blog.sparetomato.com

I’ve decided that the time has finally come for me to stop procrastinating and go ahead and archive this blog.

I’ve been keeping this blog for over 5 years now, and I think the time has come for it to get a completely fresh facelift and redesign.

I’ll probably keep most of what I consider to be my better posts in an archived version of the blog, but over the next few weeks I’ll be scrubbing this main site completely out and starting fresh.

Photo by Leo Reynolds used with cc.

I picked up an Apple Magic Mouse last night after finally getting fed up with the scroll ball in the ‘Mighty Mouse’ getting clogged and not working.

The Magic Mouse is a gorgeous minimalistic piece of wireless hardware that features a touch-sensitive surface, allowing you to perform the actions of the scroll ball or a scroll wheel simply by dragging your finger across the top of the mouse.

The one huge omission however is the missing side buttons. On the Mighty Mouse, ‘Exposé’ can be triggered by squeezing the sides of the mouse – an incredibly useful gesture. Given Apple’s fantastic gesture implementations on the trackpads (4 finger swipe down to activate Exposé) this is a strange omission.

However, a quick search on Google turned up ‘Better Touch Tool’. This little application can be configured to perform certain actions based on the user’s gestures. It seems strange that the Magic Mouse can clearly detect these gestures, yet Apple decided not to exploit them.

BTT also allows you to configure gestures by application, which may take a while to set up, but could potentially be worth it – particularly if you were able to configure it within a game.

A little over two weeks ago, I bought an iPad. I wasn’t really excited about the device and I did wonder if it really was a necessary purchase.

So, after two weeks am I still using it?

Well, yes!

I still maintain that it is a luxury item – it’s not something you necessarily need, and it isn’t really a device that would supercede any other electronic device I already own but what it does do is offer an alternative to them.

As a content consuming device it is incredible. eBooks are clear and easy to read, browsing the internet is so much easier than on the iPhone (which is still an improvement over previous incarnations of mobile internet browsers) and viewing films is superb thanks to the super sharp display. Apps such as the Metro newspaper app have meant that I’ve not had to pick up the physical copy of the newspaper at the station, which has consequently meant that I’ve not left it on the train when I’ve finished reading it.

To some extents it has replaced my laptop, but even more surprisingly it has actually replaced a pen and paper. It has been a pleasure to take to meetings and take notes using the inbuilt notes application, make diagrams using the Adobe Ideas sketch pad application, and add to-dos using the Things task manager. When multitasking arrives with iOS4.0, switching between these will hopefully become even more effective.

Opening up the internet full screen is great, and the fact that the device is always on means that you can just jump on the web to check something, pay a bill or do whatever it is you want to do on the web.

Battery life is impressive, although the charge time is really long. Apple store staff suggested it would charge from empty to full in 2 hours – I’ve found it to be closer to 6.

So the downsides:

It is not really a device for creating content. While the touch screen keyboard is easy to type on, endless tapping on the screen does not have the cushioning effect of a normal keyboard, and isn’t tactile, so mistyping is easy to do.

No Flash. This has been a big criticism of the iPad/iPhone/iWhatever, due to the impasse between Apple and Adobe we are unlikely to ever see Flash on these devices. Apple have pinned their colours to the HTML5 flagpole, which while impressive, will not really take off until there is a simple IDE to build content-rich HTML5 sites – and who produces the most prolific HTML4 IDE? yup – Adobe, who won’t have any enthusiasm to concentrate on an HTML5 heavy Dreamweaver over Flash.

While the absence of Flash is a good thing in that you’re not treated to inane animated intros, some sites do use Flash in a useful way – all of the embedded videos on the BBC news site use Flash. Flash is not going to happen on the iPad, which is a shame as because of the public spat between two behemoths in their field, it is we, the user that lose.

Battery life is impressive, but drains very quickly with constant use. You cannot turn the device “Off” either, which means the battery is always being used, even if it’s minimal.

Apps are generally more expensive on the iPad – with commercial apps being priced around the £5-£10 mark. The iWork suite for the iPad will set you back £18 if you were to buy it in it’s entirety. When you consider that the desktop version of the suite retails at £71, the substantially limited iPad versions are very overpriced.

eBooks in the iBookstore are also rather expensive – priced at the same level as their physical counterparts. Given the cheaper distribution and production costs of eBooks, surely they can be made cheaper. The digital music market benefitted greatly from a fairly standardised pricing structure, slightly cheaper than their CD counterparts.

The Application scaling from iPhone to iPad apps is a bit hit and miss. Some of the higher quality iPhone applications that use custom graphics scale pretty well, but the ones that use the native iPhone controls do not scale at all well. I’m not sure how the applications are compiled, but I would have thought Apple would ensure that their native graphics looked good on both devices.

To summarise, the iPad is probably not the ‘game changer’ that Apple are marketing it as (then again, every Apple marketed product is a ‘game changer’) but it is a useful little tool. It won’t replace any device already on the market, but it is a more portable option for the lightweight tasks that you might normally do on your laptop.

Like the iPhone, it is the Applications that will make this a useful device, and there are already some nice applications out there. The integrated capability to run iPhone apps has already meant that there are many great applications available, with the added advantage that any purchased applications don’t need to be repurchased (unless you want an iPad specific version, but some developers have been happy to release the iPad version at no additional cost if you have the iPhone version).

There is certainly some mileage in the iPad, and because it’s Apple it will shake up the tablet market but only time will tell the long term future for the product. It is quite telling that Apple haven’t announced an upgrade to the Macbook Air since it was released. It is quite possible that the second, or probably third iteration of the iPad will replace Apple’s “It’s not a netbook” netbook.

iPad image from Koninyetska on Flickr used with CC.

Last Saturday my Blog was hacked with the ZettaPetta hack. basically all my PHP files had some malicious code injected somehow.

Information about how this happened is quite cagey – various people on the internet have commented that it is across a lot of sites, and not necessarily just WordPress sites.

Apologies if you’ve visited this blog over the past week and had a warning about Malware. I think it’s all cleaned up now, and I’ve adjusted the security permissions on the site to hopefully tighten it up a bit.

In other news, I have decided to use this opportunity to redesign the site layout soon.

Last Friday, along with hundreds of others, I was in a queue at the Birmingham Bullring Apple store to purchase an iPad.

When it was announced, I really didn’t think that I’d want one. Yes, it looked nice, but why would I need a device that was basically a glorified eBook reader, web browser and email reader?

The fact that it was running the iPhone Operating System, and not even a full version of OSX added to my scepticism, believing that Apple had produced this device quickly to cash in on the tablet market, which has been around for years but has yet to really take off.

So what happened?

As the UK release date came nearer, I began to read independent reviews, from people who I trust, such as J.C. Hutchins. Yes, the reviews are biased, as most Apple fan reviews are, but as Stephen Fry points out – Apple are a company that illicit a ‘marmite’ reaction. Much like the Ferrari Formula One team, you love ‘em, or hate ‘em, but you have to respect how they can turn grown adults into crazy fans.

Reading these reviews, I began to realise that while the iPad would not be able to replace my laptop or my iPhone, it would offer a kind of halfway house. Always ‘on’ like the iPhone, it is quick to pick up and surf the web or send an email, and with a larger screen than the iPhone it is easier to use. I’ve tended to take my laptop to meetings to take notes on (which is next to impossible on the iPhone) and after trying the full-blown mac version of the task manager ‘things’, I’ve found myself needing a good electronic ‘to do’ list.

For simple tasks like these, the iPad comes into its own. I can watch the Formula One on TV while having the live timing displayed on the iPad screen, meaning I don’t have the bulky laptop open. I have a simple interface to log actions for meetings instead of using a piece of paper that I am likely to lose. I am able to jump on the internet and check something quickly when I don’t have my laptop to hand.

All of the above can be accomplished with the iPhone, or even with a laptop, and the iPad really offers nothing new in that regard. What it does offer is a different interface to the above. After just 10 minutes with the iPad, you realise how much better the internet is to view on the larger screen size; typing an email is so much easier than on the iPhone.

I still maintain that the iPad doesn’t go far enough – many have bemoaned the lack of a camera (which I don’t see the point of), and I would have preferred the iPad to have a full-blown OSX on there to allow me to develop, but I can see three strong reasons why Apple would not go this far with the first iPad:

1. The iPad is not a game changer, or ‘kindle killer’, but its form factor actually does place it in competition with Apple’s own MacBook Air. Even Steve Jobs was critical of Netbooks in his iPad announcement. At the moment, the fact that the Air runs a full version of OSX Leopard is still a selling point for the device.
2. The App Store. Apple’s simple method for selling applications has been a huge hit for the iPhone. Developers can enjoy a relatively simple distribution method, while the iPad can claim over 200,000 applications are available at launch. The fact that the iPad can emulate the iPhone (and scale applications up to use the full screen) means that developers do not have to re-write their applications – but more on this in a bit.
3. Battery Life. The iPad boasts a 12 hour battery life – I cannot vouch for this myself, but with pretty heavy use over the weekend, I’ve only had to charge it up once so far, which is more than I can say for my iPhone. With a full version of OSX running, the battery life would probably be considerably shorter and the processor faster.

I mentioned the iPhone emulation on the iPad, and I’ve tried several applications. The apps open by default in the middle of the iPad, at the same screen resolution as the iPhone. In the bottom corner is a button that allows you to double the size of the application so that it fills the iPad screen. Some apps fare better than others, ironically the ones that look the worst zoomed in are those that use the standard iPhone controls. I think this is an area Apple should have addressed, as although rendered graphics can be excused for looking blocky, the standard iPhone controls such as the ‘Date Picker’ should really scale better.

I don’t regret purchasing the iPad (I went for the 32GB 3G version), but it really doesn’t offer anything new yet. Time will tell for the future of this device – will Apple take the plunge and discontinue the Macbook Air in favour of a premium iPad that runs full OSX? If the iPad forces the same wake up call to the rather staid tablet PC market then we may see Apple taking that direction. For now, I think that the 1st generation iPad is merely Apple dipping their toes into the market and seeing if this luxury device has any legs.

As with the iPhone, it will be the apps that make the iPad a success. It doesn’t offer anything new to the market, but it does offer an alternative way of doing it.