Yes I’m ignoring Microsoft, they probably can’t even spell HTML5 (or progress), think about it, they obviously didn’t like Flash so they made Silverlight which as far as I can tell is the same if not worse than Flash (not that I can say that with any experience because I refuse to install the SIlverlight plugin)

It is running what is basically the iPhone OS, with slightly bigger icons, and plenty of space between them on the home screen. I mean plenty. A small child could thump their paw down on the screen an only hit one app. It has the general iPhone feel (flick/pinch/swipe etc) to the interface, with the exception of the OS X style dock, also with really spaced out icons (I wonder how many you can actually put on it?).

The Name?

Why iPad? Why Apple? Why? Why does its have to being with an ‘i’? Its very much got the appearance of a ‘pro’ product, what with its aluminium back and glass front, but the name ‘iPad’ doesn’t have anything ‘pro’ about it. Its too similar to ‘iPod’ for starters (maybe they chose it because the iPad is just a giant iPod). But tablet, slate or canvas, in my opinion, would have all been better.

Part of me wonders though when they decided on the name, a lot of rumours were around late last year referring to the device as the ‘slate’ or ‘iSlate’, and then CES rolled around and the HP ‘slate’ was shown off by that crazy bald dude from Microsoft. Was there a hasty rebranding of the, then unreleased, Apple product that we now know as the iPad? I guess we’ll never know.

iPad Apps? There’s an iPhone app for that

All the same apps that you get on the iPhone are there - Safari, mail, calendar, contacts, maps, YouTube, music, videos etc. They’ve apparently all been redeveloped specifically for the iPad’s larger screen (and they look hot), and its probably reasonable to assume that some of the smaller UI differences might make an appearance in iPhone 4.0 later in the year. It also runs all other iPhone apps (140,000+) by floating them in the middle of the screen, or upscaling them… hrm, a little dodgy but better than nothing. Oh and only one app a time…

Hopefully the iPad SDK will result in iPad specific version of all the good apps being released along side their iPhone counterparts. Personally I think an iPad version of The Hit List would work very nicely, but I guess we need to wait for the iPhone version to materialise. I’m being patient. Honest.

Design

I really quite like the design, its a bit iPhone and a bit MacBook Pro, and it looks great. The only thing I’m not so sure on is the massive bezel around the screen. I’m sure there are technical packaging reasons why this was necessary, but it makes the device seem considerably larger than it might have otherwise been. It might only be half an inch thick, but I would have no worry with that blowing out a slight fraction if it meant less bezel. Or they could keep it the same physical size and throw a bigger screen in, I don’t mind

Gruber says the wide bezel is so that you’ve got somewhere to rest your thumbs. Ok fair point, but how wide are some peoples thumbs that the bezel needs to be so large? (Yes I know my exceptionally narrow thumbs are the exception, not the rule, but still). Maybe the press images are deceptive (possible), but the bezel looks like it could be half the width and still leave plenty of room to rest your thumbs. But again, that’s just my opinion.

No camera? really?

I would have hoped for at least one (they’ve got plenty of room in that bezel), surely the camera component used above the MacBook Pro screens could have been squeezed in there somewhere. Then they could have added an iPad version of Photobooth, think of all the cool photo morphing fun that you could have had using an in-built camera and the iPad’s touch interface. Maybe we’ll see a camera in the next generation, I’m guessing there are quite a few things people would like to see in the next generation.

Although it would be nice if they’d put one in, the lack of a camera isn’t a deal breaker for me. Remember this is just the first generation iPad. After all the camera in the the first and second gen iPhones was pretty ordinary.

Giant iPhone or keyboard-less netbook-sized MacBook?

Or something else entirely? I think the intention is to target the netbook end of the market, but I think they’ve made it a little too iPhone-like, but again thats just my opinion. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with the iPhone OS, its mostly great (lack of multi-tasking being a downer), it just looks a little weird on a much larger screen… maybe I just need time for it to grow on me.

A big benefit of being very iPhone-like is that the millions and millions of people who already own iPhones will already know how to use the iPad, which I’m guessing was a big motivating factor for Apple. Another completely different user experience would like scare a lot of people away.

No Flash? Awesome.

There a a lot of people complaining that the iPad doesn’t support Flash. I don’t really care. I hate Flash. It’s not Flash’s fault, its the fault of people who think that its justifiable to create entire websites in Flash. Flash advertising also annoys the crap out of me, so browsing the net on the iPad would be good simply because all those annoying Flash banners won’t work. Yes, its moderately disappointing that the lack of Flash means that you can’t play ‘cool’ Flash games etc, but I can live with that.

I’ve seen a few people mention that the iPad should have Flash so that video services such as Hulu can be used on this fantastic new device. Firstly, we can’t use Hulu in Australia so I don’t care. Secondly, perhaps websites providing video services should start to move away from using Flash for their videos, or at least make an alternative available - like YouTube has done.

Kindle-killer

I’ve never used a kindle so I can’t really comment on whether the iPad will kill it, or by how much it will do so. But on the face of it the iPad does look like a solid competitor, especially given the amount of additional functionality that you get in addition to being a snazzy e-reader.

I’ve also only tried a couple of e-books on the iPhone, and I didn’t hate the experience, but it just seemed wierd on a device the size of that size. However, I can definitely see the experience being more likable on the iPad’s larger screen

Tech specs

Obviously I haven’t played with one yet, but from what people are saying the Apple A4 processor is really quick which is a good thing, and hopefully something that will flow over into the next-gen iPhone in a few months time. As far as connectivity goes it is equipped with WiFi (802.11 a/b/g/n), Bluetooth 2.1 and on the 3G model there is support for HSDPA and GSM/EDGE (data only, not calls).

The 9.7-inch (would it have killed them to go full 10-inch…) screen is 1024x768 pixels and sports 132 pixels per inch (ppi) which is a long way off the iPhone’s 163 ppi. If you’re interested, if the screen had the same pixel density as the iPhone it could have been 1260x950 pixels and iPad still would have been the same size (although probably more expensive).

Something I didn’t know is that the pixels per inch for the latest iMacs is apparently north of 200, putting both the iPhone and iPad to shame. At that ppi you’d nearly get a full widescreen HD display onto the iPad (it would obviously have to be slightly longer and narrower).

They’re even making a relatively wide range of storage sizes available, with 16, 32 or 64GB models available (both 3G and non-3G versions of each). I suspect that 128GB SSDs are still too pricey to make them worthwhile.

iPad 3G

The 3G model, which will come along a little while after the WiFi only version goes on sale, will use a mini-sim - which feels to me a little bit too much like they’ve made it different to the iPhone just so you can’t swap and change sim cards between the two easily. It also appears that the only real extra in the 3G model is 3G support (oh and ‘assisted GPS’), and yet it costs $130 extra - which in the case of the 16GB model a whopping 25% more than the non-3G version - and then you’re expected to pay for a monthly data contract as well.

My question is, that if I’m already paying $50 per month for my iPhone (including phone payments) on a plan that includes 500 MB of data per month, then why can’t get a second sim for this same account to go in my iPad so I can actually make use of the downloads I’m already paying for? According to the stats on my iPhone (which say they’ve never been reset) I’ve used just 637 MB in TOTAL since I got my iPhone 18 months ago. Surely there has to be someway they can make this happen. But then again mobile providers are evil.

Good (slightly misleading) marketing

If you watch the demo videos on apple.com, you probably noticed a couple of quotes when they are expressing how awesome they think the device is. “The best way to watch movies”, really? I’ve got a 40-inch HD digital TV that’s pretty good for that, not to mention the surround sound speakers I’ve got hooked up. And “with a screen this large you can just see more of the web”, again, really? So you’re saying that all this time I’ve been browsing the internet on my 24-inch Cinema Display with nearly 4x the pixels of the iPad that I’ve been missing bits of the web, wow, wish someone had told me sooner….

Verdict

Do I want one, yeah I kind of do. The demonstration videos make me want one, even if I’m not sure I need one. I guess thats the point of the videos. In fact the more I simply read about it the more I want one.

Will I buy one? Maybe, it’ll depend on how much they end up costing down here, and when they’re available how much extra the 3G version will be. Also I’m planning on updating to the next-gen iPhone when they arrive so if it comes down to me having to choose one over the other I’ll probably go for the new iPhone, and hold out for the second gen iPad. Maybe, unless I change my mind. After all I never intended to get an iPhone either… and then I got up at 4 in the morning to get in the queue. Damn you Apple and your sexy products.

One more thing

If I do get one I want to be able to purchase a twelvesouth iPad-sized ‘BookBook’ to put it in. So go over here: http://bit.ly/bNvTXK and let them know you’d like one too. Thx.

What might the event reveal? Some (unlikely) possibilities

• The ‘tablet’ will be just like all the fan-made mockups we’ve seen in the past couple of years.
• The ‘tablet’ will be completely different to everything people have dreamed up over the past couple of years - remember how wrong all those iPhone mockups were prior to the reveal of the original iPhone
• The ‘tablet’ probably won’t be available with a docking LED display or add-on keyboard as Tim Van Damme hopes but it sure would be awesome if it did.
• The ‘tablet’ will run the iPhoneOS just on a bigger screen (unlikely)
• The ‘tablet’ will run full OS X, or an optimised version for the ‘lesser’ hardware
• The ‘tablet’ will run a “new” OS which will still have OS X as the base, but with a new (awesome) UI
• The next gen iPhone hardware will be previewed (unlikely)
• The iPhone 4.0 software will be previewed (maybe)
• The MacBook Pro line will get an update with new Core i5/i7 processors etc
• An LED cinema display in a size other than 24-inch
• Or… we’ll all be disappointed when there is no ‘tablet’ announcement, no iPhone 4.0 announcement, no MBP update - instead Apple announce that they’re moving more into the software side of things and that their first product will be a direct competitor for Photoshop.

Keep in mind this falls into the category of “people can use twitter however the hell they want”, you’re allowed to disagree, just don’t be a knob about it.

The Hahlo side of the things

Hahlo is about moving forward, not backwards, if I were not interested in keeping up with the new feature additions to twitter (and the api) then Hahlo probably wouldn’t still be in active development. Also maintaining two different methods for retweeting means more work on my side making sure they both continue working, having an ‘RT’ button which performs different functions for different people is not only illogical, but would very quickly become a pain to support. Also, please remember I don’t get paid anything to work on or support Hahlo, I do that because I’m a nice guy.

The twitter side of things

Those who’ve used Hahlo will see that I’ve tried to match the same ‘flow’ as on twitter.com. For example, you click ‘retweet’ and you’re asked to confirm that you’d like to retweet this tweet to your followers. Not everyone likes the new-style retweets, but then not everyone like change. But changes happens, deal with it.

Evan Williams wrote a great post on why retweets work the way that they work on twitter.com, if you haven’t read it I strongly suggest you do.

The “retweets annoy me” side of things

There is a reason I never added retweets to Hahlo prior to version 4, I don’t (or didn’t to be more precise) like them. And then when I did add them, I also added an ‘hide all retweets’ option. This is why, and if you disagree (likely) I’d like to hear (constructively) why that is. Lets try a common example to illustrate my point.

Lets say I follow ‘Joe Smith’, ‘Tom Johnson’, ‘Harry Williams’ and the company they work for ‘Globoawesome Solutions’.

‘Globoawesome Solutions’ tweets:

globoawesome: Check this out, we just won an award http://bit.ly/weareawesome

I see this tweet because I follow ‘Globoawesome Solutions’. This is fine.

Because Joe, Tom and Harry love the company they work for, and are proud that they won an award so they retweet the original tweet.

joeman77: RT @globoawesome Check this out, we just won an award http://bit.ly/weareawesome

tomlovesdogs: Check this out, we just won an award http://bit.ly/weareawesome (via @globoawesome)

harrywho: Oh man we’re fully awesome. RT @globoawesome Check this out, we just won an award http://bit.ly/weareawesome

Now, because I also follow Joe, Tom and Harry I also see these three tweets. This is not fine. This is a pain. To be clear I would not have problem (or not as big a one) if they had each tweeted the link with their own thoughts eg.

tomlovesdogs: My employers Globoawesome Solutions just won an award, check it out -> http://bit.ly/weareawesome

This scenario is annoying because it really happens.

This is the first reason that the “new-style” retweets are better, because if Joe, Tom and Harry all retweet the original tweet I don’t have to see it another 3 times.

A similar problem arises when you follow two or three (or more) people who seem to endless retweet each other so much you begin to wonder if they’re the same person.

My understanding of how the new retweets behave better in this situation, and when they’ll appear in your timelines.

• If you follow ‘User A’ and ‘User B’, and ‘User A’ retweets ‘User B’ you WON’T see the retweet because you’ll see the original.
• If you follow ‘User A’ but NOT ‘User B’, and ‘User A’ retweets ‘User B’ you will see the retweet unless you’ve blocked retweets from ‘User A’.

Annoyance number two.

We only get 140 characters to play with. If I tweet something and its 138 characters long, the person X retweets it in the old-style then they have to shorten/edit/change my original tweet, potentially changing its meaning/intention/purpose. How times have you seen something like this:

captnawesome: RT @foobar RT @jellydonuts We’ve got a super special on awesome jelly donuts happening right now, pls RT (via @donutman65) (via @steve)

There’s a high chance there could have a been a link pointing to said jelly donuts in the original tweet, but you’d never know now that it has little to no context remaining (apart from that we now know that captnawesome, fooba and steve all like jelly donuts - and/or spam)

Third times a charm

Until recently twitter was ‘asking’ “What are you doing?” (they’ve now changed it to a slightly more generic “What’s happening?”). The point is, that it was what are YOU doing, not “What is the linux fanboy you follow doing?”. If I really want to know what the linux fanboy is doing, I’ll follow them.

Old-style retweets are the spam/telemarketers of the twittersphere

Every time you add something like “pls RT or kittens will die” (or something to that effect) real kittens actually die, seriously, they’re dead. I don’t really care how awesome you think you’re new flash game is, don’t ask people to spam their followers by retweeting your dribble. Even charities, who are arguably the only groups that should be allowed to ask for an RT in the first place, shouldn’t do it. If awareness for the charity is deserved then people will likely tweet about it anyway, without you begging them to.

I hang up on telemarketers. I also block people who post endless amounts of crap to twitter, this is crap that they usually retweet from elsewhere. I’ve also started block (and report as spam) people who send direct message spam, or “thanks for following” messages to me after I’ve followed them because they were already following me, but thats another argument altogether.

RT via cc goo goo ga ga

There was a discussion a while back about the difference between ‘RT’ and ‘via’ two of most commonly used old-style retweeting syntax, I think it was @maxvoltar but can’t remember for sure (feel free to correct me). The conclusion was something like this:

• RT = word-for-word copy of someone else’s tweet
• via = usually a link or thought from someone else but as part of your tweet

Think of it this way. RT = plagiarism. via = referenced source material.

But, but, but, I want to add a comment to my RT

Then its not a retweet. It’s a tweet mentioning something someone else already tweeted.

Maybe if twitter fixed replies then people could just @reply to the tweet they wanted to comment on, this would keep context, keep it in the conversation chain, and still allow only those who actually wanted to see your additional witty comment to see it. (Remember you used to have the option to see all the @replies/mentions that those you follow posted instead of just the ones directed at other people you already follow).

But I can’t pad out my tweet count if I have to think of them all myself

I strongly believe there are people out there who were retweeting like crazy just to pad out their total tweet count, almost as if it was going to make them more important or something. From what I can tell the new retweets don’t count towards your tweet count, which is great. What will be even great is when a ‘retweet counter’ is added, because I’m sure we’re going to spot a few people who retweet more than they actually tweet themselves.

Of course, then we just have to work out what to do about people who feel the need to post every flicker photo, delicious bookmark, blog post, aim status change and bowel movement to twitter. Their time will come.

Conclusion

Old-style = Bad. New-style = Good.

Change within the twittersphere is good, just think, without change you would not have @mentions, #hashtags, lists, search, saved searches, geolocation or just about any of the other cool things that you now take for granted.

Is it just me, or is everything even more awesome when drawn as Lego minifigs?

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5422093/dc-comics-heroes-and-villains-drawn-as-minifigs

Not only are native iPhone apps faster and more capable than their web-app equivalents, but they’re easier to write.

Faster? Yes. More apable? Yes. Easier to write? Unless you know objective-c/cocoa/etc no, not really. if it was that ‘easy’ Hahlo would have stopped being a webapp long ago.

Also on the speed issue, yes the interfaces on a native app are going to be smoother and faster to use than webapps, but in the case of something like a twitter app a lot of that ‘speed’ has to do with the retrieving of the data from the twitter api. There is only one api and both webapps and native apps use it, they both request the same data, from the same source, over the same connection. They have to download the same avatars (poorly resized avatars don’t help download speeds…) etc. this isn’t where the speed issue lies. For example once you’re using Hahlo and all the main UI resources have loaded, your not really requesting much more data than a native app when you view a new timeline, profile, search results etc.

Also, how many native iPhone apps can also be used on Android devices and other devices such as the Nokia N900? Just saying ;p