook, grappler, photon wrangler. Follow him on Twitter, App.net, Google+.
So Apple is currently unveiling has unveiled its iPad, an iPod touch like tablet computer that, so far at least, doesn't seem impressive at all.The thing I don't get here is... So far, nothing new. This has all been done before elsewhere. I'm astonished this isn't nicer looking or more interesting.Jobs: "It's so much more intimate than a laptop." Yes, Steve. PC users have known that since 2002. Geesh.OK, this has to be a joke. He can't really be this excited about this device. Maybe this will be a candid camera moment and all thus joyful faces in the audience will get an actual, happy, surprise. It's a joke. It's gotta be.Did he just show an
Time is money, and apps don’t last forever. You’re never going to get back the hours you spent Oinking that hip record shop in Williamsburg or Stamping the bars with the best absinthe martinis. The weeks you’ve spent carefully crafting that ‘Slow Jams’ playlist on Spotify binds you to it, and discourages you from switching to Rdio or Rhapsody at the bat of an eyelash. If Apple acquired Foursquare to supplement its lackluster Maps app, it could, in an instant, render void your hundreds or thousands of check-ins.Free apps are dangerous, yet free is the dominant business model most mobile apps are taking these days. The roadmap is simple: grow as
The web has been alight these past few weeks with the details of the Apple v. Samsung lawsuit. It's been a unique opportunity to peer behind the curtain of how these two companies operate, as the trial seeks to answer the question: did Samsung copy Apple? But there's actually another question that I think is much more interesting to the future of innovation in the technology industry: regardless of whether the courts say that Samsung copied Apple or not, would we all be better off if we allowed — even encouraged — companies to
The iPhone 5 is the greatest phone in the world. It has top-notch hardware with a zippy new A6 processor and amazing four-inch display. Its new operating system, iOS 6, is slicker than slugs on ice. And its ultra-slim body, an all glass and aluminum enclosure, is a triumph of industrial design. There is nothing not to like about the phone. It’s aces. Just aces.Yes, it’s better than the iPhone 4S or the iPhone 4 or just about any other phone you can buy. It’s faster with a bigger screen and an LTE antenna so you can suck up data from your carrier like Michael Phelps at a table full of pizza. But mostly it is the Toyota Prius of phone updates.
Until now, AT&T has always made exceptions for early iPhone adopters by qualifying these customers for full upgrade prices before their contract technically allowed it. I took advantage of this when upgrading from the iPhone 3G to iPhone 3GS, from iPhone 3GS to iPhone 4, and from iPhone 4 to iPhone 4S. Not this year. Not for the iPhone 5. Those glorious days are now over.I learned today that my account is only eligible for "early upgrade" pricing, which is $250 more than "full upgrade" pricing. So a 16 GB iPhone 5 will cost me $450 instead of $200. Ouch.Before learning of this fact, I was already considering making the switch to Verizon because
People downloaded over 30 billion apps in 2012, yet the average smartphone owner only uses about 15 of them every week. Even worse, a study by Localytics estimated that 22 percent of apps are only opened once.While the answer to that question is certainly complicated, a number of common mistakes companies are repeatedly made in the app on-boarding process. We’ll be discussing user experience and more at VentureBeat’s upcoming Mobile Summit.When you demand that users go through a sign-up process or hand over their social credentials before you’ve offered them any clear benefit, you risk losing them right off the bat.Consider two apps: Pheed and
iCloud promised ubiquity, all our stuff, every where and every when we wanted it. Not sync, Apple very carefully, almost awkwardly explained it, but an idea that was and is just as simple. You create something, it gets stores on the iCloud, and pushed down to all of your iOS and OS X devices. Not a server-side truth store, and critically, not a file system either. Unlike Google, it didn't live in the browser, and unlike Dropbox or the iDisk that came before it, there were and are no folders or hierarchies to get lost in, no Finder or Explorer to trudge through. iCloud, as Apple positioned it, was and is something new and something potentially
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