iPad has entered my life

Safari has become the new Finder. Say goodbye to the desktop metaphor.

After being lured into the world of Macintosh back in 1984 by a "new user experience," followed by a couple of decades of fine tuning my brain and eye-hand coordination, now the UI again represents both a challenge and an opportunity. I think I will adjust pretty easily despite my advancing years, and the new iPad should broaden computer usage to a much wider audience.

Files now live in the "cloud," hiding behind aliases and short cuts disguised as web pages. Locating things has become a search, rather than one's way down through a hierarchy of folders and files... type a few letters and you're there. Could it be that this is a better way for those among us who are not "list-oriented?"

Data entry has a new set of tools, Or a lack thereof.

No arrow keys. No undo. A pointing tool that has a mind of it's own. No Save commands. No Print or Print to PDF commands. A keyboard without numbers. A spelling corrector that fights with me that "Macintouch" should really be "Macintosh."

Some of these changes are "fixable" by using third-party software "apps." Others just require slight mind-adjustments, like using a special shift key to get numbers and punctuation.

The iPad is seductive despite its challenges. It's light. It's sturdy. It's "cute." it works well at most of my everyday tasks involving the web and email. It looks like it will integrate easily into my "system" for managing and viewing digital images, as soon as the necessary "camera adaptor" arrives from China.

It gives me a third option for portable computing between my MacBook and smartphone (Treo 700p). Deciding what to carry should be fairly easy since each product brings its own tradeoffs of functions vs weight. The Treo will go everywhere. The iPad will go with me whenever I have room. The laptop will go wherever I have to deal with troubleshooting or creative/design activities, or need other software capabilities that don't exist for the iPad.

For two and a half decades I have lived and taught the philosophy that good software, properly matched to the task at hand, will provide a menu command to perform whatever needs to be done. The promise of the iPad and its new interface will ultimately succeed if Apple and the app developers succeed at maintaining that same consistency and predictability. The iPad has a good chance to become the modern "computer for the rest of us," and for "them," too.

Macworld 2010

San Francisco

Thursday, February 11, 2010.

11:15am. It’s hard to believe that I’m about to enter the exhibit hall for at least my 40th “Macworld.” My first was in Boston - I believe that it was in 1985. I began to attend the San Francisco shows around 1989, and only missed a few in either city after that, including the brief New York Macworld and the sadly impotent return to Boston’s shiny new convention center.

So here I am, with memories of crowds at registration, rented Hummers, signs all over San Francisco and exhibits that packed both big halls at the Moscone Center. But today’s reality is that there are only a few signs for about a block around the convention center, uncrowded sidewalks and no Hummers. And the larger Hall A is being used by a “Gift Convention.” The sidewalk in front of Hall A where eager folks once handed out non-working replicas of the soon-to-be released Zip Disk is empty.

Exhibits open in a few minutes, but there is no push to get into the hall. Out here at the bottom of the escalator there tables with more seats empty that not. Upstairs where I picked up my badge I had a choice of lines and was the only person in the one that I chose.

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Fortunately I heard a cheerful “Hi Joe” as PMUG’s Devores passed me on the other side of the escalator, verifying that I’m really in the right place.

11:30 I'm going into the exhibits now - they opened 45 min early -apparently not enough people bought the "early entrance" perk to please the exhibitors...

12:30 It took just under an hour to make my first pass through the exhibits. This was longer than I had expected, and included only one conversation with a vendor. The aisles are comfortably full with a few inexplicable pockets of enthusiasm for aftermarket enhancements for iPods and iPhones. The vendor - I'll get his identity later - was at his first Macworld and wishes they had put his document scanner closer to other business-oriented products such as document scanning software. He turned out to be an industry old-timer from SuperMac and PaperPort. This is a "pre-introduction" showing so I'll go back for more specific info.

I saw only one unexpected product: an overlay for the iPhone places raised "bumps" over and between the virtual keys, providing a tactile feel. It's an effect something like the raised bumps that are found on the "f" and "g" keys of many conventional keyboards to aid touch typists.

MacSpeech is showing a variety of products and has a live demo of their voice recognition software. Omni products has a large booth

The highlight of the exhibits may be 20-30 small developer stands under the "Special Interest Pavillion" banner. I'll spend lots more time there later.

The music has started.

2:40pm The crowd has grown and filled the exhibit area. There a very few empty chairs and lots of campers sitting on the floor to eat their picnic lunches out here, in the lower lobby, and there are about the same numbers of people going both up and down the escalators...

Navigon AG (Hamburg, Germany) is showing their turn by turn nav system for the iPhone and offering a $69. show price. It includes a set of Navteq maps which - unfortunately - have the same bug as the Navteq maps in our 2+ year old Motorola TN30 GPS (try to find SE Briggs St, Milwaukie, Oregon with your favorite GPS unit)

Berklee School of Music (Boston) again has a large booth with demos of software for music creation and editing. Their presentation are on line at http://berkleemwsf.com/

Scosche Industries has a big crowd interested in iPod/iPhone accessories. They showed some interesting bluetooth products at CES but I didn’t fight thru the mob to see if they’re available here.

No sign of FileMaker although their web site last year stated an expectation to be here.

I talked with Omni - they are working on versions of their productivity software for iPhone and iPad... should be interesting since lots of bells and whistles won’t fit on the smaller screen and could reduce the modal clutter that has kept me away from their Mac products.

Microsoft has a modest booth for MacOffice, giving away mints in heart-shaped tins that proclaims “OfficeMac (heart) You! For more there’s twitter.com/officeformac --Correction: they are Red Hots - not mints...

5:20pm The crowd thinned out fast after the lunch hour. The floor stayed busy, but not jammed up.

I spent some time with Mike Jacobs, co-founder of Appsaurus (in the small developer area) His product will assist an iPhone user to extract a short list of potentially-interesting iPhone/iPad apps from the iTunes Store. In the old days this would have been called AI (Artificial Intelligence)! The booth was so new that it didn't have a sign, and its identity was displayed (hidden?) by colorful renderings of dinosaur-like creatures. www.appsaurusapp.com

At another Small Developer stand, CEO Tod Hadley of Juicy Development explained that his Talk Radio app would soon be able to help radio listeners to avoid selected talk shows while driving... the app now makes it possible to do the inverse selection. www.juicydevelopment.com

Guiseppe Giunto, CEO, and his son demonstrated Hyperbolic Software's "Tidy Up" software for the Mac and convinced me to buy a copy. In addition to its more-or-less obvious functions, Tidy Up makes it possible to scan multiple hard drives and identify one copy of every unique file, so that a collection can be created without making duplicates. www.hyperbolicsoftware.com

Time to call it a day. More tomorrow, maybe.

Friday, February 12, 2010

1:04 I've been in the hall for about 3 hours and the traffic pattern looks similar to yesterday except a little lighter at mid-day. Still the aisles have been busy. The mobile special interest area is packed with iPhone app developers'

I was taken by 3DiPhoneInc from Vancouver BC, whose president, Arcady Kropov demonstrated 3D imaging using pairs of iPhones - one set taking stereo pairs from a platform above the booth, and another pair used with an inexpensive magnifier-viewer. (Think of an 1800s stereo viewer - the one with the wood handle - recreated in brightly colored plastic!)

Talking with HP about their "Media Server" product, I realized how difficult it is to define the product without using the words "server" and "media." That said, it appears to offer less functionality than the recently announced Apple "Mini Server" as a tool for collecting and brings entertainment content to the living room.

Some miscellaneous items that were interesting enough at the time for me to pick up literature, but not to engage the booth personnel:

General purpose business apps from RLM Tools (www.rlmtools.com and Quickoffice (quickoffice.com)

Eye-Fi X2 enhanced SDHC 8GB memory card that provides 802.11n network connectivity and wifi-based geotagging/location service

Despite the show floor activity I sense a sort of depressed feeling among us "old timers." Big change is upon us. I hope it's not well-represented by the 20-something guy who sat cross-legged in the middle of one of the heavily-traveled aisles like an earth-toned pylon, nor by the hundreds of people who simply walked around him without a sign of concern.

I'm out of here.

Ham Radio and Emergency Organizations

The local amateur radio emergency service folks have been putting on a show of organizational bad behavior for quite a few weeks now. I'm embarrassed by it.

Fortunately I can still remember the joy and satisfaction of my early years of "hamming" starting with getting my ticket as a 15-year old in 1947. At this point I can still copy cw at 25-30 wpm (faster than I can send it) and I still feel pride at the inevitable reports of hams doing good works in emergencies. Yet I can't help feeling that the institutionalization of ham's emergency activities has gone too far when it causes well-meaning radio amateurs to get caught up in office politics and posturing... no matter what the "official" party line may be.

Joe Hallett

W2HFD, ex-W1QMJ

Amateur Extra Class

This is one of those "thoughts while driving" that seems profound and capable of solving many of the world's problems... at least mine.

The trigger was the FCC statement on internet freedom. I guess my brain matched it up to thoughts about health insurance and various other situations where private industry and "government" are both capable of delivering services.

Here's the thought: I don't want businesses treating me any differently than I want government to treat me. It's isn't an ideological issue for me, it's just a matter of fairness.

No matter who I'm dealing with, I want to be treated fairly. Discrimination is bad. So are cheating and lying. I'm happy to let the market decide issues of product pricing, and features. But I expect the providers to be like people... can you say "corporate citizens?"

There should be a better way to put the liars and cheats out of business that doesn't depend upon arguments about privatizing and nationalizing. And I don't buy an argument that says that an insurance company is a better judge than a Government single payer system of "when to pull the plug."

Today's Oregonian editorialized: "Tek's Shanghai Surprise... The storied company will move production work to China in a disappointing blow to Oregon's economy and pride."

That made me think backward through my career.

Tektronix brought me to the Pacific Northwest in 1980. Years earlier I had a list of the companies that I would most like to work for some day. Tek was at the top of my list, and the reality exceeded the dream, rewarding me with several of the best years of my professional life, before the once-great company started to crumble.

I had experienced a similar scenario during almost 25 years working for Sylvania Electric Products - my first real job out of college - first watching it merge with General Telephone to form GTE, and later deciding that the pending acquisition by Philips was a good time to make that move to Oregon.

During a coop education at Northeastern University, I had worked for four half-years at General Radio Company, then the premier electronic test equipment company. It was said that GR's new competitor, now known as HP, could have the business west of the Rockies, and GR would keep the rest. GR, too, is long gone, vanishing into a new world of semiconductor manufacturing.

All that's left are the brands: Tektronix, Sylvania, GR(GenRad).

In one lifetime this seems like a story of multiple disasters. But maybe growth in population and technology leave no other options for the old-style company than to "burn out." The next century may not favor big companies organized for "efficiency of scale." Instead, a better model may be loose affiliations of many smaller firms that can act together or individually to meet current conditions, without incurring long term commitments.

The challenge for today's kid is to guess what tools and experience are the best qualifications for staying on top even as the ride gets bumpy.

CNN: What are You?

Ok, I admit that my politics are more Keith and Rachel than O'Reilly and Beck. But at least they represent a consistent bias. If I want one-sided coverage of the news I know where to go.

PBS and CSPAN provide lots of useful resources but they lack focused coverage of policy & opinion when it comes to current political issues.

Where is CNN? This network has done serious reporting on many subjects, but it seems to be left at the starting gate on current issues.

Why must CNN support Lou Dobbs' rants and superficial discussions among the same experts night after night.

Dan Schorr recently said that his concern about the decline of newspapers is the loss of editing. So why couldn't CNN be a viable TV "newspaper?"

Why can't CNN give us more access to the wisdom of thoughtful, knowledgeable people like David Gergen and David Brooks and give them enough time to fully develop subjects of current interest. Why not add some serious satire to the mix, rather than leaving it to the Comedy Channel? And let's eliminate plugs for new books as a criteria for being on these shows.

Perhaps they could have a daily "top ten list" of topics that the public is (or should be) concerned about. They could bring in expert, middle-of-the-road, moderators for each topic, updating at regular intervals and interrupting with "breaking news" when appropriate. Perhaps they wouldn't be afraid of talking about Limbaugh's inappropriate comments or references to the "Brown shirts" or the roles of various special interest groups in political debates.

GE vs Apple

Am I the only one who enjoys watching the capitalization horse race between GE and AAPL?

It's back to being pretty close today, despite the recent big run up in Apple...