something of nothing...

Liz

Along the Columbia.

hasta la vista, iPad

Last night, I watched the latest Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode on the iPad (Goldblum’s getting less weird, which isn’t good for the show, in my opinion). I then opened up the iBooks app and finished James S. Hirsch’s biography of Willie Mays (well-written and fun read, with lots of things I didn’t know about Willie; 3.5 out of 5).

This morning, I hooked up the iPad to my Mac, and wiped it clean by restoring it to its factory defaults. I then dropped off the iPad, case, and dock with its new owner, who was quite happy to receive it.

I liked the iPad, and could see it hanging around the house like the 10 or 12 iPods and iPod speaker systems that I’ve accumulated over the past eight years, but in the end I realized I’d rather spend the $700 on motorcycle gear or camera equipment. As I said earlier in the month, I don’t really need a third device, especially if that device is the iPad in its current incarnation.

I’m not dissing it, really: two friends who have iPads love them, and when I see what they’re doing with it, it makes sense. I tried really hard to like the iPad as a book reader, but its weight, size and the glare really made it difficult for me. Reading Hirsch’s book in bed on the iPad was an exercise in constant repositioning, much like reading the hardcover, and I kept thinking, “this was why I bought the Kindle in the first place.”

There were plenty of fun moments with the iPad, and I could see myself playing lots of games on it (which I don’t do on the iPhone or my Mac), and the whole photo viewer experience was quite cool. But, in the end, it just was not essential to me, and the things I hated (detailed in the previous post as well) were really getting to me, and I let it go.

I feel kind of funny about it, like I’m losing touch with the Apple world, but I’m not going to worry about it. Apple might make a version of the iPad in the next year that solves some of my complaints (iPhone OS 4.0 will certainly help with some of the usability issues), but then again, Amazon might come up with a Kindle 3 that is truly the best ebook reader out there, and I’ll go for that. As it stands right now, I’m $700 richer, and I’m ok with that.

do we really need a third device?

So, five days in, and a bit of buyer’s remorse has set in with the iPad. As I said in my previous post, there’s a lot to like about the tablet, but there are also more things that give me pause as I try to use the iPad as yet another computing device.

And that’s the operative phrase: “yet another computing device.” When my good friend Ben and I were discussing the iPad shortly after it was announced, we came to the conclusion that we already had two good devices – our laptops and our phones – and did we really, really need another one, something that sat in the middle?

Ben remained skeptical, but I was willing to take a chance. I really wanted a better e-book reader than what I had with the Kindle, and there was enough extra “stuff” in the iPad to make me want one. I rationalized it by telling myself that I could always sell it if I didn’t like it, and now I’m sitting here, thinking that I might just do that, because we were right: we don’t need a third device, especially one as ridden with compromise as the iPad.

I don’t mean to argue with the people who think that the iPad is a revolutionary device, but I am a bit sick of all the glowing hype. Even when people are complaining about some little annoyance on the iPad, they’re pitching their gripes as if it were dust on the statue of David, minor things that can be brushed away.

Yeah, Apple might announce multitasking tomorrow for the iPad. If done right, that could lessen my complaints about having to click the Home button about 50 times more a day than I feel I need to. And, they might come up with a better way to get more documents (and document types) onto the iPad, so I can really do some productive work. But they’re not going to come up with a cure for keeping fingerprints off the screen, which is more than a nuisance. It’s not going to be better balanced, so you can work with it less awkwardly when you’re lying down or trying to type with it in your lap. They’re not going to reduce the glare that gets in the way when you’re trying to watch a video.

I’ve been asked by a bunch of friends about the iPad, most of whom want a reason to buy one. I’m pretty much recommending that they don’t. Sure, it’s got some great capabilities and features. It looks beautiful (especially when you clean the screen). There are some fun and inventive apps. Photos look gorgeous. But, in the end, if you’ve got a laptop (or desktop) and a smartphone, you have all the computing power you need, and you can get fun apps, look at beautiful photos, and have a lot more functionality. You don’t need a third device, and I’m pretty sure that I don’t.

The iPad isn’t revolutionary; it’s luxury.

iPad observations

A number of people have done an excellent job on reviewing the iPad (Jason and Andy have done the best jobs, imho), and I have neither the will nor the desire to rehash their fine work. However, I do have a few observations after a couple days of living with an iPad:

• A lot of reviewers have mentioned how solid the iPad is, and they’re right: it feels substantial, but it’s also heavy, and the bezel around the screen is almost too narrow for me. When I pick it up, it’s slippery, and I’m occasionally reaching into the screen area, causing odd things to happen with errant taps. Now, I have fat fingers — typing with the iPhone has been a challenge — and it will obviously take some time to feel comfortable holding the device (I imagine a good case will probably help).

• And, despite my fat fingers, I’m finding the iPad keyboard to be surprisingly tactile and easy to use. I can touch-type on it quite quickly, especially in landscape mode. I typed most of this on the iPad in Pages, touching it up in BBEdit on my Mac before posting. Unfortunately, it wasn’t easy to do a lot of typing on the iPad in my lap or on a table without going through some physical contortions. That’s one of the reasons you’ll need a case that sets the iPad at an angle; it really needs 20 to 30 degrees of angle for viewing and typing. (And I’m not sure if the Apple case does angled viewing in portrait mode – it doesn’t look like it, and I don’t know if the dock is really the right angle for interacting via a touch interface.)

• Related to the keyboard, I wish that I could get a slightly bigger “bubble” when I’m trying to position the cursor. When trying to view the screen while typing on my lap, it’s much harder to position the cursor than it is on the iPhone. (While I'm at it, it would also be great if you could select text without having to go through the “Tap > Click Select > Move little on-screen pins” routine.) [My bad – that is there; been there in the iPhone for a while, too.]

• I can’t quite believe the quality of the screen, especially for viewing photos. Videos are nice too, but I’m more interested in the photo side of things.

  I had been looking at a couple of the stand-alone photo viewers for offline storage and photo viewing when on the road, but the good ones are as expensive as the iPad, if not more. If the Camera Connector Kit works well with Raw files from my 5D Mark 2, then I can get by with a cheap field back-up unit (which I have), importing selects onto the iPad for checking focus, composition and more. (And when that 128GB iPad ships, I’ll be all over it.)

• One of the main reasons I ordered an iPad on the first day was its potential capability as an e-book reader. My Kindle 2 is okay, but I hate the interface for everything but reading books, and that physical keyboard drives me crazy. It is also extremely convenient.

  As an e-book reader, I’m finding the iPad a mixed bag. Books – presented via either Apple’s reader or the Kindle app – look beautiful. Sitting in my favorite chair, with low levels of lighting, the whole experience of reading a book is wonderful. (Glenn does a nice job of comparing the apps for TidBITS.)

  Lying down in bed is a completely different experience. The heft of the iPad, combined with the narrow bezel and the touch-sensitive screen, make it really hard for me to read lying down. The case might help for gripping it, but the Kindle is much better balanced (it is a bit smaller and lighter, after all).

  But what’s really driving me crazy in this scenario is the hyper-responsiveness of the screen. I’m constantly flipping pages back and forth because I can’t keep my hands outside the active tablet area. Again, this is probably me — and a good case might help here — but the Kindle was much easier to read this way right out of the box than the iPad has been for me. As much as I bitch about those Next Page and Previous Page buttons on the Kindle, there’s something to be said for physical buttons. (GoodReader, a very nice PDF viewer, uses active “zones” on the screen to page forward and back through a document, so it is possible to do. Whether Apple thinks that it’s elegant is another thing.)

  [As an aside, I think Amazon is being pretty smart in getting the Kindle app on the iPad so quickly; it’s a perfect sandbox for them to see what people want, not only in a dedicated book reader, but in a tablet.]

• It also drives me crazy that the App Store application drops you into the Home screen every time you buy an app. While that kind of makes sense, why can’t I keep browsing, and have the app download In the background? On the iPhone, the small screen real estate meant that I generally browsed for apps on my Mac, and only hit the app store when I was looking for a specific app. That’s different (for me) on the iPad: I want to browse.

• I definitely agree with people who have complained about the airiness of the Home screen, wishing that you could either put widget-style stuff (weather, rss feeds, something) on these pages. I love the new WeatherBug Elite app for the iPad, but I have a hard time thinking I’ll want to see all of that app every time I want a weather forecast.

• Yes Mail looks awesome, but why, after all this time, can’t I get a view of all my mailboxes at once? This clicking back and forth through multiple mailboxes sucks. I know it’s a geeky feature, but it can’t be that hard to do, can it? Maybe even make it a setting?

• Running non-iPad-enhanced apps is technically a splendid feat, but, as Gruber noted, it’s a a bit like “driving … on the sidewalk.” I have bought or downloaded a boatload of great new iPad apps – how come no one told me about Beatwave? – and a couple of disappointments, like the NY Times’ Editor’s Choice app (largely because I don’t want part of the paper, I want it all).

• Related to that very last point, it doesn’t matter that the NY Times app stinks for me, because Safari on the iPad is wonderful. Really.

• I love the little contextual pop-ups throughout the system; they’re quite nicely done. In some places, when you double-tap on a misspelled word, you get a suggested replacement, which is great.

• Carry something to keep the screen clean; the fingerprints will drive you crazy.

Despite these criticisms, I’m quite pleased so far with the iPad. Time will tell how much it supplants my laptop or my iPhone, but it’s quite an auspicious beginning. 

mea culpa

These days, I watch the crap that goes on in the Mac “news” market with a combination of anger and bemusement. The anger part drives me crazy, because honestly, it’s none of my business any more, and I really shouldn’t waste energy even worrying about this shit.

I have a lot of friends in the market, people I’ve enjoyed working with, and whom I love, and I watch many of them (and lots of others) post questionable stories, poorly sourced rumors, and pure, unadulterated junk. I’m not going to call them out here, because (a) it’s a free Internet, and (b) I know how hard it can be to try and stay in business. Plus, I think readers are, by and large, pretty smart about going to the sites that matter for them, and if there’s a sizable contingent that wants nothing but rumors and high-fallutin’ smack-downs, well, let them have it.

When the anger starts, I just need to shut it all off, and go pay attention to something else. A lot of times, that’s pretty easy. I'll go weeks without looking at a single Mac site (or Mac silo in a bigger site).

But when the anger comes with that bemusement part, well, that drives me crazier in the end. That’s where I just want to detach myself from the quote-unquote Mac market, and drift away forever.

This ultimately isn’t because of anything anyone is doing (or writing); it’s all about me. You see, back in the mid-1990s, when I was the editor-in-chief at MacWEEK, I crossed the line. I let us become part of the story, instead of covering it the way a journalist should.

At the time, the Mac was on its way out (or so went conventional wisdom), and the only way that Apple would succeed was if they entirely opened up their OS and allowed clone manufacturers to sell Macs. That had been happening, but, by the end of 1996, things were fucked up, and it was really hard to see how Apple was going to pull it out. We certainly felt it at MacWEEK: advertising was dwindling, our core audience of IT professionals was increasingly turning to Windows, and Apple was stuck in a spiral of crappy products and inane strategies of colored boxes and cute icons.

This all culminated with the inexorable Gil Amelio keynote at Macworld Expo in January 1997. Hours and hours of drivel, culminating in the triumphant “return” of Woz and Jobs—but hey, we all got VHS copies of “Independence Day”!

[One of the zaniest phone calls I ever received at MacWEEK came the following week, from Amelio himself, asking, “Rick, was I really that bad?” It was almost as odd as running into Spindler at the ATM at the airport after Mac the Knife had cruelly eviscerated him for some bizarre moves involving Performa TV tuners and eWorld.]

With the acquisition of NeXT, and the return of Jobs, the issue of clones came to a head. The Jobs contingent inside Apple was adamant that the clone program had to stop, and there was an amazing full-court press from the primary cloners—Power Computing and DayStar, primarily—to stop Apple.

At MacWEEK, we didn’t want the clone program to fail, or stop. But instead of confining it to the editorial pages, sounding off from our bully pulpit, we let our passion drift into the news pages. It was a Cause. We were on the right side, and, if you read us in those days (our last full year), we were opinionated and never let up on how wrong Apple was. We became a shrill, one-note publication.

This wasn’t the fault of our staff—this was largely my fault. I let our editors and writers loose, and encouraged their passions. By the time I realized that we had gone too far, it was too late. We became part of the story, and, to be brutally honest, we had nothing to say.

To be fair, MacWEEK wasn’t going to survive. Even at the advent of the Internet era, a quick look at the economics of a newsweekly in a niche market pointed one way: down. But I didn’t help things. It saddens me, but I’ve done fine, and the world didn’t end, and a lot of good writers and editors found much more fulfilling careers rising from the wreckage of a great publication.

This is where that bemusement comes in. I look at some of the crap that gets thrown up on the Web these days, in the guise of “true” Mac coverage, and I remember how easy it was to get caught up in the passions of what was right and wrong. But the reality was that we got played. This was not about civil rights, it was about money, and Apple’s money won. (And, for the record, we were wrong, and Steve Jobs was right. Not that anyone cares.)

I don’t think Apple is a better or worse company than most others. I still love the stuff they turn out, and would much rather be pushing a Mac than a Windows box. But, for all of you who think that the Mac—or Apple, or the iPhone—is a Cause, and that somehow Apple cares about you, wake up. And for the folks writing and opining on all things Mac, remember that the world doesn’t revolve around you. You need to pay attention to providing solid, unbiased info about the products and trends in the market. Which rumor, what show, or who said what is not important in the long run. You might do well today, but if you want to be relevant in the long run, it would be smart to cater to a better audience.

If you're interested, my old friend Rik Myslewski wrote a nice overview of the Clone Wars for Macworld.com a couple of years back.

why Flash does matter

I really don’t mean to come off like I love Flash; I could care less whether it’s Flash, QuickTime, HTML5, or some dude pushing bits of 16mm film live through his Internet connection.

I am sick of the whole “Apple vs. Adobe” bullshit. The people on the Apple side of things view this as the chance to finally “get Adobe” and kill Flash once and for all. To the pro-Adobe contingent, it’s the “Apple is the dictator” crap. Both groups are driving me crazy, and I feel that most (not all) people are missing the point, which is this:

People don’t care about technology. They don’t want to care about technology. They look at people like us as nutjobs who need a life. They want to watch old “Mary Tyler Moore” episodes — or sadly, “My Mom the Porn Star” — on Hulu. It works or it doesn’t, and if it doesn’t, they don’t go, “Oh, I wonder if I can just buy that on the iTunes Store.” No, they get pissed off. They move on.

Yes, Apple appears to have created another cool content-consumption device. And they’re absolutely right when they say — in their snide, semi-public way — that Flash isn’t a good browser companion for Safari. But to just shut it down and pretend that the whole Flash thing is some insignificant, “underground” piece of crap is disingenuous and arrogant.

One of the arguments constantly raised by friends is that that Apple’s already proven that Flash is irrelevant, as evidenced by the 75 million iPhone/iPod Touch users. I’d argue that taking the screen from the pocket to the lap significantly raises the expectation of the experience. If this is truly a third device category that Apple claims to be pioneering, one designed for consuming media, well, users are going to expect something better than what they get on the iPhone. After all, the iPhone is first and foremost a phone. The iPad is something completely different.

Yeah, HTML5 is cool, and it could be just the thing that minimizes Flash as a long-term Web standard. But the reality is that by the time HTML5 is ubiquitous, we’ll be on the second or third generation of the iPad. And companies that use Flash to stream video (and other stuff) will look at it over time to see if it provides a better overall experience for their users. That’s the way the world works. Apple, if you want to push the crap out of HTML5, then by all means, join the pep squad and run for head cheerleader. But realize that not every user is as enlightened as you want them to be, and some of them might want to use the Web in ways that you might not approve. Oh, wait, you do realize that: I can buy Wobble iBoobs in the App Store. [update, 02/18/2010: Apple has decided that sexual content is not appropriate for the App Store. Buh-bye, iBoobs.]

I have very little sympathy for Adobe; as a company, they seem to be more concerned about being the next Microsoft — an attitude that I thought was long dead — than truly offering the best experiences for their customers. I look at them and think that they are lost. Just look at last year’s purchase of the Web analytics company Omniture; how do they really believe that this is something their user base is crying for? It’s not: it just makes them bigger.

Ultimately, however, Adobe will thrive or die based on the quality of their products. The pre- and post-Internet world is littered with technologies that were once “in” that have since gone “out.” Users are pretty good at letting companies know when they’ve turned from cutting edge to superfluous. Apple, you should let users be your guide; it has served you well to this point, and I honestly don’t see where it hurts you. This whole thing where you get to be our dad, and make sure that we’re following the right path? Enough of that. I didn’t like it when I was 16, and I don’t like it now.

And to the Apple fanboys (of which I am one on most days, although this might drum me out of the corps), don’t you think that this is a silly thing to go to the mat for? If you don’t want to go to a site that has Flash, don’t go there. Stay away from Hulu and Kitten Launcher or whatever else there is out there. Buy your shit from the iTunes Store and be done with it. But in what universe does it really matter that someone can use some less-than-ideal technology to watch bad TV or play stupid games? I just don’t get it.