iPad

[Jeff Kelly]

Sorry I am more snarky than usual.

It's just always the same old discussion and I'm getting tired of it. Buying decisions are never just about price or potential. If you just view it as such you'll always come to the conclusion that people are stupid because they didn't choose the best price or the most potential.

The value of a purchase might just be that it offers something besides price or performance potential at that difference might even be enough to get them to pay more. Since most normal users I now seem to hate their phones and computers it might just be a device that I hate less than what I own today.

As to Maemo: A good friend of mine met a few of the Maeomo developers at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin at the end of december (one of the biggest hacker conventions in Europe). They told him that the project team has been dissolved.

[Murgos]

Tablet PC's have been around for at least 6 or 7 years.

You're all acting like everyone and their mother hadn't already tried to come up with a killer app to get people to buy them, and failed miserably, for years.  Now that Apple has everyone in the mindset of how they could be fun toys you're all disappointed that they (Apple) are following the same product mentality that got them here.

At first I was disappointed with the iPad announcement but since then I have come to realize that the only real reason I felt that way is because of the unreasonable hype preceding the launch.

For something that is the same price as the Kindle DX you get something way more attractive, feature laden and functional and I am supposed to think it's a failure as a product before it's seen a day of sales?  Really?

Sense you make not, hmm?

[MahrinSkel]

I can stick a Kindle in my pocket, and use it to surf the web for free.  eInk isn't as fragile a display medium, either.  Not a big fan of tablets, and I've got an HP "convertible" notebook (tap-screen that flips around and latches down to make a tablet).  On rare occasions I have used it in tablet format (when using it strictly for reading an eBook or a lot of web surfing where I know I won't need to enter text), but generally it's too much hassle.  iPad is quite a lot heavier than a Kindle, as well (about twice as heavy, in fact), and the form factor is too large for one-handing it securely (and again, more fragile), especially as being a touch-screen you can't just clamp a thumb over it, but would have to hold it by the edge.

I'd be all over a smartphone with a 7-inch screen and the ability to function as a netbook with plugins.  Or a 10-inch (wide format) netbook with an eInk screen on the top cover that could be used for reading without killing the battery.  This thing is clumsy, half-assed, and if it wasn't from Apple everyone would react with a "meh".

--Dave

EDIT: Not everything with an Apple logo on it is golden, remember the Newton?  This seems like another "almost cool, but not quite" concept to me.  For a company that normally puts such a high premium on usability, that they created something too big for one hand or pockets, but way short on functionality for something you carry in a bag, seems like another such "whoops".

EDIT2: Also, the version that could *almost* compete with the Kindle on price has no 3G and too little storage to actually deliver on "feature-laden".  The one that does what you are arguing for costs twice as much as a Kindle DX, three times as much as a classic Kindle, and costs extra per month for the 3G required to make it more than a paperweight.

[Murgos]

EDIT2: Also, the version that could *almost* compete with the Kindle on price has no 3G and too little storage to actually deliver on "feature-laden".  The one that does what you are arguing for costs twice as much as a Kindle DX, three times as much as a classic Kindle, and costs extra per month for the 3G required to make it more than a paperweight.

I'm not sure why you think it has to have 3G or 32 times the storage to be competitive, no the version I am arguing for is the base model, I think it's perfectly reasonable to compare that to the Kindle DX.  Great, with the basic kindle you don't need to find a hotspot to DL a book.  Whoop de do.

Again, in simpler terms, I think you have no clue what a 'good' tablet PC should do or be (no one else does either) so your just saying the iPad isn't it, sight unseen.  Whatever, I don't think it does what you think it does.

[Venkman]

This is not directly competing with eBook readers. It's creating a category between eBook readers and laptops for people who want to consume full color content and have some other experiences.

If your first reaction o the presentation was "I want to program/design/work" on it, you are not the audience. The iPad is trying to create a new market nobody is sure exists. Maybe it'll tank. They can afford it if it does.

Not everything from Apple is great (Newton, those DSP voice-to-text models, that stupid anniversary one I only ever saw on Seinfeld, many desktop models, etc). But each failure was based on trying to enter an existing market with a half-assed solution.

They've narrowed their focus to industries that could easily be conquered by doing one more thing right: the ecomm system between consumers and media companies (iPod, iPhone, iPad). Notice that the Apple of today is not the Mac business of old. That business is more being helped by their CE/service business nowadays than the other way around.

They're not inventing anything. They're just doing it better by ignoring some of the things that have held everyone else back (The Rules). It's why I keep calling them the Blizzard of CE.

This thing is clumsy, half-assed, and if it wasn't from Apple everyone would react with a "meh".

Lots of people keep saying this without recognizing why: it'd be plastic, flimsy, cost $199, have a crappy UI designed by engineers, and would only be interesting to those that aren't interested in the iPad because of an open-source foundation that lets the user solve all the stupid decisions those engineers made  

Edit: now with more snark

[MahrinSkel]

Okay, then tell me *what* I'm supposed to do with this thing.  I want a portable computational and connectivity device.  One unit that I can use as my core electronic device for information exchange.  Sometimes I need to enter a lot of text, so it needs to be able to support a real keyboard.  Sometimes I want to read a lot of text, for hours at a time, so it needs to be able to display a webpage decently and not kill the battery doing it.  Sometimes I want to view video or listen to audio, so it needs to handle that (including storage).  Sometimes I want to have a phone conversation, so I want it to do that.  Sometimes I want to manipulate information, so it needs to run *real* programs, including ones I write.

A smartphone with a decent sized screen, battery life, open architecture, and standardized PC-style I/O (USB, Bluetooth, laptop card slots, whatever as long as it's more than just an SD slot) would fill my desires adequately.  So would a netbook with built-in 3G/4G, Bluetooth, and VOIP.  Bonus points if they have the ability to drive a full-size display when it's available.  Nothing *quite* gets there yet, but some of them are coming close (and many Android platforms are *very* close).  iPad is going off in some weird direction for reasons that make no sense, filling needs I don't have in ways I don't like.

--Dave

EDIT: And it needs to do all of that in something I can tuck into pockets, at least large coat pockets.

[Righ]

This is supposed to go on your coffee table so that you can pick it up when the urge to search imdb strikes during a movie. Since we're envisioning the sort of people who are not permanently attached to a laptop here, that rules out most of us as candidates. However, for the many people who typically use the computer in another room of the house, this is the non-intrusive computer that can live on the coffee table rather than being closed and hidden under it like the netbook that they're using today. This may well be a viable market. If it is, I could imagine it being one where custom modding shops could make a lot of money too.

[Samwise]

This is supposed to go on your coffee table so that you can pick it up when the urge to search imdb strikes during a movie. Since we're envisioning the sort of people who are not permanently attached to a laptop here, that rules out most of us as candidates.

Are we also envisioning people who don't have smartphones or iPod Touches?  I don't even have a laptop any more because it just started gathering dust once I got the iPod.

[Engels]

I have to agree with Righ here. I'd take it an nth degree further; the target audience is the people who only reluctantly accept the need and utility of the internet/computer.

[ghost]

I'm not sure why there is so much angst about this.  I've been asking for a larger iPod touch for a long time.  The only real issue I see with it is that you cannot, to my knowledge, listen to music and do other stuff at the same time.  If true, that is a mistake that will likely be fixed rather quickly. 

[Venkman]

Okay, then tell me *what* I'm supposed to do with this thing.

You are not supposed to do anything with it. Because you already customize your surroundings against expectations you've spent years refining. And along the way have adopted the tech-leaning mentality that quality through iteration can only happen in open style environments upon utility devices. That's not a value judgement, it's just a personality profile.

This is for people who want a good media consumption experience and aren't going to spend months researching the best ones based on processors and clockspeeds. This is for the person that reads, listens and watches more than they type, compose and designs, and if they do the latter at all, they've got a computer for that. It's for someone like my wife who will watch TV with the iPhone but grumbles about the small screen. It's for someone like my oldest who loves the apps and music but would like to play on a bigger screen. Basically, the same market as the netbook user except locked down enough the user doesn't try and do things it's not designed to do and therefore returns it (which is a problem with netbooks).

Everyone wants the single device that does them all. But until we get to wrist-strapped personal 3D holographic projectors (itself just a babystep towards shared network neural implants), we're stuck with what's here. And we're stuck not until technology improves, but until adoption improves enough to compel iteration. Tablet PCs weren't getting us there because they are billed as utility devices with an additional feature people can't figure out why they want.

Meanwhile, that's what the iPhone and Touch have been doing for three years.

[ahoythematey]

So far the only thing I'm seeing the ipad designed to do is exploit the eagerness of the apple faithful.  For now, I'll do just fine with my ipad-nano, and maybe their third or fourth revision will have things actually worth excitement.

[Venkman]

Completely separate but related question.

Been poking around the web today and only now started seeing what others have probably been hearing for awhile: developers moving away from Flash to HTML5?

Is this real or just some fringe anti-Flash group? Most of the conversations I've seen focus on video players rather than what I've mostly seen Flash used for (Games). Does HTML5 offer that level of programmable interactivity? Is it projected to be fully supported by browsers this year? What makes it better than Flash?

This may be better as a separate thread. iPad doesn't have Flash and I don't know if it'll support HTML5 either. It's just because of this thread I even stumbled upon such articles in the first place.

[Quinton]

I'm no HTML5 expert, but my (very fuzzy) understanding is that modern browsers with HTML5 and javascript, css, svg, canvas, video, etc, can do an awful lot (all?) of what you can do in flash.  And flash is just notoriously unstable and cpu hoggy (I think flash probably accounts for like 95+% of the browser crashes I've seen in the last couple years).  The flash imaging model also has a bunch of annoying features that make it really hard to 2d/3d accelerate well, which contributes to the performance issue.

Which is why on the face of it, I don't find Steve's "no flash for us" policy completely irrational.  (I'm just annoyed that he won't let you install an alternate browser with flash if you prefer flash to stability or whatever ^^)

[Tarami]

Quinton is pretty much on the money. HTML5 has three elements that (if designed well and then successfully implemented by browser vendors) will largely obsolete Flash; video, audio and canvas.

- Video is what you expect, an inline video player;
- audio, an element to define and play back audio;
- canvas, an element that lets you draw onto a surface at pretty decent speeds using JavaScript, bitmaps and SVG. Combine this with <audio> and using Javascript for input and you got a pretty powerful tool. There are even tentative specifications for ways of saving the canvas to disk, so you can basically create an image editor in nothing but HTML and script and then let people save their results directly, without having to post geometric data or similar to the server. With the advances in Javascript interpreters (like Chrome's V8), it's all rather exciting to be honest.

Flash is, frankly, a terrible technology for mostly anything. It's used because it has good coverage mainly. I don't think anybody would really miss it if it went the way of the dodos.

[Trippy]

I'm not sure why there is so much angst about this.  I've been asking for a larger iPod touch for a long time.  The only real issue I see with it is that you cannot, to my knowledge, listen to music and do other stuff at the same time.  If true, that is a mistake that will likely be fixed rather quickly. 

The iPod player on the iPhone and the iPod Touch can play music in the background and there's no reason to expect the iPad is any different.

[Venkman]

Yep. And nowadays developers can give playback control from directly within the app, beyond the normal pause/volume/fwd/back you can get from the popup.

Ah ok thanks. How does this work for games? Can Canvas create the kind of interactivity you'd get on Miniclip or Addictinggames games? I've also read about Silverlight, but I don't know how that works beyond image and movie media playback.

What I'm really wondering is how online games will evolve in the coming years if Flash declines. For mobile devices that won't matter much*. I'm thinking more PCs and laptops.

* Incidentally, I find it interesting how Adobe keeps showing they're on 99% of all browsers, when so many browsers hitting the net are on mobile devices that don't support Flash.

[Tarami]

Well, http://www.canvasdemos.com

A NES-emulator written in JavaScript, using HTML5: http://benfirshman.com/projects/jsnes/

Works best with Chrome (thanks to the superior JS engine) but also works well in FireFox and supposedly also in Opera and Safari.

[Venkman]

Thanks. That's pretty cool. The image animation portion works fine on the iPhone too.

Just found out Silverlight offers similar interactivity as well. Some freaky games out there, usual experimental indie stuff (usually the best kind).

Do people foresee a sea-change coming in the next year or two? Or is Flash here for a long while yet? As in, how entrenched is the development community (and marketing/PR types) vs how easy will it be for studios to branch out (or will they be forced to through adoption)?

[Tarami]

Yeah, Silverlight is Microsoft's answer to Flash, basically. It's a subset of .NET sandbox'ed in the browser pretty much, with its own set of advantages and drawbacks. Silverlight is rather more "serious" than Flash, as it has a real GUI layer (Windows Presentation Foundation) and uses a "real" virtual machine (.NET). Last time I checked, Flash still has an edge concerning a lot of the bread-and-butter stuff for games, like 2D rendering. The big issue with Silverlight is that since it's Microsoft, most vendors are reluctant to support it because, well, it's Microsoft. Otherwise I think it's a pretty nice piece of technology, but it doesn't have nearly the same coverage as Flash and that makes it less interesting in itself, because in the end you just want your stuff to work for as many as possible, and not necessarily by using the most able technology.

One cool feature of Silverlight is that it lets you break out of the browser host and run it stand-alone, in itself hosting "web applications" that are basically Silverlight apps running from a webserver, distributed-style without needing a browser at all. It creates a link on the desktop and you can run it directly like any app and have an experience that's pretty darn close to a real app.

Edit:
As for your question, I can't see that we've fully replaced Flash even in five years. It's just too deeply ingrained in the community as the "catch-all" solution to all the problems script and HTML can't solve (even if it's a bad idea, like Flash site navigation.) That's just my personal opinion, however.

[Quinton]

Youtube and some other video streaming sites are heading toward <VIDEO> tag.  I wouldn't be surprised if flash was more and more marginalized over the next couple years -- nobody really benefits from flash except adobe (who sells authoring tools) and it causes headaches for pretty much everybody.  I think as the bulk of the installed base of browsers winds up supporting HTML5, VIDEO, etc we may finally see the end of flash.

[schild]

I despise flash with ever fiber of my being, but until something usefully replaces it (not Silverlight - it's no better), we're not going to see flash going away. Could be a while.

[Malakili]

Moderately interesting blog here "iPad explained to geeks" http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/192799.asp

I still think its useless though.  Oh look, a device that fits firmly in a place between my phone and my laptop...a place where I didn't need anything.

[Venkman]

Good infoz, thanks. The more I read about HTML5, the more I hope that gets adopted quickly. I don't mind Flash, but mostly because I'm not the one stuck developing in it (that's what sub-contracting is for ). I just want it to stick around long enough to see how their upcoming App porting strategy is going to play out. I've seen this promise before (on some older handheld CE devices like the GP32), and it never is as easy as they think. I would guess it'd be easier to just learn the iPhone SDK dev environment than it would be to try and design once and port multiple times within a system that's going to come with a lot more overhead by default, to slow down the experience and make it more buggy.

And that blog post is basically what I've been feeling. This kind of announcement is like Apple before the iPhone. They'd come out and announce OS X.## or some new Macbook and most people didn't give a shit because it was just a Mac, or an iPod or something for other people. The iPhone comes along and converts enough geeks to a superior experience that is almost great except it's locked down unless jailbroken and stuck on AT&T unless you want T-Mobile through another jailbreak. But they think the iPhone is for them "if only it had..."

I think it's that audience which is the most disappointed. They wanted another device that was almost for them but which actually isn't at all, for the same reasons the iPhone isn't.

[naum]

I despise flash with ever fiber of my being, but until something usefully replaces it (not Silverlight - it's no better), we're not going to see flash going away. Could be a while.

But it already is starting to go away.

On some sites, 1 in 6 or greater have flash disabled. As new sites are rolled out, old sites refreshed, the splashy stuff flash used to do is supplanted jQuery or other javascript (AJAXy) library photo carousel plugins. And even video/media is coded to use HTML5 (or non-flash H264) first, and fallback to flash if browser doesn't support. Eventually, just like IE6 with most sites now, the plug will be yanked for good.

[Engels]

Thanks for posting that artcile, Malakili. I reluctantly have to agree with its conclusions.

Darniaq, I think you're very wrong about the iPhone appeal audience. The iPad probably isn't going to be for geeks, but the iPhone, because it is a small portable device, a phone, camera and 3g/edge internet device does meet most geek needs. I can ssh into my solaris email server from the bustop and make sure the processors aren't jammed by spam. The tablet just isn't handy that way.

The nefarious part is that the iPad is creating a content portal. Much like the airlines, it will probably end up a pseudo monopoly where everything is cut in the name of profit, and the end user is just as hosed as the underpayed and overworked airline pilot. The difference being that if content portal devices such as OnLive, iTunes and XBox Live become legion, the masses will forget that there were once other options. They will fork over money for things that once upon a time were slightly more sophisticated and comparatively cheaper.

[AutomaticZen]

But it already is starting to go away.

On some sites, 1 in 6 or greater have flash disabled. As new sites are rolled out, old sites refreshed, the splashy stuff flash used to do is supplanted jQuery or other javascript (AJAXy) library photo carousel plugins. And even video/media is coded to use HTML5 (or non-flash H264) first, and fallback to flash if browser doesn't support. Eventually, just like IE6 with most sites now, the plug will be yanked for good.

You're talking 2 or 3 years at least.   Youtube just announced their HTML 5 Test on the 20th.  It doesn't support embedding.  Or full screen.  Or those wonderful ads Youtube loves.  (Plus for us, minus for Youtube)  Vimeo as well.

At which point the iPad will probably be on it's second or third iteration.  Definitely with more features and fixes.

This item, on the other hand, is not the ultimate internet device they tout.

HTML5 is hot though.

[Kitsune]

HTML5 will be spiffy as its support becomes more universal, but right now the projected date of full adoption of the standard is 2022.   

I'm sure that the real day to day Internet will have adopted a 'good enough' HTML5 that plays nice on all the major browsers in the next year or two, and I'm looking forward to it.  I hate plugins and format wars.

[Venkman]

Darniaq, I think you're very wrong about the iPhone appeal audience. The iPad probably isn't going to be for geeks, but the iPhone, because it is a small portable device, a phone, camera and 3g/edge internet device does meet most geek needs. I can ssh into my solaris email server from the bustop and make sure the processors aren't jammed by spam. The tablet just isn't handy that way.

No, see, that was my entire point: The iPhone attracted a type of geek that is disappointed the iPad doesn't do anything for them. Which is to say they were expecting the followup to the iPhone to be just as much for them as the iPhone was. Apple doesn't see them as a market, but that audience wanted to be one.

Think of it this way: just because a company makes an RPG for a certain type of audience doesn't mean all of their RPGs are going to be for that audience, even if that audience wants that to be the case.

[ghost]

The iPod player on the iPhone and the iPod Touch can play music in the background and there's no reason to expect the iPad is any different.

I hope so.  There is a good chance that the idiot "Genius" at the mac store had no clue what they were talking about. 

[Quinton]

I'm sure, likewise, that you won't be able to stream music with Pandora or some other third party service while you run other apps, just like the iPhone.  I assume Apple's answer to this is not "enable background apps" but instead "provide a proprietary streaming music solution endorsed by Apple" (see purchase of LaLa).

[Tarami]

HTML5 will be spiffy as its support becomes more universal, but right now the projected date of full adoption of the standard is 2022.   

I'm sure that the real day to day Internet will have adopted a 'good enough' HTML5 that plays nice on all the major browsers in the next year or two, and I'm looking forward to it.  I hate plugins and format wars.

This adoption shit takes time, too much time. As an example, the sites I work for still have between 10 and 15% IE6 users. Firefox is like 20%. Anyone saying IE6 is "dead" is sorely mistaking themselves, it just looks that way to us as powerusers. We even have a small percentage (like 2-3) that still uses goddamn IE 5. I don't see how though, because the sites don't support IE5 one iota but I guess if they've endured this long, they'll keep enduring. You can't tell that many people to "get an upgrade", you're not the first and it just won't happen. They'll just not use your site instead. I think the big job there is to get rid of all the Windows 95/98/Me/2K users that can't update their IE past version 6. Once a user has XP, it's atleast possible to get them to update IE, if not get them a proper browser.

But atleast we can thank God for modern JavaScript libraries that take 95% of the development pains out.

[Venkman]

I'm sure, likewise, that you won't be able to stream music with Pandora or some other third party service while you run other apps, just like the iPhone.  I assume Apple's answer to this is not "enable background apps" but instead "provide a proprietary streaming music solution endorsed by Apple" (see purchase of LaLa).

Wuh? You can stream music through the Pandora app. Did it on the Touch and have been doing so on the iPhone. My usual process is Shazam>Pandora>purchase-maybe.

Or did you mean stream music in the background with Pandora? That you can't do.

[Trippy]

I'm sure, likewise, that you won't be able to stream music with Pandora or some other third party service while you run other apps, just like the iPhone.  I assume Apple's answer to this is not "enable background apps" but instead "provide a proprietary streaming music solution endorsed by Apple" (see purchase of LaLa).

Wuh? You can stream music through the Pandora app. Did it on the Touch and have been doing so on the iPhone. My usual process is Shazam>Pandora>purchase-maybe.

Or did you mean stream music in the background with Pandora? That you can't do.

"while you run other apps"

[Venkman]

Doh.