iPad

"The reason Apple is able to create products like the iPad is because we've always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts. To get the best of both, to make extremely advanced products from a technology point of view, but have them be intuitive, easy to use, fun to use. Fit the users, rather than having users come to them. The combination of these two things has let us make the kind of creative products like the iPad."

Well, here it is a few skinny hours later and Apple did not disappoint. And it's a good thing because I need diversions right about now. The iPad is one very impressive tablet computer. It's super thin and light with a 9.7" multi-touch color screen that looks like computer candy. It's got a 10 hour battery life running and one month in standby, so you can watch movies on a plane all the way to Europe. It knows to go to sleep when you lay it down. And the interface is incredible, next-level stuff for sure. The pop-up keyboard is way cool, and it's context-sensitive - it adapts to the specific app you are in. And speaking of apps, it will run current iPhone apps and all the basic on-board apps (Mail, Safari web browser, Maps, YouTube, Calendar, iPhoto, etc..) have been redesigned from scratch with this new interface in mind. And likewise there are new versions of word processing and spreadsheet programs that can be used with the your finger. It's so easy to use a child could pick it up in a few minutes. I kid you not, that is no exaggeration...I have a three-year-old expert iPhone user at home to prove it.

Now that is cool.

Apple product reveals are like a kind of cultural event. The sheer volume of the technical press in attendance brought the WiFi and 3G systems at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco to a complete meltdown. As the new York Times reported: "Zero bandwidth at the event." Another techie wrote "We haz broke the internets!". But the information leaked out eventually and it was worth the wait.

Steve came out and said, in his typical pumped-up style: "Last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it."

Aside from cruising the internet, music, movies, email, and other typical uses, this device will be huge in the educational and medical fields. eBooks are available by the thousands already, and textbooks will be available as well. There are apps in development to let the iPad read medical records and interactive MRI scans from anywhere.

iPad is pretty reasonably priced too, considering what it does...it starts at $499, and that base model is more than enough for a casual user.

I think David Wild Photography is going to be needing one of these in the very near future. :)

Genius

I'm sitting here in the Apple Store, drooling over all the cool new shiny stuff. It's no wonder this company is like Midas. Everything they make is a piece of art. This MacBook Pro I'm typing on right now is like a Steinway. I can't think of a thing I would improve on this computer, and I'm very picky. Yeah, it costs more than a plastic Dell, but OMG there is no comparison. It's like a different thing altogether, with its unibody aluminum frame, multi-touch trackpad (4-finger gestures!) and high gamut display, everything looks like candy and feels solid as stone.

This place is hopping at 8:45AM. There is a large group of deaf people taking a class on how to publish websites with an Apple teacher that knows sign language! No shit! And several very pretty young rich wives are in here taking private lessons on how to use iTunes. Yeah, that software that anyone can learn in five minutes. I guess they need to have something to spend their money on. "Ok, maam, one more time...a playlist is kindof like a..."

1 Infinite Loop

One of the things us Apple devotees love about our favorite consumer electronics company is the attention to detail they design into everything they make. The level of software-hardware integration, the gorgeous and snappy user interfaces, and all the other little touches that remind us just how fanatical Steve and his crazy band of engineers are about every aspect, every pixel of their designs.

So I suppose I shouldn't have been very surprised at what I just learned about the map icon that I stare at every day on my iPhone screen. It looks like one of those things that must be a generic drawing of a map, something that was created just to look good in icon form. But it's not. It's actually a real map. And not just any map. It depicts the site of Apple's World Headquarters:

1 Infinite Loop
Cupertino, CA 95014

Don't Forget Steve

And a big Happy Birthday also goes out to Steve Jobs, maker of all things cool. Here's to hoping this isn't your last one, pancreatic cancer can be hard to shake off.

Car 84, Where Are You?

Zach and I have been collecting the die-cast cars from the Pixar Movie "Cars". He got a big box with the entire collection for his birthday last year. But since then they have come out with quite a few new ones. We've been picking these up as we find them and we have almost all of them.

Or so we thought.

It seems that Mattel (who makes them) came out with a special set in May that contained a whole bunch of previously unreleased new cars from the movie. They only made 1,000 sets and these sold out almost immediately.

Doh!

To make matters much worse, one of the cars is an awesome find for any Mac fan like me. The car was only in the movie for a split second during a race, it was put in by Pixar as a nod to Apple. It's painted in the ever-understated-yet-dramatic "Apple White" and comes bearing the number 84 (a reference to the cool "1984" ad that played at the Super Bowl that year to kick off the original Macintosh).

So I checked eBay, just in case, and my heart sank. They are going for $200! Far more than I could ever spend on a toy car, even if it does bear the bitten-apple logo.

Oh well.

Favor?

If any of you finds yourself perusing a garage sale and sees one of these for sale cheap, get it for me! I mean, for us.

I'll love you forever.

A Couple Of Super Computers

This is a great and telling incident in the history of computers, one that has entered the status of legend.

"Apple Computer purchased a big Cray supercomputer in the mid-1980s. In fact, Steve Jobs was Cray's first and only walk-in customer. He arrived unannounced at Cray headquarters in Mendota Heights, Minnesota and asked to speak to someone about buying a Cray. They nearly threw him out. It's only slightly less eccentric than someone walking into NASA Johnson Space Center and inquiring how to purchase a shuttle orbiter.

Later, Cray president John Rollwagen phoned Seymour and told him that Apple had just purchased a Cray that would be used in designing the next Macintosh.

Seymour thought for a bit, and replied that it seemed reasonable, since he was using a Macintosh to design the next Cray!"

Cool Stuff. Soon.

Twice a year Apple has big events and unleashes cool new stuff to an aching, tech-needy world. Today is one such event, the World-Wide Developers Conference. Steve goes live at 1PM EST. Cool stuff coming soon. Very soon.

Code Faster, Monkey!

I want 10.5.2 pretty soon, Ok Steve? You guys have hogged it long enough, time to set it free...