Linked List: June 25, 2013

Tuesday, 25 June 2013

Barnes & Noble Giving Up on Hardware ★

Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, reporting for the WSJ:

The bookseller said Tuesday that losses at its Nook digital business more than doubled in the quarter ended April 27, easily wiping out profits generated at its bookstores. As a result, Barnes & Noble said it would stop producing its own color tablets, in favor of co-branded devices made by third-party manufacturers.

Good luck with that.

Instagram Video and the Death of Fantasy ★

Jenna Wortham:

But while that shaky video that I took on the roof was definitely steeped in reality and definitely true to the moment, it wasn’t the version of the night that I wanted to remember or share with my Instagram friends.

That’s because Instagram isn’t about reality – it’s about a well-crafted fantasy, a highlights reel of your life that shows off versions of yourself that you want to remember and put on display in a glass case for other people to admire and browse through. It’s why most of the photographs uploaded to Instagram are beautiful and entertaining slices of life and not the tedious time in-between of those moments, when bills get paid, cranky children are put to bed, little spats with friends.

Look, and Feel ★

Dan Wineman:

Affordances are the baby to skeuomorphism’s bathwater. When they engage our instincts just right, they create an emotional bond, and the unfamiliar becomes inviting. Without them, it’s just pictures under glass.

What Sync Means These Days ★

Brent Simmons:

Or consider MarsEdit, which downloads posts from your blog. That’s by far the most important part of sync for a blog editor (though I could understand wanting to sync your drafts).

But the lack of an iOS version of MarsEdit is considered a sync bug.

I’m fine with this. “Syncing” now means not just syncing itself but the creation of multiple versions of an app that sync.

Just a few years ago, web app proponents promised a future where everything would be a web app, “write once, run everywhere” would really work this time. But the truth, it turns out, is that people want more different native apps than ever before. And web apps too.