Technology
I want a folio.
Apr 13th
I bought a cheap case on Amazon. It’s the Premium Leather Flip case for iPad. It’s great for concealing my iPad but it isn’t how I intend to protect it in perpetuity.
It’s made of fairly sturdy but soft-feeling leather with a foam padding inside the front cover. It seals magnetically to the leather which surrounds the iPad. There’s a plastic cover over the iPad’s display. The bezel is covered completely in leather. I believe this covers the light sensors (certainly automatic brightness doesn’t work within the case). When folded closed, it bends the cable of any connected headphones mercilessly (the iPad doesn’t come with headphones incidentally).
When folded, either open or closed, it is about an inch thick. The plastic attracts prints and scratches. The leather feels nice though, and not hard like the Apple case is apparently. I’d like to say that my iPad is well protected inside it, and if closed, then it could be. Once, however, it has slid from the open end next to the hinge – only a couple of inches though before I tilted the other direction and it slid back in. The trouble is that one’s instinct is to hold it on the long edge and not the short. This case folds at the short edge and there is no grip or fastening to prevent the iPad’s exit when the flap is open.
I’ve decided what I want. I want a soft leather folio cover: thin and flexible and only holding the ipad across the corners so that the device is otherwise unencumbered. One of the corners, the one near the volume rocker and rotation lock and on the other edge, the sleep button will need to allow access to those controls somehow. I think the only way to do that will be to have a larger pocket in that corner with cutouts for the buttons and screen. On the back there should be a strap made of sturdy material. It should be possible to roll this and secure it and use that as a stand which works horizontally or vertically (probably the biggest ask) It should also fit through a slit on the front cover to keep it in place when closed. The leather should be a soft hide and perhaps have a chamois cloth fitted, or a pocket to keep a small one. It should open like a book cover, leaving the iPad on the right with the home button at the bottom.
How much?
My New iPad
Apr 11th
Having promised myself I’d wait, I saw an auction on eBay for a 32gb for 575 and decided I’d get it now. I have a MiFi mobile hotspot and so I didn’t need a 3G one – I like the all-aluminium looks of the WiFi version too.
It arrived on the Wednesday and I had waited for the postman – a quick sync (It arrived charged) and I was off to work.
With a little trepidation I took it out on the train to try for the first time. The screen is beautiful. You can see it clearly and brightly with great colours from almost any angle. You can easily share your photos with someone on this device. I can see this being a great asset for anyone who has to sell something with their presentation. We’re so used to seeing pictures in frames that it just lets your content shine through.
It’s a great browser. It’s so responsive to touch, just like the 3GS but it’s big enough to be able to view a whole page without zooming in. Videos can play back in situ, though not all web pages seem to do it, so I think it’s something to do with how the video is embedded.
Flash doesn’t work, no news there. I still largely think this is a good thing.
Email is good too, the big screen makes a difference here again.
Calendar and Notes are beautiful translations of ‘real objects’. Nicely laid out and easy to navigate. The way that they change when rotated to landscape is also something that feels natural.
Maps is the same as on the iPhone but larger and more responsive.
iTunes store is more like iTunes store on the desktop, more effort has been put into the screen layout. I can’t get into the App store as it wants to go to an iPad section on the UK store which doesn’t yet exist.
Photos is exactly what you want. It makes great use of the whole screen and it has a few new transitions.. Photos can also displayed while the device is locked. The stacks for your albums are a nice touch too.
Enough about the standard apps, let’s get to some of the apps I’ve tried:
Tweet Deck: It’s Tweet Deck. It’s Free. It’ll tide you over until Tweetie 2 reappears as Twitter’s official app for iPhone & iPad. Sorry Tweet Deck, somehow you just feel a little more clunky.
AirVideo: I discovered this for iPhone and now the same app is iPad compatible. It’s not the best layout you can imagine, but it’s pretty good and it lets you stream HD video to your iPad at 720p. It can also work over 3G but I wouldn’t recommend doing that in HD resolutions 
Epicurious: Recipes on the iPad. Very slick layout, nicely organised and well thought out. I can’t imagine using anything else for the job.
Instapaper: I bought this on a recommendation and I think in all it’s worthwhile. It is mainly designed for its “read later” functionality. It does also work with some RSS feeds quite well. Unfortunately not the comic strips I like to read – that would have made it more valuable.
The Elements: Is this the future of e-learning? It is almost as entertaining as my old Chemistry teacher Dr Young and that’s saying something. It’s as slick as you like and you won’t find a more in-depth guide to the Periodic Table of the Elements.
Layers: Finger Painting re-invented. I’m not an artist, but Layers is comfortable enough to let you play at it. I can see myself using this, perhaps not on a regular basis but if the mood strikes, this is the app I’ll use.
WunderRadio: I think it’s still working out what to do with the extra screen real-estate. It’s still WunderRadio though, I’m sure they’ll figure out a better layout as time goes by.
Frotz: Infocom adventures to go. Must install The Hitchhiker’s Guide.
iSSH: SSH and VNC. This works a lot better with the bigger screen of the iPad. This would be definitive if the VNC controls were better. No Cmd key is a bit annoying when connecting to a Mac.
Labyrinth 2 Lite: Not bought yet, but might. I had Labyrinth for iPhone and I don’t really want to spend out more for what appears to be a small resize.
Sudoku Tablet: Simply Sudoku puzzles. Could do with being better arranged on the screen though.
Sam & Max, The Penal Zone: Would have been the best thing on the iPad but it glitches a little bit much. I’m sure the niggles will be ironed out though.
Words with Friends HD: The closest we can get to Scrabble in the UK (at least for now). Sad really. WwF is nice though. Local play on a single iPad would have been nice.
Word Genius: Electronic boggle solitaire. Find words by tracking them with your finger.
Godfinger: It’s like a 2D version of Populous. Quite a clever idea spoilt by its online-only usage. I’ve played this game once. I thought of playing it again, but I didn’t have the MiFi with me.
Tap Tap Radiation: It’s tap tap with moving tap spots. I have played it once.
If you have an account in the USA you can also get:
iBooks: Winnie the Pooh looks great. I was also able to import a few books from Project Gutenberg in ePub format, however, it wouldn’t read my purchased Manning “iPhone in Action” book and I haven’t been able to get an explanation from the publisher. It’s possible it could be DRM but they also supply a PDF – it’s watermarked with my email address but it’s DRM free. iBooks bug?
Who knows?
BBC News: Criminal that this isn’t available to UK users, but is supplied free and without advertising to the US.
Edge: An honourable mention goes to this iPhone app for looking pretty much identical zoomed in to not zoomed. It’s got lovely gameplay. Very retro.
I have enjoyed using the iPad since I got it. It doesn’t do anything I couldn’t do on another device, it just does it better because it’s bigger than an iPhone (making it easy to read and use) and smaller than a laptop (making it easy to use on a train).
Oh, and I put it in a leather flip case so that it doesn’t stand out as nickable. That way I’ve even felt comfortable watching videos on the tube.
I think this will bring a revolution in applications because you can now use a computer in ways that haven’t really been possible before.
This could really be the beginning of the really personal computer.
HDish
Mar 28th
Everything seems to be claiming “HD” these days. Of course the dilution of the term renders it less and less meaningful. Currently it seems to be the name of choice for iPad applications. It’s not as if the iPad or iPhone are high resolution devices. Their dot pitch is higher than some previous Apple hardware but it’s nowhere near what some manufacturers are kicking out. The only thing that makes it sort-of-HDish is that 720p/1080i are often rendered to a device with 768 pixels vertically and so in a 4:3 aspect ratio, it is at the lowest end of “HD ready”. The trouble is that to fit a 16:9 aspect ratio picture in 1024 pixels width, you’re only going to use 576 pixels height, and we here in Europe know that as “PAL”… It’s higher D than the 480 of NTSC but it’s half what REAL HD video is. On the upside it means your DVD resolution sources are going to look mindblowingly good on such a small screen. Interestingly it also means you have 200 pixels space on 16:9 content which you could use for the controls, subtitles, Social networking status updates.. oh wait, no multitasking without a jailbreak. I digress…
Anyway, this week saw me purchase a new pair of headphones: Bower & Wilkins P5. and this leads me onto the subject of HD Audio. Believe it or not, audio is far more guilty of HD travesty than video.
Many were sold DVD on “Better quality audio” but really it was the multichannel equivalent of MP3. 6 channels encoded into 384 or 448kbits per second: about 128kbits stereo or the bitrate of a fairly naff MP3. Fortunately there’s some economy of scale so it sounds rather better than a 128K MP3 but we’re still not talking HD. Even at the maximum bitrate allowed by AC3 – 640kbits/s, some soundfields just didn’t map well to Dolby Digital.
Fortunately there was a saviour in the shape of Digital Theatre Surround (DTS). They allowed up to 1.5Mbit for core DTS and that gave more channel separation and dynamic range. CD is encoded losslessly at 7kbit/channel. In fact, DTS soundtracks for films in cinemas were supplied on CD originally. Music DVDs quickly began to offer DTS soundtracks. DTS can also live happily on a CD Audio track (PCM Stereo 16bit, 44.1kHz samplerate) but obviously in order to hear it, your CD player needs to be connected digitally to a DTS capable receiver otherwise you hear pink noise and you could damage your speakers. By doing this, you can store 5.1ch audio in pretty good quality on a CD. A few artists started to exploit this too.
Some thought DVD had promise as a better-than-cd-quality audio source and DVD-Audio was born. Unfortunately it didn’t catch on. Many people were perfectly happy with CD sound. A few weren’t and these purists still preferred vinyl. DVD Audio offered Multiple channels at 96kHz and a maximum of 192kHz samplerate in stereo at 24bit resolution. There was compression used, but it was lossless – Meridian Lossless Packing (MLP). It has about the same amount of compression as FLAC. Usually a DTS or PCM option was provided on the disc as well so that it would work in ordinary DVD players too. The problem is that they restricted the format to the analogue domain. You had this superb source but all the decoding was done inside the DVDA box and output via the analogue connections. So the consumer only knew as much as their DVDA player or the music publisher chose to tell them (usually very little) and so you could buy a DVDA disc with 20bit 48kHz audio for the same price as a 24bit 192kHz disc. As the consumer you couldn’t see any details about the source’s quality when you bought it (necessarily) and certainly the players I owned never gave the secret away but some discs definitely sounded better than others. Would you feel ripped off if you bought something with little discernible difference from the CD for twice the price? I think you would. Result: DVD Audio fails as a format.
Sony step in with Super Audio CD. If studios use Sony digital mastering then they almost get this free. Rather than recording 24 bits of data at each sample, they record a single bit but they sample very much faster: 2.8MHz. The result is a stream with more data than 96kHz/24bit but with a simpler, more linear process with less latency that some claim sounds more like analogue than even 192kHz/24bit audio. The catch here is that unless your DAC does native DSD processing then it gets converted to PCM and then analogue. This muddies the water somewhat. You haven’t heard SACD for real until you’ve heard SACD without a PCM stage. I wonder how many people have actually heard SACD without a PCM intermediary stage? There’s very little SACD material around. It’s very niche.
Welcome to the 21st century. Blu-ray Disc won the format war and this may end up being a good thing. Why? Blu-ray has 25 or 50gb per disc of storage, baked in support for 6CH LPCM, DTS HDMA, DD TrueHD and an audio disc profile.. One interesting little nugget is that DD TrueHD is the very same MLP that was in the DVDAudio spec, meaning that Blu-ray Disc is built with the capacity for any existing player to produce high definition audio and output it digitally via HDMI at very high bitrates.
What this means is that it’s entirely possible for all Blu-ray Disc players to be audiophile music players. This is important because soon there’ll be one in most homes and so discs will just work. That’s one heck of a captive market. There’s no excuse with Blu-ray Disc not to provide uncompressed audio with your concert.
A friend of mine asked me why there are no BD audio only discs – well, there are. I have a couple of them, but they find it hard to think of ways to use all that space.
Nine Inch Nails Ghosts comes on four audio CDs or one BD at 96/24 stereo LPCM. That’s a beautiful use of 17Gb of storage. Two audio CDs at 192/24 stereo LPCM would fit in the same space (Super release of War Of The Worlds, anyone?)
One caveat. These numbers are all assuming that the source the track is encoded from is better than that offered. If you bump up the bitrate to make it look better. It probably isn’t going to sound any better since good players will effectively do that anyway. There’s no point in storing something you can recreate with a simple algorithm. It just takes up more disk space.
No Flash, No Problem
Feb 11th
Well, it seems that another of my predictions is coming to pass. Content providers are moving away from Flash to deliver to customers. Hulu is apparently working on a Flash-Free application to allow iPad users to be able to access their content. With video-rich providers moving to other means to deliver and other technologies making the animation side of flash obsolete… As a mac user I find this wonderful. Flash has been leg-burningly horrid on the Macbook Pro for too long. Click to Flash was a godsend and I’m finding that I have to click less and less as people use other mechanisms to deliver their rich content to the masses.
Sideshow becoming more than a sideline?
Feb 3rd
Trawling the interwebs is a hobby of mine and I love to hear about new tech. I recently discovered a company is trying to create something more useful for sideshow to do than tell you how many mails you have.
It seems they’re planning to put sideshow onto a range of devices and in a two-way full implementation so that you can use your smartphone as a remote for your computer.
I’m going to keep my eye on them. I’m not entirely sure about the “Golden-i” they mention… It’s bad enough with bluetooth earpieces. Threemote reminds me of the old Salling Clicker tool for the mac, but all widgety.
Ordinarily a toy for Windows would be about as useful to me as a chocolate teapot. I don’t actually own a physical windows box any more and I only recently booted Vista just to make my momento work. I wonder if I could do anything interesting with it on the mac? iPhone’s Remote app is great if you just want to do iTunes and there are other apps to control specific functions, and even apps to allow the phone to be a mouse/keyboard.
What if you could do several remote things in one app, and not just on the iPhone. That may be interesting to more people.
iPad… shame about the name.
Jan 30th
Inductive charging. The device will come with an iMac style stand with a power cord and that will power the device while it sits in a monitor like pose. It will also provide USB ports.
Whilst there’s no inductive charging, they allow you to plug a USB port into the dock connector.
The only openings on the tablet will be headphone socket and SD slot.
Disappointed by this. I would have liked to see media import being easier. You will get SD, but only if you stick a chunk of plastic into the dock connector first.
You’ll also be able to buy additional stands so that you can dock in various places.
Of course you can get extra stands, but they’re only like the existing iPhone stand, with a little extra support for the device… or you can get one with a built-in keyboard (Who would do that rather than bluetooth?)
You’ll also be able to buy your choice of sleeve and because the charger is inductive you won’t need to remove it to sit it on the stand.
I didn’t see that their cover will make a stand, that’s a good idea – only works in landscape layout though. Expect many third party products available by the time it hits the shelves.
Anyone will be able to develop for the tablet and software will be available within and without a helpful app store.
I wish this had happened. It would have killed the jokes about ‘just a large iPod touch’ dead.
The tablet will multitask and come with iLife and iWork apps out of the box.
Well no, it doesn’t have out-of-the-box background tasks (apart from mail) but when it’s jailbroken, we can expect all of that to arrive. The iLife and iWork apps *are* there (albeit for $30 extra) and they look more like applications than apps.
The tablet will present itself as a bluetooth printer so that you can simply print a document from your work (where they may not use macs) where it will appear in finder as a PDF.
I’m sure this is an app waiting to happen. When it does, we’ll see this in meeting rooms around the world.
Folios with built in bluetooth keyboards will appear for those who need to type more on the go and who don’t like virtual keyboards. If a keyboard is connected, the virtual keyboard doesn’t restrict the display.
I’m taking this as a correct prediction, it does allow bluetooth keyboards and the virtual keyboard doesn’t come up when it’s in place it seems.
The screen will be demonstrated to be able to work with a rollerball capacitive stylus which is pressure sensitive allowing artists to use the tablet as an all in one drawing device.
There’s opportunity for a third party to add this on, and incentive now the device is big enough to draw on.
It will have a Snapdragon type processor and gaming quality graphics. Battery life will enable you to go most of a day without a recharge, and several days standby. It will have bluetooth and 802.11n wireless.
Yay, correct on all 6.
It will also have a built-in front facing webcam for conferencing.
Apparently the OS has support for this. Perhaps you will see swivel cameras which connect to the dock port. This may be why it can explicitly work in any direction (ie with the dock facing upward)
The UI will be content driven, with the metaphor of having applications on pages in a pad. Rather than scribbling over the document, you’ll scrunch your fingers quickly toward each other, balling the current document (visually) which then can be dragged to the bin icon which will appear.
I guess they still haven’t erased the shadow of Newton. I understand WHY they have kept the interface people know. They seem to have blended it with context menus and modal dialogs, this seems like a step back to me.
The device will be fully capable of playing and interacting with iTunes content, including Albums and also Comics/Books/Magazines/Newspapers. You’ll be able to schedule the download of podcasts, magazines and newspapers so that it is ready for when you leave for work to read on the train.
It has all this except for the podcast like delivery of magazines and newspapers. I think this is a missed trick. If Apple expect content publishers to create apps for their media, then they need to allow them to schedule updates automatically.
Free newspapers like “The Metro” will be able to be downloaded for free, other newspapers will carry a slight discount over the paper version (perhaps only as an early incentive), but the main advantage will be their early delivery to your device, “hot off the presses”. Content will be interactive with hyperlinks and videos.
I had this before the announcement. Metro’s iPhone app does all these things, including downloading to your device so you can read on the train. You can click hyperlinks once you’re overground again too. I think this app is crying out for a bigger display. I’m going to keep an eye on the number of discarded Dead-Tree versions of Metro I see on the tube.
All in all, I think I did quite well. The things I missed were more esoteric, and to be honest, if the price starts at £299 then they have a seriously compelling product out there. The nice to haves I listed above would probably have added significantly to the base cost.
The applications which appear for this will be what drives it to success or failure. Let’s hope people step up to the plate and produce compelling content.
Personally, I think I *will* get one. I’m fed up with running my phone out of battery doing things I’d rather be doing on a bigger device… and I still don’t want to carry a laptop on the tube. Ever tried using a physical keyboard when your elbows are in adjacent people’s ribs?
The Apple Tablet
Jan 22nd
Apple? Here’s my wishlist:
Inductive charging. The device will come with an iMac style stand with a power cord and that will power the device while it sits in a monitor like pose. It will also provide USB ports.
The only openings on the tablet will be headphone socket and SD slot. You’ll also be able to buy additional stands so that you can dock in various places. You’ll also be able to buy your choice of sleeve and because the charger is inductive you won’t need to remove it to sit it on the stand.
Anyone will be able to develop for the tablet and software will be available within and without a helpful app store. The tablet will multitask and come with iLife and iWork apps out of the box. The tablet will present itself as a bluetooth printer so that you can simply print a document from your work (where they may not use macs) where it will appear in finder as a PDF.
Folios with built in bluetooth keyboards will appear for those who need to type more on the go and who don’t like virtual keyboards. If a keyboard is connected, the virtual keyboard doesn’t restrict the display. The screen will be demonstrated to be able to work with a rollerball capacitive stylus which is pressure sensitive allowing artists to use the tablet as an all in one drawing device. It won’t come with the stylus however, since the OS will be able to be driven perfectly well with a finger.
It will have a Snapdragon type processor and gaming quality graphics. Battery life will enable you to go most of a day without a recharge, and several days standby. It will have bluetooth and 802.11n wireless. It will also have a built-in front facing webcam for conferencing.
The UI will be content driven, with the metaphor of having applications on pages in a pad. Rather than scribbling over the document, you’ll scrunch your fingers quickly toward each other, balling the current document (visually) which then can be dragged to the bin icon which will appear.
The device will be fully capable of playing and interacting with iTunes content, including Albums and also Comics/Books/Magazines/Newspapers. You’ll be able to schedule the download of podcasts, magazines and newspapers so that it is ready for when you leave for work to read on the train.
Free newspapers like “The Metro” will be able to be downloaded for free, other newspapers will carry a slight discount over the paper version (perhaps only as an early incentive), but the main advantage will be their early delivery to your device, “hot off the presses”. Content will be interactive with hyperlinks and videos.
Tune in next week to see how much humble pie I get to eat!
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