Apple’s recent patent activity shows a clear interest in bringing Near Field Communications (NFC) to your iPhone (and any other iPhone OS devices, including iPod touch and iPad).

This patent describes how travelers might use their iPhone to:
* make travel reservations
* purchase tickets
* check-in, including luggage
* prove identity
* pass through security more quickly

It’s fascinating to watch this broad vision being implemented piece by piece. NFC is about to explode onto the world in surprising ways, from controlling your living room entertainment center to buying concert tickets.

And those many scenarios will help to promote the iPhone still further: imagine you’re waiting at the ticket counter in the airport and you see someone walk up, wave their iPhone over a piece of machinery—beep, beep—and walk away, job completed, while you’re still in line. Or you attend a concert and your friend shows you afterwards in the parking lot that she has already downloaded the new music you just heard.

First you’re going to think: How did they do that?
And then: How do I get an iPhone so I can do it too?

There’s an interesting article in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer on Peter Bohlin, the creator of the glass cube in front of Apple’s Fifth Avenue store in New York City. Jobs’ vision for the stores was remarkably prescient:

Jobs, who met Bohlin when the architect was overseeing a new headquarters for his Pixar animation studio, was aware that he had never designed a store interior. But he didn’t care about that handicap, said Karl Backus, the principal in BCJ’s San Francisco office who manages the firm’s Apple projects. That’s because Jobs thought of the stores not as retail spaces but as social spaces.

Jobs believed it was more important for the stores to offer a unique and compelling experience, in much the way that a Frank Gehry-designed museum does. Otherwise, why would people bother to make a special trip to buy a product they could order more easily on the Web?

— Old-school architect creates an iOpener, philly.com, March 22, 2010

An interesting glimpse (with videos) of how Penguin Books envisions next-generation books for iPad.

A copy of Pride And Prejucide might conceivably come with videos of Keira Knightly and Colin Firth (the movie adaptation’s cast), he said, but: “We need to understand how much the consumer will pay for that, we need to engage in dynamic pricing.

— First Look: How Penguin Will Reinvent Books With iPad, paidcontent.co.uk, March 2, 2010

“Prejucide” made me laugh, but including a video with the book sounds questionable to me. You interpret books as you read them, including envisioning the characters. A filmed version of the book is unavoidably interpretive and cannot help but color your own interpretation, even taint it.

An interesting overview of teases and transitions in Microsoft’s new mobile OS:

[Natural User Interfaces] frequently need to let people know what elements are interactive. (Ideally everything is interactive in a touch-based UI but that’s a different point.) NUIs should encourage exploration and give people “permission” to touch things. Teasing people is one way of encouraging interactivity and exploration.

[...]

Transitions also help communicate interactions. When users move between screens, interaction components fly in or swivel highlighting the fact they are active and can be touched. Once someone taps on these components, they pivot or recede as if they were pushed backward into space. This animation…reinforces the fact they are active.

— Windows Phone: User Interface Teases & Transitions, lukew.com, February 17, 2010

The world map displayed within the Data & Time system preference panel changes with the seasons.

A nice touch.

The broad spectrum of patents and ideas illustrated in Patently Apple’s three-part series of prophecies about Apple’s product plans support a point made cogently by Joel Johnson at Gizmodo:

The fact that Apple does not reveal prototypes but shipping products is the fundamental difference between their entire business strategy and that of the rest of the industry. It evokes a feeling of trust between Apple and consumers—that when Apple actually reveals a product, it’s something that they’re confident enough to support for years to come.
— Show and Sell: The Secret to Apple’s Magic, Gizmodo, January 20, 2010

Overstated perhaps, but generally true.

The video looks good to me.

Trying to visit Apple’s TGI Friday promo page here in the United States:

iPhone transition animations are cooler than meets the eye.

Take page transitions, for example. It’s common to navigate from one page to another by tapping an item from a list to see more detail: new pages slide in from the right, while tapping Back slides the old page back in from the left.

You might think that animating in a new page to replace the old would simply slide the two in lock-step, like two cafeteria trays on a serving rail, but it’s more subtle than that. To see that subtlety, let’s slow things down for a closer look.

The pages featured here are from Malt Whisky, my new iPhone app, but the animations are the same throughout iPhone. In this example, we’re transitioning from the Bunnahabhain Distillery page to the pronunciation page to hear boo·na·HAA·ven pronounced.

These 13 frames shown at right (links to larger version) reveal five different animations for five different page elements:

Interested, I rigged up a similar page transition but with a single animation of “new page pushing out old page”, including the navigation bar. The difference was profound: instead of something that felt alive and vibrant, it felt like a Keynote slide transition. A completely different feeling.

The different timing of all five animations coordinate to make the page transition whoosh. You can barely notice the animations individually and as for perceiving them all in combination, forget it. But you’re not supposed to notice them. You’re simply supposed to get a tiny thrill of seeing one page whoosh in to replace the other, of using a device that somehow seems alive.

And you do.

Freek Bijl describes how Apple will revolutionize the publishing business with the potent combination of iTunes+Store+Tablet to address the respective problems of distribution+businessmodel+usability, just as it already has the music and mobile businesses.

Sounds good to me.