The next miracle (v11.1): Owen Youngman

Knight Professor of Digital Media Strategy, Medill / Northwestern

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Monthly Archives: December 2009

Take that, winter!

‘Tis winter now; the fallen snow
has left the heavens all coldly clear;
through leafless boughs the sharp winds blow,
and all the earth lies dead and drear.

–Samuel Longfellow*

So let’s say you are not dismayed that Longfellow’s sharp winds are blowing (“the skies are chill, and frosts are keen”).  In fact, you’re nicely bundled up, wearing insulated mittens, among other accoutrements of the season.

And your iPhone alerts you that someone has just texted you.

So now those nice, thick mittens are causing you a problem: to respond to that text after you fumble for the phone, you’re going to have to expose your electrically charged fingers to the keen frost.

pogosketch2
Admittedly, it hasn’t been all that cold around here since about 1986 – well before the era of capacitave touch interfaces. But for those of you in Fargo, Flin Flon, and Fairbanks, I would like to alert you to a solution that appeared among my Christmas gifts: the Pogo Sketch from Ten One Design in Montclair, N.J. (average low in January, 19 degrees; record low, minus 14 degrees, 1985).

This battery-operated aluminum stylus, the size of a small pen, transmits an electrical charge through its cushioned tips, so you can keep those pinkies toasty when using your iPhone, Droid, Storm, or similar labor-saving/time-wasting device.

So grab your phone, your Pogo Sketch and your mittens, and head for Frostbite Falls.  Minnesota is lovely this time of year, don’t you think?

(* younger brother of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

It’s an e-reader! No, it’s a tablet! No, it’s . . . a means to an end

a30_businessIt seems that one of the questions I got asked most frequently in 2009 – at weddings, in email, in the church narthex, at Northwestern – was some version of “Should I get a Kindle?”  Even people who aren’t sure assume that I have one (and indeed, thanks to the generosity of friends, I have a couple).

The most recent version of the query came from Tribune literary editor Liz Taylor, who wondered if I could write a piece for the Printers Row pages of the Saturday Tribune on “why you use it, and maybe some tips . . . but as a WORD person, who loves books no matter what the form.” Well, sure. You can see the result, from the Dec. 26 edition, here.

Meanwhile, it seems that there were nearly as many articles on e-readers published this Christmas season as there were books to consume on them.  Christmas morning, for instance, the Trib business section reported on shortages and / or delayed launches of several Kindle competitors; on Christmas Eve morning the NYT’s “Bits” blog used an interview with Jeff Bezos and some data mining of customer comments to lay out a reason why all those competitors were rushing to get into the market.  It’s getting to the point that covering e-readers is like covering presidential politics: lots of focus on the horse race, very little on either the technology or the use case.

Which is why I probably enjoyed the Economist’s Dec. 12th piece, “Read all about it,” more than most.  It’s mostly about the display technology behind the readers; as the piece’s pullout summary puts it, “Readers of electronic books must choose between long battery life or vibrant, living colour. Could they have both?”  This is the place to go if you want to read about choleristic LCD’s and electophoretic displays, among other contenders to provide an answer to that question . . . while responsibly pointing out that “in the history of ingenious display technologies, only a handful have ever made it into mass production.”

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Was that a year? Well, it was 50 weeks of one.

There were still two weeks left to go until 2010, but on Dec. 17 I bravely joined Michael Miner of the Reader and Mark Fitzgerald of Editor & Publisher on Milt Rosenberg’s “Extension 720″ on WGN Radio to discuss the year in Chicago media.

If you are looking for two hours of background chatter as you organize gift receipts and packages for an afternoon of exchanging and refunding at the mall, you have come to the right place.

Extension 720 Uncut Podcast 12-17-09 Part 1 – WGN Radio.

Extension 720 Uncut Podcast 12-17-09 Part 2 – WGN Radio.