iPad, iFolio, iSuccumbed (well, almost)

Written by Chris Oaten Tuesday, 20 July 2010 14:09

Surprisingly, the Oaten household has been iPad-free up until only recently, when it rained iPads. One was bought for junior as a 16th birthday present, another arrived soon after on loan from Apple. A double epiphany, as it turns out.

The time for a review of Apple’s wunderkind pad/tablet has long passed but I figured I’d share my thoughts on it as a photographer’s aid. This is quite the challenge because every time I pick the iPad up I find myself drawn to playing Doodle Jump or Need for Speed Shift. As a gaming device, the iPad gets the thumbs up from me.

But I digress. I knew that would happen. Didn’t beat my Doodle Jump high score, either. Again.

What I did manage to confirm in my time with an iPad is that it can be a terrific tool for previewing images. I’ve got some runs on the board here, so let me share with you the devices against which I’m comparing the iPad.

My Canon M80 is a pretty good photo box. Epson makes something very similar called the P-7000. At 140x81x34mm, the M80 is a small device that wears well as a belt attachment. With an 80GB drive and slots for CD and SD cards, it’s hard to beat for portability. I’ve used it whenever I knew there’d be a long time between laptop drinks, such as when roaming a racing circuit.

Two problems with the M80. It’s slow, and the battery life is terrible. Best I’ve ever got from it is about three hours. The 3.7in TFT screen, however, is excellent. The M80, at $1100, also is expensive. Especially as it’s a one-trick pony. It stores pictures and videos. That’s it.

Another device I’ve wanted to like a lot is a digital photo album from Digital Foci. This is very much like a digital photo frame, with a leatherette cover and front-mounted controls. It has only a 4GB internal memory capacity, which is its biggest downfall but its screen, about the same size as an iPad but with a coarser resolution, is its saving grace. Photos go into it via CF, SD or USB and, as such, makes for a handy sales tool. However, it, too, is a bit slow.

I had long hoped for a device that combined the portability of the M80 with the visual appeal of the Foci’s large-enough screen. Hello, iPad.

The iPad doesn’t quite measure up to the M80 on the portability front. I don’t see myself attaching one to a belt while I go walkabout. The iPad does slip into my camera bag a lot easier than a MacBook, though of course the iPad has neither the versatility or the processing grunt to match. What it does have is a quicksilver response to user input, which is great.

Why? Because if you are going to use it to preview images for someone, as I did on the night before writing this, you want to be able to flick away the dud shots you don’t want to share. Either that, or be more selective in the first place about which images you choose to import. Sitting in front of someone while ticking or unticking import previews is not only tedious but kind of spoils the mood of the moment. A bit like when you’re talking to someone more interested in their text messages.

Few professional photographers would ever expose themselves to this kind of potential for embarrassment. I, too, see it as a risk. Indeed, there was a series of shots that I thought was working really well while firing them off but, in reality, not so much. It was a bit humiliating to reveal my misdirected creativity.

Even so, it’s high marks to the iPad as a preview tool, though I would always make clear to anyone previewing images with me in this way that they shouldn’t judge the image quality. This will come later, after the RAW versions have been processed.

The other use for the iPad is as a portfolio. I reckon on this score the iPad is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can’t be beaten for versatility. You could store a number of portfolios that show your different styles or strengths and easily combine a new set of images tailored to a specific interview. What’s more, with the visual grace that a Keynote presentation offers, you can make your portfolio really shine and help it stand out from the crowd. Until, that is, the rest of the crowd has an iPad, too.

The flip side is that while the iPad is a great portfolio tool when displaying to anyone who buys images for 72dpi applications (web pages and so on), the size of the iPad’s display can do little to demonstrate that the quality of your technique and equipment are up to the task of producing fine art quality prints. If you were thinking you could use an iPad exclusively as a portfolio tool, I wouldn’t advise you against it, but I would say you should still have a set of your finest prints, just in case some old-fashioned fuddy-duddy like me wanted to be reassured your print workflow was up to the same standard as your digital presentation.

So if you were to ask me if I would buy an iPad to help me with my photography, the answer would be “no, not for now”. And here’s why.

For a start, my daughter has one. So when the occasion calls for it, her iPad can be put to work.

However, the thing I most want to do with an iPad, which is to set up a workflow that allows for wireless transmission of images into the iPad’s photo album, is simply not feasible. I can’t do this because the iPad doesn’t allow for creating ad-hoc network set-ups. Sure, I can create an ad-hoc from a laptop and shunt images in a folder via a third-party app such as Air Sharing. And, to be fair, this works OK, except that the folder of images is locked inside the Air Sharing app. I want them in the Photos app, where they are fun to share.

Also useful would be the ability to import/export between apps. This would allow me to, for instance, shunt images wirelessly from a laptop to the iPad using Air Sharing, and then export an image into a Bento library from which a sales order could be generated, along with a model release if needed.

Better yet would be the ability to link the iPad to an SD Eye-Fi card. I’d shoot to CF card and SD simultaneously, allowing f or wireless transmission of JPEGs from SD card to iPad without interfering with accessing RAW files from the CF card.

Even better than that would be for Apple to recognise that users may want to use the iPad in ways that don’t fit within Apple’s definition of the way it should be used, and give developers the tools to create the support for a workflow of the type I just described. An import button in Photos that lets me grab images stored in other iPad apps would make a great start. Unless it can already be done with a third-party solution. The App Store is a forest of possibilities in which it can be difficult to spot the tree with the solution that fits.

If anyone knows of that magic faraway tree that does support the workflow I just described, please let me know about it in the forum. Please. I desperately need an ironclad excuse for buying an iPad.

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Apps Gone Crazy

Written by Alex Kidman Tuesday, 20 July 2010 00:31

Prince made headlines recently by declaring that the "internet is over".

Before you panic, no, he's wrong. Quite wrong. Especially the part where he declares computers and digital gadgets to be no good because "they just fill your head with numbers and that can't be good for you".

Utter rubbish. I've never had a problem with my iPad besides the 000001010101010101010101011110101011111010101010WOZWOZERE10100001010101010110101

Sorry, where was I?

It was part of an interview the minuscule Minneapolis musician did with the UK's Daily Mirror to promote an album he was giving away with the newspaper and, naturally enough, generate a little controversy. He's no stranger to controversy. It was the name of his fourth album, after all. He also went on to declare that releasing albums via a newspaper made perfect sense because it eliminated online piracy.

That bit didn't work there are copies all over the net right now, probably more than there would have been had he not said that. For the record, I've sourced a completely legitimate copy of the album via a relative of mine in the UK who bought (with some embarrassment) the paper in question. It's not very good. The album, that is. I already had a low opinion of the Mirror.

Anyway, before you worry — that you've somehow slipped from MacTheMag into PrinceTheMag — there is an interesting tale to tell here for App developers.

Prince's problem — well, one of them, anyway — is that it's increasingly hard to sell music in a crowded marketplace, especially if you don't like the established labels that much. Sales are down for everyone, even with the remarkable success of iTunes. There's a generation out there who happily just download every skerrick of music they can find without ever expecting to pay for it. It's a bit tough to keep yourself in shiny white doves and purple motorbikes in that kind of environment.

Aside from generating controversy, which helps sell newspapers and promote the deal, there's some sensible business here for Prince. He got paid upfront by the paper (and apparently by several other European publications) for delivering the music to them. For all I know, they may have even paid for pressing the CDs and sleeves to put them in. He writes, gets paid for the music and in one sense can happily ignore the piracy problem because he's already got the money. Depending on the nature of the deal, quite possibly more money than either a record company or ongoing sales might have netted him in this day and age.

So then, a market where there's a flood of content, much of it acquired for free, in which it's hard to compete or even stand out. That's the music market today. Does it remind you of anything else?

It reminds me of the App market. For every Angry Birds there's countless other games. For every Hipstamatic, countless other photography apps. And so on, and so forth. The established method for getting noticed tends to be radical price drops in order to shoot up the App charts. That might net you some notice, but not a significant chunk of cash, and you're gambling that word of mouth and App chart placement will reap some kind of reward down the track. Unless, that is, everyone's moved on to the next free App of the day. Otherwise, you're just blithely hoping somebody at Apple will notice your app and decide to feature it on the iTunes front page.

This is where I reckon a little clever marketing might just make a world of difference. There's established precedent in the Australian marketplace for iTunes giveaways, for a start. The Herald/Age newspapers gave away iTunes music and video content over Christmas last year, a deal that undoubtedly involved Apple and the papers playing nicely together along with the content providers. Clearly, the infrastructure exists, whether it's a matter of a website to generate the codes, or a one-day-only code.

The trick is a marketing one convincing an established outlet (whether it's a newspaper, magazine, coffee chain or petrol station doesn't matter, as long as it's mass market enough) that it's worth paying you upfront for the App in question. Sure, you'd perhaps lose out on a percentage of sales to people who might have otherwise handed over the cash, but you get instant prominence (and potentially the same shooting up the App store rankings boost you'd get out of a "free" app switch) and a payout upfront. That to me seems better than the financial Russian Roulette than current App development seems to be.

Or perhaps, as Prince would have put it once upon a time, I've gone crazy. If you'll excuse me, I'm off to look for the purple banana before they put me in the truck.

What do you think? Do App developers need to innovate in their marketing and sales approaches in order to make actual money?

Discuss it with me at MacTheForum!

Time capsule — no, not that Time Capsule

Written by Chris Oaten Thursday, 15 July 2010 00:01

Personal log. The year is 2087, or UD745.42 if you can tolerate that new world government crap. Me? I like the old ways of doing things. Yeah, that’s right. I’m an old-fashioned kind of guy. I even insist on still using my family surname. But don’t write me off. What I’ve got to share is important. Really important... so listen up.

I’ve been shooting for 90 years now. Yeah, I know that seems unlikely, but the quantum computing watershed of 2016 changed a lot of things, among them the ability to lengthen our life expectancy. At age 124 I’m as fit as I was at age 46 when I wrote that piece in MacTheBlog about putting your precious memories in print.

But I’m getting off track. I’d hoped to come back personally, in the flesh. but the binary boffins have so far only worked out how to send data back in time. Flesh and blood doesn’t travel so well. Proof? Our first attempt was a volunteer. A science academy librarian. We knew her as Sharon. You know her as Lady Gaga.

Anyway, here’s the message. In timeline form. Soak it up. They say those who ignore their history are doomed to repeat it, and this is 80 years of history coming your way before it’s even happened. Squander it, and I’ll rip your arms off when you get here.

Back in 2010, I had a collection of 73,184 images in JPEG form. Not a bad effort, eh? With RAW originals, I needed about 7.5TB of storage for them all. I wish life had always been that simple. In 2014, I decided those images should be backed up to optical disc. You see, the global power grid had become flaky since the fire from the BP spill blackened the skies permanently and cut off our solar energy. We knew those guys shouldn’t have tried burning the oil off. An almost limitless supply of oil, set on fire. The bastards paid no heed and torched it anyway. We had to revert to coal power and ... oh, hang on ... you’ll find out the whole of that sorry tale for yourselves soon enough.

Here’s that timeline

2014: Backup entire image to optical disc as contingency planning due to unreliable (and mega-expensive) global power supply. Cost: $268 in media plus non-billable personal time. Exercise repeated each five years as new image format parameters and non-powered storage media emerges.

2017: Array of hard drives have come to end of life. Finally time to install dynamically expandable multi-disc array. Cost: $2500.

2020 to 2080: Replacement and upgrade of arrays each five years. Cost: $1,632,000 plus annual power supply charges. Inflation’s a bitch.

2047: Bunker storage required. Environmental toxicity has increased to a level that quickly corrodes exposed storage hardware. "Wraps" prolong hardware life, but it's only ever a stopgap. Amazingly, Kennards is still in this business. Good thing I did that contra job in 2038. They gave me a discount rate on the bunker. $2750 a year.

2062: Following the election of a new world government, a collective of global security professionals outlaw the JGIF image format due to its ability to harbour clandestine messages in 2048-bit encryption. (FYI, JGIF replaced the JFEG standard in 2034. JFEG had overrun JPEG 12 years before that). They enacted the law overnight and even though many in the imaging business saw it coming, I still lost 80 per cent of my stock library, which included many of the last known images of the brown pelican, bilby and other extinct species. Also lost the only pictorial evidence of Overseer Gillard before she was fully automated.

2074: At last, a breakthrough in barium vapour encoding means an infinite, secure, and low-cost means of storing images is available to anyone who can cough up the $4,347,000 for the encoding device. I’d explain how it works if I thought you were even remotely ready in your time to handle such a concept. (Remember, as you’re reading this, quantum computing for the masses is still six years away.)

2083: A return to copyright infringement prosecution is finally made possible by unique signatures embedded in randomised electron tracers. The actual ability to enforce payment for copyright infringement catches 17,382 image object hackers with their pants down and I can finally retire with that nest egg I’ve been working tirelessly to create for more than 100 years.

Good thing, too, because on May 24, 2084, the EMF device at CERN finally blows its lid, and the global EMF shockwave wipes out every digital image in existence. The image bunkers don’t fare any better. The EMF pulse took out the fusion reactors, too, and when they finally went back online, an unprecedented voltage surge fried every image bank on the planet. We were only a year away from getting hypernet access to storage bunkers on Mars, too. Shame. Still, I made my fortune just in the nick of time.

But that wasn’t the end of my good luck. As one of nine photographers in the IPA (International Preservation Alliance) who committed to archiving significant images in hard copy format, my travelling exhibition “Life Before the Pulse” is a sellout wherever it goes. $500 a head to marvel at my prints of early 21st century insanity. I’m not sure whether they come to see the images or for the novelty factor of an unpowered image display. Pearls before swine, really.

Many ask if the designs are available as air banners. In your time, it’s the equivalent of asking if Ansel Adams’ prints are available as tea towels. Yep. Prints. That’s where the money is.

My advice? There’s a start-up listing on the ASX tomorrow. Yep, tomorrow, if your editor publishes this on the date I specified. It’s called Bamblue (BBU). The company makes photo-quality paper from bamboo rhizomes. Extraordinary paper. Reminds me of Seagull Pearl. In 2064, when the last of the world’s paper production plantations vanish, Bamblue’s photo paper, a hitherto largely ignored technology surviving mainly through the support of the IPA, is the only game in town.

So do your grandkids a favour. Buy the BBU shares. As many as you can afford. And go have a family portrait taken. Have it printed with the best archival method available (I’d suggest a giclee print) and have it locked away in a vault, because in 80 years time, your descendants will deserve to know what their benefactors looked like.

Go on. Go do it. Now.

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iPad on the move

Wednesday, 14 July 2010 03:40

The question of whether to buy a 3G iPad or the regular WiFi one is a rather tricky thing to balance. On the one hand, Apple charges a frankly ludicrous markup for the addition of 3G and GPS. Really. Yes, there's more engineering involved, and a few more chips, but nowhere in the build of materials to justify the $A170 price gap you're left looking at once you reach the register.

On the other hand, 3G (not to mention GPS) can be rather handy stuff. In my continuing quest to work out what the iPad's actually good for, I spent some time this week testing 3G Micro SIMs on my iPad.

Now, I'm sure some of you will be wondering why I'm not with the times. After all, the week the iPad came out, there were plenty of test results for all the major carriers. It's been done, surely?

Well ... yes and no.

Yes, there were tests done by some quite reputable journalists, some of them very good friends of mine. But in almost every case (and most of those that I'm aware of) they were fairly localised tests, mostly centred around Sydney usage. To let you in on a small-scale secret, a large proportion of the tests you see for any given product are likely to have been conducted in Sydney, simply because that's where a large proportion of the country's tech media is based, for better or worse. I'm amongst that number.

Micro SIM tests like that are OK for relative figures within the Sydney market, and to be fair, most of the test results I saw were scrupulously clear in stating where they'd tested for their results. If you live in Sydney, that's fine. But what if you don't?

Moreover, what if you want to use that shiny new iPad on the road?

Well, if the Road Runner cartoon I've just watched is any indication, your iPad will get blown up, then fall down a cliff before forming a perfect circle of dust. An anvil may or may not then fall upon it, depending on your choice of wacky scheme. Needless to say, this will void your AppleCare warranty.

On a more serious note, I took the opportunity of a road trip from Sydney to Adelaide to test as many iPad Micro SIMs as I could get my hands on in three separate locations. Three Micro SIMs, to be precise. One from Telstra, one from Vodafone and one from Three. Which might technically only count as 2.5 Micro SIMs, what with Vodafone owning the Three brand entirely. You might notice that Optus, the other big player, is missing from my figures. I invited Optus to supply a Micro SIM, but it never got back to me.

A quick word on setting up Micro SIMs. Presuming you've gone through whatever hell your provider(s) place on activating the Micro SIM accounts, all you should need to do (or all I had to do) was an initial sync with each Micro SIM inserted with iTunes. iTunes happily informed me that it was grabbing my carrier details, after which each Micro SIM worked just fine. I could swap them, and after a brief pause they'd identify the correct carrier and "just work". Checking the settings page showed up the correct APN details for each connected Micro SIM, so you shouldn't hit billing problems. I say shouldn't, because with mobile broadband and telcos, anything is possible.

Anyway, my first set of figures came direct and live to you from the world famous, highly exciting ... dining table at my home in Sydney's Northern Suburbs. Speedtest's App was run three times and averaged to get each download figure.

From my Sydney home, there wasn't much to separate any of the contenders. Telstra won a narrow victory with a download rate of 2589Kbps. Not that far behind (but a little cheaper to run), Vodafone managed 2247Kbps, while Three took the back of the pack figure of a still respectable 2123Kbps. Given the vagaries of mobile broadband, in actual usage you might not see that much variance at all between these three services if you happened to live on my dining table. I should probably point out right now that the location in question isn't for rent.

Anyway, to keep things level, my next testing regime was performed at a relative's house in the fine city of Wagga Wagga, again on the kitchen table. Good, repeatable, accurate testing involves eliminating as many variables as possible, after all.

That Telstra's country performance was better than the rest probably won't come as news to any country-based readers. The margins, however, were a little higher than I might have reasonably expected. Telstra bested its Sydney figures (perhaps the cell towers were less crowded, or perhaps I just got lucky) with an average download score of 3117Kbps. Three actually refused to connect, which is no great surprise as the company simply doesn't sell or advertise outside of metropolitan areas. Vodafone did connect (for the trivia fans, Wagga Wagga was amongst the first areas to which Vodafone extended its regional 3G network a couple of years ago), but I'd have to say that "connect" was putting it mildly. Vodafone's average was extremely easy to calculate, as it scored the exact same Speedtest score each time.

That score was 3.

Not Mbps. 3Kbps. The difference in signal when swapping out a Telstra Micro SIM and popping in a Vodafone one was a tad over a thousand times. That kind of speed difference you will notice, and is almost certainly a casualty of the iPad's 3G support for 850MHz - which Telstra's NextG uses - and not 900Mhz, which is what Vodafone and Optus use in regional areas.

So I headed further west.

One quick in-car observation, in stark contrast to my in-flight observation of the week before. On a flight with no Wi-Fi and no 3G, I barely dented the iPad's battery life. With 3G enabled and running all day, although the Pad itself was only in direct use for maybe four hours between two drivers (not while driving, I hasten to add), it quickly spiralled down the battery life, ending up at 23% after eleven hours away from a charger, and even that only by selectively switching 3G off. There's little point in areas where even Telstra admits it doesn't have signal.

Having headed further west, I found myself with an iPad on a kitchen bench in Glenelg, one of Adelaide's nicer suburbs. I'm rather fond of Adelaide (it's technically my ancestral home), and outside the wilds of regional Australia, it seems the Micro SIMs were rather fond of it too. Telstra again took the line honours with an average Speedtest score of 4313Kbps, and Vodafone redeemed its woeful Wagga scores with an average of 3092. The same couldn't quite be said of Three, which limped in with a score of just 391Kbps.

So what's the practical upshot of all this testing? In reality, I suspect most 3G iPads won't travel all that far all that often. I know mine won't, despite the thousands of kilometres it's racked up in just the past fortnight. If you do travel, though, Telstra remains a very solid bet for widespread coverage. If you don't, Vodafone might save you a few dollars - especially if you're close to a capital city centre. Three's pricing is so close, but its speeds so poor that it's not worth thinking about. As for Optus, who can tell?

What do you think? What kinds of speeds can you get from your Micro SIM?

Discuss it with me at MacTheForum!