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Software

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Digits Calculator for iPad

Digits Calculator for iPad was designed and programmed by Joshua Distler. I love this app. simply for the fact that it has a great UI without succumbing to the use 'skeuomorphic' design cues like many of Apples own software. I find the trend visually tiring and at times distasteful. Digits Calculator is set in Helvetica, features changeable background colors, a scrolling history tape, undo/scrollback, autosave and aspect ratios from landscape to portrait.

Digits Calculator for iPad. Via app.itize.us.

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City Poems: Location Based Poetry

Poet and journalist Vicor Keegan writes in the Guardian about his adventures in publishing his first app for the iPhone. His app., City Poems, is an inventive use of location based data and will provide a whole new experience to the streets of London. His description of City Poems:

City Poems - published today - ... uses satellite navigation to guide culture vultures and tourists alike through the streets of central London poem by poem. After weeks of researching poems about the city, I realised that you can learn more about the past life of a city from poems than from most guide books and histories. Wherever you are standing in London (or New York for that matter) with an iPhone (or iPod Touch or iPad) in your hand it will tell you how many metres you are away from places and events that poems have been written about.

They include the execution of the criminal Jonathan Wild (one of the inspirations for John Gay's The Beggar's Opera), public burnings in Smithfield ("His guts filled a barrel") or the curious stories behind the statues in Trafalgar Square, which I had passed by in ignorance for many decades...

City Poems is available on iTunes. Via Openculture.

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Scolu - Aquatic creatures on mobile devices

Scolu begins as an interactive aquarium, populated by virtual creatures. As a gateway between digital life and physical life, the aquarium is the starting point of a journey that will eventually lead to the four corners of the planet. Moving from iPhone to iPhone, from pocket to pocket, the virtual creatures form a community that is both real and virtual, connecting human beings and virtual creatures through physical contact. The experience is thereby prolonged beyond the walls of the exhibition and seeks to spread itself well beyond its source.

Mobilebehavior makes a point about how these type of interactions open up the possibility of sharing digital objects in a physical way. Imagine an app. that allows kids to collect and share their Dinosaur King* (古代王者恐竜キング Kodai Ōja Kyōryū Kingu?) cards like they do so frequently now. If someone build an app. that would allowed for collecting, sharing and playing with these characters, every kid in Taiwan would want an iPhone.

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Exquisite Clock iPhone app

Another great clock app. for the iPhone to add to my collection. The Exquisite Clock iPhone app embeds the idea that every user can carry their own exquisite clock time display and at the same time become a number collector for the project. The project is based on the idea that time is everywhere and that people can share their vision of time. Through their website, users are invited to collect and upload images of numbers that can be found in different contexts around them - objects, surfaces, landscapes, cables... anything that has a resemblance to a number.

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Analog Digital Clock iPhone App

One of my favorite uses for the iPhone is as a clock or alarm. In fact other than checking email, or browsing the web, the clock apps I have get more use than anything else. Via Mocoloco, Maartin Baas' Analog Digital Clock, the next installment in the Dutch designers "Real Time" series, shows the current time by someone actually painting and erasing the digits. It's amazing to look at but takes on a whole new meaning when you realize that this was accomplished by an actor in real time over the course of 12 hours.

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What if the real problem with app stores is what they are selling?

William Hook photo

Rachel Hinman pressents some interesting ideas in her article, Discovering the Chiaroscuro of Mobile, which ultimately call into question the very concept of mobile applications. She looks to historical precedents in art and wonders if mobile applications will follow similar arcs of change.

Data is similar to physical form in that it has perspective. We think about it along lines of place, time, and social dimensions... yet mobile applications rarely allow us to truly experience the multi-dimensional aspects of information. Instead, similar to Medieval art, mobile applications flatten data. Users are forced to either burrow deeply into single application or pogo stick across a host of lightweight applications, often with no through lines for the data. As we begin to prism data through more and more devices - televisions, car dashboards, screens in public spaces - the application model becomes brittle. It locks us into a way of thinking about information that doesn't accurately represent the multi-dimensional ways we perceive and use it.

What if the app stores and "wild west" application development we're seeing today in the mobile space is a re-enactment of the evolution of the web? What if mobile applications we download through Apple's app store are the "brochureware" of what we will experience five years from now? What if applications are a borrowed and broken model we'll ride out until the "perspective techniques" of data representation and manipulation in a mobile context are discovered and celebrated.

If applications go away, what will replace them? Compelling data visualizations? Adaptive interfaces?

Discovering the Chiaroscuro of Mobile [June, 2009]

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CloqWork iPhone Clock App.

I think it's a bit hard to read but my wife absolutely loves CloqWork, an illustrated clock app where the time is shown using animated flowers thrown by a small cute character at the bottom of the screen. She's only had it a short time but the only time the app. hasn't been running is the few times she has sent an email. Looks great.

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Popular Science+ - a new way to experience magazines

I've been coming back to the fantastic Mag+ concept that was released last year by BERG and Bonnier trying to synthesize their ideas with others I have seen. They have since recently developed an iPad version of Popular Science based on that work. I'm not sure if this is the future of publishing but it is a completely new way to experience magazines.

Here is the original concept they presented:

We find that the graphical page-turning metaphors that you see quite frequently in web-based e-magazine readers are not terribly believable, and they don't feel very honest to the form of the screen. [...] Scrolling systems are more appropriate to what we're dealing with.

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Reflect by Joshua Davis

In my work I derive huge satisfaction from creating discrete shape and color palettes and then writing algorithms that assemble the pieces into randomized, whole compositions. Chance is not always pretty, but it is fun. Take a walk, or rather design, in my shoes. -Joshua Davis

Create art that looks like what Joshua Davis would create. Reflect, an iPhone application released last year from one of the original web design rock stars Joshua Davis, encourages participants to explore the world of algorithmic art from the comfort of their iPhone. The app. gives you the ability to work with shapes and colors and then view them through a reflective kaleidoscopic. As each generated piece is relatively different, it effectively turns your iPhone into your own personal gallery of original art. This is a great way to exercise your creativity and/or pass some time with a fun activity during an idle moment.

Reflect by Joshua Davis

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Travel app: DaylightCal

Perfect for the traveling photographer and those seeking the sun, DaylightCal visualises the duration, angle and quality of sunlight wherever you are. Combining worldwide weather data and astronomical data, the application shows you how much daylight you will have on any given day in any location - and what quality it will have. I love the aesthetic.

DaylightCal by Bureau for Visual Affairs

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