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My Thoughts on the iPad

iPad
I've followed engadget's live blog, seen the keynote video, listened to Tom and Molly talk about it, even read others' opinions on engadget, gdgt and twitter, etc etc. I guess you could say I am pretty excited. 

The tech savy(engadget, gdgt, BOL, etc) are in general underwhelmed or disappointed. Below are some of the complaints I have heard:
  • No Webcam or microphone - which pretty much rules out using Skype on it, which would have been a great killer app at this form factor. I think they will add these to the iPad in the future. Update: actually, there IS a built-in microphone, so at least you can make audio calls with Skype.
  • Still No Flash Support - you cannot seriously claim it has the best web browsing experience when it doesn't support Flash! Apple has not allowed Flash to run on the iPhone all this time. Now that they are doing the  same with the iPad - which with it's larger screen you would think would be much better suited to run Flash apps, and add to it the fact that Flash has never ran great on Macs, it's becoming obvious that this is political. Apple wants to fight a format war with Adobe. Why would you need flash when you can buy great apps from the app store and buy TV shows and movies from iTunes? On the other hand, I can also see the concern that almost all of the flash apps out there(possibly with the exception of Flash ads) just aren't designed for the touch screen, and having users run them on the iPhone or the iPad degrades the user experience and therefore could hurt the products' reputation. Apple's PR, however, is going with: "it could rapidly drain battery life", which I think is probably in reality 3rd or 4th down on their list of concerns.
  • No multiple tasks/apps/windows - this is a pretty big one: given the iPad's screen real estate, it seems artificially limiting to not allow multiple apps to be running in separate windows. I believe the iPad will eventually have this feature. How the UI will turn out will be interesting to see. 
  • The App Store Sucks - Apple prevents certain types of applications from entering its App Store. One example is programming language interpreters; another is any app that Apple views as overstepping their core apps' boundaries. Given that the iPad is even more of a computer than the iPhone, these limitations may become even more glaring.
  • I just don't see the need - "I already have a laptop and a smartphone, there just isn't any more room for yet another device!" I think that at the moment the iPad is more exciting for developers than consumers, but that will change.

All the negatives are well and good, but I overlook all of them, because, from my point of view, the iPad - and what it will lead to - is much bigger. All of the tablet computers I've seen in stores in the past - HP's, Fujitsu's, etc: they all suck. These computer manufacturers created tablet computers but installed on them an Operating System which is design from the ground up for use with a mouse and a keyboard. They figured: "A tablet computer has a stylus. We can use it as a pointing device in the same way that a mouse is a pointing device. We just hook up the stylus driver to control the pointer, and boom! We got ourselves a tablet Operating System! Brilliant!" This is understandable, because it is the nature of software engineers to want to build solutions that solve as many problems as possible - and Windows is a very very big solution indeed. However, this tendency also causes brilliant people to routinely produce crap. The tablet form factor is more versatile than the mouse, and can be much more natural to use from a UI standpoint, but dumbing it down and retrofitting it to an inferior UI paradigm caused it to be marginal. Yes, you could use a tablet to draw, sign documents, take notes, etc, but when it came to interacting with the UI elements, it was usually very kludgy. 

iPad is the first tablet I've seen that comes close to realizing the potential of the tablet form factor. Why? It's all about the software, stupid! The software that come with the iPad were designed and written  specifically for the large multi-touch screen device. This is to take nothing away from the amazing hardware. Multi-touch was ground breaking when it first surfaced. When the iPad comes to market, it will be the single best showcase of multi-touch technology. But, the software is what brings it all together, and you can tell Apple put a lot of time and effort into the software. Okay, enough of my rambling. What am I really trying to say? 

iPad marks a historical step towards our liberation from mouse pointers and a paradigm shift in computer technology.

I hereby reiterate my prediction that in 5 to 10 years, mice will be on the way to extinction.
Posted by Toby about 1 month ago about apple, fourcast, gadgets, ipad, tablet and tech (0 comments)

Simulating a Tablet Using the Touchpad

Chinese Handwriting
I came across OS X's Chinese Trackpad Handwriting input method the other day, and was really impressed. Once you activate the handwriting mode(hotkey: Ctrl-Shift-Space), the mouse pointer disappears, and you can use write your chinese character on your trackpad using your finger. The UI looks like this:

Handwriting UI

What's interesting to me is the buttons on the left and right of the character recognition area. It took me a while to figure out how to use them at first, but after some experimentation, I figured it out: basically, the pretty gray box corresponds to your trackpad, and so to press a button on the upper left corner, you would tap the area in the upper left corner of your trackpad, and so on and so forth. It is very intuitive really. I would even say brilliant. Essentially, the trackpad has been made to work just like the Vistablet or any of the tablet accessories you can get from the Apple store these days. 

Which got me thinking, how far can we take this? Can we use this to say...draw? A couple of google searches later, I discovered the Inklet from Ten One Design. The Inklet is an application, which is primarily used with a stylus you can buy from the same company called the Pogo Sketch. 

Pogo Sketch Stylus

The Pogo Sketch is a pressure sensitive stylus that works with the Apple trackpads as well as the iphone and ipod touch. With Inklet and the Pogo Sketch together, you basically have the features of Vistablet. Here's their demo using Photoshop:

Embedded Content


Brilliant, brilliant stuff. Another why-didn't-I-think-of-that moment for me. The lesson from all of this is that, at least for the new Macs, you can do a lot more with the trackpad than you thought(or at least I thought). For some types of applications, it may make sense to completely do away with the mouse pointer and use a tablet-style interface instead, and we can do this NOW! (Yes, now - three days before the imminent release of the Apple Tablet). Tablet doubters, just you wait, tablets will be the way of the future. In 5-10 years(oh this could be another Fourcast prediction), the mice could be heading towards extinction. Just you wait.
Posted by Toby about 1 month ago about fourcast, gadgets, tablet, tech and touchpad (0 comments)

HP Mini vs Eee PC

Netbooks are the new ipods this year! The took up 8 of the 10 spots on Amazon's top seller list towards the end of the year. I am going to share my experiences with the HP Mini and the Eee PC.

We first bought the Eee PC at target. They just had it laying around at the end of an aisle - they were still there the last time I was there. They go for only $299! The one we got was the 901 I believe and had a forked version of debian on it called Xandros. The out-of-the-box experience was pretty good. Firefox 2 , Skype, and a bunch of other apps were preinstalled. There were also launchers for gmail and google docs. I also give them credit for doing a great job integrating with the hardware. Most stuff worked fairly painlessly, by Linux standards at least. However, the we never could get it to work with our brothers 210c printer because the device driver wasn't on the list. Also, the wireless was flaky at times. Sometimes when it starts up from sleep mode, it takes a while for the wireless to connect, sometimes you have to even manually restart the connection. During our vacation, we could never get it to connect to the access point at the resort, whereas the windows XP machine was able to connect. The community for the Eee PC is pretty good, I figured out how to install a program someone wrote to add custom launchers to my desktop. Surprisingly, it had ruby and python preinstalled. I installed a whole rails dev environment on it too. It had only 4G of on-board storage(flash, no harddisk) so we had to be careful what to install. At the end though, the keyboard was too small and the touch pad buttons were too hard to press. It really wasn't comfortable doing dev work on it.

So, a couple of month in to using the Eee PC, we saw the HP Mini at Costco. The main thing that attracted us to it was - it looked good! We decide to get it, and if we liked it, we would return the Eee PC(Target and Costco both have 90 return policies for electronics). The Mini's keyboard is much larger than that of the Eee and much more comfortable. The mouse buttons are placed strangly on the left and right vertical sides of the touch pad. The operating system is Window XP, not Vista, what a relief! We are very familiar with XP so that's a plus. It's got a 60G harddrive in it, much more spacious, so we can put pictures on it, unlike the Eee. It's got USB and an SD-mini slot, good for use with our camera. The form factor of the Mini is lengthier than the Eee because it's a wide screen. The Mini is very fast coming out of sleep mode, and the wireless works much more reliably than the Eee. But I have had once when the wireless couldn't connect and I had to manually repair it. We like the HP Mini, and looks like we are going to stick with it.
Posted by Toby about 1 year ago about eee, gadgets, hp and netbook (0 comments)

Beef with Frog!

Dang! Frogger! You no behave right!

I am getting proficient enough with the black USB froggie to start doing some real work, but this bug that I finally uncovered make using it really painful. Whenever I use the ctrl-s combination on the frogpad, the ctrl key will lock, eventhough the ctrl indicator does not show it. This kinda makes everything you do after that difficult. No, this does not have the feel of a polished product.
Posted by Toby about 1 year ago about frogpad, gadgets and tech (2 comments)

Update on the Frogpad

Here's the latest on the frogpad. I exchanged my bluetooth frogpad for a USB one, and the reason is: the USB one had a non-sticky symbol key: so, the latest product(the bluetooth version) is worse than the earlier one(the USB), at least from my perspective. The USB one works a look better in terms of typing in symbols, at I expected. I am still using only on and off though, so I really need a lot more practice before I can use it for normal work. I do use it at work some times, and it's quite easy to switch back and forth, and/or have a different key input for different windows.
Posted by Toby about 1 year ago about gadgets and tech (0 comments)

书法with Vistablet

 I bought avistablet today.  And I found that with it you can write 书法，and I am taking advantage of it. Here's my first attempt.

Posted by Toby about 1 year ago about gadgets, shufa and tablet (6 comments)

书法with Vistablet

 I bought avistablet today.  And I found that with it you can write 书法，and I am taking advantage of it. Here's my first attempt.

Posted by Toby about 1 year ago about gadgets, shufa and tablet (6 comments)

书法with Vistablet

 I bought avistablet today.  And I found that with it you can write 书法，and I am taking advantage of it. Here's my first attempt.

Posted by Toby about 1 year ago about gadgets, shufa and tablet (6 comments)

Love hate relationship with the frog

Sigh... I like typing on the frog. But till now, I haven't been able to use it for my programing work because, while it is quite good for typing in English, it is lousy for typing programs. This is because symbols on the frog are a pain to type. You have to hit one key to go into symbol mode(it's modal) hit your symbol, and then another key stroke to go out of symbol mode. In most programming langages(except maybe COBOL), you alternate between letters and symbols quite often, this is why the frog may not be suitable for programming. Can you reprogram the keys? I don't know, haven't found any resources on it yet. I later found that the USB version of the frog is better in this respect because the symbol key is non-modal(like the shift key). No word yet on whether I can get my Bluetooth version to do that though. Keeping an eye on this thread.
Posted by Toby about 1 year ago about frogpad, gadgets and tech (0 comments)

Blogging on my Frogpad

So I've had my frogpad for about half a month now. I've been practicing on it about a hour every two or three days, and.. this is my first blog post on it! I still obiviously need a lot more practice, but it's coming along.
I tell ya, not having to switch back and forth between the keyword and the mouse does change the way you do things a lot. You'll find that you'll be able to use the mouse in a lot more situations where you normally wouldn't. This is cool! As for my normal typing, because I've been switch back to it for my normal usage, I've sort of overcome the skill deteriation there.
Posted by Toby about 1 year ago about frogpad, gadgets and tech (0 comments)

Frogpad growing pains

I've been training with the Frogpad now about a hour every other day or so. And I've found it's negatively affected my normal keyboard typing. Basically it's causing a confusion in the circuitry in my brain that responds to what to do when I want to type a certain letter. Whereas before it "hardcoded" on what to do, now it has to first know whether I am typing on a regular keyboard or a Frogpad. There's a term for it in cognitive science, but I can't remember it now. When I learned DVORAK I had the luxury that I intended to give up QWERTY completely, but now with the frogpad I am not sure that's the case. I guess right now I'll just try to learn the frogpad while still staying proficient with DVORAK by switching back and forth. Crossing my fingers...
Posted by Toby about 1 year ago about frogpad, gadgets, keyboard, tech and typing (0 comments)

I got my Frogpad!!

Yea!!! Pictures to come. I love my shiny new gadget! Starting to practice...can type some sentences slowly now...
Posted by Toby about 1 year ago about frogpad, gadgets and tech (0 comments)