Linked List: July 27, 2011

Wednesday, 27 July 2011

Charles Arthur, reporting on these web browsing stats from Netmarketshare:

In other words, for every thousand page views by a tablet, 965 would come from an iPad, 19 from a Galaxy Tab, 12 from a Xoom and 3 from a PlayBook. (In market share terms, that would show up as Android having a 3 percent share.)

With 25m iPads sold, that would imply (on a like-for-like basis) that there are something like half a million Galaxy Tabs in use, and 325,000 Xooms.

Sometimes a Cigar Is Just a Cigar ★

Nice piece by John August regarding Rob Ager’s detailed analysis of Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel sets:

The fact is, Kubrick doesn’t have to do either. Audiences easily accept that the two locations are the same, not because Kubrick has perfected some form of cinematic spatial disorientation, but because that’s how movies work.

When Shelley Duvall is crawling out the window, what matters is that we believe it’s the same window inside and outside — not whether it’s a corner apartment. Kubrick isn’t performing some amazing psychological trick here.

EA CEO: Consoles Now Only 40 Percent of Games Industry ★

EA CEO John Riccitiello, in an interview with James Brightman at IndustryGamers:

Consoles used to be 80 percent of the industry as recently as 2000. Consoles today are 40 percent of the game industry, so what do we really have? We have a new hardware platform and we’re putting out software every 90 days. Our fastest growing platform is the iPad right now and that didn’t exist 18 months ago.

Page One: Banish Multi-Page Articles ★

Excellent Safari and Chrome extension from Josh Clark:

I despise multi-page articles with the heat of a million suns. The Page One extension for Safari and Chrome fixes them, automatically displaying the single-page version of articles for several popular news sites.

Installed.

Update: See also: AutoPagerize, which takes a different tactic. (Via Shawn King.)

Redesigning and Re-Thinking the News ★

Paul Scrivens:

Could you imagine watching a news broadcast that split the screen into 16 squares and they all reported the news at once? That is how most news sites feel to me. Newspapers always have one front page article that receives the giant headline treatment. The rest of the articles the readers have to “scroll” and find. Why can’t their online counterparts work in the exact same way?

HTML5 Fullscreen Video ★

Jilion:

Until now, the lack of true fullscreen playback has been the biggest limitation of HTML5 over Flash video. Safari already offered a basic fullscreen option for HTML5 video players, but this was via a non-customizable QuickTime view that didn’t allow the player to be branded or to feature custom controls.

Retrevo Survey on the Tablet Market ★

Interesting results, particularly the one showing Amazon’s brand strength. But keep in mind that in February 2010, a Retrevo study predicted the iPad was unlikely to be a hit.

On Designing a Big News Site ★

Thoughtful piece by Joshua Benton, responding to Andy Rutledge’s proposed New York Times website redesign:

The challenge of a news organization that pumps out that much content is how to present it all in a way that maximizes its value, both journalistically and financially. There are many, many beautiful websites around the Internet that, as lovely as they are, would be awful as an entry point of a news site. (Similarly, stripping stories down to just headlines — no intro text, which Rutledge dislikes for some reason, no thumbnails — may maximize typographic beauty, but it doesn’t do much for enticing a click.)

The core problem facing The Times — and all other big news sites — is CPM advertising. They need to “entice clicks”, so they wind up with overly dense designs and gimmicks. Just look at how uncluttered the print edition of The Times is, and how it’s designed to emphasize what is important.

With print, newspapers chase circulation — readers. With the web, they’re not chasing readers but instead page views. It’s a corrupting revenue model.