Random observations about the iPad now that I’ve actually used one

Tonight I visited the Apple Store at Mall of America (and, while I was at it, the Best Buy at Mall of America), and here are some things I observed or thought about during the experience:

I expected the Apple Store to have maybe 3 or 4 iPads on display. In fact there were at least a 16, and there were still crowds gathered around them waiting for a turn. The Best Buy had 3 of them, and a proportionately smaller crowd of waiters.

It’s simultaneously smaller and bigger than I expected. The physical form is maybe 80% of the size I envisioned, but the screen seems bigger, and the bezel is less… erm… excessive than it seems in photos.

The screen is just… wow. It’s a thing of beauty. Even though the ppi is lower than on the iPhone, it seems higher. The extra screen real estate makes an incredible difference. I played a round of my favorite iPhone game, Plants vs. Zombies, and was totally amazed at the difference visually.

This is how a touchscreen interface should be. The iPhone was just a warm-up.

When I first lifted it, I was surprised at how light it was, but before long it started to feel heavy. If I were to use one regularly, I’d definitely want to prop it up in some way.

iPhone apps look surprisingly good in double resolution. They’re intelligently anti-aliased in a way that reminds me of the DVD “upconvert” process on a Blu-Ray player.

Both the Apple Store and Best Buy had the demo units displayed on clear, angled, cylindrical acrylic blocks with a white rubberized ring on top. It put the iPad at a perfect angle for viewing at demo stations, and the rubber kept it in place while still allowing it to be lifted easily. They should sell these.

Apple might be singlehandedly responsible for another H1N1 outbreak. Just think about how many hands are touching these things. They should’ve had Purell dispensers at the front door.

This feels like a new beginning. Sure, the iPad has flaws. But this is the first of something new, and I think it’s an order of magnitude bigger than either the iPod or iPhone. (And not just in terms of the physical dimensions.)

I know it’s too early for me to get one — I want a camera, or at the very least 3G (the latter of which is actually coming, in a few weeks). I also don’t want to pay $829 for a 64 GB, 3G model. But I know by now that eventually… eventually… I will own (or have owned) multiple iPads. I can see buying the $499 entry-level model now, and then buying a higher-end model in a year or two, when the features I want are available at a better price, and keeping the old one around the house too. I bought an original iPhone 9 months after it came out, which I passed on to SLP a little over a year later when I upgraded to a 3GS. I can see the iPad following a similar path — but one slightly less painful, since I paid $200 more for the original iPhone than for the 3GS, and I don’t see the iPad following the same rapid price reduction path.

I cannot put into words just how much it pains me that I walked out of Best Buy, not with an iPad under my arm, but with DVDs of High School Musical 3: Senior Year and Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel along with two reams of printer paper. These are the sacrifices we make as parents. (Granted, if I were really being a good parent I’d refuse to let them watch this tripe — the Chipmunks movie, anyway; I have to admit I actually kind of like the HSM trilogy — but… well, OK, I won’t try to justify it.)

More to come…

Everything old is new again: a new Room 34 compilation album is now available

Lately I’ve been realizing that my body of recordings has grown large enough that I could start producing the modern equivalent of mixtapes: MP3 playlists.

And so I have. Last fall I remixed and remastered my “greatest hits,” so to speak, from the past couple of years, and released the results on both CD and MP3 as Notated Scorns. I don’t plan to go that far with every future “mixtape,” but there’s still tremendous potential in 10 years’ worth of recordings to produce interesting new rearrangements of tracks without all the mucky-muck of remastering and having CDs manufactured.

Today I am announcing the immediate (and, of course, free) availability of the first of these new compilations: The Ambient Collection: 2001–2008. This collection includes 7 ambient tracks produced, surprisingly enough, between 2001 and 2008, in their original forms, along with some fresh new cover art. Enjoy!

iPokédex update

Back in early 2008, I set up an iPhone-optimized Pokédex web app. I pulled information from some of the usual suspects in the online world of Pokémon compendia.

A few people have asked me why I didn’t build it as a native app I could then sell in the App Store for boatloads of cash (because, you know, there’s a huge untapped market for… this).

Well, that’s a good question. A few answers:

  1. The App Store didn’t exist at the time I created it, and I had no interest in either jailbreaking my iPhone nor in supporting the jailbreak “community.”
  2. I didn’t (and so far, still don’t) have a developer account with Apple, and I didn’t (and so far, still don’t) know how to build a native iPhone app. Web apps, though, are second nature to me.
  3. It seemed clear to me that Apple wouldn’t (or, more accurately, shouldn’t) approve such an app. The entire contents of the app would be in violation of copyright, and there’s no way (that I could see) that Nintendo would license the content under the circumstances.

As far as I was concerned, that was pretty much it. The only way a Pokédex could live on the iPhone was as a web app. I’ve since learned that, whatever criteria they do employ in approving apps, copyrighted content does not appear to be a “dealbreaker” for Apple. I think it’s safe to say that Apple wouldn’t approve an unauthorized Pokémon game for the iPhone, but there are currently four Pokédex apps in the App Store.

Anyway… my iPokédex web app lives on. I just finished some updates: mostly some minor bug fixes, but also some visual refinements. Overall the improvements are slight, but I’m still pretty pleased with how well it works and how useful it is, especially considering that I essentially created it in an evening.

If you haven’t checked it out (ever, or lately), take a look now… especially on an iPhone!

http://pokemon.room34.com

Some more thoughts on the iPad from someone without one

I’m a joke maker

Did you hear the one about the guy who bought a Kindle on the day the iPad was released? Of course you didn’t, because no one is buying a Kindle today!

Well, I’m sure someone’s buying a Kindle. I’m not sure why.

Waiting for the second generation

I can understand why some people wouldn’t want an iPad. I’m not buying one today. I didn’t buy an iPhone until 9 months after it was released. I probably will own an iPad eventually. I would definitely wait until the 3G models are out; I would probably wait until a future version is available with a built-in camera, and after prices come down so at least 32 GB of storage is available for the same price as 16 GB today.

Common complaints

Most of the critics (including Walt Mossberg and David Carr on last night’s episode of Charlie Rose), while generally lavishing high praise on the device, cite a common (small) set of complaints: lack of a camera for video chat, the awkwardness of holding it for long periods, and no support for Flash tend to be at the top of the list.

I can certainly agree on the first two points: a camera (or two — one on each side) seems like such an obviously necessary feature that I can’t believe it won’t be added to the second generation model; and although I’ve yet to touch an iPad, much less hold one, I can already imagine that I would quickly tire of propping it up and that two-handed typing while balancing it on my lap would be frustrating. But it comes with a nice case with a built-in prop (as demonstrated by David Carr last night on Charlie Rose), and more accessories will certainly be coming soon from third-party manufacturers.

There was an inadvertent demonstration of the potential physical awkwardness of the device last night on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon when the host and Joshua Topolsky attempted to play a game of air hockey with the iPad placed flat on Jimmy’s desk: with its curved aluminum back, the iPad was prone to skating around on the desk as the two slid their virtual paddles around on-screen.

Click here to see the video from Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. I’m so mad at NBC for their stupid embed code just embedding an SNL promo instead of the proper video clip that I’ve actually resorted to using the phrase “click here.” So, spare me further agony and just… click here.

Flash? We don’t need no stinkin’ Flash!

But the complaint about the iPad that is most divisive is its lack of Flash support. I’ve already made my feelings on the matter known (1, 2). I think there are a very limited number of circumstances where Flash is useful (or at least grudgingly necessary), but it has been an overused crutch for far too long, and the more the iPad/iPhone ecosystem promotes movement away from Flash and to web standards, both well-established (CSS, JavaScript) and emerging (HTML5, H.264 video), the better. I know different people use the web in different ways: I rarely never play Flash-based games online; major video sites like YouTube and Vimeo are moving to supporting H.264 alternatives to Flash video (and I can live without the ones that aren’t). But I would challenge just about any user of the Internet to make the case that their experience, overall, is improved by these positive uses of Flash more than it is hindered by obnoxious Flash-based advertisements and non-standard Flash-based website UI.

Game changer

Charlie Rose loves the iPad. He called it a “game changer” at least 3 or 4 times last night. There’s been some dispute over the iPad’s potential impact, but I think those who are criticizing it on its technical specifics — the lack of whatever they deem it to be lacking — are completely missing the point. I read something recently (which I’ll link to if I manage to track it down again) that was talking about how the upcoming Windows Phone 7 interface would have been just as revolutionary if it had come sooner; the implication being that the major factor in Apple’s success was timing. To me, this so profoundly misses the mark that it’s hard to even take seriously. As much as I hate to use the word “paradigm,” Apple changed the paradigm with the iPhone interface. There wouldn’t be a Windows Phone 7 without the iPhone, nor a Droid, nor any of the other major advancements we’ve seen in “smartphones” since the iPhone was released in the summer of 2007. Yes, there were smartphones before the iPhone and they did a lot of the same things. Yes, Android was being developed for a number of years before the iPhone was released. But the iPhone changed both the perception and the reality of what a smartphone can do.

This is what the iPad will do, for a market — netbooks, or whatever fills the void between phones and laptops — that is even more anemic than the cellphone market was a few years ago. The hardware physically fills that niche perfectly, but the UI is what’s really revolutionary, creating a whole new, far more intuitive, natural, and fun way for people to interact with a technology device, with an underlying system that is more stable and worry-free — it just works — than any computer before it. And just think about the amazing things the 150,000-plus iPhone apps can do today: not even Apple envisioned all of the ways the iPhone would so quickly come to be used by people of all ages, for just about everything. This is what the iPad will do.

I didn’t want one, until I did

Most people see the iPad primarily as a device for consuming media, and to a large extent that’s true. The most strident complaints about its limitations seem to be coming from those who create media, and I can understand where they’re coming from… to an extent. But the iPhone has become a powerful tool for creating media, with its camera and photo manipulation apps; with creative drawing tools (good enough to have produced several New Yorker covers to date); and with a vast array of music creation apps, turning the pocket device… the freaking cell phone into both a musical instrument and a recording studio. Just imagine what the same kinds of innovative thinking can do with a more powerful processor and a much larger screen. You might never find Adobe Creative Suite or Pro Tools on the iPad, but that’s old world thinking. If you let go of the familiar (and far less intuitive to non-techies) trappings of mice and windows, of plugging in peripherals and navigating hierarchical file systems, and embrace the potential of a new way of interacting with a computer, a new world will open up to you.

Over the past several years, I’ve read numerous articles lamenting the fact that for all of the advances in computer hardware technology we’ve witnessed in the last quarter century, the basic GUI concepts have not evolved one bit from the first Macintosh Apple unleashed on the world in 1984 — and its concepts were largely the same as those developed experimentally at Xerox PARC in the late 1960s. When will we finally have a new way of interacting with computers? And where will it come from? It’s not much of a surprise that it came from Apple, and it’s here today.

I just realized I’m a big jerk

“Just now?” you may be saying in mock surprise. To you I say, “Shut up!” in my jerkiest voice, which I have just now realized is more seriously jerky than I had previously assumed.

What did I do that was so jerky? Well, nothing, really. That’s just it. I did nothing because I am a jerk. Instead of doing something that any reasonably non-jerky person would have done, I did nothing, and then I thought so much about how I didn’t do anything that I became overcome with guilt for my inaction and felt compelled to seek penance in the confessional of my blog.

As I do about once a week or so, I spent much of the day today at Coffman Memorial Union at the University of Minnesota. Never mind the fact that I am neither student, nor faculty, nor staff, nor alumnus. (Nor do I know whether or not it’s grammatically correct to use “neither” with that many “nors,” although I suspect it is not.) SLP is on the faculty, and my frequent visits correspond to our weekly-ish lunch dates.

Anyway… at one point in the day I was in the B-level men’s room, and I noticed an abandoned Droid on a sink basin. No, no no, no. I didn’t take it. I didn’t take it to keep (which I shouldn’t, and wouldn’t do; I’m a jerk, not a thief). I also didn’t take it to the lost and found (which… well). I just left it there.

Several hours later I was back in that men’s room, and before leaving I wanted to check and see if the Droid was still there, this time intending to do the right thing and take it to the lost and found. But for the entire time I was in the men’s room, there was some other guy standing at the sink right next to the sink the Droid had been left on. God knows what he was doing that he needed to spend that much time at the sink, but it was too far away from the urinal I was using for me to go over to it without seeming weird, and going over there after I had washed my hands at a different sink would seem even more weird, and besides, I was just getting pissed at that guy for taking so damn long at the sink!

People who take forever doing whatever they’re doing in public restrooms always bug me, perhaps because it prevents me from taking forever myself without feeling self-conscious about it. Perhaps I’m just resentful of guys who are so indifferent to what jerks like me think about them, that they can happily go about whatever it is they want to do without worrying. Because I worry a lot, about things both important and irrelevant.

Obviously.

In the end, I never did find out what happened to the Droid, nor did I figure out why that guy needed to spend so long at the sink. Come to think of it, I didn’t really learn anything from this whole experience. If anything I’m even more bitter and worried than I was before. What a jerk.