Tag Archives: iPad

A childhood fantasy (almost) realized: 100 Atari games in my pocket

Owners of 1980s technology intellectual property are in an unenviable position. Their IP has very little value beyond historical significance or nostalgia. No one (well, I hope no one) is going to use an Apple IIe computer for serious productivity work these days, but that doesn’t diminish its importance in computing history, nor the strong positive memories its once loyal users may still hold onto.

There are few properties from the ’80s whose value is more purely historical and nostalgic than those bearing the brand of Atari. Sure, there’s still a company today named Atari, and it still makes modern video games for modern consoles, but this Atari shares only its name with the hallowed institution founded in Sunnyvale, California in 1972. The name and all of the properties that go with it have been sold and re-sold and re-re-sold so many times over the intervening years that any minute connection to the past, beyond the games themselves, has been lost.

So, what is a modern company that owns all of this (relatively speaking) useless IP to do? Trying to cash in on it is obvious, but doing it right is a huge challenge. The biggest hurdle is the very historical significance and nostalgia that give these games any lingering value in the first place. The only people who are really going to want to play Combat or Yars’ Revenge or — ah-hem — Math Gran Prix on an iPhone are people who either owned (and played the hell out of) these games as kids 30 years ago, or their kids, who harbor a morbid curiosity about this old crap their parents like for some reason. In order to satisfy these customers, the company that now calls itself Atari needs to achieve perfection in recreating the experience people remember. Not just the graphics and the sounds and the program mechanics of the games, but the feel… the essence of what it meant to play video games in the days when Ronald Reagan was president, pastels were popular in men’s fashion, and MTV still showed music videos.

Yesterday Atari released Atari’s Greatest Hits as a universal app for iOS devices. (To the non-nerd[s] in my audience: that means the same app works on iPhone/iPod touch and iPad.) The game comes free with arcade Pong, and 99 other classic (and not-so-classic, but… well… old) Atari games, both from the arcades and for the Atari 2600 VCS, available as in-app purchases. The games are sold in packs of four for 99 cents, or the entire set can be downloaded for $14.99. Let’s be serious: anyone who cares about this at all should just get it over with and download the works, immediately.

So did Atari live up to my unrealistic expectations? Read on after the screenshot gallery to find out.

First impressions

It’s clear from the moment you load Atari’s Greatest Hits on your iPhone or iPad that a great deal of attention and care went into putting this package together. And yet, it just doesn’t quite hit the mark. The graphic design of the menu interface bears plenty of superficial nods to the vintage Atari experience: plenty of use of Bauhaus font (the font Atari used with the original 7 cartridges released with the Atari VCS in 1977), lots of browns and oranges, and of course the carousel navigation that uses the original cabinet and/or game box art to help you select a game to play. But despite fonts and colors, this doesn’t look ’80s, and it certainly doesn’t sound ’80s. The entire time you’re on the menu, loud 21st century techno music booms from your speaker. To be fair, I like this kind of music, and the music they chose is decent. But it’s a distracting anachronism.

I compare this to the Williams Pinball Collection that came out a few years ago on the modern consoles. Its interface looks like an arcade, with the pinball tables lined up along the wall, and over the din of a dozen pinball machines blasts licensed ’80s popular music. (The song that stands out for me is the quite-possibly-perfect Loverboy hit “Workin’ for the Weekend.”) This is what I would have liked (if not downright expected) in a properly executed Atari collection.

Lamentations about “what could have been” aside, it is truly great to see the original game box art and arcade cabinets on the menu, and the menu itself is intuitive and fun to navigate. And it’s great that each game also includes a full high-resolution scan of the original instruction manual, which also explains why a collection of 100 games, most of which were only about 4 KB each on the original cartridges, could add up to a 68 MB download on iOS.

The sound and the fury

There was almost no question for me which game I would try first: Yars’ Revenge. I logged hundreds of hours (sometimes in a single game, it seemed) playing this game in the ’80s, long past the date when I should have moved on to the NES or PC games. Any true Atari retro experience needs to deliver a perfect rendition of Yars’ Revenge for me to consider it a success.

I started the game, picked my favorite game variation (Game 6), and then… WHAAAAA!!! Playing the game on my iPad, I was assaulted by hideous distorted grinding noises. I tried a few other games and confirmed that all of the 2600 games had horribly distorted sound. (It also didn’t help that Yars’ Revenge gets most of its intensity from a constant droning buzz, making this quite possibly the worst game I could begin this experience with.)

Fortunately, later in the evening I loaded the game onto my iPhone 3GS, and found absolutely no sound issues with the 2600 games, even Yars’ Revenge. So I’m not sure if this is a general issue with the game on the iPad, or if it was an isolated problem that could have been resolved with a reboot. I’ll follow up on that when I know more.

Playing the game

With my worries about sound allayed, I was able to focus my attention on the quality of the game experience. All of the games are presented in a relatively small area of the screen, with ample space above and below devoted to on-screen controls. There have been some complaints in App Store reviews about the games not using the full display, but I think those complaints are misguided. These Atari games in their original form were so low-res that even when shrunk down to a little less than half the size of an iPhone screen, they’re still easily viewable. Plus, displaying the games in full-screen mode would mean you’d need to obscure part of the display with your fingers in order to control the game. Unacceptable.

The developers and designers who worked on this collection put considerable thought into translating the original game controls to on-screen counterparts that do not necessarily mimic the original feel, but that usually (but not always) contribute to a satisfying game experience.

A good pair of games to consider in reviewing the merits of these control systems are the arcade versions of Asteroids and Tempest. Both games translate quite well to the iOS experience. They look fantastic (all of the vector games, in particular, come through well here), and are just as fun to play as ever. With Tempest, the original control mechanism was a flywheel-like spinner. That is replaced with a thumbwheel that reminds me of the volume controls on old transistor radios. It’s way different from the original control, but it feels surprisingly natural and it’s very easy to adapt to this type of play.

Asteroids, on the other hand, does not benefit from this new alternate control mechanism, at least for the way I like to play the game. (I should probably note that I own an actual Asteroids cocktail table, so I’m very accustomed to the arcade controls.) The default control mechanism is a combination rotate/thrust “disc,” not unlike the disc controller on an old Intellivision. (Intellivision controls on an Atari game? Blasphemy!) Some people may prefer this, but I found it absolutely unusable, mainly because of my preferred Asteroids playing style: I don’t thrust all over the screen. I stay in one spot and just rotate, and I move around only when absolutely necessary. The disc control makes it nearly impossible, for me at least, to rotate without thrusting. Luckily, Asteroids (and apparently most of the arcade games, though I haven’t tried them all yet) offers multiple control schemes, including the original arcade-style five-button configuration. This worked well for me on the iPad, but I didn’t try it yet on the iPhone, and I imagine size could be an issue there, not to mention just holding the iPhone while fiddling with five on-screen buttons at the bottom of the display.

A few other miscellaneous game notes:

No licensed games. This was a no-brainer for me, but apparently (based on reviews on the App Store) it’s confusing to some users. This collection only consists of games Atari owns the rights to. That means games that were licensed for the original Atari 2600 won’t show up here, not even if Atari developed those games. You won’t find arcade classics like Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Defender or Berzerk, and you won’t find licensed movie properties like Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark or E.T. And you definitely won’t find games that were originally released by other game companies like Activision, Imagic or Parker Brothers. Although… one wonders. Atari licensed Pitfall! and River Raid from Activision for inclusion on the plug-and-play Atari Flashback 2 console a few years back. Maybe a similar license could be in the works. It wouldn’t be difficult for Atari to offer additional in-app purchases of more games in the future.

I think the funniest instance of licensing issues popping up here though is the matter of Pong Sports. Back in the ’80s Atari manufactured the 2600 and a number of its games under special branding for sale at Sears stores, and there were three Sears exclusive titles (Steeplechase, Submarine Commander and Stellar Track), all of which are included here. And then there’s Pong Sports. Atari released this game as Video Olympics, and sold it as Pong Sports in Sears stores. But here it’s called Pong Sports, presumably because they couldn’t get the rights to use the word “Olympics” this time around.

Unreleased and homebrew games. If you’re not a hardcore Atari fanatic, you probably don’t realize that in recent years a number of unreleased prototype games have come to light as downloadable ROMs to play in computer-based Atari 2600 emulation software. And a rabid homebrew community has developed as well, creating brand new games for the system. This collection includes a few of these prototype and homebrew games, such as the Atari 2600 version of Tempest and an unreleased game called Save Mary. I find it funny that Atari had to, of course, come up with box art for these games for the menu interface, and they went with some really low-quality homemade art for most of them. But Save Mary is the weirdest… it uses the cover art that originally went with the Atari 2600 BASIC Programming cartridge.

It’s also funny… and probably an intentional joke… that for these games, the manual scans that are displayed are not for the games (since they don’t have instruction manuals) but for the Atari 2600 console itself. Somewhat of an Easter egg, I think.

God (or is it the devil?) is in the details

Atari got a lot of things right with this collection, but there is definitely room for improvement. Here are a few things that come to mind, some of which I’ve already mentioned.

License some great ’80s music for the menu. The aforementioned Loverboy hit would certainly be great, but really just about any music that was in heavy rotation on MTV circa 1983 would work. Personally I’d love to hear plenty of Duran Duran and Men at Work.

Alternate control schemes for the 2600 titles. Here’s the one thing that I think would make the biggest difference in creating an authentic Atari 2600 experience: position the on-screen controls to better mimic the feeling of holding an old CX-40 joystick. The space is already there; they’d just need to rearrange the controls. Move the fire button to the upper left where the pause button is; move the d-pad to the lower right where the fire button is; and move the pause button to the lower right where the d-pad is. Holding a square-ish device in the left hand and pressing a button with one’s left thumb while using one’s right hand to control movement is the natural way of the Atari 2600 experience. Ideally the d-pad would be tweaked a bit as well… it’s a little too restrictive feeling. A lot of iOS games with a virtual d-pad allow you to place your thumb anywhere in a general region of the screen and that instantly becomes the “zero” position of the d-pad. I suspect (or at least hope) that, given the nature of iOS apps, Atari will continue to refine the controls in future updates.

Better “cabinet art.” I have to be honest… I can live with the graphic design of the main menus, but the graphics framing the game itself while in play are downright ugly. Better to have it look like an actual vintage TV set like VH1’s (yes, VH1’s) Intellivision collection for iOS. And I’d prefer that the on-screen buttons look exactly like the real buttons on the arcade cabinets and console controllers, without the unnecessary added visual junk. It also seems like they phoned in the design of the on-screen slider for the paddle-based games. (Why doesn’t it at least look like the control they developed for Tempest?)

Final thoughts

I could nitpick details only an OCD Atari junkie will notice, much less care about, but in the end there’s only one thing I can say about this collection. Back in the early days of the App Store, Atari released a few of its classic arcade games as standalone apps, each consisting of both the original and a new version with modernized graphics and sound: Centipede, Super Breakout, Missile Command. Then they disappeared, and were gone for ages. A month or two ago, they reappeared, but with only the modernized portions. For ages I’ve been speculating that Atari had a massive collection app in the works, and finally yesterday it arrived. I was absolutely giddy. And while it will probably never fully live up to my expectations, it’s damn close. I’ve dreamed ever since I first got my Atari 2600 console in 1982, when I was 8 years old, that one day I’d be able to carry the experience around in my pocket. And now I can… almost. It’s not perfect, and it couldn’t be. But I’ll take it anyway.

So just what exactly is behind my dislike of Flash?

Caveat emptor. This is going to be a really long post. But I’ve been saving this up for a long time, and hopefully I can purge myself of it in one sitting. Also, I apologize for that vaguely vomitous metaphor, but it fits my feelings about Flash. And, perhaps, by the end yours as well. So if you have a strong stomach (and care at all about this crap), read on. Otherwise, see you next time.

OK, so I’ve chimed in on the whole Apple vs. Adobe, no Flash on iPhone OS situation before. (And, if you care to scroll back through my history of mostly beer-fueled tweets about the Minnesota Twins, you’ll find a few choice 140-character missives on the matter from me on Twitter as well.) But up to now I’ve never made a clear — or, failing clarity, at least a verbose — argument for why I so strongly dislike Flash. The time has come.

I am well aware that Flash means different things to different groups of people. Essentially, as I see it, there are three main groups of people where Flash is concerned: pro-Flash designers/developers, anti-Flash designers/developers, and users. I don’t bother to distinguish between pro- and anti-Flash among users, because ultimately I don’t think most users (unless they’re also in one of the other two groups) give a crap what technology is behind the content they’re consuming on the Internet. They just want it to work.

So, with this in mind, I’m splitting this post into two sections: my arguments against Flash from the user perspective, and my arguments against it from the designer/developer perspective. I don’t bother representing the third group, because there’s really no part of me that supports it. I have reluctantly used Flash for a few, very limited purposes in recent years1, but I am actively striving to eliminate even those rare instances of it from my work.

But enough about my work (for now). Any web designer or developer worth their hourly rate knows the user comes first.

Part one: the user’s perspective

1. Flash-based designs look bad. I know I’m not an ordinary user, given my professional background, but I can spot Flash-based content in an instant, and it’s always a turn-off. There’s just something… cheap-looking about most of it. More often than not, I notice that Flash-based content has bad text rendering (both because of kerning and leading issues and because of Adobe’s abysmal anti-aliasing technology, far surpassed by the built-in anti-aliasing of plain HTML text in modern Mac web browsers and Mac OS X itself). And beyond the text, most Flash content I see has cheesy, cookie-cutter animated effects. It’s not as objectionable as a PowerPoint presentation, but it’s almost as immediately identifiable, and equally uninspiring.

Now, it’s true I’ve seen some excellent Flash-based web design. But it’s definitely the exception, and it’s rarer as an overall percentage (or at least feels that way) than first-rate design is on non-Flash sites. Plus, since I can never entirely turn off my professional perspective, knowing the drawbacks that an all-Flash website brings, my experience even of these best examples of Flash-based design are tainted beyond redemption.

2. The most high-profile use of Flash is for ads — and annoying ones at that. OK, there’s a lot of Flash content out there that’s not ads. I’d like to believe that ads make up a minority — hopefully a small one — of all Flash content on the web. But I think most of the interesting Flash web design is never seen by most people. The only Flash-heavy content that draws a lot of traffic is either online games (some good, some… meh), kids’ interactive sites (probably the only use of Flash I unabashedly support), and promotional sites for blockbuster movies and console video games. Of course, the number one use of Flash these days is probably to watch video online, from sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Funny or Die, Hulu. Flash-based video is everywhere. But that’s changing.

So, set aside the sites that require heavy-duty interactive content or (for now) video, and what are you left with? Where else does the average Internet user encounter Flash most often? Ads. Annoying, intrusive, obnoxious ads. I realize perfectly well that unless a website is actually selling stuff (including, potentially, access to the site itself, and good luck with that unless your content is either targeted at highly-specialized professions or X-rated), the only viable revenue source is advertising. But websites that operate on an ad-based business model walk a fine line: the ads need to be attention-getting enough to encourage the user to click on them, but they can’t get in the way so much that people stop visiting your site altogether. As a user, when I encounter a site with an over-abundance of intrusive ads, it’s a double negative: not only do I think the site’s design is too annoying to deal with, but I automatically assume its content must be crap, not worth wading through the ads to get to anyway.

3. It’s a plug-in. A plug-what? A what-in? This is beyond the level of most users’ interest in their computers. I just want it to work, I don’t want to fiddle around with downloading extra crap, especially when the installer was written by Adobe. (See, it’s hard for me to divorce my mind from my professional experience, even for a few minutes.) Once it’s installed, you’re done forever (or… well… until a new version of Flash comes out), so it’s easy to forget about it, but get a new computer and it’s either not installed, or you’ve purchased a PC that’s not only preloaded with Flash but 3 dozen other crappy OEM add-on applications that you’ll spend a week trying to get rid of (or, more likely, leave on your desktop gathering metaphorical dust along with 100 other icons, including every Word document you’ve ever created, forever).

The point is, despite Adobe’s efforts to make us think Flash is a natural part of the web, a sibling to HTML, CSS and JavaScript, in fact it is not a web technology at all. It’s just this proprietary thing Macromedia (now part of Adobe) developed for creating interactive media (first as Director, and then as Shockwave) and decided at some point to turn into something that could be embedded in web pages: Flash. (I’m sure the longtime Macromedia fanboys will want to correct me on some point of that history, but for anyone who doesn’t give a crap, that’s the gist of it.)

Flash filled a niche, but web standards have caught up (or are well on their way to doing so), and a proprietary add-on just isn’t necessary in the way that it used to be. And, of course, on any device running iPhone OS, it’s not even that. It’s this.

4. You can’t “deep link.” I realize that to anyone who doesn’t know what a “plug-in” is (as I joked about in the previous item), the concept of “deep linking” may cause a spontaneous mental breakdown. But just because the average user doesn’t know what “deep linking” means doesn’t mean they don’t want to do it. The best example of this (though sadly I don’t have an example of it at the moment) is the scenario of a Flash-based photo gallery. Want to send your friend a link to the 14th photo in the gallery? Too bad. If you copy and paste the URL from your browser into an email, they’re going to be taken to the first photo, or, more likely, to the obnoxious crap you didn’t bother watching when you first landed on the site, because the designer at least had the courtesy of including a “Skip Intro” button.

It’s possible now to work around some of these limitations, but in my experience most Flash-based websites don’t.

5. It’s sometimes used when it’s not really needed. This is closely related to the previous item, and is probably more of a complaint I have as a developer than as a user. But there are just some sites that don’t need Flash. Or even if they do, the whole thing doesn’t need to be in Flash. If Flash were restricted to the parts of the site that require its capabilities, and things like the main navigation and text content were in plain HTML, then deep linking and a host of related problems could be alleviated.

6. Mobile. Note that I said “mobile” and not “iPhone OS.” It’s true that Apple is the only mobile device manufacturer who is actively and aggressively keeping Flash off the platform, but up to now no other mobile device has a working, readily available version of Flash either. And even though Android 2.2 (on the Android-based devices that are actually upgradeable to it) does finally offer Flash support, the jury is still out on how usable it is. Adobe is working hard (apparently), but there are major technical hurdles in optimizing Flash both for the low processing power of mobile CPUs and for reasonable battery consumption. But even if those technical issues are resolved, there’s the interface issue. Flash simply was not designed for touchscreen devices, and even though, from what I’ve read, Adobe has added programming hooks for touchscreen input, a lot of existing Flash-based interactive content will not be usable as-is on a touchscreen device. This is an issue for “regular” web technologies too, but the open standards of HTML and JavaScript make building a mobile web browser that overcomes these differences far easier than with Flash — and Adobe doesn’t need to be at the center of the process.

7. The security and privacy settings you don’t know about, but should. There’s a reasonably good chance you’ve looked at the privacy settings in your web browser’s Preferences dialog box. But have you seen this screen before?

Probably not. But maybe you want to check it out. It’s here. You see, Flash really isn’t a part of your web browser. Flash has its own privacy settings, its own cache, its own cookies. Web sites that use Flash can store and retrieve information on your computer, completely apart from the capabilities and limitations in your web browser. And Flash can access information on your computer that the web browser by itself can’t. That’s the whole reason Flash-based file uploaders exist, and why they work better than a regular browser “upload” form field: because Flash can read information about files on your computer that is strictly off-limits, for security purposes, to HTML and JavaScript.

I’m not claiming the sky is falling or crying wolf. I don’t personally know of any major security exploits that have come out of this particular capability of Flash. But what happens if there is an exploit? There’s no one who can fix the problem but Adobe, and no alternative means for you to access Flash-based content. If Internet Explorer has a security exploit, you can always browse the web with Firefox, but despite some noble open source efforts, there really is no alternative to Flash. Adobe has an absolute monopoly on Flash-based web content.

8. Performance. Flash is notoriously much slower on the Mac than it is on Windows. Always has been, always will be. Apparently, according to none other than Steve Jobs himself, it’s also the number one reason Macs crash. I don’t doubt it, though I haven’t experienced it myself, mainly because I avoid Flash-based content as much as possible. But even though it performs well on Windows (largely due, I suspect, to more direct access to the system’s hardware — another security concern, incidentally — on Windows compared to the abstracted hardware access the Mac grants applications), it’s a resource hog everwhere else. I already talked about Flash’s performance issues on mobile devices. The upshot is that Flash seems to be pretty bloated and inefficient, and since Adobe won’t let anyone else look under the hood, I suspect there’s a good chance that it is… perhaps even more than anyone thinks.

In other words, if there’s a better way to do something, use it. Dump Flash.

Part two: the designer/developer’s perspective

1. Flash created a rift in the community. You don’t say! Just as there’s a big wall in the corporate software development world between .NET and Java, there’s a huge wall in the web design/development community between those who use Flash and those who don’t. This may stem in no small part from Adobe’s (and, previously, Macromedia’s) marketing tactics. There are almost unlimited options available for free (or at least cheap) IDEs for web and application development (or you can just use Notepad), but the only way2 to create Flash content is to pony up.

The result of this — and I speak from my own experience, which was a contributing factor in which side of the fence I fell on — is that designers who were given Adobe Creative Suite had Flash on their desktops, and developers who did not have CS were shut out. Flash, with ActionScript, became a gateway drug for designers looking to get into programming. Adobe capitalized on familiarity with their applications’ user interfaces, and a generation of Flash evangelists was born.

Or, on the other hand, you had developers or, like me, designer-developers who happened to fall just slightly more into the “developer” column, who were maybe given a copy of Photoshop, but encouraged not to use it. There have been periods over the past decade where I have been receptive to the idea of getting into Flash development, but was denied access to the necessary tools. It doesn’t take too long playing that role — in the context of all of the criticisms I’ve already levied from the user’s perspective — before you just decide it’s a piece of crap; you’re better off without it; and you’ll do everything you can to prove that standards-based alternatives are better.

The war between Apple and Adobe over Flash support on the iPhone OS has brought the situation to a head, with the Flash development community up in arms over Apple’s war (in which they are at least collateral damage, and at worst Adobe mercenaries), and the standards community cheering what they see as the overdue demise of public enemy number one.

2. Flash developers use it unnecessarily. There’s the rift in the community again. Because Flash developers were often weaned on Adobe Creative Suite and don’t know how to program in anything other than ActionScript, nor often how to build a simple web page in HTML/CSS, and because it’s easy for them to dazzle clients with a Flash-based site, it’s often tempting to just build an entire site in Flash. It looks impressive, the client thinks they’re getting what they want, and the check’s in the mail.

The problem is, although you can build an entire website in Flash doesn’t mean you should. In addition to the aforementioned mobile devices, Flash content is invisible to screen readers, meaning visually impaired users can’t access it, and, probably more important to the client’s bottom line, to search engines. As far as Google is concerned, that whiz-bang all-Flash website you just created for your client may as well not even exist.

Again, there are ways around a lot of these limitations, but I can think of a better one: just don’t use Flash.

And so on. I had a few other items on my list of complaints from the developer’s perspective, but they’re mostly facets of these same points: it’s a closed system entirely dependent upon one company; it’s expensive; it’s increasingly unnecessary as web standards evolve; it encourages bad user experience (UX) design; it distracts designers-turned-developers from learning web standards; etc.

Arguing for or against Flash is a lot like arguing politics and religion. It’s a polarizing issue. Everyone who has any interest in the debate also has investment in a particular perspective — baggage and biases they may not be fully willing to admit even to themselves, much less throw into their arguments. And a lot of it isn’t entirely rational.

As Upton Sinclair famously wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” It’s also easy to use that argument when you’re entirely convinced that it’s describing the other person’s position. I’m sure there is more behind most pro-Flash arguments than a vested interest in the ongoing potential for work developing for the platform. But from my perspective, it’s difficult to see.

Notes

1 I said there were “a few” things I’ve used Flash for in recent years. In fact, there are three: 1) YUI Uploader, on the administrative side of my CMS, for handling file uploads with a user-friendly progress bar; 2) JW Player, on a few client sites running my CMS, for displaying Flash-encoded video (FLV) in a skinnable player; and 3) sIFR, that damnable bastard Flash/JavaScript hybrid solution to the problem of customizing fonts on the web. I’m pleased to say I haven’t used sIFR in nearly two years (though, sadly, I’m still avoiding promising CSS3-based solutions like Typekit and the new Google Font API because of poor rendering on Windows, especially in Firefox). And I’ve just — temporarily, at least — pulled YUI Uploader out of my CMS after upgrading to CakePHP 1.3, due to an incompatibility I have yet to troubleshoot. As for JW Player, well, I’m still using it for now, but I’ll actively pursue HTML5 video solutions on future projects.

2 OK, owning a $700 copy of Adobe Flash isn’t the only way to create Flash content. Knock yourself out. Adobe will be standing by to take your order when you get back.

iPad: Son of Newton

There’s some buzz going around concerning Apple’s new iPad commercial and its similarity to one Apple produced for the Newton two decades ago. Though I’m not the first to comment on this, I have a few thoughts of my own, so here goes…

First, let’s watch both commercials. I did not remember this (apparently) “classic” (in John Gruber’s words) ad for the Newton:

Now, watch Apple’s new iPad ad:

Wow. Homage indeed. I doubt very many people remember the Newton commercial, but the iPad commercial is stunningly similar. This had to be deliberate, but I’m wondering what exactly that deliberateness is supposed to mean.

Well, I’ll tell you this: watching the two ads back-to-back, I’m left feeling that a) the Newton really was way ahead of its time, and b) the Newton ad seems like one of those futuristic concept videos Apple (among other computer makers) seemed to love producing in the 1980s.

Newton was a vision of the future. iPad is the reality. That Newton actually became a shipping product says a lot about Apple’s ability to realize its vision (compared to the long line of never-to-be-made concepts that have come from Microsoft over the years, most recently… well… this). But the Newton was too far ahead of its time. Then again, it ushered in the PDA era, which ushered in the “smartphone” era, which led to the iPhone and now the iPad. So maybe Apple was really seeding (if you’ll pardon the pun) its own future with the Newton.

There are two key lines that for me define the difference between the two ads:

“Newton can receive a page and sends faxes and, soon, electronic mail.”

“(iPad is) 200,000 apps and counting. All the world’s websites in your hands.”

Granted, paging and faxing were still relevant technologies when the Newton was released, but they were already doomed, and the best Apple could say was that “soon” Newton could handle “electronic mail” (even then, using a soon-to-be-antiquated term). In contrast, the iPad hits the ground running, leveraging the existing success of the iPhone, and with forward momentum for future technologies. Newton was about what could be, but iPad is.

More iPad observations: iBooks

Note: I originally wrote this as a comment on my previous entry, but it seemed substantial enough to warrant its own post.

I admit it. Much to SLP’s chagrin, I’m not a huge reader of books. In the past I typically read 10-15 books per year, although more recently, with the lifestyle changes that have come with young kids and new technology (iPhone, Nintendo DS), my book reading has really fallen off. I’m not sure I’ve read an entire book cover-to-cover since I polished off the Harry Potter series in late 2007.

Anyway… the reason I mention that is to say that I have never been interested in a dedicated e-book reader like the Kindle, partly because I’m just not reading that many books these days. But I’m also not impressed by them technologically. The e-ink displays are cool (in a limited way), but beyond that they’re very unimpressive. I dislike single-function devices on principle. (And remember, the Kindle DX is only ten dollars cheaper than the entry-level iPad.)

Which brings me to iBooks, the e-book reader app for the iPad. I think I could embrace the idea of e-books on a device that also does a lot of other cool stuff, and even though the iPad has certain characteristics that are arguably inferior to the Kindle for the purpose of reading books — namely, a lower-resolution, backlit display, which can be harder on the eyes than the Kindle’s display, and that also doesn’t work so well in bright sunlight — arguments can also certainly be made in favor of the iPad as a superior e-book reader: you don’t need to have a light on to use it (meaning you can read it in bed without disturbing your partner), and the full-color touchscreen display is much more responsive, allowing for not just brilliant color images, but video and other interactive features.

And then there’s the iBooks interface: in particular, the way you turn pages. On the Kindle, you press buttons on the sides of the device, which “turn” the page in the form of a 3-second redraw. On the iPad, you really turn the page with a swipe of your finger, which causes the corner of the on-screen page to curl up and follow your finger movement as you lay it down on the other side of the “book.” It’s a cool effect, and it works incredibly well, but it wasn’t until I used it myself that I realized it wasn’t just a gimmick: you can stop partway through the turn and hold the page there, allowing you to see part of the page before/after the one you’re on. You can move it back and forth.

And that’s when it hit me that I do that a lot when I’m reading a “real” book. I will often be reading a passage and want to refer back to something I just saw on the previous page. On the iPad, you can do that, in exactly the same way that you do it with a physical book. And to me, that goes a much longer way towards making reading a book on the iPad feel like reading a book instead of reading dark gray letters on a light gray screen, and pushing flimsy plastic buttons to move to the next gray screen’s worth of text.

It is this kind of attention to the finer details of the user experience that sets Apple’s product (hardware and software) designs apart from the rest. In my experience no one innovates user experience like Apple. Eventually others catch on, but Apple has consistently led the way, for over a quarter century. And I don’t see that changing anytime soon (regardless of the continued presence of Steve Jobs).

Side note: iBook vs. iBooks. Apple let the iBook moniker for its consumer-level laptops die when it switched to Intel processors a few years ago. Now the name has a whole new meaning. I have yet to see anyone else make note of this, but I’m sure I’m not alone in this observation.

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…