First impressions, based on the Gallery and Tech Specs pages at Apple.com: Meh.

Here’s a list of things they should have incorporated from the get-go:

• Fold-out Handle. It’s all curvy and smooth and sleek, but unlike the iPod or iPhone it’s too big to wrap your hand around. I predict lots of dropped iPads. Added bonus – a fold out handle with the right articulation could give the iPad a nice tilt if you happen to be using it on a desk with the onscreen keyboard.
• Built-in SD card reader. They’ve put them on iMacs. The iPad should have had one too. Making it an add-on for the dock connector is stupid, it’s something extra you have to buy and remember.
• Camera. It wouldn’t have killed them to stick a tiny camera (or two!) in the iPad. I don’t know if anyone uses them that much, but better to have than not have. They could have had one on the back like the iPhone, then stuck one on the front for video conferencing.
• USB port. It obviously has one in the dock, but you shouldn’t need an extra dock adaptor just to plug in a USB peripheral. It should have a simple ordinary plain boring old USB port or two.

I don’t know if the iPad will be a fail or not, but I’m not itching to run out and buy one. The only thing I saw that did interest me was the keyboard with the built-in dock connector. I wonder if that would work with an iPhone – I hate the onscreen keyboard on the iPhone. Well to be specific I hate the inaccuracy of it. Without getting all into the technicalities, the way the touchscreen works makes it difficult to be really precise. Anyways, the keyboard accessory looked good.

One other thing intrigued me a little – they mentioned the processor was a custom-designed Apple A4 system on a chip. I wonder what the specs are, who made it, if the architecture is similar to or based on anything we’re familiar with, etc. etc.

I read somewhere that the ‘average iPhone user’ has 6 pages of apps on their device. That seems like a lot to me, but then I’ve never been accused of being an average anything. I’ve only got three pages of icons on my iPhone, and none of those pages are ‘full’ – I don’t like the aesthetic appearance of a full screen of icons, for some reason eleven seems to be the magic number for me – that’s the most I will put on a screen, before it looks too crowded and busy for me.

On my ‘main screen’ (first page) the only two installed apps I have there are the two I created – Liber Umbrarum et Lux, and PassGenR. Not that I use them every day, but I’m proud of them and like to see them there. Actually I guess there’s a third installed app there too – down at that bottom area, that appears on every page, is the Files app. Well worth whatever I paid for it, it’s a handy place to store data. For instance, I have copies of PDF manuals for stuff (digital camera, iPhone, etc) in there, so I can refer to them if I need to even if there’s no computer handy.
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Time for another rant about what ticks me off with technology.

They keep changing the accessories.

On what seems like a regular basis, suddenly all your accessories aren’t compatible with the newest gizmo. I’ve been through this with the cellphone companies, both Nokia and Sony/Ericsson have rendered all their A/C adaptors and car adaptors obsolete by changing the specs. There’s no reason for this. Other than, they’ve decided it’s time to sell more adaptors. Seriously – the sub-mini phono jack is a fine standard for headsets and the coaxial DC jack is fine for power. All your stupid annoying proprietary molded plastic plugs just earn you more hate – and a deeper level in hell every time you change them on us!

However, my specific ire today is not for cellphone companies – although they, and virtually every other tech company is guilty of this at one time or another. No, today I am ranting again about Apple.

So last night I decided I wanted to watch a certain movie on my tv in my bedroom. I bought & downloaded the movie a month or two ago from the iTunes store, and have watched it on my computer once or twice, but now I want to see it on an actual TV. So I poked around and checked and found that indeed, you cannot burn purchased movies to a DVD. (You can burn purchased music to CDs, so I had hoped maybe movies would work the same.)

Oh well – there’s always another way. I have an “Apple universal dock” on which I spend about $50 and it has an AV port on it. So I unplugged that from my computer and dug up an AV cable and hooked it all up to my TV, after first transfering the movie to my iPhone. Figuring I’ll just run the movie on the iPhone and play it to the TV. The iPhone has TV-out and it was all set up right.

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I’m a Mac user. I have an iPhone. I (heart) the Mac OS X. But I’m no Apple fangrrrl, I don’t drink their kool-aid. I like their products but I’ll call them on their BS when I see it. I don’t expect them to be all warm and fuzzy, I understand that they are a big business and all that jazz. But lately it’s starting to feel like they’re going out of their way to remind us that all we are to them is dollar signs.

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I’ve been quiet for some time on this subject and I owe an explanation as to the status of my iPhone application development.

My two iPhone apps, Liber Umbrarum et Lux and PassGenR have both been available on the iTunes App Store for a few months. Both are free. Over the few months I’ve received a couple suggestions on how to improve them, and a lot of requests to make them available to a wider range of hardware.

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With mobile / handheld internet-enabled devices becoming more and more common, it makes sense to be able to offer one’s content in an alternative format that is geared towards serving the mobile devices. The small screen and alternative interface (i.e. no mouse etc.) can make browsing normal sites more of a challenge.

There is already at least one rather popular and very powerful Wordpress plugin that creates a mobile version and serves it automatically to any browsers that it recognizes as belonging to the handheld class of devices. I’ve used it for a while, but there were some aspects of it that I did not like. First and formost was the theme – it was styled to look rather similar to an iPhone application I believe, and while that would be familiar to iPhone users, it meant that my unique scheme of colours and appearance were completely lost on the mobile platforms.

Then there were functional issues as well – I didn’t like how the posts were formatted, how the pages were handled, or that there did not appear to be any way to incorporate other unique content the way I wanted. I looked at the code and theme directories a few times but it seemed very complicated and like a lot of work to customize it. So in the end, I started from scratch and made my own mobile theme, based very much on my normal theme of course.

It remains optomized for handhelds, no graphics are served up on the home page, just text, which allows for quick loading and minimizes data transfer charges. It does include brief excerpts for the posts, and I have created a customized form of ’sidebar’ which resides at the bottom of each page. I then created my own super-simplified plugin to drive the mobile version of the theme – the plugin code is based somewhat on the package I mentioned earlier, though my version has almost no features other than the barest minimum.

When I had finished it, I then created mobile-friendly but customized themes for my work’s web site, and my friend Lezley’s site. Lezley’s was a tough one, as she’s using ComicPress which makes some significant changes to how Wordpress works, and building a new theme to be compatible with ComicPress as well as being mobile-friendly was a challenge.

To view the mobile versions, just head on over with your mobile device. Or if you’d like a preview, follow the links below. (It will look super-huge on a full size monitor, but that’s why it works on a mobile device.)

• PlanetStephanie.net
• LezleyDavidson.com
• Maksystems.com

If  you have visited my site or one of these others with a mobile device but found either the mobile version does not appear for you, or it appears but the style is broken or aspects do not work, please contact me via the comments and let me know so I can fix it.

Recently I folded my Artwork website into my blog/CMS/site here. After some contemplation and thinking it over, I’ve decided to also fold my iPhone Software site into here as well.

There are a few reasons for doing this.

Primarily, it is to get everything into one place with regards to administration and site management. Certainly it’s easier to manage when all the related pages are under one roof so to speak.

Second, is the fact that having everything running under the same CMS / site provides a consistant look / feel / style to all the related content. In other words, instead of each separate site / sub-site having a different style and set-up, they all now share a common appearance, common menu navigation, and common search setup.

Finally, it makes things easier in the sense of not having to remember / maintain a bunch of different domains or sub-directories. The various domains can continue to exist but redirect to the new location under the primary domain, which makes overall navigation and cross-promotion within my various interests much easier, for readers and for myself.