In fact, let’s try something new. I’ll do a one-word reaction followed by a more detailed commentary (hopefully still brief), so you can TL;DR as you see fit.

New iPods

Shuffle: Buttons!

Nano: Slick. Looks like Apple may be either branching iOS again for the new device’s itty bitty square screen, or they’re aping the UI totally and running something else entirely custom underneath. My money is actually on a device-specific branch of iOS, since it seems like they’re trying to provide a stepping stone to the multi-touch interface of the iPhone and iPod Touch now. With the iPod Classic not even warranting a mention as part of the “complete iPod line update” this year, it seems clear that the purpose of the Nano is no longer to give people experience with the bigger iPod Classic’s UI and controls, but instead to get their feet wet in Apple’s new hotness.

Touch: Sexy. Interesting to see that its design is still using the rounded back rather than iPhone 4’s squared-off sides, despite being even more of an iPhone without the phone now. It’s also interesting that the back camera isn’t 5 megapixel like its cousin on the iPhone, but only just big enough to do 720p video recording (iPod Touch photos are 960×720 max according to the specs page). Guess they were a bit desperate for a point of differentiation between the two. Sweet that it supports FaceTime using email addresses; less sweet that it needs to be an email address that’s registered with Apple to work. Not helping the “open standard” mantra there, guys.

Classic: Who? Apparently still around, but unchanged in design, specs, and price.

iTunes 10

Ping: Eh. I get the feeling Apple decided to roll their own social network because of Facebook being a total data mining ad whore, and nobody gets to data mine Apple’s customers but Apple. I think Jobs kind of tipped his hand to that when he explicitly mentioned the simplicity and ease of use of Ping’s privacy controls. Beyond that, I really don’t care. It’s getting increasingly difficult to succeed in being anti-social on the internet anymore these days…

UI: WTF? The new list view + album art is … interesting, I guess, but ultimately not a huge thing. The vertically-oriented traffic lights are just bizarre (way to stick to your HIG guns there, Apple…). Honestly, I’m actually more annoyed about the monochromatic Source List icons, though, because at least the close button is still in the same place. The lack of colorized icons in the source list is just frustrating, since color is one of those oh-so-important elements of UI design that help users quickly distinguish between objects (especially small ones). At least they tweaked the icons themselves to be more shape-oriented to compensate, but seriously. That’s just annoying.

Icon: Glowy. I’ll miss the CD, but given the sprawling nature of the app, I understand why it’s gone. The fact that it retains the musical notes seems like more of a formality than anything else at this point.

I’m at work on a limited-user account, so I can’t actually install the app here and get a feel for how it actually feels, but dear god I hope someone has bothered to do a code review of the thing, if only for the sake of the Windows users of the world.

Apple TV

Design: Teensy. I really don’t have an opinion one way or the other on the new design beyond that, except to say that evidently Sony has decided that matte black plastic with glossy inlaid text is in, and the world (including Apple) is following suit. At least Apple isn’t trying to pimp the Spider-Man font like it’s going out of style (because it is)…

Hardware: A4ATW! Interesting to see Apple continue to consolidate its chipset lines into Intel multi-core and A4 divisions on usage lines. The general-purpose Mac “truck” (lawl) computers get the Core 2 Duo and iN chips, and specialized devices like the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, and now Apple TV get the A4. It’ll definitely cut down on the thing’s power draw, which is always good because the current one is a beast. Not sure how cool I am with the total removal of internal storage… streaming HD video content seems to be a little hiccup-prone on our wifi network. Of course, it’s sort of locked down to 802.11g speeds because of the iPod Touches in the apartment, and I haven’t bothered to spring for a dual-band router to fix that problem, so maybe bumping the network would solve that problem.

Software: Yay? I guess? I’m guessing the move to the A4 processor necessitated this, but, it’s being backed by a custom build of iOS with a 10-foot UI. At least, so sayeth The Gruber… Beyond that, there’s not really a whole lot new about the UI compared to Apple TV Software 3.0, just some reorganization. It’s cool that Netflix got added to the list of internet content portals, but the rumors of an app store for the device, and my associated musings on Apple taking on the console market are apparently unfounded. Stupid hobby… I would totally go for an Apple set top box that had a gaming controller and access to an App Store for games and entertainment titles, in addition to access to the iTunes media store, and cost $99 to $149. Given how dead-simple setting up an Apple TV already is (and how dead-simpler it is with the new version) and how easy it is to get your content onto it, with the right pricing structure and offerings, this could blow past the Wii for casual living room gaming and give Apple its much-coveted entry into the television space for content delivery. And speaking of content…

Content: Woo? Nice to see HD TV show rentals make an appearance (and assuming you’re not paying for cable and a DVR, 99¢ isn’t a bad price), but it sucks that it’s limited to ABC and FOX right now. Also, it kinda sucks that there’s no way to actually buy content on the Apple TV anymore… so much for that iTunes cloud-based streaming service that would store your stuff in the cloud that everyone was so sure of. As far as pricing is concerned, I’ve never actually had a problem with movie pricing for purchases or rentals. TV shows – especially HD ones – are frequently annoyingly expensive, but the season passes tend to be much better deals for that. Heck, I got the whole fourth season of BSG in HD for the cost of half of Season 4 on DVD (I paid something like $54 for it, and the DVD release for 4.0 was like $52). Warehouse 13 Season 2 is $30 in HD… even if SyFy does their stupid half-length season thing, that’s not a bad price for the show in 720p and near-immediate access to episodes past. (Of course, having gone to look up the price, Season 2 is no longer listed in iTunes. Awesome. Here’s hoping NBC/Universal isn’t being a douchebag again and I get the rest of the episodes I’ve already paid for. And people wonder why torrents are so popular…)

Boxee: Doubtful anymore, especially since the patchstick-friendly USB port has been replaced with a micro-USB port. Plus there’s the whole switch to the ARM processor thing… Not that I’ve bothered to Boxee-up my Apple TV in recent history. The only thing I ever used Boxee for was Hulu, so I could watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report without fuxing with the TV-attached computer, but between Hulu blocking Boxee and Comedy Central leaving Hulu, I really don’t care. The rest of my content is already Apple TV-compatible (sometimes by force), and the rest of the stuff accessible through Boxee just carries no interest for me. Plus, having a remote mouse/keyboard app on my iPad to operate the computer removes the annoying obstacle of dealing with tangled keyboard cords and insufficient wireless mouse range.

There’s a storm coming, and it’s in your teapot.

The Right is still spinning this as another bullshit “damned activist judges!” complaint, because naturally, the ruling today overturned “the will of the people” (and that’s only okay when it’s overturning stuff that they don’t support). This of course ignores centuries of historic precedent of voting majorities oppressing smaller populations (such as blacks and women, and now moving on to include latinos and homosexuals), and remedies only being available through the courts, whose duty is to uphold the law and the Constitution, regardless of what the “will of the people” may have to say about it. I believe this is where the “if everyone was jumping off a bridge, would you do it too?” counter-argument comes in handy. Just because it’s popular doesn’t mean it’s good or right (like slavery, or war, or Fox News, or American Idol).

Of course, the Right is continuing to do everything they can to demonize the concept of homosexuality and shift the debate away fundamental rights and equal protection under the law, to “LALALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!!! GAY PEOPLE ARE GROSS!!!!” This is, “of course”, a very compelling emotional argument, but has absolutely no legal standing against the text of the 14th Amendment of the Right’s beloved United States Constitution:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

There’s a few things to note about this text. First, there’s the equal protection bit, which the Right tries to ignore as much as possible whenever it affects things they disagree with for any reason. Because marriage is a civil act of contract law in the United States, it is bound by the text of the 14th Amendment, and it is therefore unconstitutional to deny anyone the right to create such a contract between themselves and another person.

Second, I’ve seen a ton of people opposed to gay marriage claim that marriage is a privilege, not a right. It’s like getting a driver’s license, or owning a house, or (in their mind) having access to quality affordable health care (amazing how this all ties together in some ways, isn’t it?). However, as the very first sentence of the bit I’ve quoted from the 14th Amendment quite clearly states (emphasis mine, for those who are hard of reading):

“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States”.

This argument also ignores the fact that there are already precedents for things like the privilege of owning a house being subject to the 14th Amendment (ever hear of the Equal Housing Act?), but let’s not let logic and facts get in the way of a good gay-hating.

Even if I were willing to grant you, for the sake of argument, the absurd assertion that homosexuality is a choice (which I’m not, but let’s continue to deal in hypothetical hypotheticals), Proposition 8 would still be unconstitutional because there is still no legal reason to discriminate against gay people when it comes to issuing marriage licenses. Naturally the “EWWW GAY PEOPLE ARE ICKY!!!” argument still stands, but as I’ve already said, that has no basis in law. And besides, if you want to go after something that really squicks people out and which many people consider immoral (or at least inadvisable and openly ridiculable), why not go after the laws that allow first cousins to marry? Oh right, you can’t build a culture war out of that issue…

Gay people getting married won’t ruin your marriage (or shouldn’t, anyway… I can’t really speak for how fragile your relationship may be that other people doing something completely outside your sphere of influence will cause it to collapse). It won’t cause fire to rain from the sky. It won’t cause anything terrible to happen to this country (besides, there’s already plenty of terrible shit happening to this country that has nothing to do with gay marriage). When you say stupid shit like that, it makes you sound like the jackass Imam from Saudi Arabia or wherever who said that women wearing revealing clothing causes earthquakes. It’s absolute, total, scientifically disprovable bullshit. It won’t destroy our children. It won’t cause everyone to become afflicted with The Gay. It will, in fact, do absolutely fucking nothing to you, so why the hell do you even care? Oh right, culture war and all that. Never mind.

I also inexplicably keep seeing people tumble down the slippery slope arguing that legalizing gay marriage will lead to polygamy, bestiality, and people marrying their favorite inanimate objects. To tackle the simple stupid arguments first, there is no way for this to lead to bestiality or people marrying their red Swingline staplers, because dogs, cats, horses, staplers, toasters, refrigerators, and the like are unable to enter into legal contracts in the United States, and frankly I don’t see a judge agreeing with the assertion that Fluffy can read and comprehend the terms of a marriage license.

The (only marginally) more complex argument, of course, is that this will inevitably lead to polygamy becoming legal. This is still wrong, however, because it again ignores some basic facts about the marriage contract. Namely, a marriage contract is a legal document that applies to two people. That’s how the contract works. It would take considerable effort to manage to convince anyone with a sound sense of reason or logic that this two-person contract should apply just as well to parties of three, or four, or twelve. The number of persons who can enter into the marriage contract has never and will never be an issue. The issue is that the contract should, like all other legal contracts, be genderless. There are no rules that say only a male and a female can enter into a contract to start a small business together, for instance. So why is the marriage contract so special? The answer: it’s not. And I say this as a married man. What’s special is the relationship upon which the contract is founded, and that has nothing to do with the law.

Polygamy is also a really tricky concept which would require completely new contracts to cover the complex sets of legal protections and provisions stemming from a multi-party relationship. At that point I think you start pushing into the realm of organizational law rather than personal law, and I just don’t think there’s enough demand to motivate anyone to draw up the relevant contracts. What works for one doesn’t work for two, and what works for two doesn’t work for three or more. It’s like expanding rock, paper, scissors to more than two players. Sure you can do it (as Cyan has demonstrated), but it relies on a lot of house rules and additional complexity to make it work which frequently just isn’t worth the effort involved.

That said, I’m pretty squarely in the “let consenting adults be consenting adults” camp, which you’d think would be totally in line with the Right’s assertion that government is the problem, and that it needs to get the hell out of our homes and let us live our lives. Inexplicably though, this only seems to apply to their homes. Everyone else is subject to the intrusive power of government acting at the behest of the easily-offended fundamentalists slinging untrue accusations about easily-demonizable minorities (but I’m the Nazi, remember…). In my opinion, if six people want to marry each other, and they can work out a contract to make that happen (as opposed to just living together and legally acting as individuals), why stop them? What harm are they doing to each other, or to you (besides offending your sensibilities)? And why should it be the government’s job to do anything to help you go out of your way to be offended by their existence? I’d say pull the stick out of your ass, but apparently putting things in your bum is an abomination, isn’t it?

Of course, the big fear isn’t that gay people will suddenly be happy (or miserable, depending on how cynical you are of marriage in general), but that somehow by making it okay to be gay, it’ll encourage children to also be gay, which feeds directly into the Right’s fears of a dwindling caucasian population (because gay people don’t have babies) in the face of the screaming unwashed hordes of brown people lurking at the gate, waiting for their chance to storm the castle.

There’s also the fear that, horror of horrors, it’ll be illegal to discriminate against gay people (incidentally, when your platform is “help us support discrimination!”, it may be time to examine what you’re doing). Given the power that religion holds over government in this country already (why else would Prop 8 have been on the ballot in the first place?), this seems like a bizarre concern, but okay, let’s look at it. The thing that seems to come up most frequently is that it will require religions that think homosexuality is a sin to recognize and/or perform gay marriages. No it won’t. Now, if you offer your church or meeting space for public use for weddings, you have to comply with all relevant anti-discrimination laws, but this will not force the Catholic Church (to pick a fucked up, bigoted old organization purely at random, and not because I grew up as part of it… *ahem*) to recognize gay marriages, nor would it require its priests to perform them. The same laws that stipulate, in effect, that your right to your beliefs ends at my doorstep work both ways.

Hopefully, those opposed to the legalization of gay marriage will get over their debilitating fear of catching The Gay before they end up looking as backwards, repressive, and controlling as the folks who opposed (and especially the folks who still do oppose) the legalization of interracial marriages. And out of curiosity, whatever happened to that little piece of advice handed down through the ages by the carpenter from Judea? You know, that thing about loving thy neighbor, and doing unto others?

1. Microsoft discontinued their FrontPage product following Office 2003’s release.
2. Microsoft replaced FrontPage with Expression Web.
3. Microsoft officially deprecated FrontPage Server Extensions (FPSE) in 2006.
4. IIS 7 lists FPSE as an unsupported feature.
5. IIS 7.5 on Windows Server 2008 R2 won’t even run FPSE.
6. IIS 7 has integrated WebDAV support.
7. Expression Web supports WebDAV connectivity.
8. Visual Studio 2005 does not support WebDAV, but supports FPSE.
9. Visual Studio 2008 does not support WebDAV, but supports FPSE.
10. Visual Studio 2010 does not support WebDAV, but supports FPSE.

Microsoft, you are a multi-billion dollar company. How hard is it to get your software IDE team to talk to your server OS and webserver platform development teams to actually provide consistent support for connection types across your product line?

Frankly, it is inexcusable for you to have a professional product that costs thousands of dollars fail to support such a basic and fundamental internet connectivity method as WebDAV, but soldier on with FrontPage Server Extensions over 4 years after they were officially deprecated (by you, no less!), and 2 years after you released a version of your operating system that won’t even run them anymore.

I realize that it isn’t the end of the world for IIS 7 to not support one of your flagship development platform’s primary internet connectivity options, but seriously, it comes across as incredibly lazy and unprofessional. Get your act together, guys.

Wow, anyway, moving on before I drift any further off topic…

There’s been more than enough said by the tech press about the iPhone 4’s antenna issues, but I’ll go ahead and pile on with what I hope is a more level-headed commentary than what the rest of the internet has been flinging around this past couple of weeks.

Apple’s not had a good time of things in the press the last few weeks, and the bumbling public response to the outcry by their PR department hasn’t exactly helped. I was interested to hear that Jobs was in Hawaii on vacation last week, which is when the Apple PR-signed “it’s totally a software problem that has nothing to do with the phone even though every phone has this problem” press release weirdness happened. I’m wondering if Steve has taken over the public management of this issue, including calling the press conference, as a result of that, and whether he was involved in crafting the PR response that had everyone shaking their heads.

To a certain extent, while it’s demonstrable that iPhone 4 has a reproducible signal attenuation issue when held in the lower left corner, I think the impact of the problem has been considerably overblown by the media, and the tech press/blogs in particular. It’s something of a complex problem because in areas of good signal, it’s not even an issue (even though the problem still exists), and the antenna design by itself seems to result in getting better signal in more places. Locations with already-poor signal quality seem more likely to be affected by this, and the iPhone’s wonky bar reporting algorithm made it more likely to make you think you were outside of a problem location. Given AT&T’s spotty network quality track record, it’s possible that like previous iPhones, this may disproportionately impact people in places like NY and SF, while users in other markets have no problems at all.

I think this is backed up by four bits of data that are floating around now. First, Consumer Reports’ signal strength testing does show signal loss on a consistent basis. At the same time, however, the increased rate of dropped calls compared to the 3GS and its more traditional (and oft-stated “better” by tech press) cell antenna design is marginal at best: less than 1 additional dropped call per 100 calls made, according to Apple and AT&T. Still, it is marginally higher, and if Steve is to be believed, it’s not something Apple is willing to consider acceptable. Apple’s rate of return is also 1/3rd of what it was for the 3GS, coming in at just 1.7% (though there’s no breakout for why the device was being returned to provide more granular numbers on returns based on signal issues). Finally, Apple’s own customer complaint data indicates that just over one half of one percent (0.55%) of all calls they’ve received concerning iPhone 4 are related to the antenna. Put together, these data seem to indicate that while there is signal attenuation, it has little to no impact on the actual performance of the device on the network. I think that a lot of the perceived enormity of “antennagate” is due almost entirely to the breathless coverage by the online tech press, which has used its massive echo chamber to artificially magnify the severity of the problem.

The echo chamber’s already at it again with the dropped call delta, with people using percentage magic to claim that iPhone 4, assuming a low dropped call rate for the 3GS, is dropping up to 100% more calls, because 1/100 dropped to 1.9/100 dropped is a 100% increase, you know. If only the number were 0/100, then we could have an infinitely larger dropped call rate on iPhone4! The anti-Apple folks are spinning the number Jobs cited as either a massive increase in the dropped call rate assuming a low 3GS dropped call rate, or a condemnation of Apple’s phone line as a whole assuming a high 3GS dropped call rate. Where’s this “less than one additional dropped call per 100 means .9 additional dropped calls per 100″ logic coming from, by the way? Why can’t <1 additional dropped call mean .4 additional dropped calls?

In reality land, however, an increase from 1/100 dropped calls to 1.9/100 dropped calls means you’re a whopping 9% more likely to experience a dropped call on average, not 100% (or even 50%). Still not a good number, but miles away from the backwards percentage assumptions being thrown around in the Engadget comments. Bottom line: if you rarely experience dropped calls, you’re still not likely to ever experience one. If you experience dropped calls a lot, you probably won’t notice the minor increase. I’m also inclined to think that areas with high dropped call rates like NY (which is frequently quoted as having upwards of a 30% dropped call rate on earlier iPhone models) and SF are negatively impacting AT&T’s national dropped call rates, and outside of those areas the chances of a dropped call are dramatically lower than the national rate would imply.

As far as additional data go, I’d be interested in seeing the results of a Consumer Reports test of other cell phones when held in similar positions, to see whether there is any attenuation in them as well, and how severe it is. That would shed some light on the veracity of Apple’s claims and testing showing that other phones experience this issue as well. I’d also be interested in seeing dropped call deltas for non-US carriers to see if this is an AT&T-specific issue (as most network problems with the iPhone in the US seem to be).

Apple’s near-term fixes are largely band-aids to mitigate the problem, but based on Steve’s comments during his intro and during the Q&A, it doesn’t sound like they’re done researching ways to resolve the problem long-term, and hardware fixes within the phone itself may be pending down the line if they can figure something out. I think Apple has done the right thing by offering a free bumper with the phone, and while it won’t impact the hardware itself, the modified signal indicator algorithm seems likely to provide a more accurate indication of the impact of the attenuation on your network connection. In most cases it will probably result in a drop of a bar or two at higher signal levels where there wasn’t any drop before, but reduce the drop in areas where the signal was already low (2-3 bars). The indicator also reaches to a lower dB level now, so the signal indicator will stay at one bar in weaker signal areas than before. Whether this lower db level will be sufficient for making or retaining a call, I’m not sure. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think AT&T had anything to do with the “wrong” signal algorithm that was used prior to iOS 4.0.1, given their “more bars in more places” marketing campaign, but that’s the conspiracy theorist in me taking.

If I had $199 burning a hole in my pocket, could afford the cost of the monthly plan, and didn’t already have a 3G iPad to do most of my mobile stuff on, I would get an iPhone 4. In my estimation, the improvements to the hardware outweigh the apparently limited impacts of the signal attenuation problems in daily use. And for full disclosure, I hold my phone in my left hand.

It’s also interesting to me that, performance differences aside, the iPod touch just feels way more cramped after using the iPad so extensively, particularly when it comes to the home screens. The added icon spacing that seemed so excessive on the iPad when it was first announced really makes the tight grid of the iPhone-sized devices seem claustrophobic by comparison when coming back to it after a long absence.

In other news, I bought a stylus for doodling with, because my motor skills are lacking in the finger painting department. Unfortunately, it has a very soft rubberized tip, so it drag a horribly on the glass display. Fortunately, it was a set of 2 for $3.50 on eBay with free shipping, and I have a workaround: tape a piece of tissue paper (or straw wrapper paper in this case) around the tip. Voilà, a perfectly serviceable stylus.

It’s not, however, all unicorns and rainbows with the iPad, and there are a few things I wanted to bring up.

First, I want the timer/clock app back. Failing that, give me short timers built into my 3rd party alarm clock app once local notifications come to the device this fall. I’ve had to scrounge for my iPod a couple of times now to time oven usage, and it’s just kind of irksome when I’m already roaming the apartment with my iPad.

Next, what’s the deal with leaving out Voice Control? Or the voice recorder app for that matter? All of the hardware is already there to support both apps. Is Voice Control just considered too much of a mobile thing for the merely-portable iPad? ‘Cause let me tell you, it’d still come in handy when driving and trying to pick music to listen to.

Speaking of using while driving, is the iPad’s power draw just too high to charge via the cigarette adapter in the car? If not, someone needs to build an iPad-charging FM transmitter. For serious. It’s not a huge deal given that the battery life of the iPad anyway will very probably outlast any stint of driving I may be using it on, but it’d be a comfort having it charged when I get where I’m going and not in need of a wall socket to leech off of overnight.

I really hope iOS 5 comes with a better notification system. Push notifications never really bugged me this much when I was on my iPod because using it for hours on end or for “primary” computing wasn’t really an option for the most part. On the iPad, though, they get a bit tedious, especially where IM services are concerned. I might experiment this week with not having the dialog notice enabled, but keeping badges and sound alerts on and see if that’s more tolerable.

I can’t wait to get folders and fast app switching. The tendency for apps to remember their state when closing them in iOS 3.x seems to be decreasing rather than increasing as the platform matures, which is annoying to say the least. Apple’s stuff is generally pretty good at state persistence, along with some other apps like dropbox, but other apps are a serious grab bag ranging from great to suck. I’d also like to be able to put more than just games on an entire page of my home screen, and group some handy but simple and infrequently-used utility-type apps into a single slot on my home screen. The six available dock slots are a godsend though… I’ve got iPod, Safari, Mail, IM+, Osfoora HD (Twitter), and Settings lined up down there, which covers a good 75% of my primary usage (another 15% probably comes from FeeddlerRSS, which is on page 1).

Something else I really hope gets put into iOS 4 for iPad: using retina display-compatible graphics and text in apps that are built to support iPhone 4 when running them in the iPad’s emulator. There is no reason a retina display-compatible app should render all fuzzy and blocky at 2x on the iPad when its the exact same pixel dimensions as the iPhone 4 screen (albeit at a lower pixel density). Anything is better than the double-sized 320×480 pixels though. Maybe I should email Steve and make sure that idea is on his radar. It’d make using iPhone apps on the iPad a lot more pleasant.

Irksomely, I haven’t been able to find an Apple case for this thing since I bought mine and opted to drop the $40 for it later. Nobody else’s cases seem to get the whole notebook sleeve/stand idea that Apple’s has, and I really like that. Also, it seems I may not have a camera connector before Mysterium. Wonder if someone else will have one I can bum off them for a few minutes… Mine isn’t supposed to get here until the 18th of August. Sigh.

As interesting as it is to see Hulu come to the iOS platform, I feel like someone in the executive offices still doesn’t really understand the way the internet works, or how converged our devices are becoming, and is trying to artificially segment the availability of their content to score additional revenue according to outdated concepts of viewership. Ultimately I guess it’s not that surprising of a move, since “Big Content” (ugh, now I feel like a conspiracy theorist/dirty fucking hippie) has historically proven itself to be completely opposed to changing its business model in the face of new technological challenges, but it is still disappointing nonetheless.

The biggest problem, as I see it, is that the content providers are still trying to distinguish between television screens and, well, everything else. They’ve even taken it one step further now and turned mobile usage into a premium-only experience that goes completely counter to the trend in video consumption over the past few years. This all started, of course, with Hulu’s media overloads expressing displeasure with the fact that Boxee was allowing users to legally consume content from Hulu’s own openly-accessible feeds, ads and all, without using Hulu’s website to do so. Worse, you could do it on your television! The horror! So, Boxee got banned from accessing Hulu, and they’ve been in something of an arms race ever since to get around the arcane distinction that Hulu has created between watching their content on a computer connected to a monitor, and watching that same content on a computer connected to a television screen. The EULA for Hulu’s own Hulu Desktop application actually expressly forbids you from installing it on a computer connected to your TV. Like that’s even remotely enforceable.

It’s like Hulu understands that the internet is an important platform, and even goes so far as to make their service trendy and modern with things like show queues and RSS feeds for available content, but totally misses the point of the internet as a ubiquitous-access platform, and is instead trying to protect their existing distribution methods while making token concessions to the internet-savvy crowd.

I think advertisers are also behind the curve on this one, which isn’t helping the adoption of internet-based services by content providers. Online ads are notoriously less profitable by a wide margin, compared to television ads. I understand why this is true for traditional web advertising, where banners and buttons are incidental content that can be easily ignored (or even blocked) by users. But when it comes to advertising on services like Hulu, where ads can be highly targeted, and are shown in a way that creates a captive audience, I would think that despite the smaller number of eyeballs, such ads would be more valuable to advertisers because viewers are more likely to actually pay attention to them.

Hulu really could make a strong case for charging premium prices for online advertising. The ads themselves already exist in most cases, since they’re just running existing TV ads, so there’s no additional overhead for creating them. They can be targeted to users based on their preferences, so they’re immediately more relevant to the end consumer than TV ads. There are a limited number of ads that run in a Hulu-broadcast episode or movie, which should again increase their value, not decrease it. Finally, because of this limitation on the number of ads being run, users are more likely to actually watch them than they are TV ads, which run for upwards of 5 minutes per break, giving users ample time to leave the room and perform quick tasks, and thus decreasing the viewership of your ad. With Hulu’s 30-second to 2-minute ad breaks, it’s much harder to go to the bathroom without missing something (assuming it’s more convenient to stay seated than to have to scrub back to the start of the segment, which for me it generally is).

When it comes to the whole Hulu Plus thing, I again think someone in the board room has misunderstood what I think could be called a generally-accepted social contract for advertising online. Namely, free content is very probably going to have ads. That’s understandable – and even acceptable –though depending on how the service provider chooses to implement them, folks may get grumpy about it. Paid content, however, is usually paid for so you can skip or avoid the ads. Hulu Plus doesn’t do this, instead opting to double-dip with both subscription and ad revenue. I think this is the source of much of the angst being expressed online about paying for content with ads, even though we already do so in so many other venues (cable TV is the oft-cited example, but it also applies to newspapers, magazines, DVDs, and even movies at the theater). People are used to buying into a web service to remove ads, and Hulu Plus doesn’t provide this convenience. That, combined with the $10 price, leaves a lot of people (myself included) feeling a bit put off.

As I mentioned earlier, this is further compounded by the fact that Hulu is only available on mobile devices with a Plus subscription. There’s no access to the existing free service through the Hulu app in the App Store, you have to pay for Hulu Plus in order to be able to use it. Again this strikes me as a move destined to leave money on the table. There are hundreds of millions of video-capable mobile devices that Hulu could put itself on to increase its viewership pool and thus improve its leverage against advertisers for more expensive ad rates simply by offering a free Hulu app. Instead, they’ve made a move that looks greedy (even if it actually isn’t) by instituting a pay wall on mobile devices.

Ultimately, for a company whose stated goal is to offer TV anywhere, they’re going pretty far out of their way to put up a ton of road blocks to that goal. Whether this is because of an internal lack of understanding of the internet (which I doubt… the Hulu guys themselves seem pretty savvy), a panicked move to try and improve their revenue stream (which is possible considering how many PSA ads get run these days), the result of external meddling by their largely technology-inept content overlords, or a combination of the three, it’s just frustrating to see such a promising service continue to shoot itself in the foot when trying to connect with its most fervent supporters.

I’ve actually come pretty much full circle on Hulu since it launched… at first I was initially skeptical of the obvious stick-it-to-Apple nature of the service’s unveiling just after NBC ditched the iTunes Store a few years ago, and was not even remotely interested in it. It eventually won me over because of the breadth of its offerings and the convenience of being able to watch shows whenever I wanted without tediously long ad breaks. Then they started doing week-long delays of new episodes (again, a concession to a media empire that just doesn’t “get it”) and losing providers, which decreased its value. The final straw for me was when they banned Boxee for entirely pointless and completely stupid reasons at the demand of their primary stakeholders, who happen to be NBC and Fox. Since then, the service seems like it’s been on a downhill slope in terms of mindshare and usage share, and Hulu Plus is a rather desperate bid to try and regain lost revenue without actually bothering to understand the reasons for their declining popularity in the first place.

Needless to say, I won’t be subscribing to Hulu Plus. I would almost certainly have put the app to decent use on my iPad if it offered the same level of service for free as their website, but I don’t need it nearly often enough to justify spending $9.99 for the convenience of being able to watch on the go a show or two a month that I might have missed, or want to revisit. I just don’t watch that much TV in the first place. I also tend to prefer buying the few shows I do watch on iTunes, since it’s generally cheaper and faster than waiting for the DVDs (even in HD), and the episodes are almost always available the following day if I miss one.

I know al-Qaeda is al-Qaeda, right? But is it OK to point out that they‘re ridiculous, that their propaganda is inadvertently funny as in, “Ha-ha, I‘m laughing at you”? These guys are like the reject pile at talk radio tryouts.

My response: yes. It is absolutely OK to point out that they’re ridiculous. In fact, that’s perhaps the best thing that we and the media could possibly do. I’m not suggesting that our government not take them seriously as a threat, because they’ve proven themselves to be a lot deadlier in the battlefield than they are in front of a video camera. However, I think it gives al-Qaeda far more power than they actually have to continually portray them in public and in the media as some kind of superhuman fighting force the likes of which no man has ever seen; an existential threat to the very fabric of society unlike any the world has ever known, and against which all of our quaint notions of criminal justice and civil liberties are useless impediments to victory.

By all means, laugh at them. It takes the wind out of any asshole’s sails when you refuse to be intimidated by them, and this is doubly true of terrorists. Yeah, they destroyed the World Trade Center, made a good try at destroying the Pentagon, and could very well have been aiming to destroy the Capitol Building or the White House with United 93 on 9/11. They’ve killed thousands of American soldiers and native civilians in the countries of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

However, they also seem to have been getting increasingly desperate and incompetent in their attempts to launch assaults on foreign targets. There was the guy with explosives in his shoes who failed to blow up a plane in 2002 (thanks, asshole, for giving the TSA one more way to make it a pain in the ass to get through security). There were the guys who thought they could blow up JFK airport by igniting the pipe that fed jet fuel to the airport over a mile away (news flash: Mythbusters has shown us that jet fuel doesn’t burn especially readily. Also, you’re idiots). Back in October, someone apparently tried to blow up the Saudi royal family by stuffing a bomb up his own ass to sneak it past security (he only succeeded in blowing himself up, ass first of course, and not much else). More recently, there was the guy who stuffed explosives in his underwear to try and blow up a plane (I swear to god, if the TSA makes me take my pants off on my way to Mysterium, I’m going to go find that Nigerian punk myself and give him the biggest atomic wedgie in the history of mankind). And let’s not forget the moron who tried to blow up Times Square with an SUV full of unopened propane tanks and non-explosive fertilizer, left the keys to his getaway vehicle in said SUV, and had to call his landlord to let him back into his apartment when he finally made it home at 3:00 in the morning. Al-qaeda in Pakistan disowned that guy, he was such an embarrassment to their cause.

How do they expect us, the public they’re trying to scare the shit out of, to take them seriously when they’ve been so astonishingly bad at their primary objective of inciting terror since 9/11? It’s like watching an Austin Powers bad guy or something. Perhaps the thing that confuses me most is that there are so many people in this country still convinced that we can’t risk putting these people on trial after we catch them being complete dipshits because somehow they’ll execute some bizarre X-Men-type stunt of sucking all the iron out of the court bailiff’s blood, escape into the street, and become American citizens on the spot (as if this would incur some additional level of magical protection against being found guilty as fuck).

For god’s sake, laugh at them. The point of terrorism is to scare the shit out of you and make you do things you would otherwise not do in a rational state of mind, in an effort to drive you to your own brand of extremism in response to theirs, thus perpetuating a cycle of violence and destruction. Osama bin Laden’s own publicly stated goal was to draw the United States into an amorphous conflict it couldn’t win, thereby bleeding it dry and destroying it from within without expending anywhere near the same level of resources. If you refuse to actually be terrorized by their actions, however occasionally horrifying and devastating they may be, you undermine their goals and purpose far more successfully than any bomb or bullet ever could. Also, laughter is way cheaper than guns, tanks, ammo, bulletproof vests, and human lives.

The full video segment from Rachel’s show is after the break.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Overall

Apple has replaced the gray color scheme with a somewhat higher-contrast blue one, extending all the way into the login page, which has also gotten a facelift. I don’t recall if it was there before, but there’s now a quite prominent link to sign up for a 60-day trial right next to the news block. I like the new color scheme, as it feels a bit more engaging and interesting than the previous austere gray. Oddly (though perhaps intentionally, to illustrate the importance of the task), the gray scheme is retained on the re-authorization dialogs used to access Find My iPhone and the Account settings page.

What I don’t particularly care for is the new app switching method. Prior to today, switching from Mail to the Gallery was a one-click process. Now, probably because of the new design of the header toolbar and the way it ties into the various applications on the site, all of the applications are hidden behind a MobileMe cloud button, which brings up a patently oversized OS X-style task switcher display. Switching apps now requires two clicks and a considerably larger amount of mouse movement.

The new MobileMe Task Switcher

I would much rather have preferred that the original switching method was retained, since it provides more immediate discoverability of features. Since the new design precludes that, however, I think a better approach would have been to tie the MobileMe cloud icon to a pop-out menu, similar to the one used in the account drop-down on the right side of the header. The design could even be kept similar to the current design (either horizontal or adjusted to vertical), but by making it a fancy drop-down menu and ideally resizing the images, it would have greatly reduced the amount of travel time and distance required to perform such a simple and frequent operation.

Mail

The New MobileMe Mail

I don’t intend to touch on every app individually, but I do want to talk about Mail in particular, because it’s seen the largest amount of improvement and alteration over the old design. Apple launched this as a beta about a month ago, and has now made it available to all with the web services upgrade. It’s frankly miles above the old web app, and much more pleasant to use. The service loads data much more quickly, and the new widescreen viewer mode is really nice. It retains a number of desktop-y features like multiple (and discontinuous) item selection, as well as drag-and-drop message moving (and adding drag-and-drop folder reorganizing, yay!), while adding more web-ish things as well, like the Move icon in the toolbar, which functions similarly to the move command in iOS.

Perplexingly, Apple has decided to roll their own scrollbars in Mail, something it has not done for any of its other web apps. This has the net effect of overriding my preferred scrollbar behavior of having the up/down buttons split instead of joined at the bottom of the scroll area, and makes the UI inconsistent with both the rest of MobileMe and the rest of the scrollbars on my machine. I can understand the condensed scrollbar overlay for the folders listing, but the redundant full-sized custom scrollbars in the message list and preview pane are kind of annoying.

They’ve also added an Archive feature, pretty much pulled straight from Gmail as far as I can tell. It will be interesting to see if this feature manages to migrate out of the web application and into Apple’s other mail clients in the future.

Other new features include push mail in the web client, some composition window improvements (including some slick auto-completion and a nice “add contact” dialog with live filtering and To/CC/BCC checkboxes for all contacts, but lacking the self-contained pill items on recognized contacts from the desktop Mail client), fetching of mail from an external address, the ability to send an email from an alias (or said external address), support for vacation auto-response setup, server-side mail rules, and a long-overdue implementation of https communication.

Overall, a very nice upgrade to the Mail app that brings it on par in many ways to the web apps offered by other mail services. It also still retains some of the desktop application feel that Apple seems intent on maintaining on the web, and brings some iPhone/iPad-like additions into the fold as well. Very solid, though obviously more evolutionary than revolutionary. This feels like what MobileMe should have been from the beginning, but I’m glad Apple has been busy putting effort into polish since the original launch 2 years ago.

Other Apps

As a whole, the entire set of web services feels much faster than it did yesterday. I have no idea if this has anything to do with Apple’s new data center in North Carolina, or if they’ve just gotten better at query optimization, but in any case, it’s welcome and appreciated. Pretty much the only service that’s still sluggish is the Find my iPhone page, but that has some external limitations that I don’t think are nearly as easy to overcome. The UI is much improved though, and features a really nice custom Google Maps integration with some slick pushpin annotation stuff for device location features.

As an interesting side note, the Gallery icon has changed from the iPhone’s “Photos” icon to the iPhone’s “MobileMe Gallery App” icon. While this provides some consistent branding, I think I’d much rather have the MobileMe Gallery functionality built into the iPhone/iPad Photos app than tucked away in a separate location on my device. Considering that the Photos app already allows you to upload files to MobileMe, it seems like it would make more sense to keep those files all accessible and manageable in one spot. This is more of an iOS rant than a MobileMe rant though, so I’ll leave it at that.

Summary

As a whole, the upgrade isn’t a huge change from what was previously available, but it’s a solid evolution of the service (Mail in particular seems to have been the focus of this update), and I hope that this is a sign of more good things to come.

The Hardware

While I already had a pretty good feel for the hardware just from handling one of the demo units at Best Buy, having one of my own to truck around has enabled me to get an even better feel for it as a portable device, and not just as a fancy display tied to the table. It’s an exceptionally well-machined piece of kit. The seams are smooth and almost nonexistent, even between the metal case and the black plastic tab that the 3G models have to allow the cell signal to get through. I actually kind of like the tab, to be honest. It may make the casing a little less “perfect”, but I think it lends some character to the design.

Apple is notoriously precise with their hardware designs and builds, and this definitely lives up to their high standard of excellence. The iPad is weighty without being exceptionally so, though as a result of its mass it does get heavy in the hand after extended periods. It definitely has a heft to it that keeps it from feeling cheap, and the metal-and-glass enclosure is miles above the feel of the flimsy plastic mess of most portable devices. I’d much rather have a device that didn’t feel like I was going to snap it in half, to be honest, and it only seems to get cumbersome if I hold it by the side with just one hand. Holding it more like a serving tray is much easier on the arm, hand, and wrist.

Yes, the display is glossy, and yes, it is a fingerprint magnet, but as I noted in my Best Buy hands-on, it doesn’t really impact my ability to use or enjoy the device. The display is bright and crisp enough to outshine the surface reflections and smudges, and with the exception of accidentally blasting my office-mate with reflected early morning sunlight while showing it to him, I haven’t so far run into any glare problems.

The speaker is surprisingly robust, capable of putting out a pretty decent (if slightly tinny) range, as well as considerable volume. I actually watched Men in Black on the device last night using the speaker, and it was completely intelligible.

The Battery

This deserves its own heading just so I can point this out and be sure people see it. I run my iPad for a near-consecutive 12 hours yesterday (7:00 AM to 7:00 PM) before plugging it into the wall, and when I did so, it still had 13% of its battery left. Now, I definitely didn’t go easy on this thing its first day. I downloaded podcasts and apps, played music, watched two 40-minute videos, ran through a couple dozen games of solitaire, read over 100 RSS articles, had the display on for a disproportionate period of time, and  played several rounds of a few other games. I put this thing through its paces, and it came through like a champ. I would love to see someone post similar battery life numbers for a netbook under such constant use.

Amusingly, the battery indicator keeps throwing me off in a way. I’m fairly used to the battery drain rate on my iPod Touch, so my brain tends to use it as a benchmark for the passage of time (weird, I know). I’ve taken my iPad to work twice now and each day its slower drain rate has me both worried that it won’t last as long as it should and underestimating the amount of time that’s elapsed since I got to work.

The OS

My god this thing is smooth. It may be partly because I’m coming from a first-generation iPod Touch, which is getting a bit long in the tooth, and which has some issues playing nicely with more recent OS and software updates, but this thing screams. It’s just pure, raw, unadulterated performance on display. I don’t even really care if being effectively a unitasking OS is the primary reason for it (which I guess will get put to a greater test this fall with iOS 4). This thing is a sheer delight to use. Everything is smooth as silk. Swiping, scrolling, zooming, opening, closing, listening, watching, playing… it’s all easily 30 frames per second or higher, and the responsiveness is so high as to be indistinguishable from realtime. I know I’m sounding overly effusive about this, but damn. Even my desktop machines don’t feel this fast, and they’ve got much beefier hardware in them.

Part of this feeling may be the immediacy and intimacy of touch-based input. It’s not fully tactile like a real-world object, but it makes the mouse-and-pointer system feel kludgy and backwards by comparison. There’s absolutely no intermediary layer between you and the computer the way there is on a desktop/laptop device. It may sound stupid to only be realizing this now given how long I’ve had a Touch, but the 9.7″ display really drives home the awesome feeling of directly interacting with a computer. This is freaking Star Trek-type stuff here.

It’s easy to understand why Jobs loves to refer to this device as “magical”, though I would stop short of doing so myself. It sort of draws from Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law of Prediction, that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The device is way more than the sum of its already considerable parts, and it does seem to take actually using one for that realization to sink in. In much the same way that Shakespeare must be experienced in the original Klingon to be fully appreciated, the iPad really has to be used to understand what all the hype is about. The experience is just completely seamless and amazingly personal. Honestly though, I’d love to have a few more “magical” devices in the world if it meant getting this sort of experience out of using them. If computing could, to the masses, be accurately described as a black box that occasionally punches you in the face for reasons you probably won’t understand (because it’s a black box), the iPad could be described as a black box that gives you ponies (or bacon).

The Keyboard

Yeah, the keyboard gets its own section. I actually really like the iPad keyboard, but really only if I’m using it in landscape mode. The portrait keyboard is just large enough that it’s awkward to use one-handed, but small enough that it’s also awkward to use two-handed with any speed or accuracy.

The landscape keyboard’s keys are almost identical (if not completely identical, I haven’t actually measured with a ruler) to the size of the aluminum keyboard’s chicklet keys, so typing on it is a pretty natural affair. I may have a leg-up on the average writer in terms of efficiency with the keyboard since I always hunt-and-peck and stare at the keyboard when I write, but I’ve gotten pretty speedy and can rack up some decent WPMs (nothing close to touch typists, but fast enough to be serviceable). The only real issue I’ve had is that I keep aiming for the apostrophe key while typing on the iPad, which just results in me hitting the return key and starting the rest of my contraction on a new line with a capital letter. I did it three times yesterday while writing a draft of this post.

I also noticed that switching straight from the iPad keyboard to an aluminum keyboard requires a little bit of mental re-adjustment on two fronts. First, there’s no auto-capitalize in Mac OS X (and no auto-period either, though I use that less on the iPad due to the period being where it belongs… there’s a feminine hygiene joke in there somewhere, but I’m not interested in digging it out), so I keep starting sentences with lowercase letter. Second, the aluminum keyboard actually requires pressing buttons, while the iPad keyboard lets you type with the lightest of touches. As a result, I keep brushing over keys on my aluminum keyboard expecting them to work, and end up wih sentncs tht lk lik ths. Guh.

One final annoyance on the iPad keyboard is the symbol/number key. I totally get why the iPhone keyboard lets you drag-release from that key to the symbol or number you’re after to swap straight back to the qwerty board when you let go… it’s a small board and you’re using it with just your thumbs for the most part, where that action is relatively natural. On the iPad though, that motion is much less natural and intuitive, so I keep trying to use the symbol key as a pseudo-shift key, which then annoys me when I have to hit it again to switch back to qwerty. I’d love to be able to hold down the symbol key, tap the other key I’d like to use, and have the board spring back to qwerty automatically once I release the symbol key. Sadly, this doesn’t work. Grr. Oh well.

All in all, I think the software keyboard (in landscape) is perfectly useable for light or even moderate composition, but I’d leave the novel-writing to your desktop, or get a keyboard dock/bluetooth keyboard for heavy-duty input. The portrait keyboard is much more “meh”.

The Software

Honestly this is where things become more of a mixed bag, but even over the last 24 hours I’ve been able to improve the experience considerably over where it was when I started. Just as a note, I’ve yet to encounter an app that won’t run on the iPad. When I refer to adding iPad support further down, I mean building a UI that is specific to the iPad, so the device doesn’t run in the iPhone emulator.

As is typical for Apple products, the bundled software is fabulous. I’m particularly fond of the Calendar app’s design, and the split views in other apps like Mail and Notes are a marvelous improvement over their iPhone counterparts. Where most companies would have (and just by looking at the App Store, did in some cases) just scaled up the iPhone UI to fill the whole 9.7″ screen, Apple actually seems to have put considerable thought and effort into maximizing the utility and functionality of the apps on a larger display. The iTunes-style iPod application is also really nice, and finally being able to fully manage my playlists on the device is a welcome addition (no Smart Playlist editing, but I don’t use those all that often anyway). Still wishing for search and alphabetical jumplist scrolling when adding new tracks to a playlist though…

The iBooks app is very nice. I’m really not sure what else to say about it… it’s a competently-crafted app for reading books, and it performs this task very well. I’m definitely looking forward to the update announced at WWDC. Apple’s other App Store offerings are a huge disappointment though. Not one of the apps that they sell for the iPhone has been optimized for the iPad so far, so iDisk, the MobileMe Gallery app, and Remote are all constrained to the iPhone emulator. Hopefully this will change in the very near future.

Third-party software is, as I mentioned, a bit of a mixed bag at the moment. A number of the apps I use have been updated to include iPad support, but several of the big ones, thus far, have not. This includes Byline and the now-official Twitter application. There are also a handful of double-dipping apps that want me to buy an iPad-specific version, but having just dropped $900 on the hardware, some of those updates will have to come later.

That’s not to say, though, that all uses of the iPhone simulator are fraught with annoyance. For example, Grocery iQ seems to be a lot easier to use when the iPhone UI is blown up to iPad scale. I went shopping Monday night after buying the iPad and had it in the child seat of the shopping cart throughout the store. The super-sized type and enlarged buttons made it pretty easy to use, and I didn’t have a hand full with my iPod in the process.

Games also seem to look better than text-heavy apps when running in the simulator. Realtime stuff looks pretty good (I’ve played Star Defense and Cogs at 2X and was quite pleased with the results), and again the enlarged controls can sometimes be something of a godsend (games like LineUp really benefit from this). Even Myst looked quite respectable on the iPad. I was worried that it would be a blocky, pixelated mess, but it holds up really well despite the artwork being limited to the iPhone’s screen resolution. I would actually have no problem recommending the game for other iPad owners despite it being built for the iPhone. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t love to see iPad-specific versions of Myst and eventually Riven on the iPad at full resolution, but given how unlikely that is (especially for Myst), I’ll take what I can get . Also, the geeky pleasure-squee I got from “touching” a Linking Panel on my iPod is only magnified when it’s done on a roughly book-sized display. Just sayin’.

As far as apps that are built for the iPad, overall I’ve been pretty impressed with them. There have been some (such as Now Playing) that just re-scaled their UI to fill the iPad’s screen, which works not at all, but in general there’s a lot of really good stuff out there. I’m still working through my collection to get some real in-depth experience with everything, but I’ll share some thoughts on the apps that have seen heavier usage thus far.

RSS

Byline’s lack of iPad support had me trawling the App Store for a replacement (at least until Byline gets updated), and I came across FeeddlerRSS. It’s got a good UI, a nice method of reading articles, and supports Google Reader sync. Perhaps my only complaint is that there’s no browser navigation. Some articles get truncated in the feed content, so I have to visit the site to view the whole thing. If I follow a link from that article and want to go back, I have to jump all the way back to the feed content viewer and re-open the full article all over again. Not a huge annoyance, but still annoying.

TV Listings

I’m waffling between the HD version of What’s On and the Yahoo! Entertainment app for TV listings. What’s On also takes the “blow up the iPhone UI” approach to its interface, but overall that works out pretty well, since it enables me to see more of the listings at a time. Yahoo!’s app is also super-slick though, and has a somewhat better design to the information detail UI. Despite not opening it while I’m online for the past day, it’s still giving me schedule data for today while I’m offline, which is also nice. My only quibble is that it always launches to a dashboard with access to Yahoo! Entertainment news and videos, which I really don’t care about. I’m using the Yahoo! app at the moment, and will see how things go.

IM

I use Meebo on my iPod, but there isn’t an iPad version of the app available yet, so I had to go looking for alternatives again. Initially I considered buying Beejive, but $9.99 for an IM client seemed a little over-the-top to buy sight unseen. Instead, I found IM+, and am using the Lite version as a trial. Since the full version (also $9.99) also runs on the iPhone/iPod Touch, I may end up getting it a bit later and migrate off of Meebo entirely. I still need to use it a little more before I commit to that decision though.

Twitter

The official Twitter app’s lack of iPad support once again spurred a trip through the App Store looking for a substitute (though you can bet that I’ll probably switch back to Twitter’s app as soon as Loren updates it). Since this is much more of a stopgap than the other alternatives I went looking for, I picked up the free version of Twitterific. I have to say, it’s a really nice app, and depending on what Twitter for iPad looks like, it may get a permanent spot on my iPad’s dock. The free version doesn’t support multiple accounts, but that’s not a huge issue until Mysterium rolls around (at which point I’ll be at least partly responsible for maintaining the MysteriumCon and MysteriumQuotes accounts as well). If there’s no official Twitter app by then, I’ll probably spring for the Twitterific app and leave it at that.

WordPress

Finally, I wanted to comment quickly on WordPress’s app. It’s a nice app, albeit rather sparse. The biggest issue I’ve had with it thus far is that I can’t seem to delete a local draft, in either landscape or portrait view. Anyone have any tips on this issue?

Usability

This seems like something that should have come earlier, but because it’s dependent upon all of the above sections, I decided to hold off on it until here.

Contrary to Apple’s marketing and hardware design, I tend to use my iPad in landscape mode far more often than in portrait. It may be the comfortable familiarity of the aspect ratio in that mode, but mostly I think it’s because it just feels less cramped that way. A lot of the really nice UI enhancements like split views are only visible in landscape mode, and they feel less cluttered than the pop-overs that you have to use in portrait. Landscape just seems to give the interface more room to breathe. I think most printed content will probably shoot for the familiarity of the portrait mode’s aspect ratio, and that’s fine, but apps like Stephen Fry’s FryPaper show that landscape is equally viable. It just depends on how your content is typically formatted.

One thing I wish was available was the ability to use the iPhone simulator in portrait mode at 1X while holding the iPad in landscape mode. A number of iPhone apps are portrait-only because of the size limitations of the iPhone display, and having to turn my iPad around  to use them seems counter to the “there’s no wrong way to hold it” bit of Apple’s marketing. I know games tend to require reorientation too, but for non-game apps in particular it’s frustratingly restrictive (Byline is a good example… even though it supports landscape mode, using that on an iPad is a total exercise in pain and frustration). Another button above the magnification toggle to rotate the running app into portrait-on-landscape mode would make using some iPhone apps much more pleasant, without having to change my overall iPad usage habits.

On the subject of orientation, I kind of wonder whether so many of the negative comments about the software keyboard are seated in the tendency for others to prefer using portrait mode. The portrait keyboard is definitely functionally inferior to the landscape one, and can be a pain to use for anything more than punching out login credentials. I could probably write all day on the landscape keyboard if I were so inclined though. It’s about as close to a real keyboard as a virtual one can get, I think.

Wrap-up

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I’d much rather have a portable device that I can use –ideally all day long – and enjoy, than a portable device that has “more awesome” specs but inferior battery life, can theoretically run all of my existing desktop software (the day I see someone try to run Photoshop CS4 on an Eee PC is the day my faith in humanity dies… unless it’s RIUM, because we all know he’s not human ), and makes me want to throw it out the window.

With all of the apps available for it, there isn’t a single thing I need to do on the go that my iPad can’t accomplish. Note that I said “on the go” there. I’m not going to be busting out a portable device to do a major web design project from scratch in Photoshop (or Pixelmator or DrawIt) while I’m out. That sort of work gets done at the desk, because that’s where I can actually focus on getting it done, and where I know I have the hardware to back the software I plan on using. Really, what good is a netbook’s ability to run Windows software when it can barely handle running Windows? Blame the hardware all you want, but I’d rather actually own a useful portable device than talk about the day that such useful portable devices running Windows 7 will eventually arrive. Maybe. Someday. And how ’bout that Courier, huh?

Let’s ignore netbooks though. Could I “do more” with a laptop? Probably. But I also probably wouldn’t drag it around with me to nearly as many places as I can take my iPad (I certainly wouldn’t lug it to work every day, or drive around town using it to play music). So in theory I’d be able to do more with it, but in practice I’d be using it for far less. My daily routine is just not attuned to the needs that a laptop fills. It is, however, pretty attuned to having a more portable large-screen device.

I can play music, watch videos (even stuff on the web, for the most part… I discovered yesterday that FAILblog’s links to Funny Or Die will bring up an HTML5 video player there, so that even nixes one of my previous gripes), handle emails, write blog posts, play games, do preliminary design doodle-work, look at photos, browse the web, keep up to date on RSS and Twitter, read books, manage my shopping list, keep my to-do list organized, get directions, control my TV computer and Apple TV, manage client billing for web development work, and even do some simple website management tasks. That’s a pretty substantial list of stuff for a 1.5 pound device that “doesn’t run a real OS”. Of course, iOS is a “real” OS, it’s just not Windows, or OS X (well, it’s sort of OS X…). I’m not sure how this argument even validates in people’s minds though, considering that it never seems to get applied to the mythical Android Tablet Devices that have geeks on the edge of their seats now. I guess because it’s an Apple product. Whatever.

In The Future™

I haven’t yet purchased a 3G data plan for my iPad, again because just buying the device has let me out of money for bonus goodies, but that’ll definitely happen around Mysterium time so that I can stay connected throughout the convention. Interestingly, despite having bought my iPad well after the June 7th cut-off for unlimited 3G data from AT&T, the order page on my iPad still displays it as an option. I may have to test whether I can actually buy it when the time comes to hook up to their network.

I’m also planning on getting a case, because I’d just feel better having one around it, and because the Apple case seems like it would improve some of the viewing and usage conditions a bit… it’s perfectly useable as it is, but being able to easily put it on a slight incline while typing, for example, would be handy. I may also look for a cheap satchel or something at Goodwill to carry it around in, especially for Mysterium.

Finally, I do plan on getting a camera connector kit before Mysterium to use for keeping my photos from overwhelming my camera card (assuming the camera itself is still serviceable by then… it’s starting to get pretty crotchety). It really doesn’t bug me that there’s no USB port on the iPad, to be honest. I don’t really plan on copying photos to the thing while I’m out and about anyway, so the connector (and associated USB cable, since my camera doesn’t use SD cards) can stay safely at the hotel during the day, and be used each night to clean off the camera (I don’t take that many pictures).