Much better. (h/t Michael Anderson.)
John Carey:
I would say a good 90 percent of the debate on the iPads usefulness as a computer is coming from writers and casual users and this is where I find the debate getting a little one sided. Of course a writer would like the ipad. The tools most needed to get their work done are right there for the taking, you can hunt and gather all day long and it does make a fantastic, distraction free space to write in.
John is right. The iPad is very well suited for the sort of work that guys like myself, Federico Viticci, and Andy Ihnatko do.
Isaiah Carew, an indie Mac software developer, has nearly the exact same sentiment:
Speaking personally, my job revolves around: writing and debugging software, manipulating production graphics design, and supporting customers. I’ve tried to do all of these tasks on an iPad, and while all are possible, at least in part. There isn’t any task that’s made easier by the iPad. And most are made much more difficult.
The argument for why the iPad doesn’t work as a laptop replacement is just as valid for why it does. There are a lot of folks, like John and Isaiah, who are using professional-grade software to do design work, app development, photography and video editing, and more. The iPad of today can’t handle that.
What the iPad of today can handle is most all of the standard tasks of most average users. Email, Web browsing, Facebook, movies, music, games, and more. What will things look like 5 and 10 years from now?
I like this summary paragraph from John’s article:
As it stands, the iPad is amazing. I use it every single day for writing, browsing the news, sketching ideas, and reading though email or tech riders and I love every minute of it. It complements my daily life and on days when I don’t need to get any real work done, I leave my laptop at home. But when it comes to honest creative work I can not help but find the iPad as little more than a sidekick. I can say with certainty though, that this is far from the last word on this. I can clearly see a future where touch screen devices such as the iPad become more and more viable for the kind of things I have discussed here today. It is still new territory being explored and I for one can not wait to see where it takes us.
Side note: remember when the conversation was about whether or not the MacBook Air could be your only computer?
Stellar article by Alex Payne.
Stellar article by Michael Lopp.
Speaking of Mac utilities, this new Menu Bar app is pretty cool. It’s basically a Menu Bar folder, where you can store away some of the Menu Bar apps which are necessary evils. I’ve got a few apps living in my Menu Bar that I keep running but which I don’t need to see. Bartender hides them for me.
Bartender is currently in public beta, so it’s free to try out and if you buy a license now it’s half the price that it will be once it reaches version 1.0. My only quibble with Bartender so far is that the icon options are all blurry in the Menu Bar. If you’re going to have just a single Menu Bar icon, it ought to be crisp and well-designed.
Update: Here is a nice replacement icon by Adam Betts.
Here’s a great deal for what is probably the most-used utility application on my Mac.
Aaron Cohen, who was guest-editing for Jason Kottke over the weekend, asks the following question in his link to Jason Pontin’s article about apps and publications:
What’s the best way to use new technology to build and sustain an audience?
A lot of people are trying to figure that out. There is no one right answer, and there a lot of factors which come in to play. As someone who is making a living from publishing this website I do have a few thoughts.
Ultimately it boils down to one thing: make your content as easy to access and read as possible.
Not as fun, or unique, or feature-rich as possible. As easy.
Jeff Atwood:
Getting the details right is the difference between something that delights, and something customers tolerate.
Here’s a random way to think of it: every user is a princess and every poorly-implemented detail is a pea.
I like the idea of skipping Episode One all together, even though it does feel like cheating. Sure The Phantom Menace is by far and away the worst of all the episodes and pretty much adds nothing to the storyline nor does it provide any entertainment value. But: it is still one of the six episodes, and I hear kids love it.
Amazing. Works great on the iPad and iPhone, too.
I wrote this nearly a year ago. It’s still relevant (even more relevant now that the new iPad has a Retina display) and is related to the last link.
Jason Pontin, editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review:
The paid, expensively developed publishers’ app, with its extravagantly produced digital replica, is dead.
I’d say that the magazine app was only alive for about one issue (if that).
I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and printlike on something open, new, and digital.
The magazine app seemed alive only during that brief moment when the iPad was brand new and it was a novelty to have your favorite magazine available on your new tablet. But then you realized that it took up a lot of space, was slow to download on demand, and was not as easy to read as an article in Instapaper.
The Shawn Blanc T-Shirt Shop is currently open with a brand new t-shirt design that’s available in creme and heather gray.
The shirt was designed by local Kansas City illustrator and good friend of mine, Adam Grason, and is built off the same theme of last year’s shirt, that Computers are for Creating. Can you identify all the elements in the design?
I’ll be taking pre-orders until Monday, May 21. After which the t-shirt shop will close and all orders will be sent to print. Shirts are expected to be mailed out during the first week of June.
Speaking of The Avengers.
The Avengers brought in just over $200 million this past weekend, setting a new box office record. And, as Jonathan Weilbaecher writes for The Flick Cast, “it was the original Spider-Man movie in 2001 that was the first to breach the $100 Million Dollar plateau.”
Seth Godin:
The tipping point is the sum total of many individuals buzzing about something. But for an individual to start buzzing, something has to change in that person’s mind. Something flips from boredom or ignorance to excitement or anger.
This morning I brewed a cup of coffee using the recipe that Charlene Debuysere used to win The Gold AeroPress in this year’s World AeroPress Championship. It was delicious. It was also a nice change of pace as it’s quite different than the espresso-like cup that I normally brew with the AeroPress.
My thanks to Timing for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. On a personal note, Timing is one of the few apps in my Mac’s Menu bar. I use it to track and monitor how I spend my time at my computer.
Timing is the best way to keep track of the time you spend with your Mac. It automatically tracks which documents you are editing, applications you use, and the domains of the websites you visit. You’ll never have to worry about forgetting to start or stop a timer again!
After tracking, just drag and drop activities into projects. Sophisticated graphs show you how you spent your time each day and which projects consumed most of your time.
This week, Timing is available at a 60% discount off the regular price of $19.99. Get it from the Mac App Store today! There’s also a free version available that’s limited to showing today’s and yesterday’s activities.
Nice tip from Ted Landau. Odd preference location placement by Apple.
Lots of great tips here. Command+B and Command+R were new to me.
Matt Gemmell:
Unconsidered design (or lack of design) tends to simply gravitate towards the familiar, which is a natural instinct when we’re lost in some way.
Talk about a trip down memory lane. (Via Shaun Inman, naturally.)
Some behind-the-scenes info on the development of the color theme appearance options for Photoshop CS6.
One of the hallmark features of InDesign CS6 is its adaptive design functionality and the introduction of alternate layouts within the same document, liquid layout rules, and the content collector tools. Here’s Jay J. Nelson’s review of these features for Macworld.
Here’s a first-look overview of InDesign CS6 by Mike Rankin, based on the public beta. Of the creative suite apps, InDesign is perhaps my favorite and the CS6 update looks like it brings a lot of great new features. It’s not just for print-design anymore (well, it hasn’t been since CS5).
Adobe Creative Suite 6 is now available. The Photoshop CS6 beta has been out for a while, and I have yet to read or hear one negative thing about it.
I’m still rocking CS3 Design Standard from my previous life as a print designer, and this is the first update to the creative suite family that has me considering an upgrade even though I have no reason to.
If you’re jumping on the “access trumps ownership” bandwagon (cf. Netflix, Rdio), then you may be interested in Creative Cloud. It’s a $50/month subscription service that gives you complete access to the latest version of every app in the Master Collection, as well as a handful of cloud-centric services such as file storage, over-the-air sync, a Typekit subscription, and more.
I’ve been using Instacast to subscribe and listen to podcasts since I first came across it over a year ago. It’s simply a great app and version 2 has a lot of design and functionality improvements — I like how Stephen Hackett describes it as the best getting better.
Thanks to apps like Instacast and Rdio, the native Music app on my iPhone pretty much never gets used. Instacast 2 is just a buck in the app store.
My thanks to The Escapers for sponsoring the RSS feed this week to promote the just-released version of their web-design app, Flux 4. Flux is both a text editor and a WYSIWYG editor for building and designing web sites.
The hallmark feature of Flux 4 is what’s called FreeCode. FreeCode is the Flux text editor that stays un-touched by the WYSIWYG editor. If you’ve ever done WYSIWYG editing you know how mangled your clean code can get. Flux leaves the code you write intact if you switch between the text and the visual editor. Additional new features include: support for MAP and AREA tags, so you can visually edit image maps, code completion, support for TextMate themes and Coda plugins, an all new FTP/SFTP engine, and more.
Flux is available direct from The Escapers website or via the Mac App Store.
