Month: April 2010

iPad ownership: How’d I wind up here?

Posted on by Nimgimli

You can catch up on my iPad journey here. It takes me through Monday morning. By that time I’d ordered an iPad online and was prepared to wait for the April 12th ship date. Then I got to work and my co-worker had his and was showing it off. It didn’t take long for April 12th to seem far, far in the future. I called the local Apple Store and they had iPads in stock.

At lunch, said co-worker (who is a HUGE Apple fan) and I headed to the store. It took jumping through some strange hoops but I walked out with my iPad (and not one but TWO Apple credit accounts…don’t ask). He dealt with the Apple sales staff, I just signed things. It’s like being in a hostile foreign country, going into one of those stores. If you bring a native guide it’s much easier to get around.

It’s been interesting watching the hype-wave crest, and break, and now as the hype runs back into the sea the backlash is coming on strong. One of the most frequent criticisms I see is “It’s just a giant iPhone.” Well first of all, it doesn’t make calls so it’d be more accurate to says it’s just a giant iPod Touch. Now I don’t have an iPod Touch so I can’t really comment on that. But let’s say for the sake of argument that it’s true. What’s wrong with it being a giant iPod Touch?

If I was running a single core PC with on-board graphics and a 15″ VGA screen, and I said “Woohoo! I just bought an i7 system with that new GeForce 480 GPU and a 24″ 1600×1200 monitor!” no one would reply with “But it’s just a giant pc” would they? No, because better resolution, bigger screen, faster processor… those upgrades are great! And as far as I can tell, the iPad is an iPod Touch with better resolution, a bigger screen and a faster processor. So how’s that a bad thing?

*shrug*

I justified my early adoption with my ITWorld blog. The iPad is such a phenomenom, for good or evil, that I felt like I needed to know the truth behind the device. I wasn’t really sure what to expect; I hate Apple products. I’m an ex-Apple fanboy and no one is as bitter as an ex-fanboy. Dude, I had a G4 Cube. I spent nearly $4,000 on the first “TiBook” laptop….that’s how much of a fanboy I was. I was torn between hoping I enjoyed the iPad, and hoping I’d hate it so I could rip it to shreds in the public eye.

I never expected to fall head over heels in love with the damned thing. But I have. And I’m still trying to quantify why. It has a lot to do with how damned pretty it is; the screen is stunning and feels downright soothing to my eyes. Ironically the lower-than-my-PC resolution might be part of that. 1024×768 but crisp and clear with apps intended for that resolution. (OMG, is the iPad the Jitterbug of computing devices!?) And a lot of it is how comfortable it is to use. I can slouch to my heart’s content. Use it sitting back with my feet on the desk, or slung out on the couch, or laying in bed. Yeah, I could do all this with a netbook too, but netbooks are awkward and slow. The iPad is snappy and easy to hold (if a tad heavy). I highly suggest the ‘binder’ case that Apple sells. It gives you more holding options and doubles as a stand. And there’s the “new to the App Store” factor for me. There’s a lot of cool apps for this thing.

Now in my defense, for *years* I’ve wanted a tablet. Essentially since watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. But until now they’ve all sucked. Angela got me a netbook that converts into a tablet for Christmas and although I tried desperately to love it, I just didn’t. It was slow and not at all responsive to touch and I constantly had to recalibrate the screen. It’s a sweet little netbook, but not a very good tablet. Her heart was in the right place and it killed me that I didn’t love it, but there ya go…

So then I was waiting for the Android tablets. I’m still waiting for those. I can absolutely see having 2 tablets because I AM that much of a geek. I love my Droid smartphone. I love that Android is open. I love that these soon-to-arrive Android tablets have 1080P displays and are powered by the super snappy Tegra 2 chip (rumored to be powering the Nintendo 3DS as well). But those are the future. The few Android based tablets that have come out: devices like the enTourage eDGe (their caps) or the Camangi Webstation, just haven’t reviewed very well. Nope, wait for the Tegra and Android 2.1 if you want an Android tablet.

But the iPad was here now, and yeah, I got caught up in the hype, and had a way to justify buying early, and, shame on me, Apple was offering interest-free credit. I haven’t done anything truly fiscally irresponsible in years; the time just seemed right. 🙂

Now I just need the weekend to get here so I can *really* play with the thing. I sucked it up and installed iTunes *shudder* which I hate even more now than I did the last time I tried it, but the iPad really expects to be syncing to something, for whatever reason. So that was Monday evening shot, getting that done. Last night I tried to download a big app (the digital edition of The Elements) and found that the only system slower than The Playstation Network is The Apple Store (this was on my Windows machine so I can’t blame the iPad) and sorted through all my music deciding which of it/how much of it to sync to the iPad. And tonight of course I’m writing this blog post.

But I sneak in moments of iPad time whenever I can. During lunch at work, right before bed, in the 10 free minutes I find while waiting for dinner. I carry the damned thing everywhere with me.

The question is, once I have LOTS of time to spend with it, will I still love it or will I start to see its flaws? That remains to be seen. Stay tuned!

Pondering changing UI paradigms; is the Wii the first step into the future?

Posted on by Nimgimli

Yesterday I was working on an ITWorld post about Netflix Streaming on the Wii. In describing the navigation of your queue I said “You can click on the arrows on each end of the nav bar…”

That sentence didn’t register until this morning when I was proofreading. Click on the arrows. Clicking, on a video game system. That’s new. Now granted, there’ve been torturous control systems in console games before where you’d move a cursor via analog stick and then press a controller button to ‘click’ on an on-screen button, but the experience has always been pretty awful. And plenty of Wii games (my favorite Wii games, in fact) use a point and click interface. But doing a non-gaming task on the Wii really made me aware that I was doing something different.

On a computer, of course, we click constantly; the entire modern computer interface is built around moving a cursor and clicking mouse buttons. But the Wii is the first console that’s successfully brought that metaphor onto game systems. Presumably Playstation Move will do this as well. But not Natal (see below).

And then there’s the iPad, which takes its UI from smartphones. On the iPad there’s no concept of a cursor. You can still ‘click’ things but the feeling is different from doing so with the mouse where you see the cursor. You can’t roll-over interface items to get helper pop-up texts or anything along those lines [no, I haven’t used an iPad, I’m extrapolating from using smartphones]. On the Android platform, at least, there’s even a change in outcome depending on how long you click. There’s clicking and then there’s “long press” that will generate different results from the same icon/link/on-screen item.

And then there’s multitouch, of course. The pinch to zoom function still feels awkward to me, but it feels like just the start of what’s possible. I have one app on the Android that does interesting things via tap-patterns. For example, if you tap-press (ie, a double tap where you ‘hold’ the second tap) you can then slide your finger left and right to zoom in and out. Really the possibilities are endless, though we’ll need some standards to evolve in order to be efficient (awkward though pinch to zoom is, it’s become a defacto standard that everyone understands).

I’m guessing the Natal experience will be closer to the iPad than to a PC. With the whole “body as controller” I can’t imagine MS putting a cursor on-screen, though maybe they will. (In some cases they may have to.) I think the strength of Natal will be more in ‘gesture controls’ rather than on-screen buttons to be pressed.

I don’t have a real point to this post, I’m just pondering… as game consoles become more generalized devices, they’re borrowing from other devices and/or evolving their UI. At the same time the iPad (and the Android tablets that are soon to come) are establishing a completely different paradigm.

So what does the future look like? Will the “mouse & pointer” combo become some quaint idea of yesteryear? Probably not. Touch interfaces are wonderful for devices that you hold in your lap or that lay flat on a low table, but as soon as you have a vertical service it’s been shown that fatigue sets in pretty quickly with touch interfaces. Any time you have to manipulate a device above heart level it becomes an issue over time. For a fast transaction like using an ATM machine you’d never notice this, but in an hour long touch-gaming session where you have to hold your arms up to manipulate the game, you’d definitely feel it. Lowering the screen, of course, leads to neck strain and back problems.

It’s an exciting time and I feel like computing/gaming/human-machine interfacing is poised on the cusp of a major upheaval; one which will lead to improvements in the way we manipulate these devices that we’re so enamored with.