Scenes from a launch

Written by BGrant Thursday, 08 April 2010 13:31

The giddy atmosphere that accompanied the "arrival" of iPad makes an interesting study. I'm not looking at the reviews per se. The best reviews will come in a few months' time when the reality distortion field dissipates and real people begin using iPad for real tasks.

31st March: embargo lifts, journalists who have a week with iPad under their belts publish their reviews. If the Apple-sphere wasn't already abuzz, it went berserk at this point.

Notably, Andy Ihnatko does an hour and a quarter interview and demo live on TWiT, complete with viewer questions. Ihnatko is convinced it's a computer, just not a computer as we understand it right now.

The FCC even joined in, publishing pictures of the gizzards, which iFixIt did a superb job dissecting (see, iPad is good for promoting biology education at least). This kept the geeks busy until release day.  iFixit also did its own, more detailed teardown on release day.

I don't know if reviewers were giddy at having the most sought-after gadget on the planet to themselves for a week, but reviews were positive to a fault. Criticisms were pretty lame. No Flash (yawn!). PC sites decried the lack of file system, USB port for extra storage or printing. Opinion was divided as to whether the screen was easier to read than Kindle in daylight. Mail still won't let you create folders, (iPhone whinge) etc. Won't charge from computer's USB (MJCP's favourite). Most of these could have been inferred from the tech specs. What did they learn from a week of ownership?

Cory Doctorow sounded a cautionary note and even he seemed to be reaching — perhaps as an over-reaction to the hype. He criticised iPad for perpetuating old and dying media business models — people can't share comic books anymore! Doctorow publishes with a major publishing company, while giving away full copies of all his books free from his web site, so I have a lot of time for him, even if I don't agree in this case.

11am the day before: the truly dedicated Robert Scoble set up a tent at the Palo Alto Apple Store — what he calls "Steve Jobs's Apple Store" — and played Pied Piper to the rest of the media, waiting for Mac luminaries like Bill Atkinson and Steve Wozniak to drop in overnight. The TWiT crew grabbed a "magical" quarter hour of Woz's time to talk about the whatchamacallit.

And the local angle. The ballad of a couple of guys from Melbourne going to New York to pick up some iPads for friends. Read how it went down on Twitter.

Share your memories of "iPad Day" on MacTheForum!

Why the iPad will be successful

Written by John Chidgey Thursday, 08 April 2010 13:20

Many pundits have put forth their suggestions regarding Apple's new "magical" device and, having read through the opinions both for and against, it's time to draw a line in the sand and face the facts: The iPad will be successful.

Before discussing why let's first tackle the leading arguments against the iPad in the current global debate:

The iPad is just an over-sized iPod touch. Yes - that's exactly what it is. This is a bad thing? Why? The most infuriating thing about an iPod Touch or iPhone is the amount of scrolling that needs to be done when surfing the web, reading a book, navigating long lists of items in contacts, music, email or whichever application is running. The iPad reduces this problem by having a bigger screen. Another drawback of the iPod touch/iPhone is the battery life isn't very good. The iPad - in most benchmarks so far - is exceeding Apple's claimed ten hours of continuous use by a good margin. The only bad thing about the iPad is that it's bigger and heavier which, frankly, it needs to be in order to overcome the previously-mentioned limitations. What is the problem with being an over-sized iPod touch? Nothing so far as I can tell. People who want a portable music player that can surf the internet in a pinch when they are out and about will choose an iPod touch/iPhone - the others who want a bigger screen and a more immersive experience and don't mind the extra bulk will buy an iPad. Maybe some people will even buy both.

The iPad is not as powerful as a laptop. It's important to understand that whilst the iPad is a powerful computer in its own right, it's not trying to be everything for everyone - yet. For the moment most application s have been tweaked over many decades of development toward mouse-hover and -click and not touch input. With time applications will be ported to the iPad/iPhone/iPod touch devices and will also be usable on these devices too - it's just a matter of software and time. The Apple A4 chip (like many ARM-based CPUs) is very energy efficient. So are the latest Intel CPUs and, on benchmark tests, the performance gap is beginning to narrow (when single core executions are considered). In the interests of slimmer packaging, better battery life and better cooling needs, laptops are also reducing their speed when operating on their battery and future iterations of the iPad will come much closer to laptop performance.

That said, what is it about laptop performance that matters anyway? If you are serious about video editing or playing graphically-intensive games chances are you're not using a laptop anyway, or if you are it's a high-end MacBook Pro which is a major step in price above the iPad. Simply put, as the software selection improves, less people will want to use laptops because they are bigger, more expensive to purchase and difficult to carry around when compared to an iPad.

The iPad doesn't support Flash. This is regrettably Apple's choice and it's a shame that it's taking a stand on such a significant product as Adobe Flash. There is no doubt that Flash (to date) hasn't endeared itself to the computing public as it is a resource hog (unless hardware accelerated), it is proprietary code which Adobe changes regularly without much notice (making hardware acceleration difficult in the long term), and it is well known to be unstable (prone to crashing browsers and some operating systems). Apple's stance may well be right on this one but it seems too much like a back-door action against Adobe for other reasons which doesn't endear Apple to anyone. Win or lose, in the end this will be a pain for the very large number of people in the world who enjoy playing Flash games in Facebook or any number of novelty emails that fly about the ether. With Apple's mind unlikely to change and Adobe unlikely to support a rear-guard action with a Flash plug-in loadable on jail-broken iPads, it seems we will all die wondering whether this was much ado about nothing from Apple.

The iPad can't be easily read in bright sunlight. How many laptops can be easily read in bright sunlight? Take that number and then divide it by the number of people who also enjoy reading a book in bright sunlightyou're your result is in double-digits then that's about how many people in the world this will affect. It's a problem, yes, but for so few people it doesn't really matter. If it really bothers you, buy an e-Ink device like the Kindle or the Nook.

There is no multi-tasking (for third party apps) on the iPad. There are four basic scenarios when background applications make sense: For notifications/listening (like a VOIP application); for loading/working on data in the background (like a web browser); for swapping data back and forth between applications (copying bits and pieces between notes and email and Pages lets say); and keeping the state of the application when reopening it (like staying on the same place in a book you're reading when you reopen the application).

Due to the nature of VOIP there's currently no choice but for each device to register on the internet and wait for a call. It would be possible to have a notify-respond-recall system that would work with push notifications but this is not the way VOIP currently works and hence there's no easy way around this one.

Loading or working in the background is most common when users want to play with a simple (non-intensive) application like Twitter, whilst typing up a long email or similar between comments in a conversation. Switching in and out of the apps to answer a tweet then back to the email seems like a pain to some people but in reality this is merely the equivalent of switching windows on OSX/Windows - except the mouse is used and not the home button with a tap on the application. Why is that such a problem?

Another common multi-tasking need is transferring data between programs - usually text and/or pictures. The iPad supports this with cut, copy and paste. It takes not that much more time on an iPad than it would to perform the same operation in OSX/Windows.

It would surprise many to know that most of the way interruptions to an iPad application are handled (or iPod touch/iPhone application for that matter) has more to do with how the application is written than it does with the OS. If the application is well-written the state of the application is stored on exit and restored on reentry and this isn't a problem.

Whilst it is true that running applications in the background could be advantageous at times, it's not a deal-breaker and, once again, it can be easily rectified by a firmware update at any time should Apple change its mind.

Tablet PCs have been around for a decade and have never taken off. Yes the hardware platform known as Tablet PC has been around for a decade or more now. However, the intention of a Tablet PC is that touch (via pen or finger) completely controls the device and all of its functions. In the past, touching was simply overlaid onto a point-and-click interface. Gestures were basic, inconsistent, unreliable and for the most part not well thought out in nearly all implementations. Add to that a greater expense for the device and it's no wonder they never took off.

The iPad is different because: it's more affordable than the vast majority of tablets that have been and gone before it; it builds on the iPod touch/iPhone gestures and touch technology which is now best in class; the entire operating system for the iPad was developed with touch in mind - not a mouse; and the applications written for it are optimised for touch input - they're not desktop applications which have no idea you're using a Tablet PC.

Herein lies the fundamental reason why the iPad will succeed. Unlike all the Tablet PCs that have come before it, it is designed to be basic hardware, with most of Apple's efforts focused on the software. Why did Apple itself write three flagship applications in Pages, Keynote and Numbers for the iPad? It had to show the world how to write a good touch-based, desktop-quality application. Third-party developers will follow Apple's lead and the sky's the limit.

Despite the detractors and a few restrictions the iPad will be a success. Is it magical? That's debatable. It is Apple's second big step down the new road in computing - putting the PC into the hands of the masses who can easily learn to use and enjoy what PCs have to offer. If you think it needs a built-in hardware keyboard and a command-line interface, chances are you're a geek and it's just you.

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From iPhoto to Aperture

Written by clinton1550 Tuesday, 06 April 2010 21:22

It used to be easy to see the difference between iPhoto and Aperture. iPhoto was the simple, consumer-oriented one that was less powerful but had a nicer interface, while Aperture was the powerful professional one that was a bit intimidating to use. So the choice was simple. Now, it's less so.

A few years ago, I downloaded the 30-day free trial of Aperture 1.0. I didn’t know much about Aperture, other than it was Apple’s own professional photo-management application and that it was supposed to be very good. I was quite happy using iPhoto but I thought I’d try Aperture, just for the fun of it.

I’m certain that I only used about ten seconds of that 30-day trial. I opened Aperture up, found the interface to be a bit daunting and promptly closed it. My intention was to sit down one weekend and really get to know the interface but I never got around to that. I let the trial expire.

Less than a year later, Apple released Aperture 2. Again, I intended to download the trial and give it a whirl — especially seeing "interface improvements" among the marquee features — but I never got around to it. When Apple released iPhoto ’09 with Faces and Places a year after that, I couldn't see a reason to bother with Aperture anymore.

Apple updated Aperture to 3.0 in February and one feature immediately caught my eye: Places. Earlier in the year, I wrote an article about what features I would like in the next version of iPhoto, and Places was one of the areas that I thought needed significant improvement. It seems that an executive at Apple read that article and decided to upsell me to Aperture.

Places in Aperture 3 solves all the problems I had with Places in iPhoto. Aperture 3’s Places has a split-screen system: photos on the bottom, Google Maps up top. Geotagging images is far from clumsy: just drag and drop a photo onto the map. You can even import GPX tracks into Aperture for display and geotagging photos.

So, with renewed interest in Aperture, I downloaded the free trial and bought the full version a week later. I’m pleased I bought Aperture 3 but it hasn’t been smooth sailing all the way.

I had a few problems just downloading the trial version. On the morning that Apple updated Aperture, I requested a trial license with my .Mac account. The license hadn’t turned up by late afternoon so I requested another, this time with my Gmail account. The Gmail license turned up immediately, the .Mac license turned up two days later — so I’m glad I didn’t wait. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who had trouble getting a license from Apple. I talked to a few people on Twitter who had the same problem.

Once I downloaded and installed Aperture 3, I imported 5000 photos from my iPhoto Library to play around with. The import took less then an hour and was pretty straightforward. I spent whatever free time I had over the next few days mucking about in Aperture. I put a slideshow together, made a book, played around with Faces and Places. It wasn’t long before I decided that I would buy a boxed copy on the weekend.

Once I had a boxed copy, the next step was to transfer my entire iPhoto Library over to Aperture. Moving 33,000 photos taking up 100GB was a monumental task — a monumental task that I’ve had to perform three times.

The first transfer was done on a 320GB FireWire 800 drive. I thought that the transfer would be faster if both my iPhoto Library and my new Aperture Library were on the same drive. So I cleared some space, moved my iPhoto Library to the drive and created an Aperture Library right along side it. All I had to do was select the “Import iPhoto Library…” option from Aperture’s File menu and leave it going overnight.

I woke up the next morning to find that the import had driven my Mac mini to the brink of insanity. First, it wouldn’t accept any mouse input — no tracking, no clicking — but the keyboard worked just fine. Then I couldn’t get any keyboard input — I couldn’t click with my mouse but I could track. A bit later on my Mac mini started accepting some keyboard commands. I lost the menu bar, the Dock sort of worked, I couldn’t switch applications — there wasn’t much that I could do.

I eventually managed to open Activity Monitor to find out what was going on. CPU usage was fine, RAM seemed to be fine but I discovered that I was rapidly running out of space on the FireWire drive, I had 3GB left and Aperture was still importing. I couldn’t get into the Finder to move files off the drive so I ended up using my PowerBook to SSH into my Mac mini and mv a heap of folders to another drive.

The emergency move worked. I freed up 30GB of space, but my Mac mini was still exhibiting some very strange behaviour.

I’d like to take a moment to praise Mac OS X for being so stable. It was running out of resources but it ploughed on, I didn’t get a Kernel Panic, nothing actually crashed and Aperture finished the import. A quick restart later and everything was back to normal.

I later found out that many other users had been reporting similar problems when importing an iPhoto Library into Aperture. Turns out that a bug in Faces was causing Aperture to hoard tons of Virtual Memory, choking OS X of resources. The bug was fixed in the Aperture 3.0.1 update which was released less than a week later.

Once the 3.0.1 update was out, I decided that I should re-import my iPhoto Library. Although the first import was a success, there were a few things missing — Aperture didn’t get to finish the final processing phase of the import. This time, I moved my iPhoto Library to a separate FireWire 800 drive and gave Aperture the entire 320GB drive all to itself. The second import went much more smoothly. It took about the same amount of time and the processing phase finished just as it should. However, Aperture got stuck on Places lookup — so when looking at photos on the map, Aperture didn’t know the names of the places.

Apple released Aperture 3.0.2 a few weeks later, which fixed a number of issues including problems that occurred while importing iPhoto Libraries. So I thought I should import my Library for a third time and, yes, third time lucky. The third import was a complete success, everything worked exactly as it should, I am satisfied with my new Library and I’m never going to do that again. As I said, it is a monumental task.

Unfortunately, my Aperture woes didn’t stop at importing photos. I also had trouble with Faces. When naming people in Faces, Aperture would interpret the letter "s" as an “m”, the letter “g” as an “o” and “t” as “p”. It took five tries to get each letter right. This bug was finally fixed in 3.0.2, so I'm glad I don't have to put up with that anymore.

But there is still one thing about Faces that needs fixing: the performance.

Faces beachballs like you wouldn't believe. I type a letter to name someone, beachball. I finish typing someone's name and hit return, beachball. I click on a photo, beachball. I try to confirm faces, beachball. Beachball, beachball, beachball. Honestly, I've never seen an Apple application perform this badly. I did a very unscientific test comparing the performance of Faces in Aperture to Faces in iPhoto. I could name the same number of faces significantly more quickly in iPhoto than I could in Aperture. I don’t know why Aperture is so slow — maybe it’s doing something extra in the background — but I’ve given up on Faces. It’s too slow to be bothered with.

I’m really pleased that I bought Aperture 3. Switching from iPhoto to Aperture was pretty rough at the start but I feel the move has been worth it. There’s a huge amount of power hidden inside Aperture, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of what it can do. There’s still a lot left to learn so I better get back to it.

Between keywords, labels, star ratings, folders, albums and Projects, I’m a little spoilt for choice as far as organisational tools in Aperture are concerned. If you have any suggestions, let me know on MacTheForum.

Amazon can't lose

Written by Alex Kidman Thursday, 01 April 2010 01:29

In just a few short days, the iPad goes on sale in the USA. Some keen Aussie Apple fans are making the trek to pick one up early, and those with slightly less disposable income are awaiting the exact details of what "late April" actually means in terms of a local release date (latest rumour suggests the 24^th, but, well, pinches of salt leap to mind).

The iPad is touted to be many things, but one of the key features of the platform is its ability to enable electronic publishing — whether that's the latest Stephanie Meyer insult to the humble noun or the Sydney Morning Herald. In that guise, it takes on a number of other e-reader devices, none more prominent than Amazon's Kindle e-reader.

The battle lines, it would seem, are drawn, and there can be only one winner.

OK, that's hyperbole, but go with me here. I suspect the winner will be Amazon.

Not that Amazon winning means that Apple loses; quite the reverse. Apple can still "win", in that it will sell lots and lots of iPads. If the initial sales figures are to be believed, it's already pre-sold a bucketload, although initial sales figures aren't always a good indicator of future sales performance.

That thought came to me when I was checking out Amazon's Kindle for Mac client. It's a neat enough piece of software if you already have a Kindle account, which I do owing to reviewing the initially-available Kindle late last year. It's good for displaying books and, naturally enough, there are hooks to take you (via your browser) to Amazon's Kindle store. There's also an iPhone/iPod touch application that does pretty much the same thing.

Amazon's got a lot of capacity to absorb losses (or even only partial victories) due to its widespread e-commerce stance. To describe Amazon simply as a bookseller would be to miss the point. Amazon also sells DVDs, CDs … heck, it's even possible to buy barbecue sauce via Amazon.com, although getting it shipped to Australia might be a little challenging!

Amazon's positioned itself everywhere, and nowhere is that more evident than with the Kindle, which has client applications everywhere. It seems highly unlikely that the iPhone Kindle client won't run on the iPad — it is after all, mostly text we're talking about here — and I'd hazard the guess that Amazon's programming team has an iPad client ready to go. Whether Apple would approve it is anybody's guess. The point is, you buy a Kindle book or magazine, and you can read it on your iPhone, on your iPad, on your Mac, on a PC and on a Kindle.

Buy an iPad book, and you can read it on ... an iPad.

There's no clear path for iPhone/iPod touch users to buy or read books just yet, and I doubt Apple would scupper early iPad sales by introducing that feature particularly quickly, although I'd love to be proved wrong there.

I don't own either a Kindle or an iPad yet. That's partly down to my own budgetary issues, and partly because I'm fence-sitting. Certainly, the iPad's feature set dwarfs that of the Kindle, and the pricing for the entry level model is a solid kick in the teeth for the larger Kindle DX. Looking at the bigger picture, however, I could solidly envisage buying an iPad and then filling it with Kindle books. Apple doesn't exactly lose under that scenario, but it doesn't win as many of my dollars as it could.

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