Phil Bradley's weblog

izik - A search engine for tablet devices

The folks behind Blekko have produced a search engine that is designed to work well with tablet based devices. izik (pronounced Isaac) uses the concept that we're all familiar with, of swiping across a screen to move content. Rather than scroll down as per 'normal' search engines, izik provides content that is best viewed by horizontal scrolling. It works for the iPad, and Android tablets, and you can view it on their mobile web version too (the same link as previously given).

Simply search for what you need, and izik will display various categories of information - quick answer, images, top results and so on - tailored to your search. A search for 'dog' returned categories such as pets and veterinary, while gave me recipes and travel. The screenshot below shows you what the results page looks like:

If we then do a side by side comparison with Google, we can see the difference:

I think the results from izik are clearer to view and they are more user friendly. Although there's less on a page, the side swipe will continually reveal more information.

izik didn't outperform Google everywhere however; a search for '3D printing' returned more recent material, and in greater amounts than izik found, and in my Everton example above, recent results were more easily found using Google. However, playing with izik on my iPad was an absolute delight. Side swipe scrolling worked really well and was immediately comfortable. (If you don't have a tablet, try the web based version, linked above, and give it a whirl. If you prefer to look down the screen however, you can expand out a category of results, and izik will display them down the screen.

izik is a really nice idea - it's got a great design and it's very easy and intuitive to use. I have no doubt that on a tablet at least it's going to swiftly become my favourite search engine. I'm also very pleased that it's been put together by Blekko, which is an engine that I have a lot of time for. It's this type of innovation which is sadly lacking with Google these days - they're still stuck in a model that they are unable to get out of. Great for the web, but when it comes to new devices, I think they really need to pull their socks up and try and look at things in a totally different way. izik is a really nice breath of fresh air.

If you still want more, take a look at the video.

izik: take search for a joy ride from blekko on Vimeo.

 

Related articles

Blekko Launches New Tablet Search Engine "Izik"

Blekko's "Izik" Offers Tablet-Tailored Search

Blekko Reimagines Search Again With izik

New search engine Izik tailored especially for tablets

LG's Flexible E-Paper Display Is Coming to Europe in April

via mashable.com

This is going to be a fun development in the ebook/ereader saga. The electronic paper display (EPD) is a 6-inch, 1024×768 e-ink plastic screen. It’s 0.7mm thick, it weighs 14g, and LG claims it’s resistant to scratches and drops from a 1.5 meter height. It can bend at a range of 40 degrees from the center of the screen, and it's also about one-third thinner and half as light as current glass EPDs, LG says, meaning it'll be even easier to carry than the e-book readers today.

There are going to be a whole host of uses for this - can anyone say 'Hogwarts newspaper'? Then there's delegate badges, signs that can be instantly changed, and of course if you can put a few of these together you have your electronic ink book.

 

Related articles

• Coming to an e-book near you - LG's flexible e-paper display (gizmag.com)
• LG to launch Flexible E-Ink Paper Display in Europe this April (thegeeksclub.com)
• Electronic Paper Display A Reality (rubbishcorp.com)

Need an app? Try this app search engine

Quixey is a genius resource. If you're looking for an app for your browser or smart phone, this has just become one of your very best friends. Type in what you're looking for, limit to the resource that you're interested in, read the little summary and then click on the link to go and get it.

If you're into apps for your smart phone or iDevice, then you're going to be very happy indeed. Cracking little engine. And yes, it does also do games as well. Since it also includes priced as well as free apps keep a hold onto your wallet!

News curation apps for the iPad

Flipboard, Pulse, Zite, Flud; all free apps that you can download onto your iPad to keep you up to date with your own news interests. They will generally get their data directly from your own resources - your Twitter or Facebook account, or they'll provide you with the option of choosing subject areas, and then you can indicate if you like a subject, which will then affect the information returned in the future. You'll also find that rather than simply give a list of URLs the app will collect the original story for you and return it, so that it can simply be read on the screen. Consequently, you're creating your own magazine, split into various sections, to be read at your leisure. Let's take a look at each of these in turn.

Flipboard. If you've heard of any of these, this is the one that you'll probably be aware of. It's made up of small subject cubes, so when you open the app it'll look something like this:

Very attractive and colourful. Tapping on a segment takes you into more detail, with stories displayed in a similar cube or magazine format:

What you don't get from the static image is that when you swipe across the screen, you do get a quite pleasing flip effect as the page 'turns'. Clicking on a story opens up the original tweet or status, displays the story on the screen, and links to the full story on the website. An upward swipe loads it directly for you to read. New sections can be added easily, and they're just a tap or two away:

Flipboard is generally very well regarded. It was the first of the news curation services that I used and I very impressed. However, as I've looked at other resources it's slipped down my personal list, but it's still something that I do check every evening. Since it does a good job and it's free, there is no doubt in my mind that it's worth having.

Pulse.news is another free app, and the blurb from the site says "It incorporates colorful panning story bars and fills them with content from your favorite sources. Pulse redefines news, giving you the opportunity to experience the news you desire from traditional sources, your favorite blogs and social networks – all in one beautiful interface." You can choose up to 5 pages of content, with 12 resources in each. This is one of the things that does annoy me about this one - a limit of 60 news feeds really is a limit, and not in a good way. It does look very neat however:

Clicking on a story opens it in the right hand side of the screen, and you can simply scroll across. It's very elegant and smooth. It's easy to edit resources and add more as these two shots show:

Clicking the '+' button leads into the screen to add more resources:

Pulse displays information very easily, links to full stories via the Safari browser and movement from story to story is graceful. I am slightly concerned that it does often take some time to update the newsfeeds and I sit tapping my fingers (which is unadvisable on a touchscreen, let me tell you!) waiting for the new stories to come through.

FLUD is a new resource that's only recently become available. It styles itself thus: "a modern, beautiful and personalized mobile news ecosystem with a vision to empower it's users to interact with each other to access, engage and broadcast content that is relevant to them. You probably visit hundreds of sites a week to look at content you love, but, until now it’s been a pain to do and far from classy." Well, perhaps. It looks like this:

Clicking on a story opens it in the right hand side of the screen, and you can view stories in web view (ala the page) or as straightforward text. You can also email it to other people, Facebook or tweet a story. It's easy enough to add new resources, based on RSS feeds:

You can also pull resources in from Google Reader as well, which is useful, but not uncommon, as most of the other resources also offer the same functionality. Absolutely nothing wrong with FLUD, but I think it suffers because it's the latest in an increasingly long line. It's very Pulse.news like in my opinion, and while the shifting panes of data works perfectly well, I don't find it a particularly neat or attractive way to set out data. Which brings me to my last, and preferred option.

Zite is a great app, with a very high 'wow' factor. It calls itself 'a personalised magazine that gets smarter as you use it.' I find it the most attractive of all the apps:

Your stories appear in the main body of the screen, and it always opens with the top stories culled from all your different sections, which appear on the right hand side of the screen. You can click on a link to open up the entire story to read:

Personalisation is easy, by telling the app if you like something, and it will also create on the fly subjects based on the content of the story that you're looking at. Tapping as appropriate teaches it, and I can confirm that you do get tailored results over time. It's also very easy to send the stories to colleagues, tweet, Facebook or add to your delicious account.

Adding new content is very easy:

Either choose from their readymade sections, or add your own in. You can also link a Twitter or Facebook account, though this doesn't seem to make much difference at all, so there's a question mark over that in my mind. However, I generally find the material that it returns to be useful and ontopic. There's often repetition, as it will return the same story from a variety of different resources, but that can also be useful in that it highlights what's really important, and from various viewpoints. It's my personal favourite - attractive, intuitive, easy to update, and it does learn what I'm interested in. If I could only have one app on my iPad in this category, it would be this one, without any doubt. However, since they're all free, I have all of them, and why not!

There are other, similar resources, but these tend to simply take your existing RSS feeds and display them for you. I've played around with two of them:

TheFeed is "a Google Reader client for your iPad that lets you decide how to consume all the juicy content of your feeds.The Feed’s flexible and uncluttered interface gives you a better overview of everything on the menu while a versatile filtering system and two different zoom levels make content more appetizing and digestible. And don’t worry about finishing everything on your plate: The Feed uses proportionately sized stacks to illustrate your read and unread items, rather than badges that cause unnecessary stress." It's certainly very attractive:

More so than the Google Reader resource, and I'm perfectly happy with it.

NewsRack is the final app that I'm looking at here. It's very similar to the look and feel of Google Reader:

and it's probably why I like it the least. They have a great opportunity to totally change the look and feel, yet, it's almost a clone. It does the job perfectly well though, and if that's what you're after, it's a reasonable choice. I have a free version, but when I looked on the site it seemed to imply you could only purchase it now. In which case - go with one of the others in my opinion.

In summary, a good news curation app will utilise the power of the iPad, provide a graceful method of reading stories, will link to and display the original information, and allow you to quickly and easily bookmark, email or otherwise share with friends and colleagues. They are however becoming a major headache from the sources of this data, since I don't actually ever have to visit those sites directly any more, so I'm not seeing the advertising that is supposed to help grease the wheels. There are already rumblings of discontent, and I fully expect these to increase in the coming months. However, the more the noise, the more valuable and useful they are. I'd happy buy these apps, with Zite being the one that I'd most easily part with money to continue to use.

The iPad Dracula

I saw a tweet from @libwithattitude about the iPad Dracula, and it looked interesting, so took a peep at the website. Go take a quick peek and run back. It's astonishing, so my £2.99 was very quickly spent. I have to say that it's absolutely tremendous, and I'm really enjoying it. My one gripe is that it's abridged, which is annoying. However, once you get over that, the way in which the iPad has been used to emphasis the text is fantastic. I'm reading about Harker's coach trip, and I hear the sounds of the horses hooves and the wheels going over cobbles. I see that he has a letter, and I can flick the envelope onto the screen, open it, and read the handwritten letter. There's a description of Renfield and his flies, and you hear them, and see their shadows buzzing over the page:

It's absolutely fascinating. Some people won't like it, as it includes sound, music, images and so on, which may be regarded as detracting from the reading process, but others will thoroughly enjoy the added richness these bring to the tale. I can really see how this process could be used to great effect when working with students.

It's marvellous - if you have an iPad, buy this app! It's wonderful.

My iPad - early impressions

Well, I've had an iPad for a couple of weeks now, so I think I've got a bit of a handle on how it works and how I'm going to be using it. First off - a couple of 'not' things. It's not heavy! I don't understand why people say that it is, because it's perfectly easy to hold in one hand and type/touch with the other. It's no worse than a heavy paperback or light hardback, and I've wandered around the house holding it without any difficulty at all. Secondly, while you can't multi-task with it (and I'll return to this point later), you can listen to music at the same time as doing other things. Once you've got some tunes on it by syncing it to your computer they play quite happily in the background without any problem. So if you want to listen to music at the same time as reading a book - not a problem. It's also not a replacement for anything else either - this is something that is again causing lots of people grief and I'm not exactly sure why. It is what it is, and it sits quite nicely in the spectrum of desktop, phone, [iPad], netbook and laptop I'm already using it for entirely different things. 

So, if that's a couple of things that it isn't, what is it? I got the 64GB wifi version - I already pay O2 good money for my iPhone, and I'm not about to give them any more. What I'd really like to do is simply give O2 money every month and let them keep a check on what I'm spending. In the long run I suspect that they'd make more out of me, but perhaps I'm just being too linear about this. The only disadvantage of the wifi version is that if I'm going anywhere I need to remember to copy anything that I'm likely to use onto it before I go via the connection at home, and that isn't exactly a hardship. If I want to get access to emails and so forth my iPhone does all of that for me - it's just not an issue. 

It's a great entertainment centre. I've copied films onto it, tv shows, books, comics, music, and I can take it wherever I want. In the old days I'd make sure I took a book with me, and now I make sure that I still take a book with me, just that it's now on the iPad. I don't have to worry about having an iPod with me, but to be honest, that's so tiny it doesn't matter anyway. The screen is really good - and watching the BBC iPlayer on it is like having a 42" HD tv - but sitting in your hands. I left it with my dad the other day while I went out, and he was very happy watching programmes on it - in fact happier, since his eyesight isn't great (neither is his hearing), and the iPad was perfect for him. This is a guy who is well into his 80s now, and not exactly up to scratch with his computer skills - which is fine, because the iPad isn't a computer - it's something else. Why the journalists attempting to rip it to bits can't understand this is beyond me. I've sat on the sofa, sat up in bed, sat out in the garden and used it to keep me entertained - it is excellent at doing this.

Since the screen is so clear, I'm much happier to read from it - reading from the iPhone was ok, but it wasn't great, due to the size. I couldn't easily read books on my laptop because the size got in the way, ditto with the netbook, though that was easier. The iPad - it's just not an issue. It does what it is supposed to - which is display text clearly and easily enough for me to read without any issues. I can now start (finally!) to move away from buying books in a hardcopy form, which I'm looking forward to.

Another of the reasons that it's excellent is that it's on. You turn it on, and it's on. None of this boot up nonsense - functionality is available at once. I've already found myself using it instead of the laptop or iPhone to check my mail, simply because it's faster. This is also why, for me, multitasking isn't too much of an issue. I want to check my mail, so I check my mail. I then go and poke around on Facebook, close that app down, move into Twitter and so on. Sure, it's a bit more of a nuisance than just tab clicking but y'know - it's not that much of a problem. So I can't use flash - to be honest, this isn't that much of a problem either, and I've actually found very few times where this has been an annoyance. I do need to think slightly different about the way I use stuff - on the laptop or desktop I'd see something that interests me, open a new tab and start blogging it, but to be fair, it's not going to happen on the iPad. And you know what - it doesn't matter. I've yet to find a device that does everything for me, and the reason for that is that there isn't one. I've yet to see any of the tech eliet journos whining on about how crappy a desktop machine is because you can't pick it up and take it with you!

Something else which gives me pause for thought - had to take my dad to the hospital for a procedure yesterday, and he wasn't looking forward to it. Prior to the iPad, there's not much I could have done about that - but we spent the time waiting playing Airhockey, Bejeweled and Crib on it. It simply would not have been possible to do that with a laptop, netbook or iPhone. This is the gap that the iPad is filling for me - won't necessarily be what floats your boat with it, but that's a personal choice of course. 

I'm still playing around with the apps that are available - if you're into RSS feeds I'd recommend Newsrack - it syncs with Google Reader and I paid my measily 2.99 for it without thinking. I have a slight preference for the iBook reader over the Kindle app, but not a great issue. The comics apps are all quite splendid; people are again complaining that you need to have different apps for different comic brands, but again - why is that an issue? The apps are generally free, or as cheap to be free, and you just move from one to another as necessary. We don't have an issue switching from application to application for other things, and I think most of us are intelligent enough to work out that one app works one way, and another app works another? I'm using the Brizzly app for reading Twitter, and I'm happy with the way that works. However, I'll write more about apps in another post.

So - should you get one? Don't ask me - I have no idea. If you're looking for a computer, I'd suggest that it's not what you want. While the onscreen keyboard is ok I wouldn't want to write a book on it, so anything that requires heavy writing wouldn't be a good idea. If you want something you can slip in a (admittedly large) bag and take with you - absolutely. I was unsure about using it with a laptop, but the extra weight isn't going to be a problem. I can see that I'd use the iPad on the train and then switch to the laptop for work.

Unless you're really keen though, you may want to wait for the next version. I think a camera on board would be really fun, because you could take a photograph, play with it for a while in situ, retake the photograph, add in anything that was needed, use the real life scene to get the picture doing what you wanted and so on. That's going to be exciting. It'll be good when you can video with it as well - do a video, edit it on scene and send to wherever it's got to go. These are the sorts of things that are going to make the iPad into a huge success over the next few years - and I think my mantra is going to be 'it's all about the applications, stupid!'. Ignore the tech journos who can't see beyond the specs, ignore the people who can't get it into their heads that it's a different device and see if you can play with one for a bit. You'll soon see if there's value in it for you - there certainly is for me!