I’ve noticed an interesting trend in recent years; when old media (tv, publishers) try to translate their wares into new media formats (smartphones, tablets) they often fail miserably because they translate the formats too literally. That is they try to make a digital newspaper look and behave like a paper newspaper, and so on, without considering the fundamental differences between the way you interact with both mediums.
I was extremely excited to find out today that MUJI, the Japanese “no-brand” brand, which sells a wide variety of minimalist designed consumer products has just launched four iPad / iPhone apps – a calendar, notebook, travel companion, and an apparel catalogue.
It seems fairly obvious that Apple is betting the future of computing on multi-touch interfaces built around a two-tiered architecture of browser-based HTML5 web apps and local apps more closely tied to the operating system – iOS. Google are also taking a similar path, albeit with a more web-centric approach. I’ve been thinking about this recently and want to talk a little about where I see it all going.