arig:
A Virtual Keyboard for iPad & iPhone
We live in the future. No, seriously, we do. This laser virtual keyboard ($170) is proof of it. It syncs with your iPad or iPhone over bluetooth so that you can type on any surface. Check out the video of it in action.
You can even choose to have simulated keyboard sounds, just in case silent typing isn’t your thing. Can you imagine full school classes or workplaces where everyone is typing on lasers? So crazy. The size of the cube laser device is just a bit larger than a matchbook and the battery lasts for 2.5 hrs.
(via brit)
I remember seeing this in the NYT years ago. So cool.
This might make the iPad usable for me. Note the up and down keys, missing on the iPad screen keyboard, making it impossible to use Tumblr in Safari. I will have to try.
I Cracked It
The rumors are flying about Apple rolling out a game-changing TV, because of Walter Isaacson quoting Jobs as saying ‘I cracked it’. Some level of reserve is appropriate, I guess considering how old and entrenched the TV industry is. But, isn’t that a perfect recipe for disruption?
I’ve been talking about Apple’s push to win ‘the battle for the livingroom’ for years. Given Apple TV, and the rise of the post-PC world, Apple will obviously continue the push into the living room. Apple TV is to the next Apple Television as Newton was to the iPad. A foray, an exercise: a hobby, as Jobs said.
What is needed is a really smart way of turning advertising from a nuisance into a service. We have a very real chance of being able to do something like that.
- Josh Quittner, cited by Laura Locke in Flipboard editorial chief on how magazines are flipping out
Also notable:
So I think that as we move from a Twitter or news-feed sense of news to a restoration of relevance it becomes a lot more interesting. So, if I only have five minutes, I would love to see the most important things, not the most recent things. That’s an interesting direction for us.
Daring Fireball: All His Life Has He Looked Away, to the Future, to the Horizon. Never His Mind on Where He Was. What He Was Doing.
Gruber responds to a Windows 8 fan boy, Paul Thurrott, who twittered ‘Hello, Windows 8? This is iPad. You win.’ after seeing a demo on a Samsung-produced tablet:
John Gruber via Daring Fireball
What did Microsoft show, though? They showed a Metro-style touchscreen tablet user interface that is, without argument, original. No accusations of ripping off the iPad here. Microsoft is admirably blazing its own trail.
But the OS reportedly isn’t coming out for at least a year. The demo tablet hardware from Samsung they’re showing it on (and giving to Build attendees) is a Core i5 Intel-based PC replete with a fan. Spec-wise these units are much more like MacBook Airs than iPads. Presumably actual shipping iPad-competing Windows 8 tablets will use low-power mobile CPUs — be they ARM, Atom, whatever, just so long as they get iPad-caliber long battery life and low temperatures.
How will Windows 8 run on such hardware? When will they actually ship? How many as-yet-unannounced iPad 3s will Apple have sold by the time the first Windows 8 tablet hits stores? (Not to mention the many tens of millions of iPad 2s Apple will sell in just the next quarter alone.)
It’s all in the future. All potential, nothing actual. Think about how different Apple’s and Microsoft’s approaches are. Apple unveiled the iPad to the public only when it was a completely finished product, two months before it hit stores. The demo units we in the press had access to that day were exactly like the mass-produced iPads that shipped to customers two months later. Can you imagine Apple doing with the iPad what Microsoft is doing with Windows 8? Say, showing a prototype iPad at WWDC in June 2009, running on MacBook Pro-caliber Intel hardware? Letting the public and the press play with the OS in half-finished alpha state on prototype hardware? Impossible even to imagine. (There were no hands-on demos, let alone take-home prototypes or developer downloads, when Apple showed a “sneak preview” of Mac OS X Lion at last year’s “Back to the Mac” event.)
I’m not passing judgment here — at least not yet — regarding which strategy is superior. I simply wish to direct your attention at how utterly different the two companies are.
Gruber seems to be making a corporate culture argument, but I think this is also a case of Microsoft playing catch-up, from way back in the pack.They hope to stall some buyers from buying an iPad, thinking that some razzamatazz might hypnotize them.
But iPad is clearly dominating the tablet space, and I don’t think Microsoft has a chance.
I am still betting on a Microsoft/Facebook social OS alliance. I wonder how closely integrated Facebook will be in Windows 8, when it launches.
Why AirPlay is the Next Big Thing - David Frampton
A pretty well-reasoned argument as to why Apple’s infrastructure - Airplay, Bonjour, Apple TV, iPhone, iPad - is going to have a big impact on games in the living room.
Why The Atlantic joined up with Pulse — and what the app’s usage stats can tell data-hungry publishers -
These stats don’t surprise, but just confirm:
[…] one clear trend is the difference in the reading patterns on the iPhone vs. the iPad. On any given week, Pulse users on smartphones open the app twice as often as people on the tablet version. But all told, tablet users spend more time on Pulse, and their sessions are twice as long as those of iPhone users. What’s also interesting is that in some cases one platform feeds into another: “If you look at usage patterns, [users] will come in small bursts to look at news, and if they like it — long-form articles or something from The Economist — they’ll save them and read them on other devices,” he said.
So in a typical day a Pulse reader may drop in more than 3 times to check the news, but only spend 5-10 minutes scanning, Kothari said. From what they’re seeing, a good chunk of Pulse’s audience falls somewhere into this category of heavy-ish users who subscribe to multiple sources, as opposed to those who scan stories and headlines on Pulse with less frequency.
It probably shouldn’t be a surprise that Pulse tracks with patterns we’ve been seeing emerge in the ways people read on new devices. In terms of the iPad, Pulse seems to mirror similar evidence we’ve seen suggesting that people look for a comfy spot to do serious reading on their tablets. “The consumption pattern on the tablet is slightly different, spending longer time,” Kothari said. “The use-case is kind of like sitting in home, maybe lounging with the iPad and consuming lots of time and news stories.”
Another trend they saw was an increase in delayed reading. Not long after launching, it became clear readers were using Pulse to dip into and out of the day’s news and emailing stories to themselves. “We realized that a good majority of people want something to save (stories) and go back to it later, simple functionality to save from Pulse and synch with other devices,” he said. (They’ve since added Instapaper and Read It Later buttons.)
D’uh.
I do find the place-shifted reading interesting. It’s not just about time-shifting.
So Maybe We Can All Keep Our Devices On?
One of the downsides of using Kindle software on my iPhone when traveling is having to power down during take off and landing on planes. But now that pilots are putting critical reading material on their iPads, that might change:
Kate Murphy, iPads Replacing Pilots’ Paper Manuals - NYTimes.com
American Airlines won F.A.A. approval last month for its pilots to use the iPad to read aeronautical charts. American received authorization last year to use the device instead of paper reference manuals. Executive Jet Management, a NetJets company owned by Berkshire Hathaway, received the F.A.A.’s permission in February for its pilots to read aeronautical charts on iPads.
Moreover, the F.A.A. said pilots at the two airlines would not have to shut off and store their iPads during taxiing, takeoff and landing because they had demonstrated that the devices would not impair the functioning of onboard electronics.
So let’s see, now that pilots are using electronic devices, suddenly they aren’t a threat to air safety?
(via underpaidgenius)
AppleInsider | Suppliers indicate Apple will ship as many as 14M iPads next quarter
Apple is set to dramatically boost shipments of the iPad 2 next quarter, with overseas suppliers indicating the total number of units shipped will be between 12 million and 14 million.
If Apple were to ship 14 million iPad 2 units in the next quarter, it would be a number nearly three times greater than the 4.69 million units sold by Apple in its March quarter. That number was considered by Wall Street to be a mild disappointment.
That’s another indicator of the sea change going on in society. I asked a pal this morning, Rachel Weidlinger, how she keeps track of everything in her crazy busy life, and she showed me a worn paper organizer. The she said, ‘but I expect I’ll be moving to a tablet, because I’ll be able to write on it, as well as type.”
The coming liquid world: and Apple iPad and touch interfaces are a major factor in that revolution.
AppleInsider | Suppliers indicate Apple will ship as many as 14M iPads next quarter
Apple is set to dramatically boost shipments of the iPad 2 next quarter, with overseas suppliers indicating the total number of units shipped will be between 12 million and 14 million.
If Apple were to ship 14 million iPad 2 units in the next quarter, it would be a number nearly three times greater than the 4.69 million units sold by Apple in its March quarter. That number was considered by Wall Street to be a mild disappointment.
That’s another indicator of the sea change going on in society. I asked a pal this morning, Rachel Weidlinger, how she keeps track of everything in her crazy busy life, and she showed me a worn paper organizer. The she said, ‘but I expect I’ll be moving to a tablet, because I’ll be able to write on it, as well as type.”
The coming liquid world: and Apple iPad and touch interfaces are a major factor in that revolution.
The Android tablet problem, nicely summarized by one review’s conclusion – Marco.org
Marco gets into (way too much) detail about the Android table problem, which could be summarized:
Hardware is easy, but software is hard.
And Marco is right that the chicken-and-egg problem means that developers won’t fill in the lack of good software for the device.
Social anthropologist, clairvoyant, postfuturist.
