iPad Wallpaper

One of my albums on the iPad is called "Nature" and contains some of my photographs which I use to periodically change the lock-screen wallpaper on the iPad.

I have only recently changed the home-screen wallpaper with a recent photograph:

Pretty much any photo works as lockscreen wallpaper, however, to qualify for home-screen wallpaper, photos have to be uniform in colour or they become distracting and clash with the colourful app icons.

Here are a few photos I found to be suitable home-screen wallpaper:

From Friday Foto

The Past Week's Disappointments

Two things happened this past week: on the 18th, Apple reported its quarterly earnings and on the 20th, Apple announced some new products.

The first disappointment was with lower-than expected sale of iPads (4.19M sold in the quarter, averaging about 1.4M a month or about 46,000 a day) reported. The analysts who had predicted close to 5M were disappointed.

The second disappointment was a personal one. Before the product announcement, rumours had predicted an 11.6" MacBook Air. I was expecting that the MacBook Air would actually be an iPad running iOS and that it would have a detachable keyboard. Sadly, we got a $999 netbook.

Neilsen Survey Results

Nielsen released a survey of 5,000 "connected device" owners.

Reading books and magazines was more popular on iPads than on the iPhone, while music and news (online, I suppose) was more popular on the iPhone. Listening to streaming radio was about the same.

Games was the most downloaded genre of app, while books and music came second and third. From a personal standpoint, games are the most popular app on the iPad especially for the kids while my Dad watches TV shows and reads books. He has only recently begun listening to streaming radio. So far, my Mom mostly uses the iPad to browse online stores. 

According to the survey, 32% of owners have never downloaded an app. My Dad has browsed the App Store, but has not actually asked me to download any of the apps he has seen (other than "The New Mass" which he read about). I can understand this statistic because these people are likely in the same situation as my parents, who use the iPad as their first computer.

"No Orchids for Miss Blandish"

As a follow-up to my last post on the lack of books in the iBookstore, I would like to suggest a couple of places where ePub format books for iBooks can be downloaded:

• Manybooks.net has a collection of excellent books that are out of copyright; e.g. "No Orchids for Miss Blandish" by James Hadley Chase.
• Project Gutenberg also serves ePub versions for their entire collection; e.g. "Mysterious Affair at Styles" by Agatha Christie is the first appearance of Hercule Poirot.

Remember to also download the cover image (or search for a suitable one in Google Images) and after selecting the book in iTunes, drop the image in the cover-art area in the bottom-left corner of the sidebar.

i(no)Bookstore

David Winograd wrote a comparative analysis of the book selection on the iBookstore with that of Amazon's Kindle bookstore-- Amazon was the clear winner.

I went looking for Olen Steinhaur's CIA spy thriller "The Tourist" on the iBookstore and it wasn't available. Meanwhile, Amazon has a Kindle edition ($9.49), the hardcover edition ($16.47), the paperback edition ($9.99) and the audiobook edition for ($22).

October Apps

I just read the news today the the NY Times Editor's Choice App has been replaced with a full NY Times app which will be free until early 2011 when the paywall goes up. Note that the app requires email registration (which then entails being spammed with NY Times "offers"). But I feel that's a small price to pay. There are ads at the bottom of the app and there is also the occasional video ad before the article appears (which can be skipped using the eponymous button on the bottom right).

I also installed What's on TV, a TV listings app, which is quite impressive for having TV listings of Canadian cable suppliers like Rogers and Bell. I had a bit of trouble getting the listings to show-up because I was indoors and location services was not able to get my co-ordinates. But once I entered by postal code, everything started working.

VLC Media Player is also out for the iPad meaning, I no longer have to transcode all my .avi files into .mp4. Update: It played the .avi files I copied over to the iPad with no problems; it did not, however, play a .flv video downloaded from YouTube. As expected, battery life suffers, as the decoding is done in software: 4 minutes of avi video playback caused the battery to drop 1%. To me, that is not worth it. I deleted the VLC app.

I should make a note of the Free App a Day website (they also have an app) which is  true to it's namesake with apps for both the iPad and the iPod Touch/iPhone.

I also installed the Stanza app which is great for reading comic books encoded in .cbr and .cbz. It also opens PDF files. File transfer is done via drag-and-drop from the Apps tab in iTunes (scroll all the way to the bottom).

"The Secret of Steve Jobs' Success"

Leander Kahney has a great interview with John Sculley, former CEO of Apple who was responsible for ousting Steve Jobs from Apple, who enumerates Steve Jobs' qualities that led to Apple's growth in the PC market (an all-time high of 10% of the U.S. market.) 

Bluetooth Camera for the iPad?

I was reading a post by Tim Bray comparing the iPad to the Samsung Tab where he mentioned the prohibitive size of the iPad for use as a camera and it occurred to me that it would be cool if there was a Bluetooth camera that would allow you to keep the iPad in your bag while performing the photography with a compact device. Or evan an iPod Nano with a camera that streamed the photos/video to the iPad.

Then I read a /. post that mentions a NY Times article about body sensors that transmit data to the iPhone via Bluetooth, implying that the iOS stack has been augmented to support more than just audio for headsets and keyboards.

iPad Stands

Of all the iPad stands I have seen so far, the business-card holder is my favourite. It is compact, elegant and simple to use.

There are several stand designs that look like miniature artist easels and look too complicated. The Griffin Loop Stand is not compact and elegant. The Belkin Flip Blade is a bit more interesting because it's compact and elegant but it looks like it has some moving parts.

There are several LEGO stands that have been made, but none of them meet my criteria.

I was thinking of designing a stand similar to the business-card holder (which Business Depot in Canada doesn't seem to carry) but made of a single block of wood.

Update: I just found out about the Glif, an iPhone4 stand which can also be used to mount the phone on a tripod.

Update 2: I found instructions for a wooden iPad stand made from a single block of wood, which my brother built for me.

Adopt an iPad

The adoption rate of the iPad by consumers has exceeded that of the iPhone and the DVD player.

If the current rate persists, the iPad could become a $9 billion per year business, blowing right past game consoles and cell phones to become the fourth largest consumer electronics category. That would put the iPad right behind TVs, smartphones, and laptops.

iTunes enhancement request

I submitted an iTunes feature enhancement to Apple so that the media-type for videos (Movie, TV show, Music Video) could be automatically set by iTunes itself based on the duration of the video.

By default, any video file dropped into iTunes is automatically with a media-type of "Movie". I propose that using some heuristics based on the duration, the video file can be intelligently categorized by iTunes itself, as a Movie, a TV show or a Music Video.

If the file is either around 22 minutes in duration, or 45 minutes in duration,  it's very likely a half-hour or 1-hour TV show, respectively; if it's around 90 minutes long or more, it's likely a movie; if it's less than 15 minutes, it's a music video or a short.

Moleskine Covers

Moleskine announced covers for both the iPad and the iPhone:

Both Covers are combined with blank notebook pages. They are conceived as analog-digital ultra-portable workstations for the contemporary nomads.

 My Moleskine notebook, which is a few years old now, is used mostly  for jotting down random thoughts, noting books-to-read and for sketching. I also keep track of the weather for each day and what I wore that on that day, so that on a future day with the same weather, I can choose the appropriate number of layers that worked in the past.

I also have a watercolour-paper Moleskine, which has some paintings, but has been neglected for about a year.

NPD Group iPad Survey Results

The NPD Group has published the results of an iPad owner survey.

Early adopters (people who bought the iPad within the first two months of release) are more satisfied (80% of respondents) that people who bought them after.

The biggest complaint (51%) is the lack of USB ports; for me the biggest disappointment is the weight-- it could be lighter.

I can't say I love the iPad; I can't say I hate it, either; I do enjoy using it.

I also don't deny that what Apple has accomplished is pretty amazing. I think I feel this way precisely because I am an early adopter and I see the details that could have been done better. If I had waited for the second or later generations, I would probably be more amazed and I would likely have instantly fallen in love with it.

I also don't regret buying the iPad (despite the limited time I have spent with it, as my parents have it most of the time) . The kids do love it and at least it has given them exposure to the future of computing.