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The introduction of the iPad by Apple has made me think about how I use the various computers and devices that are part of my life. Do I need to have a bunch of different devices doing similar things?
The short answer is “yes” and the short reason is context. My iPod Touch is great for having a tiny computer with me all of the time. It also can be used for listening to music too (someday we’ll tell our kids about how there were thing called iPods that only played music and they’ll give us blank stares). But many time when I’m using my iPod on the couch I think that it would be better if it was a bit bigger and that’s one thing that the iPad does well.
One interesting thing about the way we use and share things on the screens that we use is that there is a physical and social component to it. How many time have you shown someone something on your iPhone or laptop. It would be easier with the iPad.
But the most revolutionary and interesting thing to me is the lack of multitasking and the disappearance of the filesystem. It is great how I am limited on my iPod Touch. I can only do one thing at a time and I don’t have to remember where I’ve saved something. As I write this blog post using my iPod, the only other thing I can do is listen to music. Twitter doesn’t distract me, or email, or anything else. I don’t have notifications on, so I don’t get distracted. I think about what I’m doing and everything else gets out of the way.
Focus is good and it is also rare. Unless I consciously shut down email and Twitter and my RSS reader and web browser it is really easy to get distracted and come back to a film, a half-written tweet, an email draft, and a bunch of tabs in the browser. It’s more productive when single-tasking on the iPod Touch than multitasking on a MacBook Pro.
The iPad is like a good notebook and pen (a very nice and expensive notebook and pen). People have different notebooks for different contexts, so why not have similar device for different places. The days of the mutipurpose computer on a desk where you do everything and store everything are over. The computer is becoming an appliance and that’s a very good thing.
While I don’t think I’ll get the first generation iPad, I’m pretty sure that I will eventually have one. My next big Apple purchase will probably be an iPhone (the unannounced next generation one) and it will be interesting to see how the iPhone evolves in the increasingly mobile Apple ecosystem. Will you get an iPad?

While I’ve posted the list elsewhere, I didn’t really explain the choices. So here is the annotated collection of my favourite films from last year in alphabetical order: 35 Shots of Rum, (500) Days of Summer, Bright Star, Broken Embraces, An Education, The Invention of Lying, Moon, Pontypool, A Serious Man, and Tokyo Sonata.
It was a pretty good year for films.

Continue reading “Top Ten Films of 2009″ →

Sometimes when you grow accustomed to certain applications they disappear as they’re always there and you use them all the time. In compiling a list of apps that I use every day, I forgot about the ones that are so completely integrated that I don’t really think about them as I just constantly use them. Oddly they are all related to money and time.

I get things done and (frequently) stay within a budget with the following apps for my iPod Touch: OmniFocus, Spend, and Grocery Gadget. Interestingly they all use lists and two of them use the cloud to synchronize the data that they use.
Continue reading “Essential Apps for Time and Money” →

Over the past few months I’ve been relying on my 2nd generation iPod Touch more and more for connecting to the online world. On a recent 3 day trip I didn’t even take my MacBook pro with me and I didn’t miss it at all. All of my reading and email and even posting things online all stayed up-to-date all with the tiny little powerful computer in my pocket. While an iPhone would allow me to be connected all of the time, there were enough wifi hotspots to keep me connected for most of the day every day.

Another realization that I made is that the applications that I rely upon to stay connected are simple and powerful. The five apps I use throughout every day are Twitterrific, Tumblr, Simplenote, Reeder, and Instapaper. Simplicity is the key and if a choice needs to be made between something that is simple and works most of the time and something that may have a lot more possibilities, it’s obvious that simple is the way to go.

The other aspect of the five apps that I use every day to connect and share things with the world is that all of them rely on APIs to get and share the information that they use. That means that it doesn’t all just stay on my iPod Touch, but that everything is synchronized so I can check things out on my MacBook Pro or even another computer on the web and I don’t have to worry about losing something. Now I start and end every day in bed with my iPod Touch doing a little bit of reading and catching up using my favourite apps.
Continue reading “The Beauty of Simple Apps” →

With some of my online homes I’ve been quite active and with others, not so much. One of the things that is quite enjoyable to do is record audio podcasts with my son John. We started doing the Bad Metaphor podcast (an audio podcast) a few years ago and would sporadically update it. Due to some perfectionism and procrastination the output has grown increasingly infrequent, but John always wants to create more, so we’ve started recording podcasts again in a more casual way to try and get them done and up more often.

The wonderful thing about technology is that it advances and makes things easier and cheaper all the time. So last weekend we sat down on the floor with my MacBook Pro, my Zoom H2, and John’s Nintendo DSi along with a stereo omnidirectional microphone from Giant Squid Audio Lab and we recorded a new episode of Bad Metaphor in Soundtrack Pro. The neat thing is that we were able to do some multitrack recording right to disk with the audio from each of us going to separate tracks and the music going to a stereo track. This means we can adjust the levels after the recording and also means that it is much faster to edit. It’s a setup that works and I’m really glad that we figured it out and I hope that we’ll be doing a lot more soon. So go on over and take a listen to the under 8 minute episode 11 of Bad Metaphor: Synthesizing Stories where John plays some music using his Korg DS-10 emulator.

I’ve had a lot of Mac laptops (actually every laptop I’ve had since the first has been a Mac) and I can say for myself that the new 15-inch MacBook Pro that I have is great.

Best. Laptop. Ever.

The only other laptop where I’ve felt this sort of love for was my “Pismo” G3 PowerBook that just felt right and was powerful and beautiful. With the G3 PowerBook it was the balance of speed and power and features that made it work. The slightly curving case was comfortable and fit easily into the carrying case. It was fast to set up and very flexible with 2 FireWire 400 ports, USB, s-video out as well as VGA out. There was AirPort too… and this was 8 years ago. I haven’t plugged in a laptop to go online at home for 8 years!
Over the past near-decade things have changed a lot with technology and with the new MacBook Pro Apple strikes the balance just right again. There are 2 USB-2 ports, one FireWire 800 port (which is a bit of a pain, but with an adapter cord, all of the FW400 things work with it), ethernet, a different Mini DisplayPort plug for external video (which means you need to get adapters for VGI or DVI out), and an SD card slot. I initially thought that the SD card slot was kind of strange, but I find that it’s great for getting pictures from the SD card in my digital camera. It is very fast and I don’t need any cables as I just pop in the card and the transfer speed is a lot faster than through the camera with cables. While I haven’t tried it yet, it will also work great with digital audio files that I record with my Zoom H2 recorder, which also uses SD cards.
The battery life is amazing. While the official story is that it will last up to 7 hours, in reality, it’s still pretty amazing, and I’ve been able to get more than 6 hours out of it and I haven’t had the battery die on me yet. It runs very quiet and doesn’t seem to get very warm. I’m using the lower capacity video card as it takes less power. With the video card with twice the RAM (512 MB), it apparently eats more power. For video editing that’s the one that will get used, but for surfing and writing and other non-video tasks, the display is fine.
The screen is absolutely gorgeous with the best colour and contrast that I’ve ever seen on a laptop. In working with photographs there is a lot more detail and the colours just seem to pop. I don’t know about using it for serious colour-correction, but it’s dramatically better than anything I’ve seen before.
Some unique changes that are part of Apple’s zen-like design ethos is the new, buttonless trackpad. The trackpad is much larger and the whole thing is a button. Initially I didn’t even notice the change, since the larger area works perfectly with my thumb where the button would have been. The trackpad is made from a similar glass to the surface of the iPod touch and there are all sorts of cool multi-touch features. Two fingers to scroll, three fingers to page around, and four fingers up and down for Expose (for hiding things and showing all active windows) and finally four fingers left and right to switch between applications. In the System Preferences there are great little videos demonstrating all of the multi-touch mouse action, which makes it much easier to understand.
The new 15-inch MacBook Pro is a simply beautiful and powerful laptop that makes me fall in love with design and laptop computing all over again.