PlanetB

Make no mistake, if Steve Jobs came out on stage at an Apple press conference and announced that they were coming out with $500 touch screen toilet paper called iTP, the World would still have mad Apple love and Twitter would be buzzing with multi-touch toilet paper envy. The fan base that Apple has secured is certainly not without merrit. When Jobs came back to Apple in 97, the slew of inspiring tech that came out of the company, with slick design and spot on marketing, arguably took it from being a supplier of niche products to becoming a brand with almost mind controlling powers. And like it or not, the iPhone could potentially be considered as the catalyst for the biggest paradigm shift in consumer technology in the last 20 years.

If you asked me 4 years ago if a multi-touch 3.5 inch screen mobile phone with great software support would be an amazing seller, I would have said yes, regardless of which company produced it. It was exactly what the general consumer didn’t know they needed. The iPad though? It can’t be carried in one’s pocket. Face it folks, it has limitations:

• can’t take pictures.
• wouldn’t be a very good portable music player.
• certainly wouldn’t be useful as a phone.
• no FLASH support
• no multi-tasking

At least that’s the kind of criticism I hear about the iPad – even from the zanny Apple lovers. And when most people speak positively about it, I don’t hear much that would convince my mother that the iPad was something she needed. When I asked my nephew what he thought about the iPad, he almost started foaming at the mouth. But when I ask what it is about it that he likes, his vague descriptions made it sound like the iPad is simply a large-screen iPod that is less effective than my $250 netbook. To some extent, perhaps it is.

But I believe that most people’s expectations of what the iPad should have been was grounded on, more or less, in what the iPhone and netbook or laptop are. The iPad will be neither of those. And it wasn’t meant to be.

• the smart phone or mobile device – fits in the palm of your hand
• the netbook or laptop or desktop – to do things that would otherwise require a keyboard and large(er) screen (not necessarily just email – documents, programming, photo manipulation, etc)

So where does the iPad fit in? It’s a tablet and as such fits squarely (with rounded edges of course) between the mobile device and netbook/laptop. It may be able to do some of the things that both of those devices can do, but will definitely not surpass them in their ability to do various specific things well (phone, writing, programming, music player, photoshop, etc).

The challenge that will face most consumers is getting over their expectations. I forsee lots of unsatisfied iPad buyers on launch day.

There is also a challenge facing software developers targeting the iPad. You can simply take your iPhone apps and blow them up for the larger iPad format. Doing so, however, don’t expect much. Those iFart apps lose their luster on the larger format. Or not… fart noises are still hilarious. But you get the idea. The iPad requires remodeling, rethinking, a different approach.

The question remains – what are some of the practical applications for the Apple iPad? Let’s not really discuss specific apps, but more target markets… I’ve been thinking about this and have some ideas.

Clipboarders - Anyone who would carry a clipboard or visit clients. This includes real estate agents, insurance agents, door to door solicitors, FedEx carriers, physicians, auditors, fitness professionals… the list goes on and on. Each of those markets could likely benefit from niche applications catering to what they would otherwise do with a clipboard or perhaps on a laptop.

Couch surfers – This market includes people who semi-casually want to look something up or show someone something while at home, probably sitting on the couch (or other place, unfortunately probably also including the toilet for some). Could be movie listings, the weather, photo albums, the family tree, security cameras feeds, youtube videos, TED Talks, vodcasts, Discovery Channel tv shows that you can’t watch because the rest of your family is hogging the tv… This list is endless. Sure these applications could possibly work just as well on a different device, but the iPad definitely has a market for these kinds of things and this is the kind of market that most developers will likely target.

Readers – People do still read books. Sure the iPad may not be as good as an e-ink device for reading, but I’m sure the market for ebooks on the iPad will be huge. I’m also sure that many iPad owners will additionally own a Kindle or other ebook reader that is specifically made for such a task. We aren’t heading to a single device World any time soon.

Makers – The makers market is probably one of the smaller markets that could be targetted by the iPad. Programmers would obviously have a hard time writing anything of any significance on the iPad. Writers would likely be somewhat unproductive at writing their next novel without a true keyboard. But for cooking, baking, music making, finger painting, proofing and other things that don’t necessarily require external input devices, there is room for some innovative applications. Of course, Steve Jobs is anti-stylus for some reason. He was quoted as saying “yuck” regarding a stylus. The lack of which means less impact to the maker market. The inability of the iPad to use a regular stylus may not be a huge constraint though as there are indications that third party companies have created a compatible stylus. Having this would no doubt increase the market penetration of the iPad on the maker category.

Gamers – This is obvious. At the iPad press conference, some low key uninspiring game demos were shown. I’m not convinced that driving games will rock on the iPad as much as they do on the iPhone, but there is no doubt an incredible oportunity for game developers to port or create for the iPad. With the larger screen dimensions, even two player board games are possible. Checkers or Go anyone??

Expectations that the iPad would be a device all encompasing in its ability to adequately handle all activities from A to Z is unrealistic. Also unrealistic is the idea that the iPad should have features that simply work better on other devices. It is not a camera nor is it a mobile phone. The iPad is what it is and will be successful in its own right. When I want to talk on the phone I will use my Blackberry. When I want to listen to music, I’ll use my iPod. To take a picture I’ll continue to use my SLR and to read an ebook from the comfort of my couch, well when the iPad comes out, I’ll probably use that.

I’ve been in Hyderabad India for a week and a half now on a work assignment from the company at which I’m “officially” employed. Fortunately, while I’m spending a good chunck of the time here actually working on said assignment, I’ve also been lucky enough to find some time for personal growth, learning and enjoying the experience. India is a place where amazing things are literally a dime a dozen and in many cases, to a Canadian like me, some of the most incredible sites are virtually free.

There are lots of people here. Lots of people. Metro Hyderabad has a population of over 6 million and it’s only the 6th largest city in India. Andhra Pradesh state (of which Hyderabad is the capital) has over 76 million in total! It would be like sticking more than twice the population of Canada in Southern Ontario. Fortunately, the vast majority of the people (in Hyderabad at least) are incredibly friendly. I have yet to feel intimidated. I have yet to feel unwelcome. The other day while taking a tour of a couple of sites, at one point I thought I was asked to take a picture of a group of people. In fact, I was asked to be in a picture with the group. I’m assuming that they mistook me for Brad Pitt.

Along with the large number of people is an insane traffic system. Very losely calling it a system here. Cars, bikes, motorcycles, pedestrians, three wheeled taxis all cutting each other off, all jostling for a better position, honking horns and waving arms abound; it’s like an insane game of Mario Kart. But I have yet to see a single accident.

A few Canadian dollars go a long way. What would get you a standard room in the Holiday Inn downtown Toronto buys you absolute luxury here. The club room at the Taj Krishna comes complete with a buttler, laundry service and invitations to free cocktail parties (strong martinis… with an extra olive if you ask nice). Fantastic food at a fraction of the price and although entrance fees to the tourist sites costs substantially more for foreigners, it’s still barely the cost of a Tim Hortons coffee.

Of course, with all the good comes some not so good. The pollution here is surreal. Walking around outside for any length of time is likely not good for one’s health. With all the vehicles (mostly two stroke deisel), the environment seriously takes a beating from emissions.
And there’s a huge gap between the wealthy and the poor. I’ve been told that there is no middle class here. You either have servants or you are one or could only hope to be. The contrast is dizzying. BMW’s with tinted windows driving beside a man in ragged clothes on a rusty bicycle and a family of four on a single dirt bike; a grand shopping mall in between stores barely standing. In the gardens at the Taj, it’s paradise and we’re spoiled rotten. 100 meters from there, people struggling; pure desperation.

But in paradox, the less people have, the more they want to be friendly and give. I’ve been humbled many times throughout the trip.

All in all, India is an amazing and wonderful place. The history, the culture, the people… every day brings something new and unreal. Being here for a couple of weeks for work has made me want to come back and see more. I’ve only been in one city – can only imagine what the rest of the country has to show.

Computers get old. As they get old, they get noisy. 9 times out of 10, if the noise isn’t the hard drive, it’s a fan somewhere. For a few bucks and a few minutes of your time, you can put the hush back on that fan.

You will need the following items:

1. Lube. Avoid WD40 and other similar spray on lubes like that. They will work, but only temporarily as they tend to dry up. Sewing machine oil actually works very well and can be found at department stores (Sears) for just a couple bucks.
2. Some needle nose pliers. Possibly even tweezers would help.
3. Phillips screwdriver – PC’s are usually held together by the Phillips head screw.
4. If it’s a fan on your graphics card that’s causing all the noise, a set of precision screwdrivers are probably necessary to get at the tiny screws. A set of these things can be picked up usually for $5.

Step 1 : Open the case and take out the fan. Processor fans might be a little trick to take out. They can be clamped down to the socket by various means. If space is tight, might be a good idea to remove a drive or the power supply (unplug first) to give a bit more room. A flash light can help identify how the fan is clamped down. If the fan is on the graphics card, just remove the card, and unscrew the fan from the card.



Step 2 : Once you have the fan screwed off or unclamped from wherever, turn it upside down. There will be a round sticker on the bottom. There’s probably also a sticker on the top, but that’s just for show. Peel the bottom sticker off with the pliers or tweezers.



Step 3 : With the sticker off, there should be a small hole revealed. Drop a single drop of the sewing machine oil into the hole. That’s all it will take. Wait a few seconds for the oil to make its rounds within the fan motor. A tissue or paper towel might be useful to wipe up any excess oil.



Step 4 : Put the sticker back over the hole, turn the fan back upright and screw and clamp everything back together. That’s all there is to it.

On the eve of Halloween, between trick or treaters, my pocket buzzed and I noticed the words appear on the front of my Blackberry Flip (yes, I use that) – “Welcome to Google Wave”. My first reaction was “Sweet” and shut the door on a little panda bear and tiny butterfly. I raced to my netbook (which was running some solid Halloween tunes by yours truly – more on that in a future post) and after some furious typing logged into my account.

“Alright!” But no sooner did I log on that I realized I had no clue what to use it for. It looked super sweet, that’s for sure, but there was seemingly nothing to do. I created a Wave. Something simple. But I only had one contact showing up and despite being a super good guy, James wasn’t responding to my wave. It suddenly dawned on me that Google Wave might have huge potential, but at the moment it isn’t very useful. I was then free to continue handing out candy.

The next day (or possibly the next next day) I started looking at it again. Nope – still nothing. I re-watched the youtube clips in the introductory wave (one of several waves that are in new users’ inboxes by default) and still had no clue. I figured that Google Wave would be many times more useful if I just had more contacts. I then noticed that I had about 20 invites available (in the invite friends wave) and I began dishing them out through Twitter lightning speed. Unfortunately invites get approved more slowly than a wait in a Canadian H1N1 vaccine line (burn). A day later I still had only one additional contact listed and his name didn’t really ring a bell.

So that was my first impression of Google Wave. It looked cool, has obvious collaboration benefits over traditional email, but without the contacts, like email, it isn’t entirely useful. Or is it??

I noticed through Twitter that @modsuperstar had posted a Google Wave tip for searching public waves.

Entering “with:public bananas” in the search bar reveals all public waves about bananas. Similarly, “with:public extensions” reveals all waves (presumably) containing the word extensions. This immediately made Google Wave a little more useful by virtue of the fact that one can make a wave public and then people can contribute to it, reply to threads, start threads – very similar to IRC or BBS but with an obscene amount more editing possibilities. Plus the benefit of being able to see people edit the wave, real time – which is very cool.

I started a wave called “Google Wave Tips and Tricks”. I added a couple tips and then made the wave public. Making it public was an interesting task. To make a wave public, you must add public@a.gwave.com to your contact list. Then drag and drop that contact to the subscribed user list of the wave. You then see a message at the top of your wave saying that “This wave is public” (or something along those lines). Interesting choice phrase. But as soon as I did this, other users began subscribing to, commenting and editing the wave. Bots were also added to the wave (bots are scripts that automatically do stuff to a wave given certain criteria, for example format @name to a link to that person’s twitter profile).

Lifehacker noted in their Google Wave 101 article that one should take caution when making a wave public – doing so tends to cause a wave to be destroyed by newbies and people cluttering the wave with useless edits and junk. I can see that happening. Samples of these cluttered sorts of waves can be seen in a search for “with:public photography”. Click on a resulting wave and notice how your browser grinds to a halt as it tries to load the hundreds of photostream gadgets embedded in the wave by the countless number of subscribers/contributors.

Editing content in waves implies editing “blips”. A blip is like a small section in the wave that can be edited by one person at a time. There doesn’t seem to be a way to manage rights on blips or waves in general (as of now anyway – something I’m sure we’ll see in future iterations), which makes for the possibility of other users totally modifying something that you’ve previously written. Fortunately there is a way to navigate through the history of a wave. Google Wave has the ability to play back an entire wave from conception through to the present time. As you play the wave back, you get to see all the edits and “who done what”. Very fun to watch, actually.

As time progressed, various people added further tips:

• shift-enter can be used as a “done editing blip” shortcut (clicking outside of the blip also accomplished the same).
• how to stop getting notified about waves you’ve subscribed to
• that at the moment you can’t unsubscribe yourself (or someone) from a wave
• I questioned if Google Chrome ran Google Wave faster and immediately got answers (that yes indeed, the latest Chrome beta does – which I later verififed).

It was all kind of uncanny how quickly people began subscribing and adding content to the wave. I presume this was largely because Google Wave is relatively new and a public tips and tricks wave would be useful as the majority of users are newbies.

And it was watching the real-time collaborative effort of this wave that made me get all “neat-o”. Google Wave removes the constraints imposed by email – sending messages back and forth to edit something has been effectively canned, in favour of allowing individuals edit documents at the same time, real time. Theoretically, the speed at which a document could go from nothing to something is increased with real-time collaboration.

Now it’s not all bubblegum and chopsticks though. The base is all there, but Google Wave is still a work in progress. Some of the things that I’m looking forward to seeing include

• Rights and accessability management within waves – being able to identify who has the right to do what within a wave
• Read-only public waves. Currently a public wave is Read-Write by default, with no ability to change it
• User settings. There aren’t any right now. There should be a billion (or at least 5).
• Email notifications of wave updates. Right now if someone updates a wave which you are a part of, you have no idea until you login

But as the coming weeks and months go by, Google Wave will sign-up more users and make significant bug fixes and new features will be released. I’m looking forward to it. The possibilities with Google Wave when it comes to sharing info and working collaboratively are really interesting (I was initially thinking provocative, but then thought it was a possibly misleading). In the meantime, I’m going to continue to dig around the wave world. I’ve started a new website, gwavetips.net where I plan on posting regular Google Wave related updates.

Just surfing around my few corners of the web and came across some old tunes I had posted to Reverbnation a while ago.  This track was SleazyEasy.  I really dug the tune when I created it, actually.  I’m pretty sure I used Jeskola Buzz Tracker to make it.  Keyboard from my old Korg M2 (yes, old school gear – the battery died in it and it lost all pre-programmed sounds two years ago).