The Problem
If you ever want to, say, sell your now SSD-equipped computer, you’re probably going to want to erase its contents as securely as possible. Back in the HD days, this was very well-understood and relatively easy to do. You simply overwrote every bit of data on your Hard Drive numerous times with zeroes or random data or what have you. There are command-line tools that allow you to do this, as well as Disk Utility’s Secure Erase Options, which allow very secure and thorough erasure of a drive. But because of the way that SSDs work, all this goes out the window.

I’m not a Hard Drive or SSD expert, but, in a nutshell, in order to maintain performance and increase longevity, SSDs add another level of abstraction between the device and the filesystem that makes it impossible for the OS to accurately know the location of a given file on the actual device. This means that it’s virtually impossible to securely erase individual files. So the question becomes: How do I securely erase the entire drive?

We Want… Information (-ation, -ation)
The tools and procedures for securely erasing SSDs are not self-evident. I poured over a pretty hefty amount of literature before arriving at a method that I think will work fairly effectively. Since there’s no way to accurately erase individual files, this method erases the entire SSD. And since the best way to do this, while still balancing usability and effectiveness, is to use encryption, we’ll be enabling FileVault 2 in Lion, as well as, of all things, Find My Mac in iCloud. I’ll go over all of this in a bit, but let me first talk a bit about my thinking.

My Thinking
The most secure way to delete an SSD is to find a way to scrub the drive, to go through every cell on the SSD and overwrite the data, similar to how you would securely delete a typical hard drive, but at the hardware level. Out of the box the Mac has no way to do this. There are a variety of Linux and Windows utilities — some of which come directly from the drive vendors — that allow you to do this, but they require a huge number of hoops to jump through, not the least of which is creating a Linux LiveCD or Windows machine to boot from, as well as a significant time investment. Using this method, while perhaps a more secure deletion of the data, will be time consuming, difficult and error-prone.

As I mentioned, there’s a ton of literature on the topic of securely erasing SSDs, but the vast majority of it is theoretical. There are very few articles that actually tell you, practically, how to go about securely erasing your SSD. What got me thinking in the right direction was an article from Ars Technica that very broadly discussed the various difficulties with and methods for secure SSD erasure. In it, they talk about drive scrubbing approaches, but then they also mention using an encryption-based approach:

“The most popular option for protecting data, absent of robust secure erasing tools that scrub right down into the over-provisioned cracks, is to encrypt the SSD’s contents. This way, if someone’s coming after your data, the only thing you need to make sure is off the drive is the security key (128- or 256-bit AES is recommended) and your bits will be safe, unless whoever wants your data is up to cracking that code.“

This caught my attention, because it sounds very much to me like the secure erase procedure that newer iPhones use. If you’ve ever securely erased an iPhone 3GS or later, you may have noticed that it goes extremely fast. Older phones take a long time because they’re actually scrubbing the SSD clean of data, but newer ones are really fast because all they’re actually doing is deleting the encryption key, making the data virtually impossible to access.

Finding a similar procedure for an SSD-equipped Mac was no easy feat, but I think I’ve dug one up that may work for most typical users who just want to pass on their SSD-equipped Macs without worrying about someone accessing their private data. The thing that’s tricky about doing this is that Apple has provided no similar utility for erasing SSDs as they have for the iPhone. On an iPhone you simply go to your Settings and choose:
General->Reset->Erase All Content and Settings.

There is no such utility on a Mac.

Or is there?

Enter: FileVault 2
Mac OS X10.7, Lion, has a new feature called full disk encryption, now popularly known as FileVault 2. What FileVault 2 does is take all the data on your boot drive — which in my case is my SSD — and encrypts it. The encryption key is stored on the disk and is only accessible with your home account password (or any other user’s password that you allow). In and of itself, in fact, assuming you have a reasonably secure password, simply enabling FileVault 2 on your boot drive provides a pretty decent degree of security: No one can access the contents of your disk without your password.

Encryption key deletion, a la the iPhone, provides the final layer of security, but how do you go about doing such a thing? The Apple literature on FileVault 2 makes reference to something called “Instant Wipe:”

“With FileVault 2, instant wipe removes the encryption key from your Mac instantaneously, making the data completely inaccessible.“

Enter: iCloud & Find My Mac
I have yet to find a way to access this “Instant Wipe” from my Mac, nor is there any reference to it in the Help files. But with the addition of the Find My Mac feature, now freely available via iCloud, a Mac can securely erase a drive in a fashion quite similar to that of the iPhone. Find My Mac allows Mac users to remotely locate and lock, send messages and alert sounds to, and — most important for our purposes — wipe a lost Mac. Of course, this functionality works perfectly well with Macs that aren’t lost as well.

Sending the “Wipe” command to your Mac from Find My Mac (either via a browser logged in to iCloud or from Find My iPhone on your iPhone) will do the same thing to your Mac that Secure Erase does on your iPhone. It will erase the encryption key that protects the data on your SSD.

“The Remote Wipe command is, of course, a last resort, as it instantly destroys the boot drive’s contents by erasing the encrypted volume’s key, rendering the drive’s contents unusable.“

This means that, once the encryption key is deleted, even you will no longer be able to access your data with your password. Once this happens, the only way to access the data is to decrypt it, and without the key, this is a monumental task far beyond the capabilities of most users. The XTS-AES 128 bit encryption that Lion uses is extremely difficult and time consuming to crack. In fact, though there are more secure options out there, I believe this one has yet to be cracked at this point.

Also, once the encryption key is wiped, the wipe command apparently goes through and deletes all the data as well:

“Instant wipe removes the encryption key from your Mac — making the data completely inaccessible — then proceeds with a thorough wipe of all data from the disk.“

It’s unclear exactly how this wipe is performed. Does it happen at the hardware level clearing data from each and every cell of the SSD? Are the files overwritten multiple times with random data or are they just marked offline? It’s hard to tell from the scant online literature I’ve seen; even the developer docs seem to be out of date. But whatever the case, this is pretty durned good security for the average joe.

So, how to get all this working? There are only two things you need to set up: FileVault 2 and iCloud with Find My Mac

This article is already long enough, so I won’t go into FileVault 2 or iCloud setup here. They’re easy to do and there’s already plenty of information about the procedures. Here are some great links to get you started:
Set Up Filevault 2
Set Up iCloud’s Find My Mac

Suffice to say, once these services are configured, erasing your SSD, when the time comes, should be as simple as logging in to iCloud, locating the Mac in question using Find My Mac, and issuing the Wipe command. After a very short amount of time, the encryption key will be deleted, and some time later (how long depends on a number of variables, some of which we don’t actually know), your disk will, in theory, be wiped clean of data.

One caveat: I have yet to actually try the Wipe command. Oh, believe me, I intend to. But we’re talking about a day out of my life, and that’s a day I just don’t have to spare. And you know what they say about good intentions. Yeah.

If I do manage to get around to this, I’ll certainly post my findings here. I encourage others to do likewise in the comments section of this article.

MORE:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.ars/13
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Disk_Encryption

A Piecemeal Network
My home network, like many, started simply with a wired router. It then progressed to wireless with my first Airport Express, which, at the time was plenty for me, living alone in my small studio apartment. My next apartment, however, was a duplex, so I extended my network with an additional Airport Express, one capable of 802.11n. Then, as wireless networks in the city exploded and frequencies grew more congested, causing problems with the wireless Netflix streaming I started doing a good deal of, I added yet another Airport Express and built out my network, creating one 5GHz network for my heaviest use-cases, and a 2.4GHz network for my phones and gadgets.

When all was said and done I had a wired router feeding three Airport Expresses, two of which were supplying wireless on 5GHz and one of which provided separate wireless access on the 2.4GHz frequency. It was a total mess: it took forever to set up (like when we recently moved to a new house); it broke often and was horrible to troubleshoot.

Cut To The Present Day
So this year one of my presents was an Airport Extreme. I just wanted to simplify everything. I suppose I could’ve gotten some LinkSys dealio that would’ve been faster, but frankly, this is about laziness, and the Airport Extreme is, for me, the easiest option available, if for no other reason than the fact that I already use and am quite familiar with the Airport ecosystem.

And easy it was! In fact, I was able to set it up and completely replace my existing network — a router and three Airport Expresses — in about ten minutes. That’s right, what used to take me hours to set up and get working just so took ten minutes with an Airport Extreme. And now, all those boxes are gone, replaced with a single — and quite attractive, I might add — wireless router. It’s fantastic!

I have to say, setting up my Airport Extreme was one of the best user experiences I’ve had in a very, very long time. I’m not used to calling network setup easy, but that’s exactly what it was. I entered my settings and it simply Just Worked.

Clearly a lot has changed since I first began building my home network. It’s nice to finally be using some current gear, and the Airport Extreme is a great box. Super simple to set up and use. Oh, and it’s fast too!

If you’re looking to upgrade an aging wireless network, want simplicity and ease-of-use, and don’t need a ton of tweakable settings, I highly recommend the Airport Extreme.

The Phone
In many regards, this is the same phone I had a few weeks ago. The software is the same, the data is the same, most things are the same. And this is a good thing. Moving to the new phone was almost completely painless and straightforward.

Performance
Overall, though, there are some differences, of course. In general, I really like the phone itself. It’s a huge speed boost from the iPhone 3GS, and that helps make everything work better, more smoothly and quicker. The interface is just faster, and that’s really nice.

I was more surprised at how much faster the network is. I assume that this has something to do with my new provider, Verizon (more on that in a minute), but I also think that speed gain is a function of the phone hardware itself. Whatever the reason, I’m extremely pleased by this.

The Body
Coming from the iPhone 3GS‘s rounded edges and arched back, I was a bit skeptical that I’d like the body of the iPhone4S, with it’s all-flat surfaces and hard edges. The 3GS felt perfect in my hand. It was a most ergonomic body shape.

But I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how much I actually do like the 4S’s feel. It’s not as soft to the touch, but it feels a bit thinner, and the hard edges add a certain grippiness that makes it feel very firm in hand and easy to pick up. They also afford the possibility of placing the phone on its edge for video shoots.

The glass surfaces, too, are very elegant — far more so than the 3GS’s plastic back — yet have enough friction to them that the phone never feels in danger of slipping out of my hand. They also don’t appear to scuff as easily or as much as the 3GS’s plastic back.

And the iPhone 4S’s body is just beautiful, maybe the prettiest phone I’ve ever seen. There are tradeoffs to the new body style, but they’re very minor and pretty much even out. I’m quite pleased with the body style of this phone.

The Screen
I’m pretty blown away by the Retina Display. This is one of my favorite things about my new phone. Sure, I’d seen friends’ iPhone 4s, so it wasn’t completely new to me. But seeing the screen and using one on a regular basis are two very different things. Using the Retina Display is amazing, especially as my vision gets crappier with age. Reading text on this screen is noticeably better, an improvement that extends to every area of the iPhone experience. Also, I can finally notice tiny details, like the paper texture in Notes, that I’d never seen before. It’s really terrific.

The Camera
The camera is much faster than the one on my old phone. It’s also better, but I wouldn’t say the improvement is huge. Side by side you can certainly tell a difference, but these still look like iPhone photos.

The HDR functionality is good only for certain types of lighting situations. For anything else it usually does a worse job. Moreover, it slows the camera down considerably. I recommend keeping it off unless you need it. For this reason I wish it had a dedicated button instead of being buried within a submenu.

Video is still clearly phone video, though as such it’s quite serviceable. But what impressed me was the stabilization. It’s very good, and on such a small device, it’s really essential. These little video phones tend to exacerbate camera shake, but the iPhone 4S does a pretty darned good job of smoothing out the worst of it by using the phone’s physical sensors, in part, to do the job. This, perhaps even more than the optics, makes a huge improvement to the video the iPhone 4S produces.

Siri
The big surprise for me, with Siri, is how much I actually do use it. For Reminders and phone calls it really is much quicker and easier than using the touch screen. And, yes, it’s really as accurate as everyone says. It’s not for everything, but there are certain situations that Siri is perfect for, and when you’re in those situations, Siri is a joy.

Perhaps my favorite use of Siri is dictation. It’s great! It’s very accurate, and far more convenient than typing everything out on the touchscreen keyboard. Accurate dictation is far less useful on a computer with a physical keyboard, because you can usually type faster than you can speak. But with virtual keyboards, the equation is the reverse, and this is one place where Siri really shines.

Siri’s limitations can be frustrating, though. I wish (as I think everyone does) that it was more hooked into the OS. I’d love to use Siri as an application launcher, for instance. Or maybe even for navigation. Siri’s technically only in beta at this point, though, so I’m sure we’ll start to see these sorts of things as the service evolves. I think it’s going to be great.

Verizon
One of the biggest changes for me with this upgrade has nothing to do with the actual phone hardware itself. For this phone purchase I switched to Verizon as my mobile provider. I was actually a little worried about the switch as I’d been fairly happy with AT&T’s customer service and web apps. But I live in New York City, and AT&T’s reception is pretty lousy here. Moreover, at work, often when I really need a connection, AT&T is spotty or just plain out of range, and that’s not cool.

So I switched to Verizon on a trial basis.

Thus far I’ve been very happy. The cell service is truly amazing, a huge step up. Calls are not only more reliable, they are also clearer and louder. Some of this may be due to the new phone hardware, but credit where due, Verizon’s cell service works everywhere I go, and works very, very well. I’ve not had a dropped or garbled call, nor been in an area with no signal yet. I actually needed to make a call on the first day I had the phone from a previously impossible location at work and it worked flawlessly. With voice commands, no less!

The improved reception has also brought another advantage: my data connection is more pervasive and reliable. Suddenly, I’m able to get a data connection in all sorts of places where it had been terrible on AT&T. At times, I believe this more reliable data connection even makes it appear that the network is much faster than on my old phone, which would choke when trying to connect using a spotty connection. So, overall, the increased reliability has ultimately resulted in increased network speeds.

Verizon’s customer service has been very good as well. I’ve had two occasions to deal with their phone support, and both times they’ve gotten the job done quickly and politely. And that’s pretty much all I ask.

Their account management site is also very good and easy to use.

Verizon is definitely more expensive, however. About $30 more per month for the plan I got, which is a slight step up from my old AT&T plan. I am now getting an employee discount that brings this back down to only about $10 a month more than my AT&T account, but without that, the price hike is significant. If phone reception is key, though, it might just be worth it; the improvement is huge. In my case, I’m more than happy to pay $10 more per month for much, much improved service.

Bugs and Updates
It hasn’t been all wine and roses, however. There have been some bugs and issues.

The most annoying problem I’ve had is that, when shooting pictures or video with the Camera app — and this seems particularly bad when shooting from the lock screen rather than launching directly from the Springboard — sometimes they don’t show up in the Camera Roll gallery. If I sort by Places, the pictures appear and can be moved to other galleries, but for some reason they don’t appear in the Camera Roll. For that reason, importing via iPhoto can be hit-or-miss. Sometimes the photos appear for import, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they get deleted from the phone, sometimes they don’t. It’s more of an annoyance than anything, and I haven’t permanently lost any data yet. But I really wish they’d fix it. And fast.

I was hoping the iOS 5.0.1 update would bring some relief, but it does not seem to have addressed the issue. Moreover, after applying the update, I
experienced the bug wherein contact names don’t appear for incoming calls, despite the fact that they’re still in your Contacts. This I was able to fix, however. It seems the Contacts database gets corrupted with the iOS 5.0.1 update, and the punctuation (parentheses and dashes and what not) gets removed from the phone numbers of all your Contacts. The incoming phone number, however, does retain all the necessary punctuation, and this inconsistency causes the Phone app to be unable to recognize said incoming number.

The fix that worked for me is easy enough: Just restore your contacts from a recent backup. Of course, this assumes you made a backup before updating. If you didn’t, this is perfect example of why you should. Shit happens.

Conclusion
I’m very happy with my Verizon iPhone 4S. The hardware is a vast improvement over the 3GS, and I notice the speed boost and spectacular display all the time, in every area of operation, from note-taking to search, even after weeks of use. Siri is fun and useful, and the technology to watch; it’s going to be great someday and a real boon to iPhone users. Finally, Verizon has really rounded out my user experience by at last allowing my phone to perform well in its primary function, as a phone.

Like a lot of people, I’d imagine, I seem to be on a leapfrog iPhone upgrade cycle, upgrading every other version, and so far that seems to be working out well. Each time I upgrade I receive a subsidy on the price of the phone and a significant hardware boost. The iPhone 4S is no exception. It’s a solid upgrade, and I’m very happy with it.

Now comes this latest salvo in the barrage of evidence that points to major focus shifts at Apple: It appears they are considering ending the Mac Pro line of desktop machines.

Now I quite realize that this is just at the rumor stage. But I actually think it’s very likely that this will come to pass, that Apple will end the Mac Pro line, or at least radically transform it to such a degree as to be unrecognizable to its former user base. Apple is aggressively cutting out parts of the business that aren’t big money makers. Everything they’ve done with their pro-oriented products speaks to a company that’s pretty much only interested in mass markets, huge ones like cell phones, not niche ones like pro workstations and software.

I may be proven wrong, but I do think this is the beginning of the end, not just of the Mac Pro line, but of Macs as powerful tools for creative professionals.

I hope I’m wrong, but that seems to be the way the wind is blowing.

And so, a tiny Yay!

And by someone like me I should reiterate that I am, by trade, a systems administrator and that I use computers, to a large extent, to set up and maintain other computers with highly specialized or high-level functions. In my spare time I use computers to make art — video, music, and, most recently, to scan and post drawings. For much of my job an iPad is simply useless. And for many of my personal pursuits it’s a non-option as well. I’m really not the intended audience for the iPad.

So when a co-worker recently purchased an iPad and was kind enough to let me test it out for a week, the question I set out to answer was: Is there anything useful I can do with the iPad?

The short answer is a qualified yes. There is a lot about the iPad to like, and there are quite a few things I don’t like, but I did manage to find some areas in which the iPad shined, even for “someone like me.”

The Downside

Let’s start with the areas that, for me, proved disappointing. These will, of course, be based on my own usage preferences. But suffice to say there are at least a few areas where the iPad left me wanting, and some of them were quite surprising.

Performance
Much has been said about the iPad’s performance. All of it positive. But frankly — and I realize I sound like a crank here, but — I just didn’t see it. Maybe it was all the hype going in, or maybe it was the iOS 4.2 update I applied immediately after cracking the box, but the iPad felt to me like it performed almost exactly like my iPhone 3GS. That’s right, 3GS. Not that that’s particularly bad, mind you, but I was expecting to be impressed with the speed of the iPad, especially considering the fact that I’m accustomed to previous-generation hardware, and I wasn’t.

In my experience, I often would touch an interface element and have to wait — sometimes for well over a second — for something to happen. For example, in iBooks, when I would touch a book in the Store section it would typically take up to five seconds to load the book info. Once it would load, if I pressed the Get Book button I’d be waiting between two and three seconds for any sort of response from the interface. Pressing a book in my library would result in a similar wait time.

What’s worse is that sometimes there’d be no indication that the touch had even taken place. No dimming of the touched item, no “Loading…” message, no barber pole. You’d just wait and hope that the touch had occurred. There seemed to be some caching issues at work here, as this sort of thing seemed to get better with time spent in a given application. Nevertheless, I would hesitate to describe much of the iPad interface as zippy.

Typing
Coming from the iPhone, typing on the software keyboard felt — and largely continues to feel — awkward and difficult. Typing is so key to so many things I do that not being able to do it as easily as I can on my iPhone feels pretty crippling. I felt like I was able to learn to thumb-type much more quickly on my iPhone. But on the iPad, it’s too wide to hold and thumb type on, at least with my rather dainty hands. But two-handed typing is even more difficult, and touch typing is simply impossible without some sort of tactile feedback. Without easier typing the iPad feels a lot more limited than my iPhone.

Netflix & Facebook
One thing I could see myself using the iPad for is casual movie and TV watching, and it’s pretty good for that. I have to say, though, that after using the Netflix app for iPhone — which by and large I like quite a bit — I found the iPad version to be quite terrible. It’s essentially no different than the web app. Unlike the iPhone app, the iPad version doesn’t appear to have been optimized for the device at all. It just a slow, laggy view of the Netflix website, and I found it to be really irritating to use. The only place Netflix for iPad really shines is, of course, the watching of movies. Here, of course, the large screen makes watching stuff much nicer than it is on the iPhone.

The Facebook app, on the other hand, simply hasn’t been refactored at all, which was disappointing to discover. I use my iPhone to peruse Facebook quite a bit. It’s nice that iPhone apps will run on the iPad, but it really is true that they scale poorly. I was a bit surprised at how bad they look. I actually prefer the Facebook app on my iPhone to the scaled up version on iPad. The good news is that the Facebook website looks terrific, but I often prefer using the mobile app to the website; in many ways it’s a better interface for browsing. So overall, while nice to have, Facebook on the iPad was disappointing.

The Physical Device
While the build quality of the iPad is, in typical Apple fashion, lovely, I found handling it to be less than optimal for many of the things I want to use it for. After watching a movie in bed for a while, I found my hands and arms getting tired. The iPad starts to feel heavy and I found myself adjusting the way I was sitting or switching hands a lot. In fact, fatigue set in when using the iPad for surfing too. And when typing or holding the iPad for extended periods, the sharp metal edges frequently dug uncomfortably into my hands and fingers. While the squared off edges do look beautiful, I can’t help feeling something round would be a bit easier on the hands, and overall the iPad just felt a bit too heavy for extended use.

My co-worker also got the Apple-made iPad case. And as superb as the build quality of the iPad itself is, this case is just as crappy. Really. It’s worse than I’d even surmised from the photos. Just total shit. The material is like cardboard wrapped in cheap plastic, it’s flimsy, and when getting the iPad into and out of it it feels very much like it could easily break. The case also offers a way to prop the iPad up for extended viewing, but I think you’ll get just as much mileage out of something homemade, and for much less money. If you’re looking for a way to prop up your iPad, find a different case. One that’s good. Though really, I wish there were a built-in way to do this. Maybe in iPad 2.

Finally, the iPad Dock. The dock is actually pretty nice, akin to the dock for iPhone. It makes a great and fairly stable stand for the iPad. My only gripe is that it’s a bit difficult to remove the iPad from the dock without lifting the entire kit and kaboodle off the table. Still, it’s a worthwhile accessory.

Activation and IDs
There were just a few other spots in the whole experience that I found perplexing. For one, can someone tell me why I need to activate this thing with a computer? This seems pretty ridiculous to me. And activation is through iTunes? But… I have iTunes on my iPad, right? Why can’t I just use that? It’s a shame that a computer that’s perfect for people who aren’t particularly interested in computers requires both a computer and a fairly tech saavy computer user to activate. I really, really don’t get this. It seems contrary to the very idea of the iPad.

What’s worse, I could at least see the activation process simplifying the activation of all those Apple-supplied services, but it doesn’t. Despite the fact that I have to activate the iPad on my computer using my Apple ID, that ID exists in limbo on the iPad. If I launch the App Store, or iTunes, or iBooks on the iPad, I end up having to enter that same stupid Apple ID every time. Why? Can’t the iPad make the assumption that you’ll be using that ID for every Apple service? It would really make my life easier, and I’m an advanced user. Imagine how much better it would make my mom’s life.

The Upside

In the end, I actually did manage to find a few areas in which an iPad could serve some use in my life. It took a while, but I managed.

Reading
It’s been pretty obvious to me from the start that the iPad would be a great device for reading books. And it is. The form factor is that of a book, the weight is similar to a hardcover book. And if those clues weren’t enough: iBooks.

I really enjoy reading books on the iPad far more than I do on my iPhone, for obvious reasons. The large, bright screen and jumbo touch areas make reading on a digital device a true pleasure. If I were going to go all digital with my book collection today, I’d do it on an iPad. And the iPad itself — along with the spatial deficiencies of a Manhattan apartment — makes a great case for doing just that. My only complaint about reading on the iPad is the weight. My arms do get tired. Fortunately, I don’t tend to read for large stretches of time, so for me it’s a minor point.

Pictures
I’ve been doing a lot of drawing lately. Particularly comics. I was very pleasantly surprised at how wonderful it’s been to look at my comics on the iPad.

As the story goes, I was testing the basic Photo app functionality, and just happened to have my comics on hand to work with, so that’s what I ended up using. But it turned out to be such a thrill to look at them on the iPad, flipping from page to page in the Photos app (or in Dropbox). There’s a physicality to hand-drawn images that is wonderfully complimented by the physicality of the iPad. Both are about gesture and the touch of the human hand. And the iPad’s display and the way it processes images is just glorious. Looking at my drawings on the iPad was the closest I got to that revelatory feeling I had when I first slid open my iPhone. It was truly magical.

General Coolness

There are a few other areas where the iPad really shines for me. And while these aren’t necessarily things that will make the device useful to me, they are immensely cool, and worthy of mention. They are a showcase of the promise this device holds.

Mixed Mode Interface
The change in interface that occurs in some apps when held horizontally versus vertically is terrific. I always thought this was really smart in the ads for the iPad. But in practice it’s even better. The mixed mode interface adds both delight and functionality to the basic idea that the iPad can function in either orientation. It takes advantage of this fact by offering a reason beyond personal preference to turn the device. I just find it a very thoughtful touch that could really be exploited by developers.

Battery Life
Another delight is the phenomenal battery life. I used the iPad moderately all Thanksgiving weekend (a three-day weekend for me) and when I got back to work (yes, on Sunday) the battery still read 34%, which means it probably would have lasted another day if I’d been so lucky as to be off. That’s amazing battery performance, folks! I’ve never seen anything like it.

Maps
While it’s probably not all that useful unless you have the 3G version (which I did not) the Maps application is really nice. The larger screen makes it much more usable, and the zooming implementation in that app in particular works very, very well. I’m not sure what it is, it’s very subtle. But it’s nice! And I found myself impressed with the Maps app.

Keyboard
Using the Bluetooth keyboard really makes the iPad much more computer-like in its usefulness. Set the iPad on the Dock and use the keyboard for typing and it’s really pretty useful. I only got to do this a bit, but I can already see the potential. The keyboard and iPad combo is a powerful one.

My Stepfather
We’ve wanted to get my stepfather involved in computing somehow for a long time now, but he’s been resistant. I think it’s the learning curve. Computers tend to make people feel either really smart or really stupid, and I think my stepfather — and probably most normal people — falls into the latter camp. So I decided to show him the iPad as he’s expressed some interest in getting one. With very little “training” he was able to start using the device, and I think he even enjoyed it somewhat. It’s by no means a sure thing, but I think the iPad represents the best hope for people like my stepfather who want to take advantage of the basic wonders computers have to offer without feeling like an idiot. If we can accomplish this with my stepfather using an iPad it would be, in my eyes, the ultimate success of the device. Time will tell.

Conclusion

So the ultimate question is: Do I want an iPad? Or perhaps, more specifically, Can I use an iPad?

This answer’s not so cut and dry, I’m afraid. There is a techno-lusty side of me that wants one just because they’re neat. Any new device offers a certain allure to folks like me. But folks like me also have a huge practical side.

I’ve said many times now, if the iPad were $200 I’d buy one in a heartbeat. But at $500 clams, bare minimum — no keyboard, no case, no dock — I’ll have to pass. For now. If I’m going to spend that kind of money, I’m going to need to be able to do a lot more with an iPad than I can right now. I’m going to need a reason for one, a killer app, a justification. And that doesn’t quite exist yet.

That said, after using it for a week, while my basic suspicions were confirmed, I also came away with a greater appreciation of the device. And a much greater sense of its potential. This is already a great device for reading digital books. And it’s simply a joy for perusing images. I fully expect to get one of these babies someday. Maybe it will be iPad 2, maybe iPad 3, I don’t know. But they’re only going to get more useful, and at some point that usefulness will reach a critical mass and I’ll have to have one. What I’ve seen so far has proven at least that to me.

]]> http://systemsboy.com/2010/06/iphone-4-more-camera-like.html/feed 0 http://systemsboy.com/2010/05/screen-savers-and-firewire-drives.html http://systemsboy.com/2010/05/screen-savers-and-firewire-drives.html#comments Thu, 13 May 2010 12:57:05 +0000 systemsboy http://systemsboy.com/?p=3305 For some time now I’ve had an odd problem on my MacBook wherein my Time Machine firewire drive appears to spontaneously, and without reason, disconnect. No warning is produced, no error message appears. It always happens, in fact, when the computer is not in use. I leave the system on, say, while a large backup is taking place, and I go up to go to sleep. I come down the next morning to find the drive unmounted. The only sign something’s gone wrong is an entry in my system log that reads something like this:

May 10 11:01:02 mrpooter com.apple.backupd[255]: Stopping backupd to allow ejection of backup destination disk!

Weird, huh? I know!

My Energy Saver setting are set to never sleep the machine and never spin down hard drives, though I’ve tried every variance of this, as per this Apple Knowledgebase thread, to no avail. The problem persists.

After reading that thread, though, I was able to narrow and eventually solve the problem. Oddly, it seems to be related to my screen saver. I’ve been using an iPhoto album for my screen saver for a while, and I wondered if it had to do with that. So I switched back to one of the built-in, included screen savers — Arabesque, if you must know — and it’s all better now.

For a few nights in a row now I’ve been able to leave my machine on indefinitely, even overnight. And where this would once have certainly cause my firewire drive to unmount, it no longer does.

Winscape

I’ve actually had this idea for some time. Get a large, bright screen and show video of the outdoors on it. Hang it on the wall and frame it with some trim so it looks like a window, and voila! Instant techno-window. But this rig adds one cool wrinkle: parallax. Parallax is the changing of said view out said window as your position relative to said window changes. Simply playing video of the beach on a screen will yield less realistic results as it will lack the parallax effect.

Parallax in the Winscape rig is achieved with a transmitter on the viewer that sends location to a sensor on or near the virtual window display. As the viewer moves relative to the screen, a computer tracks the movement and updates the display accordingly.

As someone who deals with a lot of art and museum installation, I can tell you that there is at least one big potential problem with this kind of setup. How do you deal with more than one viewer?

The Winscape system, while cool in concept, is clearly only suitable for the basement-living single crowd. Pity.

Color me unimpressed.

I know, I know. Lots of people will say I don’t “get it.” That the iPad is revolutionary. That’s it’s the next big thing in computing. And that may all be true. But there’s nothing the iPad offers, in it’s present incarnation, that I need, or, frankly, even that I want. Don’t get me wrong, I want to want an iPad. I really do. I’m as close to being an Apple fanboy as you can get (Hell, maybe I am one); I love new toys and gadgets; and I love all my Apple products — my MacBook Pro, my iPhone, they’re among my favorite products ever.

Apple Store 59th Street Stairs

But, after touching it and experiencing it for myself, the iPad just kinda leaves me cold.

Yes, the touch interface is undeniably cool and well-done. Yes, the hardware is gorgeous. But I can’t help seeing the iPad as a hobbled MacBook on the one hand, and as a hobbled iPhone on the other. I can only see it in terms of what doesn’t do, because there’s nothing it does much better than anything I already have. I don’t plan on using a tablet to consume ever more movies and TV; I get enough of that already, and it’s disappointing enough as it is. And, frankly, the hype around the idea that surfing the web on the iPad with my hands is somehow the apex of the browsing experience is completely over the top. I did not find it particularly magical at all. The only thing the iPad offers is the promise of something great in the future, the idea that there’s a simple computing paradigm for people who aren’t particularly interested in technology for technology’s sake.

Maybe I’m underwhelmed because I’ve already experienced the first-time rush of touch interaction three years ago when I bought my first iPhone. Maybe it’s because I actually like computers and always have. Maybe the iPad, as I suspect, is just not intended for someone like me. This is probably the case.

That said, speaking from the point of view of someone like me — someone who likes computers and already has a laptop and a smartphone that work really well — who has now experienced the iPad firsthand, in the flesh, there is little I find compelling about the product. As a device that can’t even be activated without a computer, and that is shackled in many of the same ways the iPod is (another product I never saw a need to buy), the iPad represents an interesting, yet in many ways still frustrating, vision of what computers could someday become. The touch interaction and simplicity are great and will someday be a boon to people who don’t particularly enjoy using computers. But for those of us who do, the current iPad will likely prove disappointing until it is capable of much more than it currently is.

I’ll say again, I think the main schism is between creativity and consumerism. Right now, the iPad is mainly geared towards the consumption of digital media. Until its capabilities as a creative tool are greatly expanded, I think you’ll see those of use who want to use computers primarily to make stuff unimpressed by the device.

Now that I’ve touched the iPad, that’s the camp you’ll find me in.