If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area and would like to catch a public showing of TILT, please stop by the Palo Alto office of design firm IDEO at 5pm this Thursday, June 12. Given IDEO’s illustrious history, I’m hoping for lots of great product design-related discussion during the Q&A with me before and after the screening. Please stop by to catch the film, talk about pinball, Disney posters, or whatever else you’re interested in…
Hope to see you there!
Following-up on my earlier Space Mountain poster—created specifically to address the lack of high-quality Mountain-related imagery flowing out of Disney—the Vintage Disneyland Tickets blog proves me wrong with some beautiful stuff I’d never seen before.
This ticket image isn’t really done any favors with the its single-color palette, but the composition is great:
And this ’70s-era magazine cover really would have been a beautiful attraction poster in its own right, capturing that pencil-drawn, ’70s vignette look that is so emblematic of the era:
Again, check out the Vintage Disneyland Tickets blog for more info on these images…and thanks to its proprietor for digging them up!
We’re still a ways away from Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (June 9-13, 2008), but it’s not too soon to start the foolish and almost always incorrect speculation about what will be announced. Here’s my guess at what might happen with the iPhone.
Everyone’s taken it as a foregone conclusion that a 3G phone will be introduced, and by Apple’s non-reaction I think we can assume that’s correct. (If it’s not, Apple needs to start doing damage control right this second.) As I’ve said before, I believe this is less of an event than most think it is—EDGE network performance and MobileSafari rendering are a workable combination; better than most are used to, anyway—but analysts have been dying to find some chink in the iPhone’s armor, and this is the closest thing to it.
But beyond 3G, what will we see? I suspect we’ll see the iPhone line transition to two—and maybe three—distinct categories. What will happen to the current iPhone model is where I’m most confused, so I’ll start at the low-end: I think we’ll see an iPhone “mini”. The introduction of a mini model in the iPod line is the moment at which the iPod went from high-end curiosity to mainstream sensation; I think a cheaper phone priced at $199 is likely to do the same for the iPhone. What this iPhone mini will look like is a complete mystery to me, though I suspect it will leave off everything to do with the Internet in favor of straightforward phone, PIM, and iPod functionality.
Like I said, the mid- to high-end is where I’m less certain:
If the iPhone mini does come to pass, I suspect we may see something in Q4 that many thought we might not see for years: the start of a downward trend in iPod sales. Some will try and paint this as a negative, but face it: the standalone MP3 player was obviously a goner in the long-term; that it’s happening sooner than some expected is a testament to how quickly the iPhone became a stunningly compelling product.
Now the wait…just exactly how wrong will I be?
Update: After the fact, I don’t feel too bad, though my predictions would hardly qualify as clairvoyant. No new category of iPhone, but I knew that was a long-shot given the complete lack of rumors around such a thing. I was dead-on in terms of $199 being a magic price point, though I (like everyone else) was shocked that it was the 3G-GPS iPhone that would hit that number. I still think there could be a market for a way-simplified iPhone that does far less than the current model. Too many people think the current iPhone offers too many features. (They’re wrong, though you can’t blame them for thinking that way given their experience with other manufacturers’ phones.)
…happened this past week, on April 8, 2008. If you like pinball–or even if you don’t, but are the kind of person who enjoys learning about how things get built–please go check out the film’s official web site. And now at the low price of $20, this thing is priced to move. Pick up your copy now! (That is, if you want to…but I really think you’ll like it.)
Lots of reviews over the past couple of weeks. A few of my favorites:
Visitors to Space Mountain today, with its Buck Rogers, sci-fi-inspired trappings, might be excused for forgetting the over-the-top NASA awesomeness that was the style back when the ride opened in 1975. (Does anyone else miss this statue out front?) Hopefully I can jog some memories with my attempt at a Space Mountain poster, a ride whose previous posters have always seemed like afterthoughts.
Design-wise, I was on shaky ground: the style is Disneyland serigraph circa 1958, yet this ride didn’t open until 1975, an era in which 1) Disney produced few posters, and 2) those that they did exhibited little in the way of style, silk-screened or otherwise. Ultimately, I decided to live with the ’50s/’70s contradiction. (And if I ever come up with an idea on how to do a good ’70s-era Space Mountain poster, I’ll give it a try.)
As I did with my earlier posters, I’ve provided versions that you can download yourself, print out, decorate your wall, etc. The only thing I ask is that if you like it enough to download it, please either leave a comment below or drop me a note and let me know what you think.
Anyone wanting to take a deeper dive into retro Space Mountain should absolutely read show producer George McGinnis’ take on the design of the ride (part 1 and part 2). And to learn more about the actual experience of Space Mountain, check out the great Space Mountain page at Widen Your World.
Hope you enjoy the poster! (And a shameless plug: if you haven’t already checked it out, please visit the web site for my documentary TILT: The Battle to Save Pinball, just released this past week. If you’re the kind of person that enjoys this poster, you might just be the kind of person that’ll like my film. Thanks!)
On to the downloads!
There are two versions of the poster: a 4 x 6 inch version with no bleed (the color “stops” right at the border of the image), and a 36 x 54 inch version with a 0.5 inch bleed (the color leaks over the edge, so if it’s trimmed you won’t see any white edges.) Since either version can be scaled by your print driver to be any size you’d like, the version you pick has less to do with the size you want the poster to be than whether you want the bleed or not. To scale the image, on the Mac, just specify the appropriate percentage in the Page Setup… dialog. On Windows I’m not sure, but there’s got to be a similar way to do it.
For years, Java Web Start, Adobe AIR, several Microsoft initiatives, and who knows how many failed startups, have all tried to answer the question: does it make any sense to take all of that “traditional app”-development expertise that’s floating around in the world, and use it to try to write web applications that are based around something other than HTML? (Or, to characterize these companies motives more accurately: how can we own that thing that dares to compete with HTML?)
With iPhone apps, we may have the answer, and it’s due to the App Store and its highly compelling business model. What will make developers buy a Mac to write code on, learn Objective C, write to APIs they’d previously never heard of, and finally, pay (an admittedly scrawny) $99 for the privilege? Money. And the App Store provides an incredibly compelling way to make it.
I’ll now launch into an awkward analogy, but I’ll go with it, because it shows how far Apple has come over the past ten years: with the iPhone App Store, we have a bit of the promise of OpenDoc–small bits of code, sold quickly and easily for low prices, tying into larger ones floating around on the network–but wired to a business model that makes so much sense, it just slaps you in the face and dares you not to make sense of it.
We had to practically blackmail developers to write to OpenDoc. I’m not even sure there needs to be an evangelist for the iPhone App Store.
With iPhone apps, we have a technology that might just be able to deliver the viral addictiveness of Facebook apps, but combined with a monetization plan, something Facebook app developers figure they can get around to some day, but for reasons they share with no one, haven’t decided to.
iPhone Apps have the same persistent user identity model that makes it so much easier to sign up for Facebook apps than traditional web apps (where each demands its own userid and password.) iPhone’s App Store also shares Facebook’s one-click installation model. Combine that with the fact that your iPhone knows your credit card number, and there’s something really going on here. (It does lack Facebook’s “social graph” aspect…or does it? How long before we see iPhone apps that try to spam your Contacts? I mean, Apple developers probably won’t be as crass as that, but no doubt they’ll figure out some way to do this tastefully and non-intrusively.)
I posed my headline as a question, but can there be any doubt?
Just going through the Apple keynote, and marveling at the moment where Jobs tells the world that developers get to pick whatever price they want for their apps. It’s a nice “screw you” to the record industry, who have long asserted that they deserve a similar right to charge different pricing for different songs.
I don’t think there’s any chance this represents a change in Apple’s thinking. Jobs will credibly (though not persuasively) assert that the app market is completely different from that for recorded music. But is Apple right? It’s possible the App Store may show that these two markets aren’t as wildly dissimilar as people suspect. Perhaps “digital goods” are just “digital goods,” whether they’re recorded music or executable code?
Is it possible for both sides—content producers and consumers—to lose the DRM war? Because they both deserve to.
The content producers—record labels, especially—make it so hard not to hate them. Digital distribution is exposing the fact that they add almost no value to the music publishing process they’ve been shepherding for the past fifty years. But what’s worse are the people who insist that DRM is unfailingly evil, neglecting the fact that it’s an attempt to solve a completely legitimate problem, i.e., people stealing content. The biggest complaint you hear from this camp is that DRM systems “treat everyone like a criminal.” My locked front door treats everyone like a criminal. Do you find that offensive? You shouldn’t. And at least when it comes to copying digital content, everyone is a criminal. I don’t know of anyone who hasn’t pirated music or software at some point, and this includes my parents. Doesn’t that at least justify the need for DRM, if not with the sometimes draconian restrictions that can be tied to it?
Ultimately, I think the solution to many of these problems—especially with video, which needs a rental component in order to work the way people want—is a very permissive, lenient DRM. I frequently got into a debate with the other founder of Zero G Software on the subject of software piracy: my point was that our product, a software application, shouldn’t be any harder to pirate than our competitor’s product. If someone’s going to pirate one of our products, I want it to be ours. At least then we’d have a shot at getting some upgrade and tech support dollars, in addition to increased mindshare. I never won this argument—our DRM was always a lot stricter than theirs—but the argument still sounds valid to me. It would be nice if the music producers felt the same.
Amazon’s new Kindle is appealing. I haven’t used one, but I hope it works well. (Even if it doesn’t, one of these days, somebody will get these eBook things right and they’ll take off.) I especially love that the Kindle doesn’t come with a wireless fee. “Pay-for-use” feels refreshingly liberating in an environment where every product seems to require a monthly stipend from its owners, used or not.
Yet I’m having a hard time getting excited about buying a Kindle. The screen looks nice, but frankly, not nicer than the one I already find on my iPhone (both are 160 pixels per inch resolution). More appealing is the prospect of tapping into Kindle’s online library of e-content. How about a Kindle Reader for iPhone? No one would seem to lose in this arrangement. Amazon doesn’t really want to sell hardware, does it? And Apple garners another useful application for the iPhone.
For consumers, there’s the question of buying book content in Amazon’s proprietary .AZW format, and though I don’t relish the idea of DRM’d books, I have to admit that it doesn’t bother me, either. To wish that Amazon were publishing all of its .AZW content in some open format is exactly that–a wish–and to bemoan that fact is to sit out this current generation of eReading. Sure, I might have to buy the book again some day, in some new-fangled format. In the meantime, however, I got an electronic book at a discount price. There are worse things to blow your money on.
My Disney blog at LaughingPlace TILT Documentary blog
