Posts by John Russell
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Amazingly terrible IT work, leading to excellent journalism. So at least there is symmetry.
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Hard News: Killing Volume, in reply to Chris Waugh,
There's a simple aesthetic pleasure about the tactile and olfactory experience of dead trees in hand that no amount or gadgetry can ever match.
Replace "dead trees" with "vinyl records" here, and this is exactly the sort of response I was speaking of earlier when I talked about niche markets.
Secondly, gadgets break, power goes out, batteries go flat. Those who are now dependent on all the fancy new technology are setting themselves up for a hell of a shock. High tech is good, but sometimes old tech and low tech are best tech.
It is true that when society collapses and we regress to a hunter/gatherer pseudo-civilisation, I am going to find it quite difficult to read even the Project Gutenberg collection.
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Hard News: Killing Volume, in reply to Martin Lindberg,
I guess I don't buy as many magazines as I used to but this just silly. I don't believe that a computer is the end-all for media consumption. Would you apply the same reasoning to (physical) books as well?
Yeah, I would. I haven't bought a physical book since I got an iPad. Dead tree books are heavy, awkward, low-density pains in the ass. I expect that, much like vinyl records, physical books will become a niche market for people who simply must read on paper. Or trophies - it's quite hard to get an author to sign your ebook.
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I searched for Music of the Gays on iTunes. Doesn't exist. Very disappointed. Watching old Glee episodes instead.
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Hard News: Christchurch: Square Two, in reply to Emma Hart,
If you want your handcuff key back, you're going to have to solve a series of puzzles, each more fiendish than the last.
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This persons job involves having short-skirted schoolgirls kneel before them? Presumably on command? Their job. Their actual job?
Huh.
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Oh, I am pretty sure you can attempt to measure it on every single state, and create some kind of graph.
One could probably express ones graph as an equation. And then, of course, have that equation printed on a t-shirt. For the ladies. Aw yeah.
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Well, there's a shade of difference in meaning between 'lover' and, say 'bonk', or 'fuckbuddy' or 'shag'.
How about "Beneficiary", as in Friends With.
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I mostly use the iPad for reading twitter, facebook, tumblr posts, my google reader RSS feed, and the usual magazine-style apps like BBC news, the Times editors choice, NPR, and now the NZ Herald. None of these things really needs much of a keyboard, although the onscreen one is fine for tweets and other relatively short bits of writing.
You wouldn't use the thing for serious work involving typing- although it will talk to a bluetooth keyboard, so if you were stuck then it is an option - but it wouldn't be your first choice.
Also ... stuff.co.nz, your web site is pretty okay in Safari, but a native iPad app, even one that just scrapes your site and presents that content in a nicer format, would make me happy.
The Herald app is actually quite usable and easy on the eye, though I am pissed off that it pauses any tunes or podcasts that I'm listening to, just to play a "Whoosh" sound on the intro video, then doesn't bloody well unpause them again. I hope they fix that, because it's a small thing that causes big hate, and it's otherwise nice.
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(Disclaimer: My main workstation is a Mac, but I use Windows and Linux routinely in my work. I'm familiar with all three environments. Each is better than the other at certain things. I admit that apple gets shit wrong, often hilariously and hugely. Don't even get me started on the stupid assholeness of not letting you tether your ipad to your iphone so you can share that 3G connection. Man, that sucks. Screw you, Apple!)
The answer to "How is this different from tablet PCs?" is the same as to "Why is this so cool compared to netbooks?" and that answer is the UI and the OS. The iPad is, frankly, the single slickest and most direct interface currently existing between you and your news and newsfeeds and digital books and comics. And games. And social apps. And most other stuff. You cannot even BEGIN to compare the iPad UI to Windows 7 running on a tablet or a netbook. They're doing completely different things.
I sourced a Wifi one a while back from the US, with the intent to assess it and see what it was like. Result: It's awesome. I bought a bigger, 3G one, on launch day, when they came out here in NZ.
It'll take a while for app writers (especially for content delivery apps) to figure out what works and what sucks with regards to tablet and touch UIs. But then it also took them a while to work out what's shit with regards to web UIs. And in some cases, they're still doing so.
They'll get there. They'll have to. Because this iPad shit, right here? This is really, properly, no foolin', The Future.