No, it’s not how liberally Steve Jobs borrowed from Orson Scott Card’s vision of Ender’s desk — although that was a good excuse to re-read the brilliant Ender’s Game. But it dealt with where exactly does the iPad fit into the spectrum of smart phone to laptop computer.

For me this question involved thinking about how I would use an iPad. What makes my iPhone smarter than my circa-2000 Denso mobile phone from Sprint is the addition of some very computer/laptop-like functions: e-mail, Web browsing, music playing and other applications. So other than screen size I was wondering what is the difference between the iPad and either my iPhone or my MacBook Pro.

In reading the Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines for the iPad I found a distinction I didn’t expect. Apple tells me the iPad is NOT a computer:

Although iPad applications can allow people to create and manipulate files, this does not mean that people should have a sense of the file system on iPad… On iPad, there is no application analogous to the Mac OS X Finder, and people should not be asked to interact with files as they do on a computer.

But that left me wondering what defines a computer — at least to Apple’s user interface designers. Is it the exposure of a file system? As more and more devices share information over the Internet, the dividing line between devices that are computers and those that are not will get harder to draw.

The next generation e-mail using, Web-browsing mobile phones will be so ubiquitous that it will be silly to discuss smart phones — every phone will be smart. But that still leaves a category to be defined. Will the iPad be an example of a tablet — an internet-enabled device larger than a phone, but without a keyboard? A tablet computer? Or despite Apple’s guidelines just a computer in the shape of tablet?

1. Long-form, magazine stories are not easy to read on mobile devices. What is the future of long-form if — as I suggested — journalism’s future is not the Web but new devices? *

   I answered by saying that journalists need to be more sophisticated about serving the right kind of content to the right audience depending on the device the audience is using. On a smartphone audio is always an option. Doing more to reformat the text or break it up would make it more device friendly. And new platforms like e-book readers and tablets may be better options for long-form stories. The key is not to pretend that televisions are radios, that smart phones are magazines or that tablets are laptops. Let each device have the type and format of content most suited to it.

2. Another student asked if I was concerned that proprietary OSes (for the iPhone, Kindle & Palm Pre) and formats (he meant Flash) would limit the potential of content distribution? *

   The proprietary OS issue worries me less — it reminded me of the late 80s when software development was very platform specific. The marketplace forced developers to make the software cross platform and created common user experience regardless of where the software lived. Besides most users are really using an App or a Web browser to get data from the Internet so the content itself is still not locked down.

   But what about Flash and Apples iPhone/iPad? Sadly I wasn’t prepared to quote Jeffrey Zeldman: “Flash won’t die tomorrow, but plug-in technology is on its way out” or John Gruber: “Web site producers tend to be practical. Those that use Flash do so not because they’re Flash proponents, but because Flash is easy and ubiquitous… Flash is no longer ubiquitous. There’s a big difference between “everywhere” and “almost everywhere.”

   The issues with Flash will solve themselves — either mobile devices will find a to run Flash or designers will present their content without it. Technology issues on new platforms are real, but pay walls and and exclusive content deals are a more insidious threat because consumers, just like developers, can decide they can live without journalism if its not accessible.

But what I didn’t anticipate was the social consequence. I was used to scanning my friends’ rows of CD cases to see what was new or different. It was a way to learn about new music and about them. The iTunes-organized digital music that replaced my CD collection was more convenient and practical but so much less social.

The Kindle and Apple’s rumored tablet promise more of the same. I’ll be able to take my books, magazines and newspapers anywhere but they’ll be totally private. If I feel like claiming I’m reading Faulkner but secretly it’s Dan Brown no one would know looking at my bedside table.

I have no doubt that I will love how the next generation of eBook readers makes my personal library portable but I know I’ll miss the ladder I will, now, never need.

UPDATE: The New York Times has made it official that they will charge for Online Access.

In essence, news, which readers spent decades paying for and then a decade not paying for, would suddenly have a price tag again.

It would seem to be a difficult challenge to convince readers to pay for something that was free only recently and is free elsewhere — except that this is hardly a new idea. Bottled water companies have been incredibly successful doing just that.

Tap water had been practically free for decades when bottlers started pouring it into plastic containers and selling it for prices much higher than milk or gasoline.

So how could this model help media companies?

• Focus on readers’ fears: Bottled water is trumpeted as cleaner and safer than tap. News companies like the Times need to convince users that all information is not equal. The Times is better sourced and more trustworthy than its rivals.
• Pump up the benefits: Bottled water was prompted as a healthy alternative to soft drinks and coffee. Media companies can focus on the value of informed citizenry and the economic advantages of keeping up with the news.
• Preach portabilty: You can grab water on the go and take it anywhere. Media companies need their information to be available on any device, anytime and anywhere. Charge for information on new devices and platforms. eBook readers, smartphones and tablets can all be new revenue streams because readers don’t have an expectation of free content — yet.
• Emphasize the brand: Water from Fiji probably doesn’t actually taste that much better than tap water. Media companies like the Times and the Wall Street Journal are luxury brands but don’t really portray themselves as such. These companies need focus on showing their products as status symbols.

It will take more than just marketing, but it could be possible to get people to pay for news and forget that they ever minded paying.

At the time I didn’t really appreciate the full implications of the question. But later that evening on the phone with a reporter asking about Pay Walls I started to wonder: As much as we concern ourselves with Net Neutrality, should we be equally concerned about Search Engine Neutrality?

What will happen if Microsoft’s Bing search engine really does pay Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. for exclusive access to his company’s news content? Will Bing weigh stories from USA Today, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal equally? If I paid millions for the right to include the Wall Street Journal in my search results I might weight that more heavily. What about similar stories from the New York Post and the Daily News?

I am not excited about a world in which the search engines change their model from relevancy to exclusive partnerships. This may not be very different from what the Satellite and Cable operators do, but that model doesn’t work well for consumers either. And access to out of region NFL games seems less important to democracy than access to a variety of voices around important news stories.

There is nothing left to Steelers fans like me, except to speculate. I awoke Saturday morning to The New York Times’ Judy Battista who laid out the AFC playoff scenarios in one of the web’s best storytelling devices, a series of lists. As she usual does, Judy presented each of the three to five possible scenarios laying out each one like an arithmetic problem.

This would have been a great storytelling solution to a fairly complicated problem, except that Yahoo had already told the same story better. Yahoo Sports’ NFL Playoff Scenario Generator let’s users pick who wins each game with a simple, visual toggle. Or they allow users to predict the outcome of all the games based on 10 different metrics. The generator visually depicts the changing playoff picture as the user makes their selections (if only Yahoo used Javascript and CSS instead of Flash this would be a great smartphone tool).

At any given moment my television screen listed:

• The names of the two teams (the home team is listed second)
• The number of timeouts (three yellow lines under the team names)
• The down and distance as well as the playclock (super imposed on the field)
• The quarter and the time remaining in it
• The network and, in this case, the bowl name
• A crawl of the latest sports scores, scandals and other headlines (across the bottom)
• And, of course, the score…

All of this changes my viewing experience. In some ways it enriches it, but at the same time it threatens to distract from actually watching the game. This balancing act is the same challenge that web, print and mobile designer’s face. News organizations want to lure you to advertisements and other stories but they run the risk of enticing you to forget the very contact you came to see.

But this week I have heard of several big news stories from television only to scramble for my smartphone or laptop to learn what was really going on. I’ve come to find online news and journalist publishing through social media, like Twitter, are faster and more detailed in their reporting than traditional broadcast TV.

Tonight, CNBC’s Darren Rovell, sent — via Twitter — me to Urban Meyer’s resignation letter. ESPN’s TV announcers could only tell me he resigned. This is hardly a repudiation of cable news. But it does say something about how I consume news and information, what I’ve come to trust and how media companies need to reach me. And I doubt I’m alone.

For those who don’t know know me I am a professor at Northwestern University teaching undergraduate and graduate students interactive storytelling and media design for both the Medill School of Journalism and the Segal Design Institute. I also work as a freelance graphic artist designing Websites, print publications and mobile applications. When I’m not in the classroom I study human centered interaction design and online journalism. I’m an occasional writer and former employee of the Poynter Institute.

I hope to add to this blog a couple of times each week and regularly showcase interesting work.

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.