shiv.me

It’s been a year since I sold my kidneys for an iPad. It’s been fun. It has replaced every other device I own (ie, a couple of PCs and the nexus one). It’s an outright winner, when it comes to reading, especially long-form articles, and books alike. It has become my go-to machine for everyday news, twitter/facebook, and even for browsing my favorite photographers.

It have however remained strictly in the realm of content consumption — until now. In the last few days, I’ve added a stylus – the Targus iPad stylus (available quite readily at most ‘best-buy’s, and on Amazon), and the iPad’s camera connect kit. If you own an iPad (v1 or v2) I would recommend that you fork out the moolah for these two. It will be the best $50 you’ll ever spend on accessories for the iPad. Forget the cool looking smart cover. These will be more rewarding than the 2 hours of thrill of watching the smart cover turn off the ipad when you close it.

The targus stylus is without doubt the best one in the market yet. It’s got good heft to it. Feels comfortable to hold. The only gripe I have with the Targus is the length. I can’t but wonder why they didn’t make it same as a standard pencil.

There is no contest between this, and the Pogo Sketch. (Ten-one design could be the next Wacom, if they get their pressure sensitive stylus right. Wacom should buy them out, now, before they get too big). The targus has an air-filled bubble for the tip, which slides with less resistance against the iPad’s screen, than the spongy one of the pogo sketch. The tip is still fairly large, and the level of control you get varies by the app. If you use Penultimate, this stylus will provide much better control. The iPad can now actually replace paper & pen (somewhat). I can’t wait to see how good the Wacom stylus is going to be. It will definitely cost more (around $40 if I’m right), but for $20, this is the best stylus (that is also readily available) right now.

The camera connect kit, is a thing of marvel. It is not like Apple to allow such a wide range of applications for a single piece of plastic (even if it is over-priced for something that should be part of the iPad purchase). I just found out that it works quite well with my camera (a Canon 7D). Importing RAW images onto the iPad are faster than importing them on my MacbookPro (something seriously out-of-whack here — I’ll need to investigate, to confirm this). It also allows connecting any “Mac” supported keyboard (I’m typing this post on my logitech USB Wave keyboard, which I must say kicks the pants off any keyboard Apple currently sells). Of course, carrying a keyboard around is out of question, but it’s nice to know it works without any special drivers.

Tip: Both Ctrl+shift+arrows (begin/end of line), and Cmd+shift+arrows (1-word at a time) allow you to select text on iPad. of course, you can navigate around the text, if you don’t use shift. No, someone needs to port vim to iOS. That would be awesome.

The killer combo of the week, was a little hard to choose. Here are two:

• Targus Stylus + Penultimate
• Blogsy + iPad Camera connect kit + Logitech Wave keyboard

Photosmith looks like a promising app. Currently, it is metadata management and import app, that syncs with Lightroom via Wifi. $20 is quite reasonable for an app that will allow automatic import into lightroom. However, I’m unconvinced with the design. I wish they would provide better selection capabilities. I’d buy it in a heartbeat, if they allowed multi-select+tagging or some kind of paint interface that can apply a group of tag+collection info that I define.

I did it. I said I wouldn’t. I said I will hold out for purely ethical reasons, but it is very hard to resist the iPad. The first impression in-store is simply — awesome. This of course is not a surprise and is something that one can expect from apple these days. Warning: This is a long post .. Here are some thoughts, after a day of use:

1. It’s fast. Much faster than the iPhone 3GS. This is good news for the upcoming iPhone.
2. The battery lasts a really long time. It was around 80% and I used it for incessantly until it died 7/8 hours later. The a4 processor is at this point THE chip to kill for. If you have any samsung shares, I would dump them now, and load up on apple (although they are a tad pricy these days)
3. iPhone apps are useless and look ugly on the iPad. Don’t bother synching any of them
4. The keyboard is a lot more usable that I thought it would be. I’m typing this post at about 60-70% of my usual typing speed. (Only true if inclined at an proper angle — the perfect angle: the one you get with the iPad case).
5. I missed the universal back button. I’ve been spoiled by the freedom-toting nexus one robot
6. Other small annoyances include URL copy pasting between apps, and how the app store lists apps. Exiting the app store every time I install an app is also mind-numbing. I know I can use a Mac and install all apps at one go, but I didn’t spend a 1000 dollars for workarounds.
7. Although I could type very well, creating a blog post is not this device’s forte. For one, all the switching back and forth, is a nightmare, and there is simply no way to get the links to apps for instance from the ipad. Adding images is a pain as well (which is why this is a purely text-only post). It is really nice until you want to go beyond its function as a consumption device. Even a little, and it makes you want to get to a mac/pc in a hurry.
8. Some apps are just stellar, that make it worthwhile go through the above mentioned niggles.

I don’t feel any remorse at having bought it, but at the same time, I’m not floored by everything either. That is actually the strength of the device. It is the first time a computing device completely disappears and you interact with data. The experience depends on the app that you are using. Instapaper does a great job, so does the gmail web app. I’m not a fan of the drop list widget though. This is the one interface element that gets in the way, and frankly, I’m surprised that this got through the apple ui designers. A sliding in from left/right would have been a better option. I’m a little cautious about buying a lot of apps like I did for the iPhone and then quitting the platform although I don’t see that happening with the iPad, there is no competition in sight for at least another 18 months, and even then it would take an androId tablet a year to get to this level of refinement (if they ever do) If you are a still here, here are some must have apps. Most of them are free, so get ‘em now:

1. Instapaper
2. Goodreader
3. Penultimate
4. Beatwave
5. Tweetdeck
6. Epicurious
7. Exploreflickr
8. Kindle
9. Nyt
10. Alice lite
11. (bonus) put icons for all the google apps you use on the home screen. The web versions are really good.
12. (Ok. I’ll stop with this) Dropbox

This is a test post to see if Dave Winer‘s OPML editor works with a self-hosted wordpress blog. There is something geeky about seeing crappy fonts on a screen, that makes one want to use a tool more.

I’ve known of the OPML editor for a few years now, and have tried several times to find a neat use-case for it in my workflow, and it never had a compelling enough reason for me to stick with it. I’m hoping that this new wordpress editor tool will make me want to use this more.

This is the first post that I’m writing using OPMLEditor, and here are some of the impressions in the first 30 minutes of use. This is by no means a thorough analysis, and is mostly off the top of my head.

Some cool things:

• Very simple elegant interface, that let’s you focus on writing content
• Updating an existing post, is as simple as opening a window, and starting to type. This also allows for micro-updates. As I typed this post, I save atleast 3 times. Since my blog has RSSCLoud and PubSubHubBub (sucky name), every time I hit save, you happen to be online, you will receive an update.

Some annoyances:

HTML markup when you decide to mark up your page. Since I’m a geek, I guess I don’t mind this, although I would like to be able to use my favourite markup syntax, like Markdown. Non-standard menu layout => I need to search for stuff. This is pain, until I learnt the ropes a bit (all of 15 mins), and I figured out how to use it. I don’t like to take my hands of the keyboard very often, and I tend to shy away from tools that make me do it. Unfortunately, there are no default shortcuts for the simple functionality like adding a link or making something bold, etc. On the one hand, this means, that I will complete writing all that I want to write and then make it pretty. Although, I might get used to working this way, I would still be able to do most of the annotation using just the keyboard. I hope that there is someway to acheive this. I might be wrong about this, so don’t stone me over this. Another really annoying thing, every time I press enter, it OPMLEditor starts a new outline, which is great for outlining, but when I try to create a list of items, it sucks — big time. For instance, see how it is horrible to view this list in the editor. If need to change one element, I will need to look at much more of the text, just to figure out where to change it. This can be solved by allowing multiple lines in the editor (using shift+enter), and ignoring those when converting to HTML. Images have to handle independant of the post creation. I so, wish that the OPML, can also publish the img with the post, but I think WordPress doesn’t provide XMLRPC API for such upload. I posted the image on this post on dropbox, which to a certain extent mitigates this issue, since all you have to do, is use something Skitch to take a screenshot and move it a public dropbox folder. Right-click the image, and you can copy the public link of that image, in finder. Another Cmd-tab, brings you back to the editing context, and few more clicks later, you have placed your image in the post. It’s a pain, but it is better than waiting for the image to upload, etc.. It creates tables for every item in an outline!! This is going to be a very big problem for me, since this means mixing presentation with data so much, that it will be impossible for me to parse this out later, if I just need to get the data. I don’t understand, why what is being done using tables, can’t be done using paragraphs instead?! This would also allow, the theme on the site to layout the data in whatever way it deems fit. I wonder if I can change this myself?

I’ve been waiting for this for a while now! Gary I hope it is all that I expect it to be. If I don’t read this the day I get it, and jump up from my bed at 2 AM crying “crush it” … well … I bet I will.