I'm not much of a coffee table book person.  First, I don't own a coffee table.  Second, most of these books are bigger than my apartment.   They never sit nicely on a shelf, or fit properly in a box.  Yes, my troubles know no end.  But I make an exception for the Definitive Visual Guides and Eyewitness Travel Guides series published by Dorling Kindersley (DK).  If there is such a thing as a well-worn coffee table book, my copy of "The Universe: a Definitive Visual Guide" certainly qualifies. 

DK Publishing is renowned for its distinctive, beautifully illustrated edu-tainment books.  They are also known for nearly bankrupting themselves in 1999 by miscalculating consumer demand for 18 million Star Wars books.  Reminiscent of the great Atari 2600 E.T. game disaster of 1982, DK sold only a fraction of their inventory.  However, instead of dumping all the books in a landfill like Atari did with the game cartridges, D.K. continued to make efforts to sell off the extra inventory.  In 2000 DK was taken over by the Pearson PLC media company and made part of Penguin Group, which also owns the Penguin Books label.

But back to the books.  The photographs are gorgeous, the diagrams are rich and immersive, and there's just enough digestible, bite-sized nuggets of information to keep you engrossed and engaged in discovery for hours on end.

In other words, exactly the kind of content you'd want to consume on a tablet.

Thankfully, someone at Penguin agrees.  As I was doing some research for a current iOS project, I stumbled upon the concept video below from Penguin that hints at what an Definitive Visual Guide and an Eyewitness Travel Guide experience might look like on an iPad.

While not nearly as impressive as Bonnier's futuristic concept video for Pop Sci magazine, the ideas in this DK/Penguin video are far more realistic and achievable.  But you only need to browse one of their real books to see how nicely their content could be converted to 3D interactive graphics and timelines, video, popovers, and searchable text for a tablet.  I particularly enjoy the implied feature in the Paris Travel Guide that allows you to create an itinerary. 

Here's to hoping I can retire my cumbersome and dogeared copy of "The Universe" to a storage locker someday soon.

I spent a moment today adding a viewport meta tag to my Posterous so that it would show up nicely on a mobile device. What I saw when I went to test it on my iPhone was unexpected!

Looks like Posterous finally added some much needed mobile formatting.  Unfortunately I host most of my images off-site, so no pics in the image gutter.  

Bookmark management in Safari for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch completely sucks.

Yes, you could manage your bookmarks with whatever version of Safari you happen to be running on your desktop or laptop, and then synchronize the bookmarks to your devices through iTunes. That works great if you're one of the 2% of crazies that actually use Safari or pay Apple $99 a year for MobileMe. You could also import all of your bookmarks from IE or Firefox or what-have-you into Safari and then synchronize to your devices. Knock yourself out. I'm sure that will be a great use of your time and that you'll really enjoy regularly maintaining your bookmarks across browsers and devices.

None of this ever really bothered me, though. I don't use browser bookmarks anyway (does anyone anymore?) There's browser history and address bar autocomplete, not to mention there are more than enough online tools to keep track of where you've been, where you want to go back to, and what you want to remember. All of this eliminates the need to load up your browser with thousands of bookmarks.

What I do use, however, is bookmarklets -- those tasty little bits of Javascript that masquerade as bookmarks but add actual functionality and convenience to your everyday World-Wide-Web experience. Unfortunately, getting these bookmarklets into Safari on the iPhone is an extremely painful process. But that didn't bother me either... until I got my iPad.

Once I got my hands on the pad, I quickly realized I could no longer function without my beloved bookmarklets. I found myself surfing in a way that mimicked my desktop browsing behavior much more closely than when I browsed on the iPhone.  This meant that I now needed to have my bookmarklets for sharing, posting, tagging, saving, look-ups, etc. But the steps for adding a bookmarklet on the iPad was the same as with the iPhone -- an awful one.

The process is far too painful to describe in detail, but Marco Arment of Instapaper details the procedure nicely in his step-by-step guide to adding the Instapaper bookmarklet to an iPhone or iPad.

Basically, you first need to add a placeholder bookmark, and then edit that bookmark by renaming it and pasting the bookmarklet's Javascript into the field reserved for the bookmark's URL. That doesn't sound so terrible until you realize it involves somewhere between 10 and 13 taps as well as typing and pasting.

It goes something like this:  

Of course that's only IF you managed to find a way to copy a bookmarklet's Javascript to your clipboard.

And that, for me, is the part that goes beyond pain and crosses over into torture territory. Bookmarklets are created by putting Javascript into a URL.  This enables you to drag the snippet to your browser's bookmark bar like any other link.  Unfortunately this just wont work in Safari for the i-Devices. And if you think you can take a gander at the page's source in mobile Safari and copy the Javascript from there, you are mistaken. Furthermore, it isn't standard practice (thankfully) for bookmarklet creators to put the bookmarklet's Javascript on the page for you to copy and paste into a bookmark. In most cases that would be fugly. And stupid.

So I took a few minutes to copy the Javascript from all my Chrome bookmarklets and made myself a little iPhone/iPad formatted page with all the Javascript in a selectable textarea for each bookmarklet. I opened up the page on my gadgets, and in about 5 minutes had all of my important bookmarklets loaded into Safari on both my iPad and my iPhone.

I know this is far from ideal, and even further from anything resembling a solution, but until some smart person comes up with a way around this, or until Apple adds some better bookmark management or add-on capabilities to mobile Safari this will have to do for now.

I'll leave this page up for anyone who wants to add some of these bookmarklets to Safari on their own iPads or iPhones. Just visit http://static.chrisbray.com/bookmarklets on your iPad or iPhone and start tapping.  I hope this takes at least some of the pain out of the process.

When a 2009 survey revealed that 50% of their customers with smartphones have iPhones, the web-based company asked us (Schematic) to partner with them in creating a mobile strategy, and to build an app that would make buying groceries even easier for their customers on the go.

So that's exactly what we did.  

Perhaps the most complex transaction-based commerce application available in the App Store to date, the FreshDirect iPhone app delivers about 90% of the same functionality available on FreshDirect.com.  

Partnering closely with FreshDirect, we designed an experience that enables users to access FreshDirect's entire inventory of food and brand-name groceries, while promoting their proprietary website features such as nutritional information and daily produce and seafood quality ratings. We also implemented the site’s Quick Shop feature, which makes it fast and easy to shop from previous orders, favorite items, or curated lists such as "President's Picks" and "Featured Deals". The app enables their customers to start a new order from scratch on their iPhones, as well as modify an existing order or delivery time.

FreshDirect customers can now do all their grocery shopping in just a few short minutes wherever they happen to be — in a taxi, on a bus, or, if you are like me, staring mindlessly into the refrigerator.

Check out the video below that highlights the key features and functionality of the FreshDirect iPhone app, then go download it for free.  If you have time, you should also check out the Wall Street Journal's article on the app in today's Digits blog. Lastly, don't forget to celebrate the release by entering for a chance to win a gift card worth $500 in FreshDirect food, plus a $500 gift card to the Apple Store. Nine lucky second-place prizes will win a $200 Apple gift card, plus $100 in FreshDirect food.

On a personal note, I have to say that it was deeply satisfying to have been part of this particular project, and it was a pleasure to have worked with all the talented and dedicated people both at Schematic and over at FreshDirect. You all know who you are, so congratulations to everyone involved with this terrific product launch!

UPDATE: Our good friend Alex over at EveryDayUX has some additional background info on the making of the app, and why it was a dream project for him.

Plenty has been written about Millennials.  There are books on how to contend with them in the workplace, there are countless articles about how to market products and services to them, and there are hundreds of studies rich with data about their sexual behaviors, the causes of their ennui, their politics, and their favorite monster breakfast cereals.

Yesterday, the Pew Research Center's Social & Demographic Trends project released yet another report in their ongoing series about Millennials entitled, oddly enough, "Millennials: A Portrait of Generation Next".  The study examines trends in Millennial attitudes toward identity, work, education, family values, politics, religion, and of course technology.

Millennials are so connected to tech, apparently, that about 1/4 of them cite it as the most unique characteristic of their generation compared to other distinctions such as their fashion.

Over 90% of these creatures are active online, with over 60% accessing the internet via wireless and mobile networks. Their connectivity is their lifeline -- an umbillical cord that remains unsevered even when when they go to bed (83% of them sleep with their cell phones! Creepy.)

Millennials outpace all other generations in technology hardware and services usage, with a heavy emphasis on texting and other wireless related activities. 75% of them are social network users, with over 50% of them claiming to be daily users. This, compared to Gen-Xers (another fairly connected group), of whom only 50% claim to have a social network profile at all.

Millennials use Twitter more. They post more videos of themselves online, not even stopping to consider that kind of thing is just a little weird. 40% of them have no landline phone, they watch less TV than any other generation, and increasingly are getting their news from online outlets, citing Yahoo! and CNN.com as their top sources. Yes, Yahoo! No wonder that Yahoo! is moving forward with tighter Facebook and Twitter integration.

So yes, Millennials are connected to technology like no other generation before them. We probably didn't need another study to tell us this, but I'm not sure as technology developers, innovators, and digital marketers we've completely grasped it.

The trend will continue. The next generation will not merely be very connected. They will be completely connected. The services we build and innovate today will need to operate in a world without technology borders, where digital will be completely ubiquitous, expected, and taken for granted. Users will not distinguish between such novel concepts as mobile and desktop, or blog and portal content. Marketing that is not sociable will be irrelevant. A fourth "R" (Retrieval) will be added to the foundation set of basic skills (Reading, 'Riting, 'Rithmetic) and absolutely everything will require a sophisticated approach to discovery and findability. There will only be online. Offline will be a memory and embraced only, perhaps, by the Amish.

We tend to break apart our approaches to digital marketing into separate bolt-on components. Client A needs a social strategy. Client B needs search. We suggest to Client C that they consider mobile in another phase. But the Millennials, and all subsequent generations, will demand portability, sociability, digestability, and findability from all of the content and services they consume. Services that are deficient in any one of those key elements will be neglected. The experiences we build and the strategies we develop will need to be comprehensive and inclusive, and the successful digital marketer/strategist will need to stop thinking about their services in terms of narrow specializations.

The kids, they'll want it all. And for better or for worse, we'll have to give it to them. They are, after all, entitled to it.

Want to know how in touch you are with the Millennials? Pew set up a quiz to give you an idea of how much you have in common with them.

My results?

Wish I had never gotten those tattoos and piercings.

On his website, Antatoly Zenkov's claims he can do anything. That's a bit of a stretch, but what he certainly can do is make an awesome little Java app. Mouse Path (Mac version | Windows version) runs in the background while you work and tracks all of your mouse movements throughout the day. Just launch the .jar file, minimize it, and go about you business. The lines represent the mouse's movement, and the circles represent the mouse at rest. The longer the mouse is idle, the larger the circles are. Mouse Path doesn't recognize multiple displays. It will only track movements on your main monitor, but it will continue tracking as you change Spaces.

In a few hours you'll start to see some terrific patterns emerge. The image above represents about 10 hours of my activity at work on Thursday, Feb 12. The large dark circles were meetings or phone calls, and the smaller circles indicate reading, typing (Mouse Path doesn't capture keystrokes unfortunately), or trips to the bathroom/kitchen. The thick horizontal scratches across the top are obviously from clicking across browser tabs. I've also learned that I spend a lot of time in the upper left quadrant. No real surprise there.

Even if you're not a fan of the action painters like Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, there is something rather satisfying about unwittingly creating a personal piece of abstract expressionism while you point and click your way through your dull, digital day.

Art from meaninglessness. No mess, and no cleanup.

What you sold...

What you built...

What they needed...

The following are images of internet warning signs in the halls of a South Korean grade school.  I grabbed them from this week's Frontline: Digital Nation. Well worth the watch.

This one says "Constantly playing computer games shrinks your capacity to think"

Here, "Slanderous comments on the internet hurts my friend"

And the popular slogan "Our ancestors were known as the politest Eastern state, now we are the kingdom of internet etiquette"

Finally, the young children sing the Internet Song!

Lyrics:

While chatting, first greet happily / Use polite words in a cordial way / During the game always be open, honest and do the right thing / Be careful on the keyboard / I know who did it (be careful) / I know I am the internet guardian angel / I will be the first to protect / I want to be the first to protect / Though faces are unknown, it's a warm neighborhood / Precious Internet friend / Precious Internet friend (friend!) / Netiquette!

Microsoft's Surface is capable of recognizing items placed onto the tabletop, but with Pictionaire -- a project from Microsoft Research and the University of California, Berkeley -- digital media and common everyday objects found in a designer's arsenal are combined in a way that promises to innovate new ways of productivity-based collaboration in multi-touch environments.

Pictionaire (yes, it's a silly name) promises a system for design teams that introduces interactions for capturing physical artifacts and organizing their digital copies with functionality for retrieval and annotation. It enables multiple designers to fluidly move imagery from the physical to the digital realm; work with found, drawn and captured imagery; organize items into functional collections; and record meeting histories.

The setup is not much different than most large projection style multi-touch tables, and in fact the rig is rather simple and looks like something you might find over at Instructables.

But the key feature here is a high resolution still camera suspended a couple of meters above the surface. The camera takes shots of objects such as magazines, books, sketch pads and white boards and digitizes the content. Once the item is removed from the table it is replaced by the digital version. This allows notes, photos and other items to be captured and then shared in the collaborative environment like any other piece of digital media. It even allows the digitized media to be overlaid onto real paper, notepads or white boards so it can be annotated or marked up.

Additionally, the table recognizes input devices placed on the surface such as wireless keyboards, mice and pen-based tablets.

When a keyboard is placed on the table, a text box appears, allowing the operator to write, notate the media, and add text to other people's documents. Digital objects can be "linked" to keyboards by simply pointing and clicking with a mouse, and two keyboards, when brought into close proximity to one another, allows the operators to share the document being created.

Check out the vid.