kip/bot/blog

One of the smartest designers I know gave a typically compact and smart assessment of the iPad:

DOA. Apple does better (in the last 10 years or so) when it re-imagines categories, not when it invents them. I’m sure I will regret saying this, but that’s how I feel right now.

It does a nice job highlighting Apple’s strengths (re-invent what’s out there after drafting on others’ experience in the market and with an unwavering focus on user experience), but it also hints at the bigger problem: it’s trying to be several categories (reader, netbook, bigger media player, game platform, web browser), under one technology (shiny, thin, touch screen, with none of those nasty mechanics that collect crumbs from your lunch) without being any one thing that is clearly needed.

While Apple often wins by delivering better versions of stripped down, less function-laden things like the iPod, the iPad is doing this across too many categories and likely to fail in all but one:

Reader Steve Jobs infamously said he would never do a reader because people don’t read anymore. He’s actually onto something — some people are passionate readers, while most do it casually. This means the number of passionate readers is too small for an e-reader to be as big as the iPod. The iPad won’t serve either audience well. It will suck for passionate readers: the battery life is dubious, the finger smudges will be a drag, and most important, the backlighting will be prohibitive. Jane Jepson, the creator of the OLPC screen and founder of Qi technologies (LED displays) likened reading from a computer screen to putting a flashlight in your eyes, it’s unsustainable for passionate readers. Casual readers won’t read enough for it to be worth dropping a big chunk of change and things like beach reading, subway reading will be dicey with a fancy device that large. The math will look better than the Kindle’s — spending $400 on a Kindle vs buying books is a quick and obvious decision for many — but the all-in-one argument is pretty weak when it comes to the reading.

Netbook Jobs’s digs at netbooks totally miss the value they have for people who like having a portable work device. The iPad doesn’t replace the processing power or precise mousing needed for real apps like word processing or spreadsheets with graphics, and it’s still unclear whether typing on glass for extended periods of time (like writing something longer than an email or entering numbers into a budget) works for people.

Bigger Media Player This one is tricky to guess, but I have a hard time picturing people dropping serious coin on a third screen that is bigger than their phone but smaller than their TV. Where would you use it? To watch something in bed before going to sleep? Is that worth the cost of getting a decent flat screen?

Game Player Again, a risky proposition. What’s the market for people wanting to play games bigger than the iPhone but smaller than their console? What do those games look like? They’ll lack the immersion of a TV or computer screen game because it’s too small, but will they add to the little games of the iPhone?

Web browser Right on! The video on apple.com references the superior web browsing experience of the iPad many many times, and they’re right. Having the iPad in the living room (with a remote built-in) so I can do quick simple email tasks (like writing “you’re very welcome” as in the video, or forwarding with “FYI”, or deleting what you don’t need) and look up baseball stats while watching the Yankees on an iPad is vastly superior to using overheated macbook or my crunched netbook keyboard. I do a lot of web stuff while I watch crap TV and baseball, and, as a reasonably affluent convenience-obsessed guy with some concerns about the aesthetics of my appliances, this might be enough to see my way clear to $500.

But that’s it. The iPad will be a high-end version of the web appliance that we all talked about several years ago. Only it will be too fancy to use while cooking (one of the standard scenarios we all gushed about), and much too fancy for us to call it an appliance.

Looks like Plastic Logic has an e-Reader that covers many things the Kindle doesn’t: touch-screen, larger display, Office document compatibility. None of the coverage talks yet about energy consumption, keyboard input, or better scanning/navigation of documents (though the touch screen could help that a lot). Also, not sure if 8.5 * 11 is the ideal size for a book replacement.

None of those concerns stops the ache to actually have one and convert my library . . .

Fun little article in the Sunday NYT about the influence of Gary Gygax on generations exposed to D&D. Sunday is when things get summed up from a longer perspective than the news itself, so it makes bigger claims than the obituary.

For us, the character sheet and the rules for adventuring in an imaginary world became a manual for how people are put together. Life could be lived as a kind of vast, always-on role-playing campaign.

Don’t give me that look. I know I’m not a paladin, and I know I don’t live in the Matrix. But the realization that everyone else was engaged in role-playing all the time gave my universe rules and order.

We geeks might not be able to intuit the subtext of a facial expression or a casual phrase, but give us a behavioral algorithm and human interactions become a data stream. We can process what’s going on in the heads of the people around us. Through careful observation of body language and awkward silences, we can even learn to detect when we are bringing the party down with our analysis of how loop quantum gravity helps explain the time travel in that new “Terminator� TV show. I mean, so I hear.

The writer, an editor from Wired, goes a little farther than I would, or did. I’m not so sure that D&D kinked us to understand people better, but it fer sher made us more proficient at reducing them and their actions to flow charts and equations.

The article’s worth a read if only to check out the info-graphic, a boxes and arrows play on D&D-driven geekness. It may span too many generations, though. The clip I grabbed shows the TRS-80 and cassettes and Captain Crunch, but also covers Vin Diesel, Peter Jackson and LOLCats. Still, fun exercise to look at the black boxes . . .

I’m pretty blah about my HDTV. There’s not so much content that I’m wowed all the time, SD content looks like crap, and I’ve watched enough seasons of TV shows on an elliptical trainer with my pre-Touch iPod to just think it’s a big TV. I always rave, though, when someone asks. After all, I spent $3000 on the damn thing so it damn well better rock.

But I am smitten anew and lasting. Connecting Apple TV to my girlfriend’s flickr account, I just saw her pictures from Savannah, Charleston and the Wellington Equestrian show in HD glory. The TV brought out the full resolution in a way that flickr on a computer can’t even come close to. The Ken Burns effect (which pans or zooms and pans across photos a la Ken Burns Civil War and other documentaries), sometime mucks things up, but usually does a great job of keeping it lively, making familiar pictures fresh, and enlivening dull pictures.

One of my favorite flickr’ers is Magic Fly Paula, a woman about whom I know nothing aside from that she lives in Portugal, and has cool sets like Invisible Cities, Imaginary Libraries, Imaginary Books, Star Diaries. Much of her work is photoshopped and there’s a mix of Jules Verne (wood and brass) and Umberto Eco (philology and polymath wordplay) and Calvino (fantastical).

So I put her photostream on my HDTV with Renaissance era masses and chants and it was incredible. I looked at J-Rube’s slides from Ecuador and got a great travelogue.

They just need to connect it to the interestingness feed, or the popular or most recent feed and it would be perfect. (Perphaps that’s a project for me to work-around.)

I’ve been looking sporadically at this blog that purports to be by Stephen Fry and keep not believing that it’s actually him — the tech is pretty deep, and surely he can’t be all the amazing things he is (novelist, performer, wit, historian) and a gadget getter. But he is. And look at this lovely pair of sentences about open source and the Asus EEE:

he two great pillars of Open Source are the GNU project and Linux. I shan’t burden you with too much detail, I’ll just make the outrageous claim that your computer will be running some descendant of those two within the next five years and that your life will be better and happier as a result.

I am writing this article on a kind of mini John the Baptist, a system that prepares the way of the software saviour whose coming will deliver the 90% of world computer users who suffer under Windows from the expensive, clumsy, costly, ugly, pricey toils of Microsoft.

The above passage is from a regular column he does for the Guardian. The blog is here.

Nice cuts from  of the XO: 1) reduced chemicals in the battery; 2) low power needs of the machine (1/30 of most devices); 3) quick clip about the non-reflective screen (one slide below):

Doug Coates (plasticbag.org) did a review of the XO for Icon magazine (with a sexy “air” picture of the machine). He’s ambivalent, to say the least, about doing a review in this context:

There’s something troubling about reviewing Nicholas Negroponte’s XO – the so-called “$100 dollar laptop� – for a design magazine. And that I’m writing the piece on my gas-guzzling SUV of a MacBook Pro can only compound the horror.

The XO has been in the news for a while, but icon is the first magazine to actually get hold of one. The thing is, this is not a machine designed to be evaluated by people like me. In all the ways that matter, it’s not a consumer artefact. It’s not trying to wheedle itself into your living room. It has more in common with a clean water pump than it does with an iPod.

As you might imagine from the text, he’s generally behind the project. His strong feelings prompted him to republish the essay on his blog (without Icon’s editorial cuts) and with an intro, where he explicitly talks about the politics of the XO.

But at least he talks about the design from the perspective of a design critic:

Green and white with a tough, textured plastic body about the same size as a lunch-box, it has been optimised in every way to deal with the extreme conditions of its use. Its astonishingly frugal use of electricity allows it to function in areas where power is sparse or even non-existent. The screen switches into an energy-efficient black and white mode that is also readable in direct–even aggressive–sunlight. The rubberised keyboard seals the device against dust and water. Even the friendly green “ears” of the device serve a triple function - acting as latches, protective shields for USB ports and as antennae designed to extend the range of the distributed wifi networks that will connect children across the planet.

There’s more in his review, and hopefully will be more from others.  I’m still intrigued.

Roberto and Lizette Greco are plush toy designers (among other things) who designed a plush mascot for a ‘one laptop per child’ campaign’ (Un Computador por Nino, or UNPC) in Chile. The mascot is pretty cute, and UNPC even has a youTube group.

UNPC does not officially support or promote the XO, they are simply lobbying for one laptop per child as an educational initiative. So Pudu, the mascot, is carrying a less distinctive laptop.

They have a flickrstream about their children’s experience with the XO (the first pic does an evaluation of all the software they’ve installed)

They also highlighted two other piece of educational software: Squeakland, which is the inspiration for eToys; and Scratch, a programming language which looks like an interactive game/environment language. Scratch looked pretty complicated to me, but the Grecos say their kids (aged 7 and used really took to it:

Published a few years ago, Leonardo’s Laptop was a disappointing book. The premise was exciting: how would we conceive computing and the internet if Leonardo were using a laptop, like he used his notebooks?

But the book largely broke down into a discussion of usability and how technology could transform medicine, the arts, engineering, politics. That said, there are some good, Powerpoint-worthy(!), lines from the author and the people he quotes.

I feel … an ardent desire to see knowledge so disseminated through the mass of mankind that it may … reach even the extremes of society: beggars and kings. — Thomas Jefferson

A fuchsia cell phone might be pretty. But a cell phone that does not require a manual — now that is beauty. – Katrina Galway, Letter to the Editor, Time Magazine

Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything. — George Lois

JJ Abrams, in his TEDTalk, has some great lines about tools and inspiration.  He relates the importance of his Super 8 camera when he was 10, a synthesizer when we was 14 (he composed the theme to Alias), and he has a great line about his Powerbook:

mystery is the catalyst to imagination

technology is mind-blowingly inspiring to me, that blank page is a magic box

the Powerbook challenges me, it says ‘what are you gonna write worthy of me?’