Materials science and the future of publishing
Archive for June, 2010
Second thoughts on H.264
Jun 29th
Looking to send video to an iPad? It’s more complicated than I first thought.
- MPEG-LA Considering Patent Pool for VP8/WebM and X264 developer says Google’s new VP8 WebM codec is a mess – VP8 may have patent issues in addition to being a bit of a messy spec.
- Why Flash Isn’t Going Anywhere, iPad Be Damned – Moving from the Flash plug-in to the H.264 codec is like moving backward — from Flash to a more expensive Flash.
- HTML5 video and H.264 – what history tells us and why we’re standing with the web – “Much like MP3, H.264 is currently liberally licensed and also has a license that changes from year to year, depending on market conditions. This means that something that’s free today might not be free tomorrow. Like sending an H.264 file over the Internet.”
- No, you can’t do that with H.264 – Confusing licenses may limit what can be done commercially with increasingly popular video codecs like that used to deliver video to the iPad, H.264.
Update: After publishing this, John Harding of YouTube posted a defense of Flash as the primary means of YouTube’s video delivery on his company’s API Blog: Flash and the HTML5 <video> tag. This debate isn’t going away.
HTML5? Yahoo!
Jun 28th
The Yahoo! Entertainment app for the iPad is based on HTML5, but it looks like the hotly anticipated Sports Illustrated app falls a bit short of the promise of the concept.
- Sports Illustrated Releases Apple iPad App – Sports Illustrated shows how difficult it is to execute the iPad magazine app that we’re all (still) waiting for. The SI app is built on the same “backbone” as the Time app, from The Wonder Factory and WoodWing Software. Chris Hercik, SI creative director, also answers a few questions in an accompanying video.
- Is That HTML5 in Your App? – Yahoo! Product Engineer Travis Young gives an overview of how the Yahoo! Entertainment App for the iPad is based on HTML5.
- HTML5 – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – Just in case you wanted a semiofficial definition of what HTML5 actually is.
- Papers for iPad – The popular alternative PDF library app for OS X, on your iPad.
- Gourmet Magazine Revived for the iPad – Can a shuttered magazine find a new life on the iPad?
HTML, ePub, apps, or Adobe Digital Editions?
Jun 22nd
HTML, ePub, apps, or proprietary formats: What’s the best way of getting content into readers’ readers?
- E-Book Apps: You’re Doing It Wrong – Imagine that, in addition to listening to music in iTunes (or Windows Media Player, or whatever), there were some albums that you had to install. When you wanted to listen to those albums, you’d need to fire up your special Thriller, Dark Side of the Moon, or Rubber Soul program.
- Book and Beyond – Premium ebooks from Random House – The extra content is designed to be used with Adobe® Digital Editions on a computer, as they require extra processing power to display! The extra content cannot be used on the Sony Reader or other hand held devices, as they do not have the capability to display the material.
- VQR Now Available for the iPad – We have produced what we believe to be the most advanced ePub available. Period.
- iPad Revisited: 5 Topics for Publishers to Consider – Aptara CTO Samir Kakar gives an update on what may be possible with the iPad. There seems to be more possibilities for enhanced media content in the ePub format.
- Making an iPad HTML5 App & making it really fast – 7 tips for developing a fast HTML5 app for the iPad.
Digital Strategies: Learning from RPG Publishers
Jun 18th
Are you a publishing geek and a gamer? Then find your dice, stock up on Mountain Dew, and register for this webinar on how RPG publishers have adapted eBook and print-on-demand to their particular needs. I’m looking forward to this.
2009 Impact Factors for materials science
Jun 17th
Despite the fact that we can calculate these ourselves ahead of time with 99.9% accuracy, it’s exciting for editors when the Institute for Scientific Information releases the Impact Factors every June. It might be a flawed way of measuring how important a journal is, but the Impact Factor is currently the most-used criteria (short of actually reading what is published, gasp!).
So, good news for our team this year: the Impact Factor of Advanced Materials increased to 8.379, and that of Advanced Functional Materials went up to 6.990. In other words, more people are citing, and hopefully reading, the articles, that our journals published in recent years.
If you’re interested in more details, you can read about our materials science and polymer science journals on MaterialsViews.com.
Five short links on designing for the iPad
Jun 14th
Is there a good iPad magazine app yet?
- WIRED on iPad: Just like a Paper Tiger… – It’s the 1990s (CD shovelware) all over again…
- iPad News Apps review – One analysis of news apps for the iPad, from somebody at the German Press Association newslab.
- Is This Really The Future of Magazines or Why Didn’t They Just Use HTML 5? – So why didn’t they choose HTML5 and build a custom viewer application around WebKit?
- Bonnier’s Popular Science+ Debuts on iPad as the Magazine of Tomorrow – The six principles that underlie the Mag+ digital platform: silent mode, fluid motion, designed pages, defined beginning and end, issue-based delivery, and advertising as content.
- Time Magazine Previews Updates to Apple iPad App – Comparing a rush job (“Project Noah”) with having time to see how users interact with a device.
What I’m reading on my iPad
Jun 13th
Here’s what’s I’ve recently finished reading on my iPad’s Kindle app:
- The Demon Under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor’s Heroic Search for the World’s First Miracle Drug. Thanks to @solidstateux for the suggestion.
- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. A rare science book whose title doesn’t take the form “Noun prepositional phrase: The story of the noun.“ Rebecca Skloot is also on Twitter.
- The Family That Couldn’t Sleep: A Medical Mystery. Blending the history of prion diseases with the story of a scary, rare disease.
If you have suggestions for other popular science books that you’ve enjoyed, let me know.
Postalicious
Thanks to David Bradley (@sciencebase on Twitter) for directing me to the WordPress plugin Postalicious. It sucks in links and comments from your Delicious bookmarks feed and queues them up as a draft post that you can edit and publish.
Debating plasma kinetics in the scientific literature
Jun 10th
On his It’s the Rheo Thing blog, John Spevacek gives a good introduction to an experiment being conducted in Plasma Processes and Polymers, a debate published in the journal on the polymerization kinetics in plasma reactors.
There’s a few articles involved, all of which are currently free to access and listed on MaterialsViews.com.
I’m glad that the groups involved appear to be viewing this as an opportunity. As John says, “…pull up a chair and watch something that doesn’t come along very often at all.”
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