ReutersiPhone 4

The launch was accompanied by the usual queues of enthusiastic users who waited from Thursday night the opening of the Apple Stores eager to grab the new phone by the Cupertino company.

In Rome’s Apple Store the iPhone was already sold out at 11 in the morning after around 3000 units were already purchased. In Milan (Carugate) there have been reports of a fight breaking out because the supplies weren’t enough to satisfy the request from customers who had been queueing up for hours.

However, there seem to be resistances expressed by Italian buyers which are to be found, more than in the whole Antennagate issue, in the embarrassingly high price of the device.

The 16 GB model starts at 659 Euros, the equivalent of about $ 856, a price that’s far too high even for a country like Italy, where the circulation of iPhone among fanatics is something like 1.2 million units, with an average penetration of 1 every 50 inhabitants. (Corriere Blog)

The alternative is buying the iPhone 4 at a way lower cost or even getting it for “free” taking advantage of the many different offers by phone carriers (3, Vodafone, Tim). The downside is the mandatory subscription plan with questionable economic viability in the medium term.

Probably the best solution for those unwilling to spend all that money at once is to buy an unlocked iPhone in an Apple store taking advantage of financing solution.

However, we’ll wait for more in-depth analysis of sales numbers in order to evaluate what will happen in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

Getty ImagesApple iPad

MORE LINKS

• Your iPad Is Not Ready for Flash but It’s Ready for Porn – WoorkUp
• 8 iPad Cases Every Fashion Geek Should To Consider – WoorkUp
• Booming Mac sales drive Apple’s best-ever quarter – CNN
• Reeder For iPad: RSS With Attention To Detail – Gizmodo

CUPERTINO – Three months after the launch of the iPad, in April 2010, Apple has recently claimed to have sold over 3.27 million units of its new tablet and, according to some estimates, if the sales continue along this route, later this year the total number could rise up to 10-12 million iPads sold worldwide.

Beyond the unquestionable commercial success of the iPad, there are also some people who bought the tablet but were left unsatisfied and who, therefore, still rather use their old laptop or netbook.

The main reason for this situation is that not for all users the iPad can be regarded as the instrument to fully substitute their laptop. Before buying a product like the iPad, putting aside the emotional and impulsive approach, you should ask yourself what could you use it for and what would you actually do with it.

Personally, since when I bought the 3G + WiFi version of the Apple’s tablet I have completely abandoned my netbook and my MacBook. I used them to surf the Internet, read e-mail, keep me informed with my feeds on Google Reader and write articles for the blog when my desktop computer wasn’t available. So, ultimately, it was a limited set of activities that are fully reproducible with my iPad.

If your profile matches with mine (and I know many do), besides Safari and Mail allowing you to surf the Internet and read e-mail, I recommend you to download Pages for iPad which is the perfect tool for writing articles and publishing them on your blog. Furthermore, if you’re an avid feed reader you should try Reeder or Pulse. iBooks allows you to read eBooks and view PDF files. If you love travel, you can consult the electronic version of any city guide with your iBook and use the Google Maps application in order to choose your path and guide you perfectly through museums, restaurants and hotels. Finally, if you are a Twitter-addict there are many clients available that will allow you to keep in touch with your followers at times in a more practical way than any smartphone could do.

And now we want to know your opinion: how are you using your iPad? Are you satisfied or disappointed by the Apple tablet?

Let’s face it. Sometimes a nice list with “X ” (where X is an integer between 5 and infinity) of the most interesting things you can find about a certain subject is what you feel you need for your readers.

For example: the 10 best applications for the iPhone, the 20 most interesting code snippets for WordPress, the 30 most popular plugins for jQuery, the 50 best sites to inspire all those web designers who fell victim of a pathological decrease of creativity.

This is a sort of widespread mania, typical of a huge number of bloggers, that behind the naive intention to suggest something interesting and useful to their readers, often hides the opportunistic side, of generating traffic to their site, preferably with little to no effort.

Because lists work. They generate traffic, a lot of it. They represent an investment with high return and low risk that sooner or later every blogger will consider.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing intrinsically bad in choosing the utilitarian side moving along the highway rather than the steep and rugged mountain path. I myself often used lists, use them now and will probably use them in the future, just like many others.

At the end of the day, every blog owner can understand that. The typical case is when, after hours of calculations spent in the vain attempt of finding an interesting topic for your next post, you are miserably forced to lean on the safe long list to reenforce the visits to your site which dramatically decreased since your last post, dating back to a couple of days before.

Just to be sure, a nice article with the “ten coolest fonts of the month” is always a hit destined to climb rapidly the top ten links of the day on Delicious, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Popurls and so on.

A list of the 10 most interesting cheat sheets is by no means to be underestimated either. But since hundreds of lists like that are already around – they’re almost all the same except for the order in which the links appear – you will have to make an effort to find at least 20, 40, 60 (and multiples) fonts or cheat sheets to be more attractive on the market and make your list really memorable.

This is a classic mechanism that triggers a vicious spiral of atrocities, designed to deliver a list made up of a disproportionate number of links on the topic of your choice. Eventually you will have something humongous, capable of competing with the Google index. And rest assured: it will undoubtedly be successful in terms of visits.

If you’re lucky, you’ll also have the pleasure of tasting the bitter glory generated by the appearance of your beautiful mega list on Digg’s homepage. I say “bitter ” because if you’re not well equipped, after 30 seconds, your site will collapse, miserably overwhelmed by a horde of visitors per second comparable to your average daily balance.

And now, left on the table, a question: are those lists really useful in giving more value to a blog? To me, popularity and success of a blog are not measured only by the number of visits, but by the quality of content. That’s why I’d think twice.

What about you?

So, you’ve extensively thought about how to turn an idea, a vision into a great presentation and now you’re ready to open your designated application and start filling your slides with images, words, whatever. It might be worth implementing a new phase into the preliminary work, that will save you a lot of revision time later on. Hold tight.

Second Rule: Plan (ahead).

I usually go through this process separating two steps of action.

First, I start off putting the clear ideas I managed to get to, following First Rule, in a place where I can see them all at once. To me, visualization is the best way of organizing my mind and the concepts I have floating in it. It’s like scattering on a table the pieces of a puzzle. You already know how the finished image should look like but you cannot start unless you arrange the pieces in some way. In fact, from then on you can categorize and start putting them all together in an ordered way, getting the big picture in place.

To support this activity I usually reach for my notepad and fill it with words and lines, but sometimes I also use a tiny wonderful application called MindNode (for Mac). At this stage you won’t need anything more than this, no frills.

The second and crucial step is the one in which you linearize the contents, building the flow of information that will lead to a conclusion and ultimately to success. When this time comes, I step away from whichever technological instrument I’m working on and no matter what I pick up pen and paper. I then draw some rectangles (my slide-wannabe’s) and put some words or images into them. You don’t need to be good at drawing to do this.

I will then create a progression, indicating the correct flow between slides and concepts with numbers or arrows, finally getting the big picture laid down and clearly viewable. You’ll end up with 100% of the concept work done before even opening Keynote or Powerpoint (or whichever application you are using) and you will then be able to concentrate only on the aesthetics, instead of wondering if the presentation will be clear and effective when you’re probably already running out of time.

Moreover, in case you’re working as an employee in some company, or you’re producing a presentation that will need to go through the approval of some manager, you’ll be able to present your plan before wasting time in the wrong direction.

Once done, you will find yourself with what can be called a storyboard, ready for “shooting”. Keep the story stuff in mind because that’s what the third rule will be about.

Corollary to Second Rule: Don’t be afraid of changing the plan (if you have better ideas later on)

_{Side note: there’s another (more complex) way of conceiving presentations that implies de-structuring the linearity into a more “ad hoc” stream of information (and Seth Godin mentioned it while describing his dream app for the iPad) but we will talk about that in the future.}

This week our inspiring playlist for web designers contains eight new beautiful tracks. Any suggestion for the next issue? Please leave a comment or subscribe to our RSS feeds to stay up to date with our latest news!

Jónsi – Kolniður

Damien Rice – Delicate

Bent – I Can’t Believe It’s Over

Alexi Murdoch – Orange Sky

Maxime Morin – No Heaven

Peter Gabriel – Love to be Loved

Chris Isaak – Wicked Game

Trespassers William- In A Song