iPad typewriter, for realsies

We've before seen a typewriter which was made into a USB keyboard. That was kewl, but this is the ultracoolest.
Too bad, you can't buy it, it's a hobby project, and has probably not been easy to make.



(Gotta say though, I think I can type faster even on the screen. But hey, he's an engineer, not a typist, 'at's cool.)

"An Embarrassing, Lazy, Arrogant Money Grab"

Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 Review: An Embarrassing, Lazy, Arrogant Money Grab, review of the new Samsung Note 10.1.

Reviews of the latest big-news tablet are... decidedly mixed. This guy does not hide his feelings...

The Bad:

• The build quality. Terrible even by Samsung's low standards. The back is actually squishy, and you can feel it deform while holding it. It's noisy too, the plastic creaks, groans, and grinds when you pick it up. Regular, strong plastic would still be unacceptable when everyone else uses aluminum, but this... this is insulting for a $500 tablet.
• An ugly two-tone "please don't ever confuse this with an iPad" design. It's not designed to look good, it's only designed to not look like an iPad.
• A 1280x800 resolution display on a flagship device is not ok. Asus does 1920x1200, and Samsung makes a 9.7 inch, 2048x1536 display for Apple. They seriously cheaped out here.

The saddest thing is, Samsung can do so much better. The Series 9 laptop guys make beautiful, kick-ass products out of aluminum every day.

I agree, I have a Series 9, and it's by far the most beautiful non-Apple Laptop I've seen.

... I should say it's a long and detailed review, and it's not all bad.

Flote tablet/ereader holder (updated again)

Update: It's funny how different it feels (in a good way) to read on the iPad without a big plate holder behind it. I took these photos trying to illustrate that.

(Photo: Stobblehouse with Olympus Pen Lite, 20mm F: 1.7 (hence the soft background))

It took a while, because it was a Kickstarter project etc, but my Flote tablet holder finally came. (It holds almost any ereader or tablet.) The box was surprisingly big and heavy.

It was easy to put together, and compared to my old book holder, it looks better, takes up less space, and yet manages to have better reach (over a meter!) and being easier to adjust. Not the least because of the powerful magnetic ball which holds the device, a brilliant solution to multi-angle adjustment. The tablet can be adjusted to virtually any angle or position, straight or crooked, that anybody could desire.

We'll see how well it functions in the long run, but so far it seems very good. You can adjust things just-so, so they are held in place by friction and you don't need to loosen any screws to adjust the position or rotation of the tablet. Unless something unexpected happens (and I'd guess not, it's a delightfully simple device), I'll call this a really nice piece of engineering. In fact this was expressed also by Jade, 12, who helped me put it together and could probably have done it faster if I'd not been there (not kidding). She has firm beliefs and good taste and twice commented on how nice the Flote is.

Photo by Stobblehouse, Sony RX100. Jade kindly lent her modeling talents.

Sadly, what with it being hand-engineered in the US, the Flote is not the cheapest stand you can get. But then it is an upscale product. I hope it'll sell, it deserves it. David Cutler has made a page explaining the situation. (Note: I hear that the price may fall in late autumn (or autumn in late fall), so if it hurts too much now, look later.)

Update: one of my friends wrote: "When I read in bed, I'm on my side.  This thing won't work too well for that."
You'd think so, but I tested it and it works perfectly for that. (I'd not tried it before, because I use glasses and it's not very practical.) You just put the stand and arm parallel to the bed, put the tablet screen on non-rotate, and pull it down to the height your head is at. You can place it anywhere you would hold a book, and your hand won’t get cold or tired. Behold:

"Flote" is a good name. Particular if you come from a holder like my old one: big, clumsy arm and monstrous mounting plate. In comparison, the small iPad seems to flote alone is space in front of me, it's really nice.

Holds anything between a Kindle and an iPad.

“If the pundits are right, and the touch-screen tablet is the future of computing, then we’ll have to come to terms with the Handling Issue: unlike with a laptop or desktop computer, you have to hold a tablet with your hand as you’re using it.” – David Pogue, NY TIMES

"We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes."  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Lighter and thinner

John Gruber has reached the same idea that I mentioned recently: that the selling points of the iPad Mini (if it exists) will be a very competitive price, being very thin, and being very light.
The lightness would be crucial, it's so important for reading. And Gruber seems to think that even being an 8-inch device, the smaller iPad could still come under 300 grams! That would be so kewl. It would totally transform the experience of using the iPad, especially as a reader.

Toshiba U845W wide-screen notebook

Review.
The display is more than double as wide as it is high. I'm not sure of the advantages of this apart from double-window use, but it looks very kewl.

Text to Speech on iPad

Text-to-speech has been improved on the iPad! Before, it was linked to other "Accessibility" (for the sight-impaired) features, and was clumsy. But now you can turn it on in the "General" settings. (The voice is also now male and better quality than in earlier incarnations.) And if you select text, "speak" comes up. It does not work in the Kindle app (puzzling and sad. I don't know why, since Kindle devices have had this feature for years), but it does work in most apps where you can select text, including iBooks.

I saw a YouTube video demonstrating how it will continue to read, and even turn pages automatically in iBooks. But on my iPad 3 or 2, it will only read selected text (stroke down with two fingers to select). This makes the feature sadly limited, you have to select text again for each new page!

Does anybody know how to make this work better?


(This is different than on my iPad 3 or 2, the text selections also looks different.)

Kindle working miracles for weak readers

In a TKC podcast Len Edgerly has a great interview (audio file a bit down the page) with a teacher telling about how the Kindle (with text-to-speech) is a surprisingly powerful help to students with reading difficulties. She tells some amazing stories. Apart from many of the students going from fear of reading to enthusiasm for it, the class did 70% in a standard test compared to the (typical) 30% for last year's class!

Tablets are overtaking e-reading

Dear Len,

You express a little sadness that tablets are overtaking dedicated ereaders for reading. But I think it can be viewed as tablets bringing reading to more people.

If you think about it, a dedicated ereader only makes sense to somebody for whom book reading is much more important than web reading, games, email, and video combined. That’s not so many people!

Those “the rest of us” until recently at best had a laptop for all those things, and as you know, a laptop is not great for reading on. But now people kill pigs with birds on tablets, and they can now also read The Girl With The Dragon Kabooz on the same tablets. Net effect, serious reading is only a click away and will probably happen more often.

Another thing is that now that weight and price are coming way down for tablets, the e-ink screen is the remaining main advantage for ereaders. But it’s not an advantage for everybody. We are a sizeable minority who just don’t like the greyness of it, it’s too dark. Despite me buying every generation of Kindle, my ereading didn’t really take off until the iPad came along, and then it took off fast. And I hear of many people who read on their phones and are now considering the mini-tablet Samsung note or the Nexus Seven. It’s not everybody who are greatly bothered by backlit screens.

Also, maybe somebody will yet invent what I suggested on your show: an app which will make you wait a bit if you want to leave the ereading app, thus encouraging more reading and less Fruit Ninja.

Love, Eolake

Notes on the Note 10.1 (updated)

[Another, hrm, note: I've been reading a bit recently on the small Samsung Note, the 5.2 inch model (which probably will be updated soon). And I still think it may be the top contender for the perfect pocket-ereader! The screen is superply sharp, and the size is just right for hand-holding, and it fits in many pockets, especially thigh pockets. And it runs Android like a champ, nothing low-rent about it. I'm not the only one who like the size, they've sold ten million of them.]

-----------------------------

Here are comments and links to reviews of the new Samsung Note 10.1.
Update: notably (dang) David Pogue's review.

Two things are definitely interesting about the Note 10.1:

1) it can run two apps side by side on the screen.

2) it has a real pressure-sensitive pen.
(In a couple of weeks I should have my Jot Touch pressure-sensitive pen for iPad, we'll see how it is.)

The latter has been awaited eagerly mainly by artists, and the former by people who are into Apple's fabled post-PC age, where you are productive on the tablet. While this is great, and there are some excellent apps for the iPad, certain aspects of Apple's iOS hinders real success on it: the clumsy file system, where you can't freely get at your files, only through the app which made them. And the lack of ability to see two apps at the same time. Though I haven't had use for it myself, I think that Android is also stronger in the area of the flexibility of the file system. Apple has really sacrificed a lot on the alter of ease-of-use, for better and for worse.

"Apple's Secrets Revealed at Trial"

Apple's Secrets Revealed at Trial, article, Wall Street Journal.  Interesting peeks behind Apple's iron walls.

On Friday, Scott Forstall, a senior vice president who oversees the software used on the company's mobile devices, testified that as early as January 2011, an Apple executive advocated that the company build a tablet with a 7-inch screen. Apple has generally disputed the appeal of devices smaller than its 9.7-inch iPad, despite reports the company is developing a smaller model.
In cross-examination, Mr. Forstall said Eddy Cue, now head of Apple's Internet services efforts, had used a 7-inch Samsung tablet for a time, and sent an email to Chief Executive Tim Cook that he believed "there will be a 7-inch market and we should do one."

Interesting. I don't think they would have any reason to say this in court, unless there is a smaller iPad on the way.

Habits are hard!

(More.)

Me, I love paper. Good paper. I even not long ago purchased some hand-made books from a one-man papermill in Italy, which are just wood covers and watercolor paper (hand-made). They are lovely.
But cheap copypaper is just... junk, really, isn't it? It's really historically just a filler until screens got good (and cheap) and light enough to read on. Which we have now with ereaders and tablets.
Students in universities for example have used an unholy amount of copy paper each year. For millions of dollars per year for just one big university. I hope tablets are already cutting into that waste.

Free-book resource

Here's a good resource for out-of-copyright books, in multiple ebook format and often in audiobook too! "BooksShouldBeFree". It's well designed, good interface, and seems to have reference to a *lot* of books. I actually immediately found two books from one of my fave authors which I had no idea existed, even in audiobook format (via the volunteer-work site Librivox). I haven't sniffed out yet how it all works, but it seems it is legit, not a pirate site.

Gates or Windows?

This (the sentence) is actually almost as old as the web, but it struck me that it's even more pertinent now, when we have new amazing platforms for using the Internet.

New Galaxy Note 10.1

I like my "mini-tablet" Samsung Note 5.2. It's a great pocket ereader. Now Samsung is bringing out a 10-incher. The video below is interesting. But beware: "sequences are shortened and screen images are simulated". Also, I can't really tell what's going on. But it sure shows things you can't do on an iPad, so maybe for some users it may lead somewhere interesting. (I'd suspect a small audience though, I don't think very many really want to use a stylus unless they have a very good reason.)



... In other news, there are voices saying that Android tablet sales are much worse than we even thought. Which would be bad, because Apple really needs the competition to be kept on their toes. A company with a de facto monopoly usually start slipping in areas like customer service and development.

Oh no, podcast interfaces!! (Apple interface rant)

[Warning: rant time.]

So Apple just released a special app for podcasts for the iPad. I think yipee, because before this you had to depend on a computer to subscribe (or independent apps which didn't connect to iTunes). Also the interface of the iPad's music player is... sigh, I'm sorry, it's just awful, I haven't yet figured it out after two years! Well, I can use it, but it's ugly, non-intuitive, and very poor for podcasts/audiobooks.

To my joy, at first glance, the Podcast app's interface is clear as a bell. Big, clear buttons. And there's a 10-second backwards button and a 30-seconds forwards button. Kewl.

And then I saw it: get this... the app has no timeline. 

I'm just stunned. Say you want to go back 25 minutes to re-listen to a special segment, like an interview, you're basically boffed. Trying to do that with the little jump buttons, while not knowing where you are in the file (it does not even show how long it is!), is just ridic. I'm sorry, Fail to Apple for this.

The dedicated iPods with physical scroll wheels are OK for podcasts and audiobooks. Not great, but OK (For example, if you hold down the left button, it'll scroll back. Not with great precision, but it sort of works). But the iOS apps for them on iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad need important changes to become really usable.

... No timeline... it's like building a car with no way to see the road.

Update:
It was too stupid to be true. But the truth is also almost  too stupid to be true: you have to tap on the picture to reveal most of the control interface! No indications whatsoever that you have to do that. Hidden navigation, gotta love that.
Len wrote to me:
I think if you tap on my photo when the podcast is running the photo will roll up like a windowshade and reveal the timeline, along with a sort of superfluous image of an old-fashioned tape recorder. 

Yeah... It's sort of pretty (though very dark), but how many of Apple's customers have even seen one of these? I guess the people who hate the superfluous leather and stitching in Apple's Notes and Calendar apps really hate this part.

It reminds me of another pet peeve: the menus on the iPad very often do not show in any way that there is more menu hidden below the bottom item. No scroll bar, no arrows, nothing. And it's especially non-intuitive since the menus usually do not take up the whole screen. A good designer would fit as much as the menu into the space as he can, not hide half the menu, and especially not hide it in a way so it's not visible that there is more to find.
Example:
Perfect, complete menu, yes? (And notice the space under it, wasted.) Clearly these are all your choices.

Nope, if you happen to touch it in the right way, more is revealed:

I'm sorry to sound so bitter. Maybe it's because Apple normally does things so much better than everybody else, that it's a particularly harsh pill to swallow when they mess up, especially when a glaring error stand untouched for years.