{"id":8,"date":"2012-03-06T22:40:00","date_gmt":"2012-03-07T01:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/endlesshybrids.wordpress.com\/2012\/03\/06\/growing-old-with-the-net-energized-once-more-by-apps"},"modified":"2017-06-26T17:19:14","modified_gmt":"2017-06-26T17:19:14","slug":"growing-old-with-the-net-energized-once-more-by-apps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/thoughts\/growing-old-with-the-net-energized-once-more-by-apps\/","title":{"rendered":"Growing old with the Net. Energized once more by apps"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the last twenty years apps have determined my world. Early 1993<\/strong>: sitting in front of a Sun workstation I read an intriguing e-mail announcement from an Illinois college student describing a GUI application for X Windows\/Unix that combined Internet protocols (telnet, FTP) with the hypertext of the new World-Wide-Web system. I grabbed the code, compiled it, and was hooked on Mosaic. Within weeks I had started developing Web sites that created virtual exhibitions from text and images supplied by the Library of Congress<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Fast forward almost two decades: as a librarian, avid reader, and co-founder of a book design studio I had stayed very interested in the potential of digital content. E-book reading on Kindle or iPhone didn’t appeal to me initially (though now it certainly does). The iPad was a much more enticing format. But it wasn’t until I saw the History of Jazz app that I really grasped the game changing nature of the tablet<\/strong>. For some time I had wanted to break free of the browser. Apps on tablets are pioneering a path.<\/p>\n

Yet, the majority in publishing is on a different path, figuring out how to fit complex multimedia layouts into some variation of ePub formatted ebooks. The reason is pure commerce. It’s more economical to standardize on a format that can work across platforms or be adapted easily to do so<\/strong>. That’s a well reasoned argument for publishers and authors interested in selling books. There remains, however, a call towards custom development of native apps as a type of specialty in which innovative narratives supported by graphic design override standardized approaches<\/strong>.These more artistic books as apps might find a following large or small.<\/p>\n

The quest is whether there’s anything remarkable in apps. It’s easy to forget that Web browsers are apps as are e-book readers such as iBooks & the Kindle for iPad. Apps are software and all software are apps. We’re in a time when software development has never been so “easy”. So much of our lives are now lived through apps. Apps are forming the heritage of our culture<\/strong>. That’s too important to leave merely to commerce. We need to find the ways that apps bind to our experience of being human. <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the last twenty years apps have determined my world. Early 1993: sitting in front of a Sun workstation I read an intriguing e-mail announcement from an Illinois college student describing a GUI application for X Windows\/Unix that combined Internet protocols (telnet, FTP) with the hypertext of the new World-Wide-Web system. I grabbed the code, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[16],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1118,"href":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions\/1118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}