sky, Author at Sky's Blog

Why the iPad gets a good grade from me

2 February, 2010 by sky 3 Comments

How could Steve/Apple ever possibly have topped all the hype the preceded the announcement of the iPad? He was up against a real challenge.

Well, in some ways, Apple did top it—for one, the price is really, really aggressive. In other areas, the announcement was exactly what we expected. And that, in my opinion, is why the iPad is getting poor reviews from so many people, though they haven’t used it yet. Like a kid on Christmas eve, they had just gotten too overwrought in anticipation of all that candy they had hoped for!

I can see how the iPad could knock off the ebook readers and the netbooks all with one fell swoop. Maybe even the TabletPCs (remember, I’ve had a Toshiba TabletPC for 5 years).

First, here’s what I like about it:

I love the glossy and really bright screens. (I only have one “old” non-glossy screen left in my office.)
I love the multi-touch gestures. My iPhone is the first device I’ve been able to interact with in the way I really wanted to – touching the screen. My MacBook gets close, though, because of the multi-touch (example: two-finger wipe to scroll up or down) gestures that make it so fast to operate!
I love the size of the screen (and consequently the device). I read ebooks on my iPhone now, and they’re just a tad too small (that is, I’m having to swipe to turn a “pages” every 1 or 2 seconds), so having 4x the screen real-estate will be wonderful.
I’m impressed that they were able to put the iWork suite on the iPad. I use Pages and Keynote a lot, and from the demos I’ve seen, these will be pretty easy to use on the iPad. I love the idea of using the iPad to draft presentations and documents while I’m on a flight from here to Delhi.
Battery life. 10 hours sounds great and we’ll probably get 6 hours in real life, but if I can keep it charged up while I’m in that airplane, then I’m one happy camper. (More and more flights I’m on have power plugs now, and I’m starting to choose airlines and flights based on whether they have a plug under my seat so I can run the computer. One question—can I plug the iPad into the airplane charger?)
Did I say price? I think $499 is really good as a starting price. I just received, as a gift from its manufacturer, an electronic pictureframe that’s priced higher than that, and it only does pictures. And it’s more than a high-end Kindle, but it does a lot more than a Kindle!

And what’s questionable about it:

Only running one app at a time. I absolutely can’t stand this on my iPhone. What a pain! But, I don’t think this is going to get fixed any time soon.
No microphone. They’d better fix this—I want to record interviews and notes, and I want to use the iPad as a speaker phone (thru Skype if not through real 3G phone). Maybe the iPhone headset (which has a microphone) will be usable in the production models—that would be OK.

Will I get one. Yes, most certainly at some point. Certainly not the first or second or even third production models, but I’ll bet you I’ll be working with an iPad before then end of 2010.

Read what I’ve said about my use of ebooks and ebook prices. Also read this note about what Amazon is saying about prices higher than $9.99.

The $9.99 ebook

1 February, 2010 by sky Leave a Comment

I have been reading ebooks for about 5 years now. Mostly I buy them from Fictionwise.com and most often I download their sci-fi short-story Nebula-award nominees series, which they publish once a year, for free. But, I’ve probably spent on the order of $200 on other books as well.

Oh, and I subscribe to Scientific American digital (monthly) and read it as a PDF on the screen rather than get all that paper that just piles up before I can get to it.

As in quantum-tunneling^[1] effects, you can get me past the initial resistance to an ebook if:

The price of the ebook is 60% or less than the price of the physical book; or if
I don’t want the physical book hanging around anyway after I’ve read it; or if
It’s available in PDF so I can read it anywhere (though I do purchase prioprietary DRM formats frequently); or if
It’s $9.99 even if I think I could find a paperback for slightly less somewhere else.

It is just so much easier to take an ebook with me and read it on my screen (or iPhone in the case of the Kindle^[2] and Fictionwise readers)!

[1] I use quantum-tunneling as a metaphor all the time. Read about quantum-tunneling here in Wikipedia where it’s a difficult article to follow, but go the the paragraph that describes Shroedinger and has the little illustration of the “tunneling” particle (see above).

[2] There’s a Kindle book reader iPhone app that allows you to buy and download Kindle books from Amazon to read them on your iPhone. No reason this wouldn’t also work on the iPad, since they say 140,000 apps already run on it. (I wonder who took the time to test that assumption…) Fictionwise.com also has a reader available in the app store.

No chance for true security?

28 January, 2010 by sky Leave a Comment

Is security dead on the Internet? Yeah, it probably is—as long as we rely on software other people have written^[1]. Unless you’re capable of writing all of your own software, without any errors, and keeping it isolated from software written by anyone else, you’re never going to have a secure digital life^[2].

But there are things you can do to protect yourself. NGO-in-a-box has developed Security-in-a-box, a set of tools and tactics for your digital security. Worth taking a look!

It’s often said that “if we can envision it, we can create it,” but in the world of computer (and network) software this is only partially true. We can attempt to create it, but it will always have bugs in it. And those bugs are the chinks in the armor that allow malware to work and cyberwarfare to succeed.

[1] That’s because I can write a perfect program with no bugs, but nobody else can.

[2] See also The Social Graph of Malware, my site where I explore ways in which social engineering is used by the bad guys to get malware onto your computer.

Embed web page fonts using @font-face

25 January, 2010 by sky 5 Comments

In searching for a solution to embed a particular font in one of my games^[1] at YBCA, I spent dozens of hours experimenting with the @font-face cross-browser^[2] CSS technology. It’s a technique that allows your browser (like MSIE or Firefox, right?) to read a TrueType (.TTF) or OpenType (.OTF) font file from a server and then use it to render type on a web page. The headlines on my blog are rendered using this technology^[3]. I’m really happy with the results.

The idea is to give the designer of the web page the ability to select exactly the font he or she wants to see on the finished page!

But, even with this great tech in place, Microsoft is playing its game of insisting on its own solution—they propose it as a “web standard” but in real life it’s implemented by nobody except Microsoft (using their .EOT file format). So there are two competing and incompatible ways of adding fonts to a web page—the open-source method, and the Microsoft method.

Initially I was able to devise a solution that works except for FireFox (it failed both on Mac OSX and on Windows and Firefox represents about 40% of my users so I really need it to work)… and then, by accident… [Read more…]