Not too much going on today. I converted a few more of my videos to mp4 format using Handbrake, threw some more PDF’s onto the iPad and made my own dock by hooking up my old Bluetooth Stowaway Foldable Keyboard and a book stand I got a while ago from Office Depot. Check it out.
So day one has gone by, and I got a chance to goof around a little with the iPad, and here are my findings so far.
First off, iTunes doesn’t really distinguish between apps for the iPad and iPhone, so if you’re like me I have upwards of 300+ applications in iTunes. Partly because I’m lazy and haven’t widdled down my apps list. So, I definitely didn’t let iTunes automatically sync my apps. So, I had to manually plow through all my apps one at a time, since iTunes was nice enough to check every one of them, and unselect the ones I wanted… a UNCHECK ALL would have been nice to have here…
Today was launch day! The infamous Apple iPad made it’s way to consumers today. Unlike the thousands of others that pre-ordered it, I decided not to. Partially, I wasn’t intending to jump on board with release one, and the fact that I’ve not done anything significant on the iPhone made the purchase decision a little harder to justify. So, I was going to let it pass and maybe pick one up after all the hoopla died down. But my wife called me today, while I was waiting for my son’s morning classes to end (normally a little after 9:30am), and she said she would meet me over at Best Buy, and we would try our luck – usually waiting on line for anything usually doesn’t turn out well for me, my luck normally isn’t that good. I’ve meet with many black friday/launch day failures, so my hopes weren’t too high. I arrived at Best Buy in time to see it open and I saw my wife go in with a few others who I assume were also waiting in line. Upon entering and meeting up with my wife near the back of the store, she told me, to my surprise, they had enough for everyone waiting! So after waiting for a bit in line, and humorously watching the Best Buy reps unbox a big box to unbox a smaller box to pull out the iPad box, I soon went home with a 32GB version.
I finally got around to putting my pictures from the Big Nerd Ranch together, better late than never. Enjoy.
Well, I downloaded the beta 3.2 SDK for the iPad. It’s interesting to see how large the screen is in comparison to the iPhone. Yeah, that’s a no-duh statement, but you really don’t get as good a sense of it until you try and build something in Interface Builder. You suddenly have this enormous amount of real estate. I’ll admit that even though it doesn’t have some of the things I would have liked to have in a tablet, there is no doubt in my mind that it’ll be a fun device to develop for. Just the potential of a screen this large that’s as reactive as an iPhone screen is exciting. I can see gaming will heavily utilize this. With a screen this large, I can easily see RTS games being a huge (no pun intended) genre here, being able to touch your troops and have them go. Yes, they have RTS games like that on the iPhone, but having it on a 10″ screen will make it a whole new experience.
Well, it’s called the iPad, and from what I’ve seen so far, it’s less than stellar. It appears to be nothing more than a big iPhone; which to me, is a disappointment and a missed opportunity by Apple to do something even greater. Now, I may be a bit harsh in my initial judgement, but to me it doesn’t seem to fill the niche that the netbooks try to with portable computing. From a development point of view, this could be interesting, since you can probably do more with a larger iPhone, which will address the limited screen size of the iPhone. I can see some interesting apps pop up, and I’ll probably still plunk money down to buy one; if only to attempt to develop for. I paid alot to learn Objective-C and iPhone development, so I figure I might as well get in early on this. I hope I’m wrong and this thing revolutionizes slate computing.
Well, tomorrow is the day Apple let’s us all know what the big deal is with the Tablet. Let’s see if they prove my misgivings wrong and make something I’ll be really excited about.
Today, I ran across something at work with my co-worker Sean that just hit us as a “duh” moment. I’ve been a web developer for a LONG time, and this little gem was never in my arsenal of web knowledge.
My co-worker Sean found my blog today and picked on me for not updating this thing since the end of November.
It’s not like I don’t have anything to say, but I suffered from the same excuse… Too busy with other things.
Well, now that the old decade is behind me, and the end of the year madness is mostly ended, I’m getting back into this.
I got a couple of things I’m working on right now, first, my wife was sweet enough to buy me a new Wacom Bamboo Fun tablet, which I’m experimenting with right now for an upcoming review. In addition, to commemorate the upcoming Apple Tablet I dug up my old Newton 120 Messagepad to share some of my insights on.
Today’s development blog entry is some coldfusion code that’s helped me make a little app that is basically a proxy.
It takes a URL as input and does a pre-flight check to ensure that the endpoint is available before launching the user to the destination.
Most web developers probably never need to take this extra step, since it’s another layer in the link chain, but this becomes important if you are dealing with a large multi-environment site or external links that are a critical portion of your web site. The trend (at least in the company I work for) seems to be a move move toward outsourced web services, where whole portions of your website functionality is literally outsourced to a vendor. The outsource component is more complex than it seems, because this isn’t just sending the user blindly over to the vendor; we must perform authentication in some fashion, a single sign on, if you will, to allow for a more seamless experience. In the case of a large internal multi-environment web site, you have multiple pieces, which are expected to behave as a single entity, so any failure in one part ruins the cohesive single experience.
