Ken Nelson

70% of iPhone apps cost money. About the same percent of Android apps are free.

So as a professional developer… where should I invest my company’s resources?

Oddly… when I consider mobile projects, I lean towards the Android. Why? It is easier to program, and I don’t have to get Apple’s permission. Plus, I think the iPhone’s glory days are nearly ended.

The acid test will be the DroidPad, which I think will kick the snot out of the iPad both on price and features.

In the near future Apple will be hard pressed to be as totalitarian as they have been and I expect longer term that the iPhone will be marginalized like the BlackBerry rapidly has become.  Since phone turnover is extremely rapid, this can happen quicker than you think.

The inventor of T9 texting has come up with “Swype”; a faster way to type on a virtual keyboard.

You’ll never be bored enough to build this if you have an iPad

An iPad user returns it because it is too useful and keeps him from being bored:

My best ideas come to me when I am unproductive. When I am running but not listening to my iPod. When I am sitting, doing nothing, waiting for someone. When I am lying in bed as my mind wanders before falling to sleep. These "wasted" moments, moments not filled with anything in particular, are vital.

I use my iPad to read using the Kindle App. And to browse the web when I don’t feel like getting to a computer. It visits IMDB a lot to answer “who is that” TV questions.

I like it, and I’d like it better if it ran Flash, but it isn’t so useful that I’ll be returning it!

His article is really a caution to not always be busy. That is good advice that I stick to regularly.

A winner of Popular Science’s 2010 Inventions of the Year, the KOR-FX does two things well… it hides the bass/woofer of your loud music or game from neighbors, and it immerses you in the acoustic experience permitting you to sense direction and distance from it.

The latter lets you know you are taking sniper fire from behind and left in your favorite first person shooter. A very useful trait.

I don’t play video games, but if I did, I’d be intrigued by this.

This crappy post took me 15 minutes!

I am experimenting with a blogging from my iPad. So far it has been very hard, mostly due to the mono tasking nature of the iPad operating system.

This post was done with the Blogpress app. I would include the link but it is too damn hard!

The only way I see to do this right is to build a web browser with a blogging client built in. It is just too hard to switch apps and keep context and content in usable form.

There seems to be a lot of need for a good app, but nothing exists yet.

Location:Verdugo Blvd,Glendale,United States

 
Source: SDNN

Adobe and Apple scrap over Apple banning Adobe Flash from the iPad.  Apple claims “technical reasons” but really they just want to control the desktop.  Adobe claims “access to all content” but they just want to control the desktop.

I’m sympathetic to Adobe’s point however.  The iPad is useful to me as a Kindle book reader and as a portable web browser.  A significant percent of  websites present their content with Flash.  So I regularly hit sites on the iPad that don’t behave or look right. Apple’s decision reduces the utility of their device to me, and billions, of people.

I have an iPad, but I’m pretty sure it will be relegated to the unused heap once DroidPad comes along.

I’m pretty sure Apple will rescind this decision after market forces smack them upside their smug turtleneck wearing heads.

You don’t want to carry it this way.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ipad.html

iPad apps are inconsistent and have low feature discoverability, with frequent user errors due to accidental gestures. An overly strong print metaphor and weird interaction styles cause further usability problems.

I hit the problems he mentions all the time with my iPad. Sometimes you press on, say, a link, and you get a menu, other times something pops up, other times, a different menu, and still other times nothing happens.

Also, don’t even think of using one without a case. Not so much to protect it, but to keep your paws off the screen to hold it. Hold a bare iPad for long, and your fingers will take you many unexpected web or app places.

I read using the iPad Kindle app last evening. It works pretty well, and it is nice in that I can read with the light turned off.  The fonts rendered nicely and turning pages was easy (just tap the left or right side of the page).

My daughter enjoyed the iPad, she “customized it” with new wallpaper, and put a few games on it.

I’ll look forward to the case for it arriving, as it feels very fragile  and vulnerable as is.

I browsed around the Internet and found the lack of Flash moderately irritating. I don’t recall the sites, just stuff found off popurls.com and other aggregator sites, but every so often I’d hit a page and nothing would happen and I’d see “you need to download flash”.   Desktop users are usually the collateral damage in desktop share wars, as those using the desktop seem to be the last consideration of the vendors.

So it remains a decent reader. But I don’t see me making content on it.  Perhaps light e-mailing, but that is about it.

And I still hate the “no trial” policy of the iTunes store.

So far I am underwhelmed by the quality and number of apps for the iPad.
I am blogging using the iPad for this post using a free app from wordpress. It is good quality although awkward at best.

I’m not sure how or if I can paste in a picture and the iPad lack of multitasking makes looking for images inconvenient as well.

I think the iPad will be a decent media viewer but I am having trouble seeing more usese for it.

Also I HATE the iStore that has no trial mode. It sucks to buy software to try it.

All for now…

It wants me to sign into the App Store. I don’t remember the password, so I asked it to remind me. And this is the page I get.

This after forcing me to update iTunes (108mb) download, and then reboot my computer. So far, NOT FEELING THE LOVE!

Update…. Apple made me “agree” to a 58 page iTunes Store Terms and Conditions agreement. Wonder what is in it?

My new iPad 32GB arrived a few minutes ago. 

I’ll post reports as I go along, but I’m already disappointed. It won’t do anything til it talks to iTunes. I hate that. And I hate iTunes.

So it is digging a hole every minute I wait for the 106MB iTunes update to download and install.  And if it makes me reboot… hell, it will be some time before whatever coolness/utility the iPad has overcomes the hole it dug when it arrived.

Just heard about “gestures” at lunch yesterday where we discussed adding to my fortune with an iPad app.  Can’t wait for that!

Gestures are things you do with your fingers on the screen that make the iPad and iTouch do clever complicated things you would normally do easily on a computer (like select all and stuff like that).  I knew about gestures, but on my MacBook they cause me grief. I learned how to turn them off on the macBook at lunch – sweet. But they look useful on mobile devices.

Here is a guide to gestures – and you need to read it if you have an iTouch or iPad cause you will NEVER sort them out with guess work.

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Im-Givin-Ye-All-Shes-Got!.aspx

Eric knew there was no point in explaining things. "I’ll look into it." As soon as Kevin turned away, Eric opened up UTILITY.BAS, and this time jumped down to the SHOW QUEUE command. In five minutes, he added logic to make all of the accounting jobs to look like they had a higher priority than they actually did.

For geeks only, but non-techies that enjoy stupid boss stories might like it as well.

You have to be careful when you walk around with hundreds of dollars of easily pawned  or eBay sellable technology.

Denver Police are searching for two thieves who stole an iPad from a man shopping at the Cherry Creek Mall, and ripped off his little finger in the process.

They try it with me, they will just get some iLead.

My new iPad may arrive today. I’ll post a full report.

I finally gave up on my Blackberry. It was okay, but the lack of applications, the irritating way of buying them by typing in my paypal password every time, and the irritation that when I updated the phones OS it blew away all the apps I’d installed and their licenses finally made me say “NO MORE”.

So I got a Motorola Droid.

Initial summary: As with most smart phones, it makes the one thing you need – a phone – a bit harder to use than it should be. But the apps and other features more than make up for it.

Longer review:

There is no comparison to the Blackberry.  I can do so much more with this phone. It’s web browser works well and its full screen makes it easier to read.  A zillion apps, mostly free, awaited me. The keypad typing works well, although I usually just use the touch key pad unless I’m typing something really complicated.

Google Map / GPS integration works quite well. I got the Droid in Texas and drove home from there. As long as I had a data connection (1 or 3G) the mapping worked well.

The phone features are tough to use. At least compared to the Blackberry. Answering a call required complex finger action. I’d prefer a button to “Answer” and a button to “Hangup”. Other Droid variants have this.

I’ve heard other people rave about the Speech recognition dialing, but it doesn’t work well for me.  It rarely recognizes what I want, and I have to use a touch key to confirm it.  The Blackberry was better here. It got it right always and I could say Yes or No to accept its suggestion. Sounds like an App needs to be written to address this shortcoming as I see lots of complaints about it when I search on the Droid.

Google Voice Search does work well, surprising well in fact. It got some odd queries right.

All these features come with a cost… shorter battery life than I’d prefer, especially if you use GPS and mapping.  But in the car, keep it plugged in and it is happy.

The camera works well.  It has a 5MP sensor, relatively fast shutter reaction and a 3X zoom. It works well as a walk around camera to have at all times.  I didn’t like that Messaging resized the original photos when I shared them via MMS text. Originals should be sacred.

It takes good pictures

My favorite app so far is Google Places, which tells you what’s near you (using GPS). Very slick. Using it and the reviews people post with it, we found some great places to eat in Texas.

The harder phone dialing irks me, but I don’t really use the phone as a phone that much. I don’t like talking on the phone. I have it if needed, but really what I’m walking around with now is an awesome computer/camera and decent phone.

That is a perfect balance for me.