blackplasticglasses.com says Apple has aimed the iPad at education, particularly higher education, by first delivering iWork on a great content device:

By putting the horse before the cart, Apple will have given students what they want first, only then following it with the education content they will need. In other words, if the iPad can achieve the market penetration of the iPhone/iPod Touch, Apple will have a legion of students on campuses a year or two from now who will be ready to buy and read their textbooks on the iPad. No education hardware selling needed — just release the content and watch it work.

— The iPad: Gateway Drug to Digital Learning?, blackplasticglasses.com, May 5th, 2010

Apple’s thoughts on Flash couldn’t be clearer.

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 200,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

— Thoughts on Flash, Steve Jobs, April 29, 2010

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: