A lot of commentators on the iPad noticed the similarity between Delicious Library and the iBooks virtual bookshelves for the display of e-book titles. So did Delicious Monsters Wil Shipley.
Talking to the Washington Post, Shipley seemed upset… but also seemed to understand.
But the thing about iBooks is, it’s a book-reader. So, of course they looked around, found the best interface for displaying books (Delicious Library’s shelves), and said: yup, this is what we’re doing…
Shipley then notes that he actually understands why Apple couldn’t write him a check: it would have been taken as a legal admission that Apple copied his design, and since Delicious Library’s UI isn’t copyrighted or patented, it actually would open up culpability, not close it.
As inevitable as the dawn follows the night, a LEGO simulacrum will follow the announcement of the latest Apple product announcement. Here, then, in dimpled, rainbow colored blocks, the necessary LEGO iPad, courtesy of Flickr user Brickjournal and his plastic brick ingenuity.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs did some trash-talking about the company’s growing rivalry with Google. In one case, Jobs is alleged to have said Google’s famous ‘Don’t Be Evil’ standard of conduct “is a load of crap.”
Due to Apple’s infamous distaste for publicity and unauthorized leaks, a series of anonymous sources talked to the tech press about last week’s internal “town hall” style company meeting. The comments show two companies once quite close competing on several fronts.
Although it’s hardly as killer a feature as carrier unlock, one of the main reasons I still jailbreak my iPhone is so I can cram five icons into the dock… so when the iPad was first demonstrated, and showed only four available icons in the dock, I actually winced.
No need to fear, though, because this time, Apple has us all covered: a reader wrote into TUAW and pointed out that the iPad SDK allows up to six icons in the dock.
You might assume the iPad supports this behavior because of the larger screen, but the iPhone crams five icons into the dock just fine. I’ve always assumed, in fact, that the iPhone only allows four icons so that each dock’s icons is symmetrical with the columns of icons above.
I wonder two things: will the iPad, then, allow up to six icons per row, to make everything symmetrical with the dock? Finally, will the next iPhone update expand the dock similarly? Fingers crossed on both accounts.
How do you get more attention for a largely unknown netbook at a time when the tech press has the vapors for Apple’s iPad? You sue Apple and claim its new device is just a clone of your netbook, thus grabbing some headlines for a day or two. China’s Shenzhen Great Loong Brothers said it might sue Apple, claiming the iPad looks like its P88.
The Chinese company’s president Xiaolong Wu, in an interview with Spain’s El Mundo, said if Apple tries to sell the iPad in China he “won’t have any choice but to report them [Apple],” noting the device would hurt his sales.
Amazon has raised the white flag in the first skirmish over ebook pricing. The victors in this first round could be publisher Macmillan and rival ebook-reader maker Apple. After temporarily stopping selling Macmillan titles over a pricing dispute, the online book-seller said it was capitulating to the publisher’s demands.
“We will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books,” Amazon announced on its Kindle Community forums.
Though the announcement of Apple’s iPad has met with the typical mixture of hyperbolic praise and hyperbolic criticism (no one can talk sensibly about it), there has been one consistent complaint that most would agree is valid: a device this powerful should be capable of some form of multitasking. But I think I have the answer.
What it is: Skimble is a fitness-tracking iPhone app that stands out from the crowd by keeping track of rock climbing, swimming, and even yoga.
Why it’s cool: Maria Ly created Skimble because she found no good tools for tracking the sports she had become passionate about in recent years. Basically, she’s become a very good rock climber in a very short time, and didn’t have a way to really track that progress and get a clear picture of how far she had come. She also does a lot of yoga, and, unsurprisingly, Nike+ doesn’t work so well for quantifying the impact of your Downward Dogs and Sun Salutations.
Fortunately, Maria’s a talented software engineer, so she was actually able to do something about it. And, as a rock climber (though one not quite so good as Ly), I can say that Skimble is just about perfect for tracking your climbing and bouldering efforts. I put into action at my local climbing emporium Mission Cliffs yesterday, and I was easily able to click a button to select the difficulty of the climb, the fashion in which I finished it, and a note (typically the name of the route). And as a result, I have a record of where I succeeded, where I failed, and where I maybe over-did it (that would be the late 5.12a I threw in).
If you’re an Apple fanboy (or girl) and your tee shirt repertoire doesn’t include as many Apple inspired tees as it should—you’re in luck—Coty over at cotygonzales.com has come to your rescue. With much sweat and toil, he’s put together a huge list of 101 T-Shirts for Apple Fanboys and the Mac Faithful that is sure to help you get you get back on the right track.
Fanboy protocol calls for 5-6 different Apple shirts to be worn publicly per week—better stock up.
“From $59 to $7,000, if you want an Apple product, there’s a pretty darn good chance you’ll be able to pick something in your price range. Simply brilliant,” says the site.
But note that the chart does not show ALL Apple’s products and price points: there’a lot of products missing. But it does show that although Apple has a reputation as pricey, it does hit a lot of sub-$1,000 price points.
“General purpose computing is too complicated for most people anyway, and the iPad’s descendants along with similar competing products from other companies will offer an enticing alternative. So I see the death of the traditional, open personal computer as a likely occurrence.”
Pro: But Facebook iPhone developer Joe Hewitt is extremely positively about the iPad’s closed system. To his mind it’s a major asset:
“The one thing that makes an iPhone/iPad app “closed” is that it lives in a sandbox, which means it can’t just read and write willy-nilly to the file system, access hardware, or interfere with other apps. In my mind, this is one of the best features of the OS. It makes native apps more like web apps, which are similarly sandboxed, and therefore much more secure. On Macs and PCs, you have to re-install the OS every couple years or so just to undo the damage done by apps, but iPhone OS is completely immune to this.”
I’m with Hewitt. The IPad is a cloud computer par excellence, and we will likely be able to run almost any software we want on it, but it’ll be on a server somewhere and not on the iPad. Colburn notes this too, but thinks it’s a bad thing.
How the web will look on the Flash-less iPad, according to Adobe.
Why is there no Adobe Flash on the iPad? Adobe says it’s not because it’s buggy, as an Apple source claimed this afternoon to CultofMac.com.
It’s because Apple is protecting revenue streams derived from content like movies and games. If users could watch free TV shows on Hulu, they wouldn’t buy them through iTunes.
“It’s pretty clear if you connect the dots: the issue is about revenue,” says Adrian Ludwig, an Adobe group product manager for Flash, during a telephone interview on Friday afternoon.
Well, that didn’t take long — app developers have already begun rolling out versions of their apps that’ll expand the capabilities of the iPad, still a good two months away from store shelves. One of the first is ActivePrint, from developer Pocket Watch.
Currently, ActivePrint lets iPhone users pop out things like photos, web pages, plain text and clipboard contents. But Pocket Watch says the new iPad SDK will allow printing of office-type stuff — like word processing docs, spreadsheets and presentations — to any WIndows PC.
…wait, what? You heard right — currently, ActivePrint only outputs to printers connected to a Windows machine. But not for long, the developer says: Mac compatibility should be out in March.
Adobe is so bothered by Apple excluding Flash from the iPad, it put porn up on its blog to prove the point.
Abobe’s official Flash Blog has a post entitled “The iPad provides the ultimate browsing experience?” which shows how several popular websites would look without Flash content. Right at the top is a screenshot of Bang Bros HD, a hardcore porn site.
As you can see, an iPad without Flash is going to be pretty much useless for HD porn.
“Millions of websites use Flash,” the blog post says. “Get used to the blue Legos.”
UPDATE: We checked, and there’s an MP4-based version of Bang Bros, which works fine on the iPad as is. So even Adobe’s most desperate tactic isn’t true.
We close out a jam-packed week with some familiar deals for Mac fans. We have an iMac with the i5 processor (2.66GHz), a 27-inch screen, 8GB of RAM and Windows 7 – all for $2,207. The iLife ’09 home productivity suite from Apple could be a big hit for new iPad owners, or any Mac owner. Today’s deal is hard to beat: just $38. Finally, who doesn’t like free? We round out our top three deals with a new bevy of App Store freebies, including Super Slyder, a puzzle game that puts to use the iPhone’s accelerometer.
Along the way, we also look at other gadgets, including a way to keep your laptop cool, an easy way to get digital video and a colorful way to kick back and check out a screen wider than what’s in your hand.
As usual, details on these and many other bargains, can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
Following up yesterday’s revelation that the iPad SDK contains photo capturing ability, despite the lack of onboard camera, comes this juicy little screenshot, showing the iPad displaying an iPhone-esque “Touch to return a call” bar across the top of the screen.
Since there’s no chance the iPad is going to operate as an enormous mobile phone (I wonder who the exclusive carrier of the iPad in Brobdingnag would even be?) I think this pretty much confirms what I guessed: the iPad SDK has some residual iPhone features still loitering shiftlessly about, and everything will probably be polished up before the iPad’s release. About your business then.
See that New York Times article displayed on the iPad in the official Apple demo image to the right?
It’s called 31 Places to Go in 2010: you should click on it and check it out. When you’re done, come back and tell me what’s wrong with the iPad demo image.
Yup. Exactly so. The iPad doesn’t do Flash, but yet the New York Times’ piece contains a slideshow powered by Adobe’s plugin.
This doesn’t mean the iPad secretly runs Flash: Apple’s clearly trying to move the web away from it as a standard plugin, not just because it threatens the App Store but, as Apple themselves noted on Wednesday, the Flash plugin was responsible for more crashes reported to Apple across all of OS X than any other source.
It looks like Apple just fudged the truth a little in their iPad promo images. That’s worth a scolding cluck or two, but there’s no doubt in my mind that sites like the New York Times are already hard at work making sure all of their content works on the iPad without Flash. Not so much a fib, then, as a look at the future.
Soon after the iPad was introduced, one of the earliest complaints was that readers don’t want apps and other accessories interfering with the words. Now comes a university study showing people need more than reading to fall in love with e-readers.
Indeed, the Univ. of Georgia study found younger consumers may prefer their phone to an e-reader. According to the research, young people view Amazon’s Kindle as “old” compared to smartphones with applications allowing them to do everything from listen to music to finding a restaurant, along with reading online.
Before you can even get your hands on one, Northern Film & Media is offering £40,000 (about $64,500) for iPad application ideas from developers in England’s North East.
Dev teams — which can include some members from out of the area — have until February 24 to come up with revenue-generating ideas that don’t duplicate the device’s standard app functions, aren’t kissing cousins of iPhone apps and are launchable by summer, 2010.
They’re putting up the cash in the hopes that locals will make a mark on the iPad:
“The iPod changed the way we thought about music. The iPhone transformed our attitudes to mobile phones, and opened our minds to all the things they could do other than call people” Tom Harvey, Chief Executive of Northern Film & Media said in the presser. “What does the iPad transform? You decide. Newspaper and magazine reading? Gaming? Writing and painting?”
The location requirement is fairly strict but may be skirtable: the app must “be developed by teams where at least 70% of the team’s talent have their base in and 50% of the budget is spent in the North East.”
Apple has often dismissed the possibility the company should compete with low-cost netbook computers, saying the popular devices are ‘junk.’ When rumors of Apple making a tablet computer appeared, focus was on ebooks and publishing. But will the iPad turn out to be Apple’s answer to those pesky netbooks? One highly-placed supplier thinks the iPad could outsell netbooks.
With a $499 starting price, the iPad could “achieve annual sales of 10 million units, which is a significant estimate considering the current tablet PC market is only about 3 million a year,” said Paul Peng, executive vice-president of AU Optronics’ global business unit. AUO makes LCD displays.
The iBooks service/feature for iPad is conspicuous in its absence from Apple iPad web pages outside of the USA, and the American site’s rather ominous “iBooks is available only in the U.S.” footnote made people ask whether Apple was going to fumble the ball. PC Pro today got confirmation from an Apple spokesperson about the subject from a British perspective, the statement being: “iBooks will be available in the UK, but the timing of that will not be announced until the iPad goes on sale”. In other words, pretty much as John Brownlee guessed here, yesterday.
Here’s hoping the timescale is ‘very soon’, rather than it taking as long to get British iBooks (and those for other non-US territories) as it did movies and other non-music media in iTunes. Here’s also hoping that PC Pro gives its headline writer a slap—titling an article ‘Book service in doubt for UK iPad’ when the Apple spokesperson confirmed the feature will be in no doubt is, to say the least, inaccurate link-bait tosh.
Since Amazon introduced its Kindle ebook reader, analysts and rivals have attempted to gauge its success via learning sales numbers. Because of that, the online bookseller has jealously guarded those figures – at least until Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Thursday let slip “millions” of people own the device. That number is actually 3 million, according to a new report.
“The total number of all types of Kindles out there in users hands hit 3 million sometime in December,” Michael Arrington of TechCrunch writes, citing sources who’ve been “amazingly accurate” in the past.
Although Amazon spokespeople refuse to elaborate on Bezos’ “millions” remark, the word sent BusinessWeek to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations.
“Assuming that at least two million people have bought the device, and that each paid at least $259 – the cost of the least-expensive Kindle – Amazon now has a business worth more than $500 million in sales,” the publication said Thursday.
Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney also figures Amazon could sell 2 million Kindles this year. Other analysts predict Apple’s iPad may sell twice that in 2010 alone.
Why is it so important how many Kindles is sold? Not only has Barnes & Noble’s Nook attempted to challenge the ebook leader, Amazon figured prominently in Apple’s introduction of its own “Kindle killer,” the iPad. CEO Steve Jobs announced his company will “stand on their [Amazon’s] shoulders and go a bit further.” In private, however, Apple has used Amazon’s pricing as a wedge to split off some big-name publishers. Although Amazon has attempted to adopt some of Apple’s practices (raising the royalties for publishers and adding apps to its e-reader), the company is squarely in Apple’s sights. Little wonder Amazon doesn’t want to talk numbers.
