I use the Line app once a month, and for the exact same reason every time: to check the new messages from the official Japanese Nintendo account, for the purpose of downloading the new iPhone calendar wallpaper it shares each month. Pictured above, the wallpapers we’ve gotten for July, August, and September (which is now adorning my iPhone lock screen, a bit ahead of schedule). I absolutely love these.
When the latest issue of Wallpaper came out, I posted about the plans to also release an accompanying iPad app featuring works by the issue’s two guest editors, David Lynch and Robert Wilson. Well, it’s now out as a free download, and you should go and take a look.
It’s quite simple as an app, but does what it should do well — give you some extra video content by each creator, with the only other extra a brief intro to who they are after you click on each name. Wilson contributes quite a few “video portraits,” but I was especially interested in Lynch’s section, which is comprised of a short that revisits the main character from his seminal film, Eraserhead.
Every time I hear that song (“In Heaven”) I can’t help but think of the great Pixies cover, which is still one of my favorite b-sides from them.
You may have noticed the latest issue of Wallpaper, featuring guest editors David Lynch and Robert Wilson — it even has a fancy interactive cover. Although Wallpaper doesn’t have a proper iPad edition — they only have an iPhone app that acts as an interface for its website’s content — this issue will introduce an iPad-only supplement, the Director’s Cut, featuring video content by Lynch and Wilson.
I would still rather Wallpaper go and launch a proper iPad version of the magazine, which could then include these extras — just like Wired has recently been including more and more video content — but the idea of a supplement is not a bad one. The app is not out yet, and there’s no word yet on whether it will be free — it’s “presented by Tudor,” so I’m assuming it will be — but there is something to the idea of releasing supplementary content in iPad form, especially when it works as it’s own thing (like the Lynch/Wilson collaboration).
First Tokyo, then Kyoto, now it’s Osaka’s turn to get the Wallpaper City Guide treatment. As I wrote when I covered the Kyoto volume’s release, I really like what these book’s represent. No, they’re not intended to be a thorough travel guide to the cities they cover. Instead, they act as handy compendiums of the types of spots you see highlighted in Wallpaper, but end up forgetting about (unless you cut them out and paste them in a notebook).
As with the Kyoto edition, regular Tokyo-based Wallpaper contributor Gordon Kanki Knight is the author , and I have to say that he’s come up with a very cool collection of stylish spots I never knew existed in Osaka, and I’ve already marked a few I plan on taking in on my next visit — and don’t you know you it, as with all of these Wallpaper guides, you have extra blank note pages at the end in which to write down all those things.
The official release, as indicated on its Amazon US page (or even Amazon Japan), is December 9, but Gordon tells me that the book should be popping up in some shops around mid-November. As for what’s next for the City Guide series in Japan, I hear that Sapporo is on the horizon.