[OSX-Users] Re: ipad?

[Steve Harris]

On 29 Jan 2010, at 09:54, Leslie Carr wrote:
>
> On 28 Jan 2010, at 15:25, Nick Gibbins wrote:
>
>> Neither fish nor fowl nor good red meat.
> but something in a strong apple sauce :-)
>
>> It isn't a laptop replacement, it isn't an iPhone/iPod Touch  
>> replacement, it isn't a netbook replacement, and it isn't a  
>> replacement for ebook readers (like the Sony PRS505/700 or Kindle)  
>> at the size it is.
>
> I call you out on the whole Kindle replacement thing. On a trip to  
> washington the other day I saw two people using Kindles in public  
> and I had to stop myself staring. And laughing. And not in a good  
> way. Kindles are fugly (have they been constructed from lego?) and  
> seem to have really appalling contrast ratio (dark grey text on  
> light grey backgrounds) that make them look like literary Etch-a- 
> Sketches. I want to do what people do with Kindles (read! download  
> books instantly!) but I would like a better-designed one. Oh yes,  
> and one that worked in the UK.

Right, except that were not getting iBooks in the UK at launch.

The Sony ebooks are much better designed, but the PC-side software is  
really unacceptably awful. I use a combination of cp, shell scripts,  
and a lot of swearing as a replacement - that's preferable to fighting  
with adobe's or sony's ebook software.

>> It may be that my singular lack of imagination is blinding me to to  
>> obvious purpose for this device, but I'm finding it hard to think  
>> of anything it does that isn't done better by something else.
> That's the problem with General Purpose Computers. At least the  
> iPhone provided a new set of communication functions to distinguish  
> it from a laptop.

Small, instant on, faster than a netbook, better built than a netbook,  
better screen than a netbook. Seems like a winner to me.

>> Most of all, I'm disappointed that they've kept with the closed  
>> platform/AppStore model. I shouldn't have to resort to jailbreaking  
>> to make a computer do what it's capable of.
> It's getting really embarrassing that a device/software platform  
> that encourages so much software development (and such a big  
> software market) gets labelled "closed". Jonathan Zittrain managed  
> to pull that off in the days before the SDK and the App Store, but I  
> think it's an argument that is past its best now. Sure it's  
> controlled, but exactly what is closed about this platform?

Agreed, the platform is GCC+Darwin+ARM, hardly closed. The binary  
distribution system however, is closed. You always have the HTTP+HTML 
+javascript route if you don't like the App Store distribution model,  
c.f. Google Voice.

Even saying it as a dyed in the wool free software nerd, the app store  
user experience is leagues ahead of the normal software (un-)install  
experience on any open distribution system. Desktop Mac OS X is the  
next best I've seen for installing random apps, and that's still a  
long way behind the app store.

If I was Ubuntu, I'd be looking at the app store and wondering how I  
can replicate it in an open manner.

- Steve