Category Archives: iPad

Will the iPhone and iPad kill off the Mac?

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column.

Companies go where the commercial opportunities are. The inescapable conclusion to be drawn from Apple's recent history is that the spectacular growth opportunities are in mobile devices, not deskbound computers or even laptops. The iPad is selling at a rate of a million a month. More than 1.4 million of the new iPhones were sold in the first four days. And the pace seems to be increasing. It took the first iPhone 74 days to reach its first million. The iPad got there in 28. Only things like the Nintendo Wii (13 days) shift faster. Then there's the small matter of the 40% contribution the iPhone now makes to Apple's bottom line. In those circumstances, if you were Steve Jobs, what would you focus on?

I’ve just had an email from a reader who, many years ago, switched to the Mac on my advice. He writes:

I’ve just read your piece in the Observer New Review. I suppose I have to prepare for the end of civilisation as I know it!

There’s an App for that — so help me God

Posted on by

From today’s New York Times.

Publishers of Christian material have begun producing iPhone applications that can cough up quick comebacks and rhetorical strategies for believers who want to fight back against what they view as a new strain of strident atheism. And a competing crop of apps is arming nonbelievers for battle.

“Say someone calls you narrow-minded because you think Jesus is the only way to God,” says one top-selling application introduced in March by a Christian publishing company. “Your first answer should be: ‘What do you mean by narrow-minded?’ ”

For religious skeptics, the “BibleThumper” iPhone app boasts that it “allows the atheist to keep the most funny and irrational Bible verses right in their pocket” to be “always ready to confront fundamentalist Christians or have a little fun among friends.”

There was a lovely cartoon in the New York Times a while back. It shows a guy coming home and saying “Hi Honey! Bad news. I’ve been replaced by an App”.

App Creep and the case for the mobile browser

Posted on by

The problem with Apps (well, one problem with Apps) is that they’re largely impulse-buy items. The result is predictable: you wind up with having to wade through screen after screen until you find the one you want. And in doing so you pass lots that you don’t use much — or haven’t actually used at all. Hence the new syndrome: Apps creep. Kevin Kelleher has written a thoughtful piece about this.

By app creep, I mean the collecting (and then forgetting) of software programs. It isn’t new. But on mobile phones, the less popular apps are more visible, even a nuisance –- you frequently flip past pages of them searching for the one you need. It’s less of a problem on laptops and desktops, in part, because of the centrality of the web browsers on those devices. On a smartphone, I use a browser well less than a quarter of the time. But sooner than later, that will change, because as more and more companies offer services on the mobile web, the mobile browser will play a bigger role. Thanks to the advent of HTML5, browsers and apps will learn to live with each other.

In the meantime, while there may be 200,000 apps for the iPhone and 50,000 for Android phones, but iPhone users have on average just 37 apps installed and Android owners, 22, according to the latest figures from Nielsen. Of course, not all apps connect users to the web, but many of those that don’t contain content that can easily be found online.

Eventually, a spot on the home screens of smartphones will become like beachfront property in Monte Carlo –- highly coveted real estate. Most non-elite developers will find it easier to reach a mobile audience through the browser. But for now, the lion’s share of them are ignoring the browser in favor of native apps, which -– unless they’re a featured or best-selling app in an app store -– often languish in obscurity…

iPad: the blog killer

Posted on by

As part of my ongoing project to try and assess the utility of the iPad, I’ve been using it as much as possible in the course of my day. We’re now several weeks into the experiment and I’ve noticed something interesting: I’ve been blogging less. And the reason is simple: the iPad is hopeless as a blogging tool, or at any rate as a tool for the kind of blogging that I do. Since I use Memex as a kind of working notebook — an online commonplace-book — multi-tasking is absolutely essential: I read something online and decide that I want to log it in Memex. On a real computer, that’s dead easy: highlight the key passage, hit the ‘Press This’ bookmarklet (I use WordPress), edit, hit ‘publish’. That’s it. With the iPad, the workflow needed to achieve the same result doesn’t even bear thinking about — it involves closing one application, launching another, clumsy selecting, cutting and pasting, etc. etc. Zzzz…

There is a WordPress App for the iPad, and it’s ok as far as it goes, which is only to write posts from scratch. For some bloggers — those who just write original stuff — it’s useable. But for someone like me it’s not really helpful.

Another quirk: when blogging with WordPress (and, I guess, Blogger) one’s composing inside a text box — as here:

Note that when the draft post exceeds the size of the box a scroll-bar appears. On the iPad, there’s no scroll bar. “No problem”, you think. “Just grab the text and move it up to make room”. Not possible: all that happens is that you move the entire web-page. Not sure if this is fix-able within the parameters of Apple’s touch interface, but at the moment it makes the editing of longer blog posts effectively impossible.

(And as for getting an image into the post to illustrate a point — as above — well, forget it.)

My hunch is that there’s an opening for a serious iPad blogging App. The big question, I guess, is whether it’s possible to do one within the confines of the present OS.

All of this merely confirms, of course, that the iPad has been conceived as essentially a tool for consumption rather than creation — and that users like me are, really, rather quaint exceptions with little marketing significance. Steve Jobs might say that we should stick to our multi-tasking laptops; and, given the huge sales of the iPad, who’s to say that he’s wrong?

The iPad? Well, it’s not exactly the Apple of my eye

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column.

The essence of the iPad is that it's a good device for passive ‘consumption’ of preprepared multimedia content. That’s why the old media dinosaurs are salivating about it: it seems to offer them a way of regaining control of the customer – and of ensuring that s/he pays for content. And one can understand why they are so charmingly deluded about this: all apps have to come through the iTunes store and can be charged for. No wonder Murdoch & co love the device. They think it’ll rescue them from the wild west web, where people believe that content should be free. Yeah, and pigs will also fly in close formation.

It’s when one tries to use the iPad for generating content that its deficiencies become obvious. The biggest flaw is the absence of multitasking, so you have to close one app to open another, which is a bit like going back to the world of MS-DOS…

See also my diary of a week with the device.