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my hunch is that users don't actually want to be as literally in "control" as designers. We just want stuff to work.

good Web design often has more in common with the invisible soft-science of industrial design than the in-your-face, "art directed" aestheticism that many of us associate it with.

The swoops and rhythms of ancient typography have been all but lost in an age of modern digital fonts and utilitarian book design. But Scott-Martin Kosofsky and Matthew Carter have produced an astonishing corrective, in the form a fresh new type mined from the pages of a 16-century Hebrew tome.

Jamy Ian Swiss calls himself an «honest liar», because as a magician, he promises to deceive his audience, and then promptly does. User interface designers are somewhat similar, though probably a bit less honest. We constantly lie to our users about what they actually see. A button on a screen isn’t really a button, it’s a bunch of colored dots. The better we lie to users, to more easily we can convince them that it actually is a button.

The Digital Publishing Platform being developed by Adobe allows publishers and advertisers to create immersive onscreen experiences that combine the visual impact of print design, the immediacy of touch interaction, and the engagement of interactive elements such as video, audio, animated infographics, 360° views, and more. Because this platform builds on the foundation of Creative Suite 5, it lets magazine design, editorial, and production teams use familiar tools and skills to efficiently create versions for print and a wide range of screens. Integrated analytics will enable publishers to plan editorial content and provide advertisers with accurate, detailed insight into how readers are interacting with stories and ads.

There’s more to a gadget than just good hardware. An elegantly designed user interface can put a gadget head and shoulders above its peers. That’s where most e-readers have fallen short. E-reader manufacturers’ focus on hardware design means their user interfaces often feel like an afterthought.

Another way to enhance the experience may be through opening up e-readers to third-party apps, as Amazon has done with the Kindle. That could bring additional features to the devices and maybe even alternate readers with more elegant interfaces.

If Ron Wayne, now 76, weren't one of the most luckless men in the history of Silicon Valley, it wouldn't have turned out like this.He was present at the birth of cool on April Fool's Day, 1976: Co-founder — along with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak — of the Apple Computer Inc., Wayne designed the company's original logo, wrote the manual for the Apple I computer, and drafted the fledgling company's partnership agreement.That agreement gave him a 10 percent ownership stake in Apple, a position that would be worth about $22 billion today if Wayne had held onto it.

Lonny looks and acts like a print magazine, not a Web site or a blog. It has pages to turn, a table of contents and full-page ads. But it offers Web-only benefits like zoomable, clickable images, so readers can inspect a lamp displayed in a photograph of someone’s living room and then click to buy it.

Lonny is published every other month using Issuu, a Web platform where, for $19 a month, anyone can upload a PDF and instantly create an online magazine that looks like a print one.

“you’ll know a new narrative form has emerged when you have to consume a particular story on an iPad to truly understand its content, and reading it on any other platform simply wouldn’t work.”

With the new terms, developers will be able to create apps in Flash after Apple publicly restricted the creative tool widely used by the design community.

Apple has plateaued in U.S. smartphone market share in recent months at more than 20% -- it's slowly bleeding percentage points, according to comScore. So getting more apps in the store might be a play to increase iAd inventory when its user base is stagnant. Apple still leads in the app market -- with more than 250,000 apps in the App Store, versus Android's 80,000.

Zinepal turns existing web content into printable PDFs and eBooks in the ePub, Amazon Kindle and Mobipocket formats. It is the easiest way to repurpose your existing web content and reach additional audiences using eBooks and printable PDFs.

Presently, online versions of magazines lose "the coherence and majesty of the [printed] medium," said Anderson. Tablets, on the other hand, offer impressive functionality, such as 360-degree views and iPhone-like screen sliding, plus collapsing and layering -- all of which make the user experience vastly more compelling than the Web,

Also revolutionary from an editorial and design perspective is that magazine staffers -- now editing for print and the Web in separate work flows -- will be able to edit for print and tablets simultaneously.

tablet renderings of traditional magazines will draw consumers who weren't magazine readers before.