Hm. I seem to have scrambled my religious holidays again. No wonder the Easter Bunny didn’t leave an iPad under my pillow in exchange for that tooth.
OK, ’fess up, now — how many of you crazy kids rushed out to score iPads yesterday? I won’t make fun of you, I promise. You can trust me; I’m in the media.
If you had one and were able to figure it out in time for the Tour of Flanders this morning, you’d know that Fabian Cancellara crushed Tom Boonen to win the cobbled classic. Dropped him like a used syringe on the Muur, he did. But you might not have been able to watch any of the live video feeds ’cause they’re probably Flash-based, which makes the iPad hork. Pray for the rapid expansion of HTML5.
In comments Steve O’ is placing bets as to whether I’ll be buying an iPad. Sad to say, if any Dog-catchers are staking out the Briargate Apple Store in hopes of throwing a net over me, they’ll be disappointed.
I’m pretty much in agreement with former Apple marketing guy Guy Kawasaki, who toldThe New York Times: “The first 5 million will be sold in a heartbeat. But let’s see: You can’t make a phone call with it, you can’t take a picture with it, and you have to buy content that before now you were not willing to pay for. That seems tough to me.”
Well said. I think the iPad is a nifty little toy with a wealth of possibilities, but in its infancy it’s clearly more about consumption than creation, and I already feel a tad overwhelmed by the wonders of the digital world, thanks all the same.
If I were to spring for some new technology in the iPad’s price range, I might go for a netbook Hackintosh, if only to drive myself further around the bend with technical problems. A guy can write and edit on the run with one of those.
Meanwhile, the NYT is live-blogging today’s iPad mania. That’s about as close to one as I intend to get. For now, anyway.
• Late update: Jesus, Apple’s marketing department must love the media foofaraw over the company’s every product release. Every major daily and most of the minors sent the troops out to cover today’s iPad feeding frenzy. Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray, told the NYT that he estimates Apple will spend $77 million promoting the iPad. Uh, why, exactly? Why buy what everyone’s giving away?
Since I’m going to be away from wi-fi for a spell during my Arizona trip, I thought it might be smart to see whether I can update the DogSite via iPhone. Too bad I didn’t think about doing this a couple months ago. The joys of technology may be boundless, but so are the headaches.
Text updates work OK, kinda, sorta — I have to type in the HTML window instead of the Visual window — but pix are a no-go on the Flash-impaired iPhone when using Safari. I tried an end-around using TwitPic, but no joy. Anyone out there with a little more experience? I’m running an old version of self-hosted WordPress (2.6), which may be the source of my troubles. There’s a WordPress app for iPhone, but it requires WordPress 2.7.
The long-awaited Apple tablet was announced today, and the name — iPad — is apparently causing much snickering for perfectly predictable reasons. Hell, I snickered myself when I glanced at the live-bloggery surrounding what appeared to be an iPod Touch on growth hormone.
The iPad: Insert your favorite sanitary-napkin joke here.
“That’s fuckin’ stupid,” I thought. “Who wants one of those?”
As Pogue notes, the iPad seems aimed more toward consumption than creation, which means it’s not intended for the likes of me. When I go somewhere I need a full-featured laptop, with Photoshop, Office and other bells and whistles (like an actual keyboard). I’m driving, not flying, so I’m not interested in watching movies, streaming video or reading an e-book. What I want to be able to do on the road is pretty much what I do at home — write, edit, take photos, wrestle with race results (which show up in everything from Excel to PDF to Cretan Linear B), download really filthy porn and hack into the FBI database to see what they’ve got on me this week.
But for the gadget geek who simply must stay wired on the go, it’s a pretty damn’ smart little piece of whiz-bang — and dirt cheap for an Apple product at $499 for the basic model.
Aftermarket add-ons include a smart, foldable carrying case, which both protects the iPad and lets you angle it for more convenient movie-watching or typing on the virtual keyboard, and an actual keyboard-slash-dock that charges the iPad and lets you add a camera connection kit and output audio to a stereo or powered speakers. So nobody is gonna get away with paying half a hundy for this thing. The add-ons will add up.
And once enough hipsters break out their iPads at the local java stop, people will forget the risible connection to sanitary napkins and the snickering will cease. It will be replaced, as per usual, by drooling.
• Late update: One of the Twitterati says that “MaxiPod” would be a better name. I can’t imagine how I missed that one. I must not be drinking enough.
It’s New Technology Weekend here at the DogHaus, what with the installation of a refurbished Sony Blu-ray player to feed the TV and a new iMac to feed the rest of us. How odd to find oneself in the 21st century just like that.
The Blu-ray install involved an acceptable profanity-to-success ratio, since the owner’s manual is surprisingly straightforward and both the Sony and the Toshiba TV have HDMI ports. Our obsolete Sony home-theater setup does not, but it does share optical digital connectivity with the Blu-ray. And hijo, madre, puto, cabron, does the sound output all of a sudden get a whole lot better when you plug that bad boy in. And all this time we thought the salesperson at Ultimate Electronics was bullshitting us. That cable’s been gathering dust around here for months.
The iMac, meanwhile, is getting its trial by fire today and tomorrow during my shift in the VeloBarrel, which presently involves posting stories and photos from cyclo-cross nats in Oregon. One interesting hurdle cropped up this morning — it’s not clear whether my copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements 6, which I use for RGB photo editing, will function properly under Snow Leopard, a.k.a. OS X 10.6.1. Some folks say si, others no.
While Adobe will graciously permit me to upgrade to a full CMYK version of Photoshop CS4 for a mere $599 US, I would rather spend that hard-earned cash on tasty food, strong drink and a proper solstice present for Herself, who after all has had to jog 19 laps around the sun with Your Humble Narrator. This is not exactly a day at the beach.
So if any of you have experience with Snow Leopard and Elements 6, please feel free to chime in. Otherwise I may just buy a $70 copy of Elements 8 for online photo editing and keep using the G4 and P-shop 4 to color those silly-ass cartoons.
Meanwhile, Harry Reid should punt Joe Lieberman to the GOP where he belongs. Let the miserable prick give the Elefinks brain cramps for a change. The cocksucker is as reliable as MacWrite II on a Cray supercomputer.
Mad Blog Media 