Gillico Worldwide

About That iPad

2010-09-05T05:12:24Z

In the Spring of 2010, I was writing for a small tech blog, and was asked to produce a piece about the forthcoming iPad. I’d never seen or used one, but I did a bunch of research about it and, as usual, formed a fairly negative opinion about Apple’s latest introduction before ever using it. It reminded me of my reaction to the introduction of the iPod, when I said that first no one would want to carry a portable disk drive with music on it, then I said no one would want to carry around their photos, nor watch video on such a small screen. At least I am consistent. In any case, the piece never ran, I stopped writing for the blog, and then went out and got an iPad for myself.

Here in three parts is my take on the iPad- before owning one, now that I have one, and essential Apps on my iPad.

The iPad Cometh

The Apple iPad, the most hotly anticipated gadget since Steve Jobs’ last pocket-sized hunk of perfection arrives April 3, and is already taking pre-orders. Announced at a special Apple media event on January 27, 2010, it has already been previewed to the public in a TV commercial during the Oscars. Unlike the launch of the iPhone, where Apple was trying to crash the preexisting portable device market, Apple is breaking new ground this time, trying to create a new category of device, along with a whole new paradigm of controlling the end user experience.

Tabula Rasa

There are companies that make tablets already; most of them are just adaptations of laptops with screens that allow for text input or some other adaptation grafted onto current operating systems like Windows or Linux. That’s not what Apple is trying to do with the iPad. And neither is it a larger version of an iPhone. Apple keeps describing it with the phrases “the best,” “instantly familiar,” and “it just feels right.” Jony Ive, Senior VP of Design summed the philosophy up as: “I don’t have to change myself to fit the product; it fits me.” Michael Sippey probably put it best when he said that the iPad is going to become the new family computer.

Apple has always been a company that cares about every detail. You can see that in the physical design of their products as much as in their software. This is the first product where they have taken it to the ultimate level and designed the hardware inside, as well. According to Bob Mansfield, Senior VP of Hardware, using Apple’s custom A4 chip allows 10 hour battery life and response times that no other chip allowed. As well, the new 9.7″ screen is the largest multitouch screen area Apple has ever produced, containing over 1000 sensors.

Devil in the Details

To enhance the user experience Apple allegedly spent a lot of time working on new software for the iPad. According to Scott Forstall, Senior VP, iPhone Software,”We decided, let’s redesign it all. Let’s redesign, re-imagine and rebuild every single app from the ground up specifically for the iPad.” So instead of applications simply ported over from the iPhone and doubled in size, “…You get apps that are an order of magnitude more powerful.” There are volumes of documents for developers governing how to design third party iPad applications to maintain consistency and allow the full use of all the abilities built into the device.

Apple’s App store already has over 140,000 applications available for today’s iPhone and iPod Touch. Apple promises that the iPad is going to run virtually all the apps that are available and will let you use apps you have already downloaded for the other two devices. However, to make these programs run properly on the iPad, they are scaled up, doubled in size, to match the display resolution. This is somewhat analogous to watching a low resolution YouTube video on a high definition TV- it’s bearable, but not something you’ll want to do for long.

Damningly for Apple’s assertions that iPhone apps run fine on the iPad, Jon Gruber noted that some of the stock applications that come with the iPhone and iPod touch will not be appearing on the iPad. Even worse, Forbes says that of those 140K+ apps, actually only about 16,700 have been certified as actually iPad compatible, and many will not even run at all because the lower priced versions will not have GPS functionality, and none will have a camera.

Anything For Power Users?

I’ve got an old MacBook Pro, and I was thinking about getting an iPad to replace it. As of now, the only apps announced for the iPad for actually getting any work done (other than email) is Apple’s iWork suite of Keynote, Pages and Numbers. They’re nice apps for a casual user, but not really helpful for a professional graphic designer whose bread and butter is the Adobe CS Suite. Considering that the iPad does not allow for the use of Flash, I’m not anticipating Adobe lighting a fire under their developers to get a version out the door anytime soon.

That means I can’t work on any of my projects with the iPad or use it to display work to clients, other than via Safari. Nor is there even a basic HTML editor to even work on web pages. And, the entire file system is obfuscated, making it nigh on impossible to manage files except from within applications themselves. It doesn’t even have HD video output despite the higher price.

I was hoping for something more than a glorified media player and game platform, but that is really what the iPad is- an eBook reader with internet connectivity and other games and the like, just like my iPod touch, just with a bigger screen, and faster processor that allows for some user interface niftier tricks. Eventually, developers will catch up and release some software that takes advantage of the big screen and powerful processor and make it an actual competitor to a laptop. For now, it would be more of an exotic trophy to me than a device I could actually get work done with.

No iPad For Me

And that really leads to why I won’t be pre-ordering one or getting a first generation model. Apple has been notorious with their first generation products for not fully working out the kinks in their products, nor fully realizing how people might want to use them. Right now, the iPad is singularly Steve Jobs’ vision of a tablet and home computer, but it doesn’t do anything more than I already want of my iPod touch.

I’m also not at all jazzed by the idea that some of the basic features of the iPad are tied to the 3G model. I have perfectly good wireless around my house, and I don’t want another data plan, certainly not from at&t. That’s a basic reason I never got an iPhone and instead have an Android phone. Apple likes their walled garden and to safely guide their users, but they sometimes forget the individuality they once espoused in their classic 1984 commercial.

Steve Jobs is right. The iPad is fantastic and wonderful and great and the best thing Apple has ever done. At least to him. But it’s not open enough for my needs despite everything Jony Ive wants to believe or thought he designed into the product. And until it is, a lot of people are going to hold off buying one, just like I am.

Boy, Was I Wrong, Again.

Steve Jobs is right. The iPad is fantastic and wonderful and great and the best thing Apple has ever done. What I didn’t get before, was that it is not a replacement for a desktop computer/graphic design machine. Neither is it a replacement for a laptop. But it does most of the functions of both, and since I have gotten mine, I have gotten rid of my MacBook Pro and my iMac, leaving me with only a Mac Mini and the iPad as my sole hardware, and that’s all I need.

Insanely Great

That may seem a surprising change of attitude, but it really is true. The main reason for this is the power and speed of the iPad’s processor and the interface, and also the iPad’s “secret killer app,” which is now available to iPhone and other iOS 4.0 users: the separate Bluetooth keyboard. Many reviews of the iPad have complained about the terrible on-screen keyboard, but it’s really about as good as any implementation can be without the actual tactile feedback of real keys. What I don’t like about the on-screen keyboard is how much space it takes up while in use; the Bluetooth keyboard takes care of this by freeing up all the screen space while active. And, when you look at how small it is combined with the iPad itself, it’s still way smaller than even the MacBook Air.

So now the iPad has become my primary email and internet machine; I use it to read my RSS feeds and surf the web, tweet and Facebook and to look things up quickly. Since my house is chock full of Wifi goodness, it’s always available, even when I am using it to listen to music out in the garden. What has surprised me is how useful it is for other tasks that I wasn’t expecting. No, I still can’t do page layout, nor do I expect to. But Adobe has put out a couple of surprisingly good free apps for the iPad already: Adobe Ideas for vector sketching and Adobe Photoshop Express (which both work on other iDevices, too) for simple image processing. There are HTML markup apps and FTP apps. File management is handled seamlessly on the iPad- individual apps that need to know where things are, do.

Much like Jony Ive said, the iPad really IS instantly familiar and just feels right. I have seen people pick mine up and instantly understand how to interact with it and open apps and pinch and flick to navigate. Honestly, the hardest concept for most seems to be to press the honking great big button to return to the home screen. The size is comfortable for big and small hands, young and old. The screen is a great size for sharing video, and reading web pages, and manages to feel personal at the same time.

Think Different

Now that I have had my iPad for several months, I have my laundry list of things that could be done better and I would like to see fixed. First of all, like any of us who has a device that runs iOS 4, it’s frustrating to endure the lack of the best of those features on the iPad- multitasking, folders, unified inbox, etc. (Update September 4, 2010: This will be coming in November along with AirPlay as promised by his Steveness at the September 1 Apple Event.)

Secondly, as Khoi Vinh has pointed out, shaking the iPad to undo is ridiculous. It was fine for a hand-held device, but not for something this size. In the same vein, the non-traditional layout of the on-screen keyboard can be frustrating, especially with the placement of the Undo button, and switching between iPhone and iPad apps.

Speaking of iPhone vs iPad apps, it’s disheartening how many major applications, like Facebook and Twitter still rely on doubled versions of their iPhone app for their iPad customers, when over 3 million iPads have been sold by now. I was also disappointed that Apple included so few apps with the iPad compared to what they include with the iPhone, like no alarm clock or weather app. As well, they have an iMovie app for iPhone, but it’s not supported by the iPad, which seems odd, since the screen size and processing power would be well suited to the task.

And, it’s also pretty harsh that so many developers are releasing “HD”/iPad versions of their apps that are not much different than the iPhone/iPod version other than scaled up graphics, but 3-9x the price. I bought Plants vs Zombies for my iPod touch last year for $1.99, and at 2x on my iPad it looks great, and doesn’t make me feel like I missed out by not paying $9.99 for the HD version. After spending more on an iPad than an iPhone or iPod Touch, one would think that developers would understand that our pocketbooks are roughed up and can’t take the gouging.

I would like to have control of push notifications; i.e. I would like to turn them off during certain hours. I would also like to be able to set apps to update themselves, instead of having to check and then authorize them each time. It would also be nice to set up separate accounts so that I could have a configuration for when my friend’s young children come over, all they see are kid’s games and painting apps.

The Computer for the Rest of Us

The iPad is the first of a new class of computing devices that has long been anticipated. Others have tried to get it right, but Apple, once again, told us what we wanted and given it to us in a tidy, well-designed and functional package. Developers are already getting on board with the new device and coming up with software and ideas that only months ago would have seemed ridiculous science fiction. This is a computer your octogenarian great-grandmother could get as much use and enjoyment from as your teething toddler or a professional like me. With the Bluetooth keyboard and my Compass stand, anywhere there’s Wifi, I have a fully functional workstation where I can sit down comfortably and get real work done.

Discarding the mouse, which has been the standard input device since 1984, may be a difficult task for some, easier for others, but in all, it’s a liberation that makes interacting with technology simple and elegant and intuitive. Pointing and clicking is one step less removed, now. Although I understand why mouse support will never happen, it would be nice if Apple allowed the Magic Trackpad access to the iPad in a future update. Multi-touch is easy to learn as well; although one has to be mindful of resting extra fingers accidentally.

There is also a certain pleasure from sharing media on a right-sized screen such as the iPad’s. It’s not just that it’s a glorified media player. It’s an extension of social media, heavy on the social. It’s big enough to gather around, and small enough to pass to a friend. Better yet are the (still limited, but hopefully growing number of) apps that allow video out from the iPad to composite video and external audio. Now I can stream movies instantly from Netflix to my HDTV any time I want, as well as from YouTube, but, unfortunately, not from Hulu Plus.

A few accessories I have picked up for my iPad that I recommend to anyone who has an iPad:

Apple Camera Connector kit, which allows you to download photos and video when you connect to the dock connector via one of two dongles (I haven’t gotten it to download video yet, however):
- a USB connector which allows you to connect your camera’s data cable to the port on your camera. I’ve tried but it doesn’t accept other devices.
- an SD card reader.
Apple Bluetooth keyboard
Apple Earphones with built-in remote and mic
Apple Component audio and video output cables
Apple 10 watt power adapter
Silicone outer skin
Screen protectors
12South Compass iPad stand

The Apps I Can’t live without

I use a variety of different apps for different things, but if I had to whittle down my iPad to only 30 non-included apps, these would stay (+ indicates universal app, multiple prices listed iPhone first, iPad last):

Air Display + $9.99 – Allows iDevice to function as auxillary touch sensitive display for your desktop machine.
Analytics Free, in-app upgrade $5.99 – iPad interface to Google Analytics with charts and reports
Angry Birds Free, 99¢, $4.99 – Insane game where one must kill pigs by launching birds at them.
AppMiner Free – Non-iPad app, useful for finding things on sale and free at the iTunes Store.
Atomic Web + Free, 99¢ – Full screen tabbed browser with gestural interface.
Chopper 2 + $2.99- Insanely detailed chopper simulator shoot-em-up, best played using a second iDevice as a controller.
Dropbox + Free – Always synced cloud storage for your iPad and desktop computers.
Evernote + Free – Keep track of notes and pieces of information synced across all your devices.
Glow Hockey 2 HD $1.99 – Best air hockey game, even better when playing two-player head to head.
GoodReader 99¢ – Opens almost any kind of document and works seamlessly with Dropbox.
Google Earth + Free – Find anything anywhere at street level or from space.
Instapaper + $4.99 – Save web pages and articles to read later.
Last.fm Free – Non-iPad App, streaming music custom tailored to my tastes, based on my actual music library.
Mocha VNC Lite Free – Full control over your desktop from your iPad, at a totally reasonable speed, with keyboard input.
Netflix + Free (plus Netflix membership) – Stream anything from Netflix’s library and put DVDs in your queue.
NPR Free – Access all of NPR’s programming plus live podcasts anytime.
Orbital Free, $2.99, $2.99 – A cerebral shoot-em-up. My favorite time waster.
Osmos $2.99, $4.99 – Darwinian amoeba strategy game. This game was around on other platforms, but is really suited to the iPad’s interface.
Photo fx Ultra $5.99 – From the makers of Tiffen photography filters, this app packs a lot of photo processing power.
PS Express + Free – Surprise! Adobe Does ♥ Apple! This is another useful photo processing app, and the price can’t be beaten.
Real Racing Free, $4.99, $9.99 – As good as this game is for the iPhone/iPod, it’s exponentially better for the iPad, and one of the few games I don’t mind shelling out again for, and shelling out that much for. Excellent.
Reeder for iPad $4.99 – The best news reader I’ve found on any platform, bar none. Elegant, intuitive, and a pleasure to use, it syncs with Google Reader, and makes consuming media enjoyable.
Remote Free – Another non-iPad App that makes the cut because of its usefulness- I like to be able to control my iTunes without having to be at my computer.
Shazam Free – This is what the music companies should have been fighting for all these years. Now there is a legal, legitimate way to identify, find and buy new music, without having to resort to stealing it. Brilliant. Now cut out the tagging limit.
Skype Free – Also non-iPad, but worthwhile for the ease of having a portable speakerphone with which one can make free international calls.
Soundpaper $4.99 – A clever use of iPad technology, this app records audio and uses your typing as cues during the recording for recall. So when you type “John stepped up and started speaking” as John steps and starts speaking, when you later click on that block of text, it jumps you to that part of the recorded audio. Great for taking notes at meetings and reporting.
Soundrop + Free, $1.99 in-app upgrade – Silly physics fun- draw lines for balls to bounce off and make music. It’s far more addictive than it sounds.
Twitter Free – This app cries out for an iPad version, considering how full featured it is, and how cramped it is, but it’s still the best Twitter client available. Updated September 4, 2010: Now the updated iPad version is a showcase for how good iPad apps can be. Location searches aren’t as good as they were in the iPhone app, unfortunately, but overall, it’s still best-in-class.
Uzu $1.99- A fascinating particle simulator that shows off how fast the iPad is, and how nifty the multi-touch input can be.
Words With Friends Free, $2.99, $2.99 – A great Scrabble clone with network and pass and play functionality.

So, what have I missed? Any plaudits or gripes you want to contribute? Any apps you can’t live without? Please leave them in the comments below.

I ♥ the EFF

2010-06-06T07:02:11Z

I thought I’d take a moment and give a shoutout to all my buddies at the EFF and remind everyone about all the good work they do protecting freedom of speech online! ›› Bloggers’ Rights | Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Buzz Off, Google

2010-06-04T06:13:21Z

When Google announced and subsequently unleashed Buzz on the world, on February 9, 2010, it was hoping to have a social networking hit on its hands. Instead, it was met with a lot of frustration and anger from users, who found Buzz thrust upon them, turned on and connected to the rest of the internet before users even knew it.

And when I say connected, I mean connected! Everything in your Google profile, including all your contacts and links and your YouTube Profile (like your sharing links to Twitter accounts), Picasa, your Google Reader shared items, and more, became available to anyone familiar with your Gmail address who wanted to follow your Buzz account. And this wasn’t a choice to opt-in, but instead was switched on all at once from Google headquarters and shoved out the door.

A Bouncing Baby Buzz Bomb

This was a curious move from Google, for sure. To date, most of its new offerings have trickled out, by invitation only, in beta form. Gmail, Voice, Wave, even the Nexus One all have started slowly and only after being tested carefully and in small batches. Perhaps Google is feeling the pinch of all the potential search revenue to be earned in social media among Twitter, Facebook and other players and felt the need to quickly make its way into the game.

Nevertheless, it was clear that this was a very early alpha product that was pushed out far too quickly by Google in hopes of forcing its way into capturing market share. But, in doing so, Google ended up violating a lot of trust.

One of the angriest responses was a screed by the formerly anonymous blogger behind Fugitivus, whose entire private life was made available to her abusive ex-husband, by Google’s ham-fisted whim to enter the social networking space. I was myself distressed to find that within a day of Buzz being switched on for me and picking up my personal Twitter account, my 10-year old niece and 13-year old nephew were automatically subscribed to my Buzz stream without their knowledge and consent.

I love my niece and nephew dearly, but my personal Twitter stream occasionally contains adult content, and is not suitable for them. I emailed my sister to tell her, and she was frightened by what they were automatically signed up for without her knowledge, and found it to be a huge breach of her trust in Google.

We’re Not Gonna Take it

After a Harvard Law student filed a class action lawsuit, the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint with the FTC, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation strongly cautioned Buzz users, Google weakly made some changes to its policies, suggesting you follow people instead of forcing you to, but it still remains an opt-out service. Now, several weeks after launch, you can finally completely turn off Buzz from a Gmail setting.

Buzz also turned out to be a bit of a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Twitter and Facebook represent two different paradigms of how one post to the internet. Twitter is asymmetrical: you’re not necessarily following those who follow you. You don’t always know who is reading what you post. Facebook is symmetrical- for someone to be your friend and follow you, you have to be their friend and follow them back, and you see what each other posts.

Each scenario presents a different thought process behind what you say and how you say it. Google’s mantra for however long now has been “Don’t be evil.” So when Buzz showed up, the natural assumption was that it was going to be a Facebook-like community experience, when in fact, it was more of an anonymous, back alley. No one had any idea what they were in for when they turned on Buzz, whether intentionally or accidentally, and the results left many confused.

Signal to Noise

Privacy issues aside, and mind you they’re pretty big issues to simply set aside, for a user, or for a big company like Google (you think they might have learned from Facebook’s and Twitter’s mis-steps?) the biggest problem with Buzz is all the noise. The purpose of Buzz is supposed to be to bring together all sorts of varied social media- photo streams, Twitter streams, RSS feeds, YouTube videos, blog posts, and allow people to comment on them and share them with friends.

Here’s the problem: everyone who is already interested in these streams already subscribes to them in one form or another. I really just don’t need to go to Google Buzz to get MJ’s latest food photos on Flickr or Rebecca’s latest Tweets or Scamper’s latest blog posts because I already get them in one form or another through RSS or directly from Twitter or Flickr. I already go to my friends’ YouTube channels and favorite their videos of their beautiful children, and comment on their RSS feeds that they follow in Google Reader.

The supposed added value that Buzz was to bring to the table was to allow you to comment on these streams within Buzz. Which meant… More noise. Another sign that Buzz was only half-baked when it was released: I check my Gmail account via POP with my email reader. Every time I posted something to Buzz or I commented on something via Buzz, *DING*! My email reader would chime letting me know that I had just commented on or posted something to Buzz. Which, I already knew. More noise.

How I Lost My Buzz

I’ve integrated Twitter so that it posts to my Facebook status when I want it to, and so it posts to my blog when appropriate. I have integrated my blog with Facebook as well. I use Brizzly to Tweet as often as Twidroid. I watch TV as often over the internet as I do on my DVR or live over the air. So I’m not afraid to mix and match my technologies and try new things when they make sense. I like Google products just fine: I use Chrome, Android, Apps, Gmail, Reader, Voice, and Wave (well, not really Wave, but who does?) but Buzz pissed me off to the point that I turned it off and explained to some of my friends and family how to do it as well, before Google made it a one-click switch.

I’m pretty much the sweet spot for who Google wants to to be using its product, yet I have it turned off, and sealed in a radioactive-proof box right now. Is it the privacy issue or the noise issue or the half-baked feel issue or the Google trying to dominate the world issue that is keeping me from being a Buzz fan? Honestly, it’s a combination of all of them. First and foremost, people like to be asked, not told.

From the start, Buzz should have been an opt-in service. I know Google wants to be bigger than Jesus, but that can’t be accomplished by destroying the privacy of people’s online information, especially who they choose to communicate with. My little black book, virtual or otherwise, is my property, not Google’s, to disseminate, much less without my permission.

A bigger challenge for Buzz: what does it bring to the table that isn’t already there. It seems that so far it’s just more noise. Wave seems to be suffering a similar fate. No one knows what to make of it: Is it email? Is it instant messaging? What does it do? One might ask the same of Buzz: What does it do besides add meta-noise? I’m still waiting to get a good answer to that…

That leaves the last two issues- what to make of a half-baked product put out by a company that wants to take over the world. Google’s much better at buying companies which put out great products and then making them its own, like it did with YouTube or GrandCentral, which became Google Voice. I’m sure the management at Google dreams of the day that Twitter is a Google product, but Buzz is not the way to scare anyone into selling the farm.

If I was to come back to Buzz, I’d need a compelling reason. Google has yet to come up with any. So it plays nice with Maps and my phone. Whoop-de-do. So do a lot of things already. So I can “Like” things. Neat-o. This is a case of not getting the point, being late to the game, and not having anything of real value to offer. Google has so many things up their sleeve in their Labs and in other products, it’s surprising that Buzz is so still-born.

A Bone for Google Buzz 2.0

I’m not on Google’s marketing or engineering teams but lemme toss them a bone for Buzz 2.0: How about real-time sharing? Leverage Google Chat and YouTube to do something that other services can’t offer yet. Instead of abusing trust, build on it and create something that people will want to use. Make people want to queue to sign up for it. Remember the mystique surrounding having the first Gmail account? That was something people were excited about, and you should want to replicate, not the rush to tell you to Buzz off. So instead of bullying your way into the market and garnering bad attention, try earning your way in with a thoughtful, well-executed experience like you have done so successfully in the past, and maybe I’ll be Buzzing again.

Stopping Cyber-Bullies

2010-06-11T06:00:30Z

My 90 year old stepfather was just recently claiming to my mother that kids didn’t pick on each other back in his day. When she told me about it, we nodded knowingly, smiled, and agreed he has a touch of the old-timer’s. Anyone who is a kid, has been a kid, or has a kid of their own knows that bullying is a big problem, at home, at school and on the playground. But with the advent of the internet, it’s moved into an entirely different arena- online, and taken a new name- cyber-bullying.

This can take on all kinds of forms- from teasing each other in chat rooms and sending insulting text messages all the way to setting up threatening websites and posting compromising photos without the subject’s knowledge. The psychological damage this can cause is way beyond the bumps and bruises usually incurred from fighting, because these battles are not confined to the two (or few) kids involved, it’s on the internet for everyone to see.

The old adage “Sticks and stone may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” has not really made the transition smoothly to this digital age. What about 1,000 text messages? Naked photos? A web page about your entire private life? A transcript of what you thought was a private, personal chat posted online for everyone to see? Those being made public against someone’s will can really be hurtful!

What makes cyber-bullying so difficult for parents, is that their kids are often so embarrassed and ashamed by what’s happened, they refuse to speak about it, and, since there is no physical evidence of the bullying, parents are left unaware. For parents who wish to delve a little deeper into their kids’ activities online, there is software available to monitor their child’s computer for evidence of such activity.

“PC Pandora 6.0 lets parents know exactly what their young surfers are doing online and see first-hand how they are interacting with others,” explains Pandora Corp. co-founder Jamie Leasure. “If their child is being bullied, they will have records and information they can use to help put an end the situation.” Other similar options include CyberBully Alert, Securus, and NetBus Spector Pro.

Although all of these options are not really solutions… They’re just tools to alert you to the problem. If you’re already aware there’s a problem with your kid being cyber-bullied, it’s too late to prevent the problem, you’re on mop-up duty.

Your best bet is to have an open dialog with your kids and to be able to talk with them when these situations occur and help them deal with bullies. Teach them not to put inappropriate material online. Keep your kids’ computer in an common area where you can monitor their online usage if you’re worried about what’s going on, and check in with their mobile phone usage too.

The internet is a huge, sometimes scary place, but one where you and your kids should feel safe conducting your daily business. Talk with your kids and make sure that they feel safe in their digital domain, and if they don’t, check some of these resources for more help:

Excuse Me, You Have Email On Your Shirt!

2010-06-04T06:02:37Z

Chris Ball is the lead software engineer for One Laptop Per Child, who is a geek and wears t-shirts and has an Android phone, pretty much like a lot of the rest of us.

But recently, a local electronics retailer had a promotion where they gave away free parts to 1000 people, and Chris was one of the lucky ones to participate.

Chris made off with $100 in free electronics and decided, with the help of his wife Madeline, to put them to use in a way no one had ever thought of before- making a t-shirt that keeps count of unread emails! Right there on the front of the t-shirt, using LEDs, it keeps a total count of how many messages are waiting to be read in the Inbox. It uses an Arduino Lilypad and Bluetooth dongle to talk to his Android phone and the count displayed right on the shirt for everyone to see!

He’s even made the source code publicly available, but for now, there is no shirt available that will actually DISPLAY your emails. You’ll still need another fashion accessory for that…

Screw Like Doctor Who!

2010-06-04T05:52:41Z

Admit it, you watch Dr. Who, and you never miss an episode. You love Tom Baker and his stripey muffler best, but you think the new guy is doing a pretty darn good job so far.

And, you’re probably one of those types who likes to collect knick-knacks from your favorite sci-fi shows, too, right?

Think Geek‘s got you covered! The 10th Doctor’s sonic screwdriver was sadly destroyed… But, like Madonna’s career, thanks to the power of the TARDIS, it keeps coming back! Each Doctor has had a different sonic screwdriver, and this latest one is a little bigger and features the power of green light to work it’s magic.

You, too, can own one, and impress your friends while you make imaginary repairs to your inter-dimensional post boxes and time warp conduits, prepare your cube for impromptu time travel or just look cooler than the Star Wars kid.

Sound effects, springy action, and best of all, batteries included, just for $25.99! DO NOT DEVIATE!

What Do We Google?

2010-06-04T05:53:37Z

Sometimes when you’re bored, you put your name into Google just to see the results, right? I’ve done it, you’ve done it, we’ve all done it… Then that gets boring, so you start looking for other stuff, just to see what you can find.

The staff of Nina Hale Search Marketing compiled some of the funniest and weirdest searches that they charted on Google over the past three months from their clients’ accounts, and found:

1. gloves that people can shoot out web
2. wool gangster shirts
3. what were the boots worn by Tom Selleck in Quigley Down Under
4. do tuna cook while they swim
5. who invented friction
6. kitten smells like rotten eggs
7. is turkey poop brown
8. what is tuna made of
9. what does Farrah Faucet look like
10. did duck hunting change the world

Now that Google has amassed such a huge amount of knowledge and parsed so many queries, this writer thought it would be interesting ask the grandest search engine of them all for suggestions about the six basic questions of life (or reporting, for that matter): who, what, where, when, why and how. The answers were a little surprising-

Who:

What:

Where:

When:

Why:

How:

Surprisingly, none of them offered up forty-two as a suggestion, which I’m sure disappoints more than just this author.

What’s NASA Been Puffin’?

2010-06-04T05:54:40Z

Probably the worst part about working is the daily commute each way, stuck in traffic. NASA aerospace engineer, Mark Moore, dreams of the day we all get around like the Jetsons, flying around in our own personal space cars, instead.

He’s come up with the Puffin, a vertical-takeoff-and-landing (VTOL) personal aircraft, as part of his doctoral thesis. It’s purely designed for single occupancy- only 12′ long with a 14.5′ wingspan, and it’s completely electrically powered. Even more bizarrely, it’s part plane, part helicopter, and part “WTF is that?!?!?”

“If you’ve ever seen a puffin on the ground, it looks very awkward, with wings too small to fly, and that’s exactly what our vehicle looks like,” Moore says. “But it’s also apparently called the most environmentally friendly bird, because it hides its poop. So the vehicle is environmentally friendly because it essentially has no emissions. Also, puffins tend to live in solitude, only ever coming together on land to mate, and ours is a one-person vehicle.”

It’s designed to be lightweight and efficient- only 400 lbs total weight for the aircraft and battery combined, and can carry up to an additional 200 lbs of passenger and cargo. The motors are redundant, allowing the pilot to continue to hover safely even if multiple power train components fail, and produce a total of 6o HP. This would allow the lucky pilot to zing through the air at speeds of up to 150 miles per hour, but only with a cruising range of about 50 miles.

Although it’s just a concept at this point, Moore has presented the design at a conference on aeromechanics and hopes that the concepts of the Puffin will take hold in other designs.

Source: NASA

When Will IE Get It?

2010-06-04T05:55:28Z

I’m sick and tired of having to design a website more than once every time I make one. Anyone who designs websites knows what I am talking about. You design it to W3 standards, which works for every modern browser like Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera, and then you go back and make it work as well as you possibly can in Internet Explorer.

Even though Microsoft has released version 8 and is developing version 9, they are notorious for having their own standards for the web all the way back to the first release of Explorer. They are fairly capricious about which parts of CSS IE respects, and instead insist upon using their own set of “filter” commands to complete a small subset of what CSS can do.

Because it is the default install browser for Windows, it commands a large market share. The statistics on my websites show that IE users account for between 40 and 70% of my traffic. So I can’t dismiss it, as much as I would like to. But anyone who is reading this site, or is even slightly technically inclined, knows that their internet experience will be enhanced by using any other browser. Even my 90-year old stepfather surfs the web with Firefox.

But Microsoft doesn’t get this and continues to ram a substandard user experience down our collective throats, and as consumers and designers, we are all left frustrated and under-served. Who exactly is Microsoft serving by having a browser that doesn’t take advantage of the newest and best features the web has to offer?

I just redesigned my professional site, relying heavily on CSS3 to make it load more quickly and render uniformly across modern browsers. It uses CSS to round corners, create gradients and make drop shadows. Guess what? Even the newest version of Internet Explorer can’t process any of that. So people who visit my site get an adequate experience in IE- the corners are square, there are no gradients or drop shadows. The site works but it’s lacking the features I included to make it special and interesting.

By not including the ability to render these simple features of current CSS, designers like myself lack incentive to develop sites that include features for Internet Explorer. For many sites, IE is no longer the most commonly used browser. Many organizations counsel against using it for security reasons. Fortunately, many large companies have finally started phasing out the aged and decrepit IE6, which, surprisingly, persists to this day, despite first being released in 2001.

The internet is a huge place and having to code sites more than once to make them work with all browsers is not an efficient way to work or to court clientele. Microsoft is used to being big and having their own way and overpowering competition to get their way. But now that the world wide web has been around long enough that people have embraced its potential and explored what it can truly do, people aren’t content to settle for the third-rate experience that Microsoft is pushing with their browser.

I really should go and add the specific “filter” code to my site that would make the bits that look so cool in modern browsers look cool in IE too, but, honestly I don’t really care enough to bother. If someone thinks that IE provides an adequate browsing experience, then they get an adequate version of my site with it. But if you want full richness that is available on the web these days, you’re not going to get it via Internet Explorer.

The Trouble With Astroturf

2010-06-16T19:18:13Z

I was going through my RSS feeds yesterday, when, to my surprise, I came upon a glowing review of the tech blog I used to write for. “Techi.com Will Not Bore You” proclaimed the headline! And when I clicked through, I read a shining review of how original the content and magnificent the site was. Surprisingly, for a design site, there was no mention of the site design itself, which, at least from this designer’s standpoint is plain, at best.

The sentence that really caught my attention, however, was “I’m familiar with the guy behind this project and can honestly say he knows what he is doing.” I, too, am familiar with the guy behind this project. His name is Walter Apai, and he is also the guy behind Web Design Depot, a clearinghouse for web design links that has had middling success on the web. He’s also a self-admitted control freak, micro-manager and will freely admit to knowing little to nothing about technology or how to run his business. From what I gathered while working together, he got lucky once and is hoping to replicate his success with Techi.com.

So, the problem is, I know full well that Walter doesn’t have any idea what he’s doing. And when I commented to that effect with my credentials on the post, my comment was “held for moderation” and then never appeared. That seemed strange to me, because my comment was relevant, on topic, and I was certainly qualified to comment.

So I commented again under another identity, also in a negative manner, to see how it would be treated, and it, too, was never posted. By now it was pretty clear that this was not a post that the author, one “Brant Wilson” wrote freely or because he was actually endorsing the product. Normal blogs and blog posts allow for free conversation and exchange of ideas, even when they may not fully agree with the poster or their ideas. I had suspected from the tone of the post that it was a plant from the start, and by this point I was pretty sure.

So I posted one final comment, letting the author know that one must indicate when one runs a paid advertisement, and that one cannot pass off a paid review as one generated organically.

SURPRISE!!!! Suddenly at the top of the “review,” this paragraph was added:

Disclosure: This is a paid review, if you wish to purchase a paid review for your website (I have a 90% turn down ratio so if I turn you down don’t take it personally) contact us

I don’t know about you, but for me, this pretty much trashes the credibility of both sites in one fell swoop. That disclaimer should have been at the top of the article from the beginning; it should not have taken mine or anyone else’s prompting to show up. As for Techi.com, this continues to underline the problem I have with Walter Apai- you can’t purchase credibility, you have to earn it. It’s not luck. Astroturf just isn’t worth it, it hurts everyone in the long run because it’s just fake, and the fake stays with you.