Today, Apple announced their new product, dubbed the “iPad.”  It’s the first Apple product release in the past few years that made me laugh out loud.  I’m still occasionally pinching myself in order to verify that everything went down the way that it actually did.  The iPad, while certainly rather slick in a number of ways, is largely a big iPod.  It isn’t going to be a great machine for work; it is too bulky to be reasonably portable; and the choice of a standard LCD-based backlit display obliterates its use as a legitimate reading device.  I’m sure there will be plenty of people who will buy an iPad or two despite these shortcomings; though I’d argue its a rather big waste of money that could instead be spent on a whole variety of better options.

I don’t know that now is the time for Apple’s debut into the space developed by the emperor’s new clothes; though I do feel that there are some visible cracks in the armor built up around its own empire.

Reading

Reading books seems to be only one small part of the larger uses for the iPad.  Where this is most evident is by Apple’s choice in display technology, opting for an LCD display in lieu of Pixel Qi or other emerging e-ink like technologies.  I’m looking at an LCD of one sort or another for a massive part of my daily life: at work, and then at home on my computer or on my TV.

I also have a Sony Reader Touch (model PRS-600) which I got a few months ago.  The difference in reading on an e-ink or a similar display which is not backlit is rather astounding.  Eye strain drips away, and the low power draw makes for much more infrequent charge cycles.  No matter how much I read, I can get about two weeks before I need to charge the Reader.

As Steve Jobs has said in the past that no one reads anymore, it seems clear enough that this viewpoint took place in part of the design of the iPad.  ”iBooks” may be one feature of the device, though it is certainly not a central component.  Pixel Qi, on the other hand, seems to be perfectly suited for the iPad form factor and use case; and that’s just one technology.  Mirasol and Liquavista could also occupy this same space, with slightly different approaches to about the same problem.

On the other hand, Apple does seem to have gotten behind the EPUB standard for electronic books.  What they did not reveal, of course, is the type of DRM that will go along with their EPUB titles sold by their store.  Already there are a few different systems out there, namely by Adobe, now augmented by Barnes and Noble with their Nook.  Fundamentally, the EPUB bandwagon is what I’d hope to be the standard for the future; though with Amazon having their own format, there is still heavy fragmentation in this space.

Graphics compatibility setbacks: cured

The PC runs an ATI X300 PCI Express graphics card, which, up until some recent patches, had some really ugly bugs with X11: running the graphical interface at all would completely crash the machine, forcing a hard reboot.  It was not until a couple months ago that this bug was fixed, so in certain ways I wasn’t heading away from my OS X setup with any speed; and I only had heard of the fix a week or two ago.

Overperforming on aging hardware

I’m running a Dell desktop machine, which was in the high mid-range about four years ago: a hyper-threading Pentium 4 with 1GB of memory.  No matter which way you cut it, the computer just isn’t that fast.  With Ubuntu 9.10, however, coming straight off a more capable OS X machine, I have yet to find it any more daunting or less responsive.

OpenOffice works on the memory and processor rather heavily, though admittedly it’s not that much behind where I’ve used it in OS X.  Opera, sadly, does not work quite as well as Firefox, perhaps due to some implementation issues on the platform.  I have found Opera runs best in Windows, about as well though slightly worse in OS X, and in Linux it just needs a bit more time.  Firefox, on the other hand, seems to handle itself better in Linux than OS X, especially in terms of memory management.

The GIMP, too, seems much more adept and at home in Linux, being in general a great deal more inter-operable with the GNOME desktop than the OS X environment.  This, of course, is to be expected, especially where the OS X version is an adaptation from the Linux version, not the other way around.  I really do love the GIMP interface, though, and find it rather perfect for the level of image editing and manipulating that I do.

I am, of course, missing certain applications in the Ubuntu environment that are readily available in other platforms.  For work, the big app is Adobe InDesign, which despite it’s massive Adobe-level system requirements and resource strains, acts very well for the poster and other print designs that I do at work.  I can, of course, run this on Windows XP in a VirtualBox session.  I have not tried this yet, though it certainly is not going to match up compared to running it natively on the MacBook Pro which has all around heavier specs.

My point here isn’t that Linux suddenly turns some turdy old machine into something that beats out any modern computer.  What I am saying, however, is that there’s a lot of work that’s gone into the Linux kernel and the systems in general.  With GIMP, Firefox, a decent terminal, and good memory and resource management, I can get a hell of a lot of good work done.  I even rather quickly fell back into using Mutt, which, while not as fancy as some of the alternatives, is still incredibly fast, full of keyboard shortcuts, and, eventually, a more efficient path towards managing email.

Linux certainly has a different philosophy underlying its use, though one that I had strong ties to a number of years ago; ties which I feel I’m now regaining and living through again fondly.  OS X may still look a bit more flashy, though I’d much rather have a strictly proper terminal any day.

Or, so I’ve felt, anyway. A few days ago I finally got to using VirtualBox to run a fresh install of Ubuntu v9.10. Even after being away from GNOME and its related systems for a few years, it all still seems familiar. In the process I’ve unlocked a good deal of nostalgia over my experience with the open source operating system.

No, I have not yet gone so far as to head back to FVWM as my primary window manager. I also still am keeping in mind certain advantages to device and software support for media (namely, Logic and Final Cut Pro).. but even so, I certainly do feel as though I’m missing something by not having X as my primary windowing system. I would much prefer to be able to configure most everything via modifying configuration files. I miss the joys of apt-get, and, above all, the very quick and efficient GTK and terminal applications that sip at the CPU and memory.

Hell, at the end of the day, it’s mostly my Mac-only external audio interface and my copy of Logic Studio 8 with all its luscious built-in plugins that is keeping me tied to OS X. I yearn for a future system with proper multi-channel audio-outputting HDMI which can use the sound software I want without the cruft or flash I don’t need.

The actual install went OK. Popped in the DVD, waited about an hour, and I’m back and running with most of my programs.

Finding Dvorak-Right

Snow Leopard finally now supports Dvorak-Right natively.. something that Windows has done since.. shit, apparently since MS-DOS 5.0! The workaround for OS X 10.5 and lower wasn’t too crazy, though it involved finding a third-party solution on a website created very long ago, hidden in a dark corner of the Internets. This “solution” also differed from the standard Dvorak-Right layout in the placement of the Q, Z, and some number keys, so I am now having fun re-adjusting to what should have been there in the first place. Moreover, the Snow-y Leopard broke my 10.5 solution, making the transition even more spooky than I wanted until I found the proper place in System Preferences.

It is worth pointing out that OS X and Apple in general does promote itself as a pioneer of accessibility. Having only one hand to type with, however, I find this to be a grossly inaccurate picture in comparison to any other system I’ve used, especially Windows which has been rather faithful to Dvorak-Right since I can remember using it.

Broken apps and drivers

I have a device from Apogee, which I love heartily and which was flat out not recognized when I connected it to my machine. Just needed a driver update from the manufacturer, so no big deal.

Cyberduck, a file transfer program I really like a lot, does not work in Snow Leopard. There is a beta which supposedly works, however their website seems to be down today and I’m shit out of luck until it comes back online. Not Apple’s fault, of course, though that isn’t making my SCP’ing any easier for today.

Apple AirPort Extreme file sharing: seriously?

I may be wrong on this particular point, though it seems to me that sharing my disk via my Apple AirPort Extreme to Snow Leopard was broken. It worked, sometimes, though about half of the requests failed and data access was just not good. Why? It looks like a problem that I had with the naming of the AirPort router. I had a colon (i.e., “:”) in the name of the router, and 10.6 seemed to want to truncate the name at this character one half the time, and be OK with it the other half. I renamed the device to not contain the special character, and it seems to be working much better now. I understand that there are bugs in the world and it can be hard to find them all, but not being able to use my Apple device with my Apple computer running the Apple operating system because of a problem with string parsing .. that doesn’t seem like good QA to me.

Some positives

Not all that sure why I needed an upgraded OS to remove the crap I didn’t need in the first place, though having an extra 10GB of space on my currently crowded drive does make me feel better. My system load does also seem to be a bit lower in general, with less swapping and slightly enhanced graphical capabilities. It is not clear to me as to whether this is temporary, or if it’s significant, though I suppose time will tell.

I’m sure there are a lot of good things that Apple has done with 10.6, but the truth of the matter is that at the end of one day of use, I am certainly more frustrated than I am happy. For an operating system being out for more than a month, with one patch already, it does not seem to me that it is ready yet. For an operating system, that, to me, is a pretty bad thing to have to say, and by the end I would certainly recommend holding off unless you have a burning desire to spend $30 to have parts of your core system break.