Just a quick post to let customers of The Early Edition know about some of our plans. Firstly though, thank you to those who have used the feedback sticky note to write to us and tell us your initial impressions and give us your suggestions – we love hearing from you!
Now, down to business. As with any new software release (particularly in this case where we hadn’t even touched a real iPad until yesterday) there have been a few small bugs that some users have experienced. You’ll be glad to know that we’ve already issued an update addressing these issues, which is now in the hands of Apple’s review team.
But more significantly we’ve also begun work on some of the features we planned to have ready for the launch but ended up having to shelve temporarily in order to meet the deadline. These include Google Reader and Instapaper integration. I know that’s going to make a few people quite happy, so to them I say thanks for your patience. 
But we’re not stopping there. We’re really excited about The Early Edition and we’ve got a lot of ideas for making it an even more fluid and enjoyable news reading experience on the iPad. So as they say… Watch this space.
I have to admit, the first 10,000 miles (my flight to NY last Tuesday) weren’t very comfortable. Let’s just say the plane was fully booked and I was allocated one of the last two seats. But thankfully the next 10,000 will be a different story. I do have a better seat, but the thing that will really make the difference is at last having an iPad in my hot little hands. That’s what I came here for after all!
After waiting in the queue since 1.30am, I was very excited to open the box but even more excited to get the device out and install The Early Edition on it. To finally be able to test our iPad app on a real-life device was very cool, if not a bit nerve-wracking. All in all it worked well and I managed to impress a few journos and Apple staff which was fun.
My first impressions of the iPad were that it was smooth. Yes the glass is smooth, but that’s not what I mean… It’s just a smooth device. Apps spring open and the interface responds to gestures in a very refined and spritely way. You can tell that details matter to Apple to a degree that very few of their competitors can match. That’s not to say everything is perfect in iPad v1. But to be honest I’ve barely touched the surface (excuse the pun). I’d like to spend a lot more time going through the finer details of each new app that Apple have developed and some of the amazing new apps from developers.
It’s just as well I’ve got 10,000 miles left to do just that.
Raise your right hand if you’ve ever had an application crash on you? Okay now keep it raised if it’s happened and you didn’t save your work? Good, now keep it raised if you felt like picking up your computer and hurling it out the window? Excellent. Now keep it raised if you’ve actually hurled it out the window? Right well I think you have a problem. You should see someone about that.
The screensnap above was taken 15 minutes ago, at the moment I realised that Illustrator was about to crash on me and that I hadn’t saved what I was doing. It’s that dreadful few seconds when you see the spinning beachball and realise what you see on the screen is about to wave goodbye forever unless you do something about it NOW. So I did what any fool would do and frantically hit Shift-Command-3, otherwise known as a full screen capture, (in this case my screensnap didn’t help much, due to the image being zoomed in so far).
So. What is the point of all this? Well I guess it’s part advice for you, and part therapy for me. Okay it’s mostly therapy for me. If I didn’t write this blog post, I’d probably have a broken window to deal with.
Okay, so the last couple of weeks since my last post have been pretty eventful. On the home front, my son – who’s in Kindergarten – fell out of a tree and ended up looking like he’d done 10 rounds with Mike Tyson. Then after driving 50km home from the hospital at 2am I came down with a terrible flu (not just any old flu I’ll have you know… Man-flu, which is the worst kind).
On the iPad front, Apple have also been busy, airing the first iPad TV commercial during the Oscars, and announcing that the wifi version will be on sale from 3 April in the USA.
We’d really like to test our iPad app on actual hardware as soon as possible, so there’s only one thing for it. I’m off to New York to get my iPad test-unit as soon as the doors of Apple’s Fifth Avenue store open on Saturday morning of 3 April.
Needless to say I’m pretty excited.
Make no mistake, the days of the mouse are numbered, and I for one will not miss them one incy, wincy, teeny, weeny little bit. Okay, to be fair, the mouse has actually advanced personal computing incomprehensibly – after all, it ushered in the graphical user interface (GUI) and without that, computers would never have fallen into the hands of mere mortals.
But me, I’m sick of my mouse. Aside from such joys as inoperable trackballs and laggy movements, the mouse is responsible for something else that drives me up the wall – RSI. At the end of each day my hand is aching and my fingers are incapable of moving slowly… They can only snap from one position to the other.
There are of course plenty of issues to iron out if touchscreens are to take over the world. It’s pretty obvious you won’t be able to simply replace your existing monitor and stay seated, tapping away all day – your arms would drop off after a week! But that shouldn’t be a roadblock. We just need to rethink how we work. Standing isn’t such a bad thing (were we really designed to slump into a chair all day?).
When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug his foolscap-sized Newspad into the ship’s information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world’s major electronic papers. -Excerpt from 2001: A Space Odyssey
You could be forgiven for thinking that last week’s announcement from Apple was just about another new product… A bigger iPod Touch. Apple were quick to position the device as a netbook alternative but not something you’d want to replace a full-fledged computer with. But their recreation of the iWork applications proved that the tablet format is capable of much more than just surfing the web and checking emails. Touchscreens could actually become the successor to the mouse. Now the iPad wasn’t the first tablet on the scene by any stretch of the imagination, but it is the first that looked like you’d want to use it. It’s the first that’s been properly designed for touching with your fingers, as opposed to a Stylus which is really just a pen in disguise. No, pens aren’t the answer. There’s a disconnect between holding a mouse or a pen and watching the screen that is simply not there with touch. There’s no mindgap. The curser is elevated from that pixelated white pointing glove into a real human hand – your own!
So the launch of the iPad last week got me dreaming of the day I can throw my mouse away and unpack a whopping, great, big, black box with an Apple logo on the side that says “30 inch iPad”. Perhaps it’ll be called a Mac Pad, or a Mac Touch, who knows… But I want one before my fingers fall off at the knuckles.
For more interesting blog posts, articles and opinion on the iPad and touch-based computing in general, these are some of the more interesting ones I’ve read in the last few days:
- Removing Features (brilliant read)
- I need to talk to you about computers. (again, excellent)
- In praise of the iPad: A contrarian view – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
- Editorial: Engadget on the Apple iPad
- iPhone-to-iPad development: How’s the timing going to work out?
- Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 Newspad finally arrives, nine years late
Finally after years of rumours and speculation about a mythical Apple tablet, their elephant in the room has been unveiled and boy is it sweet. If you haven’t already seen a demo of the iPad, you seriously have to check it out.
So how did Apple deliver on my wishlist of what I’d like to see in the device…
- a parallel SDK for the tablet/iPhone: ✔ Check
- long battery life: ✔ Check
- speedy processor: ✔ Check
- front-facing camera: ✘ No cigar
- but ultimately, I want to be surprised (as only Apple know how): ✔ Check
One of the most common questions floating around has been “Will it be useful?”. In other words, is it an answer looking for a problem that doesn’t exist? Well, you be the judge – but watch it in action first. I have to say, I was more than a little blown-away by Apple’s work on the software. That is after all, where the device either wins or loses in the area of usefulness. The beauty of this device is that – just like the iPhone – it’s a whole new product every time it opens up the latest and greatest software release, be it OS-based or third party.
And what about the price? US$499 for the base model? *jaw hits carpet*
Netbooks aren’t better at anything. They’re just cheaper. Steve Jobs
Apple are clearly taking it to the streets and aiming for big… no, huge… no, MASSIVE sales. Why else would they price it so aggressively when it has no competition? Think iPod infiltration levels all over again.
It’s great that it runs iPhone apps straight off the bat, but I have to admit I was a bit surprised by the decision to include a 2x scaling option for iPhone sized apps on the device. It’s not like Apple to blow up pixels bigger than they were meant to be. Interesting decision, but I’ll reserve my final judgement until I’ve seen the results. It’s great that the SDK tools are available straight away though, because designing for this size screen is going to be awesome.
It’s a shame about the staggered release timing. There are three wifi-only models (16Gb, 32Gb and 64Gb) all available in two months from today, but add 3G into the mix and it’s an extra month on top of that. I may be wrong but it seems that if developers (who will need the device in their hands for testing purposes) are to try and get their apps ready for the initial flood of dedicated iPad app sales, they’re forced into getting a non-3G model, or buying both.
But that’s a minor quibble. It’s a flat out brilliant new device in a segment all of it’s own and I can’t wait to start working on a bigger canvas!
What do you think about Apple’s new baby?
