Be Excellent To Each Other

That one runs Win7, which is nice. I await a price, though.

That's not a tampon.

I'm not readin[GUNSHOT]

If suffering from a gunshot wound, a tampon would be most handy!

So would an iPad. You could hit yourself in the head with it to numb the pain. Or slide along to the hospital on it.

Perfect for axe wounds too.

That just gets funnier every time I see it.

Those never get old.

Funnily enough, that's almost exactly what I thought.
They had a chance to do something truly great, and they went all mediocre on us.

Their shares have dropped in value after their big conference in January every year for at least the last three that I've been watching.

And who gives a fuck what Wall Street think?

I've never understood why people start going "ooh, share price wnet down on the announcement" when the share price is governed by a bunch of cowboy wankers who have absolutely no clue about anything suddenly decide to pass judgement on something that they know absolutely nothing about.

Let us not forget these are the same people who were saying every bank in the Western world was A++++++++ VERY SAFE WILL BUY FROM AGAIN.

Fuck what they think. FUCK THEM.

That's not really what share price means.

Actually, mobile technology analysts are in my experience an extremely bright bunch of people. I've had to give numerous briefings to groups of them across loads of different institutions and they're well-versed in the technology and its use, asking surprisingly detailed technical questions.

Oh, and the answer to "Who gives a fuck" is Apple's shareholders. Which means Apple do.

Charlie Brooker has written a thing about it. Because that's his job.

Hmm, I suspect he'll mock the hype surrounding it and make fun of the fanboys. That's what I'd do.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... why-idunno

There's some interesting debate happening in various tech blogs about whether this sealed-environment computing platform represents the way future tech will go, what that might mean, and whether it's a good or bad thing.

http://stevenf.tumblr.com/post/35922439 ... s-ive-been
http://www.suntimes.com/technology/ihna ... 10.article
http://poeks.tumblr.com/post/362444542/on-multitasking

Daring Fireball has a typically long post about iPad miscellanea:

http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/various_ipad_thoughts

Interesting that the keyboard support seems to be very rough indeed.

Also, is Flash really important, or is it dying anyway? And would we be better off without it?

http://smarterware.org/4978/flashs-decl ... 06-to-2010

Pics of the iPad from http://www.flickr.com/photos/ipodlounger show SD Card readers, a host USB port, and a VGA output as dock connector accessories. And also an official case with a lid that folds around to become a stand for the iPad in landscape mode, presumably for video playback.

I'd be delighted if you could replace flash/flex, silverlight, ajax, and all the other gubbins with HTML5, but I think the crucial thing is that we're not there yet. Dying it may be, but it's not dead, so excluding it from your platform is a problem.

It does look like they've leaned towards connectivity being provided with 3rd party connectors, which I think is a reasonable step - until you lose them. I'm not exactly sure what is in the guts of the thing that meant that none of those connectivity options can be provided in-chassis though.

Hmm, they said exactly the same thing when Apple started leaving off all connectors except USB though

It's a bit irritating currently, certainly.

Quite recently flash has been driving me fucking mental. It now has this function where even if you wave your pointer over something it automatically fucking leaps out and sticks an advert in your face. FFS you don't even have to click the fucking shit any more. It's basically a embedded popup, spam. So in honesty I think I will just remove the fucking thing and have done with it.

Definitely hear that article though. I clearly remember Flash being utter gash on my G4.

"iBooks uses full-justified layout for books, with no apparent option to switch to ragged right. It doesn’t do hyphenation, so you wind up with very unsightly word-spacing gaps."

Bleurgh!

There's no justification for full-justified.

The iPad would have been a no brainer for me if they'd included full OS X on it.

They could quite easily have made the iPad start up in "simple mode" using the iPhone-a-like interface, and then allowed power users to turn that off in settings.

Chicken and egg though. Until a major platform doesn't have Flash, web designers aren't going to be motivated to moving to the HTML5 new formats. And lack of Flash hasn't hurt iPhone sales too badly, has it? Robert Scoble has made the point that when Firefox launched, lots of websites didn't support it and many people predicted it would die but instead the web became a lot more standards compliant. I hope we see something similar here.

I think not including an SD card reader in the body of the device was a mistake. USB I'm more neutral on, because there are so many things people would plug in that cannot work that it would just be a carnival of disappoinment. But dumping digital camera images onto the iPad whilst on the go is such a natural use case I'm surprised it relies on a fragile and easy-to-lose accessory. It's either purely so they can charge $20 for the reader, or so they can market New! Improved! iPad v2! with integrated SD reader, or because they didn't think of it until really late on. Or all three.

Wonder what happens if you plug that SD card reader into an iPhone.

That was never, ever going to happen and I'm surprised how many people thought it would.

Ms K is getting one.

In a scenario reminiscent of that episode of The Simpsons where Marge gets a bowling ball for her birthday.

Most websites gave you more than a little blue cube though. Speaking for myself, it's led to a significant number of "Oh, FFS" moments. Especially as it's clearly not a technology issue.

I'd also suggest that the reasonable adoption of HTML5 is further out than the lifespan of the iPad Gen 1. It's all very well to engineer for the future, but cutting out the present (and for shit reasons) is daft.

Quite. I didn't think for a second it would, but it seems like such a glaring omission that it amazes me they aren't marketing "iPad Pro". Although I guess that's for the next keynote speech to reveal.

They've registered iPad "Runs like a dog and has shit battery life" Edition as a trademark.

i'm waiting for the motion sensitive edition, where if you hold it to the sky, it tells you what Jobs is thinking. Or if you hold it near a wall, it becomes a picture frame... Or window

It's not a glaring omission. It would be shit for the same reason all previous tablets are shit: the desktop interface is wrong. The whole point of this thing is the UI.
So, sure, your existing OS X apps aren't going to work. Get compiling then!

What about the video playback? It's not widescreen, and when they demo'd it the video only used the top half of the (portrait) screen.
That can't be how it'll end up when it's released, surely?

[edit]No. Good! Carry on!

Indeed. Desktop interfaces are suited to desktops alone; they're barely even workable on laptops without plugging in a mouse a lot of the time, for fuck's sake. Putting them on phones and tablets is a daft and incredibly short-sighted thing to do. It just doesn't work.

"it just doesn't work!"

The new ipeen slogan

Is "compiling" the tecknuckal term for "convert from Mac OS X to iPhone OS"?

Exactly. If Microsoft aren't working on a tablet version of Windows from the ground up then they are madmen. A desktop OS can't compete on a tablet, the iPhone has proven that to me.

Unless they just want it to be a two horse race between the iPhones OS and Android.

This would be the same Microsoft who have let Windows Mobile rot on the vine, yes? It's seen no significant new releases in nearly five years now, and wasn't that good before they seemingly stopped spending money on it.

I don't like how some of you have turned the no Flash thing into "Flash is shit any way".

On what grounds can you claim Flash isn't a pain in the arse?

I thought I'd read somewhere that the latest version of Windows Mobile is a stopgap until a new and completely overhauled version arrives sometime soon.

On what grounds can you claim Flash isn't a pain in the arse?
\

It is. But then the one before this was supposed to be that, too. Seven will be coming at the end of the year, but I really can't see it blowing anyone's socks off.

I am expecting good things from Windows Mobile 7.

You'll be disappointed. Microsoft are playing catchup on this, not innovating.

Aren't they always?

I've read a lot of interesting reports surround this iPad design and some of the decisions as well. Flash support isn't there because it's a buggy piece of shit on most macs and rapes the processors even on fairly speedy machines. Apple have effectively said in the past few days that "most" of the crash reports they get from users for Safari are caused by Flash. There are other reasons, obviously; the most significant is Apple wanting to have total architectural control over the iPhone OS for revenue and stability reasons.

Another thing that interested me is these two little stats I came across yesterday on one of the Apple sites. Touch sales are going to outstrip iPhone sales this year, by some significant margin they predict. The second one is this. Most Touch users don't really use them for music. Browsing/email and game/app playing are the two main usages apparently.

Also, re the stock dip. I don't know why, but since I've been checking the last few years, Apple stock has always dipped by quite a significant margin just after their January conference. Maybe it's become self fulfilling with brokers now creating this situation by dumping stock and rebuying cheaper a few hours later.

But they tend to be at their best when they are under actual competition.

Edit: They have also had a huge team working on it for quite a long time.

Edit: also, look at the sexy ZuneHD interface:

This would be the same microsoft who geek out with there touch screen tables all the time though too remember.

I hope they've let Windows Mobile rot because they realise they need to start over.

I mean I hate M$ (DO YOU SEE WHAT I DID) but proper OS competition is essential to keep things in the public interest. And the closed nature of the iPad would push me to open alternatives very quickly as it becomes more of a computer and less of a phone.

Those touch table doohickies do look very nice and I'm sure they have very useful applications, but aren't they just a shell sitting on top of vista, in the same way Media Center sits on top?

That's actually Apple's fault. They don't expose an API into CoreImage that Flash can use, so it cannot hardware accelerate the decoding of high resolution video. Linux doesn't do that either, although Adobe could sort that out themselves if they really wanted to.

It's still buggy though, and it still leaks memory like a sieve, even (in my experience at least) under Windows which certainly has the most robust Flash runtime.

I'm still baffled that in the Zune interface the word "marketplace" doesn't fit on the screen. Half the "e" is missing. Oddly sloppy given the degree of polish the rest of it has.

Rich media, man. "Wah wah wah HTML5" yeah I know, but we're not even close to that yet. They are including fucking applications to get around the fact they have no flash support (step forward, YouTube).
Oh, and games. Free games, that you can play for free. That Apple will have no control over. I'd imagine that's got more that a little to do with the "no flash" story.