Up close and personal with the iPad
Photo by Karl Mondon / Bay Area News Group
Link to slideshow at the Contra Costa Times
My pal Karl, a Bay Area photojournalist, took this about 10 minutes into Steve Jobs presentation yesterday. We texted afterwards:
Karl: So…what’s the verdict? I tried to rub one on my thigh to see if I’d hear violins, but it was too loud in there, and security was starting to eye me.
Me: Heehee! I’m sure there’ll be an app for that. Jobs knows, the porn industry is thrilled by this thing. Well, I’m psyched, of course. Wish it had a camera, and I wanna hear if heavy reading brings eye fatigue, but, shoot, it’s clearly a game-changer.
Karl: Sweet. Hope it’s a bonanza for the J2 MacWhisperer.
Me: Thing is, these devices are so bloody easy, people just do what they want with ‘em, and they just work. Once we set someone’s iPhone up, we get very few calls afterwards asking us how to use it. It’s ridiculous. That’s why they design them without the fancy stuff. You want a tablet with two cameras, front and back? (c.f: Jason Calacanis’ predictions at http://twitter.com/jason/.) Somebody’ll make one, probably with Android, and it’ll be good. It may not be as baby-butt smooth as the iPad, and it will owe an elephantine debt of gratitude to Apple’s Platonic ideal of “tablet,” but it will do things the iPad won’t. So goeth evolution, which I guess means they won’t get to use iPads in Kansas.
Other friends wrote in:
Not a problem if they would just make Bluetooth tethering actually do something. GD AT&T. I’m glad it doesn’t have 3G. Love the Kindle Whispernet!
>Jobs certainly did not deign to mention that one can run Amazon’s Kindle app for iPhone on this thing, adding tons of purchasable material to whatever deals Apple has made with publishers.
Very happy with iWork and Camera Connection Kit. Those were deal breakers for me. I’m gonna be looking real hard at some of these replacing laptops for some of my folks. Put a server-managed iMac on their desk and one of these ZERO support beauties in their hands and I’m a happy IT guy.
There’s little question to me that the iPad and its ilk will be replacing laptops and desktops for many people. So many of our clients don’t do anything beyond email, web surfing, and document processing with their computers, and while they love their Macs, the Mac OS is clearly too much and too confusing for many folks, who wish their computer would “just work.”
I’m very pleased, not just because it was one of my predictions, that they highlighted the creative possibilities the iPad presents. It’s a great canvas, and I am going to be happily doing presentations and proposals and spreadsheets on it. Yet I still don’t have a sense of how you save files on it, or whether you can open, say, a Word doc attachment from an email into the Pages app. Google Docs support, pleeeeeeeeeeease?
Also, I was very amused and beaming that, last night, my 9-year-old daughter said, “It would be cool if it could be a keyboard and a painting pad for your computer.” Woah, I hadn’t even thought of that! I’m already using Touchpad Elite [iTunes link] to control my Macs over VNC. The iPad might very well take the place of a Wacom tablet, sans the pressure sensitivity.
Prices seem great without 3G, pricey with. I’m sure most of that addition $130 has nothing to do with hardware. Probably $4 hardware, $126 profit for Apple, AT&T, etc.
I was thinking the same thing. It’s really a jerky gouge, especially considering how much he was touting their pricing. And I’m gonna have to buy the 3G version; I probably won’t pay for the service every month, but I it could be handy, and I think it will be more attractive in resale.
Password change
I changed my password in Google Mail yesterday. This morning, Mail.app was not able to access nor was my iCal.
So obviously there is another step that I did not know to take.
You just need to plug the new password into a few places:
- Apple Mail (Mail menu > Preferences > Accounts > Incoming Mail Server settings, and also click “Edit SMTP Server List” in the Outgoing Mail Server drop-down)
- iCal (iCal > Preferences > Accounts)
- iPhone (Settings > Mail, Contacts, and Calendar > tap on your account, change the password in Account Information and also in Outgoing Mail Server > Primary Server).
January 28, 2010 | Filed Under Tech | Leave a Comment
New cheaper AT&T unlimited plan
I was in Chicago last week, and noticed a sign in an AT&T store window advertising $70 unlimited talk and text plan. Having been on their previously-really-pricey unlimited deal for a a couple of years, I was very pleased to learn that the new pricing is extended to iPhone users.
We still have to pay the thieving bastards an additional $20 for unlimited text messaging, and as always, $30/month for data. So that’s $120 + tax for everything, while Sprint still does unlimited everything for $100/month. Perhaps this was a reaction to Verizon’s price cut, or perhaps Apple nudged their mobile partner to adopt the new pricing to encourage people to roll a 3G subscription for their iPad into their budget. Either way it does help a bit. That texting price, however, makes no freakin’ sense.
If these are all true…
…we’re gonna see some crazy good stuff at noon CST today. #apple #tablet
http://mobile.twitter.com/jason
January 27, 2010 | Filed Under Tech | Leave a Comment
Google Voice gets a slick new mobile web interface
And ooooo-wee, it is slick!
January 26, 2010 | Filed Under Tech | Leave a Comment
Universal Home Entertainment Remote for the iPhone
New Kinetix Rē IR based Universal Home Entertainment Remote for the iPhone
http://www.newkinetix.com/ My family is so sick of me praying out loud for a real, good, easy, cheap(ish) programmable universal remote for the iPhone. I knew the wait couldn’t be that long, and in fact, I told my friend Tom that 2010 would be the year that the Logitech Harmony and its ilk become dinosaurs. Well, hey hey, here it is! Due for 1st quarter ‘010. I’m psyched!
http://www.newkinetix.com/ My family is so sick of me praying out loud for a real, good, easy, cheap(ish) programmable universal remote for the iPhone. I knew the wait couldn’t be that long, and in fact, I told my friend Tom that 2010 would be the year that the Logitech Harmony and its ilk become dinosaurs. Well, hey hey, here it is! Due for 1st quarter ‘010. I’m psyched!
January 24, 2010 | Filed Under Tech | Leave a Comment
type management input needed
From: MarinaDate: January 12, 2010We are trying to get industry feedback on why type management is an essential tool in the day-to-day business and production of graphic design. Why is type management important to your business? What type management tool do you use? We need validation for our argument that type management should be incorporated into any graphic design curriculum.
For a couple of years now, designers have been able to by pass the roughly $100 expense of the well known Suitcase and FontAgent with the free FontExplorerX by Linotype. It worked very very well, all the way through OS X 10.5, but last year, Linotype released FontExplorer Pro and announced discontinued support for the free version, left without OS X 10.6 or Adobe CS4 compatibility at v1.2.3. Ah well, all things must pass. At least it's $20 less than the competition.
So, we're kind of back where we started, with a few expensive options, but at least they have all matured into full-featured, efficient, and aesthetically pleasing packages, which have great tools for helping you pick the right type for the task. This AppleBlog article has a basic comparison of the apps. I have an old bias against Extensis Suitcase, which put designers through all kinds of bugs and crashes and incompatibilities through the evolution of Mac OS X. FontAgent has had an edge on Suitcase, but now the two appear neck-and-neck, with FontExplorer Pro taking a bit of a lead. The post makes the smart recommendation to kick the tires on all the trials.
Meanwhile, trying to design without one of these tools would be well nigh impossible, or at least mind-numbingly inefficient, and students should learn to get a handle on their font collection, even before they start trying to crank out their first document.
January 12, 2010 | Filed Under Tech | Leave a Comment
Why I Believe Printers Were Sent From Hell to Make Us Miserable [Humor]
Too freakin’ funny!
Matthew Inman, aka “The Oatmeal,” is a former web designer turned comic artist. He subsists primarily on a diet of dead crickets and malt liquor. He also thinks that printers have a place in hell right next to unicorns.
January 11, 2010 | Filed Under Tech | Leave a Comment
