OT: Apple Tablet

Well that was mighty thoughtful of Apple.

(Speaking of coincidental timing, isn't the State of the Union speech tonight? I wonder whether Jobs is more annoyed at Obama for taking his headlines, or vice versa.)

Wish Cam a happy birthday for us, huh, Joey?

Thank you Jeff...I will. iPad owns the media today. I didn't even know we HAD a President

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Hey, might want to consider whether you get your kid the thing now. Remember when the iPhone dropped in price? "First one in line" often gets rogered.

Yes, from a gamer's perspective, this gadget looks great. From a parent's perspective, it may be a zombie farm...


www.derekmok.com

The camera is missing because ATT (or Verizon, where this *should* go) doesn;t wan tto choke up its fragile 3G network with video bandwidth. Out of iSight, out of mind.

Jeff H. mentioned you can't stand this unit upright. Sure you can; look at the case accessory offered on the iPad page. Well thought out!

But I'll wait for the camera, and a choice of carriers.

- Loren

Today's FCP keytip:
Set a motion effect keyframe instantly with Control-K!

Your Final Cut Studio KeyGuide? Power Pack.
Now available at KeyGuide Central.
www.neotrondesign.com

While the first in line might get it in the shorts, it won't happen immediately. The Web page says the thing hasn't even been FCC'd yet. There's no announced shipping date, far as I can tell.

Yeah, D...not even hinting at getting the first or even the second generation. I will wait. This isn't one of those "gotta have it now" Apple toys like the iPhone was when it first came out. I remember I had to get on a waiting list with ATT for the black 16 GB unit. I didn't care. I just had to have it. I am still as thrilled with it as I was the day I got it.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

SO, if you are using one hand to manipulate it and one hand to hold it, what is given to the holer have for when you are standing in a subway with people bumping around. OoOPS and oOoPs again.

The first thing that ran thru my mind was why didn't they give it a better handle for those heavy movement areas of life. maybe we can get a suction handle for it.

====

as far as the Doom for Macpro. I feel like that it is possibly in the air. Mainly because it makes no kind of logical sense for the company to do it. Companies often make stupid moves when they are drinking kool-aid.

It was really profession apps and the need for more stable and stronger processing that made apple popular. (Protools, FCP, PS...ect) Back when PC's were 90% of the market people in the creative industries started switching to mac for stable os and processing power. As the g4s came, music studios started switching to mac based digital music production and eventually video.

Then it took off like hot grease. If they stop producing heavy handed processing units like the towers they are giving up a lot and killing off the roots of the apple tree. They would take a heavy revenue hit and profession digital composers with towers would just keep their macpros healthy and not buy any new macs without at least 2.6 quad-core performance alternative that allowed 16gigs of RAM.

They wouldn't give up the sales that the video and music industries produce. 1 indy b styled movie could sell 10 8cores and multi licenses for FCSv3 or v4.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

grafixjoe Wrote:
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>Who the hell's gonna want to sit in
> front of a computer when you can hold and control
> the pad?

People that want to play games w/control schemes that are beyond what the iPad can offer? Multi-touch and motion controls can be great some types of games, mainly casual, but once you get into games that require more intricate controls (MW2, Madden, UFC Unleashed, etc.,) you need a better input device (game pad, KB/M, etc.,) or you have to dumb down the game. RTS games would be cool w/multi-touch though.


-Andrew

I'm doing this all from memory because it's late and I can't be assed to look any of it up right now. But when I was in college, I read a book by Stewart Brand called "The Media Lab." It was about research done at MIT into information technology and stuff.

In it, there was some discussion of some work done on a paradigm of human-machine interaction called "Put That There." It was a really complicated and clunky system that involved a big (like wall-sized) screen, speech recognition and some form of motion tracking. You'd point at something, and say "Put that," then point somewhere else and say "there," and the computer would move the thing you pointed at to the place you'd pointed to.

Ah. A little googling revealed a demo on Youtube.





This was the neolithic age, as computers go; late 70s, something like that. It was a time when the "mouse" was still a new-fangled, largely unproven idea. So people were still trying to figure out just how people and machines were supposed to interact. "Put That There" was, as I recall, just a proof-of-concept sort of research project, an exploration of an idea. And it was pretty neat at the time.

Now, for a lot of immediately obvious reasons, "Put That There" wasn't really practical at all. Even thirty years later it makes a hell of a demo, but it's got obvious limitations. However, it was a radically different method of man-machine interaction than was in widespread use at the time ? the keyboard ? or that's in widespread use today ? the keyboard and cursor device like a mouse or trackpad.

The iPad has a radically different user interface. But what Apple's done (from what I can tell) that's different from any other screen-based UI implementation I've seen is to rethink practically everything and throw out a ton of stuff. Menus? The iPad doesn't have them. Scroll bars? The iPad doesn't have them. I saw a Web forum thing elsewhere today where somebody asked if you could use a Bluetooth mouse when the iPad is keyboard-docked. The answer is no, but for a reason that's not immediately obvious: The iPad has no cursor.

This is really different. It seems less radical than it is 'cause we're all going "Oh, it's just a big-ass iPhone," and that's true. But the iPad is obviously intended to do some of the tasks that had previously been the exclusive domain of computers; witness the iWork app suite. That means Apple thinks it's possible, at least in theory, to do at least some computery-type stuff on a device with no cursor, no mechanical keyboard and a multitouch screen.

If they're right, this is a radical evolution in human-computer interaction design. If they're right ? and this is a huge if ? it's a development that's arguably bigger than the advent of the cursor-based, mouse-driven graphical interface was. If the iPad is a successful device and not an evolutionary niche or dead-end, then it's really the first major change in human-machine interaction since the invention of the teletype.

That sounds hyperbolic, I know. But think about it. We went from morse code to the teletype to the VDT to the modern monitor-keyboard-mouse computer. Those were the big evolutions. The iPad throws all that out except the screen, and says "Here's a different and better way to do things."

Are they right? Oh, who the heck knows. The iPhone-based evidence is pretty hard to ignore; we've all seen that youtube video of the baby who figures out how to use an iPhone. We've all had the experience of picking up an iPhone for the first time and not having to think about how to make it go, because touch is so natural. But on the other hand, we all listened for a damn year to people who complained about the lack of copy-and-paste, and argued back and forth about the least-disruptive way to implement copy-and-paste on a device that's meant to be touched. And we can even disagree today about whether the copy-and-paste feature in the current iPhone operating system is any good or not. So who knows.

"Put That There" is a really cool concept, and it made a great demo. It also went basically nowhere; it was more or less a dead end. It remains to be seen (obviously) whether the iPad will end up as a dead end, or whether it'll settle into a nice niche that doesn't displace anything, or whether it takes over and thirty years from now we'll shake our heads at the antique notion of a "cursor" or a "pointing device" like we do now with punch cards and paper tape.

But one thing's for sure, at least for me: The iPad is interesting as hell, for a variety of reasons. I think it's definitely worth paying attention to.

I do agree that multi-touch interfaces are changing the way we interact w/some devices. For example, I've had my Palm Pre since almost launch and if you give me a non-touch screen smart phone I feel lost trying to use a nub/ball/d-pad to navigate around. My initial reaction is to touch the screen and then look perplexed as to why the phone isn't responding to my pokes.

A couple of years ago I pretty much got rid of my mouse and use a Wacom tablet and keyboard to do everything from edit to surf on my machine. I wouldn't be surprised to see a multi-touch pad replace my Wacom some time in the future. Obviously it probably wouldn't be good for fine detail GFX or compositing work, but a multi-touch pad + keyboard sounds like a pretty suite combination to me.


-Andrew

Quote

I wouldn't be surprised to see a multi-touch pad replace my Wacom some time in the future.

Nope...that will not happen. Artists need tools to paint / draw and not fingerpaint. If anything, Wacom will develop BETTER pens to work with the glass multi-touch surface by themselves and the tablets could go away. They will develop better FATTER pens with nice soft grips for those of us with large hands. Being able to write / paint / draw right on a 24" tablet with the precision of a pen...sweet.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

grafixjoe Wrote:
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> Nope...that will not happen. Artists need tools to
> paint / draw and not fingerpaint.

Which is why the next line in my post said, "Obviously it probably wouldn't be good for fine detail GFX or compositing work..."

For general computing (web, e-mail, opening/closing apps, etc.,) 'finger painting' is probably accurate enough.

John August, "How screenwriters will use the iPad"

- Justin Barham -

Ya know some wacoms are 7inch(6.8) and lots of people use it for art. 10 inches would be really nice compared to the wacom bamboo fun medium.

The joy is that there is an os on it that would be able to allow for a lot of other functions.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

Quote

Ya know some wacoms are 7inch(6.8) and lots of people use it for art.

The tablet is 6x8...the MONITOR is usually 24" (pretty much standard today). The Tablet surface is in proportion with the monitor via mapping settings in the System Preferences.

People aren't using a 6x8 tablet for a 6x8 monitor.

...unless you do, corbett...for your art.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

i know.

I was thinking more on lines that the screen protocols in an app that would allow the apple tablet to become a graphics tablet would keep the screen on the tablet proportionate to the screen connected to the tower.

And since the os on the tablet is so similar it could interact with a tower better. This may make the tablet's graphic pad app have extra feature when paired with the tower, that wacom may not be able to achieve because of its lack of a matching os.

But it could never take the place of wacom cause of that pen and paper feel.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

Michael Horton
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Michael Horton
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So yea... The ipad has been an engine, pda and bra.

[kensegall.com]



www.strypesinpost.com

> So yea... The ipad has been an engine, pda and bra.

Can still be.


www.derekmok.com