Megatheriums for Breakfast

I can’t think of any product about which more has been written, both before and after its announcement, than the forthcoming Apple iPad.

So I might as well add to the flood.

The speculation before Steve Job’s announcement of the iPad on January 27, 2010, had reached hysterical levels. Hysterical in every sense of the word -absolute madness, and absolutely funny. I was secretly hoping that Jobs would stride onto stage that day and tell the world that Apple had no intention of producing a tablet, just to see what the reaction would be. He did acknowledge the silliness of all of the speculation by throwing up a slide showing Moses on Mt Sinai and a quotation from the Wall Street Journal:

The last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it.

What is even more interesting, really, is the almost equally hysterical commentary about the Apple tablet after the details were released. This seems to range from near fury on the part of some commentators due to disappointed (I would say misguided) expectations and what they see as the shortcomings of the device, to sensible and thoughtful comments from people like John Gruber.

Now I am not an Apple fanboy, far from it. I’m basically a Windows user and a Windows programmer, and I have been for a very long time. But I remain fascinated by Apple and by Steve Job’s strategic approach. And I’m a huge fan and user of the iPod and the iPhone.

Personally, I think the iPad is an absolutely brilliant device, and more importantly it is an extremely clever strategic move on Apple’s part.

Much of the negative comment and outright hostility to the iPad seems to be based on the concept that this thing is meant to replace a laptop computer or a netbook and that it doesn’t have what it takes to do that. Paradoxically, I think this is both very true and at the same time very misguided.

I think that the iPad will replace (actually, displace) laptops and netbooks for some people, for some usages, in some circumstances. Circumstances alter cases.

Think about it. If you are in what I call ‘couch mode’ – you want to sit and relax and maybe read a book, or surf the web, or look through your email, or admire your photos, or play a casual game, or watch a movie or even attend a lecture – all of these things can be done much more comfortably on the couch rather than at your desk. And if you are in that mode, a laptop is a damn uncomfortable device. It weighs too much, it’s hard to handle, and it gets uncomfortably warm. A netbook would be better in some ways, yes. But an iPad would be best of all.

So for many, many people who like to go into couch mode (surely almost all of us), the iPad would be a brilliant device to have on the coffee table.

I myself wouldn’t be interested in using an iPad to sort out my taxes, or edit video, or develop software, or update my web site design. But Apple isn’t suggesting that you would.

The genius of Apple is recognising that there are millions of people (like seniors, for example) who are uncomfortable with computers in general, and who have no other use-cases than those I mention above – accessing the Internet, reading and answering email, admiring photos, being entertained. People who might not today even have a computer could easily pick up and use an iPad as a simple appliance, as Farhad Manjoo identified before the announcement.

Apple are into re-inventing the whole idea of computing.

And the real sting in the tail for companies like Microsoft is the fact that Apple will sell versions of its iWork applications – Keynote, Pages and Numbers – specially designed to work with a touch interface – for only $9.99 each. Think about this for a moment. For only $30 you will be able to buy the functional equivalents of Microsoft Office to run on your iPad.

Sure, you probably won’t want to write a novel that way.

But can’t you see the pathway? Someone who is a reluctant computer user gets hold of an iPad and really enjoys it. They decide to use it for writing some family history stories, perhaps, so they pay the trivial $9.99 cost to get Pages on the iPad. Then they decide they are confident enough with computers to get really serious. They are now familiar with Apple products. They are now familiar with Apple software. If they are in the market for a laptop, what are they going to buy? A Windows-based machine, with expensive Office applications? No way. They will buy a Mac.

I am predicting that the iPad will have a slow start, but then become a roaring success.

Oh, and it will kill the Kindle stone dead.

Go, Soul, the body’s guest,
Upon a thankless arrant:
Fear not to touch the best;
The truth shall be thy warrant.

– Sir Walter Ralegh

Well, I finally did it.

After six months of loving my iPod Touch but carrying a separate mobile phone, I gave in and signed up for a fully-fledged iPhone when the 3GS model came out.

My justification was that I would only have to carry one device with me on my morning walks, or when I was driving. That’s my excuse, but what I was really drooling over were some of the exciting new capabilities that the iPhone has which are still missing from the iPod Touch.

Here we have an elegant, powerful, multi-functional pocket computer with some astonishing capabilities. It’s truly a ‘Swiss Army Knife’ of electronic devices.

Rehashing my earlier list of functions of the iPod Touch, now expanded by the addition of iPhone 3GS features:

I can (and do!) use it to:

* Store my contacts, calendar, notes, photos
* Get my email from several accounts
* Calculate
* Act as an an alarm clock and stop watch
* Keep track of my working time on various projects
* Listen to music – I have some 160 albums on it
* Listen to audiobooks as I walk or drive
* Play games
* Watch videos
* Read e-books
* Take photographs
* Find my way with maps, compass and GPS
* Store all of my passwords
* Check the weather
* Check the stock market
* Record sound
* Browse the Internet
* Look up train, tram and bus timetables (with real-time advice on arrival of trams)
* Find the nearest ATM
* Look up postcodes
* Identify planets, stars and constellations in the night sky
* “Fax” documents
* Remotely control my computers
* Improve my musical ear

Oh yes, nearly forgot:
* Make and receive phone calls
* Write and receive text messages

Others, with a different selection of ‘apps’ will have a different list. But I submit that such a list of capabilities is truly astonishing. It’s the kind of ‘magical machine’ that I could barely have dreamed of when I was young. Heck, I spent a long while saving up for a simple four-function calculator when I was in my first year at college!

If you are wondering how I do some of the things in the list above, here’s a short list of my favorite iPhone apps at the moment:

MotionX GPS

This is currently my very favorite app. It really leverages the power of the GPS, compass and accelerometer. I set off for my morning walk, start my audiobook playing, fire up this app and start walking. When I get back home, I stop and save the ‘track’. Now I know exactly how long I’ve walked for, how far, what my average speed was, what my maximum speed was, and the highest and lowest altitudes I’ve visited. My exact path is shown on the map, and I can even email it to myself or friends, complete with a Google Earth KMZ file. Brilliant and worth every cent (AU$3.99).

JotNot

This is a clever application for those out on the road – essentially it turns your iPhone into a mobile scanner/fax. Take a photo of a document with your camera – even at an angle – and then an overlay appears with movable corners. Position the corners to match the corners of your document, and voilà ! JotNot processes the image, reshapes it to make it into a perfect rectangle, adjusts the sharpness and contrast, and you have something which looks like a pretty good scan. JotNot then lets you email the result as an image or as a PDF. Terrific for receipts, newspaper clippings, white-board workings, business cards…. I love it. (AU$5.99)

Pocket Universe

This really leverages all the features of the iPhone 3GS. It knows what time it is because of the clock; it knows where in the world you are because of the GPS chip; it knows which way you are facing because of the compass; it knows how much you are tilting it because of the accelerometer. Thus, you can hold it up to the night sky and it will show you essentially the same view – but with the constellation lines shown, and labels next to the brightest objects. Instant recognition of ‘what’s that star or planet’? It tracks the phase of the moon and all of the planets, and has a summary of ‘Tonight’s Sky’, with rising and setting times. Very clever stuff. (AU $3.99).

MetLink and Tram Tracker

These are specific to the Australian city where I live (Melbourne), but offer a really handy way to discover when the next public transport vehicle is leaving for your destination. Metlink has all the latest timetables (updating live) for train, tram and bus. You can set up your favorite stations/stops. Tram Tracker is even neater: it shows the actual time – not just the scheduled time – before the next tram arrives at your stop, working off the very same live electronic information available to the company running the trams. Both of these are free!

When it comes to preserving your valuable data, it pays to be paranoid.

Assume the worst, think of all the possible ways things could go wrong. Be paranoid. The question is not whether you are paranoid, but whether you are paranoid enough.

These days, everyone has valuable data, and it’s taking up more and more room. Documents, spreadsheets and databases; emails, photographs and even video. Game players have many save files capturing their progress in various games. In my case and that of most programmers I also have many files and folders comprising highly valuable program source code. We’re all working hard generating digital files of one form or another, almost every day.

So, think about how you would feel if you lost that data. Bad? It could be worse than bad.

About ten years ago the young programmers in my office were having fun replaying an audio file garnered off the Internet, from some computer company’s help-line. It was a call from some guy who had been writing a book on his computer, maybe a novel. Something went wrong with the machine and he sent it in for repair. The computer company had (for whatever reason) wiped the hard disk. The young guys in my office thought it was hugely amusing to hear this guy raging in despair about the loss of all of his data, almost literally foaming at the mouth. Personally, I found it very painful to listen to. I could feel his pain.

Losing data, particularly creative work you have labored over, is tragic. This is why I am paranoid about backups.

Here are my paranoid rules:

• If there’s only one copy of something, it might as well not exist at all, you’re going to lose it. Make an immediate copy of any irreplaceable item (such as photographs of a wedding, which can’t be replaced at all).
   
• If you only have two copies of something, each copy must be kept in a different physical location. The house or office could burn down (or, as happened to my daughter and her husband, the backup drive can be stolen along with the laptop it was backing up).
   
• Two copies is not enough. Your hard drive could crash AND the backup copy could be lost or prove corrupt. I’ve had it happen.
   
• How do you know your backup files aren’t corrupt? Check them regularly.
   
• Are you backing up everything you might want? I regularly (say once very 18 months) reformat my desktop computer. That’s when I remember all the things I should have backed up but could easily forget to: fonts, passwords, email archives, application settings.
   
• What about backups of material not on your desktop computer? Like on-line blogs, forum posts, etc. A colleague of mine forgot to renew his domain name and hosting package and lost a valuable travel blog and photographs.
   
• Think about how much time you would be prepared to put in to re-create your work if it was lost. In other words, how much work could you bear to lose? A day’s worth? A week’s worth? Backup more often than that.
   
• There’s no such thing as too many copies if the data is really valuable.

So here’s my backup strategy. Personally, I don’t yet think it’s paranoid enough.

• For program source code, I use a version control system (Subversion) to save progressive versions, each time I do significant work on any programming project. The commit happens via a VPN, to a server in a different physical location to my desktop – in fact, to an office some 20 km away. This generally happens once or twice a day on a current project. As Jeff Attwood says, source control is the absolute bedrock of software engineering.
   
• I have an external network drive (a 500GB LaCie Ethernet Mini). I use Acronis to schedule weekly backups of ‘My Documents’ and source code folders, on an incremental basis (this means I can backtrack, à la Mac Time Machine, to previous versions of things).
   
• I copy the Acronis backup files from the LaCie to one of two identical external USB drives (Western Digital MyBooks). Only one of these is kept at my house. On an approximately weekly basis, I take the current MyBook drive with me to another physical location, and swap it with the identical drive already there. Even in my house, the MyBook drive doesn’t live on my desk, but somewhere else in the house where a thief won’t find it.
   
• When I’m feeling particularly vulnerable, I burn DVD-ROMs of really critical files and keep them somewhere else.

You might quite reasonably ask why I don’t use ‘cloud storage’ to backup files to a location on the Internet, like Amazon’s S3. The answer is that in Australia our broadband upload speeds are still so feeble that it would take weeks to backup any significant volume of data this way.

So am I paranoid enough? I guess I’ll only find out when things go wrong.

“Even paranoids have enemies”
— Golda Meir to Henry Kissinger