Still Here After All This Time

It's been a really long time since my last post on this blog.  That was caused by a number of things: recovery from surgery was slower than I expected, at least in terms of getting back the energy to do things during the day.  For awhile there it was all I could do to go to the park and sit for an hour while the dogs walked around.  It took almost six months to get up the energy to walk any distance myself, but once I started doing that, my energy started coming back at a faster pace.  Now I can do 3 or 4 hours of (mostly non-physical) work a day after walking the dogs.

But once I had the energy, more things intervened.  Our Lhasa Apso, Jemma,  suddenly (over the course of 2 or 3 weeks) went blind.  We spent some time going to vets and not getting a definitive diagnosis until we saw a veterinary opthalmologist.  He diagnosed SORD (Sudden Onset Retinal Disorder), a disorder whose etiology and mechanism are pretty much unknown, but whose prognosis is 100% blindness in almost all cases, and which has no treatment.  Jemma has been blind now for several months, and has mostly acclimated herself to it.  Dogs aren't as strongly affected by blindness as humans, because smell and hearing are so much more acute for them.  Jemma's only serious problem (aside from a non-related eye infection that lasted several weeks) is that when she gets excited or upset she gets disoriented and gets stuck in loops between obstacles, going back and forth until she accidentally goes off at an angle and misses one of them.  We''re working with her on that, but she is a very stubborn dog (a breed quality) and is having trouble taking direction when she gets that way.  Spencer, our Rat Terrier, has been very solicitous of her, following her and trying to help her (though not very consistently). He has come to get us a couple of times when she got into trouble in the back yard.

The other thing that's been keeping me from the blog is a project I've started.  Now that I'm able to do useful work at least part of the day, I've decided to come partially out of retirement and create software that, with a little luck, I can sell to bring in a little extra money; at least enough, I hope, to pay for the additional hardware and software I've had to buy for the development work (that's not really a lot, but retirement hasn't been quite what it was supposed to be, thanks to the Current Financial Unpleasantness).  I've got a project that I think I can do myself, one that I've been thinking about off and on for a year or so.  It will start out as a Macintosh application, sold through Apple's Mac App Store, and if that's successful, I plan to port it to the iPad. Details in a near future blog post.

I'll continue to post here, but probably not as often as I was doing last fall.  I'll be spending about 20 hours a week on the software project, and that will include some postings on a new blog I'm setting up now along with a website for the company that will sell the software.  I'll post the details for the new site and blog here soon.

iPad, You Pad, We all Pad

The outpouring of opinions, punditry, glee, and bile since last Wednesday has been pretty predictable.  Apple fanboys have waxed ecstatic, Apple naysayers have snarked and pointed to missing features, all the usual pundits have told us why the iPad matters desperately or doesn't matter at all as the case may be.  I thought I'd wait awhile before saying anything, in the hopes that the uproar would have died down enough for a rational conversation to take place.  Or one side of one, anyway, in case my two readers are out of town.

First, did Apple get it right?  I think they did as well as they ever do in a first product introduction: they showed us a first generation product which will create a new product category, and perhaps even a whole new market.  It's not perfect, and it's not yet complete, but it's out there as a stake in the ground.  And it's credible enough that it freaked Amazon into trying to extort Macmillan into submission by delisting their books.  Macmillan was one of the publishers who's been talking to Apple about ebook business models for the iPad, and their CEO went to Amazon on Thursday to say, "We like what Apple proposes and we want you to go along."  Amazon's response was "Oh, crap, it's Stevie and the Pirates! Run out all the guns!"

Let's review Steve Jobs' strategy for introducing the first generation of game-changing products like the iPod, the iPhone, and the iMac:

1. It has to be recognizably an Apple product, with the level of fit & finish,  industrial design, and usability that we've come to expect of an Apple product.
2. It should open a new market niche, or one whose current occupants haven't been able to get a handle on.
3. It doesn't need to have every feature you can imagine, but it should be immediately useful to a large market segment, with potential enhancements that will pull in still more market.
4. The target market is never programmers, computer geeks, sysadmins, or engineers.  The emphasis is always on helping people get their tasks done, or on having fun with the product.
5. It doesn't need to be the cheapest product out there, or the most customizable, or the fastest.  It should excel in enough areas to be the best choice overall for a large part of the market in the long term.
6. It should allow Apple to create an ecology to go with it: iTunes for iPod as an example.

I claim that the iPad fits these goals, and that it is in position to create a whole new market segment that isn't served well by existing products.  That market is the portable media server for the individual: a system to create, store, and communicate documents, books, images, video, and music, and allow access to the web and all forms of instant and asynchronous communications.  It has a screen big enough to see photographs, videos, and high-quality book text without squinting; it has a user interface that is useful in places other than at a desk or standing motionless¹ in line at the airport; and it would appear that it has enough power to be pleasant to use for the kind of simple tasks we've seen so far.

One point that seems to have been generally overlooked is that, for the purposes of its intended market, the iPad is not a computer.  It's an application engine for a whole host of applications.  Programming it,  customizing it, or having it maintained by the user are irrelevant objectives for the market in which it will be sold.  And that market is vastly larger than all of the technical users who would want to write their own apps or install a Linux distro on it.

I'm not the only one of the opinion that the iPad makes some sense.  Charlie Stross and Stephen Fry seem to agree.  Of course, both of them are tarred by the same brush I am: they're Mac users.  Perhaps not all the time, or for all tasks, but they own and enjoy using Macs, as do I.  So our opinions are not likely to be of interest to those who either loathe Apple entirely, or are only interested in what to Apple are edge-case uses of the product.

Some of the enhancements that Apple is going to make over the next 2 or 3 iterations of the iPad product line are pretty obvious.  They'll add some apps that weren't feasible for the iPhone such as the iLife applications, giving the iPad the means for creation, manipulation, and viewing of photographs, music, and movies.  They'll add 2 cameras: one facing out for taking photographs and movies of the world, and the other facing the user to allow video chat.  But there are bound to be enhancements that won't be obvious, that even Apple might not yet forsee. That's because nobody knows yet what the full range of applications will be for this kind of product,  or what use they'll be put to for which some new software or hardware will be helpful.  This is why creating a new product category can be so profitable for a company like Apple that's willing to accept a little bit of a leap into the unknown.  I predict that the real killer apps for iPad won't be things we expect.

¹ Think about using it to create maps of an archeological dig in the field, or record airplane or bus or train maintenance results on the tarmac or the rail.  I'm thinking about plugging my digital camera into it and using it check and touch up my photos in the field.