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The 264dpi screen is a big deal. I was at a workshop with Edward Tufte this week. He extoled the virtures of using paper for information-rich data transfer. Having paper-like screen resolution is an obvious advantage for disseminating information.

I'd like to see a startup take on PowerPoint by releasing software to compose iPad-friendly presentations. Think one-pagers full of text, graphs, and figures. On an iPad they could be interactive, annotated, and linked together. Every iPad-toting meeting goer could scan a QR code on the way in to get on the same page, and then sit and discuss the content. Gone will be the days of presenters doling out bullet points at excruciatingly slow pace.

Having read Isaacson's biography of Jobs, it seems that Apple may be gunning to disrupt the textbook market. Having paper-like resolution is a great step in that direction.



When I was at Eyeo Casey Reas stated that print is like using a static version of a dynamic display from the future (or something to that effect) ... This talk about retina perception of pixels is indeed compelling and true, but 1200dpi is still "nicer" in many ways that I wouldn't want to try and prove on HN :P


Apple sells their Keynote presentation software for the iPad.


Keynote is great, but it's still slideware. People need to think about the iPad as a printer for dynamic content. It's smart paper.

Edit: Thanks to gte910h for pointing out iBooks Author. I wasn't aware of it!

http://www.apple.com/ibooks-author/


You're thinking of the iBooks app (seriously, check out the free apple iBook creator). It's very dynamic content.


For publications you will use locally on the iPad, maybe.

If you're intending to publish via Apple, I'd say wait. After two weeks of waiting for Apple to approve a book I yanked it and am having the manuscript converted for Kindle sale as we speak. The conversion from the .ibooks file to anything usable in the real world was a giant pain. All of which was predictable and I knew that going in.

But as a book-writing tool it is great. I wrote an entire book on a direct flight from Los Angeles to Dubai. Edited it on the way back. Way, way better than Word.

Now I'm using Scrivener.


Doesn't Creator's license restrict you from publishing a book authored with it on a different platform?


Not the book, the output of the program. You'd need another tool anyhow because of the extensions.


Yes but the output format used is proprietary superset of the ePub standard so it wouldn't be possible to view them on other platforms anyway.


Time to bring back Hypercard? : P

Web standards are probably your best bet as a smart paper API.


There are quite a few bi tools that do pretty much what you're describing on the ipad and other mobile devices now. Share a link, pulls up an interactive dashboard for everyone that they can play with and discuss in the meeting. Many also let you build a slide deck in PowerPoint with interactive dashboards on each slide.

Now if you could have the ppt (or whatever) allow attendees to collaboratively interact with the current dashboard slide then you'd really have something.

Maybe I should get to work on that!


Won't this make it hard for developers to develop apps on Macs that still have only 1920x1080 displays?


the simulator already offers multiple levels of zoom


As mentioned elsewhere, Macs may see similar resolution bumps soon, along with resolution independent UI.


Huh, what about the meeting goers who aren't toting iPads? Couldn't your interactive presentations be achieved with content built to web standards?


Sure, maybe the output of the composer app is a web document. The point is that it should think like a book in terms of composition and layout, and less like a website.




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