This is scary stuff, especially after seeing videos like this one of a mouse plague.
Posting from my iPad
April 24, 2010 By 3 Comments
There is no question that the iPad packs a lot of promise in to its small form factor. Already I’ve done liveblogging with it on another site I run (here at Minnov8: http://minnov8.com/mhta2010/) but doing serious blogging on the iPad is still an exercise in frustration. I’m writing this post in Blogpress Pro on my iPad using an Apple Bluetooth keyboard (since long-form text editing isn’t a joy with the built-in keyboard!).
DEALKILLER #1: NO HYPERLINKING or TEXT EDITING
Notice that I had to type out the hyperlink instead of using the app “Blogpress” for the iPad? It’s because it — and the WordPress app now optimized for iPad — are unable to enable easy entering of hyperlinks. Huh? Aren’t hyperlinks “Web 101″ and something at its most basic core? Yep.
I’ve interacted with a guy named from the WordPress team who developed the iPhone version and modified it for the iPad. Seems like a great guy (Chris Boyd @chrisboyddotnet on Twitter) and says both image editing (in Blogpress but missing in WordPress for anything but posting at the bottom of a post) and hyperlinking is being taken in to consideration.
Add to that no bolding, italics or other uses (though I might experiment to see if adding HTML code might do the trick like bolding these words)
DEALKILLER #2: NO REMOTE SAVING/LIMITED FEATURES
The other frustration is an inability to remotely save posts (so I can do a workaround by firing up Safari and finish editing within the web interface). Remote saving would fix that.
Blogpress Pro was $2.99 and is what I’m using to write this post. Of course, I can’t add a thumbnail (used on my homepage) or any custom fields nor can I hyperlink. I’m taking a risk by seeing if the image I placed within this post looks good or not (used Photogene on the iPad to modify it) and then I’ll turn to my main MacPro to add the thumbnail and so on.
DEALKILLER #3: NO HTTPS
When I’m on-the-go and need to access my WordPress backends I *always* login with https in order to ensure my username/password combo isn’t flying through a coffee shop’s Wifi connection exposed for snagging by some unscrupulous packet sniffer running on a geeks laptop.
It’s this sort of productivity stuff that is somewhat missing from the iPad *or* it takes a bunch of new steps most of us don’t yet know. With text editors for coders/developers out and coming out, easy ways to access remote servers (e.g., Box.net, iDisk for MobileMe, lots of built-in FTP capability in apps) I can see that it will become second nature to use our iPad’s for content creation at some point, but it’s just not yet there.
UPDATE: Blogpress posted via Twitter to THE WRONG ACCOUNT (my Minno8 one) because it can only manage ONE Twitter account. It also scheduled the post when I submitted Publish to my blog with a time FOUR HOURS AND 27 MINUTES after I published it. So not only does Blogpress have serious limitations, it has serious bugs.
Will Success Destroy Toktumi?
April 15, 2010 By Leave a Comment
In September of last year I tried out the Toktumi (“talk to me”) service with their 30 day free trial and received a phone number. Not ready to pull the trigger and sign up at the end of that trial, I was ready a few weeks ago (and have six clients who could use it too) so decided to signup. Unfortunately, all hell had broken loose because The New York Times published David Pogue‘s review of Toktumi’s Line2 app for the iPhone (an app I’d downloaded back in September and still had on my iPhone) and an untold number of people tried to signup and hackers took the site down with some sort of account signup attack.
Toktumi took signups offline in order to recover and guard against future attacks so I added myself to the list of people being notified. But then the “impossibility gremlins” arrived to make buying their service impossible, mainly because their database still has my mobile number in it from last year’s 30 day trial so I’m unable to get past their “Activate Service” screen and complete the transaction.
Sounds easy to fix, right? A quick assistance from a human should do the trick, don’t ya think?
After several customer service emails, calling their toll-free number (support and sales…both of which aren’t answered and encourage filling out a help ticket) and attempting to receive help by using their live chat (which gives a rough time of engaging in live chat–mine has been 6, 8 or 10 minutes the three times I tried using it–but after 45-60 minutes I’ve given up and closed the chat window), I decided today to leave a voicemail for Peter Sisson, Toktumi’s CEO and describe the infinite loop I find myself in simply trying to buy their service, make him aware of it and see if I can “shake the tree” a bit and get some help.
Since I’m highly motivated I’ll keep trying through tomorrow and then give up permanently. It’s sad since I cover startups (at another site I’m involved in, Minnov8) and I’m well aware of the trials and tribulations entrepreneurs experience, especially when a sudden event blows up their company and they scramble to recover. But the ones that have survived “success” like Toktumi is experiencing have learned one thing and executed on it well: focus on those who want to give you their money and become your customers.
UPDATE: That was quick. 10 minutes after I published this post I emailed Toktumi customer service and they setup an account, told me how to upgrade and so forth so I’m moving forward.
Will NetVibes See The Huge Opportunity on iPad?
April 13, 2010 By 1 Comment
Techcrunch had this post today about NetVibes launching a new auto-dashboard and tracking service, and it sparked a thought about my new iPad and I had to discover if the NetVibes service I used to know would be an efficient method of having a single spot to aggregate lots of sites and RSS feeds.
Most of the functionality works, but the same latency issues remain and a couple of iPad-centric ones emerge as I’ll explain, but those are trivial to the opportunity the iPad presents for NetVibes.
NetVibes is the best “start page” or “portal creator” engine out there in my opinion. It’s trivial to create tabs (like those you see in the screenshot above) and populate them with widgets that are either standalone ones for news, weather, sports, email, calendar, Twitter, Facebook or other news feeds and hosted applications and you can create your own widgets too. It’s also incredibly attractive and there are hundreds of “skins” to customize the look, feel and color schemes or you can create your own from scratch.
While this isn’t an exhaustive post about the functionality of NetVibes, I was quite delighted to logon just before lunchtime and see that a “dashboard” which I’d created over a year ago functioned perfectly on my iPad, though was a bit crowded with the 22 tabs I had in it (a number of tabs which looked fine on my huge desktop monitor, but a bit cramped on the iPad). [Read more...]
Quit Whining About The iPad Interface
April 7, 2010 By 4 Comments
There has been a fair amount of iPad bashing going on with the lack of multitasking, limited ability to create content (or at least as flexibly as when using a mouse-driven computer) and the constraints put on developers by Apple.
Man….does this ever bring up memories and an analogy that you might find interesting!
When Apple introduced the Macintosh in 1984, they simultaneously published Apple Human Interface Guidelines which specifically outlined how to build an application that leveraged the supplied interface “toolkit” in ROM so that there would be a consistent user experience across applications (e.g., people would always know where “Quit” was under the “File” menu). There were howls of protests from developers over “the constraints Apple is imposing on us” and “command-line driven applications are so much more flexible than ones that have to fit in to the “File>Edit” metaphor” as well as “who does Apple think they are telling us how to build and deliver great applications?“
Sound familiar to today’s whining about the iPad? Look at the original Microsoft MS-DOS driven personal computers and the graphical user interface (GUI) on the Macintosh (and its predecessor, the Lisa). Which would you rather use?
Yes, all of us have become pretty adept at the GUI and all the applications we use today are optimized for that human interface paradigm. Will a transition to any other form of human interface be painful? Absolutely, especially since we’ve all been using GUIs since the mid-1980s! You know that it’s easy to look back and see that a GUI-driven computer world was a much better one to live in than a command-line one, but it’s more difficult to look in to the future to see what a touch-driven computing world will look like.
Apple has published iPad Human Interface Guidelines and it’s pretty clear that the time has come for the computer to take the next leap. Many are discussing it and this post by Keith Kleiner at the Singularity Hub is a good overview of some of the thought leading technologies being explored with this next generation touch paradigm.
The iPad is the first mass market product to embrace this paradigm and make it palatable to everyone, with the possible exception of the whining developers, tech geeks and others who see it as too limiting, closed or different. Is the iPad without warts? Nope and it’s certain to improve and competition will abound. But every time I look at the landscape of human-created products, services, religions or any other endeavor, absolute perfection seems to be missing so get over it.
Steve’s Social Stuff