1. The closed world of the App Store may be a mistake, but the Internet has enabled cloud-based applications like Gmail, Flickr or Photoshop Online. While you cannot download these applications, you do not need to. That too is a powerful legacy of the Internet.
2. Many iPad and iPhone content producers are confusing Apps with Websites. HTML 5 allows the offline viewing of content. If the only difference between a media company’s Apple-approved App and their Website is off-line viewing they are missing the point. App store items should take advantage of something device specific — like the accelerometer or the microphone. Otherwise just make a Web app.
3. Flash has nothing to do with the legacy of the Internet. Flash technology is every bit the inaccessible Gated Community that the Apple App store is. Worse still, Flash makes Web-content inaccessible and violates most Web standards. If anything Apple, inadvertently, may be saving the Internet.
4. Apple is not marketing the iPad as a replacement for a laptop or netbook. An issue not widely discussed is the fact that the iPad needs to be synced to a computer running iTunes before it can be used. The iPad is meant to be a new kind of device — but most importantly an additional device.
5. As long as Safari still has a prominent place on the iPhone the Internet is alive and well. Will the iPad change the Web? Maybe. But if Websites have been created semantically, a new CSS layer will just present the information differently — everything the Internet is meant to do.

Merck has been publishing it’s Manual since the late 1890s. In the mid-1990s Agile Partners helped Merck publish that data on the Web. But even portable laptops are not always available when users need medical data. So in 2009 I teamed up with Agile Partners and Merck to create an on-the-go iPhone app.

The app makes it easy for home users to handle emergencies and for medically professionals to diagnose patient symptoms.

The Home Edition version of the app has been a regular in the iTunes Store’s What’s Hot list. Here are some of the things reviewers have said about the app design:

• iMedicalApps: What I liked:
  • - Navigation and User Interface are beautifully designed
  • - Ability to E-mail or copy portions of selected articles is a nice touch
  • - Bookmarking of your favorite articles
  • - Can manipulate text size
  • - Could see this actually improving a patient-physician relationship
• MedTapp: Thumbs up for…
  • - easy navigation
  • - neat interface
• The New York Times Gadget Blog: If you are think you suffer from something slightly more exotic, the Merck Manual of Medical Information is now available as a $9.99 application for the iPhone. It lists enough illnesses to stump even Dr. Gregory House. it covers everything from Abetalipoproteinemia to Zollinger-Ellison Syndrome. A section on Emergencies and injuries offers practical information on treating everything from life-threatening injuries to bug bites.

For 12 weeks almost a dozen Medill graduate students and a similar number of computer science students explored these questions while they created potentially industry changing applications.

In a class I co-directed with Dr. Kris Hammond and Dr. Larry Birnbaum from Northwestern University’s InfoLab five cross-disciplinary teams built these five exciting projects, this was how the students described them in their final report:

• Machine Generated Sports Stories (aka. StatsMonkey): an application that automatically writes sports stories based on box scores
• News Feed: an iPhone application that presents users with stories of a particular length and topic depending on how much time they have to read
• EasyWriter: a Microsoft Word plug-in that automatically brings up Internet search results alongside a document based on highlighted text
• Tweedia: a widget that can be incorporated into a news Web site to enable readers to see real-time tweets related to an article
• Twitter Publishing: programming that allows Twitter users to automatically receive relevant news links based on their tweets

The students used audio, video, photography and animation to tell stories of peoples’ first loves. Our First Loves is filled with stories like someone’s love of John Travolta, Spaghetti or ‘the boy next door.’ Users of the site are encouraged to rate each story (‘crinkle my nose,’ ‘want to cry’ or ‘want to create an e-dating profile’) and to tell their own stories.

The final product was built in the open-source web framework Django, uses Facebook Connect for registration and is available on Google Code for your use. The project went on to win an award from AEJMC’s 2008 Best of the Web and be a finalist for a 2008 ONA award. The two journalists-coders, Brian Boyer and Ryan Mark have gone on to found the Chicago Tribune’s News Application Team.

• • Featured content

  • In surveys and interviews users emphasized the challenge of finding the newest content on Poynter Online. Making that content easier to find was a key priority of the new site.
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• • Navigation improvements

  • Another major challenge was balancing the Institutes’ teaching areas against the kind of content on Poynter Online. During the redesign a variety of research methods were employed to craft the lexicon including card sorting and interviewing methods.
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• • Search efficiencies

  • Pre-redesign user testing revealed problems with the existing search. It was not sortable and regularly returned unexpected results. The advanced search was hard to find and rarely employed. Adding categories and returning results ordered by date were among the many improvements.
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