Bonnier and BERG unveil MAG+
The Danes tend to know what they’re doing from my experience but unfortunately this is one of those examples where theory is all that’s being exhibited.
Bonnier and BERG teamed up to publish a concept video surrounding the requirements of publishing for tablet format devices – entitled MAG+
According to the Bonnier website this video was primarily a launch spot for discussion as to what exactly issuing magazines to tablet format devices would entail and how best to fit in refined gesture tech along side natural, intuitive human computer interaction.
Once you’ve seen the video I presume there will be questions, of which these are mine:
- The hardware is designed to do the job of a colour ebook reader with multi-touch, video playback, connectivity etc, so how will this formatting distinguish itself from online magazines (usually free) using good web design. Ie. Any android based tablet would be able to find a site designed along these guidelines and read with similar interaction. With the publishing industry working on this sort of platform/system looking for revenue comparable with paper magazines – this will have to weave in to a web-based revenue model to work across all access points and not soley focused on ebook/tablet formats.
- Have I got it all wrong? Could this style of “browsing” with touch and gesture translate into web 2.5 – the start of sites being designed around touch specific controls?
Video and official blog entry can be found here.
Fedora 10 and 11 on the Acer Aspire One
I have been using various flavours of Linux on a variety of platforms for a couple of years and have most recently been using Fedora 10 on an Acer Aspire One.
I can only say that the out-of-box usage after installing from a Live USB image was 100% and beat the 8.10 Ubuntu distro hands down. The install was fast and simple, although ext3 file system was installed by default and the indexing used is known to slow performance. However with SELinux disabled for added speed and some fedoraproject.org tips on speeding up the SSD usage and converting the filesystem things started to look snappy.
Where Ubuntu had struggled with WiFi simplicity Fedora did not and networking on my LAN with other PCs was as easily achievable.
Now though, after a few months of toying, upgrading the RAM by 1gb and so on, I want more speed if possible and just an upgrade to the stable, new releases of Linux OS building blocks – Gnome, Ext FS, nautilus, pidgin etc that really make a difference to everyday usage.
This evening I downloaded Fedora 11 and this time I’m going for the xfce desktop varient that should perform a shade faster than gnome or KDE on the netbook. I’ll be uploading a post as soon as I’ve tested out the Live version and am comfortable installing to give a mroe thorough review.