New iPad app Planetary transforms music collection into solar system - nice data viz!

Excerpt from readwriteweb.com:

"A new iPad app launched this month called Planetary. It visualizes your music collection using the solar system as a metaphor and it's visually stunning. It also seems gimmicky, at first glance. The concept is that stars are music artists, planets are albums and moons orbiting a planet are the album tracks. You can browse and listen to your music as if it was a universe. One reviewer of the app on iTunes coolly dismissed Planetary as "visually appealing but useless." With probably unintentional irony, the reviewer gave Planetary just 2 stars.

With all due respect, that critic is missing the point. Behind the design coolness, Planetary shows how data visualizations will become the new interface to your computing experiences. Whether on your mobile phone, tablet device, or walking along an urban street, increasingly you will control how you interact with apps using data visualizations of the kind offered by Planetary...."

SUPER Cool: iPad App Tells The Full Story Behind Making "Portal 2", Pushing Limits Of Story Telling | Co.Design

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Excerpt from fastcodesign.com original article:

"Geoff Keighley is kind of like the John McPhee of video game journalism: he made his name by publishing exhaustively reported, fly-on-the-wall accounts of the making of blockbuster games like Metal Gear Solid 2 and Half-Life 2. Then he realized he had to do un-McPhee-like jobs (like writing for Entertainment Weekly and producing shows on G4 and SpikeTV) to make a living. But he never let go of his passion for writing epic behind-the-scenes stories about video game creators -- and in 2010, he saw a dual opportunity.

"I equate this to the music industry, where everyone buys singles now."

The result, a $1.99 app called "The Final Hours of Portal 2," is a 15,000 word, 13-chapter opus stuffed to the gills with magazine-quality photos, videos, and interactives. Sound like an intimidatingly dense, loss-leader passion project? Wrong: it's doing gangbusters business and raking in five-star ratings. "I equate this to the music industry, where everyone buys singles now," Keighley says. "There's a shift going on in publishing much like what happened in the music business, where the single became popular online. And our app shows that a deep dive on a particular topic can be very appealing."...

read the full article on fastcodesign.com