Kindle Fire tips/tricks

Here's a tips/tricks tutorial video on the Kindle Fire. And there's more on the site, The Ebook Reader.

Three iPads?

I hardly believe this rumor about a three-iPad lineup soon, but I would love it to be true. That way there could be a cheap entry-level model for kids and others, a normal model (maybe close to the current iPad 2), and a super-model for the enthusiasts with super-high-rez screen and the works, at a premium price.
Making everybody happy at a single price point (only varied by over-charging for more memory) is not so easy.

Big personal library

Here's Bart in an episode where he switches places with a very rich kid.
I know I rarely buy paper books anymore, but I still get weak in the knees by the thought of having a personal library like this. Keeewl.

I would combine it with a café and have book readings and such, it would be a great hang-out.

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I don't understand the PNG format, or rather why it's used so much. It may be lossless or something, but often it's nearly ten times bigger than a decent JPG. Like the above screenshot from my iPad was 1.2MB! The JPG is 160k.

Flote arm

There are signs in the stars that my humble wish for more tablet holders is coming through. I was contacted by the makers of the Flote arm, and it does look promising, and rather lighter and more elegant than the one I have.
Watch the video, it is good, and funny.




I got this info from the designer David Cutler:

I've been working with a UK distributor about retailing FLOTE it in Europe.
For now, we are charging $110 for international shipping  via USPS, which may take a several days to a few weeks.
I wanted to inform you of an important improvement to the FLOTE. We have designed the "sliding" boom to now be a "telescoping" boom. This removes the concern of the "boom tail"- the end of the boom opposite the tablet- bumping into things like chairs and walls when you swing your tablet around. Aesthetically we are making the "fixed" boom tail look similar to the current design, remaining extended about 5"  to give FLOTE its balanced look.

You can get it in custom colors for a premium, even in 14karat gold plating for a bigger premium! :-) (I'm not sure what kind of home that would be for. A movie star home or a housing-scam investment advisor home. You know the kind: huge house, no furniture but a big toy race track and an $200k stereo system still in the boxes.)

I wonder why it took so long for such products to appear.
Look at this study about the unfortunate ergonomics of using a tablet.

B&N Fights Fire with $199 Nook Tablet

B&N Fights Fire with $199 Nook Tablet, article.

The Nook is overall surprisingly successful against an overwhelming competition like the Kindle/Amazon.
For example the writing app My Writing Spot works now on the Nook, and the developer tells me that the Nook market is the Android market where the software is selling best! I doubt anybody would have predicted that.

Book bloggers

If you sometimes want to find fresh authors to read, maybe book bloggers can help.
Here is Book Bloggers Directory (SF division).

E-books Can’t Burn

E-books Can’t Burn, article.
At the university where I work, certain professors, old and young, will react with disapproval at the notion that one is reading poetry on a Kindle. It is sacrilege.
[...] Add to that the e-book’s ease of transport, its international vocation (could the Iron Curtain have kept out e-books?), its indestructibility (you can’t burn e-books), its promise that all books will be able to remain forever in print and what is more available at reasonable prices, and it becomes harder and harder to see why the literati are not giving the phenomenon a more generous welcome.

It's yet more proof that even the most intelligent people are often unable to distinguish when emotions are ruling their judgment. If you remove the thought from a paper book, all you have left is dead wood. But still for many people, the precious content is inseparable from the paper it was printed on.

Pakistani Military Introduces Android-Based PACPAD

Pakistani Military Introduces Android-Based PACPAD, article.

PACPAD is being sold in limited quantities, but represents a new effort by Pakistan’s military to enter into the consumer electronics space. 
“I just can’t figure it out,” Jehan Ara, head of Pakistan’s Software Houses Association, said to the AP. “Even if they could sell a billion units, I can’t see the point. The air force is supposed to be protecting the air space and borders of the country.”

Personally I think that this could be a great trend. If the military industry in various countries around the world might learn that they can have fun and profit without killing people, that might be a stick more towards building the coffin for war in this world.

I heard of a South American country, forget which, which years ago completely abolished their military, and their education and industry have been booming since.

8 Unexpected Downsides of the Switch to E-books

8 Unexpected Downsides of the Switch to E-books, satirical article.

It's funny, even as I (and many like me) have virtually stopped buying paper publications, it's nigh impossible to imagine a world without paper books and -magazines.
But I guess as super-cheap displays as well as Net connections become omnipresent over the next twenty years, that'll change. When something that works like an iPad but costs and weighs barely more than a CD, and will find and display anything anybody wants to share, is everywhere, the need or desire for anything on paper will be an exception.

"Breaking the Page" (updated)

Breaking the Page, ebook (free for now)

Thanks to Len. I will read this with interest. I like the title a lot. Like I've talked about, in traditional publishing, virtually everything is based on the PAGE, and so is our thinking. It is no coincidence that the first big, popular destop publishing application was called PageMaker. 

Ebooks have many advantages, speed of delivery, etc. But a major difference, something which will take us collectively years or even decades to really get beyond, is that they are not bound by pages. That's why I think that old legacy software like inDesign is not really well designed for making and designing ebooks. It requires a different thinking from bottom up. 

Scott McCloud has written a lot about this. He sees the screen (computer, tablet etc) not as a page, but rather as a window through which we can look at an infinite "page" we can scroll around in. And in that space, we can arrange things in manners which have never been possible before. Scott has made many interesting web comics in highly experimental formats. 

Here's a good example: London Unfurled, an iPad app. You get one long drawing of the buildings along the London Thames which you can scroll along, and you can click on the name of many of them and read a short article about it.

The next 'pad

Happy Valentine's day.

So, probably within a month we'll know what the iPad 3 will be like. Personally what I'm hoping for is some quantum-leap upgrade in screen technology. Like, easier on the eyes somehow, and twice the resolution.
The iPad 2 has a big screen, but it is still very limited how much text you can have on it and still read it comfortably. Not very much really. And there's barely any difference between HD and SD video on it.
And the Retina Display on iPhone 4 showed us how much better it can be. So here's to... uhm, the crazy ones.

Anger Over 'Distasteful' Steve Jobs Advert

[Thanks to Mary]

Anger Over 'Distasteful' Steve Jobs Advert, article and video.

After reading half his bio, I've lost some of my respect of Steve as a person (it shouldn't be beyond anybody to curtail rudeness), but still I think this ad is, well, just that, distasteful, and not even well done.

Ol' faithful iPad

I just ordered my Instapaper app on my iPad to show me the article I was reading in the Safari browser. Nothing happened.

A little irritating, but really what it illustrated to me was how rare this is for me with iOS devices. I've been using iPad 1 and 2 and iPhone 4 and 4S for two years now, and something like this has happened only a couple of times. That's pretty amazing, especially when you consider how young the platform is.

God knows it's a vast and welcome improvement over the (nineties) systems Mac OS 7, 8, 9, and Window 95, 98, Me, which all were about as stable as a stilt walker on a freshly polished floor. A decade ago if I had a day without a couple of system-wide crashes, I lit a candle in the window.

A new tablet clamp/arm

I hope the tablet holder arm market will expand a lot, there are still way too few options. A promising new one, though, is this Arkon mount.
I'm trying to find out from the company if it can be used with my bed stand, which only has two centimeters depth of edge. If it can, it might replace my floor stand, which I love, but which takes up a lot of space and looks like something from Frankenstein's laboratory.

Bookle, an EPUB Reader for Mac OS X

Introducing Bookle, an EPUB Reader for Mac OS X, article.

it’s clear that EPUB is the future. Unfortunately, we haven’t been happy with the best-known EPUB readers for the Mac, such as Calibre, which is cross-platform ugly beyond belief; Stanza, the Mac version of which strips all formatting and graphics and is now obsolete; and EPUBReader, which requires Firefox and isn’t Mac-like.
[...] Enter Bookle — a straightforward, elegant EPUB reader for Mac OS X that maintains your library of EPUBs, available now from the Mac App Store for $9.99.