We’ve been making biscuits (which we often do on Wednesdays for Playgroup) but today, for a change, we had added some almond essence. We’re done, and she’s licking the bowl.
Me: Does it taste almondy?
Hazel: I was wondering what that taste was.
She’s 3.
Describing the fate of a pop-out book she’s been looking at:
“Unfortunately, I dropped it and the staples didn’t hold tight enough.”
A few notes for the non-technical readers of this blog.
So there’s a new iPad?
Yes, out March 25 here in Australia.
Should I get one?
It’s thinner, faster, and has video cameras for video chats. If that doesn’t excite you, and saving money does, get the old iPad for $449 (was $629) while you can. The new one will likely be about $599 as the AU$ is worth more than a year ago. While only you can know if an iPad would be good for you, they’re very good and you’ll probably like it. Apple Stores allow 14 days to return for a full refund if you don’t. Don’t forget to download my apps!
I have a laptop, what do I want an iPad for?
It’s what’s missing from the iPad (keyboard, weight, size) that makes it good. You can read on the couch, use it in a meeting as obtrusively as a piece of paper, kids can use it, older people can use it. Applications for it are generally cheaper and more focused than their desktop equivalents. However, it doesn’t have a huge screen, won’t help you open 20 windows at once, and isn’t for everyone. I would still choose an iPad for many tasks: Zinio’s iPad app is better than their Mac app I use for reading New Scientist, and obviously I’d rather read on the sofa than at my desk. Music is also much easier on the iPad.
What about the other tablets available?
All bad, according to reviews. Bad, expensive, or both. iPad will rule this roost for at least a year to come, and are likely to have the best apps for even longer. Technical users may prefer a different tablet, or no tablet at all.
What does Apple say about the iPad?
They made this very nice video. It’s of course a sales video, but it shows a lot of use cases I hadn’t considered.
I have more questions!
Ask away in the comments, before they automatically close.
There’s a very poor way to begin a thought
a way to show your iq is nought
if this comes out then you’re just not thinking
or maybe you’ve just spent too long drinking
I’m not a racist, but
yes you are
yes you are
yes you are
I’m not a racist, but
yes you are
oh yes you are you are
If you say love it or leave it, how dare you
tell me this country is just for you few
bigots who can’t tolerate something different
except Chinese takeaways you think are brilliant
I’m not a racist, but
yes you are
yes you are
yes you are
I’m not a racist, but
yes you are
oh yes you are you are
The world is bigger than you and your brain
the diversity of culture is awesome, insane
your culture you think you share with me?
it’s yours alone — mine’s open and free
I’m not a racist, but
yes you are
yes you are
yes you are
I’m not a racist, but
yes you are
oh yes you are you are
Complain all you want about Muslims or Jews
you’re just a bully finding foes to abuse
it doesn’t matter if their skin’s not white
and I’m not going to listen to more of your shite
I’m not a racist, but
yes you are
yes you are
yes you are
I’m not a racist, but
yes you are
oh yes you are you are
…shole.
Licensed Creative Commons Attribution. I would love someone like The Herd or Andrew Hansen to sing this. Maybe all of them together?
A quick followup to my last post about not ignoring minorities. A new policy seems to force third-party content sellers to also sell through Apple’s in-purchase mechanisms if they sell through other means. So, for example, Amazon would have to sell through their app as well as letting you buy through their website.
Without offering any comment on the policy itself, I can see this playing out a couple of ways:
No matter how it plays out, this is going to be seen as yet another money grab by some techs, bloggers and so on. Some of them are more likely to influence their friends and relatives not to buy an iPad or an iPhone because “Apple is evil/greedy”. Many small policies can — rightly or wrongly — add up to a much larger impression. (It’s been a joke on The IT Crowd: “I’ll be able to get an iPhone without giving any money to Apple: I’ll be living the dream.”)
Salespeople have monetary incentive to sell non-iPhone devices already through a different commission structure. I already know someone who was pushed away from an iPhone to an Android because a salesperson convinced her to, and she’s not alone. If people don’t study technology, they’ll get information from third-party sources: media, friends, salespeople. Maybe they don’t care too much about the salespeople, but the techies? The media? If Apple gets them offside — rightly or wrongly — then that’s a problem.
Several years ago, I created a multimedia product with Director. At the time, nearly everyone had at least an 800×600 pixel screen, so I designed the (freakishly odd) interface to use one. It worked everywhere except on the Mac owned by the guy who had to sign off on the project, who had an ancient 640×480 screen.
That incident taught me that you can’t ignore minorities. If your product is designed only for the majority platform, you will piss some people off, and to some degree, this is inevitable. For example, a mobile-targeted web app is useful to anyone with a smartphone, but if you want more functionality than the web allows, or want to make money by selling it, you’ll likely be making an iPhone app and skipping the Android market.
In desktop computing just a few years ago, the majority of customers were on Windows, so a Mac client was often a second priority. A key fact, though: many bloggers, PR people, geeks and other tech tastemakers were on Macs. No Mac client, no buzz. Here’s a quote from a co-founder of a Dropbox competitor:
Next, we had issues getting the press excited at launch. We built a fantastic Windows client. 3 years ago, everyone was running Windows*. We were so excited to show the press, yet they *all* had Macs. Walt Mossberg wouldn’t write about our product because it was PC only. Months after we hired our PR agency, we found out that they had never even used our product… because they too only had Macs. It’s pretty hard to pitch a service when you haven’t used it.
At the end of the day, you’ll fail to cater for at least some part of your potential market. But if that market contains the people who would make your product popular, you’ve got serious problems.
If you want attention, general consumer market share is not nearly as important as market share among journalists, bloggers and techies.
Two gems. The other day, she was complaining about how she didn’t like something. It might have been a piece of carrot. She said “It’s too crunchy.” It wasn’t, and we told her so. “It’s too soft then.”
And tonight, at the top of her lungs, “I’M NOT YELLING!!!”.
Philip Bloom knows a lot about DSLR video. If you’d like to hear what he has to say, he’ll be in Brisbane for two dates only: Feb 25 (Fri, 6pm-10pm) and 26 (Sat, 12pm-4pm). Book your tickets here:
http://www.rodemic.com/philipbloom/
A great chance to find out more about video on digital SLRs and network with the local community. I’ll be there on the Saturday if you want to meet up. Bring weird Final Cut Pro questions for me if you like, it should be a good time.
There are also dates available in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, but tickets are limited.
Among the great things that Twitter has given us (instant worldwide directed mass push communication) there’s the tendency to oversimplify, to dumb down, and to manufacture soundbites. That soundbite culture, already a poison for news media, reduced common opinion to a win/fail mentality where there can’t possibly be something that’s mostly good, or which some people enjoy while other people do not.
So, for example, an opinion held by someone in one part of the world may be retweeted to others, worldwide, who may not be terribly well informed about this particular topic and receive this opinion as fact. One example: I recently received a tweet that went something like this:
“In the battle between HD-DVD and Blu-ray, who won? Streaming.”
And that might well be the case in the US, where Blockbuster went bust and the video shop is a distant memory — Netflix and streaming (Netflix or otherwise) have killed it. But in other parts of the world, say, Australia, it simply isn’t. Few people have the bandwidth for streaming movies on a regular basis, and fewer still have the ability to play them on their television. We don’t have a Netflix competitor worthy of the name, and the iTunes store has a much thinner range of content, very little in HD. We also have a thriving real-world video rental market, where physical stores still distrubute real discs, and where Blu-ray sits right there on the shelf next to DVD for every major release and many minor releases. On a Tuesday, everything’s $1 or $2 if you go to the right place.
So, while the US-centric “discs are dead” perception might be valid for them, much of the rest of the planet makes do with a physical distribution method for just a little bit longer. Quite a lot longer if we don’t get an NBN any time soon — if I can’t stream Blu-ray quality I’ll just wait for the Blu-ray, thanks very much.
There’s a second opinion pushing Blu-ray down, that the discs themselves are burdened with the studios’ need to add bullshit and “enhance” the movie-watching experience. Certainly, companies rarely improve things by getting between me and an entertainment experience; last night, I disconnected the PS3 from the net so that Scott Pilgrim vs. the World would even play — it just sat there “loading” while it had a net connection. Now, I don’t particularly care if my net connection was flaky or their server was down, this is just not good enough. Between that and the endless, painful PS3 updates, it’s very tempting to leave the plug out. We’ll see.
Still, the movie rocked. Fantastic, 10/10, brilliant, incredible, innovative, unexpected and funny. And much better in Blu-ray than any other distribution format. It would be a sad, sad thing to lose support for the best (still flawed!) format available here because it doesn’t suit people in other parts of the world. Now, I don’t think that’s going to happen — Blu-ray players can replace DVD players but not vice-versa — but “buzz” has enough power these days that the perception of a problem is enough to kill a product.
HD video is just one of the many things discussed on social media. If you’re on Twitter, I’m sure you’ve seen headlines presented as opinions (alone or with acronyms like LOL or WTF appended) and had your opinions influenced, even if you didn’t have time to follow the link. Beware: your opinion is not the only one out there; even limited awareness of contrary viewpoints will go a long way. One-line solutions aren’t enough.
My iPad book for kids is now live and free in Australia and New Zealand:
What Was That Noise? AU·NZ
No catches, no ads. I wrote and spoke the words, drew the pictures and edited the sound effects; I hope you and your kids like it. There are sharing links on the final page if you want to tell your friends on Facebook or Twitter.
If you’re in the US, UK, Canada or elsewhere, it’s not free, but it’s cheap as it can be ($0.99/£0.59):
What Was That Noise? (international)