The iPhone 4 is an amazing looking product. And it feels even better. I can best describe it as sleek, it’s thinness and glossy glass body makes it smooth to touch and to get out of a pocket.

The bumper takes all that away. With a thick rubber edge that sticks to your hand, your pocket, the table, everything really. With plastic sides making the bumper pretty useless for protecting the phone from dropping it on the sides.

I don’t know. I can’t figure out what it’s for.

Basically, don’t go near this thing. It really sucks.

With the upcoming release of iOS 4.2 Apple has revealed a new feature, or an upgrade to the old Airtunes feature, called Airplay. Airplay will let us stream media content between our iOS devices.

Just think about it, coming home from a shopping spree just aching to tell your spouse about the hideous dress/jacket/guy you saw. Whipping out your iPhone and displaying the picture on your Apple TV or iPad. Sounds like the future to me!

There are only two questions that come to mind I’m really interested in:

1. Will Airplay allow us to send content to a Mac as well as from one?
2. We know third party devices will be able to receive media but can third party apps also send media through Airplay? Since it’s a part of iOS it should be an open API… right?

Check out the CNET write up for more thoughts on Airplay.

In case you didn’t know; UX week is a conference in San Fransisco that, if your into UX, you wish you were at. It has great speakers on great subjects and sounds like heaven for all us UX designers spread across the planet.

Nicole Lazzaro has a presentation scheduled on the future of UX where she argues that design focusing on increasing positive emotions rather than minimizing negative experience is the future of UX development. A field where game design is leading the way.

I for one am really happy someone is bringing this up at a large conference. I studied game design for this very reason and I’m still having a hard time selling the idea to my colleagues, the notion that games are basically toys is still deeply ingrained in western culture and it’s now starting to hold us back from creating better experiences.

For anyone interested in learning from game design I recommend you start with legendary designer Raph Koster‘s excellent book A Theory of Fun.

My first impression of the iPad, after the glowing halo of hype wore off, was really not that good. It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with the iPad, there wasn’t. It just didn’t work the way I wanted it to.

A week later I hadn’t really changed my mind, until I was typing away earlier tonight and realized why I didn’t feel it fitted into my life. It’s a unitasking machine.

The iPad doesn’t multitask, yet, but after comparing my experience using the same apps on my iPhone 4 I’m now convinced that my problem is not a result of the device lacking features, but instead that the iPad forces me to focus on my work.

Work which I’ve learned so well to digress and be distracted from on my other machines. I’m just not used to having to focus for more than a few minutes at a time.

This discovery has really turned my experience around, I can’t wait to work like this for a few more days and see where it leads me. Unitasking is the new productivity buzz word. Let’s see if this machine helps me become more productive or leaves me doing less complex work.

RT @durietz: “Why does Dropbox rock but Apple’s iDisk suck balls? How hard can it be to copy an existing service?” [link]

Good question.

And how come some Apple products are so amazing while others, as @durietz put it, suck balls? What’s the difference in the pipeline at Cupertino?

Ever created anything or said something you stand for?
Of course you have. Chances are that there were people grumbling at you or about what you did/said.

In person this is rude and we all grow thick skin over the years to bear the bleating of haters. But in business it can be a huge problem.

Making haters into evangelists is on of the best uses of social media to date, but I want to talk about a beautiful way Jason Calacanis recently monetized the hate aimed at him.

For those who don’t know, Jason Calacanis is a serial entrepreneur with some great successes currently developing Mahalo.com and the ThisWeekIn podcast network (not to be confused with the TWiT.tv pod casting network run by Leo Laporte). Being successful and especially in a public space means you will attract haters in the hundreds or worse.

Tired of the haters Jason put on a special podcast featuring all hater guests. That’s right, anyone with any complaints again Jason were invited to speak against with him about whatever it was they didn’t approve of.

This is brilliant.
The podcast earns its revenue from ads and lo and behold the haters were filling the podcast with compelling content, not just for loyal listeners who’d chuckle at the event but for even more haters who’d love a go at Jason.

Short and simple, Jason was making his haters earn him money by hating him and looking all the more noble and right for doing it.

Jason, I don’t agree with everything you say but my god; that was one brilliant move!

Watch the episode here for a great example of how to monetize your haters.

When I first saw the EpicWin app trailer a few months ago I had a nerdgasm. The sheer amount of hilarious humor applied to something so mundane as a to do list really hit the spot with me. This iPhone app really looked like an epic win, if not for productivity than just for comedy.

EpicWin was released today and I downloaded it on the subway on my way to work. I was happily choosing my avatar and plowing through the “tutorial” quests (the first few to do’s that get you up to speed with the app) and I find myself creating smaller and smaller to do’s just to progress in my quests.

The way the game handles valuation of tasks makes it a bit strange but I’m not going to say to much to early. I’ll keep using the app a few days and update when I’ve really come to terms with it.

It’s just a few bucks and worth it just for laughs. You can find out more at the developers site: EpicWinApp.com

Update:
Launch trailer is up

Update 2:
EpicWin apparently closes all other music or sound processes. So if you’re listening to music and open EpicWin your iPod/Pandora/Spotify will actually stop the music, not just pause it. This is really annoying if you’re just quickly adding a task.

Great news! Both Torchlight and Ratchet & Clank are both going coop!

A lot of games are opting for cooperative or immersive multiplayer modes to allow players to be more social and have even more fun with their products.

But there’s a problem. Sorry to be the grouch, but the first step of getting out of a trap is noticing it’s there.
Cooperative and multiplayer games are mostly synchronous. Which means you have to play them at the same time. In fact minimizing gameplay lag is on of the largest problems game developers have today.

But is that really a good thing?
It’s great for action. But it’s terrible for pick up and play gaming. Which is already the dominant form of play if we compare online games and casual platforms such as the Nintendo Wii, DS and the iPhone with more core audience devices such as the Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360.

The problem with multiplayer is the same as with loading times.
If we, as developers, are trying to convince our players to spent $60 and 20 hours to play our game, the game really needs to be fun and easy to get into. Loading times subtract from the experience, but not nearly enough as waiting for friends, not having friends or worst of all; having friends that all need to cash out $60 for the game. This kind of tribal synchronisation is very probably not that usual.

We need to open up to the fact that games are a part of life and start designing for finding new friends or, if possible, playing with friends asynchronously.

Flipboard is a news aggregator. Much like feed readers you’ve probably used in the past. The difference is that Flipboard reads your Twitter and Facebook streams, scans them for content and present it to you in a fantastic UI.

Flipboard is extremely competent and feels great to use, it’s well implemented into Twitter and Facebook functionally making it easy to reweet, comment, like and share.

Flipboard is free in the Appstore right now but I’d recommend giving it a look as fast as you can as a lot of media companies are gunning for Flipboard for scraping material not presented in their RISS feeds. Well see how it pans out in the end but this is really how you’ll want to use social media in the future.