The iPad Is Unbeatable

Farhad Manjoo, writing for Slate:

Imagine you run a large technology company not named Apple. Let’s say you’re Steve Ballmer, Michael Dell, Meg Whitman, Larry Page, or Intel’s Paul Otellini. How are you feeling today, a day after Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled the new iPad? Are you discounting the device as just an incremental improvement, the same shiny tablet with a better screen and faster cellular access? Or is it possible you had trouble sleeping last night? Did you toss and turn, worrying that Apple’s new device represents a potential knockout punch, a move that will cement its place as the undisputed leader of the biggest, most disruptive new tech market since the advent of the Web browser? Maybe your last few hours have been even worse than that. Perhaps you’re now paralyzed with confusion, fearful that you might be completely boxed in by the iPad—that there seems no good way to beat it. For your sake, my hypothetical CEO friend, I hope you’re frightened. He hopes, but I doubt it. If they were, they would be restructuring their entire companies in order to compete with this new market. As far as I can tell, they're still in finger-in-their-ears-saying-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-I-can't-hear-you mode.

Why The iPad Has And Will Continue To Dominate The Tablet Market

Matthew Panzarino, writing for The Next Web:

In a Neilsen survey from earlier this year it was shown that almost no respondents stopped using their smartphones after purchasing a tablet, while 3% completely stopped using their desktop computers and 32% reported that they were using their desktops much less. Consumers treat phones and tablets as separate entities, they look at them as different tools for different purposes. He goes on to discuss many other points, in a well written piece that does a very good job of laying it all out.

We Need To Talk About Android

Frasier Speirs, an expert on technology used in education, chimed in on a question he gets asked a lot: "What's wrong with Android?":

You're either buying into a platform or you're buying gadgets. The fundamental disconnect between the apparently solid Android engineering that's happening at Google and the actual packaging and deployment that's happening to end-users is turning into a real problem. To my mind, it's a dealbreaker for schools or anyone thinking beyond their next carrier subsidy. I would argue that most, if not all of the points that he lays out in his article, also apply to Enterprise as well.

Make Mission Control Feel Snappier

I highly recommend this. I am now doing it on 4 of my Macs.

Additional iPad Haptic Feedback Details

Update: Completely false rumor.

My colleague, Jacquelyn Erdman, writing on her website, Technolust & Loathing:

In Oct 2010, at the ACM SIGCHI conference in NYC, grad students presented on this technology and allowed people to demo it. See my conference notes at: http://technolustandloathing.wordpress.com/2010/10/15/acm-uist-notes-4-next-generation-touch-screens. They students mentioned that “someone” bought the rights to the technology, but wouldn’t say who. I then saw a very tiny blurb about Apple having the technology in the ACM Communications magazine several months back. I actually thought they would have this up and running for the iPad 3, (see prediction here), but I wasn’t sure how quickly it would roll out as I thought the iPad 3 was going to be out for last holiday season. So, enough of my rolling of the eyes on the release and self-congratulations and let’s talk about the technology! Jacquelyn goes on to describe what it was like to use it, and speculates on how Apple has probably improved it since then (if this all turns out to be true). She wrote this piece shortly after I shared the news from Apple Insider this morning about Apple using technology in the new iPad to be announced today from a company called Senseg. This could be huge.

Update: Apple patented this tech in 2010.

Jacquelyn dug up this 21 month old article on Apple Insider.

Mountain Lion: Hands On With Mail

Dan Frakes, writing for Macworld on changes coming to Mail in Mountain Lion:

A VIP is any person you designate as being important enough to have their messages treated differently by Mail. You designate someone as a VIP by clicking the star icon to the left of the person's name in any incoming or sent message. You'll immediately notice that every message to or from that person now displays a star in message lists, making it easier to find those messages. In addition, when you designate a sender as a VIP, that person gets his or her own entry in a new VIPs section of Mail's Mailboxes sidebar. Click a VIP's name, and you get a list of all messages, across all mailboxes (including Sent and Trash), to or from that person. If like me, you use Mail exclusively, you'll want to read this article as it details all the gritty details of what's coming. Having been using the developer preview of Mountain Lion for 4 days already, I had not even noticed these changes yet.

Visualizing the iPad 3 Screen

David Smith has posted an excellent comparison of the iPad 3 screen when stacked up against the various resolutions of existing iOS devices, Apple notebook machines and desktops. He makes an good point when talking about the insanely high resolution of a retina display on a 9.7" screen:

This will present problems for developers and designers of iPad apps unless Apple also releases a new display with either a higher resolution or a HiDPI mode. Otherwise we will no longer be able to view 1:1 mockups or run the simulator at full size without clipping part of the view. Check out the comparison chart he made on his site.

iPhone Address Book Privacy

Jason Kottke:

13 out of 15! Zuckerberg's cell phone number! Maybe I'm being old-fashioned here, but this seems unequivocally wrong. Any app, from Angry Birds to Fart App 3000, can just grab the information in your address book without asking? Hell. No. And Curtis is right in calling Apple out about this...apps should not have access to address book information without explicitly asking. But now that the horse is out of the barn, this "quiet understanding" needs to be met with some noisy investigation. What happened to Path needs to happen to all the other apps that are storing our data. There's an opportunity here for some enterprising data journalist to follow Thampi's lead: investigate what other apps are grabbing address book data and then ask the responsible developers the same questions that were put to Path. Well put.