Geeking out!

iOS 4 appears to be eating the battery of my 3G for breakfast. Someone said that the wifi no longer goes to sleep when you put the iPhone into sleep mode. This seems plausible to me, because the new OS supports a number of multitasking operations (not on the 3G mind you). I have turned off wifi and I will see how quickly the battery dies from here. It doesn’t make a huge difference to me as I will probably own a iPhone 4 in a couple of days.

Side note: the updated wordpress app means that I can once again post from my iPad!

Just closed my Facebook account.  Mark Zuckerberg obviously disdains the users of his service, and I will not support him.

Steam has been released for the Mac.  A number of games on my steam account already have Mac ports.

The second step is Linux:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=valve_steam_announcement&num=1

http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/05/12/1831208/Steam-Client-for-Mac-Launches-Linux-Client-On-the-Way

So… beautiful… should have sent… a poet.

Everyone, its time to celebrate.

http://store.steampowered.com/freeportal/

I thought I would go ahead and post this note. After a day or two of having the iPad this is probably my favorite way to surf the web and to access google reader. Having this large, high resolution touch screen is a great way to browse. The news apps: USA Today, BBC, NPR, and NYT are absolutely fabulous for getting news. NPR integrates their audio casts with their print news articles, it’s brilliant. Comic book reading has been great. I can’t get rid of my laptop just yet, but I certainly prefer this to that for just browsing.

I’m still annoyed that I can’t subscribe and auto update my podcasts without syncing or using a 3rd party app. I’ve switched to using my iPad for audiobooks and podcasts since it has a much better battery life than my iPhone.

I thought it was only fitting that I should write this post on the iPad. So I am typing this whole thing out on the keyboard screen. Let’s see how it goes.

Ok, first things first, pics:

So it’s a good size. Feels great in the hand. I’ve been carrying it around, as you might imagine, and its been very comfortable. The screen looks fantastic! I really like how this thing looks! When the screen is powered on you cant see the fingerprints on the screen. So aside from how this thing feels, the experience has been great so far. For those of you with iphones you know what it is like when you find a really good app, well there are quite a few apps that are really nice. I knew what I was going to be interested in when I bought this. Here are a couple of snap of my app library so far:

Quite a few fun toys. I have to admit that one of the big reasons I wanted a iPad was for comic books. I love me some digital comics! Digital comics are something I’ve been waiting for for a long time and I absolutely love this incarnation. Cheap, easy access to comics, I can download what I want when I want it, and re-download later if I want. I’ve been out of the paper comic world for a while, but they’ve got me hooked with this new comic access. I need to check out the Marvel app. More fun things that I am looking forward to doing with this is taking it on trips, talk about portable! The ten plus hour battery life really makes it a great traveling device. This is going to be fantastic for plane trips. I really need a good offline google reader app. Right now i have a pretty good app that was designed for the iPhone, but i’ve already seen the massive difference in the quality of an app that is designed for the iPad. The Netflix app is really nice, I’m pretty shocked apple let it into the store as it will surely cut into apples sales. If Netflix lets you cache a movie on the device, it will be a real killer. The book applications are really nice. I will definitely end up reading books on this thing, in addition to audio books. There is one thing on top of all that I want to use this device for:

Playing games with my nephew! One of the most important features you could possible imagine for a device.

Well, at least one person does.  If you haven’t already heard Apple just announced their iPad, which is a tablet device (I’m not going to call it a computer, I’ll explain why later).  If you aren’t aware, Apple has been working on a tablet for years and years so this has been a long awaited device.  Rumors about this or a similar device have been around since before 2001.  So there’s been a whole lot of hype about this for a very long time.  The weeks leading up to the announcement of the iPad were saturated with rumors and wishlists.  A lot of people had a lot of high hopes and I’m kind of annoyed at all the reviews that spend a lot of time talking about what the device -isn’t-, because it didn’t meet their really high expectations.

A lot of people have correctly identified that the niche for this device is one that apple is carving from in between phones and laptops.  There isn’t a “netbook” space really.  There is a “cheap computer” space, and portable cheap computer happen to be netbooks.  Is it a “netbook” competitor?  I don’t believe it is.  For one thing, there is no real comparison between the iPadOS (not the official name of the OS to my knowledge) and a full-fledge operating system like Windows, Mac, or Linux.  The iPadOS is very limited in terms of what it is capable of because of the platform restrictions and DRM that lockdown the system.  So what the iPad device really is is a media platform that is highly extend-able.  Is there a market for such a device?  I think there’s currently a small one, and that as the device gains popularity, it will grow (see: ipod, iphone).

The major media the iPad handles are Video, Music, Books,  Games and Web.  Do you want a “larger than an iphone” device that can do that stuff?  If you do then you are interested in the iPad.

The iPad will excel at watching iTunes videos.  It will not excel at watching other video sources.  Make no mistake that Apple has done a lot of work trying to tie you to iTunes for all your media consumption.  If you can watch it on iTunes you can watch it on your iPad.  If you cannot watch it on iTunes, don’t think you’ll be able to on the iPad.  The iPad isn’t going to support flash so no hulu for you.

I don’t think I need to say much about music.  If all you want is a music player, get an iPod.  If you want to do more and don’t mind the size of the device this will work equally as well as the iPod.

How will the iPad function as a book reader?  Well, its hard to say for certain because I don’t have my hands on one, but I think the answer will be “pretty good for people who don’t mind reading on backlit LCDs”.  Fortunately for Apple I think “students” fall into that category.  For people with sensitive eyes, something like the Kindle will probably work a bit better (though the kindle is unreadable in low light conditions, just like a book).  Personally, I’ve read 2 books using the Kindle App for iPhone so I think I would have no problems reading a whole book on this device.  I still listen to books much more than I actually sit down and read them, so I’m not certain if I would use the iPad all that much for book reading.  I tell you what would be a killer app though: Graphic Novels.  If the comixology app updates for the iPad I might have to pick it up just for that.  Having a comic book collection sitting on a single device would be really really cool.  $1-$2 dollar digital comic books is a great way to consume comic books.  It’s one of those things that I’ll be keeping an eye on.

The iPad is going to be a pretty good gaming platform, but lack of hardware controls will keep it from being a great game platform.  There are tons of good games for the iPhone and most of those will translate very well to the iPad, but there are tons of games and game types that require the tactile feedback of a d-pad to work well.  So, as a game platform there will be some areas where the pad will be deeply lacking.  That being said, Telltale games, one of my favorite game companies currently has mentioned that they are interested in developing for the iPad.  Monkey Island on the iPad? Yes please.

If all the iPad did was browse the web, there would be people who would buy this device.  And they would probably be very happy with it.  This device will work very well for browsing most web content.  It doesn’t have flash, if you need flash this device won’t work for you.  If you require Java this won’t work for you.  If you just like hitting google news and other sites that know to make their content broadly accessible, you’ll be fine.  At $500 ($630 w/3g)  its a little pricey for just a web browser, but it’s still tempting to have access to web content on such a device at all times.

In addition to all that stuff, if you currently own an iPhone or iPod Touch, you will be able to transfer all your apps to it.  That’s a pretty good library of software (not fantastic, but pretty good).  Given that the iPad does not run a full OS, I think a strong app library is crucial.

So my final verdict?  You don’t need one today (though you might want one).  In 2 years?  I think the iPad is gonna follow the same path as the iPod, it’s a joke to a lot of people today, but it’ll become very popular in years to come.

wishlist for v2.0:
-front facing camera for video chat
-subscription based content access ($20 dollars a month for access to all the itunes video and music).
-more open system (no gonna happen)

For my iPhone loving pals out there IMDB finally released an iPhone app.  I no longer have to navigate that horrible website when I want to check something on my iPhone.

Adblock has come to chrome.  I’m now ready to use chrome fulltime.

I made a little project for myself.  My brother is doing a radio show these days, but he’s on the east coast, so I have to catch it online.  Which works out just fine because I figured I’d be able to record it pretty easily so that I could listen to it at my leisure.  We’ll I did a little work and automated the whole recording process and I thought it would make an interesting thing to post.  So here goes…

Tools:
VLC
OS  X or Linux (i’m using #! currently)
Dropbox
curl
twitter
bit.ly

(continue reading…)

I picked up my copy of Snow Leopard today.  So far so good.  I did a full reinstall of my Mac Mini, because I had absolutely no space left (not quite sure why).  So far it’s been quite fast, I’m getting the bare essentials reinstalled so I’m not quite up to speed yet.