The announcement of an Apple tablet had been perennially rumored for announcement at MacWorld and WWDC events over the years, yet for the longest time, the announcement failed to happen. Until finally, at an Apple event last January, they finally pulled the curtain back on the iPad. Given what Apple has created over the years, my expectations for a tablet were very high. Too high, I suppose. I don’t know what I expected, but what Apple demonstrated was essentially an oversized iPhone. That doesn’t make calls. The usual suspects hailed it as a breakthrough. Revolutionary. Even magical.

Magical?

I wasn’t seeing it. But then again, I’ve generally been a bit skeptical of Apple’s products at the time they are announced. I tried to keep an open mind, tried to imagine how an iPad would benefit me. When the iPad was released, I played with one. Read the glowing reviews. An yet, the magic wasn’t rubbing off on me. So, after a couple months passed by, naturally I bought one. Actually my wife got it for my for Father’s day. Now that I’ve had a little over a week to play with it, have I seen the light?!

First Impressions

It almost goes without saying that anything Apple makes is going to be beautiful. The iPad is no exception. It is a gorgeous piece of hardware. As a nook owner, I was a bit dismayed at the heft of the iPad, and the the slightly curved back makes it annoyed to try and use on a flat surface. I also haven’t found a comfortable way to carry it around. I really need a case, if only I knew of somewhere to get one… Apart from those minor complaints the design is fantastic. Then I started using it.

Setting up the iPad was easy enough. I plugged it into my computer synced my contact, calendar, music, and also the apps I had installed on my iPhone. You have to wonder why a physical cable is still required for this when the thing has WiFi built right in. One beautiful day we’ll be able to synchronize and update our iDevices wirelessly, but until that day arrives, I have yet another cable to keep track of.

Multitasking

Next, I spent a half hour or so poking around on the iPad. Then I got bored and a bit frustrated. As everyone knows by now, you can’t run more than one application at a time on any iOS device, unless that application was made by Apple. iOS 4.0 will remedy this somewhat, allowing limited multitasking, but it won’t go far enough. There’s no good way to browse the web and have a instant messaging, twitter, IRC client and RSS reader fired up as I normally do on my laptop. Granted, I’m a “power user” and many have suggested that the iPad is not targeted to power users. Fair enough, but I thought about how my daughter uses her netbook. Generally she is talking with her friends on AIM with a web browser open to YouTube or something Twilight related and discussing whatever it is that is interesting to 12 year old girls these days. She’s hardly what I would call a power user but the iPad would not be able to handle her computing needs. My wife and 10 year old son quite like the iPad. Typically when they are using it, it’s for a very specific task. Namely video games. I haven’t noticed either of them use it for anything else.

Notifications

Okay, you can’t have multiple apps running at the same time, but apps can push notifications to the user when they have something interesting to tell you. This should lessen the need for true multitasking, and it would if they were done right. Unfortunately, notifications are broken on both the iPad and the iPhone. When you receive a notification, say a new message on AIM, whatever you’re doing at the moment is interrupted and you’re presented with a big blue modal dialog box that demands you respond to the notification right that minute. Or you can dismiss it and hope you remember it after you’ve finished whatever task was interrupted. It is fantastically annoying. Compare that to the notification system on Android: when notifications come it, they are queued up in a convenient drop down drawer at the top of the screen. Not only can I refer to them on my own time, I can also address them in any order I choose. If Apple would make this one change, 90% of my multitasking complaints would disappear.

Users

When we got our iPad I was thinking that maybe we could use it as sort of a coffee table device that the whole family could share. The iPad could be great for that. Laying about as a reference for those times when you want to look something up on the web, or if you have a spare moment and you want to check your email, or if the kids had some time to kill and wanted to play a game. And of course everyone that sees one want to play with it. Unfortunately there is no concept of user accounts so all the email accounts are visible to everyone that uses it. All of your documents. All of your apps, including those with sensitive data such as mint, are all right there where everyone can look at them. I don’t want my wife and kinds reading my email and I’m sure they don’t want me reading theirs. So email isn’t even used on my iPad. All the music and pictures on it are synced to my computer, so if my wife or kids want to listen to their music, they’re out of luck. Each of us also have apps and logins that are different for Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Gmail… and rather than deal with the hassle logging in for the correct person, it’s easier to go grab the laptop. As a coffee table device, the lack of multi-user supports cripples the iPad. Of course I’m sure Apple would rather me purchase 3 more devices, but I can barely justify the cost of one. And even if I did have another $1500 for 3 more iPads, I’d have the opposite complaint, because I do want to share some things between some users.

Web Browsing

A few evenings ago I sat down for what I expected to be my first attempt to use the iPad for something practical. I needed to buy some tickets to a baseball game and figured I’d relax on the couch, watch a little TV, and mull over my ticket choices. I navigated to StubHub to make my purchase and sure enough, StubHub requires Flash to work. Prior to the purchase of the iPad, I didn’t really care on way or the other about the whole Flash versus HTML 5 debate. I don’t really care who’s fault it is that Flash isn’t supported on the iPad, all I know is the iPad doesn’t work with a chunk of the internet right now. The transition to HTML 5 will help to be sure, but flash is going to be with us for a very long time. Some time ago, I went through a phase where I played flash based games (yes even Farmville) on Facebook. None of this will work on the iPad. Although, Farmville is coming (or maybe it’s available now) as a standalone app, if you’re like me, you played games on Facebook, because you could also interact with Facebook, through chat for example, while you were playing. Flash won’t work in Safari, and chat won’t work while playing the standalone version because of the multitasking limitations.

The Display

When the resolution of the iPad’s display was announced at 1024 by 768 (132 ppi) I was a little dismayed. After all, the Nexus One had a resolution of 800 x 480 (254 ppi)and that was a mobile phone. Of course the Nexus uses a PenTile display so it that’s cheating. Still, I was a little disappointed but figured I was picking nits. Five months later, Apple announces the iPhone 4 with a resolution almost equal to the iPad at 960 by 640 pixels. Three hundred and twenty-six pixels per inch. That deserved to be typed out. It’s just gorgeous. Suddenly the iPad’s display doesn’t seem nearly so good. I’m sure that it will be improved in the future. It does make me wonder, however. iOS developers have there different resolutions to target right now and there are certain to be more in the future. It’s already a little messy for developers to support each of these, and I’m wondering how much more so it will be as we move forward.

Good stuff

I was a bit initially a bit skeptical that I would enjoy typing on the iPad. And I certainly didn’t think I’d be able to type very fast. However, typing works surprisingly well on the iPad. The same predictive text is in place here as it is on the iPhone which helps, but it even without it, typing would be just fine. Also, the ability to get all of my Barnes and Noble eBooks on the iPad is great. It makes a very convenient means for my wife to read all the books on my nook since I’ve been unwilling to share my eReader.

Final Thoughts

I’ve written quite a lot and most of it is negative I suppose. I’ve even held back a bit. There are a lot of times the iPad seems to be working against me. But there is a lot to like too. And so much potential that’s not limited by the hardware. In my case, the iPad is little more than a toy. But I can see how it would work well for certain types of people, such as those that travel a lot, or those that are want a dead simple device for browsing the internet and checking email. I’m sure Apple will continue to refine iOS and eventually I’ll have nothing left to complain about (yeah right).

So yesterday iTunes dropped all DRM from their music. This is good. In addition, they added a variable pricing scheme where some of the really popular tracks would be $1.29, but never fear (says Apple), this will be offset by many tracks which will be $0.69. This is bad. The majority of tracks should remain $0.99. I read this news with little interest since there was nothing in that news to sway me from Amazon back to iTunes.

Until this morning. Today I came across an article claiming that Amazon and Wal-Mart have followed suit and will charge a premium on their more popular tracks as well. Amazon will be charging $1.29 for premium tracks while Wal-Mart will be charging $1.24. I was a bit distraught. If Amazon prices their music the same as iTunes then they lose whatever advantage they may have over them. I’m certainly not using Amazon for the elegant user interface.

So, I did a little research. I looked at the top 20 selling tracks on iTunes and compared them to the prices on Amazon. Here are the top 20 most popular tracks on iTunes and the prices on both iTMS and Amazon:

Amazon has indeed increased their prices. But they are not anywhere near the changes that Apple has made. In fact it looks like the difference in price between Amazon and Apple has just gotten that much wider. Amazon beats or matches Apple’s prices on all but one track. While I can’t say I’m happy with the price increase, Amazon’s average price has only jumped a few pennies a track on average. While Apple’s prices have jumped almost $0.20 per track in this sample. I looked at a larger sample comparing Apple and Amazon’s top 100 tracks and found that in Apple’s case they are charging $1.29 for 41 tracks and $0.99 for the other 59. This brings the average down to around $1.11. An increase of around twelve cents per track on average. Amazon’s top 100 tracks had the following breakdown: 8 tracks at $1.29, 87 tracks at $0.99, 1 track at $0.89, 6 tracks at $0.79 and 2 free tracks for an average of $1.02 per track.

Now it may be, since Amazon has only recently adopted this price increase, that all of the changes have not yet taken affect in which case I may need to reconsider. But as things stand now, Amazon is in little danger of losing me as a music customer. I’ll be watching with interest though.

This is only the latest in a series of disappointments from the iPhone developer community. A brief timeline:

• We have an SDK, it’s html and javascript (boo!)
• OK, just kidding we have a real SDK (yay!)
• But you’ll only be able to distribute your apps through our store (boo!)
• But all the tools will be free (yay!)
• And it’ll be $99 per year to become a developer (yee… meh)
• Oh and you’ll need to be an authorized iPhone developer to post apps on the App Store and you’ll go through a potentially long drawn out process where you’ll receive no feedback from Apple and in the end probably get chosen or denied at random (boo!)
• OK you can submit your apps now (yay!)
• But it’ll take days or weeks before they’ll be approved… or denied. And again you won’t know the progress of your submission until the point we reach our decision. (boo!)
• Oh and by the way this is still all under NDA (BOO!)
• NullRiver’s NetShare is available. At last we can tether with the iPhone! (yay!)
• No you can’t (boo!)
• Yes you can (yay!)
• No you can’t (boo!)

There have been plenty of suggested remedies to deal with these issues, but everything in Apple’s history leads me to think that Apple will tighten, rather than loosen, their control of, well pretty much everything they do. We love Apple because they create great hardware and software. They devote resources to the little details that another company might gloss over, but these details are what sets them apart from their competitors. But let’s be honest, the man running Apple would like very much if it were possible to sell you a product in which everything that you need (and don’t) has been decided upon based on aesthetics and function. The degree of openness for each of the three platforms: the Mac, iPhone, and iPod, is directly proportionally to the amount of competition Apple has in each category.

For example look back at the original Mac 128k: it will have no fan, by God, or hard drive, or ability to expand it in any way. And to make sure people didn’t try and fiddle around in it’s perfect innards the case was held together with screws that could only be removed with a special screwdriver. (Later Apple would learn their lesson and remove screws altogether from the iPod and iPhone. Can anyone, anyone at all provide a valid reason, other than aesthetics, for not providing a user replaceable battery on these devices?) The Macintosh did make a dent in the universe, but not in the way that Apple originally hoped. It brought the graphical user interface indirectly to the masses. Indirectly since sadly it was Windows based machines, which were much more open to user customization, that came to dominate the desktop computer market.

This control applies not only to hardware and software, but perhaps most importantly to the image that Apple projects. They make products for the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, and the round pegs in square holes. You’re cool if you buy an Apple product. Not a lemming like some Windows user. Ironic, since some Apple devotees happily camp out for new iPhones, iPods, OS updates, new Apple Store openings and frantically refresh their browsers windows during live blogs of any Steve Jobs presentation. This is all cultivated by Apple. All of the information that comes from Apple is carefully crafted to try and insure that they are on message. I’m not sure I’ve ever read any news articles about them that didn’t end with “Apple declined to comment”. They sued and then shut down Think Secret. Radar, Apple’s bug reporting service, is of little use to developers since they’re not allowed to see bug others have submitted. Recently I heard of a situation with a developer that had appended an iPhone application description to say that an update was ready, but Apple was working through a backlog and had not yet approved it. The developer was contacted and asked to change the description so it did not appear that the delay was Apple’s.

OK, so I’m kinda of going off in the weeds here. I didn’t really intend to just bash Apple. I only wanted to illustrate that the company has its faults and we should try and view things objectively. Apple is trying to make money. Period. They’re not trying to make the world a happy shiny place. So, while I appreciate Fraser Speirs gesture, their are thousands of developers lined up waiting to develop for the iPhone that will step in to take his place. So what incentive does Apple have to loosen the restrictions they’ve placed on development? Civil disobedience could be fun. All the developers could simultaneously change the price of their apps to $9999.99 for a day in protest. That would make news and we’d all lose our App Store privileges and likely enrage our customers, so maybe not. Or, we could hope that the outcry becomes such that it becomes felt in wider circles than just the developer community. If Apple’s image starts taking a hit they might change their minds. Although there is a slow undercurrent of dissatisfaction forming based on the cumulative effects of the recent negative actions, by and large people are willing to give Apple the benefit of the doubt in most situations. Certainly Apple is given far, far wider latitude than a company like Microsoft.

So what if the iPhone comes to dominate the cell phone market the way the iPod has dominated the mp3 player market? Will we end up with the same diversity of development that we see on the iPod? Perhaps not to the same degree, but it’s reasonable to expect that the smaller players would be slowly squeezed out. What the iPhone needs is legitimate competition. Yes, there are plenty of smartphones out there, but Apple needs someone to deliver a device as elegant, or nearly so, as the iPhone. Perhaps Google’s Android or RIM is up to the challenge?

At the very least Google / RIM should try and capitalize on some of Apple’s missteps, especially with the developer community. What if RIM tried to woo away developers of applications like Podcaster with an offer to assist in bringing the application to Blackberry? Hey we’ll give you a phone, a system to develop on, the tools, and a nice chunk of cash and no NDA, if you’ll bring your application to our platform, whadaya say? It might be harder to lure away deeply loyal developers that cut their teeth on the desktop platform, but plenty of developers have no such history and would be perfectly happy to learn another SDK if the opportunity looked promising. RIM could then turn that into a great little PR campaign while their at it. Maybe even make their own 1984 type commercial with Apple playing the part of Big Brother this time.

Does all this mean, am I rooting for Blackberry, Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile?! No of course not, I’m rooting for the consumer. Technology. Innovation. Apple’s recent tactics will stifle innovation and the only real remedy is healthy competition. This is exactly what the iPhone brought to the creaking cell phone industry. Now we need to the competition to respond to insure innovation continues with mobile software development.

In a nutshell Apple has me (and Shipley) a little worried. Shipley explains.

Which reminds me. I had one other (crazy?) theory recently regarding the iPhone and relative ease with which it was hacked. In this past Apple hasn’t shown much remorse when it comes to “borrowing” ideas developed by third parties and incorporating them into the Mac operating system, no? Everyone remembers Watson, Konfabulator, etc. At least they had the decency to buy CoverFlow. While Apple isn’t encouraging iPhone development (unless it’s web based), they haven’t yet made a concerted effort to put a stop to it. Perhaps Apple is watching closely to see what proves popular so they can incorporate it into the next release of the iPhone / iPod Touch without worry of guilt, compensation, or acknowledgement. Probably far fetched. Not the bit about Apple stealing any good ideas that might come from the iPhone development community. No that’s not far fetched at all. But surely this isn’t part of some master plan… or is it? [Cue: dramatic chipmunk]

That reminded me of this idea for a commercial some of the guys at work came up with, but sadly, was never filmed. John Hodgeman wanted too much money or something.

Mac: Hello, I’m a Mac.
PC: And I’m a PC.
Mac: What do you have there PC?
PC: Oh this, it’s just a beach ball.
Mac: Cool, mind if I take a look
PC: Not at all.

(PC hands Mac a rainbow colored beach ball and Mac begins examining it, turning it over and over)

PC: Mac?

(Mac’s eyes have glazed over. A little trickle of drool begins to run from the corner of his mouth.)

PC: Hello?

(PC waves his hand in front of Mac’s eyes. This elicits no response.)

Oh, one other thing. You may have heard that Apple has introduced a cellular phone called the, um, iPhone. By shear coincidence, the iPhone is coming out tomorrow too. Of course it’s going to cost like $600, not to mention a contract with AT&T! Heh, can you imagine anyone silly enough to stand in line for that?

The iPhone announcement was particularly insulting I thought. Of course AJAX based apps can be developed for the iPhone. He should also keep in mind that the very same apps will also run on pretty much every other smart phone out there. Making this non-annonucement one of two “One more things“, was the icing on the cake of a lackluster keynote.

The other “one more thing” was Safari for the Windows. Eh? And you make have noticed from the slides that Apple is not interested in claiming Internet Explorer’s slice of the browser market, no they want Firefox’s share and the other 2 percent? The whole thing was bizarre.

Update: Oh and one other thing… one intriguing announcement was EA’s commitment to the Mac platform. I can only hope this means that the will be a Mac release of Spore released alongside the Windows version.

Sunday: My flight arrived in Oakland around 4:30PM, where we were met by Scott Naylor, a Griffin associate, who took us into San Francisco to check into the hotel. Next we checked in at the Moscone and went on a “short walk” to Coit Tower, followed by collapse dinner at Fog City Diner. Note to self: Begin regular visits to the Y.

Monday Morning: I met Mike Ash from Rogue Amoeba while waiting in line for the Keynote. Mike and I got along well and had several discussions before the conference ended. The Keynote started well enough, though the Windows bashing is getting a bit tiresome from my perspective. I watched the rundown of the top 10 features in Leopard waiting for the one (or more) items that would amaze me. Sadly there wasn’t one. It certainly seems “nice”, but nothing I would just have to run out and get I think. I was really disappointed about the “Top Secret” features that were being kept hidden, ostensibly to prevent Microsoft from copying them any sooner than they have to. I expect the reality is that they simply weren’t demo ready.

Monday Night: At the reception dinner, we caught up with Rich Wardwell from Landmark Digital Services and then headed over to Buzz Anderson’s Weblogger’s Party. I met quite a few folks here, among them Gus Mueller, Martin Pittenauer, and Brent Simmons. All super nice, though I think I might have freaked Gus out a bit at first, as I began my introduction by saying “I’ve got something for you” while reaching into my backpack. Perhaps he was worried I was a disgruntled VoodooPad user that had snapped. It was all good though. I brought him a promised PowerMate. I also met Scott and Jenny Ellsworth. Scott’s a new hire at Google (you may have heard of them). I spent most of the evening talking to the two of them about all manner of things including the interview process at Google. Fascinating stuff and also very nice people.

Tuesday Morning: During one of the morning sessions I noticed a guy wearing a Nashville Predators jersey and just had to find out who this might be. Turned out it was Justin Williams aka carpeaqua. Justin will be moving to Nashville sometime around the beginning of next year bringing the total number of Mac developers in the area to something like 4. Sadly, we didn’t get much chance to talk though.

Tuesday Evening: After eating something vaguely resembling pizza and vaguely tasting of cardboard coated in Elmer’s glue, the Apple Design Awards began. All of the winners (though the Automator action category was a bit of a head scratcher) were examples of excellent software. Congrats to all the winners. After the ADA’s came Stump the Experts. Which, for whatever reason, wasn’t quite so good as last year. Finally after Stump, I caught up with Rob Barris from Blizzard who told me all the secrets regarding the upcoming expansion to World of Warcraft… not really though.

Wednesday: (Note: this may have actually happened Tuesday, but I couldn’t think of anything else terribly interesting from Wednesday so we’ll just pretend) Whilst standing out front of the main entrance to the Moscone, I was approached by a couple guys (OK, I know this was San Francisco, but it’s not what you’re thinking) whom I chatted with for a while. Turns out they were from Baca Film and found me relatively interesting somehow. They asked if it was okay to interview me… on camera. Being the ham that I am, of course I consented. I’m not 100% sure what they’re up to, but I think maybe they’ll be slip my interview in between that of Woz and Andy Hertzfeld.

Interlude: This would be a good time to say that while the preview of Leopard didn’t exactly blow me away, the same can’t be said about the work being put into the next iteration of XCode and company. The NDA prevents me from going into details, but suffice to say, there are some very nice changes in store for developers in this department.

Thursday Morning: The news of the plot to blow up the airplanes leaving England didn’t exactly start the day off right, but fortunately the news was of arrests and not actual death and destruction. Still I was a bit uneasy about having to fly across country in a couple days. I put the troubling morning news behind me and headed to the conference where I had lunch with Dominic Feira from Ambrosia Software. We chatted about interesting new things going on there and at Griffin, the conference and finally a long bit about coding conventions. The sort of thing that would put normal humans to sleep.

Thursday Evening: Beer! The Apple Campus bash was a lot of fun. Although again I did not manage to beat the line to the Apple employee store. We even traveled by car and beat all the busses there. When I do manage to visit, I expect I’ll be extremely underwhelmed but I can’t imagine what it is that compels folks to stand in line for hours and hours while a perfectly good party is going on inside. The music this time around was performed by bt. I’d have to say I approved enthusiastically.

Friday (aka tourist day): WWDC 2006 wrapped up at 12:30PM leaving the rest of the day to play tourist and finally eat some decent food. Among the tourist stops, Coit Tower, Lombard Street, Golden Gate Bridge, Fisherman’s Wharf. By the end of the day I was beat and ready to head home.

Saturday: I was a bit worried about getting to the airport with enough time to pass through the mess I expected to be waiting for me there. It wasn’t much fun, but it wasn’t terrible either. About an hour or so standing in various lines before I arrived at the gate and finally my flight back home to Nashville.

One more thing… I didn’t get one of these from Steve, so I’ll add my own here. Of course I was running Proxi and I can’t tell you how many people where transfixed when they saw the Bubbles plugin running. I just want to say thanks to all of you for the complements. I think it’s pretty cool too And finally, they were lots of other people that I met during the show that I didn’t mention in the interest of space (note to “Wolf”: definitely leave the quotes escaped next year!), but everyone was very approachable, personable, and / or just generally nice folks. It was a pleasure and I’m looking forward to seeing you all again at WWDC 2007!

Take this item from Interface Builder 2.5.4 release notes:

Popup buttons now stay open while editing.

To fix a previous bug, popup buttons closed after an item was edited. Now popup buttons remain open for editing until the mouse is clicked outside of the popup button.

I just had an opportunity to add a popup menu in IB and couldn’t figure out what I was suddenly doing to make the menus stay open as they were being edited, until it occurred to me Interface Builder may have been updated along with XCode 2.3. Bless you XCode / Interface Builder team. My cube neighbors will welcome the reduced levels of profanities I’m sure. Now if I can only do something about my other emanations.

After I finished my little ditty. I showed Alex how to use GarageBand. She and Aaron proceeded to make this 30 second masterpiece. It’s called Stay Out of the Basement! And features vocal by Aaron (my 5 year old) pitch shifted down many octaves. Try not to be too frightened.