Found Footage: Beautiful Apple Design

thanks TUAW: http://www.tuaw.com/2010/07/26/found-footage-beautiful-apple-design/

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iPad Encounter

I finally got a chance to spend some time at a couple local Apple Stores to handle an iPad. I don’t mean to be so Zen about it, but given all of the noise from the fan boys and haters, Reality is not either good or bad, Reality is just reality. Case in point, my first thought was that the iPad was much heavier than I first expected. The fan boys might look at that and say that this is because the iPad is so solidly constructed and mostly battery (to support the 10-hour run time!). The haters might say, it’s just too heavy. I have to say that it is difficult to hold it with one hand for any extended period. But then it isn’t any heavier than your basic hardcover book.

Next surprise I encountered during my maiden voyage to iPad-land was that when I pulled up my blog on the iPad all of the videos worked. Cool. Then when I went to my course blog none of the videos worked. Not cool. So YouTube works but Viddler doesn’t? A few weeks ago I checked out the HTML5 beta on YouTube but I don’t think that changed anything. I’m guessing that YouTube has the horsepower to detect that you are browsing on an iPad and transcode the feed so that it streams video that’s playable on the iPad (and iPhone). Viddler on the iPad I didn’t even get the broken media lego block. Fail. I might have to move my course videos back to YouTube. Ack. I was checking out Blip.tv because their pro-account offers an encoding option that’s iPhone-friendly. More research on this is is going to be needed. Archive.org?

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Just a Big iTouch – Questions Mere Days Til iPad D-Day

“Let me know how you like the ipad. It looks like a jumbo iphone to me ,” I’ve gotten this question more than a few times in the past few months. And most of us have seen variations of the following Doritos ad, punking the idea that the iPad is just a big iPod/iTouch. Funny AND stupid.

So on April 1st many of the A-List reviewers released their reviews of the iPad. WSJ’s Walt Mosberg mused, Apple iPad Review: Laptop Killer? Pretty Close. NY Times columnist David Pogue doubled downed his review for the geeks and the non-geeks. One of the best video reviews I’ve seen was by Chicago Sun-Times columnist, Andy Ihnatko (see below).

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ePad – Rockin’ It Like It’s 1987

You know you have something going right when the spoofs are spectacular…

Then we have this dream sequence/history of Apple’s computer designs. Beautifully done, but I don’t see how they could have left out the evolution of the iMac or iPod, except maybe they couldn’t get the curves of their virtual rendition to look right… Read more

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Apple iPad Announced: Oh My God, It Doesn’t Have a Rubber Baby Buggy Bumper!

I love CNET. It’s one tech news source where I can find everything from straight tech journalism to flawed editorials on the latest things happening in the tech world. Take the overhyped announcement of the iPad a little bit ago, CNET provided the following excellent straight news reporting on the event:

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Moving Media Around the House

By definition, this is a “first world” problem. In the news gap between CES and the Apple event next week, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I might manage my media collections between all of my computers. The buzz around the Boxee box and anticipating the need to have most of my working data in the cloud so that I can access it regardless of what computer or platform I’m using has inspired me to find a better way to work with my media. Actually this is a “problem” that I didn’t have until I moved from my one-room studio to my one-bedroom apartment and then two-bedroom townhouse. I have four macs floating around the house (and anticipate a fifth Apple in the form of an iPad-netbook-media-thingy), each with their own full copies of my iTunes library, DVDs ripped to a couple macs, and daily podcasts downloaded to all four computers. In the past I manually erased podcasts I’d already listened to on one of the four computer and my iPhone, but given how many podcasts I listen to this method is just too much work. I’d also been hoping to store my DVDs on one computer and be able to view them on any of the other devices. The upcoming release of the Boxee box has me rethinking my media sharing scheme.

Boxee Beta from boxee on Vimeo.

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Form Factor: 8×11

Nope, this isn’t about grading assignments while drinking beer, though that practice clearly deserves a blog entry/study of it’s own. This one is about a unexpected discovery I made last Sunday when I needed to get away from my domicile and plant myself at a local pub to watch a day of NFL goodness. Of course having 10-page student papers to grade wasn’t going to stop me. Now, because access to a power-outlet was in doubt and previously the wifi was iffy at best, I took the unusual precaution of actually printing out all of the assignments and choose to read through and make notes on these pages before uploading the comments onto my laptop. I’m pretty fanatical about NOT printing out things, so I can’t remember the last I graded something in the dead-tree version. But I have to tell you that it was remarkably convenient to quickly flip through the pages, mark them up and then move on. And from the perspective of my small table in the bar, it was a lot less conspicuous and I wasn’t looking over a screen to see the TV(s). Weird. It was just amazingly natural to work in an 8×11 form factor.

How much more efficient would it have been if I had some device, roughly 8×11, where I could have marked up the documents (in their native electronic form), that could run all day on a single charge and had access to the Internet even when there’s no nearby wifi. Hmm. No, I guess I could make the notes on the text with my finger, but a stylus works too. I doubt it’ll have a stylus, but I have to wonder if Apple’s upcoming announcement next Wednesday will include the announcement of a device that fulfills this content creation need. The announcement better not be just a rev of the iLife suite. Ack.

Sources:
image by Joe Bustillos

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Interactive IKEA Catalog – Apple iPad?

Apple reserved presentation space for the end of January and the rumor mills is cranking up around the Apple netbook-thingy… At CES2010 everyone and their brother is announcing all sorts of tablet/slate/netbook/e-book readers devices, all trying to fight against the buzz of a device that hasn’t been announced yet. Amazing.

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Macworld expo, gnomedex or SxSW 2010 – What’s a Media Educator To Do?

Over the past three years my attendance at Macworld Expo has been completely automatic but with Apple pulling out of the conference and then having the conference moved to February I’m not sure that attending the 2010 conference will be the best use of my increasingly diminished conference funds. I recognize that the Macworld isn’t just about the keynote, but I had the good fortune to go to the historic 2007 keynote when Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone and none of the following keynotes have matched that high. And as great as the keynote can be as far as being a geek rock show, the real experience is to rub elbows with my fellow apple geeks famous and not-so-famous. Alas, in the time between expos I haven’t made much of an effort to strengthen the conversations I’ve had with many a mac-pilgrim over the past three years. So not going isn’t as painful as it might otherwise be. Then I got a link to this year’s Gnomedex conference. I think I’m experiencing conference lust (a geek off-shoot of wander-lust). Damn.

Community is so important and I haven’t been to happy with my level of “commitment.” The last few times I went to my more local CUE conferences (Computer Using Educators) in California I was not too happy that I wasn’t more involved in presenting or contributing to the process, but I always seemed to be more than busy enough with my days filled with teaching and my ill-fated graduate studies. So, it’s not like I’m sitting around wondering how I might get more involved. but it seems hardly efficient to just go to these conferences hoping for a new tech/geek high. It’s just too expensive (especially traveling from the East Coast). Damn. What a media educator to do? I wonder when SxSW is going to be?

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Damn You, HD Nation!

Several months ago I was contemplating simplifying my home-theater thing by drafting my Nintendo Wii to take care of media server details. Only a couple problems with this plan: 1) No DVD support, 2) low-resolution screen, 3) No native iTunes support. Yeah. Not so great. Not being able to just play a DVD was bad enough, but the Wii has such a low resolution that it makes doing simple web browsing ridiculous and made it impossible to use the Wii to play my iTunes media (using the MyTunes software on the MacMini). Fail. Then I fell in love with the idea building a Hackintosh to do the media server role, especially because of how great the Apple app Front Row works with DVDs and videos stored on connected and networked hard drives. I was building a case against investing in BluRay, because, except for digital animations like Wall*E, the sharpness of the picture takes me out of the movie (I feel like I can tell we’re on a film set and fully expect to see a boom mic fall into the frame). Then I started watching Revision 3′s latest offering, HD Nation. Damn it, now I can’t imagine not doing BluRay. Argh!!!

I’m much closer to putting down the cash for a PS3… then I heard that Sony is going to do some upgrade/product roll-out sometime in August. Damn.

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